Cryptozoologist Adam Davies Shares Global Cryptid Hunting Adventures

A recent interview on The Nights Watch YouTube channel features one of the most well-traveled researchers in the cryptid community, Adam Davies, and the stories he shares are the kind that remind you just how much of this planet remains truly wild and unknown. Davies has spent decades trekking through some of the most remote and dangerous places on Earth, searching for creatures that mainstream science tends to shrug off. His list of pursuits reads like a cryptozoology greatest hits album: the Orang Pendek of Sumatra, the Yeti of the Himalayas, Mokele-Mbembe in the Congo, and of course, Sasquatch right here in North America. Most of this work has been self-financed, and as he puts it, most of it has been dangerous, but he's still here with both arms intact, which honestly feels like an accomplishment worth celebrating on its own. One of the standout moments in the conversation comes when Davies recounts his time deep in the Sumatran jungle searching for the Orang Pendek, a bipedal primate reported throughout the region with a historical pedigree stretching all the way back to Marco Polo's era. He describes setting up silent observation posts with a small team, waiting motionless for hours to see if anything would wander into view. The area, he notes, also happens to hold one of the highest concentrations of tigers anywhere on the planet, which adds a certain edge to the whole enterprise. Truckers in the region refuse to drive certain roads alone because of tiger encounters, and someone on a moped had actually been killed and eaten not long before his expedition. It was during one of these silent watches that Davies caught a stripe of movement in his peripheral vision. A female tiger had stalked right up to his camp, and the only reason he noticed her at all was the cloud of tiny flies hovering above her. He managed to get a plaster cast of her print, which is the kind of hands-on fieldwork that separates actual researchers from armchair speculators. The conversation also wanders into the Congo, where Davies became the first person to play drums with a group of Pygmy people, a detail he delivers with the dry humor of someone who has genuinely lived a life most adventure books would reject as too far-fetched. He recommends the original Livingston and Stanley accounts of the Congo for anyone who wants to understand just how much of that region remains a mystery, even today. One of the more striking points comes when Davies describes a conversation with an Indian government official while seeking permits to explore the Meghalaya jungle in search of the Mande Barong. The official told him point blank that they have no idea what lives in roughly 80 percent of that jungle. Eighty percent. In 2024. That kind of statistic should give anyone pause, especially when you consider similar gaps in the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and the vast stretches of the Congo basin. For anyone who has ever felt that the official maps of biology are a little too tidy, Davies' perspective is refreshing. He pushes back on the assumption that our digital age has somehow illuminated every corner of the planet, pointing out that the Victorians thought the same thing, and they were spectacularly wrong. There are still thousands of square miles out there where the notion of an unknown hominid or relic species existing is not inherently implausible, and frankly, it's a little arrogant to pretend otherwise. Davies also mentions his upcoming novel, Ghosts and Beasts, which sounds like it pulls from the same well of strange encounters and far-flung expeditions that has defined his career. He's written other books before, but this one is his first non-fiction title in about five years, so there's clearly a lot of material to draw from. The whole interview is worth sitting down with, especially for anyone who grew up watching Destination Truth or Monster Quest and wondered what it would actually be like to do this work for real. Davies has been on those shows, he's been on History Channel and Geo, and he has the scars and stories to prove it. The Nights Watch channel hosts the full conversation, and it runs long enough to really dig into the philosophy behind the search as much as the fieldwork itself. Check it out when you get a chance. It's the kind of interview that makes you want to dust off the old hiking boots and start asking questions again.