Author Q&A, Parte the Seconde

I was recently interviewed for a site called ParanormalBucket and answered several questions about my work and books. This week and in following weeks I'll be posting some of them here.

Q: Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky has said that “[s]cience is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.” Do you think the scientific method can be used to reinvent/reinvigorate a person’s interest in supernatural topics, or are science and the paranormal fundamentally incompatible?

A: The process of science is about solving mysteries, and when you do that, you find more mysteries, so it’s often the case that, as Sopolsky says, scientific breakthroughs lead to more mysteries. Not only should mysteries be investigated scientifically, but in fact many mysteries cannot be solved without scientific methods.

My skeptical colleagues and I, using scientific methods, have solved hundreds of mysteries. We have found answers and solutions to everything from astrology to zombies, ESP to ghosts. Yet non-scientific paranormal investigators rarely if ever find conclusive evidence; theirs is an open-ended quest fueled by evidence that is marginal at best. Look for yourself at the mountains of non-skeptical books on paranormal topics; see for yourself if their investigations find any conclusive evidence for the phenomenon. Ghost Hunters has been on television for a decade; what hard evidence have they found for ghosts? What definitive knowledge have we gained about the nature of ghosts over the past 10 or 20 years? Nothing; it’s all just speculation and theory. I have a book coming out later this year titled "Investigating Ghosts," that discusses this in depth.