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April 15, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:16:03
Edition 342 - Howard Storm

American Howard Storm is a former Professor who believes - during an NDE - he was sent backfrom hell - by Jesus...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet.
By webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Well, the arrival of spring in London, for weather fans, is a little delayed.
For some reason, very misty and murky the last few days here.
The other night I went into London, which I try and do as little as I can just to avoid the transportation hassles of doing it.
But there's a building in London called The Shard.
Look it up online if you've never heard of it.
It is supposed to be an architectural triumph.
I quite like it.
There are other people who don't.
It's a big, like a shard of glass sticking into the sky.
And the other night, the top of it was like the Himalayas because it was shrouded in cloud.
It was really weird.
You know, it was like, what was that movie, Shangri-La, years ago, that it looked a bit like.
So we're still waiting for the sunshine, but the temperatures have picked up a bit, thank goodness.
And I'm just waiting for the summer now.
You know, that's my time, my time of year.
On this edition, we have a very special guest, somebody who I think may be controversial.
You can tell me about that, but I'll tell you more about him in a moment.
No shout-outs on this edition, but I want to do a couple of things.
I've been asked to say hello to a couple of people, which is kind of taking me back to my disc jockey days before I discovered news.
Hello to Nurse Pug from Ben in Manchester.
Nurse Pug, you know who you are, and it's nice to know that you're listening.
Ben and Nurse Pug in Manchester.
Please give a shout out to Nico in Birmingham.
I got him listening to your show a couple of years ago, and he's been hooked since then, and I know he'll be listening.
Well, Nico in Birmingham, nice to know that you're there.
And also, Nico, thanks very much for sending me that contact, and I hope you're both doing well in a city where I used to work on a radio station called BRMB, which doesn't exist anymore.
Sadly, it was the biggest radio station in Birmingham, and I loved Birmingham.
And then I moved to London and spent the rest of, up to now, my life here.
What else have I got to do?
One thing I do want to do before we get to the guest on this edition is just mention an email that had a bit of an impact on me from Amy in the United States.
I won't tell you precisely where Amy is, but Amy made a point that definitely touched me.
Amy, like a lot of us, has had a number of bereavements, people who've either gone prematurely or gone when their time, if we can say that there is ever the correct time to leave this plane, because there are always people left behind grieving.
And Amy's email was all about that.
She said, do I believe, from what I've deduced from doing interviews, that by grieving for people, we hold them back and we somehow impede their journey going further on?
Now, that's a very big point.
I bet a lot of you have thought about that.
And Amy definitely has, and so have I. I miss my parents every single day.
They were a huge factor in my life.
And, you know, nothing's been the same since they left us.
And it never will be, and that's just how things are.
And you may relate to that feeling as you're listening to this.
Amy wonders, though, if we hold them back by constantly thinking at them and maybe mourning for them.
And my only thought about this, and I'm not an expert and I'm not a psychic and I'm not a medium, I'm nothing, I'm just this guy who does this.
My only thought is that I think the thing they'd all want is for us to live in the here and now the best life that we can.
And whether we mourn from them or for them a lot, or we mourn for them a little or as much as we think we should, I don't think it makes a difference.
I think if those people were close to you when they were here, they will be close to you beyond.
And they will do whatever they have to do in whatever comes next.
I think probably something does come next.
I just don't know what.
And that's why I do this show.
But I do think that my parents, and maybe Amy, the people you've lost, would expect you to live the best life you can here.
And, you know, that is the best that any of us can do.
To make the most of it, and to make the best of it sometimes when the going's tough.
Which it sometimes, as you know, is very.
All right, the guest on this edition of the show, oh, before I do that, thank you very much to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for all of his hard work ongoing on this show.
I was looking at the new website, and I've got some bits of copy to write for it, and then it's pretty much good to go.
But thank you, Adam, at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for all the work on the website.
The address of my website, please go there, put a hit on it, is theunexplained.tv, and that's the place if you want to send me a message, or vitally important if you'd like to send me a donation to allow this show to continue.
All right, the guest on this edition said he would be controversial.
We've had a few people over the years on the radio and online versions of this show who've claimed that they've met Jesus.
But nobody has a story quite like Howard Storm.
So before you send me an email of condemnation, have a listen to what Howard Storm has to say.
Now, I'm not saying that any of this really happened, but it did for Howard Storm.
He is convinced it did.
But this man had a near-death experience and was going to hell.
There's no other way to put it.
And was somehow drawn back, he says, from that journey to damnation.
I don't know whether it was that.
But not a great place.
So have a listen to and just take in the details of Howard Storm's story and let me know what you think.
You can always communicate with me.
And of course, you can always let him know because he's got a website what you think too.
So let's cross to the US now and hear what I think is a unique story, certainly in the way that it's put, from Howard Storm.
Howard, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Well, thank you for inviting me.
Howard, you've had an awful lot of media coverage from what I read in your biography.
You've been featured on shows like The Oprah Winfrey Show in the U.S., so there are a lot of people taking you very seriously.
But you know that anybody who claims that they have met and conversed with and been guided by Jesus is going to be put under a great deal of scrutiny.
So, I guess you are well familiar, having had this experience for, I think, the thick end of four decades.
You're well familiar with those kinds of responses, I would assume.
Oh, yeah, I've been called crazy, nuts, out for the money.
You know, I think I've been called about everything and things that I can't say on the air by people that I used to consider to be close personal friends and family.
It's a hard road that you tread, isn't it?
Why do you continue to tread it?
For a variety of reasons.
One is out of gratitude because I know absolutely without any question in my mind that my fate was to die June 1st, 1985 in a hospital in Paris and to then proceed into a horrible world of darkness and torment.
And not only did he rescue me from that, but he changed my whole life in a very kind and patient way, giving me the opportunity to have a second chance, reboot, redo at this life.
And he's been guiding me and helping me ever since.
So there's the sense of gratitude.
And secondly, I don't want anyone, and I mean that anyone, I don't want anyone to go through what I went through.
And that's two things.
Not just the horrible afterlife hellish experience, but also I find life so much better living a life of faith and God than trying to do this as a hedonist and as an atheist.
Well, of course, many people say that they live a life of faith.
Many people who listen to this show are very closely adhered to their faith, and they believe it's a bedrock of everything that they are and everything they do.
But most of them do not claim that they have met the founder of one religion, Jesus.
And you do.
Yes.
And I think that I needed a major knock in the head to straighten me out.
So I congratulate the people who've lived lives of faith and have not found it necessary to experience what I did because I really wouldn't wish it upon anyone.
And of course, it does say in the Bible, doesn't it?
And I have to say that I'm not the greatest Bible scholar.
I learned what I learned in school.
But, you know, isn't there a line about blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed?
I'm sorry you brought that up because that shakes me up every time I hear it.
Because you're absolutely right.
That's a very appropriate quote.
All right, Howard.
I think what we need to do, and I'm going to give you the space and the time to do it, is to tell the story.
A lot of people in the US, I think, are familiar with your story.
I think listeners in the UK and other parts of the world will not be.
So talk to me about how this occurred.
You found yourself hospitalized.
Not uncommonly, you say that you had a near-death experience, and then something else happened.
So talk to me about, first of all, the circumstances then.
Who were you?
How old were you?
And what were you up to when your experience in Paris, you say, happened?
On June 1st, 1985, I was a 38-year-old college professor, and I was leading an art tour of Europe with a group of students and my wife along.
We had just spent three weeks on the continent, been to Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and now we were in the Netherlands and then back concluding a week in primarily Paris.
And the very next day we were going to return home when I had a perforation of the duatum, which to put in lay language, I had a pretty good size hole rupture through my small stomach.
I subsequently found out from American doctors and every doctor I've talked to in the U.S. has confirmed this, that it's a grave situation because you become septic very quickly and your life expectancy is a few hours, five hours at most.
Infection is a real serious issue, I forgive, if that happens, if your stomach is perforated in that way.
From what I understand, for some people, that's a death sentence.
Yes, septis, once it migrates throughout your abdominal cavities, pretty hard to fight and very often fatal.
Anyways, this knocked me right down to the ground and I was in total panic.
My first reaction was that I'd been shot in the stomach and the pain was the most acute pain I'd ever experienced in my life.
My wife called the desk at the hotel.
This was at 11 o'clock in the morning and they called an emergency service, a very nice doctor, arrived pretty quickly and got me off the floor and examined me.
He knew exactly what was wrong immediately and he told me that I had to have surgery immediately and he called an ambulance service and they came and more or less carried me to the elevator, down the elevator, down the flight of stairs to the ground level.
So there you are in a foreign country facing a medical emergency being taken for emergency treatment.
How were you feeling?
Terrified.
My French had gone as far as ninth grade, so Many years before, so I had very little language capability.
And I knew that I was in like the center of civilization.
Being an artist, I was a great admirer of French culture.
So, you know, I kept thinking to myself, oh, this is just going to be, you know, like an inconvenience.
I'll be in the hospital for a few weeks and, you know, after my surgery, and then I'll go home.
I need to look at this as like an inconvenience, but it'll be an adventure, you know, get to stay in France for a little time more.
And then I was very concerned about my wife.
I was concerned about the students who I was now abandoning on their own devices, hoping that they would make it to the airport and get home.
And the pain was quite overwhelming.
I wasn't thinking very clearly at all because the pain was, it just consumed me, consumed all my thoughts and everything else.
And the ambulance ride was very tipsy and very rapid through Paris.
And so that aggravated everything.
I got to the emergency room.
Two lovely female doctors examined me, x-rayed me, took my medical history.
They were very nice, said that I had to have surgery like right now.
I even inquired if I might go to another hospital because I was aware that I'd been taken to a general hospital, a city hospital.
And they said, no, there's no time to transfer you to another hospital.
You've got to go to surgery right.
You're going to surgery now.
So off I went on a gurney a few blocks away to the surgical hospital, which is Cauchin.
And I was put in a room to await the arrival of a surgeon.
Unbeknownst to myself or my wife, there was no surgeon.
And because it was a Saturday and in the summertime in France, anybody that can gets out of Paris on the weekend.
And so we sat and waited.
There was virtually no information coming to us through the rare and occasional visits of the nurses over the next 10 hours.
In emergency and at Cochin, I was given no medication, no drugs.
One of the things that is irritating, people always tell me, oh, I just had a drug trip.
And it's like, gee, I spent 10 hours begging for drugs and never given any.
So like, I don't think the drugs were really a factor of this.
But Howard, what a terrible, terrible position to be in, thousands of miles from home, in a place where you don't entirely speak all of the language, and then to be told that you need emergency surgery.
But unfortunately, the person necessary to do your emergency surgery is not here.
Yes, the only comfort was that I had a 68-year-old Frenchman by the name of Monsieur Florin as a roommate in that room, and he was very kind.
And his wife came later to visit him, and she was exceedingly kind.
So they were our comfort, assuring us that it was all going to be okay.
But it was not okay because after a few hours, I had the acute sense that I was dying.
And part of the way that that manifested was it was getting increasingly difficult to breathe.
And I was aware enough to know that if I stopped breathing, that would be very bad.
And I didn't want to die because I was an atheist.
And I knew that when you die, you're dead and there's nothing else.
And during this time, of course, I never thought about the idea of praying or anything like that because I didn't believe in any of that stuff.
I thought I was a highly rational, science-based, materialistic person who, you know, we're just an electrochemical organism having this experience, this meaningless experience of life.
And you want to maximize your pleasure and minimize your pain.
And when you die, it's over.
That is, it's an unusual position because they do say, and, you know, I've been in situations where my health has not been great.
Last year was one of them where I was terribly worried.
And I have to say, and I'm, you know, I make no bones about it.
I did call for guidance from whatever it is might be up there because I was scared and I really didn't want to go now.
So it is unusual, I think, for you to be in a position where you're lying in the hospital.
You think you're dying.
You cannot get the help you need, but you don't say, Lord, or whatever might be there, please do something to help me.
So you were just at the mercy of whatever was going to befall you.
Yes.
And I think that's one of the things that I want to get across to people is that there is supernatural help.
There is a God.
And if we call upon God, our situations can change in remarkable and miraculous ways.
But at the time in the hospital in Paris, you were not doing that.
No.
So what happened?
At 8.30 that night, now this started at 11 o'clock in the morning.
At 8.30 that night, the nurse came in and said that she was sorry they were unable to locate a doctor and they were trying to get one the next day, which was Sunday.
And I had been hanging on by my finger, and this is a metaphor, of course, hanging on by my fingertips onto the edge of the cliff, not wanting to fall into the abyss.
And when she told me that, I realized it was a useless struggle and that it was time to just let go and to submit to the inevitable, which was the cessation of my life, also known as death.
And what does that look like?
So many people we read about and we know about in our own families reach that kind of dark moment of the soul where you know or you suspect that this is probably it and you have To in some degree release.
I'm just interested to explore what that felt like, if it's okay for you to talk about.
Very conflicted emotions because at 38 years old, looking back now from the perspective of being 71, that was like a great time in my life.
You know, I had gone through the struggles of youth and finding my identity and starting a career and having some success and then having a wife and two children.
And so I had a position, I had a good salary, I had a certain amount of power and responsibility in my position and won honors as an artist.
And so it was like I was achieving my goals in life.
And it just seemed like just when I'm getting there, it's all over.
This is like, that's not the way it's supposed to work, you know?
And it's not supposed to work that way.
I'm supposed to, you know, I'm supposed to be able to enjoy this and go further in my career and with my life and see my kids grow up.
It's so unfair.
But on the other hand, it's like, I can't take this anymore.
The pain had gone from being an acute point in the center of my abdomen to everything from my collarbone down to my groin of this excruciating pain.
And like, I just can't do it anymore.
And the breathing thing had become very, very difficult.
I was expending all of my energy trying to inhale, exhale.
All I could do was try and do that.
And it was me getting increasingly difficult to do that.
And what about your poor wife who was there with you?
In her words, she was in hell.
She said to me once, you know, well, you went to hell, but I was in hell.
Because, you know, not just to watch her husband pass away, but to be helpless in the situation, all of our attempts to get any information about is there a doctor anywhere in our future were rebuffed.
And Monsieur Floren had interceded for us with the nurses, and he got no information either.
So basically, the hospital have a situation where they cannot get a medic who's qualified to do the necessary with you.
You are slipping away.
This is a terrible situation in which, I mean, I've never been in that situation, but you either panic or, as I've heard before, and as I've experienced to some extent myself, in a situation that is absolutely make or break, and break you thought in this case, a calmness descends over you and you begin to accept your fate almost.
Yes, I just decided that this was it and I just let go and went very quickly into unconsciousness, which I assume was in a stage of dying.
And had you given like a final message?
It's horrible to think about, but a final message to your wife?
Oh, yeah, I told her that I loved her and tell my parents that I loved them and my sisters and my kids and tell my friends I was thinking about them.
You know, I did a whole little farewell speech to her, which upset her greatly.
What a terrible, horrendous situation.
And then for you, the awful nightmare is over because you lapse into unconsciousness.
Supposedly the pain is gone.
What happened then?
To my complete surprise and delight, I found myself standing next to the bed and I felt wonderful, no pain.
And I quickly realized that my senses were heightened beyond anything I'd ever experienced before.
And I mean all of my senses.
I could see, hear, taste, touch, feel better than I'd ever in my life.
And it was startling because like one of the first things I realized that I could smell Monsieur Florin.
He had leaked some urine.
I could smell it.
And I was like, oh, Monsieur Lorraine, you smell, you know.
And I hadn't noticed that before.
And I was like sniffing the room like a dog.
I mean, just standing there.
And then I realized that I could feel the texture of the linoleums in the soles of my feet.
So I began to explore my own body with my hands.
And it was like the most incredible sensory overload I'd ever experienced in my life.
As I looked around the room, I could see better than I'd ever seen in my life.
And then I perceived in the bed that I was standing next to, mostly covered with a sheet, but with the face uncovered, a figure that looked terribly like me.
And I say terribly because I knew that that thing in the bed was dead, meat, and that although it looked like me, I knew rationally that can't possibly be me because I'm fine.
I'm doing great.
I'm standing here feeling better than I've ever hoped before.
And in this guise standing by the bed, were you younger?
Were you a younger version of yourself?
No, I think I was exactly as I might consciously had perceived myself.
No change.
So you'd had a reset of the senses.
Did you have any awareness of what might have happened?
I mean, the term then near-death experience was around, of course.
People were writing books about it and things, but it wasn't nearly as common as it is now.
Right.
Well, I absolutely refused to believe that I was dead or that anything had happened.
And so I tried to talk to my wife, and she didn't respond to me at all, which made me very angry because one of her techniques for punishing me when we had disagreements was to treat me off.
Right.
The silent treatment.
And so I thought, okay, she's mad at me because I put her through all this.
And she looked horrible.
I mean, she'd been crying so much.
I'd never seen her look so miserable.
And so I turned to Monsieur Floren, who had been so kind to us.
And I was asking him what's going on.
I got no reaction from him whatsoever.
So I started to yell and scream and swear at him, got no reaction from him.
So I'm very, very agitated because these two people are ignoring me, and I'm in this very difficult situation.
And I'm asking, you know, what's that thing in the bed?
Who is that?
That's not me.
It looks like me, but it's not me, you know, stuff like that.
And then I heard people outside the room calling me by name in English.
And I was acutely aware that they were speaking English because not surprisingly, people in the French hospital spoke French or what English they spoke was with a very strong French accent.
But the people outside the room were calling me in plain English and they were saying, Howard, let's go, hurry up, come with us, time to go.
And so I went over to the doorway of the room and I looked out in the hallway and there was a group of people out there and it was very gray, very fuzzy.
And there was a number of people out there, possibly eight or ten, hard to make out.
Were these people that you knew?
No, I couldn't.
It was so unclear.
I could tell they were people, but I couldn't recognize them.
And did you have any sense then that you were being almost summoned on a journey?
Oh, absolutely.
But I asked them, I said, I'm sick.
I'm supposed to have surgery.
I need a doctor.
And they said, we know all about you.
We've been waiting for you for a long time.
Let's go.
Hurry up.
And I'm like, oh, okay.
These are the hospital people and the doctor has arrived and they're going to take me to my surgery.
And so we're going to walk to the surgery.
But in the meantime, the things that don't compute are your poor wife is sobbing her heart out.
And what appears to be a sick version of you is lying in the bed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I had no problem leaving that object in the bed because it disturbed me a great deal because I could not reconcile my mind to what that was or who it was, although I knew it was me.
Strange question at this point, but it's just one that's been burning in my mind for the last minute or two.
You said that you were able to feel the linoleum there and you were able to touch your own body and sense that.
Were you able to touch objects there?
You know, the idea that if you wanted to get attention, do you think you'd have been able to push a vase over or something like that?
Yes, I think so.
I'm not sure, but I think so.
But my sense is when I was yelling at Monsieur Floren, I put my hands on the bed to lean very close into his face as I was screaming at him.
And I think I remember feeling the bed and all that.
Had drugs been administered to you before this point?
I'm just wondering whether there was any chance that what this may have been was some kind of hallucination.
No, I'd never been given anything, which I'd begged for.
I mean, every time a nurse came in, I begged and begged for morphine or something.
And they didn't give it to you, my God.
No, because, well, they couldn't because there was no doctor to prescribe it.
And as in the U.S. and France and everywhere else, nurses can't administer without doctor's orders.
So as far as you were aware, something had happened to you.
Some part of you had died, but it sounds to me like there was a disconnect.
The penny, as we say here, the penny wasn't dropping with you as to what had become of you.
No, the whole thing was very confusing, but now I'm confident that I'm being taken to surgery by this group of people.
And so everything's going to work out.
So I left the room.
And when I left the room, I looked back into the brightly lit room, and I had a really bad feeling about leaving that room and going out into the grayish, dark hallway with these strangers.
And leaving your wife behind.
Yes.
And I thought, well, this is what I've got to do.
I've got to, you know, tough it up here and be brave and, you know, go to my hoped for surgery, which was going to fix what ailed me, although it wasn't bothering me at the time.
So you were kind of convinced in a way that you were coming back?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
No doubt about it.
So the people escorted me by encircling me down this hallway.
And pretty soon I began to question the mechanics of what was happening because I knew that we had gone up on the gurney in an elevator and I knew that we were on the fourth floor and we're walking on this hallway and we're walking and walking and walking and it feels like hours and days and like,
okay, this is ridiculous because there's no features in this hallway, just this flat surface and the atmosphere was getting darker.
It was getting heavier.
The atmosphere felt heavy, humid, dank.
And more and more people were joining our group.
And as I would ask them, like, I would say to them, like, how far is this?
We've gone a long way.
You know, I don't remember this building being this big.
They would say, shut up.
Don't ask questions.
You'll find out.
Keep going.
What are you talking for?
There's no talking.
You know, be quiet.
This sounds to me less of a spiritual experience than more of an Abduction.
Yeah.
So we kept going and going, and eventually I found myself in complete darkness.
And I was terrified because the people had gone from rudeness to making very crude remarks about me and saying things that made me very paranoid, like, be quiet.
Don't scare them off.
You know, watch what you say.
And I said, I'm not going with you any further.
I'm going back, which was a bluff because I was completely disoriented and in complete darkness.
So back would be what direction I had no idea.
But I didn't want to go with them any further.
And they said, no, you've got to go further.
And I refused to move.
So they started to push and pull at me.
And I tried to resist them by fighting back.
And did you say, who are you people?
No, because I still thought that they, I mean, talk about being dense.
They're slowing the uptake.
I still thought that they were hospital personnel.
So you still thought these people were medical professionals and somewhere down the line, you were going to be led to an operating theater?
Right.
I mean, you know, I'm a stubborn person.
When I get an idea in my head, that's it.
You know, hard to persuade me otherwise.
And so they're pushing and pulling at me and I'm trying to get them off me.
And then they started to scratch and bite and tear and kick.
And I was punching back and kicking back, except that now there were many of them in this darkness.
I couldn't see anything, obviously, but I could hear and feel.
And there were a lot of them.
And then there might have been hundreds of them.
I don't know.
And did they look similar?
Did they all look similar or were they all different?
How did they look?
They were male and female.
They were all adults.
Some were taller, some shorter, some heavier, some thinner.
But I never was able to see their features clearly.
But I'm quite convinced that they had been people.
They weren't like supernatural demons or anything like that.
Right.
I mean, would you now call them lost souls?
Well, you know, okay, lost souls.
That's the impression I've gone.
I think one of the things that I understand is the thing that makes hell hellish is the people there.
I believe that God doesn't punish anyone.
God gives everybody exactly what they, in their hearts, they desire.
And some people desire to be separate and apart from God.
So God says, fine, if that's what you want, you got it.
So he lets them go to this place.
And God doesn't make hell hellish.
They do, because they no longer have any restraints on their behavior.
There's no law enforcement.
No morality.
It's just like anything goes.
And so because the place is so devoid of anything good, no butterflies, no laughing children, no, you know, no fish and ships, which I love, by the way.
I mean, there's nothing there except all these people.
What they have done to do is the only thing that they have to do is to try and dominate and impose themselves on one another and get some sort of gratification out of this intense physical contact with each other.
But I don't think that it ever really satisfies.
I don't think that they ever truly get gratified.
But, you know, psychologists have taken rats and other animals and put them in a cage and let them reproduce.
And they end up just gnawing on each other when they become overpopulated.
And that was my sense of what they are.
They're kind of like the rats in the cage just devouring each other all the time.
At what stage did you believe that you were in hell?
Bearing in mind, of course, that the Pope said, as you may have read in the news about two weeks or so ago, that there isn't hell.
He doesn't believe that hell exists in the way that perhaps we've understood it to.
But you would be here to say, yes, it does exist.
It's a real place.
And I've been there.
Yeah, I'm a big admirer of Pope Francis, and I would like to understand what he was getting at before I wanted to argue with him.
But I mean, I believe that God is good and that God gives people what they both desire and what they deserve.
And that people that love God go to heaven and people that hate God, why would they want to go to heaven?
I'm not, you know, universalism makes no sense to me.
Why were you going to hell, though?
Had you been bad?
Or was it just that you didn't believe?
Myself and all of my friends who were all atheists, we thought we were really good people.
You know, we paid our taxes and didn't cheat too much on that.
When they collected for charity at the university, we'd put $5 or $10 into the charity.
Thought that was amazingly generous of us, you know, our great contribution to the poor.
We taught students and tried to be fair and interested in the students, but not to the point where it interfered with our lives.
We had families and thought we were good parents.
So by our own standards, we thought we were really good people.
I didn't rob, I didn't steal.
But there you are in hell.
Did the thought dawn upon you, what am I doing here when I've been as good as good can be?
Well, let me get to that by falling the snow.
So they had sufficiently torn me up so that I was alone in that place.
And I heard a voice come out of my chest saying, pray to God.
And I thought, I don't pray to God.
I don't believe in God.
And the voice said, pray to God.
And I thought, I don't know how to pray.
I can't pray.
And the voice said, pray to God.
And I was thinking about my childhood when I had been dropped off at church, gone to Sunday school, and I was trying to think of prayers.
And it got all mixed up with everything that I'd memorized, including Shylock's speech in the Merchant of Venice and the Pledge of Allegiance and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
And I'm trying to remember, like, I know there's a prayer somewhere down there, and I'm trying to remember.
And I finally come up with like bits and pieces of the Lord is my shepherd and our Father who art in heaven.
And when I did those things, the people became extremely angry, told me there was no God, nobody could hear me, and that it was going to be much worse for me if I didn't stop.
But I also found that by any mention of God, it drove them off.
It was so repugnant to them that they couldn't bear it.
So it was almost like waving garlic at a vampire.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And I found myself alone in that place, and I was there.
This whole place is completely devoid of time as we know it.
And I thought about my life and I realized that my relationships with my mother and father had been a roller coaster of good and bad.
You know, there are times when we didn't speak to each other and angry at each other and hateful even and other times when we got along, I realized my relationship with my wife was pretty rocky.
I realized that in so many ways I had neglected or failed my children because I was so obsessed with my own career and my own needs.
I thought about my friends and, you know, my friendship was based on going out on Friday or Saturday night to the local bars and drinking a lot of beer and talking dirty about everything, you know, politics, sex, women, wives, life.
I mean, that, you know, guy talk in a bar, pretty crude.
But of course, you are talking about the kind of life that millions of people, I guess, around the world live.
Yeah, I considered myself a real normal, good guy, you know, regular guy.
That's the kind of stuff we did.
But as I thought about my life, my background was as a teacher, I started to grade my life and I realized that I had failed the course.
I didn't know what the course was about.
What was this life supposed to be about?
But whatever it was, mine looked pretty miserable.
And I came to the conclusion that I had gone down the cesspool of the universe and I was with all the other garbage people and that this was exactly what I had sought in my life and what I deserved.
And the only way that I could make the best of it was that somehow I needed to recover enough so that I could be crueler and meaner and more vicious than they were.
And then they wouldn't be attacked.
I didn't want to be the victim anymore.
If anything, I was going to have to become the predator.
And yet you had a voice, you say, that came out of your chest that suggested that to save yourself or to keep away the bad people down there, you started praying.
So what was it within you or around you that was impelling you to do that?
Where was that coming from?
I think it was coming from memories as a child believing in all that Sunday school stuff, which as an adult, I had decided was just childhood fantasy.
But as a little kid, you know, when I had nightmares in the middle of the night, I could chase away the alligators and bears and lions that were roaming around my room, nibbling at my toes, you know, by calling on Jesus.
And I went back to those, that simple childlike faith.
So that was coming from within you.
Now, are you sure, and you've had a lot of time to think about it, that you were not just simply hallucinating this wasn't an artifact of your brain?
Because you know an awful lot of people, a lot of researchers, believe that's what these things are.
Well, my response to that is that if you look up the definition of a hallucination, it's a destructive psychotic incident.
Ultimately, my whole experience, which we're only in the beginning of, turned out to be the most healing, helpful thing in my life.
And not only was I physically healed, but I was emotionally, spiritually, psychologically healed of a lot of things.
So it was not a psychotic, bad experience.
The other thing is that this is hard for people to believe, but my experience was more real than what I experience in this world, which we call reality.
So, you know, I see this world as a very small fraction of the greater experience of what life is all about.
And I look forward to experiencing real life later on.
And yet we do have, a lot of us have, very vivid dreams.
Only last week I had a dream that was multicolored, three-dimensional.
It was full of people I've never seen before in my life.
And in the dream, somehow I'd escaped from a German prisoner of war camp in World War II.
And no, I hadn't been watching war movies before all of that.
I hadn't been watching my favorite Clint Eastwood movies or Richard Burton movies.
None of that.
But I was there and I'd escaped and I was wearing a trench coat and I walked into a bar and I ordered a beer, hoping that people wouldn't realize that I wasn't German and, you know, that I was out of place there.
And the woman behind the bar said, we only have a glass of beer here or you can have a Stein of beer.
And at that moment, while I was debating whether to have a Stein of beer and how was I going to pay for it, I woke up.
Our brains, our minds can do amazing things, but you're sure that this was not anything like that?
Right.
I have, like everybody, I have lots of dreams every night of my life.
I remember a lot of my dreams, especially when I first wake up.
And many times my dreams wake me up in the middle of the night.
I know what dreams are.
I know what they feel like.
Matter of fact, I've often had the experience in a dream of like getting to an uncomfortable bit of it and going, okay, this is a dream.
I don't like it anymore.
I'm tired.
I'm waking up.
I'm out of here.
I'm done with this.
You know, and I wake up.
This wasn't a dream.
I know the difference between I've had millions of dreams in my life and I wasn't dreaming.
All right.
So you were in hell.
Was the devil on duty that day?
Don't know.
I don't know.
I'm sure he was enjoying it.
You know, the spectacle.
So I lay there in this completely total pit of despair, stuck in this place.
I knew that this is where I belong.
This was my fate.
And I wanted out, but I couldn't think of any way out.
And then my mind went back once again to childhood.
And I had a vivid memory of sitting in a Sunday school classroom singing Jesus Loves Me.
And more intensely, I remembered what it felt like to believe in what that song was stating to me.
And I thought, I'm going to try it.
I'm just going to, I'm going to go for it.
And so I called out, Jesus, please save me.
And to my complete surprise, when I did that, a light appeared in the darkness, got very, very bright, very intense, and it came over me.
And emerging from the light were hands and arms which reached down and touched me.
And when these hands touched me, all of, and I could now see how utterly gory I was.
I mean, I looked like Roadkill.
All that dissolved away and I became intact, filled with his love, filled with joy.
And he lifted me up and put his arms around me and held me very close, gently stroking my back while I cried into his chest out of delight and joy that he came for me.
Because I couldn't have been more surprised or delighted.
I don't want to trivialize this, but what did he say?
Did he say, we've got to get you out of here?
Or were you out of there already?
He didn't say anything, just silence.
And I was just filled with his love.
And then all of a sudden, we started lifting up.
And then very much like a helicopter ride, we just started all of a sudden, uh-oh, we're going.
You know, he's holding me and we're going and we're going up.
And we started traveling.
And as we were moving out of the darkness, I realized that we were moving towards a world of light.
And I had this overwhelming sense of shame because I knew that, like, he was real.
I knew that where we were going was where heaven was, where God was.
And this is the stuff that I had ridiculed openly all my adult life and tried to convince my students that that stuff was all fantasy and they needed to grow up and get over it and not believe in those things.
And I thought to myself, I'm a piece of filth.
Actually, I used a stronger word, which I won't use.
And I'm a piece of filth.
He's made a terrible mistake.
I don't belong here.
And I was thinking, you know, he should put me back in the darkness with those other people because I just an analogy I use is I use this in the U.S. Like imagine if you were like a filthy bum who hadn't had a bath in two months and lived in the gutter and were dressed in the most awful clothes and stank.
Well, you know, some people may say that given the life that you were leading, which was like a lot of people's lives, maybe you were being a little hard on yourself.
While all of this was happening, Howard, let's not lose sight of the fact.
What was happening, as far as you're aware, in the emergency room or whichever room of the hospital in Paris, you know, the body that you'd left behind was?
What was going on then?
According to my wife, nothing.
I was in a room on the fourth floor of Cochin Surgical Unit, the hospital Générale de Assistant Publique de Paris.
Just she said nothing was happening.
I was doing nothing.
She was just waiting for somebody to do something.
So a character that you knew as Jesus was leading you back or leading you somewhere.
So when I said, when I thought these things, he spoke to me for the first time and he said to my mind, from his mind, we don't make mistakes.
You do belong here.
And I thought, how did you know what I thought?
Because I hadn't said it.
I only thought it.
He said, I know everything you've ever thought.
And I thought, oh, I don't want you to know everything I've ever thought because I've thought of some really terrible things.
And the first thing that came to my mind was an image of a naked woman.
And he laughed.
I said, is that okay?
And he said, yeah, it's like not a problem.
You know, like, you know, I know everything you've ever thought.
You've said a lot worse things than that.
And I was so relieved that he wasn't angry or upset.
Very difficult to, when you are trying to think of things you don't want to think about, you immediately, of course, think about them.
So then I realized, like, don't try to not think about things.
Well, that's the human condition, I think.
You know, if they tell you not to do a thing when you're a kid, you go and do it.
It's the same throughout life, I would assume.
So you are having, and again, not to trivialize it, but you are having what you think is a real-life Morgan Freeman moment.
Yes.
Yeah.
There is Jesus standing there.
I mean, Jesus himself, as far as you could see, was he glowing?
What was he like?
What did he look like?
He was brilliant white light, but so bright that it's not light like we know it.
Because when I was young, I'd worked as a welder for a while, and we used to have to wear a mask with an extremely dark piece of glass in it, which you could see nothing out of until you struck the ark and then it became visible.
And if you pulled the mask down too soon, the ark was blinding and really hurt your eyes.
He was brighter than the light of an arc light.
And he said to you, we don't make mistakes.
Yes.
So there was a reason for bringing you back then, presumably, for leading you away.
We haven't got to the part where he's bringing you back, but he's led you away.
So was all to be revealed?
So we began to converse, and he was just trying to put me at ease because I was very concerned that I was going to offend him.
And we had stopped our progress towards heaven.
So we were outside of heaven, not in it.
And he said that he had people that he wanted me to meet.
So he called out with some musical tones and a group of what I refer to as angels, other beings surrounded and light came hovering, hanging around us.
And he told me that they had recorded my life, they'd been with me all my life, and that they wanted to show me my life.
And I thought, oh, well, this would be fun.
You know, being an egotist is like, yeah, I'm the center of attention here.
Let's talk about me.
So they proceeded to show me from my birth and through my early childhood.
And that was all pretty fun and lovey-dubby.
And then as I became an adolescent, I became more and more antagonistic towards my father and he towards me.
And I saw myself becoming rebellious and becoming obsessed with sexuality, pretty normal stuff as a teenager.
And it wasn't so fun anymore.
They weren't being critical of what we were seeing, but they made it clear that things were not going well in my life.
And I was going in a lot of destructive directions, self-destructive directions.
And eventually, as I progressed in my life and became antagonistic towards religion and God and the faith that I had as a child, I realized that it made them very sad, extremely disappointed.
And then I saw myself becoming more successful in the world, but being very manipulative, very self-centered, just very focused on what is in it for me and indifferent to everybody else.
I mean, I considered my career, my success to be what my life was about.
And in American society, that works really well because that seems to be the nature of being an American in our culture.
Not only in America, I'm here to tell you, but that is the nature of so many people's lives.
So there you are.
You've been saved, I guess you would call it.
What happened then?
So during this life review, the thing that I got out of it was that God had created me to being a kind, compassionate, loving person.
My duty, I was created, my job in life was to care for my mother and father, my sisters, eventually then my wife and my children and the people that I worked with.
And the world was not about me.
It was about how I could care for other people.
So in a word, God had created me to be a compassionate person and I was passionate about myself, but not about anybody else.
I had missed it.
And when it came to the conclusion, Jesus asked me if I had any questions.
And I said, I've got a million questions.
And he said, well, what are your questions?
So I asked him everything that I could at that time think of to ask him.
Philosophical questions, personal questions, historical questions, everything that I could think of.
And he answered everything very kindly, very well.
We went places.
He showed me things.
And when it was done, I said, I want to go to heaven.
I want to be in heaven.
And he said, no, you're not really fit for it yet.
And you've got to go back to the world and try and live your life the way that God wanted it to be in the first place.
And I said, I don't want to go back there, and so we had a big argument, but I gave him all my best reasons for why this world was too unpleasant for him to force me to live in.
And he made it clear to me that that was what I needed to do and try and live differently.
And so finally, I agreed.
And when I agreed, without any transition, I was slammed back into the body.
And the pain was just unbelievable.
And immediately when I returned to the body, the nurse who had been in the room a little earlier had come back into the room.
She says, a doctor has arrived and we are going to prepare you for surgery.
And that was roughly around 9 o'clock.
When she told me there was no doctor, that was around 8.30.
And now it was around 9 o'clock.
And a team of orderlies and nurses came in and they prepared me for surgery, which consisted primarily of shaving me from chin to groin.
And then I was taken by Gurney down to surgery, and I had the surgery at 10 o'clock that night.
And you must have thought then, having had the, presumably when you came back into your body and you were in pain and you were told you were having surgery, you were had you remembered the experience of being with Jesus and all the rest of it?
Oh, vividly.
When the nurse came into the room, followed by the team of people, they evicted my wife from the room.
And so the next time I saw her was on the gurney being taken into surgery and just being rushed by her, I said, everything's going to be wonderful from now on.
And she looked at me and like tears flowing out of her eyes because, I mean, that sounded like, you know, bravado.
I mean, she.
So after the surgery, when I was in the recovery area, I was thinking about what had happened to me.
And, of course, very tired and very weak.
This was on the next day, Sunday morning, when I was conscious again.
And I was trying to compose some summary of what I had experienced because I knew that I didn't have the energy to tell her everything or even much.
So when she finally arrived into the recovery area, I said to her, it's all love.
And she said, I love you.
And I said, I know you love me.
But I said, it's all love.
And she said, lots of people love you.
And I said, I know lots of people love me, but that's not what I'm talking about.
I said, it's a huge ocean of love.
And you have to let go of everything and just go into the ocean of love.
And she said, you need to go to sleep.
She must have thought you were really delirious.
Yes.
So I was very disappointed because I had been working on my little speech, thought it made tremendous sense.
It made sense to me.
And she just dismissed it as, you know, just ranting about a nut job.
And I thought, you know, what am I going to do?
So for the next days, I would tell her bits and pieces of this.
And whenever I would tell her about it, she would get very upset and tell me, oh, you know, it didn't happen.
Why do you want to talk about that?
You know.
And of course, it would have been nice, and maybe this did happen, but it would have been nice if he had given you something that you could have brought back, a piece of evidence or a prediction or something that would have absolutely proved that you had been somewhere else and you had met someone else.
Yeah, well, I did have that proof, and that was later confirmed by the doctors in the U.S. Every doctor I've ever talked to said, you should have died.
And I came back, and although I was very sick for a long time, I mean, I got well, and the doctors, when I was recovering back in the U.S., I was in the hospital for months afterwards in the U.S. recovering from the septis, the doctors started using the word miracle.
It's a miracle you're alive.
It's a miracle you survived that day and evening in Paris.
It's a miracle you recovered from the septis.
I was in the U.S. I was on critical for five weeks at the hospital here.
And critical in the U.S. means they don't know whether you're going to be alive the next hour or two.
I mean, I was really, really sick for a long time.
And I consider I'm not only alive, but my whole life has been remade.
I now understand what I didn't know.
And I now have a faith and a love and a hope.
And I've tried to the best of my ability and failed terribly, but I've tried to the best of my ability to represent what I learned by being a kind and loving person and consequently left my career as a tenured professor of art and went to seminary so that I could become a ordained pastor,
which I in 88 I started seminary and I graduated and was ordained in 92.
And unlike most of those other people who were at the seminary, you, I don't know if you talked with them about it, presumably you did, but you'd had a direct personal experience.
Yeah, it was kind of funny.
And I know this sounds terribly egotistical, but I know that I know that I know.
And when I would, I mean, there were other people that had a really strong faith, and there were many people at seminary that were sort of going to seminary to try and define or discover their faith.
And I was trying to assure them, yeah, you're on the right track.
This is real stuff.
Don't, you know, don't take your doubts too seriously because, you know, put your trust in these things.
It was kind of a strange position to be in.
You said that you asked in that period many questions, and I presume some of those questions included things like, why don't you make yourself a bit more visible in this world?
And why on earth do you allow wars and deprivation and suffering and all the horrible, dreadful things that happen each and every day?
Those would be a couple of my first questions if I was to meet Jesus.
Oh, I did ask him those things.
For example, I mean, some of this stuff is pretty funny, and I mean that in a self-depreciating way.
I said to him, you know, I said, people don't believe in you.
You know, why don't you do something really dramatic so that they know that you are absolutely, positively real?
And he said, well, I did.
I came to the earth and I, you know, and I tried to show people and they still, many people, some believed and some didn't.
And I said, no, yeah, but I mean, do something today.
Like, and so I suggested to Jesus, why don't you like write in the sky, I am Jesus Christ and I am real in orange letters, big, big block orange letters.
I said, that would get people's attention.
And he thought that was very funny.
He laughed heartily at that.
And he said, no, he said, the whole point is people have to make their own choice.
And I said, why?
And he said, well, because love cannot be coerced.
You can't force it.
It has to be chosen.
And so we allow people to, we've given them ample evidence through the prophets and my work during my incarnation and through the church.
We've given people ample opportunity to know the reality of this and they have the opportunity to choose it or dismiss it.
And I suppose, look, you know, not wishing to speak for him, but I presume if he turned up on a Thursday in a shopping mall in Bel Air and said, I am the returned Jesus and I want you to reform your ways and I'll help you do it.
Unfortunately, in this world in which we live, most of the people who would see that would say, there's another lunatic.
Oh, I have no doubt that he would have been scooped up and taken to a psych ward.
There's a wonderful book, The Cotton Patch Gospel, about Jesus showing up in Atlanta, Georgia, and people becoming very hostile to him because they're just like, okay, another nutcase.
What do you say to people who might say, and I can't speak for them because they haven't communicated with me yet, who might say that what you're saying here is something that was a medical experience that you had.
It was kind of hallucinatory in some way.
And what you're now going around and saying is almost a form of blasphemy because you are choosing to, you are basically saying that you are one of the chosen people.
Well, a couple of responses.
One is I began investigating near-death experiences and ultimately got involved with groups of people that have those experiences and find out that there's millions of people that have had similar experiences all over the world.
These are universal and people have studied them in distant cultures and have remarkably similar experiences.
So I belong to this club of millions of people and I see them and meet with them and talk with them all the time.
And there's comfort in knowing that there's very like-minded people and we reassure each other that we're not crazy, that we're okay.
Another thing that I would say is if a person were to examine what I'm doing with my life, I'm trying to be helpful.
The reason why I went into the church was the opportunity to be a pastor and to meet with people.
This afternoon after this interview, I'm meeting with a teenager from my church who needs some counseling, and I'm going to try and be as helpful and sympathetic and hopefully guide him towards some resolution of whatever is troubling him.
I mean, that's what I do with my life.
I'm in a helping profession.
And you're absolutely sure that after the experience you had, you didn't sort of come down with a form of religious mania?
Yes.
No, I'm a religious nut.
I mean, absolutely.
I say that proudly.
I have to temper myself all the time.
I have never gone out on the street with sandwich boards going, repent, the end is near.
And as far as you were made aware, is the end near?
That's a question that I would have asked.
Are we, as many people suspect, destroying civilization?
I really believe, he didn't give me a date exactly, but I believe that we've gotten to the point where we're being so destructive to the planet, to the life on this planet, and to one another, that it's time for a huge reset, a huge change.
And, you know, people talk about the end of the world, but that's not the important part.
The end of the world simply means the beginning of a whole new world, a better world.
We're rapidly, unfortunately, running out of time.
It's a fascinating story, and I'm glad we had the conversation.
You didn't believe in Jesus.
You were not religious before this experience.
Having said that, did you ever think, well, why didn't Buddha come to me or another prophet or another great religious figure from another religion?
Because if you didn't believe in any of it, isn't it interesting that it was Jesus who came to you, you say?
Or maybe that's just a part of your conditioning, your upbringing, and that was a natural thing.
I don't know.
Right.
I've tried to study world religions, I have studied Buddhism and Islam and Hinduism and a little bit of Sikh and Baha'i and some Native American religions, things like that.
And I believe that Jesus is, in fact, the perfect revelation of God, the Son of God, and the other prophets had inspired things to say, but they were not equivalent to Jesus.
You know that there are going to be many millions of people around the world who would take issue with that, but I'm sure you've heard from them already.
Yeah, and I want to quote Mother Teresa.
She was asked what she thought of all the religions, and she said, I love all religions, but I love my own the best.
It's a brilliant answer.
So obviously, you know, it comes to us all, and I am too.
We're nearer the end of the journey than the beginning, unless, of course, you know, immortality is visited upon either of us.
Where do you believe you will go when it is your time, which inevitably with all of us, it will be?
Well, I have no doubt that I'm going to heaven, not because I'm so good, but because I have his promises that anyone who puts their faith in him, he will come and take them to where he is in heaven.
So I know he's trustworthy, and I put my trust in him.
And you said that you had abuse and you'd had people who tried to correct you in your ways in various ways.
There must have been people who have said to you or tried to imply that you're just mad.
What do you say to them?
Look at my life.
Look at what I do for a living.
Look at my relationships.
And you tell me if I'm doing something wrong because I'm trying to be a good man, a good husband, a good father, a good grandfather.
And I think that the proof is that, you know, it certainly appears that I'm living a pretty sane existence.
And look, it's not for me to say whether these things happen or they didn't.
All I know is that there are a lot of people who live empty, meaningless lives.
And if what you believe happened improved your life, then on any level, it's a good thing.
Yes, and the improvement in my life is in my relationships, not so much financially.
People tell me that I'm doing this for money, and my response is, what money?
Where's the money?
No, I'm still looking for the money.
I think you probably have done better if you'd stayed in academia.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you look, I find it fascinating.
And as I come to this stage in my life, I increasingly believe, although I can't say that I'm a particularly religious person, that ultimately love is all there is.
And I wouldn't have told you that 15 years or 20 years ago, because I was absolutely driven by my career and the desire to get to whatever nirvana in that there was.
Of course, in the end, there was no money in it.
And it's all illusory.
It's fun to do, and it's what I do for a living.
But like so many other people, as you get older, you realize what life is really about.
So, you know, you've come to your revelation one way, and maybe I've come to mine in another way, Howard.
But it's a pleasure to speak with you.
Oh, thank you.
It was a real pleasure for me to work with you and have this conversation.
You've written a number of books.
I know you have a website.
There will be people who will want to read more about you.
What is the website?
HowardStorm.com.
Excellent.
Howard, thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you for telling me your story.
Thank you.
You've been hearing Howard Storm.
I know that you will have definite views on that one way or the other.
If you'd like to let me and him know, that's fine.
I will put a link to his website on my website, theunexplained.tv.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here.
And also that new website coming along very soon.
So, until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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