How did they know the monsters' names ahead of time?

I was obsessed with this show as a kid; in the 70s, Ultraman was played heavily in syndication (the first series only -- no idea why the other series never made the jump to the US, at least not until Ultraman Tiga in the 90s). Several years back, I picked up the two box sets with the full series, the one with the restored original scenes that were deleted from the exported English versions.

One thing I couldn't figure out, either then or now, was how the Science Patrol members often seemed to know the monsters' names when they should have been encountering them for the first time. When Hayata named them, it made sense, since he shared Ultraman's knowledge and presumably had encountered some of them before. But several episodes have other members recognizing the monsters, and it didn't seem like they were just assigning names to them on the spot, at least not all the time (once in awhile they did say something like "We're calling the creature 'X'," but other times it was more along the lines of "Look, there's Y"). I got the distinct impression that there was a backstory to several of the kaiju that didn't come across in the English versions.

Did this make sense in the Japanese versions? I've watched all of the versions with English subtitles that don't match the dubbed dialog, so I believe the subtitles were at least a closer approximation of the Japanese scripts, but I still feel like there is some context missing.