Joel Rothschild, one of America’s longest-surviving AIDS patients, shares his book Signals, detailing a pact with his deceased best friend Albert—whose voice guided him to retrieve a note from a neighbor’s trash in 1994—revealing fear of losing Rothschild due to illness. Rothschild describes ghostly communications like hummingbirds landing on him during hospital visits and a Mason’s ring appearing in a photo one year after a father’s death, suggesting the dead linger in the present. Callers recount similar experiences, from light apparitions to synchronicities, reinforcing Rothschild’s belief that love transcends death. Inspired by Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Rothschild now advocates for life’s purpose over self-euthanasia, framing suffering as a catalyst for unconditional love and afterlife connections. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning as the case may be.
And welcome to another edition of the Best in Live Overnight Talk Radio.
From the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands, commercially out west eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north, all the way to the Pole.
This is Coast Close AM.
And I'm Mark Bell.
In a moment, coming up is going to be Peter Kirsten.
unidentified
It looks like Peter had a really good day in court.
I've got a whole lot of stuff I need to get on the air tonight, so I'll just sort of do the best I can, but I want to get this whole Arizona thing covered, what's going on down in Arizona, because it is very, very important.
But first, I've got a sad note that I've got to get on the air.
You may have been seeing on CNN, if you've been watching the late news, the news on the two small planes that collided in Chicago with one of those planes landing on a hospital roof.
Unfortunately, a colleague in the industry, Bob Collins, who had been hosting the morning program for my competitor in Chicago, WGN, was in one of those planes.
He is dead.
And there just have been too many lately.
But Bob Collins, known to Chicago audiences, since 1974, dead in a plane crash.
We'll get more of that next hour.
Or I'll hit on it again, because actually that's when Chicago, I think, joins.
So in a moment, you're going to get to hear what happened in Arizona in a courtroom where I understand, thanks to you all, there was SRO, standing room only.
And I guess Peter really laid it on him.
That's coming up.
The End All right, as many of you know, my wife and I saw a large triangular object float, not fly, above our heads.
Millions of other Americans have seen them.
Peter Gerston filed a Freedom of Information request trying to find out about these triangular objects that those of us who have seen them know damn well are up there.
And we didn't think, you know, you just keep batting against the wall and you don't think anything necessarily is going to happen, but you keep trying because you got to.
Well, Peter went to court.
In a precedent-setting hearing, the federal judge has now decided to consider a UFO group's claims that the government failed to conduct an adequate search for information about a very unusual aerial object.
Well, hooray.
In the Phoenix, Arizona federal lawsuit, citizens against UFO secrecy, that's our Peter Gerston cause, versus the Department of Defense Chief Judge Stephen McNamee, once again ignored the government's plea to dismiss the case.
Hooray for you, Judge McNamee.
Instead, took under advisement the group's claim that the government was guilty of bad faith.
In its search for information about a very unusual triangular aerial object.
Though cause, which had brought the lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act in 1999, submitted numerous affidavits from witnesses who had observed the aerial object, the Department of Defense, ours, continues to maintain in court that it could find no information, none, confirming the existence of this object.
And so they had like a 30-minute court go-round about all of this.
And it looks like Peter is standing, still standing, and the we'll find out right now.
Yes, and I want to thank you for your help in getting the word out, because most of the people that came said they heard about the lawsuit on the Ott Bell show.
Now, for those who were not standing in there, standing room only courtroom, what was it like?
Can you give us a sense of how it came down and the expression on people's faces, the tone of their voices, the things that we all can't get from the story?
I had asked my membership to send me positive energy starting at 10 o'clock Arizona time, and the energy was terrific.
It was really positive.
And the courtroom was packed, and I had some of my closest friends there as supporters.
Ted Lohman, the deputy director of CORES, came all the way up, and you know, he's legally blind, came all the way up from Tucson to sit at the table next to me.
We had Jim De La Toso there.
We had some of my other friends who showed up, members of Coors.
And then we had some people that came in.
It's interesting because after I was on your show the other night, before I even hung up, I got a call from an individual who wanted to know if I wanted him to bring his friends down to federal court in order to be rowdy.
So I suggested that this is federal court, and I don't think that's in his best interest.
Not a good, but I think they were the ones that showed up with purple hair and green hair and things like that.
And then a couple of individuals walked in the courtroom before the case was called with some cups of water and coffee, and of course you're not allowed to do that.
Federal court is very strict and very conservative and very professionally run.
It's totally different than state court.
And you're not allowed to have audio or video equipment not only in the courtroom, but in the courthouse.
And then they had some cases called before they called the cause case and they actually even admitted some attorneys into federal court right before they called the case.
So I was watching the judge and the judge was schmoozing with some of the new attorneys that were being admitted and he was asking them about what alma mater they went to and they were talking about basketball and the NCAA.
So it was a pretty light atmosphere as well as high energy.
So I felt pretty comfortable and then they called the cause case and there's a podium and each of the attorneys have to get up and speak in front of the podium, you know, looking at the judge.
So I couldn't see how many people were coming in.
And the court, I guess, held about 70, 80 people.
And unbeknownst to me, while I was speaking, more people were coming in.
And basically, it was standing room only.
So there were close to about 100 people there that came for that particular case.
Well, I think maybe not generally, but in this particular case, it might have because one of his questions during the arguments was directed to the fact that I only had a sample number of affidavits from certain locations that he considered populated.
And he wanted to know if this object was seen in populated areas, how come I wouldn't have more affidavits?
So basically, I indicated to him that I could have produced hundreds and thousands of affidavits.
These were just samples.
And I alluded to the audience.
And I made reference to the fact that I would say that at least half the people in the audience, if not more, has seen this object.
So I would think the fact that not only was the audience packed, but it was full of people who were eyewitnesses to what it is that I was trying to prove existed, to infer that the Department of Defense would have to have information on it, I think for that effect it was effective.
The U.S. Attorney was there, two U.S. Attorneys were there, the one that has been handling all my cases that cause has brought, including the evasion case.
And he seemed so unprepared and so as if uncomfortable that he didn't want to be there.
I was surprised because usually you would think that Central Cosmic Casting would send down somebody that was on an equal level so that you would rise to the occasion.
And that's what I like, somebody who is at least at the same level so that I can rise to that occasion.
Well, maybe then he was an attorney, and of course I'm speculating, but he was just sent down there as a matter of course without any DOD consultation whatsoever and said, handle this case.
Well, I guess, you know, they're subjected to certain concerns.
And if, in fact, the Department of Defense had found documents and had withheld them on national security grounds, like the government usually does in UFO cases, then I'm sure he would have sided with the government, as they all do in these type of cases.
Because how do you attack an exemption of national security?
I mean instead of saying they didn't find any documents, they initially said national security.
Yeah, now I would say it's too late unless somehow they say, well, we went back and we did another search and we looked in areas we never looked in before and we found them.
But now that affects national security.
It's possible they can say that.
But we're not even at that stage.
The judge still has to decide on my suggestion that he don't decide the motion for summary judgment, but put it over for 90 days and allow me during those 90 days to assist the Department of Defense in finding and locating the documents.
Because there is no doubt in my mind that somewhere within the Department of Defense are those documents.
He's proposed, or you've proposed, that you be given 90 days to work with DOD to help them find information on a triangular object that does, in fact, exist.
He can decide on a hearing and bring in the witnesses and allow me to cross-examine them as to their search.
He can give me subpoena power and allow me to take depositions from some of the officials within the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
I can renew my application to subpoena and depose Stephen Greer and Peter Davenport, which he denied.
Peter Gerston is here, and I think Peter's had a victory.
There's no question about it.
One resolution could be that Peter would get subpoena power, and in that way he could help the Department of Defense find the documents about the triangles that we know damn well are there.
That'd be interesting.
Cpena power.
We could actually bring Department of Defense people in and put them under oath.
Something they'd have to think real hard about before they answered.
Well, you know, I'm not sure that an attorney is supposed to think of it this way, but hey, Peter, if you got subpoena power and you could actually bring DOD people in to be deposed and put them under oath and ask them questions, would that be fun?
I have a list of questions that people have been sending me for the last six months if I had the opportunity.
But basically, it has to do with the policies and procedures on UFOs in general, on these particular objects, on this search, the methods they do with search, the classification of the analysts that do the search.
In particular, you know, hopefully this SD Form 472 where this declassification specialist Betty Goode initially indicated that records were found, I hope this is the document, so-called Smoking Gun, that will sway the judge in favor of allowing me these additional.
One box says records found and the other box says no records.
So what you have in the records found box is an X that is blacked over and in the no records box is an X. Now of course they would have to check the records found box first.
Would there be no reason to check it after the no records, you know.
So for some reason they checked that, crossed it out, then checked the no records.
Now I don't know why.
It's a regular form, why they didn't just destroy the form and start over again with a clean copy.
But it's funny because this judge was so open to my arguments.
He was very sharp.
He was an independent thinker.
And usually, I can use a comparison.
In a criminal case, when you sum up the summations, the closing arguments, you're supposed to confine yourself to the evidence that was introduced at trial and not go outside of the evidence and make all kinds of inferences.
Well, it's the same thing in the argument before the federal judge.
I was supposed to confine myself to my responses that I had made, my arguments, on paper in response to the summary judgment motion and comment on that, argue those points and not argue points that weren't in those papers.
But in referring, it's funny, I think I'm hanging out with Richard too much.
In referring to this SD Form 472, where it initially had record found, checked, and then crossed out, then no record, I said to the judge, judge, there is some belief that within the Department of Defense there are the good guys for disclosure and the bad guys who are for secrecy.
And maybe, maybe this is some type of message from the good guys that there are records.
I said, we're not looking for an object that crashed 52 years ago in a place in New Mexico.
And he smiled a little bit at that.
I said, we're looking for an object that's seen almost every month, and as recently as two weeks ago, and that wasn't in my papers either, as recently as two weeks ago in Illinois.
I would, in choreographing this script before I came into this 3D reality, I would think that that would be part of the script I would do for myself.
In auditioning for the role of the UFO lawyer, I think that was one of the things I had to audition for.
So with my creativity and imagination, sure, I would program that into my cosmic computer program when I came down here and became the UFO lawyer.
Why not?
That's good to me.
And you're part of it.
If it wasn't for you, CORES wouldn't be where it is today, and we wouldn't have those people in the courtroom.
Because it was in January of 1998, after being on your program, that I resurrected Cause and made it an Internet organization with a website that is now, you know, with the same web web wizard Keith Rowland.
It's unbelievable.
And you are a main co-conspirator in this whole thing.
The issue is, separate and aside from whether the object exists, is whether a reasonable search, that's the law.
All they have to do is a reasonable search, not an exhaustive search, a reasonable search.
So the question is, and they have to accept, the judge has to accept the affidavits from the DOD at face value.
In other words, unless I can raise an issue of bad faith, then they're presumed to have good faith and the lawsuit's dismissed.
So I'm hoping that this SD Form 472, as well as the other arguments I made about the predisposition of the DOD prior to any appeal on my part, they ignored my initial appeal.
They saw citizens against UFO secrecy, and that was enough to send me a denial without even doing a search.
So hopefully my arguments were persuasive.
And if they were, then the court can do several things.
And it wasn't until I suggested that they not rule, that the judge not rule on the motion until 90 days and allow me to assist the agency in trying to find the documents.
And if I can't get any closer in 90 days, come in and dismiss it.
What's the sense?
They say they can't find it.
I can't tell them where to look, dismiss it.
He started making notes.
He started writing a little bit for the first time.
In your opinion, would it be I don't want to say legal, would it be something the government would do in response to an FOI request of the sort that you made, if there is a national security issue at stake here, for them to reply no?
In other words, under the guise of national security, could they politically check the no box and get away with it?
In the lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency, they found documents, stated they found documents, and withheld them on national security grounds, which was upheld by the district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals.
The National Security Agency searched their files, found documents, stated they found documents, and stated we're not giving them to you on national security.
That was upheld by the district court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
So there's precedent for the Department of Defense saying, we have documents, you're not getting them, national security.
And I'm sure Judge McNamee would upheld that decision.
You would get an acknowledgment that the object exists, at least.
But, you know, basically, the agency has done it in the past, and they're still, you know, the CIA is still withholding the 57 documents after, what, 20-something years?
Yeah, I noticed also the President just the other day, without referring to Area 51 by name, said the military facility or secret facility near Groom Lake, and he signed another document holding that as secret.
Well, then I'm going to sit down and I'm going to speak to some of my associates and I'm going to put out some queries on my website and we're going to go forward.
We're going to, you know, like we would in any kind of case, we would plan strategy.
We would decide who we're going to subpoena, when we're going to subpoena them.
I would speak to the U.S. Attorney and try to do it.
But basically, in any civil suit, if you subpoena an officer of the corporation or the corporation, they can supply any person who has knowledge and information about the subject matter that's the basis of the lawsuit.
So somebody who would be in a position to provide information, assuming they had the information.
Yeah, there's a newsletter that Well, if they have access to the website, they wouldn't want to sign up.
But if they don't have Internet access or email access, they can write to CARS and sign up for the monthly newsletter, which is the highlights of the daily CARS updates.
Now, that address is CARS, C-A-U-S, 8624, San Bruno, S-A-N, B-R-U-N-O, two words, Drive, Scottsdale, Arizona, 85258.
And we have to charge because there's printing and posting.
Because it's possible the judge can eventually grant the government's motion and dismiss it by saying I did not raise enough issues of bad faith.
But I agree with you.
I think he's going to give me the time.
And once he does, then I will come back on your show and say we have to raise some kind of legal fund for these depositions, for the transcripts, for the videotaping, for the court reporters, for the travel expenses.
Because as far as I'm concerned, that's what I want to devote my next 90 days to, doing this and doing as many people as possible.
Last hour, we spoke with Peter Gerston, who had a Hanuma victory in an Arizona court, trying to encourage the Department of Defense to Go back and look again.
Do a more thorough search and find whatever they've got on this triangular object.
So it's a victory, in my opinion, for the good side.
And you can kind of sit back in a lot of ways and wait and see what's going to happen.
You can join the cause at CAUS website.
It's link through mine.
And when you do, you'll get a daily free report about what's going on.
And you can bet this is going to be highlighted in that.
So thanks to everybody, standing room only in the courtroom, as Peter stopped them in their tracks.
Now, I've got a number of things that I really would like to cover.
My sympathies to the family of Derek Thomas.
As you know, he just died after an automobile accident.
There have been a lot of very untimely deaths lately.
Derek Thomas was one of those, of course.
And also, I note that Bob Collins, who did the morning show and has done so for about a decade now in WGN in Chicago, who is a private pilot, today collided, had his private plane collide with another private plane.
You may have seen all of this on CNN.
Well, piloting one of those planes was Bob Collins, 57 years of age, who had been doing the morning show and very well known in Chicago and to all of you in Chicago for a full decade now, is dead, much too early, at 57 years of age.
So a colleague in the industry and my sympathy, of course, to his family as well.
So there seems to be a lot of that going around.
In a moment, you're going to be hearing from Joel Rothschild.
Joel is perhaps the longest surviving AIDS patient, AIDS survivor, in the world.
He's written a new book called Signals.
So he's here not just to talk about AIDS, but about signals.
Now, what do we mean by signals?
Well, signals from the other side.
Because before his friend died, they made a pact.
They made a pact together that whichever one went first would attempt to send signals from the other side.
And in talking to Joel just before this hour began, he said, what are you looking for?
And I said, just the truth.
So that's, I hope what we're going to get.
I trust what we're going to get.
And it's yet another attempt to find out if there really is more to this world than the material world that Mr. Lennon was calling for us to ignore in the bumper music coming in to this hour.
Should be a very, very, very interesting interview.
There is so much going on out there right now that I want to comment on that I've got to get a word in on that I hope Joel will be patient with me.
Number one, I do not send you to the web for idle stuff, but we've got a photograph up on the web right now, which I would like your interpretation of, please.
It's obviously a legitimate photograph.
The picture taken by, well, I don't know who took it, is of Mike.
And it was taken on his prom night.
You know, everybody takes a picture on their prom night, right?
But Mike's picture, when you look at it, you're going to go, oh my God.
Located in the chest and stomach area, you're going to see what I would describe as a demon.
This is not a double exposure.
Whatever it is, it's really there, and it's really visible, and when you see it, it's going to remind you.
You know what it reminded me of?
You remember the monster?
Well, let's see, which movie would most closely resemble what I think is on his chest?
I'm not going to tell you because I would like you to form your own opinions.
It is easy to see, perhaps not at first.
Turn the light up on your monitor if you don't see it.
But it's on his chest, and that's a ghost, or in my estimation, some kind of demon.
It is a shockingly good photograph.
And so I would not idly send you up there.
I'm telling you, we got a whopper up there right now.
So go take a look.
It's in the new items section.
Let me see.
It's newest site editions.
You'll see the story on the tragic death of radio personality in Chicago first.
And then new ghost photo with description of haunted house.
But boy, when you see what's on that man's chest.
So, www.artbell.com, that's my address, www.artbell.com.
The reason I think ghost photographs and demon photographs are so important, well, that should be obvious.
If we are on a quest to try and prove something, then when you occasionally get your hand On really good forensic material of this kind, it's irresistible.
And so go take a look, and you tell me what's on that man's chest.
Latest news on the Alaska Airlines tragedy is that radar signals may show a piece of that plane may have broken off before the final one-minute descent to the ocean floor and death for everybody aboard.
There have been too many coincidences lately involving the MD-80 series.
On Saturday, an Alaska Airlines MD-83 returned to the airport in Reno, Nevada, minutes after taking off for Seattle.
NTSB is investigating now, said, though it probably was caused by an overheated stabilizer motor.
On Thursday, an Alaska MD-80 taxiing toward the runway in Seattle experienced intermittent problems with the stabilizer motor.
An American Airlines MD-83 flight out of Phoenix returned to the gate last week after a stabilizer problem, and they think that it may be a faulty control switch in the cockpit on that one.
But this is getting pretty weird, I would say.
Now, the only explanation that you could offer for this seemingly impossible chain of coincidence regarding the MD series of aircraft would be that after an accident of this sort, pilots are particularly sensitive to MD-80 stabilizer hiccups at all, and so we're hearing more about it, maybe.
Or there really is something going on.
And if that's the case, you begin to look for any common thread, obviously, between any of these things and where that would take you.
Then they said an asteroid would hit Earth, possibly, in the year 2022.
And then they said, no, it won't.
Now, whatever happened to the, we're going to wait three days before we announce this and do the math.
Didn't we just go through this a little while ago?
Asteroid's going to hit?
Then it's not going to hit.
So anyway, the latest math says it will not hit.
Personally, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in math structured on what we know about something that might or might not happen 20 some odd years from now because just a slight encounter with something out there that would change even the earth's encounter with the earth might change it just enough you never really know there's cyberterrorism going on out there eBay was shut
down by.com was shut down hackers people with denial of service and they're just essentially doing what I do when I send you all up to my website to see a ghost photograph so many people hit it with requests at one time that the server can't take it and it goes and dies now that occasionally occurs when I send you all up like this
incredible ghost or demon photograph is more like it.
Some of you may be denied service for a little while trying to get in to see it because so many people are trying to see it at once.
But this looks like an orchestrated effort to deny service to cause trouble for e-commerce companies, and the FBI is going to catch these people.
And when they do, they won't like it.
the people
people all right now Mr. Rothschild coming up he wrote the following this story proves there is more to heaven and earth than has been dreamt in the minds of men an illuminating and inspiring read signals the book is wonderful proof that we are never apart from those we love as a quote from Deepak Chopra the AIDS
pandemic was over 12 years old in 1994.
AIDS, the leading killer of men between the ages of 25 and 40, and hundreds of thousands of people had already died from this disease.
Nowhere was the devastation more horrid than amongst urban gay communities.
Tragically, it enveloped the lives of two best friends in Los Angeles, having AIDS.
They feared, obviously, their deaths to be imminent, so they made a pact.
They promised if there was a possibility to contact the other after death, they vowed to try.
Skeptic Joel Rothschild was the one who got left behind.
Signals, his book, chronicles a series of miraculous experiences and coincidences that offer proof of an afterlife.
His cynicism fading, his health improved, and he is now one of our nation's longest living AIDS survivors.
His forthcoming book is an engaging true story of love, hope, and healing.
It will take you on an adventure that we are going to take you on tonight.
Joel Rothschild: You know, the best place to start is in the beginning.
another pact that albert and i have have to do with the first bit of proof of life after life wasn't just this one pack and i have to tell you that i was a card carrying member of the national atheist association for ten years old really madeline got my money so i was at this skeptical as anybody could be and i went along with the pact to have that that's not even skeptical if you're a uh...
Albert and I and a couple other friends decided another thing that we would do.
We went down to Mexico and we got the suicide drugs because we all felt, my little group of friends, that there were certain things that could happen physically that we wouldn't want to live with.
And my particular thing was, I thought if I lost my eyesight, I wouldn't want to live.
Well, Albert, my best friend, best friend since high school, whom I had the pact with about signaling from beyond, was the one in the group that was in perfect health.
June 1st, oh, I'm going to skip the point.
The pact with the suicide was, with Albert and myself, if either one of us decided to take our own life, we would support the other.
We would be there with that person.
We would help them to die.
And this may sound very morbid, but that's what life was like.
Well, there were a lot of issues, you know, and there were a lot going on with his life.
All of our friends were dying.
He really couldn't bear to see me get sick, and that was a big part of it.
But here's the first signal.
This is the first time I had held a dead body.
On one hand, I was crying.
I was devastated.
On the other hand, I was angry that he had taken his own life.
So angry, I was shaking his body.
The coroner arrived.
The police arrived.
I'm screaming.
I'm hysterical.
And I'm not rational.
And in the midst of all, and there's no notes, no explanation.
And I needed an explanation.
I needed to know why.
Not only why, I needed to know that he loved me when he was alive.
If he wrote my name across the sky in a rainbow, at that point it didn't matter because he had violated this commitment that we had and not said goodbye to me.
It was horrible.
Anyway, the very first signal, I hear his voice.
I'm holding a dead body and I hear his voice.
And he says to me, get yourselves together, hop the wall to the house next door, go in the trash, and you'll find a note.
And toward that end, there are several areas that I look toward when I'm trying to figure out this great question for humanity.
And it's the biggest question I think any of us have and will ever have in our lifetime, as well as our greatest mortal fear, that is of death and whether there is anything that follows it or whether it's just lights out.
The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out and all the rest of that.
I cannot think of any greater question.
Can you?
I don't think so because there's so much at stake.
Well, I look at a lot of things.
I look at forensic evidence and one piece of really good evidence is up on the website tonight.
It's a photograph of Mike.
And I'm telling you right now, what's on his chest can only by me be described as a demon.
A demon.
You look and decide for yourself.
I don't frequently, you know, I get a lot of, I can't tell you how many supposed ghost photographs I get.
And I only very occasionally call attention, probably one out of a hundred.
This one you better see.
It's on my website now at www.artbell.com and I would appreciate one way or the other your comments on it.
It's not a fake.
You know, whatever's there is there.
I guess it could be some sort of trick of light and shadow.
I sound like NASA, don't I?
But I don't think so.
And then, of course, there's my guest tonight.
By the way, the foreword to his book called Signals was written by guess who?
Neil Donald Walsh of Conversations with God, who did a guest whole slot here a few nights ago.
He wrote the foreword to the book.
We'll talk a little bit more about that.
But Joel and his friend had gone to Mexico to get the appropriate medicine to make final exit.
You know, they had AIDS, and it was at that time an absolute death sentence.
And for some reason, Albert, though he was still healthy, decided he was going to go and go right then.
And unfortunately, Joel was the one to find his body.
He was shaking his body.
And a voice said to jump the fence, go next door, get into the trash can, and you'll find a note.
A lot of things I can imagine could have happened, but to direct you next door to a trash can to get a note for a suicide for a body you were holding, no, not coincidence, definitely not.
Once in my life, I saw at an airport outside, it was really interesting, a hummingbird came right up to somebody's nose, literally just sat there in front of his nose, and it totally freaked him out.
That's the only time I've seen a hummingbird approach a human, and that was outside.
So this is the worst for me to, this is the hardest story for me to tell you because it's the most powerful signal and the most powerful contact, and I don't have a witness.
And this event, which was the most Powerful event, I seriously have considered that over and over and over again, except for one thing.
What had happened wasn't something, and what he said to me wasn't something that I ever intended to write a book or to share.
And the message in what he told me that night carried me through the rest of my life, carried me through chemotherapy, carried me through AIDS.
The message that he said to me was that every moment of life, every breath you take, good or bad, happy or sad, in pain or not, all have meaning and all have a purpose that you're not going to understand from where you're at now.
So live your life, Joel, as much as you can, go as far as you can and endure as much as you can because you are working things out that are connected to a greater good that you won't understand from where you're at now.
Well, I personally believe that we don't have a vengeful God, you know, a really angry God, and that if you take your own life, he punishes you for that by sending you to hell or even something in between.
Particularly in the case of somebody who has a fatal disease.
Well, that contact that night gave me the hope and the courage to go on living and to live through some opportunistic infections that were 80%, 90% fatal at the time.
So, you know, that was a very powerful experience that evening, and it's not one that's documentatable.
It's not one that happened with someone else there, and it's not one that was well-witnessed, and it would be very easy to chalk it up to grieving.
I'll tell you, I don't believe, Art, that any disease in the history of mankind has ever been 100% fatal.
And there have been people that have come out of the Eboli comas and lived.
And I think that part of surviving and part of my surviving is achieving a state of forgiveness, being able to let go of things, reduce stress, strong inner will to live.
I mean, if you lived, you have to understand, if you lived through your best friend or your partner dying and coming to you, you know, telling you that there's a note in the trash and you find the note, no matter how skeptical you are, that happens to you, you're going to live a different life after that because you're going to have knowledge that there really is something after this and that there's meaning and there's purpose in all of these moments of life.
It's a tremendous experience for me and I can only go so low no matter what happens to me in life.
Does that philosophy include, you know, a grain of sand and a greater consciousness all sounds like a collective thing, but the messages you got were individual and specific and not from a collective?
Do you think there's a period of time when the individual is not yet part of the collective, when individual action of the kind that began when Albert died can occur?
We're going to do exactly what we want to do here.
And this gentleman is here with a poignant and important story.
If you don't care about your afterlife, that's your business.
and if you carry a prejudice this time in my opinion you'd better be worried about your afterlife All right, I'm trying to pursue a path to the truth, which is what I told Joel before the broadcast.
He said, what are you looking for?
He said, the truth.
Looking for the truth.
And there are various ways of looking for the truth.
One is with the kind of forensic evidence that I've got up on the website tonight.
You might take a look.
There is an image on this man's front of his jacket that you've got to see.
It's one of those classic photographs.
I would suggest you take a look at my website at www.aracl.com.
The other is life after life is probably the biggest question that man faces because without something after this life, then what are the motions that we are going through?
What do they mean?
And toward the end of the hour, I was asking about the collective versus the individual.
Joel, you're back on the air again.
Here's what I mean.
It seems as though ghosts, if you want to call them that, for lack of a better name, or spirits departed, are able to be in rather direct contact many times in the way contact was apparently made with you, but then at some point pass into another realm or the contact ceases for whatever reason.
That's why I said, I wonder if there is a period of time where that kind of contact is possible, probable, whatever, and then something changes in the afterlife.
But I still kind of hoped that I would see them or have some sort of contact.
My feeling was that when he was with me, he wasn't alone.
That there were other spirits with him.
And I do think that since this has happened, I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I've read a lot of spiritual books.
I get a feeling, what I'm getting a sense of, is that after the soul leaves the body, there's a period very briefly, and I've had this debate with a lot of people, people disagree with me, that the soul leaves the body, is alone, and then joins the collective numbers of souls.
But even when it joins that collective number of souls, it can still signal, because I really believe that when Albert was with me, when Albert came to me, there were other souls with him.
But I don't know if it matters.
I think what really matters ultimately is to have faith that there is something after this.
I think that we, at least in some of us, it will instill a better consciousness and a better style of living, taking care of it.
Well, it's always been said that religion is the taskmaster that keeps everybody in line.
The threat of the threat of hell and the threat of all the things standard religion talks about, or even many religions, actually, for that matter, to keep people socially in line.
In fact, if there is an afterlife, it certainly is going to keep people to some degree in line, I would think.
My wife years ago, and I know my audience may have heard this several times from me, she told me something.
I always thought, you know, if I had a fatal disease of any kind that was going to be a very painful, prolonged death, that I would seek that out, you know, read Final Exit, go to Mexico, get whatever you need, and check out, rather than going through a long, painful death.
And my wife told me that no, no, no, she said.
You're supposed to play out the hand you're dealt.
And I don't know if that's true or not.
I've given it a lot of thought, and I think now, more than not, it's probably true.
You're supposed to play out the hand you're dealt because your friend took his own life before he was even ill.
You were ill at the time.
You're playing out your hand.
I don't know.
On the other hand, maybe it was his hand to take his life, but it seems an unsatisfactory conclusion.
I don't think we suffer equally, but I think we all suffer.
And, you know, maybe there is a maybe suffering functions if we're all collected, we're all connected in this collective body of God, perhaps suffering is like the liver in a body.
You know, it cleanses.
I don't understand the meaning and the purpose in suffering, but one of the things that Albert said to me the night that he died was that there is meaning and purpose in the suffering.
And it's something that I profoundly believe.
And it was one of the biggest changes throughout this.
You know, that's not the message I would have expected from him.
I mean, he took his own life.
So the message I would have expected, or I would have expected, let's put it this way, your mind to generate, would have been one that justified his death.
But that statement doesn't necessarily justify his death at all to suggest that every moment of life, good, bad, or ugly, is precious and important.
Well, maybe he was telling me and giving me hope to go forward, because at that time I was suicidal.
And so what he was trying to instill in me is a sense of hope that there was a meaning and there was a purpose in this.
And if I could have experienced that knowing from someone departed who I shared this great friendship and this great love with, I would have that seed of hope in my heart.
And, you know, hope is an amazing thing.
I mean, ultimately, you asked me earlier, how am I still here?
they're discovering now that the immune system does bounce back, but the longer, the quicker...
What they're finding now is that people that seroconvert or come down with AIDS now, they get on the medicine, the immune system really bounces back very quickly.
They can get the virus to a level of undetectable in the system, and their system bounces back.
But what they've found with me is that it won't bounce back to anywhere near a normal level.
So I'm functioning as an AIDS patient, but a healthy AIDS patient.
It wasn't meant to be a book, and it wasn't meant for other people.
These messages and these signals were really specific to me.
And the way that it came into being, into a book, into sharing this, is that things would happen with friends, like a hummingbird landing on me, and friends said, you've got to write this.
Everybody said, you've got to write this.
You've got to write this.
So, of course, this is a very personal experience.
It wasn't meant to be shared.
It wasn't meant for a radio show or a television show.
Once again, my guest, and we are about to go to the phones here.
So if you have a question, I can imagine you might.
You're more than welcome to ask it.
This is kind of interesting.
Something I want to cover with you, Joel.
It says, Art, your homosexual guest on the air is experiencing a series of demonic visits.
The entity appearing and or communicating with him is a personifier of his dead gay friend.
Demons have been known to do that.
Now, that's really interesting because I've noticed that when a Christian dies and a relative is left behind and there's a signal or a voice, it's because of God.
But because you're homosexual and your friend was, it's going to be a demon, according to this factor.
Well, my answer to that is that ever since this happened, I've been the best Joel that I could ever be and the kindest and done more good than I've ever done in my life.
Yeah, a really beautiful friendship, a really beautiful love between two people.
And there was a desire to signal.
Out of that loyalty, out of that friendship.
I think he has a great point.
but in this in in my particular case there was you know there was a friendship like brothers better than brothers i mean best best best friends well that must have been a rather interesting conversation when you During the break, I went in.
Well, you know, while a lot of people in my audience I know don't agree with your lifestyle, it is my view, Joel, that love is the strongest binding force in the universe.
My best friend, Jim, also died of AIDS, and we made a pact that he would give me a signal once he made it to the other side.
And, Art, one of the photos that I sent to Joel, my friend Jim died on the 8th of September, 94.
My next-door neighbor was taking a photograph of the moon with a flash camera exactly one year to the day after Jim's death.
Jim showed up in the photograph.
This has happened so many times in my life.
My loved ones who have died have kind of barged their way into photographs.
What I have found as time goes along, for those who are interested in contacting people or being contacted, it calls for a change in perspective.
And this is the change.
We tend to think of ourselves as being visited by them, like they peek through our windows, like they come into our world.
That's not true.
We are right now living in their world.
Once you let that change in perspective take over in your life, you will be more open to it and you'll be amazed at the things that are going to happen to you in terms of getting contacts from the other side.
About a year after Albert died, I was in my new building, and a bunch of us went out on a Saturday night, and I'm sober, and so I was the designated driver, and we're on La Cieneca and Santa Monica Boulevard, which is a huge intersection.
And about 90 feet before the intersection, I heard Albert's voice say, stop the car.
So many of us, you know, we want to know, we want to believe, and that's why I have people like you on the radio, because I haven't met that same kind of concrete proof that you have.
Do you think that when somebody is open to this, when you have made yourself receptive to these sorts of messages, that they are very much more likely to be received?
There was a time when, like that story with the girl that was pregnant, there was a couple other experiences where I had a message similar to the sixth sense someone.
And after the experience, I was drained, almost felt physically jet-lagged.
And there was a period of a time where I wished it wasn't happening.
Well, the phones are stacked, so we'll do one more hour.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Ark Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 8, 2000.
In my arms, I know the magic of her charms Cause I want a girl to call my own I want a dream lover so I don't have to dream alone Dream lover, where you're going Where are you with a love for so true?
And the hands that I can hold, here and here as I grow old'Cause I want a girl to call my own I wanna dream, lover, so I don't have to dream alone Some day I don't know how I hope she'll hear my breathing.
Some way I don't know how you'll bring her love to me.
dream Sweet dreams are made of visions.
Who am I to deserve?
I travel the world and the seven seas.
Everybody is looking for something.
Some of them want to use you.
Some of them want to get used by you.
Some of them want to abuse you.
Some of them want to be abused Sweet deep darling.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 8th, 2000.
And what's amazing about the book is that it transcends sexuality and the fact that it was written by a gay man.
The book is for everyone.
Joel hasn't said much this evening about his psychic experiences since Albert's death, but for me, it was like reading those accounts of his psychic experiences in the book that have made me realize how much more there is than just the tangible things that we can see or hear.
His book is one of the most significant things I've ever read.
This is interesting.
By the way, he says, when I was trying to find time to read signals, which I really needed spiritually at the time, there was a hummingbird outside my window for a long time, and it stayed there until I finally sat down and read the book.
The following is from Gail in Las Vegas, and Gail says, you know, before Albert's suicide, Joel had no faith in God, no hope of any kind.
What a wonderful gift Albert left behind.
It doesn't sound like he was escaping.
It sounds like he was lighting the way.
Interesting.
Beautiful point.
All right, to the phones.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Joel Rothschild.
About a year and a half ago or so, I discovered that I actually have this somewhat of a psychic ability.
Pretty much a friend told me, you know, you've got to listen to these signals, pretty much like what your guest was saying.
And I was wondering, now, since I have these, I can pick up on these things, would I actually be able to communicate with somebody who's already passed away, or is that along the same lines as that?
In other words, there are people, and I've had several of them on the show, nationally famous mediums, yeah, who are able to communicate with somebody who has passed away.
Now, that seems different than what happened to you, Joel.
Well, my question for him, for Josh, is the process or what he's going through right now, is it healthy for his grieving process, or is it extending maybe the grieving for this person?
I know I'm married to my soulmate, and we've made Kind of a similar pact, and I've been concerned that maybe it'll extend the pain rather than let it just go.
I'm way past the grieving period myself, and what a clinical social worker said to me who called me on another show is that in some cases, these type experiences are written off to grieving, to people's grief, grief hallucinations.
My mother and I especially and other members of my family saw lights, a sequence of lights of different colors going through different periods of time.
And because the dead apparently can see into the future, we found that Bardoth et al.
later on, and it says the Tibetan Book of the Dead that Joel mentioned that he read earlier.
And by the way, that means after-death hearing, which implies the need to listen after you're dead to progress spiritually.
But in any case, we found that the sequence of lights that we saw matched exactly the phases in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
And the Tibetan Book of the Dead also says that I believe this to be true, that during the first seven days are days, not literal days, but the days after death that we go through meeting relatives and having a good time, is basically having what we want, being able to create what we want.
And then we go through, it transits into a period of seven days of meeting our conscience, which are in the form of wrathful and terrifying deities, they call them, or demons or whatever.
And it's important, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, says, and I feel this to be true, to tell the dead to bless these and to recognize that they're reflections of our own soul as soon as possible after death.
And that's the whole purpose of the book is to coach the dead into the light, so to speak.
And, you know, I just wanted to make the point, and Joel can respond to this, that, you know, find, communicate telepathically with your dead, but I just don't think it's good to ask for the deceased to expend any extra energy for any special things.
That's a good point, and that's, I believe, you know, yeah, we do want to move on after death, but yet that pact was so ingrained in Albert's conscience that, yes, it's good that, you know, that gave it energy.
He gave energy to that commitment long before he died, is my belief.
A lot of people feel that God as such doesn't render up some judgment after you die and you go on to whatever is next.
That in effect, you judge yourself.
And probably if you really think about it, if you really were forced to look at the mirror of your life as it really was, not as you have glossed over it or conveniently forgotten it, then you would be a very harsh judge of yourself indeed.
Maybe, caller, it has to do with the fact that that pact was only for the purpose of trying to prove there was an afterlife, as opposed to trying to send a signal to somebody you loved.
I was wondering if it would be a normal pattern when someone passes away that, you know, good things should happen to the person's family and friends.
did it happen to you uh...
It's kind of hard for me to say, though, because I know this one woman who passed away from having cancer, and the only regret that I have is I've never really gotten to know her.
And so I can't really answer that.
But I was just wondering, you know, for any close friends or family, if any good things would happen afterwards.
It's been a catalyst for a lot of people writing me letters and sharing stories that are fairly miraculous that I never would have believed until I lived through it firsthand.
You know, I think there's a lot of great people out there, a lot of really good, kind people, and I think that there's a lot of people with a lot of hate out there, too.
Well, I mean, it almost goes to the sixth sense, and I don't want to give that away because a lot of people have yet to crash into that movie, or the movie crash into them.
I don't want this to sound silly or flighty or anything, but I had a cat whose name was Kitten Fuzzy Paw, and I loved him a lot.
Of course, he loved me.
He was my kitty cat.
And he was at my mom's house.
I had just moved to Oregon from San Francisco, and he was at my mom's house.
And I was moving into a house, a whole new town where I didn't know anyone.
And I had met a few people, and I met this person, this guy who was in my life, but I had only just met him.
Oh, God, I'm kind of embarrassed.
Anyhow, he was at my mom's house, and I had had a dream.
I was asleep.
I had had this dream that I was holding Kitten Fuzzy Paw and rubbing his stomach, like I always did, and he was introducing me to this guy, Trace.
And then I woke up from the dream, and I sleep on my stomach, and I woke up on my stomach, and it was sunrise, and it was like an early summer morning, and I could see the brick wall outside of my window, and I could hear birds chirping and whatever.
But I had this really pleasant feeling all over.
And then about 10 minutes later, I started dozing off again, and my mom called me, and she had called just about 20 minutes earlier.
She had let Kitten Fuzzy Paw out to run around, and he got hit by a car and was killed.
And that was like right when I was dreaming the dream.
And then this person that I had met, I'm not going to say his name, but he was in my life for five and a half years, and it was a pretty intense love.
No, I have this definite feeling that while I'm still searching for evidence of life beyond, I have this feeling that love is such a bindingly, incredibly strong force that if anything can pierce the veil, that is what does it.
And that is what does it.
I mean, you could listen to these stories, whether it's a cat or a prison or a loved one, somebody desperately loved.
You could hear these stories all day long.
And a lot of them cannot be attributed, just like the beginning of your story, to some sort of random protection of the brain grief exhibiting itself in your brain.
That's not what I would call your stories, and a lot of the other ones I've heard.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Joel Rothschild.
First of all, Joel, that idiot who called and said the demons were visiting you, I don't think the devil would send anything that would produce you closer to God would come from the devil.
It would only come from God.
So actually, that's probably the purpose.
On suffering, I used to volunteer with children in Dallas that were HIV positive.
We had a home for the children.
And a lot of times the children, we would go to their hospital and basically on their deathbed, and the children would talk about the light and everything.
And I had one child in particular who was only four years old who would tell me about the light man, who would take away all his hurt because everybody was worried about all the suffering he was going through.
And what I found out, and through this child, what I learned was suffering, it's like natural disasters.
People are drawn together that normally wouldn't be drawn together, and there is this unconditional love that comes around.
And sometimes when people are sick and they're suffering, people who would not be drawn together tend to have this unconditional love and surpass the things that we look at here on earth.
And their purpose seems to be to draw those people together and to produce an unconditional love.
And I know with this child, what's really odd is it's like he's been reincarnated through my nephew.
The things that this child did, my nephew does.
And then we found out my nephew is terminally ill.
And what's really odd is everybody in my family, nobody would be a genetic match except me to donate a kidney to him, which is really, really odd because the child that I took care of would play with the lights, and he would talk particularly about the light, and so does my nephew.
And so it's like this reincarnation, and he doesn't seem to be suffering at all physically.
It's just this learning process that he has taught the whole family and everyone else.
And I was just wondering if that you have experienced that a lot of people through that suffering have learned unconditional love because of your friend.
Well, you remind me of, your story reminds me of my favorite book of all time, which sort of says the same thing that you said.
There was a Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning, greatest book I've ever read in my life.
And actually, my inspiration for putting this thing on paper, because I didn't want to share these stories, even though friends were telling me to share these stories.
And his courage in telling his Holocaust story is what encouraged me to do this.
And I couldn't agree with you more.
I mean, there's a solidification.
There's people coming together.
There's lessons to be learned here.
Lessons about hope.
Lessons about love.
I mean, there's so many lessons that are learned in this suffering.
I mean, AIDS, for example, we're all going to die.
I mean, we're all dying.
And one of the things that AIDS did for me, which was a gift, is stripped away my natural human denial of my own death so that I was able to live in the moment, which was actually a gift.
My viewpoint is that of someone who has lost two close family members to cancer.
I've wondered why, in America today, only house pets and convicted serial murderers are given the painless death of chemically induced execution until I came across a rather startling statistic, and that is that of the several billion dollars spent every year by Americans for medical services,
hospitals, doctors, prescription drugs, fully 70% of all that money is spent on maintaining individuals in the last 60 to 90 days of life.
It's a phenomenal amount of money to maintain people who are virtually at death's door.
And I was curious to know if Joel and his friend Albert's experience with self-euthanasia by choice, if he feels there is any hope for Americans to break this medical deadlock so that people will not have to seek painful deaths through self-inflicted gunshot wounds or whatever when they finally reach that Point where they can no longer tolerate the pain.
Well, I mean, I personally believe that it's I wish we had that freedom as they do in a few other countries in the Netherlands.
But then spiritually, having gone, and this is going to go, boy, right against what I just said, and I'm someone who got the drugs and planned for my final exit, having gone through these experiences, spiritually I now believe that I would never do that, that every moment of life matters.
I've seen some horrible deaths from cancer and from AIDS, and protracted and long and very ugly.
And I've also seen some deaths where people went a long period of time in their suffering and was in the room with them when they died, and there was this amazing sense of peace and transition.
have you ever being with a dying person and i i i i talk to a lot of people who are with dying have you ever actually felt something at the exact moment of transition at the moment of physical death have you ever It is, I guess.
I'd just like to say I believe that there's something to the strong bond of love that makes you maybe see something that other people don't see or feel something that other people don't feel.
The best thing I can relate it to is my dog, Max, died of throat cancer.
And Max was just the greatest dog.
I mean, I loved him to death.
To this day, I just still can't get over his passing away.
But every night for about a week, Max would come to the foot of my bed, and he would just sit there, and I would wake up, very peaceful, warm feeling, and I'd look at him, and he would just vanish after a few moments.
In writing it, it was that Viktor Frankl thing again.
I just wanted to, I didn't want to be emotional about the experiences and I didn't want to editorialize.
I just wanted to present them as they happened.
unidentified
i felt you i thought this guy really wrote from the heart because when i was reading the word It came right off the page as though I was talking with you.
And I thought, how ironic.
I really lived close to this guy and I might have met him at some point.
And one time, about eight years ago, when my niece died in Germany, she was in the Navy.
She was 22 and she hit a tree and died.
I woke up and knew.
And when they called me, they said we're having a hard time getting the body into the country from Germany through all the difficulties they had with the Navy and all the red tape.
And I heard her voice.
I was standing in my room and she said, I'll be home in seven days.
And she told me when and where and what.
And I called my mother and she says, oh, no, that's impossible.
We tried doing that, and they said it couldn't happen.
I said, she's going to be there at this time, and it happened.
So that was a very unexplainable thing.
And it happened to me.
And I did hear a voice, and it did come to me like that.
And I didn't try to go against it.
I just went with it and told the people I needed to be told.
One of the strangest things in our relationship is that there was this synchronicity, not hearing things like that, but we were constantly running into each other.
There were odd coincidences our whole life.
We live on opposite ends of town.
We used to see each other every day, and on a particular day, I would say, well, I'm going downtown, and he'd say, well, I'm going to Long Beach.
And we both changed our minds, and we're in the valley and run into each other at a major intersection.
unidentified
For no reason at all, and you just run into each other.
We constantly were having these synchronicities where we were running into each other and odd events like that during our lifetime, during his lifetime when he was here.