MonsterTalk

Blake and Karen welcome back Daniel Alan Jones, investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and creator and host of The Vortex, for the second half of their conversation. Last week covered how Jones found his way into the field. This week the question is where the field has gone since he arrived, and where it might be headed next.

Jones has watched cryptozoology move from obscure online forums to social media feeds, streaming documentaries, and a festival in seemingly every state. Along the way, the creatures themselves seem to be changing. The talk ranges from AI-generated monster images to the rise of Dogman, from a lawmaker's Bigfoot bounty to the ethics of chasing mysteries you may never catch.

👤 About Our GuestDaniel Alan Jones is an investigative reporter and researcher based in South Texas, and the founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, a networking hub for people interested in cryptids and their lore. He is the creator and host of The Vortex, a YouTube channel and website covering cryptids, UFOs, and unexplained phenomena. He first encountered cryptozoology through an online forum in 2006 and has been active in the field since 2010. His fieldwork has taken him from the Piney Woods of East Texas to Bluff Creek, Death Valley, and Point Pleasant, and he takes an ethnographic approach to the subject, treating the community of monster hunters as part of what deserves study. His favorite cryptid is a hometown one.

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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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