Spooky Science

Our Halloween special investigates the science of ghosts and other haunting phenomena.

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.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And this week, we're doing a live show about dead people. It's Halloween time, and there's no other subject we could tackle for this week's episode than ghost hunting. I have with me Eugene Mirman. Eugene?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Hello. Yes, it's good to be back. I love being here.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene tweets at Eugene Mirman.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you do, and that's where I find you, and I don't otherwise see you.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eugene, are you a big ghost guy, or what?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I'm a huge ghost guy. Uh, first of all, thanks for asking such an easily answered question.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just a conversation starter. I don't, yeah, don't overthink it, yeah.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I don't, I don't, uh, I'm not a, no. I guess the answer is, I don't know that I think they're ghosts, but I do think that there's lots of wizards. So, you know, I'm not all bad.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That makes up for it. So, this, of course, has been around forever. People have, you know, it's a pre-scientific notion.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Before science, there were ghost thoughts?

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The notion, yes, ghost thoughts, and it surely continues well into the, into the era of science, scientific investigations, the methods and tools of science. But it was long suspected that dead people still hung around to haunt the living. In particular, it was not just people who died ordinary deaths. That's not the typical ghost you'd find. It was people that might have died horrible deaths, or died too early, or died under extraordinary circumstances, almost as though their spirits were never at rest.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Basically, little kids and then horse carriage mishaps.

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess so. Right, because horses long outnumbered the years of utility than that cars.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's why I choose horses for my joke.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brilliantly done.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, another interesting phenomenon was that in the late 1800s, early 20th century, there was a resurgence of people's efforts to communicate with the dead.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And seances were really big business. And you'd go into, would it be a well-lit room?

• 2:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it would be a darkened room.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A darkened room.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Ghosts, everyone knows ghosts hate light bulbs.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a darkened room and you'd pay someone, usually a woman, who would communicate with the spirits who you lost. And so, this whole show is about the analysis of what those folks did, what people are doing or say they're doing when they're trying to hunt down ghosts. And we have several guests we'll be bringing on for this. One of them was, a little while back, I interviewed-

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Former President Harry Truman!

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The spirit of. So, one guest was Mary Roach. She's quite a prolific author on many subjects, but one of her books was called Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. And she was kind of agnostic on the issue. All she wanted to do was compile in her book a whole study of the stuff people did to investigate ghosts.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's a compilation, really, but very well-written. And, let's see, let's see what she says about this. Mary Roach. You've got ghost hunting shows.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  You sure do.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are they about?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Well, anytime there's a new technology, somebody gets the idea that this is what we need to communicate with the beyond. And frequently, you know, it's something like infrasound, or ultrasound, or infrared. The only problem we've had in the past is just that we can't communicate with them, but now we're in a different range.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New tool, new methods of-

• 3:44Speaker 02

  New tool, new method, this is the way to get through them. Even Edison, Thomas Edison, the time he died was-

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know any other Edison?

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Con.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Con Edison. The electric company of New York.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  So, Thomas Edison, he was working on this machine that was, in essence, an amplifier. Because he believed that when you die, you turned into these little life units, these little bits, and he thought it was kinda like the Who's down in Whoville, the Dr. Seuss. Their voices are very, very tiny, and if you could amplify them, you could hear them. So, he was trying to create this sort of amplifying device for reaching the spirit world. So, modern day Ghostbusters, they'll use, you know, infrared cameras, or sonar detectors, bat detectors, that, thinking that maybe they communicate in a different wavelength than what we do.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, the few ghost people I've spoken with, they're pretty convinced that they've got good enough data to say that ghosts are among us. But you've surveyed a century of this, or centuries of this, are they any more convincing to you than previous investigators?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Well, I contacted one of the people who makes these electromagnetic, you know, EMF meters, which is a common tool that the Ghostbusters use.

• 4:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What kind of meter again?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  EMF.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, EMF, electromagnetic field.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  And I contacted one of these people, and I said, "Where along the line did you get the sense that what an EMF measures is spirit energy? Where does that come from?" And he said, "Well, people seem to say that."

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good enough for me!

• 5:03Speaker 02

  And P.S., we're selling a heck of a lot of them.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  So, they now, they started marketing, because it used to be something linemen would use, and, you know, I mean, it's some, it's a tool, it's a...

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Linemen, you mean, people for high tension lines?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, there's, you know, industrial applications for these things.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if you're a football fan, a lineman is someone else.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  That's true, and they don't use those.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they don't use those meters.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Well, they might. I don't know what they do with those meters. Anyway, these meters, EMF meters.

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, electromagnetic field is all around us. There's radio waves, microwave.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, or you, like, one time I was doing an article, I was on this supposedly haunted whaling ship at Mystic Seaport, and they're there with their EMF meters, and there's a giant...

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mystic, Connecticut.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's the big whaling village from the past.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Exactly. There's a whaling ship, and they've got their equipment all set up, and their EMF meters, and they're getting like, you know, "Ooh, look at this." Well, there's a great big anchor, there's a great big hunk of...

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Iron.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Iron. Okay, that'll do it.

• 5:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'll totally distort an electromagnetic field.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, so, I just wish if you're gonna use a piece of equipment like that...

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Learn some physics!

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Actually know what an EMF is, how the meter works.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Learn some physics!

• 6:03Speaker 02

  What other things might set it off. Thank you.

• 6:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eugene, it's all about the tools.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you go into the physics lab, pull out what you think will detect things you can't see, and why not invoke it?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Well, you can get lots of boxes that you could put in places that'll make sounds. Based on random stuff that you don't understand.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this is part of the problem, because if you don't fully, if you haven't fully characterized your environment, you'll start detecting things that have been there all along, but you'll start thinking with your new apparatus that it's something spooky.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  That it's ghosts.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's ghosts, yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And weird radio waves.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Or normal radio waves.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the list is long. The list, there's something called an EVP detector, Electronic Voice Phenomenon Detector, which detects sort of acoustic frequencies outside of what the human ear can detect. So typically, dogs can hear outside of our frequencies, but this would, at its best, would do much better than that. But what you don't know, what people don't often know, is that practically any transmitting device in a room has some kind of vibration that's got some kind of sound that you're not even paying attention to, you can't even hear.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's gonna start picking up. We live in a technological environment. And so, what would be great if you had one of these detectors and you lived in a mud hut?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  And then you could see.

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you start to detect.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Or if you had a dog that could detect ghosts.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be even better. We have dogs that detect bedbugs. You'd think you'd have one by now who could detect ghosts. There's an interesting study with regard to infrasound. This would be sound with frequencies lower than what is audible to the human eye.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  But I just wanna say that just because I can't hear it, doesn't mean it's a ghost. That's the strangest assumption I've ever heard. Like, I can't hear it, it's probably a ghost. That's what it must be. What else could a person not hear?

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If your tools detect it, and you don't, then you have an argument. So, there was a fellow named Vic Tandy, who was a lecturer at Coventry University. He was curious whether infrasound, again, this is sound at a lower frequency than you can hear, the human ear bottoms out at about 20 Hz, something like that. So, you, what he found is that at the frequency of 18 Hz, Hz is vibrations per second of a sound wave, that about that frequency, it resonates with the structure of the human eyeball. And if you have a sound that resonates with something material, it'll make the material vibrate at that frequency. And so that's what you mean by it resonates. And when it, when that happens to you, your eye begins to see things that are in fact not there.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there was a room, there was a lab where he worked that was declared to be haunted by many people. Because you'd see things out the corner of your eye, a little fuzzy thing moving. And he would see it himself. And he finally actually did a research paper to show that there was a, there was a subsonic vibration in the room that triggered this reaction in the human eyeball upon walking in. And so, uh, it's, it's interesting when you think something supernatural, you just sort of think about it a little further.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  If I could emit a, an 18 hertz frequency, then would I freak people out everywhere I went?

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would be a new kind of superhero, putting visions into people's eyeballs. Yes.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  This is my plan now. Thank you, Neil.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are also things like ions in the air. Ions are, are, uh, they're charged atoms, charged particles, anything that's not a whole atom. I, I, you can trust me on this one.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I do.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Save your doubts for another time.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This one, I'm good for, I'm good for this one. So an ion, you take an atom, you strip off its electrons, uh, or you add too many electrons, you make an ion. So an ion is a charged particle floating freely. Uh, matter doesn't like staying charged. It wants to sort of find its mate, close it, close the loop and, and you're done for it. Rendering most matter in the universe, neutral. All right. But so if you have ions, an ion field, it means something was going on there. Because the air does not want to stay ionized. And by the way, a lightning bolt is an ion, is, is the atmosphere rendered visible? Because the lightning ionized the air on its way from the ground up to the cloud, which is the way lightning travels.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 10:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Duh.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Lightning.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And also there are things like, uh, uh, uh, we see, uh, what we call visible light. You know, Roy G. Biv? Can you recite Roy G. Biv for me?

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Uh, like red, yellow.

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Orange.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Orange.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Orange, yellow.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Biv, uh, b- b- blue, violet, devotee.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I should have warned you, you'd be quizzed for this program. And so what you have is outside of that frequency of light, there's other bands of the spectrum. You know, infrared, ultraviolet, we can't see those. So you can imagine exploring the world. I've never seen cartoons, ever. And so, what we have is, there's a colleague of mine, a good friend and colleague, Phil Plait, his handle, his Twitter handle is Bad Astronomer. He had a blog called Bad Astronomy, where you'd write in and tell them things that you thought were true about the universe, and he would sort of give you the straight shot. And he's thought about ghosts as well. Let's find out what he tells us about this whole business.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  A lot of ghost hunters on TV and in life use a lot of equipment that they claim will detect a ghost. They'll use thermal cameras, for example, cameras that can sense infrared light. And they walk around in places and they see all kinds of little hot spots and cold spots. But in fact, there's wiring behind the walls that can warm up a wall. There are places where the air is trapped and it's warmer, where even if you lean against a wall and then walk away, you've warmed the wall up a little bit and you can see that. I have seen my own footprints on the floor glowing as I've walked past a thermal camera. They also use what they call EMFs, or electromagnetic force detectors. And these basically are just testing for electricity.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  And so if there's electricity flowing through a wall, they're gonna see it. And if you walk past one of these things with metal in your pocket, that can be detected. So really, these things aren't really telling you what's there, except that there's just everything there. They're so sensitive that everything trips them. So every time you see these shows and they say, "Oh, it must be a ghost." It's like, "No, it must be a million things. I think it would have ghosts on the end of that list."

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carl Sagan would have said it would have been a billion things, I'm quite sure. So, we're coming up on our first break, but after the break, we're gonna bring in one of the foremost ghost investigators in the world.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Oh wow.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His name is Joe Nichol.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  And he's going to tell us how he misuses science equipment to claim there are ghosts. I hope you can't hear me.

• 12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He started life as a private investigator, so he thinks about data in a Sherlock Holmes sort of way. "All right, you say this, but I really see that. And here's the evidence against what you're saying." And so that's how he started. And in that world, he then realized that there was a lot of work to be done in the sort of the skeptical world of exploring claims that people make. And it's, people make honest, innocent statements about what's going on.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Just seeing a frequency that makes their eyes think that there's a ghost, I get it.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For example.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  It's not their fault.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That they're pretty sure they're talking to a dead friend. Example. So, we're gonna talk to him about what tools he uses, what kinds of things he's investigated. Uh, he's actually, uh, in New Orleans right now, and earlier today, performed a séance in an attempt to reach the ghost of Houdini. Oh. Which is an annual thing that gets done around Halloween time. We've gotta take a quick break, but more StarTalk when we return.

• 14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk Radio's Halloween Show. I have with me Eugene Mirman, and we're trying to summon the spirit of Joe Nickle on our line. Is he here? No, it's the spirit in New Orleans. Joe Nickle, are you on the line?

• 14:15Speaker 04

  Hi Neil.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joe, hey man, how you doing?

• 14:17Speaker 04

  We've had a poltergeist experience here.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm glad we did not have to murder you.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  I feel myself being re-energized and coming back to the earth plane.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, uh, yeah. So Eugene was glad we didn't have to kill you because we weren't getting to your physical body, but we would surely get to your spiritual one.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Thank you for that.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're welcome. So, so, so, let me ask, Joe, we're talking about searching for ghosts, and we've got clips from an interview I conducted with Mary Roach. We've got everybody's favorite bad astronomer Phil Plake coming in and out, but I've got you live on the line here, and you, I've already introduced you, so people already know who I'm talking to. You're a ghost hunter extraordinaire. No, you're a ghost investigator extraordinaire. What, do you use technology to, to, when you walk into someone's home and they complain that their house is haunted, like, what do you do when you knock on the door?

• 15:05Speaker 04

  What I do is so different from what the ghost hunters do. The ghost hunters say, sort of, "Move aside ma'am, uh, just let us bring our high-tech equipment in here and..." And we'll see what we can find. And they bring in EVP meters and they look for EVP. They bring in EMF meters. They bring in thermal imaging cameras. And on the silly notion that somehow there's a ghost energy. Well, science hasn't found this. And in fact, they're not detecting ghosts. They're detecting, you know, whatever. I mean, there might be a microwave broadcast tower causing the EMF meter to go off or faulty wiring. So this is the pseudoscience approach. They're using scientific equipment, but they're using,

• 15:48Speaker 04

  fundamentally doing pseudoscience. What I do is to say, "Okay, ma'am, what exactly is happening in your home?" And if she says, "Well, I woke up and I saw a ghost figure. I think it was my father. He was standing by my bedside." I would say, "Well, you know, you're probably having a waking dream. It exists in the twilight between being fully asleep and fully awake. It's very common. It's harmless, but it isn't a ghost." Or if someone reports a noise, "My first haunted house was 1972, a Mackenzie house in Toronto."

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've got a whole book of these things?

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. People were hearing footsteps on the stairs late at night when there was no one in the house and the house was locked. But as it turns out, next door... Was a footstep machine. Yes. You got it. Forty inches away was a parallel iron staircase and a late-night cleanup crew. So, yes, a footstep machine. And so, people were hearing footsteps, but they weren't hearing a ghost. So what I'm trying to do, just to sum up, I'm trying to explain what's happening.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Not, so, so, so I'm, I'm absolutely having to listen to the person who's telling me why they think they have a ghost and I'm trying to explain that. Not anything else, just that.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  So you don't use like magic ghost goggles or anything, you're like, oh, there's a staircase? Or you, you dreamed when you were waking up?

• 17:23Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  You're a morphine addict, so everything is crazy.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  No magic ghost addict, no, no magic ghost goggles.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but you don't go in there presuming there's no ghost.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  No, what I'm trying to do is, is sort of what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief. I'm, I'm saying, look, when we cross the threshold into the haunted house, let us be careful to, to suspend belief and disbelief. Let's just free ourselves up, rather like a crime scene technician, who's trying to find out what's going on at this time in this place.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Making no assumptions upfront.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  You're like a non menacing Batman.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  That's right. You see, i- i- it's just as bad to, to have, like the ghost hunters, to have an agenda, they start with a belief in ghosts and then they're just using confirmation bias, just trying to confirm, uh, that, so any anomaly is considered evidence for a ghost. And the opposite of that, the dismissive, uh, debunking approach is, is equally bad because both of those are starting with the answer and working backwards to the evidence. And science doesn't do that.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joe, let's get back to that. I want to put it, slip in another clip of my interview with Mary Roach. She wrote a book, Spooked, that Science Tackles the Afterlife. And let's just see what she says about ghosts and the machines.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Anytime a machine does something peculiar, there's a subset of the population that chooses to interpret it as a spirit. For example, there are people who've thought that when their VCR or their telephone, their voice recorder, their, the answering machine does something strange, there was a fairly well-known case in, in the sort of psychic community of a spell checker that was communicating supposedly by the suggestions, because it would make strange suggestions. Did you mean Penelope? Whoa, that's nothing like Penelope, was it? But it turned out-

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, I know a Penelope, oh my gosh.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. It turned out is that the guy who owned the computer had added some things, you know, you can add things to your dictionary. You can customize it. So he had been customizing anyway, but it was a, an interesting case because they seemed out of the blue, like Cellar, Penelope, you know, there were all these things that added up to a famous murder in a castle somewhere. And so he thought that this spirit was communicating via a spell checker. Can you think of a more laborious and insane way to be communicating?

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, why not just whisper it in your ear? Say, yeah, thanks. Or write down, write down a note.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  A chalkboard. I don't know. A spell checker.

• 19:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay. So, yeah, this goes on and on, Joe. Now, Joe, you, you conducted a séance earlier today, is that correct?

• 19:56Speaker 04

  We did.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Did you conduct it or did you attend it?

• 19:59Speaker 04

  I conducted the séance.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  All right.

• 20:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have, you have the tower, the power and the, and the knowledge?

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Well, look, people have been trying to contact the spirit of Houdini since he died in 1926 on Halloween.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Houdini?

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Houdini. That's who we were looking for. And it turns out that, that no one has contacted Houdini's spirit.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Has anyone tried texting?

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Well, they, they've tried having spirit mediums. So this time we're trying, we're trying, uh, using skeptics who think like Houdini. You know, he spent the last years of his life exposing bogus, uh, spirit mediums who were pretending to contact the dead. They were doing no such thing.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  He would be furious to get contacted by a medium then.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  That's right. So, so, so the mediums naturally fail. So we've suggested, hey, Harry, maybe we're your friends, uh, come along.

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of his own peeps. One of his own peeps.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Of course, he, he never shows up for us either, maybe proving the point that when your brain is dead, you're really actually, actually dead.

• 21:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, in mediums, you know, there was a, in the movie Ghost itself, uh, it portrayed Whoopi Goldberg as one of the spirit mediums and, but a modern day, not from a century ago. And, uh, do you have any comment about, uh, Ghost portrayed in film?

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Well, of course, you know, when you have the visual medium, you can actually make the ghosts appear.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  How realistic do you think Star Wars is?

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, they look rather like us, only a little transparent. Or they can be whatever you want.

• 21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's cool that they're kind of semi-transparent. I've always liked that.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  Well, look, this is interesting because, you know, when photography was discovered, the original daguerreotypes, there were no ghosts. There were no ghosts in the next ambrotypes or tintypes. Only when glass plate negatives were invented, making double exposures possible, you started getting ghosts looking like transparent humans.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then that went okay through the 19th century. Occasionally, you get some other kind of glitch. But really, until fairly recently, ghosts sort of looked like, well, us, only transparent. And now, the ghost hunters are finding, you know, ghost orbs, balls of energy. And all those are, are particles of dust in the air, right in front of the lens, bouncing the flash back.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Off the flash, exactly.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. But it's interesting, because we've had this whole iconographic sort of shift from ghosts that look like us to ghosts that may look like balls of energy.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  It's a lot easier to find a ball of energy than Obi-Wan Kenobi.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  That's right. And sometimes you'll see a strand in a photograph. It's supposed to be a strand of ectoplasmic energy. And that's the camera strap.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The camera strap, okay. Ectoplasmic camera strap. You know, I've got a clip from Phil Plank talking about movies. He's a big movie buff.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  And a good friend of mine.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a good friend of yours. Let's see what he has to say about ghosts in movies.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  In a lot of movies, you get kind of three types of ghosts. You get the ghosts who are loved ones, like in the movie Ghost. You get the mischievous ones who are trying to cause some trouble, like in Ghostbusters. And then some that just kind of hang around and don't do anything. And there have been a couple of movies like that as well. I think in real life, what most gets reported as a ghostly phenomenon are simply pictures or movies that people see, or things that happen in their house. Now, you can imagine, you're in an old house at night, you're hearing noises, things are moving. That is when you... You're vulnerable to being frightened. And so I think that when you get reports like that, they're more likely to be from people who are scared. I remember in my old house, we had a fan that was way up on the ceiling. We had to turn it on using a remote control.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  And the frequency would drift a little bit. And so sometimes that thing would just turn on by itself when the neighbors turned on their TV or something. And our TV used to turn off and on by itself, too, because of that remote control problem. And if you're alone in some house at night and that happens, that's freaky. And so I think in general, those are the kind of ghosts that you hear the reports about. And those are the kind of movies, I think, that do really well.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Joe, when you, this is Joe Nickel on the line. Joe, when you greet up with people who ask you to investigate their homes, are they afraid or are they curious?

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Well, they're often both. They're, if they go so far as to ask me to come, they're probably not looking to-

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On mushrooms?

• 24:30Speaker 04

  They're probably prepared to have me try to explain it rather than just agree with them. Otherwise, if they go to ghost hunters, of course, the ghost hunters are gonna pretty much find that, yes, we have some anomalies here. And, look, the ghost hunters are using what's called an argument from ignorance. This is, most of the paranormal works this way.

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get back to the argument from ignorance, but only after we take a quick break. We'll see you in a few.

• 25:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to our Halloween edition of StarTalk Radio. So, I've got on the line Joe Nickel, who's a professional ghost sighting investigator. And we have him live from New Orleans, where he's attending a skeptics conference. And, Joe, let me ask you something.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  And if I may say, risking my life here, buddy, I mean, the vampires, the voodoo-

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll all come out in New Orleans.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  I believe you mean goths. I think you're mistaking your fans.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Oh, maybe these are just people dressed up. Okay. But it is New Orleans, you know, it is.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know if many people know that the cemetery in the- In the ghoul scene of Michael Jackson's Thriller video is a cemetery on the outskirts of New Orleans.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's correct, a small cemetery there. I drove by it at night, scared the hell out of me. So Joe, when people tell you they've seen ghosts, what kind of evidence do they offer you to get your interest?

• 26:11Speaker 04

  By and large, they're using an argument from ignorance. What they're doing is they're saying, gee, you know, this happened, they had some electronic glitch, or I heard a noise, or something happened, my keys were mislaid, I mean, not mislaid, my keys were moved. And so what they do is, is it's an argument from ignorance, they're saying, we don't know what caused this, therefore, it's a ghost.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  There's no way I put my keys in this weird place, probably a ghost.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  That's right, that's an, it's called an argument from ignorance, meaning, meaning not that the person is an ignoramus, but what it means is that, that you're saying, I don't know.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  They're like low-level conspiracy theorists.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're trying to draw a conclusion from I don't know, so it's a, it's a logical fallacy, I don't know, therefore, I do know. And so, what we're trying to do is, is explain things, saying, well, maybe it could be this, maybe you mislaid your keys, maybe, maybe that went on, as Phil, as Phil Plait was saying, you know, there could be an electronic glitch causing something to come on.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, or a ghost in a remote control.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Turning on your TV at random.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  Exactly, but look, we have to prioritize the possibilities, we have to say, look, this, this, we know this happens sometimes, so that's a pretty good hypothesis, and we've never, ever found, science has never found one, not one ghost.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, Joe, that's because you haven't found the ectoplasm. And in fact, I spoke with Mary Roach about ectoplasm, apparently it's a real concept in the ghost hunting community, let's find out what she has to say about it.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your book, you actually have the word ectoplasm.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's Ghostbusters all the way. I don't even know what ectoplasm. I'm using the word in the sentence. I don't even know what it is. It's fun to say, though.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Ghostbusters ectoplasm is just sort of slime.

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's green goo.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  It's that green goo that's kind of sticky and probably tough to get out of your clothes. But ectoplasm, back in the spiritualism. You're familiar with spiritualism. This was a belief. It was a religious movement. Yes, but not only that, this ectoplasm was tangible representation of spirit energy. So the medium would produce this stuff and say, here, look, it's tangible proof. You can hold it in your hand. You can see it.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So ectoplasm had a real meaning and definition.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not it itself was real.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 28:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  So these mediums.

• 28:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this period would have been late 1800s, I guess, right?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, through the early.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Early 1900s, right? Sure. And that's when you had seances. Seances were big.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of the hottest ticket in town, some of those. It was very entertaining. You'd have this woman, you know.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was there a guy? Why can't a guy be in touch with the dead?

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Yes, there was a guy, Rudy Schneider, is that his last name? Anyway, he very, very, very charismatic and colorful. I won't go into the details because they're a little gross.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll have to read the book to get into the details. Spook by Mary Roach. Okay.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  So anyway, this ectoplasm, they'd go into a medium cabinet, they'd pull the curtain, and it's dark in there, and the curtain would open, and there'd be this stuff that had come out of this medium's mouth. And people were like, whoa, wow, look at that. Was it? It turned out it took magicians to debunk this because they had.

• 29:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Houdini among them.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Houdini and Harry Price. Because their point of view was, no, you don't need a PhD. What you need is a background in magic. And I can tell you what they're doing.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How to fool somebody.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Yes, and how to fool somebody.

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, a scientist has no experience purposefully trying to fool somebody.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Right, right. So they got, you know, Charles Rocher, Nobel laureate. They got Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who fell for everything, apparently. But people really bought into this. The Scientific American did articles on ectoplasm. The Sorbonne, there were studies done there on ectoplasm.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the urge to believe was so strong.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  It turned out to be cheesecloth.

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The skepticism with cheesecloth.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  It was cheesecloth, wound up very, very tight, that the person would swallow and regurgitate. They were regurgitators. It's a sideshow.

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the slime was their saliva all over it.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, their stomach juices, yeah.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nasty.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Nasty. Sometimes they would use sheep oaf, guts, too.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sheep guts. So the urge to believe overcame any urge to be skeptical, except among magicians, who saw this as quite an act.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Yes, and what was interesting about both Houdini and Harry Price is that they had lost a parent or loved one and they were looking for the real deal, but along the way they were like, "You're not it, you're not it, you're not it," and in the end didn't find anybody who passed their criteria, but they knew how to-

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they maintained their skepticism all the way?

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they had this hope that they'd find the real deal.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that makes it that much stronger a result if you're looking for it and you want it to be true-

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But none of it convinces you.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that was Mary Roach reflecting on some elements of her book Spook. I've got on the line Joe Nickel. Joe, has anyone offered you ectoplasm as evidence for ghosts?

• 30:46Speaker 04

  Well, as I mentioned earlier, these, some of these photographs that you get have what looks like a spiraling vortex, or, or sometimes a strand-like effect, and people often say that's, that's ectoplasm, but what it invariably tends to be is the camera strap is bouncing the flashback. You can get almost anything in front of the camera lens when the flash is on, a wandering fingertip, strand of hair, a, a, a passing insect, particles of dust, almost anything, and you could create really, really spooky effects. Could be a ghost insect. It could be a ghost insect, right, right? A dead fly ghost insect.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I think it's a ghost camera strap.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  And, and I'll give those hypotheses all the, all the attention they, they deserve. That is, I will promptly ignore them and, and move right on. So, so anything, anything that, that can intrude, even if you're in a cold place and your breath, uh, goes out and, and creates a kind of fog, it, it can create a really misty-looking ghost effect. All these things, some of these are called ectoplasm, and they're all supposed to be some form of ghost energy. None of them actually, of course, are.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now that everyone has access to a digital camera with immediate results of what they photographed, you, you probably have more of these incidences, especially when people don't fully understand the photographic, uh, photography as a medium.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  Right, because what they're doing is, particularly, see, if, now if this happened in a suburban home, maybe they wouldn't think, they'd just think it's a photo glitch, but if, if now they're in a haunted house looking for a ghost- And so, any, anything happens. I mean, literally, anything. They call it an anomaly, and that's supposed to infer that it's a ghost. But again, it's just an argument from ignorance.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's what, you don't know what it is, it must be a ghost, that's the, right.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Especially if the thing you're in is called a haunted house.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, that's, that's gonna predispose people to some false information.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  That absolutely, absolutely does.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Joe, I want to put you on the spot. What would you count as really good evidence for a ghost? Just so I can do that, and, and get you to certify.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Well, you know, that's, it's, it's hard to say what some nonexistent thing might, might be like. I mean, we just, I think we would.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Well, do you think it would be handsome?

• 33:04Speaker 04

  I think by now, if ghosts existed, we would know it. I, I think one would have come up to, to a group of skeptics and, and convinced them in no uncertain terms, and, and this would have happened repeatedly.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  You don't get how ghosts think.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. Ghosts avoid skeptics at all costs.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  What if they're simply socially anxious? You never thought that when people die, maybe they just don't like groups?

• 33:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, or, or as Maury Povich said to me once, uh, Maury's nothing if not a smart aleck. He said, you know, I said, I was on your show, and I said, "Well, whenever I go into a haunted house, ghosts appear to go out the back door." And he said, "Well, Joe, maybe they just don't like you."

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  And, you know, I, I kept to consider that that's possible.

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, uh, uh, continuing in my conversation with Phil Plait, the bad astronomer, we talked about how skepticism actually has, revealed itself in the two famous ghost movies, Ghostbusters and Ghosts, from decades past. Let's check it out.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  I love some of the stuff in Ghostbusters where they turn skepticism on its head, and, and in the beginning of the movie, when they're walking around through the library, and there's a bunch of books piled up. And I think it was Egon who goes a little crazy about it, and says, "That's amazing." And then Bill Murray says, "Yes, no human would stack books this way." Which is such a great skeptic line, because of course, you have to look for the mundane explanation. But the beauty of that is in the movie, it was the ghosts that did that, so it's all messed up. And in the movie Ghost, there is a skeptical series of steps that goes on. And I like the way they did it. Whoopi Goldberg's character is in fact a fraud. She cannot speak to the dead, but then Sam shows up, Patrick Swayze's character shows up and she can hear him. She can't see him, but she can hear him. And then she has to

• 34:44Speaker 03

  go and prove that she can do this. And of course, Demi Moore's character doesn't believe her and there has to be a series of pieces of evidence. And in fact, when Demi Moore goes to the cops and says, "Listen, this psychic told me things that she couldn't possibly have known," the cops say, "Look, she could have figured this out this way and this way and this way," all of which was basically correct. They did that pretty well. But then they show, of course, that it is in fact Patrick Swayze's ghost who's talking to Whoopi Goldberg. And so it turns skepticism on its head. I actually felt that that was pretty good, the way they set that all up. And they kind of poke fun at the skeptics. But of course, the only way they can do that is because it is a fictional movie. In the end, sadly

• 35:24Speaker 03

  to say, skeptics typically are correct. So I think that most, in fact, the vast majority of cases of ghosts are clearly misidentification. And the ones that are unsolved, if there are any, are probably solvable if we just had a little bit more evidence that would show that they're not ghosts.

• 35:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was the bad astronomer, Phil Plank. Joe, you have a book coming out now? It's out or is it coming out soon?

• 35:48Speaker 04

  It'll be out early next year, I hope.

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You hope?

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Yes, I hope.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Is it called "It's Probably Not a Ghost, But Maybe?"

• 35:54Speaker 04

  "The Science of Ghosts." But look, I've actually caught some ghosts.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, we're gonna have to go to break in like a few seconds, but hold that thought. All right. We've gotta take a quick break, but more StarTalk when we return.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Radio. Welcome back. Before the break, Joe Nickel, who we have on the line, a ghost investigator extraordinaire. You left us hanging, Joe. You said you found evidence for ghosts.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  Well, as I've, as I've published in our magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, I've caught a few ghosts. One of them was at a haunted inn in Ohio. And people couldn't explain how... They would go to this particular room and paintings and pictures on the walls would be turned askew and they would straighten them, the cleaning crew would straighten things back up and sure enough, the next time they were askew again and this was very puzzling and you know, I thought, well, maybe trucks going by rumbling could shake the walls enough. Not a great hypothesis. Turned out, when I checked into the hotel late one night and just chatted up the desk

• 37:24Speaker 04

  clerk, she said, you know, that room upstairs, she said, well, the cleaning crew is just so superstitious, I just can't help but mess with their minds.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  And so I use my pass key and I go up at night and I turn things away and they just, they get so excited and of course, right then and there, I had caught another ghost.

• 37:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Doesn't get more real than that, Neil.

• 37:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Caught a real ghost.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  So most ghosts are Mr. and Mrs. Clerks.

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mr. and Mrs. Clerks. Let me get to my last clip with Phil Plait, the bad astronomer, who reflects, interestingly, on the movie Ghost, which I think is everyone's favorite ghost movie. Well, it was mine, actually, and...

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't give me ghosts. Don't make me like ghosts.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  I think it's fine.

• 38:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, it's my favorite ghost movie, if I had to pick one. Let's check out, see what he has to say.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Look, it's a beautiful story. It was funny, it was warm, it was a beautiful romance story. I got choked up at the end of it, of course, you can't help it, it's just being human. But it does buy into this idea that people tend to believe in things like that and it reinforces this idea as well. If you're deeply in love, if you're married or you have a lifetime partner and that person dies, who would not want to spend another hour with that person or even just a moment like they do at the end of that movie? And besides that sort of immediate emotional comfort, there's also sort of a long-term idea that, look, there is an afterlife. When you die, there are some of you that sticks around or maybe doesn't literally stick

• 39:00Speaker 03

  around on earth, but still exists and has your memories, is you. And I can't think of anything more appealing than that. So in a movie like that, it does sort of play into those emotions. Every skeptic I know who does it all the time says, "The things I have to be most skeptical about are the things I most want to believe are true." Because that's how easy it is to get fooled, to fool yourself. And that's when you have to be most on guard.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  What he's saying is the reason that I, I don't totally believe in Valhalla, but really want to.

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Joe, the urge to want to believe, that's pretty strong, isn't it?

• 39:37Speaker 04

  It's absolutely powerful. Carl Sagan used to say that he wished he could talk, even if just once a year, to his dead parents. These are, these are powerful emotions. I remember when my grandmother died as a boy and how much I didn't want that to be the case. So if we were, if we were voting, who among us wouldn't vote for, for ghosts? We'd all raise our hands. Yes, we want, we want that. But we're not, we don't vote in science. We're, we have to look at the evidence and no matter how powerful that urge is, even in me, I mean, even, even when I'm not that personally involved and I'm in a haunted castle in, in Austria or someplace.

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get around.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  I do, I do. I've been in more haunted places than Casper. But I can feel the ambience. I can feel the ambiance sometimes of places and I say to myself, if this place isn't haunted, it ought to be.

• 40:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you feel in the vibe. You feel in the haunted vibe. Is there one country that's more haunted than others in terms of their claims and assertions?

• 40:34Speaker 04

  Oh, we probably outdo about everybody else. I mean, we've, we've got ghost hunting stuff on, on every channel and it's just huge. It's just absolutely huge. And now today, almost every city, town and hamlet in the, in the country has a ghost hunting club.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Really?

• 40:52Speaker 04

  And bless them, they don't know what they're doing, they're not detecting ghosts, they're, they're, they're not on the, you know, the cutting edge of, of, you know, finding something that science can't find.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But their heart's in the right place.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  Their heart's in the right place.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're there to rip out their heart. That's what you do.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Their gadgets, their hearts are in the right place and their gadgets are in the right place, but, but nothing they're doing vaguely resembles science.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, when I was a kid, I was, I was angry that the only thing haunted out there were haunted houses and I grew up in an apartment. And I said, can't we have a haunted apartment? And then came Ghostbusters, the movie, it was a haunted apartment.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, yes.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Or, or Dr. Robert Baker, who I, the late Dr. Robert Baker, the psychologist with whom I investigated so many haunted places. And he's, he had a saying, there are no haunted places. Only haunted people.

• 41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  And then Paranormal Activity came out to prove it.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to wind down here.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  I'm going out looking for ghosts, right?

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in New Orleans.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  As soon as I can get out of here.

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in the best place to do it.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I want to leave with a clip from our favorite phone-in comedian, Brian Mallow. He's the science comedian. You can catch him in his Twitter stream. He has some reflections on what ghosts might be, what might look like if you found one. Let's check him out.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  This weekend, while everyone is dressing up for Halloween, I'm reminded of why I don't believe in ghosts. I know it's a controversial stand, but hear me out. If ghosts were real, they would be naked. And I'm completely serious. At the point that you die, you give up your physical body, transcend the material realm, why on earth would you need clothes? Are you cold? Is it a little bit drafty in between dimensions? Or maybe you're shy, still a little self-conscious about the size of your ghosthood? Are they the clothes you wore in real life? Bermuda shorts, knee-high socks? Whoa, scary. Or just a plain white gown that's issued when you check in upstairs? You know, the non-gender-specific eternal white gown for all your honking needs.

• 42:56Speaker 05

  No, ghosts would be naked, and that's even scarier than the Shining. For StarTalk Radio, I'm Brian Mallow, reminding you that astronomy can save your life. If you're undead.

• 43:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was Brian Mallow, who's a science, professional science comedian. Did you know they were out there, Eugene?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  They or him?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  But now I do.

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Both.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is both. We've got a wind down on StarTalk Radio on this Halloween edition. I want to thank my guests, and as always, I bid you to keep looking up.