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Oct. 5, 2015 - Art Bell
02:22:07
Art Bell MITD - Tess Gerritsen Gravity
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From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you all good evening, good
morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones.
Each and every one of them covered like a blanket by this program, Midnight in the Desert.
I'm Art Bell.
Great to be here tonight.
Actually, it's raining outside.
Raining in the desert.
A rare occurrence.
I know elsewhere they'd have a lot too much of it, but here in the desert it's very rare.
It is storming in the mountains, so to say a prayer for the microwave shot, I'm sure it'll be fine.
Two rules for this program.
I have only two rules.
One is only one call per show.
And the other is no bad language.
No bad language.
one damn culprits of show that's it uh...
uh...
well i just looked over at uh...
the wormhole and somebody just typed
my wife is a shadow person Where did that come from?
Hangover from last week.
My wife is a shadow person.
Good Lord.
I'm married to an alien last Friday for fun.
I need to interview you, sir.
All right, so let's see where to go.
Lots of news to talk about.
CNN did a story actually continuing coverage of the shootings in Oregon.
Horrible, right?
Horrible.
But they did something tonight that I have never seen on CNN before, may never see again, so I'm going to note it.
Of course, what they do is, you know, they talk about the shooter.
You know how it goes.
We have so many of these shootings now, you know how it goes, right?
They find out all they can about the shooter, and you're told that, and you're told then about the victims, but, you know, not any personal information on the victims because it's too early.
And then a few days later, you begin hearing from the victim's families, and they had one of those interviews on.
And I don't think they expected it to go the way that it did.
But they were interviewing the relative of one of the victims, and they asked him about guns, expecting the usual anti-gun answer.
And this guy stood there and said, we don't have a gun problem in America.
We have a mental health problem.
And I swear to God, if I had, you know, if I didn't know that it was a hard screen, I would have jumped into the TV and kissed the guy in the cheek.
I can't believe somebody finally said it.
I'm sure CNN had no idea what to do with it.
But he said it.
He said the truth.
And that is the truth.
We have a mental health problem.
Guns rarely jump up and do damage on their own.
But we did damage when we emptied out the mental asylums.
And, uh, yes, they can lay their hands on guns and do bad things with them if they're mentally ill, which, as a general rule in these incidents, they are.
Healthy-minded people don't go out and just sort of, you know, shoot strangers.
They just don't do it.
In, uh, South Carolina?
Big, big, big trouble.
They're calling this a thousand-year storm.
With global warming, probably it'll become a 500-year storm and then a 250-year storm and so forth.
But it is awful.
Thousands of people with no running water.
Try it.
Try living with no running water.
What do they say about all the water around and not a drop to drink?
Not even close.
You shouldn't even really walk in it.
There's a lot of sewage in there and it's awful.
And it's going to get worse.
The rain is occurring upstate and it's coming down the tributaries to the rivers, to the dams.
Over Creek Dam just bleached a few hours ago.
And it's going to get worse before it gets better.
They're calling it a billion dollar disaster.
That used to be a lot of money.
I guess a billion dollars is not what it once was.
Millions certainly not at all what it once was, right?
I feel so sorry for the people in that area and if we had open lines I would be asking for somebody in that area to call and see how it's going.
It's not going well.
That's for sure.
So, that's awful.
The captain of a 790 foot El Faro, that's the big ship that went down, they were trying to get away from Hurricane Joaquin but they had some kind of mechanical failure.
It was a container ship and it was loaded with cars and containers and according to the Coast Guard it's probably all hands lost.
It's down in 15,000 feet of water.
15,000 feet of water. So, I'm afraid we're not going to hear anymore about that.
Thank you.
Let's see, um, from, uh, theanomalist.com, oh, no, before I even get to that, I have something I want you to see.
This is on my website.
Now, you never know about these kinds of things, but this comes from Thailand.
It's a brand new photograph.
And I'm telling you, you've never seen anything like this in your life.
This creature, that we have a very, very clear photograph of, was born of a buffalo.
Born of a buffalo.
But, it's not a buffalo.
Or it's only half a buffalo, or maybe, I don't know, a third buffalo.
It has the features of a crocodile.
Not kidding you.
You can clearly see the crock head.
And it's got the body of a buffalo, kind of.
No, it does have it.
This is just in.
Breaking bad news.
I guess you could call it.
I really think that you should... This is one of those where you go, honey, come here, you gotta see this.
And when Honey comes there and looks at it, she goes, oh my God, what's that?
And that was my reaction.
Oh my God, what's that?
When I called Honey over.
Kind of horrid.
I mean, there's no way that a buffalo and a crocodile, right?
There's no way.
At least, I don't even want to picture it in my mind.
But it appears to be Right there for you to see a very clear photograph.
None of this fuzzy photograph stuff.
This is almost too clear.
So, I'll take your comments on that.
I'm really curious.
Anyway, from, where was I?
The Anomalous, yes.
A former U.S.
Navy pilot.
It says that a huge fireball maneuvered above the Hanford Atomic Plant during World War II.
First attempted intercept of a UFO by a military fighter?
The UFO Chronicles.
Robert Hastings digs up one of the earliest reported sightings of a UFO over our nuclear facilities, the Hanford Plutonium Production Plant in Washington State.
Happened on three different nights in January of 45 before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
According to a former U.S.
Naval Lieutenant Junior Grade Clarence R. Budd Klim.
The report is backed up, in fact, by an official document from the headquarters of the 4th Air Force.
All right, what else?
Football.
I don't know how many of you know I'm a big football fan.
New Miami Dolphins coach, Dan Campbell, believes that his underachieving team needs to be more aggressive.
In fact, he says, aggressiveness that stops just short of dirty play.
So, in other words, he's picking up the Raiders playbook, right?
And he looks forward to breaking up a few fights in practice.
Joe Philbin, he's not.
I guess Joe was the one to let go, right?
So what was the problem?
They were being too meek?
Don't tackle so hard!
What was going on with Miami?
I don't really follow Miami.
But it was a hell of a, boy I'll tell you what, this weekend was one heck of a football weekend.
I don't know if any of you recall, I don't like the Chiefs.
So I enjoyed their getting trounced.
And I do like Green Bay, as you know.
And I like Denver.
And Green Bay is 4-0.
And Denver is 4-0.
All in all, it was a really, really satisfying football weekend.
I mean, it was really good.
Watching some of that will lift your spirits.
Especially when it's a team you really want to see trounced.
Alright, coming up in a moment, Tess Gerritsen.
Oh, you're going to want to catch this one.
She's really something.
I'm Art Bell.
That's 1-952-CALL-ART.
Please make note of the number and call it not now, but later.
Well, alright, um... Clearly, one of the best books that I've ever read in my life, and that's a lot.
I'm a big reader.
I read a lot of books.
One of the best books I've ever read is Gravity.
And back when I read it, a long time ago, I said, oh, I've got to get this lady on.
Whoever wrote this, I've got to get him on.
And it turned out to be Tess Gerritsen.
And here she comes.
Internationally best-selling author Tess Gerritsen took a rather unusual route to a writing career.
She's a graduate of Stanford University, Texas, uh, Stanford University.
She then went on to medical school, get this, medical school, at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was awarded her MD.
So she's a doctor here, actually.
Now retired from medicine, so we can call her Tess, I think.
She writes full-time.
Her books have been published in 40 countries, and more than 30 million copies have been sold all around The world.
Tess, welcome to Midnight in the Desert.
It is good to be talking to you again, Art.
And you're back on the East Coast, where it's really after midnight already, right?
That's right.
It's way past my bedtime, so I have no responsibility for what I say.
I'm going to be punchy.
I didn't even drink my whiskey tonight.
Okay.
All right.
Gee, it's awfully hard to know where to begin.
Let me say this.
When I was in the Philippines, you sent me a book all the way to the Philippines.
Yeah.
As a surgeon, I think.
And you know, I've got to tell you, Tess, when you send somebody something to the Philippines, it gets there eventually.
But you get this notice.
And then you have to go down and you have to talk to the customs people, if you can find them.
Oh no.
Oh yeah, and then they will take out whatever it is and examine it.
Hmm, I wonder how much we can get for this.
And so they'll usually look it up on the internet, come up with a price, and then tell you how much they want personally, and then how much the government wants.
What an ordeal.
That's the way it works over there.
But I got the book.
Well, I'm sorry to put you through all that.
No, it's all right.
It's just the way things are done there.
Anyway, your book, Gravity, remains probably, I guess, in the top eight books that I've read in my whole life, and that's saying a lot.
And so, when I heard that the movie Gravity was coming out, I went, Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
Her book is becoming a movie!
What a movie it's gonna be!
And then... And then... And then?
Yeah, and then I found out... No!
Wait a minute!
No, it has to be!
Tess wrote Gravity, right?
Um, so... You can imagine my surprise, outrage, anger... I... I... If, you know, if I'd had a phone I could've picked up then, I would've...
And called you.
I couldn't believe it.
And I guess you couldn't either.
No, it is a long and sordid tale.
And you know, the public doesn't even know everything that happened because we never got to court.
But I'm happy to talk about it now because one of the advantages of my dropping the lawsuit is I never had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Lucky you.
Yeah, I know.
That was one of the reasons I decided to stop then, because there was no way I could not talk about this.
It's not only a sordid tale, it ends up with a rather creepy twist that we'll get to later on.
All right, well let's hold all that, and let's go back and talk about the research you did for the book Gravity.
I mean, you know, you're a doctor, sure, and you had the biological, you know, Well, it started off with this idea of a disaster aboard the International Space Station.
stuff that was in there so how did you research it?
Yeah, well it started off with this idea of a disaster aboard the International Space
Station and this was back in 97 when I got the idea.
Now I'm a doctor.
I had the basic science, physics, chemistry, etc.
leading up to medical school, but I didn't know much about aerospace medicine.
I was just a Star Trekkie like everybody else I knew.
So, it started off the way I always research my books, which is just I dive into it with a lot of reading.
I spent about five months just reading about astronaut training, about NASA, about Aerospace medicine, and then eventually you need to go to the source.
And one of the things I've learned, because I was an anthropology major in college, is to understand the culture of the people you're about to, you know, talk to.
Yes.
So I picked up the phone and I called up the public affairs officer at NASA, at Johnson Space Center, and the conversation went something like this.
I'm going to write a thriller about the International Space Station.
Can you help me?
And he said, tell me what your book is about.
And I said, well, there's a disaster in space and it kills everybody but my heroine.
And he said, do you know what the purpose of my office is here?
It's to make my organization look good.
What else happens in your story?
And I said, a shuttle crashes on landing, killing everybody aboard.
And he said, I don't think we want to cooperate.
And I said, wait, wait, wait, everything that goes wrong in my book is not your fault.
NASA does everything right.
And he said, whose fault is it?
And I said, it's the military's.
And he said, when would you like to come?
So what I had learned earlier is that there's this inherent tension between, you know, military space and civilian space.
Well, of course, in fact, the shuttle, you know, did missions for both.
Right, they did.
They did.
But there is, you know, there's this competition for dollars between military and civilian.
There's also a different philosophy.
I think the people who go into civilian space Exploration, they come from Star Trek, just like I do.
You know, you drive into the NASA parking lot, and you see the bumper stickers that say, Beam Me Up Scotty.
You know these are people who grew up with the idea that space is for all mankind.
Of course, yes.
Yeah.
I'm sure for every million dollars that goes to the military, a penny gets squeezed out for NASA.
That's probably even less than that.
Yeah, that's right.
So I ended up spending a wonderful week at Johnson Space Center talking to everybody I needed to talk to.
I spent another week at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
I downloaded thousands of pages from the NASA website.
This was pre-911, so they had a lot of stuff that was available, including essentially the entire operations manual for the ISS.
They didn't put you through any of the testing, did they?
No.
No, I just got to go and drink coffee with him.
I think what was cool was just understanding engineers, understanding the language, because they do speak a completely different language from us.
NASA is also known as the National Acronym Slinging Agency, and so you have to understand the language.
Really immersing myself so deeply into the space program that by the end of writing the book, and this was two years later, every night I would dream I was weightless.
So that is how thoroughly immersed it became.
You know, when I do these research trips, a lot of it has to do with finding out details that bother me, that freak me out.
As an example, it's got to be freaky for the astronauts to know when they're strapped in and about to blast off.
Oh yes.
That the news agencies have already written their obituaries.
I mean, that's got to bother them.
Oh, sure.
Well, you know what?
Yours is probably on file somewhere, too.
I mean, anybody who's achieved some measure of fame, one way or the other, probably already has it written in the file, waiting.
Yeah, well, Art, I guess you're in part of the club.
I bet I am.
I read something the other day that I thought was kind of interesting.
Did you know, this is just a stupid, obscure fact, That, um, in the case of nuclear war, um, they had gone to, um, believe it or not, Arthur Godfrey, who recorded an end of the world thing to be played to the American people in case, you know, we were about to all die.
I did not know that.
Yeah, and because the American people at that time trusted Arthur Godfrey that much, so the government went to him and had him recorded.
Boy, I'd love to get my hands on that.
Oh, yeah.
Oh.
Well, you know, the world is full of creepy things.
So creepy that it might still be of use yet.
Ah, you can laugh about these things.
Well, yeah, we can now, but wait till it happens.
I know.
I know.
I did a show on actually what would happen in a full exchange.
I did that like a week ago, and boy, was that scary.
Yeah, yeah.
And the world is deteriorating.
Russia is looking more like the USSR every day, and they've still got all the same weapons.
In fact, they're upgrading.
And we're upgrading too, Tess.
We're spending a trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear weapons.
Well, that's because they're all deteriorating.
All our missile silos are pretty much... they probably have vines growing down into them right now.
You got it.
That's right.
All right.
Back to gravity now.
And again, you know, I just...
When I heard that the movie Gravity was coming, I really did jump up and down for you.
No kidding, Tess.
I really did.
I thought, God, it's going to happen.
A lot of readers did.
I got a lot of emails.
Let's backtrack a little bit.
So the book came out.
Two years of research and writing, and it came out.
Even a couple months before it was released, I sold the movie rights.
Absolutely.
It was one of the biggest deals for book rights that had been done on Hollywood in a long, long time.
It was on the front page of Daily Variety.
My deal with New Line Productions was that I got paid for, first of all, a huge advance Um, but if they made the movie, I was supposed to get credit based upon credit, right?
I was supposed to get a production bonus and I was supposed to get a percentage of the net profits, which probably would end up being zero.
But, um, trust me, they end up being zero, no matter how, how well it does, they figure out a way it can be zero.
So that, that was, that was my, um, what was promised to me.
And they had a script written by a wonderful screenwriter named Michael Goldenberg, who wrote the script for Contact.
Oh, man.
Yeah, that was a good movie.
So the script came back, and there was a little concern because the third... He followed the book very closely, and that was part of the problem, was the third act in the book, as maybe you remember, is really medical.
A procedure is done on the heroine and saves her life, and that's not really cinematic.
So I said, hey, I could fix your third act.
And I wrote, rewrote the third act.
And in my third act, a satellite is shot down, the debris destroys the International Space Station, and the heroine is left drifting in her space suit.
Wow.
Untethered.
Wow.
Yeah.
Okay, so I sent that, I faxed that into Artist Management Group, which is my manager there, and also, incidentally, Alfonso Cuarón's manager.
Stop right there.
That's so interesting.
And so she is out adrift, untethered, I presume without even jets to move around?
Right, right.
By this point she's sick and she's dying.
But she's untethered and satellite debris has destroyed the International Space Station.
Oh my God!
So anyway, that's where we stood and the last I saw on Daily Variety is the script is about to be sent out to AMG clients who are directors.
We're going to line up our director and then the whole thing went dark.
I didn't hear anything for a long time and I assumed the whole project was dead because my project never made it out of development.
So I went on, moved on, ten years go by.
And then I started to get emails from readers, just the way, you know, you wanted to email me.
Congratulations, we hear that your book is about to become a movie.
And, you know, I heard that it was about a female astronaut trapped aboard the International Space Station after her crew dies.
And the original script, apparently, based on the press releases, was that her motivation to live was to be reunited with her daughter on Earth.
So I thought, that sounds awfully suspicious, especially when it's called Gravity.
But I was not aware of any connection, and the movie was going to be made by Warner Brothers.
Now in 2008, Warner Brothers acquired New Line Productions.
So they acquired the rights to my book.
Um, but at this point, I still didn't, I thought it was all coincidental.
It was, you know, parallel production.
This happens... Well, no, wait, wait.
Back up.
New Line bought the rights to your book?
Right.
And then Warner Brothers bought New Line.
Okay.
Um, hold on.
We're at a break point.
I want to understand all this very clearly.
Because, in my opinion, this was such a rip.
That's such a rip.
Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
We've got a lot to talk about tonight.
stay right where you are.
I'm not going to be a fool.
Take a walk on the wild side of midnight.
From the Kingdom of Nile, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
Please call the show at 1-952-225-5278.
That's 1-952.
Call Art.
Not yet, actually.
How you all doing?
Huh?
5 5 2 7 8 that's 1 9 5 2 call art not yet actually how you all do it huh
tonight is Tess Gerritsen and what a story we're getting It's, uh, it's just amazing the way things sometimes work out and sometimes don't.
Anyway, so New Line originally scarfed this up, bought, paid you something, I presume, and I hope it was a fair amount.
It was a lot.
It was a lot.
Okay, good.
Well, at least there is that.
Yes.
I had better luck, and I got quite a bit as well for a book that Whitley and I did, you know, that became The Day After Tomorrow.
Oh, I didn't know that was your book!
Surprise, surprise!
Wow!
It was.
Anyway, our book was called The Coming Global Superstorm.
It became The Day After Tomorrow, and then of course, you know, they change things.
Your book is never It never works out quite the way you want in the movie, but... Right, they always change things.
Yeah, they always change things.
And as you mentioned, when you get a piece of something supposedly, you know, you're never going to get that.
I mean, that has to be written off.
It's never going to happen.
I mentioned Hollywood can figure out a way.
I get these statements all the time, and they're always zeros.
Right.
I mean, all you can hope for is a credit, based upon credit, and that you sell more books.
That's really what it is.
Well, that's right.
That's right.
But if you do get paid up front, that's good.
And so you got something from New Line.
At least that's something.
But ten years later... Right.
Okay.
So, continuing the story.
Yes.
Ten years later, my movie has never been made.
Warner Brothers has bought New Line.
New Line still owns the rights to my book because they bought it outright.
And then I started hearing congratulations from various people, you know, congrats, your book is going to be made into a movie.
And I saw a lot of parallels.
And I didn't know quite what to do.
And so I called my literary agent, and we just felt, we don't really know that there's a connection between my book and Cuaron's project.
We knew that Alfonso Cuaron and his son said that they had written this.
It was an original screenplay.
They had come up with it entirely by themselves.
And that this was something that they had created.
So, you know, if you can't prove that there's any connection, there's really nothing you can sue about.
They'll just say it's all coincidence.
And besides which, I really respected Cuaron.
I thought he was a great director.
I loved his Children of Men.
I liked his Harry Potter film.
I am going to give this man the benefit of the doubt.
Now, Alfonso Cuaron, I hope I'm saying that correctly, it's my understanding he said he knocked this out in like three weeks or something?
Yeah, we're getting to that.
Yes, there was an interview with him in the Hollywood Reporter, and I even have the quote right in front of me.
This happened, he was in London, he had just come off a project that had fallen apart on him.
And he and his son had this image of an astronaut spinning in a void, and they decided they were going to write a movie.
And they wrote it in three weeks.
Now, there was no, apparently there was no research involved.
This is a very highly technical screenplay.
Sure is.
Right.
And he did it in three weeks after an image of a woman floating in space.
And in later interviews, he said that There was nothing technically wrong.
When they went on to the later drafts, the first draft turned out to be technically pretty much on the spot.
And I just thought, how do you do that in three weeks when it took me two years to get everything correct?
Right.
So that was the first thing that tipped me off that there's something really, really weird about this.
And then I saw the movie.
Visually spectacular.
These were some great shots.
Oh, it was.
Yeah, but I got that queasy, queasy feeling.
You know, you're sitting down and you think, oh my gosh, I mean, he threw out the first three quarters of my book and he just used my crisis point.
There wasn't much of a plot to the movie.
It was pretty much, bam, the crisis starts and this is how she survives.
And I thought, wow, satellite debris hitting the space station and she's drifting.
Um, it's, you know, there are, my book was 500 manuscript pages long, so it's a lot of plot, there's a lot of stuff going on, but it's as if he threw out the first part and just used the crisis from then on as his entire movie.
Yeah, I went to the opening day of the movie, actually.
I saw it on the big screen in 3D, it was very impressive.
Well, yeah, it has to be seen in 3D because that's really how it works.
I think he did a great job as a director.
I had quibbles with the science and with the character of Sandra Bullock, but the directing itself looked pretty darn amazing.
So I went home and people asked me, you know, was that based on your book?
And I thought, I can't prove that it is, so I just said, despite all the similarities, From what I've told, it's not based on my novel.
Although there was a journalist in South Africa who wrote a column that said this was Hollywood's biggest rip-off.
He said that the movie was a Reader's Digest condensed version of the book.
So I just decided there's nothing I could do about it.
I avoid conflict anyway.
I've never sued anybody.
And then I got a phone call.
And this is where it turns into a John Grisham novel.
Um, my agent called me and she said that she had just spoken to, let's call this person Deep Throat.
Deep Throat contacted her.
This was somebody who was in the industry who had incredibly detailed information and said essentially that when my book was in development to make a movie, Alfonso Cuaron was attached to be the director for my film.
Oh my God.
So, um, he was supposed to direct my movie.
Let me make sure I have this straight.
The phone call came from your agent, right?
Yes, but my agent got the call from Deep Throat.
From some Deep Throat who said that that Caron was going to be, uh, was going to be the, uh, the director of Of my movie.
Of your movie.
In the year 2000.
In the year 2000.
So, connection, connection, ding, ding, ding, ding.
There's a connection.
Not only that, when Cuaron was attached to be the director of my film, he had suggested George Clooney for the male lead.
Oh, wow.
So now we have a connection.
And my agent said, what do you want to do about this?
Do you want the name of an attorney?
And that's what started the whole big mess.
So I got a terrific attorney.
I got a couple of attorneys who worked for me.
We started preliminarily, of course, with the investigation.
You know, who knew what and when did they know it?
And then finally, we filed a suit.
It was in April of 2014.
Well, let me ask this.
Did you ever get hold of Deep Throat?
I kept my distance because I never spoke to Deep Throat.
I did not want there to look like any collusion between me and this person.
But I will say that Deep Throat signed a sworn affidavit.
This person would have gone to jail if there had been a lie in the sworn affidavit.
and this person knew what was going on and even told us where all the paperwork would be found,
told us where all the documentation would be found, but we had to go to Discovery to get it.
Good Lord. So at that point, if you thought you could get very angry, so at that point you're
launching to Discovery, so to speak.
We want to go to discovery, but you can't go to discovery until you jump through some legal hoops, right?
Oh, that's true, yes.
Right.
And what we were told through Cuaron's representative was that he said he had never heard of me and he'd never heard of my book.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And now this is not This is not that far-fetched, because, you know, he directed the movie Children of Men, based on the P.D.
James book.
Everybody knew it was based on the P.D.
James book.
And, in fact, officially it was based on the P.D.
James book.
And he wrote the script.
After that movie came out, in interviews, he said he never bothered to read her book.
That the movie was really all his.
So this is not unusual for him to say, I've never read her book, or I've never heard of her.
Whatever the project is, he takes ownership of it.
So, now we're in the lawsuit, and this is the interesting thing about it, is very early on, we were contacted by Warner Brothers attorneys who wanted to talk settlement, and I thought, great, you know, we can avoid this whole thing, let's just talk!
Because I think they realized there was a lot of... they had a problem.
Um, and then soon after we found out who the judge was that was assigned to our case, all settlement talks stopped.
Oh?
Um, and that was it.
We never heard a settlement talk again, and then all of a sudden they brought in these big, big... Well, what was the rep of the judge that would... We don't know.
I mean, as far as I... I'm not asking for the name.
I'm asking for the rep.
There must have been some sort of reputation that made them think, we've got it in the bag.
I don't know.
I don't know whether it's that or whether they came up with some, uh, some strategy that they thought could win.
Um, so then, uh, Warner Brothers turned it over to a, you know, really, really powerful law firm against my, my lawyers.
Um, and, um, the first thing they did was, you know, file a motion to dismiss, which is absolutely expected.
That's what they would do, but always, always, but their motion to dismiss was really strange.
They did not say anything about the book or the movie.
They didn't say it's dissimilar.
They didn't say that, you know, she's lying.
What they said was she signed her contract with New Line.
Warner Brothers bought New Line.
Warner Brothers may have acquired the rights to the movie, but they did not acquire the obligations.
So that was their motion to dismiss.
Um, and we went through, I mean... But that's kind of almost an admission in a way, right?
Well, they're not, you know, truly admitting anything.
They're just saying, let's just stop it right here because... But they're saying dismiss because New Line bought it and it's now on buy.
So that's establishing sort of a link.
Yeah, but their feeling is that the obligations did not transfer, even though the assets did.
I see.
So my understanding is that this is done off, and this is what corporations do.
This is why they have shell companies.
So papers were flying back and forth.
There was a lot of press.
I was demonized, of course.
I was the greedy, lying writer.
And a little over a year later, the judge Agreed with the Warner Brothers side and dismissed it.
Now, at that point, I had a choice.
I could go on to appeal, which is what my lawyer wanted to do.
My lawyer has actually won a case before the U.S.
Supreme Court, and he was anxious, too.
He said, I think we can go ahead and do this.
But what I foresaw was that even when you win an appeal, you still have to go back to the original court.
You still end up with the original judge.
So we'd end up with her again, number one.
And number two, if we got to the point where they realized they were going to lose, we'd go to settlement and I would be required to sign that non-disclosure agreement, which I did not want to do.
So I decided to pull out and, you know, preserve my right to talk about it.
And also, you know, the idea of going for years and years and years, which is what these lawsuits run.
Oh, yes.
Probably millions of dollars.
Oh, yes.
Wasn't worth the emotional hassle for me because I wasn't really in for the money.
I was in because I was mad.
No, I totally get it.
And you're right about if you proceed with a lawsuit, you're looking at years.
And then even if you win, good luck on collecting.
That could be years too.
I mean, it's just, it's, you know, it's stacked for the lawyers.
Yeah, the legal system is, well, it's not just the lawyers.
The legal system is stacked for the side, certainly in the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles.
Here is a statistic that shocked me.
Okay, there's an entertainment attorney that did a recent study of all the intellectual property lawsuits by writers against Hollywood studios in Los Angeles, Ninth Circuit.
Over the last two decades, 50 lawsuits, not a single writer won.
The studios won everything.
Consistently.
And these lawyers are saying there's something very strange going on in the Ninth Circuit.
You know, I'm sure some of these writers are probably crackpots, but some of them were very well-respected screenwriters with credits who went up against studios, including the writers who wrote the screenplay for The Last Samurai.
You know, they submitted it.
And we're told, no, we're not interested.
And a couple years later, the studio came out with The Last Samurai about an American soldier who goes to fight in Civil War era Japan.
That's pretty obscure.
It is.
But, I mean, as you're well aware, you've said it, when a big movie comes out and a lot of money's on the line, there are always people coming forward saying, I have been ripped off.
Right.
Always crackpots.
But you know what?
These are people who were able to prove access by the producer ahead of time.
So these are not coincidences.
There's another lawsuit going on right now which is truly terrifying.
It's a writer.
The movie was The Walk of Shame and he submitted his screenplay called Darcy's Walk of Shame with a very similar plot.
They said, oh, we're not interested.
And a few years later, they made the movie The Walk of Shame.
So he's sued.
And this is what's chilling about it.
So he's lost on appeal.
The other side, the studio side, has now personally sued the writer's attorney for taking the case.
What, what, what, what?
They sued his attorney for taking the case?
What?
So the attorney is doing his job.
Since when can you do that?
Well, this has never been done before, and let me tell you, this has thrown a shudder through all entertainment lawyers in Los Angeles, that now, the lawyer is personally liable for taking on a case.
And this is their way of just saying, don't you dare sue us.
Twenty years, fifty writers have lost, not a single writer has won.
And it sounds like attorneys are about to lose.
Attorneys are about to lose big as well.
So that's kind of like a shot across the bow to the attorney saying, hey, don't take these cases.
That's right.
We don't want to see these cases.
We don't want to see you in our courtroom.
So getting back to my case, here's what the chilling part was.
Okay, so mine was a breach of contract case because I had a contract.
I could not sue for copyright infringement because New Line owned the copyright.
But since I can't sue for breach of contract, here is the upshot of this.
Even if the movie had copied my book, word for word, I cannot sue in any way.
I can't sue for copyright infringement, and I can't sue for breach of contract.
Because?
Because I can't, well, New Line owns my copyright.
They're never going to sue Warner Brothers for copyright infringement because they're owned by Warner Brothers.
So they're the only ones who can sue for copyright infringement.
And I just got shot down from being able to sue for breach of contract.
I have no legal ability to do anything about this.
And this is what every writer would be faced with because of these corporate takeovers.
So, Tess, how does a writer protect his or herself?
You can't.
You really can't.
You know, my contract was very, very good.
My contract said specifically, Another company takes over these obligations transfer.
Right.
Right.
I mean, it's in there.
There is a definite transfer clause in there that that whoever takes over a due line is supposed to take over the obligations.
But apparently this judge did not think that was true.
So, but the other thing that's interesting is that there have been the only successful lawsuits that I'm aware of were filed outside the state of California.
There was a case about Bat Draft, the writers, Ron Howard, but they sued in New York State and they were successful there.
So there's something, again, I keep saying there's something strange about the Ninth Circuit, that Hollywood area.
The studios are so powerful and I'm sort of getting hints about other weird things that were happening there.
Yeah, apparently a lot weirder.
A lot weirder.
I mean, now we're out of the realm of law and we're into the realm of what your listeners probably are more interested in.
Probably.
But, you know, there is one other thing.
A lawsuit is not only expensive and probably not going to go well and all the rest of it, and goes on for years, but there is an emotional toll that it takes.
And it's a big, big emotional toll.
Have you been involved in lawsuits?
Yes.
Yes, and so you know... So I know.
I know, yes, that's right.
You have to be ready to pay a really big price, Tess.
And any attorney worth his salt, before he takes you on, had better sit you down and tell you about the emotional toll, because it's gigantic.
Listen, hold tight, we're at the top of the hour here, so we'll take a brief break and come back and talk about, I don't know, the weirder stuff.
some of the evil possibly stuff that's ahead.
I'm going to be doing a lot of that.
These calls are unscreened for your listening pleasure.
Call 1-952-CALL-ART.
That's 1-952-225-5278.
Cousin, I could say that was your internet buffering, but that would be wrong.
That was Ross.
seven thousand i could say that was your internet offering but that would be wrong
that was lost that's just sounded like a buffer
but uh... i'd like to get that one time tonight just to remind me i think that
it can happen Anyway, my guest is Tess Gerritsen, and the subject we're about to delve into is evil, I guess.
We're going to talk a little bit about evil.
Now, you're a doctor, Tess, and I would say, I'm just going to ballpark it here, I don't know, 75, 80% of the doctors I have dealt with all say that they don't believe in God.
Well, that's interesting because I'm in that group.
I am.
I'm an agnostic.
There you have it.
Yeah, I think it has to do with having a scientific background and, you know, also growing up in a fairly agnostic household as well.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that said, I have nowhere to go at all, because if you believe in God, then you probably believe in Satan as well.
If you don't believe in God, then you probably don't believe in Satan.
I think it's just lights out when it's over.
Right?
Yeah, I'm afraid.
You know what?
I have to say, I agree with Carl Sagan.
I'm afraid it is lights out when all is over.
That's not a very pleasant thought.
I mean, I wish I did believe in heaven, but then that would mean you'd have to believe in hell, which is not so nice.
But, you know, as I said, agnosticism always leaves open the door to other possibilities.
Now, just because you don't believe in God does not mean you don't believe in what I guess would be religiously called evil.
I think that there is a form of it that does exist.
Okay, but not a supernatural form.
No, but there are still things that give me... There's plenty of evil from man, that's for sure.
Yeah, but there are things that give me chills because I always wonder... You know, I don't know if you know this about me, but I grew up with a mother who was a parapsychologist.
No, I didn't know that.
Yes.
We had a fun group of people for dinner every week, some of whom would go into trances and start to channel people from thousands of years.
Okay, so you mean as guests?
As guests, right.
That was sort of a joke.
So I grew up in that whole, I knew that whole milieu.
People who believed in evil spirits and good spirits and that kind of thing.
So perhaps my reaction to it was against my childhood.
I wanted to go the opposite way.
But I've always been open to things.
My mother grew up in China.
She saw ghosts.
She always told me the ghosts she saw because she was there during the Japanese bombing of her hometown.
Oh, yes.
So, you know, there's a deep spirituality from my roots that I'd like to think that my feet are pretty firmly on the ground.
I've looked for ghosts all my life.
I still haven't seen one.
Well, you need to listen here more frequently.
Yes, your mom was from China.
In Asia, they firmly believe in ghosts.
In fact, a lot of the worship in Asia is of ancestors.
Yes, I took my mother's ashes back to China after she died.
So we went through the whole Buddhist ceremony.
I didn't understand anything, but certainly part of it was burning paper money for her spirit and making sure that She was well taken care of and making sure that the proper prayers were told and all the ceremony was done.
And, you know, interesting things that happened because of the village she came from, in that when we carried her ashes, she had to be carried in shadow.
So everywhere we went with her urn, there was an umbrella over it.
You know, just various things.
You know, think about it.
We're very touching.
But also strange things, like when you leave a cemetery in that village, you must announce that you are going, so the spirits know that you are leaving.
Otherwise, they'll follow you.
So we lined up at the cemetery gates, and as we were leaving, we'd all turn around and say, I'm leaving now to tell the spirits, you know, stay where you are.
I've got to go home.
Right.
So you went through all that.
I don't know what to tell you.
I just know that what you say is correct pretty much across Asia, with some little variations, but it's true.
And they believe all of that.
And a lot of people here believe it too, Tess, but not many doctors.
And I guess it's kind of drilled out of you from the beginning of medical school, right?
Well, we're very evidence-based.
We like to think we're evidence-based anyway.
But there's always that little part of me that thinks, what if there's something else out there?
And every so often, I get hints that there might be.
Well, we deal with a lot more than hints here.
And it does seem like there is something else, to be honest with you, Tess.
I'm kind of a doubter, too.
But I'm an investigator.
I want to know.
And I must tell you, frankly, that I am somewhat envious of people of faith, you know.
They just have no question.
They know.
Yeah, I know.
They know, and I'm envious.
They're very lucky, indeed.
They don't have questions, and they don't want to entertain questions.
They simply know.
And so I guess if it turns out they're wrong, it won't matter, will it?
No, but if they're right, you know, good!
That's great, but right now I think when you don't have faith, the future looks gloomy and what you are reminded of is that this is what we have.
Every day, enjoy every single day, or as Warren Zevon once said, enjoy every sandwich.
Yes.
So we should be aware that our time on earth is short and And precious.
That I know.
So, all this said, you do think there is evil in Hollywood?
Well, here's what I got.
This is one of the benefits, or maybe the downsides of being a public person with a public email address, is I get contacted.
I get contacted by interesting people sometimes.
I bet you do.
And in the midst of this lawsuit, I got contacted by several people who work in Hollywood.
And I'm going to paraphrase some of the messages they gave me because they are kind of freaky.
One person said that she wanted to impart some secret information.
that the major studios, including powerful insiders, use egregore in legal matters like these.
Hollywood is an oligarchy and that includes the judicial system.
Before your next round of litigation, seek the input of a skilled LHP practitioner.
You cannot win without challenging that part of their defenses.
I know this, trust me.
So, at that point I thought, okay, egregore, that's a very familiar word for me, because I've actually used this in another book.
But LHP threw me for a loop.
I did not know what that was, and I had to dig a little bit to find out what LHP is.
Probably your listeners already know this answer.
Do they?
Go ahead.
LHP is?
Let me find this wonderful here.
I had to go to the internet to look this up.
The Left Hand Path.
It originates from Hindu and it refers to belief systems and religions that are seen themselves as the darker side.
In other words, there are some definitions that say LHP is Satanism.
And there is a quote I found somewhere that many LHP private and secret groups of an extreme nature to further the self in monetary power and influence terms Um, we'll gather together.
They are old boys networks and membership is only granted to those considered to have attained a certain level of wealth and power.
This is a cult.
So I thought, Oh, that's kind of creepy, but you know, I don't believe this stuff.
And then I got other contacts from other different people, completely different people.
Um, who said, um, here's one, um, And you just heard that person say to me about Egregore.
Here's another one.
I recommend you consult with a practitioner of the occult before you go round two with Warner Brothers.
Yes.
All major studios are protected by Egregore.
Again, that word.
It's a system of demonic entities.
The same power that surrounds the music industry.
Do your research.
Ask trusted friends.
They're right.
There you go.
And, you know, I sort of like threw this stuff out, because at this point I was like trusting my lawyers, right?
I kept thinking, oh, there's a chance we could still win.
But after that judge gave that really startling ruling, which my lawyer was appalled by, he said, I cannot believe she did this.
And I've heard from multiple entertainment attorneys who said they are shocked by how my case turned out.
Sure.
And then hearing from all these people saying, you can't win, you can't win, because you didn't go to the right practitioners.
I'm thinking, this is weird.
Maybe it's worth a book, but it's also something that I've been thinking about for a long time.
Well, so there you go.
And so the question is, how much weight now, at this point, this late point, do you begin to put in those possibilities?
I still don't.
I mean, I just entertain them because they give me a chill and because sometimes I think, I wouldn't be surprised if there are Satanists in Hollywood.
I really would not be surprised.
And there have been rumors about it for a long time that people sell their souls to become famous.
Do I believe in it?
No, I don't.
But I believe that there are people in Hollywood who believe it.
I believe that there are people in Hollywood Who probably practices this sort of stuff because it's true for them.
Well, I interviewed a very wonderful man named Father Malachi Martin.
Father Martin identified the people you just spoke of, those who have sold their soul for fame, fortune, whatever, as the perfectly possessed.
In other words, they have made a deal with essentially the devil.
And they are getting what they want in this life, but there's going to be a price.
So... It's like Dr. Faust.
Perfectly possessed.
Yeah.
He said he could actually recognize them when he saw them on the street.
You know, I've heard... Well, okay, that gets to something else.
I've heard that from many, many of my readers because of another book I wrote.
But no, this is the kind of thing where... And I've heard these rumors before about Hollywood.
You know, if you look at certain movies, you can always find the tilted pentagram hidden in various images.
But it's something that, you know, late at night when you have a bottle of scotch in front of you with a good friend over the table, you can both scare each other to death.
You can, and frankly, I kind of err on that side.
I think that kind of evil does exist now.
I'm not sure.
You know, once you start talking about evil, then you have to start talking about the possibility of the other.
You can't have the ying without the yang, right?
Yes, yes.
So that's a road you start down, and it sounds to me like you've taken the first few steps anyway.
Well, you know, I did this exploration of this whole I told you that Egregore was not a strange word to me, that I had used it before.
Yes.
Because of a book that I had written earlier that dealt with exactly this topic, and some of the communications I got from that were even stranger.
Mephisto Club?
Yes.
Okay, that concerns the origins of evil, right?
Yeah.
Well, I have had a long-term interest in this topic because of something that happened in my childhood.
Now, I told you that I had a lovely childhood with a mother who was a parapsychologist.
But what also happened was that I was exposed to a homicide when I was, you know, a child or a young adult.
We had a beloved, beloved family friend.
You know, I won't even tell you his name.
I can just say that he was kind, he was sweet, I adored him.
He was a father figure for me, because my dad was always working.
And I completely trusted him.
And when I turned 18, he was arrested for murdering a member of his family.
He tortured her and he drowned her in the toilet.
And he went to prison.
There's no doubt he did it.
So I have been left all my life with this question of why did I not see this?
Why did I not recognize that aspect of this man when I saw him so often?
What is wrong with me?
What am I missing?
What perception am I missing?
So I think that really the reason for why I choose the genre I do, which is pretty much crime and violence, I want to answer that question.
How do you identify the evil person behind the smiling face?
Have you ever come with any answers?
I mean, any at all?
No.
I have a couple of theories, but they tend to be very boringly scientific.
I believe that there's a certain percentage of people who are simply sociopaths.
And you know, when you look, there's a wonderful book called The Better Angels of Our Nature.
I don't know if you've heard about that.
It's about the history of human violence.
And the author was quoting some archaeological evidence that said, when you dig up bones, prehistoric bones of humans, in at least 15% of them, you find evidence on the skeletons of homicide.
Right.
So you're talking about a baseline, a death rate of 15% homicide.
We're not even talking about soft tissue injuries, which you would not find on skeletons.
So as a baseline, humans are very, very violent.
We kill each other on an astonishing percentage, and our current time is the safest in all of human history.
Even when you take into account World War II and the massive numbers of deaths during that war, the 20th century was still the safest century in history.
So you think about once you remove civilization, once you remove culture and society, and we revert back to our Our native, you know, animalistic tendencies.
We are terrible, terrible creatures.
I guess.
Look, I can look at most murders and I can find motive, which doesn't explain, but it gives you a satisfaction of understanding why.
Yes.
But we have entered this era now where we have people walking into, for example, schools in Oregon Um, and just randomly killing as many people as possible.
That's not new.
It's not new, but it is increasing.
While the overall numbers might be going down, it might be a safer world, this kind of, this particular kind of crime is increasing and very, very difficult to explain.
Uh, except by talking about mental illness, and I think you may have heard in my open, I mentioned on CNN, they interviewed one of the relatives, and the relative said it's not a gun problem, it's a mental health problem, and I could have kissed the guy, they never say that.
Well, you know, just to put it in some perspective, Captain Cook noticed when he was in the Moluccan Islands, you know, centuries ago, that there is a certain phenomenon of what we would call, you know, gone amok.
And that is actually the word, amok.
And when he was describing it among It always happened among young men.
It's always males for some reason.
Yes.
And in, of course, in Malacca, they would go around with machetes and they would just kill everybody they could get their hands on on the street.
So the only thing he could he could come up with was they tended to be single males and they had anger issues and they had a weapon in their hand and they would do mass murder.
So, you know, a number of murders just happens to correlate with how deadly your weapon is.
But this kind of behavior is seen in every single culture around the world.
It's happened for centuries.
And yes, it is a mental health issue.
It seems to be these disaffected, unattached, uh... mail who just don't have anything to call it in their
lives and they don't think on that there was a social media quote of this guy
saying it's the only way i'll ever get in the news
i think they need to be noticed uh... so that's business it's not that it's happening more
often now it's always happened and that's that's what gives me
part of the inmate capitalism about humanity if we ever because
society ever collapses There was this interesting lecture I saw by an FBI agent during the Kosovo mess, you know, when we were, when there was all that ethnic cleansing.
Yes.
And he said that a certain percentage of the murders there during, in Kosovo, were not ethnic cleansing.
They were not anything to do with politics.
They were simply the fact that serial killers were free to come out and play.
That they're always with us.
There's always a certain percentage of them who are predators, and they're just looking for opportunity.
And when Kosovo fell apart, that was their opportunity.
What that means is that if tomorrow where you live falls apart, they're around you somewhere, and they will come out and play.
And none of this you would ascribe to Evil?
No.
No, I think I, you know, now this is this is the theory, you know, I was trying to understand who these people are.
Because those of us who are not like that, we don't understand the motive to kill somebody who you don't even know.
We try to explain it.
Is it mental illness?
Well, okay, maybe some of them are mental illness.
But then there's a certain subsegment of people who are perfectly sane, by all standards, you know, they're sociopaths, they simply Well, one explanation for the kind of person you just talked about.
without any sense of sympathy. Those are the ones I'm more terrified of actually, and they are always among us.
And I don't know what to perceive.
Well, one explanation for the kind of person you just talked about. Sociopath, yes, but evil, pure evil can also
be described.
And it's as good a guess as anything else.
Yeah, I mean, whatever you want to say it is, you can also say it's genetic.
There is a certain genetic component to those who are sociopaths.
But basically, they look at the rest of the human race differently than we do.
They see opportunity.
They see They see people that they can use, and that's you and me.
As a physician and a scientist, if we were able to identify a genetic marker that would probably say there's a high chance or a high probability somebody will do something like this, what would you say we should do?
Watch them?
You know, I think that sociopaths can be taught You can civilize them.
You can teach them this is right and this is wrong and make it very clear that there are penalties to bad behavior.
They do understand that.
They understand that there are consequences.
They just don't care.
Well, they care about whether it hurts them.
The consequences hurt them.
But it needs to be impressed upon them that there are consequences.
Because we cannot start infringing on people's civil liberties just because they have the potential for violence.
Yes, well... Then it's a slippery slope.
It is indeed, isn't it?
In other words, genetic science may get good enough to eventually give you an awfully high probability, and then society's going to have to do some pretty deep thinking.
About what to do with those people?
Well, yes, and that's where the topic of that other book, The Mephisto Club, comes in.
Okay, how so?
Let's stabilize people.
I know.
It just sort of falls into this whole question of evil, which I think is what a lot of people are fascinated by because we're afraid of it.
We are like every other prey animal.
We have to pay attention to those things that can hurt us.
I think this is particularly true for women and children in society.
We feel vulnerable if we don't pay attention.
So anyway, the story about Mephisto Club came about because, as I have this long-term question about what makes somebody do terrible things, and I happen to be browsing in a bookshop in Oxford, England, when I came across a copy of the book of Enoch.
Yeah, you probably know about it.
It's a religious text which was not accepted as part of The regular Bible.
It was probably written around the time that Christ was born, and I was just sort of flipping through it, and it had some interesting things in there.
Let's see, where are we in the time?
Because I'm going to start quoting something.
We're all right.
Okay, so I come across this interesting quote.
The book of Enoch, Enoch, by the way, is a really holy, wonderful man who was said to have walked with God.
In the line from Adam, and I think he's like six or seven generations away from Adam, and he talks about these things called fallen angels.
And the quote is like this, and it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters.
And the angels, the children of the heavens, saw and lusted after them and said to one another, come let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget children.
That's right.
Right, okay, so the angels had sex with humans, they had children, and these children were pretty darn evil.
They were, first of all, described as being very, very big, and they were also said to afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth.
So, these creatures, the children of these angels, were called the Nephilim.
Which, depending on how you define it, it could either be known as Giants, or they could be translated as the Fallen.
But their parents, these angels, were also called the Watchers, or the Grigori.
And they are the ones who perform Egrigori, this magic that supposedly protects Hollywood.
So it all sort of ties in together.
Anyway, so I did this book called The Mephisto Club, because I thought, okay, let's go scientific here.
Let's assume that these legends of the Nephilim actually are based on something biological.
Maybe this is a tribe of sociopaths.
Maybe because sociopathy is genetic, what the ancient Jews were seeing, they were thinking We're seeing evil creatures, when actually it's just a tribe of people who are sociopaths who, you know, do horrible things.
And sociopaths are also known to be quite charming and quite seductive, which is how the Nephilim are described.
And let's say that they are still among us, this genetic line is still among us, and nowadays we still have the Nephilim among us.
And in fact, if you look at biblical literature, the Nephilim still are among us.
They are They were so evil that God apparently decided to wipe them out, so that was part of the reason for Noah's flood.
But he allowed 10% of them to survive, to remain among man as evil creatures, to tempt us, to cause, to wreak havoc, and they still are among us.
So that is something that It's already on the internet.
I mean, these conspiracy theorists are all over the place.
Maybe we can recognize them.
But how does Tess Gerritsen, with her belief system, sit down and write about this?
I did it because I felt I wanted to come up with a scientific explanation.
I did by saying, oh, they're sociopaths, but I also believe there are people who believe that these really are the children of fallen angels.
And if they were among us, if evil was among us, and these Nephilim would be classic sociopaths, they're charming, they become leaders, they're charismatic, they become presidents, they become kings and queens.
Who's going to battle them?
Who's going to protect mankind?
against these evil creatures.
There would have to be an organization.
So I invented what we call the Mephisto Club.
This group of crime fighters who follow the footprints of evil.
They check crime statistics.
They look around the world.
They are checking for the presence of the Nephilim and they are there to be in opposition to it.
And that was the origin of the book I wrote called the Mephisto Club.
Yes, but you're writing about something that you don't really believe in.
I don't.
I don't.
And yet, and yet, I get, and we're going to talk about this later, I get correspondence, again, from people, and among them are people who say, you wrote your book, I read your book, you have You're saying bad things about us.
Hold on, Tess.
Tess Gerritsen is my guest.
And we're at a break point.
I'm Art Bell.
Midnight in the desert underway raging in the night Will you partake of that last offer cup
Or disappear into the potter's ground to go.
Midnight in the Desert spans the world.
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and Canada only, use Skype with a headset mic, if on a computer, and call MITD55.
That's MITD55.
It is.
My guest is Tess Gerritsen.
She's really quite something, as I'm sure you've gathered by now.
Like something else, he's dying.
She's walking the line.
That's for sure.
You really are.
You're walking the line.
Yeah, I guess so.
You know, I mean, I kind of am on the side of the people who wrote you those emails saying, you know what, you really should have employed both the legal side and the other side.
Well, there were times when I thought maybe I should have.
Right.
All right, so anyway, here we are with the Nephilim.
Yeah, the Nephilim.
So here I wrote this book about the Mephisto Club and the Nephilim and, you know, crimes being committed, and I started to get these really interesting messages.
Lucky you did.
Yes, of course I did.
Some of them were, I have seen evil, I can recognize them, I know them by their eyes.
That's one line.
I got a lot of those and we'll talk about some of those stories.
But the ones that really kind of freaked me out were the ones that said, You didn't say good things about us, and we're not happy.
Was that the worst of it, actually?
Well, they tried to educate me, and one of them, somebody who says, I think this person is trying to say that she's part Nephilim, she says, trust me, you really don't want to annoy them or make any of them feel really threatened by masses of stupid humans.
Not a good idea.
So from their point of view, and here we're going through history, we're going through biblical texts that say they're bad, they're evil, they brought weapons, they caused wars, and the other side is that the Nephilim, or the self-identified Nephilim, are writing me to say, those who write the history books tell lies, that we're the good guys.
And you aren't hearing the other side of what's really the truth.
So, it's a fascinating thing where you have two stories.
And maybe it is that we have been hearing about.
If they're with us, maybe they're not as bad as they say.
Now, here's one of the, really, it's practically a scientific treatise that was sent to me by a Nephilim about where they come from.
what they're doing and why they have mated with us and you know this particular woman traces her line back through Hungary all the way back to the Sumerians and she says that around 70,000 years ago there was a natural disaster there was a volcano that a super eruption in indonesia have you heard about the lake toba super
eruption nobody can actually believe it is a extremely active there right okay
well it in fact there was a an eruption seventy thousand years ago
uh... that cause volcanic winter for six to ten years and caused uh... global
cooling for you know all that maybe a hundred years it wiped out
a lot of the species a lot of mammals And in fact, when you look at... Okay, right.
I am familiar with that.
They've got sampling and cores they've drilled to prove that.
Right.
So the human population, or what was essentially the human population, dropped drastically to maybe just a few thousand individuals.
And when you look at human genetics, you do find that a lot of the Y-chromosomes all originated With one individual from where around 70,000 years ago, so we were we were on the edge of extinction according to not just this woman but biologists so this person said that's when the Nephilim stepped in and said well should we help the human race survive let's mate with them and that's where she sees the the legends coming through is that
They decided to mix their genes with us, and we were able to bounce back after that 70,000 year disaster.
So by introducing their stronger genetics, they helped human race survive.
But now they are facing the aftermath, which is, oh, humans are not as good as we thought they would be.
They cause wars.
They're horrifying things.
Maybe every so often we should have a call.
And she says that diseases have been introduced.
By the Nephilim, plagues, they introduce strife into areas that need culling or are considered morally bankrupt.
Have you run into the infamous Planet X yet?
No, I know about it, but I have not run into it yet.
She says that they also introduce natural disasters and that the collapse of La Palma, which is that volcano off the Canary Islands, caused tsunamis.
It's going to be the next call.
It's going to take out evil Manhattan.
So, they identify pockets of trouble by installing watchers, which she said, well, it's really eerie, but that's just like out of your Mephisto Club.
The watchers are there.
They have egregore networks.
They're able to communicate with each other's minds.
Don't annoy them or you'll get into trouble.
That they are always constantly monitoring what human beings are doing, and because I guess we're considered the mass unwashed, that sometimes have to be taken out.
So the general feeling is that the Nephilim are really here to keep an eye on Earth, to make sure we don't get out of control, but also they feel that they are victims because they are abused and they are persecuted by human beings.
So that is that point of view.
Okay, it's always the victim's point of view, right?
You always have to look at that side.
Now, let's look at the human point of view, which is where I got most of my emails from.
People who say, I can recognize them, I can see them, I can look into their eyes and know who's who.
And I believe you've had a couple of guests who can see evil, right?
And you said that.
Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
So I was, you know, getting really I'm kind of monitoring a lot of this stuff, but some of the personal stories that were told to me face-to-face by people I know really, really kind of freaked me out.
Were you at all or at any point concerned for your personal safety?
No, I'm not.
I'm really not.
Maybe I'm fearless that way or stupid, but I am not.
I don't feel that people really want to harm me.
I never have felt that way.
And I feel that when Nephilim, or I keep saying Nephilim, but they're self-identified Nephilim, reach out to contact me, it's for a benevolent purpose.
It's to say, you know, you got it wrong.
Here's the truth.
But just don't get us pissed off.
Well, yeah, that's what I meant.
If you got on the wrong side of somebody, or somebody who thought they were part of that group, but maybe actually weren't, it wouldn't matter much.
If they took action.
Well, that's true.
I mean, there are always crazies out there, and that's something that anybody who's in the public eye has to worry about.
I mean, you have to worry about it.
That's right.
That's right.
I bet you're armed to the teeth out there, too.
You bet.
So, the other thing that this writer said to me, which I found interesting, was she said that Nephilim, I think they're known for shapeshifting.
Yes.
And their favorite animals are cats.
Mm-hmm.
Cats don't show their age, and they are able to sort of slip in and out very quietly.
So that's one of the reasons they choose to shapeshift as cats.
So let's go to the other side, as I was saying.
Okay.
The people who can see evil.
Yes.
Or what they detect as evil.
Now here's something where I actually believe there's scientific basis for.
It's been known that dogs can detect aggression.
And I've heard this again and again, but a dog, somebody said that he had guests over and somebody brought a friend and the dog immediately, you know, the hair rose up on the back of his neck and he started to bark and there was this one person the dog did not like.
And it turned out that person actually had a criminal record for... Well, I've done all kinds of interesting experiments with dogs.
I'm not sure if you saw it, but there was a I think it was a 2020 piece, something like that.
One of the big news shows did a piece on testing dogs, Tess.
In other words, a dog, for example... Are you still there?
Tess?
Uh-oh.
That doesn't sound good.
Just when I was going to explain something to Tess.
Well, that's definitely a problem.
One, I'm not going to be able to cure real quickly.
One more time, Tess, are you there?
No, we've lost Tess.
So, let me invite...
Between now and the top of the hour, a few of you to call in if you like and comment on what you've heard thus far, and then I'll call Tess back at the top of the hour instead of trying to do it right now.
So, any of you who would like to comment on what you've heard, particularly about the evil and or the Nephilim, or for that matter, commenting on what happened with gravity, I'd be more than happy to hear from you, and you can call our national number, Anyway, I was about to open the lines for Tess anyway.
So you can call our national number now if you like.
Area code 952-225-5278.
That's area code 952-225-5278.
Now, when I say that, I hope it's working.
In other words, the fact that we lost Tess could indicate a further or bigger problem that I'm not aware of.
You can also get to the show by Skype.
And I'll take this opportunity to do my little speech that everybody, oh, they send me email requesting this speech.
I get messages on the wormhole requesting this speech.
If you have Skype, you can call us.
All you've got to do is on your iPhone or whatever it is that you've got, Android, download Skype.
You know, it's simple.
Download Skype.
Go to the store and download Skype.
And when you do, you will notice that you can add somebody.
You can add a contact.
Well, we are a contact.
And so here's how it works.
If you're in North America, Canada or America, just add us as a contact and call us MITD51.
That's MITD51.
If you're outside of North America, rest of the world, You can add us by calling MITD55.
And after you've done that, we will appear magically on your contact list.
You can press it and call us just like that.
It's really pretty cool.
And it's free worldwide.
So that's pretty hard to beat.
In the meantime, let's very quickly go to the lines and say, Las Vegas, I think you're on the air.
Hello.
Last name's on the air, so.
Okay, well, sorry about that, but I did that for a reason, only because of what Tess was talking about.
I just tuned in, as she was mentioning, an 0 and 50 rate, loss rate for writers against the studio.
That's right.
And I can relate to that because I'm actually the guy that Tom Cruise plays in the movie Tropic Thunder and had the same occasion to go up against the same studios and I'm not at all surprised by what you said.
Really?
Well, I'm sad to hear that, but it does seem to be a thing, doesn't it?
It's totally fascinating, and I'm actually fighting them as we speak, and the good news is, have them at a standstill.
Yes, well, they probably will bring you to a standstill as well, and I'm not in the business of giving out advice here, but I will tell you, and I told her, and mentioned to her, That the emotional price that you're going to pay for what you're doing is going to be extremely high.
So you've got to be prepared for that.
I take it you are.
Well, that's a great point, Art.
And what you say is actually very, very accurate.
Right.
We're somewhat both at standstills, but I chose the route of doing my own thing.
As that entity, all right, with the book and all that, and I'm not calling into hype all that.
I'm just talking in the big picture here.
So, you know, all we can do is see what happens as it comes to The reality of, shall we say, an LG movie.
Right, okay, well thank you.
Either way, you know, it doesn't matter.
Before you decide to take on something like she took on, or any gigantic litigation, your lawyer, if he's worth two cents, has got to sit you down and tell you about what you're going to face.
And what you're going to face is going to be, I'll call it, almost emotional Armageddon.
What you're going to have to go through is emotionally ripping.
It will take part of your life, and as part of your life, you will never get back win, lose, or draw.
Let's go to Eric on Skype.
Hello, Eric.
All right.
Yes, my goodness.
Yeah, the guy that I met, I didn't really sense evil so much as just pure sociopath.
I mean, it was like I was sitting across the table from an octopus.
That's horrible.
I mean, that feeling is horrible.
There's no question about it.
So, in that sense, there absolutely is evil, right?
I've seen that in other people, but this guy was just... my body reacted.
I wanted, you know, just that primal fight or flight.
I just wanted to get up and run away from this guy because I could tell the only reason he didn't kill me and eat me was because he wasn't hungry.
Oh, God!
I've never heard it put quite that way.
His eyes were just cold.
He was highly intelligent, but I just reacted to him on a visceral level.
Well, Jon, there's absolutely no sense in these people of right, wrong, or anything.
It's just not there.
It's like they're flat.
It's like, I don't know, it's hard to even put into words, but yes, you certainly sense it, and I don't think you have to be a dog with extrasensory perception to know it when you're in the presence of it.
But she was right.
Dogs do sense these things, and a lot more.
I was about to tell her about a 2020 piece, I think, pretty sure it was, in which they monitored dogs at home, and they could tell when, you know, they would start the boss, you know, the owner of the home, coming home at some ridiculous time when they wouldn't normally come home during the day, and the dog knew it instantly.
And somehow would start getting agitated and be waiting by the door, and so that's a type of extrasensory perception.
Oh, yeah.
I remember that.
Yeah.
Do you?
I remember that.
And my wife and I, if she's sad... It's the most bizarre thing.
You know, I was sitting there reading one day, and just out of nowhere, I just became terribly sad, and I called my wife.
I'm like, are you okay?
She said, yeah, my...
Patient's son was yelling at her, so we were both sad.
Really?
I was just, okay.
Yeah, and ever since then, I've known.
So, I mean, you know, it's just, it's always been like this.
Oh, reminds me, you are the perfect person to do this.
I used to take calls in a nationwide call center, and all day, people would be in one mood or another.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, you're so correct.
And I'm sure somebody in a call center would know better than most.
For me, I was a medic in the Air Force, worked in hospitals, and same deal.
Exact same deal.
One day, you'd be sitting there like the Maytag repairman, nothing going on.
Other days, it was disaster after disaster after disaster.
And anybody in police work, medical work, They all know this is true.
Now, why... I kind of wish... I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
I'm going to put you on hold, if I can, because I actually want you here when Tess is on, because I want you to relate this to her, okay?
Okay.
You're going to have to get good and close to your mic, okay?
I hope we're not having... I'm going to put you on hold there, and we're going to take a quick break.
And I'm going to try and get Tess back, because she really needs to hear some of that.
I'm sure that's right down the alley of what we're talking about.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
This is a video of the desert.
your way on the Dark Matter Digital Network.
To call the show, please direct your finger digits to dial 1952-225-5278.
That's 1952.
Call Art.
Alright, I've got Tess back, and I really did want to pretty soon go to the phones anyway, so if you have questions for Tess, Once again, our public line, area code 952-225-5278.
And here is Tess, I hope.
Hi, Tess.
Hi.
Let's hope I stay on this time.
Yes, let's hope.
So, I've got a gentleman on the line I just want you to hear.
He had some comments that were probably relevant.
Eric, still there?
Hello, Eric.
Oh, that's too bad.
I guess we lost Eric.
Well, you know, we were starting to talk about, I think we were in the middle of talking about dogs.
I was mentioning to you when we got cut off that 2020 did a very interesting piece years ago on dogs and what they would do, Tess, is they'd get the dog of the house and then they'd bring the owner home at unexpected, completely Weird times of the day, you know, like two or three hours after you went to work, he comes home and they would have cameras on these dogs and the dogs would know that the owner is on the way home.
They would start to get agitated.
They'd go to the door, they'd be barking.
It was wild.
It showed, it proved that dogs had some sort of, some kind of ESP.
Well, they certainly have a, you know, the sense of smell is what I think they are detecting in aggression.
I think we give off, I think people who are bound for violence give off some sort of extra scent that dogs can detect and back away and are cautious about.
Okay, well that would be in the very presence of the kind of evil that we're talking about, but what they showed and what they proved went well beyond that.
You know, that miles away, how could they possibly know that my owner is coming home?
How could they know?
But they proved it.
I don't know how to explain that.
That's, you know, as they say, it's a mystery.
It is.
And there have been a couple of articles in, I read something called Science Digest, and there have been articles about the sense of somebody who's going to do evil.
Mm-hmm.
So, science is actually beginning to take a bite out of this, just a very early tentative bite, but they are.
And, you know, I think people... Now, when we sense evil, and this is a story that was told to me by a colleague, that she had a workman coming in to do something at the house, and her five-year-old girl saw the man and pulled her mother aside and says, Mommy, that's a bad man.
Uh-huh, yes.
And that's what she just saw him, and the woman later She left the house with her child and found out that this workman had just gotten out of prison after assaulting his wife.
So this little girl, who'd never seen this man before, immediately picked up on something.
We do have a sense of aggression.
I think that some of us are more in touch with it than others.
It's the thing that makes you step out of an elevator when somebody steps in and you just feel that something bad is going to happen.
I think to a large degree.
Humans have always had it as well.
We're a little dulled to it.
We suppress it.
We suppress it because of social convention.
We don't want to appear rude.
Especially women.
Women don't want to appear rude.
So even though there's this sense of danger tingling in there, you don't want to offend somebody.
And that's particularly a feminine problem, I think.
Or politically incorrect.
Yeah.
And, you know, and then there's the story that I got a lot of about people seeing reptilian eyes, and I knew that there was something different about this person, and then backing away.
But, you know, there are a lot of crazy people out there, too, so... All right, well, here's the Eric that we lost on Skype.
He came back, okay.
Yeah, Eric, are you there?
Yeah, I am.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I could hear you loud and clear.
You wanted me to tell Tess?
Am I on the air right now?
You are.
I'm sorry, bud.
Yeah, I met a guy that I felt like I was sitting across the table from an octopus.
I mean, there was no, he was just pure psychopath and I felt like the only reason he didn't, you know, kill me was because he wasn't, you know, he just didn't feel like it.
I hear earlier you said because he wasn't hungry.
Yeah, because, yeah, I mean, My body responded.
I had to control myself and not run away.
What was the situation?
How did you end up running across the table from him?
Yeah, I don't really want to say too much about a dangerous person like that.
I mean, I meet a lot of people and I'm a really good judge of people.
I mean, like in the first five seconds, I know who they are.
Um, and, you know, there have been several people like that, that, you know, like one guy I met, um, he could have been a serial killer.
I had no evidence, just my feeling, you know, so... That's a very good comment.
You said in the first five seconds, uh, you can, you can judge a person, um, politically incorrect as that may be.
I'm with you all the way.
I understand that.
There are some people I meet and I just, it's an immediate, oh no, this is not the right person for me to be near.
Well, you know, that's a gift.
It really is a gift.
Assuming that you are detecting something and that you're not, you know, layering that over with any preconceptions.
Right.
I've always loved art's, you know, scientific approach to things, and so I try and take that same approach myself.
And it's a gift and a curse.
I, at times, don't like seeing that deeply into people.
People are human.
What are you looking at?
Is it their eyes?
Is it their face?
Can you identify what exactly is setting this off?
No, I can't.
For me, it's a mixture of psychic ability, micro-expressions on the person's face, the way their face is set.
You can tell if a person is a happy person in general or, you know, a mean person.
You know, it's how they speak, it's in their eyes, in their stance.
And it's in something you just cannot describe.
You said it yourself, a little bit psychic, right?
Oh yeah, sometimes it's just either psychic or chemical or whatever, but yeah, you just know.
You know, I don't know if I would say psychic, but I think that humans have An amazing ability, like you said, to read micro-expressions.
That we detect so much more than we're conscious of.
And that's really what instinct is.
Alright, instinct.
You want to call it instinct?
Eric, thank you for the call.
How about this example, Tess?
You're out in the woods, right?
Mm-hmm.
And you're a hunter, and you've got a high-powered rifle, .30-06, and you've got it trained on a buck out there.
Okay.
And you're almost, you're just about ready to pull the trigger, and instantly, somehow, that buck raises his head up, is alerted, And starts to run away.
Well, it's too late, of course.
The .30-06 finds him very quickly and he's dead, but there was something that that animal sensed just before the bullet hit the bone.
Mm-hmm.
Scent?
You know, maybe your scent traveled on the wind or maybe you made some sound you weren't aware of?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Well, I mean, there are people.
There's also a study that said people can, you know, can you sense when somebody's staring at you?
Can you feel that?
Yes.
And they've done that study, and it turned out people cannot.
They think they can, but they haven't been able to do that.
Oh, I disagree.
I disagree.
I disagree.
I absolutely disagree.
You can't.
No, well, the one study I've seen showed that people, you know, weren't able to distinguish when somebody was staring and when somebody was not.
Hmm.
Okay, you want to take a few calls?
Yeah, let's do it.
All right, good.
Colorado Springs, hello there.
You're on the air with Tess.
This is Kevin, and just to follow up what you're saying, I'm blind.
I felt that expression of someone staring at me before I became blind.
I felt it when I'm blind.
And also, talk to any victim of child abuse.
They have a term called hypervigilant.
And children, that sometimes goes into adulthood.
And I've gotten the same sense over people.
I worked as a medic.
I'll follow up one other thing by saying, Art's exactly right about the full moon effect.
Uh, yeah.
And talk to anybody in that field of work and they will tell you.
I've seen the studies that say it doesn't exist.
Oh, nonsense.
I'm here to tell you, yeah.
Yeah, nonsense.
Alright, caller, thank you.
Yeah, we were talking about that.
I was a medic in the Air Force.
Um, Tess, still there?
Yeah, I'm still here.
Okay, I was a medic in the Air Force, Tess, and I can, I guarantee you, I don't know if it was a full moon or what, but generally around full moons, We had an awful lot more, you know, we had full waiting rooms of people in the emergency room and you were a doctor.
I don't know if you did that kind of work or not.
Yeah, I mean, that was something that we commented on sometimes, that it felt like it was the full moon because the ER was busy or crazy things happened on the full moon.
I don't know whether anybody's actually done... I seem to remember there was somebody who tallied ER visits with the Cycle to the Moon and could not find anything.
I just don't believe it.
I don't believe it.
Anybody who works with... I'm sorry to bring you down on this stuff, but... No, that's alright.
It's the police, too.
I'm sure there's some cops out there.
That's right.
I know that...
This is a long-term belief among emergency workers that the full moon affects people, but I haven't found any studies that say that's absolutely true.
Well, I'm not going to even say the full moon.
I'm just going to say it goes in cycles.
I won't say it's weather-related.
Stephen, hello, you're on the air with Tess Gerritsen.
Hey Art, long time fan, long time listener, glad you're back on the air.
Thank you.
I just wanted to say, you know, being a former military soldier, you know, I disagree completely with you can't sense when somebody's watching you.
I mean, we're trained to look for that and know that.
You know, being to Iraq once, Afghanistan once, I've done my deployments there.
I can tell you for a fact that it's not hard.
You can go around, and now coming back stateside, you can stand in a Walmart and feel the energy and the people around you and who's watching you.
You know, even to the point where you can actually pick out and feel the security cameras.
If somebody's actually watching and monitoring the security camera, you can know when it's actually on you.
It is definitely a hyper-vigilance.
I don't know if it's a disorder or just an unlocking of the brain.
But there definitely needs to be studies on it.
I would say, honestly, make a bunch of friends with a bunch of veterans or hang out at a VA hospital.
I mean, you can do your own study there and get all kinds of numbers.
Yeah, I think there should be more studies.
It's just that the one I have seen has said that maybe these were college students who were totally unstressed.
So they didn't have that hypervigilant aspect that you're talking about.
So I don't even know how you would...
I've never crammed for a final.
It almost sounds...
When you talk about hypervigilance, it almost sounds as if you're talking about, you know,
stress...
The post-traumatic stress disorder or something.
It is.
It would be the same effect, basically, like Art was saying earlier about deer hunting.
It's the fight or flight instinct.
I mean, you unlock that part of your brain and everybody can have it.
I think it's a very primitive part of our brain that we've forgotten how to use.
That we've all had and it's all there.
It's always there.
It's just we've forgotten how to use it.
It's gotten more commonplace now.
I think that's why people get into accidents and they say that they weren't paying attention or didn't see.
It came out of nowhere.
And I think it's one of those because they're just not aware of their surroundings anymore.
They can't feel the energies or the vibes that people are putting out around them.
Kind of like if you walk too close to a TV, you can feel the static and the energy actually coming off of a TV.
I think it's the same way with people.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, we need to do this study.
We need to get some veterans together and see if they can tell when they're being stared at.
Oh yeah, definitely.
Go down to your local VA.
I mean, hey, just sit there.
I mean, you can actually sit in a VA hospital and just feel it and watch it.
You'll see all the veterans.
They'll be able to tell you who walked in a door that you may not even have noticed that was there.
They'll be able to tell you what color shirt they're wearing, how tall they are, how they were acting, their mannerisms, the whole nine yards.
Just sit in there.
Okay.
Thank you very much for the call.
You know, people will say, oh, it's anecdotal.
But it's more than that.
There's something real about it.
I say tests.
Something real about it.
Well, I'm open to numbers.
I would love to see some numbers on that.
You are a scientist, aren't you?
You know, how did you write this book?
Again, I wonder how you wrote this book.
With your belief system, how did those words get formed?
I'm open to alternative thought.
That's all.
I think that, you know, I dive into somebody else's head and I start to write and I think, well, how do they, what do they believe?
How do they think?
It's the same way as writing a book about serial killers.
You know, I have to get into the head of the killer and figure out how do you, you know, when you walk down the mall and you're looking at other people and you are a predator, you don't look at the child the same way that the rest of us do.
You look at the child and say, Is he alone?
Is anybody watching him?
Is he grabbable?
So it really, I think, is very much a case of empathy and being able to understand how other people live and think.
They say that these people who commit these crimes we were talking about earlier have an absolute absence of empathy.
Absolute absence of empathy.
Hard for me to understand, but I guess I can Hi, I had something happen to me that was so unbelievable.
I was at work and I stepped outside just for a few minutes and as I stepped outside I saw three people walk inside.
So I turned around and went right back in and as I was standing there it was like all my hair just And I froze and I was looking at the three people and I thought, Oh my God, I'm thinking death.
And I looked at them and they were looking down.
They didn't look up at all and they weren't really looking at anything.
There was no, they had really no reason to be in there, but their presence was so scary.
So I was waiting for a ride to come pick me up and it was closing time.
And so, I could barely talk.
I just froze.
You could feel it.
So anyway, I said, well, I have to close.
And I was scared to even say that.
And they didn't say a word.
And they just slowly walked out.
And the person that came to pick me up in the car, I got in the car.
And he goes, he had just, I had sliding windows.
You could look in where my counter was.
And when the three left, the person that picked me up said, I have their license plate. I go, you felt them from the
inside?
He goes, yes. So he took the license plate. Listen to this.
So I go, oh my God, this is telling us something. This this is I go, we got to call the police. I
go, but nothing happened, you know, I said, but it was so strong. So did you did you run the
plate?
I called the police and I told the police, I said, listen, I know this is crazy, but I have to tell you what happened because it was too strong.
The police said, I know they said, you know, it's okay.
You did the right thing.
He goes, what's the license plate?
We told him the license plate.
And he goes, listen, we were looking for three people in the same description of the car.
He goes for kidnapping.
Ooh.
Yes.
Well, so there you have it.
You read something.
You read something in there in those people.
That's right.
That's right.
So there is something, Tess.
There's something.
Oh, there is something.
I just I just feel that it's going to be chemical or physical.
Yeah, and I think that what we consider ESP is actually that we are processing and sensing things that we're not even conscious of.
All right.
Yeah, you're going to deal with your skeptic on the other end.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'm going to tell a story that I know my audience has heard, and that's too bad because I can't resist, okay?
Go ahead.
I lived, Tess, in Santa Barbara, California at one point.
And I had a beautiful little, I lived by myself, I had a little garden apartment and I had some sliding doors in my apartment and through those doors you could look out across the grass at the street and I would park my car, and you were allowed to, on the street, right?
And literally in front of those Sliding glass doors and then I had the curtains closed so I wasn't always looking out and allowing people to look in and I had the curtains closed.
And I came home one day, Tess, this is, I swear to God, the truth.
Or I swear to anybody you think is important that it's the truth.
I sat down to watch TV.
I was watching the evening news.
I even say the newscaster, it was so long ago and it would date me.
Something came washing over me, Tess, like waves hitting me.
Somebody saying, your car's going to get hit.
Something's going to happen to your car.
It's going to get hit.
So I went up, I said a bad word, walked over, opened the curtains, looked out at my car and it was fine.
I said another bad word, went back and sat down to watch the news.
Here it comes again, washing over me.
Get up, get up, something's going to happen to your car.
Another bad word.
Go overnight.
Look at my car.
It's fine.
Third time.
Tess, this is the truth.
Third time.
I mean, it was so overwhelming that you could not ignore it.
Finally, I went over, opened my curtains, slid the door open, watched as a guy walked down the path next to my apartment, which went down to the street.
He got in the car in front of mine, started the engine, put it in reverse, and hit my car.
It so shocked me, Tess, that I sank to my knees, but not so much that I wasn't smart enough to get up and say, hey, I saw that, and he said, I'm stopping, I'm stopping.
But, you know, the point is, what was that?
That is one of those unexplained mysteries.
Does this happen to you often?
No, no, no, no, no.
That was the only instance of that ever happening to me, but it was It could not be ignored.
It was not a subtle little something.
This was, here it comes, it's about to happen, and it just kept coming and coming and coming like ocean waves crashing over me until I went over there and watched what I saw.
Well, that's one of those instances where I can just say I have no idea how that happened, and isn't it wonderful that we still have these unexplained mysteries?
Yes, it's wonderful, I guess, that we have them, but it's indicative of something beyond... Something beyond what we've... Yes.
Well, you know what, as a doctor, I saw a lot of things I could not explain when I was working in the hospital.
I had a patient who was getting ready, you know, he's recovered, he was about to be discharged the next day, and he suddenly collapsed and died in his room.
And his family, which was out shopping that day, suddenly came rushing back into the hospital.
Nobody had called them.
They were not alerted to it.
They just knew in the middle of their shopping trip that dad had died.
You know, they came running back in.
And I remember all of us thinking, you know, how did this work?
So, you know, I have seen that.
Certainly, I was practicing in Honolulu at the time, where people believe in ghosts there.
Yes, I know.
Haunted, haunted.
Yeah, and I was working in a hospital where there was one room that was considered haunted, and we tried not to put patients in there, because every time we did, they would wake up screaming to get that person out of their room.
So, these are the mysteries that keep me wanting to find a ghost, to see a ghost, that keep me thinking, you know, I think I'm scientific, but I'm open to other possibilities.
What kind of physician were you?
Internal medicine.
So, we had a lot of patients die, and we were talking about, you know, heart attacks and cancer and people who are sick, older people.
Right.
Did you have any instance of anybody who flatlined and came back?
No, I've never had anybody with a near-death experience.
Unfortunately, when they flatlined, they were pretty much dead.
I have not talked to anybody with an NDE.
I know that's something that you've discussed on your show before.
Sure.
My things I remember have always been about ghosts.
about people who seem to sense that a loved one was in trouble and would come running back into the hospital.
Right.
We had a, one of our nurses was a nun and she always knew when somebody would die.
I mean, it was weird.
She would, you would, you would knew it because she would go in and she'd bless them and then within a day they'd be dead.
She just knew. It was like that cat that used to, you know...
Oh, you know about the cat?
Oh yeah, I know about the cat. The cat that would make the rounds and the cat knew who would die next.
Yes. Scott on Skype, you're on the air.
Yeah, hi Art.
Hi.
When Tess was telling of her adventures in the courtroom dealing with the Hollywood types,
my mind went back to the 1997 film with Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves, The Devil's Advocate.
Yeah, I remember that.
And if you haven't seen it, you should watch it.
I won't spoil the plot, but watch it and see if what was depicted doesn't resonate in terms of evil influences in big business and in the legal world.
Yeah, well, you know, corporations are considered an organism as well, aren't they?
They will do everything to protect themselves.
Yeah, and one of the speeches that Al Pacino gives as head of this international law firm, you know, somebody asked, why, why the law as this evil character?
He said, well, the law reaches into everything, business, finance, entertainment, everywhere, on and on and on.
And I'm telling you, if you haven't seen it, it's on cable every now and then.
Watch it, because I think it will resonate with you.
I agree.
It was a great film.
You know it, right?
Yes, I do.
That was my one and only experience with the legal system, and it was very disheartening.
It only takes one.
I'm sorry to say.
That's right.
It only takes one to teach you that you are, it teaches you your place in the universe, which is very small.
Yes.
Very quickly, let's go, well, let's see, where?
We're going, I think, to Stockton, California.
Hey, this is Benny.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, sir.
Good, good.
Great show tonight.
Thank you.
I just wanted to ask your guest.
Uh, about the Denver airport and uh, of course like there's, I guess there's a lot of symbology going on there and supposedly there's conspiracy of the reptilians underneath.
I doubt she knows about it, but we can ask.
I don't, I've never been, I haven't been to the Denver airport in like a decade.
Right.
There's all kinds of conspiracy and... Of course.
...surrounding the Denver Airport.
It's really weird.
And also, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
That's alright.
This episode recalled me to a past show of yours on the old radio show of a caller that he was like an Area 51 guy and he supposedly worked for them and He was really frantic and all of a sudden got cut off, but what he was mentioning was how supposedly these aliens had infiltrated certain aspects of the military establishment of Area 51 and so on and so forth.
It just kind of ran parallel with what you guys were talking about, or with what she kind of was mentioning.
I don't see where the parallels are, but that's a very infamous incident, of course.
Yes, the infamous incident, exactly.
Exactly.
Well, um, I just thought that as the reptilians, you know, if they were, you know, hidden, you know, human slash, like aliens and maybe they had something that, I don't know.
No, well, they'd be everywhere.
They would be in, they would be, have infiltrated the legal system as well as the military.
So, well, I mean, a lot of this is no weirder than what you wrote about with the Nephilim.
This is true.
It's not.
It certainly opens up this shadowy world.
I mean, if you believe in this, then you see them everywhere.
Well, I don't know about everywhere, but yes.
Well, wherever power is.
You know, it's all about power.
What are you going to write about next?
I'm actually writing about the symbolism of Saints who have died.
Really?
Martyred saints.
I was in Italy and I was looking at a lot of, you know, museum paintings.
My goodness, Tess!
The writing you do with the police system, you've got it!
My goodness!
Hold on, we're at a point.
We'll be back.
Tim Gerritsen is my guest and if you want to join us, you know how.
Thank you very much.
Look at us, but do not touch.
From the Kingdom of Nye in the High Desert, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
Please ring Art's bell at 1-952-225-5278.
That's 1-952-CALL-ART.
to uh... and my team
he five one north america and my team five five in the rest of the world
uh... my guest is just a resume and uh... it's so interesting that
writes about things that uh...
she's only sort of flirting with as a
possibility in real life and and yet obviously finds them intriguing interest
I sure do.
I find a lot of things intriguing, but it doesn't mean that I'm not open Two possibilities, and I'm always interested in what people say and how they react and the kind of stories I hear, because I know these people actually believe that they have seen reptilian eyes.
Oh, yes?
Yes.
Yes, indeed.
All right, let's continue.
A lot of people want to talk to you.
Washington on cell phone, I guess.
Hi.
Sir, I can't even understand what you're saying.
Try it again.
If you're on a speakerphone, get off that.
Hello?
Hello?
Yeah, much better.
Hello.
Hey, Art.
How's it going?
Fine, Jim.
Go ahead and talk.
Hey, yeah, I just wanted to share a little experience I had because I got out of the military, you know, and when I was in boot camp, I had this really strange experience, you know, just before I left and it was kind of weird because occasionally people would They train you to stand watch and sometimes during the, I don't know if it was the lunar phase or what, but they would see things or people would sit up in bed and start hollering.
Somebody would be talking in their sleep or something.
But I experienced something and it was like a bunch of people running around jabbing at you.
It was like when you wake up and you're not sure if you're dreaming.
It didn't seem like they were real bad guys, but it seemed like they were having a lot of fun.
Well, I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I guess you can sense when somebody's coming for you, whether it's with evil intent or just joking around.
I don't know.
But I do believe that we have these senses.
Again, Tess, you said that they've done testing that shows that people really don't know when they're being stared at.
Can you actually quote that study?
I can't remember where I saw that.
I remember seeing that and thinking, well, that's surprising because I always felt that I could sense when people are staring at me.
I will hunt that down and email it to you if I can.
I would love that because it's just so hard to buy.
Hello, Ray on Skype.
Good morning, Eric.
How are you doing today?
Doing fine.
So, I have a little something for Tess.
I just wanted to say thank you for being one of the few scientists out there that's willing to say, I don't know.
That's probably the best thing that a scientist could learn to say.
I mean, there's so many things we don't know, and to be honest about it, instead of saying, well, I have a theory.
That's all I have for this evening.
Okay.
Well, that was enough.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's right.
Saying I don't know sometimes is so the right thing to do.
The right thing to say.
If you don't know, just say it.
Yeah, but always say I don't know, but it's possible.
Uh-huh.
Let's go to Iowa, I think.
You're on the air with Tess Gerritsen.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello, this is John.
Greetings from Iowa.
Howdy.
Hi, I have several quick questions and I'll make it fast and you can choose whichever you would like to discuss.
I have a question for Tess regarding the Russian video of the people at a dance club where the lights accidentally went out and there were at least four or five guests there whose eyes immediately shone bright in the pupils, so much so that they scared the band and people just started running out of the club.
Have you heard of that?
I haven't.
I haven't.
I'm going to have to find that.
Is that on YouTube?
Yes.
There's several versions now.
Someone quickly tried to debunk it, but there's another video where they interviewed members of the band, and this was a real thing in Russia.
They're still very, very scared about it, to talk about it.
How would you find it on YouTube?
I didn't see it myself.
I've never heard of this.
I believe if you use the keywords hybrids, Um, hybrids, eyes, uh, beam bright when lights go out during nightclub show.
Okay.
I will look for it.
The amazing thing was, before the lights went out, if you freeze the video and you look at these people, they're completely perfect.
They're completely polished.
There's nothing, I mean, they're mannequin-like, but they're very, very beautiful.
There's nothing wrong with their hair, their clothes, their appearance.
They look too good to be true.
Oh, I found the video.
Okay, I found it.
Wow, you're fast.
But it's four minutes long, so... Okay, we'll have to watch it after this, but thank you very much, Caller.
Let's go outside, well, to the other side of the world, at Jazz Munda.
Hello.
Hi, Art, how are you?
Howdy, I'm fine.
That's great.
I've actually done my own experiments, nothing scientific, but my own experiments in staring at other people and trying to get them to turn around and look.
And I think I've had quite a high success rate in that.
Well now, that's an interesting twist on what we were talking about.
I don't claim to be psychic at all, but usually if I try and sort of think, turn around, turn around, and maybe you're in danger, you're in danger, and people start maybe darting around, looking around, and the more I keep doing it, they end up sort of turning around.
Okay, well I'm going to look up some other studies and see how often this has been done because I mean it is a fascinating topic.
Because there is no scent involved, there's no sound involved, what would make somebody turn around?
I have no idea but it is an interesting topic and I find that I have a better success rate with family members and in particular my wife who fortunately isn't blood related to me but we are kind of soulmates.
Yeah, I can get her to turn around like that, if she's on the other side of the room.
Huh, okay.
Well, you know, we're going to have to start setting up our own scientific experiments here, aren't we?
Um, actually, I think there have been quite a few in this category done.
Jazz, that's really interesting.
And the opposite of what we were, you know, we were talking about a person's ability to sense danger, but you can project Well, what is it you're projecting?
Just willing that person to turn?
Is that it?
I think so.
I might be on a bus or on a plane or a train and I'll just stare at the back of someone's head and just even sort of whisper it to myself, you know, turn around, turn around, you know, and sometimes they turn around.
Try projecting, I'm going to take your arm off at the elbow and see how that works.
I don't want to hurt anyone.
No, I'm not saying do it, I'm saying just project that thought and see if it gets a quicker reception.
I will.
Thanks Jazz, all the way from Australia.
In other words, project.
Danger.
You're not going to really do danger to somebody.
Or aggression.
Or aggression.
That's it.
Exactly.
I think aggression would be much more likely to be sense, because again, we're talking about that sense you are emitting.
There you have it.
But again, you fall back on sense.
I do.
Instead of sense.
I am stuck on logical explanations.
I'm sorry.
Alright, let's see what Robert has.
Robert on Skype, you're on the air.
Hey, how you doing?
Just fine.
I got a question for Tess here.
You had talked about the movies and being, like, Satan-oriented with the people, and then you brought music into it, too.
And I was just kind of curious, since Satan is the bringer of light and the bringer of music... Well, I think she was talking about Hollywood and then the music industry, right?
Oh, yeah.
The note I got was that Gregory seems to have enchantments that protect both the music industry and the Hollywood industry.
Right.
So anybody trying to break into either movies or music, With good intention, does that mean that you have to subjugate yourself to something you don't believe in?
Good question.
Good question.
Jess?
I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, I'm sure there are people who break in because of sheer talent, and they don't have to subjugate themselves this way.
But, you know, in a way, going to Hollywood and getting into the system, You are giving up so much of yourself.
You are giving up.
And so, Tess, what kind of deal did you make for the best sellers?
Oh, you don't know who I've slept with, Art.
No, I don't.
No, I don't.
Phantom, hello.
Hi, Art.
Hi.
Calling from my laptop.
Do I sound all right?
You sound fine.
Where are you?
I'm in Utah.
My name is Josh.
I keep forgetting to ask people where they are.
Go ahead.
I chat with the folks on SorceryNet IRC in the Ardbell Channel.
I have a question for your author regarding the lawsuits and how the lawyers are always winning.
Doesn't that seem kind of odd, and what kind of an effect does that have on your creativity, knowing that you're going to always lose the battle?
Well, that is a good question.
Actually, does that affect your creativity, Tess?
No, it doesn't.
I just assume that whatever I write, I have control over it as it is in print.
But once somebody in Hollywood picks it up, who knows who picks up what book?
Who knows how many people are getting copied?
No, it doesn't.
I just keep on doing my own thing.
I think that the lesson here, though, is that if you want to make movies, you should make your own.
If you suspect it happens, there's nothing you can do about it.
So I guess a follow-up question would be, does that ever affect how you would write
a sequel to your first books?
No, it doesn't.
I just keep on doing my own thing.
I think that the lesson here, though, is that if you want to make movies, you should make
your own.
You should be an independent filmmaker and write your movie and make your own movie.
Boy, that's another tough path.
I'll hop off and let you answer another call.
Take care.
One thing that I think would be a very difficult test would be writing a book, having it purchased by a motion picture company, and then being an advisor on the movie.
And watch your book get decimated.
It happens all the time.
Yes, I know.
Authors always complain.
They say, oh, they ruined my book.
But the truth is, yeah, your book is still there on the shelf.
The book has not been ruined.
Hollywood may have just made a shoddy reproduction of it.
Once it gets into the hands of Hollywood producers, they want to be in control.
And unless you're J.K.
Rowling, who can exert that control, you've really lost it.
Um, alright, let's go to just over the hill in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Hi.
Hi, it's me.
You.
Yes.
Okay, this is OC at Las Vegas.
Hi, Art.
Hi.
Uh, Tess, did you have a tax year at Las Vegas?
I did not know that.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I think it's the rest of you from the press.
Well, there's a lot of people.
Remember Sinatra, sir?
Oh, yeah, of course.
Oh, yeah.
You know, the corridors of power are filled with evil people, I guess is all I can say.
Yes, they are.
So, are you going to continue to write, Tess?
Is that where your career now is firmly planted?
I am going to write until I drop dead.
It's something that I feel I need to do, and there's all these stories I need to tell, and yes, here I'm writing a story about Saints and Martyrs, which is rather fascinating.
As I said, I'm not religious, but I keep returning to that because it's a theme that fascinates me.
It fascinates me, too, that you choose that to write about.
Anyway, Heather, hello.
Heather on Skype?
Hi.
We are talking about I have a story.
My grandmother passed away.
My great-grandmother.
The night before she died, I was sitting in the hospital with her.
Yes.
She was 98 and at that point she could barely talk.
Right.
The nurse came in and she looked at me and she said, you know, visiting hours are over.
And I said, well, I don't want to leave her.
I said, you know, she's not going to make it through the night.
And the nurse says, Honey, she's fine.
Her vitals are fine.
She's good.
She's going to be okay.
And at that point, I walked over to my grandmother, and I looked at her, and she looked at me, and she says, Honey, I'm going to be okay.
So I'm listening to your stories tonight, and I'm listening to, you know, the stories, and I was thinking about that, and I was thinking that... Well, finish your story.
What happened?
Well, I was adopted, so we weren't blood related.
And the next morning, she passed away early in the morning, about 8 o'clock.
I was at work.
And my thought of it is, is that I think sometimes you're connected to other people so solely, it doesn't matter.
I think that you become connected to somebody, and you can become connected to, as your caller said before, you know, like, Yeah, but even what you're saying, the connection that you're implying exists, according to Tess, the scientist, can't be.
I didn't say it can't be, I just said I have no evidence.
Except for, except for, you know, as you said, anecdotal.
I think sometimes, though, that you project Not that you... I think that sometimes your bonds with people are so close.
Mm-hmm.
And I think certain people can feel that, those bonds with other people.
I don't think that... I don't think it can't happen.
I know, of course, exactly what you're saying, but again, Tess will regard it as anecdotal.
and as a scientist she would have to have some kind of no i don't know
uh... great i'm not even a test great study that would conclusively
proves statistically beyond any shadow of a doubt that that kind of thing
happened Right?
That's right.
It would make me feel more comfortable.
We could argue about this for years, and I'll still want my numbers, and you'll still say anecdotal things.
I know.
You know, that's why I've been on the air for years, Tess.
That's right.
I mean, it wouldn't be any fun if we agreed on everything, right?
That's right.
That's exactly right.
But I can agree.
I think we can all agree.
You are one great guest.
Thank you.
It has been a pleasure.
Thank you.
And sorry for the phone hiccup.
No problem.
Take care, Tess.
Bye-bye.
That's Tess Gerritsen, everybody.
It, indeed, has been a pleasure.
Sure pleasure.
Thank you all very much from the high desert.
The rainy, rainy high desert.
Good night.
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