On 7 June 1971, Dafal brought the Tasaday to meet Manuel “Manda” Elizalde,Jr., a Spanish-American Filipino who headed an organization that assisted Philippine tribal people in their struggle to survive the onrush of modern civilization. Elizalde had spotted three logging roads approaching a vast uncharted old-growth forest where Dafal had told him a group of simple people lived. Knowing from experience that loggers would level the

forest and  endanger any people inside, Elizalde asked Dafal to bring the Tasaday to a cleared knoll at the the edge of the forest where his helicopter could land and he could meet them and warn of danger. 

    Dafal brought them, but on seeing the vast clearing they hid. He persuaded three Tasaday men and two boys to leave the safety of the forest and venture onto the knoll. A cool breeze and bright sky made them uncomfortable and they turned back  toward the forest, but Dafal urged them to stay because the good man was coming now. Dafal pointed to a flying object in the sky, which the Tasaday thought at first was an insect, then a bird, and as it loomed overhead they saw it as a screaming sky monster that blew its breath down upon them like a powerful wind. They collapsed to the ground in fear. A young man named Belayem tried to run and warn the others, but fell flat in the grass. He said he had one thought: “Ubus Tasaday, Ubus--the end of the Tasaday, the end.”

    The Tasaday survived, but it marked the beginning of the end of their traditional way of life. They were standing on the brink of a new world and --for better or worse--their lives would never be the same.  

    Out of the helicopter stepped Elizalde, who realized at once that the Tasaday were frightened. He worried

they might run away. But nobody in his party could speak the Tasaday’s unique dialect and assure them they were safe.  Elizalde offered gifts, starting with rice, but they didn’t know rice--and they didn’t know corn, camote, tobacco or other things common to tribes outside the forest. The first gifts that excited them were colorful bead necklaces. Then he gave steel knives, far superior to any of Dafal’s.  He then brought Igna, a woman of the Sduff Blit tribe who sang in many dialects. She could not speak Tasa- day, but knew speech close toTasaday, which was among several  Manobo dialects in the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages spoken throughout the region.

    Elizalde invited social scientists to meet the Tasaday. Robert Fox, an American who was curator of anthro- pology at the Phililppines National Museum and for Elizalde’s foundation--the Philippine’s Association for National Minorities (PANAMIN), came with Jesus Peralta, a Filipino anthropologist with the Museum. They collected data which Fox put together with data gathered by Elizalde to write a 32-page paper

introducing the Tasaday to the world. Fox and Peralta were particularly excited by the Tasaday’s stone tools, unique dialect,  and their apparent long period of isolation in the forest, which they estimated at that time to be more than 400 years.

    The data paper of Elizalde and Fox identified 26 Tasaday, described their technology and food gathering customs, and called for extended study of the Tasaday by a team of social scientists. They also called for an area of the forest to be set aside as a reserve for the exclusive use of the Tasaday and the Manobo Blit, a group of a few hundred people who had recently established a settlement just outside the edge of the forest. The authors urged quick action in declaring the reserve to prevent the incoming logging companies from leveling this forest as they had so many others around the country.

    Over the next few months, Elizalde brought social scientists and journalsits to meet the Tasaday at the forest’s edge.  In order to persuade the government to proclaim a reservation, however, it was necessary to establish more precisely where the Tasaday lived inside this sprawling uncharted rainforest that covered several hundred square miles in south central Mindanao.