Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling will probably never get hired to promote tourism for the state of New Hampshire. The Vershire author and investigative reporter just published his second book about how the Granite State is a bellwether for wacky ideas that challenge institutional norms and gain an outsize influence on mainstream culture.
“New Hampshire is on the leading edge of a slow-breaking tidal wave of distrust,” Hongoltz-Hetling writes in The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science. And as New Hampshire goes, he says, so goes the rest of American society.
Hongoltz-Hetling’s first book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears), recounts the darkly comic tale of the Free Town Project, a utopian plot hatched by some Grafton, N.H., libertarians to eliminate their local government. His 2023 release, If It Sounds Like a Quack…: A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine, took aim at a nationwide phenomenon: the hordes of medical fraudsters and peddlers of dubious remedies who are subverting legitimate medicine.
The Ghost Lab, published in May, focuses a critical yet compassionate eye on the Kitt Research Initiative, or KRI, a paranormal investigation group in New Hampshire’s Seacoast region that became a magnet for self-proclaimed psychics, UFO abductees, cryptozoologists and other paranormal truth seekers. Hongoltz-Hetling spent two years exploring how their earnest but out-there beliefs reflect and feed a growing skepticism about traditional sources of knowledge, including science, government and the media. He proposes an unconventional solution: Give the paranormal believers a degree of legitimacy, such as providing state-issued certifications for spiritual mediums and partnering research scientists with ghost hunters.
Hongoltz-Hetling, 52, is a George Polk Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist and former reporter with the Valley News. He spoke to Seven Days about The Ghost Lab, how the belief in paranormal activity relates to the election of President Donald Trump and how summarily dismissing fringe ideas may actually do more harm than good.
When you met the paranormal hunters at KRI, were you thinking about writing a book or just curious about their subculture?
When I began to understand the connection between distrust and paranormal beliefs, I started casting a wide net among the paranormal enthusiast landscape to write a book. So I talked to a state legislator who was a Wiccan. I talked to a woman who owned a haunted crêpe restaurant — and it was the restaurant that was haunted, not the crêpes. But I landed on KRI and [founder] Andy Kitt, who I thought would be interesting because I knew he’d gone from one ghost-hunting group to another, and that implied conflict and a difference of opinion.
You write that the paranormal investigators you met weren’t, for the most part, lying, crazy or stupid. Were you agnostic about the veracity of their claims?
I would describe my personal beliefs as very skeptical. If I’m to believe in something, I want to see the evidence. I want the guys in white lab coats to show me the beaker full of ectoplasm. In the course of researching the book, I saw some things I couldn’t explain. But I didn’t get the compelling evidence that would convert me into a believer, in part because I trust the institution of science more than I trust my own perceptions. At the same time, I really wanted to honor their experiences.
What did you tell the investigators about your beliefs in the paranormal?
I told them that I was predisposed to not believe but that I was open to compelling evidence. I’m a little more of a hard-boiled skeptic. There’s a community of skeptics who are actively out there debunking, which I was not. I’m not gullible, but my skepticism will not prevent me from accepting an extraordinary claim. And that’s how they think of themselves. So when I described myself as a skeptic, they were like, “Cool, we are, too.”
Can their beliefs be explained away by groupthink, confirmation bias or collective psychosis? There seems to be a lot going on with some of them, psychologically speaking.
Their batch of evidence for any of these wacky beliefs is probably similar to what I myself, a skeptic, would rely upon to guide me through daily decisions and understandings of the universe. But at the end of the day I fact-check myself against the scientific consensus with some humility. They don’t do that.
I would compare it to religion. People have an experience and a relationship with God that they develop, in part, with the support of a group of peers who all have similar experiences and say similar things. We can point to a lot of those things that you mentioned in terms of confirmation bias and groupthink. But [the paranormal investigators] are no more susceptible to them than other humans. It’s a feature of the human animal.
And when you get down to the very biggest questions in science, there’s almost a sort of mysticism there: What was here before the big bang? How did life on Earth evolve? What is the smallest particle? We thought it was atoms, and then it was quarks. Now it’s all these other flavors that start to sound as wacky as the idea of your recently departed loved one speaking to you.
You write that society should adopt a more “delicate respect” for some of these fringe beliefs, much the way we respect major religions. But some of their claims, like Michael Stevens’ stories about his repeated UFO abductions, seem to suggest past traumas or even mental illness.
The things they believe in and the reasons they believe in them are the same reasons that you and I believe in the things we believe in. It’s often less about the underlying science and more about what our experiences tell us and what our peers tell us. It’s the bubble in which we live, only their bubble has this bizarre underlying spiritual new-age pastiche.
If we give legitimacy to pseudoscientific beliefs, doesn’t that undermine the credibility of rigorous science?
It’s a fair question, because the position that I’ve come to adopt is so distasteful. Doesn’t it feel like we’re capitulating to the dark forces? There are some risks and downsides to doing earnest scientific investigations into phenomena that we’re fairly sure are not real. But right now a third of all scientific experiments in this country are halted, I would argue, because of this root distrust of government that has installed an administration that is willing to take a wrecking ball to science.
So when we talk about losing some purity and the capability for research, that horse has already left the barn. But as a matter of practicality, I think we have to do it. There’s a reason the United Nations recognizes witchcraft as a crime — because if they didn’t, the refugee camps in which they administer justice will form violent mobs and administer their own justice. So you have to provide an outlet for these beliefs.
Do we then run the risk of making all fact-based knowledge suspect?
I am confident that if science were to legitimize some of these beliefs, in that they were willing to partner with paranormal influencers in scientific experiments in the same manner that they partner with conservation groups to investigate river ecosystems, they will find very little evidence of, say, ghosts. But they will have bought the goodwill of the paranormal community that will harness those energies towards a legitimate scientific purpose. You’re both moving the wacky paranormal people closer to a rigorous scientific understanding of the universe, and you are preserving your own funding and legitimacy — and, perhaps, being a little kinder to people.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Distrust Funders | The Ghost Lab peers behind the veil of paranormal investigations to see how they undermine science”
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4 2025.
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