Dr. Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist and NDE researcher, explores the 1992 Gallup survey revealing 13 million U.S. adults had near-death experiences (NDEs), often featuring tunnels, bright lights, and life reviews like Vicki Noratuck’s—a blind musician who saw vivid visions during her 1973 car accident-induced NDE, including Jesus instructing her to return for her children. Diane’s 1958 childbirth NDE confirmed rare multilocation, with details later verified, while Long notes 60% of experiencers believe in reincarnation despite only 20% of the general population holding this view. Skeptics’ explanations fail against consistent accounts, like Sharon’s 1974 NDE where she met her deceased mother and delayed sharing her story for five years, underscoring NDEs’ persistent themes of love, justice, and an afterlife beyond medical plausibility. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever the case may be in all 25 time zones, and possibly more.
We get lots of argument about that.
Covered.
Covered every single one of them by this program.
Coast Coast AM I'm R Bell.
Honored and privileged to be with you throughout this weekend.
I got a kind of a strange call from Whitley, Whitley Streeper, very good friend of mine, and he said, hey, Art, have you been watching the earthquakes?
Well, yes, but not closely enough, apparently, to know that as of tonight, there have been 350 of them on the California Nevada line.
And Whitley said, you know, maybe something's getting ready to let go, and maybe it is.
And he said, you're going to need to get out of there.
And so that's how I'm starting the program tonight with that sage bit of wisdom.
Anyway, we'll watch carefully.
Maybe something big is about to happen.
One other item, the web camshot tonight, it's kind of interesting.
That was taken a few days ago, and it was taken about three-quarters of the way up my commercial radio tower toward one portion of Prump, and you'll see the big mountain in the background.
That's Mount Charleston, which is about 11,900 feet high.
It's kind of a magical night.
I was chatting on ham radio with a guy at 42,000 feet in a business jet streaking across Arizona headed toward the Southern California area, and that was a lot of fun.
So I was doing that just a minute ago before I got on here.
Let's see what's going on in the world.
Depressing as that normally is.
The Iraqi prime minister insisted Sunday that the raging insurgency, which has now claimed over 300 lives in the last week alone and resulted in a wave of kidnappings, is not going to delay January elections, promising the vote will be a major blow struck against the violent opposition.
Meanwhile, a grisly videotape posted on a website showed the beheading of three more hostages believed to be Iraqi Kurds accused of militants of cooperating with us, the U.S. The tropics continue to rage.
In fact, Tropical Storm Gene has killed now at least 50 people in Haiti after battering the neighboring Dominican Republic with its lashing winds and deadly storm surge before it finally pushed off into the open sea on Sunday.
Officials said floods tore through the northwestern capital town and surrounding areas Saturday night, covering crops but not fully engulfing homes.
Senators from both parties urged the Bush administration on Sunday to make a realistic assessment of the situation in Iraq and then adjust its policies aimed at pacifying the country.
But Bush readied a very firm defense of his policy in Iraq and a sharp new attack on rival Kerry's stance for a big speech, I guess, on Monday.
Hundreds of relief workers fanned out across Florida on Sunday trying to help still numb families.
Motorists waited in long, mile-long lines to buy gas and get free food, ice and water.
People of all ages sifted through the rubble of demolished and damaged homes and businesses trying to salvage clothes, photos, anything of what their life was before Ivan the Terrible.
Microsoft Corporation is going to share its source code.
Now, there's a headline you would never have expected to read.
Sharing its source code for their incredible operating systems?
Why, yes, it would seem.
Beginning Monday, Microsoft will offer more than 60 governments and international organizations, oh, darn, that's not us, the option of viewing the proprietary source code for the latest version of its ubiquitous office software, including the Outlook email program.
We had an incredible response to the harp sounds that I played last night.
I'll read you just a few of them, but they came in by the hundred.
So in a moment, we'll review some of them and once again play that sound for you.
What we're about to do, and the reaction to it is absolutely astounding, really.
And I want to give those of you a chance who do not want to hear the harp sound a chance to turn off the radio.
That way you will not have to hear it.
Now, the response I got from playing that was astounding.
I mean, everything from art, it caused my back to start hurting to I wanted to kill someone, some lady said, to I have a headache, to it made me feel warm and fuzzy, to here's Joe, Art, you've got to play that ARP transmission again, or post it on your website.
That is the weirdest, most far-out stuff I've ever heard anywhere.
Please post it on the site so people can download it.
My friends have to hear that.
It's that bizarre.
Or, oh God, Art, when you played the clip of HAARP, I got the worst, strangest, most uncomfortable feeling of my life.
I had a strange sensation run up and down my spine and found it terrifying.
As a race, we've got to stop use of this.
I think it is very evil.
And on and on and on and on.
Evil.
Well, maybe.
What is HARP?
It's an ionospheric heater, ostensibly studying the effects of high amounts of radio frequency concentrated in a very small spot on the ionosphere, perhaps burning a hole right through it.
And there have been many things attributed to HAARP.
The ability to control mines, perhaps one of the wilder.
Weather control, perhaps not so wild.
And everything in between.
But the government is clearly doing something up in Alaska.
And what you're about to hear are the sounds, the actual transmissions of HARP recorded by a friend of mine.
And it is what it is.
And what these sounds mean and what they're doing to the ionosphere and all of us, I have no idea.
You hear it beginning to come down the other way in frequency.
It's like it hiccups and then it starts in the other direction.
That's really weird stuff, eerie stuff.
And that's a real transmission of harp.
My thanks to Steve Wingate for recording and sending it to me.
That was recorded in the last week or so.
Maybe the people up in Alaska would enjoy hearing what they're doing.
That's harp.
Oh, I had reports of cats scattering and dogs doing wild things, and you name it.
So there you have it.
We talk a lot about it, but this is, I think, your first opportunity ever to actually hear the real McCoy.
All right, now, this is kind of interesting.
It's Reuters News reporting that most Americans would get this, would not cooperate as officials expect they would during a major terror incident, something like smallpox or perhaps a dirty bomb attack.
An in-depth survey found that the people do not trust the federal government to take care of them during an attack and would take matters into their own hands, endangering themselves and their families.
Only two-fifths of those surveyed, two-fifths, would follow the instructions to go to a public vaccination site in a smallpox outbreak, and only three-fifths would stay in a building other than their home after a dirty bomb explosion.
But a little more planning and working with communities may help improve all of this.
If the survey's predictions are true, said Sherry Gleed, chairman of the Department of Health Policy at Columbia University in New York, our plans are going to fail.
The study looked at how people would react to two hypothetical scenarios, a smallpox outbreak and a dirty bomb explosion.
Smallpox, of course, a highly infectious virus that killed about 30% of, or does kill 30% of those who come down with it.
It was wiped out back in 1979 with global vaccinations, and people born after 72 are not likely to have been even vaccinated against it.
A dirty bomb would use a conventional explosion to spread radioactive material.
Current plans call for vaccinations as needed during any sort of smallpox attack and for keeping people inside buildings until the danger from any dirty bomb had passed.
The researchers conducted in-depth discussions with government and private sector planners, with community residents from around the country, did a national telephone survey of 2,545 randomly selected adults.
They found members of the public would not necessarily obey instructions from emergency officials.
People did not respond irrationally.
Rather, they made rational, logical choices.
For instance, many of those surveyed feared they could go to a smallpox vaccination site, get exposed to people who already had smallpox, and then be told they could not safely get the vaccine because they were pregnant, had eczema, AIDS, or some other immune-compromising condition.
And people asked to think about a dirty bomb explosion said they'd try hard to get their children or other family members to get to them, even if they were told to stay put by authorities.
Only 59% would stay in the building, said Roz Lasker, who led that study.
Assuring the safety of people who depend on them is more important than their own safety, he said.
So basically, this story is saying that all of you out there would absolutely not obey emergency officials, period.
Just would not obey The Great Majority.
Here's another one.
Last night during your show, you played recordings of harp art.
I had a physical response to one of the two you played.
While the higher-pitched recording was playing, I felt a throbbing on the right side of my head, just from one side to the crown chakra.
I also began to sweat profusely as if the body was trying to burn off something the way it would when you have a fever.
As soon as you stopped playing the higher-pitched sound, the throbbing in my head stopped, and so did the sweating.
So there you have it.
Pretty strange stuff all the way around.
Certainly strange reactions.
And I wonder if, well, I kind of wonder if it's psychological or maybe not psychological.
In other words, are people because there's a kind of mysticism almost attached now to HAARP in many minds out there, as many interviews as we have done about it, and some people, you know, feel that it's evil in some way, and who knows, it might be, that they're having a reaction to it.
After all, 30 or 40% of those given sugar pills get quite well despite whatever illness it would be.
So the mind has great powers, or perhaps there is something inherently evil.
Well, evil is a very strong word.
Let's take some phone calls.
Don't forget, at the top of this hour, we're going to be having, I think, a very unusual program.
Dr. Jeffrey Long is here, who brought us Sarah.
Sarah, if I could drag it out again for you and play it, I would.
Sarah was one of the most amazing near-death stories I've ever heard in my whole life.
And I'll tell you what, if you're even a pretty firm non-believer or skeptic regarding the afterlife and all the rest of it, could not listen to that story by Sarah and feel the same way or have the same confidence of the lack of something well beyond ourselves after hearing that interview, I assure you.
And tonight's interview is going to be of a young lady named Vicki, Nora Tuck, I believe it is.
And she has been blind since birth.
And she had an absolutely an amazing NDE.
And Dr. Long will bring her here tonight.
He is a researcher into exactly that.
Near-death experiences.
If we are to ever know the nature of the other side, or even if there really is one, then we really need to listen to stories like the one you're going to hear tonight.
Wildcard Lion, you are on the air.
Welcome.
How you doing, Art?
All right.
unidentified
Look here, you were talking about the hurricanes last night down in the Gulf.
My friend constantly sees ghosts, and he did growing up, but one instance in particular, it was a funny one.
He kept seeing the same woman in his bedroom over and over, and so one night he got the courage to ask her what she was doing there, ask her who she was.
He woke up, and there she was, kind of at the end of the room there, and he was laying in bed.
And so he said, who are you?
She looked at him, circled the room three times, and then came right up in his face, inches from his face, scared him to death almost.
He just about died in his bed from this old woman who was haunting his room.
And by the way, I just watched the latest installment of Dead Like Me with Ellen Muth, who I got to interview last week.
This is where I found this music, you know, on Dead Like Me, which airs on Showtime.
You guys got to see it.
I mean, it's right down your alley.
What a wonderful show.
Ellen is cute as a bug.
And it's kind of strange because during the interview last week, you may recall, I asked her if in one of the episodes coming up, she might lose her cosmic virginity.
And lo and behold, just about an hour ago, it happened.
I'd like to know if you could upload the harp sound to your website because yesterday my girlfriend and I were listening to the sound and she got really frisky if you know what I mean.
I really, now there are, let me take a stab at it, all right?
Trying to explain it the old-fashioned way.
There are a number of services that will, if they cannot get through, in other words, you leave a message, and if it cannot, if it cannot be delivered.
I'm beginning to believe there is indeed, you know, perhaps a dimension or another place of being other than ours where time is simply not measured nor is it cared about.
So it's a pretty good question, isn't it?
unidentified
Yeah, it's a good point.
And the thing is, when you go to the other side, I mean, what does it matter?
Let me tell you what I do know, and maybe you can take it from There.
But what the people have told me about HAARP is that those tones that you're hearing are kind of irrelevant.
When they take tones and beat one tone against the other, then they get a differential tone, which may be something they otherwise could not achieve with all of this power.
In other words, it's a sum and a difference.
unidentified
It sounds to me like what they're trying to do is jam modems that are being used to guide incoming missiles.
No, that many billions of dollars, those towers rising off the Alaskan floor 70 feet, pumping up to a billion watts ultimately into the ionosphere.
No, they're not trying to screw with somebody's modem.
Uh-uh.
It's bigger than that.
Believe me, it's bigger than that.
Whatever it is, we can discuss, and we have discussed, what we think it might be, and it's going to be one of those in all probability, and that's a lot bigger than screwing with somebody's modem.
I wonder, just out of, it's kind of off the side of what you're saying a little bit, but when they make a period piece, when they make a movie that, for example, is supposed to occur in the 1800s or something, I wonder how much of a problem contrails and chemtrails and any other unnatural things in the sky would be for them.
I just got out of the hospital, and I had pneumonia, and I was on my way home, and I was waiting on the bus at the bus stop, and I fell asleep while I was sitting there, and I could see myself.
I don't know if it was a dream or if it was out of the body experience, but I got on the bus, and as I'm sitting on the bus, I looked out the window, and I'm sitting on the bench.
And it really freaked me out.
And about, I don't know how long it was, but maybe a couple minutes, I woke up and I'm sitting back on the bench.
Okay, I thought to myself, it could be the ghost with the Nazis, that guy could have been, the Nazi guy screaming at these people.
I think immediately it just occurred to me, I think it's a Nazis screaming at all these people and they're all yelling because that's where they used to send the people to Siberia.
It's almost like a Nazi screaming at these people to me, you know, to maybe to shut up and stop screaming because, you know, you're here and you're being punished.
Do you really think Romeo and Juliet are in eternity together?
I've wondered about that one for a long time.
Tonight, maybe we'll explore that possibility.
metaphorically anyway, actually in some ways quite literally.
If you'll just stay right where you are ahead, Dr. Jeffrey Long and...
MD, is a leading near-death experience researcher.
Dr. Long founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation.
It has a website, by the way, and www.nderf.org and two other related websites devoted to experiences related to NDEs after, Death Communication Research Foundation and Out-of-Body Experience Research Foundation both have websites.
Dr. Long serves on the board of directors of INDS, International Association for Near Death Studies, and chairs the IANDS Research Committee, Dr. Long, a physician actively practicing the medical specialty of radiation oncology.
That would be the use of radiation to treat cancer in Tacoma, Washington.
I guess doing what you do, treating people with cancer, you know, I understand there are many successes to be talked about, but in this day and even modern day and age, a lot of cancer victims obviously don't make it.
So you would see the face of death in your profession, wouldn't you?
I think anytime any physician approaches patients with cancer, you have to have a strong measure of compassion.
You have to hurt just a little bit when they do, and yet you can't let that hurt that you experience when your patients fail, especially when they fail their treatment unexpectedly, get you down.
You have to be strong for the next patient you're going to face and the next and the next.
And so it's a little bit of a balancing act.
Fortunately, I think I've achieved some measure of success in doing that.
I worked in, you know, as a one time I had a year as a 911 dispatcher, and I found myself unable to isolate myself from the kind of thing that I faced at work.
It just stayed with me and I couldn't sleep and it was changing my life and I quickly decided that wasn't for me.
Well, in all the years that I've done this talk show, and that's a lot of years now, you know, there are a few things that really stick out that I just can never and never until my dying day will forget.
And Sarah's NDE is right in the middle of that category.
It was the most amazing, emotionally incredible program I think we ever did.
This poor girl riding her bicycle home from school, hit by a car, thrown over 100 feet, so close to death, she's actually partly paralyzed on one side of her body for the rest of her life, and yet her account was absolutely incredible.
As a doctor that treats cancer, I'm well known in the medical community as being very hard-nosed about evidence-based medicine.
If you want to treat a patient a certain way, my question is, well, what's the evidence?
So how could I come to believe in the truth and the reality of near-death experience?
And that's interesting.
Actually, Art, I first heard about near-death experience back in the early 1980s.
I didn't hear it on the radio or TV because I was in training to be a radiation oncology physician, so I really didn't have time to do much of anything except eat, sleep, and study, basically.
And yet, when I was looking up an article pertinent to treating cancer patients in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, I found to my amazement one day an article entitled Near-Death Experiences.
And I was immediately taken aback.
I said, I've never heard about this in my residency training in medical school.
What's this all about?
So I read the article, and it was regarding near-death experiences and some of the early research that had gone on in the 1980s.
And I was immediately amazed.
I said, this is absolutely incredible.
If this really happens, knowing what I know about medicine, there's absolutely no way that this could happen.
Dr. Long, was there a medical explanation proffered for, you know, the stories that were chronicled there?
In other words, a hard-nosed medical explanation Of course, they see a light at the end of what appears to be a tunnel and that sort of thing because the brain tissues are dying.
You know, let's talk about that specific example because that's often used.
The theory that they tell you, Art, is that when you're dying, the brain's oxygen level gradually drops.
And as a consequence, especially when the blood level drops, as you would expect during the time when the heart stops, the blood flow to the retina, the portion of the eye responsible for vision, would gradually decrease, especially from the outside in, and that might result in the sensation of a light that would, potentially a light that would actually gradually grow larger.
The problem with physicians that advocate that point of view and other skeptics with similar arguments is that they're simply not talking to people that had a near-death experience.
That's sort of trying to explain the tunnel experience of a near-death experience, the light that gets brighter and brighter as if you're going through a tunnel toward a light.
But when you talk to these people that have had a near-death experience, that's really not what they're describing.
It's not at all unusual for near-death experiencers to describe tunnels where there's other beings with them.
They're talking.
They see multiple colors or patterns within the tunnel.
They're moving very, very rapidly.
There can be a whole host of other visual and even auditory stimuli during their travel down the tunnel.
Even if the skeptics are correct that theoretically you could have an illusion of a light getting brighter and brighter, that has nothing to do with what the great majority of near-death experiencers describe.
Well, if we're really hard-nosed here, doctor, what percentage of people who come close to death or physically actually die on operating tables or at accident scenes and that sort of thing, what percentage actually report near-death experiences?
About 15 or 20 percent that have a cardiac arrest, their heart stops, or if they stop breathing, will have a near-death experience.
In the surveys, 1992 Gallup survey estimated that in the United States, about 13 million adults had experienced near-death experience, about 5% of the population.
Yeah, certainly with any medical phenomena or psychological or any kind of paranormal experiences, you almost never encounter a situation where everybody had a particular experience or everybody didn't.
So I think it's far more startling that that number of people have had an experience like that than a majority didn't have an experience.
That's one of the most evidential things to me about near-death experience is that unlike dreams or hallucinations or just random experiences that people might have, the pattern of near-death experience is very, very ordered.
Of course, there's the associated life-threatening event.
Their heart stops, or they stop breathing.
After about 10 seconds of your heart not beating, blood no longer flows to the brain.
Within about 10 seconds, if you measure an electroencephalogram, that's a measure of electrical activity in the brain, it goes to zero.
These people are not capable of thinking, and yet at this time, they may have their consciousness apart from the body, very often above their body, looking down at their resuscitation efforts.
This happens in about half the near-death experiences.
They're able to hear and see what's going on down below them at a time they're clinically dead.
What could possibly, possibly, is there any medical explanation for people seeing the tools that were used to work on them, things that were said by nurses and doctors in those fleeting, incredible seconds?
With the detail they describe, we've had people describe the serial numbers on the machines that were used to resuscitate them.
We've had people describe in detail some clothes that are not aware.
As a physician, I have some special insights on this.
Very often, the near-death experiencers describe, shall we say, unprofessional behavior while the resuscitation is going on.
Unfortunately, it's often doctors yelling, cussing, equipment's not available, people are frantic, things don't go well during the resuscitation effort.
No, if your heart has stopped, and doctors are very good at determining if there's no heartbeat, 10 seconds later, there is no brain electrical activity that can be measured at all, even by our most sensitive equipment.
You cannot be thinking.
You cannot have a conscious act.
That's why these people are literally unconscious, as the name implies, no potential for even any kind of a conscious thought at all.
And yet what they're describing is so vivid, so detailed, it's just absolutely medically inexplicable.
Well, like other doctors, they really aren't exposed to near-death experience because they're so focused on their medical knowledge, which isn't all bad.
They need that to help save lives.
But when I talk to my colleagues, if I have a chance to sit down where it's quiet and it's over a supper and they become aware of what I do, by the time you actually start talking to doctors and they lower their initial resistance to near-death experience, it's amazing how many doctors are open to this.
I mean, I haven't had a single doctor yet after I explain all the details of near-death experience and what happens.
Not one doctor who's carefully listened to all the evidence believes it's medically explicable that's really sat down and listened.
In fact, longtime listeners may recall the very earliest part of her near-death experience involved some very hellish realms.
There were beings and there were monsters and they seemed to be harming other people and it was just horrible.
The sounds and the sights.
She was floating above this, looking down on this, were very dramatic.
Our frightening near-death experiences happen about 15% of the time.
Some of the most horrific things that I've ever read in my life are from that very, very, very small percentage of people that have hellish near-death experiences.
But there's more to it than that.
Even the near-death experiencers, over time, will come to process their experience and actually grow spiritually themselves.
That's an interesting topic, and perhaps if we have some time to go into that a little bit further, we could explain that.
The people that have had these, and again, it's a very, very small percentage that even of the people that have frightening near-death experiences actually have hellish near-death experiences.
And they are horrific, really horrific.
But of those that do, they change, and they change positively.
It takes often years for them to come to grips with what they had experienced.
But over time, they ultimately come to believe that the ruling force in this universe is love, that they sort of face their very darkness, but at the end of that passageway of coming to grips with the darkness they face, they see the light, and they understand that there really is love that's really the end point For all of us in this world.
You can be legally blind and still have a little bit of vision.
That's not true for Vicki.
She has no vision and has had absolutely none for her entire life.
She was born very, very premature, and they decades ago would often put these infants under oxygen, and that would damage the retina, the part of the eye that's necessary for vision.
And so Vicki has had absolutely no vision at all at no point during her life until she had her near-death experience.
Dr. Jeffrey Long, who is a radiation oncologist, deals very frequently with people right on the edge.
We're talking about near-death experiences.
Vicki Norituck will join us in a moment.
She had one.
Only thing is, she's been blind, totally blind, since birth.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
I'm Art
Bell.
Please be honest with me.
We were too hot to be sleeping We had to get out before the magic got away We were running with the night Laying in the shadows I'll put you at night To the
morning light To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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I have probably a whole bunch of, and I know my audience does too, real questions, kind of probably dumb questions that everybody in the world asks you, so bear with me.
No problem.
A lot of people have curiosity about people who've been blind since birth, and that has been the case with you, right?
What happened to you?
Why have you been blind?
unidentified
Too much oxygen.
I was only in the womb 22 weeks, and my eyes are totally atrophied.
That was question number two, sitting right on my screen.
I've always wanted to know, says Kim in Edmonton, Alberta, if blind people dream.
unidentified
Those who have lost their sight later in life or after they have been able to see for a little bit of time at least, even like two or three years or something like that, they have visual impressions in their dreams, but those of us who are blind from birth do not.
And we also do not have rapid eye movement to sleep.
No, she doesn't have a visual component to her dream.
Rapid eye movement is associated with seeing things in a dream, and it's some kind of a visual component.
But no rapid eye movement, as I understand it, means that she's not seeing anything, so there's no need for her eye to move in response to any visual stimuli that's occurring in a dream.
Okay, but your dream of flying, you said you dreamed of flying.
That's very common to many of us.
In my dreams, I, of course, visualize what I'm flying over.
And in fact, that's a very large part of the sense of flying, that you're going over the trees and the buildings and zooming around and the sky above you and the clouds and the things that the sight associate with flying.
unidentified
Not for me.
It's just the feeling of flying, but there's no impressions of any visual things.
Not being cited, did you, in the seconds that preceded the accident, did you have any warning, any understanding of what was happening at all?
unidentified
Well, the woman sitting next to me, the one that landed on top of me, screamed, look out, look out, and then that was it.
And then the next thing I knew, my body was lying on the street, and what would be me, I, was going in and out of my mouth several times.
And it was like the only analogy I can think of is the body was like the peel, and I was like the banana, but I had all of my consciousness there as far as my thoughts and impressions and feelings, but I was not in that body.
She had symptoms suggestive of massive head trauma, including probably a base of skull fracture.
In fact, there's a lot more to Vicki's story when she was in the emergency room.
I think the doctors that were actually attending you at the time were afraid that the injuries were severe enough that, as I recall, Vicki, you said that they were afraid you wouldn't be able to hear because of the enormity of your injuries.
And what else did they say?
unidentified
Well, of course, this going in and out of my mouth happened before I was in the emergency room, and then there was a blank space, and then I was in the emergency room, and I was up on the ceiling at Harborview Medical Center looking down at what was going on.
Oh, the onrush of emotions and sensations that you must have been feeling, and to suddenly be sighted in this way and to be seeing other people, I mean, virtually for the first time in your life, all of that would have been trauma enough.
But here you are sort of feeling calm and detached about it.
But at this point, you're beginning to get a little excited, it sounds like.
How did the medical workers respond to the fact that you had heard and were accurately describing all of this?
unidentified
One nurse was very sympathetic and believed me, and I told her that I'd been dead, and she did believe me, and my mother believed me, and quite a few people did believe me.
This was in 1973 when this happened, when I was 22 years old.
And so this wasn't really talked about that much.
But one nurse said, oh, you must have hit your head a lot harder than people thought you did.
And she implied that I was kind of nuts, so I just didn't talk to her.
And meanwhile, my oldest, dearest friend, Anne, down in Oregon, woke up from a sound sleep, and she was screaming alone in her apartment.
And she called my first husband.
I was married to my first husband, Doug, at that time, and she said, Vicki's dead.
Vicki's dead.
And I was coming home from an engagement at a club when this happened.
It was like 1.30 in the morning or so, between 1.30 and 2 in the morning.
And Doug said, oh, come on.
She's just on her way home and she hasn't gotten here yet.
Go back to sleep and you've just had a bad dream.
And then the people from Harvardview called him about 20 minutes later and told him that I probably wouldn't survive and that he needed to get down there.
Boy, I mean, even if you had that sudden feeling that Vicki's dead, you probably think twice before you picked up the phone and called a relative and said something like that on the phone.
unidentified
And Aunt is blind, too.
We've known each other ever since I was four years old.
And she was very close to me, and she knew, and she instantly was aware of the fact of what was happening to me, and she knew that she had to let him know.
How do you process or do you process the information looking down on your own body with somebody telling you or you're hearing that you might not come back or you might be a vegetable or whatever, but you're gone.
I mean, that's really something to try and digest and process.
unidentified
Well, I was very much alive, so the way I felt about it, I was fine.
And so I really didn't care too much about the body, frankly.
I just sort of thought, oh, well, I can't communicate with these people.
But I did feel frustrated about the fact that I couldn't get through to them.
And I thought, well, I'm out of here.
I can't get through to these people and let them know that I'm all right.
And immediately I went up through the ceiling as if it were nothing at all.
Can you recall how shocked you were at having sight and seeing things that you had only previously imagined or heard?
unidentified
Yes, I definitely recall that.
And then I was up above the street again and looking down, and I was kind of like a puppy rolling in the grass, as it were, because I didn't have to worry about bumping into anything, and I was floating up above the buildings and the street and really enjoying it.
And then I got sucked into this kind of tube thing.
Tube thing.
Yeah, it had apertures in it that you could see out of, but it traveled at a very rapid rate of speed.
Well, that sounds like you went through hell or a hellish kind of place, followed by, I don't know, maybe someplace in between.
unidentified
Well, the first one was the confused people, and then I went past the really hellish place, and I thought, oh, I don't want to be anywhere near this place.
And immediately my tube speeded up, and I went away from it.
My guests are Dr. Jeffrey Long and Vicki Noratuck, Lynn Since Birth.
What she's describing right now is the beginning of a near-death experience.
She coded for four minutes.
From the high desert to in the middle of the night, I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
When you subscribe to the approach to the cake,
of the asperry tree with his dying knees turning gold but the white bird just sits in the cage rolling gold white
bird must fly or she will die white bird must fly or she will die the sun sets home the sun sets go the clouds won't lie the air turns slow the angry times do always grow
and she must fly she must fly to talk with our fellow wildcard line in area code 775-727-1295.
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To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Dr. Jeffrey Long, who's a radiation oncologist, has brought us Vicki Nora Tuck.
Blind since birth, she's never seen a thing until she died.
At least died for about four minutes.
And we're right in the middle of listening to what occurred during that period of time.
Stay right there.
Once again, Dr. Jeffrey Long and Vicki Noratoka.
You two, welcome back.
Vicki, just a quick one here.
And it's another one of these sort of questions that I guess maybe all of us wonder about, but could you ask your guest, please, Art for me, this is Dr. Nothing in Eugene Oregon, how seeing for the first time translated to her other senses?
In other words, for example, the fabric and bulk of a nurse's coat as compared to something only felt before or imagined, was there any of that kind of detail in the early stages when you realized you suddenly had sight?
unidentified
No, it was like hearing a foreign language and not being able to understand it.
So you had been, you actually went from the operating table and the ceiling to outside the buildings and then sucked into this something.
unidentified
It was a tube.
A four-year-old boy, I guess, at one point when he was dying, described it as a noodle, but it was like being inside of this vehicle thing that had apertures in it that I could see out of.
And it was traveling very fast, and then I was going toward this wind chime sound and a beautiful light.
And I went past this place where people were very confused and sad, and I wanted to get them to listen and to realize how important life was.
And then I went past this other place.
And two years ago, a couple of years ago, I guess it was about two years ago, some friends of mine had a sample of rock from Sodom and Gomorrah.
And I didn't know that that was what it was.
And they wanted me to touch this thing.
And the smell that emanated from that sample of rock was the same smell that came from that awful area.
The confusion has been described in a number of other NDEs, and then the actual hellish realms where there's more hellish imagery is certainly well known in NDEs.
A lot of us wonder about that, whether in another realm or on the other side or whatever words we want to attach to it, there is time as we feel it and understand to hear a literal, you know, linear sense of time happening.
unidentified
It was slowed down.
It was like a whole lot happened.
And I was told that this was four minutes during which all of this transpired.
But I had done some tape recording of this whole incident.
And they have like, I guess, five and a half hours of transcripts from this experience through International Association of Near-Death Studies.
And they wanted me to describe this in detail, but I'm trying to encapsulate it the best I can.
We've got a lot of time on radio, so give us all you can.
unidentified
I went toward this beautiful light, and there were people ahead of me and people behind me in this tube thing, but I was alone in mine.
But I knew that there were people ahead of me, and there were people behind me.
And there was a place where there were animals, too, and I wanted to find my childhood pets, but I couldn't, and I couldn't get out of my tube thing yet.
And I ended up in this area where there was, I landed on some huge flowers, and I was worried about hurting them, but it was communicated to me mentally, I guess you could say, that I didn't hurt them, and they instantly sprang back.
No, but it was kind of like it reminded me of a park shelter because there were structures there, And there was a big gate, a beautiful, ornate gate, but I was not allowed to go near that.
And as I was ejected from this tube, there were five people there to meet me, and there was a river there, and there were these giant flowers, and there were birds.
And she was there to meet me because prior to her death, I did go down and see her.
She died two years before this.
She died in 1971.
And she asked my forgiveness before she died.
And she said, I'm off my rocker.
I'm off my rocker.
And I said, yeah, Grandma, I know you are.
And so she asked me to forgive her and said that she was sorry for everything that she had done and that she honestly believed I was grandpa in a female body.
And I told her, well, you did some terrible things to me, but I do forgive you, which I honestly did.
And she was there reaching her arms out to me.
And before she was actually dead, she repented of everything and she asked me to pray with her.
And she said that she wanted God to forgive her for everything.
And so then Jesus was there, and he held up his hand and said, no, you may not go to my father's house now.
And then he said that I needed to go back to have my children, to give birth to my children.
And another thing he said was, you have been through many hard things, and you will go through many more, some of which man will call unforgivable, but you must forgive.
Loving and forgiving are the key to life.
And he told me that I was to go back and to teach people about loving and forgiving.
And that I would be put in many situations where that would be severely tested.
And he also said that it was not up to me who was to be forgiven and who was not, and that I was to just make every effort to forgive whatever my feelings were, and that the justice and the vengeance would be his.
Well, I mean, in order to forgive, there was a lot in your life that you just finished telling us about.
There's a big mountain to forgive there.
unidentified
Yes.
But another interesting factor about this was that this was a place where all knowledge was.
And I could call to mind anything that I wanted to know, and it would be there.
The information would be there.
And I understood physics and astronomy and different things that I was an A student, but there were certain things that I had a lot of difficulty with comprehending.
And after that, I was able to forgive her even more and to heal from what she had done to me because I felt how it was to be her and the torment that she went through.
Yeah, I was going to ask how you could feel somebody's mental illness and what an incredible thing that would be to be suddenly inside somebody so out of it, so out of it.
unidentified
I felt so much compassion for her that I never had felt before.
I mean, I forgave her and I was willing to do it, but after that, I felt almost gut-wrenching compassion.
And then I understood that one scripture that talks about Jesus' bells being, oh, what's the word?
They were rent, as it were, with the pain that he felt for us, and how his whole insides ached with what he, you know, with the love and the sorrow and everything that he felt toward all of us.
Did you have a sense of yourself through all of this?
I mean, you're having these incredible, I mean, a life review, and to go inside the mind of a psychotic person, these are so mind-wrenching that it's hard to imagine you really paid attention to any detail, any tactile detail of how things were.
unidentified
It sounds strange, but it was like it was irrelevant, as lawyers put it, irrelevant new material.
You would think, on the other hand, that especially in your 20s, to suddenly be seeing color when you had never perceived or understood color would be such, in itself, would be such an incredible rush of sensations.
You know, there's so much to this near-death experience that's absolutely incredible.
You know, of course, one of the most dramatic things being here's Vicki absolutely and completely blind from birth, you know, having incredible, the entire experience is just replete with visual stimuli, you know, and understanding.
Now it begins Now that you're gone Needles and pins Quite like you're done Watching back up Till you return Hiding back forth And watching you
burn Now it begins Maybe all the leaves must fall But don't you know That it hurts me so To say goodbye to you Wish you didn't have to go To talk with Art Bell.
Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From West to the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Once again, Dr. Jeffrey Long, who is a radiation oncologist in Vicky Norotok, who blind since birth, had a near-death experience following, immediately following a car accident.
She was dead, really dead, for four minutes.
And she's telling us what happened in those four minutes.
And by the way, Dr. Long, had you heard the story about Roy Horne?
Yeah, virtually everybody that, in fact, one of the things that's almost absolute near-death experiences is that if you encounter people during the experience, these are people that died previously.
Certainly there's been a number of near-death experience accounts where people do encounter beloved pets.
Again, they're always deceased.
When you do encounter a beloved pet, uniformly, at least in the experiences I've heard, the pet is at the peak of health.
They very much know the person having the near-death experience.
It's a joyous reunion.
It's really a homecoming, and the pets are a part of that.
I think the best near-death experience evidence is that indeed art, animals do have souls, and that there is an eternal relationship between the animals we love on the other side.
I think, Vicki, I would be just fascinated to hear you finish up just what all happened next during your near-death experience.
unidentified
Well, that was touched on when Jesus was talking to me and giving me the life review and everything.
And he gave me the scripture about how the lion shall lie down with the lamb and all that, and how a child shall play with a snake and all that kind of thing.
And that during that time, that's how it's going to be, because there won't be this enmity between man and any creatures or any other creatures and one another, and that everybody will be in harmony there.
And yes, all of those animals were at the peak Of health, the birds, the flowers, everything.
Everything was beautiful, and it was like the most incredible summer day that you could imagine, but much better.
Would you say that you were at the gates of heaven?
Is that I mean, you mentioned a wonderful gate that you weren't allowed to go through.
Was it your impression you were at the gates of heaven?
unidentified
Yes.
I had arrived at paradise, and I was told I couldn't go any further because this was not the time I was supposed to be there.
And he told me that I needed to come back and tell people what had happened to me, and to ask him for help during difficult times when I had trouble forgiving, to give it to him and have him help me to forgive things.
All of this makes sense to me, but, you know, it's so classic in the way, I don't know, I guess we all imagine it, you know, a gate of heaven and life reviews and the presence of Jesus.
I mean, I don't know what happened physically, but I assume that sort of coincided with the end of your NDE.
Or it probably did, right?
You probably came rushing back at some point.
unidentified
Well, yes, after the life review, and when he said, watch this, and I felt everything that everyone else felt as well as what I had felt and had the detailed review of everything that had happened to me from birth up until 22 years of age, then I was sent back, and it was like reversing the way that I had come in this tube.
Since you've been blind from birth, if you did not dream prior to your accident and prior to all of this, do you now that you have had visual experience, have you begun to now dream?
Yeah, there's very few folks that are blind from birth that have been reported, but that's a good question.
I think a lot of what Vicki is describing as vision certainly involves seeing things and seeing objects, recognizing them.
But during near-death experiences, and I've actually studied the vision that people have during near-death experiences, I don't think it's exactly the type of vision that we have here on Earth.
It's more of a sense of a knowing or an understanding that seems to be a part of the visual mechanism that we don't really have on Earth.
And Vicki, you might explain a little more about that.
unidentified
Oh, yes.
That hits it right on the head, as the expression goes.
That's exactly what it feels like.
It's more intuitive.
And it's like it becomes a part of you.
It's not so physical.
It's more intense, and it's more all-around, kind of pervasive.
Yeah, you know, I think, again, what people have when they're having near-death experiences is, you know, of course, these are at times of when the heart stopped, when people are stopped breathing.
There's really no, you know, 10 seconds after a cardiac arrest, there's no brain flow to the brain, and the brain function ceases as measured by electroencephalograms.
So I think that what people Are having during near-death experiences, I think it's described visually because I think that's, and there is clearly visual components to that, but it's probably something above and beyond vision.
In other words, it's sort of like the communication they have.
You describe this talking, but it really isn't, Vicki.
I mean, it's more of an understanding, it's sharing, it's not physical talking like the way we're talking now.
unidentified
Intuitive is the only word I can think of to describe it.
It's sort of you see things, but in addition to just simply seeing objects, you're not just as passionately seeing an object and you recognize it's there.
You have an understanding or sort of a more in-depth awareness or sense of the meaning of that, whatever you're seeing.
unidentified
And it's like the foreignness of the physicalness or the foreignness of the physicality of it remained to some degree, but yet I knew what things were.
And I briefly had the knowledge of, as I said, physics, astronomy, color, but I can't tell you what it was because it was something that was taken when I returned.
I remember having the knowledge, but I don't remember it.
The great, great majority of near-death experiencers that encounter overwhelming knowledge or understanding are basically told that they can't have it when they come back.
In fact, one near-death experiencer put it this way, they said it's like an ocean of knowledge, and your brain is like a teacup.
Well, is there anything else, Vicki, that we should know from your experience, either how it's affected you since or it still does now?
It certainly seems awfully clear in your mind.
unidentified
Oh, yes.
And another thing that's happened is that I have gotten impressions about people when they are in distress or have needed something that I was to make contact with them.
And every single time it's been a major, major thing.
Now, again, doctor, what she had is so classic Christian.
It screamed a million questions come to me.
Sure.
And so since your organization looks at all of this worldwide, you must be able to answer to some degree what people of other faiths and beliefs report.
There's less, some cultures, particularly the Japanese, have a little less probability of going through a tunnel than others, but certainly there's a very distinct percentage of the near-death experiences that have that.
Lights, you know, different cultures may have somewhat different probabilities of encountering a light, but that's certainly a very important part of it.
The feelings of peace, love, and the intensity of those feelings, surpassing anything on earth, is also very, very common.
I had a long discussion about that with a near-death experience researcher in Taiwan, and he studied a very large number of near-death experiences, probably more than any other non-Western NDEs that I'm aware of, or I've interacted directly with someone with first-hand knowledge.
And I asked him about that directly, because Jesus is seen in about 5% to 10% of near-death experiences, not at all unusual in the experiences I have.
What this physician in Taiwan who studies this said was that, yes, it's fairly common that people encounter religious figures there, but their religious figures, and I asked directly, is it Buddha?
And they go, well, no, it's some of the other, more common than that are the minor religious figures in the Buddhist belief system that they have there.
And again, fairly common there, but they're going to be religious figures that the near-death experiencer is going to be comfortable with.
And, you know, we're going to, it's going to be, if these experiences are to be a product of an interaction between the near-death experiencer and a higher power, a loving higher power, it would make sense that they're going to have an experience that they're going to be familiar with, be able to relate to.
It wouldn't, you know, the Buddhist encountering Jesus, I haven't heard that yet.
Nor have I, I rarely have encountered Christians encountering Buddha, although, you know, maybe like one experience.
What's really interesting, I've even, one of my more interesting near-death experiences are the occasional atheists that we get who encounter Jesus.
And one atheist in the near-death experience, I remember vividly, argued with Jesus and said, I don't believe in you.
And Jesus communicated that.
Is that a Hallmark moment?
But Jesus, and again, we're talking about this telepathic or non-physical communication communicated back a sense to the effect of, I know, but I believe in you.
And it's okay.
And so atheists, it's very, very hard for atheists to remain atheists after they've had a near-death experience like this.
I mean, it's basically when people encounter Jesus in near-death experiences, first of all, I don't know that I've ever encountered a near-death experience where this entity states they are Jesus.
That's just simply not reported.
What happens is people say this is a knowing or an understanding, like so much else they encounter far along in their near-death experience.
Well, of course, you know, we're getting it occasionally we see the hellish near-death experience, which is very opposite in terms of the feelings and the sights and the sort of anti-love sensation that classic near-death experiences have.
So that's sort of the polar opposite of these kind of things.
But others just have the tunnel or a bright light, encounter deceased relatives.
I mean, it certainly has convinced me there's something going on.
I mean, if, you know, for a near-death experience is to essentially always encounter people, only people that deceased on the other side, essentially never living people, like you would with a dream or hallucination.
But for that to always happen and for them to universally be at the prime of their health, happy, delightful, I mean, it's just part of the chain of evidence that has absolutely convinced me that near-death experiences are for real.
And I could hear and see everything that they were doing in their minds, what they were thinking.
I was with my doctor as he was coming to the hospital, but I was also looking down at the Earth from space.
And I could see the Earth and that it wasn't a round globe like we bought in the stores.
We hadn't gone to space yet.
And I was going through the universe at the same time.
And it was very familiar to me.
I knew I was going home.
And then I went to heaven.
And unlike anybody else, I think Dr. Long will remember, I got a walkabout.
And it was partly religious and partly technology.
But I went to many cities, including what I call the City of Technology, which was a city that was about, it was all white, and it had beautiful green grass, and it had no more than three-story high buildings.
As I recall, she did confirm with the people that she multilocated with.
First of all, there is some occasional times when indie ears describe multilocation, that is, being aware of where people are at, especially what they are thinking, and basically visualizing them, even considerable geographic distances away.
You know, my impression was that she did, but I can't confirm that because, you know, again, I've got 600 or 700 of these accounts floating around.
I recall she shared hers a long time ago.
I'm almost certain she did, but I can't vouch for that with a certainty.
I can tell you other people that multilocate.
And actually, a more common time that multilocation occurs is people code in an emergency room or an operating room, and they become aware of their family members or other beloved people that are like in the hospital waiting room or in other areas of the hospital.
In other times where multi-location like that has been reported, a number of these people do ask them directly, were you here?
Were you doing this at this time?
And every one of the experiences that I'm aware of has been confirmed.
I think the detail with which they bring back, when they talk to these folks, they're exactly here.
They may be leaning against a wall.
They may have their hands over their head.
They may be crying, even though they're not used to seeing them cry.
But the depth of the detail that they bring back, which is not just like a snapshot of a picture, but sort of a movie, if you will, I think that the detail like that is highly evidential.
And obviously, there's absolutely no medical explanation for that at all.
And then again, the other advantage I have in reviewing about 600 or 700 of these near-death experiences, a few percent that have these multivocation things, is that I'm very, very, you know, I'm a scientist, a medical scientist also.
I look very, very hard for any evidence of it not adding up.
Is there something that they see that's not plausible or doesn't make sense?
I've looked very hard over the last six years for experiences where what they saw wasn't real.
And did anybody share that at any time?
And the answer is no.
Any time that they've confirmed the details that they saw geographically outside of the emergency room operating room, it really happened just exactly as they saw or heard it.
You know, Art, that's really interesting since near-death experience has become much more known when they're resuscitating people.
Doctors that are astute to this, and most of the people that are working with critical care do run into this periodically, they're actually much more polite.
They won't say anything disparaging about whoever they're trying to resuscitate, because if you've ever been a doctor and made any disparaging remarks and had the patient come back and confront you with that, and that has happened, that's embarrassing for the doctor.
So just a little bit more sensitivity working with people that are being resuscitated or dying actively and a little more compassion, I think, has been the result of these kind of accounts.
Well, let's say, take the average emergency room doctor who's been working there on the front lines for five or six or seven years.
I understand they don't last real long working in those environments, period.
That takes the young and the brave, I guess.
But for those that have been working that period of time, would there ever be an instance where they would say, oh, Boulder Dash, you know, this is such baloney, or would they all be convinced?
The thing of it is, usually people that have had these profound near-death experiences, when they come back, they're critically ill.
They often are intubated.
That means they have a tube down their throat in their trachea, and they're on a ventilator.
And they really can't share about their experience initially.
Furthermore, they're usually not inclined to immediately come out of these experiences and immediately tell the doctor or nurse that's nearby, oh, gosh, guess what happened to me?
Yeah, but most of them aren't going to share that immediately because, I mean, they just basically recovered from being dead.
And, you know, they may be, you know, they're so overwhelmed with the experience that they just had.
I mean, they can hardly even verbalize it.
And so, you know, when they're that critically ill and have just recovered from having their heart stop, they're not going to really, their probability of them sharing it's fairly low.
Very few near-death experiencers I've seen actually started talking about it or sharing it immediately.
And don't forget, a lot of these people are so sick or ill, frankly, that they really can't talk immediately after their experience.
Ultimately, whenever we hear about it, doctor, how frequently does a full life experience, you know, the movie of your life unrolling before you like, here it is, baby, your life.
Vicki had a very detailed life review where she saw everything from the moment of her birth to the time of accident and then further sensed what everybody else was sensing and feeling that interacted with her.
Those are among the most detailed of life reviews.
Those are relatively uncommon, probably in the 10 or 20 percent range.
Most life reviews that I've seen involve just seeing images of your life.
They're going to be often moving at a very, very rapid pace.
And that's a more typical life review, but it's often the highlights of the life that you lived.
I'm trying so hard to put it all together in my mind, and that's why I reached out to other parts of the world to try and understand this phenomena is different, but it's the same.
That's one of the incredible things we've learned since we have on our website near-death experiences in over 20 languages, and we encourage people all over the world to share.
We've actually developed the form that people share their near-death experience on in 20 different languages, foreign languages.
So we're actually studying this and understanding this at a very high level.
I think what we don't know far exceeds what we do know.
You really, as best I can tell with near-death experiencers, to just really cut it to the quick, these are people that are earthly beings that are in, even if their thinking is greatly accelerated and their processing enormously speeded up, they're basically finite beings encountering something infinite.
So it's, you know, to come back, it's like the knowledge Vicki was shown, the enormous body of knowledge and understanding, and it's the analogy I used.
It's like trying to put an ocean of knowledge into the teacup that our brains are.
Well, she had hers again in 1973, which was prior to Raymond Moody's, Dr. Moody's beginning to write about all this.
These days, modern days, if somebody has one, people would say, well, you know, so many in the American public have heard about NDEs that it is suggested to them that this is what should happen, and so it's what happens.
Okay, these are called copycat experiences because you've heard about near-death experience, therefore that affects what they describe in their experience in some way.
Glad you brought that up, Art.
I actually did a study and have actually published it in the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
What I did is this study is, again, using the data from our web form on near-death experiences, I studied a population of, I think we had about 60 people that had their near-death experiences before 1975.
This is before Raymond Moody wrote about near-death experience.
Nobody knew about near-death experience before 1975.
And I compared the experience elements that they had during their near-death experience with a population of well over 200 people that had near-death experiences after 1975.
In other words, they would have had some potential to be aware that near-death experience is a described entity and know something about what it is.
Well, what this published research study I did indicated that there was absolutely zero statistical significant difference in the experience elements whether you had your NDE prior to 1975 or after it.
There seems to be absolutely, and these are very large numbers of near-death experiencers studied.
So that's pretty conclusive that whether you knew you had your NDE at a time you potentially could know about it or not made absolutely no difference in the experience that you have.
Okay, if we go back to years prior to Dr. Moody, there's plenty of years of human awareness and writings and recordings of human activities and happenings that go, well, as far back as man can write.
What evidence is there that 100, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, people experienced and dared to write about this?
The oldest surviving explicit report of a near-death experience in Western literature was actually written by Plato.
And Plato wrote his legendary book called The Republic.
And in Plato's book, The Republic, he discusses the story of Ur.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, but it's spelled ER.
This amazing account is a soldier who went out to do battle and was killed.
And as part of the Greek culture, what they did with their deceased is they would build a funeral pyre and basically place them on top of a pile of logs and they would be burned.
Air, the soldier who died, was placed on top of the funeral pyre, but all of a sudden resuscitated, spontaneously came back to life and immediately got up and immediately started talking about a remarkable near-death experience containing a lot of the classic elements that we talk about today.
Clearly, you know, a civilization far removed from us, and yet again, as far back as Plato, near-death experiences have been happening.
Even though these things, and actually in medieval times, there were quite a few near-death experiences documented too, but nobody did what Raymond Moody did.
Instead of having just rare, you know, isolated near-death experience reports where you would hear it and you'd go, well, I don't know what that means.
Dr. Moody's contribution was to find over 60 of these accounts.
And at that point in time, when he looked at a fairly large group of them, he was able to say, hey, look, there's a pattern.
These people have the out-of-body experiences.
They go through the tunnel, they see a light, they have these incredible feelings of peace and love, see deceased relatives, encounter a boundary, and involved in a decision to return.
Oh, that's something I want to talk about, is decisions.
In other words, a lot of NDEers are given the opportunity to make decisions about whether they stay or whether they go back.
Decisions, decisions.
Life and apparently death are full of them.
I'm Mark Bell.
unidentified
I'm Mark Bell.
I was a highwayman.
Along the coach roads I did ride.
With sword and pistol by my side.
Many a young maid lost her marbles in my trade.
Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade.
The master turned me in the spring of 25.
But I am still alive.
I was a sailor.
I was born upon the tide.
With the sea I did a fight.
I sailed and scooted around the horn of Mexico.
I went off the world, the mainsail in a blow.
And when the yards broke off, they said that I got killed.
But I'm living still.
I was a damn building across the river deep and wide.
We're stealing what it did to life.
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado.
I slipped it down.
the building to the wind complete alone Everything electric to the no sound I still run I'll always be run To talk with Art Bell,
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You know, I was joking a little while ago, life is nothing but one big, long series of choices and decisions that we've got to make.
But apparently death is, too.
Now, how many by percent, or however you can impart to me, how many are given the opportunity to either go through the gate and go to the other side or come back to Earth?
You know, in the fairly detailed near-death experiences, that's not unusual at all.
You're getting around 40% plus are actually involved in a decision.
Very often, they reach a point during the experience.
You know, there may be a stream going across a path they're walking along.
A gate can be described as something.
But once they reach this point of no return, there's a decision made.
Now, essentially always, it's not a decision they make in isolation, but there's other beings or entities with them, and they dialogue about the decision to go back to Earth.
What's interesting is that, and most people have a choice.
Only a minority basically go back to Earth without seeming to have an interaction or discussion or dialogue about it.
But most of the people, and this is very striking in near-death experiences, the majority don't want to go back.
Understand these people are having their experience in heavenly realms.
They are feeling and knowing love and peace and compassion.
Things are perfect.
There's no pain.
They're literally in heaven.
And yet, why on earth would these people leave heaven and choose to return to earth?
The number one reason that they give are because they have relationships on earth that are important, and it's important for them to go back.
Most often, that involves children.
It could be parents, other family members, other things.
But relationships on earth seem to be one of the most important reasons people choose to leave heaven and go to earth.
And certainly number two and right up there are the lessons that they have to learn, and the lessons predominantly revolve around lessons about love that they can only uniquely learn on earth.
Well, you know, I think the answer to that is the affirmative art.
Among the general population, about 20% of people believe in reincarnation.
Among people who have had a near-death experience, it's about 60%.
If you go to the International Association for Near-Death Studies Board of Directors, it's close to 100%.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
So I think the evidence is not as strong as it is with other elements of near-death experience.
But some of the life reviews, and we've talked about that tonight, a few of these people, when they have life reviews, actually go back to review lives that they had prior to their current earthly life.
That's very, very unusual.
But I've had people describe even a series of lives they may be describing that they felt had the same sense, the personality they were themselves, and yet they were in different cultures, different times.
They may be male, they may be female, and yet they always knew it was themselves.
No, this is just what we hear from near-death experiencers, and this is the beliefs that they come to have after their experience.
Absolutely remarkable how they could relive in detail.
And again, the incredible thing, artists, is they're having these incredibly vivid, clear understandings of prior lives at a time they're not having any blood flow to their brain.
Sharon, you might try to find a picture of your great-grandmother who you believe you saw.
Virtually everyone believes they've seen a deceased relative that they've never even seen before, if they can find pictures, almost invariably it's the individual you saw and knew as your great-grandmother.
unidentified
Well, what was really interesting is the five years passed before I told anyone, I had thought about it that I thought people would think I was crazy if I ever said anything like that.
I think the great majority of near-death experiencers find that their experience is so unlike earthly events and they may falteringly try to share it with other people who aren't open to it, will tell them that it's a dream, tell them that they were hallucinating.
And Sharon, you know darn good and well it wasn't a dream.
You were probably more alert and lucid at that experience at any time in your life.
A very high percentage of people that have near-death experiences, because their thought is so speeded up and things are so non-ordinary, an awful lot of near-death experiencers literally can't put it in words.
And Art, you certainly can have some empathy with that as much as about anybody for your own body experience.
And that's why I really have a lot of respect for the courage for people that come out and do their very, very best to describe something that's almost not describable in words, in words as best they can.
Do you think the average person could review all your materials, hopscotching around your websites, we've got them linked up there, and come away with a firm conclusion and belief that it's not over when it's over?
Oh, I don't know how you could have any other belief.
The entire website, and by the way, we don't pull punches on that website.
In fact, if anything, we have a bias to put experiences that are not typical and are against what the prevailing belief is about near-death experience.
But even with that slight bias, to give the full picture of near-death experiences, the near-death experience accounts and what we have and what others have shared are really what they seem, an overwhelming message of hope, that we really don't die, that there is an afterlife, and the afterlife is wonderful.
I think that's a manifest conclusion.
And certainly that's what near-death experiencers come away believing.
But even if you haven't had that, if you can just share with the near-death experiencers by hearing, like listening to your radio show and hearing near-death experiencers share, reading about it, you'll come to understand what they're trying to share.
I think the final push might come from the fact that you look carefully at what the skeptics have said, who said, no, no, it isn't real, thought out very carefully why they think it's not real, and published it.
That's instructive in itself.
For the people that think that near-death experience is not for real, not for exactly what Vicki's sharing it is, the first thing that jumps out is the skeptics have over 20 different alternative explanations for near-death experience.
The reason for that is simple.
There's no one or several alternative explanations to near-death experience that make sense even to the skeptics.
And then you go looking at like we did with the tunnel vision, how they try to explain it by hypoxia, lack of oxygen to the brain.
I mean, the arguments not only don't hold water, but they're silly.
In fact, you don't need an MD or a PhD to figure this out.
My nine-year-old son was hearing a nearly blind near-death experiencer share their experience up in Seattle several years ago.
And at the end of that, he said, Dad, this can't be brain chemistry.
You don't need advanced degrees.
You just simply need to understand that it's absolutely manifestly impossible.
The skeptics just look silly trying to come up with an alternative explanation for something that's obvious and manifest reality.
Well, that's important, Art, because that understanding that near-death experience is part of a spectrum of these type Of experiences led me to develop my after-death communication and out-of-body experience website.
So there's no question that people can have these elements even when they haven't actually coded.
The experiences tend to be a little bit more varied, and they're not as consistent as far as the elements of near-death experiences, but they're darn sure for real.
There's no question about that.
As you know, with your own out-of-body experience, we are clearly more than our physical bodies would suggest.
We have some part of us that's much, much more than we physically see and interact with every day.
Yes, there was actually a very large study out of the Netherlands in which they talked to people that had coded cardiac arrest specifically.
They identified a population of 63 people that had near-death experiences.
They took their near-death experience accounts several weeks after it occurred, and then they asked them again about a year later, and then they asked them again about their experience seven years later.
The conclusion of this study was that their experiences, right down to the detail, were absolutely the same, even seven years after their occurrence.
Absolutely no hint that over time they wavered in their account at all.
Are you at all familiar in real life, not the movies, but in real life, with anybody anywhere who has become so intrigued with near-death that they have attempted essentially what occurred in Flatliners?
We have people that have an interest basically in suicide because they think the afterlife is wonderful and it beats the heck out of the misery they're experiencing.
But really, Flatliner is where it would certainly be possible, wouldn't it, to stop somebody's heart and then to bring them back again a minute later, a minute and a half later?
I'm sure not, but it was an irresistible question.
I mean, if there's such a fascination with this, I guess I could understand, as depicted in that movie, how a group of perhaps young people could become so interested that they might go to that length.
But as you point out, it probably wouldn't be printed, there wouldn't be a story about it, it would never see the light of day.
Well, they could certainly share it with my website.
I worry that some people might have done something as inappropriate as that.
And quite frankly, the fact that I and no near-death experience researcher has ever heard of such an account suggests they either had no experience or they died.