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For your discernment:

FORMER NIGHTCLUB KING SAYS HE SAW FUTURE DURING NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE

By Michael H. Brown

I just read an intriguing book over the weekend. It's called The Fast Lane to Heaven, and it's about Ned Dougherty, who once owned the hottest nightclub in the New York City area. The club was in the Hamptons on Long Island (home to the super-rich), and was called Club Marakesh. Ned had a second club in West Palm Beach, and lived the glamorous life: limos, models, celebrities, seaplanes, Dom Perignon champagne.  

On July 2, 1984, something happened to him, something like a heart attack or a stroke, and Dougherty found himself collapsing on the sidewalk outside his club. He felt like he was "floating, suspended in a black, bottomless pit." In the distance he could hear voices. "I have no vitals! We're losing him!" said an emergency technician in an ambulance en route to the hospital. Dougherty was able to sit up in the spirit and rise above the ambulance -- watching it speed off. As he was suspended in air he saw a "kaleidoscopic review" of his lifestyle and possessions, which then vaporized. Suddenly a mass of energy formed over him in the sky and shaped itself into a cylinder funneling upwards. He was drawn into another realm -- a realm in which he saw deceased loved ones, a realm in which he was enveloped by the Light of God.

There was a "symphonic" music. There were buildings made out of no earthly material. There were spirits. Dougherty very capably recounts the experience of reviewing his life and understanding what it had been all about. It really makes for fascinating reading.

But what makes this account unusual is that Dougherty -- hardly a devout Catholic (in fact a heavy drinker who had liked the life of a playboy) -- had an experience in the afterlife with a "Lady of Light" who stood next to a large globe of the earth and began to speak to him about the future of the world.

According to Dougherty (and remember, this is in a book that came out in March), the "Lady of Light" -- who he would later identify as the Virgin Mary -- showed him events that would first happen in the Middle East and then Italy. "I was told that these events would be acts of 'aggression, terrorism, and war, performed by self-proclaimed radical groups, supposedly in the name of God," he wrote before the events of September 11. Dougherty flatly predicted that "terrorist attacks and acts of war and aggression will continue to plague the Middle East, Africa, and Europe." He was shown a future in which violence would spread from the Middle East to Europe, and then to the former Soviet Union and to the Far East -- particularly China.

The greatest threat, he was shown, would come from China and a "two hundred million army" (see Revelation 9:16). "The Lady of Light specifically told me, 'Pray for the conversion of China,'" claims Dougherty. "'The conversion of China to God is necessary for the salvation of the world.'"

Naturally, such claims have to be discerned, although, for Ned, the fruits seemed good. He was delivered from the "fast lane" and all the drugs, sex, and booze that had come with it. He says the phenomena he has seen is similar to what he has since learned about apparitions at Zeitoun, Egypt, where Mary was also called the Lady of Light. This is intense stuff and brings to mind Fatima -- where the Virgin came nearly a hundred years ago and expressed an almost identical concern about a similar threat from Communist Russia.

But most remarkable was what Dougherty had been told about the U.S. "While acts of terrorism and war and political unrest plague the Eastern Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere will be spared the worst of the terrorism," he was told. "However, a major terrorist attack may befall New York City or Washington, D.C., severely impacting the way we live in the United States."

Remember, this was recorded in a book released six months before the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center! We learn of all this just a week after running an article about another Long Island resident who, a week before September 11, was allegedly receiving apparitions of Therese the Little Flower with similar foreboding. Clearly, things are beginning to happen fast and furiously -- especially around New York. Indeed, Dougherty later had visions of the Virgin at a shrine in Eastport, along with an experience with the Archangel Michael. We'll discuss this next. And we'll look at what else Dougherty prophesied. 

For although he did not see terrorism destroying the United States, he claims to have foreseen other events that would...

[due to requests we are making Ned's book, The Fast Lane to Heaven, available here; otherwise it can be purchased at a secular store; as always, we urge readers to exercise prayer, fasting, and discernment. Ned can be contacted at ndened1@fastlanetoheaven.com]

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