Art Bell hosts Dr. Jeff Long and Trisha McGill exploring near-death experiences (NDEs), where 8 million Americans reported them per a 1982 Gallup poll, with consistent themes like tunnels, lights, and life reviews across cultures. They debate Drug X—a rumored anesthetic inducing fragmented NDE-like visions—while dismissing physiological explanations for verifiable details like out-of-body observations. Bell’s own OBE and callers’ accounts, including a 13-year-old’s drowning experience and a woman’s "hell" variant, suggest consciousness persists beyond death, reinforcing spiritual survival theories over evolutionary biology. Long and McGill plan controlled experiments, even building a psychomantium device, to study these phenomena further. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may be across all these many, many time zones stretching from the Hawaiian and Tahitian Islands out west eastward to the Caribbean, the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Good morning in St. Thomas, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet, thanks to broadcast.com.
This is close to close a.m.
By the way, tonight we've got the raw feed back up for those of you listening on the internet.
And when I say raw feed, that means that things that are discussed or talked about or comments I make during what would otherwise be the news and station break times, you'll hear on the internet, it'll all come pouring forth in its raw, its most raw form.
And so we've gone back to that.
We've been kind of shifting around, getting a receiver here and there and getting it done.
But I thought that some would enjoy hearing the raw feed.
Kind of like if you have satellite TV getting raw feeds, you'll have to hear anything.
And that's exactly what I intend.
All right, in the first hour, I have something just absolutely astounding to relate to you, and I am going to do that through two guests.
And they are Jim Warren and Carl Grossman, who has a master in journalism.
He's an investigative journalist.
Jim Warren heads an organization in Durham, North Carolina.
And we'll let him tell you about his organization and a call he received shortly.
And it's a bone chiller for sure, so you better sit down and strap in.
Now, what you are about to hear, I want to tell you, first of all, that what you are about to hear, we cannot confirm.
We cannot in any way suggest that it is authentic, but it could be.
It could be.
And so all we're doing tonight is relating the content and discussing the content of a phone call received by Jim Warren's organization, which we're going to hear about in a moment.
In the next hour, I'm going to have two guests on, and they're going to discuss something that is every bit as volatile, I guess we'll put it that way, volatile, huh?
Near-death experiences, induced, I repeat, induced near-death experiences.
Dr. Tricia McGill will be here, along with Dr. Long, who is an onycologist.
And they're going to be talking about chemically, actually they're going to be talking about NDEs, period, but a very, very controversial new subject, chemically induced NDEs, which we're only at the rumor stage, you know, just a few days ago.
And tonight we've got the lowdown for you on this, and we'll discuss NDEs generally.
So that's kind of what's on tap.
That's a lot to be on tap.
We're going to have a very, very busy night tonight.
I want to repeat again, what you are about to hear is in no way verified, nor do we have even a second source for what we are going to tell you.
We are going to tell you this because I think it would be irresponsible not to tell you this, but I want to do that and be very, very careful to tell you that what you are about to hear may be totally untrue.
It is simply a warning, which I guess is a pretty good way to put it, that was received by my guest, Jim Warren, at the Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, or WARN, if you will.
Sounding pretty synchronistic already, huh?
Waste Awareness and Reduction Network.
They're in North Carolina.
Here is Jim Warren.
And also with us is a journalist.
His master is in journalism, an investigative journalist, Carl Grossman.
Gentlemen, welcome.
First, let me go to you, Jim, and ask you, what is WARN?
unidentified
Well, NC WARN, which we're mainly known by, is, as you said, Waste Awareness and Reduction Network.
We're a grassroots environmental organization working on industrial and radioactive pollution issues around North Carolina.
Again, as you mentioned, we don't have any way to verify this, what has happened.
Before we even get to that, for example, in North Carolina, there has been a big problem with hysteria.
I'm sure you are well aware of hysteria with a touch and the toxic waste.
Does Warren get into those kinds of areas?
unidentified
No, we're more involved in the chemical and radioactive pollution side of things, which we have enormous problems in North Carolina.
And one of our primary issues is challenging a southern state nuclear waste dump that is being trying to, the state is trying to license in central North Carolina.
Now, I think at this point, so that we can get the discussion going, we're going to have our second guest, if you would be so kind, as to read us exactly.
You have a transcript, I believe, an actual written transcript of what came in.
Right.
That is correct?
Okay, Carl Grossman, you're an author.
You're an investigative journalist.
You have a master in journalism.
How did you, if you wouldn't mind, just before you read this for us, how did you get involved in this?
In other words, did Jim get this and probably, as I would have done, freak out and call you for some sort of investigation?
This is Monday when Jim called me, and what I was working on then, Monday, was work on August 18th, Tuesday, which was, well, now a day before yesterday, but essentially yesterday, depending on your time zone.
On August 18th of 1999, Cassini, with its 72.3 pounds of plutonium dioxide, is NASA isn't stopped, and there's a big effort now to try to stop NASA, but people should join in in my judgment.
Isn't stopped.
They're going to have this Cassini probe come hurtling back at the Earth for a gravity assist maneuver.
They admit in the environmental impact statement that the plutonium would come raining down, and in fact, much of it as respirable particles, which is just what you don't want with plutonium.
It's been described as the most toxic substance known.
The big danger is if it is in the form of dust and a little particle gets into one's lung, it can cause lung cancer.
And here you have an enormous amount.
And a particularly toxic form of plutonium.
Plutonium-238 is hotter.
It's more radioactive than the plutonium.
They're committed with plutonium-239.
The report by this nuclear safety review panel, I mean, this is after NASA claimed there would be only 2,300 deaths only if this thing, it's supposed to come in at 496 miles high.
If it dips down into the 75-mile high atmosphere as it whips around the Earth at 42,000 miles an hour, it'll disintegrate, the plutonium will rain out, and here I'm just reading from, this is again an official nuclear regulatory interagency nuclear safety review panel report.
That it is possible using the linear non-threshold DOP hypothesis to postulate up to several tens of thousands of latent cancer fatalities worldwide if this flyby doesn't work.
The five agencies that sign off on this, and again, it's to the White House, this is the Department of Defense, which is in a colonel, Department of Energy, EPA, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and here, this is the same time this agency is talking about the possibility of tens of thousands of deaths, and NASA was saying only 2,300 or maybe even less.
This particular report, which contradicts NASA's official line at that point, was signed off in addition to the other agencies by John W. Reiger, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Now, aren't we fortunate that our probes, our space probes, like the ones that have gone to Mars and elsewhere, have never screwed up and that spacecraft which are launched never blow up?
Aren't we lucky?
Because otherwise, think what we'd be risking, tens of thousands dead.
Watts, if it had solar panels, worst comes to worse, it hit the atmosphere, debris would rain down, but not plutonium.
And the issue is injecting into the equation lethal nuclear poisons.
And I mean, rockets are going to blow up on launch.
What goes up, I mean, Buddha said it years ago will come down often.
The issue here is not that accidents won't happen, they will happen because you throw plutonium into the equation, and you're not just going to lose a lot of money and lose a lot of time, you're going to lose a lot of people.
And of course, they say, when I say they, NASA says that they have tested all of this to the nth degree, and that the containment for the plutonium is impervious to anything.
I mean, if it emits a third, and even more important, if the stuff stayed together as marble-sized pellets that people couldn't breathe in, okay, that wouldn't be a serious problem.
It would be a problem, but not a kind of problem.
I mean, here, this goes on, the fraction of fuel particles released during re-entry estimated to be reduced to vapor or respirable particles less than 10 microns, ranges from 66% for shallow reentries to 8%, to about 20% for steep 90-degree reentries.
So what they're saying is of the 72 pounds of plutonium-238 on Cassini, they're estimating that about 30 pounds would be released.
And of the 30 pounds, anywhere between 20 and 66 percent would be released as dust.
In fact, slowly rained down.
They speak of it raining down over months and years, and people will breathe in this stuff.
I've meanwhile run this page through independent scientists, and they say, you know, it isn't going to be 32 to 34 percent and 20 to 66 percent as dust.
If this thing hits the atmosphere on October 18th, 1999, coming in at 42,000 miles an hour, it's thicker than the speed of a bullet, no heat shield, it's going to be 100% release.
I must say that the only defense NASA has isn't that the plutonium is not going to get out.
You get into the documentation, you see that it will get out.
The only defense NASA has, and this actually is the issue, brings us back to the issue we're talking about this evening primarily, but it covers this issue as well, is the likelihood, the probability.
When I was on your show earlier before the launch, NASA was not only claiming falsely that the plutonium wouldn't be released, but was also claiming that every step of this Cassini mission was so carefully planned and, for example, a launch pad accident.
It was a year, it'll be about a year, and Cassini's going to come roaring back.
But you haven't even heard what may potentially be the bad news yet.
Stay right where you are.
Once again, I want to say what you have just heard regarding Cassini and plutonium is completely accurate.
Completely accurate, and there's no controversy about it at all.
What you are about to hear, there's going to be plenty of controversy about, and it may not be accurate at all.
We don't warrant in any way that what we are going to allow you to hear is accurate information, but because of the nature of it, I felt that it really needed to get on the air.
So again, bear in mind, there may be no basis to what you're about to hear, and I hope there isn't at all.
But having said that, Jim from Warren, Jim Warren rather, from Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, you got a phone call on your answering machine.
It's my position, as you know, that since it came on the answering machine, as far as I'm concerned, you ought to just play it on the air, but you don't want to do that, which is fine.
I'll take it as I can get it.
You made a transcript of the phone call received on the answering machine, and that transcript is in Carl Grossman's hands now, right, Carl?
Yeah, and I think Jim is concerned about playing it, the message of the machine, because he fears that if the voice of this person would be heard, some people might be able to identify the individual who could get to him.
NASA, when we last spoke, was saying, well, the launch will be fine because this Titan IV rocket is very reliable.
Well, it turned out that there was a blow-up on launch 93 of a Titan rocket, just like Titan IV, just the kind of thing that lifted the Cassini probe and its plutonium.
And then, just a couple of weeks ago now, on August 12th, a second launch explosion, 25 launches of Titan IVs, two launch explosions, and spectacular ones.
And again, it makes the chances of a Titan IV, I mean, you're talking about realized, not what the numbers NASA wants to make up, at 1 in 12 and shows the folks who are upset about, including myself, concerned about the Cassini launch being dangerous were quite right.
As a matter of fact, I think the Secretary of Defense came out and made a statement that as a result of the loss of the satellite, the explosion of the Titan, that U.S. national security would not be compromised.
Why ever in the world he said that, I don't know.
It makes one wonder why you've got to launch something so expensive if it isn't going to make any difference to our national security if it isn't there.
However, having said that, let's have you read, if you wouldn't mind the text of this answering machine message.
Hi, I'm calling in regards to the accident on Wednesday involving the Vortex classified satellite being launched by the Titan.
I'll make this very brief.
I'm a project engineer, and I think the public needs to know there was an RTG power device that's called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.
It's one of these devices, like a Cassini with plutonium aboard.
When the Air Force issued the destruct command after the initial explosion, they did so to reduce the possibility of the public determining that there was indeed a plutonium fuel cell.
They reduced everything to particulate matter when they issued the destruct sequence, which means that the 20 pounds of plutonium went airborne at 20,000 feet off the coast of Florida on Wednesday during a failed Titan launch of the vortex.
That plutonium has now passed over the majority of the East Coast.
This is the single largest nuclear accident in the history of the United States.
Its risks for public safety are unprecedented, and goes on.
Major media sources are not reporting this.
They're reporting the accident, but they're not including the critical piece of information the public needs to be aware of, and that is there was an RTT power device, and the Air Force chose to detonate it after the initial explosion, thus ensuring the plutonium went to particulate and was dispersed atmospherically across the East Coast.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but like I say, I'm a project engineer.
We have all been affected by this, and I hope that you or somebody in your organization can help get the word out.
Please get out on the internet, contact for our newspapers, contact everybody you can because this has to get out.
Well, I've been on this ever since I heard the tape trying to see.
This is raw information.
The question is whether it's going to be corroborated.
It's also a question of whether there are agencies within our government straight enough, independent enough, honest enough to tell us the truth.
I think the first thing that has to be established, and I've been trying to establish it, is what's called the footprint in this type of situation.
The meteorological conditions at that time on August 12th, which would determine where, if indeed there was a plutonium, RTT, where the plutonium fell out.
As to determining then how it fell out, I mean whether in fact the RTT, if there was an RTT, was broken up and the plutonium ended up as respirable particles or vapor and where it might have landed.
It could have gone toward the Bahamas or 20,000 feet is kind of, I mean, I was just on a jet coming back from Europe, but 37,000 to 28,000 feet isn't that high, but it's high enough.
This stuff is heavy metal.
It's put on a bath, so it's heavy metal.
But still, it's taken by the winds, and it can fall out with the rain, or it can fall out just naturally.
The big problem on this issue, I mean, I've spoken to so many people, including, for example, speaking of whistleblowers, Alan Cohen.
He, for many years, 30 years, was a NASA career official, was their emergency operations officer for a number of nuclear launches at the Cape.
He's one of the people I've spoken to on this issue, and he doesn't know, but he just thinks that there are circumstances here in terms of the actions being taken by the government.
It's a huge search at this point that's underway for debris from this thing.
Does anybody know what would happen if the plutonium, let's say the best case happened and it never reached U.S. East Coast shores, if it fell into the water and was dispersed, does anybody have any idea what the effect would be?
All right, well, now this was a military class 5 satellite that would have been in Earth orbit, making the probability of an RTG power device not impossible, certainly, but less likely.
You would think they'd be less likely to put an RTG power device in a satellite that goes around and around.
But listen, never underestimate the idiots.
They've done a lot, they'll do more.
So it could be.
This is one of those things that could be.
Now, after having read that message, this is such a god-forsakenly important thing, should it be true, that I said, look, there's two ways of looking at this.
I said, you ought to play the message on the air so people can hear it.
And apparently, I don't know how you feel about that, Carl.
I'll ask in a moment.
But I know that Jim didn't want to do it.
And I said, look, there's two ways of looking at it.
One, if it's true, it's so important that it's one of those things that people ought to hear.
I mean, it would affect millions and millions of people.
And to hell with one man's career.
On the other hand, if it's a hoax, then the voice of the hoaxer ought to be heard and, if possible, identified.
Now, that, of course, is the position of a guy who wants to broadcast whatever information he can.
And why would either one of you take a position not to play that part?
unidentified
Let me address that real briefly, as some of us have talked earlier.
Our feeling is at this point, as you say, it's a very important issue, but the importance of the issue does not rest in this man's voice.
The other thing, If it were true or if this person believes it to be true, the last thing in the world that people that want to find out the truth would want to do is to broadcast the men's voice and then have him or potentially others who may come forward then be frozen out by the horror of hearing their voice on national radio or on the internet or anywhere else.
And it would seem to be imprudent in that respect.
It's going to take more than little me, and maybe your listeners can help.
I think the key here, as you were mentioning before, is what now have been, if there was an architecture, what now have been the consequences in terms of radiation?
And what we need to do, I mean, I'm getting denials.
The Air Force is saying no, or this one's saying no, it can't so forth.
But what we need are people to call the congresspeople tomorrow morning.
And I mean, this is obviously a national security issue, but I think the public health and welfare have to override in this type of situation.
This isn't sky-is falling kind of thing, this nukes and space issue.
Out of the 27 space nuclear shots the U.S. has done, there have been three accidents, including in 1964, a military satellite with an RTG aboard, the SNAP-9A, came tumbling down into the atmosphere, disintegrated, plutonium, was spread all over the planet.
In my book, The Road Stuff, I cite a report of a grouping of European radiation agencies talking about how by 1970, debris, radioactive debris from the SNAP-9A was found at all latitudes on all continents.
The Soviets, now Russia, they've done now 41 of these space nuclear shots, six accidents.
It may be completely groundless, but it sort of sounded like there might be something to it.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
I don't feel it's a way.
I can't buy a gold.
You're not there.
Keep me in the justice one day You'll be happy And you'll say Oh, I'm gonna stand to believe you may If I'm feeling good to you And you'll be with me There ain't nothing to say I'm feeling good I'm feeling bad
From the Kingdom of Nigh, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
From east of the Rockies, call our at 1-800-825-5033.
West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico at 1-800-618-8255.
First time callers may reach Art with area code 702-727-1222.
Anybody out there think of any subject that is really more important to us inside than whether we live after we die, whether we continue to exist, whether we come back as something else or somebody else, or whether it's just lights out, good night, worms crawl in and worms crawl out.
It's, I suppose, life's biggest question.
And tonight, we're going to move toward a very controversial way of answering it.
I have two guests coming up that were both inducted at the last minute.
Both of them agreeing to come on virtually at the last minute earlier today.
Both of them well qualified to be discussing what they are discussing.
So I will introduce them to you in a moment.
You have heard the rumors of a drug which induces a near-death experience.
I think I talked to you about that not moment ago.
And I told you there was a rumor out there running hard that such a drug existed.
Well, tonight we are going to talk about, generally, about NDEs.
And we are going to specifically touch on something which we are going to call Drug X. Because there is, apparently, such a drug.
So I'll tell you about my guests and all of this in just a moment.
Let's take care of a little bit of business.
Good morning.
It should be a fascinating morning.
Strap in.
All right, here they come.
My guests are Dr. Tricia McGill, who is a clinical psychologist.
She also holds a PhD in hypnotherapy.
She has, in the past, hosted her own talk show regarding psychology issues.
We are as well joined by Dr. Jeff Long.
He is a radiation oncologist.
I don't know what that is.
He'll have to tell us.
I guess he treats cancer patients with radiation therapy.
And both practice in Las Vegas.
Both have had a long-term interest in the near-death experience, NDE.
And we are going to be touching on some pretty controversial things this evening.
NDE, of course, is a term that was coined by Dr. Raymond Moody, who was basically the pioneer in all of this, who brought this to the attention of the world in his book, Life After Life.
Anyway, we came up with this interview, Jeff and I, between us.
The near-death experience, or NDE, may be defined as a lucid experience associated with perceived consciousness apart from the body, occurring at the time of actual or threatened imminent death.
And this definition, of course, is subject to being...
As you've mentioned, in years gone by, it was thought that after three to five minutes of no heart function and no breathing that there would be irreversible damage to the brain.
That's really not true.
For example, individuals have drowned in ice water, icy waters, and they can be, especially children, can be pulled out of ice water after they stopped breathing and their heart stopped for 30, 40 minutes, and yet their brain function returns and they can return to life.
So it's a much more complex issue than we thought before.
And yet there are people like Daniel Brinkley, a friend of mine, and others, who have been dead at room temperatures or even above because he was struck by lightning.
And certainly there are other people, like Mr. Brinkley and a variety of others that have had a cessation of breathing and heart function for far longer than we would have normally conceived was possible.
The body is very mysterious in its ability to recoup.
Just as a matter of interest, I guess there's no hard-fast rule you can give, but of the people that you treat, doctor, what percentage get better for five years or something as compared to those who don't make it?
For people that have cancer that's metastasized, radiation therapy is highly effective in relieving symptoms.
These people may not be curable, but 90% or better can have those symptoms relieved, and their quality of life can improve dramatically.
The other group of patients we treat, about the other half of the group of patients, are those that we treat with the hopes of curing.
And it's highly dependent on what type of cancer they have and how advanced it is.
But there are a large number of cancers that we have an excellent chance of curing with radiation therapy, possibly in combination with surgery or chemotherapy.
Well, in my case, being a psychologist, I don't deal with terminally ill patients as a general rule.
However, I am devoting my entire practice.
I'm turning it over strictly to grief counseling and also preparing people who are terminally ill to prepare for their own death and to accept it not with fear and panic and dread, but to look at it with a whole new understanding that they may be going on to a much better existence without the pain and suffering that they now therein lies the $64 billion with inflation question.
Based on my observations, my interviews with people, all the books that I've read, everything I can get my hands on for the last 10 years, I have been preparing to try to make a conclusion based on everything that I've gathered.
And then I'll say I believe that based on all this information and hundreds and hundreds of accounts that have similar, what I would call patterns that keep coming up, I've identified about 30 of them actually.
And based on that and some really incredible things that people can come back with from their experience, this is the key thing.
You see, a lot of people say, oh, you know, this is the brain, the starving of oxygen, or chemicals released to help ease your trauma.
But really, there's been, and I have had two just recently, that came back with what I call verifiable evidence that they could not have gotten unless they were separate from their body.
Okay, there was a lady who was pronounced dead in a hospital, who floated out of her room, floated out of the hospital, spotted a tennis shoe on a ledge, and then floated back in her room,
saw what was going on with her body and the doctor, went out into the hall, and listened to conversation that her brother-in-law was having about, you know, well, I guess I'm going to have to bury my sister-in-law because she kicked the bucket.
she's getting ready to kick the bucket in those terms.
She went to see both of her sisters and could tell what they were wearing, what they were doing, what they were saying, who they were with, and details that there was no way she could have found.
But anyway, the doctor actually heard all of this.
And because she'd heard it so many times before, her curiosity was piqued.
So she crawled out on the ledge to see if there was really, in fact, a tennis shoe there with the right color and the right shape.
And everything was exactly the way the woman.
There was no way this woman could have floated, I mean, could have seen that or known about that tennis shoe because somebody had probably dropped it from the roof.
Now, these are the kinds of things that I really take, you know.
In fact, it was over 15 years ago I talked to my first NDE experiencer before it was well known in the press or well described in a variety of books.
And this person was very baffled and very consistent with what Dr. Tricia was describing.
This individual, coded, means complete cessation of breathing and heart, on an operating room table, experienced an out-of-body experience where she perceived that she floated up to the top of the operating room, observed people working on her frantically down below, floated out to the nurses' station,
very clearly heard the nurses talking in the nursing station of the inpatient unit where she was at at the hospital, very clearly perceiving what all they were talking about, what the conversation was, went through the classic NDE experience, which I hope we have a chance to discuss a little bit further later on in your show.
Excellent, excellent, and ultimately was resuscitated.
Now, when she described her experience to the nurses and told them in great detail after she'd been revived about exactly what they were talking about, they were very frightened and very concerned.
And clearly, she was absolutely accurate in what she was describing.
What's interesting is that this experience, as well as the one Trisha's describing, are not rare or isolated events.
We keep seeing this time and time and time again, where people have near-death experiences and receive some information that is only explicable by their being consciously apart from their body and able to perceive, see, and hear things that are occurring remote from where their physical body is.
Well, Dr. Ritchie, who was the psychiatrist that first alerted Dr. Moody to the fact that there was such a phenomenon, actually went to a place he'd never been before while he was out of the body.
Now, when he was revived, he knew exactly what this place looked like down to every last detail, and he went there and confirmed it.
Now, this man would not lie about these kinds of things.
I'm going to call her Mary to protect her privacy.
When she was a young girl, she was admitted to the hospital with severe complications following a failed attempted abortion, which she had done in her apartment bathroom.
Yeah, she hemorrhaged quite badly, lost a lot of blood.
She did call the ambulance, and then she passed out.
She was taken into the emergency room, and people started doing a lot of things, you know, the typical emergency room type procedures trying to save her life.
She remembered popping out of her body and floating above her body, watching everybody below hectically and frantically trying to save her life.
At two times during this experience, the doctors had said, well, we lost her.
And we lost the baby.
Because she was about three or four months long at that point.
But then after the nursing part, she saw this little baby who was sitting up, and then it was taking its first steps.
And then the little baby became a full-blown little boy, toddler, and was running around playing.
And as he was doing all these things, she was getting this strange sensation about this child, kind of a bonding effect.
A bonding, a sort of an emotional bond.
Then the child became a teenager and then a young adult and then a full-grown man.
And she was looking at this person and she was not sure who this person was.
But, you know, she was curious and she said, who's that?
And the being of light said, that's your son, Michael.
Well, she didn't have a son, Michael.
But she was shown that this could be her son if she did not want to say she could go back that this could be her son, the one that she was trying to abort.
Yeah, and so when she told him she was pregnant, he immediately broke off the relationship and told her he had a wife and five children in another city.
She felt a little guilty about it, but she was still asking the being of light, how in the world can I manage?
I can barely manage my own life.
Then he showed her a picture of a man holding like a baby, not a baby, but a toddler's hand.
And then she was in the background.
So she understood instantly that this was her future husband, that there would be somebody provided in her life to help her with this child.
And then she felt an overwhelming sense of guilt that she was trying to murder this child essentially because she was worried about finances and basically being very selfish, in her opinion.
This is her own words.
And then, pop, she was back in her body.
And all the pain and all the anguish and all everything came right back to her.
And there was a nurse standing over her.
And this was the only nurse that was in a blue uniform.
And she'd seen that woman when she was admitted to the hospital.
The one woman in the blue uniform was like the head nurse.
So she recognized that nurse.
When she came to, you know, and she was basically over the worst part of her situation, the doctor came in and said, it's a miracle that we saved your life.
We thought we'd lost you and the baby.
I don't understand how it's an absolute miracle.
He kept saying, it's a miracle that we saved the baby.
And she said, yes, I know.
And his name is going to be Michael.
And the doctor kind of looked at her like, oh, God, you know, he's dripping out, hallucinating.
And so he didn't want to hear about it.
Then later on, the nurse came in and she told the nurse.
Now, the nurse had been used to hearing these kinds of tales.
So the nurse thought, gosh, you know, I better listen to this woman because obviously nobody else wanted to be bothered with this weird woman.
And she said, you know, there is a red sticker on the seating fan, and it was in German, which didn't bother her.
She could still read the sticker even though she was Polish.
But nevertheless, that doesn't seem to be a problem when you're in this state.
So the nurse ordered an orderly to go down and get the ladder, and they climbed up and confirmed that there was a sticker indeed on the underside of this ceiling fan.
do you I mean that's an astounding story particularly the last part of it now how do we know let's see she would not have been in any state where she could have gotten up and looked at that fan and gotten above Well, basically, you see, this happened 34 years ago.
So all I'm doing is I'm going by this woman's word.
And believe me, I had to work hard and long, and Jeff can confirm this, to get this woman to spill the beans because she told me she'd had a near-death experience six months ago, and it took me that long to get it out of her.
And the reason she gave it to me at all was because I think she knew that she was going to be going back to Poland to be with her son Michael, who, by the way, now has a grandchild.
She said this experience totally changed her life and she became a much better person afterwards and even got back into the church at a different sort of church, one that was a little more liberal.
And also the man in the life that she saw that the being gave her a preview of actually did come along and help her raise that child.
And so, see, a lot of these things have come together.
Now, since she had this child, Michael, it was her only child because she couldn't have any other children due to the damage she had done to herself.
Yes.
She and he have been exceptionally close in all ways and even psychically bonded.
I have heard, and certainly it was true with Daniel Brinkley and so many others who have had NDEs, when they come back, they seem to have acquired powers of psychic powers of one sort or another.
Very strong at the beginning, and then, according to Daniel, I don't know if this is typical, but over the years, then beginning to fade.
Yes, now, this lady had said to me that in the beginning she had a lot of visionary dreams of things that were going to happen to her and her loved ones, and they came true.
Yeah, I think for the listeners that might be quite startled by a story like that, they may come away wondering, well, how do we know is this story unusual or unique in some particular way?
And I'd like to assure your listeners that this story is not rare or even particularly unusual, but there are dozens and dozens, hundreds, and certainly with our Near Death Experience Research Foundation, we're logging more and more of these types of experiences.
This is not unusual for people to have experiences where there is this kind of sense of consciousness outside of their body where they get information that is absolutely not verifiable, you know, that absolutely could not have happened with any other explanation other than the near-death experience working.
I mean, there's no brain chemistry explanation for this.
There's really no alternate explanation other than that this is some kind of a significant phenomenon of a near-death experience.
Well, Dr. Long, being an oncologist, you're just very much a mainstream medical doctor.
And so I think that an awful lot of your colleagues, where they hear what you're saying right now, I've seen them as you have on programs explaining brain death and that the entire experience is such a crock.
It's just brain cells that are dying on the outside, moving inward, and that the light is at the center of this.
And so people seeing light is no big surprise.
Look, we're at the top of the hour.
So when we come back, let's, Dr. Long, would you pick up on that point as we proceed, all right?
We're talking, very seriously talking about near-death experiences.
We have two guests right now, Dr. Tricia McGill, who is a clinical psychologist, and Dr. Jet Long, who's a radiation oncologist.
And they're both talking about NBEs.
Dr. McGill has told us several stories now that seem, in some cases, irrefutable.
People who have clinically died for varying periods of time and then have seen things that they could not possibly have seen, things that were checked out and proven to be true.
They have visited relatives.
In one case, one woman who died saw a sneaker on a ledge outside of the building that she was in the hospital, and that was confirmed.
Now, some of this sort of testimony and evidence really begins to seem irrefutable.
We will continue with some of that and talk to Dr. Long about brain death, brain cell death, in a moment.
I'm Mark Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
All right, back now to my guests, Dr. Jeff Long and Dr. Tricia McGill.
I wanted to move to Dr. Long for a moment and ask Dr. Long, a lot of regular physicians, doctor, stand up, as we briefly touched on earlier, and they say, look.
And this whole NDE experience is easily explained.
The brain dies, and it does so from the outside moving inward to the more inner portions of the brain.
And that accounts for the white light that people see.
And there are endorphins released in a protective manner by the body to make the dying process, I guess, more physically palatable for a person.
And there is really nothing more to this whole NDE thing than that.
And I'm sure if they were to hear you deviate from that, they would no doubt take issue with you.
Well, I think a lot of physicians are closed-minded and some are fairly open-minded.
I think some of the more open-minded ones would be open to the concept we have that there's some reality to near-death experience that goes above and beyond just simply the physiological.
You talked about endorphins and the concept of the brain sort of shutting down from the outside to the inside.
These are all incorporated in some of the alternate theories of near-death experience.
In other words, There's some physicians and other health science professionals that argue, hey, there's an alternate way to explain near-death experience.
There may be something related to endorphins, which for your listener's sake is a type of naturally produced narcotic substance in the brain that helps relieve pain.
There's a lot of other psychological or physiological explanations that I don't think any of these explanations that have been advanced by any health professional at any time can really explain the kind of experiences that we're describing.
I mean, time and time again, we're hearing about people that simply describe things that they simply could not have known if they didn't have a full-blown out-of-body experience associated with consciousness removed from their physical body.
And there's nothing, there's no chemical in the brain that can cause this kind of thing, to the best of my knowledge.
Well, endorphins are a type of naturally produced, if you will, narcotic type substance.
And I say that in a sense that they have narcotic type of effects.
They reduce pain.
They can sort of be associated with a sense of euphoria.
People that, for example, joggers that do very vigorous physical activity can raise their endorphin levels in their brain and feel sort of, if you will, a high or a sort of narcotic type of a sensation as a result of naturally occurring endorphins.
And I think certainly within my clinical practice managing cancer patients, we use an awful lot of narcotics in relieving cancer pain.
At no point have I heard anybody that we've treated with these type of narcotic drugs describe anything like a near-death experience.
It simply is not associated with, to the best of my knowledge, either naturally occurring endorphins or synthetic type of medications that we use to relieve pain.
I think there are certainly some, what I would refer to as open-minded skeptics that would quibble with me based on some alternate explanations of near-death experience.
And I'm open to that.
I think that's entirely reasonable.
I support open-minded skeptics and any alternate explanation that they can possibly provide.
I think that's how we're going to learn.
As researchers here with the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, I welcome this kind of challenge.
I welcome this kind of input.
I welcome this kind of open-minded alternate type of explanations to near-death experience.
In the meantime, I've got lots of really good questions for you.
Have you interfaced with anybody who has actually done work on brain cell death and on the death of the brain?
I mean, there's some pretty...
And one of the outrageous things we've discussed is long ago, they used to lop people's heads off.
They would just, you know, the guillotine.
And there is some substantial reason to believe, I think, that people actually, there were some very gory macabre experiments done by some people who were given the guillotine in which they would blink as their head was in the basket and that sort of thing.
I mean, that would indicate that even with a complete cessation of blood flow, some seconds, at least, some seconds of consciousness would remain.
The brain has about as high a dependency on blood flow as any other organ in the body.
So once it loses its blood flow, as you would if it's been severed from the body, you're talking about a matter of a relatively short number of seconds before you would lose consciousness, at least the way we conceive of it medically.
I think part of what we're doing with the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation is we're starting with the premise that we don't know the answers to a lot of those very important questions.
You know, we're asking ourselves some of those very same concepts, and our method of research is our belief that the more near-death experience research, the more near-death experience experiencers that we talk to, the more we're going to try to get some idea about the answers to that.
We're very early in our work with the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, and our ideas that we're developing are fairly preliminary.
One of the ideas that we have that I think is relatively original is that at the time of many near-death experiences, there's a life review.
At the time of life review, very often this is associated with not only perceiving your entire life and understanding how you felt when you interacted with other people, but understanding how the other people felt that interacted with you throughout your entire life.
A concept that occurs about maybe one out of every four of the near-death experiences that we've run into.
There are lots of people who seem to report the exact same thing.
Is it reasonable scientifically to conclude yet that based on the evidence Tricia was talking about earlier, based on what you know, that there really is a life after death, some sort of existence, some sort of passage of energy that continues?
You know, that's my very strong bias that based on all available evidence that we have, and the near-death experience is probably the strongest evidence that we have.
I think from, and I'm a pretty skeptical guy, Art.
You know, I don't jump into believing things or accepting things without some proof that goes along with it.
And based on what I've encountered with near-death experience, I get it.
I think there's some life after death.
I think very clearly there's some consciousness that exists after death and apart from the physical body.
There have been near-death experiences are not rare.
In 1982, a Gallup poll suggested that as many as 8 million Americans had 8 million near-death experiences.
I mean, do people come back, and here you'll probably step into trouble, but do people come back and report that they experienced what, you know, their Catholicism told them they would experience or their Baptist background or their Protestant background or Buddhist or whatever.
Do people come back and report those things or not?
Well, you know, I think there's sort of a duality.
I think I'm very impressed with the fact that near-death experiences are very consistent.
Some of the consistent elements that I hope we have a chance to go over later on in the show are very consistent no matter where you are in terms of time over centuries, no matter where you are in terms of country or religious belief or cultural background.
That's one of the really fascinating parts of near-death experiences.
It seems to be very, the common elements seem to be very, very persistent throughout very diverse cultures and religious backgrounds.
So I think that's one of the real significant things that adds credibility and credence to negative experience.
I think that is implied by the fact that the near-death experience seems to be so constant.
I think that's a strong suggestive evidence that all of us are going to end up in, quote, the same place, unquote, because of the consistency of that experience across so many diverse cultures.
And if people had, if their entire life history preceding the near-death experience was to have a strong bearing on what happened to them or what they perceived at the near-death experience, you know, i.e.
if it was a physiological or brain chemistry thing, you know, that would be one thing.
But that's not what we're seeing.
We're seeing consistency and persistency of the experience across a tremendous diversity of cultures and times and religious beliefs.
And I think that really suggests that there's something lying out there beyond.
Well, then that really suggests, again, I walk down the rough road here, that the individual religious rules, and could you turn on the radio, please?
Okay.
That's going to have to stay off during the interview, Don.
That suggests to me that all the individual religious rules, and I'll say rules, involved, for example, in Catholicism, and I'm not picking on that by any means, are really sort of out the window,
and these are made up, things made up by man, and that really there is something that happens, but it's a common thing that doesn't have anything specifically to do with any specific religion, because each one of these religions is always running around saying, we're the only path.
You go down any other path, and you know where you're going?
Nothing that I'm encountering in our research or in my talking with people that have had NDE experiences or reading about them, nothing at all seems to contradict any of the teachings of any of the major religions that I'm aware of.
I think, if anything, this helps substantiate the major religions and their teaching that there is going to be a God, there is going to be love.
And I find this reinforces my personal religious belief.
But I mean, there are a lot of, well, for example, there are religions that suggest if you are not baptized in a specific way, you're going to hell.
Now, that's a good specific example for you.
I happen to believe that's a bunch of baloney.
That if you've been a good person and if your life review goes well, you're probably going to have the white light and whatever all awaits on the other side that is good.
Getting back directly to your question, I guess what we're saying with our research is all the people that describe the being of light are talking about a being of love, a being that loves people, that cares, intense compassion.
People that have near-death experiences, the great majority of them find that this is a very life-changing, positive event in their life.
They lose, to a large degree, their fear of death.
They're much more interested in issues regarding God and their spiritual side.
And I think if this isn't the goal of the major religions, it ought to be.
And where they might have been involved in a specific religion, they come back and while they are more spiritual, they tend to drift away from a specific religion.
I don't know that that's been, I don't know that that's a consistent or persistent pattern of what we're seeing.
People are tend to be more concerned about their spiritual side.
All the major religions are pretty much by definition concerned about the individual's spirituality.
I think that has a lot to do with it.
Trisha certainly had a lot more experience with near-death experiences with her over 200 near-death experiences, and I'd be interested in her comments.
Well, she actually remained in the Catholic Church.
She started out in the Catholic Church and remained in the Catholic Church.
But I think across all religions, there's going to be people that are closed-minded, that are judgmental, that will hear a person describe a near-death experience and say, hey, this is something that is so outside of my personal life experience that this can't be real and come up with some negative judgment about the near-death experience.
I think that's because probably 1 to 2% of people have frightening near-death experiences, and I think that's probably just part of the spectrum of what we're running into with near-death experiences.
With regard to the earlier story, an individual state in the Catholic Church, just with a more liberal denomination, or if you will.
Let me take one more quick break and try that standby moment, please.
Just to get them both on, I really want them both on because we're about to get into the very controversial portion of what we're going to be talking about.
And what we're going to be talking about is a new drug, a chemically induced NDE.
And we're only going to tell you so much about it.
He was quite high up, and he just thought he was automatically going to have this wonderful, you know, life review, and that he was just going to be ushered directly right into the throne of heaven, so to speak.
But what he found out later on, much to his shock, is that that doesn't really count.
What really counts, basically, more than any other thing, is what's in your heart.
What really counts, and this came as a horrible shock to him, and he didn't even like telling it, but what really counts is did you live a good life?
How did you treat others?
What was your intention?
Intention counts For a lot.
For example, if you go to church three times a week and you do all the right things, but in your heart you think you're better than everyone, if you lord it over them, for example, and act like you're so much better and so much more godly, that's the opposite of what God really wants.
Even though he went to the light, he saw the being, it was more of a dressing down than it was an experience of love and peace and all sorts of things.
All right, now look, we're going to start stepping into it.
I want to tell my audience, and I want to tell you all, I began to hear a couple of weeks ago, and I mentioned it on the air, I began to hear rumors of a drug that can produce...
And before we move on to what we're about to talk about, before it got into the ghosts and people coming back to haunt you and all the rest of it that was in flatliners, would what they did in Flatliners, Dr. Long, I'll ask you, be technically feasible?
In other words, could you extinguish somebody's life signs by some means, their breathing, their heart, all the rest of it, in a clinical setting, and then, as they did in flatliners, wait an amount of time, two minutes, say, and revive them.
There is indeed a drug X, as we've alluded to all along in this show, which can reproduce some of the elements of a near-death experience.
It's been used by some skeptics of near-death experience to say, hey, there seems to be a chemical or some physiological reason for near-death experience outside of the spiritual realm.
So I would have to say that, and certainly from some of the experiences that have been described by users of DrugX, I would have to say, yes, it is a very interesting issue.
I think any drug that substantially impairs your consciousness and your ability to interact with the environment, and further a drug that has some risk of at least psychological dependence, has some risks.
I would view this drug very cautiously as I would any other drug that has this kind of effects.
It is, I think the way I tried to put it was that after a certain amount of research into the dangers, the risks, everything I can find out about this drug, if I think it's safe enough, and it has been used, by the way, extensively since 70s on, by the way, it's not that new a drug.
If I feel that it's safe enough, I will, under control situations, do it.
For example, if Dr. Long would be willing to help me in that department and go there and monitor me, I would do it, yes.
I think use of a drug for other than its prescribed approved utility, which happens to be an anesthetic, I think should only be done under a approved investigational study.
And there's some very definite criteria for establishment of an investigational study.
And I'd really want to see that established before I'd want anybody to take this.
Any drug that impairs your consciousness and perception of the world around you has hazards.
And I would, you know, while I'm certainly very, very interested in to what extent this can reproduce some of the experiences of a near-death experience, I'm very, very concerned for the safety of the individuals using this.
So I guess a direct answer to your question would be yes.
I would be involved with that, but only under some very kind of rigid circumstances and under an approved investigational process.
Okay, Dr. Long, do you imagine that a board of physicians like yourself reviewing the use of this drug by Dr. McGill or anybody else for the purposes that we're discussing tonight would or could be approved?
You know, I think if the proper study were designed to investigate this, absolutely.
In fact, studies like that have already been done.
Any drug that is used, and particularly Drug X, if you do it under controlled circumstances so that you get the maximal amount of information from its use, I think that might be useful.
I think it might help us to understand a little bit about what the effects of Drug X are and try to compare and contrast it with some of the near-death experiences that we shared with your listeners.
How would you medically want to monitor Tricia if she took DrugX?
In other words, just now without the panel review, if I were to ask you, what kind of medical monitoring would you want to do while she took this drug in those amounts?
Well, as with any investigational study, you need to make sure there's informed consent.
You then need to do it under circumstances in which all the, you know, you'd want to get an EKG going and check blood pressure and check all the other vital functions at the time they're taking it.
You'd want to do it very, very cautiously and perhaps with a certain dose escalation so that it maintains a maximal amount of safety.
It would be a little bit of a tricky thing to do, but I suppose it's possible.
Well, I tell you what, a lot of people say that there's some very common elements with an NDE, but there's also some things that are not the same.
So I think what I'm going to do here is I'm going to let Jeff explain a little bit, and then I'm going to take it back over and explain my part of it, okay?
Basically, according to this situation, NDEs can be induced using this dissociative drug.
And the kinds of things that they have are very similar, according to the study, of course, to an NDE.
For example, they talk about leaving the body or feelings that you're separated from the body, going into a tunnel.
They even talk about that.
Common hallucinations include landscapes, people including partners and parents, teachers and friends, and even religious and sometimes mythical figures, including angels and that sort of thing.
Yeah, some of them feel like they're separated from the body, according to this report.
I don't really know, because you see, since I haven't taken the drug and I'm a researcher, it's hard for me to say that I agree with this until I have experienced this sort of thing or interview people who've had this drug.
And up to this point, I have not interviewed a single person who's had this drug.
As soon as you called me this afternoon and asked me to be on the show, I immediately called him to see what he knew about some of the history.
And he told me that when he started into medical school back in 1972, they had already taken this drug and basically said we're not going to use it anymore because of the drug.
I would say that it was a very realistic kind of an appraisal of some of the things in his life that he thought where he had made great strides that the motivation was not totally selfless.
I think that's what I meant to say, more or less.
I'm not trying to water this down, but I'm trying to be as honest as possible.
If you lead a good life, if you don't deliberately set out to hurt anybody, if you try to be considerate of other people, you treat them the way you'd like to be treated, if you have compassion, if you have all those good motives, it doesn't matter whether you set foot in a church or not.
It's a smile that can light the end of the day for somebody who's dying a kind act, a pleasant smile, a word, a pat.
It's the little things that count.
I mean, you could be the highest holy of whatever church you belong to, but if your heart isn't good and if your mind isn't in the right place and your motives are self-serving, it doesn't really matter.
I absolutely agree with you, and I think that love, I know it sounds trite, but the truth is that love really is, I think, I don't even know what To say about it.
All right, I'm going to leave that subject for a second.
And again, Dr. McGill, you did earlier today, I'm sure you'll now recall in the conversation, suggest that you would give this drug a try or wanted to give this drug a try.
You know, I think your listeners need to know that when Tricia talks about the possibility that she would consider using Drug X as a research tool to understand what exactly the similarities and dissimilarities are of ND, I think it's probably important for your listeners to know that, and I've known Tricia for a long time.
This is an individual that essentially does not drink alcohol, has never smoked a cigarette in her life, has never used any illicit substance in her life ever.
And yet, because of her interest and passionate interest in understanding this phenomenon, is willing to take this what could be a personal risk and do this.
So I think that's somewhat courageous, if not heroic.
So do I. I certainly wouldn't recommend it for the general public, and she certainly has a long history of not using illicit substances for thrills.
I think anybody that uses drug acts under controlled circumstances is going to be, I don't think they're taking any kind of a risk of flatliners, where if your listeners aren't familiar with the movie, they actually induced some kind of cessation of heart and lung breathing and saw what happened next.
That really isn't this.
So I think it's somewhat courageous for anybody that would be willing to do this in the name of science and under very tightly controlled circumstances.
Yeah, controlled substances are those that are considered to have significant potential for abuse from a medical point of view.
And this is kind of an interesting, Drug X is an interesting drug.
It's considered a controlled substance in a number of states, but not all states.
It's not a federally recognized controlled substance, which I find surprising given the effects of this drug and the fact that some people are using it in an abuse manner.
that that is at this point the fact that actually even a minority art of states consider it to be a controlled substance well I'm still shocked I've interviewed dr. Moody I've interviewed I could just about every important person in the field and nobody until you all have mentioned Drug X and a chemically induced MDE.
Nobody.
Are you surprised, or do you just think that people wouldn't mention something like that on the radio?
No, I'm not at all surprised about that, Art, and I'll tell you why.
This is a difficult subject to talk about.
I think any serious investigators of the near-death experience, I think at some time have to face the fact that there is the existence of a drug X which seems to reproduce some of the aspects of a near-death experience.
But it's difficult to put on national radio a drug X which has some potential for abuse.
I think it's something that we all kind of are concerned about from that level.
I hope and trust that your listeners are all mature enough not to want to run out and try substances to induce a near-death experience because it's really not that easy.
However, Art, let me read to you, if I might, some writings about what the exact experience that you get with drug X is from people that have actually experienced it.
And I invite you and your listeners to compare and contrast this experience with the kind of near-death experiences that Tricia and I have been discussing previously.
Yeah, the world will begin to spin, but it won't be dizzying.
Music will become fragmented.
Chaos will ensue.
At some point, you will find yourself completely removed from your surroundings and your body.
Description of the experience varies substantially, but most include talk of alternate planes of existence, oneness, past, and future revelations, and strange fabrics of sorts.
That will be very difficult to communicate at this point.
You probably will not be able to see or hear others that are around you.
Some revelations will be extremely, quote, heavy, unquote, and some scary.
Does this sound to you like the near-death experiences we've described previously?
This is from the most credible drug I could identify.
I think there's some similarities, and I agree with you, Art.
I'm very open-minded about this.
I think it's interesting.
I think it's intriguing.
I'm very interested.
And I guess I come to you saying that I don't know if Drug X is the path to near-death experiences.
I'd say there's some similarities, and there's certainly some dissimilarities.
Certainly some more research under carefully controlled circumstances would be appropriate, and that's not going to come from people that acquire Drug X illicitly and use it for recreational purposes.
To the degree that you have to separate your consciousness, as to build your soul, separates from the body.
That is the absolute first step in both an NDE and an OBE.
And after you have the OBE first and foremost, because obviously you cannot leave that body down in the morgue, for example, the way that Daniel Brinkley was, for example, and go and have all these experiences if you were actually, you know, and you can't come back with information and that kind of thing that he was able to do, and other people were able to do exact information on things that they couldn't have known while in this unconscious state.
But to the extent that you have a separation of the body and the spirit, that is both what's going on in an OBE and an Indy.
When you sleep at night, a lot of people, including my friend Albert Taylor, you may remember him.
Well, I can only go by personal experience, and I can tell you that I, sure as hell, have never done it before.
But when I was in Paris, France, on vacation with my wife, I was lying in bed.
I've had a gazillion flying dreams in my life.
Not a gazillion, lots.
I know when I have had a dream.
I know when I wake up and I've had a dream.
No problem.
No problem separating a dream from here I am awake and this is reality and that was a dream.
But in Paris, I was lying in bed and Al Taylor and others, a million people, have told me, I exaggerate with zeros always, that you have this buzzing sound and you perhaps feel paralyzed and then suddenly you move out of your body or, as you put it earlier, pop out of your body.
Well, guess what?
None of that happened to me.
Oh, I was lying in bed and instantly, no warning whatsoever, no buzzing, no feeling of being paralyzed, I didn't just pop out of my body.
At an acceleration that I could not describe, I flew straight up out of my body.
I mean, just, there was no warning, straight up, I was way above Paris somewhere, and I was in the only way I can describe, there really aren't good words for it, except ecstasy, a feeling of overwhelming, yeah, love and peacefulness and joyfulness, and just, it was wonderful.
And it shocked me so terribly, not in a bad way, but it shocked me, nevertheless.
I mean, a shock to the system.
I've never had anything like this happen.
I sat back and immediately knew what had happened.
And I woke my wife up, who's, you know, going, huh?
And I'm going, my God, you wouldn't believe what just happened.
And it was a very quick experience, but there was no question about what I experienced.
no b_e_s but but then i'll pick up on that after the break your work at the bottom of the hour standby will be right back and and This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
We're going to begin taking calls shortly for Dr. Jet Long and Dr. Trisha McGill.
Now listen to me.
And listen to me very closely.
When you call, even if you know what Drug X is, don't name it.
I repeat, do not name it.
If you do, I'll blow you out of here like a bad wind.
So that's the only caveat as I invite you to call in.
Don't name this drug, even if you know what it is.
I certainly didn't.
All of this is new to me, and I've been interviewing people on NDEs for years, and I sure have never heard of it.
But apparently it's been around for years.
So with that caveat, we're going to shortly open the lines.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
You two are back on the air again.
How you doing?
You holding up okay?
We're doing great.
You think you're ready to ask or respond to some questions from the audience?
We'd be very happy to.
Just one question by facts before we proceed to that, and it is, would you please ask the two doctors why there have been no high-profile studies done on NDEs by major medical associations or universities?
I think something, a phenomenon that is so significant that involves hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans and, you know, even greater number of people around the world, I think this is worthy of further study.
That's why we've set up the Near Death Experience Research Foundation.
In spite of all that, the issue of the near-death experience is important enough to us that we're simply willing to spend a lot of time and carry this out.
Doctor, do you think that doctors, that physicians like yourself spend a lot of time considering whether there is an afterlife because they're dealing with life and death every day?
Do they spend a lot of time in consideration of that or how do most physicians personally handle it?
Maybe more so with physicians simply because, you know, the rest of us are not faced with mortality and tend to sort of block out the whole concept of dying for the most part.
We consider it every now and then, but physicians have it in their face every day.
You know, every day I see patients that have advanced metastatic cancer, and I don't think we're going to be able to cure them.
And for this, I guess maybe that's what's driven me to think more about this issue than a lot of other physicians and maybe more people, you know, maybe more than the average member of the public.
I encounter this every day, people that are going to succumb from disease, and I guess that's led me to think about this.
I had lunch yesterday with Dr. Moody and several staff members of a hospice that's local here.
It's called the Odyssey.
And every single one of the staff members that I interviewed, I took an opportunity after lunch to run around and talk to everybody.
They were all 100% convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is survival of the human spirit after bodily death.
They had all seen many cases of people who had what's called the near-death vision, where they suddenly perk up, sit up in bed, and say, dad, or grandpa, or mom, or something along this line, and they light up.
There's lots of books out, including, of course, Raymond Moody's books.
He has now a new one coming out.
He'll have five books in total.
And there's Dr. Melvin Morse, who did the Indies with young children who were too young, you know, to have preconceived ideas of what religion or that sort of thing.
But as far as a group of doctors getting together to do any kind of serious study, I'm not totally aware of anything like that.
Well, I would extrapolate from Trish's comments working with hospice workers.
And hospice is a health care mechanism whereby we care for the terminally ill patients.
And so the greater the exposure to people that are actually dying and are near that time when they're going to die, the greater is their belief of a survival of the spirit beyond death.
I think we doctors in some way are blessed with whatever our specialty is, that we generally have exposure to people because they're unhealthy, because they need a physician services, that some significant percentage of them are going to be facing death.
And I think I would suspect that a survey would show, you know, somewhat like the hospice workers, that there would be a higher than normal belief in the survival of the spirit beyond the death.
Okay, then I've got a real zinger for the both of you.
And either one of you can grab this.
There is a man named Matthew Alper, who I had an opportunity to interview on my program, who wrote a book called The God's Spot of the Brain.
The contention, basically, I'm going to give it to you very simply, is that no matter where you go in the world, find lost tribes in the Amazon jungle or wherever you want to go in the Philippines, tribes that have never touched civilization, all of them seem to worship something.
And Mr. Alpert's contention is that we are mortal beings with an incredible fear of death, a real serious fear of death, and that this might be for you,
Tricia, more, and that our minds, in order to compensate for that otherwise unmanageable fear, have a spot in the brain that demands belief in the afterlife, and that our brain,
in effect, and this has been a matter of our development as a species, that our brain has concocted this God part of the brain, He calls it to protect itself against this fear.
Yeah, I think back to one of the things that you first started the program with was the question, isn't this one of the most important things that we could study?
The way I kind of look at a lot of this sort of the possibility of brain chemicals and a part of the body actually being, or the brain rather being identified as where an NDE takes place, I kind of feel that if I can just, you know, say it out loud, God works in mysterious ways.
I do believe in that.
And I believe that if God created our brain, we have sort of a partnership in that.
And he may have very well come up with a very true way for us to go to a different and very real plane of existence.
I kind of look at this whole thing with Drug X as being if somebody is going to call me later on and say, hey, if Drug X can do this, then that means that there is no such thing as God.
There's no such thing as afterlife.
There's no bigger plan.
There is no hand in this thing.
There's no orderly progression.
And that our consciousness goes into oblivion after we had this little hallucination, if you will.
I don't look at it that way.
I have to admit my bias in that.
And in that, I do believe that it doesn't diminish the realness of the situation.
Evolution, if I understand it correctly, aside from bringing us from the cavemen, despite the gaps that some argue would allow evolution to be called a science, but just a theory, as conditions have changed,
for example, there is more ultraviolet radiation, so in some way our bodies adapt to that over a long period of time, or some other change, climate change, occurs and we adapt to it.
Then, with death as a consistent thing that man has been able to consider since he's been able to consider, it is reasonable psychologically to conclude that our brains have adapted and created Matthew Alper's Godspot, the demand in belief in something in almost everybody, most people, very few atheists, to protect itself.
You know, I guess evolution implies that if there's going to be a change, that it's going to result in some change that's going to enhance the survival of the species.
And aren't we talking about an evolution potentially leading to the development of some part of the brain which would allow a near-death experience as part of an evolutionary process?
That's really not consistent.
When you face a life-threatening event, the normal psychological reaction is fight or flight.
There's a very strong nervous reaction, sweating, increased muscle tone, increased alertness.
It is totally, if you will, the opposite of what's occurring within your death experience.
When I was in the Air Force in Amarillo, I had a lump discovered in my left shoulder blade.
And I worked in a hospital.
I was a medic.
And so I knew the doctors.
You know, they were all friends.
Air Force doctors are a different breed, believe me.
And so I went in and I saw the doctor and said, oh boy, it's a big lump.
We're going to have to operate.
And so they did.
And it was a big, long, protracted, horrible operation.
And they took this out.
It was just nothing but a, it turned out to be nothing but a fatty tumor.
In those days, they had to send, I was at Amarillo Air Force Base, and I think they sent the tumor, I can't remember, I think to Lackland or to, not Lackland, to some other base, you know, for a biopsy.
And I had to wait several days to find out.
And he brought me in his office and sat me down when he got the reports, stared at me stone cold, and said, Well, you've got about six months.
And the next experience she had, she was in the hospital toward the latter part of her life.
It was the last, well, within the last three months of her death, prior to her death.
And she had to be hospitalized to adjust her PCA pump, which is a pump that's given, a small pump given to cancer patients to control the medication.
And my husband was at the hospital with her at the time, and I was speaking on the phone with him, and I heard this blood-curdling scream, and of course he dropped the phone, and I could hear people rushing around.
What it sounded like to me is the OBE occurred in the first event because she was not in any real, what I would call, severe threat of bodily death, or at least she did not perceive herself to be in that threat.
So that's an OBE.
The second one sounds more like she had a full-blown NDE.
At least she got to the part where she was talking to the being of light.
Although, you know, by our definition of NDE, it's a lucid experience associated with consciousness apart from the body associated with actual or threatened imminent death.
And you'd have to know more about that first experience to know if that met our definition.
I'm a stubborn sucker, and I have to sit here and still wonder, not having experienced an NDE, a near-death experience, I have to ask myself if what I experienced was not the product of a living mind.
It was.
And so I haven't answered the question to myself, you know, about existence after death by what I experienced.
Well, when you mentioned, like, and this leads into my question, actually, I thought of it, when you mentioned Robert White, I mean the monkey head transplant.
Yep.
Something Joseph Mengela would never even have dreamed of doing.
But since this animal's involved, everyone seems to be okay with it.
I'm wondering if, when I'm thinking, Robert White would go through, if there is any God, if they have any, the doctors have heard of any experiences of NDE, no white light, no nothing, just a pure descent into hell.
That's a fine question, and there are two answers to it.
One is yes.
There are reports.
I think one of you said only 1 or 2%, something like that.
But there's a big factor here that has to be talked about, and that is that I would bet you 90% plus of those people who go to hell and back don't exactly come back and tell their family members about it or a nurse or a doctor or anything else.
It's a lot harder to talk about a negative experience, especially now that there's so much publicity about the positive aspects of NDE.
I would quibble a little bit with your term of going to hell.
I think these people have unpleasant or frightening experiences, but I don't know that it's hell, and it might actually be very, very important for their spiritual development.
Oh, the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation that we're working on is absolutely interested in both positive and frightening NDE experiences.
I think that's very important to learning what NDE is all about.
I think it's very much a real part of the spectrum of NDE experiences, even though they only occur, at least among reported experiences, one to two percent of the time.
Well, I think that it's not so much that people are reluctant to discuss it because I plan to have a every single NDE report that comes to me or to our website when we get it up, I plan to post it.
So the way I look at it is we should post everything we have.
Now, I've read a lot of reports on hell.
A lot of people think it's a kind of a state of mind.
Other people I have read say that there's like two levels of hell.
A friend of mine who's a psychic actually, according to her, went to hell, got permission actually to take a quick visit.
Like in that made-for-TV movie called America with a K. You remember that when we were all suddenly slaves and everybody was wearing brown, drab clothing and they were all walking with their heads down and slaves to the new One World Order or whatever it was.
Based on everything I've been able to put piece together.
And believe me, I don't have all the answers.
I don't even claim to have the answers.
This is a work in progress.
This is a study.
This is something that we get one piece of a puzzle and then we find out there's four more pieces that we need to make a complete picture.
So I'm not trying to say I've got all the answers, and I'm not even sure what I'm telling the listening audience is 100% correct.
But based on a few people that I have, well, several people that I've talked to and based on my friend who actually got permission to go to hell and come back with a report, it's this sort of a place.
And you can get out of it.
Now, here's how you get out of it, according to everybody.
You basically realize and you're willing to accept in all the various deepest levels of your mind and your being that you really didn't make a mess of your life and that you did not lead the right life.
And you get over this ego trip of being too good.
In other words, a Hitler type would get into hell and just stay there for a long time because he had such an enormous ego.
Well, in other words, that whatever happens or doesn't happen in your life happens while you're here and alive, and you get a review of that when you pass on.
True.
And that there's no going back in the sense of correcting what you did that was wrong.
After you die, you can't come back and correct it.
What you do, though, and this is based again on everything I've been able to piece together after 20 years of studying this, is you do go on to higher forms of learning, and you get the whole picture when you're in the C. So we should think of it as postgraduate school, huh?
Okay, well, actually, you're just describing another chemical, another drug.
That's what alcohol is, is a drug.
Dr. Long, could conceivably, you imagine, somebody would have some kind of valid experience not associated just with being drunk, but as a result of ingesting alcohol?
You could have a, I mean, I don't know much about this from personal experience, but I would imagine you could have some unusual experiences.
You know, what we've described as the near-death experiences, I think, is quite different from anything I've ever heard from people describing intoxication or heavy use of alcohol.
I'd be very interested in talking with them, and I won't take a lot of time on the air.
I had an experience, a near-death experience, when I was about 13, and it was very different from anything that I've heard discussed, and I've never really been able to talk with anyone that's had an experience.
And then there was a perception of this, and it may sound silly, but you have to remember it's 13, of this gigantic hand that just pushed, lift me up very gently and pushed me to the surface.
Okay, it's coming back from Bryan Head, Utah towards Vegas, okay?
Anyway, just as I pulled around the corner, I noticed there was this horrible wreck where two of those gigantic trucks that are like double, you know what I'm saying, double container trucks?
If I had been four minutes earlier, I would have been right in the middle of it in a compact car, and I would have died instantly.
As it was, I was there on the site to send two dead people to the light because I sensed that they were confused and they were hanging around their bodies.
I sent them both to the light, both dead drivers of the truck, okay?
This is my perception anyway.
And then, after clearing the road of the, one was hauling lettuce, the other one cat food, after clearing that out of the way, my husband and I were the first ones to get through.
I took a picture of this.
As I was putting the camera back in my purse, guess what I saw?
The average psychologist would probably walk away with the feeling of, God, that was an interesting story, but, you know, I don't know what to make of it.
I don't think, well, I'm not sure about this, but I don't think the average psychologist would dismiss it right offhand and say, oh, she's hallucinating.
This is from Dennis in Chicago who says, Art, I don't believe there's ever going to be money granted for research in this area because it might take away the fear of dying.
The reason that they were taken out of the Bible, in my humble opinion, and I could be wrong, is because of that very issue that Dennis mentioned, the care issue.
But see, my issue with that is that I was thinking in my own current life and those of the people I associate with, we are not held in any kind of grip by any organized religion.
Stay close to your phone and ask whatever you would like.
unidentified
Yes, I don't want to discount any of the OBE or religious aspects of the NDEs, but I'm still very dubious to the idea that they relate to a consciousness that exists several days or more after a person dies.
I mean, because isn't it very possible that some cognitive activity still exists in the brain, you know, even hours after death that couldn't be detected?
Well, you know, I think, Art, there can be a consciousness after you clinically die, and I think if you have that consciousness, it's going to remain in the source of the consciousness, and that is the brain and in your physical body.
The stories we've shared with you involve people that have very clearly seen and heard things that are geographically removed from where their physical body is that were later verified by people.
There have been thousands of these types of stories that occurred in the past, and there's going to be thousands of stories like this that occur in the future.
Well, let me tell you, Jeff and I are planning to build one, and we're going to be doing some experiments with that to see just what we're true.
Yes, we are.
And furthermore, if you would like art, after I have my experience with Drug X, my controlled experience, providing I decide that it's safe, I would be happy to come back on the air and tell everybody with an unbiased opinion exactly what I experienced.
Yeah, you remember the old, just like the old saying, there's a light at the end of the tunnel, you might have just been knocked slightly unconscious for a short time and saw stars.
But it's possible that you had an NDE to the degree that you went to this void, and then the little stars are actually angelic figures who are somewhat watching over you.
Okay, this one is out of body, and that one happened later in life, probably around, I don't know, 22 or so.
And I was lying in bed, very relaxed, and I was waving my right hand in front of my face, and just idly watching it go back and forth.
And when it flipped down to my right, and I followed it with my eyes, there was something really close by my face, and I nearly leaped out of my skin, thinking there was something on my pillow.
And I looked at it and realized it was my right hand.
And I thought, what the hell?
Because I'm waving my right hand in front of my face.
And I looked down my arm, and coming out of my elbow was another arm.