“It's just as bad 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 that. So any anomaly is considered evidence for a ghost. And the opposite of that, the dismissive debunking approach, is equally bad because both of those are starting with the answer and working backwards to the evidence.”
StarTalk Radio · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
The paranormal investigator explains how his approach differs from both ghost hunters and outright debunkers. Science, he says, doesn't start from the answer.
Transcript
no assumptions up front.
You're like the non-menacing Batman. That's right.
You see, it's just as bad 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 that. So any anomaly is considered evidence for a ghost. And the opposite of that, the dismissive debunking approach, is equally bad because both of those are starting with the answer and working backwards to the evidence. Let's get back to that. Science doesn't do that.
Joe, let's get back to that. I want to slip in another clip of my interview with Mary Roach. She wrote a book, Spook, that Science Tackles the Afterlife. And let's see what she says about ghosts in the machines.
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 thought that when their VCR or their telephone, their voice recorder, their answering machine does something strange. There was a fairly…
a minute, I know a Penelope. Oh, my gosh.
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