MonsterTalk

Into the Field: A Conversation with Daniel Alan Jones, Part 1

Blake and Karen welcome Daniel Alan Jones, an investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and the creator and host of The Vortex, for the first half of a two-part conversation. Blake met Jones at the Gods and Monsters Conference at Texas State in March of 2026, where an after-dinner conversation outside a restaurant, joined partway through by Jeb Card, led to the interview you are about to hear.

Jones is part of the Texas Cryptozoology scene, hanging with (the late) Jim Marrs, Ken Gerhard, Nick Redfern, Craig Woolheater and Lyle Blackburn (among others). He approaches the subject ethnographically: the people who chase monsters interest him as much as the monsters do. This first half of our interview covers the Piney Woods and its tangle of local Bigfoot names, a salamander hunt in the PNW, a failed search for giants in Death Valley, pluys a night camped out in Mothman country. Part two takes up the state of the Cryptozoology today, which will be S05E49 dropping next week.

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Karen and Matt are back from their trip to the UK and they share stories and photos from their whirlwind visit to a variety of (allegedly) haunted places. Blake makes jokes... and wishes he could go himself.

Link to trip photos and Extended Show Notes

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Blake brings us a flashback to 2017, when he and Karen sat down withThe Spooktator's Hayley Stevens to talk about the (allegedly) most haunted village in England. Hayley is a British paranormal researcher who started out a believer and came around to skepticism the hard way - by actually investigating - and she now publishes the newsletter The Ghost Geek. She first appeared on MonsterTalk back in episode 37 to talk lake monsters. This time the subject is Pluckley, a small, film-set-pretty village in Kent that is considerably more famous for its dead than for its living.

Pluckley's ghost roster runs somewhere between a dozen and sixteen-plus, depending on who's counting and when - and the number has a habit of going up. There are two different White Ladies, a Red Lady, a highwayman, a phantom coach, and a stretch of woodland that screams. Where does a reputation like this actually come from, who benefits from it, and what happens to a place once the ghost tours arrive? Also - Blake goes looking for a famous piece of documentation that everybody cites and nobody seems to have seen.

Extended notes at monstertalk.org

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⚠️Content Warning: This episode contains sustained discussion of animal injury and death, including the killing of working animals, animals shot after escaping, and graphic period newspaper accounts.⚠️

Blake and Karen discuss Circus Train Wrecks as an explanation for mysterious "real" animal sightings, as well as a source of folklore monsters of high improbability. 

 🚂 In This Episode Why circus trains wrecked so often
The economic event that ended the era - and why regulation wasn't the answer
An inversion of survivorship bias, and the data set nobody has built yet
A 1917 newspaper story about lions in a butcher shop that is not what it appears to be
The 1931 wire story about a colony of Bengal tigers in the mountains of Mexico
How armadillos actually got to Florida
Gypsy the elephant, Tifton to Valdosta, November 1902
Wallace the Lion, the Exeter mail coach lioness, and Christian the Lion
Why the Beast of Gévaudan may be the oldest "it escaped from a menagerie" case on record
How Gévaudan subverts myths about the Enlightenment

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Blake welcomes back Dr. Brian Regal - historian of science, technology, and medicine, and now Professor Emeritus at Kean University - to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters: The Long History of Cryptozoology. Regal has been a MonsterTalk guest since the show was still in single digits, and he was the first guest to reach out to the podcast rather than the other way around. He has also been sitting on this particular book for a very long time: he first floated the title on this show back in 2013, and then spent more than a decade writing everything else instead. Karen is away in the UK promoting Beyond Words, so this episode is a two-hander between Blake and an old friend.

The book runs monsters forward from the classical world - Lucretius, Pliny, Aristotle, and a Sumerian hero fighting a monster in the oldest story we have - through the Middle Ages, the age of curiosities, and into the modern hunt for anomalous primates.

🔦 In This EpisodeWhy the book is priced the way it is, and Blake's advice to check the library before the bookstore - a small tangent on academic publishing and the old "priced to rent" sticker era.
How Darwin and the Monsters almost became a doctoral dissertation, and why Brian wrote about Henry Fairfield Osborn instead.
Brian's journey from student to author.
The publish-or-perish treadmill: every new contract pushed the Darwin book back another few years.
What the book is not: it is not a Bigfoot book, and Brian has notes for the critics who wanted more Bigfoot.
Too many werewolves? Brian's 2009 paper for the British Society for the History of Science on how Darwinian thinking killed off the wolf-man - and how anomalous primates moved into the vacancy.
The dogman problem - the most popular cryptid going is arguably a werewolf, which is arguably a medieval dog-headed man, which is arguably not an animal at all.
Why the coelacanth is a bad advertisement for cryptozoology: no folkloric background, nobody was looking for it, and "living fossil" is not as accurate as people seem to think.
Grover Krantz, missing Bigfoot bones, and the Pennsylvania records of bears that died without being hunted.
Writing for an audience of one, and Brian's cheerful refusal to take criticism personally.
What is next: a long-gestating novel about a historian of science who gets into wacky trouble, and the real-life model for its main character.
Retirement, luck, and the case for going to a smaller school that will let you study monsters.
The origin of The Monster of Newark, which started as notes toward an examined life and turned into an autobiography.

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