Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marcia for Radio I, and today I
Speaker 1: will be reading National Geographic magazine dated August twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the first article
Speaker 1: entitled how to Retrieve fifty five tons of Dinosaur Bones
Speaker 1: from the Sahara Desert by Paul Serno. Millions of years ago,
Speaker 1: what's now North Africa was a lush landscape teeming with
Speaker 1: an incredible variety of life. To reveal more about the
Speaker 1: mysteries of this lost age, paleontologist Paul Serino mounted perhaps
Speaker 1: the boldest dinosaur hunt ever attempted. As the Saharan sun
Speaker 1: rose on my wayland waylaid team one morning in September
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, it seemed to burn with particular intensity.
Speaker 1: For nearly three weeks. We'd been holed up in a
Speaker 1: mud walled compound in the oasis town of Agadez in
Speaker 1: central Nizier, stalled because of officials insistence on assembling for
Speaker 1: us a large armed escort. Now as dawn broke, we
Speaker 1: were finally ready to embark. Nearly one hundred people packed
Speaker 1: into fifteen vehicles, a motley caravan of SUVs, pickups, and
Speaker 1: one large dump truck, all strapped with sand, ladders and
Speaker 1: spare tires, heading out on an extraordinary desert dinosaur hunt,
Speaker 1: without question the most ambitious of my career. Among our
Speaker 1: number were tareg guides and drivers, a film crew, sixty
Speaker 1: four armed guards, and my paleo dream team of twenty
Speaker 1: students and freshly minted professors recruited to spend three months
Speaker 1: venturing across one of the planet's least hospitable landscapes. Our
Speaker 1: mission was to explore and excavate three d distinct sites
Speaker 1: spread across hundreds of miles of blazing roadless desert. The
Speaker 1: fossils we found we would ship to my University of
Speaker 1: Chicago fossil Lab for careful cleaning and study, later returning
Speaker 1: them for display in Niger to celebrate the country's stunning
Speaker 1: ancient heritage. I had crisscrossed Nizier's Sahara during eleven previous
Speaker 1: expeditions going back thirty two years. The last two in
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, had been for reconnaissance, and
Speaker 1: I'd spotted bone rich pockets in some of the desert's
Speaker 1: most remote and win sand swept corners with dinosaur skeletons
Speaker 1: jutting from the desert floor, But without the team or
Speaker 1: tools to collect them, I could only log the sites
Speaker 1: and imagine our return trip. Then a global pandemic shut
Speaker 1: down the world, and I spent two years drawing up
Speaker 1: an audacious plan and fundraising with little success. That is
Speaker 1: until a benefactor requesting anonymity agreed to fully fund the quest.
Speaker 1: My appeal had aimed at our innate human curiosity, a
Speaker 1: chance to uncover creatures from paleontologies. Last Great Frontier Nijera
Speaker 1: is a dno wonderland because of two chance geologic events.
Speaker 1: The first unfolded one hundred and eighty million years ago
Speaker 1: during the early Jurassic, when the great land mass Gondwana
Speaker 1: began to break apart, forming a massive depression in the
Speaker 1: center of what is now the West African nation, then
Speaker 1: a verdant region teeming with life for millions of years.
Speaker 1: The depression took in sediment and the skeletons of dinosaurs
Speaker 1: and other creatures. The second event happened twenty million years ago,
Speaker 1: when a volcanic hotspot raised what's known as the ear
Speaker 1: massif on the edge of this depression, tilting the strata
Speaker 1: upward and returning to the surface the now fossilized skeletons.
Speaker 1: Driving across these rock layers today, heading from Agadez into
Speaker 1: the open desert is a through deep time. Our timeline
Speaker 1: was ambitious even before the delay in Agadez, and the
Speaker 1: expedition's success would hinge on benefiting from lessons I'd learned
Speaker 1: in the past, along with some novel technology we would
Speaker 1: deploy in the field. Our perseverance would be tested many
Speaker 1: if my young colleagues had never set foot in the Sahira,
Speaker 1: worked under armed guard in one hundred thirty degree heat,
Speaker 1: or gone a month without a shower. Those with me
Speaker 1: on previous expeditions, meanwhile, had seen it all, food poisoning, malaria, sandstorms,
Speaker 1: expedition ending breakdowns, gun toting bandits, government coups, and yet
Speaker 1: I am always eager to go back. No one knows
Speaker 1: the land and its secrets better than those who live
Speaker 1: on it, and our nearest, our site, nearest to Agadez
Speaker 1: was a return to a tantalizing find that a local
Speaker 1: Tareg Nomad had shown us years before. He'd let my
Speaker 1: team by motorbike in to the desert to a spot
Speaker 1: that the Tuareg called chichikan Karan, or place of Insects
Speaker 1: for the locusts that swarm after seasonal rains. It's a
Speaker 1: gravel rise about ten feet high that stretches for nearly
Speaker 1: a mile and a half across the acacia studded ir
Speaker 1: Haser plane. Atop the little ridge, a series of large,
Speaker 1: spool shaped vertebrae breached the surface. Some digging exposed more
Speaker 1: of the backbone, which belonged to a fifty foot long sauropod,
Speaker 1: the classification given to long necked plant eating dinosaurs. For
Speaker 1: this expedition, my team fanned out over the rise and
Speaker 1: quickly made a series of stunning discoveries, encountering four more
Speaker 1: of these massive creatures, including one whose neck ended with
Speaker 1: the most cherished of paleoprizes, a skull. All four seemingly
Speaker 1: belonged to the same, yet unnamed species. We nicknamed it
Speaker 1: iPod shorthand for an ir Haser Plane sauropod. The elevated
Speaker 1: fossil field meanwhile became Sauropod Island from the details of
Speaker 1: its skeleton. I suspected our iPod dated to the Middle Jurassic,
Speaker 1: some one hundred sixty million years ago, but without an
Speaker 1: ash bed to date it by this was only a guest.
Speaker 1: Finding a seam of volcanic ash near a dig site
Speaker 1: is every paleontologist dream since crystals with it within it
Speaker 1: can contained datable radioactive isotopes. I'd had my eyes out
Speaker 1: for ashbeds on previous expeditions, but like every Saherin explorer
Speaker 1: before me, I'd come up dry. This time, however, I
Speaker 1: brought along one of the world's great time tellers, MIT
Speaker 1: research scientists and isotope whiz Yihan Rameizani. Yihan's big discovery
Speaker 1: came by accident. After a rock punctured attire on one
Speaker 1: of our battered land rovers not far from Sauropod Island.
Speaker 1: As a few of us set about the here, he
Speaker 1: scrambled up the side of a nearby cliff. Soon Jahan
Speaker 1: was calling my name, and I found him poking at
Speaker 1: a greenish clay, an indicator of ancient volcanism to his
Speaker 1: expert eye. Would that clay contain the crystals we'd need
Speaker 1: to date our fossils? Jahan smiled at me. Confidently, I'll
Speaker 1: bet my career on this one, he said. Finding bones
Speaker 1: at Sauropot Island was the easy part. The challenge was
Speaker 1: whether we could collect all we saw in the three
Speaker 1: weeks we could devote to the site. Most of my
Speaker 1: team doubted it was possible. Thirty years ago it likely
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been, but our tools have come a long way.
Speaker 1: Some of what we bring to the Sahara today still
Speaker 1: resembles the equipment and supplies from my first fory in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three. We still use plaster, burr, lap and
Speaker 1: wood to cocoon fossils in portable field jackets. Our land
Speaker 1: rovers are trusty survivors of pass trucks. We still get
Speaker 1: by on packets of dehydrated food, although these days adding
Speaker 1: boiling water to a package labeled basagna yields something closer
Speaker 1: to the raw deal. But new gear and technologies have
Speaker 1: dramatically transformed both the speed of excavation and the imaging
Speaker 1: of fossils as they emerge. Drill breakers powered by lithium
Speaker 1: batteries have largely replaced chisels and rock hammers. Lightweight electric
Speaker 1: jackhammers have replaced picks, GPS and digital imaging technology have
Speaker 1: replaced hand drawn maps, while drones and photogrammetry can generate
Speaker 1: three D images in minutes on scales that range from
Speaker 1: sprawling dig sites to individual bones. At Sauropod Island, a
Speaker 1: drone flying overhead captured the entire scene, our tracks weaving
Speaker 1: between skeletons like ant trails. I wouldn't say modern equipment
Speaker 1: marks makes the work easy, but it does make the
Speaker 1: job safer and more efficient. Together with gold, good old
Speaker 1: fashioned sweat and fifteen hour days, it helped our efforts
Speaker 1: pay off. When we pulled away from Saarpot Island triumphant
Speaker 1: and exhilarated, our trucks strained under a load of some
Speaker 1: twenty five tons of fossils. Even more remote country awaited
Speaker 1: us at a site called god Dubufara said to me,
Speaker 1: in place where camel's fear to tread. It is Africa's
Speaker 1: most famously fossil rich area, in the heart of the
Speaker 1: Sahara's hyparidide Tenerai region, a desert within a desert. Although
Speaker 1: I've never felt so much as a drop of rain.
Speaker 1: In Gaudo Fauona, my team made a fossil discovery three
Speaker 1: there years Ago. That's a reminder of how much wetter
Speaker 1: the area once was. It wasn't a dinosaur at all,
Speaker 1: but rather prehistory's largest dino, dinosaur eating Crocodilian Sarkuskus. We
Speaker 1: took to calling it supercroc, a nickname that has stuck
Speaker 1: in the media. We left from Agades, where we deposited
Speaker 1: fossil between digs in front of us. A roadless expanse
Speaker 1: of rock gave way to a majestic but daunting dunescape,
Speaker 1: unfolding as far as the eye or drone could see.
Speaker 1: Experienced local guides are essential in such terrain, where sinkholes
Speaker 1: of unexpectedly soft sand can myer vehicles driven by even
Speaker 1: veteran Saharan cans. Our large dump truck loaded with one
Speaker 1: thousand liter tanks of water was prone to sinking. Digging
Speaker 1: it out became a familiar routine, extending what could be
Speaker 1: a single day's journey to Guadofaula, Faula into three. You
Speaker 1: know you've arrived at Gaudofaula when you see the fossil
Speaker 1: bones tinged red with irons, scattered in every direction among
Speaker 1: low rocky ridges. We were looking for species that lived
Speaker 1: alongside supercroc in the early Cretaceous, some one hundred ten
Speaker 1: million years ago. Our first tacket target was Auranosaurus, a
Speaker 1: thirty foot long sail backed herbival My team had encountered
Speaker 1: one year's had encountered one years before, and had covered
Speaker 1: it to protect it from wind erosion until we could
Speaker 1: someday return. We found it again before long, a gorgeous
Speaker 1: row of plank like bones, as tall as a human
Speaker 1: and arranged in an array like a peacock's fantail. It
Speaker 1: was the first intact bony dinosaur sale ever discovered, and
Speaker 1: studying it will help solve the mystery of what biological
Speaker 1: purposes These protrusions served to make up for our initial delay.
Speaker 1: In Agadez, we worked deep into the night excavating Aurhonosaurus,
Speaker 1: relying on generated powered lamps. Although the work was exhausting
Speaker 1: around the clock, accavation has its perks. In the heart
Speaker 1: of the Sahara, nighttime temperatures plummeted to half the day's
Speaker 1: one hundred twenty five degree high. Insects attracted by our
Speaker 1: bizarre desert light show retired before midnight. All told, we
Speaker 1: would pack out two duns two tons of Rhanosaurus fossils
Speaker 1: in just three days. Guaudaphoya hides its secrets under drifting,
Speaker 1: shifting sand. You might walk right past a hidden skull
Speaker 1: one year, only to spot it the next. On an
Speaker 1: earlier visit, we had discovered a petio like stretch of
Speaker 1: exposed sandstone that was packed to a jaw dropping degree
Speaker 1: with the embedded bones of raptors, turtles, fish, and more,
Speaker 1: what palaeontologists call a microsite. As I returned to Gaudaphoya,
Speaker 1: among the foremost questions on my mind was whether the
Speaker 1: microsite would be buried under deep sand, and if it wasn't,
Speaker 1: how we might carve it up and collect it. I
Speaker 1: held my breath as I neared the spot and saw
Speaker 1: a towering dune, but miraculously, just yards away from it,
Speaker 1: the microsite was exposed, and soon it was surrounded by
Speaker 1: awestruck palaeontologus on their hands and knees marveling at the
Speaker 1: sandstone bound menagerie. We used a rock saw with the
Speaker 1: largest diamond covered blade we could find to slice down
Speaker 1: about six inches into the bone patio, hoping to cut
Speaker 1: it into bricks we could carry out in our usual
Speaker 1: field jackets. But would the slabs separate cleanly. When the
Speaker 1: first one did with little more than a tap of
Speaker 1: a chisel, my team whooped. I felt like mclindlow at first,
Speaker 1: then like Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle, knowing a million
Speaker 1: bones of unknown species were ours for the collecting. Painstakingly
Speaker 1: removing rock or sediment from around fossil treasures like these
Speaker 1: might require years of lab time, But there at Glaudifhoya,
Speaker 1: one of my team members submerged a block from the
Speaker 1: microsite in water, and we discovered, to our amazement that
Speaker 1: the sandstone matrix softened instantly, meaning this trove could be
Speaker 1: freed with minimal effort. Back at the fossil lab, the
Speaker 1: thrill of that realization helped power through six long days
Speaker 1: transforming the bone patio into ten tons of jacketed slabs.
Speaker 1: We headed to our final site with only two weeks
Speaker 1: left in the field, feeling the pressure. Three years before,
Speaker 1: we'd come to this place, some one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: miles east of Agadez, after investigating a passage i'd read
Speaker 1: in a nineteen fifties monograph. Its author, French geologist Hugh Forrey,
Speaker 1: described an isolated site where he had found saber shaped
Speaker 1: teeth like those of the t rex esque Egyptian predator
Speaker 1: Carco Dandosaurus. With some effort, we had found this site,
Speaker 1: and along with it plenty more teeth, confirming Forre's understanding
Speaker 1: of the beds as Late Cretaceous, some ninety five million
Speaker 1: years old. We might have left with nothing more than
Speaker 1: teeth if not for a serendipitous visitor to our camp.
Speaker 1: He wore a black trench coat, shesh head wrap, and
Speaker 1: some glasses, with a Tauregg's sword slung over his shoulder.
Speaker 1: His name was Abdul Nassar, and he offered to take
Speaker 1: us to a bigger bone field. As he led us
Speaker 1: deep into one of the Sahara's great ergs or land seas,
Speaker 1: over and between dunes, our land rover struggled to keep
Speaker 1: pace with his Honda motorbike. He was feeling like a
Speaker 1: fool's errand until Abdul pulled up alongside a thigh bone.
Speaker 1: As long as I am tall, it clearly belonged to
Speaker 1: a skeleton. In every direction there was more bone. With
Speaker 1: little daylight and fuel, we were able only to note
Speaker 1: the GPS coordinates of the place called Jangwaibi and grab
Speaker 1: a few jaw pieces we assumed were from Carcarodontosaurus. But
Speaker 1: assembling the jaw back in Chicago, I realized the teeth
Speaker 1: and tooth sockets were all wrong. They belonged instead to
Speaker 1: the sail backed predator Spinosaurus, who was the first record
Speaker 1: of one of these water loving beasts found so far inland,
Speaker 1: and I suspected it was a news species. Our return
Speaker 1: trip to janguwebe took us back across the airG We
Speaker 1: have scutched among rocky areas, each smaller than the last
Speaker 1: as we traveled deeper into it. We set up camp
Speaker 1: near where we found the jaw pieces, and we've been
Speaker 1: there no more than an hour. My colleague Don Vidal,
Speaker 1: a seasoned paleontologist from Spain, came running toward me, eyes gleaming.
Speaker 1: It's here, he said the skull I found. Much of
Speaker 1: my team gathered around a toothy snout jutting up from
Speaker 1: the rock. These were the first Spinosaurus skull bones found
Speaker 1: in place in more than a century. My colleagues stood
Speaker 1: mesmerized as the significance of the find sank in. Some
Speaker 1: even wept. A few hours later, Dan found me again.
Speaker 1: This time he held an unfamiliar boomerang shaped bone. It
Speaker 1: was a head crest, we realized, but a strange one,
Speaker 1: projecting upward to agree degree never seen in predatory dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: and where the crest of an Egyptian spinosaurus is a ridge,
Speaker 1: this one was shaped like a scimitar. While the team
Speaker 1: excavated the skull, dan our Photogramma Gramma tree expert documented
Speaker 1: the emerging skeleton with digital photos, a much faster process
Speaker 1: than in my early career, when we'd have photographed a
Speaker 1: few Kissa fossils and I'd have stood over others doing
Speaker 1: shaded drawings. That evening on a laptop in the tent,
Speaker 1: he presented us with a three D image made from
Speaker 1: the stitch together photos of the skull of our new
Speaker 1: tall crested spinosaurus. The team was awestruck. It wasn't our
Speaker 1: last spectacular find at Janguebi. A few days later, an
Speaker 1: eleven year old boy from a Taurang family camped nearby
Speaker 1: offered to show us fossils he'd seen while wandering with
Speaker 1: his goats, navigating complex terrain he knew by heart. He
Speaker 1: led us to sight after sight, some with little more
Speaker 1: than a lonely bone fragment at the last sight, however,
Speaker 1: was an impressive set of bones and teeth. The latter's
Speaker 1: saber like shape left no doubt we had found Africa's
Speaker 1: first partial skeleton of a cocorad dondas suide. After cleaning
Speaker 1: an assembly, it will provide the first detailed look at
Speaker 1: Africa's line of these colossal predators. We returned to Agadez haggard,
Speaker 1: dirty and triumphant, with fossils, filling two forty foot containers
Speaker 1: on a truck scale. The results of our efforts weighed
Speaker 1: in at fifty five tons, twice what many of us
Speaker 1: had estimated. I meanwhile, was thirty two pounds later. I
Speaker 1: was also elated leaving Nigier for Chicago and knowing that
Speaker 1: in a matter of months our fossils would soon make
Speaker 1: the same trip. Then one last hurdle arose suddenly and unexpectedly.
Speaker 1: A few months after our return, a military coup toppled
Speaker 1: the elected government of Nijier, putting this shipment of the
Speaker 1: fossils on hold for nearly two years. The fossils from
Speaker 1: our expedition remained in Limbo. Then this spring I traveled
Speaker 1: to Niame, Nizier's capital, where I signed an agreement that
Speaker 1: will at last bring the fossils to Chicago. It also
Speaker 1: provides for their staged repatriation, and it establishes a blueprint
Speaker 1: to develop two new Nigerian museums to house them, along
Speaker 1: with an institute to train the country's next generation of musiologists, archaeologists,
Speaker 1: and palaeontologists. These initiatives will be overseen by Nizier Heritage,
Speaker 1: a foundation I established in twenty sixteen. I first came
Speaker 1: to Nigier for its fossils, for high adventure, and for
Speaker 1: the stark beauty of its landscape and sunsets. But I've
Speaker 1: returned again and again because of my deeper motivations as
Speaker 1: a paleontologist, because I know that the significance of my
Speaker 1: work isn't ultimately measured in new species, but by the
Speaker 1: impact those discoveries can have on the future of a nation.
Speaker 1: On the eve of our expedition, I had goaded my
Speaker 1: young team members by telling them this would be their
Speaker 1: chance to write a new chapter in Earth's history, something
Speaker 1: they'd have few opportunities to do in a lifetime. We
Speaker 1: now have troves of images, video and data from the field,
Speaker 1: and we have presented findings to conferences and journals, including
Speaker 1: a paper on the remarkable tall crusted Spinosaurus species. Soon
Speaker 1: we will have the bones for close study, along with
Speaker 1: geologic samples to reveal their age. Next will come an
Speaker 1: outpouring of discoveries related to the Carcarondontosaurus, a dozen nusauropods,
Speaker 1: a digging raptor, an armorless croc, a giant superfish, and
Speaker 1: other new species. We are poised to write that chapter
Speaker 1: introducing others to Africa's lost dinosaur worlds, daring them to
Speaker 1: imagine what still lies beneath the surface. Next, at work
Speaker 1: with the Gorilla Ballowness of South Korea by Paul Salapek,
Speaker 1: inside a covert operation to launch a ormous balloons carrying
Speaker 1: pantyhose and nature films at North Korea. Do you know
Speaker 1: how to run fast? Asked a man I'll call Park.
Speaker 1: He was driving us carefully through dusk, well below the
Speaker 1: speed limit from Soul toward the infamously militarized zone, the
Speaker 1: heavily mined frontier between South and North Korea. It was
Speaker 1: a warm summer evening, Park, a North Korean defector who
Speaker 1: allowed me to tag along provided he could use an
Speaker 1: assume name was keeping a wary eye on his rear
Speaker 1: real mirror for a police tail. The only vehicle shadowing us, thankful, Thankfully,
Speaker 1: was a nondescript pickup truck steered by one of Park's helpers.
Speaker 1: It was lugging under a blue tarp enough steel canisters
Speaker 1: of hydrogen to blow up a large house. Park's two
Speaker 1: vehicle convoy wasn't bound for some mission of terror, instead
Speaker 1: trundling past seven eleven convenience stores, rural churches topped with
Speaker 1: red neon crosses, and pig farms. He and his band
Speaker 1: of four activists we're on a bizarre mission of political resistance,
Speaker 1: one that few, if any outside journalists had witnessed before.
Speaker 1: The clandestine lot clandestine lofting of huge hand made balloons
Speaker 1: into the night skies above North Korea. Over the past
Speaker 1: twelve years, I've hiked thousands of miles across the world
Speaker 1: for a national geographic story telling project called the Out
Speaker 1: of Eden Walk. Typically, I spend my days peering down
Speaker 1: at my plotting feet to night, my attention would be
Speaker 1: focussed up on a group of improvised air strips airships
Speaker 1: floating north unfavorable summer winds carrying a payload of items
Speaker 1: that are either subversive or in short supply in the
Speaker 1: most shuddered society on Earth. The South Korean police might
Speaker 1: pull us over. Park warned. If that happened, he advised
Speaker 1: with a wink, I should bolt into the scrub. I've
Speaker 1: been fined before, but I don't care, he said. People
Speaker 1: in the North don't even know what human rights are.
Speaker 1: Our balloons help wake them up. Hours later, parked in
Speaker 1: a weedy field near the d MZ, I watched as
Speaker 1: the guerrilla aeronauts bustled about the dark in head lamps,
Speaker 1: cranking open the hydrogen cylinders to inflate their balloons. Gas
Speaker 1: jetted from the tank valves with a startlingly loud hiss.
Speaker 1: The airships, loaded with items like biblical tracks, U S
Speaker 1: dollar bills, pro democracy leaflets, rice, and women's hygiene products,
Speaker 1: did not resemble the colorful vessels at hot air balloon festivals. Rather,
Speaker 1: there they were elongated, clear plastic mammoths, enlarging two heights
Speaker 1: of four or five stories tall. Soon, twenty five balloons
Speaker 1: jutted into the moonlit sky like monumental exclamation points that
Speaker 1: were surely visible for a mile. Perhaps I remember the
Speaker 1: media reports from South Korea. Last summer, thousands of large
Speaker 1: balloons hauling plastic sacks bulging with cigarette butts, rotting clothes, worms,
Speaker 1: and even feces floated from North Korea into the air
Speaker 1: space of democratic South Korea. This barrage of garbage triggered
Speaker 1: health alert's fires and aborted flights at airports. One bag
Speaker 1: of gunk landed near the South Korean President's office in Seoul.
Speaker 1: The press often covered this armada of inflatables with a smirk,
Speaker 1: as a side show to an ongoing rivalry between sister
Speaker 1: nations that remained bitter enemies seventy two years after Korea's
Speaker 1: Civil war was paused by a cease fire. Yet the
Speaker 1: public rarely heard the other half of the story, the
Speaker 1: North Korean rubbish attacks or payback for South Korea propaganda
Speaker 1: balloons like parks. The geopolitics of this tit for tat
Speaker 1: aerial dispute, however, wasn't nearly as illuminating to me as
Speaker 1: the earnest motivations of the South Korean activists, many of
Speaker 1: whom are in fact North Korean defectors. The teams of
Speaker 1: balloonists appeared driven by a marooned sword of longing for
Speaker 1: all they've left irrevocably behind, abandoned loved ones, landscapes of memory, youth.
Speaker 1: When it comes to the finality of exile, North Koreans
Speaker 1: rank in a bleique class of their own. Among some
Speaker 1: thirty four thousand defectors in South Korea, barely a few
Speaker 1: dozen are known to have voluntarily returned to the brutal
Speaker 1: clutches of their police state. In this way, the strange
Speaker 1: balloon War resembles texts exchanged between a couple in a
Speaker 1: toxic relationship, with one partner appealing for connection while the
Speaker 1: other replies with trash talk. The exchanges carry added poignancy,
Speaker 1: since reunification of the two countries seems more implausible than
Speaker 1: ever to day, fewer and fewer young South Koreans support it,
Speaker 1: while North Korea has pivoted decisively away. My family is
Speaker 1: very lucky, very grateful to be free, said Park, twenty eight,
Speaker 1: who grew up in North Korea, listening to Western radio broadcasts,
Speaker 1: muffled under a blanket in his bed, a thought, I'm
Speaker 1: punishable by prison. We are not just living life for
Speaker 1: ourselves now, but for the people back in North Korea.
Speaker 1: Energetic and wyree Park recounted in confidence his perilous escape
Speaker 1: from North Korea with four relatives more than a decade ago.
Speaker 1: Now a youth organizer for an evangelical church outside of Seoul,
Speaker 1: he explained how fellow Christians in North Korea risked execution
Speaker 1: for practicing their faith under the cult like rule of
Speaker 1: Supreme leader Kim Jong un. He also bemoaned the sinister
Speaker 1: reach of North Korea's intelligence agencies, which had poisoned the
Speaker 1: dictator's own brother in exile in Malaysia. Arriving as a
Speaker 1: teenager in Go Go, South Korea from repressive North Korea,
Speaker 1: Park recalled had felt like being a person from the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies transported to modern day New York. North Koreans
Speaker 1: find it very hard here side Kim Sung's chul. Reflecting
Speaker 1: on the balloonist expians, some South Koreans see North Koreans
Speaker 1: as less intelligent, primitive. An older generation defector, Kim arrived
Speaker 1: in South Korea nineteen ninety three after walking away from
Speaker 1: a work camp in Siberia. He now operates a pro
Speaker 1: democracy radio station in Seoul. Even after three decades in
Speaker 1: the country, Kim noted dryly he sometimes feels like an outsider.
Speaker 1: His South Korean wife has been reproached by her friends.
Speaker 1: Why are you still living with the North Korean? Though
Speaker 1: sailing private balloons into the North was criminalized in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: the prohibition was struck down by South Korea's Constitutional Court
Speaker 1: two years ago on free speech grounds. Still, the night
Speaker 1: launches remain a fraught, calling Soul doesn't appreciate the diplomatic
Speaker 1: aggravation the police issue hefty safety finds Lee Minbak, a
Speaker 1: Craigie defector in his sixties, had his balloon truck torched.
Speaker 1: This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your
Speaker 1: reader has it's been Marcia. Thank you for listening, Keep
Speaker 1: on listening and have a great day.