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Expedition Ends in Tragedy

TALLADEGA -- A National Geographic sponsored expedition ended in tragedy, when two researchers went missing and a sound man was seriously injured while on assignment in Alabama.

Scheduled for airing later this year, the "Expedition to the Edge" episode was intended to explore "Darkest America" for the existence of intelligent life forms in one of the reddest of the so-called "Red States" depicted on the U.S. electoral map.

"We spent nearly a year, training hard for this mission," said visibly shaken expedition leader Sir Peter Blythe Piton, "But all the hours of listening to Jeff Foxworthy, watching NASCAR races and studying every frame of the movie Deliverance simply could not prepare us for the horrors we found out there."

Academics world-wide have long been frustrated in their attempts to understand and explain the sub-culture of rural America. Piton's group was to ascend the Tallapoosa River in their quest to document the habits, rituals and conventions of tribes inhabiting the nether regions of North America's conservative landscape.

Since 1890 the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration has supported more than 7,500 projects and expeditions—including the excavation of Machu Picchu, the discovery of Titanic, and the work of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and the Leakey family. The committee funds vital research, embodying the Society's 115-year-old mission: "to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge."

Efforts to organize a search party to locate the missing researchers have been unsuccessful due to a lack of volunteers.




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