Summary: Pulitzer Prize winning author Deborah Blum discusses the challenges of science reporting and the paranormal taboo. Skeptiko guest host Steve Volk welcomes Deborah Blum author of, Ghost Hunters - William James and the Hunt for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. During the interview Ms. Blum discusses her approach to covering the paranormal: Steve Volk: This is one of the hardest things. Who do we believe? Who do we trust? I want to see somehow people in the middle pick this stuff up and look at it, but that's a very, very rare occurrence. Deborah Blum: I agree. Like I said, I'm a mainstream science journalist and daughter of a chemist. But what was fascinating to me when I started working on Ghost Hunters is that I'd go and give talks at different universities. I mean literally, I was at the University of Florida and they said, 'Oh, let us tell you about our haunted laboratory.' Or I was at a meeting with a bunch of animal researchers and I was sitting next to a very respected scientist from Stanford who immediately started telling me about the telepathic experiences she'd had with a friend of hers who is a scientist at Southwestern University. I thought to myself, 'This whole world exists that really those of us in the skeptic/science community never see because people just don't tell you about it. Steve Volks's website Fringe-ology Trailer Deborah Blum - Ghost Hunters Play it: Download MP3 (58:00 min.) Read it: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Tsakiris. On this episode, as you just heard, there's a new voice behind the interview so before we get started I thought we'd take a minute and introduce that voice, that being the voice of journalist and author, Steve Volk, who's joining me right now. Steve, hi and welcome to Skeptiko. Steve Volk: Alex, thanks for having me. Alex Tsakiris: I love this interview that you have for us today. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and why you wanted to talk to today's guest, Deborah Blum? Steve Volk: Well, she had gone down a path before me that I'd wanted to go down myself and ultimately did with my book, Fringe-ology, which doesn't come out until June. But the issue for me is that I've always covered traditional topics in journalism. I've started off covering music. I was a music critic and I ultimately veered into writing lots of narrative non-fiction about politics and crime and courts. You know, just traditional journalistic subjects. But what was always sort of at the back of my mind-it would be raised from time to time when something would bubble up in pop culture that would make me think of it-is this family ghost story that I had grown up with. There was supposedly a ghost that haunted my house when I was a kid. I have some memories of it myself. I just felt like as a reporter, though, that that subject was taboo-that I couldn't cover it for the obvious reasons that you always get into on this show. It would undermine my own credibility to even entertain the idea that such things as ghosts exist. Over time, though, I started realizing that when we talk about paranormal subjects, we're really talking about the big existential questions that people find themselves asking at 3 a.m., right? What does it mean to be human? Who are we? Is there life after death? Is there a God? All these kinds of issues--are we alone in the universe?-come up through paranormal topics whether it be UFOs or telepathy or ghosts. So I really admired Deborah Blum because here she is, a Pulitzer Prize winning science reporter where the taboo against covering these sorts of topics would be even stronger, and yet she went for it. She covered William James and the scientific search for the afterlife in her book, Ghost Hunters. So I felt like I really wanted the chance to visit with her and see what her motivations were.
