1 MINUTE AGO: Josh Gates From “Expedition X” Is Breaking The News, And It’s Horrifying…

>> Yeah, I mean it’s Yeah, you know, um I I I knew Stockton and again I I really am just stunned sitting here about this news. I knew Hamish Harding as well.
>> Josh Gates from Expedition X is breaking the news and it’s horrifying. The submersible felt wrong. May 2021, somewhere in Puet Sound off the coast of Washington, Josh Gates sat inside Ocean Gates Titan submersible on a test dive with CEO Stockton Rush. The plan was simple. Film a documentary episode about the Titanic wreck. Bring millions of viewers to the ocean floor. Make incredible television. But as the dive progressed, Gates felt something he’d felt in haunted Romanian forests and abandoned tunnels beneath Jerusalem and remote Himalayan valleys where local guides refused to go after dark. That same instinct. Something is very wrong here.
2 years later in June 2023, that same submersible imploded during a Titanic expedition. Stockton Rush and four passengers died instantly. The implosion happened so fast their bodies were never recovered. And Josh Gates, the guy who spent two decades investigating monsters and mysteries around the world, had to explain to reporters why he’d walked away from one of the biggest opportunities of his career. At 48 years old, Gates has visited over a 100 countries. He’s camped in Chernobyl.
He’s spent the night in King Tut’s tomb.
He’s eaten things that would make most people vomit just looking at them. He holds a degree in archaeology from Tufts University. He’s won an Emmy. He’s discovered actual human remains buried beneath one of the seven wonders of the world. And he’s built a television empire that spans seven different shows across multiple networks. But the decision that might matter most happened in a moment of gut instinct when he told his network president that they shouldn’t do the Titanic dive, that something bad was going to happen. And then it did. Joshua Marshall Gates was born August 10th, 1977 in Manchester by the Sea, Massachusetts. His father, Lee, worked as a commercial deep sea diver, traveling to exotic locations for underwater construction and salvage operations. His mother, Sonia, was British, meaning annual trips across the Atlantic to visit family. Young Josh grew up with a passport and a sense that the world was bigger than the small coastal town where he lived. He started scuba diving at age 10. His father taught him the mechanics of it. Sure, but more importantly, the mindset. How to stay calm when something goes wrong underwater. How to trust your training when your instincts are screaming. How to know when to push through and when to call it and surface. Those lessons would matter later in ways his father couldn’t have predicted. Gates was president of his high school class. The kind of kid who was good [music] at everything without trying too hard. Smart enough to get into Tufts University. Charismatic enough to run for student government and win. But underneath all that conventional success was a kid obsessed with Indiana Jones and the Goonies and the idea that the world still had mysteries worth finding. At Tufts from 1995 to 1999, he made a decision that seemed crazy to everyone, including his parents. He declared a double major in archaeology and drama. Two of the lowest earning degrees you could possibly choose. He joked about it years later. Maybe if I’d minored in philosophy, I could have made it a complete disaster. But the combination made sense to him, even if it didn’t make sense to anyone else. He wanted to find things and he wanted to tell stories about finding things.
During college, he participated in University of Maryland archaeological excavations at Cesaria Maritima in Israel. The ancient city’s harbor was submerged, meaning he got to combine his scuba skills with legitimate archaeological work. He was part of a small team excavating underwater ruins, learning how to document artifacts properly, how to work with academic institutions, how to balance the excitement of discovery with the meticulous patience that real archaeology requires.
After graduation, Gates moved to Los Angeles with a degree in archaeology and absolutely no plan for how to use it. He did what most people with impractical degrees do. He waited tables. He took acting classes. He appeared in commercials for BMW, Coca-Cola, Dish Network. He narrated audio books in recording studios, reading other people’s adventure stories while waiting for his own.
The break came in 2002 when he appeared as a contestant on ESPN’s reality show Beg, Borrow, and Deal. The premise was teams racing across the country without money, relying on the kindness of strangers and their own resourcefulness.
During the show, Gates got [music] a Boston Bruins logo tattooed on the bottom of his foot. The kind of thing you do when you’re 25 and a camera is running and you’re trying to prove you’ll do anything. That willingness to do anything caught the attention of producer Neil Mant. In 2007, Sci-Fi Channel wanted to create a show investigating cryptids and paranormal phenomena around the world. They’d seen too many shows hosted by true believers who took every shadow as proof of Bigfoot. They wanted someone different, someone who could travel, someone with actual credentials, someone who could balance skepticism with open-mindedness, someone who wouldn’t take themselves too seriously.
They wanted Josh Gates.
Destination Truth premiered June 6th, 2007. The premise was straightforward.
Gates and a small crew would travel to remote locations, investigating reports of supernatural creatures and haunted sites. Each episode followed the same structure. Research and witness interviews, chaotic travel to impossibly remote locations, overnight investigation using thermal cameras and audio equipment, evidence analysis with actual experts back in the States. The show’s genius was Gates himself. He had the academic background to ask intelligent questions. He had the physical stamina to trek through jungles and climb mountains and spend nights in places most people wouldn’t visit during the day. He had the self-deprecating humor to make fun of the U. Alleged cars and alleged planes and alleged helicopters that kept breaking down in the middle of nowhere. and he had something else, a genuine curiosity about why people believe what they believe. Over five seasons and 55 episodes, Destination Truth visited 75 countries across six continents. They investigated the Yeti in the Himalayas, the Chupacabra in Mexico, sea monsters in Iceland, haunted locations in Romania and Japan and Egypt, and a dozen other places where the local guides would take them. so far and then refused to go any further. The Yeti episode became the show’s landmark moment. March 2008, season 2, episode 1. Gates and his team tked for 4 days through the Himalayas following local reports of large bipedal creatures in the high country. Near a river, they discovered footprints, not bear tracks, not human prints. something else. Something with a foot that measured over a foot long with clearly defined toes and a stride pattern that suggested bipedal movement. They made plaster casts. When they got back to the States, they brought the casts to Dr.
Jeffrey Meldrum, an evolutionary morphologist who’d spent decades studying primate locomotion.
Meldrum examined the cast carefully, measured it, compared it to known species. His conclusion was cautious but significant. The print was anatomically legitimate and didn’t belong to any known primate. That footprint cast is now displayed at [music] Walt Disney World’s Expedition Everest attraction.
Real evidence from a television investigation preserved in a theme park celebrating the legend it tried to prove or disprove. But the Yeti episode wasn’t the scariest. That honor belongs to Romania.
September 2009, season 3, episode 1. The team traveled to investigate the Hoya Batu Forest, allegedly the most haunted forest in the world. The trip started badly during the flight to Romania. The plane’s roof literally ripped off. Not a little tear.
The entire roof section peeled back while they were in the air. They landed safely, but it set a tone. The forest investigation that night became the stuff of destination truth legend. Crew member Evan Stone was conducting a solo investigation with a thermal camera when something threw him backwards. Not tripped him. Threw him. He hit the ground hard. Crew member Evan Stone was conducting a solo investigation with a thermal camera when something threw him backwards. Not tripped him, threw him.
He hit the ground hard. When he got up and checked himself, he discovered deep bleeding scratch marks under his thick gloves. Three parallel scratches that shouldn’t have been there. Couldn’t have been there. The gloves were intact.
Whatever scratched him did it through the fabric without tearing the fabric.
The episode drew 2.1 million viewers, the highest rated episode in the show’s history, and it scared the hell out of everyone who worked on it. The behindthe-scenes reality of Destination Truth was often more dangerous than what made it to air. Equipment failures were constant. Cars caught fire in the African bush. Engines died in the Amazon, requiring the crew to paddle dugout canoes through Pirania. infested waters. The plane incident in Romania wasn’t staged. It happened. They kept filming because that’s what they did.
Gates became severely ill during the Nanattle investigation, projectile vomiting so violently he had to be carried out of the ancient ruins.
Researcher Aaron Ryder suffered a serious dirt bike accident that required field stitches administered at a picnic table with an IV bag hanging from a tree branch. There was no modern health care, no hospitals nearby, just a medic with a suture kit doing the best he could. In Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay, a nearby boat nearly hit Gates and his cameraman during an underwater shoot. They surfaced to find a fishing vessel bearing down on them. The captain completely unaware they were in the water. They dove and the boat passed overhead close enough that they could hear the propeller cutting through the water above them. Gates later called Destination Truth without hyperbole. One of the hardest shows to produce in the history of reality television. It wasn’t an exaggeration. Five seasons of near constant travel to remote locations with minimal crew and equipment that broke down constantly. The miracle isn’t that they made 55 episodes. The miracle is that nobody died. The show ended in 2012 when Gates’s contract with NBC Universal concluded. In March 2014, he confirmed via Facebook that Destination Truth had sailed its last voyage. The tone was melancholic. It had been an incredible run. They’d seen things and been places that most people would never experience, but it was over. Except it wasn’t. Not really. It was just evolving.
Expedition Unknown premiered January 8th, 2015 on Travel Channel. Same host, same sense of humor, completely different mission. Instead of hunting cryptids and investigating haunted houses, Gates would partner with legitimate archaeological institutions to investigate historical mysteries. The shift was deliberate and significant.
Destination truth had been entertainment first. Investigation second. The goal was to create compelling television in scary locations. Expedition Unknown would be investigation first, entertainment second. The goal was to participate in actual archaeological work and bring viewers to the front lines of real exploration.
G8s started using ground penetrating radar. threedimensional scanning technology, DNA analysis, proper excavation methods overseen by credentialed archaeologists and local authorities. He wasn’t just visiting dig sites and narrating what he saw. He was getting his hands dirty doing the actual work of archaeology the way he’d learned at Cesaria Maritima 20 years earlier. The show moved to Discovery Channel in 2018 and has run for 16 seasons and over 230 episodes.
And unlike Destination Truth, which investigated hundreds of mysteries and found very little concrete evidence, Expedition Unknown started making actual discoveries. In 2020, the team unearthed a massive German bunker complex in Tamitino, Normandy that had been buried for 75 years since D-Day. In 2023, working with project recover in Chuk Lagoon in Micronesia, they located a downed World War II aircraft and the remains of missing servicemen from Operation Hailstone.
At Sakara in Egypt, Gates participated in excavations that unearthed mummies from 4,000year-old tombs. But the biggest discovery came in October 2024.
Gates traveled to Petra, Jordan. The ancient city carved into red sandstone cliffs. The Treasury building made famous by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade draws hundreds of thousands of tourists every year.
Most of them take photos of the elaborate facade and move on. Very few realize that the treasury is a tomb and almost nobody knew there was another tomb hidden directly beneath it. Working with the American Center of Research, the Jordan Department of Antiquities and the Petra Development Authority, Gates’s team used ground penetrating radar to scan beneath the treasury. Thei readings showed a void, a chamber, something that had been sealed for over 2,000 years.
The excavation took weeks, carefully removing layers of sand and rock, documenting every step. When they finally broke through into the chamber, they found 12 complete human skeletons surrounded by ceramic vessels and artifacts. One skeleton was holding a ceramic cup that bore an eerie resemblance to the Holy Grail from the Indiana Jones movie filmed at this exact location. Archaeologists called it perhaps the most significant tomb ever found at Petra. The artifacts dated back over 2,000 years to when Petra was a thriving trade city. The discovery made international news and Josh Gates, the guy who started his career investigating Bigfoot, was now participating in legitimate archaeological discoveries that would be studied for decades. The evolution was complete. From monster hunter to archaeologist, from entertainment to science, from searching for creatures that probably don’t exist to uncovering evidence of human civilizations that absolutely did.
On October 17th, 2025, Expedition Unknown won the daytime Emmy award for outstanding travel and adventure program. Gates stood on stage holding the Emmy and probably thought about that kid at Tufts University double majoring in archaeology and drama. Those two impractical degrees that his parents worried about. They’d turned out to be the perfect combination after all. But before all of that, before the Emmy, before Petra, before the shift from cryptids to archaeology, there was the submersible.
May 2021, Josh Gates sat inside the Titan submersible with Ocean Gate CEO Stockton Rush. The dive was supposed to be a test run, a chance for Gates to experience the vehicle before committing to a full Titanic expedition episode.
The plan was to film a major documentary, Descend to the Wreck, show viewers the most famous shipwreck in history, make incredible television. The dive in Puget Sound was shallow. Nothing compared to the Titanic’s depth, but problems emerged almost immediately. The submersible behavior was erratic.
Systems didn’t respond the way they should. Rush seemed unconcerned. He brushed off Gates’s questions, made jokes about the quirks of the vehicle, treated serious concerns as minor inconveniences.
Gates’s instincts started screaming. The same instincts that had kept him safe in a hundred dangerous situations around the world. The instincts his father had taught him during those early scuba lessons. When something feels wrong underwater, trust that feeling. Don’t rationalize it. Don’t let someone else talk you out of it. If it feels wrong, it is wrong. After the dive, Gates pulled aside his crew. “We’re not doing this,” they protested. This was a huge opportunity, a chance to film one of the most iconic locations on Earth. The network had signed off. The budget was approved. Everything was ready. Gates called the network president directly.
I’m really sorry. This is something that was a big deal for you to sign off on and I appreciate the opportunity, but we shouldn’t do this. This is a mistake.
Something bad is going to happen here.
He walked away from the Titanic episode.
Walked away from what would have been one of the biggest moments in Expedition Unknown’s history. and he did it based entirely on a feeling. June 18th, 2023, the Titan submersible began its descent to the Titanic wreck. Stockton Rush was aboard along with four passengers, including British billionaire Hamish Harding and French Titanic expert Paul Henri Narulet.
About an hour and 45 minutes into the dive, the submersible imploded. The pressure at that depth is enormous. When the hull failed, it failed catastrophically and instantly. All five people died before their brains could process what was happening. The debris field was discovered days later after a massive search operation. The implosion had been so violent that recovering remains was impossible. The world mourned the loss. Investigators began examining what went wrong, and Josh Gates had to explain to reporters why he’d turned down the opportunity to be on that submersible. His statement was direct. Titan did not perform well on my dive. Ultimately, I walked away from a huge opportunity to film Titanic due to my safety concerns with the Ocean Gate platform. There’s more to the history and design of Titan that has not been made public. much of it concerning.
He elaborated later about the test dive.
Stockton seemed completely unaware of how bad this dive had gone from our perspective. Once I saw that was where he was willing to go to get this operation up and running, a kind of fear set in for me that was so much deeper than anything I experienced while riding in the sub. Gates’s footage from that May 2021 test dive appears in the 2025 HBO documentary Implosion: The Titanic Subdisaster.
A record of the warning signs that were there all along if anyone had been willing to see them. Josh Gates is 40, 8 years old now. He lives in Los Angeles.
He’s divorced with two children, Owen Indiana and Isla Amelia. Named after his childhood heroes Indiana Jones and Amelia Earheart, he spends roughly 200 days a year traveling. He’s visited over a 100 countries. He holds the title of fellow of the Explorers Club and serves as a trustee on the governing board of the Archaeological Institute of America.
He’s currently producing and hosting multiple shows. Expedition Unknown just started its 16th season with investigations of the Great Pyramid using three-dimensional scans, Aon’s 40th anniversary treasure hunt, and a search for Alexander the Great’s tomb.
Expedition X continues with paranormal investigations led by teams Gates supervises, but rarely joins. Expedition Files became Discovery Channel’s highest rated freshman series of 2024.
He’s also touring the country with Josh Gates Live, doing theater shows where he tells stories and answers questions from audiences, who followed his career for nearly two decades. His philosophy hasn’t changed since he wrote it in his 2011 book, Destination: Truth Memoirs of a Monster Hunter. The true secret to seeking the unknown is in the looking, not the finding. The journey is what matters. He describes himself as an open-minded skeptic. Someone who doesn’t automatically dismiss paranormal claims, but who requires evidence before accepting them. Someone who’s been to places scary enough to make him wonder if there might be something going on that science [music] can’t explain.
someone who asks questions instead of providing answers. In a 2020 interview, he talked about his spiritual evolution.
In the first episode of Expedition Unknown, Search for the afterlife, I openly stated that I was raised Christian and like a lot of people, I sort of drifted away from the church as I got older. Now I have two small kids, I have a family, and I’m starting to ask those questions again. It’s that honesty that makes Gates compelling. He’s not pretending to have answers. He’s just genuinely curious, genuinely interested in why people believe what they believe.
Genuinely respectful of local cultures and traditions, even when he doesn’t share those beliefs. So, what’s the real story here? What’s the truth behind a career spent investigating mysteries around the world? It’s that intuition matters.
Josh Gates walked away from the Titanic dive because something felt wrong. He couldn’t articulate exactly what was wrong. He couldn’t point to a specific mechanical failure or design flaw. He just knew. And he trusted that knowing even when it meant sacrificing something huge.
Two years later, his intuition was proven tragically correct. Five people died because they didn’t have that same instinct. or they had it and ignored it, or they trusted someone else’s confidence more than their own doubts.
Gates has spent two decades going to dangerous places, haunted forests, abandoned nuclear disaster sites, war zones, remote jungles where the nearest hospital is days away. Underwater caves, mountain peaks. He’s done all of it.
Survived all of it. Not because he’s reckless, but because he knows when to push forward and when to walk away. The monsters he hunted on Destination Truth probably don’t exist. The Yeti footprint is fascinating, but it’s not proof. The scratches in Romania are unexplained, but they’re not evidence of the supernatural.
Most of the mysteries he’s investigated on Expedition Unknown remain mysteries.
He hasn’t found Amelia Heheart. He hasn’t located DB Cooper. He hasn’t solved the Datloav Pass incident, but he found that tomb beneath Petra. He helped recover the remains of missing servicemen.
He’s participated in legitimate archaeological discoveries that expanded human knowledge. He’s shown millions of viewers places they’ll never go and asked questions they never thought to ask. He’s made exploration accessible and entertaining without making it fake.
And he’s alive.
48 years old with two kids and an Emmy and a career that’s still going strong.
Alive because when that submersible felt wrong, he trusted his instincts over the opportunity.
Alive because his father taught him that being calm underwater isn’t the same as ignoring danger.
alive because sometimes the smartest thing an adventurer can do is choose not to have the adventure. That’s the real story. Not what he found in haunted forests or ancient tombs. What he found in himself.
The wisdom to know that some mysteries aren’t worth solving. That coming home matters more than making television.
that the journey is important, but only if you survive to tell the story. Josh Gates is still out there, still investigating, still asking questions, still looking for answers in places most people will never see. But he’s doing it on his own terms, with his own instincts guiding him. And that might be the most important discovery of