Bioterrorism and disaster preparedness expert, Steve Quayle spent the first half of Friday night's show discussing the war. This was followed by Open Lines which included tales from time travelers.

It's like a "four-tiered Monopoly board of the Middle East-- it seems like there's so many moves and counter moves that finally one wonders what game is being played," Quayle said of the current war situation and the behind the scenes machinations of countries such as China and Russia. "The rhetoric in Russia has been rising dramatically," Quayle said, who reported that they had sent emissaries to Iraq to remove their secret spy files in the advent of Saddam's departure. "North Korea is the glove, and China is the hand in the glove," Quayle added about one of America's other concerns.

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"Things are profoundly different," in the year 2056 said the first "time traveler" on Friday's Open Lines. He claimed to be able to travel back to our time via a womb-like device. Chatting about our timeline, he said that Syria would join forces with Iran and Iraq, and that the U.S. would leave the United Nations in 2004. The year 2012 would not be the end as the Mayan calendar predicted, but rather the planet would be moving into a new section of the Photon Belt and humans would start developing mind-over-matter type powers he said. The caller added that it was problematical for them to travel into the future because "our very thought processes are changing the future before it happens."

An organist from Norfolk, Virginia told of her haunting encounters with an entity inside the church she worked for. She first saw the apparition one night when she was alone in the church: "This huge manta ray, about 4ft. by 4ft. started to fly toward me." When she told the pastor of her experience, he replied that the church might need to be blessed again. Later the caller said she would see the entity watching her as she played the organ with the choir. It was as if it was standing even though it had no limbs. Finally one night she encountered the apparition and it "threw a blanket of gloom over me," she said. She went and got the pastor who prayed with her and she "felt this thing shoot out of my left side." It was never to return again.

Friday Night Feature: The Inherited Goggles

by Rev. Troy Heidt

When I was a young boy my father, who was a minister as I am now, pastored a church on a Native American reservation! My father befriended an elderly Native American man who had fought in World War 2 and was quite fond of Dad. This man developed lung cancer and passed away, but left my father with a very strange gift. My father had been given the wooden goggles and belt buckle of a Japanese soldier that this Native American elder had killed in the war. He wanted to leave it to his children, but they were all troubled in their lives so he left these items in the care of my father until one of his children would turn themselves around. (It seems like a morbid inheritance- but it meant something to this man who had fought for his life and our freedoms)

My father held on to the belt buckle and goggles for years and then one of this man's sons became a tribal leader on the reservation. Dad remembered the articles he'd been holding for such a time and presented them to our friend's son. He was grateful that my father gave him the items his father had saved from the war because he knew it was a form of approval from his father that lived beyond his father's lifespan.

A few months later my dad got a phone call from the reservation. The son who had received the gift of the goggles and belt buckle was on the phone and scared. He told my father that when he got the materials from him he'd put them in his basement and stored them in a safe place. He hadn't told his wife or children about what he'd received because he wanted to save these items and present them to his own "worthy" child one day.

One night his youngest son came up from the basement crying. He claimed he couldn't sleep in his room downstairs because he was scared. "The man in the uniform keeps yelling at me! I can't understand what he's saying, but he's angry!" The son was terrified to sleep in his room and his father remembered that he'd put the goggles and belt buckle in a box outside of his son's room. The boy, not knowing anything about the goggles or buckle, perfectly described a Japanese soldier, with "funny glasses" on, yelling at him.

Dad told him that perhaps instead of holding onto the spoils of war that he'd been given maybe it was time he burned them. He'd already received a greater gift from his father, he'd been bestowed his father's blessing from beyond the grave.

--Rev. Troy P. Heidt
troyh@trib.com