What do Skinwalker Ranch, Bigfoot research, and haunted objects have in common? Keep listening to find out!

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Welcome to the PEEP Podcast! I’m your host Nicolle Morock, and I’m grateful you’re here! The two big ideas behind the PEEP Podcast are to show that the paranormal is more normal than most people think and to connect the science to the psi, including ESP, hauntings, and cryptids! In this episode, I’m sharing what I learned at Cryptid Con in Lexington, Kentucky last month.

But first, I’m excited to announce that my novels, Daughter of the Mystic Moon, The Tritium Hypothesis, and The Dark Season, will be available as part of the Smashwords 2025 End of Year Sale! This is a chance to get my books, along with books from many other great authors, at a promotional discount. It runs from December 8^th through January 1^st. You can find the promo link in the show notes or visit https://smashwords.com/sale.

Now back to tonight’s topic…

So, what DO Skinwalker Ranch, Bigfoot research, haunted objects, and this podcast have in common? There are many seekers of knowledge willing to travel long distances to listen to people who are researching them. Happily, I was one of those people the weekend of November 22^nd.

This was my first Cryptid Con, and it was a lot of fun. The last two years, I traveled to Small Town Monsters’ Monster Fest, but they decided not to do the event this year. My friends from those events and I wanted to find a decent replacement to meet up again this year, and Cryptid Con won out.

Although, I’d only heard of a few of the speakers, I decided to be open-minded and learn what I can. After all, as someone who rarely watches TV or streaming, I realize there are a lot of names I won’t recognize because I live in my cozy little hobbit hole most of the year.

I also prepared by cramming as many episodes of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch into what little free time I had in the month prior. Keep in mind, I also spent the first week of November at Author Nation, so I basically got through most of the first three seasons. After all, if I was paying for the VIP ticket to meet the stars, I should at least be a little informed, right?

Sadly, now I’m hooked, and after talking with Thomas and Dragon, I’ll definitely finish binging the show. While I know the production crew takes liberties with the “reality” of it, (reality in air quotes, of course) I am convinced the show is pretty legit, and, of course, I appreciate that they do their best to use the scientific method to understand the high strangeness going on at the ranch.

Both men told me that prior to joining the team, they were not interested in the paranormal and thought the stories were just hype. During their Q&A panel on Saturday, someone asked if they ever considered quitting for their own safety. The answer? With the way the activity follows you home, quitting wouldn’t do any good. They’re in it and staying for each other.

They also said that the production company is only on-site 15 weeks out of the year and the activity doesn’t stop because the cameras do. After all these years, they have countless stories to tell, and it’s hard to choose a favorite.

I really appreciated the way they talked about the team and how they do it for each other at this point. You can get a hint of the comradery watching the show, but you really feel it in person.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Skinwalker Ranch panel was Saturday afternoon. Let’s rewind back to the first talk I attended Saturday morning: Matt Pruitt’s “Adaptations: The Phenomenal Sasquatch.”

Matt compared sasquatch to ambush hunters like tigers, and he did it in a though-provoking way. I won’t say how in case you have the opportunity to see him do a similar presentation, but I will tell you that he made a good point about the likelihood that they’ve adapted to be opportunistic ambush hunters.

One really good point he also made that I hadn’t thought about until his talk: historically, sasquatch sightings are about 50/50 night vs day. That’s 50% at night, 50% during the day. Does that mean they are out equally in both day parts? Not necessarily. Fewer people are outside at night, and it’s harder to see long distances at night. So, if 50% of the sightings are at night, they are likely more active then.

Another thought-provoking idea he shared – maybe it’s hard for us to see them because they spend so much of their time intentionally not being seen so that they can ambush their prey. Makes sense to me!

The next talk I attended was Cliff Barackman’s – also Bigfoot researcher. Cliff left TV a while ago and is putting his heart and resources into his museum: North American Bigfoot Center. His talk was a summary of the highlights of 2024, and he barely got through it in the allotted time.

Cliff does not consider sasquatch to be anything other than a real, non-paranormal animal – most likely an ape. Here are his main points related to that: supernatural or interdimensional creatures don’t leave footprints, forage for grubs in old logs, and bend down by a favorite pool for a drink of water. He’s got a good point there.

Cliff said researchers should look for trackways. Most Sasquatch sightings are 2-3 seconds long, and you can't learn much from that. But if you find a trackway from a Sasquatch, you can learn where it's going, what it's doing, and extrapolate what it might do elsewhere. It can be observed without knowing it's being observed. Because when they know someone is observing them, they behave differently.

Honestly, by the time Cliff finished, I was thinking about buying some wooded acreage near some of our NC bigfoot hot spots just to hike in my own woods and look for tracks. That’s not the first time I’d had that thought, and it won’t be the last, I’m sure.

Paranormal Researcher John Zaffis was next on my agenda, and he gave a fast-paced trip down memory lane, sharing how he got his start with Ed and Lorraine Warren, some of his more fascinating cases, and how he treats the haunted items he’s collected over the years, even after the Haunted Collector TV show had run it’s course.

I noticed his energy a little off that weekend, and he seemed like he didn’t want to be there. On my trip home, I learned he’d lost a family member that weekend, so I said a prayer for him and his family to have peace about it.

I can’t say I learned much from his talk since I’ve seen him speak before, and paranormal investigation is kind of my thing. I agreed with much of what he said, and the few things I didn’t agree with aren’t really that big of deal in the grand scheme of the paranormal.

One of the most exciting presentations of the weekend came from our friend Darby Orcutt. You might remember Darby from episodes 23 and 66 of this podcast. He was there to provide an update on the project he introduced here on Episode 66: The Study of Allegedly Morphologically Anomalous Samples and talk about how the ideas behind this research can be used for related topics and additional sample types – like audio!

I wasn’t sure how an interdisciplinary academic from NC State University would be received by the attendees of Cryptid Con. He’s not a reality TV star or a YouTube celebrity. He’s a real, down-to-earth researcher who is making in-roads with other academics and convincing many to give consideration to the idea that there may be an unknown primate in the woods of North America, and we may be able to prove that with rigorous scientific investigation of anomalous samples.

You know what? His talk ended with thunderous applause! I’m so excited about what Darby is accomplishing, and proud to consider him a friend of this show. I’ll re-share the links for his project in the show notes, so if you have a biological sample to share or want to make a donation to help fund his research (via NCSU), just click the links!

Sunday’s presentations started with “High Strangeness” by Joe Purdue and Ron Lanham of Paranormal Horizons. What caught my attention in this talk is they have recorded the same 1.6 GHz frequency that the guys researching Skinwalker Ranch see. They also regularly pick up on 1.75 and 1.8 gigahertz.

Also like at Skinwalker ranch, they use infrared and 3^rd generation night vision to record anomalies you can’t see with the naked eye. Some of the video they shared made me want to invest in some new gear and go hang out in the woods… are you sensing a theme here?

The next talk was Pat Spain’s Cryptozoology Adventures. Pat was on the Beast Hunter and Legend Hunter shows and has done some pretty incredible stuff in the name of science and entertainment. He shared some of his more memorable moments from those shows and pointed out that there’s still a lot left to uncover in this world.

I agree!

James Keenan took us back to the Uinta basin to discuss ancient phenomenon. I couldn’t remember why he looked familiar until he started his talk by reminding us that he was on an episode of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch – one I had just watched the week before I headed to Lexington.

James was a police officer and a private investigator before turning his attention to the safer topic of anthropology. While working on petroglyphs and pictographs in northern Utah, he became fascinated by Skinwalker Ranch.

He's the researcher who was doing magnetometer readings around Skinwalker Ranch, looking for voids and high amounts of iron. You should not see both from the same location, but on the mesa, he did.

He shared a fascinating story about the adjacent property to the south of Skinwalker Ranch, Space Wolf Research. A metal shipping container moved from parallel to a small house to perpendicular to it with no explanation. It happened 150 feet from site 4 that had electromagnetic readings that shifted back and forth. The side of the shipping container was charged for four hours after they found it.

He also talked about the “rumble of the Uintas,” mysterious sounds mentioned by early Mormon settlers, petroglyphs and pictograms that seem to be showing non-human entities, and he pointed out that if you draw a line through famed reported UFO crashes that happened in 1966, 1947, 1978, 2009 (UFO Alley), you get a straight line from Roswell and Corona, NM to just east of Skinwalker Ranch. Coincidence?

The presentations at Cryptid Con were worth the trip, as were the books and silly things I bought from the vendors. But the best part was catching up with my friends from other parts of the country, including my Monster Fest 2 Crew and Micah Hanks, who wasn’t there as a speaker, but was there, nonetheless.

I would definitely do it again.

Thank you for listening.

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