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.

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Hi, how can I help you?
I’m trying to get some items together for a spell, and I’m having some trouble finding some of the ingredients.
But I’m not sure, maybe these things have different names, but I’m looking for henbane.
We don’t have that.
Okay.
And hemlock.
No.
No, okay.
They asked for poplar leaves, but I guess I’d get those off a tree.
And they said something called cowbane?
We don’t have that either.
Okay.
Are these common ingredients, or is this really obscure stuff?
I don’t know.
I don’t think you can buy hemlock.
Oh, really?
Because it’s poison?
Right.
I’m not sure.
What about Belladonna?
Is that legal?
I don’t think Belladonna is either.
This is going to be hard to do.
But if I can’t get these ingredients, how can I turn myself into a werewolf?
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.
Hello, and welcome to Monster Talk, the podcast that talks about monster stories and their links with science.
I’m Blake Smith, and together with Ben Radford, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer, and Dr. Karen Stolzno, skeptical investigator, blogger, and skeptic, we critically examine stories about monsters and interview experts who can shed light on these dark mysteries.
Today, we’re talking about werewolves, magical creatures that can turn from human to wolf, or even into a hybrid wolfman.
Werewolves.
I love werewolves.
Werewolves are cool.
Yeah.
The werewolves for the 1941 movie Wolfman with Lon Chaney Jr., I didn’t love that werewolf that much.
It seemed like a jip that he got cursed with it.
But in modern literature, werewolves seem to have a lot more control over their transformations, which is what, you know, that’s really the important part.
And they’re almost indestructible.
They get to, except for silver, nothing seems to hurt them very much.
I remember watching.
Why silver?
So maybe it is a pseudoscience link.
Well, I think actually in real science, though, silver is also kind of an antibiotic.
Yeah, I think it was used as an antibiotic.
I see it on pseudoscience pages so much I don’t trust it.
I’ll have to do the research on that.
You have to do research?
Blake, come on.
We don’t do research for these things.
Come on.
It all comes down to the 1941 movie.
Before the 1941 movie, Silver did not kill werewolves, as far as I know, and werewolves was not a curse.
That’s the source, then.
Or I shouldn’t have asked.
That is the source.
That is the source.
But you’re right.
It is taken in various forms today with colloidal silver.
My mom makes her own.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
Thousands of people are going to hear this.
Is it almost like mercury?
I mean, I’m not familiar with that.
Well, it’s a heavy metal, isn’t it?
So it’s dangerous.
There’s a process where you basically take the silver and put it into a fluid, and then you drink the fluid, and then it’s supposed to help you be more healthy.
I know there’s a guy who turned blue from drinking it.
Yes, I can’t remember the name of that condition.
His name was Smurf.
It can turn you gray.
Yeah, it turns you really gray.
I think it used to be used in more orthodox medicine in nasal drops, I think for sinus conditions in the 40s and 50s until people started turning gray.
Yeah, turning gray is no good.
I mean, this guy really does look like a Smurf.
That’s no joke.
His name is Paul Kerrison of Madeira, California.
And the condition is called argyria.
Argyria.
Yeah, and it makes your skin turn blue.
It’s kind of silvery blue.
And they’re using colloidal silver as an antibiotic, and that’s what causes it.
I guess it’s absorbed into the body and we’re unable to get rid of it.
Right.
Now, most people don’t take enough, I think, to have that happen.
This guy was apparently rubbing it on his skin and taking it daily.
But our guest today is talking about werewolves.
Yes, that’s true.
But I think, just for the record, that if the 1941 theory about silver is true, then Paul Kerrison of Madeira, California, is immune from werewolf attacks.
That is true.
I’m certain he will not be attacked by a werewolf.
I think maybe.
I’ll put money on it.
I think you’re probably right.
So the Beast of Bray Road is the most recent werewolf-related sightings that I’m aware of.
Tell us about those.
The Beast of Bray Road is a book by Linda Godfrey that describes a mysterious animal witnessed in over 200 sightings, at least according to MonsterQuest.
The beast is described as a wolf-like animal that can run on four legs or on two legs, and it’s alleged to haunt the woods of Minnesota.
and it’s claimed that it weighs around 600 pounds.
MonsterQuest did an episode on it, which failed to produce the creature, but which highlighted the paucity of evidence outside the eyewitness testimony, which we skeptics know was notoriously unreliable.
Now, and they know it’s a werewolf because they actually saw the transformation, or they just assumed it’s a werewolf?
I believe the actual sightings were of a wolf-human hybrid, sort of a beast-man.
So there was, I mean, I’m not familiar with the case, but I mean, was there…
Was there some sort of before and after?
No, no, no.
That looks like something that might be a combination of a man and a wolf.
Well, it’s a hairy biped resembling a wolf-human hybrid.
They can walk on its hind legs.
It can be up to seven feet tall.
It runs really, really fast.
No one has seen it transform.
And I have to say, it seemed to me that it could have been a bear just as easily as a werewolf.
And I guess they’re calling it the Beast of Bray Road instead of the Werewolf of Bray Road because it hasn’t actually had a transformation sighting.
My take on it is there’s a lot of episodes of MonsterQuest which could be a bear or a Bigfoot.
And I’m inclined to think bear.
But that’s just because I’ve seen bears.
They seem pretty real.
But the Bigfoots, I still haven’t seen.
So what other were-creatures exist in folklore?
There’s a goat man.
Not the one on Saturday Night Live, but there’s actually a myth about a goat man.
So I’m saying were-bears as well.
Were-bears.
Yes, were-bears.
Yes, yes.
It’s a difficult one to get out with my accent.
I understand.
You know, I used to play a lot of role-playing games, and being a werebear is really great for your defense and offense.
Especially the offense.
Yeah, well, you can do a lot of extra damage when your hands turn into claws, but then you have to put your sword down.
But it’s okay because you’re immune to most damage except magical, so that’s all good.
Well, yeah, but I think that there is a long tradition of wereanimals, obviously not just, as Karen points out, not just wolves.
You know, there are stories of people turning into
you know, snakes and birds and, you know, all sorts of different things.
I think that obviously the werewolf is the most popular version, certainly coming from the European traditions.
But it’s my understanding that, you know, that depending on which culture you’re looking at, you know, it may have different stories of wereworms for all I know.
A wereworm, that would be cool.
I turned into a worm.
Were sheep.
The Goatman is from Maryland, and Loren Coleman wrote in his book Weird Virginia that the Bunnyman sightings from Fairfax County, Virginia, are a variant on the Goatman encounters.
Always cool animals.
Yeah, that’s right.
You don’t see wereworms, although I think Bunnyman’s a little odd.
For that matter, although Mothman’s not really a moth-human hybrid, I always thought a flying man-shaped moth was kind of odd, too.
Kind.
But yeah, I would expect something like a werecoyote or a werebear.
Something with some offensive power is a lot more exciting as a monster than something that’s a vegetarian, for example.
Well, I mean I think that part of the interest in them is that with something like any wereanimal where the other half is a human –
is that part of the scary and intriguing thing is that the person next to you could be a werewolf.
If one of their forms is a natural, normal human form, then that sort of adds another element of sort of fear and intrigue to it because it’s not immediately identifiable as a werewolf because, of course, it could be.
During the next full moon or the next time it gets angry or is annoyed by a reporter named Jack McGee, it turns into a monster.
I guess the legend of the werewolf prior to the 1941 movie, though, has its ties in magic.
And the original stories that I used to read a lot of werewolf books, and most of the stories about werewolves involved people who wanted to become werewolves having to go through rather intense magical rituals themselves.
They had to get fur belts and put on an ointment and do a ceremony.
Or they had to have been cursed by the gods.
Something special had to happen to make somebody go through this transformation.
I thought it was uncontrollable or is that just in other – Yeah, that’s just in modern times.
That’s just in modern times except for the guy who goes mad becomes a wolf.
But what happens is in Sabin Baron Gould’s book of werewolves, he talks about – about the first half of the book is about werewolf cases.
And they usually sound like large wolves that seem strangely –
sapient.
The wolves seem unusually cunning, or perhaps they seem a little bit supernatural.
And this is – these are all European legends.
But later on in his book, he switches over to talk about murderers.
And he breaks it up into groups of murderers who kill people and eat them, murderers who go crazy and kill people and eat them, and murderers who just kill people.
And so some of these people seem to have – it’s the cannibalistic, crazy person who thinks they’re a werewolf as part of their psychosis.
It seems to be part of the lore just as well as those animals that are mysteriously intelligent wolves.
What is a werewolf and how it attacks is a different legend than how do you become a werewolf, right?
So is it satanic?
Is it magic?
Whatever it is, it’s not you get bit by a werewolf and you become a werewolf, which is okay.
Although I like the new viral version.
I think it makes great fiction.
and I’m actually pretty excited about the upcoming remake of the 1941 movie.
Is that Benicio Del Toro’s?
Oh, it is.
Yeah, yeah.
I’m excited about that.
Apparently it’s been plagued with production problems and feuds and stuff, so it’ll be interesting to see whether… Would you say it was cursed?
Ooh!
Yeah, well, only insofar as most films are cursed on some level.
Yeah, well, maybe it won’t be good, but it looked cool.
The special effects looked nice.
Do we have anything else intelligent to say about werewolves?
Clearly not.
Apparently not.
Monster Talk.
Today we’re interviewing Dr. Brian Regal of Keene University in New Jersey.
Dr. Regal recently went to England to give a lecture about the relationship between the origin of species and the legend of werewolves.
Dr. Regal, before we start talking about Darwin and werewolves, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
Okay.
Sure.
I’m…
assistant professor for the history of science, technology, and medicine here at Kean University in New Jersey, and I have a Ph.D. in American intellectual history, my subfield is history of science.
Let’s see, I’ve been here at Kean for about three years now.
Before that, I was at a small engineering college in New York called the PCI College of Technology for about seven years.
And I write on pseudoscience, evolution history,
General history, biology, creationism, all the good stuff.
Great.
So we found you through your Science Magazine article where it was an interview with you talking about your presentation on the role of Darwin and werewolves.
Right.
And I wanted to know, can you give us kind of an overview of that presentation?
Sure.
I gave a pair of presentations actually over the summer, one at the British Society for the History of Science, their annual meeting,
at the University of Leicester and then at the University College London they have a at the Grant Museum which is in the Darwin Theatre they have an ongoing public lecture series where they bring in scientists and historians to speak about the various work that they do and I gave a talk there in which I kind of not exactly tongue in cheek but not to be taken too seriously about
the idea that the advent of Darwinian evolution theory in the mid-19th century helped put an end to the belief in some quarters in certain kinds of monsters.
My work as a historian has always been on the history of evolution.
And my very first book, which was on the life of Henry Fairfield Osborne, the famous American paleoanthropologist, I began noticing very sort of interesting…
non-scientific aspects of evolutionary biology, particularly in how scientists and laypeople interpreted these things, and that there was more to discussions of human evolution and human origins than rocks and fossils and strata.
And as I was writing that book, I began to notice these kind of other interesting tendrils of ideas that were attached to it at the edges.
And I knew I wanted to get back to that, and eventually I started focusing in on this, and I discovered monster hunting.
And I was fascinated by it because here you have these people who are doing something very interesting, and when I say these people, I mean both professional scientists and amateur naturalists.
They’re trying to prove the existence of something which the mainstream tells them doesn’t exist, yet they want to keep looking for it anyway.
And in my work on the history of monster hunting, the first paper I did on it came out last January in the journal Annals of Science, focused on the life of Grover Krantz.
And as I was looking at Krantz’s life and the world of monster hunting, it struck me that while there are a lot of groups and individuals who look for creatures like Bigfoot and the Yeti and…
the skookum and the swamp ape and the sort of related cryptids, nobody seemed to be worried about werewolves anymore.
And I thought, well, where have all the werewolves gone?
Why aren’t we worried about werewolves anymore?
And as I began to think about it more, it struck me that what happens is if you look at the writings on werewolves up to the mid-19th century, they’re generally believed, and even by scholars, but then after Darwinian evolution comes along,
they begin to go into decline and reports of werewolves, especially in the industrialized world, begin to drop off dramatically.
And so I thought, well, that’s very interesting.
You have people who are looking at the basic idea of the werewolf, which says you have a combination, a composite of a wolf or a dog and a human.
But good Darwinian evolution tells us that while dogs and humans are vaguely related because they’re all living things,
that dogs and humans are not closely related, and you can’t get a dog-human hybrid.
However, what you can get after the advent of Darwinian evolution theory is the ape-human hybrid.
In fact, the connections between humans and primates is the underlying sort of working paradigm of human evolution.
And I thought, well, that’s very interesting, because here we have an example of the old heroic narrative of science…
Science comes along and sort of defeats belief in the supernatural and fantasies like monsters.
But then if you finish that sentence, what happens is it undermines the heroic narrative.
Because after the werewolves and mermaids and these sort of creatures kind of get brushed off to the side by evolution theory, that allows for a whole new set of monsters to appear and to be believed in.
And so along comes…
the Yeti, and then Bigfoot and these other sort of anomalous primates.
And while the vast majority of the scientific community still rejects them as being genuine creatures, at least what they have over these monsters of the past is a basic scientific justification.
Because if we ever find out that Bigfoot does exist, we’ll see that it’s some kind of primate.
And so this sort of monster is allowed to exist because of evolution theory, while monsters like werewolves
get put down by evolution theory.
Brian, how did the idea of werewolves arise and how far back did these beliefs go?
And could you tell us about some of the beliefs and theories about werewolves that existed pre-origin of species?
I think I got most of your question there.
It’s just a little bit garbled.
But if you look at the…
The vast majority, if not all, of the reports of Bigfoot-like creatures, and I’ll use the term Bigfoot or anomalous primate to cover all these things.
If you look at the vast run of what the evidence that your average cryptozoologist will point to and say, well, here’s the evidence of Bigfoot way back in time, you don’t see any mention of apes prior to the middle of the 19th century.
There are discussions of monkeys and primates and apes, but the ape has yet to be connected to the sort of monstrous creature.
Apes are generally viewed prior to the 19th century as, in some places, tricksters and sort of comical characters.
In other cases, they sort of stand in for representations of
all of the dark aspects of the human psyche, but you don’t really, you’re hard-pressed to find any sort of Bigfoot, Sasquatch-related stories prior to the 19th century, prior to the advent of evolutionary theory, wherein these creatures are linked to apes.
They’re always linked to wild men rather than apes.
Okay, I was actually asking about werewolves.
It must be my accent here.
Oh, I’m sorry.
I was asking about the beliefs and theories about werewolves that existed pre-origin of species.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
Well, there’s so many.
I mean, when we think of the werewolf, we tend to think of the kind of European variation on the theme from the movie The Wolfman.
Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers at night can become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the August moon shines bright.
that’s probably the most famous piece of werewolf poetry most people don’t realize was actually written by the screenwriter for the film The Wolfman.
It’s not actually ancient at all.
But we have traditions of werecreatures, creatures that turn in, or humans that turn into various creatures around the world back to the ancient world.
The word lycanthropy comes from an ancient Greek tradition of a king who gets turned into a wolf because of
various wrongdoing.
But what I found interesting about the… And there’s no one real werewolf canon of belief.
There’s a lot of different ideas from a lot of different places that can all get thrown into one general concept of a human changing in some sort of supernatural way into some form of a wolf, sometimes a complete wolf, sometimes just a hairy human.
But if you look at…
the discussions of werewolfery in, say, like the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance is a really interesting thing goes on because already by the 1500s, you’re already seeing sort of learned discourses on the nature of werewolves where they’re mostly discounted.
There are authors who say, well, these are probably people who just think they’re werewolves.
So we think of psychological explanations for various phenomena.
as being a modern thing, but all the way back to the 14th century, you’re already getting these first hints at scholars saying, well, maybe they’re not really becoming wolves, maybe they just think they are.
There’s also theological discussions, which have a really interesting rationalism to them, where they say, well, only God can change one creature into another.
and therefore humans can’t do it themselves, and demons couldn’t do it, and so you can’t have a werewolf because God would never turn a person into a wolf.
And so there are these kind of theological disagreements on whether or not these creatures can exist.
And they start fairly early on.
That’s interesting because, as I understand it, centuries ago werewolves were often associated with magic, witchcraft, Satan, things like that.
Yet, of course, the modern Bigfoot is almost completely stripped of anything like that.
You don’t really hear stories of Bigfoot having those sorts of traditions.
And yet, of course, people do still believe in magic.
People do still believe in witchcraft and the occult in the New Age.
How do you reconcile that?
Well, there are actually supernatural aspects to anomalous primates, to Bigfoot and Sasquatch in particular.
Native American tribal lore, they see these creatures as spirit-like things.
There are even a few rare examples where it’s thought that humans turn into Bigfoot, although those are mostly relegated to Native American traditions.
And there are those who, mostly on the fringes of anomalous primary research, who claim a sort of ghostly connection for Bigfoot, a UFO connection for Bigfoot.
And while Bigfoot is generally seen as a kind of pastoral creature, there are traditions where they act quite violently and act as violently as any werewolf would.
So there are these kinds of strands within Bigfoot lore.
So are you saying that there’s strands of Bigfoot lore in which Bigfoot is associated with full moons and bloodthirst and aversion to silver and garlic and things?
Well, no, not the sort of traditional classic werewolf stuff, but in that there are Bigfoot traditions in which the creature is not seen as a biological entity rather than a spirit entity.
But, I mean, of course, most of the Bigfoot people that I have run into and probably the ones that you know wouldn’t accept that.
No, no.
I agree.
The majority of current Bigfoot enthusiasts tend also to discount the spiritual aspect of all this, and they see it as a –
a pretty straightforward biological entity rather than some sort of supernatural.
There is a contingent within Bigfoot, I don’t want to call it fandom, but within the Bigfoot community that thinks that there is a paranormal aspect, and whether that’s magical or UFO-related or multidimensional Bigfoot, you know, Beckyard’s stuff comes to mind, but the…
It’s out there.
It’s just not the mainstream of Bigfoot.
Right.
It’s kind of like if you think of like Bigfoot studies are not really mainstream anyway, then it’s like a microcosm within that, I guess, right?
Sure.
Yeah, there is the sort of – we could break the world of Bigfoot enthusiasm, amateur naturals into two basic chunks, the –
genuine biological entity school and the supernatural school.
And the supernatural school is far and away the smaller of the two.
Gotcha.
We talked about this briefly, but the idea of a werewolf bites you and then it becomes infectious, that seems really common in all the modern lore.
But doesn’t that also come back from the 1941 movie?
Yeah, there’s a lot of what people think is genuine medieval or Renaissance era werewolf lore that really is actually quite modern.
It’s a product of the cinema rather than history.
And the silver bullet, the full moon, the garlic, most of it is.
And the same thing holds for vampires.
The vast majority of what modern vampire enthusiasts believe to be genuine historical vampire lore
is all from the 20th century cinema and from Anne Rice novels.
Oh, yeah.
The reason I ask is I went back and a long time ago I read –
Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves.
I was noticing when I was studying up for this interview, it came out in 1865 and Origin of Species came out in 1859.
Already by 1865, Baring-Gould says that he thought he hadn’t seen any werewolves while he got lots of stories.
He found more cases where there were people who had gone mad and killed, people who were cannibals.
In all of my research, it seemed that up until that 1941 movie, people who wanted to become werewolves chose to become werewolves for the most part through magical ritual or some other effort, or they were cursed in some way, but not in a sort of viral way.
Does that consist of what you found?
Yes, that’s essentially correct.
That’s why I said before that in my discussion of Darwin and werewolves,
you sort of have to take it a little bit tongue-in-cheek and not take it too seriously because werewolves have never really been considered products of the natural world or biological world.
Rather, they’re products of the supernatural world.
And so that poses a difficulty for historians of science and cryptozoologists alike that you have this creature which is a part-time monster.
Creatures like Bigfoot or sea serpents or even mermaids, they exist in their totality all the time.
They don’t change one form to another, whereas the werewolf has a tradition of changing from a human form into a non-human form.
As much as we would like to believe it, there’s really no such thing as shape-shifting in the kind of cinematic way that most people are familiar with.
There are animals…
that change parts of their look temporarily.
They can change color or they can change shape slightly when they’re attacking or being attacked, but there really are no genuine shapeshifters where a particular individual organism can completely change its species into something else.
Before the mid-19th century, how seriously were werewolves taken as a danger, do you think, socially?
Well, that’s an interesting question.
They certainly were believed throughout most of the world.
But I think people certainly feared witches more than they feared werewolves.
If you look at the history of witch crazes, there was really never a werewolf craze.
And there are only a few…
only a few existing record trial records of of werewolves on trial and and in the ones that do existed it seems like the various magistrates who presided over these trials really didn’t accept the existence of werewolves and and there’s one famous one from the balkans region uh…
where this old man is called in to give evidence at a trial for something else, and in the middle of the trial, he just sort of blurts out, oh, you know, and I’m a werewolf, and sort of stuns the crowd, and the magistrate asks him to explain, and the old guy starts going on about how he’s a werewolf, and he has werewolf friends, and he’s visited hell and talked to Satan and done all these things, and you get the idea from the…
court transcripts that the magistrate is more annoyed than scared by this.
Sort of, you know, can somebody get the crazy old guy out of here?
We have witches to burn.
And he’s sort of using up our witch-burning times on the silly werewolf idea.
So it sort of depended upon where you were.
There was a general belief in werewolves, and people were sort of afraid of encountering them.
But I don’t think the fear was as great as the fear of witches or other entities that were popular at the time.
I think he was probably just trying to angle for mistrial, would be my guess.
That’s possible.
That’s a pretty dangerous ploy, though, that’s standing also close to the flames.
Yes.
Does your research have implications?
Because you talked about the whole notion of the animal-human hybrids.
What’s your position on some of the non-hybrids such as, for example, Nessie or the Duende of Latin America or other things?
I mean, I assume that much of your argument still holds up, even though they’re not necessarily something that would have had cold water thrown on them by the origin species.
Right.
Well, it’s an interesting question.
And yes, whenever you start talking about these natural monsters, if we might call them those,
things like Nessie or Bigfoot, which are not generally thought of as being supernatural, the formula, I think, still holds.
Because what happens is, as I said before, historians have this notion of the heroic narrative, where you have a grand idea which tells us something good about some aspect of the past.
Take World War II, for example.
The heroic narrative of World War II is that you have the evil of the Nazis and the Japanese Empire must be defeated by the forces of good.
And that’s what happens.
The forces of good triumph over the evils of evil.
And so we can all look back on that and feel very good about it.
In the history of science, we have similar heroic narratives.
And one of the central heroic narratives of the history of science is that the world lives in darkness and superstition, and suddenly you get the Renaissance, and then you get the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment,
And science comes along and banishes all this kind of believing in the supernatural and theological explanations for things and the cold, hard truth of reason.
And empiricism comes along.
And it makes us happy about science.
Well, science is good.
Science is progressive.
It’s forward-moving.
And it leaves bad things in the past, and we move forward into the light and goodness of the future.
And what…
the history of monsters does, what the history of cryptozoology does, as a number of other things do, is kind of throw that heroic narrative into a bit of chaos.
Because yes, while science does tend to banish things like mermaids and werewolves and other such creatures, it opens up belief in other kinds of monsters.
It simply substitutes one group of monsters for another.
It doesn’t banish the notion of monsters completely.
And what happens is that as the werewolves
So they get pushed off the stage.
Bigfoot and the Yeti and Nessie and Ogopogo and other similar creatures, McKeeley and Bembe, come along and get up on stage.
And while the scientific mainstream might not accept these creatures completely, at least they have a kind of underlying scientific justification.
And so they don’t go away completely.
So can I ask, what sort of feedback have you received regarding your theory so far, and have you had any opposition to your theory?
The feedback had actually been pretty good.
I was sort of caught off surprise when my work got noticed at all, quite frankly.
USA Today picked up on it, and then Science, the American Academy for the Advanced Science picked up on it.
And then once it hit the Internet, it started getting repeated on dozens of different websites.
And mostly the reaction was really quite positive.
People sort of got the joke a little bit and kind of played with it.
A few people said, well, you know, you can’t do this.
This is a bad idea because werewolves are supernatural and Bigfoot’s a real creature.
And one of my favorite reactions was somebody wrote in,
to a website and said that this guy, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
I just saw Twilight and there are werewolves in Twilight, so he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Huh.
So that was fun.
Thank you.
But generally speaking, the reaction was pretty positive.
I think that anecdote you just gave is an interesting one because in many ways, as you know, what you find when you start looking for these creatures is
is that you may start out looking for the actual physical specimen itself, but if it’s not there, as many of these don’t seem to be, then what you end up studying is the phenomenology of the creatures.
You start looking at the folklore and the depictions of it in artwork and films and whatever else.
The guy’s comment that, well, werewolves are still around.
I saw one last night.
There’s sort of an element of truth to that.
Darwin did not kill off the werewolves.
They’re still very much with us in books and whatever else.
And, of course, Bigfoot as well.
And so it seems to me that what’s going to happen is that many of these old creatures, unicorns, leprechauns, centaurs, what have you, some of them have died off.
I mean, I don’t know if there’s been any credible dragon sightings recently.
But there have been werewolf sightings.
Yes, and so can you talk some about that?
Yeah, well, this is another sort of hole in the facade of the heroic narrative of science banishing all foolish thinking.
As recently as, I believe it was 1999, 2000, in Wisconsin, the Beast of Bray Road, people believed they saw a creature which was a werewolf.
And this was not in some third world country amongst illiterate people.
It was in the heart of the industrial world.
And so, you know, there’s still people out there who believe these creatures are real.
And there’s Goatman.
Don’t forget Goatman.
Right.
And, you know, the Chukacabra and similar, you know, the Skunk Able.
All across North America, we still have these creatures.
So do you think these things exist or not?
Personally, I got to say, I don’t think they do.
Oh, no.
I’m a historian.
I’m not a biologist.
I accept that tomorrow we might find one.
And if we do, I’ll come back on the show and say, I’m sorry, I was wrong.
But of the evidence I’ve seen so far, some of it is really quite intriguing.
But I don’t think they’re there.
I think we would have found one by now.
Well, as a historian of science, let me just do a quick follow-up on that because, as I’m sure you’re aware, one of the both famous and favorite animals that cryptozoologists like to hold up is the coelacanth.
I can’t swing a cat in my library without hitting a book on cryptozoology that doesn’t just put that front and center as being, well, obviously, scientists are wrong about this, and I keep thinking, well, hold on here.
There’s a very big difference between…
you know, a creature that was known to exist, was thought to be extinct, was rediscovered in 1938, and so to my mind, the coelacanth is really sort of a red herring in a weird pun way.
No, I would agree with you completely.
I mean, so what’s your thought on the implications, if any, of the coelacanth to cryptozoology?
Right, well, I’m…
I have a number of friends who are cryptozoologists, and they always get mad when I say these sorts of things, but they…
I hope they know I say it as a loyal opposition, not as an angry debunker.
But the problem of the coelacanth is, first of all, it was not discovered.
It was not found because someone was looking for it.
It was found accidentally.
No one had any idea this fish might exist until someone stumbled across it.
There was a fossil record of these creatures, but no one thought, you know, there still must be coelacanths swimming around.
If only we could find one.
And a lot of those examples, like the Okapi is another one, these creatures that are discovered that are not actually being looked for.
And so there aren’t that many examples of the classic cryptozoological discovery where someone thinks, I think animal X must exist in this particular environment, in this particular place, and we’ll go there and then we find it.
The Patterson film notwithstanding and all those Bigfoot footprints notwithstanding, we haven’t yet done that.
And what gets very interesting about this is that non-cryptozoologists, biologists, zoologists, they find undiscovered creatures all the time.
Hardly a day goes by when some unknown biological entity is discovered, a new beetle, a new flower, a new microorganism.
But nobody really gets that worked up about it outside the scientific community.
It’s only the bigger animals that people really are fascinated by.
Oh, a new beetle.
So what?
I’ve got beetles all over my house.
You’ve got to crow about it.
They want the big, showy animals.
And, of course, there’s a big difference between positing a population of 12-foot-tall giant humanoids in North America and positing a population of fish off the Comoros Islands.
Right.
These are just two very different animals.
Right.
But in the end, the beauty part of all this is tomorrow we might find one, and then we have to reconsider.
But until we do, it’s just an idea.
It’s just a theory that these things are there.
So with these modern sightings, what do you think?
I know you said you’re not a biologist, but what do you think they may have been?
Oh, there’s probably a dozen different answers to that.
People see something, they think it’s something else.
Again, like I said, I can’t really… My animal recognition skills are not what they should be.
But I’ve seen…
examples on film, unambiguous examples on film where, for example, bears wander into communities of houses and people see them and they shoot them either with a video camera or they shoot them with a gun.
And I have to think that if there are populations, there are breeding populations of anomalous primates out there, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
It would just be another animal that we were aware of.
That makes sense.
I think so.
Of course, we’re all skeptics.
Right.
You’ve made it clear that this paper or presentation is lighthearted.
It seems like there’s some truth to it, that the correlation between the rise of…
Well, and I think that maybe because the rise of Darwin also represents the rise of more materialism and how that materialism can sort of drive out through education some of these mythic ideas.
Yet clearly we seem to have some need for myth and monsters.
But as a historian, how would you go about falsifying such a theory or how could you prove your theory if you were trying to make it more serious?
Well, actually, in a way, I am.
One of the things, the research project I’m working on right now is that what most people don’t realize is the role that monsters played in the development of evolutionary theory.
There is a long tradition, I’m arguing in this project, that the attempt by scholars to engage with monstrous creatures, going all the way back to Pliny the Elder in the Greco-Roman world,
helps pave the way for modern evolutionary thinking unintentionally.
Because if you think of ideas about species differentiation and species transmutation and where do monsters come from, you’re essentially setting up for belief in evolutionary theory.
So there is a long tradition of creatures like sea serpents, for example,
and mermaids, which played a really big but now sort of forgotten role in the late 19th century discussion of evolution.
What happens is anti-evolutionists say, well, if this Darwin guy is right, that would mean that you have to believe in these sort of phantasms like werewolves or sea serpents, and we know those are just childish delusions.
And so therefore, the world should be, if Darwin is right, the world should be full up with sea monsters and mermaids and hippogriffs and other such creatures.
And so since they don’t, Darwin must be wrong.
And then pro-evolutionists took the same idea and they said, well, wait a minute.
The world was once filled up with such creatures, and we have the fossil evidence for it.
The plesiosaurs and the ichthyosaurs once swam the seas as majestically as any sea serpent.
and the dinosaurs roamed the land were as frightening as anything out of Greek mythology.
And Archaeopteryx, we have fossil evidence for it.
So Darwin does show that monsters were real.
And so there was this really interesting sort of battle that goes on between the pro- and anti-evolution camps using monsters to beat each other up with.
So what do you think Darwin would have thought of the notion of werewolves and other animals like that?
Well, Darwin doesn’t really address the issue.
My feeling is that he probably would not have believed in them because there are a number of places in his published works and in his unpublished correspondence where he says, I don’t believe that something can be half of one thing and half of another.
although there is a really interesting quote where he’s writing to a naturalist friend of his, and this is in the 1840s, and a French book on both animal and human monsters had recently come out by Geoffrey St. Hilaire, and Darwin says to his correspondent, I just finished reading Hilaire’s book on animal monsters, and a nasty, curious subject it is.
So he sort of had a little bit of interest in it, but…
I think in the end he kind of dismissed it.
What’s your take on the Beast of Gavidon?
I’m sorry?
The Beast of Gavidon, the French werewolf story in 18, I think 17 something.
Yeah, again, with all of these stories, if we accept that you can’t have a natural caned human hybrid,
or if we accept that even on a supernatural level, one species can’t shapeshift into another.
It had to have been something else.
We know there’s a long history of people using the supernatural to gain political ascendancy or to outwit enemies or simply to be able to steal neighboring land when they know these things don’t exist, but they know that society at large might accept it.
And so they’ll accuse people of doing something, which is essentially the basis of most of the witch trials.
They really had nothing to do with witches at all.
It was much more political and cultural.
It’s been my experience that there’s a strong contingent of young earth creationists who seem very, very interested in finding some kind of living dinosaur or monster to disprove evolution.
Have you looked into that?
I have.
We here at Cain a couple of years ago,
We had some people from Answers in Genesis came to give a talk.
The Student Christian Association had invited them, and I showed a science for it.
At first, I wasn’t going to go, but then I thought, well, I am supposed to be the history science guy, so I’ll go, and I’ll sit in the back, and I’ll be quiet, and I won’t say anything, and I’ll just let them say their spiel.
And I went, and I got there a little bit late,
And I walked in, and there were exactly five people there.
Two of them were the two presenters, and two of them were students, and the fifth one was me.
And so I tried to keep to my – I wasn’t going there for a fight.
I just wanted to listen.
They should have offered free donuts.
I think they actually did have free donuts.
Even that wasn’t enough to get anybody in there.
But they’re talking the show in a PowerPoint presentation.
About three-quarters of the way through, the guy said something.
I forget what it was.
It was something about carbon dating that I knew he was just factually wrong on.
And I had sort of reached my limit.
It was like 9 o’clock at night.
I had been teaching and reading and writing all day, and I just wasn’t in the mood for it.
And I said, well, I’ve got to say something.
So I put my hand up.
And we got into this whole conversation.
And at one point…
I said to the guy, well, you know, I didn’t really come here to take over the talk.
I didn’t want to get into a fight about anything.
I wanted to let you guys speak.
And so he said, no, no, no, I want to keep talking.
I want to keep talking.
And he started showing me these slides of cryptids, you know, McKillian Bembe and the Thunderbird and these other things.
And he goes, well, what’s this?
What’s this?
And I said, well, that’s Bigfoot.
And he sort of was a little upset that I actually knew what this was.
And he shows me another slide.
He goes, well, what’s that?
I said, well, it’s a pterodactyl.
It’s a painting of a pterodactyl.
No, no, it’s the Thunderbird.
It’s the Thunderbird.
I said, well, it’s a painting of a pterodactyl.
Then he showed me a picture of sort of a dinosaur crashing through some sort of like a jungle scene.
And by now I know where he’s going with it.
He says, well, what’s this?
I said, well, it’s probably Michaelian Bembe.
And then he really got mad because I knew what this was.
And so how do you explain that?
How do you explain that?
I said, well, I don’t explain it.
It’s a myth.
Bring one in, bring a real one in, and we can talk about it.
What I find interesting and sort of amusing about the creationist attempt to embrace cryptozoologists, because most of them won’t do it, because they sort of sense that that’s sort of a road that if they go down, they can get in more trouble than it’s worth.
But if, for example, we do find a dinosaur wandering around the Congo,
it doesn’t necessarily prove young Earth.
It simply proves that dinosaurs lasted beyond the point in which we thought they did.
And so the belief by some creationists that if you prove that dinosaurs are still around, or if you prove that Bigfoot exists, that you’ll somehow undermine the notion of evolution, and it’s just not going to happen, because it doesn’t, logically.
That’s a really interesting point.
I don’t know if you know this or not, but right now as we speak here in October, there’s actually an alleged chupacabra that’s being exhibited at a creationist museum outside of Syracuse.
I wrote a piece on it, and it’s almost certainly a coyote, and we’ll see how much you paid for it.
But yeah, he’s convinced that this so-called chupacabra, in scare quotes, is going to embarrass and refute science.
And it never does.
No, it doesn’t.
If anything, I think people who, if you believe that Bigfoot is real, if you believe that Chico Copper is real, God bless you.
The people who are going to prove this one way or another are not going to be mainstream scientists because they don’t think it exists.
If we ever find out that Bigfoot is real, it’s going to be proven by a cryptozoologist.
So I have to give them that.
But I think the creations want to do this.
Go ahead.
I love it.
I find it fascinating.
I want to see more.
If they do find a real Chukka Kabbalah, let’s take a look at it.
And you’re not going to undermine the idea of evolution.
I just was having a discussion with some of my students, because I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but an anti-evolution organization just put out an edition of The Origin of Species.
with a long rambling introduction, essentially arguing that Darwin was this horrible person.
And one of my students had read it and said, well, what do you think about this?
Was Darwin really this bad guy?
And I said, well, first of all, he wasn’t.
If you really want to read an excellent book on Darwin’s anti-slavery, pro-abolition feelings, you have to get Adrian Desmond and Jim Morris’ recent book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause.
Even if the anti-evolutionists are correct, even if Darwin really was this terrible, awful, racist bastard, it still doesn’t mean that evolution doesn’t work.
Isaac Newton was a peculiar guy, but that doesn’t mean if you jump off the roof of your house, you’re not going to fall.
And so it doesn’t matter.
You can attack the theorist all you want.
The notion itself is still going to be there.
You’ve already made clear that your theory is not necessarily a serious theory, but it occurred to me that by 1865, when Sabin Baron Gould wrote his Book of Werewolves, that was also contemporaneous with the horrors of war coming into people’s living room through the development of photography.
So I was wondering, how much do you think the development of photography also impacted the lessening of fears of the supernatural when there were so many real-world horrors that people could suddenly see for themselves?
Well, I would question whether or not that really did undermine the supernatural, because what happens is, following the Civil War, you get a real surge in interest in spiritualism.
Now, obviously, spiritualism begins before the Civil War, but after the war, there’s this real kind of widespread interest in spiritualism in the United States because so many people lose loved ones in the war, and they’re desperate to try to contact them.
And so far from, I think, undermining supernatural belief, photography helped promote it.
I mean, you have a whole craze of spirit photography that really starts after the Civil War.
Wow.
So are you talking about like the Fox Sisters?
Right.
Well, the Fox Sisters, the notion of spiritualism in North America begins in the 1830s.
But and there’s and very quickly there’s a lot of interest in it.
But there’s this kind of nationwide surge following the Civil War because so many people have lost loved ones.
And what what may have seemed like just a sort of a silly belief prior to that suddenly like, well, if this is something I might be able to contact my dead son or my dead father with, I’ll give it a shot.
Right.
I think I even remember Lincoln and his wife wanting to try to contact their dead son.
Well, it was mostly his wife.
Yeah.
And soon after, William Mumler began faking spirit photos.
Right, right.
Okay.
Yes, that’s the thing.
That’s one of the things about the history of science.
We like to think that it’s this great, and it certainly is.
I’m certainly pro-revolution.
I’m pro-science.
But we have this misconstrued notion that science sweeps away the supernatural and science sweeps away the dark corners.
And sometimes it certainly does, but sometimes it allows for the dark corners to grow.
And in a way, when science does do that, it makes it even more difficult because we have come to, in the 21st century, we have come to believe that science is the final arbiter on all knowledge.
So if someone out there says, well, if Bigfoot is a primate, it’s an evolutionary species,
creature, so therefore science supports it and must be real, so I’ll believe in it.
That’s a jump.
And so it doesn’t always banish the dark things that go bump in the night.
Sometimes it helps them to grow.
So I was going to ask, why do you think werewolves seem to be so popular in current pop culture again?
Or do you think they never really went away?
Yeah, well…
I think it is a little more popular, certainly in the 20th century, since the introduction of the cinema.
But for my own, I always preferred the werewolf over the vampire.
The vampire always seemed like sort of the pompous ass of the monster world, where the werewolf seemed like a more tragic and sympathetic figure to me.
But that’s just me.
Do you think the interest has been pretty consistent in werewolves?
Um…
I think the popular print interest and cinema interest is greater now than it was in the past.
There aren’t that many werewolf novels, while there are lots of vampire novels in the late 19th century.
A lot of ghost stories, a lot of ghost novels, a lot of vampire novels, very few werewolf literature.
And now there’s tons of vampires, and still a lesser number of werewolf novels, but the paranormal romance field is huge right now with vampires.
Right, yeah.
And apparently somewhere along the line, the vampires and the werewolves were closely linked in ways that they were never in the past.
Right.
I mean, this is just a guess.
I haven’t actually done the research, but I do a lot of gaming.
Yeah.
And the White Wolf books.
All right.
The White Wolf, Werewolf, let’s see.
Vampires, the Requiem, and Werewolf, the Apocalypse.
I forget all the names of their books.
But they tied together werewolf and vampire lore.
And then, of course, there were the movies with Kate Beckinsale, which also had a longstanding war, which seemed pretty much a ripoff of White Wolf.
Right.
I don’t think people are watching those films for the werewolves.
Yeah, I think it’s the black leather.
That could be true, all the Euro trash and the violence, I don’t know.
And vampires have a better wardrobe.
They are very fashionable.
All they need to do now is walk slowly from explosions as though they don’t care.
I’m in, I’m in.
But yeah, I read a lot of the gaming stuff, and it seems to me that’s a White Wolf thing, and people just picked up on it.
But according, you know, White Wolf pretty much ripped off Anne Rice in their interpretation.
So, again, that’s just opinion.
So, tell us about your new book, The Pseudoscience of Critical Encyclopedia.
Oh, well, it’s supposed to be out pretty much now.
That’s what they told me.
That’s what my publisher, Greenwood, said.
It’s called Pseudoscience, a Critical Encyclopedia.
And I was asked to write this a couple of years ago by Greenwood Press.
And they said, you know, we’d like you to do, we want to put out an encyclopedia of pseudoscience.
And I said, you know, sure, I’ll do it.
But as I began to put together a proposal for it, I watch a lot of TV and I yell at my TV a lot.
I watch a lot of stuff on the Learning Channel and Smithsonian Channel and I see these shows about the supernatural.
And I love watching ghost hunters, but I end up yelling at the TV, which is really sad.
Does it help?
Yeah, because they make such statements and backed up with no historical scholarship, with no scientific acumen, not even a sense of literary flourish.
And so when I sat down to do this book on pseudoscience, I said, you know, I’m not going to do just your –
average, straightforward, A to Z.
Here’s what red mercury is, and this is what a flying saucer looks like.
I wanted to examine it.
I wanted to write it in a way that when readers read it, they would not just see some fun information about interesting topics, but learn to think scientifically, learn to think.
about the nature of the philosophy of science, learn to distinguish between what is real science and what isn’t, and to kind of see it as rather than just a compendium of a bunch of things in alphabetical order, to make it a kind of connected work that could read like, not like an encyclopedia, but as a complete work.
and in which you would be constantly asking questions about, well, if you’re looking at ghosts, what is it about ghosts that makes it pseudoscientific?
What is it about ghosts that if we wanted it to be scientific, we would have to do in order to make it scientific?
And so I approached it from that point of view as a learning device for studying the difference between genuine science and pseudoscience.
Sounds great.
Look forward to seeing it.
Well, like I said, it’s
You can order it now, and they told me in the middle of October it would be available, and it’s now the middle of October, so hopefully you can get it.
What did you find most interesting?
What was the best pseudoscience you’d never heard of?
Oh, good question.
I’d heard about most of the stuff I did.
There’s a few things that I’d seen since I put in the final manuscript that I wish I had put in
But maybe they’ll let me do a second volume.
I can put all that stuff in.
The thing that struck me, the one thing I really wasn’t aware of at the time that I didn’t include, which not only made me scratch my head but made me sort of angry, was this concept of gay repair theory or gay repair therapy.
Oh, boy.
Where you have Christian fundamentalists who think that you can sort of force a person to not be gay anymore in the length that they go.
and the genuine harm that is being done to people through this.
So that was the thing that most caught my attention.
And, you know, laughing at this monster doesn’t make me angry, but this sort of made me angry.
Yeah, I never really thought about that as a pseudoscience because it seemed almost like a magical approach.
Wow.
And what’s really interesting is that one of the leaders of the gay repair therapy movement
apparently had a bit of a lapse and came out and said, look, I’m gay and that’s it, I can’t change.
And that was a bit of a blow to the overall movement.
Like, that’s really surprising.
Right, yeah, well, yeah.
But, you know, I’m a big advocate for gay rights and gay equality and, well, civil rights, because I think, you know, we all have those things.
So, that’s, yeah, I really hadn’t looked into that very much except for the sort of comical takes that, like, The Daily Show and Kobe had done on them.
Right.
Well, it is an inherently funny idea until you see the actual human toll that it takes.
If somebody believes in Bigfoot, and I disagree, that’s fine.
Nobody’s getting hurt by it.
If you want to believe in Nessie or if you want to believe in UFOs or whatever, but there are pseudoscientific ideas that do have real-world costs, and that’s one of them.
Yeah, I think so.
Great.
Well, thanks for having me on any time.
Hopefully you’ll get the Munster Talk bump with your book sale.
One last thing.
Here at Kane, we have a historical lecture series.
And in the first week of December, I’m going to be giving the talk on Darwin and werewolves.
So if anybody’s in the New Jersey area, we’ll be putting it up online.
You can see it.
And it’ll be a free event, so people can come by.
Excellent.
Thank you very, very much for your time.
Great.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Monster Talk.
Today you heard about werewolves, the role of Darwin’s theory of evolution in banishing these creatures to the world of myth, and insights into the relationship between cryptozoology and creationism.
Our guest today was Dr. Brian Riegel, and your hosts were myself, Blake Smith, Benjamin Radford, and Dr. Karen Stolzner.
Thank you.
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I apologize.
I have kind of a funky voice.
I have a little bit of a cold going, and I’m high on NyQuil.
But other than that, I think this will be a great interview.
Okay, great.
So am I.