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April 23, 2005 - Art Bell
02:54:39
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Tess Gerritsen - Creepy Medical Topics
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From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon,
wherever you may be in the world's time zones, each and every one of them, covered like a blanket by this program,
Coast to Coast AM.
I am Art Bell, here to escort you through the weekend.
Actually, there's a minor change going on this weekend.
You may have seen it reflected in the website.
Tomorrow night, I won't be here in person.
I mean, I will be here, but not in person.
Live, that is to say.
Well, actually, I've got to go to the YASU organization, and that's down in Southern California, and so I've got to be there Monday morning early.
As a result of that, I'm going to take tomorrow off, tomorrow night off, so I can be in Southern California early.
Now, with that in mind, I have picked a program for tomorrow night that I think you're going to love.
In honor of the new Amityville movie, I really thought it would be very, very interesting for all of you to get an opportunity to hear the one program that I did with George Lutz.
Now, what you're going to hear tomorrow night is the real Amityville story.
It was one hell of an interview, and that's tomorrow evening.
Now, coming up in the next hour here, Tonight, it's going to be equally good.
I began reading a series of books by a doctor, a gal named Tess Gerritsen, and she is one in a million, I'll tell you.
She's a medical doctor with all, you know, all the education you could imagine.
I mean, she's really hot stuff, and in more ways than one.
This is a very strange woman.
She writes incredible books like gravity for example if you if you have not yet read gravity and you love high-tech space type thrillers gravity trust me is one you wanna get on Amazon in order and just read.
God it's one of those you can't put down books.
She did a lot of books like that and she is she's a weird doctor she specializes in the weird And, for example, the first question tonight is, this will give you a little taste of, you know, where she goes as a physician.
First question, are there any recent cases of corpses coming back to life?
As is that being asked of a real doctor.
So, we're going to do that tonight.
Wouldn't it be nice if, uh, some evening I came on and said, well, you know, now we'll read a little look at the world news, you know, see what's going on.
Dateline Miami dog comes home.
Man happy.
Uh, or I don't know.
Dayline Girl Scouts sell more cookies in New York City.
Break record.
Right?
Uh, or, uh, I don't know.
Anything good.
All good stuff.
But of course, you know, it doesn't work that way.
And in the news tonight, it has not worked that way.
Iraqi insurgents struck across the country with bombs, more bombs, killing at least 16 this time.
And you wish you could say it was getting better in Iraq, but clearly it is not.
And we talk about withdrawing from Iraq, withdrawing Americans from Iraq, but I tell you, it's getting worse.
Every day it seems to be getting worse.
Maybe eventually they will run out of people willing to give their lives to blow us up.
But until then, it doesn't look too good.
Security forces went on alert around the Vatican Saturday and cleared streets for an expected 500,000 pilgrims arriving for the ceremony to formally install Pope Benedict, and by the way, I told you so, I said he'd be a German, that most of the Cardinals that had been hand-picked were pretty conservative, and at the head of the list was a German possibility, sure enough, a German Pope.
Withdraw or be pushed out by the White House.
Survive the test of his professional life.
Suffer rejection by the Senate.
That's about what it comes down to for John Bolton.
The President's besieged nominee to be U.N.
Ambassador.
So he could either hang in there and make it or not make it or, you know, it's rough.
Why anybody runs for anything or agrees to be put through the meat grinder that is, you know, any President's nominee absolutely escapes me.
I have no idea why.
Why would anybody volunteer?
here to have their life torn to pieces every little thing that they had ever done that could be
questioned brought up why and and and that may go a long way
toward answering why we have the kind of representation that we do have
in Washington well more of the other news you know the other news in a moment
this alright here is some of the other news
The headline is, Biggest Extinction Caused by Low Oxygen.
This came from whitleysunknowncountry.com.
It's amazing.
The biggest mass extinction in Earth's history happened 251 million years ago, and it took millions of years for the Earth to finally repopulate.
What do you think happened?
A big rock from space?
No.
New research shows that this extinction event was caused by a sudden and sharp decline.
Sudden and sharp decline in atmospheric oxygen, the air we breathe, folks.
Why did it happen?
Could it happen again?
250 million years ago, there was a single supercontinent on Earth, right?
Most of the land was above sea level, or that which was became uninhabitable because of low oxygen levels.
It simply made breathing too difficult for most land animal organisms to survive.
Biologist Raymond Huey says an additional reason might be that the groups of the same species were virtually cut off from each other because there wasn't enough oxygen in the air for them to travel and find mates.
Now, there's about 21% oxygen in the air today.
Now, there was about 30% in the period before this extinction.
The oxygen level, it seems, fell suddenly from 30% down to around 16% and then bottoming out at less than 12%.
That situation remained on Earth, you know, for about 10 million years.
Thank you.
Oxygen dropped from its highest level to its lowest level ever in only 20 million years.
So, in other words, nobody, nothing, could breathe.
For some reason, the oxygen totally went away.
Now, of course, they look at Carbon dioxide levels, which were very high, which means it could have been global warming.
No, not by our hand, obviously.
When speaking of, it's unclear whether the increased temperature in the Antarctic, which is causing glaciers to begin to shrink like crazy, is a natural effect itself or a result of our hands.
They don't know.
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and the U.S.
Geological Survey analyzed about 2,000 aerial photographs from 1940.
Over 100 satellite images from the 1960s onward, they calculated that about 87% of the 244 glaciers going out to sea from the peninsula have retreated over the last 50 years.
that what about 87% of the 244 glaciers going out to sea from the peninsula
have retreated over the last 50 years. 87% of them are going away. And now the
commander of the Air Force Specials, or rather Space Command, denied yesterday
that his 500 nuclear-armed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles
are merely, in quotes here, Cold War icons.
And, he said, he's preparing alternative uses for the ICBMs, including arming them, perhaps, with conventional warheads To attack surface or deeply buried targets.
It's a problem.
What are we going to do with all of our ICBMs?
It really is a problem.
We were prepared for, of course, a massive, full, earth-changing, in the sense we wouldn't be on it anymore, kind of exchange with the Soviets, right?
Well, we don't have that anymore.
So, the commander of the space, you know, the whole Air Force Space Command is worried, I guess.
That all his missiles, well, they're getting old.
They need service.
And he says, well, it still forces adversaries to think before they act, but says he's exploring future uses for these systems and called for help in changing the professional mindset that considers them Cold War relics.
Well, they're not relics, he says.
What we need is something good to do with them.
So what do you suggest?
Anybody out there have any ideas?
What about launching satellites?
Couldn't we launch satellites with them?
I believe they have that capability.
I think now they're aimed at the ocean.
If memory serves me, we made an agreement with the Soviets that we would target all of our missiles to hit the ocean.
And they would do the same thing.
So in case there was a You know, a mistake in nuclear conflict, we would only kill fish.
Probably, I might add, most of them.
Pioneer 10 and 11, these are our deep space spacecraft, have been very precisely tracked for over 30 years as they have crossed and then departed our solar system.
They're gone.
When they passed a distance of 20 AU from the Sun, that would be astronomical units In other words, as far as we are from the sun, both probes suddenly exhibited a strange acceleration.
Nobody knows why the Pioneer spacecraft suddenly started going faster.
But they are.
There's no reason.
There's no propulsion system that's suddenly pushing them along faster.
Doesn't exist.
But something's doing it, and the scientists have no idea what.
Now, I don't know how many of you use it, but if this happens, I'm going to be rather upset.
Headline is, Fed's weather information could go dark.
Do you want seven-day weather forecasts for your zip code, or an hour-by-hour prediction of temperature, wind speed, humidity, chance of rain, or the weather data beamed directly to your cell phone?
The information is available for free from the National Weather Service, but under a bit of pending legislation in the U.S.
Senate, I am really thunderstruck to have to report to you that it all may disappear.
The bill introduced last week by Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
What's the matter with you, Rick?
Would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies like AccuWeather, the Weather Channel, which offer their very own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported websites.
Well, supporters say the bill wouldn't hamper the Weather Service or the National Hurricane Center from alerting the public to hazards.
In fact, it exempts forecasts meant to protect life and property, but otherwise they'd go away.
And that wonderful weather forecast, which I'm used to.
Look, I love our local weather.
I love it.
I read, I don't know how many of you read the forecast discussions, but I do.
I'm sure the guys at NOAA and so forth all think that nobody ever reads their discussion, and that's where they kind of It's really neat.
If you get the federal weather, do it yourself.
Try it yourself.
Just scroll down.
You'll see forecast discussion.
It's kind of fun.
The meteorologists talk about what they think might happen and occasionally make some wisecracks in there, but it's just a kind of sit-down discussion of what they really think the weather dynamics are, what's behind that forecast.
It is fascinating.
And, speaking of fascinating, a ham friend of mine, Karen, W6SO, sends the following now.
Remember, you know how I feel about the Princeton Project, the Human Consciousness Project.
I am fascinated by it.
And Karen has an awfully good idea.
She says, I wonder if the folks at Princeton have considered trying to couple The random number generators, what they call eggs, to some kind of very large antenna array, and I wonder what the effect would be on the result.
You think it could be made more sensitive?
That's a very, very, very, very good question, Karen.
I don't know.
But what a hell of an idea.
I'm not sure how you really would couple an antenna In a meaningful way to a random number generating computer, but I suppose it could be done.
Something I'm certainly going to think about and perhaps some scientists out there might want to consider.
Any antenna would have the ability to receive frequencies that we could perhaps not even conceive.
Just the fact of it being there Might enhance whatever communication is going on from the collective or whatever.
Think about it, guys.
And finally, here is what has probably got to be the Darwin Award winner for 2005.
Already!
I mean, we're not even halfway through the year and yet we have the following.
The following mind-boggling attempt at a crime spree in Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
appeared to be the robber's first and last.
You see, his target was H&J Leather and Firearms.
A store, right?
They sell leather and firearms.
A gun shop specializing in handguns.
The shop was full of customers.
Armed customers.
Now, to enter the shop, the robber, get this, had to step around a marked police patrol car, which was actually parked right at the front door.
A uniformed officer was standing at the counter having coffee before work.
Upon seeing the officer, the would-be robber, announced, It's a hold-up!
And he fired a few wild shots from a .22 target pistol.
Very bad idea.
The officer and a clerk promptly returned fire.
The police officer fired with a 9mm Glock 17.
The clerk, that's my preference by the way, the clerk with a .50 caliber Desert Eagle, assisted by several customers who also drew their guns, Several of whom also fired.
The robber was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics.
Crime scene investigators located 47 expended cartridges in the shop sky.
You know, they did a Bonnie and Clyde on them.
Clyde, I guess.
The subsequent autopsy revealed 23 gunshot wounds.
Ballistics identified seven rounds, or rounds rather, from seven different weapons.
No one else was apparently hurt in the exchange, which in itself is amazing when you think about it.
Here we are at the beginning of March, and we already may have the 2005 winner of the Darwin Award.
This guy's gonna be hard to beat.
I mean, think about it.
You're going into a gun store where it's full of customers, every one of them with something strapped to their hip.
You have to step around a police car, cop car parked right there.
The cop is standing up at the counter.
You go in like an idiot, or a Darwin Award winner in this case, and announce that the store is being robbed.
I mean, they're going to be picking lead out of this guy's corpse.
So...
There you've got a little taste of it.
Let us grab quickly a call.
First time caller line, you are on the air.
Hello.
Hi, this is Jeffrey from Sacramento, California.
Hey, Jeff.
Just fine.
My question for you is, were you at all disposed to watch the Discovery Channel today?
Because they had a whole series of shows about things that have been discussed on coast to coast.
Number one being they had a show called Super Volcano.
Oh, I've already seen it.
Of course.
And then they had a show about the volcano that went off in the Indonesians in 1815 and caused major climate change in 1816.
And then another show about the potential chaotic events that could be caused by the cascade fault that is You know, in the Pacific Ocean, about a hundred miles off of the coast of Northern California, all the way up to Washington.
Yes, I've seen all of that.
I am a Discovery Channel devotee.
And I hope you are, too.
It is an amazing channel.
Absolutely amazing channel.
And, of course, it's wonderful, particularly wonderful in high definition.
Perhaps the best high definition channel That, uh, that is produced anywhere.
Period.
HBO has very high standards for the, uh, video they send out, but I'll tell you what.
The Discovery Channel is simply unbeatable.
So, yes.
All of that, right down my alley, you can depend that I'm watching.
Don't forget, coming up at the top of this hour, one of the weirdest, no, THE weirdest doctor we've ever had on the program, Tess Gerritsen.
And boy, can that woman write a book.
From the high desert in the middle of the night where we do business, I'm Art Bell.
I'm a writer on the storm, writers on the storm.
Into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown.
Be it silence, hand, smell, or touch.
There's something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch or the scent of a sound or the strength of an oak when it moves deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up from tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing?
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing?
To have all these things in our memories whole?
Amusement?
To come?
Who's known to cause a lot of trouble?
I'm not sure.
To actively be part of this ride, you're going to have to call us.
And to call us, you're going to have to make note of the numbers.
And I would like you to note that they're a little bit different on the weekends.
So listen carefully, and write down the one that's relevant for you.
Wanna take a ride?
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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 800-825-5033.
From West of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art 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.
It is.
Good morning, everybody.
Coming up at the top of the hour, Dr. Tess Gerritsen, queen of the weird, I guarantee.
At any rate, it's going to be quite a night, and don't forget tomorrow night, George Lutz,
and the real story, the real Amityville Horror.
of the darkness to you. This half hour belongs to all of you.
First time caller line, you are on the air.
Hello.
Hi, this is Jim calling from Las Vegas.
Hello, Jim.
I'm wondering on your favorite subject, daylight savings, if you saw the news where they want to extend it.
No, I haven't seen this.
They want to extend the time that we have daylight savings?
Yes, they want to.
Only by one month?
Yes.
One month each way.
One month earlier and one month later.
They say it saves us millions of gallons of oil.
Well, then why don't we extend it all together?
That's right.
Why don't we just do it that way?
Keep it all year long.
Yeah.
What's the point in playing games?
Just leave it alone.
There is no point.
It's just done by cruel people.
Yes.
For unknown reasons.
Okay.
I thought that was your favorite subject.
Well, it's not my favorite.
It makes me angry.
And I don't, I don't, thank you very much, I don't want to be angry tonight.
Makes me angry.
Because... Because they're idiots.
That's why!
Because they don't know what they're doing!
Because if we had but one time, we wouldn't have to run around like... Little... Pavlov's dogs, twice a year, changing millions of clocks.
It's just plain stupid.
So extending it by a month or two, Doesn't relieve one iota of stupidity from the whole idea.
And those who refuse to change it.
But, oh, they'll take action to extend it a little bit.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello.
Going once.
Going twice.
You've waited all this time, and now you're not going to be on the air.
Oh, well.
East of the Rockies, you, however, are on the air.
Good morning.
Hello, this evening, Mr. Bell.
My wife and I are weather advocates.
We watch every channel, north and south of us.
We live down in Statesboro, Georgia.
And, you know, she was like, well, summer's here, we plant the flowers and everything, and everything, the weather's going to be warm.
And all of a sudden, I was talking to a farmer, and he said, don't take your jacket away yet.
He said, it's going to get cold again.
I said, why?
He said, see my blackberry bushes?
Learn to read the land.
He said, when the blooms fall, the cold weather's over, and they're still blooming.
An arctic blast just swam through middle Georgia, and it caught all the weathermen by surprise, and they said they don't know where it came from.
Well, there you are.
Mother Nature absolutely knows best, and those who know how to read the signs probably are almost never wrong.
You have a great evening, sir.
And if they take the National Weather Service away, I'll be lost.
What about you?
The same here, if you're traveling.
If you live locally, you learn your area.
Read the animals, the land, you can tell what's coming and when it's coming.
I know, all right, thank you.
But you see, I read the forecast for KNYE here locally every day, and I depend on the National Weather Service.
Moreover, I like their forecast discussions.
They're sort of personalized weather, if you will.
I would be heartbroken.
I mean, it's a decent use of our tax dollars.
There are so many indecent ones that, uh, the weather, it seems to me, uh... So, Santorum, in your ear.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Yes, hi.
I just wanted to say I call it daylight wasting time.
I spoke with you a few weeks ago when the GIS was on and was referred to someone that Brendan knows who worked with George Minx.
This is slow getting back to me, but in the meantime, I've located what's called the Spiricom manual.
I was wondering, it's not like really A to Z schematics, and was wondering if you could repost the schematics that you had found, just don't know if it's the same thing that you have.
Well, I did have schematic diagrams, block diagrams and schematics for the equipment that was used, and I'll see about reposting it for you.
So you actually know somebody that is going to take it on?
Well, it's my brother, and I mean, I'm doing all the legwork.
He's the electronics person, and again, still trying to have this guy get back to me who actually worked with George Meeks.
In the meantime, in the last two weeks, I've spoken with five people who I tracked down from different websites that worked directly with him, who are all on their deathbeds, and I could barely get them to Really, really sad, you know?
Yes.
I didn't want to bother him, I didn't want to let him die, but, you know, I'm realizing these guys are really ready to go and there's one guy left and I'm hoping he'll get back to us.
Well, I'm hoping that the work we did on this broadcast, thank you very much, the playing of the Spiracom tapes and then the posting of that information, that I will try and get back up for you.
We'll reinvigorate this study and what it was, you may not have heard it, on Halloween I played a pretty long track, it might have been 40 minutes or more, of some of the work done by George Meeks in a live, real-time communication with the dead.
This was not a hoax, this was not baloney, This was a scientist, actually a group, that produced electronics, that produced a series of signals, different audio pitches, that were then able to be modulated by somebody on the other side.
So instead of EVP, sort of haphazardly interesting as it is, picking up whatever is said, This allowed actual, live, two-way communications with the departed.
We had examples on the air, and if you were listening carefully, that absolutely set the hair on the back of your neck standing straight up.
Believe me.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hey Art, this is Chuck from Lexington, Kentucky.
Yes, Chuck.
Hey, I have two quick questions for you.
First one, this might be a silly question, but I was wondering, I used to I was in the Marine Corps and flew around in helicopters, helicopter crew chief, and a lot of times we see all these shooting stars, sometimes we see tons of them, especially when we're on night vision goggles.
Right.
And it got me thinking, how is it that a meteor, sometimes they do make it to the ground, planes usually travel at 30,000 feet, how is it that one hasn't smashed into an airplane yet, or is it just a matter of time?
Well, I'm not sure that we don't know that they have.
We didn't settle Flight 800, did we?
And a lot of other aircraft have gone down for unknown reasons.
If it were hit by a meteorite, it would probably be catastrophic and instant.
And there probably would not be record of it.
Now, what he mentioned using night vision, any generation, one, two, or three, really, is an astounding amount of fun.
If you can get your hands on a piece of night vision gear, looking up at the night sky will yield about a hundred, how can I put this, a hundred and five thousand percent more stars than you can see with your naked eye.
Being light sensitive up to ninety, amplifying ninety-nine thousand times in third gen, you can imagine what you're able to see in the night sky.
It is, it's just awe-inspiring.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
You know, Jerry Ford did one really good thing when he was president.
Wit only one?
Yeah, that I can recall besides falling down and making me laugh.
He extended daylight savings time one year, all year long.
Remember that?
Yes.
It was because of the fuel crisis.
Yes.
And why can't we live like that?
I mean, we have a fuel crisis today, as far as I'm concerned.
If you bought gas lately, you know it.
Oh, Lord, tell me about it.
You know what it was?
All the parents complained because little Billy and Susie had to stand out in the dark and wait for the school bus.
I was living in Chicago at the time, and it is dark there.
That's right.
That's what they make little LED lights for.
You betcha.
I'm with you, sir.
I mean, the stupidity of changing clocks twice a year has got to end.
Thank you very much.
Not just be extended by a month or two.
That's just an extension of the stupidity.
And not eliminated for one year, but eliminated for all time, so that we may never have to do that again.
Yes, it will inconvenience the little tykes at some certain part of the year waiting for a school bus, I suppose, but otherwise, it seems to me, the economic advantage outweighs anything else.
Energy, too.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
That's somebody on a cell phone, isn't it, that suddenly can't get through?
Oh, well.
What's with the Rockies?
You're on the air.
Hello.
Yeah, hi, this is Randy.
I work, actually, for the National Weather Service.
You work for the National Weather Service?
Yeah, out in northern California.
And you've heard about this Centorum bill that could put you guys out of biz?
Oh, well, you know, this is something that Kvart and some of the other companies have been trying to do for quite some time.
All right, back away from your phone a little bit.
You're too loud.
Okay.
Yeah, I really appreciate the kind words that you say about, especially our area forecast discussions, because a lot of us put a lot of thought into that now that it's a public product.
I know, and I don't think that many people read it, and I'm trying to urge them to.
It's really interesting.
I mean, it's like getting inside the forecaster's mind.
Yeah, and I'm not sure whether you're aware of it or not, but there's actually two versions, one of them, Has any word that people may not know what it means highlighted in hypertext so that you can click on it and find out what it is.
Yeah, where are you located?
I'm out of the Sacramento office.
Sacramento office.
Alright, well I called the Las Vegas office and took the time and trouble to actually call the guy who writes the forecast discussion and thank him.
And I don't think too many people do that.
That kind of feedback is really appreciated.
Every once in a while I get an email about my Maybe you could comment on one little silly thing here.
What's that?
it's been these kind of things that actually will keep up and that uh...
maybe you could comment on one little silly thing here
webcast recently uh... the federal government uh... decided to
reorganize all of the forecast information put out
uh... by the national weather service uh... with some new whoop-dee-doo computer
system and i've never seen anything so screwed up in my whole life
Well, it's a work in progress.
Basically what you're talking about is the digital data forecast phase.
Yes.
And what we're trying to do is to get it so that we can forecast for not just large areas but any point In our forecast area.
Yes, well, to tell you how messed up it was, though, when it was first done, we had a forecast here in Perot, Nevada, where it rarely, if ever, snows of five days straight with accumulations of one to two inches.
Like I said, it's a work in progress.
This is something that they've just started over the past couple of years.
It actually is getting better.
All right, well, look, I know it will, and I hope that the powers that be do not squish you.
Yeah, well, I hope so, too.
And, you know, with support with people like you, hopefully we'll be able to maintain our jobs, and the same thing won't happen to us that happened to the flight service station people in Rancho Murrieta.
Do you know about that?
I do, sir.
They got contracted out, and as a matter of fact, one guy who was five days to retirement lost his job.
Oh, brother.
All right, thank you very much, and good luck from the National Weather Service.
It would be A crying shame.
It's one of the better uses, in my mind, for our tax dollar.
To have a reliable government forecast, one that's there every day, along with the little extras they give you, like the local radar and the comments from, you know, the forecast discussion.
All the rest of it.
To lose that would be serious.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi Art.
Hi.
Turn your radio off, please.
Sure.
Hold on one second.
Alright.
Holding for that.
Always, the moment you get on the air, you have to turn off the radio or you'll sound all confused.
Okay.
Hold on one second.
Okay.
You're on the air, you see.
Okay.
I've been listening to your show for quite some time.
Yes.
And I've been hearing about a caller named Oscar who says that she's possessed and I've never got the opportunity to hear this person.
I would like that person to call in tonight.
I've never heard of a girl named Oscar.
You've never heard of Oscar?
It was on the Friday Night Show with... Billy, what's the other DJ's name?
DJ's Play Records, sir.
They spin classics.
George?
His name is George?
Yes, Nori.
Yes, and Oscar calls in and says that she's possessed and she does different voices.
I've never heard it.
I was just inviting Oscar on the air to call in and just Give us an example.
I'm dying to hear this.
I see.
All right.
They say it's real.
I see.
They say?
Who's they?
My friends.
They've heard it.
I see.
All right.
So, Oscar, huh?
A chick named Oscar who does voices that come from, well, who knows where.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
I'm on the air?
Yes.
Art?
Yes.
Hi, this is David from Dayton, Texas.
Hey there.
I don't know if it's kind of an open line, tight night or not.
Sounds like it so far, yes.
Okay, well I joined late, so I apologize.
I wanted to bring up something, get your input on possibly, okay, my story.
Take a nice deep breath.
I'm sorry, I didn't expect to get you right off the bat.
Well, that's what happens when you call.
Okay, well, I'm calling about bomb shelters, fallout shelters, that were built in the 50s, 60s, and as you know, Kennedy called upon them being built in the nation, and one of his addresses, and I believe it was Yeah, sorry.
What about bomb shelters?
Well, I have one here in my town, which is a small town.
The population is about 8 to 10,000 here.
All right, why don't you give me your coordinates, your exact coordinates, and we'll test it.
Dayton?
77535?
No, no, no, no.
I need actual longitude and latitude coordinates.
Oh, I'll have to look that up.
We need them for the launch.
Okay.
I don't have those off the top of my head.
So you don't want to test it?
Well, I would love to test it.
The question I have is, you know, this thing was built at the very front of one of our most affluent communities in the late 50s and it could hold up to 11 families.
Yes, and your question is what?
And, you know, to make a long story short here, I've busted in there a couple of times along with... What do you mean you busted in there?
Well, I mean, it's been secluded.
It's a very interesting story.
I'm making it as fast as I can here.
Well, you didn't break in, did you?
I mean, it sounds like you broke in.
Well, I... It's not been... My God, sir!
What if somebody had turned it into a love nest or something?
Yeah, that's definitely... If you believe the writing on the wall, literally... Well, there you are.
Yeah, that's what's happened.
My question is simply, with what's gone on in present days of terrorism and all, do you think that bomb shelters, fallout shelters, you know, I've done a lot of research on the internet and there are a lot of ones that have, in contrast to this one, have been restored to their historic value, which is just amazing.
I appreciate that very much.
Do you think that we would ever go back to a situation where, you know, it was just a couple or three years ago where we were being asked to buy duct tape and tarp, or whatever, drop cloth to... Well, alright, let me say this.
I think that yesterday's bomb shelter, designed to withstand, of course, not a direct nuclear strike, but something fairly regional, that that bomb shelter could reasonably be converted into some sort of biological shelter Now, and would be more effective as such.
Which is another way of telling you that I think the attack upon us will come.
And when it comes, it will be biological in nature, not nuclear.
As a matter of fact, that's something we're going to talk about with our guest coming up shortly.
She's Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
And I'm telling you right now, if you've never heard Tess, you're in for a real treat.
There's nobody like Tess Gerritsen.
On the planet, really.
She's a doctor.
But... But, she's a big but.
But she's into the weird, the strange, the unusual.
She's written any number of books.
comes to her in fact as you listen to the interview you will
you'll understand clearly and quickly how she's able to write these kinds of
books I'm
I'm I'm
Call the wildcard line at area code 7.
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.
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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.
It is, and you're in for a real treat.
Tess Gerritsen, Dr. Tess Gerritsen, took a very unusual route to a writing career.
Her lifelong interest has always been science, especially the creepy and weird aspects.
As a child, she would dissect snakes, collect buckets full of lizards to study and stuff.
No wonder then, 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, 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, viewable on her web page.
Which, by the way, is www.teskeretsen.com.
T-E-S-S-G-E-R-R-I-T-S-E-N.com.
We've got a link up for the ease of your clicking through.
When I got on the phone with her just before the program, I said, we're going to have fun, because I knew we were.
And she said, we'll just talk about creepy medical stuff.
I wonder what, when she was a doctor, practicing physician, I wonder what kind of bedside manner she had.
I don't know.
I picture her as a kind of physician that you know you come up with a you come in with a little slash or a cut you know
required three or four stitches and she'd give you a lecture on the horrors of flesh eating bacteria or
something.
We'll test Garrison in a moment.
Well the reason all this began is because of a book called Gravity.
Gravity is in the top ten books I've read of all time, and I read A book a day, you know, or a book every two days.
I knock them down real quick.
I'm a very avid reader.
And so I tend to follow authors.
When you find an author you like, well, then you're going to probably like the rest of their work.
And that was the case with Tess Gerritsen.
I've read all her books now.
All of them.
And I suggest you begin with Gravity if you're kind of a techie type and you like space stuff.
Gravity, it's one of those books that cannot Or you will not put down until you're done.
I mean, it is that riveting.
God, it's good.
That said, here is Tess Gerritsen.
Tess, welcome.
Thank you very much.
Great to have you back.
Oh, it's good to be back.
All right.
I want to start off with something a little different in a way, I guess.
You know, there's this current outbreak of Marburg in Angola.
Now, the latest death toll is 244.
Marburg, of course, is a really nasty, nasty, nasty disease.
Reminds you of Ebola.
Yes, like Ebola, you bleed out.
And 244 dead.
Well, now, I understand that it's probably not a very effective virus in the sense that it kills so quickly The story goes it kills itself off.
In other words, you get a village and they're decimated and that's it.
That's right.
And that's why, even though locally, I mean, the epidemic is pretty bad, you don't really worry about it killing hundreds of millions of people around the world the way you would with flu.
It's a very frightening virus, though.
Well, here's what I was wondering.
For a while there, they were actually beginning to wonder if this particular strain of Marburg, which, by the way, was much more deadly up in the high 90s.
It killed almost everybody.
This particular strain might be becoming airborne because of the number of health care workers that were using precaution, but nevertheless got it anyway.
But the other thing, though, is that, you know, you do have symptoms and you are spreading the virus when you're symptomatic.
And you can protect yourself.
You know who's going to kill you.
As opposed to something like the flu, where people are spreading it around and they don't even feel like they're sick.
But is something like this should become airborne?
It could be bad, but you know it kills people.
And it really destroys whole areas.
Epidemics are just Isolated in certain populations.
Well, here's what I worry about.
Now, I understand how it works in Africa, where it seems to come and go magically and mysteriously.
But we have these terrorists in the world, and all it would take is someone going down there and getting a good sample of blood, and then perhaps tampering around with it a bit, and getting it definitely airborne, and then releasing it in a very populated US city.
That is always a consideration with terrorism.
But you know, I think that it's such a dangerous virus, they might not want to mess with it too much.
It might kill them, too.
Well, that theory would stand and be all right, as long as we didn't have people willing to give up their life to kill others.
True.
That's true.
They have these martyrs.
Anyway, I love the first question.
The first question I love.
Are there recent cases of corpses coming back to life?
I didn't even know there were historical cases of corpses coming back to life.
Much less recent ones.
Oh, yes.
Yes, yes.
The reason I got this interest in it was because of something that I had read in the Boston Globe a couple of years ago about a young woman who was found dead in her bathtub in her apartment.
Fire and rescue people.
She came and said, yep, she looks dead.
And they found some pills and it appeared she'd had an overdose.
And they called the state police and they came and said it looked like it was an accidental overdose.
So they zipped her into a body bag and sent her to a morgue.
And a couple hours later she woke up and actually ended up being just fine.
And I read that story and it just gave me the chills.
You know, I'm always paying attention to what scares me.
Well, yes.
Oh, I know.
I know.
But how could they... I mean, there are certain minimal steps one takes in deciding whether somebody's actually dead.
You know, sending someone to the morgue is such a... It seems like a final decision, doesn't it?
Yeah, it does.
Well, there are a couple things in this particular case that made it difficult for them.
And, you know, I completely understand how easy it is to misdiagnose death.
In this case, she was lying in a cold bathtub.
It was very hard to feel her pulse.
She was probably very vasoconstricted.
You could not feel her pulse.
And she had taken an overdose of some kind of medication.
It wasn't mentioned in the news article, which may have depressed her respiration.
So they really couldn't see that she was breathing.
And it turns out that this is not that unusual.
Where did she actually wake up?
She woke up inside the body bag.
In a body bag?
Yes.
Yes.
That would be so disturbing.
It would be very disturbing.
Maybe not as bad as in the freezer at the morgue, but bad.
I want to tell you an even worse case.
You knew I was coming to this, didn't you?
Probably, yes.
Well, there was a case in 1984 of a man who was brought to the morgue and was about to be autopsied.
Oh?
Yes.
The pathologist Um, actually, he picked up his scalpel and was about to make the first cut when the corpse woke up.
Oh.
And grabbed him by the throat.
Oh.
And, uh, the doctor keeled over dead.
Oh.
The patient was fine.
The patient was fine?
The patient was fine.
I can understand the doctor keeling over dead.
Oh, God.
That's gotta be the worst nightmare for a doctor.
Yes.
I'm just going to give you some of these recent cases.
I mean, you'd be shocked that this is still happening.
There was a case in North Carolina, and this wasn't too long ago, of a young man who was hit by a car.
Hit by a car?
Hit by a car.
Declared dead by the emergency medical people who came to see him.
Brought to the morgue, and they opened up his bag later on and realized he was breathing.
And he ended up in the hospital.
I don't think he's actually awakened from his coma.
But there's a four-year-old boy who was brought to the hospital, found unconscious, declared dead, and began to breathe.
And he's now recovering.
So it is case after case.
There was one woman who was actually lying on the table about to be embalmed when she began to talk.
And you can imagine how the funeral home director was a little bit shocked by that.
Oh, no.
Oh, yeah.
Look, how much do we really know about death?
I mean, it seems maybe like a dumb question, but apparently not enough.
Well, you know, not enough.
You're right.
What we don't know is that it's sometimes very hard to diagnose.
And I'm talking as a doctor, and I'm going to make a little confession here, all right?
When I talk to other doctors, they all say the same thing.
When you are a medical resident or an intern, and you're called in the middle of the night to go and pronounce somebody dead in the hospital, the nurse has already decided this patient is dead.
So you're walking there, and it's maybe late at night, and you're exhausted, and you walk into the room, and there are all the relatives sitting around crying.
You don't want to spend a lot of time in that room.
Well, I even mean a little deeper into the question of death.
for 20 seconds and you look and they don't look like they're breathing and you say,
I'm very sorry and you walk out.
And there have been a couple of times when I walked out and thought, did I listen long
enough?
And I have heard from many doctors who said the same thing, that there are times when
they wonder whether they listened long enough.
Well, I even mean a little deeper into the question of death.
For example, after we die, everything doesn't wind down, I guess, right away.
And at the instant your heart stops, I mean, this is kind of like a private little horror for me, but I wonder if the dead lie there sometimes aware of the fact that they have just died.
Well, keyword aware.
Oh, I don't think you have to worry too much about that, because as soon as your heart stops, the brain goes pretty fast.
How fast?
Well, you know what?
If you were to interrupt circulation to your brain, you would probably faint within 15 to 20 seconds.
So stopping the heart is the same thing.
You're not getting any circulation to the brain.
The brain is a big, big consumer of energy, of the body's energy, and it really requires constant blood flow to stay conscious.
So we're really, really, really sure That people who have just died aren't hearing some few little things around them and have some final flashes of consciousness.
We know that, huh?
Well, you know what?
I haven't been on the other side, so I can't really tell you.
But I would suspect that within 20 seconds, you were not aware of anything.
I hope you're right.
I think I'm... Yeah, I mean, as opposed to when we were talking last time about having your head cut off, I think you would have 20 seconds of awareness.
Well, that's way too long.
That's way too long.
Way too long in a basket.
Yeah, in that particular situation, that would be way too long.
But during an otherwise normal death, you wouldn't think that would be... No, I think you probably lose consciousness, certainly after your heart stopped, but even before, because as the heart is failing, it's not pumping as strongly, and you're going to... You know how it is to black out when you start to...
Your blood pressure goes down, and you're a little fuzzy.
You're not going to notice anything.
So I wouldn't worry about that, but what I would worry about is being declared prematurely dead when you're not, and waking up in a situation that is not too pleasant.
Well, a bag's bad, a freezer's worse.
And, you know, historically, some people have woken up in their graves, which is probably the worst of all.
Oh, God.
So, if we actually know That some people have awakened in their graves.
What a horrible thing to come... I mean, how many do we... Most of them, we wouldn't know about.
And in fact, how do we even know about people who woke up actually in graves?
Well, when the tombs are reopened, sometimes to put in new bodies, they will find evidence that the people in there were not dead.
Oh, good Lord.
Scratching... Yes.
Yes.
There was a case, unfortunately, in the 1800s of a young girl who died of diphtheria, and she was she was interred in family's tomb.
And later on, when they reopened the tomb to put somebody else in, they found her corpse lying by the door.
Oh, God!
So, she had not died, and there have been cases.
I mean, it's really unpleasant, but it goes to the heart of what so many of us are terrified of.
I think that's why Edgar Allan Poe chose to use this topic.
It's because, you know, in the old days, you just And we didn't embalm people back then.
You weren't always certain.
Well, hey, forget the old days.
I'm concerned today.
Yeah, and in fact, you know, that is probably the origin of the wake, the Irish wake, where people would sit by the body for a while and they'd have their parties or whatever they do in Ireland.
Oh, you think so?
Yeah, part of it was to make sure the person was really dead.
You wanted to be sure.
I mean, he was supposed to sit there from the time they died to the time they were buried.
And that was probably the origin of the wake.
I wonder if ever at a wake... They wake up.
Yes, exactly.
It did happen.
It has happened.
I mean, I can just cite case after case.
There was, first of all, nursing homes are notorious for not being sure that their patients are dead.
I have a literary agent.
When I told her that this was sort of the plot of my next story, she said, oh, she says, in my town this happens all the time.
Oh, you're kidding.
They have a nursing home, and whenever somebody is declared dead, they're brought to the local morgue, and in three times that she could remember, the person woke up.
So their local morgue has been known as the home of rejuvenation.
Rejuvenation.
Yes.
Is there, in a normal situation, where the body isn't cooled or, I don't know, drugs aren't involved, how could they make that mistake?
Well, especially with children.
You know, children, it's hard.
Kids who've drowned in cold water, they can look perfectly dead.
And they can have stopped breathing.
But very often, you can revive a child who has drowned in cold water if they haven't been underwater for too long.
So those kids can be mistaken for dead.
I have heard stories of people awakening.
This has got to be a giant horror.
It would be for me.
For example, of getting bypass heart bypass surgery and waking up in the middle of it.
Oh, if the anesthesiologist wasn't paying attention.
Yeah, unfortunately that has happened.
The worst cases have been anesthesiologists who are actually stealing opiates.
They were the ones who were stealing what was supposed to be relieving your pain.
Oh my God!
And they were taking it home and they were giving you saline or something.
But you could not tell the surgeon because you were paralyzed by the other drugs they were giving you.
Oh good Lord!
So in other words, not only are you conscious, but you can't let anybody know.
You can't let anybody know but you're feeling the pain.
Oh my God!
Now a good anesthesiologist is always supposed to be monitoring your heart rate.
And one of the clues that you are enduring pain is that your blood pressure goes up and your heart rate goes up.
Good point.
Right, but if he's a crooked anesthesiologist, he's not going to tell anybody, right?
The hell with the heart rate.
We'll just fix the heart rate so it looks good.
Oh, right.
So there have been a couple, I think there was one anesthesiologist who went to jail for that.
Yeah, good, at least to jail.
All right, Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
she specializes in the strange, kind of like this song which I
I don't mind repeating because I so love it, from Dead Like Me
which is dead What I'd really like to do here is to take a moment, which
I've been meaning to do to talk about this television program
This was a show that aired on... They use this music.
And this was a show that aired on, uh... Well, my beautiful wife is right there.
Showtime!
And, uh... It was just one of the best things you've ever seen.
It was called Dead Like Me.
It fits kind of right in with what we're talking about right now.
And...
What can I say about that show?
It took the comical side of death, and I know it's hard to imagine the comical side of death, but there really was one, and it mixed it, at least in the first season, I would like to say, with the serious side of death.
So it was kind of a drama slash comedy about dying, and what it would be like if you died.
And in the first season, they regularly followed those who had sort of passed on, and They had sort of little angels of death known in this program as Reapers, and it was just such an unusually good program, and I understand there's a little thing you can sign running around on the internet, and I hope, you know, a petition, and I hope you will find it and sign it.
And then maybe somebody will pick up Dead Like Me.
There are rumors out there that WB or one of those other networks may pick it up.
But it's worth picking up.
It's worth developing.
It's worth returning to what they did in the first season because, like this program, it was so unusual and entertaining.
It's simply one of the best shows ever put on the big or the small tube in this case, I guess.
Dead Like Me it was called.
If you see it on DVD, pick it up, check it out.
And if you're in the television business, for God's sakes, pick it up.
Mark Bell.
Welcome to the world of music.
I'm Mark Bell.
I'm a musician.
I'm a musician.
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.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
It is.
And, uh, this is fascinating.
Doug, from Ames, Iowa.
Writes, Long ago, people would simply tie a string to the wrist of a buried person and the string to a bell above ground.
A person would stay in the cemetery overnight and listen for the ringing of the bell.
Thus the terms graveyard shift and saved by the bell were born.
Imagine that!
Try and imagine that!
What kind of bell is that?
That's not enough of a bell.
You need a serious bell for work like this.
something that'll clang across the entire countryside.
I don't know.
Even this is not really enough.
I want something that's going to absolutely wake up the whole area.
Tess Gerritsen, welcome back.
Thank you.
And you know, you're talking about the bell.
Do you know you can buy a coffin that's equipped with a telephone?
You can?
Yes, you can, just in case.
I mean, this is carrying the paranoia a little bit too far.
No, I don't know.
I mean, if you need it.
If you need it, yeah.
Can you imagine getting a call like that?
Nothing else would do.
Well, no.
Actually, no, I can't imagine getting a call like that, nor having to make one.
No, no, I know, but there are just so many cases through history that you can understand why people are afraid of it.
I mean, why take a chance?
You could pay for a six-month service, at least.
You just hope you have a good carrier.
Can you hear me now?
We're going to talk a little bit about apparently man's earliest attempts, and there have been attempts, haven't there?
In fact, probably more in the old days, I would imagine, than today, to bring people back to life.
Well, you know, it all goes back.
Remember Frankenstein?
Wonderful book and a wonderful movie.
She was inspired by things that were happening in her time, which was the 1800s.
At that time, the rage was something called Galvanism.
galvanism was uh... discovery by a find a family g galvani that
you could make a frog lake twitch if you gave it a little electric shock so yes
and it turned into the sort of quack cure in which everybody felt well
shock and they kept the dead frog flake which may be could make people come back
to life that that was for the people of why she wrote the book
frankenstein and people back then did believe a lot of strange things
though they hadn't they had been secure called the blue window glass cure we
need under blue glass and that was how to put to make you better
or they would you could be delightful but it was called the violent like
treatment and they had a lecture of magnet that would be put around the body and they could attach to a
lighting pocket was supposed to make the iron in the blood responded flow of
magnitude so they're all the way as far as you know all of those and there are
modern equivalents of that uh... blood purifying things
Doesn't work.
Well, that was going to be my question.
None of it works, huh?
No, none of it works, but there were some things that people were doing in the history of medicine that were actually working.
For instance, you know, in the 15th century, midwives already knew that when newborns were born and weren't breathing, that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation could sometimes work.
Right.
So midwives were already using mouth-to-mouth.
And later on in the 1700s, they were doing that also.
They were using mouth-to-mouth on people who were drowned.
The curious thing is that I think Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, her husband's ex-wife was drowned.
And they tried to resuscitate her and it didn't work.
That was something else.
She was very aware of what was happening in her time in medicine.
And there were all these attempts to bring people back from the dead.
Doctor, moving that concept to the modern day, is there really any reason why, even though your body died, or something in your body gave up the ghost, and you died physically, that If we had the science to do it, and I know we're close, that we couldn't keep a brain alive.
The brain is such a delicate part of our body that when other things die, I mean, your kidneys can die and your brain will be fine.
Yeah.
Well, that's my point, though.
Yeah.
I mean, if there was some way to feed the brain and keep it in a brain-friendly environment, whatever that is, why not?
Well, yeah, I suppose theoretically it's possible that If you were able to keep the blood flow going to the brain, even though everything else was dead, you could keep it alive.
All right.
There was a Dr. White that I interviewed, and Dr. White cut off the head of one monkey and put it on the body of another monkey, and it worked.
It should work, except for in the long term, you're going to get rejection.
Well, but in the short term... In the short term, yes.
In the short term, even though the spinal cord was broken, and the monkey couldn't move... It's paralyzed, yeah.
It's paralyzed, but in every other way, the head on the new monkey worked.
All the brain really needs is continued blood flow.
Well, there you are.
There you are.
So then, why could we not, in modern science, keep the blood flow going, if necessary, by machine?
After all, we can keep it going to a heart, right?
You know, that to me, that is just a nightmare scenario.
Where do you come up with this stuff?
Well, it's an obvious extension of some of what we've talked about.
I'm just imagining huge nursing homes with nothing but brains sitting in big vats.
Exactly!
Right, right.
I mean, it's possible, but I just don't think we really want to go there.
Well, we may not.
Well, some of us might want to.
Some of us might want to.
I suppose if you are postulating that sometime in the future you could come up with an artificial body.
Exactly.
Now, brain tissue, supposing that this could be done, is there anything in brain tissue by itself that would continue to age and finally, no matter how well fed it was, it would get Alzheimer's and be essentially gone, I guess?
Or could it conceivably live for hundreds and hundreds of years?
I don't think we know that.
Um, you know, you're not going to get, usually what happens with aging is that you get atherosclerotic plaques.
But if you were able to bypass that by, by, you know, continually flowing.
Exactly.
Blood flow.
Yeah.
Nothing but good blood.
There'd be no strokes.
Um, I imagine that if you, if you have the gene, for instance, for Alzheimer's, you're still going to get that.
Right, but if not... But if not, gee, that is something that we haven't tried.
You know, somebody ought to do that with mice brains.
That would be interesting, wouldn't it?
Well, sure.
I wonder if they have.
And if they haven't, why haven't they?
Because, after all, all we are, really, Is our brains.
I think.
And it may be that once we know enough about the brain, we could even give it artificial eyes, artificial ears, artificial stimuli of varying sorts.
You could.
It'd be awfully expensive.
And who would get it?
That's always the question.
The rich people.
The rich people.
They always get it, don't they?
First.
First.
And then eventually Medicare would cover it.
I don't know.
Is there really any scientific block?
Quit laughing in the other room.
Is there any scientific block against doing that?
Keeping brain matter alive.
I'm not aware of anything other than genetic illness.
No, not really.
Not really.
It seems to me that you probably could keep a brain going for quite some time.
Well, when I had Dr. White on, a great percentage of the audience was horrified.
Absolutely horrified.
I am, too.
I mean, I think I would rather just die than be stuck in a bottle somewhere.
Well, or on another body which you couldn't control.
Right.
And then, you know, I think the worst part, I think the worst part for most of us is the idea that we would live and people we loved would have passed on.
And we would be left alone with nobody we loved still alive.
Just a lonely brain.
Just a lonely brain.
Yeah.
I think that would be the worst horror of all.
Sounds like a song title.
I'm just a lonely brain.
I suppose certain types of stimuli could be concocted for it, which would no doubt cost money, but would keep the brain busy.
Well, I think that's the whole point.
That's why people are going to cryogenics.
That's why they're letting their bodies be frozen.
They keep thinking they can be reanimated.
Is there any possibility that those people could be right?
That those people being cryogenically stiffened might someday actually have a chance of becoming winners from their point of view and returning to life?
I think it would be pretty, pretty small.
I just don't think we have the technology yet to properly freeze the body so that the brain can actually be reanimated.
I'm not paying for it.
I know there are two separate plans, by the way, one which freezes your whole body, obviously more expensive.
And one just for the brain.
And one just for the brain, which would probably have the better chance of, I would think, wouldn't you?
I don't think it probably makes much difference.
You think both are toast?
I think both are toast.
You know, the other question that comes up is if we're going to be fixing people, if we're going to be donating our health care dollar to certain things, and I'm doing this from a point of view of public health, who are you going to take care of?
Are you going to take care of all these brains that are sitting in a freezer for 10, 20 years?
Are you going to be taking care of the next generation and making sure that every child is vaccinated and every kid has proper nutrition?
I just think that from a societal point of view, you have to look at where your money should go.
All right, I want to ask you, I think, a question on behalf of some of my listeners.
I've been getting some fairly disconcerting emails.
You know, we talk on this program a lot about whether there's anything at all after death.
Worms crawl in, worms crawl out, or God and reward in heaven, and we hear about white lights and tunnels and all the rest of that bloody stuff.
Um, and, well, yeah, that was rude.
I shouldn't have said baloney, because I don't know that it is myself, frankly.
It might not be.
I worry that it is baloney, but it might not be.
There might really be something to all of this, and I have some people prepared to experiment in the audience who have been writing to me, emailing me.
I'm talking flatliner people here.
They're really willing to do that.
Yeah, they're wanting to do that, and they're looking for people to help them, and I'm sure as hell not going to help them, but... Have you heard about that?
Have you ever run into that?
People who want to know about death's door, and really whether there is something on the other side, and intentionally stop their hearts?
Not to that... I haven't met anybody who wanted it to that extent, and you know, they think they can be resuscitated, alright?
Let's have some real advice here.
The real advice is that if your heart stops and you are resuscitated, say 20-30 seconds later, there's probably going to be some damage involved.
Mental damage?
Yes.
We've just discovered that people who go under general anesthesia, especially older people, when they come back out of it, even though the surgery went well and there were no incidents on the operating table, they have lost some intellectual capabilities there.
And it's certainly true for people who have been on bypass, you know, who had cardiac bypass.
Their brains have been perfused the whole time, but just that trauma of being made unconscious for a while can lead to some intellectual deficits.
Okay, well I hear stories all the time about people who have had bypass operations and They say they come out, what they say is different personalities, that they go through a personality change of some kind.
That's sort of a common rumor, and really you're saying there's a reason for that.
Yeah, some of them do have memory loss.
I just think it's too much of a trauma on the brain, and that's why I would think that the idea of volunteering to be flat-lined is outrageous.
Not so smart.
Not so smart, but maybe they wouldn't notice the deficits when they came back if they were dumb enough to do it.
Well, let's say they were dumb enough to do it.
What are their odds?
If you take a young, healthy person and stop their heart, what are their odds of being revived, or maybe I should ask it the other way around, of not being?
I don't know the statistics on that.
I would think that there would probably be at least 1% who could not come back.
Only 1%?
If they're a young heart and you give... Well, you know, when you go into cardiac bypass, they do stop the heart there.
Right.
And those are older patients, though.
Those are hearts that have some trauma involved.
And I don't remember what the percentage is that they can't restart it, but there's a significant number of older patients.
But for the younger ones, it might only be 1%.
Maybe they're not so crazy.
Maybe, yeah, but do you want to take that chance?
I would not do that, no.
No.
But I am worried that there are people out there preparing to try, and I'm not sure you've helped them.
What do you think of the idea, period, of seeking knowledge about whether there is something after physical death?
Are you absolutely sure, I suppose, as a physician?
I don't know.
I don't think any of us knows.
I mean, there are patients who come back from near-death experiences and say they had certain They saw lights.
They see relatives.
They see all kinds of amazing things that put them at peace.
And you're in doubt, though, aren't you?
And I think there's a scientific explanation for that.
They are having oxygen deprivation hallucinations.
We don't know.
We really don't know.
I would love to believe that there's life after death.
I wish I was not agnostic.
I just happen to be.
But I just don't see any If somebody was to come back to me and say they are reincarnated and tell me everything about a loved one that there is no way they could possibly know, maybe I would believe it.
But I've never come across a case that was convincing.
You know people study these things and interview people who do appear to have sometimes incontrovertible evidence, things they could not possibly have known.
And they talk, of course, about what about all the people Who talk about floating up out of their body and seeing the resuscitation work and being able to repeat things that the nurses and the emergency care people said.
Yes, they were not dead.
Their brains were on some level functioning and they were able to listen to things.
It's like people who are comatose can sometimes hear conversations in the room and recount them.
So I wouldn't really call that necessarily a near-death experience.
Well then, shouldn't workers in that area say nicer things, like, not, you know, like, oh my god, he's goner for sure, or... They should be careful.
That is one thing you've always learned in medical school, is never assume that the unconscious patient cannot hear you.
Oh.
Because sometimes they can.
Because sometimes they can.
But at times when they're in deep anesthetic, Anesthesia, you know, really deep.
How can that happen?
What explains that?
Perhaps even so deep as to have their heart stopped and to be able to explain what was said or done?
Well, that is hard to explain, but obviously if they can hear and remember there's some part of their brain that is still functioning, that's still awake.
You know, you're asking questions for which there are no firm scientific answers.
Of course!
We just don't know.
That's what I do.
I ask those kind of questions.
This is matters of faith.
We're touching on matters of faith and for that, you know... Can you imagine somebody to be so curious about death as to want to go right across the, you know, threshold and take a look?
They will find out soon enough.
Eventually.
It just seems to me too big a risk for a young, healthy person or somebody with a functioning body.
Why would you want to take that risk?
You're going to get there one of these days.
Well, because, for one thing, a lot of people who have had NDEs come back completely changed people.
Yes, some of them do come back serene.
That's what I have heard.
They're not afraid anymore.
Exactly.
They're not afraid of death anymore because of what they saw or experienced.
That's kind of convincing.
I mean, bad people coming back as much better people, and realizing that there is something else.
The reason I'm saying this, I mean, after all, our attitudes are formed, aren't they, by... If we're sure there's something else, and there's some accountability for what we do in this life, then we act one way.
If we think there's absolutely no accountability whatsoever, then at least a certain percentage of the people are likely to act very differently.
Well, a good hallucination will do the same thing, you know?
If you really, really believe that's what you saw, it doesn't necessarily mean that was what was there.
All right, hold tight.
We're at the top of the hour.
Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
Don't go around tonight, or you'll finally take your die.
There's a bad moon on the rise.
I'm here for a change.
I know the end is coming soon I'll be here forever more.
I'm sick of my feelings I'm stuck in this blue twilight zone.
This is a madhouse, a place I can't call my own.
I can't move, I'm no moving star.
Where do I go now that I've fallen too far?
Now I'm stepping into the twilight zone There is a space that feels like a ground
I'll be ground and moon and the moon and star Where I go, I'll never go too far
So you're a goner When the bullets fall
So you're a goner When the bullets fall
When the bullets fall 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.
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line at area code 775-727-1295. The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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Would it be ill-advised?
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.
I wonder if there really was a way to revive the dead, to reanimate the dead, would it
be ill-advised or something that people would crave? One more little taste of life.
one more little taste of life.
We'll be right back.
Medical science can do a lot of...
It can do a lot of really interesting things.
For example, there is a story The other day, or I don't know, a couple years ago, on 60 Minutes, about the lady who had the aneurysm, right?
And an aneurysm is like a little filled up balloon in your brain, which was absolutely inoperable, except they came up with a new idea.
They cooled this lady down, reduced her body temperature, took all of the blood out of her body, stopped her heart, brainwaves went flat for 40 minutes.
Forty minutes, put the blood back in her body, pre-warmed I might add, as you would a baby bottle, and thump, started her heart with a little thumping, and this lady came back, well, back fully intact, and so where was, where in the heck was she for forty minutes, Doctor?
They probably gave her something like phenobarbital to induce a coma.
So that brain was, you know what?
If you had looked at the brain on an EEG, it may have looked like it was dead because it was in a drug-induced coma.
But not being fed by any blood.
You know, that's what they do when kids are pulled out of cold water and they want to revive them.
They give them phenobarb and they put them into a coma.
It essentially puts the brain into this state of suspended animation so that everything else can recover and then the brain is slowly brought back up again.
If there was a way to revive the dead, perhaps those dead for various periods of time and frozen, would it be, in your opinion, a very ill-advised thing to do, or a scientifically valuable thing to do?
I think it would be fascinating, but I don't think it would be advisable from the point of view of all of society.
And I know we talk about ourselves as individuals, and we think we don't want to die.
Of course we don't want to die.
We're having a good life.
But when you look at overall society and you look at people and cities and populations, again, I just have to get back to what is the best thing for all of mankind?
And I don't think it's having huge buildings with jars and jars and jars of brains waiting for reanimation.
What current technology in the world, I've got my own answer, I wonder what technology scares you the most right now?
You know what scares me a little bit is biotechnology.
It's because we're fooling around with genes.
We're putting genes into things that don't normally carry them, like cow genes into tomatoes.
Yes, we are doing that.
Or, you know, frog genes into vegetables.
Yes.
And so the question is always, what is the consequence of this?
And we don't always know that.
Can I ask a question?
Thinking about it, why would they put a cow gene in a vegetable?
What are they trying to get it to do?
Produce milk or something?
Maybe they want it to be a beefsteak.
I don't know.
I can't really recall why they were putting meat...
It may have had something to do with frost.
Frost?
Frost, yeah.
Making them more frost-resistant, but I can't recall why they did that.
But it led to this sort of odd question for vegetarians.
Is it safe to eat a tomato now?
With a cow gene.
A cow gene, right.
I mean, you're being perfectly pure about that.
But the other thing that scares me as well is the fact we have all these crops of genetically engineered crops that are all one, they all have the same genes.
We do?
Yeah, and so if something happens to wipe them out we may have lost a great, a big supply of our corn.
Answering honestly, what do you think the oops factor is in this kind of work?
The oops factor?
Oops, it got out.
It got out.
It's now spreading.
It's out-competing native grasses, for instance.
Right.
How big is the oops factor is what I'm asking.
In other words, how large a potential is there for a well-intended but nevertheless catastrophic occurrence?
I don't know.
I think it could be pretty big if you're talking about letting a plant seed out there that will completely out-compete everything that should be there for genetic variability.
You know, you just don't want the whole world to be taken over by one kind of wheat.
Perhaps not.
No.
Also, I've talked to some scientists who have, this will get you, they've begun to hook themselves up to computers.
And when I say hook themselves up, I mean go for a main nerve part of the arm, for example, and hook it up to a computer in hopes of interfacing the brain, to some degree, With a computer.
You heard about that?
No, it sounds like something out of Spider-Man, doesn't it?
Except it's true.
What is the point of it?
Well, there are those who believe that the future is going to be man's integration with machines, specifically computational devices for the most part.
Yeah, I'm still having trouble figuring out why you would want to hook up a biologic, why a man would want to hook up to a computer.
You're implying a woman would never want that?
I think women would rather not do that.
Yeah, you're right.
Men would be more likely to be willing to be hooked up to a machine.
Yeah, cool gadget, cool new gadget.
That's what they would do.
Actually, there are all kinds of applications possible, I suppose.
For example, Pilots could give commands to aircraft instantly just by thinking them instead of having to move something.
But you know, that's a little bit scary too, because you know how many times you think something that you shouldn't be?
Well, I do.
You have to have absolute control of your thoughts that way.
And there's something about being able to filter those controls of your thoughts with what your hands are doing.
There was recently also a movie about an implant that was put into the brain, purely science fiction, of course, but the implant basically recorded the major events of that person's lifetime, and then once they died, a memorial was, you know, the chip, of course, removed at autopsy or whatever, and then that was used to make a sort of a memorial for that person.
It took the high points of their life, discarding the lower points, And, uh, made a kind of memorial video out of it, as it were.
Um, there are, they are getting closer to putting chips of various sorts in us, aren't they?
That, you know, it's a cool idea, but do you really want people to know your lower points?
No.
Yes, I mean, then all your secrets would be made available to your loved ones.
that would be a disaster, wouldn't it?
Uh, yes.
All right.
You know, this Brave New World stuff, I have to admit that I haven't really thought about
the interface of computers and people.
I'm more focused on things like bacteria and the microbiological world because that's what I think of as having the worst potential to hurt people.
Have you started watching Grey's Anatomy on TV yet?
No, I haven't.
I don't watch much TV.
It's about medical students.
You were once a medical student.
And it sort of portrays the torture that they go through at everybody's hands.
You know, the residents and the whatever.
Is that true?
Is it like that?
It is.
You know what it is?
There is a tradition of medicine that you have to prove that you're a man.
This goes back to the days when there were very few women who were in medicine.
Right.
It was part of a trial by fire and the feeling was that if you couldn't stand the heat that you really shouldn't be a doctor and that tradition has really not left medicine.
And there is a reason for it because one of the reasons that you stay overnight and watch a patient for 24 hours or however long you're on call is that you get to see the progress of an illness.
You get to see What happened, you know, to a patient who has this particular disease?
And you can see it with your own eyes.
And that led to people, you know, being forced to stay in hospitals for their education.
What ended up happening, though, was they were finding that people were making too many mistakes.
They're tired.
And, you know, it led to a lawsuit in New York State, actually.
There was a resident who made a mistake on a dose of medication and killed a patient.
And New York State decided to pass a law that limited of residents from working more than 80 hours a week.
And you think, that's outrageous.
But when I was a medical resident, there were weeks when I was working 100 hours a week.
Wow.
And, you know, you don't get much sleep that way.
No, and you would be prone to mistakes, no question about it.
And I suppose many times, coming to a patient and having to make a decision without your eyes being all the way open and your brain fully functioning after a cup of coffee, huh?
That's right, and the way the schedule works is when you're on call, people don't really know what it means to be on call.
You get to the hospital at 7 a.m., you work all day, you work all through that night, and the next morning, you work all day again.
That's 36 hours, potentially, of being on your feet, depending on how busy a hospital it is.
You can imagine why residents do make mistakes.
In terms of whether or not you're abused It depends on the personality of the doctor who is your supervisor.
They're called attending physicians.
Yes.
And if you're in surgery, there's a good chance they have some pretty prickly personalities.
So I think that there's a reason that women, by and large, decide not to go into surgery.
It tends to be much more of a male field.
Well, you mentioned the personality.
Surgeons Really good surgeons, especially, seem to develop a very... God-like... Maybe you, as a doctor, could more easily explain what that personality is.
Yeah, they're gods.
It's because when they are in the operating room, they really are in charge, and everything they say goes.
To a certain extent, They do deserve that respect because of the hours they put in and the years they put in.
To be a general surgeon requires five years of residency.
And to be a neurosurgeon is eight years.
So by the time they get out there, they're well into their thirties.
They've been working a long time and they know a lot.
And so then you're saying that attitude is perhaps justified in some cases.
In some cases.
But in other cases, they take it a little bit too far.
And I think that they can make the surgical intern's life hell.
What you're describing sounds about right to me.
Well, I'm sure it's exaggerated a little bit, but you might check it out sometime.
It's pretty fun.
I suppose there is a lot of sort of strange humor in medicine, isn't there?
There is.
And you know, when you work in a situation that's sometimes tragic, you have to get a Learn to deal with it.
And I can tell you some wild stories.
For instance, when I was a medical resident in San Francisco, we had a lot of what we'd call, I guess you would say, they were undesirable patients.
We used to call them gomers.
Gomers.
Gomers, which is short for get out of my emergency room.
Or trolls.
You know, people you'd find sleeping under bridges.
And they'd come in and you'd take care of them and you'd just want them to leave again.
Well, we had one man who just Kept coming back for an infected foot, and we didn't know what to do with him.
So finally, this residence all got together and chipped in some money and said, told the man, look, we're going to give you an airline ticket to Los Angeles.
You get to LA, you go to the emergency room, and you check in and say, my foot is infected, please admit me.
So the man said, sure.
And so they got him an airline ticket, put him on the plane, sent him to LA, and didn't hear anything from him for a long time.
And then a couple of weeks later, something came from UCLA House Staff, and it was a big envelope, and all it had in there was an x-ray of a hand.
And the hand had its middle finger extended.
So that was the response they got from the UCLA House Staff.
He finally told them, huh?
But there are weird stories, too, from medicine.
I mean, you talk about weird things happening.
I can tell you about things that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
By all means.
I worked in Honolulu.
I was a medical resident in Hawaii and worked at a hospital called St.
Francis, which was a fairly older hospital.
And there was one wing where the nurses just didn't like to walk down there.
And they would tell me that it was haunted, that a patient had died.
They didn't know who it was, but patients who were in that room would often wake up and say, there's somebody in here.
So the patients would see this ghost.
Yes.
And, you know, I would hear these stories a lot.
Maybe it's because people in Hawaii are much more open to ideas that ghosts exist.
Or another case where I had a... Well, no, wait a minute.
Before we get away from the ghost, Um, why not?
I mean, after all, ghosts are said to frequently inhabit the very area that they're last in.
And there's lots of last ins in a hospital.
You would expect hospitals to have a lot of ghosts, wouldn't you?
You would.
And so, quite a few stories are told.
Is this a general truth, or just that one?
Well, that was the one I remember from that particular hospital, was there was one room that everybody felt was haunted.
Well, why don't you doctors pay attention a little to these stories in, you know, imagining they might be true?
I do pay attention to them, because I've always been interested in ghost stories, because my mother still believes in ghosts.
And I have spent my whole life looking for ghosts.
I've never seen one.
I've wanted to, but I've never seen one.
And if you did?
I would be.
You know what?
It would make me rethink entirely my whole view of the world and of life in general.
You're talking to the original skeptic and even though I am so fascinated by the paranormal, I'm just always looking for proof and I guess it's one of those things you can't find very often.
Is it possible to actually go through medical school and all that's required to get to be a doctor and have a religious belief surviving Oh, yes, absolutely.
It is?
Oh, absolutely.
I think there are plenty of doctors who are religious.
And part of it has to do with, I guess, a sense of when you watch someone die, and I've done it so many countless times, you always question where they're going.
And it's hard to believe that somebody who was alive and talking to you didn't go somewhere.
You know, you want them to be somewhere, not just have gone into oblivion.
That's right.
Yeah.
Of course, it's a natural human thing to want to believe, I guess.
It is.
It is a natural thing.
But it's also a natural thing for medical school to absolutely drum that out of you.
Well, medical school doesn't try to drum that out of you.
All they try to do is... Maybe not specifically.
Well, they tell you that things must be proven.
They tell you that drugs, before you can give a medication, that there has to be a drug trial that shows that it's effective and safe.
And that is supposed to be, you know, objective evidence.
So I think that, again, faith is just something that is very private and it's something you have to believe in yourself and you may never have proof for.
But I would think being a doctor and seeing these things around death and hearing of these hauntings and hearing... Have you, for example, did you ever get to hear a patient tell a story of after they've come back from, you know, Being arrested?
I've only had one come back and say he was very peaceful, that he was not afraid of dying.
But that was only one.
What I have had, though, is strange cases where I did feel that ESP was involved.
I had a man who was recovering.
He was probably supposed to go home in two days.
And all of a sudden, he arrested.
He had a cardiac arrest.
And 30 seconds later, his family came running in, crying.
Nobody had called them.
Nobody had... I mean, they didn't know.
They thought their dad was doing fine.
They had been shopping at the local shopping mall, and they just looked at each other and said, there's something wrong with Dad, and came running in.
And I was never able to explain it.
There's a lot of that.
Of course, you know, because we center on this program on these sorts of things, we hear more of it than you would imagine otherwise, but boy, do we hear an awful lot of that.
You're right, but that's a function I guess of a living human brain.
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps the person sent no such message, just the fact of their passing.
But through what venue was that sent to them?
The person who died?
Is it ESP or is it telepathy?
I don't know, but the family knew.
And, you know, you're talking to a skeptic, and that was one of those things that just made me stop cold and think, what the hell is going on here?
So I certainly have had experiences.
It hasn't made me less of a skeptic, but it has made me wonder about, you know, maybe I'm not entirely correct about my view of life either.
Well, we certainly don't know... How much don't we know about the human brain?
A lot.
We don't know... Well, we don't know a lot about everything.
I heard a quote that I still believe.
Any technology that is sufficiently advanced will be indistinguishable from magic.
Exactly.
Hold it right there.
My guest is Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
In the middle of the darkness, I'm Art Bell.
Going in love was the last thing I had on my mind.
Holding you was a warmth that I thought I could never find.
Just trying to decide.
You can be here all alone, just trying to decide You can be here all alone, or stay by your side
You can be here all alone, I know I could cry I just can't find the answer to the question
Keep going through my mind Baby, it's all a lie
It's too late, it's too tight to break Knowing it can't be your mistake
It's too late, it's too tight to break Knowing it can't be your mistake
You can be here all alone, just trying to decide Hey ya hey ya hey ya ho
Hey ya hey ya hey ya ho Hey ya hey ya hey ya ho
Hey ya hey ya hey ya ho Hey ya hey ya hey ya ho
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.
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.
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.
And this night, Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
She is a physician and author of a lot of very strange books about The darker side of what could happen in the medical world, I guess.
That'd be the way to put it.
And, uh, definitely the darker side in some cases.
Every single one of her books, you know the way you get when you like an author.
Well, you just go plowing through all her books, and all her books are well worth getting just lining up and reading one after the other.
We'll be right back.
I wonder what causes a physician normally dedicated to the saving of lives and the doing
no harm thing, turn to the dark side.
Well?
My mother.
Your mom?
Blame it on mom.
It's absolutely true.
I grew up watching horror films.
I think I told you this last time.
My mother is a Chinese immigrant.
Didn't speak much English when I was a kid, but she did understand horror films.
She dragged me to every scary movie there was, and there I was, a five-year-old cowering in my theater seat.
I grew up wondering what was under the rocks and what was behind the locked door.
That's why I have this file of weird facts.
Well, there are many people like you, of course, because the horror film industry is thriving, but not a lot of them have the medical knowledge to turn it into... I mean, good horror really has to have some sort of almost basic premise, in fact.
Yes, it does, but the main thing it has to have, it has to make each of us personally afraid.
Could there be a bigger one than waking up in a body bag or worse yet buried six feet under?
I think that's probably one of those that scares us the most.
But the other, even worse one for me is having something bad happen to my family.
And those are the ones that are really powerful.
Those are the kinds of nightmares that I wake up You know, in a cold sweat about it.
I note that you have noted that they've got Trionosaurus Rex soft tissue, which seems impossible.
I mean, they found a dinosaur and it still had soft tissue left on it.
Actual viable soft tissue.
Right.
Amazing.
The corpse had been encased in some kind of rock.
And when they dug it up, they couldn't fit it onto the helicopter.
And so they had to cut the thigh bone in half to get it onto the helicopter.
And when they got it to its destination, one of the archaeologists there noticed that there seemed to be some kind of soft tissue in there.
And she took it out, and you could actually see blood vessels.
You could see blood cells.
That means DNA.
Well, they're hoping.
They're hoping they can get DNA.
I'm not sure they have yet.
But one thing they did say was that there was something about the blood cells that reminded them very much of Blood cells from birds.
Well, the dinosaurs are said to be related to birds, right?
They are.
It is interesting that they are able to find that kind of a similarity.
And I think that most people do believe nowadays that that's where they evolved from.
You see something in the evolution-creationism battle here?
I do.
You know, I have to admit that I don't I have a lot of problems with intelligent design, and I know... Art, I'm going to get in trouble, because every time I talk about this, I get lots of emails.
I know, but you know, don't let it worry you.
Really, don't let it worry you.
It's much better that you just lay out what you really feel and say what you really want to say.
Okay.
Well, you know, I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I'm looking at it from just the point of view of somebody who's looking at it logically.
And if you are to believe in intelligent design, in other words, you believe that there is some kind of an intelligence that created us, you still have that same problem of who created the designer?
Who designed the designer?
You still have to go back to that.
Where did he come from, or she come from?
Sure.
So there's that problem.
And the other problem is that if this creator is so intelligent, why did he make so many mistakes?
Why did we have so many?
There's always an answer.
The answer that would be given is free will.
Free will, so that's what caused the dinosaurs to die?
Well, if you can think of a rock having a free will.
Well, I don't know that that says anything about that.
I mean, free will allows what seem like mistakes.
When you say mistakes, what do you mean?
I mean, so many species that have gone extinct that clearly were created and then were dead ends and died.
And the other question that comes up is, why do we have vestigial organs?
Organs that we don't need.
Isn't that kind of strange that we have an appendix that appears to serve no purpose?
It's a little bit like an engineer designing a car with a rudder.
Yes, that's a very good point.
I throw it back on you.
Why do we have an appendix?
It clearly must have had a function sometime in the past, but it no longer does.
For the same reason that an ostrich no longer needs its wings.
Is it attached to us?
Oh yes, the appendix.
It has to be cut free, right?
And we cut it out all the time.
So are there any anatomical hints about where it is, meaning what it might do?
Part of what we think it might have done is it may have had something to do with the lymphatic system.
It does seem to have some tissue inside that may have to do with resistance.
It may have to do with defenses.
However, nowadays, the appendix really causes more trouble than it's worth.
I mean, that's why we end up having so many appendicitis.
Well, has anybody done any studies on People who have had their appendix removed versus those who have not in terms of disease.
No difference.
No difference?
So the appendix is good for nothing?
It's good for nothing.
It is a vestigial organ that just happens to be there.
It's sort of a hanger on and there has not been enough evolutionary pressure to get rid of it.
And for the same reason I was mentioning, you know, flightless birds, they really don't need their wings.
And how many other What organs do we have that seem to defy description in terms of function?
In the human body, I'm not aware of anything as blatant as the appendix, but I can give you some examples.
For instance, we know that birds don't have teeth, right?
They don't have teeth.
In fact, there's a saying about as rare as hen's teeth.
But it does turn out that birds do have a leftover gene.
I've heard that.
to be there for making people just it just is no longer expressed
so that it would tell you that bird at one time you fall from creatures that
one patty another with dinosaurs uh... and they continue to retain the gene even though uh...
it doesn't it it's that no use to them
and all about all living creatures have hundreds junk dna you know we
that you we have a lot of dna up function of which we don't no i've heard that and then it's called junk dna
It's because it doesn't code for any proteins that we seem to be using.
But, maybe it's for continued evolution, or maybe it's evolution that already has been, and is no longer required.
That is exactly right.
That would be your guess, the first?
Or the latter?
The latter.
These are leftover genes that we just don't use anymore, but there's no pressure to get rid of it.
So, you know, why do we have all this excess stuff?
I mean, if you were a designer, why would you have excess blueprints?
So there are everything that you look at in your DNA.
Well, listen, up at Microsoft, the trash cans are full of junk code that they've written.
They were dumped out, but we still carry it in our jeans.
So I think that for a lot of reasons, there's really no doubt about Evolution.
I mean, we talk about it being a theory, and that's what we get hit with.
Oh, it's just a theory.
But the truth is, I mean, what is a theory?
I think that people don't understand what it means in the scientific sense, which is, it's a logical and well-supported explanation that explains a great variety of facts.
Well, since you've got one foot in the frying pan, let me help you get the other in.
How do you account for the Bible?
Do you think the Bible is just sort of a nice, Story?
Man wrote the Bible.
Whatever the flaws of the men who wrote the Bible, they certainly seem to have believed what they wrote.
What about all the miracles and Jesus?
A nice work of fiction?
You know, who knows?
They were written by man, and man is flawed.
And we don't know whether their recounting is absolutely accurate.
And we were talking about corpses reanimating.
Yes.
There is a theory that the resurrection of Jesus was actually a case of misdiagnosed death.
That he may have been put into the tomb alive, and he was still alive.
Awfully big coincidence, though.
I mean, you don't frequently, you know, predict those things.
No, you can't predict them, but we do know that misdiagnosed death has happened again and again through history.
So that may, in itself, may not be a miracle.
You know, I think the Bible has, if you take it as a point of philosophy, it has some very fine things to say.
And certainly, if you were going to take Jesus' word, He was a powerful philosopher.
But, taking the next step further, did these miracles actually occur?
Is there a designer, a supernatural designer, who created mankind?
Yeah, but the problem is that if some of it is a lie, then it all could be.
Well, I don't think you have to characterize it as a lie.
I think you could characterize it as fables that they had heard from previous generations.
Well, I don't know.
Seas parting and all that sort of thing, that's pretty clear.
Well, you know, a great number of civilizations have the same kind of myth about floods.
Some people will say it's Atlantis, it's the Atlantis Theory.
You probably don't know the name Matthew Alper, but he wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain.
Simply saying, death is our biggest fear.
The brain, in a defense to that fear, because it always forms a defense, demands something like religion.
And that even when you go into the deepest forest, in the middle of heaven knows where, you find people worshiping something!
Right.
We do have a spirituality part of our brain.
That's right.
Whether it's for Christians, or whether it's for people who worship the earth, there is something that wants us to be in touch with something deeper, something very spiritual.
In the Old West, they called them dirt worshipers.
Dirt worshipers.
Well, that's not so far off.
I mean, that's worship of the earth.
That was a slang term for it, but you know, it conveys the message.
Well, we certainly do have the capacity for worship, whatever form it takes.
But it doesn't mean that you can't also believe in science as well.
You can't believe that we carry our past in our DNA.
Which, in a way, is just as wondrous a thing.
There's so much about nature that's very wondrous.
All right.
This is important to me.
It really is important to me.
I'm scared of the bird flu.
I look at various things around the world, and the bird flu thing is actually scaring me.
I've read story after story here on the air, which in an eerie way seems to have scientists and biologists predicting, you know, just saying, almost saying, it's going to get ready.
It's going to happen.
The bird flu is coming.
It's going to happen.
You're saying it too.
I'm convinced it's going to happen.
Who knows when?
I mean, maybe not in five years or ten years or whatever, but we are going to have another flu pandemic.
We have them about three times a century.
And in fact, you know, the reason I'm actually terrified of this is because I've been doing research on the 1918 pandemic and saw what a truly living horror it was for people back then.
And I just got a bulletin from the Harvard School of Public Health.
And this is a man, he's a physician, and he says it's coming.
And he points out that the 1918 pandemic killed, I think, probably close to 50 million people.
But it may have been 100 million.
And he says we are totally unprepared.
And I didn't realize this, but our Homeland Security Department has actually looked at 12 disaster scenarios, and even Homeland Security agrees that the most likely and probably the most deadly will be A flu pandemic.
So are we prepared for it?
This country is not.
We're not.
We're not.
And compared to other countries, we are in pitiful shape.
How does a country prepare for it?
Well, OK, just take the country of Finland.
All right.
They have a population of five million people.
Their government has decided that the pandemic is coming.
They have stockpiled about one and a half million doses of something called Tamiflu, which is an antiviral.
I've heard that's the most effective against it, true?
Well, it seems to have effectiveness against the bird flu, what they call H5N1 strain of bird flu.
So they have enough to take care of what, 20% of their population.
English, the English people have enough to protect 25% of their population.
They have 15 million doses of Tamiflu that they are going to be stockpiling.
What would the mortality rate likely be?
Well, the mortality rate, as The first group of people who died of the bird flu in Southeast Asia, the mortality rate was about 60-75%.
Wow.
This year it seems to be dropping a little bit.
It's now down to about 40%, which means possibly the virus is changing.
But just to compare countries, the U.S., what do we have?
We are apparently going to be stockpiling enough to take care of 1% of our population.
Doctor, is that what a virus does?
In other words, if it, in its evolving way, decides it's too deadly, Does it make the trade-off and become somewhat less lethal, but spread more easily, so that it doesn't kill itself off?
Is that what a smart virus does?
A virus doesn't care.
Well, it wants to live, though.
A virus wants to live, and as long as it can find new victims, it doesn't care if it killed the last one.
So that, you know, the flu virus is a marvelous example of evolution.
It's constantly changing because it constantly wants to jump from one victim to another.
Right.
And it really doesn't even belong in people.
It belongs in birds.
The flu virus is sort of like its natural habitat is birds.
And it jumps over to us because we have contact with poultry, with chickens and ducks, or it gets into an intermediary such as a pig.
Why, in the case of this particular bird flu, do the biologists and scientists seem so sure it's going to happen?
Why?
Because it has already infected, you know, what, 100 people, 75 people in Southeast Asia.
It has gone from human to human transmission.
That's the scary part.
Oh, now you see, I didn't know that.
I didn't know that had been confirmed.
Yeah, it has, within a family, it has.
And one of the cases was so mild that he didn't even know he had it, but apparently he does He did have the antibodies to it.
So it has already gone human to human.
They are being very careful, and they're watching it.
And, you know, in Southeast Asia, as well as any chicken farm, there's a lot of contact between people and the avian world.
And so there's plenty of time for this virus to jump over.
Now, the reason it becomes dangerous, I mean, most of the time, here it is sitting in the chicken.
It doesn't bother us.
But then it infects a person, and that person is simultaneously infected by, say, a normal flu virus.
Well, those two flu viruses can exchange their RNA, they can exchange genes, and in that way become not only very virulent, very, very infectious, they can also take on a form that our immune systems don't even recognize.
Alright, hold it right there.
Two flu viruses that meet each other, take on each other's characteristics, and come and get us.
Yikes!
Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
And this, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
Music to the ears for the weird at night.
Howdy.
What do you do when you get lonely?
Walk one way and drive yourself.
You better run, I don't trust you.
You know it's just a foolish plan, yeah.
Got me on my knees, baby.
Baby, darling, please don't leave.
I'm gonna change my world around Try to give you a resolution
Go and move on Like it, I fell in love with you
You turned my world around You cut me off my knees
And hanged on a fever You were on fire, no one could save me but you
Strange world desire make foolish people I never dreamed that I met somebody like you
I never dreamed that I knew somebody like you No, I don't wanna fall in love
No, I don't wanna fall in love It's a good sign that you're not alone.
Good morning.
Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
If you listen very carefully, we're about to begin taking questions for Dr. Gerritsen.
So if you've got a sort of weird medical question, You know, the very weird category like death and the kinds of things we've been talking about.
Here come the numbers!
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
To think that it might be in the end the little things that get us.
I know.
Don't let the little things bother you, right?
You never let them bother you.
Well, these little things bother you.
Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
I should be right back.
Of course, sometime before the beginning of the year, I think I told you all that bird
flu was my absolute biggest fear.
And the fact that I saw these scientists continually pummeling us with stories that it was, you know, virtually saying, it's going to happen.
That you could almost presume it will happen.
And Doctor, if it did happen, if the viruses got together, exchanged RNA, married, became the worst scenario, what are we looking at?
Well, I can take as our model the 1918 pandemic, otherwise known as the Spanish Flu.
Now, of course, the number of deaths probably wouldn't be so bad, because I would assume that some of those were due to bacterial pneumonia, which we can treat.
But just looking at the Spanish Flu, it killed 50 million people around the world.
It killed about 700,000 just in the United States alone.
Now, of course, that was then.
That was a third of our current population.
I know, but I mean, medically, that was then, and this is now.
Wouldn't science save us?
Well, not necessarily, and you know why?
Because a certain number of those deaths were directly from the virus itself.
It was a particularly bad death, and sometimes they would die within 12 hours of their first symptoms.
You may not even get a chance to get into a doctor.
Boy, that's fast.
It's very fast.
And what was really frightening was that it was killing young people.
Why is it that fast?
And especially with young people?
With young people, part of it was that part of the reason for the death was because the body was responding.
It was actually our immune system that was killing us.
You know, what happens when you get An influx of this virus is that your immune system pours out white blood cells and various toxins to try and kill the virus.
And what it ends up doing is flooding your lungs, your air spaces in your lungs, so that you get pneumonia.
You just can't breathe.
There's no way to exchange oxygen with your bloodstream.
Well, we do, though, have more control over pneumonia these days, don't we?
Well, that's for bacterial pneumonia.
You can give antibiotics.
These young people were dying of viral pneumonia.
They were dying of Their bodies trying to overwhelm this virus and instead overwhelming their lungs.
So they were, you know, their epithelium, their surfaces, the mucous membranes of their lungs were wearing away and so people were coughing up blood.
They were bleeding from all their orifices and they would die very quickly.
And what made it worse, of course, and this is another thing that is different, is that what was happening in 1918.
Well, we were at war and there were huge numbers of young men who were collected into these Recruitment camps.
Right.
And so they were all living under the same camps, and it was very cold that winter, so they were all huddled together.
And that's part of the reason it was spreading so quickly.
But a lot of the spread just was within the military encampment.
But then they would leave, and it would spread into the regular population.
And I was looking at some statistics that just terrified me.
You know, in Philadelphia, 43% of the medical staff at one hospital had to be hospitalized themselves, and a fifth of the nurses died.
You're looking at Cook County, where the mortality rate for influenza was 40%.
And half of the people were getting it.
So, in large cities in particular, it was very dangerous, because you were exposed to other people.
The only place that didn't get it was a little town in Nevada that actually barricaded itself.
It wouldn't let anybody in town.
That is our mentality.
Yeah, well, nobody died in that town, so it worked.
It did work, huh?
It worked.
And if something like this got loose, Doctor, what would you personally do?
I personally?
Yes.
I hate to make a run on Tamiflu, but frankly, I don't think our country has got enough stockpiled.
I would probably just try and stay indoors.
I would stay away from other people.
I would barricade my house, and I would try and keep my kids Um, in one spot and tell them not to go out.
How effective is Tamiflu?
Excuse me?
How effective is Tamiflu against... Oh, well, all I can tell you is that people who work with viruses, if they're accidentally exposed, that's what they take.
That's what they, well, again though, is there a way to know, do they have any statistics on how effective it apparently is or isn't?
Well, we're not entirely sure about bird flu because, you know, it does appear to be effective, though, in bird flu.
The way Tamiflu works is It affects one of the proteins on the virus, which it actually prevents the virus from being spread once it's invaded your cells.
So it kind of keeps it from multiplying very quickly.
And it works for other viruses as well, but it doesn't seem to be the one thing that is the most effective.
Unfortunately, it's pretty expensive.
And as I said, this country just does not have enough.
Now, the other thing, of course, is a vaccine.
The problem with developing a vaccine is you are working with a moving target.
By the time you figure out what the final blue virus is going to look like, it's going to take you six months to manufacture the vaccine.
And by that time, you may have had already one wave of an epidemic.
So, it could go... The other side of the coin is, we have the ability to travel the entire world very quickly now.
Airplanes going from continent to continent, and if something like that did get loose fairly widely... It'd be fast.
It would be very, very fast.
It would certainly encompass the world quickly, wouldn't it?
Yes, in one day, right around the world.
And that's the other thing that we have to worry about, even though we have these antibiotics for bacterial infections.
uh... everything moves much faster now so i it could move much faster
uh... i know that the u n has uh...
really have been devoted quite a lot of attention to just paint to just watching
for outbreak in copy page which is where we think it will it
will happen but we have to remember that the spanish flu on
the outbreak started in canada so that was a that was a domestic case
You see, I didn't know that.
Then why didn't they call it the Kansas flu?
Okay, well here is another part of the story that made 1918 a very strange era.
Because we were at war, there was censorship.
This is a lesson we should learn always.
The government told the media that you are not to say anything bad about the war.
You are not to print anything that will affect the morale of the American public.
So that we were not told about these huge numbers of soldiers who were dying.
Britain was at war.
They were under the same kind of restrictions on their press.
The only country that was still neutral, that was able to talk about it, was a newspaper in Spain.
So it was first reported in the Spanish newspapers, even though it had not started in Spain, and so it got the nickname of Spanish.
I'll be damned.
Yeah, but it started in Kansas.
And we're not really sure why.
It may have been... Kansas has a lot of pig farms, I assume.
It could have been incubating there.
Well, boy, did I just learn something, or what?
That's amazing.
Don't keep information from the public.
It's a very important thing.
Well, China seems to be the chief incubator these days.
Well, that's because they have a lot of contact between people and poultry, and they live with their ducks and their chickens.
Harkening back to an earlier subject, Mark in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania says, would you please ask the doctor, is there a double-sided zipper inside a body bag, so if you wake up in one, you can get out?
It's a pretty good question, actually.
I don't believe so.
I haven't really checked.
I don't think there is a double-sided zipper, so I'm afraid you're stuck in there.
But most cases of people who were found alive, they made noise, and somebody luckily heard them.
Now that story you told me about the fellow, the doctor, about to cut into the body on the table and the hand grabbing him and he is dying, that's really a true story?
That's a true story.
That's a true story.
I have, you know, there's another story like that.
There was a, I think he was a cardinal in the 1500s who had died and they were, there was going to be a post-mortem on him and they cut open his chest and they looked and the heart was still beating.
Oh, God.
And he died, of course.
Oh, yeah.
Oops.
Oh, my goodness.
All right.
A million people want to talk to you.
So, first time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
I have actually a question for the doctor.
I just finished reading Michael Creighton's Prey, the one you suggested I read a couple weeks ago.
Yes, sir.
Very good book.
I was just wondering what the doctor's opinion about nanotechnology and All right.
Let me help out here.
Prey was a really good book, as I mentioned to you, I think, just before the show.
It was about these nanites, these designer little machines that are sort of set loose in a swarm.
With the idea of making a camera that nobody could shoot down to the Defense Department.
This is technology that we're on the edge of and we are working with right now, Doctor.
I wish I could comment, but I didn't read the book.
Right, but the technology itself, nanotechnology, is something you can comment on, if you know anything at all about it.
It's kind of I don't know, the molecular genes side of what's being done in medicine.
Yeah, I don't know enough about it to say anything about it.
Maybe you can answer this then.
I know you wrote Gravity and you studied the space program pretty extensively in order to do that, right?
Have astronauts had sex yet in space?
You asked me this question last time, and then, you know what?
They're not going to tell me.
They're not going to tell me.
Well, I thought I'd try one more time, and I've forgotten that you didn't answer it then and would now.
I ask everybody this question.
I've had astronauts on.
They don't answer either, by the way.
Well, you know, I actually asked that question while I was at Houston.
They wouldn't tell me.
Well, the fact that they wouldn't tell you might be an answer.
Hello, yes, I think that God and evolution are not incompatible.
And so my version of the Asimov quote, which you mentioned at the bottom of the last hour, which was that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, my version is any sufficiently advanced deity and active ways that may be in this
distinguishable to science that's a wonderful that the wonderful way of
saying it you know i don't i agree with you i don't think it is
incompatible on the there are some people who say maybe
maybe if there was a god he said in motion evolution yet and i think that i think that uh... also
uh... john nearer about a hundred something years ago came up with the concept of visit there was not a creation
in it stopped in the world now we're living in what's created
but that the continual process of creation and...
And I think, possibly, he was not the first to come up with that, but as far as I know, he was.
And so, if you look at it from that point of view, a lot of things like, for instance, things you refer to as mistakes, Obviously, if something bad happens to me or you, we refer to that that was a mistake or someone did something.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no.
She was talking about things like the appendix.
Right, exactly.
Well, I was going to use your, what you spoke about.
The appendix was actually very brilliant in a way, because if you look at it, the appendix is an analogy.
From a lot of old-fashioned viewpoints, they viewed Antarctica or the Arctic as wastelands.
They were sort of useless.
Or volcanoes and earthquakes were just useful and terrifying things that serve no purpose.
And now we can see that Antarctica regulates our climate.
Now we can see that volcanoes actually created our climate.
We wouldn't breathe if it weren't for volcanoes.
And so why, in God's name, are we ruthlessly ripping the appendixes out?
Exactly, exactly, because in the future, 500 years from now, we will not view these things as unvaluable.
We may view them as valuable.
All right.
Doctor?
Well, we're ripping them out because they're killing us.
You know, the appendix probably did have a function at some time, and maybe it has a function that we're not aware of.
There's always that possibility.
But at this moment, it does not appear to do anything that is vital to our survival.
I think I'll start the rumor that it's the antenna that sends a prayer to God.
And then the other question is, what are we doing with our wisdom teeth, for instance?
And what do snakes have vestigial pelvises for?
We're not really sure, but it does seem to imply that these things must have had a function.
All right, tell me about wisdom teeth, if you wouldn't mind.
Yes, what about them?
Why do we have them taken out, and what happens if we don't?
If you don't, they cause you a lot of pain, and they cause a lot of crowding.
The question, you know, is why do we have them?
It appears that we must have had larger jaws at some time, you know, in our ancestry.
And as somebody who had all four of mine taken out, and everybody in my family has had all four of their wisdom teeth taken out, I can testify that they are a pain.
So I don't really know why we still have them.
I think it's because the human jaw has changed.
Uh-huh.
Well, what about the word?
Why are they called wisdom teeth?
And why must they be ripped out if they impart wisdom?
I believe they're called wisdom teeth because they came in at the age of about 18, adulthood, when you supposedly were smart.
I've learned the origin of perhaps six new words tonight.
These are the Rockies.
You're on the air with Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
Hi.
Hi.
I had a couple of things.
One related to what you were just talking about with the last caller on the vestigial organ situation and the junk gene stuff.
Yes.
You know, recently they've been talking about plants repairing their DNA when there's been a problem in the environment.
And perhaps we're holding on to DNA that we had use for in case that cycle comes around again and we need those to be able to adapt to that situation.
Plants are one of the only species that can actually, as far as I know, can do that.
We have never demonstrated that capability.
We've never observed that.
We've never observed that capability.
That doesn't mean we can't do it.
What is the junk DNA for?
Lord knows.
I wish we knew.
I tend to think that it's left over It's like vestigial organs, it's vestigial DNA.
Or maybe it's for something that hasn't come up yet.
Possibly.
We're being prepared.
I had a body bag story for you if you wanted one.
Yes, please.
I worked for 20 odd years or so with a guy who was a LERP team radio man in Nam.
As you may or may not know, LERP teams would get dropped.
50, 100 clicks up the trail to watch what was coming down to give some warning.
Yes.
And they asked him to go out one more time.
He was getting very short.
He was due to come home in less than a week.
But they said, you know, we really got just a two-day mission.
Go ahead for it.
And they got the information they needed and they headed for the LZ and were letting the chopper know that they were on the way.
And the guy in front of him stepped on a bouncing Betty.
And, uh, dodged it.
Which, of course, is almost unheard of.
But with, you know, with the radio on him, he couldn't dodge it.
He was right behind the guy, and it just shredded him.
And the guys just picked him up and started running, and they said, you know, they got the handset on the radio, and they were saying, you know, to the chopper, get in quick, because everybody in the neighborhood is going to have heard that, and they're going to be looking for us.
They said, we're at the LZ.
It's already too hot.
Get to the backup.
They said, we can't get there.
We're carrying this guy.
And they said, you've got to get to the backup because we can't get in here.
And so they got to the backup LZ.
It was some clicks away, so it took them a lot of time to get there.
The corpsman jumped out before the chopper even hit the ground, put his fingers on his throat, put his fingers on his wrist, said he's dead, grabbed his tags, and realized he was looking down the barrels of 7-16s.
And they were saying, He's going.
He's not staying.
They said, we're overloaded already.
You're going to kill us.
They said, then you can stay.
And they put him on the chopper.
And of course, Gorman came with him.
But during the entire 45 minutes or an hour of flight, they never found one sign of life.
They got him to the MASH unit.
Triage doc looked at him and said, dead.
Again, looking at seven barrels.
About 30 seconds.
Okay.
Okay.
We've got to expect miracles, but you've got to do what you can.
They opened him up.
They said, there's nothing we can do.
They put a toe tag, body bag, sent him to the morgue.
So he's now at about an hour and a half, two hours, maybe three already, since there's been any sign of life.
Three hours later, he woke up in the body bag and they took him back, took out about 15 or 20 feet of intestine.
And he lost down from 185 to about 70 pounds.
But the point is, the point is, he was alive.
He came back.
He came back.
Oh my God.
Amazing guy.
Amazing story.
Thank you very much, Dr. Holtzhoff.
Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my guest and you will want to obtain every single one of her books.
Set them in a pile and read them one by one.
Trust me.
You don't have to shout or leap for miles, you can even play them easy.
Get up out the past and all your sorrows.
You don't know why.
Baby when you see her smile.
You'll never shatter just the way you look.
Baby, you'll see.
But I'm still pretty, baby.
We're gonna have this good night.
But I'm still pretty, my boy.
There's always that good night.
We're gonna love you, love you.
We're gonna love you, love you, love you.
We're gonna love you, love you, love you.
Who loves you pretty baby?
Well, we do, and we're here to help you through the night.
No question about it.
If you'd like to provide a little bit of input, here's how you do it.
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 800-825-4242.
From west to the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access number, pressing Option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Dr. Tess Gerritsen is my honored guest at the moment.
She's a little strange.
In fact, we'll ask more about that.
And indeed, she is strange and likes to write about strange things.
But my God, they're entertaining books.
If you have a question for her, here we are.
Doctor, I wonder what the title of your next book is.
Has it been titled yet?
Yes, it's called Vanish.
Vanish?
Vanish.
It'll be out August 23rd.
August 23rd.
And it really deals with, uh... It's about a woman who wakes up in the morgue.
And who is she?
And nobody knows.
You know, I wanted to comment on that last caller because there is a case out of Iraq of a similar thing.
Of a soldier who was shot in the head.
Um, was declared dead by a medic at the scene, was again declared dead in the helicopter, and 13 hours later, when he gets to the hospital, uh, they detected a heartbeat.
And he's, uh, he's now alive and able to, um, able to walk.
So, uh, it happens, you know, right now.
I, uh, I once read a story, uh, it was an Associated Press Wire story as a matter of fact, uh, and it was in the major News also, I think, there was a man, I don't know if I mentioned this to you on the last show, but he took a gun, well actually, the fella had terminal cancer.
He had a brain tumor, an inoperable brain tumor, and he shot himself, and he lived, and he shot out the tumor.
Well, that's a hard to believe story.
I couldn't believe it either, because clean as it might be, if it got the tumor, there would still be cells, messy cells around that would start it up all over again, wouldn't there?
Well, it depends what kind of tumor it is.
If it's something as simple as a meningioma, maybe he did manage to get it all out.
Then it wouldn't necessarily regrow.
I would have a hard time believing that, but maybe he saved himself a trip to the neurosurgeon.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Tess Garrison.
Good morning.
Yes, hello.
Hi.
My name is Terri and I'm calling from Atlanta.
I was born with multiple heart conditions.
I've gone to that light and come back.
In 1983, they did reconstructive heart surgery.
Where they used to freeze your body and put you on a heart-lung machine.
Wow.
Well, what I wanted to ask Dr. Garrison, after I came through that, I started having dreams and visions of a girl that I knew, her murder.
At the time, I didn't know she'd been murdered.
Turns out I called her fiancé, and he told me about her murder, and it was just like my dreams and visions.
So what I call it is like a soul transference.
Her soul, when I, they lost me during the heart surgery.
And when I went so far out, somehow her soul transferred.
Well, that might be a bit of a jump.
I mean, it's your interpretation of what happened, but clearly you had visions and visions and dreams and weird things are not unusual after that kind of event, are they doctor?
No, they're not.
They're not unusual.
And you say that you did not know she had been murdered.
That's right.
You know, is it possible that you did hear about it sometime after that, and that you incorporated that?
You know, she's not here now, but I guess it's possible.
And people do apply their own belief systems and prejudices to these sort of stories.
I guess one person might see Jesus, another person might see Buddha, right?
Right, exactly.
And it's hard to know what happened.
It certainly is a weird story.
Whether it was a soul transfer, whether she actually met somebody on the other side who told her, go back and take care of this problem I had, you know, get my murderer.
I don't know where that came from, but I think that if you were going to go about this from the skeptic point of view, you would assume that she heard about the case somewhere, and just did not remember that she had heard about it.
The Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Garrison.
Hi.
Hi, this is Tim from L.A.
Yes.
I got a question.
There was a story on Coast to Coast about two or three weeks ago regarding bird flu and a possible treatment with kimchi in South Korea.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, my question is, is there something within the kimchi, like maybe the garlic that actually cured the birds of the avian flu?
Or do you think it's hogwash?
I have not heard about kimchi in any of the medical literature.
So at this moment, I'm going to say it's hogwash.
Oh, it really was a very strong story, wasn't it, caller?
Oh, very, very, very.
Yeah, it was in the mainstream press, that they absolutely believe there was something in kimchi.
Well, kimchi is, well, let's see, it's chili peppers and vinegar and garlic.
Right.
Well, I'm not quite sure what it would be in that combination.
Garlic certainly seems to be the cure-all for a lot of things.
It does.
Do you think there's anything at all to it?
Not that I can think of.
No.
I can't imagine why.
But, you know, it tastes good, so why not?
Which brings us to that great unknown power.
If doctors really admitted it, how much of a patient's cure is psychological?
Oh, a great deal.
A very great deal.
You know what?
Looking back at the history of medicine, I'm sort of appalled by how How much harm doctors have done to the patients.
We didn't really know what we were doing for most of medicine.
For instance, bleeding.
Where did that come from?
I mean, very few patients were ever cured by bleeding.
And yet that heritage is still with us.
There's a British medical journal called Lancet.
And that, the title of Lancet, derives from the old tool that they used to open up veins.
To bleed people?
Yes.
There were a lot of things that doctors did that were probably more harm than good.
That's another one I didn't know.
I'm never going to think about Lancet the same way.
Yeah.
And I just think about how much, you know, I read a recent history about the deaths of kings in England and what they all died from.
An appalling number of them probably died from their bad doctors doing things that they shouldn't have done.
All that fine, top-line medical treatment.
All that fine, top-line medical treatment.
And you know, one of the worst examples of harm that we have done has to do with puerperal fever.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but in the 1700s and 1800s, I mean, just how many women would die from childbirth because of infections that were given to them by doctors?
They're saying that in Europe, a woman had a 10-20% chance of dying, not from the childbirth, but from the infection that came afterwards.
Now, a great deal of harm was done, but I would agree with you that most things do get better with time without any medical intervention.
So, that little sugar pill Really, really does work.
Actually, it works so well that you'd think in double blind tests it would pass all the FDA requirements to kill, to cure whatever.
Placebos actually work pretty well.
I think I've seen a statistic that 30% of the time placebos seem to work.
Well then, why not, here's an idea for somebody to make a million dollars, why not actually produce, or do they, a real placebo that you could go to the pharmacy And a doctor could fill out a prescription form for us, send you to the pharmacy, you get your placebo, you go home and get cured.
Because the FDA decrees that a drug must be not only safe, but effective.
Well, wouldn't that fit in both categories?
Well, I don't think that they would... I mean, it's safe!
And effective!
It is safe, it is safe, and it's only 30% effective.
Well, but 30% effective, that's a better shot than you get with some things.
For some people, there are patients I really wish I did have a placebo tablet for, because nothing else would take care of them.
Yes, sir, I'm going to patent it.
The placebo pill.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Garrison.
Hello?
Hello.
Hi, Eric?
Yes.
How you doing?
Fine.
Dr. Garrison?
Yes, hi.
Hi.
I have a...
A story about my grandfather.
He's an old war veteran.
I got a call about my grandfather being in the hospital.
He was a little ill.
Oh, you're going to have to speak up.
Your grandfather was ill.
I'm sorry.
My grandfather was ill.
I got a call and my dad told me my grandfather was ill.
So we went to see him, and he seemed fine.
Later that evening, we found out later that he was pronounced dead on the scene.
He was then put in a body bag and brought down to the morgue, and on the way to the morgue, he just kicked back and I guess just came back.
And so they took him to the hospital.
That's right.
And then you got called.
Yeah.
And he came back, and you know what?
He was with us for seven years after that.
Oh my gosh.
It was just great.
We have no idea why he came back, but he just came back.
Came back.
You know, there are case after case after case.
I have a friend who was on the way to the morgue, and the orderly accidentally hit the side of the doorway with the gurney and he woke up.
So, it's rather disturbing, but sometimes the only way to know if somebody is actually
dead is to put an EKG on them and see if they have any electrical
activity in their heart.
You may not be able to hear that heart beating very well and you never know if
you're tired you may put the wrong end of the stethoscope down on the chest.
Well, one thing you know for sure is that the heart of the person who makes this discovery is good.
Yes, probably.
You're on the air, Coast to Coast AM, with Dr. Tess Garrison.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
Dr. Garrison?
Yes, hi.
And Mr. Bell?
Yes.
Okay, I have a quick comment and then a question.
There was a doctor, a doctor-scientist in France, and he was experimenting on a paraplegic.
His brain impulses would be sent to this computer box, and the computer box would send messages to his lower legs, and of course his legs would supposedly move.
But I saw that on a documentary on a cable channel.
But my question is, if a stealth pilot was to encircle the Earth for like 10 or 20 years, beyond the speed of sound, and of course being refueled every so many thousand miles, And he was to circle the Earth for 10 or 20 years.
Would he age, Doctor?
At the speed of light?
At the speed of sound.
I don't think that would be measurable in terms of the aging difference.
Yeah, not the speed of sound.
But nearing the speed of light, the answer would change very much.
Theoretically, it would change.
It would.
Okay.
I was just wondering.
Thank you.
All right.
You're very welcome.
Take care.
First time caller line, your turn with Dr. Garrison.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Hello.
Hi.
I'm calling from Pennsylvania.
I have a question for a doctor.
Okay.
Hi.
As an agnostic, as a believer of God, I have heard the different viewpoints of agnostics Yes.
I ask that question all the time and that's why I consider myself an agnostic and not an atheist.
And you know what would be the consequences of that?
Yes.
As an agnostic, and you asked yourself that, don't you have any fear of what if you're wrong?
I ask that question all the time and that's why I considered myself an agnostic and not an atheist.
I think I'm an open-minded person and I'm waiting to find out.
The consequences, if I'm wrong, I guess you have to believe in hell to worry about the consequences at that stage.
That's a good point.
You'd have to worry about hell.
But you do have an open mind, so if there is something on the other side suddenly, and awareness and consciousness continues... Yes, I'm willing to be open to the possibilities.
I also think, and maybe it's only my own version of God, My viewpoint of Christianity is that God is merciful, that He is willing to welcome anybody who has been a good person, who has done works of good, and whether or not they believe, I would think that they would be welcomed.
So it's a matter of how you view the Almighty, whether you believe they're merciful or whether you believe they're Heaven is closed to good people.
I wonder if there's any possibility, or what the social implications would be if science definitively answered the question of God one way or the other.
Either way would have drastic consequences.
It's this not knowing that keeps us where we are.
Well, you know what?
They've actually done some studies on atheists and agnostics to see Um, what kind of social people they are.
It turns out that they don't have any higher divorce rates.
Um, they don't commit any more crimes.
And certainly in college students, they found that they did not cheat anymore on tests.
So I think that ethical behavior is not necessarily wrapped up in, um, in Christianity or in religion.
It's, it's wrapped up in your, in your child, your parents telling you what's right or wrong.
Hmm.
And not an inherent sense?
Is there an inherent sense of right and wrong that goes beyond... Beyond religion.
I think it's something that, and maybe it has to do also with, think about it, evolution.
For us to get along with each other, for us to not be out there committing crimes and killing each other, we have to somehow develop a social sense that we are a community and that we have to do good to each other.
And that, it may actually be something about our survival.
Our survival as a species.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
Good morning.
Hi, this is Keith in Hamilton, Ontario.
I have a really weird question about useless body parts.
If you place your hand down on a table, fingernails up, you could lift each finger upwards except for the ring finger.
Why?
Is that a useless finger?
I could lift up my ring finger.
So can I. I was about to just say, where are you coming from?
What kind of weirdo are you, guy, that you can't lift your ring finger?
Mine goes up and down just fine.
Not as high as all the other four.
Wow.
I don't know.
I'm having no trouble at all.
It may be that you have, you know, there are some people who can roll their tongues and some people who can't.
Did you know that?
Yeah.
That there's a genetic component to whether you can roll your tongue into a tube.
And, um, maybe you have one of these weird genetic components where you just can't lift up your ring.
Yes, and maybe you're the unusual one, sir.
Maybe.
All right.
Or maybe your marriage is in trouble.
Oh, the ring's too heavy.
Thanks for the call.
Well, ease to the Rockies.
You're on the air with Dr. Gerritsen.
Hello.
About the appendix.
In primitive people, they used to eat a lot of fruit.
lot more uh... like uh...
the the from the the people much of
you know like that the pandics was uh...
for some reason i don't know it'd be filtered out needs to stop them
i read this and uh...
somebody's guests yet well it it might have had a bit some kind of a function for a
bit but the detective system because they're just sitting at
the end of the pickup you know
mom Right now, we're not really sure.
Again, I did mention that it may have something to do with the immune system.
We just don't know.
It definitely must have had a function in an ancestor of ours.
Where do you get ideas for the books you write?
I read weird stuff.
I'm one of these omnivorous people.
I read Science Magazine.
I love Science Magazine and Scientific American and Discovery and the National Enquirer.
So, really Art, what I do is I read something and if I get that punch in the gut that tells me, oh, this really bothers me, this is really scary, or this really raises the hair on the back of my neck, then I work at that to see if I can make it into a book.
How do you find life as a writer versus a doctor?
Well, I actually left medicine because I had two young kids and I just could not do it all.
I really feel kind of sorry for women who are forced to work and want to be home with their kids.
I wanted to be home with my kids.
So it was really them who determined it.
But now that I've been a writer for, I don't know how many years, and making a lot more money than I ever did as a doctor, it certainly made a lot of sense.
Well, listen, as always, I want to thank you for being here.
The hours just rush right by, and I hope everybody out there will rush right in, and by gravity, and then all your other books.
I've read them all, man.
Thank you very much, Art.
It's always been fun.
And I'm looking forward to your next, which, again, is due out when?
August 23rd.
Vanish.
I'll be looking for it.
Take care, Doctor.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Don't forget, tomorrow night, folks, the real Amityville Horror Story, the real one, with George Lutz, who really was there.
You want to hear something?
You're going to be here tomorrow night.
In the meantime, you all have a wonderful weekend.
And I'll see you on the next.
Crystal Gale is this young lady's name.
Midnight in the desert.
Is the name of the song.
Shooting stars across the sky.
Night all.
all.
Will the sun shine on you?
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