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Oct. 2, 2004 - Art Bell
02:52:42
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Dr. Tess Gerritsen - Disaster in Space
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Music playing.
From the high desert and the great American southwest adjacent to the infamous Area 51,
this is that program that covers about 24, how many time zones are out there anyway?
We cover all of them, one way or the other, with Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell, honored and privileged to be with you throughout the weekend.
And it may promise to be quite a weekend indeed.
I'll tell you all about it in a moment.
It's a very sad note, obviously.
We begin the program with, as you know, many times over the years I've interviewed Dr. Mac, Dr. John E. Mac, and I'm sure by now you're all aware, this audience certainly, of Dr. Mac's passing.
Dr. John E. Mac of the Cambridge Hospital's Department of Psychiatry was incredibly killed on Monday evening in England apparently a drunk driver has struck and instantly killed and it could not come as more of a shock to ufology to the entire legitimate investigation of those who were abducted
It's a gigantic shock, and I don't make more of it than it is.
Of course, you get the usual, oh, he was murdered.
No, he wasn't.
He was run over by a drunk driver.
And as you get older, you begin to note the passing of those who have been around you, and many I have interviewed are now gone.
Dr. Mack, another, and he'll be sorely, sorely missed in doing programs like this and in every other way in the world.
So it is with great sadness, indeed, that I note the passing of Dr. Mack.
Take care, buddy.
Let me cover a little bit of news.
I've got so much to tell you about tonight.
Of course, number one on the hit list is the mountain.
A government scientist raised the alert level Saturday.
As a matter of fact, a CNN USGS guy who did an interview said earlier, well, we now believe that the explosion Or the eruption could be bigger than perhaps we thought originally.
There's a lot of that going on with scientists.
Scientists tracking earthquake activity at Mount St.
Helens raised their warning level on Saturday to a 3-3 volcano alert, and officials prepared to evacuate a visitor center about five miles from the crater.
A Level 3 warning indicates there is a potential hazard to life and property in the area, said the U.S.
Geological Survey earlier Saturday.
A Level 2 was issued.
Then three.
Small earthquakes were detected at Mount St.
Helens on Saturday, a warning sign that pressure was building up yet again in the volcano after it spewed steam and ash on Friday.
The volcano, this is a quote, has repressurized.
That's Dan D'Souza, a USGS researcher.
It has repressurized.
He said they could be comparable to Friday's eruption.
That belts steam and ash for about 24 minutes to an altitude of about 10,000 feet.
A lot of pictures running around.
I had one up earlier.
Small, shallow earth.
In fact, there's one up there now, I think, on my webcam.
Oh, no, there isn't.
No, there isn't.
There's a picture of the book that has been written that's going to result in my interview tonight.
Oh, what an incredible book.
I'm going to tell you about that.
At any rate, if you live anywhere near the mountain, you're going to want to keep ...yourself availed of information sources like the one you're listening to right now, and we'll try and keep you up on the latest, but the headline of the latest, kind of to me, is USGS guys saying, well, it may be bigger than we thought it was going to be.
So we'll have to wait and see.
That's all you can do with the volcanoes, wait and see.
Or is it?
We, I actually had an idea the other night, I'm sure it's not a novel idea to be sure, but let me run it by you and I'm sure we'll get, you know, some reaction from the audience.
Now, you know, volcanoes, when they go, and by the way, just before I get to that, Mexico's volcano of fire rumbling to life.
Mexico's volcano of fire, belch plumes of smoke and Fired hot rocks down its slopes on Thursday, but officials said the activity did not pose any immediate threat to residents living in the area.
The explosions in Mexico began Wednesday, were provoked by the collapse of a dome that had formed recently in the crater of the 12,533 foot volcano.
Now, Mount St.
Helens, in the last eruption, lost over a thousand feet of its altitude.
It blew the whole damn top part of the mountain off.
Now, I know this may be a cockeyed idea, but this is the home of cockeyed ideas.
Coast-to-coast AMI.
We were having a conversation on ham radio the other night, and I said, well, isn't a volcano kind of like a champagne bottle?
And every now and then somebody shakes it up, and the pressure builds, and off she goes, right?
Or would it be...
Or something actually much more impressive.
Some volcanoes hurt a thousand miles away when they blow up.
So, here's the cockeyed idea.
If there's a rock dome over a volcano, which I believe is correct, if the dome, you know, forms, the lava hardens, and then you have a closed bottle of champagne, right?
Now, obviously, it would not be a human endeavor But why would it not be possible with modern technological whatever it is robots or whatever to put a drill up on the dome of a volcano and drill into it kind of like you know when you're opening a bottle of pop and you don't want it to go all over the place you open it just a little bit right and it goes
And then, you can pour it out without getting it all over yourself, right?
So, why not extend that idea to a giant robotic drilling machine that would punch a hole in the dome, and... And it may not be that simple for a volcano, but, you know, I nevertheless toss the idea out, and I'm sure it's not original.
Obviously, people must have thought of things like this, right?
Then, in this last week, there was the... the big debate.
all give you my view of the big debate in moments radio
i watched every moment of the debate and i concluded pretty much what everybody
else there though while watching I thought the president looked kind of terse, you know, kind of uncomfortable, terse, unhappy, not in his comfort zone, and it came through.
You know, all the polls are saying that Kerry ran away with it, and There's three different polls here and a lot of people say, wow, who's going to believe that?
Well, you know, it's kind of the way it hit me too, so I tend to believe it.
However, it should be noted here that most of the recent victors in the first debates in recent memory of presidents have never gone on to become president.
In other words, Even though they've done very well in the first debate, they have never gone on to be president.
That would be through about the last, I don't know, five or six presidential debates.
That's an amazing stat.
That's kind of like a football stat, I suppose, in some ways, right?
But it's true.
I don't know whether it's something that holds true or not.
We shall see.
But clearly, Terry did himself some good, and he needed to.
His campaign was obviously going nowhere, and it looked like Bush was going to be a shoo-in.
Now, now, maybe we have a race on our hands.
We'll see.
Now here's an interesting story.
Navy will shut down Project ELF, Wisconsin site.
No, I don't get this at all.
We must have something really new out there in the world.
Project ELF.
Now, you remember in a lot of movies you've seen it, right?
Submarines way under the sea are able to be communicated with by an extremely low frequency that sends extremely painfully slow baud rates, meaning it may take them some minutes to send even one letter It gets through to subs way down there.
Well, the Navy is going to disassemble it.
They say they don't need it.
It was accomplished by these incredible miles-long antennas in Wisconsin.
And they're going to take it apart.
So what does that mean?
Hmm.
The Navy Friday said it will turn off two submarine communication systems in northern Wisconsin and upper Michigan and permanently dismantle them.
Because, quote, they are outdated and no longer needed.
The Navy's extremely low frequency radio transmitter in the National Forest near Clam Lake has been the site of repeated demonstrations by anti-nuclear weapons activists.
The Navy also will shut down a similar transmitter in Michigan's Escanaba State Forest near Republic.
Radio transmissions from the sites will end September 30th.
So, it's over.
It could take the Navy up to three years to permanently close down the sites.
But obviously, they've got something new.
Now, what do you think it is the Navy has come up with to talk to their submarines?
Could it be HAARP?
Could it be something discovered with the HAARP research?
Who knows?
But obviously, they've got something.
Now, over the years I think I have made, perhaps, what I'm about to do is a personal book recommendation to you, an extremely strong book recommendation to you.
I devour a book about every, I don't know, two days on average.
I'm a very avid reader.
And I tend to like science fiction that is based in science fact.
And my wife, Ramona, picked up this book for me the other day by a gal named Tess Gerritsen.
Actually, it turns out, Dr. Tess Gerritsen, called Gravity.
It says a novel of medical suspense, and it's generally available right now.
And I am telling you, this will knock you out!
How good is this book?
Well, if you're a techie, You know, or even sort of slightly a techie, this book is going to knock you out.
I'll read you what it says on the back of the book, because that's generally all they give as a tease for a book, right?
And that's how you kind of decide in the store whether you're going to pick up this book or not.
You read the little tease on the back.
It says, Gravity, Dr. Emma Watson has been training for the adventure of a lifetime to study living beings in space.
But her mission aboard the International Space Station turns into a nightmare beyond imagination when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control and infects the space station crew with agonizing and deadly results.
Emma struggles to contain the virus outbreak while back on Earth, her estranged husband, Jack McCollum, works frantically with NASA to bring her home.
But there will be no rescue.
The contagion now threatens Earth's population and the astronauts are stranded in orbit, quarantined aboard the station where they are now dying one by one.
And I picked up this book and started reading and it was like an infection itself.
I couldn't put it down!
I'm telling you folks, for days Two days straight, actually.
Normally I read, I get in bed at night like a lot of people and read myself to sleep.
But this book, this book wouldn't let me do that.
I could not get to sleep.
I just kept reading and reading and reading and picked it up in the middle of the day when I never would and just cut hours out of my day and said, I can't put this down.
And it was that good.
And I talked, I think it was on Thursday, to my producer up in Oregon, Lisa, and said, Hey Lisa, see what you can do about getting a Tess Gerritsen, Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
And the next day I went and picked up my paperwork on what was about to happen this weekend, and there was the name Tess Gerritsen, and I just started jumping up and down.
She's incredible.
She's a doctor, and lives in the state of Maine, and though she writes novels, they are based absolutely on medical fact.
And some of what you're going to hear tonight no doubt is going to scare the hell out of you, but I recommend you stay tuned for Tess Gerritsen.
I also recommend that you go straight out and buy this book.
This would be about, over the years, about my third Really excited.
Hey, you better go get this book right away and read it.
You don't have to be a real techie type person, but you have to enjoy medical suspense.
You have to enjoy reading about... We're reading a book, obviously, where the author really knew what they were doing.
I mean, she is a doctor, so obviously she knew what she was writing.
It is medically accurate and frightening and really good.
It's called Gravity.
So trust me on this one.
Go get Gravity, and we'll talk to Tess Gerritsen in the next hour.
What a pleasure and honor it will be.
That's one of the cool things about being a talk show host.
I mean, you can read something like Gravity that just grabs you and won't let go, and then you can reach out and find the author and do an interview, and that's the case tonight.
So there you have it, that coming up in the next half hour.
By the way, Denmark Apparently would like to claim the North Pole as theirs.
That's right.
Denmark wants the North Pole.
That's a headline.
Denmark is joining Russia and Canada to see if it can lay claim to the North Pole and whatever natural riches may lie beneath it.
So you see it's not so much the pole they want.
It's the riches that lie beneath that intrigue.
The key to Denmark's claim is Greenland.
The world's largest island and a semi-independent Danish territory about 500 miles south of the North Pole.
Now, researchers are hoping to find evidence that Greenland is connected to a huge ridge beneath the floating Arctic ice.
In other words, land connected, right?
To the North Pole.
And if they can find out that Greenland is indeed connected, then they're going to say, well, it's all ours!
Doesn't matter that there's ice on top of it.
The land below is connected.
That means it's ours.
So Denmark will then take the North Pole.
Denmark has allocated $25 million for the project, which is also surveying four other areas around Greenland.
The Canadian government allocated $55.4 million for a similar seabed mapping.
So as soon as they can figure out that the land is connected, they're going to figure It is their North Pole, not the world's North Pole, but their North Pole.
Okay, one more comment about the volcanoes, because I also want to run this by you.
Now, I've heard rumors that the volcano in Hawaii has become active, right?
Very active recently.
Something about a volcano in Japan becoming active.
Something about Vesuvius becoming active.
We know about Mexico, and we certainly know about the one here at home.
So, you know, again, is it worth suggesting, ruminating about the possibility that under our Earth we know so very little about what's under the Earth, right?
That's why stories about holes down to the center of the Earth are always so intriguing.
Holes that yield sounds that we've never heard before are intriguing and dark and the whole concept of what's beneath and to the center of our earth is basically unknown scientists uh... talk about uh... an iron core and all of that well maybe but they haven't been down there to find it and see it and document it so they don't know for sure so is it not possible that there is an area of lava
That virtually encircles the globe, because it does seem like when one volcano gets active, they all tend to get active.
Now, what does that mean to you?
Just a coincidence?
I think not.
I think there's more to it.
I think they're somehow connected underground, and there's a great lava pool, and the pressure in the earth, for whatever that is worth, tends to express itself when it builds at all points of At all Earth orifices.
How about that?
And so that's why I think all our volcanoes get going together.
So there is that for you to ruminate about and you're welcome to make your own observation if you wish.
It may be a cockeyed idea.
And my other idea may be a totally cockeyed idea as well.
But you know, it just seems like it would work.
You've got that quark effect, right?
And it seems to me that if you could release a little bit of energy I'm sure it would be more than that, of course, that you could prevent an eruption that might be very economically costly to many people, in fact, costly even in lives.
How many were lost?
30?
50 lives in the last big eruption?
Mount St.
Helens?
So, it's a big deal, economically, and in every other way, when a volcano inconveniently goes near a very large city, or near actually several large cities, because it envelops If it really goes a large part of the Northwest.
So, yes, it is kind of a cockeyed idea drilling into a volcano.
And no, I wouldn't want to be the human with the jackhammer.
But I'm... I'm... Remember, I'm envisioning something on a different scale, done perhaps by robots.
Robots!
and drilling and drilling and drilling until finally...
or...
Boom!
Who knows?
You get a shiver in the dark, it's raining in the park, but mean time.
The sound of the river, you stop and you hold everything.
A band is throwing dicks in, double fall time.
Feel alright when you're hit and you feel great Well now you step inside but you don't see too many faces
Coming in hot and raining You're leaving it...
...out of control.
You're leaving it...
...out of control.
You're leaving it...
...out of control.
You're leaving it...
and the weather is lovely.
It's a beautiful day.
The sun is still warm.
It's a beautiful day.
I'm a man who's been through the twilight zone This is the madhouse, here's my people
I'll be the shimmy, moon, thunder, moon and star And I'm the gold, I'm and I've grown to hold
I'm a man who's been through the twilight zone This is the madhouse, here's my people
I'll be the shimmy, moon, thunder, moon and star Where do we go?
All right now, everybody listen very closely because the numbers on the weekend are a little different.
Here they are.
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 of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
at 800-825-5033. From west of 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.
That's what it is.
Good morning, everybody.
Top of the hour, Dr. Tess Gerritsen, who wrote a book called Gravity, that you must go out and buy right away.
I'm telling you, I know you guys, I know what you like, and I'm telling you, you're going to fall in love with this book.
We'll be right back.
Alright, as promised, let us now and go see what's in the dark of night.
First time caller in line, you would be number one this night.
How are you?
Pretty good, Art.
How are you?
Good.
Excellent.
Where are you?
How about that?
My name is Jason.
I'm calling from Reading, Pennsylvania.
Excellent.
I'm calling to you on WEEE.
WEEE?
Hello?
Sorry.
Yes.
WEEE.
Oh, EEU.
All right.
Very good.
What's up?
I've got an answer for you about your Navy dismantling the ELF system in Wisconsin thing.
Oh, yes.
From what I read in an article on Flashdot, I believe it was last week, pertaining to this, they're switching from ELF to WLF.
Or, not WLF, I'm sorry, BLF.
Very low frequency, and opposed to extremely low.
So I think they're going up the dial.
That doesn't make sense.
It doesn't to me either.
I was reading the article and I was thinking, now why would they switch to BLF if it's so... It's harder to get BLF through the ocean than it is for ELF.
Very much harder.
Unless...
They've discovered some way to make it easier for VLF to penetrate.
Isn't that interesting?
It goes back to the whole radio frequency spectrum being odd as of late.
I mean, I remember you playing a tape of the 24 second delay of a ham radio signal.
Yes.
And that was odd.
I was laying here listening to that that night and I was thinking, that is just extremely odd.
What was it?
Half a million miles?
Oh no.
At the speed of light, sir.
What you heard was way beyond anything even imaginably possible.
Period.
That's all there is to it.
Impossible.
But it did happen.
Alright.
One more quick thing for you.
You want a techie novel to read.
One that will blow your mind.
Yes.
It's a novel called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
All right.
It's a novel written by a gentleman named Roger Williams.
Very active in the online singularity community.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
That alone is interesting.
Yes.
All right.
I'll go look for that.
You go look for Gravity.
Will do.
Will do.
All right.
Let me know how you do.
I want reports back.
When I issue these, honest to God, Hey, this one's over-the-top kind of good book.
And, uh, well, you know, I guess it is, she is somewhat known.
Uh, Stephen King wrote, uh, Tess Gerritsen is an automatic must-read in my house.
That was Stephen King.
So, uh, it's not as though she's unknown.
But, but, but, but.
Well, let's see, what did the New York Post said?
Gravity combines the tension of ER with Apollo 13.
Yeah, that's right.
And beyond, this thing is awesome.
I bet they make this into a movie.
I'll bet they make it.
If they don't, they're crazy.
This one will grab you by the shorts and won't let go.
I guarantee.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi there.
How are you doing?
Quite well, sir.
Where are you?
St.
Catharines, Ontario, Kansas.
Oh, all right.
Welcome.
I'll tell you what, sir.
Turn your radio off for me, please.
That's always the first thing you do when you get on the air, before you get on the air ever, is turn off your radio.
Mandatory, actually.
Okay.
Thank you.
It's off.
Good.
I just wanted to make a comment about what you were saying about three different northern countries vying for control of the North Pole.
True, but Denmark thinks they've got the lock.
Right.
You know, from an idealistic point of view, Art, and we talk a lot, or rather, you talk a lot on the show, you know, about things that take sort of a more holistic view of life and of the universe.
Absolutely.
And, you know, it's just always, idealistically, it always irks me when I hear about human beings vying for more control of the earth, especially in an ecosystem as fragile as you know, the North Pole, looking for resources and stuff
buried beneath.
I mean, it could eventually, you know, digging under the ice or doing whatever could
contribute to a lot of these
earth changes and just sort of the negative effect that we have on the planet as a species.
Well, alright, let's just for grins right now, let us say there is a land
connection between Greenland and the North Pole.
Would that, for you, make Denmark's case that they basically own it?
Well, not necessarily.
The way the maps have been drawn for hundreds of years, or at least a hundred years, Denmark ends at the current boundary.
How can they all of a sudden say that now they own 500 miles to the north?
They would seem to be saying that, yes.
I mean, just kind of all of a sudden out of the blue after so many years to just all of a sudden say, well, we own it.
I don't necessarily agree with that.
All right.
Thank you very much.
It'll be interesting to see how the rest of you feel about that.
Denmark, however, absolutely thinks that that it may be theirs.
And I suppose if there is a land connection, I suppose they really could make that claim.
I wonder how the rest of the world would react.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, yeah, talking about propaganda and propagandizing the population on different issues.
I know you've covered the topic once in a while.
You bet.
I notice spinmeisters, naysayers, propagandists with extremist views.
For example, there are some people that are certainly not conservative.
Instead, they're a right-wing nutcase, and it's a real difference, and it's an embarrassment to a good conservative.
Who would have moral absolutes?
Now, extremists, they seem to think that the ends justify the means.
They'll lie, tell one-sided stories, don't want to look at both views.
A guy like Rush Limbaugh would be a good example.
Some people call him an entertainer.
To that I say, if he's an entertainer, then so is Joseph Goebbels.
Oh, please.
Oh, please.
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, come on now.
We want the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
And he won't give it to them.
Hold on, hold on.
Slow down.
Slow down.
No, no, no.
You slow down.
I'm just trying to get you to slow down.
Do that for me.
All right.
Look here now.
Rush never claimed Well, he sounds like Major Frank Burns on mash.
and for sure rush no no no
bear with me just take a deep breath bear with me rush says to his audience appropriately so that he is
biased he tells them right up front he is biased
so if you want to listen to some other radio show that's biased in another
direction listen to that sir well he sounds like major frank burns on mash he thinks
there's a commie under every bed practically
like major frank burns No moral absolutes.
Sir, if you don't like it, don't listen.
Well, yeah, that's an example of propagandizing.
He's a good propagandist.
No, propaganda... Look here now.
Listen to me.
Listen to me.
Propaganda would be information that is not true, that's contained, that contends to be true, to be news, for example.
Let's say You're listening to a newscast, and you get something that's clearly right or left-wing to the extreme, and crosses the boundary between news and opinion.
Then, baby, you're getting propagandized.
But if you listen to a talk show host, when you turn on your radio, you're inviting in opinions.
Rush doesn't hide that.
He has a particular point of view.
It's a right-wing point of view, and he doesn't mind telling you so.
So he's up front about it.
If you don't like that, tune to something else.
The truth will come to you when you examine enough outlets, sir, I guarantee it.
So spend less time raging about how unhappy you are about Rush and tune in to something else.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Good evening, Art.
I hope this cell phone connection is adequate.
I hope so.
It's better than most.
Good.
I can't remember how long ago it was that you had the psychologist on on a Sunday night from the University of Chicago who was dealing with induced after-death contacts.
We adopted that at our clinic here where we treat veterans of the Portland metropolitan area.
Are you a psychiatrist?
I am a psychiatrist and unfortunately we had our first suicide this week and I The people who control my experiments or my work have asked it be placed on hold.
The technique is so successful that we were having over a 98 percentile of successful induced contact.
This was a significantly beneficial therapy for these men.
Well, why would the suicide have stopped the work?
Because the patients started doing it to themselves.
The algorithm is so simple that they wanted to continue to visit this person that they had cared for.
So you're saying the experiment was so successful there that somebody took their own life to continue the road they had already seen in the experiments?
That will never be known.
Basically the person after one of the other patients And these are intelligent men and they master the algorithm so quickly and they want to experience it time and time again after their first experience and so we don't know for certain why this man committed suicide.
It may have been because he believed that we have stumbled upon and I got the impression from that psychologist you had on that this was something that he kind of just stumbled upon.
Maybe, maybe, maybe sir, that's why death is always supposed to be a mystery to us.
What that man just said was very interesting, and that is that, from a sort of a theoretical point of view, what if everybody decided that there was life beyond this life?
There absolutely was life beyond this life.
They would be with their loved ones.
I wonder if that would induce a lot of suicides.
And a lot of people who had sort of a partial experience to the degree that they now absolutely believed, and so just shed their skin and said, that's it, I'm out of here.
On to the next one.
Maybe that's why death is supposed to remain such a mystery.
What do you think?
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi, Mr. Bell.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing alright.
You're in a truck somewhere, right?
Yes, I am.
I'm in Shasta Lake.
Alright.
Just a real quick question for you.
Sure.
The weather there in Florida, they had I believe Hurricane Ivan that went up the coast and then it came back around and hit the coast again.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I was wondering if you think that might have anything to do with a severe weather pattern that might have existed in the past where the hurricanes maybe got stuck in the same pattern over and over and maybe created that severe weather you talk about a lot.
All right, thank you very much.
Here's what I think.
I think that anybody who now does a study of the ocean's currents, and really does a study, is going to be a shocked puppy about what's happening with the currents.
Slowing down by alarming percentages, and as go the ocean currents, so goes our weather here on Earth.
So go the land temperatures here on Earth.
And thus far, with one very brief exception, that would be Senator Kerry during the debates, mentioning global warming.
It was just sort of mentioned.
And the President did not respond, and there was no debate beyond that.
But take a look at what's going on with the world's ocean currents right now.
And there will lie your answer about the weather.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hart, this is David.
Hello, David.
How you doing?
I'm doing fine, what's up?
Um, about the subcommunications and HAARP.
Yes.
Okay, you know the, I forget what they call it, or the name that's been dubbed to it, about the cross-hatching in the sky with the airplane?
Uh, you mean the chemtrails.
Chemtrails.
So-called chemtrails, yes.
Right, okay.
Now you know how communications bounce off the ionosphere and back to Earth and back to the ionosphere and back to Earth to get a skip?
I do.
Okay.
What if the chemtrails are actually a place reflector, okay, to bounce the signal?
Well, the only problem with that scheme, or that idea, is that the chemtrails would be at, to use them as an ionizing agent, I should say, but they would be too close to the Earth, and any bounce that you would get would be too close in to do any good in terms of communicating with submarines worldwide, so I don't think that's it.
However, the first part of what you said regarding HAARP, maybe, maybe, Harp is, remember, they're experimenting with sounds that are harmonically related, and sounds being transmitted that produce both the sum and difference of the main frequency being transmitted, because they're combining them, the sum and the difference.
So, it may well be that with harp they have discovered how to produce a frequency, a modulation That penetrates salt water.
I don't know.
There's one example.
One you haven't heard yet of harp.
Listen to that.
That's one I didn't play a couple of weeks ago.
you're listening to an actual recording of harm.
Just what are they trying to communicate with?
I wonder.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi, is this Art Bell?
It is.
Wow, I can't believe I got through.
I sure hope I don't lose his signal.
I hope not, too.
Well, I've just started listening to y'all's show.
Yes, ma'am.
I'm a truck driver.
My co-driver, she kind of got me hooked on it.
Uh-huh.
I don't remember if it was you or that fella named George.
Y'all interviewed a guy here, some kind of psychic guy.
I think his name was Sean something.
Sean David Morton.
I interviewed him last Saturday night, dear.
That might have been him.
Yes.
But he was talking about all the weather that's been going on and the politics and the war and all that stuff.
He said that he felt what was beginning What's funny is, now I'm no big time perfect saint Christian, alright?
I'm probably one of the worst examples, right?
But I tell you, over the past number of weeks, I've been just getting this Yes, that's the word I used.
I wrote a book called The Quickening.
Yeah, and I've been feeling it.
I mean, really big time, and I couldn't really understand what it was, you know.
I was like, man, I'm just losing it, you know.
But being a driver, you know, I run East Coast, West Coast, and I talk to people all over the country, you know.
And I tell you, there's a lot of other folks out here feeling this too.
That's right.
Okay?
That's right.
I know.
You don't have to be one of the biggest psychics or sensitives in the world to feel what's going on right now.
You're exactly right.
I think the average person with the average amount of intuitive ability can feel that something right now is very much askew, out of balance, and that something's about to happen, right?
Oh, you got that right.
I just started learning about God and Jesus, oh gosh, back in 97 or something.
I wasn't raised with it.
I just figured it out on my own.
The reason why I kind of feel like it's Jesus coming back type of thing is, I don't know if you know much about CB radios, but if you get out here and You talk about, you know, God, Jesus, anything religious over CB radio.
These boys out here will crucify you.
You're gonna get a cussin' like you never had before, right?
Uh-huh.
And so, it's not something you bring up, okay?
Well, it's also probably not something that truckers discuss on the CB radio while they're plying the highways and byways of America, so I can understand you might get that reaction on CB.
Yeah, well, you'd be surprised.
Anyway, um, I kept feeling this pride in me to say something about it, and I'm not the person to be preachy.
Okay?
I'm really not.
Oh, in fact, you can't be right now because this hour has ended, my dear.
So thank you very, very much for the call.
And who knows?
It could be the beginning of tribulation.
It could perhaps be just a little hiccup.
But whatever it is, it's real.
And like the first flutterings of a new life within, also a definition offered for the quickening, it's definitely going on.
we'll be right back i don't know
i don't know i don't know
i don't know i don't know
i don't know To talk with Art Bell, call the Wild Guard line at area
code 7.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It just doesn't happen. In all the years I've been broadcasting, I've made perhaps two or
three personal from Art Bell to you guys.
Don't even think twice about this.
Just go out and find Gravity.
The book Gravity by Tess Garrison and buy it.
That's all there is to it.
Or go on, you know, Amazon and just buy it.
Just take my word for it.
Buy it!
This book was given to me by my wife who thought I would enjoy it.
Boy, was she right.
One more time, I'm going to read A little bit from the back of gravity because that's all I dare do without giving away more.
Gravity is summed up on the back of the book by this.
Dr. Emma Watson has been training for the adventure of a lifetime to study living beings in space.
But her mission aboard the International Space Station turns into a nightmare beyond imagining when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control.
And infects the space station crew with agonizing and deadly results.
Emma struggles to control the virus outbreak while back on Earth.
Her estranged husband, Jack McCollum, works frantically with NASA to bring her home, but there will be no escape, no rescue.
The contagion now threatens Earth's population and the astronauts are stranded in orbit, quarantined aboard the station where they are dying.
One by one, that's gravity and heavy.
I just consumed it!
I ate this book.
I couldn't put it down.
Tess Gerritsen is the author.
And I think I did finally finish with the book, put it down on Wednesday and said, boy, would I like to interview her.
And Lisa called, and she's a producer for Coast to Coast AM.
I said, hey, Lisa, see if you can get ahold of somebody named Tess Gerritsen, would you?
Here she is.
Tess Gerritsen.
is a person who took a very unusual route to being a writer.
Her lifelong interest has always been science, especially the creepy and weird aspects.
That would be just down our alley.
As a child, she would dissect snakes and collect buckets full of lizards to study.
It is no wonder, then, that her college studies focused on biology and physical anthropology, which in turn Led her to study medicine.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University.
She earned her B.A.
in Anthropology and went on to receive her M.D.
from the University of California, San Francisco.
She completed her internal medicine residency in Honolulu, Hawaii.
That's nice.
Where she worked as a physician.
Tess is the author of eight bestsellers.
And in her free time, she continues to compile a weird biological facts file, which is viewable on her webpage, entitled, appropriately, TessGerritsen.com.
That's T-E-S-S-G-E-R-R-I-T-S-E-N dot com.
In a moment, Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
Would you like...
To be continued...
All right, here is Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
And by the way, it says gravity.
New York Times opposed it.
Gravity combines the tension of ER and Apollo 13.
Boy, does it ever.
Dr. Gerritsen, welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me, Art.
You're in Maine, huh?
Yes, I am.
Why Maine?
Well, it's beautiful here.
If you've never been here, you really should take a visit.
We're right on the water, and you know, it's really quiet in the wintertime, but that's when I do my work.
Kind of a little fishing village, I would imagine, or something?
Well, think of Cabot Cove.
Oh, okay.
Alright, so this book, I just, I've never, with all the books I've ever read in my life, have I ever been affected as strongly as I have been by this book, Gravity Cut.
How did you do this?
First of all, I have always been fascinated by space.
I've always wanted to write a book about the space program.
You know, when I was a kid, I grew up watching Star Trek.
I wanted to be an astronaut.
So I was just sort of waiting for the right story to hit me, and it really hit me hard.
It happened at the time when there was an accident between Progress resupply module and the Mir space station.
I don't know if you remember this.
I do.
I remember just about every detail of the space program.
Okay.
Well, they had tried an experimental docking with the Progress rocket and things sort of went wrong and Progress collided with Mir and there appeared to be some sort of a breach in the hull.
The station was starting to decompress, and for some reason, the three-man crew of two Russians and one American aboard Mir did not evacuate.
So Mir was beginning to tumble out of control, and this is all I was hearing on the news.
I wasn't really clear what was going wrong, but I remember thinking at the time, oh my God, there are three dead men up there.
They never really tell you the whole story.
They issue carefully worded press releases.
No, but what really, really got to me was the fact that the communications were probably still up.
And what I was envisioning is, there you are, dying in this tin can, and everybody on Earth can hear you take your last breath.
That's what's scary about it, is that the people who love you can hear you dying.
I'm sure that's NASA's nightmare.
I'm sure it is NASA's nightmare, and NASA has a lot of nightmares.
But that was my personal thought, you know.
Trying to imagine somebody you love there, and you want to save them, and you can't, and they're so far, and there's nothing you can do.
So that was the genesis of this book, then?
That was the genesis, the idea of someone you love being trapped aboard a space station.
And so then you obviously applied your own expertise.
Being a doctor, you thought, well, what about a medical emergency in space?
What could go wrong?
You know, that's what writers always do.
They always come up with what's the worst that could happen.
And, of course, I needed to change it because Mir, I knew Mir was going to be obsolete very shortly after that.
So I decided to move it into the International Space Station because I knew that was going to be launched in modules.
And so, in a way, the book is about the near future, but it really takes into account all of the current technology that NASA is using right now.
Okay, back just a little away from your phone.
You're taking your S's and going, because it's a very good connection.
Okay.
Unusually, we have a good connection.
So yeah, you can be a little further back.
So then, did you know anything, when you, before you first put pen to paper, did you know anything about the effects of the human body, physiologically, physiological effects in microgravity?
Only what I had been reading in the popular literature.
I think I'm a pretty well-informed person.
But it did involve quite a bit of research in aerospace medicine.
I would think, for example, you might go and talk to somebody in NASA or NASA itself?
Did you try that?
I did.
And NASA, this is how I approached them.
It's a little funny story.
I just picked up the phone and I called up the public affairs officer at Johnson Space Center and I said, I'm a novelist.
I want to write a book about a biological disaster aboard the International Space Station.
Can you help me out?
And he said, a disaster?
And I said, yes.
And he said, do you know what the purpose of my office is here?
It's to make NASA look good.
Right.
So he said, what goes on in your book?
What happens?
And I had to admit that just about all the astronauts die aboard ISS.
And he said, that doesn't sound too good.
So I said, and also a shuttle crashes and everybody dies aboard that.
He said, uh, why should I help you?
Yes.
And I said, because everything that goes wrong is not NASA's fault.
And he said, well, whose fault is it?
And I said, it's the military's.
And he said, come on down.
Oh, so you, he said, come on down?
He really, I mean, they, they were, they were willing to, to talk to me and I, I think I was very sensitive to the fact that there is a sense of rivalry, I think, between the military and the civilian space program.
Does it go beyond what we would commonly call a rivalry?
Does it move over to something even a little stronger than that at times?
I mean, their missions are the same, but, oh, very divergent.
The people at NASA would tend to be, let's make the world a better place people, while the military are, we're the guys who blow up.
Right.
Exactly.
We're the guys who want to militarize space.
Yes.
And NASA's the ones who want space for all of mankind.
Yes.
I mean, part of it is the tax dollar.
They are competing for the same tax dollars.
But you're right.
There is a different mindset.
When you drive into the NASA parking lot in Johnson Space Center, you do see a lot of bumper stickers that talk about, Be Me Up, Scotty.
And you can tell that these are men who grew up Loving Star Trek with this grander vision of humankind as one race, as one being.
Yes.
As opposed to killer satellites.
So they are, I think they do tend to be something of a, you know, they have a more international view of things.
Well, a lot of the shuttle flights, Doctor, are both, aren't they?
They are.
Well, right now we... They're science and then they're military, sometimes not so publicly.
Exactly.
And they're very different missions.
But then you look at the International Space Station, which is truly an international effort.
I mean, we're working with the Russians to build that space station.
So it's quite a change from the Cold War.
I guess you've heard the latest, by the way, that there was an article, Reuters, I believe, indicating that if the Russians don't manage to fix the oxygen regenerator, they're going to have to abandon the whole station.
Well, that's the problem.
That's the downside of working with an international You know, coordination effort like that, and that you're dealing with a lot of different cultures here.
The other problem that came up is that, did you realize that the Russian side of the space station is a metric, and the American side is an imperial?
No, I didn't.
No, you need two different sets of tools, because, you know, they're using millimeters, and we're using inches.
Well now, where's the international cooperation there?
I think that they're trying to be sensitive to the cultural differences.
But you know, we shouldn't cut down the Russians.
They actually managed to have quite an impressive space program on a very tight budget.
Oh, indeed so.
Boy, they stayed up there for incredible amounts of time.
They do, and their spacecraft is very reliable.
And when you look at Mir, which was really, by the time it came down, was a pile of junk, they kept it going with duct tape.
Uh, and, you know, there's the old, the old, uh, I don't even know if this is a true story, it's maybe a little bit apocryphal, about, um, the difference between the Russian and the American space program is NASA spent a million dollars developing a pen that would write in space, and the Russians use a pencil.
I know.
I've heard that.
That's right.
The Russians thought about it and used a pencil.
It's all true.
And they did keep that bucket of bolts going for a long, long time.
Longer than it was supposed to have lasted.
So hopefully everything will be all right and they won't have to abandon the station.
But that would be weird if they had to just sort of leave it there.
It would be a shame, a terrible shame, because there is so much that that station represents, certainly to people who believe in space exploration.
All right.
What is the difference, as you did your research, between living for long amounts of time, I mean, day in, day out, in microgravity, there is, there is, people don't know what there really is, some gravity there, I guess.
That's why it's not called zero gravity, right.
But they float around, nevertheless, as though it was zero gravity, right?
Right.
Well, there are a lot of changes that happen to the human body, and most of them are not too good.
From the very beginning, within the first 24 hours after being launched in space, a lot of people get what they call space sickness.
It's a sense of disorientation.
They're tired.
They're clumsy.
If they're first-timers, they are bouncing off the walls, literally.
Is it like sea sickness?
It is like sea sickness.
Some of them just feel nauseated, and that's why, for the first 24 hours, they don't schedule anything really important for them to do.
The tasks tend to be not so demanding.
Does it finally go away for everybody, or are there a few people that go up there and just never get over it?
Generally, it goes away after the first 24 hours, but some people really don't do very well.
The funny thing is also that it's not correlated with your susceptibility to seasickness.
So that, from what I understand, John Glenn got terribly seasick when he was in the Navy, but he didn't get space sickness.
Isn't that odd?
Yeah, I'm not really sure how you can predict who's going to get space sickness or not.
Can they do that in KC-135s, you know, the vomit comet thing?
Everybody gets sick in KC-135s, so I don't think that's a good predictor.
Not a good predictor.
No.
And then the other things that happen to your body is immediately you start to have redistribution of your fluids.
Fluid leaves your intravascular system, your blood vessels, and goes into your soft tissues.
Very often when you see pictures of people from space, their faces are kind of puffy.
It's because the fluid has moved into their soft tissues.
Another problem is that calcium starts to leak out of the bones into your bloodstream, and so they will get premature osteoporosis if they stay up there very long.
And they'll get kidney stones as well because of that extra calcium.
Kidney stones are a disqualifier if you have them, aren't they?
They are, and I actually had to find that out when I went down to NASA, because I knew that I had a hero named Jack, who was in the space program.
He was going to be an astronaut, but I needed something to disqualify him, so that he would have this sense of bitterness that his wife was going up and he couldn't.
So it was kidney stones?
And I said, well, what will disqualify you?
And they said, well, kidney stones will, because, you know, this higher calcium leaching out of your Your bones will cause kidney stones.
Have you ever had a kidney stone?
No, don't want one.
I don't want one either, but I have seen people have them, and they apparently are the most painful thing that can happen to you.
It will completely knock you out.
Would a kidney stone pass, ultimately, as it might on Earth?
It probably would pass, ultimately, but, you know, not all of them do pass very easily.
Some of them... Not so easily.
Yes, hang around for a while, and that person is out of, you know, out of commission.
Yes.
I would imagine medicine in space, and this is all through your book, but medicine would be very, very different in microgravity, yes?
Well, you know, you've probably watched ER.
You've watched people getting CPR and how much chaos there is involved.
It's hard enough doing CPR on Earth.
Imagine what it's like where there's no gravity, where everything is in 3D, and things are floating around.
What they have to do is strap the patient down on a fixed board, and then in order for you to do cardiac compressions, you have to plant your feet against a surface.
Because if you don't, you will go bouncing off each other.
So as you tried to do the compression, you'd be pushed backwards?
You'd be pushed backwards.
So first of all, just trying to get yourself stationary.
The other thing is, say you want to take blood.
You put the tourniquet on and you take the tourniquet off.
If you don't fix that tourniquet to something, it will float off and you will never find it again.
It's interesting how, because things are in 3D up there, People don't normally, when they're searching for something, they don't normally look up.
But in space, of course, things will float all over and you will lose things.
Astronauts lose tools all the time and don't find them until they come back down for a landing.
Sally Ride, when she went up once in the shuttle, she lost her boots.
And when they were coming back for a landing, she had to come back in her stocking seat.
They were starting, you know, coming back and then they were feeling gravity again.
She heard the boots fall and realized they were just there all the time, just above her head.
I was going to say, but boots are so big, you would think that the space station is full of electronic panels everywhere.
And, you know, they just sort of float up against something, but they actually got lost.
They got lost.
And that's what happens to tools.
So those things, you lose vials.
You have to be very careful of where you put things.
And then what I found, as a novelist, I'm trying to find things that have a visual impact, because I'm always, you know, I'm a very visual writer, and I thought about blood.
What happens to blood?
What happens when you bleed in space?
Well, on Earth, of course, it drips, but in space it forms these giant floating globules.
And I was using as my model what had happened aboard the Mir space station.
They had an antifreeze leak once, and there were these giant floating green basketball-sized balls of antifreezes floating around, you know, the interior of Mir.
And I thought, oh, what if that was blood?
Wouldn't that be quite a dramatic scene?
Yes.
So, yeah, I mean, a lot of things are different there.
And some of this, I take it you confirm.
In other words, you just assume blood would, and I guess it would, just the way any other liquid That's right.
That's right.
The surface tension makes it round, but because there is no gravity, it does not drip.
You're a doctor.
There would be some slim chance, I suppose, that if you had pursued it, you might have been an astronaut.
Did you ever think about it?
I certainly did.
When I was interested in it at a young age, they were not taking women.
Sally Ride was the very first one.
What happened, of course, is that I got married.
I see.
And had kids.
And after that, you know, I don't think it's... I hate to say it's not responsible because astronauts, of course, should have the right to have children.
But when you find out how dangerous space travel really is, you begin to realize, you know, that there's a big risk there.
Am I brave enough to do this?
How dangerous is it?
Well, OK.
I asked, when I was at NASA, I asked, No, no, wait, wait.
I'll tell you what.
Hold on.
That's a good one.
That's a good hook.
We'll just leave them all right there.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
My guest is Tess, Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
She's with us from Maine and she's written a book that I just, I'm in love with it.
It's called Gravity.
go to amazon.com or wherever, find gravity and buy it.
I am going to show you how to make a simple and easy paper airplane.
This is a paper airplane.
You can make this paper airplane.
I am going to show you how to make a paper airplane.
This is a paper airplane.
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 800-825-5033.
From west to the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
his area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east to the Rockies, call toll free
800-825-5033. From west to the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint Access number,
pressing option 5 and dialing the I've written four, but nothing like this.
This is Gravity, Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
The best book of its kind that I've ever written, written, ha ha ha, I've written four, but
nothing like this.
This is Gravity, Tess, Dr. Tess Gerritsen, and I'm telling you, it's my recommendation.
Just don't even think about it.
I see the back of it here says it's, what, $7.99 in the U.S., $10.99 in Canada.
That was a while ago.
You'll have to check Amazon.com, but don't even think twice about it.
Available, I guess, in soft cover now, originally hard cover.
It will absorb every instant of your time.
This is one of those thrillers that really does live up to the name of medical technical space
thriller How dangerous is it?
I suppose, like insurance actuarials, you could figure out really how dangerous it is to take a ride, as it were.
In other words, So many astronauts have died, so many vehicles have blown up in so many launches, so what is the answer to the question?
Well, before I give you the number, let me just let you know, I'm sure you already know this, that before you are even launched, your obituary has already been written by all the news agencies.
So that it must be a really bad feeling to be strapped in on the launch pad, waiting to lift off, knowing that your obituary is just It just takes a click of a keystroke and there goes your bitrage, all the newspapers.
Yeah, they've already got the standard video of the seven astronauts walking out.
Yeah, that's right.
And that's what they would show.
That's right.
And the other thing that must be a little eerie knowing is that in a bunker at Cape Canaveral there is what they call range safety officers.
These are Air Force officers who are there to really to blow off the shuttle.
In case the shuttle should have a problem and the trajectory takes it over a populated area instead of over water where it's supposed to go.
So there are explosives set in the shuttle and they can be activated?
They can be activated.
And that's to protect people on the ground.
Holy smokes.
And the astronauts know this and in fact they make a point of meeting these officers before their mission just to give them a human face to look at them and say this is who you're killing if you have to do this.
Why would they do it?
You would think that would make it harder for them to do their jobs.
Well, that's what they want.
The astronauts want them to think twice before they push that button.
So the astronauts are the ones who called for that traditional meeting?
Yes, I think they do.
I see.
And I understand that they show pictures of their children, etc., at that kind of a meeting.
I see.
Now, down to the number.
I asked that question.
Now, when I did my research for gravity, this was in 97, 98, this was before Columbia.
I asked several people, I said, how dangerous is it?
I've heard, you know, in the press, they say anywhere from, oh, you know, one in a thousand things will go wrong.
And the man I asked finally looked at me and he says, you want to know the honest truth?
What we believe, we believe that one out of 50 missions will end in disaster.
And what Columbia with FDS-107, we've had two disasters in the shuttle program.
Out of about 100, he was right on the money.
So, I mean, I guess you can say 1 out of 50.
Well, you know, take your chances.
You get a great ride.
But it's, I mean, that's pretty dangerous to me.
That is pretty dangerous.
I guess they have to be insured.
But I wonder if an insurance company probably would go, no, thank you.
Especially for somebody, you know, relatively young, which an astronaut would be.
Young, healthy, right.
Long life in front of them.
It would be a big payoff.
That's right.
And these two disasters have been on liftoff and on landing.
But then We don't think about what it's like to actually die in space, which we haven't really had happen yet, which could have happened aboard Mir.
There's another set of nightmares that you can come up with.
When people think about dying in the vacuum of space, what they don't really think about is that it's very much like dying of the bends.
There are a lot of analogies between space and deep-sea diving.
In space, you're enclosed in a, well, I think of it as a tomb almost, surrounded by an environment of a drastically different pressure.
And if there's a breach in the spacecraft, air will start to rush out of that breach, and then the air pressure inside starts to drop.
You experience what a deep sea diver feels when he surfaces too quickly.
At the very beginning, you'll have a little pop in your ears because things will be changing inside your eardrum.
And then as the air keeps leaking out, your chest will start to hurt, because what's happening is that nitrogen bubbles are forming in all parts of your body, including the brain and the spinal cord.
That's the bends.
And if it keeps on leaking out, there's this little thing in physics called Boyle's Law, which describes the relationship between pressure and volume as gas.
As the pressure falls, the gas in your body starts to expand, and it distends your body cavities.
It ruptures your lungs.
Your lungs really explode.
Oh.
By that point, you're probably dead.
But just to go on with the gruesome scenario, as the pressure keeps falling all the way to vacuum, the blood in your veins will begin to boil.
And then as the pressure drops all the way down to a point where the boiling point and the freezing point merge, your blood will go from boiling to frozen solid in just about an instant.
So, and all that time probably communications is continuing and people on Earth can hear you take your last screen.
So, you know, that's the kind of things that I kind of look into and imagine while I'm writing these books.
And it really, really raised my admiration for anybody who goes into space.
Jess, if something like that happened, would NASA release the details?
Would we ever hear that?
No.
I didn't think we would.
I really doubt we would.
You know, there was a scenario that I had asked about.
I said, what if the astronauts all die in space?
Or they become incapacitated and they're sick and there's no way to rescue them?
What happens to that shuttle?
Can you land the shuttle with the dead bodies aboard?
And their answer was, no, we can't.
We can't.
That shuttle will stay in orbit for several months.
And that is actually probably their worst nightmare, because it's a constant reminder.
That coffin going around and around on Earth.
I mean, after a couple of months, the orbit will decay and it will eventually burn up in the atmosphere.
What do you believe NASA would do in the case of deadly, horrible contagion?
Maybe not exactly what you wrote about here, although yours is so plausible, but anything that would have perhaps mutated in space and would be a terrible danger to Earth.
Faced with that kind of horrid scenario, what do you imagine we would do?
I think that it would be up to the White House in that particular case.
I think that NASA would probably not take responsibility for that decision.
I'm not sure they should, because the people aboard that spacecraft, that's their friends.
They're friends and family.
Yes, of course.
Yeah.
Has there ever been a... since we both have already discussed it and we agree, we wouldn't
be told many things.
No, I don't think we would.
I mean, that's what happened with You know, when you think about other shuttle disasters, they leave out the gory details.
We don't need to know those.
Yes, but I wonder if there's already perhaps been a medical event, you know, for the Russians or for the Americans that we wouldn't know about.
Well, there have been not medical events, but emotional events that we don't know about.
That's a whole separate and fascinating topic.
There's really a fascinating interplay psychologically that goes on with crews, isn't there?
Well, you know, you think about it, the kind of people that go into space tend to be alpha personalities.
The people who take charge people.
What happens when you get six of them together in one little space?
And you know, space travel, it's very stressful.
A lot of the flight surgeons I've talked to said their worst concern about long-term space flight to Mars It's not really the physical effects, although that's a problem.
It's the emotional effects.
Is somebody going to go bonkers up there?
It has happened.
There has been a problem, and it happened aboard Mir.
One of the cosmonauts who was up there, his mother died while he was up in space, and he was so grief-stricken and so upset that he locked himself away in one of the modules and would not talk to Russian mission control for two weeks.
Two weeks?
Two weeks?
Did you say he was a commander?
He was a commander.
He would not talk to anybody.
He was in such bad shape.
These cosmonauts are very disciplined.
They follow orders.
Oh, yes.
That was an example of what can happen when something tragic happens on Earth and they can't deal with it up there.
Is that a big error in the psychological screening that went on for that crew?
I'm not sure what their psychological screening was at that particular time.
I can tell you what NASA does.
NASA makes it mandatory that at least once a week you have a private medical conference with your physician, your psychologist.
The astronauts, while they're in orbit, are given a private hour with their doctor to discuss all the problems they're having.
They also have what they call private family conferences, or PFCs, where they are given the chance to talk to their families and maybe relieve some of the stress that way.
So, and those are both mandatory because NASA understands that, you know, people are going to have problems there.
They did have one strike in space.
I don't know if you know that.
Skylab.
They had a what?
They had a work strike.
A work strike?
That's right.
The astronauts in Skylab were so, I don't know if I can say this word, angry.
Of course.
Pissed off.
Yes, you can say that.
About their load of work that they called down to Houston and said, We're taking the day off.
Goodbye.
And shut off.
All right.
I guess everybody should understand a little bit of the stress that they're under.
It's not like they're up there doing nothing.
These guys and gals are working probably as many waking hours as they can every single day on experiments, right?
Right.
And they are very, very busy.
Plus, I mean, it's probably pretty hard to sleep up there because there are lights on, there's activity constantly, and they're probably tired.
And they're dirty.
They can't take baths.
And the food's terrible.
So, I mean, they're not good working conditions.
And you can imagine what it's like to be up there for four months at a time on ISS.
Do these astronauts generally understand the nature of the experiments they're doing?
Yes.
Well, you know, you'd be amazed by how many of them are PhDs up there.
The mission specialists, a lot of them are doctors, or they're physicists, or they're engineers.
So they are very sophisticated people.
They're classic overachievers, these people.
They're athletes, plus they probably have a couple of degrees.
So they do understand what they're doing up there.
And they really are burdened to that degree nearly every waking hour.
In other words, there are these sponsored experiments, right?
University of so-and-so sends up cultures and whatever else.
Exactly.
And I know that there have been a couple of cases where the astronauts just said, I'm overwhelmed.
I did not know it would take so long to do this particular experiment.
And they get way behind in their schedules.
I wonder what NASA does when they just get a call saying, look, we're overworked.
We're taking the day off.
Click.
Well, in that particular case, they couldn't do anything about it.
It was only for a day.
It was only for a day of rest.
Fascinating.
That's history I've never heard.
That's absolutely fascinating.
Well, those are things you're not going to hear, because they're a little embarrassing, but they are human nature.
It's exactly what you'd expect.
The other thing you don't hear about is how they don't get along sometimes.
There was one astronaut, and I won't mention his name, who did not get along with the two cosmonauts in Mir.
They did not speak to each other for weeks.
They were living in a very confined area.
And the Cosmonauts disliked the American, the American disliked the two Cosmonauts, and it was terrible.
So, I'm so surprised that none of this is sort of screened and tested before they go up as crews.
Well, they are psychologically screened on the ground, but some of these things you just can't predict until you're in that situation.
So, not only do you have to worry about physical health, but you have to worry about mental health as well.
That's right.
Part of the reason I think we really do need an orbiting space station, a lot of people will say, why can't you do this stuff by computer or remote control?
These things, these tests with, you know, psychology, with human habitation, you're not going to know what it's like to send a man to Mars unless you've had him in a similar situation for months.
And that's where ISS comes in.
Well, I'm going to fall back on your book again a little bit, sort of ask this again.
Are you really certain that in every case, I mean, there are all these cultures that are sent up to the space station, that the astronauts themselves are not just keepers of some of them without knowing everything that's possible?
You know, when I wrote that book, I was looking at payloads and how they're delivered to NASA, and I discovered that The payloads, I mean, the experiments are approved on paper by a science committee at NASA.
But when they are delivered to the launch site, nobody actually checks to make sure that the payload that was promised is what is delivered from the laboratory.
So it is possible to slip something in that way.
And in fact, I heard later that one of the astronauts who had read the book Went to Payload's directorate and said, is this possible?
And they said, yeah, that's kind of a little loophole there we haven't thought about.
Oh, you're kidding.
No, I'm not.
That's what I heard from the movie producer who actually bought the rights to the film that she had called in an astronaut to be a consultant.
And they confirmed that that was a problem.
Well, you know, while I would recommend this for all of my audience, I know they're going to just absolutely love Gravity.
I would think it would be the very last book I would ever hand to an astronaut.
Ever!
I mean, they could change their minds completely and say, listen, on the other hand, I'd rather stay home.
No, you have to understand what the kind of people who are astronauts, a lot of them are pretty darn fearless and amazing, amazing people.
So I don't think this is going to discourage them.
And you know, there are a lot of people who want to be astronauts who don't get into the core.
People who work in mission control are probably people who had dreams of being astronauts and just didn't qualify.
Well, a medical question.
How much of a possibility is it that with biological experiments on board with plants and animals and just every sort of biology being experimented with, including petri dish level stuff, that something would happen in microgravity that they would not expect?
I mean, isn't it a high probability that there'll be the unexpected?
Well, that's why you send organisms up there to see what happens to them.
What do they do?
Well, yes.
I guess I should rephrase that.
Something negative might occur.
Well, OK.
I will tell you that on Mir, they had a terrible problem with mold.
Mold was actually growing on the windows.
I remember.
Yes.
So, I mean, things get loose there, and it's a closed environment.
And if your filters aren't working, I mean, they have the most advanced HEPA filters up there.
But on Mir, it wasn't, you know, And those HEPA filters, by the way, are easily overwhelmed by too much liquid, which is what happened in Mir also, that all that antifreeze screwed up their filtration systems.
One of the things that you do when you go up to space is you do experiments, because you can do things up there you can't do on Earth.
What they have noticed is that on Earth, when you grow tissue cultures, tissues tend to grow in two dimensions, flat in a sheet.
You bring them up there, they start to grow in three dimensions.
They assume forms that they never would have on Earth.
So there, right away, you have a difference in just how biology behaves itself.
All right, then that begs another question.
How would that potentially, do you imagine, affect the growth of a child, the gestation of a fetus, over a long period of time?
Dare anybody even ask such a question?
They have tried, you know, with mice.
They have sent up pregnant mice.
I don't recall what the results are, but I believe that there was a very high mortality rate among those fetal mice.
Oh.
So I don't really know what the reason for that was.
I wonder how strongly then that would suggest that there would be a high human mortality rate.
Well, I don't think it would be a responsible thing to send a pregnant woman up there, would you?
No, but I have this wild imagination that says someday... Someday it will happen.
Well, no, maybe.
That men and women will be in rockets that will go very far away, perhaps even generations far away.
And will need to reproduce, exactly.
That's true.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, that is of course what everybody's dream is, Mars.
Mars is the next, of course.
That won't take generations, but I think that once Once we figure out what is going to be happening to the human body and how, just for instance, how are we going to protect against UV light, against solar radiation, all these other things.
Protecting the human body in those little, tiny, thin, thin-hulled spacecraft, that alone is a problem.
Yes, sun flares, for example.
Not in low-Earth orbit, perhaps, but you know, once you're out there a ways, why A large sun flare could irradiate you to, you know, maybe very dangerous proportions.
I don't know.
Anyway, there's a million things.
Is man right now ready physically, physiologically to travel, oh, just say to Mars and back without serious medical repercussions?
There are too many serious medical repercussions right now, I think.
Really?
I think just considerations of osteoporosis.
All right, on that note, hold tight.
Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
She wrote a book called Gravity that if you don't go out right now and buy and read and enjoy, you're gonna love it.
If you're a techie medical thriller type person, this will knock you right over.
It's called Gravity.
Art Bell.
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Unmitigated terror on a scale that you can't even dream about until you've read this book.
Well, she's my guest, and we're talking about space, NASA, the astronauts, and, you know, not too many shows ago, maybe a couple of years worth of them, if that, we talked about sex in space.
Remember that?
We asked several, you know, Harvard types, and we didn't exactly get an answer.
Maybe Maybe Dr. Gerritsen has one.
I think I remember.
I think I had a guy from NASA here.
Actually from NASA.
And I asked him about sex in space and whether there'd been any yet.
And I soon remember he got real quiet and he kind of chuckled.
But I don't remember that he answered the question, actually.
He gave me a might have been or who knows or something like that.
What do you think, Doctor?
I'm not going to answer that question either.
You know, because I asked that same question of NASA and they gave me the same response.
They chuckled and said, Maybe, but we're not talking.
Hey, but on the serious side of this question, and it's hard to get over there on the serious side, but a baby conceived in microgravity, that would be the incredible first instant of creation and the genetic makeup getting done and all that, right?
It would be amazing.
I mean, I think that just from the point of view of us as human beings being explorers, you always want to find out what happens next, what's over that next hill, and creating a baby in space would be quite a first step.
I wonder if they've done it yet.
Do you know and can't say, or do you not?
I am not aware of it having been done yet.
There's not a lot of privacy up there, let's face it.
It would be a public performance, I'm afraid.
Well, I mean, there are sleep cycles for the crew, right?
That's right.
That's right.
But you know, we can speculate about this all we want.
I have a feeling it hasn't happened because basically they're probably just too tired and too overworked up there.
And if you've ever been around a woman who's tired, you know she's not interested.
I know.
All right.
All right.
Let me shift direction a little bit.
Right now, I'm reading stories about Scientists who are out resurrecting the 1918 flu that killed, I forget how many million, millions, tens of millions, really a bad mama of a flu.
And they're resurrecting this thing ostensibly, I guess, so that they can figure out how to combat it should it come alive again.
But how worrisome should it be that they're resurrecting this?
I mean, on the one hand, we don't have a problem with it right now, and I don't want one.
Well, I think that they're trying to find probably a vaccine for it.
No doubt.
And you know, when you look at total numbers killed, the flu is actually a far more lethal enemy of Americans than any foreign country could ever be.
I mean, it killed way more people.
The flu in itself, it's been devastating.
I mean, how many millions of people died during that particular epidemic?
I remember seeing the The charts of where people died followed the railroad lines.
Oh, really?
Yes, it did.
The further you were away from the railroad lines, the safer you were.
So it was just following the railroad tracks.
It was following the transportation lines.
Oh, well, great.
So then you project ahead to today's world, where it could follow the routes of all the airlines.
Exactly.
And, you know, you can get from one part of the world to another within 24 hours.
You can see how fast a lethal virus can travel.
That's why I think that people are concerned about something like smallpox, although that doesn't seem to be in enemy hands.
If that was to get loose and we have a whole population that is not vaccinated, it could be pretty devastating.
How long is a smallpox vaccination good for?
That's not entirely clear.
Now, at my age, I got smallpox vaccination when I was a child.
So did I. That's why I'm asking.
Right.
Is it lifelong?
We don't know.
Probably not.
So there may be some partial protection, but I suspect that even though you and I were probably vaccinated when we were children, it doesn't mean we won't get it.
Great.
I was depending on that.
And I don't know why I'm worried about smallpox.
It's just that they have talked so much about smallpox that it's almost enough to make you think they know something.
Well, you know, you have to ask the question now.
Do they know something, or are they trying to drum up tax money to pay for a drug company to come up with a vaccine?
No, couldn't be that, could it?
Well, conspiracy... I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but smallpox sounded like it was pretty well locked up, the virus itself, and it would be unlikely for it to be spreading.
But, you know, there are some government contracts out there.
They're getting a lot of money to develop these vaccines.
Hmm.
Well, that's why I go, hmm.
Because what do they know?
They must know something.
I mean, smallpox has been sort of thrown around, tossed around more than just about anything else.
Well, that's because it's far scarier than anthrax.
Anthrax you don't spread person to person.
Smallpox you do.
Huh.
Good point.
Yeah, and certainly Smallpox would go much further, much faster.
On this program, I interview a lot of, even physicians like yourself, some quite renowned, who are big believers in life after death, and they've purchased into these stories that people tell, who die and then experience something virtually on the other side, The near-death experience.
Yes, yes, yes.
And I'm just wondering, as a physician and as a novelist, you probably are going to consider it, but have you?
I'm not sure.
I don't... You know what?
I'm a skeptic.
I'll tell you right now.
I am very much a skeptic.
With my background in science, I have to have something proven to me before I will think about the possibility of it.
However, I also have an open mind.
My theory right now about near-death experiences is that it's hypoxia.
It's a hallucination that the brain experiences because of low oxygen levels.
When scientists do experiments and deprive people of oxygen, do they report these experiences at some great percentage?
Well, we don't do that because that is dangerous.
I don't think anybody would voluntarily go for a hypoxia test.
Well, those people that experience it accidentally, do they come up with even a numerically significant number of these experiences?
I don't know what the percentage of near-death experiences are overall in people.
But that is one of the theories, is that they are just experiencing the sense of light, of seeing a tunnel, of coming out into light.
Of hearing voices of loved ones.
Those very well could be just neurons firing off or... You know what?
I could buy that.
The ones that grab me are the ones where patients that are dead out, you know, coded, as it were, do come back and repeat things that were said during that period of time.
Is there a physiological way to account for that?
Yes, they are still there.
They're not really dead.
Their brain is still functioning.
In other words, once the blood supply stops, how long would a person... How long might you have hearing and still be able to process what you're hearing with your brain?
You know, two minutes probably you have irreversible brain damage with no blood circulation.
But in that time, before that two minutes, your brain can probably still register what's going on in the room.
It doesn't mean you've left your body and are floating above it listening to that.
But you're saying even somebody whose heart has stopped, they could still, during that, I mean that's a pretty morbid, horrible thing to think about, but you're saying it might even be very likely that for those two minutes, they would continue to hear what's said, you know, with the panic of trying to get their heart started?
It would explain, it could explain some of these near-death experiences.
I mean, I don't, I hate, it's a wonderful thing to think that we have life after death, And I think we all want to know there's a heaven or our loved ones are waiting for us.
But there's no proof.
Nobody's really come back from the dead, truly.
No, no.
There have been some instances that are truly amazing that I could tell you about.
But you're right.
Nobody has ever come back from the dead.
And, you know, as a skeptic, I'm Remember X-Files, Mulder, and Scully?
I'm afraid I'm the Scully.
I'm the one who's going to be shooting to town every step of the way.
Do you remember the movie Contact?
Yes, I do.
Do you remember when the question was asked, in order to get a ride on the space station, if you do connect with extraterrestrials, are you willing to say that you believe... Do you believe in God?
In other words, that was a qualifier to take the ride.
That was a qualifier.
So, if you were in that hot seat, you wouldn't be riding?
I'm afraid I wouldn't be riding, because, again, you know, the skeptic in me.
Well, that's the way most of the scientists that I've interviewed answer.
You know, at least, I think, a lot of the honest ones.
Well, what I've seen is that those who belong to the National Science Foundation, I would say probably 95% of them are agnostic, at least, at the least.
Many of them are atheists, but I think most of them are agnostic.
Seventy-five percent agnostic, and then a few complete atheists, and not a whole lot of devout believers in anything.
No, and part of it is that they are the kind of people who find explanations for things.
They need concrete evidence, and faith, just by its nature, it's belief without evidence.
Isn't that true?
Yes, of course.
Wouldn't a lot of these men, then, given the opportunity, at virtually any cost, extend life?
You mean... Well, I mean, do anything.
If you can be given certain proteins or, I don't know, shots, there's a big movement, a medical movement in America now, this longevity movement.
Oh, to live forever?
Oh, yes.
Well, if not forever, then, you know, there's some startling things, startling work being done in this area of life preservation.
Well, that's exactly what drives scientists, because those of us who are agnostic or atheist feel this is our one and only shot at existence, and we want to prolong it as long as possible, because we don't think there is another chance.
At least that's what Carl Sagan believed.
That that was his one shot and he wanted to make the most of it.
So yes, I think they would probably have a greater motivation to prolong life, but we all do.
We all want to stay around long enough to watch our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and every other generation beyond that.
That's right.
You know, life prolongation, you had this, I noticed your advertisement for growth hormone, that certainly does have an effect on muscle mass in older people.
It does seem that they're, biologically, cells do run out after a while.
Well, there's even work being done, I guess, in really wild areas like, you know, these, what do they call them, these telomeres, I believe.
Yes, well, telomeres, they become more fragile as the generations of cells go on.
And they're sort of a living, dying meter.
Unfortunately, yes.
But if somebody could sort of modify something there, I mean, a step like that could come along anytime, couldn't it?
Yes, it could, but then, you know, think about it.
What would it do to the world's population?
Would we have to start limiting how many children you could have if everybody could live forever?
Almost right away.
If this so-called longevity juice was made generally available to the whole world, yes, that's true.
And then you'd have problems with starvation, you'd have problems with overpopulation and use of resources.
So, in a way, maybe it's something mankind does not want to discover.
Well, if the magic juice did get discovered, what do you think would happen to it?
I think that the rich people would keep it for themselves, don't you?
Certainly, at first, yes.
But, my gosh, there would be a war.
Between the eternal and the non-eternal, there would be a serious war.
So, I'm just wondering if a scientist in a lab somewhere virtually came up with this juice, would it go straight to our government and then be controlled on sort of a who-do-we-want-to-keep-around basis?
I think that would probably happen, because just imagine the bills for Social Security.
Yeah.
It wouldn't be your normal release from a drug company after testing.
I mean, somewhere along the line, it would be early on, I would imagine.
The government would come in and grab that one up and I don't know what would happen.
Well, you're right.
I think it would lead to a two-tier humanity.
As you said, the immortals and the non-immortals.
The immortals would probably never want to risk their lives because they would be giving up immortality.
Well, I'll tell you, for a medical novelist, that'd make one hell of a story.
It would.
It would.
Why don't you write it?
Because you're the medical novelist.
And, you know, that's a thread, of course.
It runs through all of your books.
A lot of medicine, huh?
Yes, I tend to write about things that scare me.
Things either about medical ethics or certain diseases that give me a chill.
I've noticed that.
Why is that, Doctor?
Well, you know, things that scare me tend to scare my readers, and as readers, we like to be scared.
I think it helps us feel more comfortable in a world that is so uncertain.
We have a little safe way to be frightened within the covers of a book.
That's why people read mysteries.
They want to understand evil, and they want to understand what makes people kill, and then when they close the book, everything is back to normal again.
So you've thought about this a bit.
I've wondered about that for the longest time.
Why people like to be scared out of their wits, and Gravity is a scared-out-of-your-wits book.
Why?
And so I think you're right, because they can then return to the safe real world and say, whew!
Things are better here!
Yeah, but people are scared of different things.
Now, I know you liked Gravity, and a lot of men really enjoyed Gravity, because I noticed that my My fan mail switched around quite a bit.
It suddenly became 75% male for gravity.
But a lot of women did not read that book.
And, you know, you're talking about what scares people.
I can tell you what scares women.
One woman got up at a book signing and told me that she wasn't interested in the space program.
She wanted me to write about something that did interest her.
And I said, what's that?
And she said, serial killers and twisted sex.
And so I went around asking my readers, do you like serial killer books?
And the women almost universally said, yes, we love them, but we only want to read serial killer books where the victims are women.
And I said, what about when the victims are men?
And they said, we don't care about those.
What?
So there's an interesting psychological twist for you.
Well, maybe that one creeps right up on the fact that I hear that serial killers in prison Loads and boatloads of fan mail, and a lot of it's from women.
Maybe you'd like to explain that one to us all.
I think that women are, well, they're attracted to the fame, of course.
These men are notorious, and fame is its own sort of sexiness to it, and that's what they're responding to.
And it's true, women do write.
It's hard to believe, isn't it?
Yes.
They do, and they also love books about serial killers, but only when the serial killers kill women.
Why only when it's women?
You know, I don't think it's that we are particularly masochistic, because when you look at children... It sounds that way.
It does, doesn't it?
Yes.
But when you look at children's scary literature, kids only want to read books about kids who are threatened.
They're not too interested in the adults.
So I think we want to see ourselves as the victim, because that's where we get our catharsis at the end, when we're safe.
And so you don't think a lot of their readers, I don't know, don't enjoy or may perhaps enjoy a few moments of being tied up every now and then?
I think they just enjoy being scared out of their wits.
It's the way, it's the reason some people like to go on roller coasters.
I know, but if it's women that enjoy this, and it has to be about women, victim of serial killer, then somehow they must be psychologically placing themselves in that spot.
In the victim's spot.
That's right.
That's right.
I think they do, but it's a safe way to be frightened.
But you know what?
It's the men.
There are men also who have weird fantasies.
Well, sure.
Doctor, hold on.
We'll be right back.
Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
on market on
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Let your children To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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Indeed so.
This could be about a killer, serial killer, if you ever listen to the words.
Stand your hair right up.
We'll be right back.
stay right where you are we're going to talk about serial killers in a second but
You know, I've got to ask a question and answer for my audience something that, for years now, we've been bantering around at certain morbid moments.
And it goes back just a little bit in the interview to this two-minute thing.
You know, in years past, these cut off people's heads and they'd fall into a basket, right?
Right.
Would the two-minute rule apply to the basket?
And this has been an eternal question.
I'm sorry to ask, but I have it.
You know, people have seen mouth action and little movements after people have had their head chopped off.
Would you be aware that you were lying, you, meaning your head, is lying in a basket for a minute or so?
Theoretically, yes.
Oh, gee.
I believe, well, you know, you've cut off the head, but the brain is still functioning for at least a few seconds.
You're probably aware that your head is falling into the basket.
Your vestibular system is still working in your ears, so you will be feeling the motion of rolling forward.
It was known that Mary Queen of Scots, after her head was cut off, her lips did move for a while afterwards.
That's a pretty gruesome thought, isn't it?
It absolutely is, and we've had varying opinions on this program.
I decided to ask.
Alright, so you wanted to work on serial killers.
Coming back to this.
Trying to figure out why a lot of your people said they wanted a story on serial killers.
So where do you begin with that?
Well, the women did.
What I did was I used my medical background, and I told you, I write about things that sort of creep me out.
I've always had kind of this morbid Sensibility, I suppose.
Your website tells that story, doesn't it?
Well, I thought about what is it about medicine itself that kind of bothers me, and what has always given me like a little chill.
And I thought, you know, when I go in as a patient and get my blood drawn in a doctor's office, it sometimes makes me wonder, what happens to that tube of blood?
Where does it go?
It's the most intimate substance you're going to pass over to somebody, and there are a lot of secrets in blood.
Somebody can find out whether you've smoked a cigarette, whether you've taken medicines, whether you're diabetic.
You know, things you may not want to tell people.
So where does the blood go?
Well, okay, this is the question.
This lobotomist draws the blood in the doctor's office.
It goes probably through a messenger.
It goes to some person in the hospital basement.
And the fantasy that I was having is, what if this guy down the basement is uncapping the blood and sniffing it and getting sexually turned on by it?
Oh my gosh.
To me, that's almost like somebody coming up to you in the street corner and stroking your hair.
It's that kind of a sense of creepiness.
Oh.
And I thought, what if this really twisted guy is using blood tests to determine who his next victim is?
That because of something about your blood, he says, I'm going to go kill you.
And of course, because he's in the lab, he has your lab slip.
He knows where you live.
He knows all kinds of information.
Of course.
So that was the basis for the first serial killer novel, The Surgeon, which is about a man who does the same thing that Jack the Ripper did.
He cuts open women and removes their sexual organs, but he does it while they're still alive and awake.
And here's the part about the male fantasy that kind of creeped me out.
I went on book tour for that book, and one of my readers came up to me, a very normal-looking man, And, as I was signing his book, he bent over and he whispered in my ear, he said, thank you for writing this book.
And I said, why?
And he said, you let me enjoy my fantasies.
And he walked out the door.
Oh man, that must have totally creeped you out.
And I just thought, whoa, there are people out there who actually think the way my villain does.
But you know, when you think about, I'm not talking about crazy serial killers, I'm talking about sane ones.
There are a number who are perfectly sane.
Oh, no, no, no.
Maybe we better stop right there.
What do you mean there's a certain number that are... How could it ever be sane to be a serial killer?
Well, it depends on your definition of sanity.
I mean, these people do not... They're not schizophrenic.
They don't have hallucinations.
They know right from wrong.
They just have no sense of morality.
That's not really considered insanity, so to speak.
I've come to the conclusion, you know, looking at what happens around the world when there are wars and terrible things happen to societies, and there's a number of people out there killing, that there are walking among us almost a subspecies of human being who are predators.
They're born predators and they've always been predators.
And they look at the rest of us as prey.
They walk around a shopping mall and they say, well, there's a zebra and there's a gazelle and I could get her and I could get her.
But they don't do anything about it because they are aware of the consequences.
How common do you think that is?
Oh, I think it's rare, but I think that they're out there.
And the reason I came up with this is that, you know, during the fighting in Kosovo, when all that civil war was breaking out, there were a lot of slayings.
And there was one FBI expert I saw on TV once who said, it's not all ethnic slayings.
He doesn't think that all this stuff that's going on is war-related.
He thinks that society has broken down to such an extent That the killers have come out to play.
That everybody who might have been harboring such a fantasy can come out and do it safely.
Oh, that's... what a frightening concept that is alone.
It is a frightening concept, but you know what?
We are... people are predators.
We come from predatory ancestors.
Would you suspect there's any greater or lesser degree Of that, present in, for example, the U.S.
population versus, by comparison, you know, fourth world African nation?
I don't know if there's any studies on that.
I think that, I think we all, our society has the capacity, if it were to break down, to become quite savage.
Just look at, you know, before the Civil War, Kosovo, or at least Sarajevo, was a very civilized city.
And then when things started to break down, boy, people, you know, the dark side came out, didn't it?
Yes.
I was just wondering if you think that's equally present in Western industrialized society.
Should conditions present or, you know, get to roughly the same point?
I don't think we're immune to it, no.
I think we could be just as bad.
Could potentially break out with as much proportion as in Kosovo?
Yes, I mean, we have the same, human beings have the same genetics everywhere.
Your website does demonstrate that you have high interest in the weird.
Yes, I do.
The morbid, perhaps even.
Well, I think I'm interested in things that other people are fascinated by.
You know, for instance, just my most recent book, Before Body Double, was the center about leprosy.
Yes.
Now, that's a topic that has always fascinated me, and I suspect it probably interests you as well.
My wife read that and absolutely loved it.
Absolutely loved it.
Well, you think about leprosy.
Now, I was fascinated by that since I was a child watching the movie Ben-Hur.
If you remember the movie Ben-Hur.
Of course.
Right.
His mother and sister were put in prison by the Romans, and years later the Roman guard comes and opens up the gate to see if these prisoners are still alive.
The gate squeals open, and there's this scary music, and the guard backs up and says, oh my God, they're lepers.
Well, for an impressionable kid like I was, that made me think, oh, there must be something really, really terrible about this disease, leprosy.
Right.
And it does.
It was mentioned 41 times in the Bible.
It's usually mentioned in terms of being punishment for sin.
And through history, lepers have been horribly treated.
They were burned alive.
They were buried alive.
In medieval times, they were forced to wear cloaks and walk around with these clappers or bells so that people could know the monster was coming and they could flee.
So we've always had this ancient history of this particular disease.
And you ask, why?
Because it doesn't really kill you.
What it does is it does something which a lot of women think is much worse.
It disfigures you.
It completely destroys your face.
So, better to be dead for some women?
I think for some people it's better to be dead, and that's what's terrible about it.
What is the state of leprosy in the modern world?
There are over a million lepers in the world right now.
There is medical treatment, but it's expensive, and not everybody can get it.
I think most of the new leprosy cases are in places like Southeast Asia and India.
But I have to tell you, my husband, who is a physician, made the diagnosis of leprosy in a blonde nurse when he was practicing.
Really?
Yes, she was a woman who came in complaining of a numb place on her elbow.
And he did a biopsy and she had leprosy.
Because it turned out that years earlier she had been a nurse working in Vietnam during the war.
And that little numb area, that's kind of a telltale sign.
In fact, that is probably the reason lepers lose fingers and toes.
I actually worked in Hawaii, so I had some experience working with lepers there.
You mean they lose the feeling so much that they finally get into an accident?
Well, they can't protect themselves.
You know, pain is our early warning system.
Yes, of course.
And if you don't have pain, you can burn yourself, you can cut yourself.
In third world countries, and here's kind of one of these gruesome details, the real reason that children who have Hansen's disease, which is the official name for leprosy, the real reason they lose their fingers is that the rats get them.
When they're sleeping at nighttime, rodents climb into their cribs or their beds and chew on them.
And they don't even know it?
And they don't even know it.
My God.
So, what I was seeing in Hawaii were older people with Hansen's who'd had it for a number of years, so they were disfigured.
You know, Hawaii used to have a leper colony on the island of Molokai?
Yes.
And thousands of people with leprosy were taken on boats and just abandoned on the beach in Molokai, left to their own devices.
Pretty much to die of starvation.
But there was a man, a Belgian priest named Father Damien, I think there's been a movie made of him, who decided that God had called him to serve the lepers in Hawaii.
So he came and established a colony and really did quite saintly work and ended up dying of the disease himself some years later.
These, in modern day, how is, I don't know, the first thing about leprosy, how it's spread by contact?
You know, it's an interesting disease in that we think it's prolonged contact, but there is also something involving your genetics.
There is some genetic susceptibility.
A predisposition.
Right.
They find that actually husbands and wives don't really pass it to each other very often.
That it's more likely to go from mother to child.
So there is a genetic predisposition to it.
It's caused by a bacterium.
It's actually a relative of tuberculosis bacterium.
So, you know, it doesn't grow very well.
The one way to culture it, interestingly enough, is in the foot pads of the armadillo.
That is one way to culture it.
That's all amazing.
I didn't know any of that.
And so, how effective is modern medicine in fighting leprosy?
Can it be cured?
Is it curable?
Yes.
Well, it's certainly controllable with multiple drugs.
And a lot of the drugs are the same drugs you take for tuberculosis, but you have to take a number of them.
And one other little interesting detail is one of the drugs that's useful in treating leprosy is thalidomide.
That old nasty drug that caused all those deformed babies.
It turns out that thalidomide does have a use.
Wow.
Alright, you also write about cannibalism.
How'd you get to that?
That's on your website, right?
That's not a book, that's on your website.
Yes, well that came about because I was working on a book about mad cow disease.
That was life support, and I know you've probably had guests who've come in to talk about mad cow disease.
But it's something that I've been interested in since I was in medical school.
When I was in medical school, first of all, the human form of the disease is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD for short.
When I was in medical school, they thought that it was due to what they called a slow virus.
They didn't really know what the organism was yet.
And I remember sitting in my medical school class for infectious disease, and you know those are really boring classes, and almost falling asleep when I heard the instructor suddenly use the word human cannibalism, and I kind of sat up straight and thought, what did I miss?
Yeah, he was talking about a tribe in New Guinea called the Foray tribe, where A huge number of women were dying of CJD and nobody knew why.
Now CJD usually kills people who are older.
Yes.
And men and women equally.
But in this tribe, women and children were dying of it.
So the anthropologists were trying to figure out what were the women doing differently than the men.
And it turns out the women were eating their dead relatives.
My God.
When somebody would die in the family, they would take the body... And so like the cows.
Right.
They would cook them and eat them.
And so the women were catching Probably somebody had died spontaneously of CJD.
The women ate that corpse.
They got it, and they were in turn eaten, and by the time this disease had run its course in this tribe, the ratio of men to women was 2 to 1.
Wow.
You know, we've had a number of guests on, Doctor, so I guess I've got to try this one on you, who suggest that CJD is much more common And not diagnosed as cause of death in many, many cases, and so they try to build the case that there's CJD sort of all over the place, or there might be.
I know, crackpot theory, or is it more possible than we know?
I think it's more possible than we know.
Oh?
I think there's a lot more CJD that is diagnosed than is diagnosed.
I know that, you know, I live in a very sort of underpopulated area of Maine.
We don't have a lot of people here.
But I believe we've already had maybe three cases just in this area of middle-aged people who we don't really know what the source is.
I'm thinking and I'm hoping it's because they ate something simple like they ate deer meat.
Because we know that a form of mad cow disease is present in the elk population and also in deer populations.
And you can get it from eating game.
And we also know you can get it from eating squirrels.
Were you aware of that?
No.
Yes, there was an outbreak in, I think it was 1997 in Kentucky, of a whole valley of people where CJD was breaking out in young people and they couldn't figure out what it was.
They were eating squirrels?
They were eating squirrel brains.
Oh!
I wasn't aware of this particular culinary delicacy No, this is my first exposure, too.
But in that area, one thing you do when you come to visit somebody's house is it's considered a nice gift to bring them a sack of squirrel heads.
And what they do is they fry the heads, the little heads, in a cast iron skillet and break open the skulls and suck out the brains.
Oh, lovely.
And so that's a gift.
You know, like, welcome to the neighborhood.
Here's your basket of heads for you.
Yeah, and here's your mad cow disease.
God.
So they were eating it and catching it from squirrels.
So we know that squirrels can get it.
We know that cats can get it from infected cat food.
Apparently the only species that don't get it are anybody in the bird family.
So you're pretty safe eating chicken.
You know, I'm hearing about a lot of creepy things going on.
Here's one of them.
In China right now, they're starting to think that maybe this bird flu is mixing with something else.
I'm not, with maybe the latest, they're worried it might be mixing with the latest flu form.
Oh, recombining.
You know, that would be a disaster.
That would truly be a disaster.
Because we already know the bird flu is fatal.
Oh, quite, yes.
Yes, and if you could spread it from human to human, that would sort of add this other level of lethality to it.
How do these things happen, Doctor?
I mean, how do they suddenly mix and get a genetic partial code from something else enough to let it jump to that species?
How does that happen?
Well, they happen because sometimes DNA can get mixed.
Yes.
they have a capacity no bacteria have the capacity for instance to exchange
gene by using little viral packets of messengers
yes and so you know genetics can be mixed up in and also there's evolution involved as well I mean viruses
can evolve well it is evolution isn't it? you're seeing evolution on a
very on a very small scale and you know for those people who don't believe
in evolution you just look at the bacterial world and you see it
under the microscope Evolution is how we get the new flu strain each year, right?
That's right, and that's how we get bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
But what would have to happen between the bird flu and the human?
How does that get mixed up suddenly?
Any guesses?
I would assume it would be in one particular host.
Okay, but you mean somebody just caught the bird?
Somebody perhaps might be infected by both at the same time.
Uh-huh.
Oh, I see.
Both at the same time, and so we end up with a sort of a plus and plus equals so-and-so.
Yes.
And that's evolution?
That's evolution.
All right.
Stay right there, Doctor.
That's the kind of evolution That could devolve the human population.
That's what we were just talking about.
Tess Gerritsen, Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
I'm Art Bell from the high desert in the middle of the night where we do our work.
Hall of the city streets, speeding Light from the neon's turned the dark to day
I've had a lot of Some velvet morning when I was great
Bye.
I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life And how she made it in Some velvet mornin' when I'm astray
Flowers growin' on our hill Drownin' flies and daffodils
Learn from us very much Look at us, but do not touch
Fedra is my name Do talk with Art Bell. Call the wildcard line at area code
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Indeed, and my guest, Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
You know, as a child, she'd dissect snakes and collect Buckets full of lizards to study, and who knows what all else.
And that was as a child.
Then, of course, she became a full doctor.
In fact, let's see, Phi Beta Kappa University of Stanford.
You get the idea, right?
But she's kind of an interesting gal because she has a, hmm, is it a macabre side or an interest in real medical Terror.
That's the right word, medical terror.
interesting gal and she'll be right back in a course we're going to go to the
phone system right there okay let's say that gravity is of guys book
of for a second uh...
I'm technical enough, you all know me, on the techie side, big time, right?
And in the Air Force, I was in medicine, you'll recall, and so I found her book just absolutely accurate.
I mean, just accurate here, accurate there, accurate all the way through.
Sure, a guy's kind of book, I guess.
You know, and I'm surprised to hear a woman wrote it.
So how did you write a guy's book?
I must be a guy in disguise!
No, I think, you know, there are a lot of things that I'm interested in that I think go across sex lines.
I'm just a curious person and I have always wanted to look under the rock, I think.
I'm always looking for the bugs under the rock.
And my goal when I wrote Gravity was to write a book in which You know, where a NASA engineer would pick it up and not find anything wrong with it.
Right.
That was a pretty, pretty hard thing to do.
And I tried my very best.
You know, part of it is the language, of course, the acronyms.
NASA is also known as the National Acronym Slinging Agency because of all the... And the funny thing is they don't all use the same acronyms.
I remember asking one engineer, what does this mean?
And he said, gee, I don't know.
Let me ask Lou at the next, you know, down the next hall.
So that they don't even always communicate with each other using the same acronym.
So wait a minute, you got a pretty high level of cooperation then, in the end, huh?
I did, and a couple of months after the book came out, I got this really interesting phone call from a man, I didn't know who this guy was, but he had sort of a Texas twang, and he said, Hi, I'm an engineer down here at Johnson Space Center, and I read Gravity, and I just wanted to say you got something wrong.
And, you know, I hate those calls, right?
Of course.
So I said, what did I get wrong, sir?
And he said, well, in chapters such and such, you have your hero drive into the Building 30 parking lot and park his car.
And I said, yeah?
And he said, I've worked here 20 years and I've never found an empty space in that lot.
That was it, huh?
Yeah, all of it seemed very technically accurate, so, you know, that must have taken a lot of homework.
It had to have taken a lot.
I mean, you had the medical part of it down, sure, but... Right, the engineering part.
You know what?
I downloaded probably a thousand pages from the NASA website about the shuttle program.
Really?
Now, I caution people who want to go on and find it, but this is pre-9-11.
This was before NASA tightened up its security, and they were very open about everything.
Every single little engineering detail you wanted.
From, you know, what button pushed which rocket.
And when I went there, you know, one of the questions I had was, I had a scene in mind where I wanted to have an autopsy of these infected bodies.
But for that I needed the shuttle to crash, not so badly that the bodies would be damaged.
So I went to an engineer there and I said, how do I make a shuttle crash so that the contents are not too badly smashed?
He just sort of looked at me and he said, you know, we don't usually think of things like this.
I'm sure not.
So I said, well, OK, well, tell me tell me about my scenario.
These people, these astronauts are out of commission.
Can you land?
Can you land the orbiter using your computers and mission control?
And he said, no, we cannot.
Which surprised me because I thought that everything was computerized.
Yes.
So I guess it would be a human would have to do the following.
Right.
He said a human hand needs to flip three switches.
They need to flip a switch that starts the de-orbit burn to get them out of orbit.
I said, okay.
They need to flip another switch as it's coming in for a landing to launch the air data probes to give the computers enough data so that it can land.
And then a human hand has to flip a third switch to lower the landing gear.
And I said, thank you, you've just answered my question.
Because that's exactly what goes wrong in the book.
The pilot goes unconscious between the second and the third switch.
That's right.
Right.
So, you know, they were just so easy to work with and such a lot of fun.
And I think that because they all grew up on Star Trek, we all spoke the same language.
We all understood each other.
We all had the same vision of what space could be and what people could be.
I'm old enough to remember the day that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
You know, that first wonderful day.
I still remember crying on that day.
And I think of all of us who are old enough to remember when we had our first moonwalk, we probably all remember that as being one of those few pure moments when every American was proud of being an American.
There was no sense of, oh, we're fighting about this or we're mad at each other for that.
We were all equally amazed and awed and proud of ourselves.
Wish we had more moments like that, and I think that's what the space program does for people, for the human race.
I think you're right.
A lot of people would like to speak with you, so let's see what's out there.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
This is Dave in southeast Washington, listening on 610-KLNA.
Okay, thank you.
Hi, Dr. Gerritsen.
Hi.
Pleasure to talk to you.
You sound like a very bright and smart person.
Perfect candidate for that immortality juice, huh?
As long as I didn't have to leave my loved ones behind.
Right, right.
By the way, I enjoyed the surgeon and Gravity both.
My wife picked them up first and she got me hooked on them.
But my question to you is, Do you like to curl up with a good book, and if so, what authors and genre of books do you like?
Okay, there you go.
Good question.
I like to curl up with just about any kind of book except sports.
I'm not a big sports fan.
Some of my favorite authors right now, you know, I've always enjoyed Stephen King.
I tend to read a lot of history right now, and I can recommend very highly a book called Pompeii by Robert Harris.
Kind of a thriller about the last days before Vesuvius blew up.
I read it.
Yes, I enjoyed that book.
And I read a lot of just kind of, you know, funny history books.
I read, for instance, one book that I enjoyed a lot was Napoleon's Wives and Lovers.
A little sex and France.
Absolutely.
I'm the kind of person that likes a thriller, a science fiction sort of thriller, but for me, science fiction can't get Too far out there.
It's got to be within reach for me.
In other words, technically, I've got to believe that at least this thing would be possible.
Same with me.
I have to believe that, too.
And that's where gravity, of course, hit home.
You know, it was all the way through all of this.
Well, you know, that's a good question in itself.
The scenario depicted in Gravity, Doctor, could it happen?
That we get infected by a An organism from outer space?
Yes, ma'am.
Yes, I think that if we are going to be invaded by an extraterrestrial being, I think it's going to be on the microbial level.
You know, this is a funny thing.
Ever since I was a child, and I continue to have this nightmare.
Believe it or not, I do have nightmares.
My nightmare always has to do with invaders from the sky.
Really?
And it's a strange thing.
I've always been afraid of that.
But when you look at certain organisms that we have on Earth, these Archeons that I talk about in Gravity, which are true organisms, they're single-celled organisms, they're so ancient that they probably split off at the same time that bacteria and eukaryotes split off.
So they're the third branch of life.
They are extremely hardy.
Archeons, right?
Is that correct?
Archeons?
Archeons.
They can probably survive a time in orbit.
In fact, they've found one.
It's called a halobacterium, which is actually an archaeon, even though they call it a bacterium.
It's in the Dead Sea, and it lives in extremely salty conditions, and it can survive the vacuum of space.
They have found that when we have spacecraft in orbit and they flush their toilets, that actually some of that fecal bacteria is still surviving in orbit years later, still alive.
Arthur C. Clarke had this wonderful quote about that.
He said, What if life on Earth was actually a result of an ancient space-faring race flushing their toilet?
You know, what if we evolved from somebody, some alien's toilet?
It makes a completely different vision of Genesis, doesn't it?
Oh, very controversial one indeed, and I've not ventured quite that far until this moment.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Garrison.
Hello.
Good morning, Art.
I look like Ramona Fangio's new friend.
Oh, yes indeed.
We're going to be waiting on this movie, aren't we?
Yeah, you know, I said that to her.
You know, this would make such a good movie, wouldn't it, Doctor?
I'm sure it's going to be bought somewhere, I guarantee you.
Doctor?
It has been bought.
Right now, 20th Century Fox owns the rights.
They've gone through a couple of script rewrites, but I don't think they found a script they were happy with yet, and that's where films usually get hung up.
Well, I'm sure you'd be there to straighten them right on out.
Oh, it'll be kick-butt as a movie.
Just totally kick-butt.
I hope they stay fairly close to it for you, Doctor.
Well, the first script I saw actually was pretty close to it.
You know what their criticism of it was?
They said, too many things go wrong in such a short time.
We don't know how to get this all into two hours.
Well, that's why they're movies.
That's right.
We've got a bunch of hungry fishermen here and I've got to ask a question.
We've all been sitting around We're down here in Lake Eufaula, Alabama.
By the way, this is Stephen.
Yes, yes, Stephen.
I'm from Lake Eufaula.
Listen to your next on satellite radio.
Yes.
I've got a question.
Doc, do they send a suicide pill up with the astronauts?
Oh.
I am not aware of that.
They send up body bags.
But I'm not aware of suicide pills.
I haven't asked that question.
You know, you would think they might.
I mean, rather than face There are some pretty awful possibilities for ways to die in space, right?
Yes, there are.
But, you know, that's something that never even occurred to me.
Next time you talk to him.
Next time.
Thank you for the thoughts, Stephen.
You're on the air with Dr. Gerritsen.
Hi.
Thank you very much, Art.
I very much enjoy what your guest is saying, and I just wanted to bring up a point.
When I first heard about the plot that she used, many, many years ago, when I was much, much, much younger, there was a writer I very much enjoyed, also a science fiction writer by the name of Martin Caden, and he wrote a book called Four Came Back that had a very similar plot, but there was one major difference.
What was that?
This was based on an incident that happened during the Gemini program.
Apparently, during One of the flights, they put a little trap on the outside of the capsule to pick up space dust.
Right.
And then during one of the extra vehicle activities, they would pick it up and bring it inside before they'd return.
According to Cayden, at least within the context of the story, when the researcher opened up the trap, he got sick.
But then he got well very quickly.
Uh-huh.
Now, in his story, it was a space station, and there were about eight people there, and they had a similar collection, only it was opened up while it was inside.
Now, I have no idea about the nature of the plot, and I've got to admit, I'm really going to run down and grab it, but is there some possibility that some of the, oh, I don't know, maybe viruses or something on space dust Might come in to infect a crew in a similar fashion.
All right, let's try a bigger question actually.
Right now, Doctor, we have missions that are going to fly behind asteroids, or even perhaps land on asteroids.
I think that's planned.
Or go to Mars and retrieve material And bring it back.
Now, most material that we get on Earth goes through this sterilizing process of entering the atmosphere, so if any material actually makes it down, it's been boiled but good.
Right.
To say the least.
How careful should we be in collecting asteroid junk and dust and Mars stuff and bringing it back to Earth?
You know, NASA does have a planetary protection officer.
That is all he thinks about.
One guy?
The last I heard there was one guy, but that is his entire job, so they are considering that whole scenario.
I don't know how careful they are, though, when they retrieve stuff from Mars, for instance, and bring it back.
Or a reverse question that's a real chiller.
This might even be the plot for something.
Did you know that until the last, oh, I don't know, two or three missions to Mars, We never considered sterilizing anything that we sent to Mars.
That's true, and we could be infecting them.
Well, exactly.
And so, there are some who argue, if we find life on Mars and declare it incredibly similar to Earth... It could be ours.
At a microbial level, it might be ours?
That's right.
That's right.
I don't think it's actually possible to avoid contaminating each other.
When you think about it, we're out there, we open up hatches.
I mean, there is always going to be some kind of cross-contamination.
Right.
So... So we just have to hope that if we do find another organism, that it is not lethal.
And then one other question.
A lot of stuff regularly falls, you know, to earth.
And while it does get very hot, I suppose if you had a big chunk of something, conceivably, within it, and you know, when they find something that falls from space, they run after it, and section it, and look at it, and open it up, and one of these days, could we open up something?
We ought not.
Conceivably, we could, and as I was talking about these halo bacteria, which are, probably would be able to survive an entry, because of the fact that they enclose themselves in these little soft crystals, so they can They can live in the vacuum of space, and they're able to live at very, very high temperatures.
So it's something to think about.
You know, there are people who think that we're the only life in the universe.
Well, I think that's probably not true.
I'm sure that there is life somewhere.
All it really takes is water and carbon molecules and some nitrogen, and you could have life other places.
So you think it's probable?
I think it's probable.
I think if it's happened here, it's probably happened somewhere else in the universe.
To you, then, perhaps, the possibility of life, extraterrestrial life, is greater than the possibility of a maker in heaven and, you know, all the stuff that we're taught?
Oh, you're getting back to religion again, aren't you?
Well, I've already admitted that I am an agnostic, and you know what?
Again, it's the faith against the proof issue.
For those of us who are scientists, faith is belief without proof, and that's hard for us to accept.
It is, and I seem to recall an answer that was given going back to contact, and somebody said, I think it was one of the candidates said, well, you love your mother, right?
The guy, of course, said, oh, of course.
She said, prove it!
That's right.
How do you prove that?
Well, you can't.
You can't.
But there are a lot of stories and interesting areas of investigation and reports of ghosts and all that, but until you have absolute scientific proof, you're going to say, no, put that over there and I'm interested, but sorry, I don't buy until I see.
But there is a difference between agnosticism and atheism, which says absolutely not.
That's just as close-minded as anything else.
Quite right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm putting in a hunting rabbit and squirrels tonight.
Are you serious?
Are you serious, sir?
Yes.
You're going to hunt down some rabbits and squirrels?
And then when you do, you're going to eat them?
That's what I was planning to do.
I see.
All right.
And you're wondering about the advisability of doing that?
Well, there's some precautions I need to do when I'm handling them and how I cook them.
I'm not going to eat their brains now.
Don't eat their brains.
Try to avoid the spinal cord.
You know how we work with beef, where we try to avoid CJD with beef?
Yeah.
Anything that may have neural tissue in it, you probably should not be eating.
So be careful about any meat near the backbone.
Alright.
And definitely not the brains.
Oh, right.
Um, okay, Doctor.
Hold tight.
Definitely not the brains.
No problem here.
Never, ever, I guarantee, will you hear me say, hey, pass the brains, please.
Not a chance.
From the high desert, in the middle of the night, we're with Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
My favorite book that she's written is Gravity, but it's not the only one.
We'll tell you about the others.
I'm going to tell you about the others.
Once upon a time, once when you were mine, I remember your smile, reflected in your eyes.
I wonder where you are, I wonder if you think about me.
Once upon a time, in your wildest dreams.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 7.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
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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.
Indeed so, and Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
And actually, you know, she's written eight books.
Can you imagine that?
Eight now.
I asked her a little earlier and she did admit to me privately that Gravity was her favorite thus far.
uh... but we'll find out more about the other folks in a moment
is it true that uh... gravity is sort of your favorite so far
I think it is because of the subject matter, because I'm such a space junkie, and because I wanted to be an astronaut.
Well, there you are.
I just had a feeling there was that in you somewhere.
And that's a really important question, too, and that is, in all of your books, can you write about all of this without having an awful lot of tests in the books?
You know, it's really hard, I think, to not let myself show through all these books.
Either in the characters or in the subject matter.
Although, you know, the serial killer book, that got a little bit stretched for me.
Well, maybe.
But I mean, still, you did it.
And it still satisfies some, I guess, some creepy curiosity of my own.
I just am interested in things that gross people out.
I don't know what it is.
And so run through your book titles for me real quick.
Okay.
Harvest, which is about organ transplantation.
Life Support, which is about mad cow disease.
Bloodstream, which is about a small town in Maine where the children all become suddenly violent for biological reasons.
Gravity.
The Surgeon, which is about the serial killer.
And The Apprentice, which is the sequel to The Surgeon.
The Sinner, which is the same series, but about leprosy.
And Body Double, which is about families killed together.
Serial killer families.
Now, see, that's really quite a collection of odd... Oddities, yes.
Yes, yes.
So when you have a book signing, Everybody has book signings who writes like this.
What's your crowd like?
For the most part, they're normal.
But I do get some very strange people.
And I get some really interesting serial killer stories from my audience.
I had a man come up to me to tell me that there was a serial killer in his wife's family.
Made sure I knew it was his wife's family.
And the story he told me was that there were two twins in the family.
One grew up to be an attorney in the prosecutor's office, and the other worked for the California Highway Department.
The one who worked for the highway department was going up and down California killing women.
And when he killed them, he would cut up their underwear in a certain pattern with a pair of scissors.
Then he would call up his brother in the prosecutor's office and say, hey, they just found another body.
What are the police doing about this?
So the prosecutor did not realize he was feeding information directly to the killer himself.
Eventually, he was caught because a cop who was on the verge of retirement remembered that he had had a juvenile who used to sneak into women's bedrooms and cut up their underwear with a pair of scissors in exactly that pattern.
That pattern, wow.
And he said the juvenile had grown up.
Anyway, that man ended up in jail, and the prosecutor, I understand, is a judge.
Holy mackerel!
Serial killers are very hard to capture, aren't they?
Because they don't have the normal... I mean, most murders are solvable because there's motive that's understandable.
Right.
And if they're intelligent and if they're fairly normal, like Ted Bundy was, they can be really hard to capture.
Especially if they move across state lines, because then you're dealing with multiple jurisdictions.
I had one Maine State policeman estimate For me, there have been three serial killers in Maine, and we're a very small state.
So I can imagine they're all over the country.
Now, the FBI does have a central computerized database called VITAP, in which they're able to keep track of certain patterns of killings and maybe identify which ones are killed by the same killer.
But it's still a matter of finding these people, especially if they're bright.
Does a serial killer Have something in common.
You know, we had the earlier example of what Kozlov, for example.
Is that, is a serial killer somebody who's just simply said to himself, or for whatever reason, all those inhibitions are gone, or they were never there in the first place, or is it part of the same syndrome?
What they have is they derive pleasure.
They derive some kind of a high out of killing.
Um, and the question is, when do they start their killing?
When do they get their first opportunity?
And very often, their first opportunity is just a matter of happenstance.
There's a little girl there by herself on the road, and they have the chance, and they do it, and they get such a high out of it, they want to do it again and again and again, trying to repeat that pleasure.
Now, you know, on the other hand, there are killers who do it, and this is what I deal with in Body Double, there are families who do it for purely practical reasons.
A couple of cases through history that are truly chilling.
I mean, even I get kind of creeped out.
The best one, the one that stands out in memory is a family in 15th century Scotland, the Sawney Bean family.
He was the son of a ditch digger.
He married a young woman who was said to be a witch, and they lived in a cave on the Scottish seashore and proceeded to have children.
And their children had children with each other, so they ended up with 47 members of the same family, and the way they made their living was to ambush travelers on the road and rob them and kill them, and then of course there's all this fresh meat.
So that was how the Bonnie Bean family fed itself, because they were cannibals.
Eventually the Scottish authorities came in and dragged them all out of this cave and found over a thousand human body parts in this cave.
My Lord!
So this is a family that didn't do it for pleasure.
They did it because it was their living.
And, you know, there are cases in the United States of families who do it as a living.
That just, it just seems so beyond everything any of us can understand in every way.
Well, it does.
It does, doesn't it?
But, you know, 1970s, there was a family called the Bloody McQuarrie family.
They was a mom, a dad, a son, a daughter, and a son-in-law.
And they traveled from state to state robbing Robbing convenience stores and kidnapping female clerks and taking them on the road and shooting them and leaving them at the side of the road.
They killed almost two dozen young women.
Purely for practical reasons, they were robbing stores, but I think that the killing had to do, maybe, with a certain amount of pleasure and control.
Yeah.
Wow.
It puts a new spin on family values, doesn't it?
Yeah, it sure does.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
Hello.
Yes, hello Dr. Garrett and Art.
I was just wanting to hopefully leave you quickly with this thought because I'm working and enjoying your show here late night and up here in Canada.
I actually got introduced to Dr. Garrett when... Dr. Garrison, actually.
Garrison, sorry.
Dr. Garrison's reading as part of a book list where she was included in sort of a medical thriller list and I was hoping to get her impression on One of Tom Clancy's books, where he actually illustrates the effects of someone using weapons of terror, sort of a viral attack on the U.S.
I was wondering what she would feel about that.
They actually used the Ebola virus, the Ebola-Myandja strain, and I was wondering just what her thoughts were.
Art, if you wouldn't mind playing my part for any follow-up, I'd be more than interested to hear what you guys have to say.
Alrighty, you betcha, coming right up.
Okay, so yes, we live in an age of terror and being a doctor and up on this sort of thing, you probably know.
How big and terrible a threat is a biological attack on the U.S.?
It depends on the organism.
Anthrax I'm not too worried about.
Ebola would be a pretty serious threat.
The trouble is, it's very hard to control.
You know, once you've let it out there, how are you going to keep your vector from getting sick himself?
And the other concern, of course, was smallpox, because if that got out, that would be bad.
But you know what?
Well, you've got to remember, we live in a day and age where we're dealing with people who are willing to die to kill us.
Well, that's true.
But you know what?
I would be more concerned about the flu, frankly.
I think the flu probably is going to kill more people than An outbreak of Ebola ever would.
I didn't read that particular Tom Clancy novel.
But, you know, we worry about all kinds of terrorism.
Right now, I'm not so worried about bioterrorism as I am about nuclear terrorism.
Really?
I think that could kill a lot more people.
And as I said before, if we're going to worry about who's going to get killed by biological means, it's going to be the flu.
Is it possible for man to put together A killer virus, a very effective killer virus, or do man's efforts pale against what nature could do if she wanted to?
Oh, man could come up with truly horrifying things.
We could make, if we wanted to, we could make this smallpox virus even worse than it is.
We could bioengineer all kinds of things, but it does take a fairly sophisticated lab, so I don't think the terrorists that we have been facing so far are capable of it.
I hope you're right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Gerritsen.
Hi.
Yes, hi Art.
Excellent show tonight.
Thank you.
This is Orval calling from Miami, Florida.
I listen to you on WINC-610 radio.
Way to go.
I have a question for your guest.
Earlier when you were discussing gravity, you said that there was a range safety officer that had the ability to destroy the shuttle if it went over a populated area.
And then later in the discussion of gravity, you said that if all the astronauts died before the retro rockets were fired, that the shuttle would probably stay in orbit for several months, being an embarrassment to NASA.
Why would NASA use the range safety officers' explosives to destroy the shuttle in that case?
Well, I never thought about that.
I guess they would have the capability of doing it if they wanted to.
A good point.
I hadn't thought about it, but that was all I remember.
That was what the PAO told me, was that that was their worst nightmare, was having one up there for four to five months.
If you were working for the government, Doctor, and the government told you that a terrorist had loosed in some small or mid-sized town airborne Ebola, and you had to make a decision I remember there was a movie about this.
Do you remember that?
Yes, Dustin Hoffman.
Could you make a medically based decision like that?
To kill people trying to get out?
Well, yeah.
That was a hard decision that had to be made.
Quarantining people and then trying to I mean, if you knew you couldn't prevent the spread in any manner other than quarterizing it, so to speak.
I'm afraid there would be no other option, would there?
I mean, if you're going to protect the rest of the country, you would have to definitely quarantine and not let anybody out.
Yes.
And I think that that would be a decision you would have to make if you were going to be a responsible public servant.
That would be one very brutal decision, wouldn't it?
Yes, it would be brutal, but it would probably be necessary if you're talking about something like that.
So if you were advising the President on that situation, and it was obvious it could not be contained, you would advise the President to take that step?
Yes.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Gerritsen.
Hello.
Hello.
I was wondering if a parent You know, feels like that his children are maybe having masochistic or predatory tendencies.
Is there anything he can do to, you know, kind of nip it in the bud before they get too old?
Actually, that's a really good question.
Doctor, there are serial killers, I'm told, frequently cut their teeth on killing Pets and other animals in neighborhoods and that sort of thing.
And so if this man is observing that kind of behavior in his own children, that's a tough question.
That's a tough question.
I would be worried.
I would certainly go for professional evaluation.
You know, kids do a lot of crazy things.
They do a lot of anti-social things like break into cars or steal cars or do property crimes.
Which may actually probably be within the range of normal behavior for teenagers.
When you start doing cruel things like that, like torturing animals, killing dogs, killing cats, that's another level of concern.
I would be worried.
So professional treatment?
I think that they definitely need to be evaluated and also watch to make sure they don't hurt anybody.
You know, the question always comes up, what if you know somebody is likely to go out and commit a crime?
What do you do if they haven't committed a crime yet?
That's a good one, alright.
There's nothing you can do because, I mean, in this system of laws, you have to wait until they are guilty.
But I have a good friend who's a criminal psychologist who used to work for the military.
He had a soldier who had just killed somebody and was talking to the soldier and said, what did it feel like?
And the soldier said, It was the biggest power high I've ever had.
Wow.
And the psychologist thought, this man has to be locked away for the rest of his life because he's like a man who's just tasted cocaine.
He'll do it again.
That's so foreign.
So foreign to me.
I guess with all the study, it is not that foreign to you, but it just stops me cold.
It stops most of us cold.
Those of us who are prey.
Prey.
Right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Gerritsen.
Hello.
Hi Art.
This is Noreen in Las Cruces and thank you so much for this program.
You're very welcome.
I'm hoping Dr. Gerritsen can answer a question that's been bothering me and I'm sure thousands of other people.
George Norie had on a guest a while back that said that the cause of mad cow disease can almost not be killed.
There's very few things that can kill it, but it's even been passed from Patient to patient after the surgical instruments were autoclaved?
Yes.
My question is, can it be found in canned pet food?
Yes.
It has been found in canned pet food in England.
I'm not aware that it has been found here.
A number of pets died of it in England.
See, my problem is that I recycle all of my cans.
And so I wash all of those cans in my sink, not with my dishes, but it's
the same sink that I wash my dishes in.
And I also wonder if the cans that I've washed, since this can't be killed, and they're recycled
into something else, if there were mad cow disease in there, am I poisoning, you know,
maybe the next can that has spinach in it or something?
I see.
Well, so far, there's been no reports of it in the United States because we did not do what, or we should not have done at least, what they did in the UK, which was feed cows, downer cows.
I think you probably understand that's how it got into the system, into the herd in Great Britain, is that when cows died, they would be ground up and fed to other cows.
That's how it was passed on.
That doesn't happen in the United States, or it should not happen in the United States.
So I don't think there should be any problem with canned pet food in the U.S.
as long as it's American.
That, at least, is some small comfort.
But you sound like you have a lot of concern about this.
Well, you know, I think, well, I'm concerned because I think it's underdiagnosed.
I think there are more cases of CJD than we realize.
And she's absolutely right.
I don't know who your guest was, but it's absolutely true that the prion, which is the protein, the abnormal protein that causes CJD.
It doesn't even burn, does it?
No.
It's very, very difficult to get rid of it.
And it does survive autoclaving.
It survives cooking.
It survives charring.
It's possible you could get it in all kinds of beef products if it got into our herds.
For instance, lipstick.
Lipstick is made with beef products.
Gelatin capsules, that's a beef product.
Jell-O is a beef product.
Is it easily misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's?
Not as Alzheimer's.
I think that sometimes maybe older people get it and die and they're diagnosed with something else.
Maybe they died of pneumonia and so it was never really clear that the neurologic disease was the primary reason they died.
But as I was mentioning, we just had three cases here in the mid-coast with middle-aged people, and there were clusters of them up in the upper Midwest, I think, from eating elk meat.
So it's certainly in the environment, and we still don't really understand how it causes disease.
It just seems to change the protein structure of the brain itself and leave these big holes in the brain.
Nature is always trying to stay a step ahead.
You know, nature is scarier than anything any horror writer can come up with.
There's a great line to end it on, because we're out of time.
What a total pleasure to interview you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Art.
Good night, Doctor.
Good night.
That's Dr. Tess Gerritsen, folks.
Gravity is a book.
I'm telling you, this one, you'll never be able to put it down.
It's called Gravity.
Amazon.com or wherever you can find it.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
You all have a wonderful night, and I will see you later on this evening, actually.
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