Blaine Alan Gibson has been called a modern-day Indiana Jones – though in temperament he’s probably a lot closer to Sherlock Holmes. Gibson, 59, made headlines around the world earlier this year after he found debris from a Boeing 777 that was later confirmed to be a piece of the infamous Malaysia flight 370 aircraft, which went missing shortly after take-off on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board. After diligently working to transfer the panel to the authorities, Gibson stayed on the case, conducting his own unpaid investigation in 12 countries to solve the mystery of flight 370.
This isn’t the first time he’s tried to solve a puzzle. Journeys to Guatemala and Belize allowed him to develop a theory on the collapse of the Mayan civilization; an overland expedition to Siberia was about getting to the bottom of the mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion; and he’s chased down the Lost Ark of the Covenant on the back roads and waterways of Ethiopia. Gibson is a man who defies easy description. He is a lawyer who has never practiced law, a businessman who isn’t particularly focused on making money, and a traveler whose goal is to find clarity, not see the sights.
We linked up with Gibson in the Maldives, where he was searching for more flight 370 clues, to find out if a humble traveler can indeed solve some of the world’s great mysteries.
Q: Where did your interest in travel come from?
I was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Bay Area and Carmel. My father was the Chief Justice of California, so I grew up with politics, but I always loved travel. I collected National Geographic magazines, and from a young age I was interested in memorizing where all the countries were located and what their capitals were. I decided early on I wanted to go to all of them. I’m going to do it. I have 18 countries left to visit. Mozambique was number 177 and I found part of a Boeing 777 while I was there.
Q: How much of the year do you spend travelling?
Essentially all of it, now. I used to travel half the year but since I sold our family home in Carmel [California] and got interested in Malaysia 370, now I’m travelling non-stop. I want to keep looking for more debris and find answers regarding Malaysia 370. That’s my search, that’s my adventure right now.
Q: How do you finance your travels?
My style of travel is not the expensive kind. I like to go places where I know people or meet people who invite me to stay in their homes. Or I stay in moderately priced hotels, or I camp and backpack. I’m in the Maldives right now and I was staying in a $34 per night hotel, not a $1,000 per night resort. That’s my style. I hang with local people everywhere I go.
Q: Do you think you have to travel to get the real story?
Absolutely. You can go to a place and no matter how much you’ve read about it, you can just feel things in the air. If there is going to be a coup or if things will be resolved peacefully, you can feel it and no amount of reading and research can substitute that.
I went to the Soviet Union in 1976, age 19, just to understand what it was like. I met the Russian people and saw that they were no different from us. I could tell in 1976, when people were trying to buy blue jeans and get rock ‘n’ roll music, that communism wouldn’t last.
Q: What were some other trips you’ve taken?
The first big mystery I went to solve was to figure out what happened to the Mayan civilization. A lot of my interest was inspired by [the film] Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out in the 1980s. I went to Belize and Guatemala between 1984 and 1992 to volunteer on some archaeological expeditions. We were trying to figure out what happened to the Maya, and we did it.
We discovered some caves in Belize that had a bunch of bashed-in skulls. They had the royal and noble obsidian inlay in their teeth, which told us that they were royalty, nobility and priests being killed. We concluded that there was a civil uprising. The people in the mountains and the jungle got tired of serving the high priests. They overthrew them, went down the coast, started trading and made money. The Mayans didn’t get on a spaceship and vanish; they simply had a social upheaval.
My style of travel is not the expensive kind. I like to go places where I know people or meet people who invite me to stay in their homes. Or I stay in moderately priced hotels, or I camp and backpack. I’m in the Maldives right now and I was staying in a $34 per night hotel, not a $1,000 per night resort. That’s my style. I hang with local people everywhere I go.
Q: Do you think you have to travel to get the real story?
Absolutely. You can go to a place and no matter how much you’ve read about it, you can just feel things in the air. If there is going to be a coup or if things will be resolved peacefully, you can feel it and no amount of reading and research can substitute that.
I went to the Soviet Union in 1976, age 19, just to understand what it was like. I met the Russian people and saw that they were no different from us. I could tell in 1976, when people were trying to buy blue jeans and get rock ‘n’ roll music, that communism wouldn’t last.
Q: What were some other trips you’ve taken?
The first big mystery I went to solve was to figure out what happened to the Mayan civilization. A lot of my interest was inspired by [the film] Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out in the 1980s. I went to Belize and Guatemala between 1984 and 1992 to volunteer on some archaeological expeditions. We were trying to figure out what happened to the Maya, and we did it.
We discovered some caves in Belize that had a bunch of bashed-in skulls. They had the royal and noble obsidian inlay in their teeth, which told us that they were royalty, nobility and priests being killed. We concluded that there was a civil uprising. The people in the mountains and the jungle got tired of serving the high priests. They overthrew them, went down the coast, started trading and made money. The Mayans didn’t get on a spaceship and vanish; they simply had a social upheaval.
Collected from--The Independent
