June 6, 2025 • 19 mins
George Noory and journalist Matt Hongoltz-Hetling discuss a group of investigators examining an array of paranormal subjects like ghosts, aliens and Bigfoot, why many people are skeptical of the paranormal realm without experiencing it themselves, and why he thinks the United States is at the brink of a major shift in belief in the unexplained.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Matthew hungolds hetling with us freelance journalists specializing in narrative
features and investigative reporting. He's been named a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and has
been voted Journalist of the Year by the Main Press Association.
Congratulations there, Matt, among other numerous honors. The night on
(00:27):
Coast to Coast, we're going to talk about his work
the Ghost Lab, the belief in ghosts, aliens, bigfoot, spirits,
and other paranormal phenomena, and how it is impacting society
as a whole.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Matt, Welcome to the program.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
George, so excited to talk to you. I've been a
long time listener and so this is quite a thrill
for me. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Looking forward to this. I know our producer Tom is
really excited about your work. Tell us how did you
get started into the paranormal arena.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
You know, when I was a kid, this was a
real passion of mine. You know, I grew up sort
of like you know, reading the books of Daniel Cohen.
I don't know if you remember. He had these fantastic
evocative stories about Bigfoot and the Luckness Monster and so
on on Lyle Watson's SuperNature, which build itself as sort
(01:22):
of like a bridge between science and the occult. And
so I was one of these kids who was out there,
you trying to hypnotize myself and trying to read poems
and uh, sort of testing to see if I could
manifest effects of telepathy and telekinesis.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
And so.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
When I had an opportunity as an adult to sort
of touch base back with that world and to sort
of delve into the paranormal and various facets of the paranormal,
that was really exciting to me. I'm sure a lot
of your listeners would would understand, sort of like it's
just sort of neat to take a look at these
things and say, are these phenomenal or is there something
(02:02):
going on inside our minds that's sort of making them
appear to be real? And so I thought that was
just a really interesting thing.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Good for you.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
What was your finalist work to get you to the
Pulitzer Prize.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
I did a series on housing. I was working in
Maine as a local reporter and found some really horrendous
living situations that were being paid for by the federal
government via the Section eight program. And I sort of
like established that there had been a falling down of
responsibility on the part of not just the federal government,
(02:36):
but sort of like the state administrators and the contracted
investigators and the landlords and the residents themselves. So it
was a sort of a big cluster and we were
happy to see that our reporting brought a little bit
of light to that situation.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Tell us about the title the Ghost Lab how'd you
come up with that?
Speaker 4 (02:56):
Well, ye know, I focused on this group of really
dressing folks who came together to try to found a
ghost laboratory. They represented a bunch of different facets of
the paranormal enthusiast community, and they wanted to sort of
(03:17):
come together to explore this idea of whether or not
these phenomena were real, and so they undertook this really
concerted focus effort to devise experiments that would help them
get closer to the truth. And they were a really
colorful bunch. We had Andy kitt who was a ghost
(03:42):
hunter and a very science minded individual, He was driven
to it because in the wake of the death of
his father, he'd had a series of experiences that he
couldn't explain. There was a woman named Val who was
an EmPATH sense the feelings of others. There was a
(04:03):
bigfoot hunter named Mike Stevens who also happened to be
an alien abductee. There was a pairalegal who heard voices
in her head and was sort of looking for explanations
for that. And there was a really talented psychic medium
named bo Esbi and so they sort of represented They
had their fingers in a lot of different pots, and
(04:24):
so when they came together in this sort of like
noble joint effort, ghost Lab is sort of the shorthand
for what that effort was.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So these warn't skeptics, were they?
Speaker 4 (04:39):
No?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
No yo.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
And I talked to Andy about this in depth and
he yeah. When I first called him, I said, hey,
you know, Andy, I just want to let you know
I'm going to be sort of reporting on what you're
doing in here. And I sort of tend to come
at this from a skeptical frame of mind, and Andy said,
so do I. And so he sort of distinguishes between
(05:03):
somebody who comes at things with a critical mindset that
doesn't believe everything that that is, you know, exercising some
judgment about whether or not what they're looking at as
a real thing. And the sort of hardcore skeptic community,
which he says, is just as in the bag for
(05:26):
the opposite point of view as the paranormal enthusiasts are
for the believer point of view. And so, you know,
when I told him that I came at things skeptically,
he welcomed that. But he himself, you know, he did
exercise critical thought. He rejected a lot of the things
(05:47):
that he looked at, but he was ultimately a believer.
He would sort of frame up like this. He would say, look,
you know, when you are coming up with an explanation
for something that's happening in front of you, your natural
bias is probably going to tell you to not consider
(06:07):
the possibility of a ghost, because you know, science has
not come up with a great explanation for ghosts. But
when I look at things, I'm going to accept that
as one of many possible rational explanations for what I'm seeing.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Is the group still together.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
They're not they came together. Excuse me, they came together
in two thousand and eight or two thousand and nine,
they started performing experiments and going out into the field
and experiencing phenomena, and they did this for more than
nine years. They eventually were forced to close up shop
(06:49):
in the late twenty tens, and they all sort of
went their separate ways, and they're doing their own interesting
things now.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
They had what was called the Kit Research Initiative I
assume named after Andy.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
What was your goal?
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Yes, So they their goal was to you know, inject
signs into these fields. They had a cracker Jack mission
statement to bring science to the paranormal. They wanted to
sort of platform the best ideas. They thought, you know,
we could come up with sort of like a Snopes
like brand where we can measure whether something is truthful
or not, and if we endorse an idea, folks will
(07:31):
be able to have more confidence in that idea. They
wanted to conduct experiments on that that they felt could
tease out the reality of these things. And they also
developed a bunch of protocols and standards that would help
other sort of less polished ghost hunting groups and other
(07:51):
less polished mediums and sort of help them to attain
a higher standard for the work that they do.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
What is called a solid phantom.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
Yeah, that's a term that I actually came up with
in the writing of the book. It's a sort of shorthand.
If you don't mind, Georgia, I'll read you about one
minute's worth of a excerpt from the book that describes that.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
With that, all right, sure, absolutely, I agree.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
So a solid phantom is a key piece of evidence
that turns a myth into a fact and simultaneously applies
a wrecking ball to conventional thought. And solid phantoms do
turn up from time to time. In sixteen seventy five,
a Dutch clothing merchant named Anthony van Lumenholk peered through
a self made microscope and ended years of speculation about
(08:47):
the causes of disease by making the first observation of
what he called animal fuels. And these were germs and
other micro organisms. And there was another one in eighteen
sixty one, when an explorer strode into the hallowed halls
of London's Royal Geographical Society with a stuffed guerrilla in tow,
thereby proving the existence of a mythical man ape. And
(09:09):
then they found one in nineteen seventy one, astronomers at
Netherlands Leiden Observatory captured signals from Signus X one, a
celestial object that was smaller than Oklahoma but twenty one
times more massive than the Sun, and that was the
first observed black hole, once considered a flaw in the
theoretical models underpinning acids for physics, rather than an actual thing.
(09:34):
So George, a solid phantom is not an anecdote about
a serious glimpse, shadow or a personal experience. It's something
tangible that you can either stuff and put on display
in a museum, or that can be consistently observed under
controlled conditions by various independent parties. So it's an explanation.
(09:54):
It's sort of that hardcore evidence that can sometimes be
so elusive.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
When you went looking for more information on the paranormal aliens,
Bigfoot spirits, what did you conclude.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Matt.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Well? I looked at a lot of different things, primarily
evidence that KRII, the Kit Research Initiative, had uncovered over
the course of their efforts, and I will say there
are things that I found that I could not explain,
things that were downright eerie. I'm thinking in particular of
(10:32):
one example where the group had just done a sort
of like a training session for some incoming ghost hunters,
and they did this at their own facility in New Hampshire,
and the night was over, they were all sort of
winding down. They were relaxing around a couch and they
started playing with a Wigi board and while they were there,
(10:56):
they weren't getting a lot of great response from the
Ouiji board, but they all sort of felt this thing
that started setting their hair on end. And just as
they're sort of trying to understand why they suddenly feel
so strange, a heavy ceramic figurine of a raccoon just
(11:17):
tumbles off of the shelf of a desk that's sitting
about three feet away. And I've watched video of this, George,
and I've seen it. Yeah, I've watched it one hundred times,
and it is very, very difficult to explain why that
raccoon tumbled off of that shell. And when I think
(11:39):
about it with my sort of knee jerk skeptical mind,
I'm prying to say, well, you know, there must be
some explanation that we can explain that that is consistent
with the laws of physics, right, so you know, maybe
there was a computer or a printer on that desk
that generated a subtle vibration that caused that raccoon to
(12:02):
tumble down at just a sort of like coincidental time.
Or maybe there was a prankster among them who had,
you know, a fishing line tied to that raccoon or
something like that. But those explanations are not wholly satisfying
to me, and they made me respect the fact that
(12:24):
even though I might not, in my heart of hearts,
believe that I've seen evidence of the paranormal, I can
really respect and understand those who do hold that worldview,
who do look at something like that and yeah, I
know they're not they're not lying, they're not crazy, and
they're not stupid. They're just simply somebody uh believing it
(12:48):
in the very clear evidence in front of them.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Well, with paranormal author Matt Houngold's headline, by the way,
you have the longest last name I've ever seen on a.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
Program, Well that win me a George Norri Prize.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Yes, it just might.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
Just excellent. Excellent?
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Is that Eastern European?
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Yeah, I actually I hyphenated with my wife. She was
a Hongoltz I was a happling. She was the last Hangoldts.
I did this in two thousand, felt very progressive, although
now it's much more common bush name that I went
through the name transformation of Ellis Island and my wife's
Hongoldts was just sort of generalized Eastern European.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Now, what happened to Andy Kidd is He still around.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Andy is still around, And one of the really interesting
things about him is that he has throughout the decade
that he was studying this through the KIT Research Initiative,
he has remained dedicated to science and he has pursued
a more formal scientific education that's been sort of enabled
(14:03):
by the protocols that he put together as a ghost
hunter and that he hopes will inform his future efforts
to tease out evidence of the paranormal. And so he
has gone through a psychophysics program at a local university.
(14:23):
He's at the cusp of attaining a PhD, and he's
teaching classes. He's a university instructor and lecturer in the
field of statistics. So he is still out there, still
sort of looking for with ways to sort of make
(14:47):
the mainstream scientific community see what he sees when he's
out there looking at ghosts.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
So he's open minded.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
He's open minded, absolutely, and he's encountered. You know what
a a lot of folks who are more open minded
do when they go into scientific circles. You know, he encounters,
he encounters a lot of pushback, a lot of blowback.
He told his advisor on his PhD project what his
(15:16):
beliefs and his intentions were, and he said his advisor
looked at him like he had grown a second head.
You know, he's uh uh, He's been all the laughed
out of the room. And I think that that's a
problem in the scientific community. You know, I even though
(15:36):
I'm sort of more science minded and I'm out there
telling folks, yeah, I don't ultimately believe some of the
things that the KIT Research Initiative members believe. I see
a real problem in the scientific community sort of attitudinally
(15:56):
and in their sort of knee jerk reaction to dismiss
and debunk and in some cases ridicule. I think that
the heart of science is to be open to evidence,
and the best scientists are open to evidence. But the
sort of dismissal with prejudice is not to me in
(16:21):
keeping with the scientific process.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Man, I'm going to ask you about various aspects of
the paranormal world and reality and get your take on it,
your thoughts on ghosts.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
First of all, Yeah, well, Ay and his people they
came up with a theory of ghosts that may or
may not be familiar to your listeners. They believe that
ghosts exists in a sort of timeless place where they
are experiencing all of time and existence simultaneously. That this
(16:58):
is what the afterlife is. Spirits who are eternal, who
are sitting there and who are occasionally coming to Earth
not to find meaning, but to do it as a
sort of a joy ride, you know, to give themselves
some variety to the experience of their existence. So they
they are born into a human by some mechanism that
(17:24):
we don't understand, they live a human life and sort
of forget about their spirit world, and then when they
get out of their body, they go back to their
you know, spirit couches and kick off their spirit shoes
and say, who that was? That was something I'm glad
I did that, you know, as you or I might
do after a strenuous workout or vacation or something, you know,
(17:47):
and when I look at what ghosts are. I am
seeing a lot of sort of like the processes that
the psychological processes is that science has come up with
to explain a lot of these phenomenon, you know, persistent
feelings of unease or disease. I have felt those myself,
(18:11):
but I have come to accept that these this is
more of a trick of the mind than an external phenomenon,
even when that trick of the mind can send me
a sort of running in the opposite direction. And there
have been a lot of efforts to sort of explain
(18:32):
what it is that triggers these beliefs in a particular setting.
And sometimes it's you know, that there's a physical feature
of a house that sort of screams haunted house at us,
and that can sort of lead us down a path
of thought that arrives there. But then you know, and also, Georgie,
(18:54):
I'll say too, I've talked to some people who are
very good friends of mine, who are very close to me,
and they will tell me stories that they've experienced that
do not conform to any of those explanations. And so
I think it is important to keep an open mind
about ghosts and their nature and what they.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Are Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight
at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to
coastam dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Matthew hungolds hetling with us freelance journalists specializing in narrative
features and investigative reporting. He's been named a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and has
been voted Journalist of the Year by the Main Press Association.
Congratulations there, Matt, among other numerous honors. The night on
(00:27):
Coast to Coast, we're going to talk about his work
the Ghost Lab, the belief in ghosts, aliens, bigfoot, spirits,
and other paranormal phenomena, and how it is impacting society
as a whole.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Matt, Welcome to the program.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
George, so excited to talk to you. I've been a
long time listener and so this is quite a thrill
for me. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Looking forward to this. I know our producer Tom is
really excited about your work. Tell us how did you
get started into the paranormal arena.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
You know, when I was a kid, this was a
real passion of mine. You know, I grew up sort
of like you know, reading the books of Daniel Cohen.
I don't know if you remember. He had these fantastic
evocative stories about Bigfoot and the Luckness Monster and so
on on Lyle Watson's SuperNature, which build itself as sort
(01:22):
of like a bridge between science and the occult. And
so I was one of these kids who was out there,
you trying to hypnotize myself and trying to read poems
and uh, sort of testing to see if I could
manifest effects of telepathy and telekinesis.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
And so.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
When I had an opportunity as an adult to sort
of touch base back with that world and to sort
of delve into the paranormal and various facets of the paranormal,
that was really exciting to me. I'm sure a lot
of your listeners would would understand, sort of like it's
just sort of neat to take a look at these
things and say, are these phenomenal or is there something
(02:02):
going on inside our minds that's sort of making them
appear to be real? And so I thought that was
just a really interesting thing.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Good for you.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
What was your finalist work to get you to the
Pulitzer Prize.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
I did a series on housing. I was working in
Maine as a local reporter and found some really horrendous
living situations that were being paid for by the federal
government via the Section eight program. And I sort of
like established that there had been a falling down of
responsibility on the part of not just the federal government,
(02:36):
but sort of like the state administrators and the contracted
investigators and the landlords and the residents themselves. So it
was a sort of a big cluster and we were
happy to see that our reporting brought a little bit
of light to that situation.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Tell us about the title the Ghost Lab how'd you
come up with that?
Speaker 4 (02:56):
Well, ye know, I focused on this group of really
dressing folks who came together to try to found a
ghost laboratory. They represented a bunch of different facets of
the paranormal enthusiast community, and they wanted to sort of
(03:17):
come together to explore this idea of whether or not
these phenomena were real, and so they undertook this really
concerted focus effort to devise experiments that would help them
get closer to the truth. And they were a really
colorful bunch. We had Andy kitt who was a ghost
(03:42):
hunter and a very science minded individual, He was driven
to it because in the wake of the death of
his father, he'd had a series of experiences that he
couldn't explain. There was a woman named Val who was
an EmPATH sense the feelings of others. There was a
(04:03):
bigfoot hunter named Mike Stevens who also happened to be
an alien abductee. There was a pairalegal who heard voices
in her head and was sort of looking for explanations
for that. And there was a really talented psychic medium
named bo Esbi and so they sort of represented They
had their fingers in a lot of different pots, and
(04:24):
so when they came together in this sort of like
noble joint effort, ghost Lab is sort of the shorthand
for what that effort was.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So these warn't skeptics, were they?
Speaker 4 (04:39):
No?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
No yo.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
And I talked to Andy about this in depth and
he yeah. When I first called him, I said, hey,
you know, Andy, I just want to let you know
I'm going to be sort of reporting on what you're
doing in here. And I sort of tend to come
at this from a skeptical frame of mind, and Andy said,
so do I. And so he sort of distinguishes between
(05:03):
somebody who comes at things with a critical mindset that
doesn't believe everything that that is, you know, exercising some
judgment about whether or not what they're looking at as
a real thing. And the sort of hardcore skeptic community,
which he says, is just as in the bag for
(05:26):
the opposite point of view as the paranormal enthusiasts are
for the believer point of view. And so, you know,
when I told him that I came at things skeptically,
he welcomed that. But he himself, you know, he did
exercise critical thought. He rejected a lot of the things
(05:47):
that he looked at, but he was ultimately a believer.
He would sort of frame up like this. He would say, look,
you know, when you are coming up with an explanation
for something that's happening in front of you, your natural
bias is probably going to tell you to not consider
(06:07):
the possibility of a ghost, because you know, science has
not come up with a great explanation for ghosts. But
when I look at things, I'm going to accept that
as one of many possible rational explanations for what I'm seeing.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Is the group still together.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
They're not they came together. Excuse me, they came together
in two thousand and eight or two thousand and nine,
they started performing experiments and going out into the field
and experiencing phenomena, and they did this for more than
nine years. They eventually were forced to close up shop
(06:49):
in the late twenty tens, and they all sort of
went their separate ways, and they're doing their own interesting
things now.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
They had what was called the Kit Research Initiative I
assume named after Andy.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
What was your goal?
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Yes, So they their goal was to you know, inject
signs into these fields. They had a cracker Jack mission
statement to bring science to the paranormal. They wanted to
sort of platform the best ideas. They thought, you know,
we could come up with sort of like a Snopes
like brand where we can measure whether something is truthful
or not, and if we endorse an idea, folks will
(07:31):
be able to have more confidence in that idea. They
wanted to conduct experiments on that that they felt could
tease out the reality of these things. And they also
developed a bunch of protocols and standards that would help
other sort of less polished ghost hunting groups and other
(07:51):
less polished mediums and sort of help them to attain
a higher standard for the work that they do.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
What is called a solid phantom.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
Yeah, that's a term that I actually came up with
in the writing of the book. It's a sort of shorthand.
If you don't mind, Georgia, I'll read you about one
minute's worth of a excerpt from the book that describes that.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
With that, all right, sure, absolutely, I agree.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
So a solid phantom is a key piece of evidence
that turns a myth into a fact and simultaneously applies
a wrecking ball to conventional thought. And solid phantoms do
turn up from time to time. In sixteen seventy five,
a Dutch clothing merchant named Anthony van Lumenholk peered through
a self made microscope and ended years of speculation about
(08:47):
the causes of disease by making the first observation of
what he called animal fuels. And these were germs and
other micro organisms. And there was another one in eighteen
sixty one, when an explorer strode into the hallowed halls
of London's Royal Geographical Society with a stuffed guerrilla in tow,
thereby proving the existence of a mythical man ape. And
(09:09):
then they found one in nineteen seventy one, astronomers at
Netherlands Leiden Observatory captured signals from Signus X one, a
celestial object that was smaller than Oklahoma but twenty one
times more massive than the Sun, and that was the
first observed black hole, once considered a flaw in the
theoretical models underpinning acids for physics, rather than an actual thing.
(09:34):
So George, a solid phantom is not an anecdote about
a serious glimpse, shadow or a personal experience. It's something
tangible that you can either stuff and put on display
in a museum, or that can be consistently observed under
controlled conditions by various independent parties. So it's an explanation.
(09:54):
It's sort of that hardcore evidence that can sometimes be
so elusive.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
When you went looking for more information on the paranormal aliens,
Bigfoot spirits, what did you conclude.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Matt.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Well? I looked at a lot of different things, primarily
evidence that KRII, the Kit Research Initiative, had uncovered over
the course of their efforts, and I will say there
are things that I found that I could not explain,
things that were downright eerie. I'm thinking in particular of
(10:32):
one example where the group had just done a sort
of like a training session for some incoming ghost hunters,
and they did this at their own facility in New Hampshire,
and the night was over, they were all sort of
winding down. They were relaxing around a couch and they
started playing with a Wigi board and while they were there,
(10:56):
they weren't getting a lot of great response from the
Ouiji board, but they all sort of felt this thing
that started setting their hair on end. And just as
they're sort of trying to understand why they suddenly feel
so strange, a heavy ceramic figurine of a raccoon just
(11:17):
tumbles off of the shelf of a desk that's sitting
about three feet away. And I've watched video of this, George,
and I've seen it. Yeah, I've watched it one hundred times,
and it is very, very difficult to explain why that
raccoon tumbled off of that shell. And when I think
(11:39):
about it with my sort of knee jerk skeptical mind,
I'm prying to say, well, you know, there must be
some explanation that we can explain that that is consistent
with the laws of physics, right, so you know, maybe
there was a computer or a printer on that desk
that generated a subtle vibration that caused that raccoon to
(12:02):
tumble down at just a sort of like coincidental time.
Or maybe there was a prankster among them who had,
you know, a fishing line tied to that raccoon or
something like that. But those explanations are not wholly satisfying
to me, and they made me respect the fact that
(12:24):
even though I might not, in my heart of hearts,
believe that I've seen evidence of the paranormal, I can
really respect and understand those who do hold that worldview,
who do look at something like that and yeah, I
know they're not they're not lying, they're not crazy, and
they're not stupid. They're just simply somebody uh believing it
(12:48):
in the very clear evidence in front of them.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Well, with paranormal author Matt Houngold's headline, by the way,
you have the longest last name I've ever seen on a.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
Program, Well that win me a George Norri Prize.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Yes, it just might.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
Just excellent. Excellent?
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Is that Eastern European?
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Yeah, I actually I hyphenated with my wife. She was
a Hongoltz I was a happling. She was the last Hangoldts.
I did this in two thousand, felt very progressive, although
now it's much more common bush name that I went
through the name transformation of Ellis Island and my wife's
Hongoldts was just sort of generalized Eastern European.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Now, what happened to Andy Kidd is He still around.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Andy is still around, And one of the really interesting
things about him is that he has throughout the decade
that he was studying this through the KIT Research Initiative,
he has remained dedicated to science and he has pursued
a more formal scientific education that's been sort of enabled
(14:03):
by the protocols that he put together as a ghost
hunter and that he hopes will inform his future efforts
to tease out evidence of the paranormal. And so he
has gone through a psychophysics program at a local university.
(14:23):
He's at the cusp of attaining a PhD, and he's
teaching classes. He's a university instructor and lecturer in the
field of statistics. So he is still out there, still
sort of looking for with ways to sort of make
(14:47):
the mainstream scientific community see what he sees when he's
out there looking at ghosts.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
So he's open minded.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
He's open minded, absolutely, and he's encountered. You know what
a a lot of folks who are more open minded
do when they go into scientific circles. You know, he encounters,
he encounters a lot of pushback, a lot of blowback.
He told his advisor on his PhD project what his
(15:16):
beliefs and his intentions were, and he said his advisor
looked at him like he had grown a second head.
You know, he's uh uh, He's been all the laughed
out of the room. And I think that that's a
problem in the scientific community. You know, I even though
(15:36):
I'm sort of more science minded and I'm out there
telling folks, yeah, I don't ultimately believe some of the
things that the KIT Research Initiative members believe. I see
a real problem in the scientific community sort of attitudinally
(15:56):
and in their sort of knee jerk reaction to dismiss
and debunk and in some cases ridicule. I think that
the heart of science is to be open to evidence,
and the best scientists are open to evidence. But the
sort of dismissal with prejudice is not to me in
(16:21):
keeping with the scientific process.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Man, I'm going to ask you about various aspects of
the paranormal world and reality and get your take on it,
your thoughts on ghosts.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
First of all, Yeah, well, Ay and his people they
came up with a theory of ghosts that may or
may not be familiar to your listeners. They believe that
ghosts exists in a sort of timeless place where they
are experiencing all of time and existence simultaneously. That this
(16:58):
is what the afterlife is. Spirits who are eternal, who
are sitting there and who are occasionally coming to Earth
not to find meaning, but to do it as a
sort of a joy ride, you know, to give themselves
some variety to the experience of their existence. So they
they are born into a human by some mechanism that
(17:24):
we don't understand, they live a human life and sort
of forget about their spirit world, and then when they
get out of their body, they go back to their
you know, spirit couches and kick off their spirit shoes
and say, who that was? That was something I'm glad
I did that, you know, as you or I might
do after a strenuous workout or vacation or something, you know,
(17:47):
and when I look at what ghosts are. I am
seeing a lot of sort of like the processes that
the psychological processes is that science has come up with
to explain a lot of these phenomenon, you know, persistent
feelings of unease or disease. I have felt those myself,
(18:11):
but I have come to accept that these this is
more of a trick of the mind than an external phenomenon,
even when that trick of the mind can send me
a sort of running in the opposite direction. And there
have been a lot of efforts to sort of explain
(18:32):
what it is that triggers these beliefs in a particular setting.
And sometimes it's you know, that there's a physical feature
of a house that sort of screams haunted house at us,
and that can sort of lead us down a path
of thought that arrives there. But then you know, and also, Georgie,
(18:54):
I'll say too, I've talked to some people who are
very good friends of mine, who are very close to me,
and they will tell me stories that they've experienced that
do not conform to any of those explanations. And so
I think it is important to keep an open mind
about ghosts and their nature and what they.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
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George Noory
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