First Contact: The Selling of the Last Savage

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Outside Magazine February 2005

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The Selling of the Last Savage (cont.)

SIX DAYS AFTER OUR RIVER ESCAPE, I part ways with the group in the Papuan highland town of Wamena, where we've come to hike and decompress in the tranquil Baliem Valley. I'm due back in the States, but Dupont and I, still suspicious and troubled by our surreal sighting, decide that Dupont should interview Woolford on videotape when the two return to Bali, away rom the distractions of West Papua.

During that session, Dupont mentions that some of us had doubts about the authenticity of our encounter. Woolford, not surprisingly, insists it was genuine.

"So nothing was arranged in advance?" asks Dupont.

"Oh, no, not at all. I couldn't do that. That's beyond me," Woolford says. "Papua is so weird, you don't need to stage anything. It's the land of the unexpected."

Two weeks later, back home in Virginia, I send three hours of our video footage to several anthropologists familiar with West Papuan tribes. None of them is convinced by it.

"I'm 95 percent sure it is a hoax," the University of Sydney's William Foley declares after watching it. He's struck by the fact that the natives didn't appear to have any skin diseases, which are endemic among bushmen. "This is unheard of for people living in the forest," he says. "The guys are too clean. Secondly, their dress is far too elaborate. That's the kind of dress they wear when doing a ceremony. That's not what they wear when they go out hunting and collecting food. All those headdresses—no way."

Other anthropologists have similar reactions. Paul Taylor, at the Smithsonian, adds that it wouldn't be too difficult to hire local villagers to stash their Western garb and

Everyone is afraid—Bumbarar, the porters, even the kepala desa who Woolford claims has killed foes in tribal skirmishes.

don traditional dress, then pretend to be "discovered" as Woolford's clients plod through the jungle. "The big question in my mind," says Taylor, "is whether this is something he's paid these people to do over and over again." Whatever is going on, Taylor doesn't like it. "If it's not a first-contact situation, then it's fraudulent. And if it is a first-contact situation, then it's an insensitive way to go about it."

When I play the video for Eben Kirksey, a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Santa Cruz and one of the few scientists who has been granted permission to conduct research in West Papua, he notices many of the same suspicious details as Foley did—elaborate clothing, lack of skin diseases—but he also sees details that make him think some of what we experienced was authentic.

"The kepala desa looked really scared," he says.

The video footage supports this. I decide to have more of the kepala desa's and the other porters' dialogue translated. Some of their talk is captured on camera when they don't know they're being filmed. In one scene, after the tribesmen storm our campsite at the river, the kepala desa says to Woolford, "I was so scared, I wanted to attack them when they shot the arrows."

I also interview several of Woolford's friends, curious about whether they think he'd deliberately dupe his clients. They unanimously insist that he wouldn't. They cite his "obvious love for the Papuan people" and call him "a stickler for being a man of his word." Laurence Livingston, a 43-year-old commercial beer brewer who lives in Homer, Alaska, roomed with Woolford in college, and the two have remained close ever since. "He is not into bullshit and scams," Livingston says. "The guy's for real."

Livingston suggests one possibility that I'd also been contemplating: If the trip was a hoax, then one of the locals might have set it up, unbeknownst to Woolford and the other porters. It's at least a plausible theory—if a First Contact trek turned up nothing, Woolford would not return to that area of West Papua, and the porters would be out of a job.

Woolford, for his part, fires right back when I run the anthropologists' remarks by him, starting with a comment that anyone who doubts his word should come along on a trip. "Some of hese people are just lecturers at nice universities who have tenure and cushy jobs," he says. "If they think I've staged this, then come with me. I give them an open invitation to see for themselves. They can feel the energy of these guys, see them run around, see them barreling down and pointing arrows at them."

As for the appearance of the tribesmen, Woolford says the abundance of freshwater streams in the area means that the men we saw can bathe regularly. He chalks the elaborate ceremonial dress up to adolescent preening.

"Anywhere you go in the world, New York City or wherever, teenagers are always dressed to the hilt," he says. "In Papua's Lani country, the young guys wear kotekas [penis gourds] so big that it's obscene. I think that's the case with the guys we saw."

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