A Conversation with Dan Aykroyd (Part 2)

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s interview with Dan Aykroyd concludes with a scientific discussion about ghosts, aliens, and cars on “a mission from God” with a little help from astrophysicist Chuck Liu.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist and in my day job I direct the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. And for today's show, we're featuring an interview with Dan Aykroyd, the one, the only. He came by the museum one day and visited me in my office. I pulled out the microphone and got him, nabbed him for StarTalk. And to get to help me hear these clips, I've got Chuck Lou, Charles Liu. Hi. StarTalk fans know him as my friend and colleague and he's professor of astrophysics at College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, thanks. So Dan Aykroyd was in Trading Places, Driving Miss Daisy, Blues Brothers,

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live. He also, he might be best known for Ghostbusters. Ah. And you know, he wrote the script for Ghostbusters. Wow, what a wonderful role. And it's not just an accident. He goes deep with ghosts. Did you know this? I did not. You didn't know this. Let's find out with my first clip with Dan Aykroyd.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  At the turn of the century, in the late 1800s and-

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd have to specify with century now.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, late 1800s and early 1900s. A lot of religions had gone through America and they had recruited many people, but some people-

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mormonism is among them.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Yes, Mormonism and Methodism and the Shakers. You can look at a lot of sects and cults and religion. In fact, they used to call Upper New York State and Pennsylvania the burnt over district because the Bible salesman had been through there and the whole area was burnt over with conventional religion. So there was an embrace of spiritualism that took place there and also in Britain. And you had the founding of the British Society for Psychical Research and then the subsequent-

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Psychical-

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Psychical Research and then the subsequent founding of the American Society for Psychical Research. William James, of course, was the Harvard Psychologist. Who embraced spiritualism. Because the building at Harvard, the William James Hall. That's right. Now, he was very much a believer in the paranormal and the super normal, if we might say. And the ASPR still operates here on Seventy Second Street in Manhattan. They have the largest library on paranormal. I didn't know. Circumstances and events there. And Carlos Osas was its director for many years. And of course, they were tied in with Maimonides Dream Lab and and Esther Roll and all of these psychic researchers. So basically, a turn of the century, you've got this interest in spiritualism. Well, you had a couple of sisters called the Fox Sisters.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  They were in Rochester, New York, and they were two adolescent sisters and they started to hear rappings and knockings happening in their house. And then a voice began to speak to them. And they didn't know what it was. They were being disturbed. And they did a little digging, literal digging in the basement of their house in Rochester, and they found a corpse, a body. And they did a little tracing and they found out that this was a traveling salesman who was brought into this house and was murdered by one of the occupants of the house prior to when they had purchased it. This was an entity that they called Mr. Splitfoot, and he traveled with them purportedly. And they did psychic readings all around the world with him. So, so the, the spirit presumably of this skeleton is what they called Mr.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Who's traveled with them. Now, at the time, you had them traveling, you had other mediums. All in the news. Right there at the turn of the century, all there in newspapers and in, and disseminated in the media at the time. You had the Campbell Brothers and the Bang Sisters. They were precipitated painters. What they did was they would sit in front of a hall of four or 500 people. They would put a canvas in front of them, six feet away from their fingers. They would wiggle their fingers and all of a sudden, there would be a beautiful photorealistic image that would appear without paint, not airbrushing, not anything like that. So, my great grandfather, Sam Aykroyd, was the psychic reviewer in his hometown of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. If one of these acts would come through town, and they were acts, it was a presentation. It was an hour and a half show of a medium. Before TV. Before TV and before a radio and before any kind of entertainment

• 4:10Speaker 01

  other than show of vaudeville, you would have these psychic acts come through town. So my great grandfather was the reviewer. He saw the precipitated painters, he saw mediums, he saw trance mediums. And in fact, had a great interest in this and was known in the town for this. A gentleman walked up to him in the 1930s and said, "My name is Walter Ashurst. I believe I have a gift, Dr. Aykroyd." And Walter Ashurst became the Aykroyd family trance medium for about 10 years. Meaning that he would come over to the house and sit and it was a very presentational thing. People would come in black cars, in black suits, they would come on Sunday. My great-grandfather Sam was the impresario. They would sit down at a seance table, they would form the home circle, hold hands.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  And Walter Ashurst would go into a trance and would channel spiritual entities. Now, you can believe this or not, at one point, he got up on a chair and he was kneeling over and he was all crumpled over and he was talking in this strange Viennese dialect, they figured. During the trance. During the trance, and they didn't know what he was doing until one of the family began to research physicists who were from Austria and Dr. Steinmetz, you've heard of Steinmetz. A Charles Proteus Steinmetz? Yeah. Yeah, he's a, yeah, yeah. He's like an engineering physicist. Yeah, well, he was a hunchback. Yes, I knew that. And he used to work on the back of a chair. In fact, it's probably on my shelf, right behind us. He used to work kneeling on the back of a chair. Now Walter Ashurst had a grade 12 education, was a locomotive mechanic, probably knew nothing of Steinmetz. And so we believe that that may have been a genuine channeling.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Anyway, this was passed on to my grandfather who had seances. My father, as a young boy, witnessed seances. My uncle said he walked into the room once and there was a trumpet flying around the room, speaking in voices, and when he came into the room, the trumpet hit the ground. Okay, now, you've got to look at the background of why my great-grandfather was researching all this. At the time, you had Crooks and you had Arthur Conan Doyle. The author of Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, Crooks was a physicist at the time. These were people who were seriously interested in spiritualism and my great-grandfather was a part of this movement. So, to get to Ghostbusters, when I was a kid, instead of at the summer cottage reading National Geographics and old Life magazines, I was reading the journals of the American Society for Psychical Research.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And I picked up a journal one day and it talked about quantum physics and parapsychology and I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great to use the science of parapsychological interest, real scientific inquiry? And marry it with the concept of the gold ghost comedies of the 30s, The Bowery Boys, Bob Hope, and that's where Ghostbusters came from, from my family's interest and just the entertainment industry always having an interest in ghosts. But Howard Carrington, Oliver Crooks, Arthur Conan Doyle, William James, these were scientific inquests at the time, but a serious interest in, you know, what is the particulate matter that makes up a ghost? I mean, what was that stewardess seeing of the ghost of Flight 401 when they had a crash of a Lockheed 1011 in a swamp in Florida? The crash killed 400 people,

• 7:02Speaker 01

  they took the wreck, they put it into a warehouse. And then they had an L-1011 that had an elevator fail. So they took the elevator from the wreck and they put it in this new plane. About a week after that, stewardesses, pilots were starting to see the apparition of the flight engineer from the wreck who died. His name was Don Repo. He had red hair, they saw the stripes, they saw the uniform, they saw him. Eastern Airlines had to put out a blanket directive, "Don't talk about this. We don't want people to think there are ghosts flying on our airlines." I want to know physically, and I want scientists to begin to inquire, what is the particulate matter? What's going on molecularly? What's acting here? Is it oxygen, nitrogen? What's in the air that can produce an apparition where people can actually manifest in their vision the apparition of someone who's dead? That's where I think

• 7:45Speaker 01

  spiritualism should go, right into the scientific. And so we've got to entice serious scientific inquirists to look into this. And so far, no one's interested, except me.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When StarTalk Radio returns, I'll have more of my interview with Dan Aykroyd.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Radio. I'm here with my friend and colleague, Charles Wu.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Hey, Neil.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for being on.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Oh, it is my honor and my pleasure. You have only the slightest inkling how much I enjoy coming here.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you, thank you. And we're featuring my interview with Dan Aykroyd from a visit that he gave at my office. And we'd hit on all the stuff that interested him.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Tremendous amount to chew on.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in this show, we're talking about his... You know, he dabbled in the paranormal and that's kind of intriguing. Now, as an artist, I don't care where they get their inspiration from. I mean, as a scientist, I can say, don't do that. But if that prompted him to write Ghostbusters,

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  which was a fun romp, who am I to stop whatever he wants to do at all?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Now, remember, as he wrote Ghostbusters, he wrote himself in as the nerdy scientist, Dr. Raymond Stantz.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but also, the paranormal elements of that movie were almost caricatures.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were comical, they were not, they are so serious and here's the funny movie. The whole thing was a, was a romp.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a fascinating take on it. And he has a whole family history in there. How could he not write a movie about ghosts?

• 9:20Speaker 02

  That's exactly what he explained.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. We've got a whole clip here, just have him talk more about ghosts.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Find out, because he wants science to investigate ghosts. He's not saying they're real no matter what you say. He's saying, look, science has tools and methods, so go for it.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, good for him for doing that.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and science ought to be able to investigate anything, right? So let's see what else he tells us about ghosts. Another movie that dealt with ghosts was Ghost.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and that one-

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Survival of the Consciousness After Death.

• 9:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It certainly had comedic moments with Whoopi Goldberg getting, I think, a well-deserved Academy Award. But after that movie, the percentage of people who believed in ghosts went up. Because that was, it was so compelling to people. And one wouldn't necessarily expect that after Ghostbusters or the Stay Puft.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'd be a belief, yes, that's right. But what that tells me is that in spite of your strong feelings about this, you're not on some crusade to get everyone to think this way.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Oh, by no means, I think that's going to happen anyway. Anybody who has had a personal experience with the survival of consciousness after death, or have seen an apparition, or felt a cold spell in a room, or seen something at the, at the, you know, get on their bed. You know, I have a friend, he's a very well-known comedian. He dated a girl, her father died. He went to the funeral and the father came back and basically said, don't date my daughter. And his brother was in bed next to him and they both about to go to sleep and both of them saw this apparition. Now, you cannot take away that from this guy. He knows that happened, so-

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's real, it's as real as anything.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  It's as real as anything to him, whatever it was, was some electrochemical.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the thing, here's the thing, I'm of two minds here. So the one mind is, you can start off by asserting that ghosts are real, and then say, what scientific experiment would you bring to bear on this? I don't have a problem with that. However, there are cases where people could have done extraordinary experiments and they didn't. For example, a second cousin of mine, her father died, okay? Open casket in the room, she goes into the room, she's alone with him, sitting as close as I am to you right now. She then tells me, and she's otherwise of complete rational mind, she's a real estate agent, she's majored in accounting. She tells me she had a conversation with him while he was in the casket.

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I said, were the words coming out of nothing? No, he sat up and spoke to her. I'm now curious, I said, what did he say? What'd you talk about? I asked, how are you, are you fine? And he said, don't worry, I'm fine, I'm in a better place. And that was kind of the extent of the conversation. And I grabbed her and I said, if you're talking to a dead person, ask some good questions, like, where are you? Are you wearing clothes? Is it hot? Is it cold? Who else is there? What are the sights like? Are there clouds? Get some information. I don't see anybody doing that. So if I were to put suggestions out there, it would be, if you have an encounter with a ghost, get some real data, please.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Well, Henry Durant Watson, in an ancient text called The Ninth Plane, directly approaches that. And through mediums, he asked those questions, where are you? Do you see us? Can you come back to us? I'm not sure whether the body sat up or not. I'm more interested in experiences where there are these ethereal, sort of residual apparitions that kind of repeat on a loop, where you can come on a Wednesday afternoon at 3:00 PM and see the same spirit again and again, as I've heard from some real estate contact with properties in LA, for instance.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Properties they probably can't sell.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  In fact, you know, that when we sold our house in Los Angeles, there was a disclosure form that said we had to disclose any unusual activity in the house. We had to actually say that early on when we moved in, there was activity that could not be explained rationally or physically.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's LA.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's true, but, but you know, again, it comes down to the individual, what they're going to see, what they're going to experience, what they take away from the experience, and we can explain it away rationally that she was dreaming.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So have you ever seen an apparition?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright, so we both know that the human mind can do extraordinary things in itself.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why isn't it easier for you to just explain it all away as stuff that's going on in somebody's head?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Well, because I take-

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that a simple explanation?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  I go back to the Ghost of Flight 401, which has had several books written on it, and you had multiple witnesses there.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  By the way, when they took the elevator out of the new plane and put it back in the-

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why would they do that? But that's a separate question.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Well, they, yeah, they were looking for spare parts. The apparitions stopped. You, you had empirical, you had pilots, and you had stewardesses, you had people of the real world seeing an apparition of someone that they knew, and you had a corporate reaction to it that was quite extreme.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Frank Borman was really upset about it.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Frank Borman, Apollo astronaut.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was really upset about ghosts being on the plane.

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who became head of Eastern.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  That's right, and he, and it was under his administration that the, uh, the psychologists were telling people, "Maybe you saw something, but don't talk about it."

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  That, to me, is one of the greatest stories ever, you know, uh, whether it's true or not. Again, there were multiple witnesses, and I like it because it's associated with the world of aviation, which has an, an empirical base, because you gotta know what you're doing when you're up there.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the plane has to fly.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The laws of physics matter.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right, exactly.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I want you to promise me here and now on StarTalk Radio that wherever you are in the world, if you see a ghost, you're gonna call me, and I'm gonna come and try to find it with you.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  I would love to find out how one could see a ghost. What's happening there?

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You call me, you gotta say it. I want you to commit that right now on the air.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Well, they don't hang out, that's the problem. But there are loop ghosts, and there are residual ghosts that we hear about all the time.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The loop ghost, alright.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  A loop ghost, that's just there.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You call me for a loop ghost.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  I'd love to freeze it. I think high freon might do it.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Loop ghost.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he really wants to be the Ghostbuster on the thing. You know, he was raised in the Catholic church and actually intended to become a priest until the age of seventeen. That's why our records show. And he now considers himself a spiritualist.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, there are many people, that's one of the largest growing communities in the country are people who don't assign with a religion. Sorry, sorry, spiritual, right? Don't assign with a line with a religion, but still feel like something's out there.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they don't want anybody telling them what's out there.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yes, I know. Yeah, and this concept of spiritualism, I think is very interesting that he brought up the ghost of Flight 401, which is indeed a famous story. But you know as well as I do, Neil, that current psychological research shows the reality of group hallucinations, they don't even have to happen at the same time. All you need is a little bit of suggestion here or there, unusual circumstances or usual, they can happen all the time. So I think you brought up a very good point that the simplest explanation is much easier than what he's trying to find. But he's going about it the right way. He admitted that he had never seen one himself, which is a great thing and very, very important for people to be honest about that. So more power to him for trying to find out some scientific aspect to this stuff.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think we might be biased by courtroom dramas where the lawyer stands up and says, "I need a witness."

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then if you have two witnesses, that seals the case.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas the psychologists know that group think can mess up two witnesses just as well as the brain can mess up one witness.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  That's right. It is very easy for all of a sudden, people who supposedly don't have the same mind to see the same thing that's actually not there. It's actually very possible.

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. It's a well-studied phenomenon is what you're saying.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, and that, so it takes that person to have written Ghostbusters. It's one of the most popular comedies ever written and...

• 17:04Speaker 02

  I loved it. I thought it was great.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so here, I gotta read a quote from it.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Don't cross the streams. It would be bad. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yes, the speed of light. Well, as you know, Neil-

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a character played by Howard Ramis, of course.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Egon. That was awesome.

• 17:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Egon Spengler, yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  And as you know, there is a way where every molecule-

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why did you know his name was Egon? Who knows that?

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Ghostbusters was a very important part of my youth, trust me.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  But, as you know, you can reach the speed of light with every molecule in your body if you land on the event horizon of a black hole.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know that. Well, but why don't I just fall through the event horizon of a black hole?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Gets complicated from that point.

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, that's no answer. Alright.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back to StarTalk Radio, Charles Liu is gonna tell me why you explode at the speed of light at the edge of a black hole.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  It's that the escape velocity at the black hole's event horizon is the speed of light. So if you fall naturally down onto it, when you reach the event horizon, you are traveling at the speed of light. All of your molecules, if you are still a body, are moving at the speed of light. And so, you're not exploding or anything, you just are.

• 18:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. Fine. We'll be right back.

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio, we're back. It's Neil deGrasse Tyson. I tweet at Neil Tyson, and StarTalk, the staff here, tweets at StarTalk Radio. And Charles Liu, you tweet?

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Yes, at Chuck LIU.

• 18:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice, nice. And we're talking, where we've got clips from my interview with Dan Aykroyd, who visited me at the Hayden Planetarium. Very cool.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's a science buff, he's a blues buff, he's a ghost buff.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  He's a soul man!

• 19:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's a soul man, and he can't help but be a ghost buff, because his whole family lineage is about ghosts.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  That was really interesting.

• 19:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, earlier we heard, we heard that. And it's not only that. Oh, there's some, there's some trivia during the filming of Ghostbusters. You know, Isaac Asimov, who was a friend of the museum at the time, and we have a whole series, a whole lecture series in his honor, called the Isaac Asimov Panel Debate.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And my youngest son is named Isaac.

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In honor of Isaac Asimov?

• 19:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not Isaac Newton?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  No, not Newton.

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you kidding me? Isaac Asimov, I think one of his claims to fame was, I was told this, and it was completely believable, even, it was incredible and believable at the same time, that, even though those are technically opposite words, that he wrote so many books, that he had enough books to have at least one in every category of the Dewey Decimal System. Wow, remarkable. Yeah, yeah, just quite the polymath. Well anyhow, he lived on the block, near the block where they filmed the final scenes of Ghostbusters. Oh wow. And he kept complaining that they interrupted his pathway back home. Oh. So that was, we disrupted the man. Well, how did Dan feel about that? Well, there's probably a book that was not written because of these delays. Well, let's find out what, what just, Dan, he just, he's, he's a deep thinker about

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  everything, and he likes being on the fringe, because I think that's, excites him. Uh, let's see what he talks about, uh, aliens. Remember he's, uh, they had some movies on this topic. Let's, let's see what he, where he takes us. So when I paired up Ghostbusters and the movie Ghost, right, one was a serious attempt at this topic, and the other was completely comedic. Another pairing that I found in my search through the movies, is Coneheads, of course, are visiting aliens, and you had Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And that was portrayed as a real governmental reaction to aliens.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Jacques Vallée and Alan Hynek were both physicists.

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was an astrophysicist, J. Alan Hynek.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  He was, and he was hired by the Air Force. Why was he hired by the Air Force? He was hired by the Air Force because there was a lot of stuff going on in the skies that people could not explain. And a lot of stuff that the Air Force was very, very interested in from a defensive point of view on this planet.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, the alternative view of that, is that it was better to tell everyone they were flying saucers, so that they wouldn't get involved in our spying on Russian technologies during the Cold War.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Right, right, well, perhaps. That may have been part of the agenda. Ultimately, I think Heineck concluded that eighty percent of the sightings are so were explainable and then twenty percent were really

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little mysterious.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Unknowns, a little mysterious.

• 21:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you might be the spiritual medium counterpart to J. Allen Heineck because he died having never seen an unexplained, a UFO, something he could not explain.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yet he was intensely interested in investigating it.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't expect that I'll see a ghost in my time, but I know people who've sat down with me and told me stories that I believe are true and they go beyond just galvanic or electrochemical thing that's happening in the brain. They really have seen something that cannot be explained in the physical rational world.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that means you have really good confidence in the eyewitness testimony of your friends.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  I do. I do because of who they are.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That makes you an awesome friend. I got friends, they tell me stuff, I say, you know, go get a good night's sleep and come back tomorrow.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Well, anecdotal evidence, of course, is not really evidence, but it does have some weight. If you can accept the conviction of witnesses and see for a moment what they saw and empathize with them, you come out of it certainly not concluding that they saw something for sure, but you'd come out of it also not concluding that they didn't.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The jury's still out.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Of course, the jury's still out until you have a mass apparition of some kind.

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm still waiting for them to drag an alien out of the spacecraft and bring it into Times Square.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  You may not have to wait long.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, you've never seen an alien, I guess, or a ghost, have you?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  No, I have not.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, have you seen something that you thought someone else might have interpreted as a ghost?

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. Every once in a while, something sneaks around the corner of your consciousness or it's in the dark and you suddenly see maybe something going by your eye and you're wondering, whoa, what was that? Now, I, of course, being a skeptic and a scientist, know that there are probably ten thousand much more easily justifiable explanations for what I just experienced than a ghost. So I do not ascribe it as ghostiness.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you don't rule it out entirely, you just put it really low down on the list?

• 23:39Speaker 02

  That's the name.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nature of science, right? What I like doing, people talk about windows opening or doors closing, and anytime I'm in a house and I see that, by the way, that happens much less in an apartment. I just don't get this. It just doesn't. Apartment doesn't have as many sides open to drafts, right? It just doesn't really work that way. True. As it would in a house. We have an attic, a basement, and windows on every side, and doors, and a shutter door, and shutters. That bangs once in a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything, and squeaky, everything squeaks. So apartment people just have less experience with house ghosts, I think. But in any event, when I'm in a house and I see a shutter move, I just look at sort of the air pressure that's going on. Oh, there was a gust of wind out this side, and the moving air is lower pressure than

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  static air, so that'll open the shutter. And if you know a little air pressure, you might be able to get through this. I'm totally with you on that one, Neil. Okay. When we come back, more of my interview with Dan Aykroyd on StarTalk Radio. We're back, StarTalk Radio, featuring my interview with Dan Aykroyd. The guy's interested in so much stuff, and I've got Charles Liu here to help me just interpret and understand. Really neat stuff he's talking about. And comment, yeah.

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I like Charles because he's like a man about everything, and if I'm incomplete, he completes me. Thanks for being on, Charles. Oh, my pleasure. So, my next clip with Dan Aykroyd, recorded in my office at the Hayden Planetarium here in New York City, he talks about his sort of alien interests. Oh. Now, whatever are his actual interests, they manifest in his comedic writings and movies. My stepmother is an alien. Yeah, for example, Coneheads. Coneheads. Beldar, what a dude. Right, right. And so, let's find out where he goes with this. Check it out.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, of course, the Coneheads were aliens, and I'll let you know, to this day, my sister and I refer to our parents as our parental unit.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Ah, yes. You will be spared when my species overtakes your miserable planet. You will be placed on the protected rolls.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We still refer to them, and we even abbreviate it, so what are the units doing this weekend? No, they're on vacation.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Well, that was Tom Davis and I. We loved Day the Earth Stood Still and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and all of the great science fiction movies of the time. You know, so we took that and developed that into the Coneheads. And why they had tall heads, I don't know. We just wanted to fill that three or four inches on the little TV screen that wasn't filled with heads.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it made for good ring toss. So you were, my stepmother's an alien. Is that related, or we just won the acting job for that?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  That was just, you know, Richard Benjamin, Kim Basinger. That was a package that was put together in Hollywood. It was a nice little movie. They didn't sell it correctly, of course. Anytime there's a flop in an actor's career, he always says they didn't sell it correctly. But I really-

• 26:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an end of the book world, too, we say that.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The publisher didn't market it. Otherwise, of course, it would have been-

• 26:50Speaker 01

  That's right. It was a masterpiece. But that was really about the search for extraterrestrial life that's going on. It was about searching the skies for radio signals from other planets. And now SETI is an ongoing program. I guess it's kind of mothballed now, but I suppose it's the scientific community's most legitimate recognition of alien life out there. And if that's the way we get to an acceptance of it, that's fine with me.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and the premise was awesome, that, you know, the experiments got, removed the gravity on their planet, and then they come here to find out what's going on.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Right. Well, yeah, with the things we've been doing on this planet in the last several hundred years, they'd be interested to what we're doing to the planet, the atmosphere, and the neighborhood.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole thing. Well, actually, they'll say, "These people are not intelligent. They're stupid. Let's pass them by."

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can't be that interesting to anyone who has the power to fly through space to reach us. That's my outlook on it.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Well, on the other hand, is not this planet one of the most beautiful, beautiful orbs in the multisphere, in the multiverse?

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I think it's beautiful because it kind of has to be beautiful because we evolved in this environment. It has to be beautiful. If it wasn't, we would hate it, right?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, or we would have devolved down to where we would just, yeah.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  But I think this planet would be of great interest to an alien species just because, you know, they don't have the Rockies. They don't have, they don't have, they don't have New York City. They don't have the great trenches of the oceans. They don't have John Lennon. They don't have Keith Richards and Satisfaction. Right there, you know, just if they came and just monitored, you know, the sound waves and heard that song, they'd wanna hang around just to hear Satisfaction by Keith Richards.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a little humanistically hubristic because maybe there is something yet to be invented by an alien species that is beyond our capacity now to judge its beauty. For example, a hundred million years ago, flowers were not yet invented in the tree of life.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A world without flowers, a world without fruit. If you were alive back then, could you have imagined a flower?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. No, you could not have. Could you imagine fruit?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So today, we can look at a bouquet of flowers and admire them and say, what a beautiful world this is. But what other thing has yet to evolve that would make flowers look like something that you would just dispose of in the street?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Well, maybe some, you know, crystalline magma-like structure that you can hold in your hands and mold and that will levitate and

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it glows.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  And glows and

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good, let's work on that.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Let's work on that, yeah.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a fun little romp there.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had with him.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Well, he did have a good point that maybe art made by humans are unique in the universe because we humans are only here. And art is highly subjective and highly temporal.

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As far as we know, no other species on earth creates art.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  As far as we know.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think so. Nothing we would call art.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've seen some human art that no other species would call art either, I'm pretty sure.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  I'm happy to-

• 29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What passes for art?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Right. I'm happy to say that the SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is not completely mothballed.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, do you have an update, a quick update on that?

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Individual projects are mothballed temporarily, but the SETI Institute itself, a scientific research institute, is still alive and well.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In California.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  In California.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Northern California.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  So, good stuff is still happening.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. We still have people among us thinking about the problem.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Yes, indeed.

• 30:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more of my interview with Dan Aykroyd.

• 30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Radio. Charles?

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for being with me.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Thank you, Neil, for having me.

• 30:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And so, what is interesting, we both have common expertise in astrophysics-

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And complementary expertise, because we don't always follow the same pop culture things.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  True.

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when we come together, we make a huge Venn diagram of what we can talk about. That's why I bring you on the show.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Why we ingest consumables.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in this, we've been featuring my interview with Dan Aykroyd.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one of my, I love me some Blues Brothers movie.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I got him to talk about a particular part of the Blues Brothers movie that you wouldn't otherwise know about if you just saw the cinematic release. Let's find out what that is. Now, in the Blues Brothers, why was it that I believed the car could do all of that? I mean, it's at risk of saying, "This movie is over the top. I can't go there." But somehow-

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You had me.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Because it was-

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was about that car?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Well, it had divine power. Once we undertook the mission from God, we had the power of the Godhead behind us. We had divine power behind us. We had the power of belief. We had the power of a universal sense of the world-

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Purpose and-

• 31:53Speaker 01

  And a shared purpose and-

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and good doing.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. So, I think the car took on, you know, divine attributes. It became a holy relic at that point.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I saw in the DVD extras, there's a scene where you parked the car in a power plant-

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is going on there?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Well, I felt that in order to imbue the car with these special powers that we needed some kind of a scientific or physical basis for it.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they weren't all spiritual powers?

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Right, in my mind, in the end, they were spiritual, but yes, that was the scene where we parked near the generator for the electric train in Chicago, and that was supposed to give the car an extra power.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And because they show the lights sort of.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So this car had a special quality. But also, of course, Elwood is a great mechanic, and I don't know if you've ever seen some Hell Driver shows, but the things that they put those cars through really in the physical world are quite fantastic. They make them do flips, they make them do turns and full corkscrews and all that.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a little extra.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  If you beef up the suspension a little extra in the power, and of course, that motor was punched out. Elwood's a great mechanic, you can see where it might have been able to do some of those.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cop shock, cop engine.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Cop, cop everything.

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cop.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love me some Blues Brothers. So an interesting, Charles, over the break, you were talking about the distinction between something that is for all the world magic to you.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something to a higher civilization is just some bit of technology.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got going for it.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  That's right. Arthur C. Clarke had one of his laws.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what was it called? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  That's right. If you think about the olden days, even in Benjamin Franklin's time, lightning was still considered divine intervention, and it wasn't until he did those experiments with kites and other kinds of bell jars and things like that, that we realized that it was just a very common manifestation of static electricity.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what's interesting is that Ben Franklin, as you know, he invented the lightning rod.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then offered it to anybody who especially one of the biggest structures in every town.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are they?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  The steeples.

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The church steeples, right? And so now churches were not being destroyed by lightning that might have otherwise been.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he was accused of blasphemy by interfering with the will of God.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  I was not aware of that.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. And what's odd is that some parishioners of whatever was the denomination would turn to Ben and say, you are preventing our God from doing.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who are they worshiping? If that's how they feel about it.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Maybe Zeus, right? But it is true. And that's, I think that that extra scene described here would have been really interesting.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The deleted scene.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Would have been really interesting to have put in the movie and then people could do that same kind of transfer for themselves. We all, as you know, Neil, fill our sense of the unknown with either the desire to find out or the desire to just be satisfied with what somebody else has told us or what we believe in some sort of faith idea. And I guess, under these circumstances, when you bridge the two, you create some really interesting results.

• 34:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And actually, you make a point. If you bridge them, it makes for good storytelling.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, Stephen King has, uh, has rich storytelling where he blends real, live phenomena with spiritual forces.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look at what happened in Carrie. You know, no one, no one went to Carrie and said, oh, that would have never happened. It's like, yeah, this is happening.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it is as real as all get out.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  And as far as real and fake are concerned, right now, there's a viral video company that's actually using science fiction movie technology to create scenes like techno, tech, telekinetic work that Carrie is doing and like blasting people against walls and throwing books off shelves and freaking out the audiences.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean they're really doing? What are you saying? Oh, we ran out of time. What do you mean? We're doing it for movies?

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  In order to promote.

• 35:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fine, I thought you said we're doing it in real life.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  In order to promote, uh, the next iteration of Carrie, this viral.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right, because the movie's coming out again.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  That's right. The viral video company is creating in coffee shops, fake movie magicked versions of Carrie, like where a lady suddenly develops telekinetic powers and starts blowing people away. And then people who aren't in on the joke are just freaked out in the audience, uh, inside these coffee shops. So this is still true.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so he's creating real life things that to an uninitiated person look like actual magic is happening. Spiritual magic.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Right. And so how do we distinguish that between magic?

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't if you don't know.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  That's right. That's Arthur C. Clarke's point exactly.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it. I think we're out of time.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 36:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Already.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, featuring my interview with Dan Aykroyd and with Charles Lu helping me out here, my friend and colleague. This is StarTalk Radio. Well, you can find us on the web, StarTalkRadio.net. And we tweet StarTalkRadio, of course, it would be that. And where else are we? Find us on, we have a new YouTube channel. You can get clips of our Q and As, and so we're all over the place. Don't miss us. As always, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, signing off, bidding you to keep looking up.