MonsterTalk

We’re joined by Matt Baxter to watch and discuss another vintage BBC look at the paranormal – this time in the form of an allegedly haunted chest of drawers. Check the links and watch it yourself if you’ve got 12 mins to spare. What do you think of our takes?

Additional Links:

BBC Archive Clip – A Haunted Chest of Drawers

AGT: Special Head (levitation trick)

The Indian Rope Trick – Penn & Teller documentary about the history of the trick

David Berglas – Magician and Skeptical Investigator

Massimo Polidoro – modern skeptical investigator

Tony Cornell – British Parapsychologist and antiquarian

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

———————-

Monster House Presents
This is the ad-supported version of Monster Talk.
We’re dependent upon the revenue from these ads and from the support of our patrons at patreon.com forward slash monster talk to continue making this show.
As a disclaimer, your hosts are unable to control what ads you will hear.
And while we have done what we can to avoid ads that are divisive, the system that injects them sometimes ignores our preferences and always seems to ignore our efforts to not interrupt the conversational flow.
While we understand this can be disruptive, we’re trying our best.
Patreon remains the best way to enjoy commercial-free listening to our content, plus you generally get extended coverage of the subject.
We’re working on other ways to consume our content as well, so please stay tuned.
Those thumps recorded in a house by a university academic have never been satisfactorily explained.
They’re the kind of poltergeist evidence researcher Tony Cornell has been evaluating for 30 years.
A graduate of Cambridge, Cornell has lived all his life in the town, except for a spell as a naval officer.
His interest in the paranormal was first roused in India by an old man who could apparently defy the laws of time and space.
He said, well, my son, if you want to learn about wisdom of life, look over the hills, look over the hills.
And I looked over the hills.
And I heard the voice say to me, now do you understand?
And I thought at the time, now do you understand?
Turned, and the man wasn’t there.
He was the other side of a stream.
And I remember looking at him and thinking, well, how the devil did you get over there?
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
We had a really good time a few weeks ago looking into a BBC documentary about ghost investigations in the 1970s.
And from listener response, it seems like a lot of our audience enjoyed it too.
So, Matt and Karen are back with another bit of classic paranormal TV, this time from the BBC TV news magazine show Nationwide from 1983.
This is a segment investigating an allegedly haunted chest of drawers.
Or maybe it’s a poltergeist.
You decide.
I wanted to make a joke about a ghost bureau, but you all know how I like my jokes to be factually accurate.
And it turns out that while in America we might call it just a doors of bureau, that would only be correct if it had a mirror.
And in England, that term’s not really used for this kind of furniture.
So on reflection, I decided against such misguided wordplay.
Besides, there were other jokes that suggested themselves around the French version known as a commode, but I was afraid that joke would bomb.
Anyway, we’ll be hearing more from Nationwide in a future episode because a segment previously thought lost resurfaced a few years ago and is tied to one of my very favorite paranormal monster stories from the UK.
For now, let’s set up our vintage 8-bit computer ghost equipment and make our way to the storage room for some Monster Talk.
Well, it’s the two of us, right?
And we’ve got Matt joining us again so that we can talk about another documentary.
The listeners seem to really enjoy our look at that other BBC documentary on ghosts.
So it turns out there must be dozens of these.
Matt and I came across a number of other documentaries.
There was one on the stately ghosts of England, which we’d like to get into at some other point.
And as you say, the BBC Ghost Hunters documentary that we watched and talked about, people really enjoyed that episode.
And so we went digging and found some other interesting docos, as we’d call them in Australia.
And this one is called Paranormal Investigators and a Haunted Chest of Drawers.
The recording is only 12 minutes long, but there’s a lot to unpack here.
Matt, can you tell us a little bit about why this recording is only 12 minutes long for what would have been probably a 30-minute episode?
Well, actually, this is not a documentary is the difference.
It’s documentary style.
But the thing is, this is just a segment from the long-running BBC series Nationwide.
Now, it’s in its final season in this segment.
And the problem is, is many of the tapes that they recorded on were either disposed of or taped over.
So I can’t find a complete…
episode um that that has this segment in it so we are really really lucky to have this you know the fact that the bbc archive you know put this up on youtube is we’re so lucky to have it and at all when you watch it you’ll see just how lucky we are um i thought i thought it was incredible i don’t know how how you felt about it blake i have a strong affinity for anything like these vintage pieces uh
And I had not really been familiar with Nationwide, or so I thought.
But when I started looking at some of the clips, I realized I’ve seen some of these things before, but didn’t really know the show from which they came, right?
So, yeah.
Me too.
And growing up in Australia, we tended to get a lot of British television.
And so I think I’ve seen fragments of this before.
So it’s kind of still coming back to me.
But this was a particularly interesting episode, just chock full of…
bizarre claims.
And I guess we should start getting into them.
The segment starts off with this really loud pounding and like just photos of people we have no reference of what’s going on.
Those thumps recorded in a house by a university academic have never been satisfactorily explained.
And then they immediately go into talking about Tony Cornell.
Now, I thought that I knew all of the old paranormal investigators and everything, but come to find out, I didn’t have any idea just how popular paranormal investigation was during the 60s and 70s and probably before that.
So Tony Cornell, he’s a really fascinating guy.
And he did kind of try to bridge that old school era of ghost hunting with a more skeptical research based approach.
Now, the interesting thing is he starts out talking about this trip to India and this guy who could, you know, this Indian individual who could defy the laws of time and space.
And, you know, so basically he talks about it, how there he goes there.
And the guy says, you know, well, my son, if you want to learn about the wisdom of life, look over the hills, look over the hills.
And he was standing next to Tony and everything.
And he said, what?
Look over the hills.
So he looks over the hills and then he heard a voice say, now, do you understand?
And he’s, what?
And he turned, and the guy was now on the other side of a river suddenly waving at him from the other side.
There’s no way he could have run and gotten across this swiftly running river to get over there.
And Tony’s like, how did this happen?
What’s going on?
He’s like, oh, well, if you want to understand, look over the hills.
And he’s like, just look over the hills.
So he turns his head, looks over the hills, and then he hears this voice next to him saying, now do you understand?
And he turns and the guy is standing right there next to him.
Now, this sounds amazing, but…
You know, this is a magic trick that has been going on for, you know, at least a few hundred years in, you know, in Western society.
So who knows how long it’s been going on in India.
But for anybody who’s seen The Prestige…
with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale.
And Christian Bale.
Yeah.
You know the… Yeah, and Christian Bale as well.
Yes.
You know the secret.
And especially if someone’s on the other side of a river, they only have to look vaguely like the original person.
So what I’m saying is there was two people, one that was already on the other side of the river…
And one that was standing next to him.
They were dressed the same and made up to look basically the same.
And so it looked like he transported himself over to the other side of the river when he didn’t.
But Tony was not skeptical at all.
He didn’t ask any questions.
He didn’t say, why did you make me turn my head away from you?
You know, what little trick were you pulling there when I had to turn my head?
Didn’t ask any of those questions.
Just stood in that wonderful place, I will admit, wonderful place of amazement.
Yeah.
And he just stayed there and didn’t go to that place of critical thinking.
So, yeah, we we talked about this with our 10 year old and he watched that part of the prestige as well.
And we said to him, you know, how could you possibly do that?
And he pretty quickly recognized that.
this could not be done by one person.
And that leads you to think, oh, okay, can’t be done by one person, must be two people.
Are we talking about twins?
Are we talking about lookalikes?
Doppelgangers.
Doppelgangers.
But yeah, I think it…
Matt kind of intimated this, that when you’re talking about this case with Tony Cornell and you have some racist ideas about some groups of people and, oh, that they all look the same and he’s not distinguishing between people, he’s not really…
thinking about uh you know could this be two people these people it’s not the same person they they look different he’s just not uh distinguishing so i think uh there’s a little bit of racism underpinning that too that he’s not well you say he’s not distinguishing but he looked very distinguished to me i don’t know what you’re talking about
I think you’re both on the money with how this might have been done.
But I had a strange reaction when I saw this part of the show.
It was because, by the way, you’re absolutely correct with the number of these sort of famous tricks.
And I do say tricks, right?
Fakirs, right?
Yeah, I wanted to go into that a little bit because there’s just so much over the decades that I’ve been researching paranormal claims.
I’ve just come up with so many claims coming out of India and Southeast Asia in general.
Bangladesh and Pakistan, all the surrounding countries, a lot of trickery and fakery, some people call it.
So things like snake charmers and as you say, fakirs and levitation and charlatans in general and godmen as well.
So a lot of them are very theatrical, but some of them can be dangerous too.
And they’re all very good at reading human psychology.
And we’ve seen a lot of this classic imagery too in movies like snake charmers and
the idea that they’re hoaxing a cobra with a flute and that it’s dancing or hypnotized by the music somehow and that it’s…
reacting to movement uh but it’s really a matter of uh and there’s been a lot of investigations into this kind of thing but where the fangs have been removed by the person or they’ve even sewn their mouths shut so lots of cases of that uh and we’ve talked about for years as well doing things like lying on a bed of nails or other performing other supernatural feats
And then God-men.
I know that when I started out with Skepticism going back decades ago, there was a lot of interest in Sai Baba.
It makes me think of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi too.
That was the one that the Beatles were influenced by.
The Giggling Guru, some people call them.
And so they’re charismatic religious figures who claim that they’ve got divine powers and they…
perform miracles and have huge followings.
So I think there’s a lot of interest in that kind of thing, but it might have kind of followed the time of Tony Cornell because I think up until that point, I don’t know if people were really familiar with a lot of this trickery and these charlatans and this kind of showmanship.
This is interesting.
So you may recall when we were looking into Lord Dufferin’s ghost years and years ago, I came across a book by an investigator named Paul Huizet.
He was French.
And I was struck because, first of all, it was really hard to find his book.
And I really would like to at some point help get a new…
english translation of it but uh he he was very much in the sort of uh houdini mold he would go around there there was a big interest in fakir’s uh touring in europe in the 19 teens and 20s and he would go around and duplicate their tricks
and call them out on it for things like, especially things like the bed of nails, stuff that were more a feat of physics than magic.
And, and he had this, yes, all those things.
And he had this idea that it would be really helpful if there was some sort of cash prize for anyone who could scientifically reproduce these, these effects.
And so basically he was doing the sort of the James Randi thing.
years you know almost a century ahead of time right you know so uh very cool guy um
But when I was watching this last night, this segment did remind me of things like the Indian rope trick, which is famously not a real thing, although people report having seen it.
But the way it’s alleged to have been done is so different from how it’s actually done, if it’s done at all.
It’s more of a piece of folklore.
So we’ve talked about John Keel before.
And before he wrote The Mothman Prophecies, his first book was called Jadu.
And it was about him going to the Middle East and India in search of real magic.
And so he’s tracking down people and trying to learn how tricks are done.
But he also wants to know, is there some real magic out there?
And part of that, he tells a story.
about meeting an Indian guru who essentially does the exact same trick of basically teleporting.
And it makes me wonder, not whether, you know…
I think you’re absolutely right, Matt.
I think it could be done with a double.
It could be done in a lot of ways.
But a bigger question, was it done at all?
Or was he basically taking a piece of exotic folklore and retelling it as though he was the central character?
Because who’s going to fact check him, right?
That’s a good point, yeah.
It’s like this might be like the Indian rope trick.
It’s a thing you can make explanations for, but maybe it never happened at all.
Like maybe…
Yeah, maybe.
Exactly.
And it all cycles around.
It comes all back together again.
Because Dufferin was basically taking a piece of folklore and making it about himself.
And I can’t help but wonder if this is a little bit of, I’ve been to exotic India and I had this amazing thing happen.
And maybe he’s telling a story that he heard but did not actually experience.
I just think that might be another possibility.
Well, when I went to India and I had this thing happen to me, it was real.
I don’t know what other people experienced, but fact check that.
Matt, you also wanted to talk about another more recent example of levitation.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I think, you know, I remember seeing the photos years and years ago, back when the Internet was getting popular, of these, you know, these Indian men just levitating, just like resting on a cane.
And I was amazed by that.
And then, of course.
When I found out how it was done, it all made sense.
But then recently, more recently, within the last, I guess, a little over a decade, maybe, America’s Got Talent had an individual come on by the name of Special Head.
Have you seen this, Blake?
No.
We’ll have to have a link for this in the show notes because he comes out and it’s a Caucasian man, but he’s bald and he’s doing as much cultural appropriation as possible.
Looks like a Krishna.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he comes out and he starts doing this.
Tuvian throat singing kind of thing.
But he looks just, you know, very strange doing it.
And then suddenly he like leaps up and then levitates just like that.
And everybody in the audience flips out because they can’t figure out what’s going on.
And then, you know, a little…
uh you know explosion happens and then he’s back down with his head on his you know little uh rug that’s laid out on the floor he’s exhausted and it’s drained him it’s drained him and it was just absolutely identical to the old trick so it is amazing how these old tricks can be recycled and people a new generation has not had not seen it now we did show this to our 10 year old and he’s like oh yeah i’ve seen this i know i know this trick i know how this is done
So it’s like you get a certain amount of being jaded, I think, with everything that comes up on the Internet.
It’s Jadu.
But yeah, so it is interesting.
I think that James Randi was very correct in the idea that people that are, you know, have this bit of ego about the fact that they’re an academic.
can be easily fooled based on that, and that having a magician in the ranks is incredibly important.
And we’ll talk more about that as we get further into the episode.
Yeah, I guess moving on, we should start talking about the haunted chest of drawers.
It’s a lovely piece of furniture.
Well, yeah, and I think that that’s the funny thing because they did end up, the owners sold it to the researchers so they could take over and study this intently and intensely.
And I just think it’s funny because it was just missing handles and was so beaten up and just a terrible old thing.
And I think it’s kind of funny that they sold it, made some…
Yeah, this is before Antique Roadshow became a big thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Antique Ghostshow.
Matt’s going to supply some photographs, I think, for the show notes of this haunted chest of drawers.
Right.
But I think you came up with some pretty good theories on what was actually going on here.
Well, you know, and that’s the thing is in this short 12 minute segment, we’re given no information.
It’s really, really sparse.
So all we get.
Not exactly.
It’s not hard hitting journalism at all.
No, no.
But, you know, to be fair, it’s just a segment.
So they’re giving you the sensationalism of it because that’s all the public wants.
But when you look at this, you do have to ask some questions.
Now, when I’ve done several investigations of the Stanley Hotel here in Colorado, and one of the interesting claims is in room 401, otherwise known as Jason’s room from Ghost Hunters, the haunted chest of drawers in that room would move out into the room.
And it would happen over the course of hours or even days.
But little by little, it would move itself out.
Come to find out, there’s very, very, very subtle seismic activity that just kind of always happens there.
On top of the fact that that room is butted up against a very old elevator that shakes the entire building, but it’s not noticeable, you know, as you’re just walking around or, you know.
Sitting on a nice padded, you know, lounge or whatever, you’re not going to notice.
And just, you know, the air moving equipment in the building, you know, such as air conditioning and heating and all those things, they all contribute to this overall vibration that happens in the building.
Now, this was, what was it, East Anglis?
I’m going to leave it for you to pronounce.
He’s been making mistakes today.
So East Anglia.
Anglia.
Anglia.
Anglia.
Yeah, yeah.
East Anglia.
Yeah, that’s where this took place.
Yeah, and one of the things that I find interesting about this area, it’s got a railway museum, it’s got a transportation museum, and there’s a lot of trains that go through.
How close was this house to train tracks?
Because these drawers coming out, if they’re not on a very, very flat level surface, as the train goes by, they’re going to vibrate right out.
But what they did is they used the best equipment at the time, which was, I believe, a Timex Sinclair.
Spectrum computer.
Yeah, the ZX.
And I used to have one and I loved it.
I learned to do basic programming with it.
It was a wonderful machine.
I saw War Games with Matthew Broderick and I got that computer and I was ready to blow up the world and I loved it.
And I had it talking to me and everything so I could…
do all kinds of other stuff, but I never considered hooking it up to a haunted chest of drawers.
So that was pretty cool that they did that, but it was right around the same time that I got this.
I think I got mine in 81, and this was in 83.
Okay, long-time listeners will have seen this insert coming as soon as Matt mentioned the Spectrum.
As a passionate fan of vintage personal computing, I’ve long been interested in how certain machines that were introduced around the early 1980s became monumentally significant within certain cultural niches.
In the U.S., Apple computers’ Apple II became a de facto standard for school computing based on Apple’s aggressive pricing programs for educational adoption.
And it’s said that Steve Jobs wanted to get Apple computers into the hands of students who would then grow up already familiar with the brand, which would then impact their selections when they became able to afford their own machines.
Meanwhile, Commodore’s C64 dominated the personal computing gaming scene and sold millions of units by 1985.
However, in England…
The ZX Spectrum was significantly cheaper and much more widely adopted.
The original model had 16 kilobytes and in 1983 a 48kb unit was released.
It was priced at around 125 pounds for the 16k version and 175 pounds for the 48k version.
Meanwhile the Cummer 64 was introduced at 400 pounds which made it more of a luxury item.
A generation of British kids grew up with the Speccy and its impressive portfolio of original games and fan-based and official arcade boards.
One visual difference that is striking to Commodore users is that the sprites in the Speccy games tended to be monochromatic, each sprite composed of one color.
whereas the Commodore 64 handled up to three colors in a sprite, which game designers used to remarkable effect.
Both systems were adequate platforms for learning the basic programming language, which was the lingua franca for coding in the day.
In this clip, although we don’t see it explained or used, the Speccy’s been modified to include a new piece of hardware that appears to be both a power unit and a plug board for audio jacks or something similar.
It’s intriguing and disappointing that the tech side of this clip is not explored more.
Looking back at vintage computing videos, the original early days of home computing was a landscape of electronics hackers looking to get access to the computational power of big computers normally hidden
behind a layer of clerical hardware attendees and sorcerous software developers.
The home computer scene gave users a chance at digital disintermediation, and early projects from this era often included integrating home projects like electric model railroad switches, home weather stations, and even early attempts at smart home automation being modems and dial-up to one’s own computer.
Popular operating systems like Mac OS and Windows made computing widely popular among non-technical people, and the pricing of computers made people afraid to approach electronics projects as amateurs.
But in the past few years, low-cost machines like Raspberry Pis and interface modules like Arduinos have reinvigorated the creative space of hardware hacking.
Now this may not lead to a better understanding of haunted furniture, but it is a welcome change to the landscape of potential innovations.
All right, back to the show.
Yeah, and I want to note, too, that this is right around the time of the release of the movie Poltergeist.
So I think that they could have been influenced by that.
But you have to wonder at the ghost’s game.
I mean, what is their purpose that they’re edging out these rules little by little over the course of hours or days or weeks?
I mean, what is their purpose?
What is the point of them haunting in this way?
They can find nothing to wear.
Yeah.
They’re rifling through looking for looking for bras.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
They’re tired of the Victorian dress and they want to find something more comfortable.
The Tories looking for lingerie.
Exactly.
There’s just nothing good in there.
But, you know, the thing is, is they like tape it up with these.
It looked like scotch tape, to be honest, but it could be Irish.
We don’t know.
They had electronic contacts.
So if they came out too far, it would break and it would set off cameras and everything else.
The thing is, is if we’re talking vibrations from whatever is going on around the house, it’s only going to come out until it meets resistance.
And that resistance could be something as simple as tape.
So they’re like, ooh, it only came out just enough to not break these electronic contacts.
No, the tape stopped it from going any further because we’re only talking about vibrations.
That’s one possible explanation.
In just a few years after this, they would have been using floppy disks instead of tape, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, no, they’d still have to tape the floppy disk to the church.
But yeah, so it’s a lot of questions aren’t being asked about this.
You know, for one, we always seem to have a young person in the house that often will be part of what’s going on or the center of what’s going on.
So that in itself is another possibility.
Often the girl who’s 12 or 13, but these cases, I don’t know about the haunted set of drawers, but certainly with the other case that we’re going to start talking about, there was a young boy involved.
Yeah, a number of cases involving young boys, but I think the stereotype is a young girl.
Right.
It’s a little confusing because they don’t really lay out exactly what are the claimed phenomena, right?
We know there’s noises because they play us an audio tape.
But in their recreation of these effects, it looks to me like the furniture is perfectly empty.
So they’re not filling it up with clothes.
So it’s a little peculiar.
Look, I’m not trying to say they’re not being scientific.
But if you’re going to replicate whatever the phenomena was originally…
Not the same conditions.
You try to reproduce the conditions in which this was happening.
Also, the room where they’re doing this work…
It’s not exactly a lab, is it?
It looks like a storage room.
It is.
It’s got like a ladder and some tarps and all kinds of stuff laying around.
And that’s on the property.
It’s very rudimentary.
Yeah, and that’s on the property.
That’s where it was sitting this whole time was in the storeroom.
But you notice as soon as they take it out of the storeroom when they’re suckered into buying it, nothing happens anymore.
Yeah, it stops.
And that’s one of the themes about this that is not focused on but mentioned is that as soon as a scientific attention is given to these things, everything seems to stop.
I know where you’re going here.
Do you want to tell us the next story?
We’re talking about the thumping recordings, but also some of the people who’ve investigated this kind of phenomena, not only in this documentary, but also people we know.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Now, I do want to say that Tony Cornell is actually a really interesting individual who has done some great stuff, and a lot of his stuff is very skeptical.
So the fact that they focused on the sensational ideas and everything in this television segment shows you that television and entertainment in general has not changed.
Right, yeah, since the time of Harry Price and here with Carrington, yeah, there’s always the focus on the belief rather than the science.
Yes, make it go viral.
That’s what’s important.
But they did interview somebody that I think was a brilliant choice, and that was this magician by the name of David Burglass.
Yes.
And I feel so out of it because I didn’t know much about him.
And he is amazing.
He’s an incredible magician.
He’s an international man of mystery.
I loved how they labeled him that before Austin Powers was a thing.
They labelled him that.
You know, seeing some of his tricks makes me think of a lot of the contemporary magicians that we know.
So people like Banachick, some of his tricks, like driving blindfolded around central London.
I know that that’s…
the driving blindfold has been one of Banaszczak’s big tricks, but it seems like David Berglas was doing all of these tricks before anyone else was.
And boy, did he live a long life.
And he died two years ago and was born in 1926.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He almost made it to, to a hundred.
Yeah.
And just, he did.
He, he was amazing.
And what I love about this is they brought him in and they were talking to him about this case.
where these hands on this clock kept getting bent.
And they couldn’t figure out what was going on.
They called him in.
And he basically just got the little boy of the house alone and said, why did you do it?
When I came along and talked to the family, they were quite convinced that somehow I would get to the truth, whatever it might be.
When I came to the little boy, I decided to play it very cool rather than being the heavy investigator, and I put my arm round him and I said, Eric, why did you do it?
He assumed that I already knew, so he said, just for fun.
At that moment, the whole thing had been solved.
It was then up to me to try and find the exact way it had been achieved.
For instance, why did the father manage to swear to it that it had happened when they were on holiday?
And the answer to that was, of course, that Eric had already bent the clock hands in the house just before they left.
They locked the house up.
When they came back, they discovered the bent hands.
So they assumed that it had happened whilst they were away.
So he saw the whole case right there.
That quickly, just by using some psychology.
And he is also a trained psychotherapist as well as being this amazing magician, which I think is a really important thing for being a good magician is understanding psychology, which he showed there.
But another good magician and investigator of the paranormal who has been on the show, he’s a friend of the show.
is Massimo Polidoro.
And he had a similar case that he was telling Karen and I about years ago.
And the little boy’s name was Marco.
And there were, you know, there were things.
Yeah.
There were things going on in this house where things were breaking and thrown against walls, and it was just really heavy poltergeist activity.
And Massimo…
Really, when he came to investigate, he just stuck with the kid and didn’t really give him any time.
He just would play with him.
And suddenly all the phenomena stopped.
It just stopped completely.
Now, as soon as it was announced that Massimo and the team were leaving, because they were there for some time, that they were leaving, the boy started to get very anxious again.
And was trying to get Massimo to, you know, look over the hills, look over the hills.
Right.
And, you know, so he had a situation where he’s like, I need to get my books ready for school.
So you just keep playing that computer game we’ve been playing together, Massimo.
And Massimo’s like, no, I’ll be glad to help.
And he’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Just let me let me get this.
I’ll be done and I’ll be right back.
So Massimo allows it, but he watches the kid in the reflection of the window.
and keeps an eye on him.
And the kid is watching Mossimo very closely, but doesn’t realize that he can see him in the reflection.
So after a few moments, he grabs a glass and throws it against the wall.
And it shatters and Mossimo turns around and goes, why did you do that?
And the kid stammers, I didn’t do it.
He’s like, well, yeah, you did.
I saw you in the reflection.
Why did you do that?
And then the father comes running in.
Did it happen?
Did it happen?
You know, he’s like, no, no, no.
I accidentally bumped a glass because he didn’t want to embarrass the boy.
Yeah.
That’s kind.
Yeah.
He’s a gentleman.
Oh, he is.
Mossimo is a superhero to me.
When they say don’t meet your heroes, he is one that you can meet.
Definitely.
He’s safe to me.
He stays true.
I think there are two things that are going on here with the young boy.
I think one is a case of pious fraud.
And we’ve seen this with stories like the guy or a ghost where the kid is wanting to, nothing’s happened the whole time that Mossimo and his team were there.
And so he’s trying to produce some phenomena so that he can say, look, this thing is really happening because he’s potentially believing that this is happening anyway, but also a matter of attention seeking behavior.
And so I remember Mossimo talking about how the parents didn’t give him enough attention.
Is this a singleton child?
Doesn’t have any siblings.
And suddenly he’s getting all of this attention with this phenomena that seems to be surrounding him.
And then to find out that the team are going to be leaving, he’s not going to get this attention anymore.
He’s, I guess, trying to keep them to stay there so that he has that attention.
And perhaps something like that was going on too with the Enfield case.
Yeah.
I also want to note, just with Mossimo, seeing what was taking place in the reflection of Blake’s favourite case in Humpty Doo, where the…
The inhabitants of the house, the guys who were renting the place, were caught when they were throwing batteries around the room and knives and razor blades and other things around the room.
Did they for sure convict them of that or were they just charged?
Weren’t charged at all, evicted.
But yeah, a lot of similarities across these cases.
But I do just love that psychological angle of just kind of waiting and observing and then just reasoning with the child and just how much comes out at that point.
But yeah, apparently after that had happened, there was no more phenomena that took place in the house.
So Mossimo solved that one.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that’s just another one of those things where when you bring in a magician, they look at it through a different lens.
And I think it’s really important to kind of have that.
And I feel very privileged to have gotten to work on a few things with, say, Banachek and getting that different perspective.
So that’s all been really great.
But another interesting thing is they didn’t seem to bring David in…
To meet Tony, and I think that would have been really valuable because David did another great little thing where he was talking about how easily people can be fooled by technology because, you know, the the reporter, his name was James Hogg, and he’s got a long, great pedigree as well.
as a BBC reporter.
And he did a lot of these segments for Nationwide as well.
And he really brings a lot of good…
He’s the surrogate audience’s voice.
you know, in a lot of these things.
So he was great, I thought.
But, you know, he mentions that Tony’s using technology to help suss out if there’s fraud, you know, if someone’s being a trickster.
And…
David immediately cautions against that.
He’s like, you can be very fooled by that.
And he’s like, going to touch this cord where there’s an inline switch on this cord to his lamp.
And it shocks him and the lights go off.
And he’s like, ow.
He’s like, oh, it’s kind of funny that we were just talking about that.
And he’s like, but he gets back to his conversations.
You have to be very careful because then…
And he like just kind of moves his hand in a magical way.
And the lights come back on.
Yeah.
And he’s like, how easily you could be fooled.
And it’s like, well, I thought that was great acting because I was because the reporters like, wait, was that a trick?
Right.
Of course it was.
But I thought he’d really shocked himself, you know, and the way he laughed about it and just tried to keep going and talking.
I thought that was such great acting.
Yeah.
That when he did that little hand gesture and the lights came back on, I thought, oh, that was beautiful.
But it was a great representation that if Tony Cornell had seen that.
I think he would have jumped to that feeling of amazement and left his critical thinking at the door.
And so I really appreciate having a magician around.
And I think that we should do a deep dive into talking about David Berglas in another episode.
He had a very famous card trick that was called the Berglas effect, or that’s how it’s known today.
And so I think maybe if we can find either we can do some research and talk about him or we can bring on a guest to talk about him more.
Banachek would know it completely.
He’s such a historian when it comes to this stuff.
Yeah, that’d be cool.
Yeah.
I think we’ll do that.
But I think there was this one last segment that we wanted to talk about.
Yeah, Dr. Alan Gould.
Yeah, so he was a collaborator then with Tony Cornell, specifically about poltergeist activity.
Yeah, he wrote, he and Tony had co-written a book called Poltergeists.
And there’s an interesting statement, and they’re referring to both Dr. Alan Gould and Tony Cornell.
Those who study these matters are concentrating on two possible explanations for poltergeist activities.
One is that someone in the house unconsciously creates, perhaps through tension or aggression, a violent surge of energy which makes things move without being touched.
The other theory is that disembodied spirits are somehow involved.
Now, first off, I want to stop there and say two.
There’s only two possible explanations.
One is that someone in the house is unconsciously creates, perhaps through tension or aggression, a violent surge of energy, which makes things move without being touched.
And the other theory is that disembodied spirits are somehow involved.
So those are the only two possibilities.
Yeah, not trickling or hoaxes.
Right, or misunderstanding or natural causes.
Exactly.
So when you narrow it down like that, and that’s all you’re giving yourself as possibilities, why even bother with critical thought?
Mm-hmm.
You know, it’s like those are the only two things you have to worry about.
So that really does just kind of disturb me.
And they talk about how, oh, I don’t think there’s any trickery involved because it’s how I feel.
I don’t feel like we’re being set up.
Don’t think, I don’t think anybody’s fooling around.
I think that’s genuine.
And how much of the rest is?
I didn’t get the impression that I was having my leg pulled.
No, not at all.
So the mystery deepens, does it not?
It does.
So the mystery deepens, does it not?
Yeah, that’s a good clip.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it’s just kind of hilarious.
And I know that they are not giving these men who actually are skeptical and they are intelligent about things.
They’re only focusing on some questionable things that they do.
I mean, there’s another one where while Alan is being interviewed, that Tony has to go back to the house because they got a call.
Oh, something else has happened.
And it was, you know, a photo frame fell off the wall and down the stairs.
And it’s like, oh, that’s totally authentic.
Well, yeah, I mean, that can happen accidentally as well.
Or it can happen from someone picking it up and throwing it down the stairs as well.
Or they were framed.
Totally.
Well, and it depends on how you frame it because it could be many different things.
But Tony does this interesting thing where he says there are 38 events.
So he basically gets 38 copies of the blueprints of the location.
And each one he maps out where the people said they were during the instance.
And he does that as if it is proof.
And I think that that’s very bizarre.
It’s like, you know, if there’s more than one person or where three people were or, you know, whatever, it’s like you’ve got to do that because you’ve got to find out whether they’re taking you for a ride or not.
So you writing down where they said they were.
is proof.
And if it is not a human agency, if we’re talking about movement, seismic movement or trains or buses going past and shaking a picture off the wall, then that’s all for naught.
Going around and asking everyone to report where they were.
We have an RTD route that goes by our house.
And every time they go by, for some reason, the air brakes make a weird noise because they hit a little divot in the road out in front of our house.
Makes a strange noise.
But I’ve noticed that over time, I’ve got two photos or two pictures, framed pictures hanging up on the wall.
And I noticed that after a week of that bus going by, both pictures are hanging at an angle and I have to straighten them.
So if that were, I mean, they’re haunted, obviously, and it has nothing to do with the bus.
Well, around the house too.
I think with other paintings and portraits that we have, they’re just slowly kind of shifting and askew and have to be straightened pretty much weekly.
Yeah, or strongly.
It’s a…
One of those things where it is constant though.
And if we had decided not to connect the dots in any logical way, you could absolutely feel that there was something going on.
And the sound that the bus makes when it hits that divot echoes in the house in a very odd way.
So up on the top floor, it sounds almost like a…
I don’t know if anyone’s familiar with road roadblocks.
There used to be a, when a character listens to this show, right?
Right.
Anytime a character died, they would make this sound.
And that is the sound that is made by the bus going by.
You hear it up there.
It’s like, you said it just like it then.
And it’s so bizarre.
And yeah, I mean, you don’t know where it came from.
You just hear this sound that represents death.
And what’s going on?
Another one finds the dust in a Roblox game somewhere.
Somewhere, yeah.
I know that Blake has had some strange sounds in his house too.
Was it a previous house or with the stairwell?
I remember you talking about something, some strange sounds.
Oh, this…
Coming up the stairs at my house, I’ve seen this effect in other people’s houses too, but when you’re going up the stairs, there’s a little bit of delay and then the sound gets echoed back to you.
And it creates this really compelling audio illusion that there’s somebody right behind you, like following you up the stairs.
Even though I know what it is, it still makes me go faster and faster.
And then it’s faster and faster, too, because, you know, so it’s like being aware of what’s really going on.
There’s no proof against your body’s just, you know.
Reactions.
Reactions to these sort of visceral threats.
They’re not real, but they feel.
It’s still real to me, damn it!
You know what somebody ought to do?
Somebody ought to write a story, a ghost story, where there’s a skeptic who by the end of it is converted to a believer.
Because that’s never been done.
Never been done.
Never been done.
Because they think they’re figuring things out throughout.
And then, oh, lo and behold, they are convinced.
It’s real.
That’s the trope.
Ghost-proof my basement just by putting a sound-absorbing tile up to the top of the stairwell.
Ghost-proof of ghosts.
Ghost-proofing, yeah.
I love this idea of, we talk about it a lot, there’s a culturally available template to explain a thing, you know, so that when people sort of fit their story to what’s out there, you know, I saw a weird animal in the woods.
Maybe it was a Bigfoot.
You know, Bigfoot’s there ready to, you know, be an explanation.
Ghosts.
Very much so.
Poltergeist.
I got kind of curious, like, well, how often do poltergeists come up in the news?
Right.
So when they talked about this poltergeist book here in the episode or this in this little clip, they show the book Poltergeist by Gauld and Cornell.
And that was widely regarded as being a very good book, scientific sort of book tackling this.
This was shot in 83.
And so.
Colin Wilson had done a book called Poltergeist in 81.
And of course, Guy Lyon Play Affair had done his This House is Haunted.
We talked to him.
That was 1980.
William Roll, who taught here in West Georgia, famous for the Columbus Poltergeist, among other things.
He’s really sort of codified the idea of like a psychic energy.
You know, he’s from the J.B. Ryan School.
So his book was 72.
Nendor Fodor and Herewood Carrington wrote Haunted People in 1951.
And I guess to some extent, the Borley Rectory’s case has some sort of poltergeist elements.
That was 1940.
I saw your note there, just in our notes, and I just wanted to say, yes, there were absolutely claims of poltergeist activity.
So when you go back to the Bull family, who originally…
There in Baldy Rectory, they didn’t really talk about poltergeist activity.
It was mostly the headless coachman and the nun.
But then with the family who came in and got the SPR involved and therefore Harry Price.
they were experiencing or claiming that they were experiencing poltergeist activity.
And certainly with the Foister family, the activity was predominantly poltergeist in nature.
So it did play heavily into the stories, especially in the 1930s and the 1940s.
And I had thought maybe…
some famous case would be bringing these things up to the surface and they would go die down and come back up.
But at least in England, since the 1920s, there’s been a constant stream of poltergeist stories in the news.
There’s never a decade when there’s not some.
It’s just constantly poltergeist in the news.
And this sort of segment, this nationwide segment, that’s not what the whole show was about.
But these these sort of supernatural elements really stick out in the memory and become the thing you think about.
Kind of like Unsolved Mysteries.
Like that’s not a supernatural show for the most part.
It’s missing persons, that sort of thing.
Unsolved crimes.
But when they would do these poltergeist stories or weird UFO abduction stories, those would really stick out and be it was especially credible.
Because everything else they’re showing is, you know, ostensibly real crime or real mystery.
And then how do you explain this supernatural thing?
Which I think that’s it.
They give it a lot of added weight even.
But this sort of ends in a cliffhanger, though, right?
I mean, it doesn’t they don’t really they set up the experiments.
They show you what they’re going to be doing.
Do we ever get a follow-up?
I don’t know.
Well, no, we don’t.
And the reason we don’t is because of the fact that this was the final season of Nationwide.
And so it’s one of two things.
They ran out of time because it was the ending of the season and the end of the series.
But there’s also the thing is that they didn’t have anything compelling to tell after they moved that chest of drawers and found that it did nothing.
Yeah, and I fished around a little bit, and I couldn’t find out what had become of the chest of drawers.
So I guessed landfill somewhere in the end.
eBay.
Antique Roadshow.
eBay, yeah.
Haunted chest of drawers, for sure.
Yeah, we should look that up.
But another interesting thing is the way they started off this segment is with that photo taken of a reflection in a mirror.
Yeah.
And it was just so full of pareidolia.
You could not see what it was.
No, it was a chihuahua.
Yeah, Karen saw a chihuahua.
I saw like a woman wrapped in white cheesecloth or something.
I couldn’t tell what it was.
And when they zoomed in on it, suddenly you could see that it was a young boy asleep or pretending to be asleep while this incredibly loud banging was happening.
And, you know, again, we are given such a lack of information.
Oh, we were watching him.
Where’s the proof you were watching him?
You have a picture of a photo of a reflection in a mirror.
That’s not a good scientific photo, you know, because it’s so…
Well, yeah, yeah.
It’s hard to depict what’s there.
And I sent those pictures over to you, Blake, if you want to put them in the show notes.
And also the drawers out on the Chester drawers.
Amazing.
The thing is…
You know, there’s such little information.
How could this young boy, and you can see from the photo, he’s probably 12, 13, 14 maybe, but how could he make these sounds of a man?
Well, how do you know that that’s the, what is the sound of a man?
It’s usually flatulence.
I know.
The thing is, is how could he make this powerful sound?
Well, I demonstrated it to Karen that all you have to do is stomp.
All you have to do is use something in your hand, whether it be a baseball bat or whatever.
But something simple could easily create those sounds.
It sounded a little bit to me like pipes being hit with a bat, maybe a cricket bat in England.
I don’t know.
When you think in terms of natural explanations, there are just so many potential explanations in a natural sense to rule out paranormal claims.
But it also makes me think of the Enfield poltergeist and Janet making the sounds of the ghost of a man and just putting on that kind of gravelly voice.
And making sure everybody had to turn their back or he wouldn’t talk.
Yeah, and even babies can make growling sounds.
You can go and look on YouTube and find demon babies.
Oh, I’ve got a great piece of footage of Blade doing that when he was a baby.
He sounded just like a demon.
He’s in his crib going…
And it’s beautiful.
He’s so artful.
He was, yeah, just playing with his vocal apparatus and learning.
We have the new vocalist for Behemoth.
He’s excellent at it.
But so, yeah, anybody can do that.
And for her to go, you know, the very eloquently stated, I’m not a heaven man.
I love that.
Yeah.
It’s hilarious when you think about it, especially in retrospect.
Now, I’m sure there were elements when you were there that you could find yourself terrified.
But once you get past that feeling, you can tear it apart.
I guess that’s about it for this episode.
I would say we’ll put some links to other clips that they did.
We’ll delve into this more as a series.
I think just these, as you say, Blake, these vintage documentaries and shows, they’re good fun.
So I think our listeners should go and check that out too.
It’s only 12 minutes, but wow, so much there.
They cram a lot in, so it’s kind of cool.
It’s great.
I mean, for us, it’s very cool.
So I think they’re, I mean, I know we just sort of dissected it, but, you know, it’s also beautiful as a living frog and not just as a bunch of pins and flesh.
So, yeah.
That was a strange metaphor.
I don’t need lunch now.
Yeah.
Anyway, so thanks for bringing this to our attention.
And I think hopefully the listeners enjoy this.
Again, you can check out the clip if you want to cover this material a lot faster than we just did.
Yeah, yeah.
And we’ll certainly circle back so that we can talk about some of these characters like David Berglas.
Well, and it’s interesting because this whole area of East Anglia is, I found so many videos on YouTube talking about the ghost of East Anglia.
And it’s just like, how many could there be?
I’ve never heard anybody talk about West Anglia.
It’s always East Anglia.
Is there a West Anglia?
Oh, it’s, don’t worry about it.
Okay.
Yeah.
It’s not haunted.
We’re not referred to.
It’s not built over an ancient Native American burial ground.
Interesting.
Like East England is.
They only moved the heads and headstones.
All right.
Well, maybe we can have some listeners in Great Britain who can help us out here.
Yeah, teach us, school us in this.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You’ve been listening to Karen and me discussing a haunted chest of drawers with Matt Baxter.
Check the show notes for the full segment.
Hopefully you’ll find it as interesting and fun as we did.
Plus, there’s other links for further reading.
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
Our goal here is to bring you the best in monster-related content with a focus on scientific skepticism and critical thinking.
If you enjoy our show and want to support our mission, start out by visiting monstertalk.org forward slash support.
That’s monstertalk.org forward slash support.
There you’ll find links to our Patreon page as well as a donate button if you’d like to just make a one-time contribution.
A great way to support the show is to buy books from our Amazon wishlist.
These are books that directly help with our monster research.
We love used books very much, so don’t feel compelled to buy new ones.
And we’re also very fond of Kindle editions because of their easily searched content.
And without spending any money at all, you can support and raise the profile of the show by leaving a positive review at iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Positive reviews help keep us visible in iTunes, which is a great way to help us find new listeners.
Finally, remember to share episodes you really like with your friends and family.
You can help make Monster Talk the nightlight that keeps monsters away from someone you love.
Monster Talk theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
Thanks, as always, for listening.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post S05E07 – A Haunted Chest of Drawers appeared first on MonsterTalk.

We’re joined by host of the Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast, Karl Mamer. Karl’s working on a new book in his series of skeptically themed books of lists (The Skeptic’s Book of Lists, The Conspiracy Skeptic’s Book of Lists) and has been looking into the origins of demons & devils in Dungeons & Dragons.

Further Reading:

Deities & Demigods
BBC: The Great 1980s D&D Panic
Michael Stackpole and the Pulling Report (counter to B.A.D.D.)
The composite D&D title card is based on the work of David C. Sutherland III.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

———————-

Blake: Well, this’ll probably be pretty conversational anyway, right?
Karen Stollznow: I think so, because, yeah, I don’t know what the hell we’re really talking about.
Blake: Yeah, so…
Karl Mamer: Yeah, that’s… that’s why I was like, Karen, you… I kind of made, like, you know, a little map, like, kind of 8 things to progress through, too, and I’m like.
Karl Mamer: Karen, you just gotta keep us… keep us on track, keep us moving, because we will get, like, oh yeah, second edition, well, you know, and then there’ll be, you know…
Blake: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
Karl Mamer: Yeah.
Blake: Not any of that basic stuff.
Karen Stollznow: Certainly do my best if I can understand anything that you’re talking about.
Karl Mamer: Yeah.
Karen Stollznow: Well…
Blake: As long as we steer clear of religion, I think.
Karl Mamer: I know, yeah, we’ll be cool.
Karen Stollznow: Well, I was going to ask a question about that, but I guess we can…
Blake: No, no, it’s okay.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, can you do.
Blake: You’re wondering what… if they have stats for Satan and Jesus. That’s a great question, Karen. Thanks for bringing that up. Actually, Karen…
Karl Mamer: if…
Karen Stollznow: They should be included if, you know, fictional creatures and all.
Karl Mamer: If you could ask that question, I have an interesting little story about that.
Karen Stollznow: Oh, okay, the way that… Blake asked it, or just her?
Karl Mamer: Yeah, yeah, do they have?
Blake: We could do it in, like, when it’s natural in the flow somewhat.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, yeah, yeah, true.
Karen Stollznow: Maybe after question, like.
Karl Mamer: Jesus and Mary, and, you know, John the Baptist.
Karen Stollznow: Totally natural, yeah.
Blake: 5 and 6. There you go.
Karl Mamer: Yeah.
Blake: I think.
Karl Mamer: Yeah.
Blake: a good place.
Karen Stollznow: We should probably get started, then.
Blake: Actually, we should get started, but it’s funny, because you said from the start we should go back and look at,
Blake: Episode 220.
Karl Mamer: I did re-listen to it myself.
Blake: And I was like, that’s a great idea. Oh, it’s the Monster Manual episode, okay, okay.
Karl Mamer: Damn.
Karen Stollznow: Okay, please tell me that’s not the first question.
Karen Stollznow: That’s very confusing.
Karen Stollznow: Yes. All of this is confusing.
Blake: We had on John Peterson to talk about the history of the Monster Manual, and so, that’s more of a, hey.
Blake: We’re gonna be talking about Dungeons & Dragons, and if you’d like to know a little bit of a deeper dive on some of this stuff, you can go check out episode 220.
Blake: Yes. Which was an interview with John Peterson, who wrote a book called Playing at the World, A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games.
Blake: There you go. That’s a nice title.
Karen Stollznow: Very nice, yeah. Well, welcome to the show, Carl.
Karl Mamer: Kid, thank you.
Karen Stollznow: Good to have you back, as always.
Blake: Yeah, who is Carl Nehmer, for people who don’t know?
Karl Mamer: Appreciate it.
Blake: Are we rolling?
Blake: Well, oh yeah, we’re totally rolling, I’ve been recording already.
Karen Stollznow: We have… The last 5 minutes, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Okay.
Blake: I’ll, I’ll quickly just…
Karen Stollznow: Sneaks it up on us.
Blake: shrink a lot of that for Patreon people, but yeah, we’re rolling now. So, yeah, we’re welcoming back Carl Mamer, who is the host of the Conspiracy Podcast.
Karl Mamer: Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast.
Blake: Sorry, that’s not the real title. That’s the title that they want you to believe.
Karl Mamer: Depends which month my Soros checks are coming.
Blake: Exactly. The Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast. So, you don’t believe you have a podcast? That you’re skeptical of it? Is that the idea?
Karl Mamer: I am… I do it so infrequently these days that, yes, people would… I’d be skeptical about it. Fair enough.
Karen Stollznow: Yeah, yeah.
Blake: No, no, no. I’ll fix all that in post, Carl, don’t worry.
Karl Mamer: No worries.
Blake: So, I’ve known Carl online for a long time. I mean, I… we’ve met in person at TAM,
Blake: And you’re delightfully Canadian, Carl.
Karen Stollznow: TM2, and he gave me a chocolate bar.
Blake: That’s it.
Karl Mamer: I did, didn’t I?
Karen Stollznow: I’ll never forget that, it was delicious.
Karl Mamer: I miss him.
Blake: Hanging out with you, Carl.
Blake: So, yeah.
Karl Mamer: If I had met you at a TAM overseas, I would have given you a bottle of maple syrup, but .
Karen Stollznow: Next time.
Karl Mamer: Yeah. I don’t know, as… when I… when I travel abroad, outside of North America, I always bring little bottles of maple syrup, and then give them to, kind of.
Blake: I thought all Canadians did that, is that just you?
Karl Mamer: Just carry it on you in hip flasks. Pretty much, pretty much.
Karen Stollznow: Never know when you need…
Blake: For bartering.
Karen Stollznow: Yes, yes.
Blake: And yeah, so you…
Blake: You were actually inspired to sort of dive back into your research on monsters, or at least the monster manual because of that episode? Is that right?
Karl Mamer: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I, I mean, I’ve written two books so far, like, there’s.
Blake: Yeah, we should have mentioned the books, yeah, that may be… the Skeptic’s Book of Lists.
Karl Mamer: Correct, yeah. Okay, good. And, yeah, and then the Conspiracy Skeptics Book of Lists. Nice. And, yeah. And, so I’m doing a third one, so this one is now the Skeptics Book of Lists 2. I kind of had a plan to do
Karl Mamer: a general, and then, like, Conspiracy Skeptics book a list, skeptics book a list 2, UFO Skeptics book a list, something like… I don’t know, I don’t know, who knows how much longer I’m gonna live, but we’ll see. But.
Karen Stollznow: Lots of material there.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, exactly. So, so one of my lists, I was inspired by the, episode 220, where you kind of delved into the Monster Manual, because it was quite fascinating, where your guest talked a lot about, like, the origin of the monsters. Like, where did Gary Gygax…
Karl Mamer: get those monsters. Because, I mean, today, if you’re gonna do a…
Karl Mamer: If you’re gonna do a role-playing game and you wanted monsters, you just…
Karl Mamer: Google it, and get a list of monsters, and then…
Karl Mamer: You know, that would be your basis, but, you know.
Blake: Google was notoriously slow in the 1970s.
Karl Mamer: It was called a library, yeah. It was called a card file.
Karen Stollznow: Oh, I remember those, yeah.
Blake: For listeners, Carl is miming. Mamer is miming. Yeah.
Blake: Going through a card file.
Karen Stollznow: I want to note, too, that he looks like Corn Julio, because he’s kind of blending into his chair there.
Karl Mamer: No.
Karen Stollznow: You are really blending, it’s true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Karl Mamer: T, black chair, yeah. T for my bug hole.
Karl Mamer: So, so yeah, so, well, so it inspired me to, to do one of the lists, one of my lists, both the, Devils and Demons in the Monster Manual. So where did, where did Gary Gygax… what was his inspiration?
Karl Mamer: For, for those. And, so that’s one of the lists, and that kind of prompted me to say, hey, did you want to…
Karl Mamer: Talk about, you know, something more specific
Karl Mamer: Where, you know, the monster… the demons and devils in the Monster Manual. Where did they come from? What was Gary Gygax’s inspiration in the background on them?
Karen Stollznow: Well, I’d like to ask, are these real monsters in the sense that they’re coming from folklore, or of someone else’s creation?
Karl Mamer: Well, I mean, most of them are… most, but not all are…
Karl Mamer: I don’t want to say real devils.
Karl Mamer: But, our, our, our,
Karl Mamer: really come from, you know, various sources, like the Bible, sort of like the Talmud, and then a lot of, like, what do you call it? Grimoires.
Karen Stollznow: Grimoires, yep. Grimoires, yes. Which…
Karl Mamer: If you played Dungeons & Dragons, you encountered this grimoire word.
Karl Mamer: And if you’ve never heard anyone pronounce it before, you had no idea how to pronounce that.
Karen Stollznow: Grimoire, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Until you had Jerry Drake on to talk about Grimoires, I always called it Grimars. Grimars.
Karen Stollznow: Wow, wow, okay. Yeah, Paradigm.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, I had no idea, yeah, but yeah.
Blake: Chasm, we needn’t talk about chasms.
Karl Mamer: Grimoire.
Blake: So many words.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, so it is quite as… yeah, so, as I kind of researched into that, we can get eventually into the… some of the more popular demons and devils in the first edition of the Monster Manual, but… but yeah, in general, Gygax
Karl Mamer: pulled them… really, Gygax pulled them from…
Karl Mamer: Really wear, you know, like, you know.
Karl Mamer: you know, Dante’s Inferno, and, Milton’s Paradise Lost, like, you know, because they had to kind of populate out their stories with devils, so, he basically went to, like, same source, or maybe went to, went to
Karl Mamer: Paradise Lost, and you know, Dante’s Inferno, and pulled names out of there, but… But, yeah.
Blake: There was a… there was a big swath of,
Blake: Metaphysical and magical texts published from the late 1800s to the early 1900s,
Blake: That sort of esoteric, revival.
Blake: Especially coming out of France. So, I’ve got some really great books up here. There’s, like, the Compendium Maleficarum, there’s the False Hierarchy of Demons, and I got a bunch of other little grimoires. And of course, one of the things after talking with Jerry and picking up some of these volumes and looking at them, you… you see
Blake: they’re not the sort of satanic devil books that you would expect based on… especially the way I was raised, you know, evangelical Christian.
Karen Stollznow: I knew it.
Blake: expect these books to be about sacrificing people, or goats, or whatever, and they’re not. They’re… they’re…
Karen Stollznow: disappointed.
Blake: They’re basically Christian texts about using the power of Christ to control demons to accomplish your personal goals, is what they really are.
Karl Mamer: Exactly, which is almost like… It’s a bit of a…
Karl Mamer: it’s a bit of a game, right? So instead of… instead of conjuring a devil to, you know, make a woman love you, or improve the crops in your field.
Karl Mamer: you, you know, in the name of Jesus, you bind and control that demon, and then make him do work for you. But, in the name of Jesus, and then dispel him.
Blake: Right.
Karl Mamer: It was a bit of a dodge, I think, for, you know, people in, like, you know, the 15th and 16th and 17th century.
Karen Stollznow: Well, speaking of Jesus Christ, and…
Karen Stollznow: other religious figures, do you have these figures, in… in the Monster Manual?
Karl Mamer: Well, yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. Well, no, because as it sort of turned out, the… including, you know, names, you know, real devils like Asmodeus and Belzebub and things like that in the Monster Manual, that kind of…
Karl Mamer: during the Satanic Panic, Blake, I don’t know, when you were young, if you ever encountered any aspect of the Satanic Panic, but…
Blake: Yeah, a little, a little.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, a little. But, but that kind of, you know, that,
Karl Mamer: there’s a lot of, a lot of attention and religious and political sort of pressure on TSR to, you know, to do something about all of the, you know, the demons and devils and things in the Monster Manual. And, eventually.
Karl Mamer: TSR kind of bowed to it, and got rid of them when they kind of released a new version, which is known to players as 2nd Edition.
Karl Mamer: And, they re- ended up renaming the Monster Manual.
Karl Mamer: monstrous manual.
Karl Mamer: I don’t know. I’m sure, Blake, if they had talked to you, you could have come up with a better name for them, but…
Blake: I… yeah, why mess with a classic, is my thought, but…
Karl Mamer: Exactly.
Blake: Speaking of the Satanic Panic, though, I should mention, although this is not a paid endorsement, but
Blake: The CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is running a podcast hosted by Sarah Marshall.
Blake: And it’s called The Devil You Know, which is a look back at the satanic Panic. And what she’s doing that’s really interesting to me, I mean, I mean…
Blake: and this is a topic I feel like I know pretty well, but she’s going back and interviewing people whose lives were completely hosed by the Sutan panic, and it is fascinating. So, check that out, the devil you know. Yeah, yeah, we may… I’m gonna see if we can get her on.
Blake: shot now, and maybe too big for us, but I’d like to try to stagger, because it’s…
Karen Stollznow: If nothing else, we can watch it and then talk about it.
Blake: No, it’s good, it’s real good, so, yeah.
Karl Mamer: I mean.
Blake: It’s called You’re Wrong About, which is very popular.
Karl Mamer: I was gonna say, the interesting thing about the Satanic Panic, while it did ruin a lot of lives.
Karl Mamer: arguably, it drove sales like crazy for Dungeons & Dragons, because suddenly it was just this little game almost nobody heard of, just…
Karl Mamer: you know, little 14-year-old nerds like me, suddenly it’s, you know, in Time Magazine, and on the Geraldo Show, and all these kinds of things. And so, it really drove sales, like, crazy. But of course.
Karl Mamer: you know, a lot of pressure was being applied, and like I say, they…
Karl Mamer: They did this really skeevy thing, where they pulled the Demons and Devils out of the second edition.
Blake: Yeah.
Karl Mamer: and reintroduce them, completely rename them the, I think they called it… It’s a rebranding, the kids are calling it. Yes.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, so the Devils, they renamed the Tanari.
Karl Mamer: And the, the, the, the devils, sorry, the demons, like, right, Tanari, and then the devil’s the Betazoo, which… I, I just think they, you know, like, Gary, or,
Karl Mamer: George Lucas is gonna have a, you know, a trash can where all the Star Wars names he doesn’t like, he throws into the trash can. I think TSI went to there, grabbed those out, and like, that’s the devil, those are the demons, you know, yeah.
Karl Mamer: So, they, yeah, they just renamed it. Nobody was pleased by that, but then, eventually, when Wizards of the Coast took over, like, they… they had money up the wazoo, and they did not care, so they just kind of basically brought…
Karl Mamer: The devils and demons we all know and love back into the.
Blake: They also, they, they famously, they, in the original Monster Manual, they had,
Blake: the, Lovecraft, monsters, a lot of the Lovecraft creatures.
Karl Mamer: There was a deities and demigods.
Blake: It was in Daisy Democrat, you’re right, you’re right. Yeah, and then they later removed them. I guess Chaos seem to complained, but Chaos seem didn’t really have the copyright on it. So it was one of those, they capitulated without… they could have fought back and kept them in, but yeah.
Karl Mamer: There’s a lot of stories floating around about that, and people kind of…
Karl Mamer: shorten it down, because it is a complicated story. Yeah, but in essence,
Karl Mamer: chaosism had the, you know, the, the, the, the H.B. Lovecraft
Karl Mamer: call it Cthulhu role-playing game, but they told TSR
Karl Mamer: Don’t worry, you can use the monsters and the, you know, the deities and demigods. Just give us a little credit on, like, you know, on page 1. And,
Karl Mamer: fine, they… so they ran another edition with the credit, but then, by this time, TSR had gone completely corporate, and they were like, you know, the hell we’re gonna put our con… you know.
Blake: Competition in the book, right, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Exactly, and then the next edition, they just pulled all that crap out, so… yeah, very disappointing. But…
Karl Mamer: What was really missed in all of this was, you know, these devils and demons were not there to be worshipped, they were there to be…
Karl Mamer: Fought by player characters, right?
Blake: You know what? That’s a really good point, Carl.
Karl Mamer: Yes, yes, which is weird, because, I mean, hypothetically, you know, the, you know, if you’re truly a devout Christian, you should, you know, and Beelzebub appears, you know, at your,
Karl Mamer: you know, at your Christmas social or whatever, you know, it’s your duty, you know, to pull out your plus-five, you know, Vorpal Bible and just slay!
Karl Mamer: slay that guy, right? So, I don’t know what they’re… but… yeah.
Karl Mamer: So yeah, so, it, it…
Karl Mamer: But like I say, it really kind of, all the controversy really, really pushed sales.
Karl Mamer: Second edition came out, then there’s a bunch of other editions, and then, you know, it kind of just…
Karl Mamer: tailed off, and people still played, but it was no longer the cultural sensation until…
Karl Mamer: What TV show am I talking about, Blake?
Blake: Wow.
Karen Stollznow: Stranger Things, it was.
Karl Mamer: Thank you, Karen, yeah.
Karen Stollznow: Yikes. Yeah.
Karl Mamer: Stranger Things. Stranger Things!
Blake: My family’s very excited, like, I… did you notice my shirt?
Blake: I’m wearing my Hellfire shirt, yeah, and I’m also wearing a, Tony Tony Chopper.
Karen Stollznow: Oh, I thought that was Hello Kitty.
Blake: Yeah, yeah. No, no, it’s, it’s…
Blake: Everybody who doesn’t watch One Piece will know who Tony Tony Chopper is in just a few months, so…
Karl Mamer: Dude.
Blake: he’s a One Piece character, he’s… he’s beloved. Anyway, I shouldn’t rant.
Karen Stollznow: invigorated interest alone.
Blake: Yes. Yeah, it did! D&D got a real big infusion of both interest and cash because of Stranger Things. It really…
Karl Mamer: Huge.
Blake: It is a nostalgia… cha-ching!
Karl Mamer: Oh, yeah. And I don’t know if you have any kind of, like, first edition stuff, but, I…
Blake: I’ve sold off everything I own to keep my bills paid.
Karl Mamer: Yes, I, I, I did, I did…
Karl Mamer: put a few choice items up on eBay and sold a few things off. Like, I did have long… I did have the original deities and demigods with the Cthulhu
Karl Mamer: Pantheon, and…
Blake: I have a friend, like, I imagine we all do in the game, you’ve got that one friend who’s got everything, and I’ve got a friend who’s got that stuff.
Karl Mamer: Well, I had it, but then…
Karl Mamer: But I loaned it, to this guy named Ralph.
Karl Mamer: Still remember his name, and never got it back, and…
Blake: Wow.
Karl Mamer: My only consolation is, while it’s valuable, it’s not pay off your mortgage valuable, so…
Blake: No, no, right. There’s that, right, yeah. It’s not Action Comics number one or whatever, right? Yeah, so, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Exactly, yeah. But, yeah, but, so, Stranger Things, you know, there’s a bunch of scenes, at least a couple scenes of them playing original Dungeons & Dragons, and… and I have to laugh, because, you know, the climactic thing is, like,
Karl Mamer: You know, it’s like, you know, what’s behind the door? And it’s like, oh, it’s the Demogorgon! Oh, it’s the Demogorgon! And they’re all terrified, and that’s when their gaming session ends. Now.
Karl Mamer: If you’re unfamiliar with, you know, the devils and demons, Debbie Gorgon is, like… this might not mean anything to anybody, it’s like he… he… 200 hit points, that the… so that is a very…
Karl Mamer: You know, he’s…
Blake: Beefy.
Karl Mamer: That is a high-level monster, like, you gotta be running around, like, 14th, 15th level to be taking on…
Blake: Aaron, just so you know, that in the original game, I believe 20th was about as high as you could go.
Karen Stollznow: Okay, yeah, my eyes were glazing over.
Karl Mamer: Yes, we care, yeah.
Blake: So the point being, you, as you go up levels, you gain hit points, like, and you also gain the ability to do more damage, all those things are really important.
Blake: But the idea of these books is that your character could eventually become powerful enough to compete with these supernatural deities that are far more powerful than, you know, the sort of average monsters, the orc, the goblin, the troll, that sort of thing. So, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, exactly.
Karen Stollznow: Okay, and is this the kind of thing that people are playing nowadays online, or is it in person, or both?
Blake: Oh, now? Yeah, people are doing it every way you can think of, like, it’s super popular right now, so…
Blake: Really, a lot of this blew up, not only did stranger things happen, but also COVID happened. Yes.
Karl Mamer: That changed the nature of playing.
Blake: Yeah, like, suddenly the tools for playing online became,
Blake: way more acceptable. There were a lot of people who were old-school gamers who wanted… if you didn’t come person in person, face-to-face, you weren’t really a gamer. And now, I think the norm is your friends… you may have never met your friends who play… Right. It’s like… it’s like, your whole gaming group can be all over the world, but everybody gets together and plays, so…
Karen Stollznow: We’ve got to track down Ralph somehow.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, I know, I would, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Personally, I think he’s in jail. Still in jail.
Karen Stollznow: You can check.
Karl Mamer: He’s that… he’s that kind of guy, you know what I’m saying?
Karl Mamer: Oh, yeah.
Karen Stollznow: Yeah, but the, but the, the…
Karl Mamer: Demi… Demi Gorgon, I think, is a very good example of how…
Karl Mamer: how Gary Gygax kind of borrowed
Karl Mamer: existing demons and devils and brought them into the system. So,
Karl Mamer: I, I, I believe the… so, so there…
Karl Mamer: the Demogorgon… there is no actual Demigorgon in the Bible.
Blake: Right.
Karl Mamer: Right, right. But… there was kind of a,
Karl Mamer: demonic creature, that was sort of adopted by the Greeks called, you know, Demi Corregon, which I guess was sort of then based on… it was kind of a… you’re the language expert, Karen, but it was sort of the,
Karen Stollznow: Oh, not with Ancient Greece.
Karl Mamer: Oh, okay. Okay. Well, there was this Platonic thing called the Demiurge, which is sort of the creative force, you know… Right, that…
Blake: It’s from Gnosticism, right? So, the demiurge is the creative force of Gnosticism, but…
Blake: It is insane. It’s a little bit… it reminds me very much of a sort of Lovecraftian world, where the thing that creates us is also a really bad guy, you don’t want to meet it. So, it’s sort of, luckily for us, obscured from the real world.
Blake: And then there’s this intelligence and agency called the Sophia, who represents a sort of divine wisdom, as she sort of protects us from the madness of the… of this demiurge. Yeah, that… it’s a really interesting sort of cosmology, and one that’s,
Blake: Pretty readily understandable to anybody with a sort of poetic view of the world, yeah, so…
Karl Mamer: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so this demiurge kind of eventually got transmongrified in
Karl Mamer: you know, almost, you know, game a telephone into Demogorgon, which was then interpreted by medieval writers as some kind of demon. And then Milton, Milton in Paradise Lost, actually.
Karl Mamer: talks about, borrowed a Demigorgon, and includes, Demogorgon. So, so Gygax, you know, likely pulled Demogorgon from Paradise Lost, but in a lot of things, some of the demons and devils
Karl Mamer: The… the way they’re depicted are…
Karl Mamer: Fairly close to how, how, the, you know, people…
Karl Mamer: thought about them, but… but the Demogorgon is completely… it’s,
Karl Mamer: It’s like two baboon heads, this creature with two baboon heads.
Blake: Very strange illustration.
Karl Mamer: Yes.
Blake: Probably make that the, show picture, is that illustration, because it’s really quite, striking.
Blake: Excuse me.
Karl Mamer: Exactly, yeah.
Blake: That, along with their picture of a succubus, is one of those really burned-in-my-head memories of.
Karl Mamer: Yeah.
Karen Stollznow: Oh, my vote’s for the succubus.
Blake: Well, she’s a hottie, that’s the whole thing. She’s got a little… if my memory is right, she has sort of a Betty Page feel.
Karl Mamer: Yes.
Karen Stollznow: To agree that…
Karl Mamer: Confusion. Yeah, kind of, yeah, yeah, more… or a Russ Myers kind of a… Yeah.
Karen Stollznow: Yeah, well, this all sounds like a.
Karl Mamer: of…
Karen Stollznow: Sorry, it just all sounds like a very eclectic mix of folklore and mythology, and just invented creatures, and… is that part of the game? That you…
Karen Stollznow: Aid in the evolution of these characters?
Karl Mamer: Well, I mean, that’s kind of the interesting thing, because these… the demons and devils are so… what we would call high-level. So, you know.
Blake: Very overpowerful.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, it’s very powerful, very high level. I mean, the game’s called Dungeons & Dragons, but you, generally speaking, do not want to encounter dragons. Yes, exactly. That, like, you know, I’m sure, you know, Blake and I have
Karl Mamer: played Dungeons & Dragons for years, if not decades, and I… I don’t… I’ve never been in a game where even one of these… like, you know, even some of the lesser demons and devils have ever been, you know, you ever encounter them, so…
Blake: To that point.
Blake: I’ve never been in a combat against a dragon in a traditional tabletop, you know, Pen and paper game.
Karl Mamer: Right.
Blake: where we use combat to defeat a dragon successfully. Now, in video games, yes, absolutely, you know, for sure. But in tabletop.
Blake: we’ve always approached dragons as a thing that you better out with them, otherwise you’re going to be dead, right? So, it’s always a… use the fact that they can speak.
Blake: you know, use the fact that they think they’re very proud, you know, that sort of thing. So, like, it’s always been more of a battle of wills and wit than combat, so…
Karl Mamer: Yes.
Blake: Or we died, one of those two things.
Blake: Yes.
Blake: Exactly.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, but I mean, but very few of the devils and demons… I should explain devils and demons. We might…
Karl Mamer: conventionally use those synonymously, you know, a devil and demon, but in Dungeons & Dragons, they’re two very different things. So, devils are kind of a line called lawful evil.
Karl Mamer: And then demons are what we call chaotic evil. So, can you think of a good metaphor for Karen? This kind of was a trend for a while, you know, if, you know, you know.
Blake: Well, Lawful Evil might be, like, a billionaire executive who works within the rules of the law, but is.
Karl Mamer: UK.
Blake: only for himself.
Blake: But chaotic evil might be more like a serial killer or a, like, just a shooter, like a crazy shooter type person. Someone who is… is… generally, we can all agree they’re evil, but they’re… we can’t…
Blake: Kind of, their motivations are inscrutable.
Karl Mamer: So, a Facebook versus a Tesla, kind of, almost.
Karen Stollznow: And some…
Karl Mamer: He got a keyboard.
Karen Stollznow: metaphors that we…
Blake: Like, a lawful, evil character…
Blake: can exist in the world without ruining the world, right? They’re working within the constraints of whatever the system is of their code, or whatever.
Karen Stollznow: The loopholes, and yeah.
Blake: Yeah, right, right. So they may be terrible, but generally speaking, they’re not illegal, right? They need to be terrible. So, yeah. So, again, billionaires.
Karen Stollznow: Got it. Right? So, yeah.
Karen Stollznow: Yeah, exactly. Mark their distinction, yep.
Karl Mamer: But, you know, actually, one of the more interesting things that… I mean…
Karl Mamer: the… the satanic panic, you know, quasi-got TSR in trouble with their demons and devils, but what really actually got TSR in trouble was they… they, they went up against the token estate.
Karl Mamer: Very, very early into Dungeons & Dragons, they had, one of the…
Karl Mamer: one of the demons, I think it was one of the demons, was, it was a Type 4… Type 6 demon. They… I don’t know, they had.
Blake: Was it the bell?
Karl Mamer: The Balrog, yes, exactly. And they called it the Balrog, right? Which, you know, was straight out of Lord of the Rings, you know, you shall not pass. And, and then the token estates started to kind of look over these things and were like, Balrog? No, no, no, no, no.
Karl Mamer: So, I think they rename it, like, the…
Blake: Right, because that’s not, like, a piece of folklore, that’s a thing Tolkien made up himself, right?
Karl Mamer: Exactly, exactly. They went from… you know, when you’re just small, you’re like.
Karl Mamer: this is never gonna get on anybody’s… at the token estates desk, then suddenly, yeah. And then the, they did have Hobbits, which they eventually, you know, renamed Halflings, not to get sued.
Blake: Yep.
Karen Stollznow: Yeah, tree… they had Ents, which are, you know, the big walking trees, which they…
Karl Mamer: called Treants, yeah. So they did have to kind of, like…
Karl Mamer: tweak some names and stuff like that, but…
Blake: I probably will get in trouble for saying this out loud, but there is…
Blake: There’s something really fascinating of sort of…
Blake: I don’t know what you would call it, poetic echo.
Blake: in the way that the people who were promoting the Satanic Panic we’re essentially LARPing
Blake: their version of the, sort of, apocalyptic Christianity.
Blake: At the same time, the people they were saying were real…
Blake: satanic enemies were playing a game that was very explicitly just a game. A game created by a guy who was very explicitly Christian.
Karl Mamer: Yes, yes.
Blake: And so, they wanted so badly to live in a world where they could be in The Exorcist, or they could be fighting demonic evil.
Blake: That they had to, like…
Blake: make that world real through moral panic. Like, they really wanted it to be… they wanted to be those guys. Like, there’s so many cases where, like, the police force had satanic and demonic experts. Like, that’s not even a thing.
Blake: But, like, it was… anyway, there’s sort of this loop of who’s pretending and who’s being serious here, and the irony is that the people who were absolutely, knowingly playing.
Karen Stollznow: In a play space of the imagination.
Blake: were being personified as evil incarnate by the people who were also playing, but couldn’t realize they were playing, so…
Karl Mamer: Yes, exactly. Thankfully, that’s over, we’ll never have to deal with it again. I know. That’s not coming back, the satanic panic.
Karl Mamer: Yeah! Yeah.
Karl Mamer: But I mean, you know, when I was a kid and I played Dungeons & Dragons, when I think of myself today, I mean, other than you…
Karl Mamer: Learned cool words, like…
Karl Mamer: Grimoire and, you know, Puissant, Manual of Arms. You know, you learned a lot of big words that you would not have normally learned anyplace else, but it really propelled you to learn, you know, history and art, and statistics, and chemistry, and those sorts of things, and .
Blake: A lot of times, just to get smarter than the Game Master, right?
Karl Mamer: Exactly.
Blake: For real. Like, yeah, because you wanted your character to get ahead, so you personally got ahead, right? It matters. I mean, that… you’re not wrong. And absolutely, I know friends who spent academic levels of research
Blake: on a thing for a game, just to, like, find out about how to do X, Y, or Z, and it’s like…
Blake: They never would have done that outside of that context. They never would have done that work if it had been at their day job, like, you know, but when it helps their character get some more XP or some cool item, yes, they will absolutely spend the time to learn the real-world material. Yeah, it’s amazing.
Karl Mamer: Exactly. Like, how, how.
Blake: Karen, I sent you a copy of the succubus image from Dungeons & Dragons, so you can see what I’m talking about.
Karen Stollznow: Where did you send it to?
Blake: I said it’s your email, so…
Karl Mamer: Okay, yeah, not, not work safe.
Karen Stollznow: Yeah, yeah, not so fortunate.
Blake: She’s not quite as Betty Page as I thought. She doesn’t… I remembered her having bangs, but it’s more of a part down the middle, so…
Karen Stollznow: Well, she’s, yeah, she’s got horns.
Blake: She… she… she’s… she’s…
Karl Mamer: Definitely horny, that’s true, that’s true. Zing!
Karen Stollznow: Nice, nice bat wings, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Bye.
Karen Stollznow: Very interesting.
Blake: Oh, I didn’t even notice those!
Blake: Just kidding.
Karen Stollznow: Oh, dear, so…
Blake: It’s…
Karl Mamer: Did not…
Blake: I have to say, when I was, like, 14, this was like porn, right? Oh my god! You can publish that in a book? I can imagine. That’s amazing.
Karen Stollznow: Yeah.
Karl Mamer: It was, it was, it was a little racy back in the time.
Blake: I mean, to overshare, I also recall, like, in the backs of, like, Better Homes and Gardens, they would have advertisement for… you could order a catalog of Fredericks of Hollywood.
Blake: Like, in the picture they had for the order form was, like, some little…
Blake: drawing of a woman in a, you know, it’s just a pen and ink drawing, right? And it was like…
Blake: Yes!
Blake: basically porn for me, in my world, right? So, yeah, it’s very sad. Sethetic, yeah. Yes, yes it is, but that was the world.
Karen Stollznow: That was the best you could get, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Yep. Fair enough. Also, I’m gonna ask you, Blake, I would ask you, Karen, but, maybe you did review the material I sent, but so what was your favorite demon, and what was your favorite devil?
Blake: You know, truthfully, okay, Carl, this is… so here’s how this all played out, right? So…
Blake: When I was in high school.
Blake: none of my friends played Dungeons & Dragons, right? But my friend Mike, lifelong friend, we’ve been friends since we were 5 years old.
Blake: He… his mom would get him whatever he wanted, so he had all the books.
Karl Mamer: Right.
Blake: And I would read the Monster Manual, like, over and over again at his house on the weekends. So, I just loved that book, and I would just sit there and read it. And he was… he would calmly explain to me, you know there’s a game that this could be played with.
Blake: But nobody played the game. Nobody ran the game. I don’t think there were any gamers in my high school. The first time
Blake: ran into this, like, actually being played?
Blake: was at a debate team conference. I went into… there were some other kids from another school that were playing, and they were playing specific… it’s weird that I remember this, but they were specifically playing… there’s a module that’s based on, Through the Looking Glass.
Karl Mamer: Okay.
Blake: Or Alice in Wonderland, I don’t remember, but it has, like, mushroom people and other stuff in it. But that was the first time I saw people actually playing the game, and I tried to sort of understand what was going on, but it wasn’t really clicking. So it wasn’t until I got to college.
Blake: And then by the time I met my college friends, who are still my friends, they’re my lifelong friends, we still play role-playing games together.
Blake: But they were all playing, Iron Crown Enterprises’ ice rollmaster system.
Karl Mamer: Mmm.
Blake: Because they had sort of outgrown Dungeons & Dragons and wanted a system that had better combat. And Rolemaster had all those great
Blake: critical hit tables, and they were so into the combat, and it had a really rich magic system, and I really liked Rolemaster a lot. So, when I finally got around to playing, that’s what I played, and we hardly ever encountered named demons. Or if we did, they were stuff that the Game Master made up.
Blake: But after all that long preamble, I still think the Balrog’s the coolest. So, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Oh, yeah.
Karen Stollznow: Well.
Karl Mamer: The… I mean, back in the day, we called them Holy Wars, right? You know, is the Starship Enterprise… could the Starship Enterprise defeat the Star Destroyer? Is it GIF or GIF? I mean, these were things that occupied our time.
Blake: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Karl Mamer: On the very early internet. And one of them was, does the Balrog have wings? Now, I don’t think in token he ever comments about that, but I believe the.
Blake: The movie’s canon.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, there was…
Blake: The real thing.
Karl Mamer: The Ralph Bashke, the Ralph Bashke cartoon does show… depict him with wings, and .
Blake: By the way, if you… for listeners, if you haven’t seen Ralph Bakshi’s, Lord of the Rings, it’s, I think it only goes through the first two books, right? So, it never finishes, right?
Karl Mamer: It ends…
Karl Mamer: the Battle of Helmsteep. They… Yeah. Spoiler alert, they win it. It is really well done, but it’s rotoscope. It’s so cool.
Blake: Like, there’s so much, rotoscoping done in there. But, yeah, very, very cool, very cool. And I, I, I think superior over, say, the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, for example, yeah, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Oh, yes, not go there. Or the Return of the King, TV.
Karl Mamer: special, but yeah. But, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But the.
Blake: With the greatest adventure! No, no, no, I hate that song.
Blake: You know who loves that song?
Blake: Peter… Peter Thiel.
Karl Mamer: Oh, no.
Blake: It says volumes, by the way, it just says volumes, so…
Karen Stollznow: Okay.
Karen Stollznow: Oh, do I get a 10? No.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, yes, yes.
Karen Stollznow: Because I, I did, yeah, I did get the, the screenshots. And so, I’m gonna go with, is it Asmodeus?
Karl Mamer: Asmodeus, oh yeah. Oh, thank you, because…
Blake: People say Asmodaius, I don’t know. I know who you’re talking about.
Karen Stollznow: Amadeus.
Karl Mamer: It can be pronounced the other way, Asmodeus or Asmodeus.
Karen Stollznow: Modius, the arch-devil, anyway, because he is very reminiscent, to me of Anton LaVey.
Karl Mamer: Do you get Anton LaVey vibes?
Karen Stollznow: From him?
Karen Stollznow: How he sees himself, or would have seen himself.
Blake: Kids, if you don’t know Anton LaVey, in the 60s and 70s, he created the Church of Satan, which wasn’t actually so much about Satan as it was about taking care of your damn self.
Karl Mamer: Well, Asmodeus, or Asmodeus, however you want to pronounce him, that’s actually one of the few demons and devils that does come out of the Bible, but not
Karl Mamer: I was raised Catholic, Blake, so…
Karl Mamer: I have this in my Bible. I don’t think you have it in your Bible. There’s the Book of Tobit, so…
Blake: Nope, yep, that’s a bonus book.
Karl Mamer: But briefly, the Book of Tobit does feature Asmodeus as sort of a main character. The idea is that the Sarah, the woman in the book, Sarah, every time she marries a man, Asmodeus kills the dude, and .
Karen Stollznow: Very possessive.
Karl Mamer: I, I know, yeah, exactly.
Blake: Deus Ex Machina, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Exactly, and then… and then, so a lot of, sort of, scholars have then tried to figure out what was… why, and they, you know, kind of conclude, well, he was this, you know, he was this Lothario, like, he just wasn’t, like.
Blake: Oh, yeah.
Karl Mamer: It wasn’t like, you know, what we may picture, you know, the devil as, like, you know.
Karl Mamer: you know, Baphomet or something with, you know, goat legs or something. Yeah, he was just this slick guy, and he really loved Sarah, and was just always sort of killing her husbands and stuff like that. So, so, so yeah, so I think that’s what kind of…
Karl Mamer: Gary Gygax, when he sort of imported Asmodeus into the Monster Manual, he…
Karl Mamer: He went to more of that.
Karl Mamer: later, character development for, for that, for that devil. I made a… yeah, made him kind of a slick guy.
Karen Stollznow: It looks a little antisocial or narcissistic.
Karl Mamer: Well…
Karen Stollznow: It depends. And he’s very rare, apparently.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, yeah, very rare. That tends to mean there’s just one of them, so… but that, yeah, the, in the Monster Manor Frequency, the, you know, the common, you know, you know.
Karl Mamer: things like that. The… that’s more like as if you’re rolling dice, what’s the chance? You just… they have… they call them random monster encounters, so, you know.
Blake: Yeah, that’s true. So, in a programming world, you might think of this procedurally generated, so you have the space of the dungeon, and then as the…
Blake: the people proceed through the dungeon, the game master might either have something prepared, or they might roll on a chart, because Gary Gygax, it turns out, in his day job, before he became a full-time game developer, was a insurance actuarial guy, so he was really in…
Blake: the percentage chance that various things would happen. And so, if you know that, the first book makes a lot more sense when you can see that he’s trying to see, well, how can we use statistics to explain what people would see in a fantasy world, which is…
Blake: Kind of funny, kind of amazing.
Karen Stollznow: Also says that he’s lawful evil, so I guess that’s what Blake was talking about.
Karl Mamer: Yes, exactly so.
Karen Stollznow: Super genius.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, I think the…
Karen Stollznow: like, Wile E. Coyote.
Blake: Like Wally Coyote. Yeah.
Karl Mamer: I don’t think the intelligence was ever really well used, like, into the game system, but, but, you know…
Karl Mamer: It was there.
Blake: I mean, that’s… like, like, this whole thing…
Blake: It’s about codifying a system wherein a group of people can collectively agree
Blake: To follow the structures of a system.
Blake: To allow their imaginations to play out with a statistical insert to handle the conclusion of various activities.
Blake: I know that was really abstract, but the point is…
Karen Stollznow: Yes.
Blake: You could… you… instead of just pretending Not an improv group.
Karen Stollznow: Ugh.
Blake: Well, there is a little alcohol involved, but the point… the point is that you’re basically having structured play with friends, you’re creating a collective narrative.
Blake: The Game Master’s not writing the story, he’s setting up a framework, and in a perfect world, everybody works together to attempt to complete a story in the most satisfactory way possible.
Blake: Whether that succeeds or not varies, but some of the greatest memories I have for roleplaying are about these ridiculous characters interacting in these ridiculous scenarios and having these amazing moments that are never in a movie, they’re never in a book, and they’re only shared between the 5 or 6 people who were there.
Blake: But then, when you get a bunch of nerds together, we all want to tell stories about, let me tell you about the time that my rogue got us past a demon to get to a treasure. You know, it’s like, it’s… it’s…
Blake: that… that… it never really happened, but to that half-dozen people, it’s absolutely canonical lore. So, yeah, it’s pretty cool. It’s a really… it’s a really neat way to interact.
Blake: story.
Blake: It’s a bit… Maybe, yeah, I mean…
Karl Mamer: when my mother would listen in to us talk about our campaigns, like, you know, she was always a little bit worried, like, like, you know, we were playing this one game called Top Secret, which is kind of a…
Karl Mamer: James Bond.
Blake: Wow.
Karl Mamer: I know this guy.
Blake: Yeah, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Yes, exactly. So, you know, when you’re talking about, you know, you know, taking out the power plant, and then, you know, and then, you know, putting claymores around the police station, and your mom’s kind of there chopping carrots, she’s a bit like, like any good mom.
Karen Stollznow: around…
Karl Mamer: like… Mmm… No, no, that’s just Carl’s game he plays, I don’t know anything about it, but… Right. Yeah.
Blake: Well, we haven’t gotten there yet, but I had always assumed that by now, and I do mean, like, right now.
Blake: We would already be living in a world where people would be using augmented reality.
Blake: And playing games in the real-world space, but interacting in a virtual level that’s a little bit higher up.
Blake: Because you can absolutely do that. You could map out a fantasy game, or a spy game, or any kind of game onto the real world using, geolocation and all kinds of stuff, so that you could put real… and sort of Pokemon Go kind of played with this space, where the idea of, like, you go to real-world locations and you get virtual encounters.
Karl Mamer: owner.
Blake: right?
Blake: So, it surprises me that that’s not being cashed in on it, because it seems like a really obvious thing, but we may just be waiting for the right interface. But sooner or later.
Karen Stollznow: Maybe you’re the one to…
Blake: be in a world where that’s gonna happen, so…
Karl Mamer: Well, they do have large.
Blake: What, Karen? Sorry, you said something, but I…
Karen Stollznow: I stepped on you, sorry. Yeah, that’s typical. Maybe you’re the one to take it on.
Blake: Sorry. Well, oh, I, I… yeah, yeah, somebody with a billion dollars, not… not a dozen.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, but as I was sort of saying, like, LARPers, live-action role-playing really kind of.
Blake: Yeah, yeah.
Karl Mamer: you know, predates… You know, the whole virtual reality, where people kind.
Blake: Well, we brought up Christianity already, Carl. We’re not listening.
Karl Mamer: Yes, exactly. Sorry! That’s gonna get edited out on the live show, the real show, so, yeah. I was never a LARPer, I find…
Karl Mamer: I find LARP, you know, there’s LARPers in terms of weirdness, and just above that are furries, but I find, like…
Blake: above, really?
Karl Mamer: Well, like, as in weirder, weirder? Well, I…
Blake: I was so excited when furry culture emerged, because it meant that the LARPer, or that the, filk people were not the bottom of the rung, right? So, like, so… filk singing used to be the bottom, and I think… I think filk got to rise up a level, and then the furries is below. That’s what I think the hierarchy.
Karl Mamer: I’m used to be.
Blake: random is…
Karen Stollznow: I was brought on to interject at times like this.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, that’s sick.
Blake: That you boys are going off track. You’ve gone too far. You’ve gone too far. You’re not wrong. You’re talking about furries, yeah.
Karen Stollznow: from the topic sufficiently that we need to wind things down, or up.
Blake: True, true, true. We’re approaching the zone of conclusion.
Blake: So… It’s time for the climax, Carl. Bring us home. Alright, alright.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, but, yeah, so, my new book, coming up, I don’t, I don’t know, it’s in the editing phase right, right now, but, it will have a big section on where did, where did Gary Gygax, find…
Karl Mamer: source all the demons and devils, and like I say, it’s interesting. Some he just made up of whole cloth, and some he…
Blake: You’re gonna have a list, because it’s a book of lists, of the monsters, and then where they came from, right?
Karl Mamer: Yeah, exactly. Where they came from. Also, too, like, kind of interesting, as I sort of said in second edition, how they kind of went away, but then they were kind of brought back very surreptitiously, so… so, you know, so the, the, you know, the Satan police would be like, hmm, you know…
Karl Mamer: you know, Baal… Belsashar?
Karl Mamer: that’s not in the Bible, that’s fine, not realizing, well, that’s really, you know, Beelzebub, you know, kind of thing, so… Thank you.
Karl Mamer: Exactly. So… So.
Blake: We’re gonna have a lot of church lady inserts, I think.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, but yeah, but it was a really, like I said, it was a really fun list to write, and again, just totally inspired by, episode 220, and and, yeah, I mean, you could do, you could spend quite a long time just trying to figure out
Karl Mamer: The one thing that blew me away…
Karl Mamer: I’m watching, Night Stalker with… what was his name, Gavin…
Blake: Darren McGavin.
Karl Mamer: Darren McCown, yes.
Karl Mamer: Go on. And there’s an episode of the Rakshasa.
Karl Mamer: Which is more…
Blake: It sure is. Wow, that’s a great episode. That’s one of the better ones. Exactly. And then, you know, the way you kill it is with a wooden crossbow bolt, and that’s exactly…
Karl Mamer: how you kill it in the Monster Manual, and…
Karl Mamer: That’s exactly where Gary Gyjax pulled the Rakshasa from, from…
Karl Mamer: the Night Stalker TV show, and like.
Blake: Great episode, too, because, Karen, for your information, because I bet you haven’t seen it, the, it’s this 1970 show, the Monster of the Week format. It inspired the X-Files, it’s a super influential.
Karen Stollznow: Sure.
Blake: But… In that episode.
Blake: they have Darren McGavin going through a neighborhood, and there’s all these old Jewish people there, and they’re freaking out because all over the walls, there’s these graffiti of…
Blake: swastikas, but they’re…
Karl Mamer: Yes.
Blake: counterclockwise swastikas, and I think at first it’s anti-Semitic.
Karen Stollznow: symbol.
Blake: Right, it’s actually some people who are trying to stop the rickshasha, which we probably should cover on an episode, because that’s a great monster, and we haven’t actually covered it, but it’s very, sort of, djinn-adjacent.
Karl Mamer: Yeah. But it’s like my dream.
Blake: drink, which is vodka-based, but it’s shit-advantages.
Karl Mamer: It’s all centered around, like, a South Asian guy running an Indian restaurant.
Blake: It really is. It’s so cool.
Karl Mamer: For the 1970s, it was just…
Karl Mamer: Not stereotypical, he was just this guy running a restaurant, who knew a lot about Rakshasas, and…
Blake: It’s a neat episode.
Karl Mamer: It’s probably one of the better ones, I really do like it a lot, so… Nothing stereotypical, the guy, he’s not…
Karl Mamer: played as a creepy bad guy, he’s not, you know, he’s not there for a comic relief or anything like that. Yeah, it’s…
Blake: He’s just a guy running… he’s just a guy doing business in America.
Karl Mamer: Exactly, exactly.
Karen Stollznow: I think I have to bang my gavel again now.
Karl Mamer: Okay.
Karen Stollznow: Get you on track.
Blake: Okay, fine.
Karl Mamer: Alright, sorry.
Blake: Alright, we’ll wind down. So, Carl, when can people expect to see this out in the real world?
Karl Mamer: Yeah, so the Skeptic’s Book of Lists, too, probably not gonna be
Karl Mamer: in time for Christmas, that’s for sure, because, usually I do kind of 3 edits, and I’m really only a third of the way through my first edit, so it’s gonna be… it’s going to be a while, but,
Karl Mamer: Okay.
Blake: But they can, in the meantime, they can whet their appetite by looking at the original Skeptics Book of Lists and the Skeptic… Conspiracy Skeptics Book of Lists, right?
Karl Mamer: Available on Amazon? Yes, exactly.
Blake: There you go, we’ll put a link in the show notes, so…
Karl Mamer: Exactly, exactly. Exactly.
Blake: Alright, well, currently…
Karl Mamer: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, did you want?
Blake: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, stand up.
Karl Mamer: Wait, wait, wait, don’t tell me.
Karen Stollznow: My favorite, my favorite monsters… update on my favorite monsters.
Karen Stollznow: There’s an update.
Blake: Hey, Carl, we’ve never cared about favorite monsters, but sure, we’ll start some new thing with you. What? Well, if you remember all…
Blake: It’s 2026, isn’t it? No, it’s 2025. What year is it, Carl? First of all, what year is it? And second of all, what’s your favorite monster?
Karen Stollznow: I know.
Blake: May, eventually.
Karen Stollznow: Miss you.
Blake: vodka, so…
Karl Mamer: I see you. Okay, alright. Well, when I was first on your show, you had me on to talk about
Karl Mamer: the, Tartarian Empire and giants.
Blake: That’s right, that’s right, the mud flood, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Yes, exactly, right? Medfoot, yes. And I… my favorite monsters, they divide into three, three ages of Carl, so there’s the young Carl.
Karen Stollznow: Three ages of…
Blake: Yes. That was the… that was when you.
Karen Stollznow: Every Seinfeld.
Blake: Four legs, right?
Karl Mamer: Exactly. So, young Carl.
Blake: And then you’re walking on two legs, but now you’re on three legs, so what do you got?
Karl Mamer: You’re right. Riddle, riddle, yeah, Riddle of the, Riddle of the Sphinx. But, yeah, so, young, young Carlett was the space octopus from Space 1999, and then.
Blake: Fantastic.
Blake: Potassium.
Karl Mamer: you know, and then sort of, age 2 of Carl, it was Bigfoot, not that original, and age 3, and, you know, my old age Carl. It’s, it’s people, you know, who have, like, you know, 20 items in the, you know, the 16 or less items grocery store aisle.
Karen Stollznow: me.
Karl Mamer: That one is That one is slightly cheaper.
Blake: I’ve seen that monster many times.
Karl Mamer: Yes.
Blake: And if you complain, they want to talk to a manager. It’s like…
Karen Stollznow: Oh, nice dig there, like…
Karl Mamer: I was gonna say that was… Do you know his name?
Karen Stollznow: Not cut my hair.
Karl Mamer: That one has slightly changed now, that’s the one I want to update, so…
Blake: So, yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah. So, I mean.
Karen Stollznow: You’re not that old, Carl.
Karl Mamer: I know, but, you know, I am… if you follow my Facebook, I am rocking a cane these days, so, and because of that, I’ve got the, I’ve got… I don’t know what you call them there, but we call them accessibility passes. You put it on your car, and you can…
Blake: Down here, they’re handicap stickers, but yeah, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Exactly, so I got one of those. So, those are fantastic. So my new…
Karl Mamer: You know, Old Carl, Favorite Monster are, Uber drivers who use those spaces as pickup and drop-off spaces.
Blake: Oh, wow.
Karl Mamer: Well, I won…
Karen Stollznow: there, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Yeah, I want.
Blake: More like… Uber drivers, am I right?
Karl Mamer: Exactly, yeah. Gurr. Monsters. Yes. I’m not saying put.
Karen Stollznow: Monstrous.
Karl Mamer: through their heart, not saying that all, and you’re not seeing me tapping my nose while I’m saying that, Blake. Karen?
Karen Stollznow: On that note.
Blake: I’m out of my way.
Blake: Carl, as always, good to see you, man. Alright, thank you. Glad you’re still around.
Karen Stollznow: Good to chat with you, yeah.
Karl Mamer: Alright, it’s always fun, and I hope I didn’t embarrass myself this time.
Blake: No, no, you’re fine! I took the vodka hit for.
Karen Stollznow: Like.
Blake: You’re all set.
Karen Stollznow: He embarrassed himself, so…
Blake: That’s right, that’s… that’s… when I go back to edit this later this week, I’ll be like, what the f**k was I saying?
Karl Mamer: What was I saying? I sent her a picture of what?
Blake: Exactly, exactly. What! Okay, yeah, that is probably not wrong. That’s probably not wrong.
Karen Stollznow: Yes, yes.
Blake: So…
Karen Stollznow: For sure.
Blake: Anyway, you know, keep that syrup warm for us, I’m sure we’ll.
Karen Stollznow: Yep.
Blake: Each other again soon, so…
Karl Mamer: Alright, well, have a good night. Have a great night.
Blake: Guys.
Karen Stollznow: Bye.
Blake: This was a fun chat, I appreciate it.
Karen Stollznow: Have a good one.
Karen Stollznow: Good night. Bye-bye.
Blake: If I can figure out how to end it. Alright, but… There it is, sorry, I…

The post S05E06 – Monster Manual & Mamer appeared first on MonsterTalk.

In this episode, I talk about why I don’t believe in Bigfoot and the core of my basis of doubt. This is part of a new intermittent series wherein we’ll be looking at why a lot of monster stories fall apart when you attack them with Occam’s Razor and other similarly sharp tools.

The clip in the intro is from In Search Of… Season 1, Episode 5. If you want to hear A LOT more about that episode, check out this episode of In ReSearch Of….

Since 2009 I’ve been producing the skeptical podcast MonsterTalk and over the years we’ve always – from the very start – expressed deep skepticism about the existence of various cryptids.  But the way people consume podcasts is often incredibly spotty and eclectic these days.  If someone hopped into the show and wanted to find out about why we’ve come down so hard as skeptics about these critters it might not be that simple right now to piece together all the various converging ideas that have led me to this position of doubt.  I think it would be useful to put together some essays about why – despite so many compelling sightings and slick documentaries and videos – I don’t believe in various particular monsters.

And if I’m going to kick off a series about doubting cryptids, I have to start with the one that got me into cryptozoology:  Bigfoot.

Bigfoot’s popularity – at least in the US – is hard to overstate. The Bigfoot Field Research Organization (BFRO) – an organization that organizes Bigfoot hunts and was a big part of the TV series Finding Bigfoot boasts over 5000 uploaded reports of Bigfoot sightings in their online database.  And that television show ran for 9 seasons without – you know – finding Bigfoot. I’ve been to Bigfoot conferences and met very sincere witnesses who believe they encountered a giant anthropoid ape in the forests of America.  I don’t think they’re lying – but how could they all be wrong? 

I think it may help if I describe the framework I use to evaluate the existence of Bigfoot and other monsters. We often call it “scientific skepticism” but we don’t often break that down to describe how it works.  However, over the years I’ve come to believe that this approach is basically an algorithmic approach to testing the claims, and – critically – is a set of skills that have to be learned and honed, not a sign of special cleverness on the part of the person wielding it.  

Plausibility

I usually start with asking how plausible the existence of the described creature is from a purely biological framework. Does it fit the pattern of known biology?  For example, some monsters like a European Dragon break the tetrapod body framework if they have four limbs plus giant wings.  Similarly the Jersey Devil and most modern depictions of Mothman – there aren’t any human sized hexapods walking the earth, nor recent antecedents.  Such creatures break from plausibility in their sheer unnaturalness from known body types.

History

Then I ask whether this is a new kind of creature, or one with a long history. Cryptozoologists love to talk about how Europeans didn’t believe in gorillas but this is not the same situation as, for example, the Yeti.  Gorillas (and – yes, I know there are multiple types acknowledged in different decades by European scientists)

Signs of Folklore

There are a variety of features that indicate a story is coming from emerging or extant folklore and I like to see if the stories fit into that framework. Are people explicitly named in the story or are they either nameless strangers “a girl” “a businessman” – or even more tellingly, friends of a friend:  “my cousin’s friend upstate told her this so I know it’s true”  Does the story follow tropes common to folklore like those in the Stith-Thompson Folklore Index or tropes like those listed on TV Tropes?  These recurring patterns are good indicators you may be dealing with a bit of nascent folklore.

Hoaxes or Shenanigans

Sometimes the whiff of a hoax is pretty obvious and it’s good to at least consider that possibility, even if the initial claimants seem very sincere.  The person reporting a hoaxed event may not even be aware they’ve been tricked. Does anything about the story suggest it might have been staged?

These are very high level considerations but they’re good starting points to get a sort of “whiff value” of whether the monster or cryptid is implausible.

Let’s apply these categories of critique to Bigfoot and see how the big guy comes out.

Plausibility of Bigfoot

Is there anything overtly implausible about Bigfoot? This is a trickier question than it might seem at first glance.  We know humanoid primates exist because we are them. But could a giant hidden primate exist?  There’s nothing inherently impossible about that.  But could a giant hidden primate exist and be seen by thousands of people and yet never leave ANY physical remains that could be positively identified as expressing a DNA profile consistent with a new unknown primate?  Suddenly the plausibility begins to teeter.

The missing physicality of Bigfoot is much more consistent with it being a socio-cultural concept than a real animal.  And if one were inclined to believe in Bigfoot but have to explain this drought of positive biological data, out comes the “special pleading.” The legendarily acidic soil of the pacific northwest somehow manages to give up bones of all the other large animals in the ecosystem – but Bigfoot just can’t produce.

The late Grover Krantz used to claim nobody had ever found the remains of a naturally dead bear – but that argument has a couple of problems as analogy.  First, people find plenty of living bears as well as kill them routinely, so it’s not a perfect analogy.  Second, he’s just wrong.  People DO find naturally dead bears – and I’m not even sure what he meant other than to try to carve out some argument space for his pet monster’s plausibility.

Perhaps more importantly, Bigfoot does not really behave like a natural animal if you listen to a broad swath of reporting and don’t exclude the ones where there are quasi or explicitly supernatural elements.  Bigfoot – for many – behaves like a spirit or extraterrestrial or alien intelligence. My friend Dr. Jeb Card calls them Forest Poltergeists* and I think he’s dead accurate right down to their alleged propensity to make knocking noises and throw stones.

Collectively, this stacks up as implausible to me.

[Note: Jeb correctly asked me to attribute the phrase “forest poltergeist” to Seriah Azkath of the Where did the Road Go? podcast.]

History of Bigfoot

Ignore the cryptozoology claim that Bigfoot is an ancient creature. That’s a favorite claim for lots of monsters because anchoring a monster’s existence to ancient times makes it seem like it has always been part of the landscape and modern sightings are just the peak of a wave that stretches back beyond the veil of recorded history.

Let’s begin with SASQUATCH – a term commonly interchangeable with BIGFOOT these days, but both terms are from the 20th century.

Before the 1950s there was no such thing as “Bigfoot” as we know it. A variety of indigenous stories of tribes of hidden giants and monsters were syncretized by “Indian Agent” J.W. Burns into the concept of “Sasquatch” in Maclean’s Magazine on April 1st, 1929. In 1957 the Canadian resort town of Harrison Hot Springs tried to win $600 in funding from a British Columbia centennial committee by proposing a “Sasquatch hunt.”  They didn’t get the funding, but the request became a global news story and made the word “Sasquatch” synonymous with the wilds of the pacific northwest. The committee didn’t give Harrison Hot Springs the $600, but they did put up a $5000 prize for anyone who could bring in a live Sasquatch.  All of this coverage also led to at least one notable witness coming out to tell a strange story.

William Roe came forward with a story quite different from the “giant hidden tribe” tales common to many indigenous stories. What he saw was not a person with mysterious language and custom, or backwards facing feet.  Rather, he described seeing a hairy gigantic female upright ape. His sighting, he claimed, took place earlier in 1955. The Roe affidavit could be argued to be the real “case zero” of Sasquatch in the way it has come to be seen by modern audiences. Other historical cases would be retro-fit to match his prototype – but that’s not the full story.

Recall that the world had been primed for giant primates by the explosive photos of mysterious footprints in the Himalayas by the Shipton Everest expedition of 1951. Although the yeti (or abominable snowman) had not been photographed, the idea that there might be a mysterious living upright ape was definitely in the public consciousness by the time of the 1957 Harrison Hot Springs story and William Roe’s account.

Roe’s story grabbed a foothold down the Pacific coast in California. In 1958 a series of enormous footprints and some minor vandalism at Jerry Crew’s logging site in Bluff Creek, CA became the most important hoax to date. Giant tracks appeared several times around the construction equipment, and Crew’s employee Ray Wallace cast some of these in plaster and later presented those tracks to the newspapers.  The papers referred to the creator of those tracks as “Bigfoot” although the real creator was Ray Wallace himself, who turned out to be a lifelong practical joker.  

Texas oilman and adventurer Tom Slick had been fascinated by the Yeti and had funded expeditions to try and find it – but these were expensive and fruitless, so when the stories of an “American Yeti” hit the papers, Slick moved his monster searching to the United States. His first big American expedition kicked off in the fall of 1959. He would continue to fund monster hunts until his death in a private airplane crash in 1962. Slick’s search team would include people who carried the Bigfoot flag for the rest of the 20th century.

Into this rich broth of monster stew we now add the colorful character Roger Patterson.  A cowboy and rodeo performer, Patterson seemed to be the kind of person who was always scheming for the next get rich gimmick. Through many different accounts, he comes across as the sort of person who is extremely entertaining to know but one who you would quickly realize isn’t going to pay back that loan or return that stuff he “borrowed.”

Patterson was captivated by William Roe’s account of spotting a Sasquatch and in 1966 he published a book titled Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?  In the book he includes an illustration of the creature Roe described, a thick and hairy female upright ape with pendulous breasts walking into a clearing. In 1967 Patterson and his friend Bob Gimlin took film equipment into the Bluff Creek area. If you believe the story the pair told (and which Gimlin maintains to this day) they were going into the woods to look for bigfoot and on their first outing they came across one of the creatures and filmed it walking near a creek bed. That they would succeed on their first try where others had spent years looking with no luck, is quite a coincidence.

The other way to look at it is to consider that Patterson had been trying to put together a pseudo-documentary about the hunt for the creature and might have been shooting a sort of “sizzle reel” – a short sequence of film to drum up interest and funding. In this view, the creature would have been a man in a suit and the drawing Paterson made of the Roe sighting would be less of a speculation and more of a storyboard.

But this is not a skeptical take-down of the Patterson-Gimlin Film (PGF). People who want to believe Patterson got lucky and happened to catch the elusive creature on film his first time out – and that decades of further research can’t replicate the results are not going to be dissuaded by anything I could write here.

Still – the PGF became the template footage for all Bigfoot sightings to come – and its notable success being toured around the Pacific Northwest surely inspired the string of indy films that would attempt to cash in on this monster craze?  The Legend of Boggy Creek, Creature From Black Lake, Night of the Demon, Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot, and eventually the comedy parody of such films that was also the pinnacle of presentation HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS. Now Bigfoot is a pop culture icon – and, I would argue that this is the whole of what he ever was.  Excluding the idea that the collective belief of millions might have generated a Tulpa as a psychic reification of the creature, an idea seriously believed by many, the best explanation that fits the history is that from the 1920s to the 1970s the lore of Bigfoot evolved until it was naturally selected down to the core elements which best propagate in late 20th and early 21st century America.  And as I mentioned under plausibility, the selective pressure is leaving the “pelts and paws” version of the creature behind. Bigfoot leaves only footprints and takes only liberties when it comes to our collective narrative permissiveness.

Folklore of Bigfoot

Is Bigfoot folklore?  I would argue that the history suggests Bigfoot descended narratively from the 1950s conception of The Yeti as rewritten through Colonial exploration of the Himalayas. The Yeti – which should have its own dedicated examination – comes from a rich folkloric tradition that features supernatural elements and things like “its feet face backwards to confound trackers.” These are features that have been included in catalogs of folklore motifs. If I’m right about my historical context for the rise of Bigfoot, then the creature is much better understood as a specialized form of folklore than as a real biological animal. Its ecological niche may not be lovers’ lane or strange hotel rooms, so much as the mind of 20th and early 21st century dreamers longing for a world more mysterious and a nature big enough to house other intelligences than man.

Most of the Bigfoot stories I’ve read have been deeply personal accounts that seem sincerely shared. I don’t think the folkloric nature of Bigfoot and the lived experience of having encountered one need to be mutually exclusive.  Sincere witnesses can misperceive the kinds of things one experiences in a forest and many natural half-glimpsed movements and unexplained noises readily fit the cultural template of a Bigfoot encounter.  It doesn’t require fabrication on the part of the witnesses.  But sometimes things aren’t so clearly sincere.

Hoaxes and Shenanigans with Bigfoot

Does the existence of Bigfoot depend on hoaxes? This one is astonishingly clear cut, to my mind. The Ray Wallace hoaxed footprints literally gave us the name Bigfoot, and the visuals we connect to the imagined creature that could have made those tracks is brought to us by what I believe to be the obvious hoaxed subject of Roger Patterson’s film. Numerous hoaxers have perpetrated a form of recursive ostension to feed the Bigfooters with handcrafted plaster casts and costumes of varying quality and pale imitations of the PGF.

This does not mean that Bigfoot witnesses are liars or hoaxers – but the sincere witnesses are not clean slates.  They’re operating in a cultural ecosystem rich with the readily available template of Bigfoot to explain their peculiar sightings or experiences in the wild. Bigfoot’s “natural world” is a trickster’s paradise.

Conclusion

Clearly there are many more nuanced arguments for and against the existence of Bigfoot.  Individual sightings should be considered with their own evidence under forensic and logical scrutiny.  In the end, Skeptics can no more relegate Bigfoot to the Platonic bucket labeled “not real” then they can ghosts or UFOs – but the preponderance of the evidence against the creature existing as a natural animal is overwhelming to me.  Bigfoot isn’t my Moriarty.  I love the big galoot and somehow after a lifetime of wanting it to be a real animal, I’ve come to peace with the idea that this simply can’t happen because that’s not what Bigfoot is. Of course it would only take a single corpse or DNA sample to prove the skeptics wrong – if the lab results bear up.

You’ve been listening to me explaining why I don’t believe in Bigfoot.  I decided to drop in a clip from the TV show IN SEARCH OF in the intro.  That’s from Season one which aired back in 1977 and was probably one of the first depictions of Bigfoot I ever saw.  I am co-host on a show with archaeologist Jeb Card called “IN RESEARCH OF” where we are slowly going through all the episodes of IN SEARCH OF and there’s A LOT more to that story of the miners in APE CANYON than the way it’s typically told.  I put a link in the show notes if you want to check out more about that classic bit of paranormal TV.

If you’ve got comments about this episode – hop over to our Patreon page and sign up to discuss at PATREON.COM/MONSTERTALK. There is a free tier which should let you comment without even having to financially support us – though we certainly do appreciate those who do.

In fact – if you’re hearing THIS – then you’re one of those wonderful backers and you’re enjoying the commercial free version of this episode. Thanks for continuing to make this show possible.  

MonsterTalk’s theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys – hey – Just your occasional reminder that  I DON’T BELIEVE IN BIGFOOT – BUT I BELIEVE IN YOU.

The post S05E05 Why I Don’t Believe In… BIGFOOT appeared first on MonsterTalk.

This week on MonsterTalk, Blake and Karen are joined by Matthew Baxter to revisit Karen’s classic investigation book Haunting America — newly re-released in paperback just in time for Halloween . Together they discuss how the book began as a project for the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), the fieldwork behind its famous cases, and the updated edition’s new conclusion and color photos. Topics discussed:

• Origins of Haunting America — conceived at the JREF as a skeptical investigation anthology.
• Behind-the-scenes stories from Karen and Matt’s fieldwork across the U.S.

• Visits to legendary “haunted” sites including:
   The Myrtles Plantation — tracing the truth behind the tale of “Chloe.”
   Waverly Hills Sanatorium — separating tuberculosis history from ghost folklore.
   Winchester Mystery House — examining Sarah Winchester’s real story vs. myth.

• Working with the JREF and Tim Farley (“What’s the Harm?”) on skeptical outreach.
• Revisiting historic ghost claims through the historical method rather than gadgets and TV tropes.
• Comparing early 2000s ghost hunting culture with modern media portrayals.
• The enduring folklore vs. fact tension in places like the Stanley Hotel, Amityville, and Lizzie Borden House.
• The value of myth-busting as a form of respect for real history and real people. About the new edition:
• Now in paperback with color photographs and updated research.
• Includes follow-up findings on the Myrtles Plantation and San Antonio Railroad “ghost tracks.”
• Adds a new concluding chapter reflecting on skepticism and folklore after a decade of investigations.

The post S05E04 – Haunting America Revisited appeared first on MonsterTalk.

UAPs, “Disclosure,” and the Influence Machine
This episode looks at the latest UAP theater around Rep. Eric Burlison’s congressional presentation of the “Hellfire vs. orb” video, how it intersects with long-running media and funding networks (Skinwalker Ranch/NIDS/Las Vegas circle), and why skepticism and provenance still matter. We discuss the hearing, witness line-up, and the ecosystem that amplifies these claims—along with grounded, testable explanations where available.
With Matt Baxter.

Primary Items from the Episode
• Eric Burlison’s Congressional Presentation of Video (with George Knapp testimony)
• Eric Burlison’s UAP DISCLOSURE ACT

Skeptical Takes & Analysis
• Mick West’s take — It’s a balloon again
• Hank Green’s take — Seriously — it’s just a balloon

Related Listening from the Episode
• Strange Arrivalspodcast
• Toby Ball’s visits to MonsterTalk

Books & Authors Mentioned
• Sarah Scoles — They Are Already Here
• Sarah’s visits to MonsterTalk

Quick Reference: Acronyms, Players, and Context
• AATIP — Pentagon program often associated with Luis Elizondo
• TTSA — To The Stars Academy (Tom DeLonge, Hal Puthoff): company, Tom DeLonge, Harold Puthoff
• UAP — Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (newer terminology): overview
• UFO — Unidentified Flying Object (classic term with cultural baggage): background
• Robert Bigelow — hotelier, space entrepreneur, longtime funder in the anomaly space: bio

Key Reporting That Shifted the Conversation
• The New York Times story that broke AATIP publicly: read
• The 2020 follow-up from two of the authors (Kean & Blumenthal): read

Affiliate disclosure: Some links above are affiliate links that may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. This helps support the show’s production. Thank you!

The following transcript was AI-generated and this initial version is primarily intended to be useful to robotic readers and for SEO. It Definitely Contains ERRORS. (This is our first experiment with this and Blake is working on a much more human-friendly approach.)

Monster House presents…
This is the ad-supported version of Monster Talk.
We’re dependent upon the revenue from these ads and from the support of our patrons at patreon.com forward slash monster talk to continue making this show.
As a disclaimer, your hosts are unable to control what ads you will hear, and while we have done what we can to avoid ads that are divisive, the system that injects them sometimes ignores our preferences and always seems to ignore our efforts to not interrupt the conversational flow.
While we understand this can be disruptive, we’re trying our best.
Patreon remains the best way to enjoy commercial-free listening to our content.
Plus, you generally get extended coverage of the subject.
We’re working on other ways to consume our content as well, so please stay tuned.
Thank you, everyone.
It takes such great courage to come forward, and we acknowledge that, and I hope that you see that we are taking that seriously.
And so very thankful for what you’re doing today.
I’m also very thankful for previous witnesses that have come forward.
I see Matthew Brown in the audience.
He courageously stepped forward and was as a witness.
I encourage everybody to look and seek his testimony.
I want to thank the people that came in our first hearing, Ryan Graves, David Grush,
David Fravor, and in our second hearing, Admiral Gallaudet, Lou Elizondo, and Mr. Gold, and the many others that have come forward.
We hear you, and it’s time that we, you know, enough is enough.
It’s time that we take action.
Look, I’m not jumped to the conclusion that I believe that there are, you know, aliens coming from another planet, but I’m open to that.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant, hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stoltzner.
Hey there, Monster Talkers.
So I wasn’t feeling very well when we recorded this episode, and I appreciate Matt bringing the topic to us, but usually I’m better prepared for our episodes.
And when I was editing, I kept wanting to drop in comments of stuff that I didn’t think could say when we were talking at the time.
But instead, I’ve decided to only interrupt as little as I can get by with and then make a few comments now and then again at the end of our chat.
Because in this episode, we’re discussing the recent congressional hearing Missouri Congressman Eric Burleson arranged about some drone footage alleged to show a UFO being intercepted by an American missile.
What you’ll hear in our conversation is Karen and I doing a sort of reaction video, but as you know, we’re usually just an audio show.
And when it came time to edit this episode, again, I’m still not feeling well.
Well, I’ve read up subsequently on the particulars of the video in question, and I do have a few comments about that that mostly I’ll stick in the outro.
So…
My intense skepticism from the get-go on this topic is not because I’m blatantly dismissive of the idea of mysterious high-tech craft of unknown origin.
I think that would be really cool.
It just requires a lot of very special evidence.
But what really was going on here is I was upset because these things are almost never what they appear to be when they’re actually investigated properly.
The sort of golly gee whiz factor tends to disappear when we have skilled video analysis by people able to understand video artifacts, parallax illusions, and other common but well-understood effects common to military-grade video.
when they’re seen by civilians not in the know about the provenance, the particulars, or the circumstances of the recording.
I’m also very negatively inclined to believe any, I’m air-quoting here, evidence being presented by George Knapp, Jeremy Corbell, anyone associated with NIDS, anyone tied to Skinwalker Ranch, anyone tied to Robert Bigelow, and so on, because these people are not uninterested observers.
These are folks with a very specific agenda to promote the idea that there are non-human intelligences that work in our world and that these alleged entities can operate without fear of consequences from our puny technical powers and that this is all somehow tied into human consciousness and the paranormal.
And no matter what’s on the label, if these folks were involved, that’s what’s in the tin.
And we’ve discussed this previously when we had on Toby Ball to talk about his work on the Betty and Barney Hill case, and when we had on Sarah Scholes to talk about her book, They’re Already Here, a book that touched heavily on the 2017 New York Times article that made UAP the new term for UFO in the public arena.
But, you know, you can pour Big K Cola into a Coca-Cola tumbler, but it’s still just Big K Cola.
And apologies to all the Big K fans out there.
I’m just trying to make an analogy.
Alrighty.
I’m still recovering from this stomach bug or whatever’s going on with me, but I’m going to try and power through and let this episode mostly stand as it was recorded.
I do have a few comments about the video and the outro, but for now, let’s join Matt Baxter and Karen Stolzno for some Monster Talk.
Should I say, welcome, Matthew, for joining us again.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
And boy, I hope you’ve got something exciting for us.
Yeah.
Yeah, Matt, do you want to tell us a little bit about kind of what we’re going to be talking about and how this came about to you becoming aware of the topic?
Well, I have to admit that I am a little out of the loop when it comes to news and when it comes to government news.
I’ve been trying to avoid it.
By design, yeah.
Yes.
A friend of mine got a hold of me the other day and sent me a video.
Representative Eric Burleson, I think he’s from Missouri, presented a video to Congress of a UAP.
UAP.
And that’s UFO for the rest of us.
But UAP is Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.
Well, Blake, do you want to give us a quick refresher about this kind of shift in labeling, why this has occurred?
In my opinion, and we’ve covered this a little bit on the show before, this shift in UAP is basically to give it, this idea of UFOs, a new label that maybe doesn’t have the baggage that UFOs have of wacky people.
Flying saucers.
This is being promoted by the people from Skinwalker Ranch and Bigelow, the billionaire.
You know, the people who believe, you know, space poltergeist and cosmic Bigfoot are on a ranch in Utah.
They just don’t want that UFO wackiness getting in.
So UAP is way better.
Anyway, I’m a little I find it all ridiculous.
But just by relabeling it and throwing a few million dollars into Congress, they were able to sort of semi legitimize this stuff.
I remember all the hoo-ha in the news here in Colorado about people like Stan Romanek and Jeff Peckman, and they’re kind of, I guess, advocating for disclosure and awareness about UFOs.
And so initially I thought that this was kind of like that, but I guess this follows a representative, right?
So this is a lot more serious.
Yeah, well, as long as you put a little quote around serious, it was political theater is what it was.
But the bottom line is, last month he comes into Congress and he’s done this before from what I understand.
He’s been pushing this whole disclosure idea.
One of the things that happens when a politician storms into Congress and just –
throws this video on everybody and they’re completely unprepared.
They’re at a complete disadvantage with how they’re going to respond to it.
So basically the video kind of, this is what’s claimed, is this…
There’s this metallic orb over the water in Yemen.
And an MQ-9 Reaper drone gets aerial footage of all of this.
And it’s tracking this orb.
And then suddenly this Hellfire missile.
strikes it, and it shatters off into these pieces that kind of become self-sufficient, I guess you’d say, on their own.
And he’s, Eric Burleson, is out there demanding disclosure because he doesn’t want to be in the kind of government that hides this kind of thing from the people, and he’s, you know, kind of a fist-pounding thing.
The other bill, the UAP Disclosure Act, remarkably, it was stripped out by the House last year, and I can’t get it onto the bill leaving the House this year.
Mr. Knapp, how far would that bill go to actually getting the answers that we need?
Pretty far.
I think they’re still going to have roadblocks.
You know, the keepers of the secrets, the private companies that have been doing this job for intelligence agencies for a long time are not going to cough it up.
You’d have to force it out of them.
And Mick West did an analysis of the video.
Now, I looked at the video, and what it looked like to me was…
A cross between something microscopic, like, you know, when you see like a needle piercing, you know, like a bubble and it kind of separates.
And, you know, when you see that under a microscope kind of thing, it looks a little like that in combination with like an ultrasound.
In other words, you can’t tell what’s going on.
That’s quite a description.
Yeah.
You look at it and you’re going, what?
That’s what?
Do we know for a fact that this happened and happened in Yemen?
I mean, this is just all very strange.
It was presented in Congress.
What more do you need?
Yeah.
Bottom line is the Pentagon, I mean, nothing official has validated the video.
There’s no metadata.
In other words, it was like taken, it was videoed off of the screen that was showing it.
Hey, now we got some important cryptids that way.
The Fresno Nightcrawlers.
Would only exist.
So that’s important.
So, you know, videoing a security camera or a screen, like a replay of a VHS that’s been copied is really some of the best ways to get your cryptic video.
So, yeah.
It’s kind of in the same vein as just blurry videos of Bigfoot.
Shh, don’t say that.
I hate to sound dismissive because I haven’t seen the video.
It may be very compelling, but what you’re saying sounds awfully familiar.
Yes.
It looks almost identical to the videos that were released a few years ago.
In fact, I did a Ask a Paranormal Investigator YouTube video on those, talking about those, but they look almost identical, really.
I mean, there’s not a lot of difference.
We have such a high-tech military that can’t seem to have high-resolution video
I don’t know what’s going on there.
But anyway, the bottom line is Mick West.
And we’ve had him on the show before.
That’s Mick West of Metabunk.
You can go to Metabunk and you can see his analysis of the video.
Now, he asked some very good questions.
You know, trying to look at this, he stabilizes the video.
He crops and he zooms different segments.
He breaks things down.
And one of the big things is he’s uncertain that it’s a Hellfire missile.
And that’s a great question right there, you know, because, okay, all these things that you’re claiming, Eric Burleson, you claim it’s a Hellfire missile.
You claim that it’s an MQ-9 Reaper drone.
You claim that it’s a Yemen.
You claim that it happened in October 2024.
Those things by themselves aren’t verified.
Not a single word out of his mouth was verified.
Now, I’m thinking it interesting that there might actually be some issues in Missouri that Representative Burleson could actually be addressing.
But instead, he’s addressing this.
Now, if you want to go see Mick West’s analysis, you can go take a look at that.
He does some great work there.
We’ll put a link in the show notes.
I don’t know where you’re going with this, but just to backtrack a little bit, I wanted to ask what is a Hellfire missile?
Sounds like a biker’s club in L.A. or something.
A quick insert to answer Kieran.
The Hellfire missile is a laser-guided missile normally configured for air-to-surface or surface-to-surface strikes.
And this means that an operator paints a target with a laser, and then the missile locks onto that laser and then uses it to navigate to the target.
And these are normally used against heavy targets like tanks and vehicles.
But some famously soft target configurations have been made on these missiles, and I’m not making this up.
They pop out a bunch of blades and are designed to shred flesh instead of exploding.
These are 100-pound missiles flying at high speed and wielding a star array of sword blades.
Yeah.
That configuration is sometimes called the ninja missile or flying ginsu.
But as is clear in this video, if it is indeed a Hellfire being used, they can also be used as surface-to-air weapons in some configurations.
More on that in the outro.
And that’s the thing is, again, that’s something that was not defined.
There were a whole lot of things that were simply not defined.
And yet this is kind of released to the public, you know, with no sort of basis, no baseline, no, you know, help for the average viewer.
And these are good questions.
Where it comes from or who it comes from then?
It comes from a whistleblower.
So you need to be aware of that.
You know, they do need to be protected.
But if I were a whistleblower, I would bring more than a blurry picture of Bigfoot.
And this is, then he has not.
That’s interesting.
The Hellfire is the one, they’re laser guided.
I was just looking up their specs.
So you have to have like a targeting system that spots a laser on the target.
And that’s how it’s guided to its destination.
So that’s interesting.
Yeah.
I mean, I don’t really know what it says, other than that it’s interesting.
But somebody, whatever this unidentified object would be, would have to be painted with a laser.
There you go.
Right, right.
Now, if it wasn’t a hellfire, do we even know if it was actually a missile?
Could it have been something else?
I mean, you know how it seems like artifacts and various things like that appear to be different things all the time.
If you’re a lay person looking at these videos, you really don’t know if it’s an artifact.
You don’t know if it’s ice coming off of something.
You don’t know if it’s, you know.
A lot of experts or seeming experts don’t seem to know either.
Well, and I think a lot of the previous UAP videos, you were seeing things that looked like they were moving really fast, but you couldn’t tell if they were really close to the camera or far away.
So it’s like things that were quite close could appear to be very far away, moving very, very fast.
Say sort of like an orb in a regular ghost photo.
Yeah, true enough.
Right.
Yeah.
Oh, oh, hey, you didn’t mention George Knapp was in Congress to watch this video.
That changes everything.
Well, my apologies.
Sorry, it doesn’t change anything.
Sorry, George Knapp is among those people working for Bigelow who’s promoting the UAP narrative.
Is there any great support for this video and these demands?
Well, yes.
And I’ll get into that a little bit on where that support’s coming from and why.
Because this is very politically motivated and not critically thinkingly motivated.
And please don’t use any proper grammar or critical thinking in that sentence that I just said.
So anyway…
Another big question is, OK, if this is over this highly sort of monitored airspace because, you know, military, were there any other witnesses or any other data sources?
Right.
No, there are not.
There’s nothing else.
So this happened in a vacuum.
So there’s no proof it’s a drone.
There’s no proof it’s a hellfire.
All the things that he said, there’s no proof of it at all.
And, you know, you find interesting ideas about what it is.
There’s a lot of people thinking critically, but it seems like not a lot of people are asking all the right questions.
A really simple one is, could this have been AI?
Absolutely.
Yes.
Yeah.
That’s a good question.
Yeah.
Well, you’ve got AI upscaling and frame interpolation.
That totally could help kind of produce the steady pan and atmospheric haze that’s seen in the clip.
Now, the thing is, is you do have the issue with this being low resolution, compressed and reshared and everything else.
And second generation shot from a screen, you’re saying?
Exactly.
So forensic cues.
Which removes all the metadata from the original.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
So you can’t, those same forensic cues aren’t there.
The noise patterns, the compression artifacts, there’s nothing there that can disprove AI generation in the sense.
So it was already challenging enough, right, to trust videos because people could fake stuff.
But now, especially if you’re letting second generation where there’s literally no way to see what the original source material looked like.
It’s taken it to another level.
It makes it, well, like you say, it makes it worth it.
It’s literally worthless.
Like, so we could speculate.
I mean, I think Mick West is speculating that it was a balloon.
But no matter what it was, we don’t even know if it was a real thing at all in the first place.
Exactly.
There’s no reason to ever trust second generation video.
I barely trust first generation video at this point.
And this is why, because of AI.
Go ahead, Karen.
Well, I’m just wondering if Blake and I shouldn’t just hit pause briefly and take a look at it and do a reaction.
I like the circle around it.
That’s useful.
It’s helpful.
So you see a Hellfire missile, what you see is a white blob go by and it bumps into something.
Yeah.
And then some little blobs fall off of it.
That is like the best description I’ve heard.
Well, I think your description of an ultrasound is pretty good.
And then it seems to transfer to just being the ocean.
Right.
But yeah, I’m sorry.
They have George Knapp testifying under oath.
Bless his heart.
Really?
OK, so bless his heart.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
So George Knapp is.
Oh, wow.
And there’s Elizondo here, too.
Yeah.
OK.
It’s the same.
Rogues gallery of nonsense people, you know, who’ve been pushing this UAP agenda for years, trying to, you know, give credibility to their, I’m sure, well-intentioned search for proof of not aliens, but survival of consciousness after death.
Okay, that’s what this is all really about.
Okay, so…
Yeah.
I mean, they say UAPs.
They imply aliens.
But what they’re really trying to prove is that the human soul exists and can survive after death.
This is a very new agey religion group being financed by a billionaire.
So, sorry.
But anything they say, I would find extremely suspicious.
I mean, these are the same people who brought us Bob Lazar.
So, just…
Just no.
Just no.
I mean, it’s great that Congress is falling for something besides the other stuff that they’re always falling for.
But whatever.
I just this is just disheartening.
But, you know, some people will find blobs on video and blobs on photos very compelling.
Some people will see muscles in a.
Well, I like to blob with Steve McQueen, but I don’t like it when people look at a blurry picture, their brain fills in the gaps, and they make it match whatever story they’re wanting to push.
That really annoys me.
Well, what I’m wondering is why they’re being given this important platform.
Yeah.
And that’s the thing is you’ve got Burleson there.
Now, he’s out there.
He’s trying to appeal to a cultural narrative.
The government knows about alien storyline.
It has real political currency.
And especially with voters who distrust institutions.
So showing a sensational video that plays right into that narrative and it signals, hey, I’m on your side.
So you really have to think about that.
Like I said, this is political theater, not policy.
So, you know, and anytime you have a UAP hearing, it attracts cameras.
It attracts, you know, news people wanting to have this kind of, you know, anytime you’re presenting shocking footage, verified or not, it creates viral clips and visibility.
Yeah, see where you’re going.
Yeah, that’s attention often equals influence.
So, you know, and like I said, the members of Congress, they didn’t get to do any subject matter vetting on this.
So they were just kind of…
caught off guard.
You know, it’s easy for a lawmaker to misjudge and not know.
I mean, they can be swayed by this.
Yeah, they’re long, well-known credibility leeches.
They used to do this thing where they would like rent the press club in D.C.
And it was like, you know, from the Washington, D.C. Press Club, you know, here’s UFO details.
Right.
OK, so it’s like they just steal the credibility from Congress.
They steal the credibility from institutions, from cities, wherever they can leech it.
They try to get credibility.
It doesn’t make what they’re saying true.
And it just annoys me, especially in this group, because, again.
This group has got a long-running influence campaign, and their goals have nothing to do with protecting America from dangerous technology.
It has everything to do with convincing people that these alien intelligences are somehow tied in with the existence of human consciousness beyond the physical body.
So it’s very non-materialist, secret religion stuff.
Diane Pasolka has been sort of trying to…
or codify how this is turning into a religion.
And I think, I mean, I don’t disagree with her that it is a religion.
I just disagree with her that it’s new.
In my opinion, it’s always been religious from the days of the saucer contactees.
It was always tied into theosophy and the idea that there were these benevolent entities and intelligences out there that were coming to save us.
And it’s like, got some bad news, folks.
nobody’s coming to save us.
You’ve got to stop.
You are just, I don’t know who you think you’re preaching to right now.
Well, this is making me think about Benjamin Creme, and we’ve spoken about him before, and Cher International and his intermingling of religion with UFO theory and space brothers and space sisters and the idea that Jesus, known as Maitreya, is going to…
to come back at some point.
So that goes back to, I think, the 60s and 70s.
But as you say, it goes back even further.
It ties into theosophy.
Yeah, it goes way back.
So let’s, you know, there’s been sort of a…
I guess you would say a theme, recurring theme on Monster Talk lately about, you know, just because a lot of people say it happened doesn’t mean that it happened, whether that be cannibalism or, you know, whatever else, because it’s also a good way to other.
And that’s been a great kind of a recurring theme lately.
Now, I don’t know, I don’t think, Karen, I don’t think you’ve had a chance to read it yet, but Blake, did you see that Ken Fedder, did I pronounce his name right?
Fedder, Fedder?
I think it’s Fedder runs with Darth Vader, I think.
That’s what I thought, Kenny.
He just wrote an article about a Rocky Mountain Martian.
Oh, nice.
No, I didn’t see that.
Yeah, this Martian actually took this sort of discovery of this Martian in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado took place in, I believe, it was 1864.
And come to find out that the only place you could find out about this news was if you were in France reading a French newspaper.
And the reason being is newspapers have never really been any better than the Weekly World News.
Well, that’s true.
Because they do know that – well, the best is the Weekly World News out of all of them.
But they do know that –
there’s a huge amount of currency with these sensational stories.
And it’s only recently that being wrong carries a penalty.
Oh, no, I agree.
It didn’t used to.
And the thing is, is in Congress, there’s no penalty for being wrong.
And that’s a huge problem.
So, you know, like I said, the big question here that it just comes down to is, is the video authentic in terms of whether it’s AI or not?
Because.
AI is really easy.
I had, you know, sent you those Bigfoot vlog videos.
Yeah.
And anybody can do AI.
Anybody can do AI.
It’s just ridiculous what, you know, what you can do with it now.
The simple fact is, is this is really, really, really easily reproducible via AI and can look very convincing.
And then you can pop into Congress and show it and there’s no penalty for being wrong.
And the problem is, is this undermines legitimate inquiry.
You know, this erodes public trust, this diverts resources.
It is a big problem.
You know, we had the great quote of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And if you add in a little bit of Spider-Man, you’ve got and extraordinary responsibility.
Now, if our leaders are going to forget the second part, it is up to us to remember the first part.
We have to pay attention to this kind of thing.
And I mean, just the questions, it took me a long time to come to the question of, well, is this AI?
Because, you know, I was too busy asking all these other questions.
Okay, is this actually a drone?
Is this actually this?
Is this actually that?
You know, a lot of times when, you know, in the skeptical community, when they’re presented with something, they always jump to the idea that it’s a hoax.
And then later they think, well, maybe it’s a misunderstanding.
But they first jump to hoax.
And if I can just prove, you know, that it’s a hoax, then it’s okay.
It was a misunderstanding.
It was actually something that somebody thought they saw.
Well, I think, didn’t Joe Nickel talk about that a lot?
And he said that it rarely is a hoax.
Usually it’s going to be some kind of misconstruing of what’s going on.
Yeah, unless I’m behind it.
Well, I was going to say, but when you’ve got people bringing it who have a history of misrepresenting what they’ve been showing and who have a clear agenda, if anyone wants to bother to look at it.
And let me just add, the other thing that we’re challenged with, and I know we have…
Listeners and friends of the show who are in journalism and journalism is primarily about communication.
And it’s not sort of fact finding, you know, endeavor that a lot of people sort of imagine that it might be.
I think, you know, we at least my generation grew up, you know, after Watergate and this idea that, oh, you know, hard hitting investigative journalists, you know, can go find the real answer.
And that’s simply not what journalism is today.
Journalism, it’s entirely about getting eyeballs.
Right.
And you may recall what’s going to go viral.
Right.
In 2008, there was the whole Bigfoot in a freezer Georgia hoax.
Right.
No.
I remember that.
I mean, zero journalists thought that was real.
Nobody thought that was real.
But it was a front page news.
It was all over CNN because they knew people wanted to look at it.
Right.
Balloon Boy wasn’t real.
Nobody thought Balloon Boy really had a balloon with a kid in it, right?
But it was a sensational story, right?
I think it was just the anniversary for that, too.
Yeah.
So it’s just like you can’t trust the media to be gatekeepers of veracity.
It’s entirely up to us as individuals to learn the critical thinking skills to look through this stuff.
Yeah.
It’s a tough one.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So you’ve got Burleson up there, and he’s demanding disclosure.
And again, that’s another question has to be asked.
What does he mean by disclosure?
Because there’s two kinds.
You’ve got the literal kind, which, you know, he’s asking for the U.S. government to release materials, data, programs related to this unidentified…
aerial phenomenon.
So he’s talking satellite radar data, military encounter reports, contracts, research with defense contractors, any records of crash retrievals, reverse engineering programs, all these kinds of things, photos, videos.
That’s what demanding disclosure should mean.
But in UFO culture, disclosure means
It more refers, well, it’s with a capital D for one.
Yeah, it’s more like the second coming.
It’s a coming revelation.
It is a religious event.
It’s a religious event.
Yes, it’s a momentous government admission that aliens are real and have visited Earth.
And, you know, you have people like Stephen Greer, who’s a perfect example.
Well, he had the Disclosure Project in 2001.
And it’s just that in that mythology, it’s almost apocalyptic.
You know, it’s the day humanity learns the truth.
And what does apocalypse mean?
It’s to reveal, right?
That’s what they want.
It is a revelation, right?
But it is a cosmic revelation, not a physical hardware revelation.
Right, right.
So when politicians say that word to certain audiences, they’re tapping into that emotional charge.
And it doesn’t matter whether they believe it.
It’s just they’re really getting that, you know, that that emotional charge to to to work with in a sense.
And it’s funny because they’re they’re the things that they’re pushing for is a full declassification.
Now, you were in the military.
You know that you cannot just declassify things.
You know, we’re talking about national security in a lot of these situations.
I will withhold all cynical jokes and just agree with you.
Okay.
And they’re talking about, you know, you’ve got to remove all the private contractor NDAs because they’re hiding aerospace research tied to UAP tech.
And then, you know, congressional oversight of alleged special access programs.
And then whistleblower protections.
You know, these are all these things that they’re really working for.
But there’s no evidence that any of these programs exist.
Right.
And one thing that does exist that this video clearly ignores is that there are policies and procedures and regulations and everything about whether or not you just fire a hellfire missile at something unidentified.
You don’t.
You don’t.
Like shooting Bigfoot.
Well, like dropping a bomb on Bigfoot.
Yeah.
But yeah, it’s an absolutely ridiculous idea that they’re going to fire a hellfire missile at this unidentified thing that is not threatening.
I’m cynical, though, and I’m jaded.
But like people from Missouri allegedly are supposed to be, you got to show me.
I would love it if there were these weird, ultra-dimensional entities in the world, you know, interacting with us or scaring us or influencing us.
That’d be a really cool world where you could be afraid of something really mysterious and not just the banality of human selfishness.
I mean, the reality is…
We’re getting constantly duped by just simple greed and malfeasance.
And you don’t have to postulate alien intelligences and, you know, super technology.
It just there’s secrets out there, but they’re about how people are taking your money and denying you basic services.
There’s all kinds of real things going on.
Yeah.
But keep them distracted with the glowing orbs and the grainy videos.
Sure, sure.
I don’t know who’s falling for this besides people in Congress, but it’s scary that any of this is having an effect, honestly, at this point.
And it makes me angry that Burleson knows better.
He knows that he can’t come in with such flimsy evidence and do this, but he’s doing it.
You know, he knows that his state has more important issues that need to be addressed, but he’s going for the virility of it.
Yeah.
Well, you might want to keep an eye on who donates to his campaign.
I’m going to lose the joke now, but when you mentioned that to me, Matt, that he has bigger issues, all I could think about was cheese in Missouri.
I thought you were talking about him having bigger issues.
No.
Provel or whatever it’s called, the cheese that isn’t classified by the FDA as cheese.
That’s the first thing I thought.
A cheese product or an American – Cheese-like product, yeah, something like that.
No, you’re right.
That’s a big issue.
Why are they not there with a block of that in Congress?
And the way they cut their pizzas.
Well, that.
Oh, no.
How do they cut their pizzas?
Deep fried ravioli.
Yeah.
What?
Blake’s like, I’m going to Missouri.
Show me.
Show me.
I’ve got to go.
What are you talking about Missouri pizza cutting?
I don’t know this.
Well, they kind of cut.
It’s a round pizza, right?
And then they kind of slice it.
Cut it in a grid?
Yeah, like a grid.
And so you’ve got these tiny little pieces.
That’s because they play tic-tac-toe with it.
That’s how they… Oh, it’s the St. Louis-style pizza.
It’s a thin, cracker-like pizza crust made without yeast.
Yeah.
Oh, my gosh.
Wow.
Wow.
I’m sure we’ll get complaints about this, but then support from people in Chicago and New York.
Provel cheese instead of mozzarella.
Exactly.
Shocking.
Level out, yeah.
We’re going to blow the lid off this.
But, I mean, the thing is, it could have been a representative from any state.
You know, there are bigger issues in every single state.
It wasn’t from Colorado.
Exactly.
Exactly.
We’re not we’re not missing on Missouri here.
This is absolutely a situation where every state in the union has bigger issues.
And the fact that he represents Missouri and he’s not trying to take care of those issues is a concern.
Constituents.
So think about who you vote for.
You just lost me at Provel.
Blake is hungry.
No, I’m just, no, I’m kind of shocked.
According to Wikipedia is rarely used or sold outside of St. Louis.
That’s very specific.
I did try many, many years ago and it tasted like cheese.
It looked like cheese.
It smelled like cheese, but I don’t eat cheese anymore.
It was a lie.
Oh, cheese.
Much like their UFO videos.
Wow.
Well, Matt, thank you for bringing this to my attention.
You’re right.
Sometimes there’s a penalty for not watching the news and it’s like missing out on breaking stories like this.
Yeah.
Well, lucky we got good contacts, eh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good friends help.
Contactees.
Good Lord.
Well, I had actually sort of vaguely wondered, what are those guys from Neds up to?
Blake, you just rolled your eyes at a pun.
Is that what I heard?
I heard you roll your eyes at a pun.
Well, I can’t see him.
I’ve just seen that little picture of him.
So I don’t know.
If I did, it was an accident.
Don’t worry.
Don’t worry.
He’s still thinking about Provel.
I am.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
I know him.
It looks like a giant block of butter, but apparently it’s pasteurized processed cheese product.
He will travel there now and try it, won’t you?
I will.
I’ll be heading right to St. Louis right after this call, right?
Nice.
Well, the next time I’m in St. Louis, for real, I’ll check it out.
Yeah.
There’s another investigation.
It’s like when in Cincinnati, I’ll have to have the chili and spaghetti.
So, yeah, we’re learning all about America here.
Yeah.
Well, from what I understand, it never goes bad, so you can ship us some, and it’ll still be good when it gets here.
Yeah.
Well, it’s a new conspiracy theory.
It’s got prove right in the name.
Well, probe.
Anyway.
Well, Matt, thank you so much for catching us up on the UAP fiasco.
I mean, controversy.
Yeah.
I really should apologize to the listeners for how cynical I am about this stuff, but I can’t help it.
I don’t think they’re surprised.
I try to be open-minded, but they keep bringing the same quality junk to the table.
It’s like, you know, it’s just, it’s ridiculous.
Anyway.
Well, at least you can say your heart’s in the right place.
I guess it is.
And at least so far, it’s not full of Provel-based cholesterol.
So that’s something, right?
Till next week.
Till next week.
I’ll see if I can get some delivered here.
Like you say, I don’t think it’ll spoil.
That’s fantastic.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stoltzner.
You just heard Matt Baxter telling Karen and me about a congressional hearing on UAPs and drones.
I put some links in the show notes for some deeper dives into the topic, but after reviewing the footage myself and reading some of the very good online analysis, I support the following conclusions.
First, this does appear to be a missile strike on a balloon.
The alleged speed’s clearly coming from parallax effects.
And UAP enthusiasts ought to know better after the GoFast video, since this is essentially the same well-understood effect.
Second, this video probably shouldn’t have been released to the public, not because it’s revealing our inability to fight alien technology, but because it shares capabilities about how the U.S. is using missiles in unusual ways to combat enemy aircraft.
So third, it is likely the thing being hit was a balloon or similar soft target.
The mysterious pieces falling off might make you recall some of the unusual UFO stories of the 90s.
But in this case, we’re not seeing a vehicle turning into blobs that can rejoin together.
We’re just seeing shredded remnants of a falling, lighter-than-air aircraft following the expected laws of physics after being struck by a missile.
And finally, I’d still find a lot of entertainment listening to shows like Coast to Coast AM, and I don’t begrudge folks for such thing.
But if a breaking story is being brought to you by George Knapp, get out your skeptic hat and put it firmly on your head.
He’s part of that Bigelow UAP influence campaign to make Americans believe we’re being visited by non-human intelligences with vastly superior technology, and it simply is not true.
Speaking of Knapp, I need to take a nap until I get to feeling better.
Monster Talk’s theme music continues to be by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
Thanks for listening.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post S05E03 – So Much For The Show Me State appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Show Notes · Hosts: Blake Smith & Karen Stollznow

In this episode, Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow explore the history, mythology, and propaganda surrounding the idea of the Cult of Moloch—a figure long associated with child sacrifice and moral panic. They trace Moloch’s biblical origins in Leviticus and Kings, the contested archaeological claims from Carthage’s Tophet, and Roman accusations against rivals such as the Celts and Druids. The discussion moves through how child‑sacrifice narratives have been weaponized across history—from Rome’s propaganda and medieval blood libel to the Satanic Panic and modern conspiracy culture—while separating those myths from documented, contemporary abuse scandals.

This episode includes discussion of child sacrifice, infanticide, sexual abuse, religious violence, and moral panics. While handled through a skeptical and historical lens, some material may be distressing to listeners. Parental discretion is advised.

The following transcript was AI-generated and this initial version is primarily intended to be useful to robotic readers and for SEO. It Definitely Contains ERRORS. (This is our first experiment with this and Blake is working on a much more human-friendly approach.)

Source: S05E01 Monstertalk • Sections: 3

Narrator: This week’s episode includes discussions of child sacrifice, infanticide, sexual abuse, religious violence, and moral panics. While we do handle our content through a skeptical and historical lens, some material in this episode may be distressing to listeners. Parental discretion is advised. MonsterTalk. Welcome to MonsterTalk, the science show about monsters. I’m Blake Smith. And I’m Karen Stollznow. Wow, there’s a chill in the air, and as I walked around my neighborhood this week, I saw the first flurries of autumnal leaves whirling about. The oranges and the reds made feeble vortices, not dust devils, perhaps rust devils, taking me like Dorothy to the fantastical world of October. It’s my favorite time of the year, since it’s the harvest time, and as I often joke, it’s the time of year that the rest of the world joins MonsterTalkers in the comfortable place where we can get our spook on. I’m still not 100% comfortable with everyone calling this the spooky season, and when we went to the hardware store this week, they were already cramming the Christmas decorations in and squeezing out the Halloween decor. But pumpkins and candy fill the grocery store end caps. These seasonal festivals are ancient and complicated, and of course, commercialized relentlessly. But if it makes it acceptable for me to adorn my yard like the Addams Family or the Monsters for a few weeks without the HOA adding my corpse to the decor, then I’m for it. This week I’m going to share some observations about one of the oldest scary topics out there, and this is not a definitive episode, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts and reading about a topic that I find endlessly fascinating. I guess this will be a sort of stake in the ground for what will slowly become a series of what I’ve come to call personally the Molokian Hypothesis. I think I’m going to call this episode Think of the Children, because that idea has been used for thousands of years in innumerable languages to transmute people into monsters. The oldest version of it I know is the references in the Bible to the god Moloch, but it’s probably an older idea than that, and ironically, the phrase’s efficacy is still as real today as it ever was, even if the underlying accusations are just as illusory or perhaps elusive. That ambiguity makes it into sort of a liminal space narratively and historically, which is the kind of dark and foggy intellectual forest that I just want to grab a lantern and explore. Am I being too poetic in this week’s intro? I blame the crows and the gray skies and the pumpkins and bales of hay. Welcome to Season 5 of Monster Talk.

Narrator: Okay, Karen, I’m excited. It’s October, and so finally we can start talking about spooky stuff. Spooky season’s here, yes. So I’m very happy, and with that hopefully some cooler weather, at least in this part of the world. Oh my gosh, it was in the 50s this morning. I was so excited. I got to put on a hoodie and walked around the neighborhood drinking coffee and looking like a fool. I still took in terms of Celsius, so I’m not sure what it was this morning. It was still still pretty warm here. We’ve had some cooler days, but it got up to 29 degrees Celsius. I was talking Celsius. I was wearing an asbestos suit. Is that not what you were talking? But no, it’s a beautiful time of year. I think here at Monster Talk, our favorite time of year, where everyone is talking about thinking about the paranormal and the supernatural. Everybody hops on the bandwagon for one month while we keep the fires of Halloween alive all year long. The rest of the year, exactly. So to that end, I’d like to plug a short story that I have just published. So do you remember going back, I think it was at least a year ago, we spoke with Kian Gill. Who is, at least for the moment, dropped out of podcasting. I loved his work and I miss his voice, which I could still listen to archive. Oh, I didn’t know. He’s taking a hiatus. Is he from the wide Atlantic? Weird. Oh, okay. Well, hopefully he’ll get back to that, but I really enjoyed talking with him. Great voice. Love to have him out there sharing his stories and stuff. So yeah. Oh, absolutely. Love that kind of stuff. And so what we discussed with him was the story of the Walsingham ghosts. And I remember you being quite taken with the story because it supposedly happened in Georgia and yet you hadn’t really heard much about it. No, no, no. Yeah. So I think that Cian had initially thought the story was from somewhere else, but then attributed it to Herewood Carrington. And I know you love that name. The legendary ghost hunter. And so he compiled lots of different stories like this one, but he was, I think, the first person to tell that story. So my short story is basically a retelling of this story that Carrington called a striking story. I guess it kind of poltergeist. Which can be a pun. Yeah. But some weird stuff happens in this case. Things like furniture moving on its own. Yeah. And a family pet that’s killed as well by this creature. And then that spooky part where the blood dripped from the ceiling down onto the dinner table and disembodied heads or all kinds of strange stuff. And some real classic haunting stuff like from a spooky haunted movie or a haunted house. It’s really cool. It’s a very good story. It’s also just different to other stories that are out there and it encompasses so much. So I thought instead of doing a work of short fiction as such, I would do a retelling and kind of tell it from the perspective of Carrington and include some of his quotes. Oh, that’s a fun idea. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s available now and you can get it through Amazon and through Lulu and other outlets like that for ebooks and also for audiobooks. And Matt recorded an audiobook version of the story for me. So nice. That’s awesome. Do go and check it out and leave a review or a rating. We should put links in the show notes. Did you know we have show notes, Karen? We do. I hear your sarcasm. Yes, I do know that. I know. I just mean it because I swear a lot of people just listen to the show and don’t go read them. But if you’re ever interested in one of these topics, go to monstertalk.org. Our show notes there, the links work. They may or may not work in your podcast app, but go there. You can also find episodes by topic, which is great. It’s a great way to look at our archives, our back stuff and find the thing you’re looking for without scrolling through your phone. I lament the state of technology right now, but that is a solid way to go. Oh, boy, we’re going to get into a heavier, more dense topic here tonight. Let me just say, this is one I’ve been looking into for years, multiple years, at least more than four. Oh, I think actually this is pre-pandemic. I started in on this. But I can’t really say that I remember you telling me about it. So I guess this is just a something you’ve been doing on the side. The philosophical opinion here. We live in an age when ignorance is a choice, that you could at any time, if you have a question, you’re curious about something, you could stop what you’re doing and find to some extent the answer to almost anything, right? Especially if it’s historical, that sort of thing. So this is one of those topics that I stopped when I had, I pondered something and then I went and did a little digging and I have just continued to sort of accrue a stack of research. And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, this is one of those topics that does not have a firm answer, but it is a topic that will require a content warning. We’re about to talk about the cult of Moloch, which is absolutely tied with sacrificial killing, child sacrifice, child harm. Now, a lot of this is heavy weighted towards the archaeological and the historical and the prehistoric. But as we go through this, I think we should remind listeners that while this is a topic that has a lot of historical significance, it’s unfortunately a tactic that is used right now, today, all the time. And it’s one of the, it’s like if you were giving out life hacks for villains, here’s one, say that your enemies murder kids, you know, it still works. Yeah, that seems to be a really common theme just throughout history, throughout mythology and literature and makes me think about things like the blood libel with Jewish people and claims of them killing kids. But yeah, it’s a very difficult topic for a lot of people, me included, but it’s good to know that a lot of this is fiction. It is, thankfully, mostly fiction. But the question is, in history, people, you have to remember that the values of the present don’t extend into history, nor do they extend around the world. Other cultures have different values. I won’t get into that because that just takes you into terrible places. Yeah, it’s an entirely different topic in many ways. We can delve more into this. I think this is a good kind of initial, I guess, breaking the ice with this topic, and we can certainly do some deeper dives and invite on some experts and some authors to try and talk about this more. I think there’s a lot to unpack. I would love that, yeah. And again, as we’ll get into, part of the reason I want to bring in experts is because many of these matters are not settled, and we’ll kind of highlight some of those. Sure. The core idea of this question came up when I was reminded of the statue of Moloch. In the show notes, I’ve actually got a sketch, I think it’s on the second or third page, of this, from the 1800s, a drawing of this horned-headed god with his hands up in the air, and it’s got slots for corpses and a big fire in the bottom so that you could sacrifice your children to it. It’s a god then, it’s not a demon? Right, that’s, yes, exactly, yes, maybe. And are we talking about a pagan god, or are we talking about going back to biblical times? I grew up in a very biblical literalist family, right? So, you know, my family, very evangelical Christian with a literal biblical stance. Yeah, I can only imagine, I grew up in a secular household, but yes. Yeah, it’s very different. I have friends, you know, some of my best friends are still very religious, and some of my best friends grew up atheist, which is funny, too, because most of them are not anti-religion, they just don’t see the point, which is an odd, most people don’t want to interact, you kind of want to have a pro or negative stance in those discussions, and I don’t care, it doesn’t bother me. Maybe more humanist, yeah. Yeah, maybe, maybe. So, the god Molech, there’s several different ways it’s spelled and pronounced, which is part of the confusion. It comes up in the Old Testament, and in Leviticus, there’s this scripture, Leviticus 18.21, which says, Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God, I am the Lord. And then, Leviticus 20.2-5 says, Say to the Israelites, any Israelite or any foreigner residing in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Molech is to be put to death. The members of the community are to stone him. I myself will set my face against him and will cut him off from his people, for by sacrificing his children to Molech, he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name. If the members of the community close their eyes when that man sacrifices one of his children to Molech, and if they fail to put him to death, I myself will set my face against him and his family and will cut them off from their people together with all who follow him in prostituting themselves to Molech. And then, I got one more I want to read now. This is too much for a Friday night. Yeah, so, 2 Kings 23.10, He desecrated Topheth, which was in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, so no one could use it to sacrifice their son or daughter in the fires to Molech. Okay, now, now. Wow, very fire and brimstone, all of this. Yeah, but what I love about this, when I was looking at it today versus when I was looking at it going to church all the time, those scriptures are not saying save the children. Those scriptures are saying, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, I’m God. Don’t be running around looking at other gods. That’s cheating, you know, and it’s kind of like if you go to the Ten Commandments, a lot of those are like, what about me? What about Jehovah? Right, you know, don’t forget Jehovah. Yeah, right, exactly. So, it’s less about protecting the children, which makes sense. Can you consider like how many times in the Bible, it’s, you know, kind of implied that if children disobey their parents, you should put them to death. Seems a little harsh, right, you know, maybe. Much of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, comes across that way, and yeah, I’ve got some thoughts about this, but I guess we’re going to delve into more here. Well, so, when this came to mind, my question suddenly became, well, wait a minute, who exactly was like this the religion of? What is the religion of Molech? Is that a real religion? Yeah, some kind of cult, or. Like, does the archaeology support it? Is it a cult? Is it the religion of a different nation? And there is this site called Tophet, which they mentioned by location, but it does, as far as I could tell, there’s no archaeology that suggests there really was a place there where people routinely sacrificed children. So, the question is also, is Molech a god? I usually say Molech, by the way. I say Molech too. Yeah, it sounds like a marvel. When I talk about him all the time. All the time. Comes up always at Starbucks, you know. Yes, of course, right. You got to get those discounts. Is Molech a god or is it a ritual? The word might not even be a deity. It might be a term for a kind of sacrifice. That’s a good point. Do you know then? No, we don’t know, but we know that there is the word and the research tends to call it Punic, but they’re talking about the words of Carthage, which we have historical records for, archaeology for. There was, I’m going to try, it’s spelled M-L-K, which I assume is not milk, it’s Molk. And there’s Molk, M-O-L-K. And that is a kind of sacrificial practice, but not a god. And there’s similar kind of concerns about Baal, as we said growing up, about what that is exactly. And there’s also a term that the Carthaginians use that is very similar, which means king. So there is an ambiguity there from a historical perspective. I mean, the main thing we take away from the scripture is don’t kill your children in the name of that god Molok. At least not in the name of Molok. Exactly, right. Exactly. Don’t kill your children in the name of Molok. The Molok’s the important part, not the killing your children part. Scriptural and theology people may be mad at me saying that, but that’s what it seems to be saying. Oh, we welcome feedback as always. We always welcome feedback. Blanketmonstertalk.org. Karen didn’t say it. Okay. So I guess the thing is, whether it was a ritual or a deity to whom people were being sacrificed, the idea was it was a demarcation mark between the practices of Israel and the practices of those other guys, right? Yeah, the false gods. It’s a way of othering. For that time, yeah. Yeah. And so without the historical proof, nobody’s found the wreckage of a statue, the word Molok written on it, a bunch of baby bones in it. That would be a smoking gun, but so far this is still ambiguous, right? There is archeology around this and one of the interesting problems that comes up when people investigate is when you find a site that has the bones of children, is it a sacrificial site or is it a ritual site or is it a graveyard, a cemetery? Because we do know from right here in the United States that before the advent of modern medicine, cemeteries had a lot of dead children in them. Oh, mortality rates here were very sadly high. Thankfully, we have vaccines now and there’s no threat to that and yay. If you apply them, yeah. I’m being sarcastic and I don’t want to get political, but as a person with a, I don’t know what you’d call it, I like to go to cemeteries. It’s not out of darkness or evil, let’s say it’s Gothic, a Gothic sensibility, right? Well, especially some of the gorgeous ones that you have in Georgia, some beautiful examples and me too. I think even when I was a child, I gravitated towards places like that for the history and just for the beauty and peace. They’re lovely parks and as we know, they were historically. It’s so sad to find a family marker and then it’s just died at one, died at one, died at two. The little lamb. The little tiny, oh, the little tiny tombstone, oh, it’s so heartbreaking. Always gets me. Yeah, and that is just the way things were. My grandmother came from, she was born in 1910 and of course came from a family of 12 because you just needed to have lots of kids to ensure somebody got through. That aside, we don’t know. We don’t know what those archaeological sites mean. One of the thoughts that just came to mind when you raised this topic and I just thought about infanticide as well because I know going back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece, I’ve been doing a little bit of research into this for another book that I’m working on, not specifically about this topic, but I came across a story in Greek mythology about Agamemnon and his wife. So I think it’s Clytemnestra. I’m not sure exactly how to pronounce it. We nailed it as far as my reading. Oh, good stuff and he’d sacrificed their daughter because he had wanted her to do so, so that he would have fair weather on his trip to Troy. So she got her revenge. Years later and killed him and very sadly, this was a real thing, infanticide and killing usually girls because they didn’t have as much perceived value at that time as boys. So I’m just wondering if there’s even a link to that because it was sadly a practice going back a long time ago. This goes back to that idea of different cultural values. That’s a real question that’s hard to answer. Yeah, we’re looking at it through a modern lens. Exactly, well, even when you look at it historically through like, is it epigraphy? Looking at ancient writings, I think that’s the right term. I think so, yeah. Sounds like a bit tough, a bit. Yeah, but if you’re looking at like ancient writings, they are not always contemporaneous with the thing that they’re complaining about, right? Oh, it can sometimes be written hundreds of years later. So knowing that the thing they’re saying is necessarily a first eyewitness account, for example, it’s hard to say, but I’ve read often that the Romans would sometimes not really get truly attached to a child until they were one year old, right? Because mortality was high. Something could happen. Or they would send a child out for exposure. And whether that’s literally true as a common practice or sometimes, it certainly exists in the mythology of both Rome and Greece. Oh, yeah. And from what I’ve read, sometimes when they would leave them out for exposure, it was in the hope that someone might adopt the child, might see the child and try to claim it. Yes, which how many myths are they were going to kill the kid and then someone came along and picked it up. I mean, that’s a lot that happens. Mm-hmm, for sure. Or someone escapes with the child. Because it’s hard to argue with the biology that mothers love their babies. I mean, that I think whether you can say that their culture didn’t value a child until a certain point or not. Yeah, the bond is so strong. Cultures change, biology really doesn’t change in that sense. I think that the chemically, hormonally sense, yeah. Well, the pressure is from a patriarchy, but I mean, we could really delve into this a lot more. Yeah. We should probably stick to the matter at hand. But I do want to raise infanticide, because it’s just something that I keep coming across in my research at the moment. And it just came to mind in the midst of this. So the Romans would say that the Carthaginians were people who killed their children. And there is a little archaeological evidence. A rivalry thing going. Well, exactly. They didn’t like each other. I don’t know if you’ve heard of these Punic Wars, but they were, sometimes they got quite violent. So many wars, yeah. People think there’s so much violence and warring today, and it’s a long history. Yeah, for sure. So Carthage and Rome are across the Mediterranean from each other, but they had very strong naval societies. Trade was big. And Rome obviously developed an empire and was at war with the Carthaginian Empire, which was North African. And they did not strictly wage physical war. They also had wars of propaganda and trade. So the propaganda included that you don’t worry about killing those Carthaginians. They’re baby killers, right? Which would be a kind of genocide of sorts internally. Yeah. So sad. I think I want to mention, because often, this is usually my fault, Karen. I’ll take the blame. I do have a tendency to talk about the monsters I know, right? And often forget to mention the monsters and the sort of topic effect of these things outside of the cultures I’m most familiar with. It’s hard to fit it all in. It is. It’s a big world. But it’s important to remember there are other cultures. And so I thought we should mention that archaeologically, we do have evidence that the Inca, the Aztec, and some places in Africa historically had cases where this practice was done, whether it was systemic or occasional. It’s hard to say. I mean, we know the Aztecs killed a lot of people of all ages. Right. Sometimes enslaved people. Yeah. So the archaeology does support Aztec ritual sacrifice. The Inca seem to have had frozen children or not frozen, dead children that are preserved in that dry, frozen mummy sort of state and other places where we’ve found records of that. And I think that’s really important to mention these cases. Yeah, exactly. So historically, it sounds like Israel and Rome were accusing Carthage. And then when Christianity came into existence, the Romans accused the Christians of being child killers. And then when Christianity came into power, Christianity pretty much accused everybody who was pagan or Jewish of being child killers. And it’s just gone on and on. It’s the blame game. Keeping those hips rolling. Yeah, it’s funny. I’m just thinking back. I can’t remember all the details. But when I was writing on the offensive coming across examples like of syphilis, where it had so many different names, the English would call it the French disease. The French disease. Call it the English disease. And the Spanish would call it the Turkish disease. Yeah, Spanish flu, right? Spanish flu is not the flu from Spain. That’s propaganda, right? Yes, absolutely. There were many names given to COVID that tried to tie it specifically to China, whether it originated there or not, whether it was from a lab or from evolution. Yeah. Politicizing it with accusations is historically the norm, sadly. We’re not special. Yeah, doctors try to avoid that kind of thing nowadays. But yeah, certainly when they name diseases after particular districts where they’re found, it can cause a lot of problems for the people who live there. A lot of blame. I mean, if you take the time to have the empathy and curiosity to go look at any of these places, their cultures, usually you don’t find anything to substantiate the claim, right? So, you know, Christians claiming Jews did this for the blood libel makes no sense for a variety of reasons, right? Oh, yeah. While there’s mixed archaeology and research around the Celts, there doesn’t seem to be much proof that this idea of human sacrifice in that culture was particularly rampant. But that being said, one of my favorite horror movies for the season is The Wicker Man. And that’s really about a neo-pagan. Yeah, I was thinking of that, too. Absolutely. Yeah, you can’t talk about sacrifice and live in these times and not think about that movie. And listeners should go and check out our Debased on a True Story commentary on that movie. Yeah, I’ve still got that burned literally and figuratively into my brain. Wow, that was the first time I’d seen that. Oh, God. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. But it’s that that’s propaganda, too, that the whole idea of the Wicker Man comes from the Caesar era when Rome was pushing into northern Europe and Roman historians said, oh, yeah, those guys, they suck. They kill people and they put them in giant wicker people, you know, and burn them alive. Right. Aren’t they terrible? Yeah, they’re so primitive and savages. Again, it’s such it is the most absolutely reliable accusation to get people to turn and demonize another. Right. And so. Oh, yeah. But we’re almost to Halloween, Karen. So I had to mention, you know, I the this is not a beloved movie by most people, but I didn’t watch Halloween three until very recently. Oh, I still haven’t seen it, so. It is it’s called Season of the Witch. It’s rare for you to have not seen a horror film. Yeah, but it’s so universally hated by horror fans that I just didn’t give it a whirl. Right. OK. And do you regret it? Oh, I loved it. I absolutely. OK. I had set the bar so low, basically, unless it was just boring, I was going to have a good time. Right. And it was not boring. And even though Nigel Neal, it’s one of my favorite horror writers, and he wrote for TV, he did Quatermast in the pit. He was the original screenwriter on Halloween three, and he directly was going to tie in the idea of how that Salwyn, that word that looks like Samhain, Salwyn, is is this pagan festival that happens at the time of the harvest. And it’s when the barriers between living and dead become thin. And so all this magical energy is potentially unleashed. So the whole plot is around child sacrifice. That’s what the movie’s about. And but using really, really funny, not funny, but Halloween masks and strange Halloween masks and electronics as a modality of executing thousands and thousands of children in the name of opening up the gates between here and there. So that’s a very Nigel Neal sort of thing to try to do. So, yeah. Oh, well, you have to check that out. You should. I mean, I would say it’s maybe, I’m just ballparking it here, a three glass of wine movie. I think that’ll put you in the right place. I usually stop myself at two, so that’s the same. Yeah, I’m saying three, with that in mind. Yeah, yeah. I’ll bear that in mind. So, but enough on Halloween three. That’s not what this is about. So, the archaeology is undefinitive. The historical records exist, but clearly have the taint of propaganda. Clearly. Yeah. And the practice of making that accusation extends all the way up into the present. And, you know, a topic near and dear to both you and myself is the satanic panic, which. Oh, yes. That immediately came to mind, too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. In terms of modern times, for sure. Yeah. So without any physical evidence, in fact, with plenty of contradictory evidence, people were sent to prison for decades under the accusations of child abuse through, you know, ritual child abuse. Right. So, satanic ritual, SRA, that’s what they would call it. Right. And I would like to believe we learn from history, Karen. Not that we could, but that we do. I still hear people talking about this all the time. It still happens. All the stuff that went around in 2016 with Pizzagate and QAnon, what was it really about? Save the children, Karen. Save the children. They’re sacrificing the children, Karen. So honorable, doesn’t it? It really does. On the surface of things, as you say. And if you speak out against it, don’t you sound terrible? I don’t believe we need to save the children from satanic cults. Yeah. I mean, I don’t, but that’s because I don’t believe there are satanic cults trying to kill children. It’s a really tricky thing, too, if you’re just having a casual conversation with someone to try to educate them about it. Here’s the dark part that I really hate to talk about, but the reality is, and this is why it’s such a complicated topic, is there is real life child abuse that happens. It’s terrible. Sadly, there is. Yeah. I don’t know if it’s Rotterham or Rotherham, but in the UK, there was a multi-decade child abuse scandal. Jimmy Saville famously had a child abuse scandal, hundreds of people affected. Here in the United States, of course, we have Jeffrey Epstein. We don’t know the scale of that, but it ain’t good. More and more is coming out all the time. And of course, I think we would be remiss in our duty if we don’t mention the Catholic Church. Yeah, that’s such a good example. Really sad, all the stories and the evidence that’s come out in the past 20 years. Very, very sad. We should probably treat that in another episode. Oh, for sure. There are so many points of nucleation from which we could derive future episodes. These are, I think, honestly, good topics to talk about from a monster perspective, both the folk horror perspective and the harsh reality of using this in real-world propaganda campaigns that have resulted in death in massive scale. Oh, yeah. Separate fact from fiction. Yeah, exactly. It speaks to our core purpose here of trying to promote critical thinking around these topics. These can be highly emotional topics, but you have to separate the emotion when you’re trying to evaluate these things, step back a step and try to see if you can’t use real evidence to evaluate. The claim can be horrific. Have a heart, be human, but don’t use your emotions as the sole way that you try to evaluate these questions. Oh, yeah. And often the reality is actually a comfort and the truth is much better than the stories. Absolutely. So I would hope that people who listen to this show would develop a skill set or at least be aware that there can be a skill set where one can use those skills to figure things out on their own, to find the tools to use to get reliable evidence to solve these mysteries. Don’t just take our word for it. Use the things we talk about. Look at our sources. We have show notes, Karen. Did I mention our show notes? I don’t like – oh, you know one more. Witches. Witches were accused of stealing children and killing them. Oh, yeah. Even stories of changelings. Exactly. So that fits into maybe not so much in modern times, but definitely in the witch trial period. Early modern period. Yeah. And so many horrific things spawned from false accusations. I mean, the first, I guess, historically known – Even recently. But I was going to say that the blood libel, which we all know about with Jews being persecuted, started in 1144 after the death of William of Norwich. A kid died. They blamed the Jews and the blood libel, the idea that the Jews – so the idea was already out there, but they turned it into a moral panic with horrendous consequences, which we’re still feeling today. Yeah. And really, I think talking about demonization and dehumanization presented these people as monsters with horns and warts and all kinds of disfigurement. Yeah. Frequently, these topics are so emotional that people are too outraged to take a moment, step back and say, I’m outraged, but is the thing I’m outraged real? And I think in this case, that’s a really important question people should take the time to figure out. But that’s the trick and why it’s so powerful, this accusation, which I’ve come to think of as the Milwaukeean method. You just save the children. That’s all you need to say. And you’ve hacked the minds of most people. I think we can say that even as skeptics that critical thinking and using these tools is something that we have to practice all the time, something that we’re still learning about. And it sometimes is easier to see things, I think, from the outside than being on the inside for certain groups who might be more prone to having these kinds of beliefs. But I think it’s a work in progress, being a skeptic and using critical thinking. It is. So as I mentioned, many of the topics discussed today, historically and archaeologically, are still being debated. There is not a consensus on all of them. And I find that really interesting. And if we do decide to dive in on some of these topics, especially around the archaeological and especially in the Mediterranean, I’d like to try to get some people, I don’t want to say both sides, but I’d like to make sure that whoever we have on is able to speak to both sides of the evidence, why interpretation is so important. Because I don’t know that there is necessarily a hard and fast answer to all these questions about whether some of these cases were strictly one thing or the other. And sometimes I think complexity is the norm. And it’s the human tendency to make things simple that causes a lot of problems around here. Oh, yeah. And our understanding, too, is provisional. So we’re certainly always open to new findings. But yeah, I think we need to delve into this topic with more depth when we can. Absolutely. So that’s why I wanted to cover this today. It’s been churning around in my mind for several years. And I just want to lay some foundational work here that we can use to build out future episodes. And I hope that when we get to those, we can focus on the science, the methodology, why people have particular views, and look at the historical methods. History, folklore. Exactly. I don’t really want to focus on the dead kids. That’s sad. But there is some fascinating stuff here. Think of this more like forensics files. Yeah. And a profile about the victims. The victims, I’m very sad about whether they died naturally or not. But it is really interesting what we can say and to what degree of certainty we can say it about these stories and these cases. Oh, yeah. And maybe the truth will give us some comfort as well. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. We’ll see. More to discuss. All right. Well, in the meantime, I think we should work on luring those kids to our house with candy. Am I right? Am I right? Yeah, it is definitely time to start prepping for that. And I know we don’t want to talk too much about shows that we’re going to do in the future, but I think we should do a live episode for Halloween. I would really like to. We’ve had so many requests. So I think we’d be letting everyone down if we didn’t do that. So we need to start. Well, happy October, everybody. I promise you we’ll do our best to make the rest of this month a little more lighthearted, but I’m really excited. Lighthearted. Next week we’re talking to Brian Sharpless about cannibalism. Yes. Yeah. And your point being? The nature of the show. It is indeed. I guess it’ll be cannibalism, but with more puns. So, yeah, that’ll be fun. Oh, that’s scary. Happy October. Happy October.

Narrator: You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I’m Blake Smith. And I’m Karen Stollznow. You just heard an introductory discussion of the complicated topic of the Molokian hypothesis. Were there real cults that sacrificed children? Or has it always been mostly propaganda? And what about the accusations of cult activity today? I’m skeptical of any of the supernatural or cult accusations, but the real world cases of horrific abuse do take place. So how do we square the conspiratorial and supernatural with the mundane yet horrific? I promise we won’t relentlessly explore this topic. It’s got too many bleak avenues and cul-de-sacs mixed onto the map. But I do want sporadically, but seriously, to explore the topic because, as I said in the intro, that phrase, think of the children, is still ruining lives today. It takes work to figure out which claims are real and which are slander and propaganda. And as we occasionally return to this topic, I hope we can equip you all with the means to bring some critical thought to the conversations that such a thing inevitably spurs. Monster Talk’s theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys, but you know, I’ve always got this little ditty to fall back on. [Silver Shamrock theme plays us out]

The post S05E01 – THINK OF THE CHILDREN! appeared first on MonsterTalk.

We finish up Season 4 of MonsterTalk, not with a bang – but a chuckle, as we welcome Science Comedian Brian Malow to talk about using humor and science to entertain. 

The post S04E46 – SciCom and Science Comedy with Brian Malow appeared first on MonsterTalk.

We discuss the sketchy “science by press release” of Colossal Biosciences and the controversies lurking in the history of its lead scientist. Have they resurrected dire wolves? No. Definitely not. If only overblown celebrity endorsed hype was the only problem…

Did they make a Dire Wolf? (Spoiler: NOT EVEN REMOTELY CLOSE)

George Church’s explanation of Epstein ties

James Arthur Ray – Guru of Death?

Tony Robbins (more from Quora and Reddit)

Peter Jackson and the Moa

George R. R. Martin and the Dire Wolf

For a more… salacious take on this, check out the 2-part “Behind the Bastards” coverage of this topic. Part 1 and Part 2.

— on a more positive note —
What is CRISPR?

The post S04E45 – Resurrecting Dire Wolves and Moa Bad Ideas appeared first on MonsterTalk.

We take a look at a fascinating slice of paranormal history in the form of a 1975 BBC documentary The Ghost Hunters. How much has changed in paranormal research since 1975? Not much, after a fashion… 

Anybody know something about these plastic pub barrels from the 1970s?

Show Notes:

Benson Herbert – ghost hunter

Andrew Green – the Spectre Inspector

John Cutten (SPR, Inventor)

Watch this masterpiece on YouTube here.

Yes – the Ion Gun is, in fact, a device for cleaning vinyl records.

Hugh’s other paranormal doco – “Out of this World” from 1977

The Three Horseshoes Pub (Wiltshire)

The post S04E43 – Ghost Hunting 1975 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Blake catches Karen up on his current research projects: The four-wall tour dates of the PGF, and a contextual look at the Van Meter Visitor. Neither of these projects are finished but he is excited to share what he’s been working on.

Dolemite is mentioned favorably.

The post S04E43 – Big Foot and Van Meter appeared first on MonsterTalk.