All Episodes
April 3, 1998 - Art Bell
02:37:56
19980403_Art-Bell-SIT-Doug-Richards-Psychic-Realm-Stanley-McDaniel-Face-on-Mars

Art Bell and Stanley McDaniel debate NASA’s 1998 Mars Global Surveyor images of the Cydonia "face," citing Dr. Horace Crater’s 200M-to-1 odds against randomness, while dismissing past suppression claims as flawed logic tied to Carl Sagan’s skepticism. McDaniel insists raw data will reveal artificiality or unknown geology, potentially sparking global protocols and Mars mission funding—though he defers on origins until further proof. Doug Richards later links psychic abilities like precognition and dowsing (e.g., his wife’s accurate water divining) to unconscious manifestation, while analyzing Edgar Cayce’s misinterpreted 1998 "earth change" predictions as gradual consciousness shifts, not disasters. Bell’s friend Daniel Brinkley’s lightning-induced NDE, blending life review and psychic noise, underscores how such experiences may reshape individuals but rarely align with skeptics’ controlled tests. Richards warns against ego-driven psychic pursuit, framing genuine abilities as tools for spiritual—not worldly—growth. [Automatically generated summary]

Participants
Main
a
art bell
01:03:27
d
doug richards
55:01
f
father charles moore
22:56
Appearances
Clips
a
alex jones
infowars 00:20
Callers
russell in north mississippi
callers 01:22
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Speaker Time Text
Public Pressure on Science 00:15:23
unidentified
Welcome to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 3rd, 1998.
art bell
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning wherever you may be across all these many, many, many time zones stretching from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Island chains outwest eastward to the Caribbean, south well into South America, north all the way to the Poland worldwide on the internet.
This is Coast of Ghost AM and I'm Art Bell in a rain-soaked southwest where cats and dogs fall at this very moment.
Good morning, everybody.
Fast forward, if you will, to Monday morning, pictures of the face on Mars formation taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft pop up on NASA's websites.
And incredibly, the fanciful dreamers are correct.
Lo and behold, a sphinx-like face one mile long rising out of the Martian landscape.
As that moment occurs, our entire view of the universe would shift.
The stars are no longer empty, but full.
There are intelligent beings out there, and they were once here.
Of course, reality takes a less momentous course.
The photos confirm perhaps the face is nothing but a pile of rocks.
Or perhaps Global Surveyor misses the mark entirely, and people are left wondering whether the controversy will ever, ever be over.
Coming up in a moment, Dr. Stanley, make that Professor Stanley McDaniel, author of the McDaniel Report and organizer of the Society for Planetary SETI Research for SPSR.
He has had a recent meeting with NASA and JPL officials, and we're going to speak with him on sort of the eve of this absolutely momentous event.
So all of that coming up in a moment.
As promised, here is Professor Stanley McDaniel.
It is an honor to have you on the program, Professor.
Hello there?
unidentified
Yes.
art bell
Oh, good.
You are there.
Good.
Professor, indeed an honor to have you on the show.
Glad you could make it at this late hour.
Professor, I kind of set up a little scenario there, ran through three possible scenarios.
So I'll start by asking you to speculate.
Of the three possibilities, that is, suddenly all paradigms change, my God, it's not a natural object nor a trick of light and shadows.
That's one possibility.
The other is it is indeed a pile of rocks.
And the third possibility, we miss it altogether.
What would be the best guess for Monday?
unidentified
Well, there is a fourth one, I think.
Uh-oh.
father charles moore
The fourth is that it might be unclear right away as to exactly what or how we should evaluate it.
unidentified
You're speaking, of course, of the phase.
Yes, sir.
father charles moore
And then that would be followed by a period of time which could amount to weeks or even a few months of analyzing the image, enhancing, and so on until we've determined whether or not certain features exist that might tilt the balance one way or the other.
art bell
Would you like to venture a guess?
unidentified
As to what would be the most likely.
father charles moore
I don't think they'll miss it because I think they're very motivated to get it, and they have three solid tries.
Each time they try, they'll be refining the navigation, which at the beginning, by the way, is uncertain.
They have to keep making checks to narrow that down.
art bell
So they're really serious about this.
They really want that face.
father charles moore
I think that that's where we stand right now with all the promises they've made and the detail in the promises.
That's what's different, by the way, from the past.
art bell
Sure.
father charles moore
I think they'd be extremely embarrassed if they didn't really make a college try, you call it.
unidentified
So yeah, I think they're quite motivated.
art bell
All right, Professor, that's the next really good question.
As you well know, they have not always been so motivated.
In fact, they have gone basically from ridicule of those who wanted this done to now outright support, and they've come right out and said it's because of public pressure.
Is that fair to suggest?
father charles moore
I think that there are two main things that have led to this new, I don't want to exactly call it a new policy, but a more detailed and more precise policy.
The first one certainly is public pressure brought from many different quarters.
I'm pleased that the set of recommendations that I've had on my webpage for two or three years now, I know they've received a lot of those.
There have been other sources of pressure from various groups.
unidentified
There have been some demonstrations.
father charles moore
I think all of those combined together, it's possible since I know President Clinton and Vice President Gore and others have been getting recommendations and solicitations.
unidentified
I think they may have put a little bit of pressure on.
So certainly public pressure.
father charles moore
And then the other side of it is I think they finally caught on that there was some serious science involved.
And Dr. Pilcher told us when we met with him last November that there were in fact two factions in NASA.
unidentified
One that wants to take new pictures because they want to show us how wrong we are.
art bell
Right.
father charles moore
And the other one, though, that wants to take them because they've become curious as to whether or not there might be something there.
art bell
What, Professor, is the best short version of the best evidence to go back and take the photos.
In other words, that there is serious science at stake here.
father charles moore
Well, certainly they have now realized that the object is not a trick of light and shadow.
That's very definitely the case.
Carl Sagan said that in his last book, The Demon Haunted World, he said that that was an unfortunate statement early on.
And so with Sagan's authority behind it, I think they finally caught on to that.
Otherwise than that, we have statistical studies from four different independent techniques done by three different scientists, all of them converging on the same result that we've got something anomalous.
And I think those studies may have been among the things that kind of woke them up that there's some real science here.
art bell
Professor, what do the statistics tell us?
How likely is it numerically that this is not natural?
father charles moore
Boy, the figures are rather impressive.
We have a Dr. Horace Crater, who's a physicist at the University of Tennessee Space Institute, who did an extensive study.
unidentified
It took him over two years.
father charles moore
He ran it by at least a half a dozen accomplished statisticians to make sure there were no errors, no statistical fallacies, because when you do statistics, you can easily trick yourself.
doug richards
Sure.
father charles moore
And we've had it pretty well critiqued.
And he's running, well, it's a little hard to interpret it in terms of odds.
He made one test that was one technique of having commuter simulation of the distribution of these features which we call mounds in the area.
And that came out over 200 million to one against random distribution.
art bell
My God.
father charles moore
And that was, he ran 200 million times.
He ran random tosses of those objects, you know, simulations.
And out of those 200 million, not a single one reproduced the distribution that we see there.
art bell
God, Dr. Van Flandren has been running around, even on my program, telling the public and society they better get ready for a surprise because he also holds out that the numbers are absolutely amazing on the side of it not being natural.
Would you join him in that or be more cautious?
father charles moore
Well, Dr. Crater and I performed that study I was just talking about.
Dr. Crater did the complex mathematical work and I did some other aspects of it.
And our conclusion is that we either have something artificial or we have a geological anomaly that no one's ever seen before.
We're not willing to say that that proves it's artificial yet because mere non-random distribution could indicate some kind of geological process, but it's none that anyone can account for.
We don't know of anything on the earth that's like that.
So we're just going to say it'll either be artificial or it'll be something so bizarre and so strange that we want to go up there and take a good look anyway.
art bell
Well, my.
Again, would you say that I mean, it is going to, after all, rock institutions, scientific, religious, society in general is going to be rocked aback if the verdict is that this is not natural.
unidentified
Yeah, that's true.
father charles moore
There have been, of course, a lot of preparations going on in the public media.
We find that on polls and other things, people are a lot more accepting of the idea.
Religious people are now saying, well, God takes care of things everywhere, not just on the earth, and so on.
And I think at least in the United States or the Western world generally, there's a fair amount of public acceptance of the concepts.
Nevertheless, it's still radical enough that it would create a revolution in our thinking.
art bell
So we should at least be, you would say, braced.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
father charles moore
Now, Dr. Van Flandren is one of the several people whom I've been communicating with who are fairly strongly convinced that we are going to find artificiality.
Most of the members of the Society for Planetary SETI Research that I belong to aren't willing to go quite that far.
We're going to say we think you're going to find something unusual, but we're not yet we want to see the data.
We're not yet ready to say we believe anything.
unidentified
We want to look at the data first.
art bell
All right.
Well, let's talk about that.
Professor, in terms of proving whether these objects are artificial or not, would you think it'd be more important that the face itself be imaged or the mounds and the other attendant objects that you just discussed be imaged?
father charles moore
You know, it's a little tricky because the camera is going to get a resolution of, we think now, about 1.3 meters, which is only about 4 feet, meaning that objects from 4 feet up are going to be visible.
We won't be able to see individual bricks, I'm sure, but we'll still see some amazing stuff.
And if there's any kind of structural characteristics of buildings, that resolution might show it.
In that case, there would be no question but what we had artificial structures.
You can't predict exactly what it'll be like, but we know how to recognize structures when we see them.
art bell
All right, but again, the question is, apparently the way it's going to come across the Sidonia region, it's not going to go directly across.
It's going to kind of cut across, as I understand it.
unidentified
At an angle.
art bell
At an angle.
So that makes it a really tough shot.
I assume they can do it.
The question is, the face itself, will it yield the kind of evidence that the other attendant objects and mounds and so forth would in terms of trying to prove artificiality?
father charles moore
Yeah, in my opinion, the most important objects are the face because of its detail as we've seen it so far and the mound configuration that I was speaking of earlier, the distribution of these small objects.
Unfortunately, the field of view of the camera is so narrow, about three kilometers, in a strip maybe from anywhere from 25 kilometers long to it could be a little bit longer, but that field of view is so narrow that we won't be able to get a panoramic shot that will show us the distribution of these objects any different from what we have already at Viking.
art bell
So then if you were to be in a position where you could call what they would do first and then go for later, you know, given another couple of opportunities, if they get what they want first, would you have imaged the face first?
father charles moore
Yeah, I would go for the face first, and the second thing I go for is a strip that cuts across the middle of the city or the area that's called the city.
unidentified
Yeah.
art bell
We're already getting familiar.
All right.
I wish to bring some of your own words to you and ask you about this.
Sure.
Let me read what I believe are your own words, and you can confirm this for me.
Quote, my initial approach to the question of Sidonia was one of considerable skepticism.
Certain questions remained about the methodology involved in Errol Thorn's measurement of the DNM pyramid on Mars and Richard Hoagland's seminal work on the subject seemed at first glance to be a mixture of tantalizing facts and imaginative speculation.
Even the first book on the Martian anomalies, unusual Martian surface features by De Pitro and Molinar, Joined later, I think, by John Brandenburg, included some questionable speculations.
Clearing Up Confusion 00:03:00
art bell
These I set out to clear up by direct communication with the investigators.
Over the course of the investigation, my appreciation for what these researchers had done and the underlying scientific integrity of their work began to grow.
I found that the occasional faults of their work were far outweighed by the solidity of the data and the responsiveness to the needs of what is, after all, the first study of its kind in history.
Now, as my study of the work done by the independent investigators in NASA's response to their research continued, I became aware not only of the relatively high quality of the independent research, but also of glaring mistakes in the arguments used by NASA to reject this research.
With each new NASA document I encountered, I became more and more appalled by the impossibility, rather, correction, the impossibly bad quality of the reasoning used.
It grew more and more difficult to believe that educated scientists could engage in such faulty reasoning unless they were following some sort of hidden agenda aimed at suppressing the true nature of the data.
Those are very, very strong words.
And so the obvious question is, what's new?
father charles moore
Well, you see, I don't say that I then concluded that they were suppressing the data.
What I said was that, and that, by the way, that's from the McDaniel report, which I wrote in 1992, actually.
And at that point, I was bewildered and stunned, and it certainly did seem and does seem that it needs explanation as to why these people would be doing what they did.
For the past four years, I've puzzled over that and repeatedly said that I don't understand it.
unidentified
I've fielded different theories or different people have provided theories.
father charles moore
Some are from outright conspiracy or cover-up, all the way up to ineptness and incompetence.
And yet, the fact remains that these arguments were fallacious and foolish and almost incredible in terms of an educated scientist.
unidentified
I can give you one example, if I may.
art bell
Yes, sir.
father charles moore
Just to explain what I'm talking about here.
unidentified
Well, the trick of light and shadow argument.
father charles moore
In philosophy, we study such things as illusions, hallucinations, in order to differentiate those from the truth.
Dr. Malin's Illusion Theory 00:15:15
father charles moore
And an illusion is defined as something that looks a certain way but is produced by something that isn't that way at all.
So if you were to say that the appearance of the face is an illusion, what you mean is that some objects are lying around there that don't have any structural relationship to a face, but because of a particular sun angle, at a particular instant in time, they throw shadows that happen to look like a face.
And the minute the sun moves away from there, the illusion will be dispelled, and we'll see that it's actually these other objects.
art bell
All right, we're coming toward the bottom of the hour, but the thrust of the question was, with regard to your very profound, deep suspicions about...
unidentified
Where did I go from there?
art bell
Yes, sir.
unidentified
Yeah, and I can address that, but if you're coming to the bottom, why don't we pick that up when we get back?
art bell
And so it shall be done.
Stay right there.
Professor McDaniel is my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
We'll take you back to the past.
Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
art bell
Professor Stanley McDaniel is my guest, and we're talking about what may happen Monday.
We'll get right back to us.
Professor McDaniel, welcome back.
In your own report, sir, you did suggest that the other attendant objects, mounds and so forth, should take clear precedence as the first thing you would try and resolve.
And now you've changed your mind on that.
You said the face earlier in this interview.
And frankly, you would admit, I'm sure, that in the earlier days you had profound doubts about the procedure and agenda at NASA, and that seems to have turned around completely.
So what has changed?
father charles moore
Well, first of all, with regard to what they're targeting now, we have just three orbits available.
And so that I think indicates that the face has to be attempted first, if only for the reason that the face is the object that everyone tends to be focused on and wants.
art bell
So it's the public.
unidentified
Yeah, I think so.
Well, the scientists, too.
father charles moore
But also, in the meantime, after those things that we were talking about before, the details in the face began to come out more.
And so that's one reason I think the face is one of the two major objects.
art bell
Does the face actually have a better chance statistically, scientifically, right now of proving unambiguously, perhaps, that these objects are not natural?
father charles moore
Since we can't get the mound configuration within the narrow field of view, the face would be a very important object.
If the camera happened to range across the city, we would get several mounds in the camera's eye, and with that degree of resolution, we might actually be able to see what their structure is, and that could possibly help also.
But with regard to changing position here, NASA has been changing.
You were asking me about what made me concerned about the people being not quite honest or seeming strange with their arguments.
Well, I think now that the explanations of conspiracy, cover-up, incompetence, and so on aren't really what was going on.
I think that what's happened, and this is a result of our having met with the NASA people, by the way, I think that the NASA administration and the key people who would govern policy were not really paying much, if any, attention at all to this.
I think they abdicated that and handed it over to a very small group that immediately encountered the topic and decided that it was absurd and ridiculous.
And I think those people may have been motivated by sort of the skeptical inquirer mentality.
Carl Sagan, in his book, The Demon-Haunted World, the fear of the scientist that bizarre speculation was going to dominate people's minds, and they identified the face issue with that.
So they were adamantly against giving it any credence.
And that small group that was sort of focused with the Planetary Society, I think, more than anywhere else, just put out its explanation, and the NASA administration didn't bother with it from that point on.
I think that is the main thing that led to the nonsense that went on for almost 20 years.
art bell
Nonsense.
All right.
So then your change is really saying there's been a sea change at NASA.
father charles moore
I think that started with Daniel Golden, the administrator's decision to try to be more imaginative.
He's looking at interstellar drives that could possibly be faster than light.
unidentified
He wants a manned Mars mission.
father charles moore
He wants more responsiveness to the public.
He said that he's going to do away with the proprietary period that was such a terrible problem for the Mars Observer mission, for example.
unidentified
So those were changes.
father charles moore
And I do believe now that even though Dr. Malin, the camera operator, who is the contractor and the principal investigator for the camera mission, I think that now if he himself has not changed his extreme skepticism, he's now under the control or the auspices of Glenn Cunningham and Carl Pilcher and Daniel Golden, and I think he's going to do what they want him to do.
art bell
Well, this is remarkable.
So it sounds to me like you're saying are you absolutely convinced we're about to get an honest shake here?
father charles moore
Well, I'm as convinced as I can be on the basis, first of all, of personal relationship, getting together and looking at these people face to face, I'd say that Dr. Pilcher and Glenn Cunningham don't come across as people who are up to nefarious purposes.
Now, they could be fooling us, some cynics might say, but when I met with Dr. Pilcher, I was with six people, including Dr. David Webb, who is a very experienced person in this kind of field, and none of those six felt that we were getting a bad shake out of it.
art bell
When did you see this change take place?
Can you put a date to it or a close date?
unidentified
Yes.
father charles moore
We had been, in fact, Dr. Horace Crater, the president of the Society for Planetary Study Research, had been writing to Wesley Huntress.
Actually, we wrote to Daniel Golden, but our letters were intercepted and sent to Wes Huntress, the assistant administrator, for something like five or six months.
We sent about a letter a month to him asking for a meeting to give our data to them because we felt it might change their plans.
And we were constantly rebuffed.
And then all of a sudden, Dr. Pilcher, who replaced Jürgen Raja as the director of solar system studies and is in a temporary appointment right now, said, okay, come on and talk to us.
Well, not long after that, in fact, it's just been fairly recently, Wes Huntress has quit NASA.
I don't know if there's any meaning behind that, but I think that the administration is moving in a better and more open direction.
So I think that's the period in which this change took place.
art bell
Lyndon Moltenhow did an interview with Dr. Malin.
Linda Moltenhow on my program did an interview with Dr. Malin in which he suggested that even the odds of being able to image the face successfully were just astronomical, that it was a little tiny thing on a big planet with hardly we could hardly expect to be lucky enough to get it.
You obviously don't feel that way.
unidentified
No, and neither does Glenn Cunningham.
father charles moore
He estimated the odds now at 30 to 50 percent for each of three tries.
So when you add together three tries and those odds, you get a fairly good chance.
Dr. Malin may have been speaking of the mapping mission.
And during the mapping mission, there will be a tighter situation because they won't be able to tilt the camera to point it, in other words.
Now we have this bonus period of time where they're not bound by the mapping mission constraints and they can actually use what are called reaction wheels on the spacecraft to swing it around and actually point over toward the face.
The only impediment now is navigation, knowing exactly where they are.
art bell
Is there any danger at all for the spacecraft in maneuvering to take these pictures?
father charles moore
Well, I mean, there's always danger, of course, in a mission like this, but not the kind of danger that was associated with the arrow breaking and the damaged solar panel, because if I understand it correctly, the solar panels are retracted and it's in an instrument configuration.
The momentum wheels are electrically driven, I believe, and don't use thruster fuel, although I'm not sure.
I think they may use some thruster to help point.
But it is in the sort of situation like with the Mars Observer where they're going to do something radical and maybe knock the thing out.
art bell
Do you think that at some point Dr. Malin was essentially taken aside and instructed in the newer facts of life?
unidentified
I'm afraid I don't dare speculate on what's brought that about.
father charles moore
I think that he has shown adamant skepticism, resisted being more open about it.
He's put some things on his web page that have all the appearance of being deliberate disinformation, although I don't want to say I know they are, but they sure look terrible.
art bell
Would it be fair to say, Professor, that with what he has said, both on my program and on his website, as you point out, that the people who are deep into the conspiracies are given an awful lot of fuel.
father charles moore
They are, and I pointed that out repeatedly now in the last few weeks to NASA and said, look, get Dr. Malin to take certain things off his public web pages because it's going to fuel those who want to claim a conspiracy.
And I will say this, JPL has recently removed some references to Malin's web pages that they had in their documentation on the web.
And we think they've done that for that very reason, that they don't want to imply that Dr. Malin is the sole spokesperson or even the main spokesperson for them in this affair.
art bell
Well, you know, what I'm hearing is, from the public's point of view, really hopeful for a change.
father charles moore
I would like to say, Art, I think the best route here, whether we have some doubts or not, is to support NASA's announced policy because there's nothing to lose here.
They've said they're going to do it, and they're going to do something that will work.
unidentified
And why not support it?
father charles moore
I mean, that's the best way, I think, to guarantee that it gets done.
I think constantly attacking them at this point would be counterproductive.
art bell
All right.
Along with the line that we have been gently traversing over the last 20 minutes or so, I'm going to ask you about a rumor.
Oh, sure.
unidentified
Go ahead.
art bell
The rumor is that in the last meeting that your turnaround was in part due to the fact that there was a promise made that instead of the information going directly to Dr. Malin, or perhaps at the same time that it would go to Dr. Malin, it will be transferred to a Carlotto.
Now, can you confirm or deny that rumor?
unidentified
Well, you can hear my laughter.
I mean, that is ridiculous.
father charles moore
As a matter of fact, we were taken aback when we sat down with Glenn Cunningham and Arden Alby.
We thought that, and maybe I'm giving away a secret here, but we kind of thought that maybe we had something to offer them that they wanted to talk to us about something we could do for them.
And the very first thing that Glenn Cunningham said was, we're not going to interpret the pictures.
We're going to put them out onto the web and let the scientists, that meant us and everybody else in the world and the public, do the interpreting.
And so JPL and NASA are going to remain absolutely neutral.
unidentified
They're going to put that stuff out on the web.
father charles moore
The first time we'll see it is the first time everybody else will see it.
And I mean, there's no reason for them to make a deal with us, as you see, because they don't care what we do.
art bell
I understand.
unidentified
You see what I'm saying?
art bell
Of course.
unidentified
Yeah.
That's just a silly rumor.
art bell
In the meetings that you just most recently had, Professor, was there any discussion of the implications for society and how it would be handled if it seems unambiguously not natural?
Offering Philosophical Insight 00:05:52
father charles moore
You know, that was what we had expected might be brought up, and that was where we were going to say perhaps we could provide some useful input to NASA because in our research group we have two philosophers, one anthropologist, one archaeologist, and people who are familiar with symbols and communication.
And one of us is a professor of religion and so on.
And so we thought, well, we could offer to assist in the interpretation if something like that occurred.
And when they said, no, we're going to be neutral, we're not going to interpret, it actually ended that, yes.
art bell
Wow.
I would imagine at some level, if not NASA, then at other levels of the government, there would be some consideration of this, wouldn't you?
father charles moore
If We came up with images that were unequivocally artificial.
unidentified
I think that that's true.
father charles moore
There is a protocol for handling this, by the way, an international protocol.
NASA, I don't believe, is formally signed on to it, but informally they certainly would be somewhat obligated.
And they have to take the data, send it through certain scientific channels.
Eventually, that would then, I think, come around to the President of the United States, and he'd be making some comments.
art bell
So, in other words, if Midday Monday comes and they suggest that they did get an image, but that there's going to be a bit of a delay while they study it, that might tell the casual observer, or the astute observer, I suppose, that they really have found something and it's on its way up the tree toward the White House.
unidentified
That certainly would be the case.
father charles moore
However, they're so committed to putting the first picture out, I think they'd put it out anyway, and then I think they'd try to handle it.
It's very unlikely, in my view, that there will be such unambiguous results.
We're going to have to look closely at all this stuff, do some processing.
One of the problems is that the first image is going to be at a very unfamiliar angle.
In fact, Dr. Carlotto now has a beautiful web page out that he simulated the way it would look, interpolating from the Viking photos.
art bell
Would it still look like a face?
unidentified
Well, it will, but it's not going to look as familiar.
father charles moore
And to show that it still does look like a face, he put next to it a sculptured face in wood of Johann Sebastian Bach with the same lighting angle.
And when you look at that, you can compare it with the way the face would look, and you can see that actually there is a face there, but we'll be so unfamiliar with it in that position that at first it's going to look a little odd.
art bell
Professor, as I look at the normally seen picture of the face, I see a sort of cross between a simian-human face.
unidentified
Yes.
art bell
Is that what you see?
father charles moore
Well, certainly there's a case for saying it looks like something hominid and primitive, but the problem here is that we have a lot of erosion.
If it was a sculpture, it's not entirely clear that that simian look might be the result of a heavy erosion.
unidentified
So I'm not sure.
father charles moore
I think we need to, if it's artificial, I think to determine absolutely, we need to get up there and look at it with archaeologists on the ground.
unidentified
I think that's what will tell us.
art bell
Indeed, indeed.
And I would presume that there would be immediate consideration of funding a man.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I think that would follow very quickly.
So I'm hoping that's what will happen.
That would be wonderful.
We need to get to Mars.
The sooner the better.
art bell
A bit of just absolutely wild speculation.
Assuming that it comes up not natural, would you be inclined to think that this was some extraterrestrial type of race that had put that there?
Or would you be inclined to think that perhaps there had been a prior civilization on Earth technologically competent?
We're beginning to date objects that go way back past where they ought to be.
And we might have been around before.
father charles moore
I have a standard answer to that, Art.
My standard answer is that we can't know anything about those options until we get up there and we're standing on the thing and looking at it with archaeologists.
unidentified
But I will say this.
father charles moore
Vincent D. Pietro and John Brandenburg have proposed what they call the Sidonia hypothesis.
Oh, and Greg Molinar also was in on that.
And they argue that this was the result of an indigenous civilization that built these monuments in the manner that the Egyptians might have.
unidentified
Martians.
Martians, right.
And you know what?
father charles moore
The thing is, is that there's more support for that now because the period during which Mars is warm and wet is getting bigger and bigger with the meteorite evidence.
So, and the evidence of running water and large bodies of water.
unidentified
So, they might not be so far off.
father charles moore
I originally didn't credit that one as much as the other solutions, but now I'm beginning to wonder.
art bell
Professor, you adamantly at one time wanted a review board to look at all of this, an independent review board.
unidentified
Right.
art bell
Are you sufficiently satisfied now that the process laid down is so straightforward that you don't have to demand that?
Raw Data Revealed 00:06:50
father charles moore
I think now we have the review board in the public and the scientists that are going to get that data because NASA is going to give us the raw data first and then the process data a little bit later.
And we've got people standing by, Mark Carlotto and others, and then, of course, there's scientists all over the world who might want to look at it.
unidentified
So, I think that's our review board now.
art bell
All right.
Professor, it has been an extremely instructive hour, and it's going to be a big day.
unidentified
You didn't mention the case for the face, Art.
art bell
No, I didn't mention the case for the face.
unidentified
I didn't get a chance to go to that.
art bell
Listen, next week, if all hell breaks loose, I'll be fighting with ABC and NBC and CBS to get to you.
And hopefully, you can spend a few minutes at night with me.
unidentified
Oh, sure.
art bell
But for tonight, my friend, thank you so very much.
You're more than welcome.
Good night, Professor.
unidentified
Thank you.
Good night.
art bell
All right, folks.
That's Professor Stanley McDaniel.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
This is Coast to Coast AM.
The trip back in Time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More Somewhere in Time coming up.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 3, 1998.
art bell
Good morning, everybody.
It's great to be here as the rain pours down once again in the desert.
I'm telling you, we're going to start thinking about constructing an ark.
The only question would be, how many two and twos would we take and how many would we reject because of modern civilization?
In a moment, we are going to be honored with the presence of Dr. Douglas Richards.
Dr. Richards is at ARE, the Case Foundation.
Remember, we interviewed Edgar Casey's son not long ago.
Dr. Richards, I think you're going to enjoy this very much.
So I'll tell you more about him and what's coming up in a second.
By the way, Monday, we're going to be blessed with the presence of Sarah McLendon.
You may have read the recent Sarah McLean news item that's posted on our website.
If not, you might want to.
She is a White House news staff type person, White House reporter, and you'll know Sarah.
She's an older lady, wonderfully crusty, and she'll just yell at the Mr. President, Mr. President.
As a matter of fact, that's the title of her new book, and so we're going to be graced with her presence on Monday.
And by the way, Wednesday I have booked Graham Hancock.
We will talk to Graham from Great Britain where it will be early morning.
And we'll talk to him, of course, about the recent discoveries in Egypt, his difficulties with Dr. Zahia Was, and, of course, the coming incredible cruise and debate.
So all of that's going on.
Incidentally, there is also a really fascinating follow-up second letter from the time traveler on my website right now.
Remarkably articulate, difficult to ignore, and fascinating to read.
I suggest you go up and take a look.
It just arrived today, and we got it up there, boom, like that.
All right, coming up, Dr. Richards.
All right, we are now honored, or about to be, to speak with Dr. Douglas Richards.
He's a core faculty member at Atlantic University in Virginia Beach, where it's late, early in the morning.
He's also director of research for Meridian Institute in Virginia Beach.
His doctorate is from the University of North Carolina.
He has been researching the Edgar Casey readings on Atlantis for over 20 years now.
20 years.
In 1976, he went on his first expedition to the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, where Casey said Atlantis would be found.
In the 1980s and 90s, he returned for more expeditions.
He's explored numerous sites, including the underwater road site and the Bimini Shark Mound.
On his most recent expedition, he conducted a side-scan sonar survey searching for Atlantean ruins in that very deep water.
He is co-author of the book Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited with Edgar Evans Casey and Gail Casey Schwarzer, I believe it is, St. Martin's Press, and author of the book The Psychic Quest.
And I think a newer book, possibly, yes, Psychic Quest, would be the most recent book.
And so we're going to work a little bit backwards.
Dr. Richards, welcome to the program.
Thanks, Arch.
Great to have you.
And we are going to work a little backwards because you have done so much work on Atlantis and the work of Casey that I want to get to all of that.
But I would like to begin with your latest book, Psychic Quest.
What's that book all about, Doctor?
doug richards
What that book is, it's called The Psychic Quest, Understanding Your Psychic Potential.
And it's about people's psychic experiences that over about a 10-year period in my research program, primarily with members of the ARE, the Edgar Casey organization, I collected experiences from people ranging from dreams predicting the future to telepathic experiences between people to near-death experiences, all these kinds of things.
And it's a book about how to understand what these things mean.
Two Precognitive Incidents 00:15:35
art bell
All right, wonderful.
I am going to tell you about two, at the expense of boring my audience, because I had such a shocking experience last night that I've got to ask you about something here.
I'm now going to be soon 53 years old.
I have had exactly two what I would call incidents of precognition.
The first occurred, oh, I don't know, 25 years ago, and I was living in Santa Barbara, California, lived in a garden-style apartment.
I'll try and do this quickly for those of you who have heard it.
And working in radio, radio station in Santa Barbara, came home in the evening, turned on the TV, sat down to watch the evening news.
This garden apartment I lived in had one of those, you know, those sliding glass doors that would look outside.
And in this case, it would look outside.
My door would look out toward the street, and I would park my car directly in front so that I could look out through those glass doors and see my car.
Now the curtains were pulled, and I couldn't see anything, and I sat down to watch the news.
In the middle of the newscast, like waves crashing in over me, something was saying to me, something is going to happen to your car.
Look out, danger, car, your car.
And I was in the middle of watching the news, and I was actually annoyed, and I uttered an invective because I was so upset with myself, got over, went over, opened the curtain, looked at my car, and it was just fine.
And I think I uttered another invective, closed the curtain, went back, and resumed watching the news.
Well, it was not about 10, 15 seconds that all of this began to wash over me again and again and again and again.
Your car, your car, something's going to happen to your car.
Another invective.
Back over to the window I go, pull the curtains apart, and I look at my car, and everything's fine.
And I almost start to turn around and walk back.
But lo and behold, here's a fellow walking down the sidewalk.
So I just stand there listening to the news, and I watch this fellow walk down the sidewalk, get in the car directly in front of mine, start the engine, put it in reverse, and hit my car.
I was so blown away that I sank to my knees.
I was weak.
I was scared.
But not so scared that I didn't open the door and yell at him, hey, I got your license number.
He said, I'm stopping, I'm stopping.
And that was it.
I mean, there was some damage, no great amount of damage.
But, doctor, there was no question about it.
Something was absolutely demanding of me to notice that something was about to happen to my car.
That is precognition, is it not?
doug richards
Absolutely.
And it's not at all unusual.
According to surveys, including a Gallup poll, that sort of experience, some sort of psychic experience happens to between about two-thirds and three-quarters of all the people in the United States.
So the people who don't have experiences like that at some point in their lives are the ones that are abnormal.
art bell
Okay, up until that point, I had never had one.
Up until last night, I had never had another one.
I didn't know how to turn it on, turn it off, make it happen, or in any way whatsoever control it.
Now, check this out.
Flash forward all these years to last night on the program.
It's in the final hour of the program.
I get a call from a young man who's talking to me about a precognitive experience that he had.
And it was fascinating, and we talked about his experience, and I began wondering and speculating aloud after his call about precognition in general.
Now, at that time, I'm sitting here at a broadcast desk and I have, oh, I've got a board and I've got cartridge machines and tape recorders and I've got probably hundreds and hundreds of pounds sitting on this desk and my legs are usually under the desk.
And as I was doing that, I sat here and I thought, God, it would really be horrible if this damn desk would collapse.
It would crush my legs.
I had that thought.
And here I am talking about precognition.
I played the bumper music to the, you know, going out of the half hour and turned around to go into the other room as I normally would during a break.
And boom!
All of a sudden, this speaker, this JBL speaker, very heavy speaker, fell off backwards somehow, impossibly fell backwards, got caught by the curtains, brought the curtain rod and all the curtains in the place down, and just scared the hell out of me.
Now, it wasn't the desk that collapsed, but within three minutes of my thinking about it, Doctor, something in all the years that had never occurred, within three minutes of talking about it, kaboom, down she goes, and it freaked me out.
It just freaked me out.
And so I sat there asking myself, now, did I have a precognitive experience again, or did I in some way create what occurred?
Now, is it precognition or is it creation?
Anyway, that's what happened to me.
Those are my two now experiences.
The latest last night, I said, boy, am I glad Dr. Richards is going to be on tomorrow night.
doug richards
Let's see if I can solve your problem.
If I can explain a little of what's going on.
Actually, the one last night is quite interesting because there's several possibilities and they kind of overlap.
All these things are labels that we give to phenomena that we don't really understand.
art bell
Yes.
doug richards
But you could also consider that one to be a form of what's been called synchronicity.
The psychologist Carl Jung spoke of synchronicity, and what he meant was unusual coincidences where you can't figure out what the cause was.
And so it might be precognition or it might be some sort of psychokinesis, mind over matter, or it might be neither of them.
One thing that frequently happens to people is the idea that the universe has a very strange sense of humor and is inflicting it on you.
art bell
Well, what about this theory?
And this is one that I proffered last night as I was sitting here talking and thinking at the same time aloud on the air.
And that is that in considering and talking about precognition, I opened some sort of door that simply allowed it to occur.
doug richards
The more attention you pay to these things, often the more you begin to realize that they're happening.
One of the things that happens, I'm teaching a course in parapsychology right now for Atlantic University, and we start off the class by people talking about their psychic experiences, but pretty darn quickly people find that more are happening to them than they ever had before because they're taking a class in this.
And so it's quite common.
In fact, I'm surprised you haven't had more considering some of the callers that I'm sure you get for your show with some very unusual experiences.
That level of interest would tend to generate these sorts of things.
art bell
To be absolutely honest with you, I suppose if it happened a lot, one could grow used to it.
But frankly, it scares the hell out of me when it happens.
Both times.
The first time I described and last night, I was just flat blown away.
Now, again, if you could have these on some sort of regular basis, I'm sure you could begin to adjust to it, and you would not be as surprised.
But believe me, it just lays you out a little bit when it happens.
So I'm still in I'm kind of in shock over all that.
It's unreasonable that I would think about a collapse and be talking about precognition, and three minutes later a giant collapse occurs.
Not reasonable.
doug richards
Not reasonable at all, but surprising how often it happens.
That's the interesting statistic.
A lot of people don't share these kinds of experiences because they're afraid people will think that they're strange.
art bell
Well, everybody knows I'm strange, so there's no problem.
doug richards
And you're on national radio and you can share them.
And then some people may call in with them.
But it's amazing that often I would get calls from people who would say, you know, you're the first person I've ever told this, then would relate to me a very common psychic experience because they figured no one would ever believe them.
And I'd just go, well, great.
Yeah, that's a pretty common psychic experience.
art bell
Oh, you're right.
I get exactly the same thing.
Even people who finally come forward on the radio won't even tell their own family members.
But once they hear somebody else say it happened, it's like they can't get on the air quick enough to say, yeah, it happened to me too.
doug richards
I'll give you a good example of a kind of experience that's quite common, out-of-body experiences.
People might think, oh, my goodness, that's awfully strange.
But there was a survey done, in fact, a couple surveys that have shown that about 14% of the people out there in the general population have them.
And one survey done at the University of Virginia found that 25% of the students had had them, and not while on drugs, just in ordinary states of consciousness.
art bell
Well, I'm not, I don't think in these areas I'm a brave person.
I've done a number of shows on OPEs.
And I will tell you this.
I have come to the stage where I have experienced paralysis, you know, sleep paralysis.
And I have consciously tried.
I am absolutely unable to allow myself to let go.
It scares me so badly that I inevitably jerk myself back and I won't let it happen.
Maybe I'm too much of a control freak.
I don't know.
But I've come right to the edge of what I think is the beginning of an OBE, and I always pull back.
I'm afraid of it.
doug richards
I've gotten the full range of reports from people, from people who are just real scared of it and think, oh, my goodness, what happened to me?
To people who do it on a regular basis and have lots of fun with it or go somewhere and try to train themselves to have out-of-body experiences.
So you find the full range of responses.
I've not had one myself, and I'm not quite sure how I'd react.
art bell
It's a little frightening because in order, as I understand from those I've talked to, to proceed into the out-of-body experience, the full experience, you've got to let go.
You've got to just let the process continue.
And I've never been able to do that.
Again, going back for just a moment to precognition or whatever in the heck it is, do you suspect that this is an ability that human beings have always had, Doctor?
Or do you think it's one that is developing today, that we are, in other words, evolving into more of this ability?
What do you think?
doug richards
Well, actually, this proves that you're psychic because my most recent paper for one of the major parapsychological journals was exactly on that topic.
And the question was, some people think that psychic phenomena are a sign of spiritual evolution and therefore our race is evolving spiritually and we'll be seeing more and more psychic phenomena.
And other people say, well, wait a minute, actually, if you look closely, you can see psychic phenomena very common in primitive tribes and in children.
And in fact, there are some good studies showing psychic abilities in animals.
And so nobody really seems to know the answer.
It certainly seems to be the case that children are not as inhibited as adults about saying what experiences they're having.
And so you start talking to children and sometimes get some very interesting statements of psychic abilities.
On the other hand, it certainly is the case that a lot of spiritual traditions say that as a person or a whole civilization evolves spiritually, that these sorts of things will begin to emerge.
And you can certainly see some of that, although it's amazing how common these were even back, say, in the 70s as compared to the 90s, that people were having them, and often they just simply didn't tell their friends.
Now it's a little more acceptable to tell people about your precognitive dreams, whereas before you might keep it to yourself.
art bell
Well, did your paper reach any conclusions about whether you thought it was an evolutionary process underway or simply was always there?
doug richards
Well, it's interesting.
It was a technical paper, and I had to admit, as I often do, that I didn't know the answer.
But one of the reasons I didn't is because we didn't have very good documentation on what was happening, particularly within individuals.
It would be very nice to have someone who had had psychic experiences as a child and wrote the experiences down as soon as they were able to.
art bell
In other words, not enough of a statistical base.
Doctor, hold on.
We're at a breakpoint.
We'll be right back.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 3rd, 1998.
art bell
And we are honored with the presence of Dr. Douglas G. Richards, ARE, Casey Foundation, Back East.
Rare opportunity.
And we'll get right back to him.
alex jones
All right, back now to Dr. Richards and...
art bell
And to conclude with where we were, Doctor, you said you reached in your paper no conclusion about whether this is developing psychic ability through continued evolution or whether it's something that was always there.
Now, do you think there ever is going to be enough of a scientific study to come to some sort of conclusion in that area?
doug richards
Well, it's hard to tell whether a scientific study could determine that since it's hard to know ancient past and what people had for psychic abilities.
Solid Evidence for Psychic Phenomena 00:15:49
doug richards
But as far as scientific studies demonstrating that psychic phenomena are real, there have been just enormous strides over the past several years.
And so it's hard for any except the most die-hard skeptics to say that psychic phenomena aren't real.
And that's been very encouraging, that parapsychologists have really done some very solid studies to demonstrate that at least some of these experiences are true.
art bell
As a matter of fact, I think it's Princeton.
Princeton has done an awful lot of work in this area.
I've got an article here from the Electronic Telegraph in London that says, science proves mind's power over matter.
Startling evidence that the human mind can exert paranormal control over objects has been uncovered by researchers whose findings have confounded even hardened skeptics.
Experiments conducted by a team at Princeton University are being hailed now as the most convincing demonstration yet of so-called psychokinesis, the supposed ability of thought to affect inanimate objects.
Is that good research going on at Princeton?
doug richards
It's very good research.
In fact, the person doing the research in charge of the lab is Dr. Robert John, who was the dean of the School of Engineering at Princeton.
It's hard to get much more prestigious in this country than the Dean of the School of Engineering at Princeton.
And they've done some very rigorous work on both psychokinesis and also remote viewing, extrasensory perception.
art bell
Boy, we've got so much territory we can cover here.
Back for a second with OBEs, out-of-body experiences.
Could I ask you whether you believe that the human being is your belief we have a soul?
A soul.
A soul.
doug richards
Yes, I think I would say that.
That's not one of the things that you can scientifically prove.
art bell
Right.
doug richards
But, of course, I've been involved and interested in the Edgar Casey work.
And Edgar Casey takes a little bit different position from your typical scientific approach.
The scientific approach would look to see whether, for example, we would have telepathy between individuals or perhaps an out-of-body experience.
But science wouldn't concern itself with the ultimate nature of the human being, whereas Edgar Cayce not only was able to do some of these feats of precognition and clairvoyance, but was able to pick up a metaphysics of the way the universe works.
And his definition was that psychic is of the soul.
That is, psychic isn't just some power that a person gets, that basically psychic is part of the innate nature of the human being, and it's a core part of the soul of the person.
art bell
When a person has an out-of-body experience, then would it be fair to suggest that their soul, or I guess that's a word, their consciousness, whatever it is they are that will continue after life, if in fact we do, is outside the body?
doug richards
Well, it's always been a question about whether the person actually has something go outside the body or whether it's a kind of just image.
And they did a very interesting experiment a number of years ago at the Psychical Research Foundation in North Carolina around the time that I was working in that area.
They had a fellow who claimed he could go out of his body, and what they did was they had a pet cat, and they set up an experiment with two buildings where the cat was in one building in a room, and the cat was in a great big box with a grid on it, and a fellow had to sit there and count how many squares the cat crossed per minute and mark it down each minute.
Over in the other building, there was someone who would tell this person, okay, according to this random schedule, it's time for you to go out of your body and go visit your cat.
And what they found was that when he was not visiting the cat, when he was just sitting there in his normal state, the cat would be kind of upset being stuck in this box and would walk around the box and go, meow, and would cross a lot of squares on the grid.
And when he was out of his body visiting the cat, he'd say that he was just sitting there petting the cat, and the cat would just sit there in the box and not move.
And so they were able to show nicely, scientifically, that apparently some part of him traveled out of his body, sat there with the cat, and they based this on how often the cat moved.
unidentified
That's fascinating.
doug richards
It's kind of a clever experiment to show that perhaps, at least in some cases, some part of you does go out of your body.
art bell
All right, then let's see where this fits in.
On 2020, not long ago, I'll bet you saw it or got a tape of it or people told you about it, they did a really interesting experiment in which they seemed to conclusively prove that pets would know when their owners are coming home.
Now they did this scientifically.
They would put a video camera on a pet, and they would, without notice, start a person home from their office at an unexpected time.
And the pet would go absolutely berserk.
That pet, you know, barking, going to the door, knowing that the owner was now on the way home, even though, according to every single day's routine, it should not be so, and yet the pet knew the owner was coming home.
They filmed this.
It was remarkable.
And so does that say to you that the pet is somehow psychically enabled, or that the person on the way home is somehow transferring thought to the pet, alerting the pet that this, in fact, is underway.
doug richards
Well, either of those two things may be going on.
There's actually a fair amount of evidence of psychic abilities in animals.
I had not seen that show.
That's a fairly subtle kind of thing, and it's interesting they came up with a clever demonstration of it.
The more common ones that are reported are cases where an owner dies unexpectedly at a distance, and all of a sudden the animal starts howling and won't stop.
This is many, many stories of this sort.
And then some even more difficult to believe stories that are fairly well documented.
For example, cases, there's one particular case where a boy had a pet pigeon and he was ill and was taken to the hospital in a snowstorm, and the pigeon, sort of in a reverse homing pigeon thing, somehow got from his house in a snowstorm to the hospital the next day and appeared there at the window.
And pigeons don't do that.
They go the other way to go home.
And so presumably the pigeon had some way of finding him in a snowstorm.
art bell
But again, we have no way of knowing whether that boy and his thoughts brought the pigeon there or the pigeon on its own somehow telepathically determined where he was and when.
doug richards
Right.
In fact, it's been one of the challenges with all this.
And some people talk about kind of a psychic field that it sometimes doesn't even mean anything to talk about a sender and a receiver, that that's kind of the radio analogy.
And that's the first analogy they had.
There was a book in 1930 by the novelist Upson Sinclair called Mental Radio.
And it was experiments that he did in telepathy with his wife.
And people at first thought that this was just like this radio show, that you had a transmitter and a receiver.
But other experiments found that, for example, you don't need a sender.
So you can have clairvoyance experiments where you have a sealed deck of cards and someone simply guesses through the whole deck of cards.
And turns out those experiments work pretty much as well as experiments with a sender.
And so if you don't need a sender, then the question of what's going on becomes a little more complicated.
art bell
What a remarkable field to be working in.
It must be a joy to work in it, full of constant wonders, I would imagine.
doug richards
Certainly, you hear an awful lot of very interesting stories, and it's kind of fun when you can check them out and find that there's some substance to them, that there are many very unusual things that happen.
art bell
Well, you know, in my mind, there is no question.
I have experienced enough that there is no question that it's real, but a million questions about what it is.
And I would presume you're probably close to the same place.
doug richards
I think parapsychology in general is in that place, that parapsychology has got strong evidence that something's happening.
But exactly what's going on, what kind of energy might be responsible?
What are the basic principles involved?
Quite a bit of controversy on that.
And a lot of people don't know.
Some would still very much like a nice, simple physical model.
unidentified
Sure.
doug richards
Others would like a much more spiritual model.
And certainly there's evidence that if you try the physical model method, you can get some results.
So there are people that just want to do, say, remote viewing, clairvoyance, and get it down to just kind of a mechanical procedure.
And they've had some success.
And then there's also quite a bit of evidence that working with the spiritual side of life can play a major role in getting a better handle on what's going on with these abilities.
So different approaches seem to produce results.
art bell
You've now mentioned remote viewing twice.
I have interviewed, I believe, just about every single one of the major players in the government's remote viewing program, who now, of course, are scattered throughout civilian life.
Some of them pursued remote viewing commercially.
Others didn't.
They're all interesting.
When a person remote views, and our government spent 20 years and $20 million or something in that project, when a person remote views, what realm are they in or traveling in versus an out-of-body experience?
Is there a relationship between the two?
doug richards
Well, it's not clear what's happening because everyone does it a little bit differently.
The first person really to work in some of this remote viewing and the one that kind of got it going was Ingo Swan, and you may have had him on your show.
art bell
Ingo Swan.
As a matter of fact, he's the only one I haven't.
He's generally considered to be the great father of remote viewing.
doug richards
Right, and he himself, as I recall, was very much convinced that he was going out of body to do it.
On the other hand, the people that I know that do it simply sit there and they just do it.
They draw a picture of whatever comes to mind.
And not just the famous ones, of course, that got in the news because of working on the government projects.
But I find, well, for example, about two weeks ago, I was doing a thing called Elder Hostel, where people who are retired go to programs at various universities.
And we had a room full of 50 people and did a little remote viewing experiment.
And out of the 50 people, most of them didn't get much, but two of the people drew absolutely perfect pictures of the target.
And they were blown away because they hadn't gone out of body or done anything particular.
One of them just said that she just got a clear visual image and just drew exactly what she saw.
And it was an absolutely perfect picture of the target.
And I held it up and showed everyone.
And they were all very surprised.
So some people do it and don't have any idea what they did.
They just drew a picture.
Others go through a very elaborate ritual to get themselves in the right state.
And whatever works for an individual seems to work.
And then some people can't do it at all.
art bell
Okay, here we go.
I tried an experiment once with my wife.
She stays up late with me and helps with the program and so on.
And I thought we would try a remote viewing session.
And so we picked out an object in the house, a very, very unlikely object, something nobody would ever guess.
And I said, okay, folks, draw the object for me and send me a fax.
You know, we live in this wonderful age of immediacy.
And I probably had 200 faxes.
But here's the interesting thing.
Two people, Doctor, drew precisely what the object was.
And what it was was a marble plate about an inch thick with a laser image of myself on it in a frame, a metal frame, which came up in a very specific way and curled down again in a very specific way and came up behind it in a very specific way.
Doctor, two people, number one, two people drew that precisely.
Number two, during the entire time that the experiment was going on, now I've got millions of listeners across the country, my wife and I felt incredibly invaded is the word.
And I mean invaded.
It was as though there were a million eyes all over the place.
Now, that may have been us.
It may not have been, but two people came away with an impossible feat.
doug richards
It's interesting that your result in terms of what you got is quite similar to what I've gotten doing the same experiment but without the facts where people had to mail them in.
I've done things where there were conferences around the country.
Somebody from ARE might be lecturing, say, in Los Angeles and would have a room full of 300 people, and they would all mail me their drawings of what I or someone else who was the target person was doing at that precise time.
And I too found that you might only get, say, two, three, or four that were absolutely perfect drawings of the target.
And sometimes people would have a very clear visual image but would misinterpret it.
My very favorite of that was someone who drew two arches next to each other and wrote down that they thought this must be some kind of a stained glass window in a church and the actual target was the McDonald's sign.
Another one that I liked was when I got very lazy one day.
I was working hard on a manuscript and was sitting there at the computer and decided not to go out and look at the target at all, but simply make the computer the target.
And back came a picture of somebody with their hands playing on a piano keyboard.
And so this is the sort of thing that I've seen too.
You do an experiment the way you did it or the way I was doing that, of course, it's very hard to statistically evaluate because a skeptic might say, well, you know, if you have a target and you have a thousand people all guessing, somebody's bound to draw it.
And so, of course, the way you do it for a controlled experiment is you have a specific target pool and you can do some statistical evaluations.
And those kinds of experiments have produced some very strong statistical evidence.
art bell
I would have to reply, hogwash, to that in the sense that the people who returned these faxes to me drew it exactly.
In other words, they drew the piece of marble, the thickness.
They showed my image.
They showed the precise way the frame came around this, you know, the marble.
Impossible.
Out of 200 tries, two hits like that, impossible.
doug richards
And your number is about one out of a hundred people.
My experience has been that about one out of a hundred people can just plain do this.
And one of the ways, of course, you could screen for talented people is exactly that way.
Get the ones who did the very best pictures and then do some more work with them.
But roughly, that seems to be what people find is that around one out of a hundred people just right off the bat can really do this.
art bell
All right.
Now, what does that mean about them?
Does that mean that they're special, that they have a talent the rest of us don't?
That they have developed it?
Do you think we all equally have it if developed?
Or are these people special candidates for a special mission of some kind?
doug richards
Well, I think that it's very much like playing the trombone.
Some people can pick one up and do pretty well pretty quickly.
Others, like me, could spend their entire lives and never make a note come out of the instrument.
And I think that psychic ability is quite like that.
But one of the great dangers in this is to assume that because you're able to do a little remote viewing, that you somehow are very spiritually evolved or a special person.
Ego Inflation's Dangers 00:01:53
doug richards
It's sort of this massive ego inflation that I have frequently seen, that people will have one psychic experience, and because they didn't realize how common they are, all of a sudden now they announce that they're a psychic.
art bell
Actually, I was told by several remote viewers that one of the greatest dangers they had in the program, in the military program, was exactly that, that they began to get a kind of a god complex as time went on, and it became very damaging in the work they were doing.
doug richards
What often happens that I've found is that there's a thing that Carl Jung called the trickster archetype that comes in, where someone is doing quite well in some rather specific tasks like remote viewing and starts to believe that they're a great psychic, and somehow the universe starts providing more and more absurd kinds of information through their remote viewing.
And the sense you get in reading mythological history is that this is a transformational archetype that's supposed to knock you out of your smug satisfaction that because you can do a little bit of psychic stuff that you're a great spiritual master.
And so frequently you'll see people seem to go somewhat off the deep end, that they are having some true successes, and then will begin to get this ego inflation that they're a great psychic, and the stuff gets more and more bizarre, more and more inaccurate, and they get more and more committed to being absolutely right.
Easy to see in other people, sometimes hard to see in yourself.
art bell
The government endeavored with very strict protocols to prevent that kind of thing from occurring, but it nevertheless did.
That's the person's own ego fantasy entering into the work.
Dr. Doug Richards: Morning Call 00:03:41
doug richards
You typically, in all psychic things, get a mixture of real information and other things coming from somewhere else, either in the person's own consciousness or from somewhere else.
And often, lots of symbolic kinds of information come in.
And so it's a great challenge to sort this sort of thing out because you never know what exactly the source is for things.
And so sometimes you'll get absolutely perfect literal information.
Other times it's quite symbolic.
I'll give you an example from a psychic experience that I had that's sort of similar to the one that you had with your car.
art bell
All right, wait, this is going to obviously be a good story, and we are at the top of the hour.
So take a rest.
You've got a good 10, 12 minutes here, and we'll be right back to you.
How's that?
unidentified
Okay.
art bell
All right.
My guest from way back east, where it's got to be coming up on 3 o'clock in the morning, is Dr. Doug Richards, who is a core faculty member at Atlantic University in Virginia Beach.
I'm Art Bell, and from the high desert, where the cats and dogs are once again coming down, I don't know how much more we can take.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Keep it right where you've got it.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More somewhere in Time coming up.
Without your love.
Oh, baby, don't leave me this way.
I can't exist.
Shardin Island Now, we take you back to the path on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
art bell
And we are graced with the presence of Dr. Doug Richards.
If you're just joining at this hour, he's a core faculty member at Atlantic University in Virginia Beach.
He's also director of research for Meridian Institute in Virginia Beach, his doctorate from the University of North Carolina.
He's with the Casey Foundation, ARE, and we are discussing all manner of things psychic.
He has written a book called The Psychic Quest, a brand new book just out.
We'll tell you how to get it.
And we'll continue our discussion in a moment.
Back now to Dr. Doug Richards in Virginia, where it's, let's see, after 3 o'clock in the morning.
Are you normally up this late, Doctor?
doug richards
No, I'm afraid I'm not normally up this late.
Not sure if I'm in the dream state or the waking state, but I'm working on it.
art bell
Well, all right.
You were about to tell us something.
doug richards
Well, what I was going to talk about was the idea that a lot of psychic experiences have a mixture of symbolic and literal material.
And the problem a lot of people have is that it's very hard to sort them apart.
So give you an example of one of my own experiences.
I woke up in the morning with a dream.
And for many people, the primary place they have psychic experiences in dreams.
Near-Death Dreams 00:15:23
doug richards
And that's where I've had mine several times.
And I dreamed, very powerful dream, that I was driving to work, and the car in front of me, all of a sudden the door sprang open, and a woman fell out of the car onto the pavement.
And I jammed on the brakes and went over to look and see what was wrong.
And there she was, just quivering on her back on the pavement.
And a tray of food had been knocked over and was spread around her.
And it was a pretty powerful dream and a little frightening.
unidentified
You bet.
doug richards
And so my question was, you know, is this going to happen?
art bell
What is this?
doug richards
Is this a precognitive dream of a traffic accident?
And so I drove to work waiting to see if this would happen.
And no such thing happened on my way to work.
And I went into my building and the elevator wasn't working quite right.
So I got in the stairwell and started to climb up to a higher floor.
And as I was climbing up, there was a woman coming down from the snack bar.
And she tripped on the steps, fell down about five steps, went smack on the bottom, and was lying there on the bottom on her back, quivering with a tray of food spread all around her.
And so this is the kind of thing that happens to many people where clearly there was a precognitive experience, but it wouldn't have been much use if I was looking for a car accident.
It was right experience, wrong kind of accident.
Then sometimes these things can be completely symbolic.
One of the ones in my book that I like, because this person was able to really look and see what the experience meant, it was a dream about a plane crash where she and her husband were on a plane and the plane crashed and went down in flames.
Well, it turns out that there was no actual plane crash, but he asked her for a divorce a couple weeks later, so she realized it was the marriage going down in flames.
art bell
Symbology.
doug richards
And so, right, you see that very often in dreams, that you will see most dreams are symbolic, and every now and then there'll be one with a little psychic information, but sometimes it kind of sneaks in, and so it can be difficult sometimes to sort out the symbolic from the literal.
art bell
Yeah, the symbology or the metaphors, which I think are absolutely real, are so difficult to interpret that I'm not sure yet of their usefulness.
How do you feel about that?
doug richards
Sometimes people are able to work with them, and sometimes they're not.
One of the things that can be very valuable is to basically record your dreams every night and then look at the symbols in them.
And eventually you get used to what your personal symbols are.
And so when something comes that's out of the ordinary, then what you'll find is that it will really jump out at you.
But that's a hard thing to do.
To give you another example, this was something we did a little earlier this semester in the class that I'm teaching, is two of my students were doing an experiment to see if they could have psychic dreams.
And they came to class.
I had been out of town for a week.
And they came to class and were sharing their dreams.
And there was a great symbol in this fellow's dream.
It was an alligator in a swamp doing something.
And the woman in my class interpreted that as her former boyfriend.
And they were able to see that they'd had some kind of a psychic experience.
They were both kind of shocked when I said that the day that they'd been having the dream, I was in Florida visiting a friend of mine who lives on a lake in a swamp with alligators.
And so my symbols had somehow worked their way into their dreams.
art bell
So you were almost like a control for a remote viewer, in a sense.
doug richards
Well, it's not quite clear what was going on.
That was one of the interesting challenges, is that they didn't intend for me to be any kind of a participant in their dream.
But it was a very odd symbol.
In fact, the two of them the day before had been up in the mountains of Virginia, a place with neither swamps nor alligators.
art bell
Sure.
doug richards
So to pull my symbol into their dream was, we treated it as just one of those things that somehow the universe has a bizarre sense of humor, but it worked very nicely in the class.
art bell
Here's something I've wondered about in the dream category.
There are only now becoming, I have had dream experts on, and I frequently asked them, why not have, we have this wonderful thing, the Internet now, why not have a dream registry on the Internet, the one place where such thing would surely be possible, to try and determine if we are having mass dreams.
In other words, 260 million people in America, if you could take even a small percentage of them and begin recording their dreams, we could see if there is any commonality in them, symbolically or otherwise, that is trying to tell us something.
Have you considered such a thing?
doug richards
It's a great idea.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if someone's doing it.
Whenever I think of something like that and search the internet on something like mass dreams, I'll find that somebody's got a site who's collecting those things.
It wouldn't surprise me.
It's a good idea.
The hardest part about it is somebody has to read through all those dreams.
art bell
It's true.
It's true.
There's a lot of human work involved at the end of the day.
I want to talk to you a little bit about NDEs.
I have a very good person who's become very close to me, a personal friend.
His name is Daniel Brinkley.
doug richards
I know Daniel.
art bell
You know Daniel.
Daniel was struck by lightning.
He was dead for, I don't know, 28 minutes, 18 minutes, I can't remember.
Many minutes.
Clinically dead.
And very much damaged.
His heart was damaged.
He has terrible blood problems now and blah, But the bottom line is, after he was struck by lightning, after this near-death experience, without question, Danion acquired a number of abilities that he didn't really want or care for.
We could discuss his actual NDE.
It changed his life, as I'm sure you're aware.
But he certainly acquired a very strong psychic ability that then began to fade.
He still has it, but not to the degree, anywhere near the degree he had it immediately after recovering from being struck by lightning.
Have you seen this frequently, that people will have severe trauma, head trauma, for example, and then begin to acquire psychic ability?
doug richards
Well, certainly after near-death experiences, it's quite common.
I did a survey of ARE members.
They're a great population to do a survey in because a lot of them have had psychic experiences being interested in Ed Casey.
art bell
Sure.
doug richards
And found that of the people who'd had near-death experiences, not all, but a rather large majority found that they had developed greater psychic ability.
And the challenge with that is for some of them, like Danian Brinkley, he had some pretty extreme stuff going on.
For some of them, it's a little bit gentler.
One woman that I talk about in my book was very lucky that she had parents who were spiritualists.
They were already into this, and she'd never had a psychic experience before.
She had a motorcycle accident at the age of 16.
But after the accident, everything just flooded in, and she probably would have been in a mental institution except that with her parents and a group, it took them five years to get her abilities under control.
And now she is a practicing psychic and a perfectly well-adjusted person.
But it was some rather intense kind of stuff that came through after the near-death experience.
So for some people, it can be very traumatic.
Stuff just kind of floods in after one of those things.
art bell
Well, yes.
In fact, Danion told me that in the early years, he could not be in a crowd of people because the images, the sensing, the hearing telepathically, all of it would come rushing in like a great loud cacophony of noise that drove him crazy.
And he really hated it for a long time.
doug richards
Yeah, that sort of thing, it's not always as extreme as his, but is definitely reported by people, and it can often be very difficult to reintegrate into the real world after having a near-death experience because of this kind of thing.
art bell
Exactly so.
Certainly difficult on anybody who would be close to you, a family member, a wife, a husband, whatever.
Very difficult for them to accept and very traumatic for them to go through.
doug richards
Sometimes you'll have the opposite problem, too, that what happens is that people who've read all the books on near-death experiences and expect you to come back with cosmic wisdom, all you're trying to do is get along in life.
art bell
And then there are also those who do not experience the warm light, the tunnel, the relatives, any of that.
It's not very widely reported because people don't like to talk about it, but they had horrid experiences, even hellish experiences.
Now, this is one that you really would be unlikely to tell in public.
doug richards
When I did a survey, it was of a couple hundred people, and I think that there weren't a lot of those, but I would say at least 10% of the near-death experiences were pretty negative.
And it's been written about.
It's not the sort of thing that sells popular books, and so you find a lot less written about the negative ones than the positive ones, and people are less willing to share them.
But it does seem to happen now and then.
art bell
What would that say to you, or would you stay away from trying to analyze that?
You know, obviously to a religious person, it would say a lot.
doug richards
Well, I've never talked with anybody who's had that kind of an experience.
I've talked with some that have had the positive kind or the kind that makes them open to all sorts of psychic things.
I haven't talked to them, so it's hard to answer that, but my sense is it would be well worth having someone talk to the people about their life circumstances that may have led up to that.
A man named Ken Ring, I don't know if you've had him on your show, but Ken Ring is an expert in near-death experiences, and he found some interesting links between traumatic experiences in the person's life and the nature of their near-death experience.
So you may be able to really look and see what kinds of things had happened in the person's life, and that might tell you something.
art bell
I'm so familiar with Daniel and what he went through that I can ask questions about that.
And so I will ask you this.
He had been not such a nice guy prior to being struck by lightning.
In fact, by his own admission, he was kind of a bastard in life.
And when he had his NDE, he said he went through a complete life review in which he actually felt everything that he had inflicted on others, he was made to feel.
Is that a common report?
doug richards
Not as extreme as his.
I mean, he definitely seems to have taken it all on at once, being an extreme fellow before his experience and then having an extreme transformation during it.
Most people don't have it quite that extreme, but that kind of thing is definitely reported, and the person may well emerge from it saying, hey, I'm never going to do any of that stuff I used to do.
I'm now connected with God.
That kind of thing is not at all uncommon.
art bell
He doesn't exactly say God.
He was a really nasty guy.
I mean, he beat people up.
He was physical.
He was doing some pretty nasty things during the war, killed a bunch people.
And when he had his NDE, you're quite correct.
He came back completely, completely transformed and has now spent, I don't know, 20 years counseling people who are dying, you know, and talking to them and trying to tell them what's ahead and take away some of the abject fear that anybody who knows they're about to die carries.
And so that's proof that, I mean, that is a very significant change.
There's no question about it.
So something sure happened to him.
That is common?
doug richards
As I said, his is perhaps a little more intense than most people's, but he had a pretty intense life before he had his near-death experience.
But it's certainly common that people will just have a major reorientation of their life after a near-death experience.
art bell
All right.
Whether we're talking about NDEs or out-of-body experiences or remote viewing, are we talking, do you think, about the same realms or perhaps levels of these realms, but sort of in the same area?
doug richards
It all kind of blends together in many ways that seems to be the same realm in the sense that what you frequently get, a lot of the experiences I had reported to me, were various mixtures of near-death and out-of-body and mystical experiences and this sort of thing.
And people who haven't read all the books often don't know how to label it, so they just describe what happened.
And so a typical one that I got several reports of is a woman in childbirth in intense pain, all of a sudden floating above her body, looking down at the body and feeling no pain.
And then for some of those people, they pop back into their body, and that's about it.
For others, they get closer to death and end up going down the tunnel and seeing the being of light and that sort of thing, and then returning to find out that they almost died in childbirth.
And so you'll see things that kind of grade into each other.
And then perhaps they had a vision of the doctors and the nurses working on them and see things that they couldn't possibly have seen from any vantage point except actually being up at the ceiling, showing a kind of remote viewing ability.
So you often see that kind of mixture when people actually report these things where you can't classify it.
art bell
60 Minutes did a really, really, really interesting experiment story about NDEs.
And they covered a hospital in which I guess the surgeon was so interested in this that he took a large digital clock and put it at a high location in the operating room where if somebody were to be hovering on the ceiling, they would be able to see this digital clock.
And several, even many people, reported NDEs in that very operating room, but not one of them was able to come back and even report the fact that they had seen a digital clock strangely way up there pointed at the ceiling.
Now, do you think that goes toward disproving that people actually rise above their bodies on these occasions?
Or do you simply think that it means that the focus is not on such objects, but rather on the experience and the body and all the rest of it, and the last thing they'd be looking for is a digital clock?
doug richards
Well, I think actually that last explanation you gave is certainly one that makes some sense.
Hall of Records Conference 00:15:35
doug richards
That what you find with almost all psychic experiences is the primary focus is on things that are emotionally close to you.
For example, the doctors and nurses working on your own body.
art bell
You bet that's what you'd be looking at.
doug richards
And so that's typically what you find in almost any psychic experience, that the very best and strongest ones and the ones that are often easy to verify are ones that involve very close personal relationships and things that really matter to the person.
That's the kind of stuff that really just kind of smashes through.
Whereas things using target objects, the things, of course, that experimenters like, are often kind of disappointing.
So it gives some ammunition to skeptics who say there's nothing to it because they say, well, you know, we had a whole pack of ESP cards there in the room and the person went out of their body and they couldn't do anything with it.
But that doesn't seem to be the way this stuff works.
Every now and then you'll get somebody who has that unusual ability to tune into objects that aren't very interesting.
And you see that with some of the remote viewers or to target things.
art bell
And that brings us to Edgar Casey.
He had that ability, didn't he?
doug richards
Edgar Casey had that ability.
He had an amazing ability that, as far as I know, no one has equaled since.
art bell
Are there any modern-day people that you would name who have some good portion of that talent?
doug richards
It's very hard to say because Edgar Casey had a number of different talents.
The talent that is, I can't say unique because I'm sure that if you looked hard enough, you might be able to find someone, but was his talent for medical diagnosis.
There are a lot of psychics who will certainly give you aspects of medical diagnosis, and I've had a number of psychic readings, and some of them have been quite helpful.
But Edgar Casey's talent of being able to go anywhere in the world with just the name of the person and come up with not only a diagnosis, but an elaborate treatment that was effective, that's quite impressive.
art bell
Oh, yes, it is.
That's a very specific targeting indeed.
doug richards
And I've not heard of any psychic with a capability quite that great.
Again, there are some that can do pretty good diagnoses, but he had an amazing ability to come up with treatments.
And in fact, one of the other pieces of research that I do, I work with a group called the Meridian Institute, and we consist of me, a medical doctor, a chiropractor, and a clinical psychologist, studying the effectiveness of the Casey treatments in people today, and have had some fairly impressive successes in our short existence so far.
art bell
All right.
We'll ask you about that when we return.
Time flies.
It's already the bottom of the hour.
Dr. Doug Richards from ARE back in Virginia is our guest.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 3rd, 1998.
Her hands are never cold.
She's got better days.
She turned a music gone.
Your Networks Presents.
Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast Coast AM from April 3, 1998.
art bell
Dr. Doug Richards from ARE is my guest, and we're about to jump into the Edgar Casey questions.
And you're going to get your opportunity to ask questions.
Hang in there.
I know I've been hogging the good doctor.
Complaint to make, I...
I heard a noise during the break, and I turned around, and for about the fifth time, now I have a number of computers, but for about the fifth time, a CPU fan is beginning to grind and sound weird.
And I would like to know, in this modern day and age, when we produce 333 megahertz computers and we have all these advances and we have these incredibly fast chips, why can't somebody make a CPU fan that keeps running for more than two or three months on end?
Just a complaint.
All right.
Now, back to Professor Richards.
Doctor, this fact that has come in probably should set off this question just fine.
I'd love to hear the professor discuss Edgar Casey, his level of accuracy, how much Casey's work Richards has personally researched and confirmed.
How did you come to be a Casey admirer?
How did you come to be associated with ARE?
Discuss your trips, evidence of Atlantis, if ARE is involved presently with efforts in Egypt to explore under the Sphinx.
How about Casey Lohr hanging around Virginia Beach in ARE?
Have you met people who knew Edgar Casey and were present during his readings?
Do you know any interesting personal stories, observations about Casey?
How's that?
doug richards
Well, that pretty well covers the rest of the show, I would say.
art bell
So he is, of course, a man of great fascination.
I interviewed his son, and his son, by the way, sent me his book, Autographed, which I really treasure.
So talk about Edgar Casey.
doug richards
Well, it's hard to know where to start.
Like I said, that question covered a lot of things.
Of course, I do know some people who knew Edgar Casey pretty well since I co-authored a book with his son, Edgar Evans Casey, and his granddaughter Gail.
Right.
And I first got interested in Edgar Casey probably about 25 years ago.
I was in school, actually, originally a biologist and psychologist, and got a job working with Dr. J.B. Rine, who some listeners may know was kind of the founder of American parapsychology at Duke University.
And he had a lab across the street from Duke.
And I was working in that lab back in the early 70s and reading about Edgar Casey and fairly impressed, but doing kind of hardcore scientific parapsychology.
And I went on to become a scientist, biologist, and psychologist, but always stayed interested in Edgar Casey.
And about 11 years ago, actually, ended up becoming the director of research for Atlantic University, which was started by the Edgar Casey Foundation and is now independent, still here in Virginia Beach.
And have been researching things related to the Casey readings for about, well, about 11 years here, and actually took my first trip in search of Atlantis back in the summer of 1976.
So that would make that about almost 22 years ago.
art bell
I've got to ask you to stay good and close to that phone.
That's a lot of research of Edgar Casey.
How much of what the public believes about Edgar Casey is myth, and how much is reality?
doug richards
Well, the public, of course, often believes in exaggerations.
Actually, the stuff that Edgar Casey seems to have done extremely well on, which was his medical information, although there's sort of the popular sense that eating lots of vegetables is good for you, very few people really know many details about that.
Whereas the things about the big earthquakes, often people say, oh, Edgar Casey predicted that in 1998, California's call is going to fall on the ocean, which I would think would make you kind of nervous out there on the West Coast.
It turns out that although it's true that Casey made some predictions, they're only about out of the 14,000 or more readings, about 30 that refer to earth changes of various sorts.
And interestingly enough, and I don't know if Edgar Evans Casey got into this, but about half of them referred to changes in the 1930s that didn't happen.
And so it looks like Casey wasn't always right.
Edgar Evans Casey and his brother Hugh Lynn wrote a book called The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce's Power that talked about Casey's mistakes.
And it looks like some of the Earth Changes predictions, and particularly some of the readings looking for treasure and oil, no one ever had much luck trying to make a lot of money from Edgar Casey.
The medical readings, on the other hand, have been very impressive in terms of being able to provide information that's been useful to people for 60 years.
And the research is slowly accumulating.
The paradigm is kind of changing.
There's more and more interest now in the medical community in alternative medicine.
And so there's being a little more research into some of it.
But a lot of people, in the absence of research, have gone ahead and used the Casey treatments anyway with some good success.
art bell
With respect to the Earth Changes predictions, one might suggest the possibility of various timelines.
In other words, that if certain events take place, the following is going to occur.
But if those events don't take place, well, then there might be an entirely different sounded like it was hanging up.
Oh, boy.
That was close.
That was a close call.
doug richards
I'm here.
art bell
Others might suggest that if other events occur, it might bring an entirely different future.
And while Edgar Casey may have viewed one possible future, there, in fact, may be many possible futures, even many different dimensions.
Many modern physicists are now talking about as many as ten dimensions as a possibility.
So, chair to comment on that?
doug richards
Well, Edgar Cayce made it very clear that there were possible futures and that the human will could change the future.
And it's interesting, even in the medical readings where he had such great success, often people would ask for him to say, you know, will I get better and how long will it take?
And he'd say, it all depends on the response of the body.
And so he was actually quite reluctant to do what most people think he did most of the time, which is to make predictions of the future.
That he was much better at saying, here are the present circumstances.
Here's what you can do to make things good.
Here's some danger signs.
But always emphasized that even in his major predictions that the human will could make changes in things.
And so it is definitely the case of probable futures rather than a fixed future.
art bell
Is the Casey Foundation actively looking for another Edgar Cayce?
doug richards
Not exactly.
Actually, the Edgar Casey Foundation, as such, their primary role is to index and research the Casey readings.
The Association for Research and Enlightenment, which is the membership organization that is connected with it, is researching psychics, but not specifically to find another Edgar Casey.
They're hoping that everyone will show their own unique gifts.
And so they're actually in the process of developing an intuitive sciences institute.
And in fact, on their webpage, you're asking for advice from people, suggestions, names of good psychics, and that kind of thing.
And have been doing things for several years working with psychics where, well, for example, a conference last fall that I was doing a little research with, they had several psychics come and give readings.
And then there was quite an elaborate process of evaluating the readings so that we could see which psychics seemed to be doing better than others, what doing better actually meant, what it is that people are expecting out of a psychic, how can they separate that from a psychic, just kind of guessing, all those sorts of things.
So that's all an active research process, but it's not specifically to find another Edgar Casey.
It's to find people with a variety of gifts.
art bell
I believe Edgar Casey suggested there would be something called the Hall of Records found beneath the left paw of the Sphinx.
There is current intense interest, and there have been some scientific studies that would seem to show there is a tunnel from the pyramid which seems to angle down toward the left paw of the Sphinx.
There, additionally, has been ground-penetrating radar which seems to show some perhaps as many as five chambers or areas that may be located below the left paw of the Sphinx.
What can you tell me?
doug richards
Well, there's some pretty exciting stuff going on.
And I know that I've been listening to some of the audio archives of your show, and you've got some of these folks.
I guess you mentioned Graham Hancock, you're going to talk to on Wednesday.
art bell
Wednesday, yes.
doug richards
So, yeah, actually, the latest I know was last summer.
We had a lot of the major players in this here in Virginia Beach, Robert Poval, Zahi Hawass.
art bell
Oh, Zahi was.
That's right.
Zahi was there, wasn't he?
doug richards
I spoke on Atlantis at that one.
In fact, Tanya Brinkley came running up after my talk, and so, yeah, everybody hangs out together.
art bell
Was Zahi behaving himself?
doug richards
Zahi was wonderful.
And I think a lot of people expected that as the head honcho over there in Egypt that he'd be difficult in some way.
And actually, it was a wonderful conference.
We all had a good time, and the audience just thought he was great.
I enjoyed myself a lot at the conference.
art bell
Well, I was fortunate to go to Egypt and to stand right there above the left paw, right in front of the Sphinx.
And I asked Zahi about it.
He gave me, I was honored with a personal tour.
And he said, Art, there has never been so much as one grain of sand, not one grain of proof of anything below the Sphinx.
And he's, of course, very adamant about all of that.
And yet the scientific evidence gathered so far indicates there is something down there.
How convinced was Edgar Cayce that there is something there?
doug richards
Well, of course, you have to separate Edgar Casey, the man, from Edgar Casey, the psychic in trance.
The man, Edgar Casey, was open to anything and always said, don't accept this stuff without going and testing it.
So he and his trance source would very much approve of people going there and discovering what was there.
There's a whole set of readings about this, actually, where he gave them specific instructions to find a Hall of Records.
And it was actually from the right paw of the Sphinx.
In fact, he said there were two things.
Under the left paw of the Sphinx, there would actually be some information just right there under the paw.
But the tunnel leading into the Hall of Records actually was from the right paw of the Sphinx.
art bell
Really?
doug richards
And in fact, in our book, Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited, we actually quote pretty much all of the readings identifying how you would go about finding this Hall of Records.
And the question of what's been found, I don't know.
I have not been over to Egypt myself.
I'd like to go someday.
But it's interesting how the obvious way to find things would be simply to go in and dig.
But as I understand it, it's very similar to if some Egyptians came over and wanted to dig under the Washington Monument.
Edge Cliff Discoveries 00:15:35
art bell
It is very much like that, yes.
doug richards
And so it's more difficult than one might expect.
That's why actually I do my own work following up on some of the Casey work in the Bahamas, because we have a little bit different situation there with the underwater sites.
art bell
Yes, you went to the Bahamas looking for Atlantis.
Did you, actually, I guess many times have you turned up anything, to use the metaphor of Zahi, have you turned up one grain of anything that would indicate that Atlantis is there?
doug richards
Well, we've turned up some very interesting things.
The situation in the Bimini area, and for the listeners who don't know where Bimini is, Bimini is a very small island about six miles long in the Bahamas.
It's the closest one to the United States, and it's about 45 miles east of Miami.
art bell
Now, real tough assignment for you.
doug richards
Oh, yeah, it's great.
I mean, if you have to like, Graham Hancock wants to look for Atlantis in Antarctica, and he's welcome to go there.
I prefer Bimini.
art bell
I'll ask Graham about that.
unidentified
He's welcome to come visit me in Bimini.
doug richards
You have to pick a nice place for a vacation if you're going to do this sort of thing.
But the situation is very different there, because in Egypt, there's no difficulty at all in finding ancient ruins.
They're all over the place.
The problem is demonstrating that what you found has anything at all to do with Atlantis.
In the Bahamas, you've got the opposite situation, that there's not supposed to be any ruins of anything there.
And so if you do find anything underwater, it pretty much has to be Atlantis.
If you find any kind of an underwater building, there's certainly no known ancient civilization in the Bahamas.
art bell
Well, I'm not sure it has to be Atlantis, but it has to be ⁇ certainly would be a great shock.
It could be an ancient something or another, could it not, without being Atlantis.
In other words, there may have been many ancient civilizations.
What do we know?
doug richards
Well, actually, that's a very good point.
I think one of the difficulties is that a lot of people want to turn every ancient civilization in the world into Atlantis.
There may, in fact, have been quite a few rather advanced civilizations.
The reason we look in the Bahamas for Atlantis is that Edgar Casey mentioned Atlantis in a number of his readings.
And actually, some people think that he mentioned the island of Bimini in the Bahamas because that was the real hotspot, the center of Atlantis.
Actually, it's a little different story.
What he did was he was attempting to raise money to build a hospital for his medical work.
And a man who owned most of the island of Bimini back in 1926 asked for a reading about how he could find treasure and oil on his island.
And Casey said, well, you're not going to find any oil, and it's going to be hard to find the treasure, but this is a place where the remains of Atlantis are.
And he gave the guy strong advice to build an archaeological resort there and gave a number of readings for this fellow, but most of them were looking for treasure, and the man never found any treasure and gave up.
art bell
Well, you've been down there looking for remains.
What have you found, if anything?
doug richards
Well, what I've found, we've done a couple things.
There's one site that's become quite controversial that always comes up, which has become known as the Road site.
And the reason it's controversial is that one of Casey's predictions was that Atlantis would rise in 1968.
And some pilots flying around in small planes saw this very unusual underwater formation in about 10 feet of water near Bimini that appeared to be a huge pavement made of big blocks, about the size, say, 12 by 12 foot blocks.
And so divers went out and confirmed that indeed that's exactly what this thing looked like.
It looked like a great big road under the water going on for about 1,600 feet.
art bell
Was that in 1968?
doug richards
That was in 1968.
And over about the next, oh, I would say, 10 years, a number of people did quite a bit of work trying to either prove that this was an Atlantean ruin or prove that it was an actual geological formation.
And kicked up quite a controversy that generated a lot of heat and very little light.
And one of the problems with the site is that it looks very much like something called beach rock, which indeed forms big stone blocks on the bottom of the ocean.
What my choice has been is every now and then I go out to that site because it's kind of fun.
The dive shop has a buoy on it, so it's not too hard to find it.
But it's very much like the story of the drunk who's looking for his keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is.
That's not where the keys are.
And so the actual Edgar Casey readings did not say to search near shore because the geology is such that a lot of the sediment has covered things near shore there.
But he said if the geological survey were to be made out along the Gulf Stream near Bimini, that evidence of Atlantis would be found.
The way the geology works there is that in 10,000 B.C., which is roughly the date that Casey gave for the final destruction of Atlantis, the glaciers had tied up a lot of the water on the earth in the ice caps, and sea level was about 300 feet lower.
And what that meant is that at that time, instead of a little tiny island, the little islands of the Bahamas were one giant Bahama.
It was a huge island, not quite continent-size, but that makes sense.
art bell
No, that makes sense.
Absolutely.
doug richards
And so Casey was right on target when he said that in 10,000 B.C. you had a large landmass.
And what was interesting is that on the Florida edge of that landmass, there was probably about 150-foot cliff looking down on the Gulf Stream.
Now, with the water 300 feet higher, the edge of that cliff is under about 130 feet of water.
And so if you're looking for civilization, it would make sense that people like to build their beach houses on the tops of cliffs, as you know, being a west coaster.
art bell
I see them falling off every day lately.
doug richards
Right, if you're looking for evidence of civilization, that a pretty good place to look would be either at the top of the cliff or perhaps at the bottom of the cliff if you're in California.
And we're essentially doing the same thing in the Bimini area, that rather than look near shore, it's well known that the actual island of Bimini now is primarily composed of sediments that are about 15 feet thick before you get back to the 10,000-year-old layer.
So if you found something lying on the surface right there, you're probably looking at fairly recent degree shipwreck degree that have you yet found anything exciting?
Pretty exciting.
What we did is we did what's called a side-scan sonar survey.
And what that consists of is you have a device that sends a beam of sound out to either side of the boat, and you can tow it at any distance above the bottom.
So it's very good for searching in deep water.
And on the most recent trip that I went on, we towed this thing along the edge of the cliffs back and forth and found a number of things that we call anomalies, meaning we don't know what the heck they are, some of which don't look like anything, but they don't look natural.
Some of them look like building foundations, but we have no proof.
One of them, and one of the dangers, of course, is to jump ahead and say, oh, yeah, you know, we found a building foundation.
One of the things was very interesting.
It was what appeared to be a long, thin thing, about 45 feet long, very, very unnatural in appearance, with a big square thing about 15 feet square on one end.
art bell
My God, what a terrible place to have to break.
But it's the top of the hour.
Fascinating, Doctor.
Fascinating.
Hold on.
We'll be right back to you.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
We're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from April 3rd, 1998.
art bell
I just keep playing that again and again.
There's something about that line.
No time to be young.
That's our kids today.
No time to be young.
Good morning, everybody.
What a fascinating discussion.
Doug Richards, Professor Doug Richards, is our guest from ARE.
doug richards
All right.
art bell
We'll get back to him in a moment.
And the structures, structures, buildings, anomalies near Bimini that just might be Atlantis.
Just in case you did not catch the first hour of the program, I did a very in-depth, I think riveting interview with Professor Stanley McDaniel regarding what is going to occur on Sunday and then Monday.
Sunday, a U.S. spacecraft will pass over and attempt to reimage with high definition the face on Mars.
Professor McDaniel, as you will hear in the interview or heard, generally agrees that society had better brace itself because the odds are very, very good that this face on Mars is not a natural occurrence.
The implications of that are astounding no matter which you happen to believe, whether you believe that native Martians did that or you believe that some early human race that achieved some great level of technological advance did it.
Either way, you all had better brace yourselves.
Or it may turn out to be a pile of rocks.
Hard to tell, but it's going to be pretty interesting.
The photography on Sunday, the pictures available on Monday, it's going to be a big day.
And Professor Richards, it kind of goes to, in a way, what we're talking about, whether it's on Bimini or Mars or off the Ryukyu Islands, another subject we should touch on, there are increasing signs of some sort of prior civilization.
We keep finding older and older things.
Another discovery in southern Egypt here the last couple of weeks that's very upsetting for the Egyptians, as a matter of fact, because it sort of ruins a lot of what they thought to be true.
And we keep discovering older things.
Are you reasonably well convinced that there was once another civilization on this earth?
doug richards
Well, as I said in the last hour, there may have been more than one.
I'm sure that there was at least one.
One of the good examples of things being the time being pushed back farther and farther is that when Edgar Casey gave his readings talking about an Atlantis destruction in 10,000 B.C., it wasn't even believed that human beings were in North America more than 2,000 years ago.
Up until just a few years ago, it wasn't believed that there was anyone in the Americas earlier than about 10,000 years ago.
In last week's Chronicle of Higher Education, which is the very staid, serious educational magazine, one of the lead articles talked about now the acceptance of a 40,000-year-old date as being pretty much mainstream.
Well, Casey talked about destructions of Atlantis and migrations in 30,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. and this sort of thing.
We still have not necessarily got solid confirmation, but it's becoming more worth looking for things.
This is not wild and crazy anymore that there were people around.
art bell
Well, it is for some groups in this country.
There was the Brookings report.
We discuss that frequently on this program.
It suggests that if such evidence were to be uncovered, it could not be released because of the impact on, As a matter of fact, the biggest group that would be impacted would be scientists who have had such a strict view of the way things are, and it would turn all that upside down, and with it, them.
And, of course, the rest of society as well.
A lot of religious groups would be rather upset.
doug richards
Well, scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts always occur, usually with a fair amount of pain as they happen.
Yes.
But, you know, in the last hour we were talking about what we may have found in Bimini.
And what's interesting is just the challenge there.
In some ways, it's kind of like the face on Mars problem.
We don't have to send a spacecraft down, but when you're 130 feet down in the water, it's a little more of a challenge than people might think, particularly when you're on a very low budget.
And so in our sonar pictures, we've got some very interesting things.
But as an example of one that turned out not to be the ruins of Atlantis, just as we broke for the hour, I was talking about a thing that looked to be about 45 feet long, very thin, sticking out over the edge of the cliff.
And on the cliff, there was a big square thing on one end of this long thing that was about 15 feet square.
Obviously, not natural.
And we thought this was pretty exciting.
So we went diving down to 130 feet.
And what we found was an 18-wheeler flatbed truck lying on its side.
unidentified
What?
art bell
What?
doug richards
Which must have fallen off a boat at some point and was sitting there right on the edge of the cliff.
art bell
I can imagine how that would look and how exciting.
That must be ⁇ if you can think back to the moment when you saw that image and you realized what you were seeing could not possibly be natural, you must have had an awful big chill going down the back of your spine for a while.
doug richards
Well, we got pretty excited because we've seen quite a few other things too.
In fact, what had happened, and the reason we were searching in this particular area, is because when you're diving at that depth with normal sport diving equipment, you've only got five minutes of bottom time, and the current drifts you pretty fast across the cliff face.
And one of our divers back about five years ago had spotted something that was definitely not a truck, a huge stone slab projecting out over the edge of the cliff.
And so we were deliberately searching in a couple of mile area there trying to find the thing that he'd been diving on.
And what we found was not just the thing that turned out to be a truck, but probably four or five things projecting out over the cliff, which if you imagine the coast of California, if obviously you have either things projecting out of the edge of the cliff or falling down the cliff, that this would be something quite interesting to look for.
And so unfortunately, because you only have five minutes of bottom time, is we have only been able to dive on a tiny fraction of the various anomalous hits that we had with the sonar.
And so we don't know which of these might in fact be natural formations, which might be some kind of wreck debris, and which in fact might be truly ancient.
So there's quite a bit of work to do.
So that's what makes it a little bit like the face on Mars, is that I've been following that whole argument both on your show and in the news and presentations by the various players in this.
And everybody's been forced into making an awful lot of guesses based on some old pictures because no one's been able to go back and have another look.
Unnatural Structures in Bimini 00:05:49
doug richards
And so it's going to get pretty exciting here over the next couple of weeks.
And we've had a similar situation in Bimini that we've got some sonar that looks very interesting.
It certainly looks extremely unnatural.
But we can't make any statements at all about what we have until there's actual on-the-bottom careful examination of this, and that's the long-term process.
art bell
All right, Doctor, the $64,000 question.
If you were to suddenly stumble upon unambiguous evidence, would you immediately release it, or would you pause and think about the implications of a release of that sort before you ran to the New York Times or whatever?
doug richards
Well, I probably wouldn't run to the New York Times or the National Enquirer, for that matter.
Being a scientist, I think I do probably pretty much what Joe Shore is doing in Egypt, and I'm not sure if you talked with Joe at all, but the idea of really before releasing information to really nail it down solidly so that nobody can say, oh, you're just doing this because you're a publicity hound.
Because there have been so many false alarms in the Bimini area.
I think practically every other year, somebody finds the same old pile of wreck debris and announces that they found an Atlantean temple.
And there are definitely some big piles of granite lying there on the bottom.
They're shipwrecks of building materials.
But I think there was another one of these last summer where someone was beginning to claim that they had found this great Atlantean temple.
And so you've got to be careful to make sure you've got all your ducks in a row on this sort of thing.
art bell
Well, assuming, though, that you had your ducks, would you spirit of the question is whether you would consider the societal impact before releasing if you had unambiguous evidence.
doug richards
Well, I think the societal impact of the kinds of things that we're seeing would be it would be exciting, but nowhere near as overwhelming as, say, finding that the face on Mars is really a constructed formation.
Mars is a long way away.
The interesting thing about this stuff in Bimini is that it would have been totally wild and crazy back in Edgar Casey's time, but as they push the antiquity of people in the Americas back, finding large stone structures would certainly be a little shocking, but nothing too wild.
For example, there is a carbon-14 date from 90 feet underwater in Little Salt Spring in Florida that dates back to 13,000 years ago.
In this case, it's a stake driven through a turtle shell.
And so they know there were people there.
The question is, did the people build structures?
And so it's not as big a jump as some of these other kinds of things.
art bell
All right.
Can you update us at all?
Are you even aware of the discoveries said to be made in the Ryukyu Islands off the island of Okinawa, south-south of Japan?
doug richards
I've seen the pictures in the magazine The Ancient American.
Frank Joseph published some pictures of that.
It looks exciting.
Nice pictures.
I have no idea what that might be, but it's certainly exciting, and I hope somebody does some good work on it.
art bell
It may well be that the face on Mars, if not natural, the site at Bimini, the site on Okinawa, and who knows where else, may actually all have something in common.
In other words, it is not unreasonable, is it, to assume that there could have been an ancient civilization?
Who knows?
Graham might be right.
I mean, under the ice, who knows what we're going to find if we ever have an opportunity.
That came and went and left no traces of advanced civilization.
Is that within the realm of possibility?
doug richards
Well, it's certainly the kind of thing that Edgar Casey suggested.
He didn't get into the face on Mars back in the 1930s, but he implied in his readings rather strongly that when Atlantis finally sunk under the ocean, that immigrants from Atlantis went to several places, and he specifically identified Egypt, and, of course, as we said, said that some of the records of Atlantis were buried in a temple of records that could be found from the paw of the Sphinx.
He said that records were buried near Bimini, or underwater near Bimini.
He said that records would be found in the Mayan area in the Yucatan.
And he named a number of other locations around the world that people went as the continent went under.
So certainly it would be very consistent with the Casey readings that there would have been a worldwide civilization.
He did not mention Antarctica, but that doesn't mean there wasn't anyone there.
As I said with Bimini, the reason he mentioned Bimini is because the man that owned most of the island asked for a reading.
If we had someone that owned most of Antarctica, we might have gotten a very interesting reading.
art bell
So with regard to Edgar Casey, a lot of times you had to ask the man the right question.
doug richards
You had to ask him the right question, and often when I read the readings, I sort of kick those people who asked for them and said, why didn't you ask this question?
You might have learned something.
art bell
Yes.
Does Edgar Casey's son exhibit any of the talents of his father?
doug richards
You'd have to ask him, of course, you had him on the show.
art bell
I did.
I just thought I would ask you and see if you had an observation that collided with his.
doug richards
He's a very different sort of person.
He really is not into that phase of things at all.
art bell
He's not an intellectual.
Yes, you're absolutely correct.
Though he did have a lot of very interesting stories to tell about his dad, watching his dad as he became old enough to realize who his dad was, he does indeed tell some remarkable stories, just remarkable.
Brain Surgery Adventures 00:04:20
art bell
But he, interestingly, he will frequently tell you that, well, you know, I grew up with it, so it was kind of a natural thing for me, and I didn't think of it as such a tremendous thing.
I mean, dad did these things.
That's all there was to it, and it was for him kind of natural.
doug richards
Well, it's kind of like my son when I tell him I'm going to show my Atlanta slides, and he goes, not those slides again.
art bell
Is that so?
I have one last question for you, and then I'd like to do the last segment with our audience and let them ask you questions because I've really hogged you.
We were talking earlier about NDEs, OBEs, all sort of things.
Again, I go to a 60-minute segment.
Fascinating segment.
There was this poor lady who had an aneurysm in her brain.
That is a vessel that's bowled out, you know, and ready to burst and would have surely killed her had it burst.
They found it.
There was no way to operate, they said, because it would burst during the operation and kill her.
So what they did is they lowered her body temperature.
They drained her body of all blood.
It was all gone.
No heartbeat, no brain activity, nothing, zero, flatline, for about 40 minutes, 40 minutes.
And, of course, once they drained the blood, why the aneurysm collapsed, and they were able to open her brain and quickly do the surgery, sew her back up.
They put the blood back in her body, and her heart spontaneously began to beat.
And there she was, doctor, alive and kicking, same lady who went away.
The question is, where was she?
doug richards
Did she have any interesting experiences to report?
art bell
They asked her that.
No, no, she had no memory.
But 40 minutes, oh, that's a long time to be flatlined.
doug richards
It would be very interesting to know what went on there.
It's too bad she had no experiences.
And I was chatting with a friend of mine.
He and I, over the last couple of years, have both had surgery.
Neither of us had any cool near-death experiences to report.
unidentified
And so, yeah, the fascinating topic.
art bell
Do you recall that movie Flatliners?
doug richards
Yeah, I remember that one.
art bell
Have there ever been, to your knowledge, and you need not name names or places or anything, but have there ever been experiments like that?
People who intentionally tried to provoke through flatlining themselves an NDE?
Is there any experimentation of that sort going on that you know of in the private sector?
doug richards
I've never heard of any experiments like that.
It's certainly possible.
It's one of those problems that inducing near-death experiences can result in inducing a death experience.
So there are a few volunteers.
art bell
I was about to say, I don't think I'd volunteer for it, but there probably are people who would.
doug richards
Yeah, there may be.
art bell
And I know that there are a lot of interesting things going on in this country right now with respect to genetics.
As a matter of fact, there's one, a very concerned scientist, who feels that they are about to combine an animal and a human fetus and grow it to maturity and ending up with some sort of hybrid between an animal and a human.
In other words, they're saying that technology is right now viable and they can do it.
This scientist doesn't think they should do it, and so he's trying to patent the process so that nobody else can do it.
But I have a feeling these kinds of things and experiments are going on in our nation, or perhaps if not in ours, then in some other nation.
Are we beginning, do you think, to push the envelope a bit hard?
Pushing It Hard 00:14:34
doug richards
Well, I think we're both pushing it a little bit hard, but also it's waking people up to the ethical issues, too.
That there's no longer that kind of blanket acceptance that anything anybody does in the service of technology is good.
Right.
And so it's certainly awakening some major debates about where we're trying to hit in our future, maybe creating our own future instead of letting it just sort of run away with us.
art bell
All right.
Do you feel up to about 30 minutes of questions from the great public?
unidentified
Sure.
art bell
All right, good.
Then let's do that.
That's what will be coming up next.
And you have done a yeoman's job, particularly considering the hour back there.
It'd be about 4:30 in the morning or something in Virginia.
All right, my guest, of course, is Dr. Doug Richards from ARE.
And the range of questions you can ask can be drawn from the range of material that we've gone through, and that's pretty extensive.
So come ahead, if you will.
I'm Art Bell from the high desert.
Rainy as it is, this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
We take
you back to the past on ART BELL, Somewhere In Time.
art bell
My guest is Dr. Doug Richards from ARE.
And he's really been a trooper to stay with us this long.
I'm about to ask him about his book because he hasn't said a word.
His book is The Psychic Quest.
And if you want to know how to get it, go get a piece of paper and a pencil.
And in a moment, we'll make him tell us where to get it.
How's that?
Dr. Jacobs, you have a wonderful book that I have got to read myself.
And I would like to tell everybody how they can get it because by now I'm sure a whole lot of people would like to have it.
So your book, The Psychic Quest, where is it available?
Is there, for example, an 800 number or something people can call or generally in bookstores across America or what?
doug richards
Okay, three possible ways.
One, it's in bookstores across America.
I've seen it in quite a few.
The Psychic Quest by Douglas G. Richards, published by Cygnet.
Another way to get it is you can order it over the Internet.
I've seen it on Amazon.com.
art bell
Good.
doug richards
That and the Atlantis book, Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited, are both there.
art bell
All right.
It is kind of an interesting experience.
I wrote a book and was fortunate to have had it on the bestseller list.
And I used to walk into a bookstore and I'd see my books sitting there.
It's kind of a thrill.
All right.
Very good.
Here comes the public.
First time caller line, you are on the air with Dr. Richards.
Good morning.
Where are you, please?
unidentified
Vancouver, Canada.
art bell
Vancouver.
unidentified
Yeah, how you doing, Art?
art bell
Fine.
unidentified
Great.
I've got a letter coming up to you soon.
My name is Andrew.
art bell
Yes, sir.
unidentified
And I'm so glad that Mr. Richards is on.
I have a lot of questions, a lot of comments, and hope he can help me.
art bell
Well, we'll try.
Go.
unidentified
Okay.
Ever since I was a child, I've had very strong ESP connections and feelings as a child.
I didn't understand them.
I was very scared of those feelings.
When those feelings came about when I was a child, it scared me, and I basically hit them, put them down.
As I grew older, the first big one that hit me was that it wasn't a dream, but I had a feeling that someone very close to me was going to die.
And the name Andy kept coming into my head, and it scared the heck out of me.
The next day, I was talking to a very close friend of mine, and her sister had just had a baby boy, and the little boy's name was Andy.
Oh, my.
From there, it's gone so strong with people and everything else.
I'm very good with numbers now.
I can tell basically when someone's going to die that's in my family, very close friend.
And how that feeling starts is that I get very, very depressed.
It's like a very pit in my stomach.
And it gets to the point where it just completely drains me.
Within five days, that person that I've known is gone.
And with myself being very good with numbers and that too, I can't just do it automatically.
It just comes to me.
And all of a sudden, I can just name any number that a person is thinking.
What I'd like to know, what I need to know, is that is there anybody that is very good that I can contact that I can get this tested and use it the right way?
art bell
All right, that is a very good question.
In other words, you would like some sort of validation.
You would like to be tested.
Are there a lot of people like that, Doctor?
And what do they do?
doug richards
Well, a lot of people have these kinds of experiences, and indeed it can be very scary, particularly if it involves death.
It turns out that many psychic experiences involve deaths or crises in people that you're close to.
That's the most common kind.
As far as being tested, a lot of people would like to think there's something kind of like a math test that you could take to prove that you're psychic.
But in fact, the kinds of experiences that you're describing generally are kind of self-validating, that if you keep a journal and, in fact, you discover that there are cues that you get that show that this is real, that's the kind of psychic experience that you're having.
So if someone took you into a lab and did a remote viewing experiment, it's quite possible that you wouldn't be able to have anything happen because it doesn't involve a close personal relationship.
So there really isn't kind of an objective test of ESP that will work for anyone.
Often people just have particular kinds of things that they pick up, as you do.
As far as learning more about it and how to work with it positively, there are quite a few programs around the country that attempt to work with people's psychic ability.
The one that I often recommend to people, because it's connected with the ARE, isn't really aimed at psychic development, but it's aimed at spiritual development in order to help people integrate psychic experiences into their lives.
And it's called A Search for God.
And the ARE at that same 800 number that I just gave out has information about that.
That was created because back in 1931, Casey's closest friends asked him for a program on psychic development, and he surprised them by giving them an 11-year series of lessons on the full range from psychic to spiritual.
So I hope that's able to help you a little bit.
art bell
All right.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Richards.
Good morning.
Where are you, please?
unidentified
Is this me?
art bell
Only you know that for sure, but it sounds like you.
russell in north mississippi
This is Richard in St. Charles, listening to you on KTRS in St. Louis.
art bell
St. Charles, Missouri.
unidentified
Yes, sir.
art bell
Excellent.
unidentified
All right.
russell in north mississippi
I have two comments and two questions.
unidentified
I'll give you the comments.
You have great taste in music.
Thanks.
russell in north mississippi
The other comment you may not want to hear right now is an answer to what you were talking about with Silver Ravenwolf, how God became known strictly as male.
unidentified
Yes.
Okay.
russell in north mississippi
When there was a translation from the Bible, from the Aramaic, the Hebrew, into Greek, in Hebrew, the only way that the Jews could represent both male and female of God was to put a female ending on a male noun.
When it was translated, the Greek said, oh, this must be a mistake, and made it male.
art bell
So that's how it happened.
unidentified
It's just been kept throughout the whole thing.
art bell
All right, do you have a question for the good doctor here?
unidentified
Yes, two questions.
russell in north mississippi
I'd like him to comment on the difference between precognition and manifestation.
I'm thinking specifically about your experience with the speakers.
art bell
Did you hear that last night?
unidentified
Yes.
russell in north mississippi
I tried to call last night, and I thought, you know, that was fascinating.
And we, sometimes in the psychic community, we wonder about whether we're thinking of something that's going to happen or by thinking it, are we causing it to happen?
art bell
Well, we covered that in the beginning of this interview.
I think the answer is that there is no definitive answer yet to that question.
Is that so, Doctor?
doug richards
Well, there's no definitive answer.
If somebody has experiences like that, one that you had with everything kind of collapsing there, one of the things that, of course, is that if it only happens once, you might say, okay, this was probably precognition.
If you're someone where when you're in the room, things generally tend to collapse and computers break and cars won't start.
That's become known as a poltergeist.
People think of poltergeist as a ghost, but the researchers have found that it's often someone's unconscious psychokinesis ability.
And so every now and then you'll find someone where whenever they're around, things break and stuff falls off the shelves and that sort of thing.
And then you'd begin to suspect that you are in fact manifesting it rather than simply having precognition.
art bell
The monster from the id.
Yep.
All right.
There you are, Cole.
I beg your pardon?
unidentified
The second question?
doug richards
Yes.
unidentified
Okay.
russell in north mississippi
Does ARE's psychic research project include divination practices as well as, I guess, purely psychic phenomenon?
art bell
Divination.
unidentified
Using tools as opposed to just speaking what comes into the mind?
doug richards
Well, they have been open to quite a variety of things.
As far as actual research, it's primarily focused on psychics and things coming into the mind, but they have had conferences on such things as astrology, and that's certainly in the Edgar Casey readings.
Not really any research specifically done on it in recent times anyway, but certainly an interest.
art bell
tell you a little interesting story uh...
my wife is able to water which She's really good at it.
I was about to buy a piece of property years ago up in a hill.
I'm a ham operator at Hams Love Hills.
I had this wonderful hill just coming into this little town of Prumpa I live in.
And when we were considering buying the property, she, Water Witch, went and looked for water.
It was very rocky because it was high on a hill.
And she found it down in the lower left-hand corner of the property.
It turned out, and she said, there is a water.
Turned out, well, we didn't buy the property.
Somebody else, years later, bought the property.
And I watched the drilling rig up there go through about three different locations looking for water.
It must have cost the person a bloody fortune.
And they finally found water in exactly the spot my wife said that it would be found.
It astounded me.
I mean, that well went exactly where she said the only water would be found.
That's where they found it.
Has there been any research on that sort of thing, on how that is done?
doug richards
There has been some research.
And as usual with these things, some of it shows that it works, and some of it shows that it doesn't work so well.
But there have been some interesting studies, some publish in a journal called the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which is a great journal of basically scientists studying anomalous phenomena ranging from psychic things to the face on Mars.
And some evidence that people can do that.
I have formulated my first rule of dowsing, which is that when a dowser finds a site, say an archaeological site, they get to dig and I get to watch.
art bell
Very practical.
Very practical.
And I assume that you try and remain fairly serious when they dig and dig and dig and dig and stop finally digging.
Well, I have to say that.
doug richards
I, at one point, ended up doing the digging while they watched, and that's why I formed my rule.
But on the other hand, we were out on a boat near Bimini back several years ago, and we had a dowser with rods on the back of the boat looking for a dive site for us.
And the dive captain thought we were all crazy, but this fellow said, drop your anchor here, and we went overboard, and within about 10 minutes, we'd found a wreck.
And so the dive captain was reasonably impressed with that.
art bell
Well, you can't help it.
I mean, when you see it happen, it is impressive.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Richards.
Good morning.
unidentified
Yes, Dr. Richards.
art bell
Where are you?
unidentified
I am in Umbel.
My name is Darlene.
art bell
Down in Texas?
unidentified
Yeah, I'm with Texas, and I just wanted to...
art bell
I hear your Texas accent.
unidentified
Okay, I can't lose it.
I tried.
Okay, anyway, Dr. Richards, I was sleeping one morning or not.
It was mostly morning, you know, because it was time to get up, but I didn't want to, so I just went back to sleep until, you know, someone said, get up.
And anyway, I was laying there sleeping.
I see my brother.
He was at a party, and I seen the girl he was with.
Official Cause of Death 00:05:53
unidentified
And I seen the room.
I seen the people.
And then I seen, you know, an argument.
And then I seen my brother stab somebody.
art bell
Oh, my.
unidentified
With his, yeah, it was his left hand.
He grabbed it off a counter.
And anyway, it wasn't 20 minutes later that there was a knock at the door.
didn't hear the knock when my husband said, Darling, get out and get it.
It's your brother.
And so I opened the door.
There was my brother, and there was the girl.
So Kilwin.
He said, he wouldn't believe what happened.
What happened to us?
The weirdest thing.
You stabbed a man.
He said, how did you know it?
I was there.
art bell
Now, is that when you what is that?
That's not precognition exactly.
It's some what is that?
doug richards
Typically be called clairvoyance, meaning distant seeing, and is actually that's just a classic kind of crisis experience.
This is the sort of thing where people wonder what kinds of psychic experiences do people have.
And what you find over and over is that you'll see ones that report some kind of crisis.
Someone very close to you ends up either dying or coming very near to death or having some major emergency, gets in a car wreck, something like this, and suddenly you just sit upright in the middle of waking up from sleep and say, I know that my brother just got killed or something like that, or I know that something bad happened.
By far the most common kind of experience that really grabs you is that sort.
So that's a very, very common type of psychic experience, apparently, relating to just some sort of psychic connection among people that are close.
art bell
Would it be a better world, Doctor, if we all actively worked on developing this ability?
doug richards
Well, I think that it would be a better world if we all worked on integrating these kinds of experiences with our spiritual development.
That the danger is working on becoming more psychic so you have more strange experiences without really growing from it.
And so that's why Edgar Casey emphasized that there really needed to be an integrated path of working with these for the betterment of humanity and that sort of thing so that you don't end up just getting into massaging your ego with cool psychic experiences.
And that would be very valuable if people could integrate this into something productive for humanity.
art bell
When Edgar Cayce did what he did, was there a price he paid for it?
doug richards
Well, Edgar Casey died rather early from overwork, basically.
What happened to him, they didn't have the Art Bell show at that point, but the book There Is a River came out about his biography in 1942.
And all of a sudden, truckloads of mail would start coming from desperate people who wanted medical readings.
And he went from his maximum that his body could tolerate of two readings a day up to ten readings a day.
And his readings kept telling him if he kept it up, he'd die.
And by 1944, he was so ill that he couldn't continue, and he died in early 1945.
So he basically just exhausted himself from trying to help everybody in the world.
art bell
Was there an official cause of death?
doug richards
I'm not sure what the official cause of death was.
I'm sure there was, and I just have to look in the records.
But a lot of it was just overwork.
art bell
I understand.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Richards.
Hello.
Hello.
Where are you?
unidentified
Steve from San Diego.
art bell
San Diego.
unidentified
Okay.
Yes, and I tend to agree with Dr. Richards on that last appraisal that he was overworked.
However, I do have two questions.
Oh, and I should say to you, Mr. Bell, I really appreciate your show.
You bring out the best in everybody in the truth.
So keep up the good work.
art bell
Woefully short on time, so you better get it out.
unidentified
Okay, I will.
I've been a long follower of Edgar Casey, and I would like Mr. Dr. Richards' appraisal as far as what he considers some of the mythological or apocryphal statements that have been made about Edgar Casey.
First question.
My second question is regarding the earth changes and prospect of 98, 99 in the millennium, how likely are those to happen in his appraisal?
art bell
Doctor?
doug richards
Well, those two questions actually go together pretty nicely because a lot of people have kind of misread the Casey readings and assumed that what he said is that there would be giant earth changes in 1998.
And in fact, what's interesting is that pretty much all the readings that mention the year 1998 refer to a gradual change in consciousness and enlightenment rather than big earthquakes.
art bell
You know, I believe that is occurring now.
doug richards
Yeah, and it certainly seems to be.
The interesting thing is that the big earthquake readings, quite a number of those, the question asked in 1932 was, what will happen by 1936?
And in fact, that's a good example of some predictions of Casey's that apparently didn't come true.
Now, he certainly focused on some very earthquake-prone areas, and so it's quite possible that some of them will come true at some point.
But he didn't target 1998 as the year that there would be big disasters.
It was more that it would be a great emergence of consciousness.
art bell
Well, you know, 98 has so far been eerily quiet geologically in California, too quiet.
And when it gets too quiet for too long, that's not necessarily good.
Doctor, I have one hour of airtime left, but I'm thinking that you might want to get to bed.
Richards Thanks listeners 00:00:32
art bell
If you want the last hour, it's all yours.
If you want to go to bed, why, I fully understand.
It's up to you.
doug richards
I think I'd better check out now.
art bell
All right, my friend.
It has been a distinct honor, and we've got to do this again sometime.
This has been great.
doug richards
I've got lots more material.
If your listeners are interested, I'm up for it.
art bell
All right.
We'll be in touch.
Dr. Richards, thank you.
unidentified
Good night.
art bell
Good night, my friend, from the high desert where we're all sick of rain.
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