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Joe Rogan Experience #1351 – Dan Aykroyd

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Dan Aykroyd sits down with Joe Rogan and makes the case that Ghostbusters was never really fiction.

Episode #1351 of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” released September 12, 2019, runs two hours and twenty minutes and barely touches on Aykroyd’s Hollywood résumé. Instead, the conversation locks onto the subject that has consumed him since childhood: ghosts, UFOs, and the fringe science that mainstream science won’t touch. Rogan lets him run, and Aykroyd — never short on conviction — treats the paranormal not as a punchline but as settled fact he’s still trying to get the rest of the world to accept.

• Aykroyd traces “Ghostbusters” directly to his family history: his grandfather, a Kingston, Ontario dentist, researched psychic phenomena and employed a local locomotive mechanic named Walter Ashurst as the family’s medium for roughly 15 years.
• Aykroyd states flatly, “I think at this point we can accept that these ships are real… and these beings are real,” citing the 1964 Lonnie Zamora sighting in Socorro, New Mexico, the 1997 Phoenix Lights, and the 1996 STS-75 shuttle “tether incident.”
• Rogan and Aykroyd split on Bob Lazar’s credibility, weighing the late physicist Stanton Friedman’s skepticism of Lazar against Rogan’s own take after hosting him on the podcast earlier in 2019.

A Family Business in the Paranormal

Aykroyd doesn’t frame his fascination with the supernatural as a hobby he picked up for a movie pitch — he presents it as inheritance. His grandfather’s dabbling in psychic research in Kingston, Ontario, and the 15-year arrangement with Walter Ashurst as the family’s medium, got passed down to Aykroyd’s father and then to Dan himself. That lineage, he tells Rogan, is the real origin story behind “Ghostbusters,” a detail that reframes the 1984 film less as a comedy premise and more as Aykroyd translating a family belief system into a studio picture.

The Case for Extraterrestrial Visitation

Once the conversation shifts to UFOs, Aykroyd stops hedging. He tells Rogan he considers the existence of alien craft and their pilots settled business, not an open question. To back it up, he walks through a rotation of the field’s marquee cases: Lonnie Zamora’s 1964 encounter in Socorro, New Mexico, the mass-witnessed 1997 Phoenix Lights, and the 1996 STS-75 tether incident that ufologist David Sereda has spent years analyzing frame by frame. Optical physicist Bruce Maccabee’s photographic work also comes up as the two dig into which sightings hold up to scrutiny and which don’t.

I think at this point we can accept that these ships are real… and these beings are real.

The Lazar debate is where the episode gets its sharpest friction. Aykroyd leans on the late nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman’s skeptical read of Lazar’s claims, while Rogan pushes back with his own impressions from having Lazar sit across from him on the podcast earlier in the year — a conversation that, as InfoSearched has covered before with Navy pilots describing their own UFO encounters, has become a recurring thread on the show rather than a one-off.

Fermi, the Multiverse, and Bigfoot

The pair don’t stay confined to ufology. Rogan steers into the Fermi Paradox and theoretical physics, with detours into the multiverse and reincarnation — territory that fits the show’s broader appetite for the outer edges of the physics and fringe-science conversations Rogan regularly hosts. Cryptozoology gets its turn too: Aykroyd walks through eyewitness Bigfoot accounts he finds compelling, while Rogan stays openly skeptical of the Patterson-Gimlin film, the grainy 1967 footage that’s been cryptozoology’s most argued-over piece of evidence for over five decades.

Aykroyd leaves the studio no less convinced than when he walked in, and that’s really the point of the episode — Rogan never pushes him toward a debunking, he just lets a guy who’s been chasing this stuff since he was a kid in Kingston lay out his whole case, uninterrupted, for two hours.