Original subtitles

[William Shatner] Deadly mountain ranges

that draw thousands

of ambitious thrill-seekers.

Boiling hot eruptions

whose lethal beauty

lures scientists to the edge of imminent peril

and a lush mysterious island

that hides the prospect of

certain death.

[man screams]

All over the globe,

there are places so hazardous,

volatile and precarious,

visitors are urged to "keep out."

And yet, despite monumental challenges,

unmistakable signs of peril

and even deadly consequences,

there are those who are compelled to push fear aside

and rush headlong into the unknown.

Why are some people willing to risk their lives

for the thrill of experiencing a dangerous place?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

[Shatner] Every day, we all face a certain level of risk

in life's normal routines.

We trust other drivers on the road

and fly in airplanes

at 30,000 feet.

We even take our chances walking on a flight of stairs,

a simple activity that claims around 12,000 lives each year.

But while danger is an inescapable part of life,

there are those who choose to deliberately

put themselves in unmistakable jeopardy.

[Ken Carter] There are

some people who are sort of drawn towards

dangerous things over and over again

without really considering the risks.

You would think that danger

would sort of suppress curiosity.

But for some people, the danger actually heightens it.

I would never want to go

off of a cliff or cliff dive or skydive,

jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

What would make someone want to do that kind of thing?

And I think really,

it's sort of who they are as a person,

as part of their identity.

[Shatner] Through human evolution,

our brains have become programmed to prioritize

self-preservation and survival above all else.

So what is really going on in the minds of those

who seem to be all too willing

to put their lives at risk?

The psychological concept is called

sensation seeking, and there are

different components to it.

One is called thrill and adventure seeking.

These are dangerous situations that are more physical.

Like skydiving, bungee jumping.

But there's also experience seeking.

That's sensations of the mind and of the senses.

The really interesting thing about high sensation seekers

is they have different kinds of chemical alarms

that may go off in their body

during these really chaotic situations.

When we're around things that are dangerous,

we have that fight, flee or freeze response.

It gets our body ready to either

fight the danger directly,

freeze to avoid detection,

or flee from those dangerous situations.

And that's set off by a chemical called cortisol in our body.

The high sensation seekers, when they're around these really

chaotic experiences, don't have that much cortisol,

so they're pretty calm in those situations.

What they do have is an increase in a chemical called dopamine.

It's a pleasure neurotransmitter.

So, when they're in these really highly chaotic situations,

they're feeling a lot more pleasure,

but less stress than average people.

The world is full of danger and-and new things to explore.

If we-we only had people who were low sensation seekers,

we would never explore those things.

[Shatner] Could unique brain chemistry be the difference

between a risk taker

or someone who plays it safe?

And while the pursuit of a dopamine rush may trigger

certain dangerous behavior,

the prospect of a life of adventure

is also motivation

for those who seek their next thrill.

I've had this conversation many times with friends.

"How did you end up being this guy

"who wanted to go off and do these crazy things?

To go off into the wild blue yonder and risk it all?"

It was born into me. Something started very early,

and it would often be fueled by the books that I read

of adventurers and mountain climbers

that I aspired to be like.

And come hell or high water,

I found a way to go find some amazing adventures.

There's a certain type of person

who's just looking for adrenaline.

I'm more interested in the unknown.

I think I was born with extra curiosity,

and when I go to these places, it's gonna be dangerous.

And I'm like, "Woo-hoo, this is cool."

'Cause I don't want my last few minutes

to be filled with terror,

if they are my last few minutes.

I do have less fear than most people.

So, I think that's not normal.

[Shatner] For some, walking in the footsteps of their heroes,

or simply experiencing the unknown, is a rush.

But is it also possible that some adventurers are just

addicted to danger?

[Victor Vescovo] I feel most comfortable and happiest

when I'm pushing the edges of risk.

I don't know if I was destined for adventure,

but it certainly was a

intense compulsion to explore.

And it became somewhat addictive.

The Explorer's Grand Slam is climbing the highest mountain

on all seven continents

and skiing at least

100 kilometers to the North and South Poles.

I've done that.

That took me on this

25-year path to climb

the Seven Summits.

But after I climbed those,

then I was very curious

about the Poles.

What would it be like to go for a long distance

in extremely difficult conditions?

I've been able to go into high altitudes in aircraft.

I've been to space on a rocket that exploded

a couple of months after I went up in it.

I've been to the bottom of the ocean

with my submersible.

It takes four and a half hours

to go from the surface to the bottom.

If there was any kind of catastrophic failure

with the submersible,

you would be gone

before your brain could even register it.

It was one of the most dangerous things I've ever done.

These are things

that are not normal, and yet

I have to explore or I'm bored.

[Carter] One of the concepts we look at for sensation seeking

is called "boredom susceptibility,"

how easy it is for a person to get bored

and how irritated they get when they get bored.

I worry a lot about high sensation seekers

who get bored really easily.

Those are the people who are gonna try

the next thing, the next thing and the next thing.

[Shatner] While elite explorers

and highly trained athletes venture into

hazardous environments for a variety of reasons,

remarkably, there's a growing trend

where inexperienced people risk their well-being

in a dangerous pastime known as extreme tourism.

[Johnston] Extreme tourism is

people wanting to go into an environment

that they are not qualified to enter.

Whether you're going into space,

you're running hardcore white water,

you're going to high altitude.

This is someone who,

without the infrastructure and the guide,

cannot survive in that environment.

It's quite dangerous.

Extreme tourism makes an opportunity

that was never there before,

but it also means that anyone can say,

"I've always had a dream to be able to go up into space."

And so, if you have the money to be able to finance the trip,

then you don't have to have all the training of an astronaut.

I mean, it's always been a dangerous thing

to do, when you strap someone to a big tube

full of fuel and then you shoot them rocketing up to space.

And now, more and more people can do that.

[Ben McGee] Some people will spend money

to travel halfway across the world

to go visit something like the Claw at Chernobyl.

This was a grappling fixture

which was meant to move material around

and got intensely contaminated with a lot of radiation.

That can cause human health problems.

Not just cancer, but a breakdown

of the cardiovascular system, Alzheimer's-like effects.

And, well, there are people

who travel all the way around the world to see this,

and, in some cases, sit on it.

Tourists are lining up all over the world

to visit abandoned minefields.

They could be war zones or places where

there have been natural disasters.

I think people are drawn to places where they shouldn't be.

This is a kind of exploration of ourselves.

If I had a box that said "do not open,"

there are certain people

that are gonna want to open it to see what's inside.

[Shatner reads on-screen text]

Breaking above the horizon like a jagged

20,000-foot granite tooth is Mount McKinley.

It is considered the most dangerous mountain

in North America, having claimed over 130 lives.

In 1994, mountaineer and filmmaker Thom Pollard's

attempt to scale McKinley took a sudden turn

when his high-climbing adventure

became a harrowing tale of survival.

[Pollard] I was guiding a trip on

a semi-technical route called the West Rib, and

we became aware that

there was gonna be bad weather coming in.

-[wind whistling] -And that storm came in

like a complete firestorm.

The winds were over 100 miles an hour.

Our tent was completely destroyed.

So we started digging a small snow cave.

And we crawled into this snow cave,

and the winds were so high,

it literally shook the mountain.

And we thought, well,

we very well could die here.

It is terrifying to think

the force of nature, how great it was.

But we emerged the following morning with our toes,

with our fingers, with our lives.

And it was after that storm

that I thought to myself,

all right, I had all the qualities

that I could ever imagine needing

to go and climb a big mountain.

I'm ready for Mount Everest.

[Shatner] Why would someone who had just narrowly escaped death

want to take on an even bigger and riskier expedition?

Mount Everest,

located high in the Himalayas

on the border of Nepal and Tibet.

It is the world's tallest peak.

At over 29,000 feet,

Everest rests just below the cruising altitude

of most commercial jets.

There have been around 12,500 attempts

to summit this iconic mountain, which in many ways

represents the height

of physical human achievement.

Mountain climbers are willing to risk hypoxia, death or injury

to have the sensations that they're after.

Do they have a death wish? They say they don't.

And the fear is just enough to help them to feel alive.

It's something spiritual in terms of

what they're seeing, that sense of awe

because they're just after that experience.

[Shatner] It's safe to say that anyone

that gazes up at this titanic

heap of rock would know that

climbing it would be unspeakably dangerous.

But just how deadly is Mount Everest?

[Johnston] I think it's just over 300 people

that have died on Everest,

most of whom are still on the mountain.

Because there are places on Everest where if you fall,

you're falling thousands and thousands of feet.

We're just not gonna find you. So that happens.

But people that die on a route

generally are found by other people climbing that route.

It's hard to get a body down from that altitude.

[Vescovo] Things can happen very quickly on Everest

that will kill you.

It is like playing Russian roulette.

You can go hypothermic.

If the weather is bad, it can be

very dangerous very quickly.

And then, of course, there's avalanche.

You cannot outrun an avalanche.

Even at base camp of Everest,

avalanches have struck

and killed people out of nowhere.

If you do not clip in your rope and you slip,

you are going to die.

70% of accidents happen on the way down

because you're exhausted.

And so, Mount Everest is a brutal place.

It is not for the faint of heart.

[Shatner] And no place on Everest is as brutal

as above 26,000 feet,

which is known as the death zone.

With shearing, hurricane-force winds,

minus-30-degree temperatures,

and too little oxygen for humans

to survive without supplemental air,

it's certainly earned its menacing nickname.

There's a lot up there that can take your life away

when you're going up into the death zone.

And it is almost impossible to understand

the bitter cold at that altitude.

If you were to take off your glove

for even just a few moments

in a bitter wind up there,

you could easily lose your fingers to frostbite

in just a few moments.

Because of that high, cold, thin air,

your body is literally dying up there.

[Shatner] Not only do people face avalanches,

falls and bitter cold on Everest,

climbers are also at risk for developing

a mysterious mental affliction known as "summit fever."

[Carter] Summit fever is a psychological phenomenon

that happens

when climbers are so focused

on getting to the summit

that they don't consider the apparent risks

that they're experiencing.

Because they're so focused, they're not listening

to those obvious signals of danger

that might be around them.

Um, people that are telling them to turn back

or even physical sensations that they're ignoring

in order to achieve their goal.

[Johnston] The human mind drives people

beyond what they should do.

And they ignore where they are, they ignore what time it is,

they ignore how much water they've had,

how much food they've had, so that summit fever,

it blurs people's judgment.

[Shatner] Summit fever's dangerous psychological effects

can overwhelm a mountaineer with the compulsion

to completely ignore their survival instincts.

And perhaps even more frightening is the uncertainty

of who will be caught in its fatal grip.

I've been on mountains before

where all hell breaks loose

and I've seen people completely collapse

and lose all senses of themselves.

But here's the deal.

You don't know until something happens.

The only way to find out is to go there

and learn if you have what it takes.

Standing on the top is great, but believe it or not,

when you are in those times that are trying,

that test you, those are the times

that I feel most connected on the mountain.

Climbing Mount Everest is not only a monumental achievement

in mountaineering, it's also an unparalleled thrill

that contains a very real possibility that the mountain

could become an adventurer's eternal resting place.

But there's another beautiful location

in the wilds of New Mexico

that is possibly even more dangerous,

where unwitting travelers seem to vanish

without a trace.

[Shatner] The Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico.

This wild and scenic landscape

draws upwards of a million visitors every year,

making it one of the most popular outdoor

recreational areas in the state.

But this breathtaking wilderness has also drawn law enforcement

and independent investigators to solve

the mystery of a dangerous expanse

known in local folklore as the Pecos Triangle.

The Pecos Triangle is a dangerous place

because of the natural phenomena

that you can experience while you're there.

You have cave systems, you have sinkholes,

you have weather patterns

-that change within seconds. -[thunder crashing]

And what's interesting about this place is

that there are some people who have gone missing

that have never returned.

[Shatner] While you won't find the Pecos Triangle on a map,

locals define it as a region stretching from

north-central New Mexico,

and roughly bounded by Santa Fe,

Taos and Las Vegas.

At least 15 people that we know of

have mysteriously disappeared

in this 6,000-square-mile zone.

[Allan Pacheco] A classic example would be Mel Nadel.

This is September the 6th, '09.

He's with some hunters, and Mel says,

"I'm gonna go down into these trees here,

"I'm gonna set up a blind.

You guys, head on out."

So, they come on back.

It's dusk.

Mel's not there.

It's getting dark. He doesn't show.

They go to the ranger station,

have to call the state police.

Get a big search there.

This search has professional trackers,

cadaver dogs, Cessnas.

Since that time,

no bone, no clothing has been found of this guy.

Another missing person was Emma Tresp.

She vanished in the Pecos Triangle in 1998.

She had gone to Pecos many times before

so she knows the area.

They find her car up there on this dirt road.

And her footprints go around the car,

and that's it.

They don't go up the road, go down the road,

go to either side.

And people want to say, oh, well,

she just ended on up going into the wilds

and, uh, dying and succumbing.

Well, how come there's no body?

There's no sign of struggle, of an animal

or whatever taking her.

How come her tracks just end right there?

Despite extensive searches,

no one knows the circumstances surrounding some of

the baffling disappearances in the Pecos Triangle,

which is why researchers

continue to risk their own safety

in this mysterious wilderness

to identify why people seem to just

vanish into thin air.

The facts surrounding these two disappearances

aren't normal.

So when I started to review national park reports

and U.S. Forest reports,

immediately, I started to see that the New Mexico State Police

would bring K-9s to the scene

and the K-9s wouldn't be able to pick up a scent.

Or they brought professional trackers in.

Well, in a vast majority of these cases,

they can't find tracks either.

So, when you have an instance where someone's missing

and there's no tracks and there's no scent trail,

that points to something highly unusual.

[Pacheco] As far as this so-called Pecos Triangle,

I've, uh, been on different searches, investigations,

and those scenarios never made sense to me.

You say to yourself, how can this person

vanish into thin air

and there be

no clues? Gone.

[Shatner] With no tangible leads

for investigators to follow,

some researchers have turned to native folklore

surrounding the area,

where the history and beliefs of the local Indigenous people

may provide surprising insights

into the forest's dangerous nature.

[Thompson] The Pecos Triangle has had a very,

very interesting and tragic history.

It was once known for the Pecos Pueblo,

where the Pecos people

had a very, very large and thriving city,

drawing people in from all over to discuss things

about spirituality, the cosmos.

But after, you know, attacks by the Spanish,

violent attacks and diseases during the 16th,

17th and 18th century, this pueblo was abandoned.

So this once had a major civilization here

and that has all been sort of wiped from the map.

And so some of the legends and the mystique of this area

is that it regularly does claim people.

People have gone in there and not come out.

[Jeff Williams] The Native Americans do have

these folklore stories about shadow people

and giant snakes that live there in the forest,

whispers in the night,

luring people off of the trail.

These are the things that

you can't rationalize or put a finger on,

and this only adds to the fear

and the confusion when you're out there.

[Shatner] Are supernatural forces

behind the bizarre disappearances

in this foreboding section of the Santa Fe National Forest?

Allan Pacheco has ventured into the Triangle himself,

and based on his own unsettling experience,

he believes these perplexing vanishings

may involve visitors from another world.

I have seen UFO activity on up there.

I saw this bright light coming on down.

Fire, fire, fire. White, white bright light.

And in it was this purple triangular-type of shape.

As far as the vanishings in Pecos, there is

something there that is intelligent

that takes out people.

As far as some of the unusual things that are seen

around the area where Mel and Emma disappeared,

one of the consistencies are orbs.

They're various colors.

And imagine just a ball of light.

These orbs have been seen where people have disappeared.

But to explain

how they disappeared,

it's impossible at this point.

The Santa Fe National Forest

is a dangerous place. It's a complete mystery.

Could the vast landscape of the Pecos Triangle

be hiding the remains of lost visitors,

or is something far stranger at work in this desolate area?

We may never know.

But there are far more dangerous places

that continue to draw brave visitors every year

like the openings in Earth's crust,

that at any moment can rain down

a deadly storm of fire and ash.

[Shatner reads on-screen text]

The top of this active volcano explodes in a jet of ash

rising several miles into the atmosphere.

Hundreds of villagers flee for their lives

as an unstoppable torrent of destruction

moves towards their communities.

There's no shortage of ways for a volcano to kill you.

You can have lava erupting.

You can have pyroclastic flows,

which are giant, broiling clouds of ash

at upwards of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

You can have toxic gasses be released

and that can asphyxiate you,

even if the burning doesn't get you.

Volcanoes can also generate firebombs.

They're ejecting rocks that can smash people,

and some of them are huge.

Maybe the size of a car, a house.

And so, any of these things can

just take you out like you weren't there.

[Shatner] It's estimated that around the world,

upwards of 800 million people live within 62 miles

of a dangerously active volcano.

And history's littered with tragic

volcanic eruptions that have extinguished countless lives,

from the buried residents of Pompeii

after Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD

to the largest eruption in human history in 1815,

when Indonesia's Mount Tambora claimed 100,000 souls.

With such perilous prospects of human loss,

why do people continue to live near these

unpredictable mountains of fire?

[Oppenheimer] We often focus in on the catastrophe,

but people live on volcanoes for centuries

or millennia between eruptions, and in that time

they're living with the volcano,

they're benefiting from

the fertility of the volcanic soil.

The crops are very productive.

And you can go up at altitude

and have a nice environment to live in.

[Lance Geiger] People like to live on the sides of volcanoes

because, I mean, there's just a natural beauty

that occurs around volcanoes.

There's reasons why you would go to where we knew a volcano was

to see the flora and the fauna

and the geology and all that sort of stuff.

But any volcano that's been active

in the last 50,000 years could become active tomorrow.

And there's inherent risk to that.

[Shatner] Despite the benefits,

we can't predict when a community

might be decimated by lava and ash.

It's a fragile existence to be sure,

but there are those who embrace the danger

like the risk-takers who seek to witness

a volcano when it erupts.

[McGee] A volcano is you watching that act of creation,

geologic creation happen live.

There's a little bit of the thrill of the power,

just glimpsing what the Earth is capable of.

And then there's also a desire to see

and understand more about these processes as they're happening.

The opportunity to see something happening

raw can just be too compelling

to ignore, even if there's risk.

[Oppenheimer] I think of volcanoes,

in some ways, they're windows, they're apertures

into the deep Earth, from the Earth's interior.

A volcanic eruption is-is such

an extraordinary spectacle,

to see the fireworks go into the sky

and ash clouds roiling up into the atmosphere.

Sonically, the detonations,

the whistles, the roars, the wailing

from gas vents to the biggest explosive eruptions

where you can feel the rumbling earth

through your feet, the seismic energy,

and you can smell and taste the gases.

So volcanoes assail all the senses and-and

you can't take your eye off them.

[Shatner] An erupting volcano is truly a profound sight,

but it's not the only reason why scientists are so willing

to risk their lives in these explosive environments.

For centuries, fundamental questions about

the nature of these earthly cauldrons

has drawn researchers directly into harm's way.

As a volcanologist, I'm always humbled when I read

scientific works from 200 years ago,

and they're asking the same questions we're asking now.

Why did the volcano erupt?

Why did it explode in that particular way?

We're asking the same questions,

and we have, of course, much more sophisticated tools.

We can watch volcanoes from space.

But there's still so much that we don't understand.

And so,

if we look at the historical record,

we have eruptions that are more than a hundred times bigger

than anything we've seen.

We call them super eruptions,

and these can change the global climate.

They can have enormous impacts on pasture and crops.

[Andrew Collins] You have supervolcanoes around the world

that have the potential to destroy human life on Earth.

I mean, this happened

around 70,000 years ago

with the Mount Toba eruption

in the Pacific region.

90% of humanity were actually wiped out.

So that could happen again.

That's why what the volcanologists are doing

is just so important to the future of humanity.

[Shatner] Let's face it, there's probably

no safe place on the planet if a supervolcano explodes.

And it's believed that there are between 12 and 20

active supervolcanoes across the Earth.

But by putting themselves in peril,

perhaps scientists can discover the secret signs

to predict future apocalyptic eruptions.

[Oppenheimer] When it comes to forecasting volcanic eruptions,

there are things we can do.

Gases will leak out, and we can detect those signals

and try and make an assessment

of how likely an eruption is to take place

in a certain time frame.

But there are so many processes involved,

that we will never know with certainty--

how would I forecast it

to forestall a future disaster?

So, there are so many secrets yet

to, uh, discover and unveil.

Until scientists can actually predict a volcanic eruption,

when it comes to such a destructive force of nature,

it's probably wise to keep your distance.

But there's a remote and forbidden island

in the Indian Ocean where danger is not caused by Mother Earth

but rather by mysterious inhabitants who think nothing

of killing unwelcome visitors on sight.

[Shatner] The Andaman Islands.

This chain of over 300 islands off the coast of India

is a true tropical paradise,

attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.

But, in stark contrast,

at the remote southwestern edge of this archipelago,

lies one of the most dangerous places on Earth--

North Sentinel Island.

North Sentinel Island is really

a little speck of land, relatively.

It's just about ten miles across,

about the size of the island of Manhattan.

It's almost impossible to,

even from the air, see much

of what's going on on this island.

It really looks the part of a mysterious,

impenetrable place.

[Everett] The North Sentinel Island is

one of the most isolated places

in terms of difficulty of access in the world.

It's surrounded by coral, there's no natural harbor,

so ships can't really

dock there, and it's very dangerous

to get too close to the island.

[Shatner] While the waters surrounding

North Sentinel Island are treacherous,

the real danger lies with its mysterious inhabitants,

the most isolated Indigenous people in the world,

known as the Sentinelese.

[Everett] The Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island,

they're unique because no one has ever

successfully contacted them.

They've probably been there for 50,000 years

or something along those lines,

but we know next to nothing about the people.

We know that they're hostile.

They've tried to kill most people who've landed there.

[Thompson] This is, in some ways,

the most dangerous place to be an explorer.

Number one, uh, as an outsider coming there,

you'd probably be killed.

Right? They-they very often kill, uh, intruders.

They shoot arrows at people who come too close regularly.

The North Sentinelese have adamantly

distanced themselves from the outside world.

It's something that you're never gonna be allowed to study.

[Shatner] In 1956, the Indian government,

which maintains territorial control

of North Sentinel Island,

made it illegal for non-Sentinelese people

to even set foot on the island.

But when did the outside world

first become aware of this deadly tribe?

The first time that anyone from the outside

is recorded as having landed on North Sentinel

and interacted with the local people was in 1867,

when a merchant ship was actually shipwrecked

just off the coast of the island,

and about 80-some passengers and 20 crewmen

got safely to the beach

and promptly, some native people came out

with bows and arrows, and as they told it,

began to attack these survivors of the shipwreck.

They put up with attacks, regular attacks

from the Sentinelese,

until they were rescued by a larger boat.

So, they wrote up reports,

and we learned that this is a very hostile island.

It has probably been hostile to outsiders

for probably thousands of years.

[Shatner] Experts estimate that there are around

50 to 100 Sentinelese

currently living on the island,

but for the most part, this isolated culture

remains a complete mystery.

It's both extremely dangerous and illegal

to visit North Sentinel Island.

So, why have people continued to risk their lives

to visit these deadly shores?

[Goodheart] A lot of people in the rest of the world

first became aware of North Sentinel Island

in 2018, when the news broke globally

that a young American had been killed on the beach there.

The man's name was John Allen Chau,

and he had gone there with the intention

of bringing Christianity to the native inhabitants.

He befriended some of the local fishermen,

and then he went in a small fishing boat.

He launched a little portable kayak

and paddled onto the beach holding a waterproof Bible.

He got out of his boat,

waited for some native people to approach,

and then opened the Bible

and began reading to the Sentinelese.

Then a young boy came up

and, at point-blank range,

drew his bow

and shot the arrow into this waterproof Bible

that Chau was standing there reading from.

And so, he backed off, he got back into his kayak,

and he then returned the next day.

What happened to him next is a mystery.

Because the fishermen who had brought him to the island

circled back around to that beach a few hours later

and saw the Sentinelese

dragging his lifeless body across the beach

and burying it in the sand.

So, that concern for possible outsiders coming

continues to worry me to this day.

[Everett] I was interested at one time in going

to North Sentinel Island and studying the Sentinelese.

It's exactly what I do: study hunter-gatherers.

But, uh, knowing now what I know about the North Sentinelese,

no, I don't have any desire to go there at all.

North Sentinel Island is a dangerous place

if you're not Sentinelese.

We see this group of people on this island

that we don't know anything about.

It's a mystery, sure,

but there are a lot of mysteries in the world,

and some of them we have no business trying to figure out.

[Shatner reads on-screen text]

Along the country's Atlantic coast

is a 300-mile stretch of deadly coastline

that has conjured unbridled fear

in the hearts of sailors and seafarers for centuries.

It's one of the largest graveyards for ships

in all the world,

known as the Skeleton Coast.

[Rebecca Simon] Today, the Skeleton Coast has become

a huge tourist destination for the elite

who might want to have some sort of dangerous expedition.

No one is even allowed to attempt to go

to the Skeleton Coast on your own.

You literally have to cross these gates

that have a huge skull and crossbones

because it's probably the most inhospitable place

in all of Africa.

And it's known as the Skeleton Coast

because it's always been littered with the skeletons,

literally, of things like whales...

...other animals...

...and of shipwrecks.

Thousands of ships have crashed along the Skeleton Coast

for centuries.

The coastline is extremely dangerous.

It gets very, very windy, which means if you're sailing,

the wind is blowing these really choppy waves

against the ship.

And also, really, really dense fog builds up

very frequently along the coast,

creating zero visibility.

[ship horn blows]

It's a perfect recipe

for all kinds of disasters to happen.

[Geiger] It's not a good place to get shipwrecked,

because essentially, it is a very hot,

very dry desert right up into the ocean.

And so, if you happen to swim off your boat,

when you get to shore,

there's a very good chance that you're going to die

of thirst or starvation before anyone can come and help you.

[Shatner] While the Skeleton Coast

is undoubtedly an extremely dangerous

natural environment,

based on local folklore, some have wondered,

might the true peril of this place

be of a supernatural nature?

The two Indigenous groups

who live closest to the Skeleton Coast

are known as the Himba and the Khoisan.

According to the Himba,

the Skeleton Coast is a place for angry spirits,

evil spirits,

and other kind of

deadly supernatural phenomena to occur.

The Khoisan, the Bushmen of the region,

they believe that the gods deliberately created the area

as a forbidden zone.

The Skeleton Coast has been referred to

as "the land God made in anger."

[Shatner] Whether or not this savage shoreline

is inhabited by hostile spirits may be debatable,

but there's no denying the Skeleton Coast

is an extremely deadly environment.

And like with so many dangerous places

around the world, people continue

to risk their lives to experience them

because maybe facing death

is the most profound reminder

that we are alive.

The world is full of danger and-and new things to explore.

Things like volcanoes,

places like Mount Everest.

I think that visiting these dangerous places

is an exploration of ourselves.

It's an exploration of our fears.

[McGee] I think, nowadays,

so much of our world has gone virtual,

the idea that you could get out into the world

and actually risk something--

get close to heat,

ice,

space--

I think this is gonna have a deeper and deeper draw

the more that our day-to-day experience

lacks the kind of fundamental thrill of being human.

Why are humans attracted to dangerous places?

Is it an unquenchable thirst for knowledge

or to simply go where few have dared to tread?

Maybe it's the physical and mental challenges

these locations provide?

Some may claim it's to escape boredom,

get that adrenaline rush and be the first

to make a great discovery.

Whatever the reason,

how each of us measures

the risk versus the reward of entering

hazardous, threatening and perhaps deadly terrain

remains unexplained.

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