See full version: AP tracks slave boats to Papua New Guinea
The trawlers fled a slave island in Indonesia with captives of a brutal Southeast Asian trafficking ring whose catch reaches the United States. Hundreds of men were freed after they were discovered there earlier this year, but 34 boats loaded with workers left for new fishing grounds before help arrived — they remain missing.
"They have to be responsible for what's happened," said Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti. here
After a four-month investigation, The Associated Press has found that at least some of them ended up in a narrow, dangerous strait nearly 1,000 miles away. The proof comes from accounts from recently returned slaves, satellite beacon tracking, government records, interviews with business insiders and fishing licenses. The location is also confirmed in images from space taken by one of the world's highest resolution satellite cameras, upon the AP's request.
YANGON, Myanmar — From space, the fishing boats are just little white specks floating in a vast stretch of blue water off Papua New Guinea. But zoom in and there's the critical evidence: Two trawlers loading slave-caught seafood onto a massive refrigerated cargo ship.
As the boats hid, Indonesian investigators discovered that the company listed as their operator, Pusaka Benjina Resources, was really a venture between seafood industry tycoons and businessmen from Thailand and Indonesia. [links]
There are few areas of the world that invoke the true image of a lost world that time has forgotten as fully as the rugged island nation of Papua New Guinea. Lying in the southwestern Pacific ocean and comprising one half of the larger landmass of New Guinea, the country is largely undeveloped and covered with uncharted wilderness, with many of the residents living in rural villages and others comprising the many elusive tribes that lurk here. This is a wild land once known for cannibalism and head hunting, a truly lost world ensconced by impenetrable rain forests for as far as the eye can see. Here there are said to roam modern day dinosaurs, and this is a look at some of the stranger recent reports.
Supposed these strange living dinosaurs have been spotted in many other areas of Papua New Guinea as well, and some of these sightings have been made at the country’s largest lake, Lake Murray. Surrounded by dense jungle that is nearly impenetrable in some places, its shores populated by little contacted native tribes, it looks very much like a lost world one would expect to be inhabited by dinosaurs, and according to some accounts, perhaps it is. In December of 1999, a group of villagers making their way across the remote lake in a canoe were startled to see what they described as a dinosaur wading about in shallow water near one of the lake’s islands. The bipedal creature was said to be around 20-feet high and 6-feet wide, with two squat, thick rear legs like tree trunks, two smaller forelimbs, a long neck and a long slender tail, and skin reminiscent of that of a crocodile. The most fearsome aspect was the creature’s head, which was said to look somewhat cow-like, with a huge mouth filled with teeth “as long as a man’s fingers.” here
One veritable hotspot of such sightings comes form a remote island here, where a creature was seen in the murky water at a place called Ambungi Island, a sparsely inhabited patch of land which lies just south of the south coast of West New Britain and which is home to only about 90 people, making it pretty remote, to say the least. In 1995 a local man named Alphones Likky was out spearfishing just offshore in shallow water when he heard something very large splash behind him and crash into the coral reef nearby. The startled witness looked to see a fully submerged “dinosaur,” with a long neck and tail, short forelimbs, and muscular hind limbs topped with webbed feet like those of a duck. The beast’s head was smallish and shaped somewhat like a snake’s, and there were dermal ridges down the creature’s back and tail, with the entire length estimated as being 4 meters. It was described as swimming at a slow, leisurely pace completely underwater, making its way to the entrance of an underwater cave before slipping down into the gloom. The terrified spear fisherman claimed he had quickly swum up back to his canoe and got out of there as fast as he could. What sort of creature was this?
“This subbottom sonar unit was then combined with another type of geophysical unit — a side-scan sonar device also designed for rivers — that captured simple images of the riverbed, some 130 feet below the surface of the water in the deepest parts of the Fly. As we were cruising around, therefore, we were, first, producing beautiful centimeter-scale images of the bed of the river with this side-scan solar device. more
While the team expected that many answers would await the tedious chemical analysis of soil samples after they returned to their labs, the huge surprise of the trip came from incredible geological discoveries hidden under the riverbed. In fact, these discoveries track carbon storage back across the pages of history and into the last ice age!
NEW TOOLS FOR A NEW CENTURY
“Buried 20 feet underneath that lake bottom, however, we discovered a massive paleo-river channel, going down the center of the lake — a channel that was 60 feet deep and 1,100 feet across and about 30 feet lower than the present Strickland River. This discovery has many implications for how the rivers and lakes in Papua New Guinea responded to the last ice age 15,000 years ago.” more
While the media might be expected to play up the “surviving dinosaur” angle, a few scientists surprisingly did so as well—perhaps because they weren’t used to working with samples as badly decomposed as this one was. But it wasn’t long before other, better scientists pointed out that carcasses of this sort are discovered fairly regularly and usually turn out to be sharks or whales. Soon after the carcass became international news, tissue samples produced evidence that the creature was actually a dead basking shark. Decomposing basking shark carcasses lose the dorsal and caudal fins first, followed by most of the lower head area, making them resemble a “sea serpent” or Plesiosaur.
Accompanying the article was a depiction of the pygmy race reportedly observed by the expedition, with an artist’s reconstruction of the giant footprints of the Gazeka. Creationists have claimed there are similarities between the reconstruction and Diprotodon‘s footprints. Unfortunately, they don’t match nearly as well as the creationists claim. [links]
“Dutifully, we showed them the drawings of the Triceratops and again were rebuffed by the comment that while it looked like the Ngoubou it did not have nearly enough horns and that they were in the wrong place on the triceratops. I asked what they meant by that, the men told us that Ngoubou had six horns on the frill itself and one of them drew the configuration for me on a scrap of paper.” [links]
According to the story, which does not appear in Monckton’s own memoirs, the explorer supposedly discovered the monster attacking a village of pygmies and opened fire on it. “The huge Gazeka at once turned upon him. As it reared upon its hind legs and pawed the air it looked to the hunter as big as a house, standing fully 25 feet high. Two of Monckton’s bullets seemed to take effect, as a stream of blood flowed freely from the animal’s shoulder, but before Monckton was able to reload the animal turned and fled. By that time it was too dark to follow him, and Monckton never had another opportunity to renew his pursuit.” [links]