MonsterTalk

⚠️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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⚠️ Content AdvisoryThis episode includes an extended discussion of a televised paranormal investigation in which a crew treated an alleged spirit-box recording about a sexual assault as cause for celebration. The hosts address the claim and the ethics of its presentation directly. Please consider another episode if this topic would be traumatic for you.⚠️

Blake and Karen are joined by paranormal investigator Matt Baxter for a live MonsterTalk recording about Denver's Peabody-Whitehead Mansion - the red sandstone pile on Capitol Hill's old Millionaire Row that ghost tour operators like to call the most haunted building in Colorado, if not the country. The three of them had walked the place the night before at the invitation of author and paranormal researcher Richard Estep, who is writing a book about the mansion and wanted skeptical voices in it alongside the believer accounts he had already collected.

What they found was a genuinely beautiful 1889 Frank Edbrooke house with a well-documented history - a Crimean War surgeon, a strikebreaking governor, a second life as restaurants, nightclubs, and recently as apartments. But what does it mean if the haunting reputation does not show up anywhere in the record until the restaurant era of the 1950s? From there the episode turns to the 2012 Ghost Adventures visit, the spirit box sessions it produced, and the moment that earns this episode a content warning.

Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org

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Blake and Karen are joined by Dr. Ben Dodds, author of Myths and Memories of the Black Death to discover more about a disease which forever changed world history when it swept across Europe in the 1300s.

The conversation runs from the mechanics of the disease - what a bubo actually is, what finally kills you, and why the textbook rats-and-fleas model spreads far too slowly to explain what medieval eyewitnesses described - to the harder question of how anyone in 2026 knows any of it. Along the way: the marmot hypothesis, the medieval physicians who were certain they had it figured out, the appalling 1348 pogroms whose victims were dug out of the ground in a Catalan town a short drive from where Dodds was sitting, why Monty Python understood the Middle Ages better than most historical novelists, and a closing answer about the aftermath that most listeners will not see coming. Blake's cold open, meanwhile, sets out to explain why we call it the Black Death at all - and reels in an unexpected monster.

Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org

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Blake and Karen welcome back paranormal investigator Matthew Baxter to sift through the latest government UAP release - the so-called PURSUE document dump - and work out what, if anything, is actually in it. Baxter took on the job of reading the paperwork so nobody else has to, and he returns with a skeptic's field report on what the government handed over, and what it quietly left out.

From a Nevada billionaire's decades-long influence campaign to a $22 million taxpayer-funded hunt for the strange at a remote Utah ranch, the trio traces how fringe belief got bootstrapped into official policy - and asks whether the whole disclosure spectacle is meant to illuminate anything at all, or just to bury the question under an avalanche of unanalyzed data. Along the way: anglerfish, ice cream cones, and an epistemological war we didn't even know we'd been drafted into.

🎧 What's Inside🛸 What "PURSUE" actually stands for - and what the release did and didn't include
🏛️ AARO decoded: why "all-domain" is more than a rebrand
💰 The billionaire whose private money quietly seeded decades of official UFO research
👻 The "two agendas" baked into disclosure from the start (hint: it was never only about spacecraft)
🍦 A former government UAP chief's memorable verdict on the whole enterprise
🎣 The anglerfish test: what real extraordinary evidence actually looks like
⚔️ The "epistemological war" - and why skeptics feel like they brought a calculator to a shouting match
🪐 What some disclosure advocates are really hoping to find out there

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