December 21, 2001: Open Lines - Clinically Dead Line

Art Bell opens the phone lines on a Friday night before the holiday weekend, sharing a remarkable email from a homicide detective whose investigation was guided by the apparition of a murder victim's deceased grandson. The ghost of the young boy, killed by a car two years earlier, led the detective to both the murder weapon and the killer's residence.

Inspired by the Pam Reynolds case, Art dedicates a special phone line exclusively to callers who have experienced clinical death. The stories pour in: a man born clinically dead who recalls details of his own birth confirmed by his mother, a woman whose heart stopped from a pulmonary embolism and watched from the ceiling as doctors worked to revive her, and a teenager who spent a month in a coma after a head-on collision and returned with the sense of having lived an entire alternate lifetime.

Throughout the night, callers also share guardian angel encounters and ghost stories, including a woman in rural New Mexico reporting real-time paranormal activity in her former chicken coop home. Art repeatedly challenges the scientific explanation offered by physicist Michio Kaku, arguing that dismissing near-death experiences as residual neuron activity is a guess, not science.