Dean Koontz joins Art Bell to explore One Door Away from Heaven, blending horror, science fiction, and quantum mechanics—like parallel realities triggered by a lost fork or "Art Bell moments" in his books. They debate NASA’s Mars Odyssey focusing on the "face on Mars," missing bioweapons samples, and Japan’s solar-energy satellite risks, while Koontz links consciousness experiments to creation myths. Cloning, nanotech "gray goo," and time travel—including a San Francisco AIDS immune-system swap—spark ethical warnings, yet Bell notes how fringe theories often become reality. Post-9/11, Koontz’s themes of interconnectedness gained urgency, mirroring humanity’s shared existential roots amid secrecy and scientific breakthroughs. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's 24 time zones.
I'm Art Bell, and the program carried in all those time zones, one way or the other, is coast to coast.
A few words about Mel's poll, which you heard last night, many of you for the first time in a related story.
Let me see.
American teleman is U.S.-bound John Walker Lynn, an American who fought for the teleman, began a journey back to the U.S. today to face charges that he conspired to kill his countrymen.
A Californian who took up the cause of Islamic radicals.
Lynn was airlifted off the Navy assault ship USS Bataan in the Arabian Sea and headed home.
The FBI has descended on Enron.
Well, well, well, well.
Amid allegations of document shredding while shareholders are lining up to sue the fallen energy giant, asked a federal judge to bar the company and its former auditor from destroying any more records.
So Enron is working now its way up the list of stories.
You know, now the second most important story began just the way What a gay did.
Don't know if it's going the same direction, but it certainly is warming up just like it, isn't it?
A Palestinian gunman fired on Israelis waiting at a Jerusalem bus stop Tuesday, fatally wounding two people and injuring 14 others.
And so it goes on and on and on and on and on.
Mel's hole last night.
I had hundreds and hundreds of emails today, fascinated with the story last night.
Mel did a follow-up interview, and the military still has possession, according to Mel, of his hole.
And Mel has had some pretty weird things happen to him and some pretty hard times since returning.
And of course, he did return from Australia.
But there's really nothing new to tell you about the hole regarding its fate, save what you heard at the end, that it's in the hands of the military, not Mel.
Now, of course, he's going to be buried in the hole.
That was one deal that he managed to cut when he turned the hole over.
Rough schematic comparing relative dimensions of Earth's crustal thickness, depth of a Kola well, and height of Mount McKinley.
I wish I could show this to you.
It's a diagram.
This is from Alaska Science Forum on Russia's Kola Peninsula near the Norwegian border at about the same latitude as Prudhoe Bay.
The Soviets have been drilling a well since 1970.
It is now over 40,000 feet deep, making this the deepest hole on Earth.
Previous record holder was the Bertha Rogers well in Oklahoma, a gas well that stopped at 32,000 feet, actually, when it struck molten sulfur.
It is not oil nor gas being sought from the cola well, but an understanding instead of the nature of the Earth's crust itself.
The U.S. began a similar investigation called the Project Molehole, but you didn't know that.
In 1961, the project, which was intended to penetrate the shallow crust under the Pacific Ocean off Mexico, was abandoned in 1966 because of lack of funding.
You would think, wouldn't you, that something as interesting as the very earth we stand upon and what lies beneath our feet at great depths unknown to science or anybody else would be of intense interest and would be funded, wouldn't you?
I mean, what do we know?
We know more about the moon than we know about what's way down there.
Of course, that was part of the fascination of Mel's whole, the whole story, is that we don't know what lies down beneath us.
Anyway, it claims in this article in the Alaska Science Forum, it is possible to draw a reasonable cross-section of the Earth based purely on remote geophysical, largely seismic methods.
In other words, you make a kaboom or there's an earthquake and they sort of get a picture of what they think might be down there based on that seismic activity, whether it's man-made or otherwise.
But digging down to take a look compares with studies made on the surface in the way that exploratory surgery compares, for example, with taking an x-ray.
And so, again, the deepest hole we know about, except for the one in Oklahoma that stopped at 32,000 feet, would be the Soviet hole at 40,000 feet.
Mixed in with the hundreds of emails that I got regarding Mel's hole, and again, there is really nothing new to tell you.
You know, the hole is in the hands of the gov. But one of the responses concerned a remark that somebody made.
I think somebody fast-blasted me, or maybe I didn't have that then, emailed me, that somebody should take a cat and throw it down Mel's hole and see what happens.
Of course, a horribly cruel suggestion, which I noted incidentally at the time in the show last night.
But apparently this man got thinking about a cat.
Should it be dropped into Mel's hole?
And he made up what he thought would be a representative sound of a cat of it going into Mel's hole, whether it jumped or was dropped into.
And so the following is his short and quick rendition of what it might sound like if a cat were to descend at terminal velocity into Mel's hole.
sound, he thinks, something like this.
unidentified
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, you see, ha ha ha ha ha ha.
A scientist says that he is, this comes from the L.A. Times.
I should always give you the source here.
A scientist says he has discovered a tiny island submerged off the Central California coast more than 16,000 years after it slipped from view during the waning years of the last ice age.
Well, well, well, the island, a little more than a mile in length, lies 400 feet underwater, about a dozen miles from shore.
It poked no more than 30 feet above the waves during the last ice age, when the continental-sized ice sheets that kept much of the Earth began to melt, raising global sea levels.
At that time, the four channel islands off Santa Barbara, San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacaba were formed a single larger island called Santa Rosé.
That's interesting.
So all over the world, we are discovering things that were once above water, and they're now below water.
Some of them very ancient, some of them possibly being very ancient civilizations.
And, oh, I don't know.
I just think that's pretty interesting, since if we were here before and had built some sort of civilization, whether it had been technical or non-technical, fact is, it's history.
and apparently it's happened again and again and again and again and we keep discovering these these these little hints of what what other you know, is it a myth?
Well, maybe not.
Maybe not.
And I've got an ABC News Science article here, which I have posted for you on my website, that you can read in depth.
So if you thought what Mark Hazelwood was saying was bull, then perhaps you might want to read a little bit of this article.
It is on my website right now.
It's a dated article.
Astronomers may have found hints of a massive, distant, still unseen object at the edge of the solar system, perhaps a tenth planet, perhaps a failed companion star that appears to be shoving comets toward the inner solar system from an orbit about 3 trillion miles away.
Hey, gee, does that sound familiar?
Huh?
Two teams of scientists, one in England, one at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, independently report this conclusion based on the highly elliptical orbits of so-called long-period comets that originate from an icy cloud of debris far, far beyond Pluto.
Said the University of Louisiana physicist Daniel Whitmere, we were driven to this by rejecting everything else we could think of.
In other words, they look at clumps of comets that are sent our way by this mass out there and nothing else works.
So this is again ABC News science and very clearly it's suggesting that scientists now believe there may be a tenth planet or their words, not mine.
You can go read it for yourself.
A failed companion star.
That would be a failed companion star.
What, to our star, right?
Woohoo.
So if you thought what Mark Hazelwood said was complete BS, then you may wish to sail over to my website at artbell.com under What's New.
You will find a number of new things, as you should in such a column.
And that would be a story from 1999, ABC News, entitled A Tenth Planet, question mark.
And then beneath that, you're going to find a photograph, which I really want you to see.
Drake Stern sends the following image.
This image was taken by an employee, allegedly, of a classified military facility in the Pacific Northwest sometime this month, so it's a new photograph.
We have no more information.
No official comment was available.
And base officials, of course, deny any awareness of any unusual activity.
However, if you'll take a look at the photograph, quite clearly it's some sort of military tower with military stuff on it, on a building.
And above it, you will see a classic disc, a classic UFO.
And so if this photograph is real and they don't have any awareness of this, then I am afraid for our lives.
For these are the people who are supposedly defending us against, you know, whatever.
Bad guys on the other side of the world, people who blow stuff up, crash airplanes into us.
Whatever is out there, whatever danger, that'd be our military.
It protects us, right?
They kill people and break things and do their job.
Except maybe when it comes to something like we have in this photograph.
Now, there's no way I can warrant the authenticity of any photograph ever these days, but you can get pretty close.
This one looks pretty good.
So that's the second item under what's new right now.
Then you might want to read a 13-year-old dream and any number of new things that are in there.
I've got a couple of photos that I'm also holding on to with regard to an attempt, some check on their authenticity before we put them up.
Pretty wild photographs indeed.
All right, I've got more in a moment, if you will stay right where you are.
unidentified
The End Streamlink, the audio subscription service of Coast to Coast AM, has a new name, Coast Insider.
You'll still get all the same great features for the same low price, just 15 cents a day when you sign up for one year.
The package includes podcasting, which offers the convenience of having shows downloaded automatically to your computer or MP3 player, and the iPhone app with live and on-demand programs.
You'll also get our amazing download library of three full years of shows.
Just think, as a new subscriber, over 1,000 shows will be available for you to collect, enjoy, and listen to at your leisure.
Plus, you'll get streamed and on-demand broadcasts of Art Bell, Summer Inside Shows, and two weekly classics.
And as a member, you'll have access to our monthly live chat sessions with George Norrie and special guests.
If you're a fan of Coast, you won't want to be without Coast Insider.
Visit Coast2CoastAM.com to sign up today.
Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast2Coast AM with George Norrie.
See, I think there are more secrets out there.
I think Fannie, Freddie, the banks are probably in deeper trouble than we are led to believe.
You have to either say these are just incompetent people or they're following an ideology or maybe even more nefarious, a game plan.
That's what I think is happening.
I don't think that they're stupid people.
I think they have a different agenda than we do.
And now we take you back to the night of January 22, 2002, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Japan has just announced plans to develop a satellite filled with all kinds of solar panels that would beam energy back to the Earth.
What an idea.
The National Space Development Agency, which hopes to launch an experimental version of the satellite between 2005 and 2007, has asked two teams of private companies to submit design proposals by the end of January.
The satellite would be put into orbit by NASDA, that's NASDA, NASDAQ's H-2A rocket, which had its maiden launch last month, or a similar sized rocket.
It would be able to generate, get this now, 10 kilowatts to one megawatt of power.
This is just to try it, you see.
They hope to develop a practical version of a space-based solar power generation system as early as 2020.
So what they would do is they would collect gigantic amounts of solar energy, which of course is available outside the atmosphere.
And then I believe, although it's not said here, you'd have to read the article in detail, that they would probably attempt to microwave all of that electricity back to Earth.
It's an interesting proposition with a few what-ifs attached to it.
Like, what if the path of the satellite were to wander?
And I'm told, no problem, but, you know, I read Sunstroke.
Remember that?
It was kind of an interesting book about the possibility of a satellite that would collect energy, massive energy, microwave it to Earth.
And it is microwave energy, you know, just like comes out of your microwave oven.
And naturally, if a satellite of that sort should begin to drift, it could conceivably, in the science fiction version of this horror story, begin to sort of cook people along the way.
As Being in a microwave oven as it traversed your path if you were unlucky enough to be below it, you would be sizzled like a steak cooked alive.
But the Japanese are bound and determined to give this a shot, so it'll be interesting to see what happens.
I'm holding on to a story about anthrax spores.
I guess you've heard about that, right?
Back in the 90s, during a turbulent period of labor complaints and recriminations among rival scientists, it seems as though lab specimens of the anthrax spores, the Ebola virus, and other pathogens disappeared from the Army's Biological Warfare Research Facility.
As of right now, nobody knows what happened to this stuff.
Now, a lot of people speculate, well, it must have died no matter what, but they do have some evidence of a scientist in there working late at night because he left some strange messages on the computer, working on things like anthrax.
Yesterday, Leonard David, my old friend, who used to write for a number of space publications in Washington and covered our press conferences and now is working for Space.com, put out a remarkable story that Odyssey, Mars Odyssey, the spacecraft launched last April and arrived in Mars orbit in December and has been aerobraking into its final orbit over the last few weeks.
Well, because it was in this prep phase where they basically were dipping into the atmosphere and slowing it down and narrowing the orbit and basically circularizing at a little over 200 miles altitude, about 250 some miles.
Well they've had a problem with one of the radiation measuring instruments called MARIA or MARI and they are not going to troubleshoot that until they are in the proper orbit.
And what they're going to do in the next few days is to release a high-gain antenna and the instrument boom for the gamma-ray spectrometer, which is going to measure, in essence, the presence of water underneath the surface, close to the top of the soil.
And that should go smoothly if everything on the spacecraft is working.
And they say that everything else is working extraordinarily well.
But Leonard Daly came out yesterday with this story by Stephen Saunders, who was the project scientist for the mission, that over the next six weeks, during the first month or six weeks of the science operations, Odyssey is going to start looking at high-priority targets.
And they're going to look at, for instance, the potential landing areas for the 2003 rover missions that are going in the next time Mars is closest to us, which happens to be 2003, we're going to send two little rovers, bigger than the ones that were sent with Pathfinder, but not as big as some of the ones they're going to send later.
And they'll be landed like Pathfinder in these tetrahedral airbags.
And that will be very interesting to watch because it's where are they going to land them.
He says, this is quoting Saunders now, we've got a number of other high-priority targets that are of great interest to people in general.
These include the top of Olympus Mons.
That's that huge Shield volcano, which is the size of Kansas and about 16 miles high.
Vallas Marineris, which is this 3,000-mile-long canyon that stretches across a quarter of Mars.
It's about two miles deep in some places.
It makes the Grand Canyon look like a rivulet.
And, drum roll, please, the so-called face on Mars.
Michael Nalen, you know, the principal investigator on Mars Surveyor, which is the other spacecraft currently orbiting Mars, taking really neat pictures, you know, he put like 10,000 on a list of 10,000 targets.
You can't get lower than 10,000.
And here we are, Saunders, new team, new spacecraft, based, by the way, at a new place.
The Themis instrument, which is the imaging and infrared instrument that's going to take these pictures, combination of heat images and spectral data composition and visual information, is a whole new room.
It's a whole new team, and it's based, the Themis group is based at the University of Arizona, not Michael Malin and his little crowd down there in San Diego.
This is double speak, you know, new speak or Wellian speak, whatever you want to call it.
Some political force, and I really think it's this audience, I think it's the folks out there, you boys and girls and everybody listening to us tonight, I think you can take extraordinary pride in forcing this space agency to make this a high priority.
Now we get to the good stuff, because unlike a just black and white visual image, this camera, this instrument called Themis, which is named after the Greek goddess of justice, I told somebody that this afternoon, and they doubled over in laughter at the incredible irony.
The goddess of justice is intervening to get us real data on Sidonia, finally.
All right, what it will give us is a thermal image.
You've seen these high-res satellite recon shots of the Soviet Union or of test targets in the United States.
And some of them show you, for instance, there's one neat shot that shows an airstrip with the tarmac where the jets used to be parked.
And there are no jets there, but there are little outlines on the black asphalt showing where the jets were parked and the shadows kept the ground cool.
And the parking lot was warm, not the parking lot, but the tarmac.
And so the CIA could literally count the number of Soviet MiGs that were there that had been moved before the satellite came over because of the shadowing.
That's what FEMIS will do, at a resolution of about 50, 60 meters, something like that, comparable to Vikings' visual imagery at Sidonia, which was damn good.
And what it will tell us is what happens to the ground when the sun goes down.
Now, ordinary materials, you know, if I take these kind of scans of Earth, you can tell the difference between asphalt and concrete and grass and mountains and deserts and savannahs by the cooling rate down below.
What we're expecting, those of us who think there's a lot of artificial stuff down there, is that it will cool quickly.
It doesn't have much mass.
And the natural background will cool slowly.
So you should get a differential that will make the artificial stuff stand out like a sore thumb.
Well, I don't know, but let me tell you why I think it's going to occur on the face.
All right?
Well, I'm just deferring the answer for a moment.
We've got data going back to 19, I think, 88 from Mark Carlato and a guy named Stein, I forget his first name, who when Mark was at TASC, this independent research group up in the northeast, they did what was called a fractal analysis of the Sidonia region.
The same kind of technique that was used to find Saddam Hussein's tanks camouflaged in the Iraqi and Kuwaiti desert during Desert Storm.
And the way it works is that you can't really hide artificial stuff because it doesn't look like a sand dune.
You can put a tarp over it and you can sprinkle sand on it, but the computer looking at the pixels will be able to pick out the artificial signature of what's hiding under the tarp, even if you try to camouflage it.
So applying this technique, which was the first time it was ever done, Carlotto looked at the Viking data.
And lo and behold, the face on Mars has the most non-fractal whopping signature of anything in the Sidonia region.
In fact, in terms of numbers, it's more non-natural, non-background than tanks in the desert during desert storm.
Now, my theory, and I actually published this in one of the other editions of Monuments, an earlier edition, was that this non-fractal, meaning non-natural background signature, could only come if there was artificial stuff on the face or the face was built of artificial stuff.
That it was basically a huge construct, a huge building.
It's not a sculpted mesa like everybody else has assumed.
Well, this new mission, Odyssey, with the Themis camera in taking the thermal scan imagery should confirm or deny that hypothesis.
It should test it.
And my bet is because the fractal data is there, that it looks artificial, that when we get the thermal scans, if they're honest, if they're going to play straight with us, we will confirm that there's artificial things down there that are cooling at a very different rate than the natural background deserts of Sedona.
The day that Odyssey left Earth, which was April 7th of last year, Arthur sent an email, which I reproduced in my latest edition of Monuments, to the project manager at Lockheed Martin that built the spacecraft.
And he said, and I quote, you know, this is like burned in my brain by now, he says, I won't believe in artifacts until I can see the license numbers.
Well, the most interesting question of all, though, Richard, is, and I'm not sure how to answer it, with all of a sudden the face being one of the highest priorities, did we, in fact, motivate them to make it a high priority?
Or, I mean, they've always shown signs of never particularly wanting to listen to us in the slightest.
So maybe they've decided on their own that it's a very high priority suddenly.
I've been saying for several months now that if this trend curve was what I thought it was, that this president, the son of the other guy, would take up where his father left off.
And one of the first indications we had is when I was told that it was Dick Cheney who basically mandated months ago, before April, that the new face image by Surveyor, that full-on face image that's so amazing that you and I have had interesting disagreements about, that that was mandated by none other than the vice president.
Now, we have the firing of Dan Golden.
We have Sean O'Keefe, the new administrator, saying he wants to return NASA to the glory days of Jim Webb, who was Kennedy's kick-ass administrator.
Look, this is like reading the tea leaves back during the old Kremlin days.
Where you didn't have a bug in the Kremlin.
You had to figure out what they were doing by the number of trips they made to the John.
But that's the way this game is played.
No, I think we are on the eve of something interesting.
Arthur's comments, official concert, pictures out immediately, and the kinds of pictures.
We have never had art, this kind of data, which not only is the thermal data, but also composition.
This gadget, which has 15 different spectral bands, will actually be able to read the surface at this high resolution and tell us whether we're looking at silicates or aluminum or glass.
I mean, I don't only want to see the face with this gadget.
I want to see all of Sidonia because of all the other structures down there and the geometry we've seen and the evidences of pyramidal things and tetrahedral things and stunning regularity and all that.
So if this opens the door, I mean, this is an incredible breakthrough, I think.
High priority for Sidonia.
And again, keep in mind, this is a place that NASA has said officially, as of last spring, in May when they put out that MGS image, there's nothing there.
We've got something that I'm really proud of, and Paul's really proud of, and I can't wait for Tom Mount at RKO, who called me this afternoon and said, what are you doing?
A figure currently increases more than 17 million copies a year.
His newest novel, one in which I might add I mentioned, One Door Away from Heaven, is now available.
Eight of his novels have risen to number one on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list from the corner of his eye.
Lightning, Midnight, Cold Fire, Hideaway, Dragon Tears, Intensity, and Soul Survivor, making him one of only about a dozen writers ever to have achieved that milestone.
Eleven of his books have risen to the number one position in paperback.
His books have also been major bestsellers in countries as diverse as Japan and Sweden.
He's written a screenplay for the film adaptation of his novel Cold Fire.
He wrote and executive produced the Face of Fear for Warner Bros.
CBS TV.
Phantoms, based on the author's screenplay starring Peter O'Toole and Joanna Going, was released by Miramax Dimension in January of 68.
Intensity, which went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, was filmed by Peter Gruber's Mandalay as a miniseries for the Fox Network and aired initially in August of 97.
Mandalay also produced a miniseries based on the novel Soul Survivor, while ABC has produced a miniseries of the author's novel, Mr. Murder.
Dean Kuntz was born and raised in Pennsylvania.
He graduated from Shippensburg State College, now Shippensburg University, and his job after graduation was with the Appalachian Poverty Program, where he was expected to counsel and tutor underprivileged children on a one-to-one basis his first day on the job.
He discovered the previous occupier of his position had been beaten up by the very kids that he'd been trying to help and had landed in the hospital for several weeks.
The following year was filled with some challenges, and Kuntz was more highly motivated than ever to build a career as a writer.
He wrote nights and weekends, which he continued to do after leaving the poverty program and going to work as an English teacher in a suburban school district outside Harrisburg after he'd been a year and a half in that position.
His wife, Gerda, made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
She said, I'll support you for five years.
And if you can't make it as a writer in that time, you'll never make it.
So he had five years to do it.
And of course, the rest is history.
He did it.
Coming up in a moment, Dean Kuhl.
unidentified
Coming up in a moment, Dean Kuhl.
Coast at Coast AM is happy to announce that our website is now optimized for mobile device users, specifically for the iPhone and Android platforms.
Now you'll be able to connect to most of the offerings of the Coast website on your phone in a quick and streamlined fashion.
And if you're a Coast Insider, you'll have our great subscriber features right on your phone, including the ability to listen to live programs and stream previous shows.
No special app is necessary to enjoy our new mobile site.
Simply visit CoastToCoastAM.com on your iPhone or Android browser.
Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast2Coast AM with George Norrie.
See, I think there are more secrets out there.
I think Fannie, Freddie, the banks are probably in deeper trouble than we are led to believe.
You have to either say these are just incompetent people or they're following an ideology or maybe even more nefarious, a game plan.
That's what I think is happening.
I don't think that they're stupid people.
I think they have a different agenda than we do.
And now we take you back to the night of January 22, 2002, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
When I start a book, I usually don't know much more about it than I have a little bit of a premise, a little bit of an idea, and I usually have two characters that I'm going to throw together in a scene.
And I know that opening scene.
For instance, One Door Away from Heaven, I knew it would have this disabled girl who was nine years old and had a deformed leg and hand, but was spunky and witty and going to be a lot of fun to listen to.
And I knew in the same scene there was going to be this 28-year-old woman who was at the bottom of her life, who'd made a lot of wrong decisions, was trying to change her life.
And that in this meeting was going to be one of those serendipitous encounters that changes lives.
And that's really about all I knew.
And I kind of begin that way and leap off a cliff and hope to God it's going to land somewhere and make sense.
How frequently, when you finish with the book, the final, final, final, and you send it off to the publisher, do you know, what's your track record of knowing how big a hit what you just sent off is going to be?
I travel around that territory some, but this one deals with a lot of my books have such twists and turns, you get into talking about the storyline, you think, whoops, what am I going to give away?
But let's just say that there are two characters in this who become essentially defenders of one of my main characters.
And they're twins who were Las Vegas showgirls, the Spelkenfelder sisters, they're called.
And they're the ones who make reference to you at one point in the book because they've realized they're in the middle of a total Art Bell moment.
Your interests, obviously, based on some of the questions that you sent along that might be interesting, really, really do range far and wide.
You talk a lot about the possibility of parallel realities.
Do you believe that may be the case?
There may be, certainly our best theoretical physicists now think there are perhaps as many as 11 parallel dimensions, and those would be parallel realities of some sort.
And we may soon reach parallel realities.
I'm told they're working very hard now on a quantum computer.
And if you have a quantum computer, it may well be that the next step is into another dimension.
Well, my previous book, Before One Door Away from Heaven, was one called From the Corner of His Eye.
And it deals, although it takes you a long time in the book to recognize this, it deals with the concept of parallel realities, parallel worlds that are side by side.
I say in the book that I try to take things that are in quantum mechanics that we know because quantum mechanics works.
I mean, we have television because quantum mechanics works.
We have the computers we have and the silicone chips because it's an application of quantum mechanics.
So we know that so much of quantum mechanics tells us is true of the world.
And one of the things it tells us is that there are an infinite number, in fact, of alternate realities side by side with ours that exist not as a different place in space or time really, but exist simultaneously with ours and are beyond our comprehension to see.
When you start getting into theoretical physics, it begins to be overwhelming.
But let's, instead of trying to argue how or follow through the argument of how they show this, I just, I find it interesting to accept that as a point and take off with it in a book, to think what quantum mechanics tells us is very mechanistic.
They sort of tell us that every time an event could happen one, two, or three ways.
For instance, every time a volcano could erupt or not erupt.
If it erupts in this world yesterday, there's a world where it didn't erupt.
And that these things continue to split off infinitely, almost on a second-by-second basis.
And the number of realities out there is beyond human comprehension.
There's realities in which Nazi Germany won World War II.
There's realities where I, probably a lot of them, where I didn't become a writer because I was too lazy or my wife didn't make me that offer.
And I had other lives.
And I found that a fascinating concept for a book and worked on that.
I took it a step further because I think there is, for me, it seems the mechanistic idea that this happens mechanistically didn't work for me.
I theorized that since consciousness is the greatest power in the universe, and science continuously shows us that, including quantum mechanics, that it may be that what shlits off these parallel realities are conscious decisions that all of us make.
And that when we make a choice to do one thing or another that is of significant enough level, say even a moral choice, I decide to rob a bank, and so I do, but there's a world where I decide not to rob that bank.
It is in our choices that we make this infinite variety of universes.
I frequently interview Dr. Michio Kaku, who's a world-renowned physicist, co-inventor or discoverer of string theory, heavy-duty guy.
And he suggests that time travel might eventually be possible and that if you were to be able to go back in time, of course, the old paradox of you not being able to kill your grandfather or whatever, and that if you did, you'd just blink out.
He said the way that the law that might prohibit that would be a simple one.
It would be that if you did something like that, you would simply instantly create another bubble, another universe in which that never happened.
And so that's sort of right down the line of what you're talking about.
And that might be the one answer to the whole paradox problem.
And that there could be literally an infinite number of those, kind of like a bubble on a bubble on a bubble on a bubble, all separate little universes.
When I wrote about this, I started getting a lot of feedback on the previous book from people who said, I've had experiences that prove to me there are parallel realities.
Because I said in the book, I suggested the way to think about them, because I have a character who can move objects in this book between one parallel reality and another.
Very small things.
It's a quarter, actually.
And he can do little tricks.
But then there's somebody later who can do more.
And I suggest that if you think about these parallel realities as a big block of sliced Swiss cheese, if you take a block of slices of Swiss cheese, you're going to see that the holes sometimes line up and you can see through two, three, four slices because the holes overlap.
That's right.
And then ultimately you can't see.
And he makes the statement that I can reach through to other realities and go a certain distance in that.
So I try to visualize it for readers of thinking all these infinite slices, which are each one another reality in which you exist, or don't.
You may have died in some of these realities young.
It's hard to comprehend, but at least it begins to answer some questions that heretofore we had no answer whatsoever for.
It was just sort of one of those, well, you have to have faith.
So it is fascinating, and I suppose your work then is going to begin to reflect some of these new, I don't know, discoveries, new theories, new ideas more and more.
You know, I once had a little personal experience, and this sounds terribly mundane, but when you think about it, as I have all my life since this happened, it argues for me the existence of these parallel realities.
When my wife and I were living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for a number of years, we rented an apartment, and in this apartment there was a dinette area adjacent to the kitchen.
We got in a nice dining room suit, and we were very proud of our first good furniture.
And we were sitting at dinner one night, and we lived in this apartment three years, and we were sitting at dinner one night, and I dropped a fork.
It fell alongside my chair and went under the table.
When I pulled out my chair and got down to look under the table, I could not find the fork.
It had disappeared.
I crawled all over that room.
I searched behind the buffet.
I looked everywhere.
We never found that fork.
Now, about a year or more went by, and we had guests at dinner.
Nothing like that ever happened again.
I tried to repeat it.
I threw silverware under there.
I threw everything under there.
Nothing at any angle would repeat that event.
But about a year or so later, we had some guests at dinner, and the gentleman dropped his napkin.
It slid off his lap.
And he said, oh, I dropped my napkin.
And he pulled out his chair and went down to get it.
And his napkin, he couldn't find it.
And then I told him the story of what had happened to my fork, and we spent a larger part of the rest of that dinner with him repeatedly trying to lose another napkin, fork, whatever he could.
I'd never written or spoken of that incident, but after I wrote From the Corner of His Eye, I got fascinating stories from people saying, I have had incidents in my life that tell me there is somewhere else that things can cross over to.
And those stories have just piled up ever since From the Corner of His Eye came out to the point where...
And people are, of course, hesitant to tell them really to anybody else other than, for example, yourself or myself because they know that other people just are not going to listen.
But what you've said is absolutely right.
Things occasionally, those Swiss cheese holes line up for just perhaps an instant and strange things either happen or can be seen.
Now, you said out of the corner of your eye, we've been discussing on this program a great deal of what's seen from the corner of your eye at just the edge of your peripheral vision, and many thousands of my listeners have been seeing these, I will call them shadow people, because that's the only name we have.
And when I get back, I'll explain.
We've got to take a break here.
Shadow people, the corner of your eye, other dimensions.
You didn't think that's where we were headed with Dean Kuntz, did you?
But maybe we're headed that way with most thinking people now, because maybe the world is headed that way.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 22nd, 2002.
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 of you.
Some of them want to be of you.
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 of you.
The hollow city dreams of me.
I bring the beyond the dark today.
Would you have to take me?
We had to get out before, but now I just got away.
We go on over the night, I'm playing in the shadow.
I'm playing.
I'm here at night, till the morning light We've got it, oh, we've got it tonight We've got a good girl, we've got to turn You and me on the town.
We met it all day.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 22nd, 2002.
Dean Koontz is here tonight, and we were talking about alternate reality parallel universes.
And, oh, I don't know, almost a year ago now, Dean, I had this person call in on the air, as we just have a lot of open lines here, and they said, you know, I've been seeing these weird things in the corner of my eye, in my peripheral vision, that would just move, and I knew there was something there, movement, but I really couldn't quite detect what it was.
But now, of late, I've been seeing these things full on, and they are they only sort of instantly appear and then quickly disappear or appear surprised and take off like crazy, walk through walls, whatever.
I call them shadow people for lack of a better name.
And that set off a landslide.
I had thousands and thousands of emails from people who have begun to see what for lack of a better name, they're calling shadow people.
And I wonder if the Swiss cheese that you were talking about occasionally lines up not just to either let things drop through or appear, but to let us get a visual look-see at something we would not normally see.
I wasn't expecting this, and it's so interesting because of all the responses I've had to the book that I wrote about alternate, well, from the corner of his eye, the most often expressed stories that I get from people that they believe show them that there are alternate realities have to do with this very thing, what you would call shadow people.
And I have gotten just tons of them, and almost always they begin with, I know this will sound crazy, and they give me their bonaci days, who they are and how normal members of the community they are.
They go the gamut of people seeing, they frequently report seeing in their home, it's often in their own home, when they write me about it anyway, that they walk into a living room and they see a person they don't know and of course panic sets in and the other person sees them and this look of surprise overcomes the other person and then they're gone.
And some of them have said to me, I think that I, for a moment, encountered a glimpse of another reality where I don't live in this house, where somebody else lives in this house.
And if you think about this, this could be where all of our legendary sightings of ghosts, or many of them, may actually originate.
They may have references this.
One woman wrote me that this one is curious.
Two particular ones come to mind.
One woman wrote me about she had been in a pet shelter and she had seen this particular dog.
It was mutt and very unusual coloration, everything else, and she was very drawn to it.
And she considered adopting it and then decided she couldn't do that.
She just didn't have room in her life for a dog right now.
So she went home and a few days later she was walking through her living room and she saw this dog and the same dog, same coloration, out of the corner of her eye essentially.
And when she turned, there was this dog and it was holding this tug toy in its mouth, a shake toy, and it was shaking its toy and it looked at her and then ran out of the room.
She searched the house and couldn't find the dog and convinced herself that because she hadn't adopted it, the dog had been put to death and what she had seen was the ghost of the dog.
And she became so overwhelmed with this by this that she went back to the pet shelter to find out had the dog been put to death?
But it had not been put to death.
And by divers means she managed to get the name of the people who had adopted the dog and she had to convince herself the dog was still alive.
She went there to see those people and when the woman opened the door the dog came to the door holding the very tug toy she had seen in her house.
And she has been trying to figure that out ever since and what she thinks is that somewhere in some parallel world she took that dog home and she got a glimpse of that world where that dog lived in her house.
And I can't find a different explanation for it so I find that sort of thing fascinating.
And one woman wrote me to tell me, this isn't the sighting of a person, but this is particularly interesting to me.
She said that her husband had died a couple of years before, and they had bought their dream house many years before he died, probably 20 years before he died, and he had been a lover of Art Deco.
And when they bought this house, he wanted to do the house in Art Deco decor, and she was not a lover of Art Deco.
And when Bush came to show, they went her direction and decorated the house.
And she said a year or two after he had died, she was one day walking through a room and suddenly recognized that the furnishings weren't the furnishings of her house or anything she was familiar with.
And when she turned and stopped and looked at what she was walking past, the room was furnished in Art Deco.
She was so frightened by it, she ran out of the room, called a daughter, and when the daughter came over, of course, the room was as it always has been.
She was convinced that for a moment she saw the life where they decorated the house the way her husband wanted to.
Or either that or what he couldn't get done in life, he did in death.
As the program proceeds, I get messages on my computer from my listeners.
It's kind of a neat service.
Chris in Palmer, Alaska, listening right now, asks, if our choices create other realities, then where the hell does the power needed to create those realities come from?
And you wrote something that I really powerfully agree with.
You suggest there may be evidence that consciousness may be the most powerful force in the universe.
This is probably my favorite topic right now because I have been doing experiments, probably rogue experiments in consciousness for a few years now, pretty scary stuff, which I'll tell you about and you can see what you think.
It began, you know, innocently, I thought, well, let's see if millions of mines can affect the weather.
And so we looked at several drought-stricken areas, Florida, Texas, up in Vancouver, British Columbia.
And I tell you, I had the entire audience concentrate, millions of people, and within hours, with no forecast of rain whatsoever in these areas, we produced rain.
In one case, so much rain that there was terrible flooding.
Then we tried a series of experiments with people who were ill, mass experiments.
Again, millions of people.
Each one of them declares and would sign papers that they felt the effect and it brought them up out of a near-death situation.
You know, one had a heart attack, one had embolisms in the brain, and all very interesting stuff.
Then along came Princeton University, which had this incredible study, Dean, that you might look into.
They have what they call eggs.
These are computers placed throughout the world, and they all report back to a mainframe computer at Princeton.
And for years now, without our knowledge, we're just finding out about it, Princeton has been monitoring these eggs.
They're just computers sitting out there spitting out random numbers.
They are random number generators.
And they report back to Princeton any non-randomness.
And what they've done is they've watched world events.
And this is going to give you something to think about.
They have noticed that during large breaking news world-type events, there's this incredible spike in non-randomness.
These random computers all of a sudden start getting non-random.
And they have graphed this.
They've got graphs of it.
And the one for 911, for example, shows that four hours prior to the 911 event, and then for about two or three hours following the 911 event, there was this incredible spike, just like coming right out of the noise from 0 to 100.
And it began actually four hours prior to the event itself, which gives one a little bit of pause.
And I thought, boy, is that incredible.
So I got in touch with Dean Raden, sort of unofficially, who's involved with the project.
And I thought, let's have the audience give it a shot.
I started to get scared of these experiments because I said to myself, you know, I don't know what the hell I'm doing and I don't know what I'm messing with.
But I thought, nevertheless, let's give this one a try.
And Dean Raden was involved with the Princeton deal, and so I had the audience do a concentration at a specific time on the program trying to affect the mainframe at Princeton.
Well, we got back a graph that just blew our socks off.
I mean, we just blew it right off the chart at the appointed time.
Came right up out of the noise, and it just went right up to 100, and boom, right off the charts.
Now, somewhere in there is the beginning of something, and I don't know what.
I've kind of stopped doing this because I'm afraid of the repercussions.
I'm sort of afraid that at the end of one of these is going to be somebody saying, ah, but you didn't read the fine print.
Yes, you held the hurricane off the coast for a while, but look, it built up to a category five and killed gazillions of people and you did it or your audience did it.
But a few experiments there for you in the power of consciousness.
I think you're right.
I think it's the most powerful force in the universe and it's what we will discover and what lies ahead for us.
Well what what you're saying is really another thing confirmed by quantum mechanics which among many other things in quantum mechanics they've shown repeatedly that observation of an experiment, I'm sure you've discussed this with people in the past, observation of an experiment results in a different outcome than if this experiment is run without observation and the results looked at later.
That implies that the will of the person watching the experiment has an effect upon it.
And we're talking about experiments on the subatomic level now.
So if willpower can affect the action of atomic particles, then that has some amazing implications.
What it says to me is think about how completely that relates to what basically all faith systems tell us, that the universe is a created place, that it is an act of will.
It was an act of creation, and that we have a reflection of that will within ourselves, that we have been granted free will and the power to shape our destiny.
And that's really what a lot in quantum mechanics is showing us, that in fact some quantum physicists will say that on the subatomic level, matter doesn't really act like matter.
It acts like, some of them say like dreams and some of them say like thoughts because they're struggling to put a description to it.
I feel very strongly that conscious ability of the mind to shape our own lives, the power of it sounds trite, but the power of positive thinking.
I am not surprised that you would say they tracked on these random generation computers, they track links to major negative events because I've sometimes had the feeling that when societies get very negative, that they create negative circumstances for themselves and I think it's almost imperative that we be as optimistic as we can because I do believe that to some degree or other,
as quantum mechanics shows us, we shape our destiny and that can have profound consequences to all our futures if we get as a society by the millions and millions into a very negative state of mind.
I just, while we were talking here, paused something up, and it'll take me one minute to read it to you.
But it's kind of funny because I wrote it several years ago in a book of photographs.
They were photographs of graveyards, and I was asked, they weren't scary photographs, they were actually quite beautiful.
They were European graveyards full of gorgeous sculpture.
And I was asked to write an introduction to this, and I did, and in that, I talked about whether I believe in life after death.
And I wrote this, which I just pawed open here because here's where our discussion left us.
I wrote, I believe in life after death.
To me, eternal life is not an article of faith, but an even more obvious fact than any of the laws of physics.
The universe is an efficient creation.
Matter becomes energy.
Energy becomes matter.
One form of energy is converted into another form.
The balance is forever changing, but the universe is a closed system from which no particle of matter or wave of energy is ever lost.
Nature not only loathes waves, but forbids it.
The human mind and spirit, at their noblest, can transform the material world for the better.
We can transform the human condition, lifting ourselves from a state of primal fear when we dwelled in caves and shuddered at the sight of the moon, to a position from which we can contemplate eternity and hope to understand the works of God.
Light cannot change itself into stone by an act of will, and stone cannot build itself into temples.
Only the human spirit can act with volition and consciously change itself.
It is the only thing in all creation that is not entirely at the mercy of forces outside itself, and it is therefore the most powerful and valuable form of energy in the universe.
And that's why I believe it has to go on after death.
I interviewed this really interesting lady a few weeks ago, Pam Reynolds.
She was on 48 hours.
48 Hours did a big piece on her.
She had an embolism in her brain.
Might have seen it or heard about it.
And the embolism was, you know, like a balloon ready to burst, of course.
And it was a death sentence for Pam.
Nothing she could do.
It was just a matter of when, not if.
The doctors, though, did a really strange procedure on Pam.
They lowered her body temperature, drained all the blood from her body, every bit of it.
So her heart stopped, respiration ceased, brain waves, EEG activity, all stopped.
I mean, dead cold for an hour, Dean, for one full hour.
Well, of course, when they took the blood out of her body, the embolism deflated.
They were then able to open up her head, her brain, and just clip the embolism and repair it, and then put the blood back in her body, put the paddles on her chest, gave her a jolt, and Pam came back after an hour.
Dean, after a whole hour.
Now, during that hour, you might ask, where was Pam?
Well, Pam has an answer for that.
She, on the one hand, was able to account, and this is backed up by her doctor, for every single minute of the hour that she was gone.
Everything that went on in the operating room, the tools that were used, things that were said, all the rest of it.
She can account for that hour, that linear hour.
But she also was out of her body and totally somewhere else.
Now, I regard that as probably one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I've ever heard that there absolutely is something separate from our electrical brain activity when it ceases that continues to exist.
I wrote a book once called Hideaway, in which it sounds very much like her experience.
A fellow was dead for an extended period of time because he died in a traffic accident in which his car tumbled into a river, and a river was icy and frozen, and his body temperature dropped.
and during the time he was out, he went elsewhere.
But there are too many...
When all of her function stopped, something should have happened to Pam.
She should not be there in that body anymore.
It's interesting.
It's something that medical science doesn't really like to talk about.
There's all kind of arguments when people have been in frozen or near-frozen condition, not frozen enough to develop cell damage from it, but have been revived after extended periods of time and have been dead.
By all medical argument, that consciousness could not continue to exist in their body.
The brain function had stopped.
In many of these cases, brain function had stopped totally.
Well, if that is then possible, if consciousness can step aside for a time and document what's going on in the operating room or talk about the dead relatives and the white light or whatever, and then step back again into the body, that strongly argues that in all likelihood we don't even begin to understand death at all and that there really is absolutely a continuation.
Dean, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour already.
That was fast.
Dean Coots is here.
Household word.
Author of lots of scary stuff.
Not horror, mind you, but certainly horrific.
That was a good set.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM, raging through the nighttime.
Don't touch that dial.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 22nd, 2002.
No doubt, sick.
I've got to ride like the wind to be free again.
And I've got a long way to go.
A long way to go.
To make it to the border and make it go.
So I...
I'm going to go.
Riders on the Storm Riders on the Storm Into this house we're born Into this world we're thrown Like a dog without a bone And half you're out alone Riders on the Storm There's a killer on
the road His brain is swerving like a toad Take a long holiday day Let your children play If you give this man a ride Sweet mammal he will die Killer on the road Yeah
Yeah
listening to Art Bell somewhere in time tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 22nd 2002.
Bill in Ohio says Harris, I came out of my bedroom the other day, glanced at my office at the end of the hall, and I swear to God, I saw myself sitting at the chair at the computer.
I looked back and it, in quotes, was gone.
Another universe?
Possibly.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
*Square*
Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast to Coast AM with George Norrie.
I argue with people about disclosure time and time again.
I've told them governments are not going to come out willingly to tell us it's going to happen by a mistake, it's going to happen by a whistleblower, but it's not going to be an organized thing.
Governments won't do that.
And the reason why they won't do it is because they do not want us to know.
They think that they'll lose control of us if we know.
If you actually truly believe that we were being visited by extraterrestrials and you had categorical proof that it was happening, do you think you would listen to some of the bull that government throws out all the time?
Absolutely not.
You'd look toward the heavens, you'd say there's got to be a better way, and you would start doing your own thing.
And you would forget all about government control and everything else.
So the bottom line is government will never, ever disclose the true facts of UFOs.
Now we take you back to the night of January 22, 2002, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Fortunately, it's an old book, so I don't feel so bad about giving things away because I figure a lot of people have read it.
But there you are.
I've always been fascinated, as I know you have, with time travel, and I wanted to tell a story that was a completely different approach to time travel.
And so the book begins with a woman who, at her birth, is the night of her birth.
The doctor who is going to deliver her is drunk.
And he's trying to go out in a snowstorm to get to the hospital to deliver her.
And this man comes out of the snowstorm in a blast of lightning, which generally doesn't go with a snowstorm, and overpowers the doctor and prevents him from going to the hospital.
And somebody else ends up delivering this girl.
And throughout her life, she's unaware of this, but we as a reader are, and throughout her life, however, this man at key points in our life shows up and changes her fate for the better.
And my premise in the book was that time travel had been invented a long time ago by Nazi scientists who had invented a form of time travel that could only travel to the future because I didn't want to deal with the paradox of going into the past, which we discussed earlier.
So they've invented a form of time travel in the early 40s that allowed them to go forward in the future, their purpose being to go forward to find futuristic weapons and to bring them back to change the course of the war.
And they can only go forward and come back to the point of origin of the trip.
And one of these Nazi scientists in the book sees this woman when she is 20-some years old, or 30 years old, and she is a paraplegic in a wheelchair, but she's a relatively famous author.
And he happens to see her at a book signing.
You don't find this out for well in the book.
And he is so taken with her and so fascinated by her grace and her beauty that he reads the book and he falls in love with her.
And so he begins to use, she becomes his redemption.
And he begins to use, unknown to the other people in these experiments, he uses his time traveling to move forward at various points in her life, including the night she was born, and save her from the doctor who crippled her.
So she does not become disabled.
And he keeps coming throughout her life to change her destiny.
And it's kind of a very strange love story.
But ultimately, the Nazis, of course, find out what's going, and they send people forward to get her.
You know, when I was eight years old, I was writing little stories on tablet paper and drawing covers and peddling them throughout the Tips for Nickel.
And if I were to tell you what the subjects of them were, they were uncannily like what I became obsessed with as a writer and an adult.
Do you think ultimately, you know, this is such a fascinating topic, time travel.
You're right, I'm fascinated by it.
You may recall the movie Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour, amazing movie, a love story about time travel.
If you've never seen it, you ought to.
I actually went to a reunion up on an island off Michigan for that movie.
And so I just, the whole subject of time travel, it seems to me if it's ever going to be possible, then of course somebody has asked rightfully, then where are the time travelers?
And they may well be here.
Sean, we don't know what the rules of time travel may or may not be, but if it is ever going to be possible and if our society continues without blowing itself up, you've got to imagine it will eventually be possible, and so there should be time travelers, shouldn't there?
Well, logic tells you that if at some point in the future it were ever to become possible to travel backward in time, there probably would be something the average person was doing, I doubt.
It would be something that was the government, an academic project, and the people involved in it would have to abide by rules, and those rules would be not to reveal themselves among us.
So it would make perfect sense that they could be here but unknown.
Well, I think when you're looking at something, anything that's a scientific breakthrough from the atom bomb onward has cost so many billions of dollars to research and develop that you need somebody with an entity with very deep pockets.
And you almost have to imagine then that it has to be a government entity that creates that.
Unless there is, of course, the kind of breakthrough that you saw in the turn of the previous century when a lot of people like Edison and so forth were able to, almost with one-man shops, create revolutionary developments.
And I don't think we're past the time that that could happen, but it's less and less likely as science gets more complicated.
Well, let's talk about stumbling in science for a second.
We have either cloned a person or we are about to clone a person.
My personal belief is somewhere in a lab, somewhere, it's probably already been done.
And doctors here, scientists here are saying that if the U.S. passes laws against cloning, they will pick up sticks and go to Europe or Scandinavia or wherever they can do it and happily produce babies, cloned babies, for rich people with big egos who want clones.
And they will do that for the right amount of money.
Well, if we're talking about using scientific knowledge to ultimately be able to take a sample of your organ tissue and clone a new kidney for you that will be or a new heart or that will have no chance of rejection, that's one thing.
But when we're talking about cloning human beings, I am utterly opposed.
And for this reason, which I don't often, I don't know if I see people talking about this.
You'll get into these arguments.
Well, is it moral or is it right?
But for me, the issue is what about those individuals who are being cloned, who are being created?
We don't have the knowledge to create and to be confident that we can create flawless clones.
Look at Dolly the Sheep, who has now got all these medical problems.
All of these cloned animals so far have severe medical problems.
We don't know what sort of psychological problems a human being would have cloned this way.
I'm not talking about developmental problems, but I'm talking about problems that come innately with the cloned person.
I have to think about those people.
I think about the pitiable creatures on the island of Dr. Moreau, and Moreau was creating these wonderful, to him, these wonderful crossbreeds, elevating these simple species.
But these were suffering, tormented creatures.
And to some extent, we have that terrible risk of cloning somebody a child, and then that child has all sorts of medical problems and mental problems.
What about the right of that child not to have to suffer?
I think this is a step science should never take.
But you're right, there are people going to do it because there's money in it, because their egos are on the line, and they've forgotten the example of Frankenstein.
It'll be done, but I think there will be great, terrible things that take place related to this because, again, of those individuals who are being cloned and who won't be perfect because we are so far away from understanding.
We thought we would understand the human structure or the human animal when we understood the human genome.
And now we've mapped the human genome, but it's become clear that that's only a tiny fraction of what makes us what we are.
And we're going to be a century, if not more, learning that.
Until we have learned that, I don't see how we can, with any conscience, clone a conscious human being that is going to suffer because of our inadequate science.
And in some cases if you could bring them back as the original person was, and if the science actually worked, that'd be one thing, but you can imagine the temptation to clone some of history's monsters.
And then there's always the fact that once you can clone, the next step is that you can manipulate genetic codes, and you can then try to improve upon the human being.
I mean, you can give us, you know, better vision, seeing new spectrums, another arm here and there, another eye located somewhere convenient.
I don't know, but all kinds of horrific things will be possible very, very soon.
I've written two books, Fear Nothing and Seize the Night, that are about this very subject, about genetic engineering and some unintended consequences of them.
And I said it in a very pretty little California town, but behind the scenes it's next to an abandoned military base, except it's not entirely abandoned.
So this is something that's been on my mind for a long time.
And there are great benefits to genetic engineering.
I mean, we've been doing it a long time.
We've engineered crops as long as we've, you know, for centuries in simple genetic engineering by selection of it.
I mean, in some cases, for example, butterflies have, I forget what it was, but something or another genetically engineered butterflies interacted with it and didn't do well and died.
And you don't always know exactly what's going to occur.
You get better corn, but where do the butterflies go?
Interestingly, I think we're going through a paradigm shift in science that hopefully is going to happen in time to save us.
But for most of the history of science, it's been reductionism.
It was always the belief that if we could look into the smallest particles of everything, if we could get down to the tiniest scale, we would ultimately have full understanding and knowledge of what makes everything work.
And that was what drove biology.
That's what drove physics.
When we found the atom, we thought we knew, and then we found subatomic particles.
And now quantum physicists find things going on on the subatomic level that tell them finding the tiniest particles didn't explain anything at all.
Well, they've explained some stuff, but it raised greater mysteries.
And in biology, Darwin was of the belief that the smallest particle, there was no atomic structure known when Darwin was working, but he believed the smallest particle was carbonized albumin, he called it, and that everything, all life, that was the smallest element.
Well, when we discover atomic structure underlying it and the order that's in atomic structure, a lot of Darwin theories don't hold up.
And we're getting in many of the sciences now a sort of systemic view of things where they're discovering in quantum mechanics, for instance, that yes, you can look at all those tiny particles, that very strange things are happening that aren't explained by how those particles function or what we know of their function.
And that there are interactions on a macro scale, on a great scale, that aren't explained by how everything works down there in the tiny, tiny center of everything.
Well, when science finds something that it doesn't understand, a lot of times, unfortunately, it virtually puts it on the shelf.
Then occasionally there's something so big they can't do that.
There is an offshore discovery off the shore of Cuba in which they believe they found a lost city about 2,200 feet off underwater.
Now, last ice age would account for about 300 feet at best.
And, you know, there's just no way there should be what was described with side-scan sonar as buildings, pyramidal shapes, roads, highways, what appeared to be an urban city 2,200 feet off the western coast of Cuba.
And National Geographic is on that one right now, and we'll eventually find out.
But what we believe to be true about ourselves and our past may not be exactly the way it happened.
And of course, science is very slow to accept such things.
It has a certain way, and it believes a certain thing occurred, and a lot of careers and people's money and grant money and stuff is at stake along with those careers.
And so they don't change easily.
They're very slow to make changes.
But at the same time, they're capable of making very fast, rash decisions.
For example, in San Francisco, they did, I thought, a very dangerous experiment.
I felt very sorry for the Pellead AIDS.
And they had this idea of completely killing his immune system.
I mean, utterly destroying whatever was left of it and replacing it with a simian immune system.
And they did that.
Now, they just did it.
Now, the possible consequences of that are pretty horrific in themselves.
In other words, gee whiz, some sort of simian-human combination, new disease could have come of it.
Who knows what could have come of it.
It was very heroic that they gave this shot to the fellow, but it's kind of like they admitted there could be society-wide consequences, a small risk, but they didn't really discuss that with us before they, in essence, pushed the button.
We all have what we have because it's worked more often than not.
But you do wonder sometimes about the perspective of some people who will do something like that.
But you go all the way back to the finding of the original work on the Manhattan Project.
And when the first atomic reaction was created, there were a significant number of physicists who did believe there was a possibility that when we began an atomic chain reaction, it would be uncontrollable and that it would spread throughout the entire atmosphere of the planet.
Who thought that the entire atmosphere could go into a chain reaction.
And then that would instantly be the end of us.
Yes.
Well that was then and this is now and now we have some very similar choices directly ahead, scientists who are going to play with creating black holes and the very essence of creation itself.
Now when it gets to the point where they've got the machine that'll do the creating say of a black hole and the button is right there and the finger is poised above the button how many of you out there, how many of you have confidence that that finger will draw away and say, oh no, no, no, we can't do this.
Or do you see the finger mashing on the button?
Well, I see the mashing.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 22, 2002.
Coast to Coast AM from January 22.
Coast to Coast AM from January 22.
Oh Lord.
But I've been waiting for this summer all night, night.
Oh no, oh no.
Oh no.
I really will worry.
How could I ever forget for the first time for the last time we ever met?
But I know the reason why you keep this silence of the beautiful week for the hurt of the show, but the pain so rose.
So I'm telling you.
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired January 22nd, 2002.
All right, we're about to take calls for Dean Kuhn's.
But before we do, just a couple of items.
One is nanotechnology.
Dean, have you ever heard the phrase gray goo?
Yep.
I had an expert on nanotechnology, actually a series of them on the show, and they brought up the subject of gray goo, and that one scared the hell out of me.
Just really scared the hell out of me, and I don't scare easily.
But the concept that there could be some little machine made which would gobble up everything, literally, totally, everything on the earth, and it would spread like the plague, just sort of like a creeping thing in the night that would literally eat everything in front of it, biological or your desk, your house, the grass, everything.
It would eat up everything.
That's one of the horrid promises of nanotechnology.
It's a spooky concept, but we're plunging forward in nanotechnology.
Whether the risk of the gray goo machine, the idea comes from the thought that nanomachines could be built that could take any vat of elements or anything in your room and extract the materials needed to build something.
You could fill this vat with a mixture of elements and everything else and fill it then with millions or billions of these little tiny molecular machines, each one programmed to do a certain part of building a television set, for instance.
And at periodic moments, complete television sets would bob up in this vat of slop and they would go on building these.
But then the question arises, do these things, are they containable?
Would they seek out and reduce everything around them to essentially gray goo in an attempt to create and build more things?
Again, sort of the Frankenstein syndrome.
But I'll tell you, I think nanotechnology will come.
Whether the gray goo is a real risk, I mean, we're already, we have some nanotechnology now, but I think where it comes and where I find it very interesting, perhaps very helpful, perhaps with unintended consequences, is in the medical usage.
I can certainly see that when we get very sophisticated nanotechnology, one of the first things we'll do with it is create tiny molecular machines that you are injected in a serum that contains millions of these little machines.
And their job is to circulate through your arteries and veins and continually scrape the walls clean so that you never develop plaque.
That should be a very early adaptation of nanotechnology to the medical sphere.
But I'm working on a book right now which deals with some potentially interesting negative complications of nano machines that end up in the brain and what they could do once they get there.
It's a book I'm working on now called By the Light of the Moon, and it's one of these scientists who has developed it, and some people were trying to prevent him from trying this out, but he has been trying it out.
And he considers it his life's work, and he's about to be stopped.
And so he gives it what appears to be random to a couple of people and makes the pleasant observation to them, it always does something different to everyone.
And that's one of the interesting things about nanomachines.
If you create these tiny little machines that are programmed, supposedly, to do these very specific tasks, that's one thing.
But nanomachines that could pass into the substance of the brain, and whose job is to create new connections to double and triple the number of synapses, what might that do to the brain, and what might that create in the way of benefits or less than benefits for us?
In all of these books that you write, this is kind of a question I guess you don't have to answer.
A while ago you were stressing that we need to remain optimistic because of our beliefs about consciousness, and I tend to agree with that.
But in the majority of your books, you're writing about some pretty scary negative stuff.
And it's impossible not to believe, Dean, that there's a part of you, there's a part of your brain in which, you know, I mean, some of this has got to be you.
Oh, I think that it's very interesting you make that observation, because just today my editor sent me this thing from a columnist, I think it was in the Fort Wayne Star-Telegram or somewhere like that in Texas, that said he loves reading my books because they have this weird quality and they have this darkness that you are things that are in our real lives.
They're not vampires and werewolves and that sort of thing, but things that can actually happen.
And yet, it's all wrapped up in a faith in humanity and an optimism about the future that takes you into this dark place, but in the end leaves you feeling uplifted and confident about things.
You know, I think creatively, when you're working in these areas and you open your mind to it and you're constantly exercising your creativity, I think in some way you get in touch with something primal that allows you to write about things that seem far out, but you're actually writing about things I don't want to say psychically that you perceive may be coming to pass, but you're in tune with something when you exercise your creativity a lot.
And many years ago, I wrote a book called Demon Seed, which was made in the movie of Julie Christie.
And when the movie came out, some of the reviews said, why, this is absolutely impossible.
It's ridiculous.
It's about a woman whose house has a very elaborate security system, and her house is completely computer operated.
And the reviewers said the idea that there would be a computer in a private home is so ridiculous that you can't get involved with the movie.
Well, that movie came out in 77, and some of the reviewers were saying it was absurd to think of a computer in a private home.
Well, you sort of just denied it, but there must been plenty of times when you have privately wondered about some book that you've just written about whether there is something more than just your hand and your brain involved, whether there's some sort of conduit that you don't fully understand.
You get into, especially when you get into, I'm sure you know what I mean by flow state, but you get into what athletes call in the zone.
That's right.
And it begins to come through.
It doesn't mean that it's necessarily easier to get it right, but it begins to flow through you and you almost feel like you're not creating this, but you're a conduit for it.
And in those moments, yeah, that's exactly.
There's a definite strong feeling of the uncanny.
And those periods can last for a few hours or they can last for days.
I've even said that there are times when you're in that flow state and everything is coming to you and you're creating whole worlds on paper that seem meticulously detailed.
You feel a sense, you feel godlike, and you feel not only godlike, but you feel, and this may sound, I don't, it sounds perfectly normal to me, but you feel in touch with God when that creativity is flowing, and you feel like you understand the creative force that made the universe.
And I say, I don't mean by that that I think I write better fiction than God.
God writes better fiction than I do anytime he wants to try.
But you do feel like you're in touch with some greater creativity, some massive consciousness from which everything flows to you.
And that to me is the essence of a flow state.
I've been in a flow state a couple of times where it went on for 36 hours and I did not go to bed.
I stayed up and stayed at the keyboard for 36 hours, exhausted but exhilarated.
And then there's another scary part of it, too, and that's that when you're not in it, you really wonder if you can ever get in it again, and that's a scary prospect.
First of all, congratulations to Mr. Koontz for coming up with a probable answer to the infamous mystery of the lost sock.
question, have you ever considered, sir, the possibility that the human body is nothing but a mass of sensors, the brain is nothing but a loosely programmed microprocessor, and that the memory is the soul, or whatever you wish to call it?
There's another interesting thing to consider, and that is that our brain is not the totality of our memories.
There have been a lot of interesting organ transplants that have gone on, and I've interviewed a number of people, one lady in particular, who received the heart and lungs of a young man.
You may have heard this in the news.
It hit the national news.
And when she awoke from the operation, she had immediate cravings for things that only an 18-year-old would want.
I mean, she was in her 40s or 50s, I forget.
But she had these cravings that would only be associated with about an 18-year-old.
And then, here's the topper.
She went to sleep one night shortly after the operation and dreamed the name of her donor.
Something kept very tightly from the recipient of organs.
Now, that might suggest that there's a cellular memory in places other than our brain, that all the cells of our body may contain some sort of something that gets transferred.
There is a book out there with a fairly new theory in it proposed by Sirius Sinus called The Living Energy Universe, which proposes that memory exists essentially at the cellular level in almost everything, in everything that's living.
They even propose the possibility that light particles themselves have memory.
And it's a very complicated argument, but fascinating.
And it plays to right what you've said, that memory may exist, that our concept of ourselves may exist in more places than just the brain.
That's part of this living energy universe theory, that even in there is some form of memory, and it explains why the planetary systems, for instance, keep cleansing themselves and rebuilding themselves and that there is within even the planet itself some sort of age-old memory.
It's interesting, isn't it?
You think back to when I was a kid, they had these movies that seemed terribly silly at the time, where somebody, a pianist would get a hand transplant from a killer and he would become a killer.
That's right.
And now here there is getting to be something very similar to that that is being seriously discussed in medical science.
When you guys were talking about future time travel, something came to mind that Stephen Hawking said, and I think he's a brilliant mind, that we haven't seen future time travelers because it hasn't happened yet.
But of course, if the future is out there, it's ahead of us.
And if you take the view that the past, present, and future already all exist, which is part of a concept of quantum mechanics, then all of time is already out there.
And somewhere or other, it would have been invented if it was.
So I go back to the belief that probably if there was time travel, they simply wouldn't want us to know they traveled to our time.
It would be nothing for them to gain by making themselves known to us.
All right, we're about to take calls for Dean Kuntz, but before we do, just a couple of items.
One is nanotechnology.
Dean, have you ever heard the phrase gray goo?
Yep.
I had an expert on nanotechnology, actually a series of them on the show, and they brought up the subject of gray goo, and that one scared the hell out of me.
Just really scared the hell out of me, and I don't scare easily.
But the concept that there could be some little machine made which would gobble up everything, literally, totally, everything on the earth, and it would spread like the plague, just sort of like a creeping thing in the night that would literally eat everything in front of it, biological or your desk, your house, the grass, everything.
It would eat up everything.
That's one of the horrid promises of nanotechnology.
It's a spooky concept, but we're plunging forward in nanotechnology.
Whether the risk of the gray goo machine, the idea comes from the thought that nanomachines could be built that could take any vat of elements or anything in your room and extract the materials needed to build something.
You could fill this vat with a mixture of elements and everything else and fill it then with millions or billions of these little tiny molecular machines, each one programmed to do a certain part of building a television set, for instance.
And at periodic moments, complete television sets would bob up in this vat of slot.
And they would go on building these.
But then the question arises, do these things, are they containable?
Would they seek out and reduce everything around them to essentially gray goo in an attempt to create and build more things?
Again, sort of the Frankenstein syndrome.
But I'll tell you, I think nanotechnology will come.
Whether the gray goo is a real risk, I mean, we're already, we have some nanotechnology now, but I think where it comes and where I find it very interesting, perhaps very helpful, perhaps with unintended consequences, is in the medical usage.
I can certainly see that when we get very sophisticated nanotechnology, one of the first things we'll do with it is create tiny molecular machines that you are injected in a serum that contains millions of these little machines.
And their job is to circulate through your arteries and veins and continually scrape the walls clean so that you never develop plaque.
That should be a very early adaptation of nanotechnology to the medical sphere.
But I'm working on a book right now which deals with some potentially interesting negative complications of nano machines that end up in the brain and what they could do once they get there.
It's a book I'm working on now called By the Light of the Moon.
And it's one of these scientists who has developed it.
And some people were trying to prevent him from trying this out, but he has been trying it out.
And he considers it his life's work, and he's about to be stopped.
And so he gives it what appears to be random to a couple of people and makes the pleasant observation to them.
It always does something different to everyone.
And that's one of the interesting things about nanomachines.
If you create these tiny little machines that are programmed supposedly to do these very specific tasks, that's one thing.
But nanomachines that could pass into the substance of the brain, and whose job is to create new connections to double and triple the number of synapses, what might that do to the brain, and what might that create in the way of benefits or less than benefits for us?
In all of these books that you write, this is kind of a question I guess you don't have to answer.
A while ago you were stressing that we need to remain optimistic because of our beliefs about consciousness, and I tend to agree with that.
But in the majority of your books, you're writing about some pretty scary negative stuff.
And it's impossible not to believe, Dean, that there's a part of you, there's a part of your brain in which, you know, I mean, some of this has got to be you.
Oh, I think that it's very interesting you make that observation because just today my editor sent me this thing from a columnist, I think it was in the Fort Wayne Star-Telegram or somewhere like that in Texas, that said he loves reading my books because they have this weird quality and they have this darkness that you are things that are in our real lives.
They're not vampires and werewolves and that sort of thing, but things that can actually happen.
And yet it's all wrapped up in a faith in humanity and an optimism about the future that takes you into this dark place, but in the end leaves you feeling uplifted and confident about things.
You know, I think creatively, when you're working in these areas and you open your mind to it and you're constantly exercising your creativity, I think in some way you get in touch with something primal that allows you to write about things that seem far out, but you're actually writing about things I don't want to say psychically that you perceive may be coming to pass, but you're in tune with something when you exercise your creativity a lot.
And many years ago I wrote a book called Demon Seed, which was made in the movie at Julie Christie.
And when the movie came out, some of the reviews said, well, this is absolutely impossible.
It's ridiculous.
It's about a woman whose house has a very elaborate security system and her house is completely computer operated.
And the reviewers said the idea that there would be a computer in a private home is so ridiculous that you can't get involved with the movie.
Well, that movie came out in 77 and some of the reviewers were saying it was absurd to think of a computer in a private home.
Well, you sort of just denied it, but there must been plenty of times when you have privately wondered about some book that you've just written about whether there is something more than just your hand and your brain involved, whether there's some sort of conduit that you don't fully understand.
You get into, especially when you get into, I'm sure you know what I mean by flow state, but you get into what athletes call in the zone.
That's right.
And it begins to come through.
It doesn't mean that it's necessarily easier to get it right, but it begins to flow through you and you almost feel like you're not creating this, that you're a conduit for it.
And in those moments, yeah, that's exactly.
There's a definite strong feeling of the uncanny.
And those periods can last for a few hours or they can last for days.
I've even said that there are times when you're in that flow state and everything is coming to you and you're creating whole worlds on paper that seem meticulously detailed.
You feel godlike and you feel not only godlike, but you feel, and this may sound, I don't, it sounds perfectly normal to me, but you feel in touch with God when that creativity is flowing, and you feel like you understand the creative force that made the universe.
And I say, I don't mean by that that I think I write better fiction than God.
God writes better fiction than I do anytime he wants to try.
But you do feel like you're in touch with some greater creativity, some massive consciousness from which everything flows to you.
And that to me is the essence of a flow state.
I've been in a flow state a couple of times where it went on for 36 hours and I did not go to bed.
I stayed up and stayed at the keyboard for 36 hours, exhausted but exhilarated.
And then there's another scary part of it, too, and that's that when you're not in it, you really wonder if you can ever get in it again, and that's a scary prospect.
First of all, congratulations to Mr. Koontz for coming up with a probable answer to the infamous mystery of the lost sock.
Question, have you ever considered, sir, the possibility that the human body is nothing but a mass of sensors, the brain is nothing but a loosely programmed microprocessor, and that the memory is the soul, or whatever you wish to call it?
There's another interesting thing to consider, and that is that our brain is not the totality of our memories.
There have been a lot of interesting organ transplants that have gone on, and I've interviewed a number of people, one lady in particular, who received the heart and lungs of a young man.
You may have heard this in the news.
It hit the national news.
And when she awoke from the operation, she had immediate cravings for things that only an 18-year-old would want.
I mean, she was in her 40s or 50s, I forget.
But she had these cravings that would only be associated with about an 18-year-old.
And then, here's the topper.
She went to sleep one night shortly after the operation and dreamed the name of her donor.
Something kept very tightly from the recipient of organs.
Now, that might suggest that there's a cellular memory in places other than our brain, that all the cells of our body may contain some sort of something that gets transferred.
There is a book out there with a fairly new theory in it proposed by serious scientists called the Living Energy Universe, which proposes that memory exists essentially at the cellular level in almost everything, in everything that's living.
They even propose the possibility that light particles themselves have memory.
And it's a very complicated argument, but fascinating.
And it plays to right what you've said, that memory may exist, that our concept of ourselves may exist in more places than just the brain.
That's part of this living energy universe theory, that even in there is some form of memory, and it explains why the planetary systems, for instance, keep cleansing themselves and rebuilding themselves and that there is within even the planet itself some sort of age-old memory.
It's interesting, isn't it?
You think back to when I was a kid, they had these movies that seemed terribly silly at the time, where somebody, a pianist would get a hand transplant from a killer and he would become a killer.
When you guys were talking about future time travels, something came to mind that Stephen Hawking said, and I think he's a brilliant mind, that we haven't seen future time travelers because it hasn't happened yet.
But of course, if the future is out there, it's ahead of us.
And if you take the view that the past, present, and future already all exist, which is part of the concept of quantum mechanics, then all of time is already out there.
And somewhere or other, it would have been invented if it was.
So I go back to the belief that probably if there was time travel, they simply wouldn't want us to know they traveled to our time.
It would be nothing for them to gain by making themselves known to us.
This is an eerie song and this is the song that band was talking about.
Pretty eerie, huh?
Phaedra.
What a name.
I am convinced that playing this song, talking about it, and we're going to check the birth records, that a year from now we're going to have a lot of little Phaedras running around out there.
unidentified
We'll see.
Streamlink, the audio subscription service of Coast to Coast AM, has a new name, Coast Insider.
You'll still get all the same great features for the same low price.
The package includes podcasting, which automatically downloads shows for you, and the iPhone app.
You'll also get our amazing download library of three full years of shows.
That's over a thousand shows for you to collect and enjoy.
If you're a fan of Coast, you won't want to be without Coast Insider.
Visit Coast2CoastAM.com to sign up.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 22, 2002.
Well, I deal with subjects in this book, not to give anything away, but I deal with the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
And when there was a couple of characters in this book who were fascinated with that subject and are two of the most fun characters I've ever written, when they were in a conversation and something untoward had just happened or something particularly strange had happened, it would fall to them immediately as I was writing the piece.
When I'm writing dialogue a lot of times, if it's really going well, I almost don't write it.
It flows as if I'm listening to it.
And just out of the blue, one of these Spelkenter sisters said this is a total art bell moment.
And it was the most natural thing because I know that both of them listen to you all the time.
Well, as Jodi Foster said in Contact, you know, when you look up at the night sky and all those stars, and now we know all those planets around all those stars, uncountable numbers, really.
You know, if they're not out there, what a great waste of space it would be.
So what do you think about the possibility of visitation or of there being life out there?
I think without question it's out there because the vastness of it requires that it be.
And we already are, within the last few years, we've begun to identify planets in solar systems within our own Milky Way that seem to be at the exact correct position from the sun, from their sun, to support life as this planet does.
And I think last I heard, we're mounting up into the hundreds of those identifiable planets.
And we're looking at such a tiny portion of what's out there that we know there must be billions of planets in which it can be supported.
As for visitation here, I can't say that all the UFO lore that makes a lot of sense to me.
And one reason is something this hadn't crossed my mind until we were just talking about it, but the subject of nanotechnology.
If nanotechnology works, and I think that it ultimately will, a very advanced civilization capable of traveling across the galaxy is probably going to have just great depth of nanotechnology, which would make it possible, think about this, nanotechnology used in a medical fashion would ultimately make it possible for any species to become shape-changing.
And any species with advanced nanotechnology in a medical application should be able to pass for us.
And therefore, I wonder if they're extremely advanced civilizations why we would even know they were here.
I question, you know, anything's possible, but I wonder about alien abduction stories for the simple reason of if they want to know us and they want to learn about us, they can do it much more subtly than that, and they could be living next door as far as that goes.
And a big fan of Dean ever since reading my first Dean Kuntz book back when I was a small child.
Dean, going back to your comment earlier about the fork and the napkin, have you ever heard, or maybe Art, have you ever heard of a person going, you know, falling into one of those slips and then coming back out and being able to recall the information that they've seen or anything like that kind of a time travel kind of situation?
Well, from the corner of eye, I ultimately write about exactly that experience toward the end of the book, but I've never, of course, it would be, if anybody ever did and could prove it, it would be monumental news,
but it would be a difficult thing to prove because as with any phenomenon that's outside the pale, you've seemed, whether it was a true story or not, you seem like a wacko to everybody you've heard.
What I have heard is I've had a number of people tell me that they have suddenly been in a place, in a hotel, or anywhere, and suddenly everybody was dressed in period costumes.
It's kind of like they were suddenly in the 1800s, but then it was not there long, and it just sort of was there and gone.
And you have to wonder if they just got a little peek through the Swiss cheese holes, you know.
Yeah, that's akin to those shadow people you were talking about, too, where, and that little story I mentioned about the Arct Deco decor, that I have received lots of stories from people who tell me incidents like that, which I think indicate a glimpse of it.
Until my current publisher, and I'm not saying that just because I've got my current publisher, but I actually dedicated the new book to my publisher and editor.
In the past, everywhere until the last five books, I struggled constantly.
I would turn a book in, and because it was not like the book before it, I would be, I was once told you can't, somebody mentioned the book Lightning earlier, my time travel story.
When I delivered that book, my publisher said, this will ruin your career, which is growing nicely, and it can't be published for seven years.
Now, I don't know why seven, why not five or nine, but it has to be put on a shelf and you've got to write something else.
And we entered into a four-month-long battle over that book.
And finally, it was released, and it was the most successful book I've had to date.
So you have to, when I struggled with that for many years, I was in a state of despair more often than not.
But with my new publisher that I went to several books ago, there was this attitude that, you know, you're the one who does this, and we like the fact that it's always different and fresh.
So do what you want, and if we ever think you've gone over the top, we'll tell you so.
Well, I guess, to some degree, the track record you've established allows you that latitude, but it's still something that any newly successful writer is going to be fighting, right?
And I always tell them, you know, you just have to do what you love to do and have faith that what you're doing.
It applies to anything in life.
You just do what you love to do and do it the way you think it should be done.
And if you always did everything.
I'm sure in your developing your show and everything like that, you had more advice than you could ever have hoped to receive about all the things you were doing wrong or what you should be doing differently.
First of all, I believe in what I'm about to ask you about, because at about 20 till the hour, I said, you know, I'm going to focus my will and I'm going to be able to ask a question, and lo and behold, there I am.
Anyhow, the question is, I was wondering what you thought about there was a previous caller who had said something to the effect, where does all the energy come from for these multiple realities?
And my thought is, well, the universe is energy in and of itself, so if we focus our intentions, either consciously or subconsciously, toward good or ill, that wonderful and sometimes disastrous things can actually take place.
So I was kind of wondering what your thoughts on that matter might be.
And that fellow who asked, where does this energy come from?
We got to talking about consciousness being the greatest power in the universe and willpower being an expression of consciousness.
And if we're living in a time where increasingly in molecular biology and quantum mechanics, there is a tendency to see a design universe.
This is something that flies in the face of all the science of the past couple hundred years, but it's growing, there's growing weight on the design universe side.
And so if we accept the idea that this is a designed universe, a created universe, and not just something that exploded one day, then you go back to what faith, which may be a very intuitive understanding of things, and all faiths end up telling you that the universe was created by an act of will.
But all what does it say, let there be light, which is energy.
And so energy was created by an act of will, if you believe in a designed universe.
So that says that willpower alone can create vast new reservoirs of energy.
And so in the answer to that Person's question, the mere willing of vast new energy may create it.
And that goes back to the whole concept of all religions that the universe has created, and it goes back to the design-universe series of many modern sciences.
By the way, do you have any idea why, and this is a question that works for my program and your books, why do you think people love to scare the hell out of themselves?
I think in part it's that, you know, life is pretty scary.
We never know what's coming two minutes from now.
Suspense is the most natural thing.
That's why it amazes me that books with suspense in them or scary elements are always, there's a contingent of the literary community always puts them down for that.
And I think there's nothing more natural or true to life than suspense because we live with it every minute of our lives, not knowing what's going to happen to us next.
And because life has that quality to it, I think when you can go into a story and you can encounter some of your worst fears, but it's resolved within that story, you don't get that resolution in life.
And so it's something that gives you a little sense of hope and satisfaction.
I think that's one reason people like to be scared.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 22nd, 2002.
And my last edification hadn't hurt enough.
I can read and write in the wall.
Oh, oh, you can make that home.
You look for me.
Make you think all the words of it.
Oh, yeah.
I've got a magazine.
I look at the boat back.
My mama can be, my mama can be.
My mama can be.
You don't call me there.
You know it's all coming.
You don't call me there.
You know it's got me bad.
Trust me if you want to do That you know it don't come easy You don't have to shout all things about
You can even play them easy Forget about the past And all your sorrows Cause the future won't last It will soon be your tomorrow I don't have to much I only want to And you know it's welcome easy And the club of mine keeps
growing all the time And you know it just ain't easy Open up your heart and come together You know it's a fall And we will make it work out better You know it's a fall You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 22nd, 2002.
Most of the time when I've had something turned into a film and family or friends, I see it, of course, before it's out there to the public.
And family and friends will ask me, how good is it?
And I usually have, too often I've had the answer, if you have a choice between seeing this movie and nailing your hand to a wall, nailing your hand to a wall would be a lot more entertaining.
And I just wish I could get somebody to develop them like they really are.
But I've had a few good experiences.
Intensity was an excellent miniseries, and I've had a few close ones, but I can't say it's been a satisfying experience generally.
First of all, I'd like to say I really appreciate the show.
I just got turned on to it after working some late nights and really has opened my mind to a lot of things and actually reaffirmed a lot of my own thoughts that I kind of thought I was by myself about.
And I think you do a really good job interpreting and speaking with most of your guests, even the 5% that really don't make any sense at all, I think.
But I like to say, you know, you're obviously my favorite author.
Dad first turned me on to one of your books about five or six years ago, and as soon as I heard the descriptiveness is just, the detail is unreal.
When the killer traveled up Golden Lantern Parkway into the Mediterranean apartments at the top of the hill, it was two complexes over from where I was living, so it pretty much had me hooked from there.
It was amazing to actually be, I felt like I was deeper and deeper a part of the stories and pretty much read every book since.
I was just wondering how do you go about, first of all, definitely include, if you can, more of that South County flavor in some of your books.
It's always going to have me reading copy after copy.
But as a question, I was wondering, are most of our ideas for your books original?
I mean, they're so varied from icebound to most of the paranormal, supernatural variations and some of the mysteries and stuff.
I was wondering if most of your ideas are straight original, if you employ maybe a think tank or uh you know get copies of uh submitted submitted stories to you or how do you go about that?
I've never found my dreams being very useful to turn into anything.
And as for a think tank, I don't know, I think most writers are probably like this, but I know I am, that to work up the energy and the passion to write a novel of some length, the idea has to kind of spring out of my own strange head.
And other people's ideas can look perfectly fine to me, but if I were to sit down and try to write it, I would have no interest in it.
It has to be something that's secret and held within me and that you kind of create almost as if you're feeling you're giving a gift to somebody and you don't want them to know what it is until it's finished.
So they all come from within and basically come from looking at the world around me and thinking, what if.
You know, in my youth, that happened frequently, but the older I got, the more I got past that.
And now, if I put a book aside, it always gets finished because I seem to only begin ones that I ultimately know what to do with.
And once in a while, it's necessary at the midway point to say, wow, there's stuff happening here that I have to take more time to ponder because I'm not ready to write where this is going.
But then I may go and do another book and then go back to it, and there it is, and I've figured it out now.
And when I was writing One Door Away from Heaven, even though it was published in December, I was still writing it in September.
And I was still polishing it up.
And the day I was supposed to send it off to my publisher was September 11th.
And FedEx, of course, wasn't operating then.
And when I was writing that book, I was concerned that maybe it was too funny for a suspense novel, and maybe certain elements of it dealing with is there life after death, is there a soul, those kind of questions for a suspense novel might have become too much of the story.
And however, after everybody read the book upon delivery, said, you know what, 9-11 changed the world in such a way that this is absolutely the right book for the moment.
That's the way I felt too, is if I was sort of prescient about those things.
We need something that we can laugh at.
And we also need, I think, I don't know if we need to, but I think we are all more interested in thinking about the issues of why we're here and what it all means.
And in fact, I think a lot of people that are artistic and creative and express themselves like you do, sir, I believe we draw upon even our old souls or even past lives within ourselves because you'd mentioned that when you write, you felt it was almost in a sense where you're listening to almost like a narration in a sense.
And my question to you, sir, is, do you often think that sometimes almost like you're having help, not only from within yourself, but also maybe from drawing on from maybe almost an old soul situation, maybe even a past life?
Because I think as somebody who's got so many characters as you do, tend to paint such a picture as you do, I think sometimes it's not only just the imagination, but I think we draw within something maybe some people find hard to even explain in mere words.
I can tell you that that thought passes through your mind at times.
I go back to something I said earlier, that when I was eight years old, I was writing stories and drawing little covers and stapling one margin.
I was considerate kids, so I put electrician stape over the staples so nobody hurt themselves.
And where was that coming from?
Because I lived in a house with no books.
We were very poor.
My father was a violent alcoholic, and books were not only shunned, frowned upon, but considered such a waste of time that there was never one in our house.
And yet there I was at a very young age drawn to do this.
And I sometimes wonder, just about what you're talking about, as if I had done this before.
It strikes me as one of the scariest ideas I can think of, actually, how we struggle in life to get where we are and to think you might begin it all over again, perhaps at a greater level of struggle.
Of course, we all like to think that if we're reincarnated, we'll be princesses and kings.
But somehow it seems to me that if I'm reincarnated, I'll be starting all over at the bottom again.
I think, let's see, I think there was a little bit of both.
Some of the political views were there before the book, and then as you write about it, books change you.
I think that's always a sign for me if the book is working, that things evolve in your thinking as you're working on the book that are new to you and that you begin to convince yourself are things you needed to think and develop.
So books always change you and always teach me things as I write them.
Do you think society is headed down ultimately the right road, all taken, you know, the Middle East and India and Pakistan, China and Afghanistan and the terror and all the rest of it?
do you think we're headed ultimately down a s story path or it'll all come out all right i mean you're the And certainly from the days I was a child, the world is more irrational than it was then.
And yet, the strangest thing, I think I'm not alone in this, that in that terrible event of 9-11, it's hard to imagine there could be any silver lining in something that dark.
And yet there is in a way, I feel.
And maybe that's what life is about in part, because I have felt since that so many people in my life have changed attitudes and changed perceptions that at first I thought were going to be very transitory, that were going to last for a couple of weeks, and I was going to see those attitudes slide back to what they were.
And it seems to me that it has changed people in a fundamental way and that they're more open to the thought that there is meaning and purpose in life and that they're here for something more than just to have a party.
And I think that's all for the better and the potential of saving us.
There's an analogy I like that I tell the people when they...
And that things you do in your life and every choice you make affect people that you will never meet because something you do to somebody that's a great kindness may change them in a way that they pass that along to somebody else and it ricochets and so do bad deeds in a way.
And that if we really look at human society, it's like an aspen grove.
You look at a grove of aspens and there are a great number of trees, but an aspen grove shares the same root structure and underground it's all one in interconnected secretness.
And I think all of human civilization and the human experience is very much like that, except that we're oblivious of it.
And I think events like this start to wake us up to the fact that how deeply interconnected our lives are and give us a chance to start thinking more openly.
It's one of the pleasures for me of being on your show is to exercise that open thinking.
I had, first of all, I want to make a comment that I thought what Dean said about everybody being interconnected and how everything that we do affects each other.
Well, when I was younger, and up until not too many years ago, probably until about eight or nine years ago, I read a couple hundred novels a year.
That never bothered me.
It energized me to read fiction that I liked by other people.
But as the years passed, and you've read hundreds and hundreds and ultimately a couple thousand novels, you get harder and harder to please.
And you start, and especially when you're doing it every day and you think you're improving and struggling to improve and polish and learn better, then you start seeing the tricks in other books and so it becomes a little harder.
But I still read people, a lot of people for pleasure, Jim Harrison, Ann Tyler.
I always go back and reread Dickens.
But a lot of my reading was nonfiction and I'm interested in biographies and science of all forms.
We've got a link on my website for them to do that and any of your other books.
And if you were to recommend, of course, an author is always going to say his last book, the one that you've got out right now, but other than your last book, eliminating that from the question, if you were to recommend any book as the first book, Dean Kuhn's book, anybody should read, what would it be?