Spooky Science with Mary Roach

Could ghosts possibly be real? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Eugene Mirman explore ghost hunting techniques, spiritualism, and the non-corporeal plane of existence with Mary Roach and Joe Nickell. Originally Aired October 30, 2011.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:40Speaker 01

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• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 2:36Neil 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.

• 2:54Eugene Mirman?

  Hello.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back.

• 2:56Eugene Mirman?

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

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene tweets at Eugene Mirman.

• 3:01Eugene Mirman?

  It's true.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:04Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:09Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, I'm a huge ghost guy. First of all, thanks for asking such an easily answered question.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:18Eugene Mirman?

  No, I don't, I don't, uh...

• 3:21Eugene Mirman?

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

• 3:31Neil 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.

• 3:38Eugene Mirman?

  Before science, there were ghost thoughts?

• 3:41Neil 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.

• 4:11Eugene Mirman?

  Basically, little kids and then horse carriage mishaps.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 4:22Eugene Mirman?

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

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brilliantly done.

• 4:25Eugene Mirman?

  Thank you.

• 4:26Neil 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. And séances were really big business. And you'd go into, would it be a well-lit room?

• 4:42Eugene Mirman?

  No.

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it would be a darkened room.

• 4:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A darkened room.

• 4:46Eugene Mirman?

  Ghosts, everyone knows ghosts hate light bulbs.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, 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-

• 5:11Eugene Mirman?

  Former President Harry Truman.

• 5:14Neil 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. She, all she wanted to do was compile in her book a whole study of the stuff people did to investigate ghosts.

• 5:35Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it was, 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, so what are they about?

• 5:48Mary Roach?

  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.

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New tool, new methods of-

• 6:05Mary Roach?

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

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know any other Edison?

• 6:12Mary Roach?

  Khan.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Khan Edison. The electric company of New York.

• 6:16Mary Roach?

  So Thomas Edison, he was working on this machine that was, in essence, an amplifier. Because he believed that when you die, you turn 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 kind of thinking that maybe they communicate in a different wavelength than what we do.

• 6:48Neil 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?

• 7:01Mary Roach?

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

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What kind of meter again is it?

• 7:09Mary Roach?

  EMF.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, EMF, electromagnetic field.

• 7:11Mary Roach?

  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.

• 7:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good enough for me.

• 7:24Mary Roach?

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

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Linemen, you mean people for high-tension lines?

• 7:35Mary Roach?

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

• 7:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 7:40Mary Roach?

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

• 7:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they don't use those meters.

• 7:42Mary Roach?

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

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 7:50Mary Roach?

  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-

• 7:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mystic, Connecticut.

• 7:59Mary Roach?

  Yes.

• 7:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's a big whaling village from the past.

• 8:01Mary Roach?

  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-

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Iron.

• 8:10Mary Roach?

  Iron. Okay, that'll do it.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'll totally distort an electromagnetic field.

• 8:15Mary Roach?

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

• 8:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Learn some physics.

• 8:20Mary Roach?

  Actually know what an EMF is, how the meter works, what other things might set it off. Thank you.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eugene, it's all about the tools.

• 8:31Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Neil 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?

• 8:38Eugene Mirman?

  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.

• 8:45Neil 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.

• 8:56Eugene Mirman?

  That it's ghosts.

• 8:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's ghosts, yeah.

• 8:58Eugene Mirman?

  And weird radio waves.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 9:00Eugene Mirman?

  Or normal radio waves.

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The list is long. The list, there's something called an EVP detector, an 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.

• 9:30Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 9:30Neil 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?

• 9:38Eugene Mirman?

  And then you could see.

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you start to.

• 9:40Eugene Mirman?

  Or if you had a dog that could detect ghosts.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be even better. We have dogs that detect beg bugs. 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.

• 9:56Eugene Mirman?

  But I just want to 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?

• 10:10Neil 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 hertz, something like that. So, what he found is that at the frequency of 18 hertz, hertz 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 that happens

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to you, your eye begins to see things that are in fact not there. 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 subsonic vibration in the room that triggered this reaction in the human eyeball upon walking in. And so, it's interesting when you think something supernatural, you just sort of think about it a little further.

• 11:23Eugene Mirman?

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

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 11:33Eugene Mirman?

  This is my plan now. Thank you, Neil.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are also things like ions in the air. Ions are, they're charged atoms, charged particles, anything that's not a whole atom.

• 11:44Eugene Mirman?

  If you say so.

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can trust me on this one.

• 11:46Eugene Mirman?

  I do.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Save your doubts for another time.

• 11:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:49Neil 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, or you add too many electrons, you make an ion. So, an ion is a charged particle floating freely. Matter doesn't like staying charged. It wants to sort of find its mate, close the loop, and you're done for it, rendering most matter in the universe neutral. 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 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.

• 12:30Eugene Mirman?

  Of course.

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Duh.

• 12:35Eugene Mirman?

  Lightning.

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 12:45Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, like red, yellow.

• 12:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Orange.

• 12:48Eugene Mirman?

  Orange.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Orange, yellow.

• 12:49Eugene Mirman?

  Biv, uh, blue, violet, Devoe.

• 12:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 13:06Eugene Mirman?

  Sharktruce.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've never seen sharktruce, 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.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  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

• 14:14Speaker 05

  basically are just testing for electricity. 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, "Ooh, it must be a ghost." It's like, no, it must be a million things. I think it would have ghosts at the end of that list.

• 14:40Neil 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.

• 14:52Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wow.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His name is Joe Nichol.

• 14:54Eugene Mirman?

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

• 15:01Neil 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.

• 15:25Eugene Mirman?

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

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For example.

• 15:29Eugene Mirman?

  It's not their fault that they're pretty sure they're talking to a dead friend.

• 15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Example. So, we're gonna talk to him about what tools he uses, what kinds of things he's investigated. He's actually in New Orleans right now, and earlier today, performed a séance in an attempt to reach the ghost of Houdini, which is an annual thing that gets done around Halloween time.

• 16:05Speaker 00

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• 16:47Speaker 00

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• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space fact. The Milky Way? The Incas instead called it the Celestial River. That's gotta be my favorite.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you like that fact, you can find 4,999 more in Lost in Space. 5,000 facts to help navigate the universe. Lost in Space is now available wherever you get your books.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On our line in-

• 19:45Eugene Mirman?

  Is he here?

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's a spirit in New Orleans. Joe Nickell, are you on the line?

• 19:49Speaker 06

  Hi Neil.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joe, hey man, how you doing?

• 19:51Speaker 06

  We've had a poltergeist experience here, but I think-

• 19:53Eugene Mirman?

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

• 19:55Speaker 06

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

• 19:59Neil 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.

• 20:07Speaker 06

  Thank you for that.

• 20:08Eugene Mirman?

  You're welcome.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 20:40Speaker 06

  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, uh, 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, 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

• 21:22Speaker 06

  using, fundamentally doing pseudoscience. What I do is to say, "Okay ma'am, what, what exactly is happening in your home?" And if she says, "Well, I, I woke up and, and I saw a ghost figure, I, 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, uh, "My first haunted house was 1972, McKinsey House in Toronto."

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 22:03Speaker 06

  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-

• 22:12Eugene Mirman?

  Was a footstep machine.

• 22:13Speaker 06

  Yes, you got it, there, forty, forty inches away-

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Duh.

• 22:19Speaker 06

  Was a parallel iron staircase and a late-night cleanup crew, so, yes, a footstep machine, and, and so, people were hearing footsteps, but they weren't hearing a ghost. So what I'm trying to do, in, just to sum up, I'm trying to explain what's happening, not, 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.

• 22:50Eugene Mirman?

  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."

• 22:57Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 22:58Eugene Mirman?

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

• 23:01Speaker 06

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

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 23:07Speaker 06

  No, what I'm trying to do is, is sort of like 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."

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Making no assumptions upfront.

• 23:36Eugene Mirman?

  You're like a non-menacing Batman.

• 23:39Speaker 06

  That's right. You see, it, 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.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get back to that-

• 24:04Speaker 06

  And science doesn't do that.

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 24:18Mary Roach?

  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," but it turned out-

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 24:49Mary Roach?

  Yeah, what 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?

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, why not just whisper it in your ear, say, "Yeah, thanks," or write down, write down a note.

• 25:19Mary Roach?

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

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 25:31Speaker 06

  We did.

• 25:32Eugene Mirman?

  Did you conduct it, or did you attend it?

• 25:33Speaker 06

  I conducted the séance.

• 25:36Eugene Mirman?

  All right, Mr. Science.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 25:40Speaker 06

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

• 25:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Houdini?

• 25:47Speaker 06

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

• 25:54Eugene Mirman?

  Has anyone tried texting?

• 25:56Speaker 06

  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.

• 26:15Eugene Mirman?

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

• 26:18Speaker 06

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

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of his own peeps, one of his own peeps.

• 26:29Speaker 06

  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.

• 26:38Neil 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, you know, modern day, not from a century ago, and, uh, do you have any comment about, uh, ghosts portrayed in film?

• 26:56Speaker 06

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

• 27:03Eugene Mirman?

  How realistic do you think Star Wars is?

• 27:04Speaker 06

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

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 27:12Speaker 06

  Well, look, this is interesting, because, you know, the, the, 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.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 27:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, and then, and then that went, that went okay through the 19th century, occasionally you get some other kind of glitch, but, but really, until fairly recently, ghosts sort of looked like, well, us, only transparent, and, and now, people, 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.

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Off the flash, exactly.

• 27:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, 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.

• 28:08Eugene Mirman?

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

• 28:11Speaker 06

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

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The camera strap, okay, ectoplasmic camera strap. You know, I've got a clip from Phil Plake talking about movies, he's a big movie buff.

• 28:28Speaker 06

  And a good friend of mine.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 28:34Speaker 05

  In a lot of movies, you get kind of three types of ghosts, you get the ghosts who are loved ones, like in, 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'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,

• 29:20Speaker 05

  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, uh, control problem, and if you're alone in, 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.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 29:53Speaker 06

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

• 30:03Eugene Mirman?

  On mushrooms?

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On mushrooms?

• 30:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're probably, uh, prepared to have me try to explain it, rather than just agree with them, uh, otherwise, they, if, if they go to ghost hunters, of course the ghost hunters are gonna pretty much find that, yes, we have some anomalies here, and, and, look, the ghost hunters are using what's called an argument from ignorance, this is, most of the paranormal works this way. We'll get back to the argument from ignorance, but only after we take a quick break. We'll see you in a few.

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to our Halloween edition of StarTalk Radio. So, I've got on the line Joe Nickell, 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.

• 31:07Speaker 06

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

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll all come out in New Orleans.

• 31:15Eugene Mirman?

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

• 31:20Speaker 06

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

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Plus, I don't know if many people know that the cemetery in the ghoul scene of Michael Jackson's thriller video is a cemetery on the outskirts of New Orleans.

• 31:33Eugene Mirman?

  No.

• 31:34Neil 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?

• 31:46Speaker 06

  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, it's an argument from ignorance, they're saying, we don't know what caused this, therefore, it's a ghost.

• 32:09Eugene Mirman?

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

• 32:12Speaker 06

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

• 32:24Eugene Mirman?

  They're like low-level conspiracy theorists.

• 32:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're trying to draw a conclusion from, I don't know, so it's a logical fallacy, I don't know, therefore, I do know. And so, what we're trying to do 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.

• 32:50Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, or a ghost in a remote control.

• 32:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 32:53Eugene Mirman?

  Turning on your TV at random.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  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.

• 33:11Neil 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. In your book, you actually have the word ectoplasm.

• 33:26Mary Roach?

  Hmm.

• 33:26Neil 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.

• 33:32Mary Roach?

  Yeah, the Ghostbusters ectoplasm is just sort of slime.

• 33:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's green goo.

• 33:36Mary Roach?

  It's that green goo, that kind of sticky and probably tough to get out of your clothes. But ectoplasm, back in the spiritualism, you familiar with spiritualism, this was a belief, it was a religious movement.

• 33:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That you communicate with the dead.

• 33:48Mary Roach?

  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.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So ectoplasm had a real meaning and definition?

• 34:02Mary Roach?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not it itself was real?

• 34:04Mary Roach?

  Exactly.

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 34:09Mary Roach?

  Yeah, through the early.

• 34:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Early 1900s, right, sure. And this was when you had seances, seances were big.

• 34:14Mary Roach?

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

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was there ever a guy, why can't a guy be in touch with the dead?

• 34:22Mary Roach?

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

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll have to read the book, forget all the details, Spook, by Mary Roach, okay?

• 34:34Mary Roach?

  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, what is it? It turned out, it took magicians to debunk this, because they had.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Houdini among them, yeah.

• 34:52Mary Roach?

  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.

• 34:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A background in how to fool somebody.

• 35:00Mary Roach?

  Yes, and how to fool somebody.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 35:05Mary Roach?

  Right, right, so they got, you know, Charles Rocher, Nobel laureate, they got 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.

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the urge to believe was so strong.

• 35:20Mary Roach?

  It turned out to be cheesecloth.

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The skepticism with cheesecloth.

• 35:23Mary Roach?

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

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the slime was their saliva all over it?

• 35:31Mary Roach?

  Yeah, their stomach juices, yeah.

• 35:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nasty.

• 35:34Mary Roach?

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

• 35:37Neil 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.

• 35:45Mary Roach?

  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.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they maintained their skepticism all the way?

• 36:01Mary Roach?

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

• 36:04Neil 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.

• 36:08Mary Roach?

  Yes.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But none of it convinces you.

• 36:10Mary Roach?

  Exactly.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 36:21Speaker 06

  Well, as I mentioned earlier, these, some of these photographs that you get have what looks like a spiraling vortex, or sometimes a strand-like effect, and people often say 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 passing insect, particles of dust, almost anything, and you could create really, really spooky effects.

• 36:54Eugene Mirman?

  Could be a ghost insect.

• 36:55Speaker 06

  It could be a ghost insect, right, right?

• 36:57Eugene Mirman?

  That fly ghost insect.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 37:00Speaker 06

  And I'll give those hypotheses all the, all the attention they deserve, that is, I will promptly ignore them and move right on. So, so anything, anything that can intrude, even if you're in a cold place and your breath goes out and creates a kind of fog, it could 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.

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 37:44Speaker 06

  Right, because what they're doing is, particularly, see, if this happened in a suburban home, maybe they wouldn't think, they'd just think it's a photo glitch, but if now they're in a haunted house, looking for a ghost, and 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, it's not evidence of anything.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It must be a ghost, that's right.

• 38:10Eugene Mirman?

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

• 38:12Speaker 06

  Right.

• 38:13Eugene Mirman?

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

• 38:17Speaker 06

  That absolutely, absolutely does.

• 38:19Neil 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 get you to certify.

• 38:28Speaker 06

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

• 38:36Eugene Mirman?

  Well, do you think it would be handsome?

• 38:38Speaker 06

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

• 38:51Eugene Mirman?

  You don't get how ghosts think.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, ghosts avoid skeptics at all costs.

• 38:56Eugene Mirman?

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

• 39:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, or, or as Maury Povich said to me once, 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.

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly.

• 39:16Speaker 06

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

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, 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.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  I love some of the stuff in Ghostbusters, where they turn skepticism on its head, 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

• 40:17Speaker 05

  see him, but she can hear him, and then she has to 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.

• 40:57Speaker 05

  In the end, sadly 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.

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 41:22Speaker 06

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

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You hope?

• 41:25Speaker 06

  Yes, I hope.

• 41:26Eugene Mirman?

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

• 41:29Speaker 06

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

• 41:34Eugene Mirman?

  Oh?

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna have to go to break in like a few seconds, but hold that thought.

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• 45:58Speaker 07

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• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You left us hanging, Joe. You said you found evidence for ghosts.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  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, 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 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 would 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, the desk clerk, she said, you know, that, that room upstairs,

• 47:00Speaker 00

  she said, well, the, the cleaning crew is just so superstitious, I just can't help but mess with their minds. And so I use my pass key and I go up at night and I turn things away. And I just, they get so excited. And of course, right then and there, I had caught another ghost.

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Doesn't get more real than that, Neil.

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Caught a real ghost.

• 47:23Eugene Mirman?

  So most ghosts are mischievous clerks.

• 47:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mischievous 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.

• 47:39Eugene Mirman?

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

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry.

• 47:43Eugene Mirman?

  I think it's fine.

• 47:43Neil 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.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  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 around on earth, but still exists and has

• 48:34Speaker 05

  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.

• 48:59Eugene Mirman?

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

• 49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 49:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get around.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:00Neil 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?

• 50:07Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 50:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But their heart's in the right place.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Their heart's in the right place.

• 50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 50:41Speaker 00

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

• 50:48Neil 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.

• 50:57Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 50:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, yes.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 51:13Eugene Mirman?

  And then Paranormal Activity came out. So prove it. Yes.

• 51:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to wind down here.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  I'm going out looking for ghosts, right?

• 51:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're New Orleans.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  As soon as I can get out of here.

• 51:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in the best place to do it.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:25Neil 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.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  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 ghost hood? 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

• 52:26Speaker 01

  all your hunking needs. 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.

• 52:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 52:49Eugene Mirman?

  They or him?

• 52:52Eugene Mirman?

  But now I do.

• 52:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Both.

• 52:54Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 52:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is both. We've got to 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.

• 53:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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