Regular Episode
#168 – GUNS & GOBLINS: CRYPTIDCON 2018
Blake opens the episode with a personal dedication to Annette Harris, the mother of his lifelong best friend Mike, who passed away around the time of recording. Her warmth and generosity shaped much of who Blake became — including, in some small way, the person who makes this show. It’s a moving few minutes, and worth hearing.
🔬 Guns & Goblins: Blake’s CryptidCon Presentation
Blake’s talk — titled Guns and Goblins: The Kentucky Monster Story — drew a full room and centered on his ongoing replicative research into the Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter of August 21, 1955. For listeners who haven’t heard MonsterTalk’s earlier three-part coverage, the short version: eleven people in a small rural farmhouse reported being besieged for several hours by small, glowing, silver creatures after a UFO sighting nearby. They fired on the creatures repeatedly with a 20-gauge shotgun and a .22 pistol, apparently to no effect.
One persistent skeptical claim held that the Sutton family had not actually shot through their own screen window — that the holes might have been made by a stick or screwdriver to embellish the story. Blake set out to test this directly. He obtained a section of window screen and fired both a 20-gauge shotgun and a .22 pistol through it at approximately the same distance described in the original reports. His finding: the resulting holes were entirely consistent with what Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher documented in their contemporaneous write-up of the case — including the roughly two-inch hole from the shotgun, which is smaller than most people expect.
He also examined the lunar calendar for that night in 1955: it was nearly a new moon, meaning the scene around a farmhouse eight miles from town would have been exceptionally dark — consistent with the witnesses’ apparent inability to identify what they were shooting at, and with missing entirely.
On the question of the creatures’ reported silver glow: Blake found video footage of a barn owl illuminated by a flashlight in the dark, which produces a strikingly silver-gray sheen. This, combined with the near-total darkness of the night, goes some distance toward explaining a detail that had previously seemed inexplicable. Blake notes the case is not “solved,” but several elements that once seemed mysterious are now looking considerably more mundane.
🦎 Convention Floor: Who Was There
CryptidCon’s second year brought a noticeably larger vendor floor and a two-track schedule. Among the guests and speakers Blake and Jeb encountered or attended:
– Bob Gimlin — co-subject of the Patterson–Gimlin film — was scheduled but did not attend, reportedly due to a scheduling conflict with an international Bigfoot conference (believed to be at Loren Coleman’s International Cryptozoology Museum in Maine).
– Travis Walton, the Fire in the Sky alien abductee, was present and signing.
– David Paulides, author of the Missing 411 series, drew a packed room. Blake and Jeb note that while Paulides himself tends not to name a cause for the disappearances he catalogs, the culture that has grown up around his work leans heavily conspiratorial.
– Cliff Brockman (Bigfoot researcher and former Finding Bigfoot cast member) was on hand; Blake mentions ongoing plans for a future panel episode with Brockman and primatologist Todd Disotell.
– Nick Groff, formerly of Ghost Adventures, appears to have a parent-company connection to CryptidCon itself.
🪄 Talking Boards: Robert Murch on the History of the Ouija
One of the highlights of day two was a presentation by Robert Murch, chairman of the Talking Board Historical Society and the foremost collector and historian of Ouija and talking boards. Murch, it turned out, was already a MonsterTalk listener and was familiar with Blake’s concept of how monster movies drive cryptid lore — he’d been looking for a similar framework to apply to Ouija, which he called “we-wi-stitions” (a portmanteau Blake clearly enjoyed).
The key historical points Murch covered:
– The word “Ouija” combines the French and German words for “yes” (oui and ja). It’s a trademarked term; the broader category is “talking boards.”
– The talking board and the planchette were originally separate products. The planchette was used solo for automatic writing; combining it with a lettered board created what we now call the Ouija. Blake’s observation: this actually constrained the user’s options, while also making the device far more accessible — a cleaner interface for the ideomotor effect.
– For decades the board was genuinely just a parlor game — widely used, not widely feared. Its reputation as a conduit for demonic influence is largely a post-1970s phenomenon, and Blake and Jeb trace that shift directly to The Exorcist (1973) and the broader American cultural turn toward demonology that followed. Murch is apparently booked to appear on a future MonsterTalk episode.
🐺 The Beast of Bray Road: Seth Breedlove’s New Film
A sneak-peek screening of Seth Breedlove‘s Small Town Monsters documentary The Bray Road Beast — narrated by Lyle Blackburn and connected to the work of Linda Godfrey, who introduced the screening — was a highlight of evening one. (The film was scheduled for an October 2018 release.)
Blake and Jeb had notably different reactions. Blake found it hard to suspend his prior conclusions about Dogman lore; Jeb was practically bouncing in his seat, because the film is, in his framing, “PUFT in a can” — meaning it’s a textbook example of the Paranormal Unified Field Theory, the tendency within contemporary paranormal culture to knit together cryptids, UFOs, occult phenomena, and demonology into a single overarching framework. Animal mutilations, skinwalker parallels, and geomantic site-tying all make appearances.
Godfrey’s subsequent talk reinforced this. Jeb notes that while Godfrey has historically tried to maintain that Dogman might be an undiscovered hybrid animal, her emphasis during the talk leaned heavily into supernatural and geomantic territory. Blake adds that in a brief conversation with Godfrey, she told him she does not view Bigfoot as a benevolent forest spirit — she considers it potentially as dangerous as Dogman. (An interview with Godfrey is on Blake’s wish list.)
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Spooky Archaeology: Myth and the Science of the Past 💵 by Jeb Card
– 📚 Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America 💵 by Linda Godfrey
– 🎬 The Bray Road Beast 💵 (Small Town Monsters / Seth Breedlove, 2018)
– 🎬 The Exorcist 💵 (1973) — referenced as a turning point in Ouija’s cultural reputation
🔗 Related Links
– Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter (Wikipedia)
– Ideomotor Phenomenon (Wikipedia)
– Ouija / Talking Boards (Wikipedia)
– Dogman Cryptid (Wikipedia)
– Shibboleth (Wikipedia) — discussed in the context of “Dogman” as an in-community identity marker
– Barn Owl (Wikipedia) — proposed as a natural explanation for the Kelly–Hopkinsville “goblins”
– Missing 411 (Wikipedia)
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
Blake Smith and Jeb Card (Spooky Archaeology) discuss CryptidCon 2018 and Blake’s continuing research into the Kelly-Hopkinsville Goblins Case. (See MonsterTalk’s 3 part previous coverage: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) Additional notes later this week. Please check back.
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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