INTERVIEW: jeremy holden - Orang pendek eyewitness

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Ray Tarara: I know you're a Photographer and it seems like you're all over the world on different assignments. If I could just hear more about what your background is in and what led you to this profession.

Jeremy Holden: Yes, I started off as a naturalist, as a very small child, I had like a museum in my bedroom at age four. I've always had a great interest in natural history, and that translated into photography. I started when I was in my teens, I became like an amateur wildlife photographer. I did a photography course, which then went on to be a Degree in Photography. I don't have a Biological Degree I have a Photography Degree. When I finished university I continued my traveling. I was traveling before and during university as well to Asia, mostly. I continued that, went to Sumatra in 1994 and got involved with Orang Pendek, which changed my life and gave me the break I needed to follow this as a career.

Ray: The Orang Pendek I think that it's one of the lesser known, kind of cryptid creatures out there. Can you just described to people who maybe you've never heard of it before. What is the Orang Pendek?

Jeremy: Well, we don't actually know for certain what it is. What we do know is that it's an ape, a large ape. Whether it's part of the great ape or lesser ape, or whether it's related to Orangutan or whether it's related to Gibons, we don't know. For instance, it's real like I said, it's the Indonesian version of the Big Foot that we have in the United States, except it's a much, much smaller creature. It's a large bodied ape between one and 1.5 meters is the usual size reported. It's a biped. It's covered in hair. It's clearly an ape. I don't think it's got any real relation to human beings, not anymore more than Orangutan or chimpanzee have. It's kind of a jungle Sasquatch in a way.

Ray: How did you first hear about the Orang Pendek?

Jeremy: Well, I had been interested in this kind of stuff, obviously since childhood. I knew new about the Legend in Sasquatch, the Almas in Mongolia. In fact, I knew many of these, these creatures about the world, it seems almost everywhere has one, but I had never heard of Orang Pendek when I arrived in Sumatra in 1994. While I was there, I met someone who was looking for it. I remember rather smugly telling them that it was clearly a local myth that almost every culture had a similar story. I mean, even in England, going back to like the Green Man, you have this, notion of people that came or that live in the wild, and that's what I thought Orang Pendek was, but I was wrong.

Ray: This person that you met, was this Debbie Martyr who was looking for the creature initially?

Jeremy: That's right. Debbie, she was actually a Journalist. She was the Editor of a London paper. She first heard about Orang Pendek in 1989 sorry, from a local guide that claim to have seen one. I think from the stories weren't exactly new, there's been reports of these since the first British explorers were in Sumatra in 1780. I t's something that has really been ignored by the biological community and researchers. Debbie, I think as a journalist, and being very experienced and listening to people telling stories when she heard this guy tell the story about when he saw Orang Pendek, she thought, to my mind, "This man is telling the truth." She said, "Okay, if it actually exists, then show me some evidence." By absolute luck, they managed to find a footprint. She initially thought, "This must be something that's known about, there can't be any creature like this I just obviously just haven't heard about it." She went back to UK, she spoke to a number of experts. I think they contacted David Attenborough at one point, who knew about the story and said, "Yes, I mean, there could well be something in this," but no one was really interested to go and look for it. People said, "If you wants to find out this then really you need to go there yourself." She went back in '93, did a bunch of interviews, and she didn't find any physical evidence, but she was very convinced by talking to a lot of people that knew the animal actually existed. Then, she took six months off in '94 and went back to try and break the story basically. If she had failed in '94, she probably would have gone back and resumed her work as a journalist. It was while she was there, I bumped into her and she reluctantly told me what she was doing there, after a few days. I obviously realized there's something interesting about her. Then she told me the story, which as I said, I was very skeptical about the reality of it. I hung around and she invited me along into the forest. It was during one of those trips that she first saw the animal and shortly after I saw it myself, a different animal on a different mountain. We both got to see it within a very short period of time.

Ray: I want to get to that story soon, but I'm also curious about because it seems like a lot of people have heard about the stories of Orang Pendek. It seems like something that would obviously catch the scientific community's interest if something like this did exist. What do you think it is about this creature and the stories about it that maybe have prevented folks from taking it seriously in the past and actually looking for it?

Jeremy: Well, I think because it's so rarely seen. It's very, very cryptic, the habitat there is extremely difficult. It wasn't something that people saw very often, including local people. You find people know about it, but very few people have seen it relative to the number of people that go into the forest. There just really wasn't that much evidence to follow up. I don't think there is a real disbelief in it, other than in the 1930s the Dutch, I believe put a reward of €5,000, I think it was for anybody that you could come up with any physical evidence of the animal. There were a number of Dutch planters that had claimed to have seen it. They eventually got a bunch of plaster-cast footprints, all of which turned out to be from somewhere. There was a famous hoax made from a monkey that had its toes cut off and shaved and it's teeth filed down. I think the scientific community just thought there's no evidence for this, so clearly, it doesn't exist. It's a mistaken identity or it's just fakery or folklore. There was a paper written in 1932, by the then Director of the Theological Museum, that pretty much closed the door on any further research. I think anybody that was researching in Sumatra, not that many people have actually, but I think anybody that was doing that and heard about Orang Pendek, when you looked into the history of it, you'd come across this paper which was fairly damning, and I think that was the end of it, really. I think so the book of The Footprints of the Mammals of Western Sumatra that had underneath the illustration for bear footprints, it said any footprints that are claimed to be Orang Pendek, are not. They're Malay somewhere. It didn't say they've been confused with this or maybe something. They very categorically stated that there was no such thing as Orang Pendek. I think those things combined, there was not much to follow up and when you did try and follow it up, you came across these scientific dead ends. It really shut the door on this.

Ray: I know there is a lot of folklore and mythology that surrounds the creature. I've read some pretty colorful stories around how the creature behaves and its origins. Do you have any stories like that that you've heard while you there, that obviously, is embedded within folklore, but still may pertain to a real creature?

Jeremy: The interesting thing is that there's almost no folklore about this, which is a really good indicator of it actually being a real animal in my understanding. The Sumatrans are obsessed with tigers. There's an awful lot of folklore, the Shamans, who really the spirit animals was tigers. They have awful lot of lore about tigers. People changing into tigers, we have village tigers that look after the well-being of villagers. Tigers that help people lost in the forest. I've spoken to this Shaman and said, "Why is there no or appear to be very little folklore around Orang Pendek?" They said, "It's just because we don't see enough. With tigers, we see something that's very much a part of our daily lives, but with Orang Pendek it's not. We might see it once in a lifetime. It's something that hasn't really evolved into folklore." The folklore that does-- you do hear that concerning bipedal-type animals. It's not referring to Orang Pendek, it's referring often to something that's more akin to Homo Floresiensis. A human-type animal that lived in groups, could speak rudimentary speech, but not Orang Pendek. No, there's not an awful lot of folklore.

Ray: Can we go back to when you encountered the creature itself. Could you just recount the sightings that you've had and just tell us in as much detail about those experiences and what the creature looked like?

Jeremy: Sure. It was shortly after Debbie saw her animal on one mountain, she got immediately sick. I went back to our house in the town, and she took me off on what I think was a fool's errand, to an area she'd actually been before and found nothing. I think she just wanted get rid of me for a few days. It's on a volcano, there was no water in this particular area, so no one was living on the volcano. We set up about five o'clock in the morning to try and get up to the forest as early as we could. Just at the very edge of the forest, the farmers there were growing potatoes. It's absolutely abutting on for the forest with these dry potato fields, the one on sweet potatoes planted in. As I came walking up, it's quite a steep slope, but I noticed this very, very fresh footprints, which I thought was a human footprint. I called the guide over and said, "You told me that nobody lives up here, because there's no available water. How come there's this absolutely fresh footprint?" He said, "No, no, no. That's Orang Pendek footprint." The odd thing was, although Debbie had seen the animal, I didn't. I was with her when she saw it, but I didn't see it. I still have trouble actually believing in it. I was thinking, "No. No way you can see--" Because you claimed to have seen it on one mountain, you go to another mountain and you find footprints. We looked around and we found more footprints. They weren't very clear because of the actual substrate of the soil, which was very dry, but we found a lot of potatoes that have been dug up and had been very freshly eaten. There was no oxidization. They were still absolutely white, but a lot of marks of thin tissue, which shows some of the canine marks, very rounded canines, which later became important. Then, we found a line of tracks which were heading directly along the top of the potato right on to the forest. We followed those. We found at the edge of the forest, where something had broken open a banana palm and eaten a pit. Then we found some arrow root plant that had been pulled up and the roots had been eaten. Then a ginger, which had been broken open and the pit eaten. This was only in about 10 meters, we saw different things, something that's very freshly eaten. As we came up to the edge of the forest, we heard some birds mobbing something. I knew from my childhood, in England, that when birds were behaving in this way, they've discovered an eagle or an owl, or something that they considered to be a threat. We heard these two birds, clearly, they were mobbing something. Suddenly, there was this enormous rah-type sound, which was about only 15 meters from where we were standing. I turned to the guide and said, "What the hell was that?" He began to look very pale and started shaking. I said, "Was it a bear?" He said, "No." While we were trying to work out what to do, I then heard the birds slightly moving away. It was clear that whatever was there was moving away from us. I just said to the guide, "Go and follow it. Go behind it." I sprinted along the edge of the forest for about 50 meters and then tried to cut off the animal, to try and get ahead of it. Almost, there at the moment I entered the forest, I saw about maybe 15 meters away, a banana palm sway. I knew something was coming, so I just ducked down into the undergrowth. Probably, seven meters from me, this animal, which was walking very, very fluidly on two legs. It was bipedal, upright, covered in pale yellowish hair, quite short glossy hair. It was looking backwards, towards obviously trying to listen to my guide that was behind, who had been following it. It's face was turned away from me, so I saw the head but I didn't get to see the face, which at the time I was very glad not to see the face. I saw it for just maybe two or three seconds, but very, very close. I didn't make any move. I had a camera around my neck. I didn't attempt to make a photograph, because I was too close to the animal and I thought, "If it hears anything and turns and looks, we're in a range where it might well attack." The thing was, the name Orang Pendek actually means short person in Malay. What I was expecting was not something that's big as what I actually saw, which was in the region of about one-and-a-half meters tall. It was also very, very well-built. There was no neck, the head fits very much into the shoulders. It was very, very broad. I didn't actually see muscle, because of the hair. It's not like a chimpanzee where you see the skin through the hair. The hair was thick, but I could see that this was an extremely well-built animal, and very young, muscular arms as well. It's something I really wouldn't have stood much of a chance against, had it started to charge, so I kept quiet. I watched it pass. Obviously, I had an absolute carnival of thoughts and emotions going through my mind. What I'd seen, it was extremely shocking. It was little bit frightening. I was in awe. I really needed to speak to someone and explain what I've seen. My guide then turned up and he was motioning that, "It's gone this way. It's gone this way." I said, "I know, I've just seen it." Then, we followed it. Had I followed it immediately, I probably would've got a very good view, because it went into the forest. It was quite open. It was down a slope, it traversed that. Had I followed it, I would've been above it and had a very, very clear view, but by the time we arrived, it had gone through. We followed the footprints, a very clear trail where it had gone. This is a volcano. We were obviously 100 meters with deep gullies, water runoff gullies. They're dry but they're about three meters wide, three meters deep. The animal had got across that, because it was vocalizing on the other side and it's being mobbed by another bunch of birds. I looked to the gulley and thought it will be difficult for us to cross it and if we tried, it would have made a lot of noise. I made the executive decision to go back, tell Debbie what we've seen, and get her to come the next day in the hopes that the animal would still be there, rather than us trying to follow it and scaring it off.

Ray: After that encounter, were you convinced that this creature was real? Or was there any doubt in your mind that you had seen anything but the Orang Pendek?

Jeremy: The interesting thing about my particular sighting was, well, we started off with a footprint, we found food items which showed very clear dentition. We heard three different vocalizations from the animal. Maybe the first rah sound it made, and then it made two more sounds after that, and it continued vocalizing it. It made four, five or so of the same vocalizations as it moved away.

Ray: If we just take a quick step back. I'd asked you the question about if there was any doubt in your mind about whether this creature could or could not be the Orang Pendek. You were talking about how you were following the trail and saw how they left food and bite marks, and that's where we got disconnected.

Jeremy: Yes. As I said, the sighting involved finding prints, finding foodstuff, hearing vocalizations, seeing one very, very close. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that this was something new, something unknown. It was a biped, it was walking very, very fluidly. Unlike anything else, I've ever seen. I had seen orangutans previously in northern Sumatra working on the ground and this is a very, very different way that they actually move. This animal clearly habitual biped. Clearly a different color to anything else. There's just nothing really to confuse it with. I don't have any doubt in my mind that what I saw was something that's unknown. Whether it's the Orang Pendek, it's a name that's given to an animal that people occasionally see in Sumatra. What is Orang Pendek? We don't really know if it's one animal there if it's two animals, three animals. We just alike to them that name is what people say. It just means a short person in Malay, it's not a specific animal name. If you go to different areas of Sumatra, they have different names for it. It's the name we alighted on for this thing.

Ray: There isn't any other known biped on earth and, and that's obviously a very human characteristic. Did that change your worldview in any way to see another creature walking on two legs like a human does?

Jeremy: Yes, absolutely. It's difficult to put into words. I've was always been interested in this place, and so I was always interested in the natural history. I also had a great interest in Paleoanthropology. Obviously, my first thought when I saw this thought it was Australopithecus. One of our very, very early ancestors that supposedly evolved in the African Savanna. We just started to believe that now but the reason I thought that at the time is because it was just so unlike any other big eight apes. It's because of the way it walks, it was very, very clearly a biped. The thing is, also when we see something that looks like a human being, that clearly isn't, that comes with a whole gamut of creepy responses because it's almost like a monster. Which is why I said, I was very happy at the time that I didn't see its face. If I'd got to see that creature upright, walking up a person, had it had turned and face me, what kind of face did it have? I didn't know. Whether it was a monkey-type face or whether it was going to be a human-type face. I think that would have been just too shocking, on top of seeing a large-bodied biped. I was quite happy I didn't see the face. Now, I wish I had because that sighting that distance never repeated for me.

Ray: When you read about the Orang Pendek, a lot of people's response to it is, that it's simply a misidentified Orangutan or Gibbon. Could you respond to those statements and say why you don't think that that's a possibility?

Jeremy: I absolutely understand. It's like the Occam's razor thing, the possible of explanation. If you have a landscape that already has one large-bodied primate, then when people claim to see a large body primate, it's more likely to be an orangutan than something new. I have been a Naturalist really my whole life. I know very clearly the difference between an orangutan, a gorilla, or a chimpanzee, this is very, very different. The interesting thing, there was a paper written by a couple of quite prominent orangutan researchers that claimed that it was an orangutan or it is an orangutan, the footprints that we found were the handprints of an orangutan. The interesting thing is these researchers didn't come and talk to us about after that is, and this is what I've often found is that, most people are skeptical. They come with that baggage of not wanting to believe and not really wanting to be disproved. If someone honestly sits down and listens to what we have to say or goes to Sumatra and listens to what local people have to say, well, I think they'll generally come away believing that there is something to the story.

Ray: It must be incredibly frustrating to have seen something so shocking as that, that makes you believe 100% that there's something out there and yet, the rest of the world isn't investing resources or time into finding this. Have you taken any steps after that encounter to try and push forward research or sway minds to get people to go out there and prove that this creature exists?

Jeremy: Well, yes, I've spent the rest of my life since 1994 doing exactly that. Debbie and I, we were extremely lucky in the fact that we both had a sighting. We were both absolutely convinced of what we've seen and I think my passion in the description I could give was quite convincing at the time. It may be tarnished over the years, but at that time, I really thought we kind of cracked it. Debbie had seen it in one mountain and I had seen it in another mountain, but clearly, there were more than one. Obviously, there was more than one animal, but we've gone to three different locations and we'd managed to see it. In our mind, clearly, was that, people have never seen it because they've never bothered to look. The fact that we looked, we cracked it, we knew how to find it. We went back to UK and we were extremely lucky in that we had two quite robust institutions listened to the story, believed it and supported it. One of those was Fauna & Flora International, and the other one was the Natural History unit, the BBC Natural History unit. They both came on board to support a return trip. Which is what we did. We went back in 1995 and try to get some physical evidence for the animal. We had a project supported by Fauna & Flora International for three years. Debbie and I stayed international for those three years. During that period, we diversified to what we were doing to cover up more things in the National Park, and I ended up staying there for 11 years, and Debbie never left really. Although most of her work has become Sumatran tigers, not Orang Pendek. I continued as much as I can so with a Camera Tracking program. I still, in fact, I'm just waiting to go to Sumatra now. I continue to search. It's not frustrating to me that people don't believe, because I don't have any doubt myself. When I meet people that adamantly don't believe, it actually give me a little bit of a thrill to think that I have seen something that is unbelievable. There is no other animal you can really say that about. If I saw the lion, or snow leopard, or a giant panda, those things you can pay on a tour to go and see, but with this one, you can't. That does give me a great sense of personal pride, even though a lot of people don't believe it. The great frustration is not personally one to me, it's the frustration for the animal where no one believes in it, then we can't really seem to try and protect it. That was the reason that I continue to look for it. It's not to validate it for other people, because to be honest, I really didn't care too much about that my own personal point of view. I did think this would be a fantastic tool for us to push for the conservation of the rain forest. Often you hear people saying, "Don't destroy the rain forests because we don't know what's in it." I thought, they're usually referring to , maybe even next cure for cancer. When it's something that, you know, in a sense it's closer to human beings than any other creature, not necessarily genetically, but given the fact that it's morphology that it's a biped, then what else could not be in the rain forest if it can hide something like that, until the last few years of the 20th century. That's my frustration is that we've lost an opportunity or the tool for protecting the rain forest.

Ray: Yes, if the Orang Pendek is real, there really is something tragic about the story, given that the rate the forests are being destroyed, that this creature could potentially disappear without us ever knowing that it existed, which is a horrifying thought, given that it's the most human like creature on the planet.

Jeremy: Yes, absolutely.

Ray: You had mentioned earlier that when you first saw the creature, the first thought that came to your mind was Australopithecus, but that later changed. What did that change too to your understanding of what this could be, or are you still just unsure of what you saw?

Jeremy: I'm sure of what I saw, but for me, in biology, morphology doesn't really mean very much. We can't necessarily look at something and think, "Because it's that shaped, it's this." I personally don't think it's related to Orangutans. What used to be the Ponydays, may have changed now, but at that time that was a family that it was included gorilla, and chimpanzee, and orangutan. I think we're lucky enough to see chimpanzees in the wild and Orangautans in the wild, this is something very, very, very different. Interestingly, we're working with one Indonesian researcher who was very, very adamant that it was an Orangutan. At the time in the '90s, the 500 rupee note had a feature of an Orangutan on the back of it. We were out one day interviewing a local that had seen Orang Pendek, and my counterpart was pushing really to admit that it was an Orangutan. Eventually, my friend took out the 500 rupee note and said, "Look, it didn't look anything like this?" Out of frustration, the witness said a line I've said many, many times myself, "Yes, it has a head. Yes, it has arms. Yes, it has legs." That's the only way in which it looked like an Orangutan. It's a very, very different creature.

Ray: You've mentioned that you still have plans in the future to continue looking for this creature. What are your future plans and what do you hope to do to capture evidence of the creature?

Jeremy: Well, as a photographer I was really hoping to get, and I specialize in camera track, that's what my mind working life has really been since I started using the Natural History Unit, BBC Natural History Unit Business in Munich in the mid-'90s. Now, of course, thanks to American hunters, there's a whole slew of different off the shelf cameras you can buy. I've specialized really going around Asia, photographing a lot of things that have never been photographed before, and Orang Pendek is really my huge failure in that regard as I've spent a lot of time camera tracking in Sumatra. I've got some very rare things, a lot of pictures have things for the first time, but I've missed getting Orang Pendek. As a photographer, I would like to get photographic evidence. For me, they did change greatly. When I first started doing this, there was no digital. Now, there is and it's possible to fake stuff. Even if you had brilliant footage, it wouldn't really necessarily convinced everybody. Like every new discovery, you end up having to have some kind of physical evidence, but that's very difficult because of the rules of Indonesia now about removing any anything to do with DNA or physical materials. You have to have research status to be able to do that and that's extremely difficult to get, and more so with the new rules that have just come out in Indonesia. Really, I'm left with the photographic option, which wouldn't clear up the fact that there'd been some evidence, but it wouldn't necessarily be 100% true.

Ray: I know there was a researched interest in the creature after the discovery of Homo floresiensis, given that some people thought that it could potentially be a descendant. Do you think that there's any merit to that? Or is that something that's just another speculation for what the creature could be?

Jeremy: No. To my mind, there's absolutely no relationship to those two. Directly after that discovery, I went down to Flores to just take a look for myself. Then, I worked on a documentary with a British crew, and I interviewed some people that claimed to have seen these things in Flores. They were very convincing, I must admit. I had trouble believing that they could have survived that long, but what they described is clearly very, very different than-- Primate floresiensis, obviously, is a type of human, Orang Pendek isn't, that's a great ape. I don't think there's any relationship with them at all. It's just a coincidence that two smallish bipedal creatures were discovered in Indonesia.

Ray: Other than the footprints that you found, have you seen anyone else who's discovered physical evidence that you think is pretty compelling for the evidence of the creature's existence?

Jeremy: Sorry, is that physical evidence?

Ray: Yes, physical evidence other than footprints that you've found personally, has anyone else produced like anything like hair? Has there been any hair samples or footprints that people can take a look at?

Jeremy: When Debbie had her cycling, we collected a couple of hairs, the animal that she saw stepped over a falling log, and on that log, we managed to collect some hairs. That was back in 1994. At the time, it was about $13,000 to get our hair analyzed for DNA, but at that time also if the hair didn't have a medulla, so it didn't have any skin attached to the end of it, then you couldn't extract DNA from it. The two hairs we collected at that time, they did go through analysis and nothing was found. If you had those same samples now, it will be very different. We collected hair in 1997 also from feces that we found, I had to go through it with a fine-tooth comb and I collected the same kind of hairs, long, windy, yellowish hair. That also went for analysis at great costs and again no medulla, so no result. Adam Davis also I believe came through some hairs. I remember he showed me a footprint once that had a hair embedded in it. I think they went for shaft analysis, which is actually a better thing to do in the absence of a medulla, and that showed that they were nothing that was known to be in the Sumatra rainforest. Other than that, it's a shocking falsity of any physical evidence, you have no bones. We have footprints, but really, they're almost valueless in terms of proof, because they're very easy to fake. They give us an idea of the morphology of their foot, which is easily quite different from the human foot, but in terms of evidence, there are nothing more than a curiosity. The answer is, no. In all this time we spent, we really don't have very much to show for it, unfortunately.

Ray: Could you maybe recount Debbie's experience in a little bit more detail, what she saw and experienced when she did encounter the creature?

Jeremy: Yes, like I said, I bumped into her while she was looking for this and she invited me along on one of her field trips. She had a very, very good tracker and we just seem to be every day going out and was finding footprinting, we were following them. I suggested that maybe it would be better if we did find some or took an animal with me and we split up and did a pincer movement, because I thought following it, we could do this for the rest of our lives. It's obviously going to be very aware of us in the forest and there's not much chance of ever seeing it. The very next day, she said, "Okay, let's do that." We left camp as usual with six of us in the morning and within an hour, we'd located what the guide said was an Orang Pendek was being mobbed by monkeys. We sent him round to try and get behind where the monkeys were. Debbie and I sat really anywhere we could do with inter movement because the terrain was not very friendly. We just sat on a jungle slope. I was sitting maybe two meters, four meters from Debbie. At the time, I was very skeptical. I honestly didn't believe anything too to this story. Suddenly Debbie said, "Oh shoot," and burst into tears. It took a while for her to actually be able to tell me that she'd just seen this animal walk across the opposite slope. It was a quite dense jungle, but we had a clear view of the opposite slope, so she had a similar view to what I had. We had never seen anything for very long in a forest because it's too dense. It was a clearing where there was a fallen log which she saw it step over. The animal she's so much smaller than the one I saw and slightly different color, it was a reddish Goldy color but again, a bipeds hair covered and didn't make any noise. A biped moving quietly and smoothly.

Ray: You spent a lot of time in the rain forest in Indonesia. Could you talk about some of the dangers that the rainforest is currently facing through deforestation and what the impact is on the wildlife there, Orang Pendek included?

Jeremy: I've now been going to Sumatra for 25 years, so of course, I've seen horrific changes in the amount of forest. Basically, a protected area where the phase regarding the west, a protected area is really a free for all for anybody that wants to. Especially in Indonesia now they have quite a strong belief in human rights, so the government actually discourages prosecution of anybody that's making farmland. It's a gradual childlike nibbling away at the forest edge. The park we were working in there's the... , so that National Park. It's a huge National Park. They have a border of something like 3,500 kilometers. Of course, every part of that is being eroded by illegal farms and incursions up into the valley, so you get the increasing areas of forests which become islands. It's something that Orang Pendek which it doesn't seem to have a set range, it's moving around all the time. As forests get isolated and become smaller and smaller islands, but obviously, it's no longer a suitable habitat for animals like that. I think obviously there's going to be a decrease in population. It will be harder for animals to move between areas to meet. How they actually meet and mate, we don't have a clue, but clearly, when a forest is becoming fragmented, this becomes more of a challenge.

Ray: What are some of the steps that people can take to help maybe slow down some of the deforestation that's happening now, preserve some of the natural environment?

Jeremy: This is a good question, but many have people tried to solve and have failed. There's been huge amount of money spent on development projects in the country to try and give people an alternative livelihood, but you have the problem of huge population growth in Indonesia. I think it was something like 190 million when I first went there, and now it's 290 million something like that. That's something all these people, all these land, most people in Sumatra, really in Sumatra they will have a small farm which is carved out to the forest. Before the National Parks were created, this wasn't a problem. People were just taking part as in what was very, very abundant forest. Now, with so many people, so much clearance. Also clearance not just for personal use, but to sell. Some people make a living clearing forest and selling it to people that live in the town. Those people will pay farmers to look after it. That's a huge stress. Unless you have the political will in Indonesia to protect these areas, which unfortunately we don't, because any government that in itself in enforcing protection of forest, would not be voted in basically. It's a very dire prognosis for the future of Sumatra rainforest, unfortunately.

Ray: We're running a little short on time, but I'm really interested in hearing about your recent experiences in India. What led you to hear about the creature you're looking for and a little bit about what the history and mythology around that creature itself.

Jeremy: In India?

Ray: Yes, in India.

Jeremy: Yes, this was something Northeast India. As I said, I've worked in most areas of Southeast Asia, and Orang Pendek is one of the creatures and one of these five million creatures is described from Southeast Asia. There's a whole bunch of others exactly in Bhutan, and Nepal, and China. They've seen many stories from Myanmar and Assam. There is one particular area of northeast India called Meghalaya, which was closed for a long, long time because of illegal activities wherever those sites. I went there maybe 30 years ago. I got special permission to go from the Indian government. I had a brief trip there. There's an animal there called Mande Burung, which translates as forest man. I wanted to go and have a look and see if there's any reality to those stories. I just spent a month traveling around in western Meghalaya interviewing local people that claimed to have seen the animal. Clearly, I was interested to see if they had any relationship with Orang Pendek, which it clearly doesn't. What the people have described in there is much, much bigger. Eight to nine feet tall, black-colored, black skin, black hair, huge feet with 14.5 inches long. It's more similar to the North American Bigfoot in description. I had some quite convincing stories from local people, but I didn't see any evidence myself.

Ray: Have you looked anywhere else in the world because there are so many similar stories from all across the world for creatures that match this description? Have you spent any time anywhere else looking for similar creatures?

Jeremy: No. Since it's very difficult to do and like I said, I do actually remain very, very skeptical about most of these things. I can't be skeptical about Orang Pendek because I saw it. I speak fluent Indonesian. I know the area very well, and I know that I'm not wasting my time on a wild goose chase because there's an animal there. In the case of India, I'm not so sure. I don't speak the language, so it becomes very, very difficult. It partners with Sumatra. Doing it somewhere else, yes, it becomes detrimental impossible. I've tried to utilize the funds I have and the time I had to try and crack the Orang Pendek case, rather than get diverted on trying to follow-up things which I'm not certain exists.

Ray: Thanks, Jeremy. That's all the questions I have for you. Is there anything you want to say before we end that maybe we haven't touched on in relation to the Orang Pendek?

Jeremy: If you have everything you need, then no, I'm fine. Having to reiterate, it's a real animal and I hope one day to be able to prove that.

Ray: I hope so too. I didn't realize you were still going back out there and still searching. I thought maybe you had called it a while back, so I'm glad to hear you are. If anything comes up, obviously I would be very, very interested in hearing when you're able to head back out there.

Jeremy: I think I will be doing this until I die or until I find something. Unfortunately, I'm really hooked into this. We'd be glad to get it finished. As a non-primatologist, my involvement with this would end once I discovered it. The proper people would come in to learn about it. I know that would be the end of my involvement, but I'd be quite happy with that. It would be great to be able to move on and do something else, but unfortunately, I'm all stuck with this until it's the end of my life, will be elevated somehow.

Ray: Yes. I hope you do. Thank you, Jeremy. I really, really appreciate you taking the time today to talk with me.

Jeremy: Yes, thanks for your interest.

Ray: All right. I'll talk to you later.

Jeremy: Yes. Take care.