Premise
You are an aging Texan billionaire in 1995, cosmopolitan, but based in Texas, with outposts in Louisiana, Florida, France, several Caribbean islands and various African countries.
Your influence is mostly concentrated in Texas, but you've got well-placed contacts in France, Africa and former Indochina. In general, your business involves mining, prospecting, petroleum products, natural gas, minerals, diamonds, cobalt, copper and other natural resources, as well as plenty of unrelated businesses that occured to you as you were exploiting Third World countries for natural resources
You have suspected that for years that conventional science cannot explain all there is in this world and that there are supernatural things unknown to the mainstream establishment.
For the past nine years, you have known for a fact that science is wrong and that the world is more mysterious than anyone lets on in public. For the almost a decade, you've spent many millions of dollars employing scientists, mercenaties, investigators, scholars, theorists and kooks, trying to explain the inexplicable events you were witness to. You've also endowed many universities in your intellectual orbit, focusing on fields of study relevant to the paranornal, magic and the possibility of other worlds.
You think you've finally found something that will prove to governments, universities and think-tanks around the world that science is wearing blinkers. An island in the Caribbean where no island was before. A bona fide extraplanar intrusion or at least a virgin piece of land, never mapped, explored or quantified, something for which conventional science didn't account.
Question
You plan an expedition; drawing on all the connections and goodwill thirty years as a Texan millionaire (later billionaire), oilman, investor, enterpreneur, robber baron and philanthropist can muster.
You want reputable scientists, capable experts, competent specialists and academics familiar with exploration, new discoveries and first contact with what could be a new, extraplanar, paranormal, supernatural biosphere.
What kind of scientists do you recruit, among your widespread contacts?
That is, what kind of degrees do they have, what universities do they come from and what institutions are they connected to?
Latest version of a list for the expedition, expanded to twelve spots. Still a botanist and entomologist without background (inc. which universities they come from) and I'm still looking for the last two scientific specialties.
Hi, everybody! Great to see you again!
I've been away for unpleasant health related reasons, but hope to avoid future episodes of ill health and enjoy many more years with you.