By KEITH UPCHURCH

kupchurch@heraldsun.com; 419-6612

DURHAM – Joe Nickell is a professional skeptic. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he does believe in science.

That’s why he’s spent years investigating reports of near-death experiences, haunted houses and ghosts.

He’s convinced that many of those who report such experiences are sincere – they’re just sincerely wrong in believing that the explanation is supernatural.

Nickell is a senior research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a nonprofit research organization in Buffalo, N.Y. He’s working on a book called “The Science of Ghosts.” The former private detective has a doctorate in English literature with an emphasis on literary investigation and folklore.

“Many people believe that when you die, you don’t really die – that your spirit gets up out of your body, shakes it off and moves on,” Nickell said. “The problem is that it isn’t a scientific idea. I know that the New Agers who promote many of these ideas like to believe that they are on the side of science. They will use scientific language when possible – words like energy – but fundamentally, that concept is not scientific.”

Nickell said he keeps an open mind about near-death experiences, “but not so open that my brain would fall out and that I would start with an unfair position.”

Too often, he said, people begin with a conclusion and selectively use facts to support a claim. That includes the true believers and debunkers.

“They start with the answer that they believe in – one believes and the other disbelieves – and they engage in what is called confirmation bias. This is not the scientific approach. This is what one does in politics and religion.”

The scientific approach, Nickell said, is to start with evidence and test it to see if it holds up.

“[Near-death experiencers] will often say: ‘Well, maybe I can’t prove that I went to heaven, but you can’t prove I didn’t’,” he said. “And the person who says that has just lost the argument, because the burden of proof is on the person who asserts something, who makes a claim. Try as you will, you cannot prove that leprechauns do not exist. It can’t be done.”

Regarding the supernatural, he said, it’s hard to prove a negative, and he believes doubters shouldn’t have to.

“So when someone tells me a story of how they encountered a ghost or some other strange encounter, that is anecdotal evidence,” he said. “But quite often, if people want to believe in something, they offer and readily accept that anecdotal evidence, and very quickly embrace it and defend it, using confirmation bias, and demand of anyone who would challenge it that they prove it is not so.”

Reports of near-death experiences such as traveling down a tunnel are often explained by oxygen deprivation that creates an hallucination, Nickell believes.

“When people tell us they were near death, they often say they went down a dark tunnel toward light and encountered some other spirit,” he said. “But when we look at that from a scientific standpoint, we realize it’s not necessary to be near death to have those experiences.”

The near-death experience, he said, is a physiological event that can be created by lack of oxygen, the brain’s visual cortex and other factors.

Nickell doesn’t like to be called a debunker, but a scientific investigator who goes where the evidence leads. He doesn’t make leaps of faith.

“We should be neither believers nor debunkers,” he said. “Science is not in the belief business. It’s not in the debunking business. Science is in the explaining business.”

One example he pointed to where science stripped away an illusion was in 1972, when he investigated a so-called haunted house in Toronto, Canada, where people had reported hearing footsteps on the stairs when no one was there. But that was just an illusion, he found, because the noise came from a parallel iron staircase in another building 40 inches away.

Many had truly believed that the house was inhabited by spirits, until the evidence showed otherwise.

“What we have to do is to search very much for the truth,” he said.

Nickell’s advice to people who hear accounts of near-death experiences is to respect the teller’s sincerity and not conclude that they are crazy, but to realize it’s just an hallucination.

“Hallucinations by definition seem very real,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean they are.”