Art Bell from Manila explores 2007’s "five worst days" theory via Life Expectancy by Dean Kuntz, while callers share traumas—Jay’s 1995 jaywalking fatality guilt, Mike’s 1971 Alaska quake ham radio lifeline, and Christopher’s 1997 enlightenment after losing 11 loved ones. Julie recounts pesticide poisoning as a United Airlines flight attendant in Auckland (2006), her homelessness, and her Samoyed avalanche dog Kush regaining vision post-surgery. Scott highlights the missing 9/11 Saudi passport memorial, Chuck claims reverse speech mastery, and Bill credits Bell’s intuition for saving him from scalding coffee. Stories reveal how childhood words, synchronicities, and near-death experiences shape lives, hinting at deeper consciousness connections or unresolved warnings. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, 7,107 islands.
That's a lot of islands, not all of them occupied.
Manila.
Hey there, everybody.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
Friday night, Saturday morning edition.
I'm filling in for George Norrie, who has a well-deserved day off this day.
He doesn't take very many days off, that's for sure.
So I get a three-day weekend, three days with all of you.
And it's going to be an interesting, it's going to be a very interesting night.
The webcam photograph, oh, late-breaking news first.
Earthquake, Attaman Islands, India region, not a good place.
Attaman Islands, 6.1.
No word.
That just happened.
No word on any tsunami alerts or anything like that.
But I see the Philippines and all over Southeast Asia.
We are alive with activity in the ground.
A lot of earthquakes.
One here in the Philippines as well.
The web camera photograph this night, you can see by going to coasttocoastam.com, and I think they will have Arts webcam on tonight, is of Dolly.
Our newest acquisition, this little noisemaker, you may well hear her tonight.
What's happened is that Dolly, Dolly and Abby have fallen in love.
Now, I don't say this lightly.
We think they're lovers, not in the biblical sense because she's only five months, but in every other sense, they are inseparable.
When we took Dolly to get shots, Abby went berserk.
And likewise, if Abby is not to be seen, even in another room, Dolly will begin crying to the point where you think she's had a knife that's just gone through some part of her body.
And Abby will immediately become alert and go running to Dolly like, what's wrong, little girl?
So that's Dolly.
Those little marks on her nose are play wounds.
Some of them are from before we got her.
She is a Philippine cat.
She is a Filipina.
And so they are war wounds, some of them.
And some of them have been acquired here in the act of play.
Not fighting, but play.
It is Christmas.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
Christmas here in the Philippines, in Southeast Asia, is incredible.
And I mean incredible.
87% of the population here in the Philippines is, of course, Catholic.
And so you cannot possibly, you cannot possibly imagine what it is like here.
We went to a mall yesterday.
Big mistake.
When I say there were thousands upon thousands upon thousands, there was not elbow room.
This is a big mall.
We have big, big malls here, bigger than the U.S. Maybe there's one, I think, up in the upper Midwest that might, for example, exceed the size of what we call the Mall of Asia here.
But the Mall of Asia is, I think, the second largest in all of Asia, and it is monstrous.
And oh, baby, let me tell you, there is not elbow room.
Filipinos are out in the millions, millions, shopping, last minute Christmas shopping.
It is berserko here.
Fireworks every night leading up to a crescendo at the new year.
It's just amazing, absolutely amazing what's going on out there.
Christmas here is what it is like in the U.S. Times, about 10.
It's just unbelievable.
Everything is decorated.
All the buildings, the giant skyscrapers in Makati are all decorated.
The full buildings are decorated.
It's a doggaunt of sight you ever saw in your whole life.
Now, this is, of course, the end of the year, and it is traditionally a time when we on Coast to Coast Dam reflect, and we will reflect next week in doing the predictions for 2007 and reviewing the psychic knowings of you all for the previous year, about 2006.
Always kind of fun to do.
But we might reflect in a different kind of way this night.
I recently, you know, I'm an avid reader.
I read and I read and I read.
And recently, I read a book by my friend Dean Kuntz called Life Expectancy.
I wonder how many of you have ever read this book.
It's really interesting.
By the way, in case you didn't know, open lines all night long tonight.
Open lines.
Life Expectancy is about this man named Talk.
Let me read you what it says on the back of the book.
Life expectancy.
Before he died on a storm-wracked night, Jimmy Talk's grandfather predicted there would be five very dark days in his grandson's life.
Five dates whose terrible events Jimmy must prepare himself to face.
The first is to occur in his 20th year, the last in his 30th.
What terrifying events await Jimmy on these five critical days?
What challenges must he survive?
The path he follows will defy every expectation and will take all the love, humor, and courage he possesses for.
Who Jimmy Talk is and what he must accomplish on the five days his world turns is a mystery both dangerous and wondrous.
It is an amazing book.
If you get a chance to pick up life expectancy, Dean Kuntz, of course, I had on the errand interviewed.
He's really a cool guy.
He's my kind of guy.
He writes my kind of book.
And since this is sort of a time of reflection, I thought we might open all lines tonight.
Any line.
I don't care.
I won't make it a special line.
We'll make it a special topic.
And if you can get through on any of the lines, fair enough.
What have been the best and the absolute worst days of your entire life?
Do a little reflection on that.
Again, what have been the best and the worst, the horrendous days, the day when you just can't believe you're alive.
Or if it gets any worse, you won't be.
That kind of day.
And then, of course, the most joyous day, the most wonderful day of your life.
That book made me think that would make a pretty good topic for open lines.
Let us review the state of the world.
Never good.
But I guess we're required to do so.
In Baghdad, insurgents attacked five more American troops west of the Iraqi capital, according to the military, on Friday, making December the second deadliest month for U.S. servicemen in 2006.
So far this month, 76 Americans have died in Iraq, same number that were killed in all of April.
With nine days remaining in December, the monthly total of U.S. deaths could meet or exceed the death toll of 105 in October.
The district attorney dropped rape charges Friday against three Duke University lacrosse players after the stripper who accused them changed her story yet again.
But the men still face kidnapping and sex charges that could bring more than 30 years in the pokey.
What a mess in Colorado, huh?
Denver?
Snowed in airport reopened Friday for the first time in two days.
But the backlog of flights around the country could take all weekend to clear.
Many of the nearly 5,000 holiday travelers stranded might not make it home for Christmas.
As planes finally began taking off again, passengers with long-standing reservations filled most of the outbound flights.
Bad news it was for those waiting to rebook flights canceled during the storm.
Space Shuttle Discovery and its seven astronauts returned safely to Earth on Friday after a bit of last-minute suspense over which landing site to use, closing out a year in which NASA finally got construction of the International Space Station back on track.
Its arrival announced by its signature twin sonic booms.
With eight Marines charged in connection with the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians, the Marine Corps sent a clear message to its officers they're going to be held accountable for the actions of their subordinates.
In the biggest U.S. criminal case involving civilian deaths to come out of the Iraq War so far, four of the Marines, all enlisted, were charged Thursday with unpremeditated murder.
Oh, Kansas Attorney General, a vocal abortion opponent, charged a well-known abortion provider with illegally performing late-term abortions, but a Sedgwick County judge on Friday threw out the charges after less than a day.
Judge Paul W. Clark dismissed the charges against Dr. George Chiller at the request of Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Folston, who said her office had not been consulted by Attorney General Phil Klein.
And here is a cute little Christmas story for you.
A couple accused of forcing some of their 11 adopted special needs children to sleep in wood and wire cages, oh my God, were convicted Friday good of endangerment and abuse.
Cheryl Gravelle and her husband Michael showed no reaction in the courtroom as the guilty verdicts were read.
The jury convicted four felony counts of child endangering, seven misdemeanor counts, each acquitted of 13 charges, including four felony endangering charges.
My God.
Santa has lots going against him.
He really does, right?
Schoolyard rumors, well, that was always true.
Older brothers who think they know the deal and tattle to the younger ones, errant price tags, then, of course, the tell-all internet.
And so many made-in-China labels, it seems the North Pole has been outsourced to Asia.
Humburgers everywhere.
But no worries, it's a wonderful life for Santa, and he will survive for Christmas.
More of the world and your calls coming up in a moment.
Oh, my God.
I hope I'm going to be able to make it through this.
I just had a very interesting experience.
Because of the way I do the program, I don't use a traditional microphone.
I don't like them.
I use a microphone headset made by, everybody always asks me, made by the Bayer Company, which is German, and I've used that all my life.
That allows me to kind of move around, you know, and be mobile.
And that always keeps me the exact same distance from the microphone.
But because I use this, there's a microphone obviously always in front of my mouth.
And the only way I can drink coffee during the show, one of the last vices that I'm allowing myself is to have a cup with a top on it and a straw in the cup.
I just took a big swig of coffee and I fell on the floor.
Then I unscrewed the top of the coffee and looked in and saw that it was still bubbling, as in boiling.
So my tongue right now feels as though, actually, it doesn't feel much of anything.
It's kind of like leather.
So I hope I'll be all right.
My God, that was hot.
Usually I don't do that.
Usually I let the coffee just sit there until, you know, the second hour and then begin sipping it a little bit.
This time I screwed up.
Definitely screwed up.
Just one more item before we go to the phones.
The evidence is mounting.
If you're a ham radio operator, listen up.
Even if you're not, listen up.
If you're an Ed Dames fan or an Ed Dames hater, listen up.
Scientists predict big solar cycle.
Dateline, December 21st, 2006.
Boy, you really need your tongue to talk, huh?
Evidence is mounting.
The next solar cycle is going to be a big one.
Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011, looks as though it's going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began 400 years ago.
All this according to solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
He and a colleague presented this conclusion last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
Their forecast is based on historical records of geomagnetic storms.
Hathaway explains, when a gust of solar wind hits Earth's magnetic field, the impact causes the magnetic field to shake.
If it shakes hard enough, then we call it a geomagnetic storm in the extreme.
These storms cause power outages, make compass needles swing in the wrong direction.
Auroras are the beautiful side effect.
Hathaway and Wilson looked at records of geomagnetic activity stretching back about 150 years and noticed something useful.
The amount of geomagnetic activity now tells us what the solar cycle is going to be like six to eight years in the future.
A picture is worth 1,000 words.
They have one there.
I wasn't able to get it up on the website in time for you.
They've got a new process.
They don't know why it works.
The underlying physics, they say, is a mystery, but it does work.
According to their analysis, the next solar maximum should peak around 2010 with a sunspot number of 160.
That's an average, plus or minus 25.
That would make it one of the strongest solar cycles of the past 50 years, which is to say, by the way, one of the strongest in all of recorded history.
Astronomers have been counting sunspots since the days of Galileo, watching solar activity rise and fall every 11 years, curiously.
Four of the five biggest cycles on record have come in the past 50 years.
Cycle 24 should fit right into that pattern, according to Hathaway.
These results are just the latest signs pointing to a big cycle 24.
Most compelling of all, believes Hathaway, is the work of Masumi Dikpati and colleagues at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
They have combined observations of the sun's great conveyor belt with a sophisticated computer model of the sun's inner dynamo, or dynamo, rather, to produce a physics-based prediction of the next solar cycle.
In short, it's going to be really, really intense.
Now, the reason that's good for ham operators is that means it's, well, I go back to when I was about 13 years old, would have been about 1958.
There was no single sideband yet, which is in advance of those years since.
And people were on AM, kind of like AM radio, just like an AM radio station, far less power.
It was so cool that you were able to take 5 or 10 watts of inefficient AM, sorry guys, and talk to anybody anywhere in the world, just about any time of day or night.
It was so active, the bands that normally close at night didn't even close.
In other words, if she has aches, she has pains, and there's an electromagnetic pulsing giant flea in the wall, then you tear that sucker down, or you move, or you go to a motel, or you sell the house.
Don't forget these days, when you have electromagnetic pulsing fleas in the wall, you've got to advise the buyers of that situation.
Anyway, we're looking for those of you who would like to describe the very best and the very worst days of your entire life.
From Manila, the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
You know, it's interesting.
I actually, from about the middle of my tongue down to the tip, it's like it's not even there.
I can't even feel it.
I hope it is it.
Yeah, it's there.
But it's got a new coat on it or something.
Or I have new skin on the front part of my tongue.
All right, back with your, The very best and worst days of your life.
If you can only think of one, either the best or the worst, that's fine.
And all this comes as inspired by the Dean Kuntz book called Life Expectancy, which I heartily recommend.
So if you want to recite the best and worst days of your life, we are all ears.
This is fairly serious, a small peeling of my tongue.
It's actually in my finger here, on my finger.
It never fails.
It just absolutely never fails.
All right, by the way, I understand from my screener that a disproportionate number of people were calling with the worst days of their life.
Don't worry about that.
I think they were at the beginning being rejected because, well, they didn't want a gloom fest.
But I specialize in gloom fests, so if all you've got is a worst day of your life, hey, no problem.
We'll take it.
That's really what the book was about.
It wasn't about good days.
It was about bad days.
I mean, it was amazing.
Jimmy Talk, I don't want to give away the whole book, and I won't, but Jimmy Talk, who was born on the very day that his grandfather died, his grandfather sat up sort of in the last gasp of his life and demanded that five days be written down, five horrible days that were going to occur in Jimmy Talk's life.
And without giving away any of the book, they were really, really, really horrible days.
And then she always talked about, you know, in your 1999, when he goes into 2000, she wanted to get married on that special date, right?
So I always thought about that in my mind.
I'm watching TV, you know, and it's a year later, and I'm watching TV.
And I see this wedding, people just got, a horrible tragedy happened on TV where two people just got married, and they're newlyweds.
They're on the beach, and his wife walks away near to a mountain, and in a landslide buries his new wife.
And the first thing I thought, and the first thing that came into my mind, I'm thinking, oh my God, that's something that would happen to her because she used to always tell me how she wanted to be buried.
And he said, where does this thing?
She goes, I want to be cremated.
Okay.
I go, why are you talking about this?
You're insane.
I'm seven years older than you.
Stop talking about this.
It's creepy.
And then at that point, I swear, I'm not kidding, since then, that was 99, and I stopped watching TV.
I haven't watched TV since.
I don't own this television.
That's why I'm listening to your show all the time.
And so time went by, and God, a few months go by, and I'm walking.
And the worst day in my life probably would be when I was doing security at Military Contractor in Canada, and a fellow security officer invited me out to go drinking in Toronto one night.
And I got loaded at a nightclub.
He drove me to a red light district and flashed a badge.
He said he works for the National Security Agency.
HIV and AIDS, you know, it could take years to come on.
I know.
But I can understand.
Wait a minute.
Back up a little bit.
Why would you buy his story and not only pick up the prostitute, but then go ahead and have sex with her?
unidentified
Why?
I was kind of being belittled by my brothers.
They're calling me names and stuff, and I was being pressured to lose my virginity and stuff.
And I was starting to, you know, it was kind of sad.
But, you know, anyway, the whole point is like three months later, I had the sensitivity to sunlight, hot chills, cold chills, sleep deprivation, rapid weight loss, all these symptoms.
I decided to end my life, and I drove my Volkswagen Jetta into a concrete barrier on the highway 401 and DVP, rolled over several times, and I survived that accident with just a lap bruise on my lap.
And a week later, I decided to go out to buy some booze to calm my nerves down.
It was raining, and a tractor trailer mounted the curb on the sidewalk.
And I turned around, I heard a honking horn.
I turned around, I see this tractor trailer barreling down on me.
And I just had enough time to throw the umbrella in the air and dive for cover behind the bus shelter.
I thought maybe God's trying to kill me or something or teach me a lesson.
But anyway, to make a long story short, basically I got the new test results as negative, obviously.
But the best thing is that before you move on, wouldn't it, I mean, why was it not prudent before you attempted suicide, thought you had HIV AIDS, and then almost got killed, to take the test first?
And then if it came back positive, then I could understand perhaps your actions.
unidentified
Yeah, the doctor told me to wait three months for the antibodies to develop, but all of a sudden I came down with symptoms before that.
And I don't know if in scientific terms, scientists were saying that there's what they call ARC, AIDS-related complex, that was happening that they're studying back then.
But that's been thrown out the window since.
They say it doesn't exist.
But anyway, I tested negative and stuff like that.
But I came down with weird symptoms.
I was almost demonic in nature.
I started looking a bit like an alien with dark patches underneath my eyes.
And two years later, when I was working security at another location on Mount Sinai, basically I was praying in the basement of my family's house and I felt my spirit, I don't know if it was abducted or what,
but I felt my spirit leave my body as traveling through the solar system and I saw a bright light and it was just a hand pointing down with a finger and I heard laughter and it's almost at that point that everything was revealed to me in terms of what's going to happen in the latter days and stuff and a couple of days later, I think one or two days later, I was in the basement watching TV and all of a sudden I started communicating telepathically with the TV and I was just laughing.
All right, well, that kind of thing didn't happen.
It's not common, but there can be a sudden release of endorphins in your brain or something else that gives you that kind of an experience.
Now, the AIDS thing is interesting.
If you go back to the mid-80s, I was, of course, on the radio.
And I had every AIDS expert in the world, just about, other than Dr. Fauci, I suppose.
I don't think I ever had him.
Otherwise, I had all of these AIDS experts on.
And even I began to worry that, oh, my God, I might have AIDS.
Every little tiny mark on my body, every little anomaly of one sort or another.
And I did so many shows on AIDS that it just scared the hell out of me.
And I began to think over the sexual experiences of my lifetime.
And for a while there, I too thought, boy, I hope I don't have it.
I mean, they were talking about 10, maybe 10, 12, 13 years before you would begin to come down with the symptoms.
It was a frightening time, a truly, truly frightening time.
And you think back.
And you think really hard about the experiences you had.
And, of course, AIDS is, though not as scary as it once was, we thought that a good part of the world would die.
And actually, of course, that is happening.
In sub-Saharan Africa, a high percentage are dying.
Here in the West, we have come up with drugs that extend the average life expectancy, to use that phrase of an AIDS patient quite considerably and may eventually come up with some sort of cure.
Though, I was told in many interviews that when we come up with an AIDS cure, it will be the very same day that we are able to give you an injection and change the color of your eyes.
In other words, the AIDS virus is that complicated, that given to mutation, kind of like the cold virus, which is very complex.
It's a scary disease, and we're going to continue to get scarier and scarier diseases as time comes on.
You know, that's hard to say.
Scarier and scarier.
When you're missing a small portion of your tongue, scarier is hard to say.
In all the years that I've been broadcasting, I must admit, I've had some pretty strange things occur to me.
There was all the years ago that glue.
Why at the beginning of the show?
Well, that's when the coffee was hot, I suppose.
That's why it occurred.
But believe me when I tell you, I looked down in that cup and it was boiling.
Well, it had just come out of the...
Another piece of my tongue.
I'm Art Bell.
We'll be back in a moment.
Talking about the best, and, well, it looks like we're getting a lot more of the worst days of your life, inspired by a book, actually, by Dean Kuntz called Life Expectancy.
Really a cool book.
And so I thought it'd make a good topic.
The absolute worst day of your life.
And if you wish, the best day of your life as well.
Otherwise, we're just sort of cruising along with open lines, which really means anything you want to talk about at all is absolutely fair game.
I think I have a Chia tongue, like little things growing on it.
Anyway, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever it may be, wherever you are, after finding out we're carried on Armed Forces Radio, along with everything else, and for that matter, on shortwave.
And of course, the Internet.
We are completely worldwide, so we're liable to hear from anybody anywhere.
Well, listen, I wanted to call because I have an item that I thought maybe your listeners might be interested in.
It's called the Universal Language Decoder.
And I mailed you an email.
I know you're busy, probably didn't have time to go through all your emails, but I thought this would be something that you would definitely be interested in.
And basically what it is, is it's a little decoder that allows you to take it and decode every language in the world.
No, no, basically, it teaches you how to, for example, take a spoken foreign language and be able to understand it in your own language using a little decoder.
It's just a little ABC decoder.
Basically, it demonstrates that there is no such thing as a foreign language.
Essentially, what it is, is it's like the Tower of Babel, where God disassembled the entire language and took one language and put it into separate languages.
At some point in time, the language evolves back around to where it comes back together, and there is this realization that it really isn't foreign at all.
For example, you could take words that didn't exist in our conversation 20 years ago, like email or internet or cyber, that we wouldn't have recognized.
And these are incorporated into these languages.
So at a certain point in time, the language evolves back so that you realize that the language is entirely universal.
No, no, basically what it does is you go to the website, it plays a foreign song for you, and then it decodes it and demonstrates to you that the language is universal.
In other words, all of the words are in English.
They're all words you can understand.
But they're slightly morphed together.
So it trains you how it disassembles it back for you and trains you how to understand how it deconstructs so that you can see that it basically is all in English.
So basically when you go to this website, it says click here and it brings up the media player and starts to play an Italian song and then shows you the printed, decoded version.
All right, something we probably don't want to think about very much, but we are all one way or the other terminal.
Unless, of course, science comes up with some way to extend our lives.
And by the way, I understand they're getting very close to that.
Now, I wonder how many of you actually would want to live virtually forever.
If science suddenly, in our lifetime, a distinct possibility, came up with a way to extend our lives virtually forever, would you partake of it?
I am not sure that I would, although when that moment comes, well, who knows?
I had a similar day.
I was a member of the United States Air Force, and I had a big, the gal I was with at the time found a very large lump on my back, on my shoulder blade.
And I was a medic in the Air Force, and I worked in a hospital, a surgical technician.
And so I went in, you know, I knew all the doctors.
We were all friends.
Doctors in the Air Force are not like their captains, and they're not like regular officers.
You know, they're not all about I'm a captain, you're an airman first class, salute and respect me.
They're not like that.
Doctors, in fact, a lot of them, if you remember the movie MASH, it's kind of like that.
They don't wear standard uniforms.
They don't really consider themselves all that much of the armed services.
They're doctors.
And so this doctor and I had been friends.
And I went to his office and he said, oh, my God, that's pretty big.
We're going to have to do something about that.
And scheduled me for surgery.
And the surgery itself was interesting.
I was on the operating table, not as he had predicted for me.
He said, well, you know, just lie down, give you a little local, and we'll pop that sucker out.
Well, it didn't quite work out that way.
I was on the operating table, I think, five hours, and there were five or six doctors by the time it was all done.
I was actually awake during the whole process.
They got deep down in my chest where I could feel them going clip, clip, clip, clip.
I could actually feel the cuts.
They couldn't give me a general anesthetic after they had begun, they said.
And at any rate, they took out this, what turned out to be a benign tumor.
Thank you very much.
But they sent it to Lackland Air Force Base.
I was at Amarillo at the time.
And they sent it to Lackland, and the report came back.
Doctor took me to his office, sat me down, and said, you've got about six months.
That was a bad day.
Not the worst, mind you, but a very, very bad day.
And then he watched my reaction and then began laughing.
Started laughing so hard, he damn near fell on the floor and said, no, you're fine.
It's benign.
But my entire day was, as you can imagine, ruined.
There's nothing like getting the message that you've got about six months.
Yikes.
All right, let's go to the first time caller line.
This is about my best and worst day, all within the same 24-hour period.
You too.
Anyway, I was moving from Vegas to Phoenix, and I decided to take the scenic route, Route 66, and decided to stop in Flag, fill up my gas tank, and then go down South 886.
Put your hands on the steering wheel and put your feet on the brakes and slow down.
It didn't help, not at all.
But I started going down the hill faster.
I'm getting really, really scared.
And then the voice...
No, no, you'll hear why in a little bit.
So anyway, I'm kicking off speed and I'm like, oh my God, what is going on?
And then this voice says, put your foot on the brake, grab the steering wheel, and turn sharply to the right.
And I'm thinking, I don't think I can do that.
This car is going too fast.
But I tried it and it didn't work.
And by then, I'm going now even faster and I don't have hardly any control.
And this voice says this.
You got one more time.
No, really, it says this.
The voice says, you got one more time.
And so I took all the strength that I had, put both my hands on the steering wheel as hard as I could, took my foot on the brakes, and just swung it sharply to the right.
I fishtailed into this small sandy hill, the back of my car, this long boat of a car, hit the side.
Dust was everywhere.
It was surrealistic.
You know, all this dust was everywhere.
And I guess I got a little dazed.
So I looked up.
I had been leaning on the steering wheel.
Big semi-truck was behind me.
The guy parked, jumps out, says, are you okay with this?
I'm like, oh, no, I just remembered.
I saw the tank up with gas.
So I go to jump out and I'm dizzy.
He says, oh, whoa.
Take it easy.
This other guy coming from the opposite direction is a small pickup.
Not pickup, but one of those tow trucks, but you know, a small one.
He trolls over and stops and he comes over.
He says, oh, they don't make cars like this anymore.
You don't have anything wrong.
Oh, I take that back.
They said, lady, are you okay?
We want you to come and see this.
I go to the back that they're telling me, my rear tires are spinning air.
So anyway, the tow truck driver says, we're going to get you out.
And my truck was pretty much as big as his tow truck.
And I didn't think he would do it.
But they managed to get me off and back up on the road.
And the truck driver, who was really nice, I never got his name or anything, he says, don't worry, lady.
I'm going to follow you all the way down.
You know, we get to Sedana.
I got to go in my direction.
But I'm going to make sure that you get down okay.
So anyway, we start off, and then he flags me to stop.
So I stop.
He says, park the car.
I want you to see this.
So the kill truck drivers had been directing the traffic, so everybody was going around us.
So I parked the car, and I get out.
All behind me, you could see where I had tried to stop.
He says, there's your problem.
You went through this oil thing where they had been doing construction on the highway and flag.
You imagine I've always had that fear of like hitting my brakes, going down a steep, you know, like a 10 or 11% grade in a big vehicle, and having it go right to the floorboard, no braking at all.
Indeed, here I am.
Hi, everybody.
We're doing the best and worst days of your life, inspired by a book called Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz.
Indeed, if you have only a worst day of your life, that's just fine, because really, that's what the book was all about.
I thought, you know, in the spirit of Christmas, I would have the best days as well.
Now, while my tongue is peeling away here, I see somebody who has some help possibly for me on the tongue situation.
So if what I'm saying doesn't sound quite right, you'd be surprised how much you actually need your tongue to be articulate, to correctly form words and all the rest of it.
Now, if you're still in the desert and you have any aloe plants inside or outside the house, and you can take a clipping off the end of it if you already don't have some in the house.
They should have an aloe plant very similar to ours up here.
But there's several cactus with the same kind of lipopolysaccharides or whatever they are inside there.
But if you can talk to somebody that has any knowledge of the plants close by there, or if you have an aloe plant or can get into a store, I don't know what time it is, where they'll have aloe vera juice, any kind of aloe, pure aloe product without alcohol, without any preservatives, you need to get that in your mouth.
You need to rinse with it in your mouth and then take a stone, a stone, clean it really well, cool it off in the refrigerator, and especially if you have a round, small crystal, and that will take the heat right out of your mouth.
And then you dip it in cool water again, and just keep that process, and it will take all the heat out.
But the worst thing I'm concerned about is that you've got these blisters and your skin is coming off.
And if I had more, if I was a braver person and knew more about what I was doing, I'd say, let me take over and host your show tonight.
But the only thing I could talk about would be your show about last night because you've had so many other people investigating the Mayans and so many over the years.
I've gone back at least 12, 13 years with you, it seems, before Madman Markham and all those people.
You really should have noted changes, although this may be immediately when he came back, so I guess you would just think it was part of the changed perspective.
unidentified
That's what I thought it was.
That's what I thought.
But it was very sad.
A certain kind of depression came over me, lasted for about eight years, where everything just turned dark, like my whole soul was dark.
Now, I want to tell you about the best day of my life.
I was a child performer at 12 years old.
My first job was with Jerry Lewis.
I started at the Sams Hotel in Las Vegas, recorded for RCA Victor.
I was a child performer.
I had extremely possessive and parents that were, how can I say, they were stage parents.
And after Jeffrey killed himself, they wanted me to go back to sing.
I got married to get out of the house was one of the things.
But after that, my father would say she's lost her soul and all of these things and say, you're absolutely nothing.
They wanted me to go back and sing.
And I couldn't do anything like that.
I could hardly get up.
And he said, you'll never be anything unless you sing.
Okay.
Well, this lasted for quite a while, even as a young child, so emotionally abusive he was.
Anyway, I was working for him in his store, and I drove to work one day, and every day in front of everybody, he would put me down.
I obviously had lost my sense of self because of all the, I don't know, the bad, bad things they would say to me.
Anyway, I went to work.
My father again started telling me terrible things, embarrassing me in front of everyone.
And right at that point, I said, this is it.
I said, I quit, and I said everything I wanted to say to him, that I needed to say, that I did deserve and I was good.
And I walked out of the store.
I drove home.
I came home so angry and I was breaking dishes, but I was telling myself all the good things.
I love you.
Nobody's going to ever treat you like this.
I mean, I broke my whole set of dishes.
But then, about a half an hour later, a feeling came over my body.
It was like a heat, like an energy that started through my whole body, especially through my heart.
It came out.
It was like warm and wonderful.
And it lasted for about three days.
And people were drawn to me, children.
And I'm telling you, I have looked for this feeling, and it went away just the way it came, but it lasted for three days.
It's a pleasure to speak with you after so long listening to you.
And before I get to my subject, I wanted to talk about my days back in the Air Force.
I was in the Air Force probably a little bit after you.
I just heard you say you were 61.
I'm 56.
So we're pretty close in age.
But I wanted to say one thing because I was listening to you talk about radio and how you really love radio.
And I know you're a ham operator and you really get into that sort of thing.
And I just wanted to say that back when I was stationed in Alaska in 1971 and they had the big earthquake in Sylmar in 1971.
And that's where I was born and raised.
My whole family was there.
And I couldn't get a hold of anybody by phone.
But we did have a ham operator on the base.
And he got through to some people close by.
And they told me, don't worry, it's not as bad as the news is saying.
You know, your family's probably okay.
But the ham operators were so cool to help me get through to my family.
It was just amazing to me.
And I wanted to throw that at you and let you know that some of us who aren't that into ham radios, we appreciate the service that some of you people provide sometimes.
There have been some very big changes in ham radio in just the last couple of weeks, literally.
The CW or Morse code requirement has been dropped to the dismay of many and the pleasure of others.
So you no longer have to take a code test to become a ham operator, though you still have to take a technical test.
In addition to that, the phone bands, or the voice bands, as it were, have been expanded, giving us more room.
Now, that said, the internet has surely hurt ham radio.
However, don't let that affect your desire to move into the hobby because in all the world, there is nothing like, nothing like ham radio.
It is the most amazing, magical hobby you can imagine in the world.
It's not carried on wires.
It's not a phone system.
The signal that you send out on the HF bands is reflected by the ionosphere many times all the way around the world.
And there is still a distinct magic associated with sending a signal that travels through the air, virtually around the world, never knowing who you're going to talk to.
And I can assure you of this, kind of echoing what he said, that when the very Worst happens, typhoons, hurricanes, you know, the natural disasters that inevitably occur again and again, ham radio will get through when nothing else will.
When the internet has gone down, and oh, it goes down, all right, and cell phones no longer work, and telephone lines no longer work, and all other means of communication are absolutely gone or ineffective, amateur radio or ham radio will continue to be the mode that gets the word out, that saves lives.
So the hobby end of it aside, don't let the modern-day internet and all that's going on dissuade you from looking into ham radio.
Ham radio is what led me into broadcasting.
Ham radio, I have to thank for many of the jobs that I got.
It is a fraternity that is unlike many others in the world.
I worked third shift, and I got home from work on Friday night or well, I guess it would have been Saturday morning and went to bed and had the weirdest dream that my ex, well, I consider my soulmate, we were working on getting back together at the time, and I knew that he had cancer.
From Manila in the Philippines, during Christmas, which is really quite an affair here, I'm Art Bell.
Indeed, Ed in Laredo, Texas, fast blast me, that, hey, Art, ham radio is also responsible for your being married today, isn't it?
At least the Brotherhood of Ham operators.
No, that's absolutely correct.
Some weeks after my beloved Ramona passed, Carl, Carl Richardson, my brother-in-law, contacted his fiancé here in the Philippines and said, hey, why don't you have your sister get hold of art?
And that is indeed how it happened.
And of course, the early messages that I got from Aaron were, you know, very sorry your wife died and so forth and so on.
But here I was getting in my private email these incredible messages from a young Filipino gal on the other side of the world.
And I could not understand where these messages were coming from and didn't have the common sense to ask for a couple of weeks.
And finally, I did ask, and it turned out, of course, that it was Carl Richardson, who is a ham, who I knew as a ham operator, who had asked his fiancée to have his sister write to me.
So that's how it all happened.
So that is correct, Ed, in Laredo.
That's exactly how it happened.
And a lot of the jobs that I've had in my life, particularly, by the way, those in radio and cable TV, all came because of the fact that I was a ham operator.
Inevitably, you'll run into somebody in the technical trades, and that's how I began in radio, who's also a ham operator.
And we tend to give each other jobs and do each other favors.
I guess it's kind of like the typical old boy network, right?
So ham radio opened a lot of doors for me and has been a non-stop hobby all my life.
I think that there is more to us than just a short physical existence in this life.
And I guess that's a conclusion that I've come to after all the years of doing this program.
You simply can't do a show like this without beginning to form some conclusions based on mountains of evidence.
Now, not all of it reliable.
And yes, a lot of what you hear on this show is pure speculation or even in the category of BS.
But a lot of it isn't.
A lot of it is absolutely true from person after person after person, not just the guests, but the people that call this program.
So I have become convinced, not through any organized religion, not through any wise teaching or anything like that, but through the experience of doing this program over the years, that this physical existence that we lead is not all there is.
There is indeed something else.
And indeed, I believe that our consciousness goes on for whatever that's worth.
And that may not be too much to any of you that have not come to the same conclusion as Security Guard Mel, it is, in Flint, Michigan.
And it kind of puts an exclamation point on what I just said.
We are not just the physical beings that we are at the moment, those of you listening to me.
We are much more than that.
There's more to us than all of that.
And these are the stories that prove it.
And over the 20-plus years that I've been doing the national show right now, I've proven it to myself.
And I wonder how many of the rest of you who are long-term listeners could say the same thing.
Listening to this program, listening to the people call in with stories like that, and the voice that talked to this man and told him that he would be all right.
Individually, they might not mean much.
Collectively, they mean everything.
Okay, well, let's move to Jim in Lakewood, Ohio.
You're on the air, Jim.
unidentified
Yeah, hi, Arkdal.
Boy, I had a bad day 14 years ago.
I stupidly mixed alcohol with a Valium-type drug, and I fell asleep while driving, and I crashed my car into a house that was close to my home, and my entire car went inside the living room of the house through some French windows, and my car kept on trying to go.
It blew out the tires.
All four tires were blown out, and I was trying to, I didn't know this because I had a severe concussion, and so the amnesia kicked in and da-da-da.
But I was driving my car like I was still driving while I was in this guy's living room, and he had incredibly nice wood floors, I found out later, that I wrecked.
But I was driving, like in his house, I'm driving like I'm still driving on the street.
And smoke was coming, billowing out and everything.
And he had to come over and turn the keys off so that I wouldn't make any more smoke in the house.
And then because of the wheels burning and all the smoke and everything like that, the guy, he turned everything off, but it's really weird that a cop came later, and my car was so buried into this house that the drapes came down on my car.
The drapes came down where I went into the house.
And the cop that came later said, oh, they must have taken Jim's car to the tow yard or something.
I could go on, and I could do an entire show on the other side.
No, just this one.
On 1127, 1997, I was in the presence of the Infinite or God or whatever name you wish to put on it for seven hours.
It actually came on at the last quarter at 11.45 on the 26th and lasted seven hours into the morning of the 27th, which that year happened to be Thanksgiving.
And I had no idea what had happened to me.
I mean, first I thought I was dead, and I started making notes to people.
But ironically, even though I had lots of family in Los Angeles where I was, I would normally be eating Thanksgiving with one of them.
But for some odd reason, me being by myself and in the area that I was in, I ended up going to a smorgasbord.
And then there was a man sitting alone.
And I asked if I could share a Thanksgiving meal with him.
And he said, sure.
I sat down.
And of course, I'm spilling out about this experience that I had.
And it just so happened that he was a Tao priest.
And he had like, you know, he said, you've had an enlightenment experience, you know.
But I also wanted to mention that I think this show is one of the greatest opportunities or tools to help change.
And I do believe that we still have the opportunity of change.
And I also would like to request of the collective consciousness throughout the show that I be able to complete the task that the infinite God gave me shortly after the enlightenment experience.
And we don't do those mass experiments here on the area.
At least I don't anymore.
I've learned that we don't really know about the power of collective consciousness yet.
We don't know that mistakes cannot be made.
And so, as you know, I have an aversion to trying that unless the whole world appears about ready to end.
And then, yes, I would muster up all the collective consciousness we could have and try and do something because what's to lose at that point?
It is interesting, isn't it, these worst days that people have?
You have to wonder, could they be avoided?
Now, as I mentioned a little while ago, if you avoid one, if you stay home and then nothing happens, you're never going to know for sure that it would have been your worst day.
But I still would beseech you, if you think, if you wake up in the morning and you think that something is going to go horribly wrong during the day, and yes, you do get those feelings, even if you're about to board a plane and it feels horribly wrong, don't get on.
Listen to yourself.
We have some inborn, I think it comes frankly from our ancestors, some inborn sense of impending danger.
Now, the book by Dean Koontz, Life Expectancy.
Sorry, the tongue is not working.
Life Expectancy is definitely going to highlight this for you.
But we all have some inborn sense when something is really not right.
When something is going to go horribly wrong, you know it if you're listening to yourself.
It might be only a light feeling, but learn to pay attention to it and then learn to act on it.
I'm Art Bell.
Well, good morning, afternoon, or evening, whatever time of day it is, wherever you are.
Yes, of course, this is a time for reflection.
Christmas rapidly approaching.
And yes, we will do our yearly prediction shows toward the end of the year, next week.
And you might want to begin thinking about that right now because, well, because our predictions are important.
Now, I don't want you to just call up and sort of make an off-the-cuff, I think I'll get on the radio and just talk type prediction.
I want you to really think about it a little bit.
Think about what you believe is going to occur in the year 2007.
Give it a lot of deep thought.
You've got lots of time.
Begin now.
And so if you would, please use your best psychic sense, and we'll try and have the best.
We hit an awful lot of them this year kind of show we ever had.
We review the predictions that were done for 2006, and of course do predictions for 2007.
This is a yearly event now that's been going on, annual event that's been going on, gee, I think, for the last 10 or 15 years at least.
I never heard your show before, but I'm hearing it today, and I had to call him with my story.
Okay.
Back when I was 18 years old, I was friends with a news anchor who had relocated to Presquele, Maine, which is, for those of you who don't know, the northern tip of Maine.
I was in Boston, Massachusetts, seven hours away.
In my infinite knowledge, this is my worst day ever, by the way, I decide I'm going to go up there to visit her.
Now, she's back in Boston to visit her family for her birthday.
I decide, you know what, this Sunday, I'm going to come up and visit you, Marsha.
She's like, all right, sure.
So I pack my clothes.
I pack some music for the road because I'm going to be driving in the sticks and there's no radio on the styx.
I forget my clothes.
I forget my music.
So I start driving.
Pass through New Hampshire, pass through Maine, just south of Bangor.
And I see a sign for food.
I haven't eaten yet, so I'm like, all right, sure, go over there.
I'm driving an 89 Volkswagen Cabriolet.
Small car, convertible, definitely a girl car, but that was nice.
It was lovely.
I get my food, let the car rest for a couple minutes, get back on the road.
Now, when you scarf down food art, what's the first thing that comes to mind?
Get a little gassy.
So I got a little gassy on the road, and I felt I'm going 100 miles an hour, and it's a convertible, so no one will smell it.
It wasn't gas.
In the middle of nowhere.
Oh, my God.
This is only the tip of the iceberg.
So I get off at that.
It gets art.
It gets so much worse.
Okay, well, I don't know if I want to hear about how much that's as disgusting as it gets.
The rest is just hilarious.
I have to share this.
I have to lighten it up because there's a lot of sad stories.
I feel bad for these people, but I just, we need to make it funny here.
So I get off at the wrist area and I clean up.
I'm wearing white shorts shows completely.
It doesn't, yeah, I clean it up.
Get back on the road.
Now, I don't know.
I exit 40.
I see a sign for the size, you know, right eight or something like that.
I'm like, I'll get some Maine shorts or something.
They closed at like 4 p.m. on a Sunday because this is the sticks of Maine.
They're right back on the road.
I see a sign for Walmart.
Like, yes, they're always open.
I pull off.
The Walmart hadn't been built yet.
Art, I get back on that road.
I accelerate and I hear, Art, my transmission died on my car with stained shorts.
Now, it gets better because not only I don't have AAA, and she's 10 minutes behind me.
So, this girl I have the crush on has to pick me up with her AAA car to get my car back down to Portland.
And she had to see what had happened about an hour earlier.
Hey, my story, real quick, it has a lot to do with what you kept saying about, you know, just having an idea and having a feeling early in the day that, you know, something was going to go wrong.
I live in central Oklahoma, a town called El Reno, just west of Oklahoma City.
And as everyone well knows, tornadoes do go through Oklahoma frequently.
I drive a delivery route to Wichita, Kansas during the night, and I was due to drive that evening.
And I always paid close attention to the weather.
It was a beautiful clear day, and I saw that we were going to have some, anticipate some storms that evening.
So I was prepared with my rain gear and so on.
I had this feeling, Art, that I was going to see something that night.
It was a gut feeling so much that I went and I got my video camera.
I made sure the battery was charged.
I had a field camera.
Packed all that away.
As I'm eating dinner with my family, getting ready to leave, I leave about 7 in the evening.
And the storm rolled in, and it was pretty treacherous.
My wife is from Kansas City.
That's where she grew up, and it's not quite as used to the tornado activity as we are, the native Oklahomans, you know.
And I asked her as I was about to leave, I said, do you have a plan?
You know, if something were to transpire, what's your plan?
What are you going to do?
She said, well, I'm going to go get in the hall closet.
I said, no, not in Oklahoma, you don't go get in the hall closet.
I said, you go find what we call a freighty hole, which would be a storm cellar or a basement of some sort.
And she was kind of put out with me that I was trying to tell her that she needed to have a plan and looking at me like, you know, I know what to do.
And I said, no, you need to either go to my mom's, which is down the street.
I said, you know, the next door neighbor has a cellar.
You can get there.
I said, but you need to be prepared.
And she kind of blew me off.
I kiss my wife and kids goodbye and leave for the evening.
And I no sooner than get on the interstate.
And as I'm crossing over to get on the eastbound side of Interstate 40, I look back to my right and there are two funnel clouds dropping out of the sky within a quarter mile of my home.
Yeah, well, my wife and I, I'm sorry to say that we lived together for like maybe 14 years, and then after 10 years before that, I asked her to marry me.
And the fact that Ramona was taken from me there is just no answer for it.
And there are no words of consolation when you lose your mate.
Many people will try and provide words of consolation.
And the only ones that really have any meaning and are true are, number one, that the only thing that's going to help is time.
And number two, something that I did not pay attention to myself, and I just got lucky, are don't make any important decisions.
If you lose Somebody that close to you for that many years, don't make any important decisions right away.
And number two, the only thing, no words are going to help.
Everybody's going to say something.
And it's all going to be meaningless, except that time will help, and time will be the only thing that will help.
West of the Rockies in Tucson, Arizona.
You're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
This is Poppy in Tucson, Arizona.
I was a young widow, too, at 35, and I've never heard any more truer words than those.
But I wanted to tell you the best day of my life.
It happened when I was five years old.
I was born in Indiana, grew up in Indiana.
My grandparents, well, one set of them, had a house on a lake called Big Lake.
And me and my older sister were ice skating, and I fell through the ice.
And I, you know, in the wintertime, we were all bundled up, so it just, it was even worse because you can't move.
And my sister kept trying to grab me, and she was screaming, and the ice kept breaking under her feet, and she kept, you know, backing up and backing up on her ice case.
It made it very difficult.
And I remember going under and hearing voices saying, you're going to be all right.
You're going to be all right.
Which was really weird.
Yeah.
And I pretty much had almost given up and she grabbed me, grabbed a hold of my coat or something and dragged me all the way back to my grandparents' house, which, you know, when they ripped off my clothes and put me in cold water.
Listen to that feeling, that little naggy feeling that's trying to tell you that, hey, something's going to go wrong today.
Next time you have a feeling like that, listen to it, act upon it, and let me know what happens.
I'm Art Bell.
Good day, everybody.
It is approaching Christmas.
We're on the weekend slide toward Christmas, no doubt about it.
I'm Art Bell.
Here in the Philippines, Christmas is celebrated plus, plus, plus.
It is virtually everywhere.
Great to be with you.
Open lines, anything you want to talk about, of course, is fair game, but we're doing best and worst days of your life, inspired by the Dean Kuntz book called Life Expectancy, that I highly recommend to all of you out there.
In a moment, we continue.
Intuition, 101.
Listen to yourself.
You're telling yourself something very, very important.
All right, let's go here and say, Mark in California, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hey, Erd, it's been a long time getting a hold of you.
But because it had an important message at the end, just a few short words to a kid can hurt their life, harm them towards, move their life towards the better or worse.
And so my best and worst story, I won't highlight the worst one much.
You know, I killed someone accidentally, a kid.
I'm sorry.
And it's like the guy with the accident, you know, on the highway.
Right.
But I will highlight the best one because I think it's quite appropriate for what you're going to go through in the near future here, which is very good.
First of all, I should say I'm a Marine Corps Vietnam vet, and I'm kind of desensitized to any highs or lows in my life.
Like, you know, if you're in a traumatic situation, I was trained not to get emotional.
I have to think, what am I going to do next and make myself go do it?
So I don't feel the big highs and lows.
But the biggest best day of my whole life, which I never had until this day happened, was when my daughter was born.
And I had to fight back tears streaming down my cheeks.
I mean, I know it sounds sadly, but it's, you know, it's just true, the best day of my life.
I had to fight those tears back just because I didn't want it to hinder my vision.
You know, when her little fingers were grabbing my finger and different things going on, I'm trying to video this.
Well, a lot of the audience will, of course, not have experienced this, but I can tell you personally, having seen it, that the closest thing that most of us will ever see in our lives to a true miracle is birth.
If you actually get to see it, you will come away with the Feeling that you have just experienced a miracle.
And I guess, in a way, it is.
It's a regular thing.
People are born all the time.
It just happens every day, right?
But to see it happen, you truly will, if you can stand the experience of being there, you will truly come away with the feeling that you absolutely have experienced a miracle.
First time caller line, John in Florida.
Worst day, John.
unidentified
How you doing, Art?
How you doing tonight?
Fine.
I would say it was more like a worst morning, man.
I was up playing John Madden football late one night of all things.
It got about 2, 3 o'clock in the morning, and I usually go out and have a cigarette before I go to bed.
So I turned the TV off, and I went out to the porch, and I sat down and I fired up a cigarette.
And I heard this clip-clopping of horse and buggy.
Now, this is 3 o'clock in the morning, and I don't live anywhere near a farm.
I live on a pavement road.
You can hear the hoofs hitting the concrete down the road.
I'm like, what's going on?
So I get up, and I'm looking around.
My house is on like a corner, and I look around the corner, and here comes this horse and buggy around the corner with red lights on it.
They look like lanterns, but they're like burning red candles or something in them, flickering.
And I was astonished, you know.
I was like, this is crazy.
I'm sitting here, I watch him come by, and he gets out in front of my house, right in front of where I'm sitting on the porch, and it stops.
And this guy gets out, dressed all in black, and you couldn't really see his face because he had like a hat on.
It was pulled down, like one of them big cowboy hats, kind of like, I guess.
More like a top hat.
And he points at me, and I'm like, it freaked me out.
It was completely silent.
The whole neighborhood was dark.
Completely silent after he stopped.
And he points at me.
And nothing was said, but it freaked me out.
And I stood up and I was like, I looked back and there he is.
I ran into the house, man.
And I got in the house.
I got up on the couch and I kind of pulled the blind back to peek back out here, see what was going on, and he was gone.
Well, when I'm sitting in my living room at home, I'm getting your show on about five different stations, you know, from all different angles.
And I was just thinking one night, is it possible that with everybody that's asleep in their beds here in Mississippi getting this strong, strong signal, is it possible at all that somehow, subconsciously, the signal from your show could be going in somewhere into their body where they don't realize it?
And if possible, and like I said, this could be a really dumb question, but if possible, would there be possibly a way to somehow change the world with that technology?
Or has there ever been a study or anything like that?
And without burdening everybody again with the results and the testing we did years ago, I don't do it anymore.
There may be a way, Jeremy, to change the world with many minds or with broadcasting or some other way, some form of mass consciousness, but I'm not going to toy with that again until I have a very serious reason to do so or science comes to some sort of understanding about what this is all about.
It is, I think, one day going to be proven to be one of the most powerful forces in the world, perhaps greater than atomic energy.
Now, well, I'm going to make this short and sweet because I've been a 13-year listener.
And this is actually my, I'm a conspiracy theorist at heart.
But it's my first time call because I can actually tell you something from the other side that really, really happened.
Now, as a beloved one of yours, I've had asthma since I was five years old.
I've been 911 out of here many, many, many, many times.
Always came back, stabilized, come back, no problem.
For some reason, this time when I was 911 out, I knew I wasn't coming back.
In fact, my sister is a nurse.
She called the ER and they said, you better get the family out because we had to intubate her.
They bagged me from the ambulance to the emergency room.
And what you hear is true.
You can hear.
Your hearing is the last thing to go.
And let me tell you why.
Because in the ambulance, now, mind you, I had to spend three days with my family, piecing my life together when I got home from the hospital this time, because I remembered nothing but death, which I'm going to get to in a second.
But I remember the ambulance driver saying, code blue, ETA, 10 minutes, or say 5 minutes, to be on the safe side.
They intubated me and put me on the respirator when I got to the emergency room.
And right to CCU, I went.
Okay?
Now, all I can remember is, this is not nice, but I always, in my 23 years in the healthcare profession, wanted to know if I could ever meet anyone that had been to the other side and can honestly come back and tell me truly, earnestly, and honestly what really happened.
Well, now I don't have to anymore because it happened to me.
And Art, death is a miracle itself.
You were talking to the other gentleman before about birth being a miracle.
Death is also a miracle because it's not scary at all.
It can be.
Now, let me tell you why I say it can be.
Because what happened to me was, you've heard of people going to the light, correct?
As I said a little bit earlier, and it's one of the things that I have personally derived from this program.
And doing these 20 years or so and listening to story after story after story, and these are not things that people are making up.
There is life after death.
There is an existence after death.
And I also believe that most times when people think that you're unconscious or dead, you have no life signs at all.
You're not breathing.
You have no respiration.
You have no heartbeat.
You have no blood pressure.
But for some reason, inevitably, you're always continuing to hear what's going on around you, which is kind of strange.
Can you imagine being conscious, unable to move, and listening to actually listening to people talk about your death, the fact that you're code blue, you're whatever it is, you're gone.
Sorry, we've lost him or her.
You're gone.
Can you imagine hearing that?
I believe that's true.
I took out another interesting book that I'll tell you about shortly.
West of the Rockies, Jem in Emeryville, California, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Hi.
Well, last Sunday I had a real crummy day.
But before I tell you, what happened to you last Sunday?
I actually was up the entire night the previous night for reasons that I won't discuss right now.
unidentified
Okay.
Well, I'm glad you're feeling better, except for your tongue.
Well, anyway, I'm disabled, and I ride this little disabled scooter.
It's about one and a quarter horsepower.
It goes about four or five miles an hour.
And every year they close the avenue up by the Berkeley University by Berkeley, and they have a street fair.
So instead of staying home feeling sorry for myself, every year I go up there and I look at all the arts and crafts and it cheers me up.
So I went up last Saturday, it started on Saturday, and I'd been there a couple hours and I was going along the sidewalk and I come upon these two police officers, these ladies, police officers, yelling at these little teenage boys.
You know, they'd been stealing stuff and I heard like, don't show your face around here and I won't take you in this time, you know.
So they let them go and for a while the boys were in back of me, kind of rowdy, and then they ran past me and around the corner.
I didn't think anything of it and it was getting late so I started home.
All the way home I keep hearing this clink clink and I have this kind of bicycle basket on the back of my seat and I think oh they probably threw their darn soda bottles back there you know.
So I get home and I look and it's this beautiful blown glass vase that they obviously ripped off and then stashed in the back of my seat when the cops were coming.
So I thought, oh man, you know, it was several miles away.
I thought, but wouldn't it be a wonderful Christmas gift to this vendor to show up tomorrow and, you know, and give it to them and just see the joy in their eyes that they thought this thing was gone forever.
And I thought, instead of staying home feeling sorry for myself, I'll do this good deed.
Well, I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach, just like you said, but I completely ignored it because I was all swept up with the joy of the season.
But unbeknownst to me, I had been seen with the vase in the back by some of the vendor's friends as I was leaving, and they didn't yet know that it was stolen.
Then I guess they found out.
So they were kind of lying in wait.
And I was all happy.
I lovingly wrapped it up in bubble wrap and put it back there.
And I was looking for the vendor.
All of a sudden, they surround me, him and his friends, and start yelling at me and grabbed it from the basket.
Where did you get this?
You know, we know who you are.
You stole the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so I tried to explain to them what happened, you know.
And the guy finally believed me, and he kind of stalked off with a barely grunted thank you.
And I go about a block later and I think, well, I can salvage the day.
It can still be good.
You know, I'll buy myself a trinket or something.
And then another one of his friends that didn't know what had just transpired comes marching up to me real aggressive and starts accusing me again.
Well, this time I start breaking down sobbing, you know, totally embarrassing myself.
I couldn't stop crying.
I don't know if you've ever cried so hard you can't stop and you're in front of like a whole crowd of people.
And I just sort of yelled out, I'll never do a good dude again.
Well, it's also a case point in trying to, you know, she said she had that feeling first.
So this program is a definite object lesson in trying to listen to yourself.
Try and develop this little talent to just listen to yourself.
You get the message.
Most of us ignore it.
Sort of push it to the back of our brain.
Sometimes it doesn't even rise to conscious realization.
You have to work at it to let that happen.
Let's go to Bradley in California.
You're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
I've been a religious listener for, I guess, close to a year now when a friend introduced me to your program, and I listen every night whether I'm awake or asleep.
At any rate, as far as best and worst days go, quickly, several best days.
I guess I would have to start with the loss of a parent to divorce shortly after one to suicide on my birthday, both of whom were alcoholics.
A brother who I was real close with helped me with.
I lost shortly after that to an accident.
Those events were in the late 70s and 80s.
Recently, a couple of years ago, I lost the last of my siblings to a sudden brain aneurysm.
And after relocating a long distance a year ago, I was looking for a particular vehicle for a particular purpose, of which there are some available.
And after finding a couple, I was unable to get a ride to look at one I decided on for a couple days in a row.
Thank you very, very much for the call, and take care.
We're doing best and worst days, and we're doing open lines.
Anything you want to talk about is absolutely fair game.
In a moment, I'll tell you about the book I'm reading right now and kind of a little surprise that I got as I was reading it.
That kind of stuff happens to me.
So stay right where you are.
You're listening to Coast to Coast A.M. From all the way on this side of the world, I'm Mark Bell.
The current book I'm reading, I picked up, it's called The Metro Club, and it's by Tess Gerritson.
Remember that book I recommended to you all, I don't know, about a year ago called Gravity?
So many of you read it by Tess Gerritson.
Tess has, since I read that book and fell so in love with it, been on the show a couple of times, well, she's got a new book.
She's a New York Times best-selling author, Tess Gerritson, called The Meseto Club.
And I'm just starting the book.
I'm probably an eighth of the way through it.
And oh my, what a surprise.
In the book, they were talking about how long a person might hear or have cognition, even after something as awful as a beheading.
Well, Tess Garritzon, I can't recall the page number right now, but she said people are able to hear, for example, in the old days when they were guillotined, they're able to actually hear after they're guillotined, perhaps even move their mouth, though no sound would, of course, come out.
And in the book, the character said, where did you hear that?
And Tess wrote, well, I heard it on the Art Bell show.
And I would have fallen off the bed had I not been lying on it.
So there you have it.
Tess Gerritson put me in her book.
I thought that was kind of cool, and I ran into it totally by accident.
We'll be right back.
James in Santa Rosa, California says, all right, I thought I should mention one of Kuntz's best books, Odd Thomas.
If you like the story of Jimmy and Life Expectancy, you're going to fall in love with Odd and his gift.
Already read it.
Way ahead of you.
I read just about everything Dean does.
He's just got a way of writing that I absolutely love.
Let's go to our first time caller line.
And Julie, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everybody out there.
I wanted to tell you about the best day of my life.
It just happened just a few days ago.
But in order to explain it, I kind of have to tell you about the worst day.
About 11 years ago, I was working as a flight attendant for United Airlines flying in Auckland, New Zealand.
And my crew, I don't know, there was about 16 or 18 of us, and most of the crew decided that they wanted to go down and talk to a psychic one night.
And I didn't really want to, but I kind of went along, and I sat outside while everybody got their readings.
And when they were done, the psychic came and he said, I'm waiting for you.
And I said, oh, I'm not here for a reading.
He said, no, I'm waiting for you.
Come in.
So I went in, and he said, do you know you're psychic?
And I said, well, I've been told that before.
And he said, don't leave New Zealand.
And I thought that was just kind of inappropriate to say to somebody who didn't even want a reading.
And I didn't say anything, but I thought I had wanted to move to New Zealand.
I'd only been flying international for about three years, and I mean, about three months.
And I was already thinking about seeing if I could move over there permanently.
But, you know, the idea of just not leaving and quitting my job the next day.
I mean, I'd be fired if I didn't leave the next morning.
So anyway, the next morning I got up to go to work, and it was just a fantastic day.
I remember I got up early, like at 4.30, and I went and did some weightlifting.
And I remember as I walked down the jetway, a couple of the crew members were teasing me, and they said, God, you look so good.
You're just glowing with that smile.
I got on the plane and went upstairs to, because the 747 has a sleeping room upstairs, a bunk room for the crew.
And I went upstairs to set the bunk room up for us to take a nap when we got over.
We were flying over to Australia.
And I started getting really sick, and I felt like it was like symptoms of a heart attack.
And long story short, is I was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with a severe toxic exposure to pesticides that they used on the airplanes.
And I was disabled by it.
And in the last 11 years, I got to be one of those chemically sensitive people that goes state to state living outside because they can't go on buildings and such like that.
And it was tough.
But this year, I finally found a house that was, I could breathe in and non-toxic outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I found it in about March.
And to backtrack just a little bit, I had lived in Colorado when I was flying.
And I had, at the same, a couple months before I got sick on the airplane, I had bought a samoid puppy to use to do avalanche search and rescue work.
And when I got sick, she ended up, I trained her to be my service dog, and she's just been great, been through a lot of stuff and been the best service dog.
So anyway, found this fabulous, fabulous place to live in Santa Fe where I can breathe and I was healing and just doing great and bought the house, I guess, in March.
And in July, I came home one night and opened the car door and literally fell on the ground.
I felt like I was being poisoned, which made no sense since I owned my house and I owned my property and none of my neighbors used to anything toxic.
We all do organic gardening.
Well, what happened is mistakenly an exterminator had treated my house.
They were supposed to be at somebody else's house.
So I got really sick from that.
It was the same chemical that I had run into on the airplane, you know, what a fluke.
And both myself and my service dog got really sick.
And I ended up not being able to be in buildings again and living outside for the last five months.
And we had a couple nights.
It was like 10 degrees below zero.
And it was really, really tough.
And my service dog, Kush, had gotten, she had diabetes.
She came down with diabetes last year, she had cataracts.
And when she got sick from the incident that happened at our house this summer, she just went totally blind.
And it's odd that you and your dog wouldn't have the same sensitivity.
unidentified
Yeah.
And to bring you up to the best day is after almost five months of not being able to find a place, I finally found a place that I could rent that I was non-toxic and they had sprayed pesticides and I didn't have new paint.
And it worked for me.
It was just a huge miracle.
And Kush needed to go in to get her surgery for the cataracts, which I guess on dogs they actually have to replace the lenses.
And the eye doctor had said, you know, we were really running out of time, but we couldn't do the surgery while I was homeless.
So last week we went in to do the surgery, and it turned out that we waited perhaps a little bit too long, and there were some difficulties in the surgery, and I think he almost lost her under the anesthesia.
He pulled her out of it, and he had been able to work on one eye, and he said she might have partial vision in this one eye.
And when she started recovering from the surgery, they say the dogs don't have the vision right away, but she had it right away.
And it was the coolest thing.
She looked at me, and her eyes just opened, and she realized that she could see me.
And I don't have kids, so that must be what it's like when someone sees their newborn baby and it looks at them the first time.
And she looked at me and she put her nose in my face and gave me a kiss.
And it just, you know, it made all of the stuff just melt away.
I've heard of people who develop extreme sensitivities to anything, even things that wouldn't even bother the rest of us, the smell of perfume or the spray of something or another, and just get extreme sensitivity to these toxic things in the air.
I'm sorry, that's like a lot of the rest of the callers who don't remember calling 911 or don't remember a lot or the opposite, and they hear everything that's going on around them, even though they're supposedly out or even dead.
Well, you know, I was thinking back to September 11, 2001, and I was remembering how there was all this uncertainty about what was going on and who was crashing these airliners and whatnot.
And then there was this news report that an FBI agent had found a passport belonging to a Saudi Arabian hijacker on one of the airplanes.
And, you know, that helped to focus the mind of the American people towards the origin of the atrocity.
And it occurred to me now that, you know, there's no memorial.
There's no notice of that.
Doesn't it seem like you would expect the memorial to have been placed at that site by now?
Reverse speech was indeed an interesting, a very, very interesting, what'd you call it, anyway, phenomena, I suppose.
And it seems as though there really is something to reverse speech.
I mean, we say something in the forward mode, and then later we review it as reverse speech, and you find some odd things.
Now, how many of them really are actual thoughts that person is having, subconscious thoughts, I suppose, that person is having, as they're saying something else in the forward speech?
We'll have to look more into that.
Alex in Austin, Texas, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hello, Art.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
Earlier, you mentioned about your problems with your smoking habit, and that distressed me to hear it.
So I just wanted to offer you a suggestion to hopefully help you kick the habit.
Well, I'm using, yeah, I'm using, I'll tell you what I'm doing.
I'm using the gum right now, and that is, I don't know what happened there, that is helping quite a bit.
The gum is helping quite a bit.
But a number of people have sent me emails about a new product that's on the market.
I doubt very much it's available here, but there is some new product on the market that apparently changes something in your brain, you know, the receptors in your brain that want nicotine.
So I'm stretching, and I'll try and give that a shot.
Let's go to Bill in Arizona.
Bill, you're on the air.
unidentified
Well, first of all, Art, let me tell you that you may have burnt your tongue, but you saved mine.
Because just as you said it, I was about to take a drink out of a hot, hot cup of coffee.
Well, I'm listening to you.
I looked at the coffee and I thought, ooh, that was close.
And as cruel as this may sound, the best day of my life was when my stepfather, my abusive, drunken stepfather, died a cold and lonely, miserable death.
Well, as you get older, I predict that you will retract that feeling, bad as he may have been.
Well, maybe not.
Who knows?
Very quickly, Melanie in Oklahoma.
You don't have a lot of time, Melanie.
It's going to have to be real quick.
unidentified
Okay.
I was put in with a piece of family when I was a kid.
I mean, I have places I don't even remember.
Well, the worst thing that ever happened, my foster mother told me in front of all the kids not to ever ask her to help me again because I wasn't worth it.
Oh, you see, that's kind of like what was said to me.
And again, parents, remember this.
Will you please, if there's no other lesson you take from tonight's program, and that is what you tell your children in a moment of anger or thoughtlessness can stay with them, shape their lives for good or bad, forever.
So be very, very, very careful what you say to your children.
And with that thought, after all, it is Christmas.
Everybody have a wonderful time.
I'll be back tomorrow night and the next night.
I'm Art Bell from Manila in the Philippines, where it's really warm.