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Dec. 22, 2006 - Art Bell
02:38:41
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Open Lines - Worst Days
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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, Adam and Islands, India region, not a good place.
Adam and 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 South East 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 Art's 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 It is Christmas!
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.
Philippinos are out in in the millions.
Millions!
Shopping, last-minute Christmas shopping.
It is berserk-o 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 doggone 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 AM 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.
It's 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 Toc.
Let me read you what it says on the back of the book.
Life Expectancy.
Before he died on a storm-wracked night, Jimmy Toc'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 we'll 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 air and 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's Snowdin 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.
Welcome back to Earth.
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 Fulston, who said her office had not been consulted by Attorney General Phil Kline.
And here's 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 Gravel 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.
Hamburgers 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 all 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 alright.
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.
December date line, 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 a thousand 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 Massumi Dipati 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 to produce a physics-based prediction of the next solar cycle.
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 an 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.
They stayed open all night.
You could talk to the whole world.
And that would be the expectation that would attach itself to a big solar cycle.
Now, there's one other thing that possibly attaches.
For years now, Ed Dames has been, without the help of any physicists or predictive programs, been talking about what he calls a kill shot.
He would have had no way of knowing about what's coming in terms of this solar cycle, this giant solar cycle.
There were no predictions years ago when he began talking about it.
So, look out!
She's coming around the bend.
And it should be, well, for him operators, a very, very interesting time.
Let us go to the lines.
Begin open lines.
Anthony in California, you're on the air.
Oh, hi Art.
Hi.
This is Anthony calling from the Santa Cruz Mountains in California.
Right, got it.
Anyway, my aunt knows an osteopath named Bruce.
So Bruce came to her house with an EMF meter, and the meter detected a very high level of energy in one of the walls.
It was just over 217 Mgs.
Uh-huh.
So my aunt then called a medical intuitive in Florida.
The intuitive said the energy was very smart and very negative and had been on the wall
since 1988.
The medical intuitive described this entity as being 8 feet tall and 10 feet wide.
They said...
In her wall?
Yeah.
Good lord.
Lord.
She said it was like a sophisticated flea.
Bye.
So my aunt then called a feng shui practitioner and told her to have a look at this.
Well at this point why don't you call a carpenter and tear down the whole wall and get the sophisticated flea out of there.
Well that's what she said, this feng shui lady said that.
So, she called the Sanctuary Lady, but she couldn't really help her much.
She just said just what you said.
So, my aunt tried to clear this energy by burning up some alcohol and epped some salt, but whenever she came to the wall, the flame blew out.
The energy hasn't left the wall, and she says it may be It may be causing her to have body aches and is destroying her immune system.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
So, um, and she says her husband's having a really hard time breathing these days.
And, um, her animals aren't feeling well either.
Enough is enough already.
So tear the wall down.
Yeah.
So, um, but she says whenever she leaves the house, they feel a lot better.
Well, that's a hint, buddy.
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.
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.
Hmm.
I wonder if it will peel.
I mean, this really was bad.
I looked down into the coffee cup and it was actually still boiling.
So it was boiling water.
Hmm.
Big mistake.
All right, back with your... Don't forget, we're trying to solicit from you... Talking depends on the tongue, doesn't it?
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.
the and
Hmm.
This is fairly serious.
A small peeling of my tongue is actually in my finger here.
On my finger.
It never fails.
It just absolutely never fails.
Alright, 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 the 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.
Just unbelievable.
And all of them came true.
The rest I will read nothing at all from the book and give you nothing.
You will have to go out and get it yourself.
It's called Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz.
All right, let's go west of the Rockies to Tommy, who apparently had a good and a bad day.
Hi, Tommy.
Hey, Art.
I'm overwhelmed to talk to you again.
The last time was when you came back from your hiatus and it was on my birthday and I was driving truck into Portland.
That was many years ago, but thanks.
Worst day, when I woke up drug addicted in a cardboard box in the rain in 1977 in San Rafael, California, and that was the end of my drug addiction.
I've been 30 years now without... How long had you been drug addicted?
I was a hippie street kid in Haight-Ashbury when I was 15 in 1967.
And you woke up in a cardboard box at what age?
29, 30, something like that.
That would have been the bottom.
They say everybody needs to hit bottom, or in your case I guess cardboard.
Yeah, and the best day was on October the 14th.
When my first child was born, a son.
I hope our kids get to play together.
Incredible synchronicity with my father was born on Friday the 13th in November.
And my partner, she went into labor on Friday the 13th.
And the Detroit Tigers, my father was a Detroit Tigers diehard fan.
And when they made it to the playoffs, he had a heart attack and died from being so jubilant.
And here they went again this year.
I guess there are worse ways to go, right?
Yeah.
I mean, dying because he had a heart attack because you were so happy.
Yeah, and that's how they found him, with the smile on his face and his chair.
Yeah, definitely worse ways to go than that.
I always thought of the best ways you could go, one would be immediately after one of the best sexual experiences of your life.
And a number of people do go that way.
I don't know about other good ways to go, but there are no doubt many of them out there.
I wonder if I should save this little piece of my tongue and put it under the pillow and have the expectation of pesos in the morning.
All right, we're going to a worse day.
Wildcard line number four, you have achieved the air.
Robert in Burbank, hi.
Hi.
I think this may top your gluing your lips together.
No.
No, but it's right up there.
You're the most human person I've ever heard on the radio.
I mean, whatever happens, you let everybody know.
It's great.
Mahogany, you're not.
You know, it's not like other programs.
When you spend four hours on the radio, you know, stuff happens.
Something's going to happen.
Well, anyway, yeah, God, you're probably going to get a lot of bummer stories with this.
That's all right.
I know that's all right.
That's what the book was all about.
So there are days, and by the way, whatever it is that happened to you on this worst day, did you sense that it was going to be a horrible day before it happened?
Um, actually, you know what?
Since you mentioned that, I was in a trance the whole day and I almost died myself.
There you go.
You're right.
You and I never really put that together until you just mentioned that.
It's weird.
But, um, I'll string this together real quick.
I've had people, you know, I used to do some undercover work where I was actually, you know, ambushed and tried to kill.
This is worse than that.
You know, it's actually worse when somebody you're close to dies than even yourself being threatened.
I noticed that.
Oh, that's right.
Of course.
Of course that's correct, yes.
It weighs on me.
I mean, I've had guns drawn on me.
People try to kill me at 80, 90 miles an hour on freeways.
And this is what weighs on me every day.
I have a girlfriend.
You know how that is.
You have a girlfriend, and she's always talking about marriage and stuff.
We've only known each other for like a year.
I feel like we've gotten to know her longer than that, and I couldn't say any reason why not to.
She's just perfect, you know?
I mean, it's like you've got that feeling like you've been with this person your whole life.
Everything you do and you like, she likes too.
Even working on a car, she'd go out there and help me.
It's bizarre.
So, but she was a hippie.
You know, she was a hippie type, and you know how hippies are.
She strays away.
You know, I talked about, look, you don't want to hang around with me, you know.
No, no, no, I like you, I like this, and then you eventually found her.
I found her with my boss.
That was it.
You know, she was out with my boss.
Aw, you found her with your boss?
Yeah, but that's not even the worst part.
That's not even the worst part.
Maybe she was just trying to get you a raise.
Yeah, right.
I can go somewhere that I'm not going to touch that one.
Yeah, don't.
I'm not going to touch that one.
So that was that, right?
Yeah, so I break up with her, right?
And then she was just, 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 that 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 it's the weirdest 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 know, that's why I'm listening to your show all the time.
And so, time went by, and, oh God, a few months go by, and I'm walking down the street.
No way, it wasn't her, was it?
No, no, no, this is what I'm getting to.
The last slide that buried this guy's fiancée, now after this happens, I walk, I'm in a trance, this is the day where all hell breaks loose, where everything falls apart.
I'm walking down the street, and I'm about 10 miles from my house, roughly about the same 10 miles from her house.
Okay.
And her mother, she had a subdivision in her house.
So her mother, a car is driving down the street.
Okay.
I'm walking.
I'm in a trance.
I'm looking down at the ground and I'm like in a trance.
I'm walking.
A car nearly kills me.
It barely touches my feet, the tires at 35 miles an hour.
And I put my head up and I hold my chest.
I'm hyperventilating.
Oh my God.
I almost got killed.
I'm breathing, you know, real fast.
And the car stops and I go, that person really feels stupid.
They almost killed me.
And the person getting out of the car, Was my girlfriend's mother and she goes, she goes, my name is Robert and I'm looking at her.
And I did at that point, I didn't really care.
She almost killed me.
I was just sort of weird that she's here, you know, in the middle of nowhere.
And, and she runs up to me and she had a weird look on her face, a blank look on her face.
I go, what, what's wrong?
She goes, well, my girlfriend was named Sarah.
She goes, we lost Sarah.
And I go, what do you mean?
Where is she?
She, she died.
I go, what?
You're kidding.
And she told me she died in a landslide in Hawaii.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Yeah, that qualifies, buddy.
Absolutely qualifies to be right in the Dean Kuntz book.
Wow.
That is bizarre.
And you know, when you're going to have one of these days, maybe that's a good question for some of you who have had this horrible day in your life.
And that is, My tongue is actually peeling, I think.
Could you feel it coming on?
Could you feel, hmm, could you feel sort of a down, scary, prickly on the back of the neck, hair standing up type feeling before the actual occurrence of the worst day?
Let's go here and say Nick in Ontario, Canada.
You're on the air.
Hi Art, I really enjoy your show.
Thank you.
The worst day of my life probably would be when I was doing security at a military contractor in Canada.
A fellow security officer invited me out to go drinking in Toronto one night.
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.
He told me to pick up a prostitute, so I was so drunk in my mind.
He told you to pick up a prostitute?
Yeah, a certain prostitute.
He pointed her out.
Anyway, I had sex and a couple of days later, a week later, I thought I had symptoms similar to HIV or AIDS.
It doesn't come on that quickly.
HIV and AIDS, it could take years to come on.
I know, but I can understand you'd feel bad.
No, no, wait a minute.
Back up a little bit.
Why would you, why would you buy his story and not only pick up the prostitute, but then go ahead and have sex with her?
Why?
Um, I was kind of being belittled by my brothers.
Uh, they're, they're calling me names and stuff.
And I was being pressured to lose my virginity and stuff.
And, uh, um, 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 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 and I heard a honking horn.
I turned around and 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.
Anyway, to make a long story short, basically I got the new test results as negative, obviously, but the best team... 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?
If it came back positive, then I could understand perhaps your actions.
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.
Anyway, I tested negative and stuff like that, but I came down with weird symptoms.
I was almost demonic in nature, you know.
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 in 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.
I was 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.
You were communicating telepathically with your television?
Literally, yeah!
And with other people in bars and stuff.
I'm saying I was sober at the time when I experienced this, but I was like, you can feel the vibes before they even speak on the TV.
You know what they're about to say.
And it was the most pleasant feeling that you can experience.
So that was your best day, right?
Well, let me just add a bit to it.
The best day was when I was actually driving my car in Woodbridge.
I saw the sun just literally looked like it exploded into a million pieces.
And when I was getting out of the vehicle, when I was washing my car, it looked like I was on the moon.
Everything was in slow motion.
And I thought it was the rapture.
I literally thought it was the rapture because it was just amazing.
It was an amazing high, you know, and I've never done any drugs or anything like that.
The most I've done is alcohol.
But I didn't touch any alcohol or anything like that.
I didn't do any drugs.
Alright, well that kind of thing can 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.
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 to quite considerably, and may eventually, you know, come up with some sort of cure.
Though, I was told in many interviews, that when we come up with an AIDS cure, 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.
And 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, here in the forest we have these little, they're like pitchers.
And you throw a little switch and that's the way you heat water here.
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 I'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.
more in a moment.
There was just a commercial for Chia Pets.
I think I have a chia tongue.
I don't 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.
Hopefully that will be you this night.
Let's see, where to go?
Let's go to the first-time caller line.
That would be Pat in Redondo Beach, Cal.
Hi.
How you doing, Art?
I'm alright, Pat.
What's up?
Good.
How's your tongue?
Blistering.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
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.
You mean spoken, vocal, or what?
Foreign language.
No, I understand, but I mean, you speak into it and it decodes it, or what?
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 evolved 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 evolved back so that you realize that the language is entirely universal.
Is this an electronic instrument?
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, 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 Okay, so it's basically demonstrating that, I see, I've got it, that all language has similar roots of some sort or another.
That is very interesting.
I can't allow you to give the website out over the air, but that is very interesting.
The main language here is Tagalog, and I am making amazing progress in understanding the language.
Not so much amazing progress in speaking it.
There are certain critical words that I've certainly learned and I can use.
But in terms of understanding the language, I'm doing very well.
And you know what's helping me the most?
Is television.
You know, I watch a lot of Philippine television and I will, of course, ask my wife, what's this word or what's that word?
And I get a lot of unsatisfactory answers, words that simply can't be translated.
They are what my wife calls helping words.
But nevertheless, what I found is I'm beginning to understand probably about half of what I hear.
At least I would say half of what I hear.
I can sort of follow along and understand what it is.
But in terms of speaking it, not so good.
All right.
To another worst day, the fourth wild card line in Flint, Michigan.
Mel, you're on the air.
Hello, Art.
Hi.
Hey.
Well, my day was basically my worst day and my best day.
All together?
All together.
And I've got a problem.
I've got two people just come on my site.
I've got to get off.
Really?
I'm a security guard.
I'll call back.
Okay.
Well, you leave us hanging.
I guess that happens.
If you're a security guard and you've got a security problem, you definitely have got to go after waiting all that time.
What a shame.
Okay, well perhaps we'll hear from him before the program ends.
West of the Rockies in Sandpoint, Idaho.
Hilda, you're on the air.
Yes, hi, Art.
Hi.
My worst day was when I found out I had cancer.
That's bad, all right.
And it was bad, you know.
But I've been doing this for five years, but prior to finding out that I even had cancer, I had done this Novena.
Your wife, I think, is Catholic.
I very well know what a Novena is, yes.
Yes.
So I had done this Novena prior to finding out, and anyway, after about three years battling this cancer, and it's five years now, My Novena prayers were answered, or are being answered.
So I'm just... Let me guess, you're cancer free?
No, no, no, no.
I'm terminal.
But anyway, my Novena is being answered.
I'm going to, I realize that I am going to die, you know, with Receiving all the sacraments of the church and I'll be okay.
So, isn't that special?
Well Hilda, we're all terminal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But anyway, that was the worst day of my life and the best day of my life was finally understanding that my novena was being answered.
And so I can go in peace.
Okay, Hilda.
Well, thank you very much.
I wish you the very best.
We are all terminal in this life, 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, they're captains, and they're not like regular officers.
You know, they're not, 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.
That would be Tim in Kansas someplace or another.
Hi, Tim.
How's it going?
It's going fine.
I heard about your bad day.
That is a pretty bad day.
Well, my best day happened about 10 years ago.
And believe it or not, the first time I ever saw and talked to a ghost.
You consider having a ghost talk to you a good day, okay?
Yeah, who doesn't?
I was working down in southern Texas, a little all-night gas station, and a guy pulled up in an old 50's style Cadillac, a nice car, and I was talking to him, I thought he looked really familiar, and I finally came to know who it was, and I said, who I think you are, aren't you supposed to be dead?
He said, boy, don't remember, don't believe everything you hear.
And when he pulled away, I called my friend and told him who it was, and he didn't believe me either.
So, you had in fact been talking to a ghost.
Who was this person?
A friend, or what?
Well, not really a friend.
I didn't really know him, but I knew of him.
Remember the old musical group, The Doors?
Of course.
It was Jim Morrison.
Who's Jim Morrison?
Oh yeah, of course.
You're sure it was Jim Morrison?
Yeah, I've been to his gravesite outside Paris, in the suburbs of Paris.
Okay, well that's I guess a good one.
If you get to see somebody like that, Jim Morrison.
Of course, how can you really be sure?
How can you really be sure?
I mean, did he stop?
Did he tell you that he really was Jim Morrison?
Produce I.D.
showing he was Jim Morrison?
Sing you a little song?
What?
Okay, let's go to my home state, Nevada, and I think her name is Aray?
Aray?
Aray Al.
Okay, welcome.
Thank you.
All right, this is about my death 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 Swag, fill up my gas tank, and then go down South 86th.
Anyway, I was in an Oldsmobile, which is 98.
They're pretty big cars.
Oh, yeah.
And I had my back trunk full of stuff.
Anyway, I'm going down the hill.
And for some reason I'm picking up speed and I just like, why am I picking up speed?
Um, I'm tapping on my brakes.
I'm not really slowing down.
And then this voice says, you have to slow down.
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.
Your brakes were having no effect at all?
You'll hear why in a little bit.
So anyway, I'm picking up speed and I'm like, oh my god, what is going on?
And then this boy 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 the voice says this, you got one more time.
No, really, it says it.
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, Put my foot on the brake 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 the lady on the steering wheel.
Big semi-truck was behind me.
The guy parked, jumped out, says, are you okay lady?
I'm like, Oh, no!
I just remembered I filled a 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, in a small pickup, well, um, not pickup, but, uh, one of those tow trucks, but, you know, small ones, he pulls over and stops and he comes over and he says, well, they don't make cars like this anymore.
You don't have anything wrong.
You know, 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 spitting air.
So anyway, um, 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, uh, the road.
And the, the truck driver who was really nice.
I never got his name or anything.
Uh, he says, uh, don't worry, lady.
I'm gonna follow you all the way down.
You know, we'll get to Sedona.
I gotta go in my direction, but I'm gonna make sure that you get out 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.
The, the, um, the tow truck driver had been directing the traffic, so everybody was going around us.
So I get, I park the car, and I get out.
All behind me, you could see where I had tried to stop.
He said, there's your problem.
You went through this oil thing where they had been doing construction on the highway in Flagg.
Right.
And I went through it, and because my tires were kind of worn, I had no tread, and I was just, it was just oil.
Anyway.
Oh my god.
Yeah, so we went past that little sandy hill.
On the other side was a sheer drop of at least 200 feet.
Well, you must have had a little angel on your shoulder telling you what to do.
I agree, but listen to this part.
So, I finally get to Sedona.
I'm really excited because I'm in Echincar, and they have, at that time, this beautiful place that this lady had donated to the church.
And my friend said, you've got to see it.
It's beautiful.
The views are great.
It's built to the library.
So, I'm going.
I had already called when I got to Sedona.
I said, I'm coming up.
And the guy's a caretaker.
He says, OK, just come on up.
So I'm going up and he's coming down and he meets me.
He says, I have to leave.
But I left the library door open so you could go in.
Very little time left here.
Very little time.
Anyway, I parked and I tried to go to the library.
It's locked.
And I'm like, oh, God, how great a day is this?
And then I say, go and look at the view.
It was beautiful.
Green, little silvery water, which is, you know, Oak Creek.
And I stepped down to the ledge and I stepped down further.
And this white dog follows me.
It's a beautiful dog.
Anyway, I see a beautiful, crystal city.
And it's just crazy.
It's just beautiful and serene.
It's just gorgeous.
Anyway, before I know what's going on, I wake up.
It's terribly dark.
I can't see how to get back up.
And this white dog stirs, and I follow her out.
And I'm able to go.
Okay, we're out of time.
I've got to stop it right there.
You imagine, I've always had that fear of, like, hitting my brakes, going down a steep, you know, like a 10 or 11 percent 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 Kuntz.
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 add the best days as well.
Now, while my tongue is peeling away here, I see somebody who has some help, possibly, for me.
tongue situation so if what I'm saying doesn't sound quite right it's
you'd be surprised how much you actually need your tongue to to be articulate to correctly form
words and all the rest of it. Amazing.
We will be right back.
Alright, back to it we go.
Alright, back to it we go.
All right, back to it we go.
All right, let's do it now.
Back to it we go.
This is a nurse.
How timely is that?
I think it is Kathy in Ferndale, California.
Hi, Kathy.
Hello, Art.
Yes.
I have you on my speaker, so I have to make sure what's with... Okay, let me kick off speaker phone.
Well, I'll tell you, you and I go way, way back, and it's the first time I could ever call you on a On a first date called triage, but I'm really concerned and I'm very concerned.
Did you read the little email that I sent you?
Not yet, I guess.
Okay, this is what I'd advise.
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.
Did you say if I'm still in the desert?
Oh yeah, where are you?
Are you in the Philippines or somewhere?
Yes, yes, yes.
Well, they'll have it down there.
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 I don't know what time it is, where they'll have aloe vera juice, any kind of 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'll 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 for over the years, I've
gone back at least 12, 13 years with you, it seems, before Madman, Markham and all those
people.
It's been a long time, that's for sure.
Well, all of those suggestions are worthy, but I am here by myself.
My wife flew her family up from Mininal, and so they're out at the Manila Zoo right now, and I'm here all by myself.
Little blisters, weird little, I just looked, weird little blisters are forming and little pieces are coming off my tongue.
Wonderful, just wonderful.
I appreciate the advice and I know aloe is good, but I'm afraid it's going to have to wait.
All right, let's go to Wild Card Line.
Linda in California, you're on the air, Linda.
Hi Art, what a pleasure to speak with you.
This is such a treat.
It's funny, you just had a nurse.
I was going to tell you to put some cold ice water in your mouth.
They usually put ice on a burn.
That sounds good, but again, I'm doing a radio program.
I know.
Well, anyway, the reason I'm calling is I want to tell you about Well, worst day of my life, and then I have the best day of my life.
Okay.
The worst day of my life was when my husband committed suicide.
Oh, that's bad.
Yeah.
We were married seven years in one day.
I found him in the car, in the garage, carbon monoxide poisoning.
He went to Vietnam.
He never smoked a cigarette.
He was as straight as could be.
And he came back a full-fledged heroin addict.
And I guess he didn't.
Back in the 70s, you just didn't know what to do.
And I didn't even know he was on it.
And that's remarkable.
You really should have noted changes, although this may be immediately when he came back.
So I guess you would you would just think it was part of the changed person.
Yes, 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.
Okay.
I was a child performer at 12 years old.
My first job was with Jerry Lewis.
I started at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, recorded for RCA.
Victor, I was a child performer.
Uh, I had extremely possessive and parents that were, uh, 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, uh, my father would say she's lost her soul and all of these things and say, you're absolutely not.
They wanted me to go back and sing.
And I couldn't do anything like that.
I could hardly get up.
Right.
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 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.
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 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.
Well, that's odd.
It's perhaps very much like the other caller, the caller who called a little while ago.
Our brains, in response to some great trauma, and certainly what you described would be great trauma, my God, you know, what do our parents tell us?
Parents need to be more sensitive.
The things that our fathers and our mothers tell us when we're young, to a large degree, Who we are for the rest of our lives.
Now, my father, of course, you know, I'm older.
I'm 61 years old now.
And when I was young, I chose, instead of finishing college right away, to go into the Air Force.
And my dad, God rest his soul, he's gone now, told me that I would never be anything.
That I had to go to college.
These were days when if you did not go to college, you were considered to have virtually no future in your life.
You would be nothing.
And he absolutely told me that all the time.
That that is what, in part, drove me to succeed in the business that I chose to go into.
Now, going into radio is a big gamble.
It's not a small gamble, it's a giant gamble.
And the majority of people in the radio business end up starving to death.
Trust me.
Or just barely making ends meet and traveling from radio station to radio station, state to state.
It's a very gypsy-like existence.
And indeed, I was doing that for, well, many, many, many years.
Now, my father did live long enough to see me succeed in a pretty big way, and I think it surprised him.
And the things our parents say to us Stay with us all our lives.
I recall my dad telling me that, and he was a very successful man after the Marine Corps, he became Vice President of Blue Cross Blue Shield, you know, that big insurance company.
And I recall his saying, and we'll never forget, Trey, that was my nickname, Trey, you know, I paid more tax this year than you made all year.
In fact, it was two or three times as much as I had made in that year.
And that made me feel terribly small.
And it just drove me and drove me and drove me.
And so perhaps in a kind of a strange way, it was a good thing because it did drive me so hard.
And then I can recall something I should not have done and still kind of feel sorry about later in life.
There was a year when I said to my dad, hey dad, look, I paid more tax than you made last year.
Which was a pretty ugly thing to say, but the things we say to our children resonate and stay with us all our lives.
Remember that.
If you're a parent, be very, very careful what you say to your child, because it will shape, perhaps drive them, or hurt them psychologically, so be very, very careful if you're a parent.
Wildcard Line, Jay in Los Angeles, you're on the air.
Hi there, Art.
How are you doing?
I'm OK, sir.
So the worst day of my life was I was driving home in one of those El Nino storms in Los Angeles.
Yes.
And I stopped at a light and it turned green.
And out of nowhere, a guy ran in front of my car and I ran over him.
Oh, my God.
And of course, you know, I stopped.
I called 911.
The ambulances and the police came and everything and they took him to the hospital and he died a few days later.
What happened?
Did he just run in front of your car?
Was your attention diverted or what happened?
Well, apparently, based on the police report, the witnesses and everything, he had gotten off the bus and didn't want to wait because it was raining.
So he decided just to run across the street against the light.
I see.
And so, of course, you know, the fact that, you know, I figured he probably wasn't going to live.
And then I'm also, you know, thinking, you know, what's going to happen to me?
Am I going to be charged?
Sure.
Luckily, you know, it wasn't my fault.
And if the police report said if he had lived, He would have been charged with jaywalking, but still, you know, the gravity of it, taking the life of someone you had no malice towards, you didn't even know they were there.
No, of course, it will be with you, and I'm sure you already know that all your life.
That's the kind of thing that you never, ever forget.
So, have you come to terms with it, finally?
Yeah, it's interesting, because obviously I told family and close friends, Um, it, uh, not long after that, it actually happened to a relative of mine, same sort of situation.
And, uh, um, it's funny in terms of, you know, dealing with it with the insurance company and, um, lawyers and things.
And they say, Oh yeah, well, you know, that happened to my uncle or it, it, it's not an unusual occurrence.
Um, but.
No, no, of course it's not.
It's not an unusual occurrence, but oh yes, if you take a life, no matter the circumstance, that will be with you for the rest of your life.
Thankfully that is one thing that has never occurred to me and I don't ever want it to.
It would just be on your conscience and it would be on your mind forever.
So I can easily imagine that would be the worst day of your life.
First time caller line, Mike in Idaho, you're on the air.
Hey Art, how you doing?
I'm all right.
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.
I just wanted to say that back when I was stationed in Alaska in 1971 and they had the big earthquake in Sylmar in 71 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.
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.
Boy, is that ever wonderful for you to say, Mike.
Thank you very much.
Listen.
I want to say this again, 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 It's 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 alright, 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.
It's just an amazing hobby, so feel free.
East of the Rockies, you are on the air, Terry from Ohio.
Hello, Terry from Ohio.
Hi.
Can you hear me?
I hear you now.
Yes, somebody didn't turn up a pod.
Yes, go ahead.
Oh, sorry.
First note, I wanted to say was about your cats.
I think that's really cool how they're so close.
I've got two myself that are really close in age, and they're the same way.
If one leaves the room, the other one cries for the other one.
Oh, it's something.
It is.
It's adorable.
But this is about my best and worst day.
They were both together.
So many like that.
Okay.
I worked third shift, and I got home from work on Friday night, well, I guess it would have been Saturday morning, and went to bed, and had the weirdest dream that my ex, well, I consider him my soulmate.
We were working on getting back together at the time, and I knew that he had cancer.
Hold your story right there.
We've got a break coming up, so I'm going to hold you through the break, hun, alright?
Okay, stay right where you are.
From Manila in the Philippines, during Christmas, which is really quite an affair here, I'm Art Bell.
Indeed, Ed in Laredo, Texas, fast blasted me that, hey Art, Ham Radio's 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, He contacted his fiancée 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 turned out of course that it was Carl Richardson who is a ham who I knew as a ham operator who had asked his fiancee 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
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.
So don't hesitate to inquire about Ham Radio.
It is a blast.
We are a little bit working on best and worst days of your life, inspired by the Dean Kuntz book called Life Expectancy.
Back now to Terri in Ohio.
Terri, proceed.
Should I pick up where I left off?
Recap if you wish.
I met my soulmate about four years ago and we parted In ways about a year and a half ago.
And this past August, I found out that he had cancer.
We had still stayed in contact with each other.
But, um, we had considered, we were trying to work things out, and I hadn't heard from him, this was three Fridays before Thanksgiving, I hadn't heard from him for like four days.
And I was starting to get worried.
I went to bed that morning, or that Saturday morning, And I had an amazing dream.
And he was there and he, you know, we were able to say our goodbyes to each other.
And when I woke up, I just, I knew, I knew something had happened.
I just had this weird feeling.
Went on to work that day.
I was working an odd shift.
When I got home from work that night, there was a message that his daughter had called and he had passed on Friday night.
And it was kind of a bittersweet day because I was able to say my last goodbyes to him through my dreams.
You know, I think, Terry, that there is some inherent sense in us that tells us when things like this have happened.
A lot of people ignore them.
You know, they just sort of slough it off as a dream or it was this or that, but I think it's something we all have to some degree or another.
Right, I've had an odd dream even since then where him and I went shopping.
And he went to try on some clothes and came out in a big bird costume.
And I think, in a way, that's his way of contacting me, saying, hey, you need to get out of your rut.
You need to start writing back up.
I couldn't agree more, Terry.
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.
A security guard, Mel, it is, in Flint, Michigan.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Sorry about bailing out on you.
That's alright, you're back, so go ahead.
Well, anyway, to make this real short, I was at work one day, and this was 1990, July 31st, about 8 o'clock in the morning, and I was surveying my 17 acres of property.
A rental property and I was walking around carrying a bucket and in case I encountered something that should be picked up and I was walking along, beautiful sunshiny day, sun shining and clear skies.
All of a sudden I got this pressure in my chest and I thought, oh no, what is this?
Indigestion?
And all of a sudden the sky got dark and I realized I was looking like two binoculars.
And the field of view kept getting smaller.
And I said, the pressure on my chest get worse.
And I said, Oh, my.
So I set the bucket down and sat down on the bucket.
And the light went down to a pinpoint.
And the pressure in my chest was worse.
And I said, Oh, my goodness, I'm dying.
I'm having a heart attack.
Sure.
And I said, Well, Lord, I guess you're taking me I guess this is the end of it there.
So I just gave up, you know?
And all of a sudden, well you wear earphones, you know how you hear sounds over top of your head?
You don't hear them actually in either ear?
Sure.
And I heard this voice, and it was like over top of my head, and it said, get up!
Get up and walk to the office, knock on the door, and tell Beverly you're having a heart attack and to call 911.
Oh, okay.
I can't see and I, you know, I can't breathe and my heart quit beating.
So, okay, I'll get up.
I got up and I started walking towards the office and it was really weird.
It was like I was floating over there and like I was seeing through a haze.
I mean, I could see, but it was like picture art or something.
And this voice continued to speak and it says, you're going to be all right.
You're going to have a nice long rest.
Well, presently I was at the door feeling no pain or nothing.
I knocked on a door, and the door was opened up, and there stood this woman.
We had two different ones, never knew which one would be on.
I had no idea who was there.
And it was Beverly.
And she said, what's wrong?
I said, I'm having a heart attack, Bev.
Call 911.
And the lights went out.
I didn't know nothing.
And presently, I guess, minutes later, I was only three miles from the hospital, and I All of a sudden become aware again.
I crack my eyes and a really bright light I could hardly see.
And I hear this rattling noise and I'm laying down and I see my partial vision there.
I see this metal tray being rolled up beside me and it's got all kinds of instruments on it.
And I see these hands reaching for these paddle looking things.
Oh my God.
And I thought, oh my, they're going to shock me.
Right.
And then I heard this voice says, Paltz.
And I heard this woman's voice say, Zero.
And then he said something else.
And she says, Zero.
I thought, Oh, they're going to shock me.
I better let them know I'm alive.
And I so I forced myself and I sit right straight up.
And this doctor was standing there and his eyes got big around his dinner place.
And he looked at me and he said, Put your head down.
We're trying to save your life.
So I laid back down and I said, I'm glad somebody's trying.
And then he calls to this nurse again, standing in front of a machine, and he says, pulse.
He says, 33.
Then he says another number, something else, and she says, 66.
And he says, we got him!
We got him!
We got him back!
You weren't even supposed to be hearing any of that.
That's amazing.
And then he says to me, he looks at me, dumbfounded, and he says, I can't believe this.
He says, How long have you been awake?
I said, well, I just woke up and he said, you were DOA.
I said, what?
He said, you were DOA.
Right.
And I couldn't believe it.
And I did have a nice three months off and rest and went back to work and I'm back at work.
And one day my boss says to me, he says, the guy outside wants to talk to you.
And I walked out and it was an ambulance driver sitting there.
And they come through all the time, sometimes stop and have coffee at our garage.
And he looked at me, he turned white as a ghost.
I said, what's wrong with you?
He said, I'm the guy that picked you up dead and took you to the hospital.
He said you was alive.
I don't believe it.
That's absolutely an astounding story.
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.
Yeah, hi Art.
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, he turned everything off.
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 was still in the house.
My entire car was in the house.
It sounds to me, Jim, like you were in shock.
Oh, definitely.
You know what?
I orchestrated a search.
Because I thought that my fiancé that I was going to pick up that day, I had the cops looking because my mind thought that she was with me.
They're looking under bushes for her and she never was in the car.
Gotcha.
You were in shock.
I hope nobody was hurt in the house.
No, you know, that was the weird thing.
The only person hurt was me.
I had a very, very, very severe concussion.
I had amnesia for the next two weeks.
I didn't know what was going on from the next day to the next.
And the only good part about it is that I survived.
The only bad part about the good part, I had to listen to the judge.
And I'm telling you, I paid the price.
I'm sure you did.
Fifteen days in the Grey Bar Motel, you know, and to this day I say to myself, I deserved it.
Yeah, I had a sleep problem and stuff like that, but what a time to take the wrong medicine with alcohol.
I hear you.
Well, that's definitely qualifying as a bad day, Jim.
Definitely.
Driving into a house.
My God.
I wonder how many of us get warnings of a bad day.
I mean, could we become so sensitive that instead of proceeding into the day, we just decide, no, you know, this feels, everything about this day, have you had one of those?
Everything about this day feels wrong.
I'm just going to stay home, lay on the couch and watch a little TV.
I'm not going to expose myself to the possibility.
No, most of us don't do that, do we?
I wonder how many people have saved themselves?
Of course, you'd never really know, would you?
Even if you had that feeling and you took it easy and nothing happened, you would say, well, that was, you know, I was kind of dumb, wasn't I?
That was dumb.
I just, I thought it was going to be a bad day and I stayed home and nothing happened.
Well, you'll never know, will you?
Whether it would have been an awful day, whether it could have been the day you would die, you wouldn't know.
Wildcard line number four, I think it is.
Christopher in Pueblo, Colorado.
Yes.
First of all, I'd like to say what an honor it is to speak with you and how much I'm a huge fan of this show since about 1984.
I've been listening off and on.
But I want to tell you about my worst and best day in that order.
Okay.
First of all, I'm trying to keep myself composed.
On 6-6-0-6, my oldest son passed away.
And then shortly thereafter, I lost 11 more friends in the last six months.
God, that's a bad year.
Yeah, it's been a bad year.
But now I want to switch over to my best day.
And I've had some Incredible experiences I could go on and I could do an entire show on.
Well, we don't have that much time.
No, just just this one on 11 27 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 until 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.
All right, well I hope that that works out for you, and we don't do those mass experiments here and there, 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.
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 Kuntz, 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's 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.
First time caller line, Sean in Las Vegas.
You're on the air.
Howard, how are you, my friend?
I'm well, sir.
Good, good.
Fellow radio person, I've never heard your show before, but I'm hearing it today and I had to call it with my story.
Okay.
Back when I was 18 years old, I was friends with a news anchor who had relocated to Presque Isle, 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, alright, sure.
So I pack my clothes, I pack some music for the road because I'm going to be driving in a six and there's no radio on the six.
I forget my clothes, I forget my music.
So I start driving.
Pass through New Hampshire, pass through Maine, get just south of Bangor.
And I see a sign for food.
I haven't eaten yet, so I'm like, alright, sure.
Go over there.
I'm driving an 89 Volkswagen Cabriolet.
Small car.
Convertible.
Definitely a girl's car.
But I was driving.
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.
In the middle of nowhere, oh my god.
This is only the tip of the iceberg.
So I get off, it gets hard, it gets so much worse.
Okay, well, I don't know if I want to hear about how much worse this gets.
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 we need to make it funnier.
So I get off at the rest area and I clean up.
I'm wearing white shorts.
It shows completely.
I clean it up.
Get back on the road.
Well, no, I exit 40.
I see a sign for a side, you know, right aid or something like that.
I'm like, I'll get some Maine shorts or something.
They closed at like 4pm on a Sunday, because this is the sticks of man.
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 my transmission died on my car with stained shorts.
Now it gets better.
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.
Oh my God.
Her AAA car to get my car back down to Portland and She had to see what had happened about an hour earlier.
I think I would have kept on driving.
I don't know what I would have done.
If I could have, I would have pushed the car the five hours back south to Boston.
That was the most humiliating day.
But my friend, as one radio person to another, you've been in it for much longer and hopefully will continue to be in it.
You're doing a great job.
I love it.
All right, thanks, Sean, and good luck to you.
And after that, this is where we'll take our break.
We'll be back in a moment.
You know it may be that more people tend to remember bad days than good days.
Looking at what's lined up for me, almost all of them are the worst days.
So, off we go, east of the Rockies, to Rick in Kansas City.
Hi, Rick.
Hello, Art.
It's been, I think, about three years since I talked to you.
Last time I was on 40 Meters.
Alright, well, you know, I think I recognize your voice.
Yeah, remember I was the one that was doing my Ross Mitchell impersonation and you popped in?
I do recall.
Yeah, and anyway, mine is kind of along the same lines as the last fellow there.
I spent 20 years in broadcasting, and when I have a bad day, it just seems like several things happen all at once.
Inevitably.
Inevitably.
In fact, that's the very nature of a bad day.
It's going to be bad.
A lot of bad things are going to happen.
Not necessarily just one.
But this happened to me when I was still in radio.
And it's kind of amusing.
It's amusing now.
So it's kind of along the same lines as what happened to the previous caller there.
I was laughing.
That was pretty good, I have to say.
But anyway, at the time, I was living in Atchison.
Atchison, Kansas, and I worked in St.
Joseph, Missouri Radio, which is 22 miles away.
And I woke up, and I had this horrible pain in my neck.
And my left-hand side was, I don't know, almost kind of numb.
So it was pinching a nerve.
Anyway, it took me a while to get up out of bed.
And I finally got up.
And I got on the phone and I was trying to find a chiropractor or figure out what was wrong.
So anyway, I found one in St.
Joe and I was in so much pain I had to wrap a towel around my neck to kind of support my head because it hurts so bad.
Anyway, I got out to the car, drove all the way to St.
Joe, went to a chiropractor, got my neck snapped back into place.
He gave me a little neck brace to hold it there.
They gave you this massage with kind of an electroshock thing that tenses the muscles up to hold it into place.
So anyway, I get this done and I have a radio shift in the afternoon.
So I was thinking, well, you know, I'll just get doctored up and I'll still go do my shift because I love radio.
So anyway, I get all of that done and on my way back, there's a small town you pass through on the way back to Atchison, I saw a deer running from the side of the road.
So I slowed down almost to a stop.
The deer still hit the side of the car anyway, ran right into the car.
The head of the deer came through the window, hit me in my face, twisted my neck, threw it out of place again, and this is all true.
Anyway, I was in pain again, severely, so I turn around and I go back to St.
Joe with deer mucus on my shoulder, my hair, the side of my face.
I go back to this place, pay another $50 to get my neck snapped back into place.
Anyway, at this point, I decide I'm going to drive, you know, because he's given me a prescription for painkillers, which I hadn't filled yet.
I thought, I'm going to go home and I'm going to call in today.
I am not going in today.
This is a bad day.
So anyway, I called the station and the then general manager says, that's the most bizarre lie I've ever heard.
He said, if you don't show up for work today, you're fired.
Ah.
So I go back out to the car.
I still haven't changed yet.
So I got some, a little bit of blood on my shoulder, deer mucus and all this stuff in my hair, the whole nine yards.
And there's some blood on the door.
It didn't kill the deer and there's fur stuck on the molding and all that stuff.
So I drive all the way up there.
I walk in like this and he's standing there with this stunned look on his face.
And I said, I wasn't lying.
And I told him the whole story again, and he goes, I've got to see this.
So anyway, we go out in the parking lot.
He looks at the car at the car door, looks at me, and he goes, well, what's the most bizarre thing I've ever heard?
I couldn't I couldn't believe that.
So I'm really sorry.
Why don't you go on home there?
And that's how it ended.
I still had a job, but he didn't believe me until I drove again all the way back to St.
Joe to show him this.
I see.
Well, that's the way radio is.
It's kind of like the mail must go through.
And no matter what happens, you pretty much got to be there.
I recall, actually I think it was in Las Vegas, I was fired from that job no less than about a half dozen times.
And generally rehired within the hour.
But I work for an interesting person.
I won't go any further.
Actually, I wrote about it a little bit in the book The Art of Talk, you know, describing some of my career.
But it's been a very, very, very interesting life, to say the least.
Wildcard Line, Joe in Oklahoma, you are upon the air.
Hi Art, how are you doing, sir?
I'm just fine.
Excellent.
Hey, my story real quick 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.
You've got it.
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.
I always pay close attention to the weather.
It was a beautiful, clear day, and I saw that we were going to 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 still camera.
Packed all that away.
As I'm eating dinner with my family, getting ready to leave.
I leave about 7 in the evening.
The storm rolled in and it was pretty treacherous.
My wife is from Kansas City.
That's where she grew up.
And she'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, you know, what's your plan?
What are you going to do?
She said, well, I'm going to go, you know, 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 Frady hole, which would be a storm cellar or a basement of some sort.
Sure.
And she was kind of put out with me that I was, you know, 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.
But you need to be prepared.
And she kind of blew me off.
I kissed my wife and kids goodbye and leave for the evening.
And I know 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.
Oh my God.
So I pull over immediately.
Call her.
I said get get the kids together.
Get get outside.
I'm going to be coming.
I'm turning around to come and get you.
And at this point, one of them has already dropped to the ground and she's in the truck.
My cousin Uh-oh, you're starting to break up on us.
Have you got me, Art?
I've got you.
My cousin and his two daughters who live next door, he is just coming home to get them, his daughters, which are home alone.
They all gather together and go to my cousin's, my other cousin, which is his brother's house, who has a cellar.
So I realize that they're safe and sound with him and their safety, so I get my video camera out and I'm filming this thing.
Drop out of the sky within a quarter mile of my home.
And as I watched it later on, was kind of tickled with myself with just the adrenaline rush.
And I'm just laughing to myself thinking, I knew this was going to happen today.
I knew it.
I knew it.
Fortunately, it went the opposite direction of my home, went through a local airport, destroyed airplanes and hangars and so on.
Ended up chasing the storm for the rest of the day.
Got home that night, and my wife was so apologetic for not listening to me, and she said, from now on, if you've got a hunch like this, then I'm definitely going to pay attention to what you say.
Okay, well that's what we call it, a hunch or a feeling in the pit of our stomach, I don't know.
Just those, whatever words you want to put to it.
You, if you're listening to yourself, you will know that something is going to happen.
And in that case it means get prepared or, as I said, maybe just stay home.
Just cancel whatever plans you had.
And it's a wonderful way to avoid what otherwise will turn out to be very tragic indeed.
On the international line from Canada, Stan, you're on the air.
Hello there, Art.
How are you doing?
Okay, sir.
I think the topic of the program tonight was your best day and your worst day.
I'm getting mostly worst days.
Well, my best day was when I married my wife.
And my worst day is when I lost her.
I hear that.
I just, I'm kind of curious, how long were you and Ramona married?
How long?
Yeah, if you don't mind me asking that.
Not at all.
Better than 14 years, sir.
Was that right?
Did you have any children?
No, I did not.
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.
So I had 10 years with a wonderful woman.
Well, that's about all I guess we can ask.
I don't know.
The Lord has his own way of doing things and the fact that Ramona was taken from me, there's
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.
What's for the Rockies in Tucson, Arizona?
You're on the air.
Hi Art, this is Poppy in Tucson, Arizona.
I was a young widow too at 35 and I've never heard any more true words than those.
But I wanted to tell you the best day of my life.
It happened when I was 5 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, um, I, I, you know, in, in the wintertime, we were all bundled up.
So it just, it was even worse cause you can't move.
And my sister kept trying to grab me and she was screaming and, um, the ice kept breaking under her feet and she kept, you know, backing up and backing up on her ice skates.
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 is 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, and they ripped off my clothes and put me in cold water.
Of course.
You're the second person to say that you heard a voice telling you you were going to be okay.
Yeah, it was very strange.
And I've been pretty intuitive since then.
I'm told that these kinds of experiences can make you intuitive.
Perhaps instead of making you intuitive, they just make you wise up and you start listening to yourself.
Do you think that might be true?
Yeah, it might be true.
I've had out-of-body experiences when I was younger.
And I cleared through to when I was a teenager and, you know, and then I stopped listening as an adult and then I become more aware and start listening.
Like you said, when you know something bad or you feel something bad's going to happen, you just follow that voice, that inner voice and go with it.
All right.
Thank you very, very much for the call.
And again, the lesson is driven home.
Listen to that feeling, that little naggy feeling.
It'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.
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.
Hey, I heard it's been a long time getting a hold of you.
It's like winning the lottery.
Good to have you.
Yeah.
You know, I've got a Best day and worst day story, but I'd like to say that the story about your dad that you told is the best story I've heard.
And I've been with you since back in K-O-P-E-F-M, when I think he had about 100 stations, and every time a new one came on, you'd talk about it.
You betcha.
But because it had an important message at the end, just a few short words to a kid can hurt their life, harm them, move their life towards the better or worse.
Or drive them.
Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
Yes.
And so my best and worst story, I won't highlight the worst one much.
You know, I killed someone accidentally, a kid.
And I'm sorry.
And it's like the guy with the accident, you know, on the highway.
Right.
And the 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 sappy, 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 that.
Birth is a miracle.
It was the...
One best day in my whole life.
I could die any moment, and my life is fulfilled just with that moment.
And it was such a joy to know that I have that love inside of me.
All right.
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 of the line, John in Florida.
Worst day, John.
How you doing Art?
How you doing tonight?
Fine.
I would say it was more like a worse morning, man.
I was up playing John Madden football late one night of all things.
It got about 2 or 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.
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.
Sure.
I'm like, what's going on, you know?
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.
Like, they look like lanterns.
But they were like burning red candles or something, 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 a porch, and it stopped.
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, uh, he points at me, and I'm like, it freaked me out.
It was completely silent.
The whole place, 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 bag, the peek bag out here to see what was going on and he was gone.
Maybe it was death coming to collect your soul.
Well, I don't know if he was coming to collect me because he missed out.
Maybe because you ran into the house.
Maybe because you ran into the house.
I don't know. Maybe because I smoke. Maybe because I'm doing something wrong in life. I don't know.
It was a pretty bad day and it stuck with me.
Did you quit smoking after that?
Actually, I'm smoking right now while I'm talking to you.
Well, my advice, John, is to quit while you're still young.
And I'm doing my darndest, but I'm not doing as well as I wish I could.
What I really need to do is to throw them down.
I mean, I'm really down to about three or four a day, except when I'm on the air.
And I should just throw them down and be absolutely done with it.
And I know that in every fiber in my body.
Kind of like The experiences that we're hearing about tonight.
You know, the people who are having these worst days and they sort of felt it.
They sort of knew it, but they kind of ignored it.
And it'll get you.
Wild Card Line, Jeremy in Mississippi, you're on the air.
Hey Art, how you doing?
Hey, hello Art.
I'm fine.
My question, I'm kind of off the topic tonight, I just realized, and I apologize for that.
There really is no topic, it's open line, so whatever you want to say.
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 Merry Christmas to you, and I'll just hang up and listen to your reply, and thanks for coming in for George.
You're very welcome, Jeremy.
Yeah, it's called mass consciousness, Jeremy.
And I've done a number of experiments with it 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.
Carol in Florida, you're on the air.
Hey Art, how are you doing this morning?
Okay.
Good, listen, I was told to tell you that I just got out of the hospital three days ago after being on the ventilator for ten days.
Oh my gosh.
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 called 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 911ed out of here many, many, many, many times.
Always came back.
Stabilized.
Come back.
No problem.
For some reason, this time, when I was on 9-1-1 Doubt, 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 over here.
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, Art, 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 ten minutes, or say five minutes, to be on the safe side.
They intubated me and put me on the respirator when I got to the emergency room.
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.
Death is a miracle itself.
You were talking to the 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?
Yes, of course.
Okay.
Now, I always thought, you're gonna go to the light, no problem.
I went through so much darkness.
To get to that light.
I was killing spiders.
I was killing monsters.
It was unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
But when I finally got to the light, it was like opening the door in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy walked out of that house after that tornado.
All right.
Well, that's yet another story.
There you go.
As I said a little bit earlier, and it's one of the things that I have personally derived from this program, in 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's life after death.
There is an existence after death.
And I also believe that most times when, you know, 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?
Can you imagine being conscious, unable to move, and 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 just got another interesting book that I'll tell you about shortly.
What's to the Rockies?
Jem in Emeryville, California, you're on the air.
Hi Art.
Hi.
Well, last Sunday I had a real crummy day, but before I tell you, what happened to you last Sunday?
You weren't on.
Oh yes, a little bit under the weather last Sunday.
Oh, okay.
I actually was up the entire night the previous night for reasons that I won't discuss right now.
Okay.
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, uh, 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 him 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.
Well, 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, several miles away, I thought, but wouldn't it be a wonderful Christmas gift to this vendor to show up tomorrow and and, you know, and give it to them and just see the joy in their eyes that they thought this thing was gone forever?
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.
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.
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 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 stopped off with a barely grunted a 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.
I felt like an ass.
And that was my crummy day.
Yeah, it's a crummy day, all right.
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.
Hi Art.
Hi.
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.
Um, to divorce shortly after one, to suicide on my birthday.
Um, uh, both of whom were alcoholics.
Um, a brother who I was real close with helped me with.
Um, I lost shortly after that to an accident.
Those events were in the late seventies and eighties.
Recently, a couple of years ago, I lost the last of my siblings to a sudden brain aneurysm.
And after relocating, uh, 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.
Okay, we don't have much time.
Okay, I'm almost done, and I was led to one I was not going to look at because it was only half the price, and it turned out to be in excellent condition.
And I couldn't believe that I had come across this until I realized it was my recently deceased brother's birthday.
And this is a story for those people who would just believe.
I can offer no more proof.
Very quick, very quick.
That's it.
The story's over.
Okay.
All right.
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 AM.
From all the way on this side of the world, I'm Art Bell.
The current book I'm reading, I picked up, it's called Mephisto Club and it's by Tess Gerritsen.
Remember, 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 Gerritsen.
Tess has, since I read that book and fell so in love with it, been on the show a couple of times.
A new book, she's a New York Times best-selling author, Tess Gerritsen, called the Mephisto 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 Gerritsen, 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 their guillotine, 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 Gerritsen 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, Art, I thought I should mention one of Koontz'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.
Hi, Art.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to 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.
I sat outside while everybody got their readings.
When they were done, the psychic came and he said, ìI'm waiting for you.î And I said, ìOh, I'm not here for a reading.î He said, ìNo, I'm waiting for you.
Come in.î So I went in and he said, ìDo you know your psychic?î And I said, ìWell, I've been told that before.î And he said, ìDon't leave New Zealand.î 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, 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 that never happened.
I'm going to be fired if I didn't leave the next morning.
Of course, yes.
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.
I remember as I walked down the jetway, a couple of crew members were teasing me.
They said, God, you look so good.
You're just glowing with that smile.
I got on the plane and went upstairs to the 747.
It 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.
Wow.
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 go state to state living outside because they can't go in buildings and such like that, and it was tough.
But this year I finally found a house that I could breathe in and was non-toxic outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I found it in about March.
To backtrack just a little bit, I had lived in Colorado when I was flying, and a couple months before I got sick on the airplane, I had bought a Samoyed puppy to use to do avalanche search and rescue work.
And when I got sick, 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, I 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 and 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 did organic gardening.
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 ten degrees below zero.
It was really, really tough.
And my service dog, Kush, had gotten, she had diabetes, 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... Well, it's odd that you and your dog would have the same sensitivity.
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 it.
I was non-toxic and they had sprayed pesticides and they 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're 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'd waited perhaps a little bit too long, and there were some difficulties in the surgery.
And he, I think he almost lost her under 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, Um, they say that 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 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 and it just, oh my gosh.
No, animals give you unconditional love, and that's the great thing about animals.
They don't ask anything back.
They just give you unconditional love.
I've heard of that before.
I've heard of people who develop extreme sensitivities to anything, even things that wouldn't even How are you today, Art?
You can call it a good day and a bad day at the same time.
or the spray of something or another and just get extreme sensitivity to these toxic things
in the air.
What's for the Rockies?
Dan, you're on the air.
Yeah, how are you today, Art?
I'm okay, sir.
You can call it a good day and a bad day at the same time.
Okay.
A little over three years ago, and I don't know how I did it, but it seems I passed out,
and I called 911 to get me to the hospital, and it turned out that I ended up, had water
around my heart and in my lungs.
They put me on a resuscitator, and I was in a coma for at least three months.
I'm getting better each day now.
I'm blind, but I'm in a nursing home.
I don't even remember making the phone call or anything.
That's like a lot of the rest of the callers.
Huh?
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.
Are you still there?
I'm still here.
I cannot hear you.
You could not hear me?
There, now I hear you.
Okay, good.
I don't know what's going on.
It's probably the sunspots.
But anyway, I found out from a friend of mine what exactly happened.
I thought I'd driven my car to the hospital, but it was still in front of my trailer where I lived.
And I've gradually gotten better.
Each day is better as it goes along.
Alright, well I'm glad to hear it.
I'm glad to hear you're better.
And it is interesting that so many people...
Have either one experience or the other.
They don't remember calling 9-1-1.
They don't remember soliciting help or the exact opposite.
And they remember everything.
They're out or they're even clinically dead.
And they remember hearing everything.
Isn't that odd?
I don't really want that experience.
Thank you very much.
Let's go to the wildcard line and Scott in California.
Hi.
Hello.
Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
I guess it would be good afternoon there, huh?
Yes.
Yes.
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 occurs to me now that, you know, there's no memorial, there's no notice of that.
Doesn't it seem like you would expect a memorial to have been placed at that site by now?
You mean at the site of the World Trade Towers?
No, no, no.
This guy found this passport a couple blocks away, so this airplane crashes into World Trade Centers.
World Trade Centers fall down in their own footprint, and he finds this passport a couple blocks away.
You know, it doesn't seem like there ought to be a little memorial.
You know, like you go to Gettysburg or something, they got little memorials all over the place.
Well, of course, again, there is, of course, a memorial at the World Trade Center point.
I guess it was such a tragic, gigantic mess that you can't have memorials everywhere for every part of that event.
I think there probably is one in Pennsylvania where that flight went down.
I would imagine so.
You know, I don't know that for sure.
And perhaps something at the Pentagon.
I don't know.
Let's go to Chuck in Illinois.
Hi, Chuck.
Hi, Art.
I'm glad I got through to you, and I consider it a huge privilege to see you for quite some time.
Thank you.
I'm a little reluctant as to where to start, quite frankly, without sounding like I'm a lunatic, but I spoke with George Norrie a few months back, and to give you a quick example, we were calling about a completely different subject, and the minute he picked up the phone, he said, are those ghosts back there?
No, that's in your library.
But as far as good times and bad times, one of the worst times, and I've noticed that I don't recognize them immediately.
In other words, when I think it's bad, it's really good and so forth.
But one of the worst times is when I asked for a little too much information and got it.
And the best times are when I didn't have enough information And I received help.
I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes it's difficult if you're very close to a situation to recognize what's really good for you or bad for you.
Okay, I'm trying to understand, Chuck, but you're being kind of general here, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
In other words, for example, I ran across a book called Z. It's an encyclopedia of ancient and forbidden knowledge.
And I've listened to you throughout the years, and I dare say that I have almost perfected reverse speech.
And I was encouraged by listening to your program.
And it's really wonderful.
It's a little bit difficult to express because it is so, so much.
And I've also...
I have a lot of documents that indicate some other experiences with regard to spiritual natures and other things that I've run across.
Okay, Chuck.
Well, thank you very much for the call.
Reverse speech was indeed an interesting, a very, very interesting What would 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.
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.
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.
And I would suggest trying sunflower seeds.
Sunflower seeds?
You mean to keep yourself busy?
Well, 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.
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.
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.
I was listening to you, and I looked at the coffee, and I thought, ooh, that was close.
It's an ill wind that doesn't help somebody out, I guess.
And I want to commend you, because you've done very well with it.
When I have done that, it sounds like I'm holding my tongue and trying to talk.
So you've done a great job.
Thank you.
Worst thing.
Losing your fiancé, I lost my fiancé on my 20th birthday.
Oh boy.
She was going to get my president and she was killed by a drunk driver.
Oh my god.
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.
I know that sounds pretty bad, but... It does.
You reap what you sow.
And... I guess that's true.
You know, he got it all right.
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.
Okay.
I was put in with an abusive family when I was a kid.
I mean, I have places I don't even remember.
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.
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