January 27, 1997: Open Lines
The first hour features Timothy O'Reilly discussing his documentary Round Trip, which profiles five people who experienced clinical death and returned with strikingly similar accounts of unconditional love, transparency of form, and a complete absence of fear. Their experiences transcended religious boundaries, with none finding deeper meaning in organized religion afterward. Art connects O'Reilly's work to the MacDougall study as potential evidence for the existence of the soul.
Callers weigh in on a mysterious metallic sphere recovered in Seguin, Texas, a bright flash tracked on radar over Kansas and Nebraska, the missing Telstar 401 satellite that vanished from orbit near an unidentified object, and the looming return of Hong Kong to China. The evening captures Art at his most animated, electrified by a piece of lost science finally rediscovered.
Key Moments
Art reads the 1907 MacDougall soul-weight study: Art Bell reads on air from American Medicine, Volume 8, 1907 - Dr. Duncan MacDougall's 'Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance' from Haverhill, Massachusetts. He details the first subject, a tuberculosis patient on a delicately balanced platform-beam scale: at the moment of death, the beam dropped audibly, registering a sudden three-fourths of an ounce loss that couldn't be accounted for by respiration, sweat, bowels, or bladder.
Texas space ball confiscated by Air Force: Bell reports the discovery of a roughly two-and-a-half-foot scorched and pitted metal sphere in a field near Seguin, Texas - site of MUFON founder Walt Andrus, who got out to see it. Officials from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio confiscated the object before it could be examined; only a photograph survives, posted to artbell.com.