Why don’t Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator.
For his new book, “The Ghost Lab,” Matt Hongoltz-Hetling spent time with paranormal investigators to understand their relationship with science and society.
This week, Big Think Books catches up with Matt Hongoltz-Hetling, author of Ghost Lab, to find out what a skeptic learned hanging out with paranormal investigators. Stay tuned for our summer newsletter, coming soon.
By Ross Pomeroy
Ghosts. Demons. Cryptids. Telekinesis. Alien abduction. Psychic abilities. Paranormal forces like these beguile the mind and bamboozle the senses. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans believe in at least one of them.
This prevalence suggests that belief in the paranormal is a “feature, not a bug, of the human animal,” journalist Matt Hongoltz-Hetling writes in his new book, The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science.
Despite the forceful title, Hongoltz-Hetling’s book isn’t a screed against Sasquatch stans or explorers of the spirit realm. With intellectual humility, he tells the story of New Hampshire’s Kitt Research Initiative, a ragtag bunch of paranormal investigators who attempt to scientifically and skeptically scrutinize paranormal entities, from curses to cryptids. Ghost Lab is like a season of your favorite spooky, ghost-hunting television show, in which you grow to know and like the hunters, and maybe even understand what drives them.
Hongoltz-Hetling pairs this absorbing narrative with an exploration of institutional distrust. Why do so many Americans no longer trust such social pillars as religion, government, healthcare, education, and the media? And is the concurrent rise in paranormal belief linked in some way?
Big Think got in touch with Hongoltz-Hetling for a spoiler-free discussion about his book, paranormal belief, and the broader issue of institutional distrust. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity)
Big Think: Why do so many people in New Hampshire see ghosts, aliens, and cryptids?
Hongoltz-Hetling: New Hampshire has a perfect storm of dynamics within its culture. First, New England is much more infused with a sense of history and age than other parts of the country; it was settled first, and there’s a constant homage to the past.
New Hampshire is also famously individualistic. This expresses itself in various ways. It’s the country’s libertarian hotspot. It has very high rates of atheism, which is sort of an opting out of an institution. It has its “Live free or die” motto. Those factors have also made New Hampshire the leader in institutional distrust. So all of those things together are a perfect recipe for breeding increased belief in supernatural phenomena.
Showcasing this, New Hampshire has had some truly seminal moments in paranormal history. It was the site of the first widely popularized UFO abduction story, the Betty and Barney Hill incident.
I think [that incident] seeded the local and regional communities with a higher awareness of those sorts of things. Instead of just reading about it through an AP story or seeing it talked about on The Tonight Show, you may know somebody who is connected to this big UFO incident. And that was just one of a handful of incidents to have occurred in New Hampshire.
For all those reasons New Hampshire is in the perfect place at the perfect time to inherit an increased awareness of, and belief in, those “out there” phenomena.
Big Think: What inspired you to spend so much time with and to write about a team of paranormal investigators?
Hongoltz-Hetling: I was a passionate believer and explorer of paranormal concepts when I was young, so I knew the landscape a little bit. Yet, I’ve had more of a skeptical mindset for my adult life.
When I’m asked now if I believe in ghosts, I often say “occasionally and fleetingly.” I walk around every day not believing, but then I hear something weird in the night and glimpse a shadow out of the corner of my eye, and my first thought is not an intruder. It’s, “That’s a spirit!” I have to consciously think and recognize that my gut instinct is incorrect.
We believe in science despite our human nature, not because of it.
Big Think: Let’s get into these paranormal investigators that you followed, because they are really the stars of your book and made it a fascinating, fun read. How did you come across them? What was it like spending time with them?
Hongoltz-Hetling: I wanted to do something to exemplify the paranormal landscape and its relation to science and society. I considered a bunch of entry points into that story. I talked to a state legislator who is also a warlock. I talked to a woman who owned a haunted crepe restaurant. (To be clear, the restaurant was haunted, not the crepes!)
What appealed to me about Andy [Kitt] was that he had become a big player in one paranormal group but left it to start another. That suggested conflict and differing points of view, and I was looking for those diversities of opinion within the ghost-hunting community. What is it about one group’s beliefs that can be so controversial that one of their primary members left for another group?
That keyed me into Andy, who is an unusual guy. He’s smart, logical, and science-minded, but also socially brash and offensive. He prides himself on being offensive and associates it with being a straight-shooter — he “calls it like he sees it.” Andy was not particularly interested in the paranormal until the death of his father. Then a series of compelling personal experiences caused him to take up this idea of exploring paranormal phenomena with a scientific mindset.
So he founded the Kitt Research Initiative (KRI) and assembled an “Avengers” team of paranormal enthusiasts. He had a talented psychic medium. He had a Bigfoot hunter who also happened to be an alien abductee. He had a paralegal looking for an explanation for the voices in her head. He also had an empath who could feel the emotions of others, whether human or incorporeal entities. Together, these people clung to a common dream of applying critical thinking to suss out what’s real versus what’s not and to bring a veneer of respectability to the field.
Big Think: How did you feel about believers in the paranormal before hanging out with Andy and his crew, and how did you feel afterward?
Hongoltz-Hetling: My core beliefs remain the same: I walked into it skeptical of these phenomena, and I walked away skeptical. But I really changed how I think about the people who believe them.
I thought they were nutty and bizarre, maybe even outright frauds. I realized that they’re not crazy, they’re not lying, and they’re not stupid. These people had personal experiences that have been very compelling to them.
Big Think: Your book delved deep into the psychology of paranormal belief. For example, you noted how widespread these beliefs are, calling them a “feature, not a bug, of the human animal.” Why do you think paranormal beliefs are so ingrained?
Hongoltz-Hetling: Our capacity to reason gives us the ability to understand and believe in scientific explanations for the universe’s existence, but it’s not what we’re bred to believe. We believe in science despite our human nature, not because of it. Paranormal phenomena and the sense of wonder and mystery and awe that they spark in us are incredibly compelling.
They almost always come with a story, and we all know the human affinity for stories. They also speak to our desire to impose order on random events. We hear gobbledegook white noise, and our mind searches for the words. It’s satisfying when our mind believes it has made sense of a little bit of that white noise. Is a ghost speaking to us?
Big Think: What draws you to write about paranormal believers?
We’re all looking at this global landscape where science is under fire, institutions are under fire, governments are under fire, public education is under fire, the church is under fire. The collective institutions that have dominated our lives for the last 80 years or so are losing public support. That’s such an interesting and important dynamic. I want to understand what makes that tick.
I like to do that by looking at the people who are outside the system and understanding them a little better — understanding why their beliefs and lifestyles are incompatible with more mainstream thinking. Also, these people are fun and colorful and wild.
People are allowed to have wacky beliefs. We have to find more tolerance for benign or neutral beliefs so we can leverage that to stomp out the parts of these belief systems that are truly harmful.
Big Think: Why do you think a distrust in institutions helps breed a belief in the paranormal and vice versa?
Hongoltz-Hetling: Say you’ve had a strange, compelling personal experience: Plants are talking to you. You go to research it, and you find other people also believe plants speak to them. You’re all pretty sure that your experiences are the real thing, and there are enough of you to create a protective and reinforcing bubble of belief.
Then you look to the authorities, and they’re not saying anything about this stuff. If they are, it’s a fairly nasty and dismissive debunking. You believe plants talk to you? You’re delusional. It’s certainly not nice to hear.
You may think, “If everyone in my community has these experiences, why has science not documented them?” You can only conclude that either science has an enormous blindspot [for something] a majority of Americans have experienced — these paranormal phenomena — or that scientists see the evidence but are hiding it. The authorities are actively corrupt and suppressing the truth.
Once you’re gatewayed into that mindset, then you become a prime target for conspiracy theories across the spectrum.
Big Think: Can institutions gain trust back?
Hongoltz-Hetling: I feel like I’ve been obsessed with talking about my recommendations for institutions, in part because they are probably unpalatable to your average science-minded person.
As a matter of practicality, we have to recognize that when scientists debunk and deride spiritual beliefs for fear of legitimizing them, what’s actually happening is they’re kicking tons of people out of the tent, and science itself is becoming delegitimized. An obvious expression of that now is the threat to research funding that ultimately comes from a populist, anti-expertise movement that also leans on new-age spiritual beliefs.
Institutions have to hold space and free pathways that allow for an expression of these beliefs and turn our 80,000 working psychic mediums, 6,000 or more ghost-hunting groups, and one million alien abductees into stakeholders.
[For example], if you believe you’ve been abducted by an alien, you can’t seek treatment from a therapist or a psychologist because they will call you delusional. We need to have protocols in our medical profession that can deal with these things as a metaphor for underlying evidence-driven explanations for what’s going on.
There’s an example of this in the Muslim world. A lot of clinicians will treat what’s described as Jinn possession, where a person says they’ve been possessed by an evil entity. The medical professional has access to a holy man who can come in and perform an exorcism of that Jinn. Embedded within that ritual are evidence-based treatments. So, the patient receives a satisfactory treatment for their belief, and the practitioner also provides evidence-based care.
People are allowed to have wacky beliefs. We have to find more tolerance for benign or neutral beliefs so we can leverage that to stomp out the parts of these belief systems that are truly harmful.
Big Think: How can institutions regain the trust of the public more broadly?
Hongoltz-Hetling: We know that people are more likely to believe in supernatural things when they feel like they don’t have control of a situation. In this period of political instability and economic turmoil, many people are feeling out of control.
If our institutions can communicate their work better, supernatural beliefs will dry up a bit. We’ve seen this historically.
Are institutions on a path to do that? I don’t know. People have been calling for reform for a long time, and it hasn’t happened. The distortion filter of the internet makes everything worse because it magnifies small flaws. But there are pathways that institutions can take.
Big Think: Can the rift between paranormal believers and their skeptics ever be closed?
Hongoltz-Hetling: I do think there’s a path. The Kitt Research Initiative had this idea that they would do true scientific explanations of the paranormal, and their honest effort was appealing to both believers and skeptics.
Andy embodies this aesthetic. He knows the language of skepticism and the language of belief. If there were more people who understood both worldviews, it becomes quite easy to hold them both in your head.
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