Paranormal radio host Art Bell dies
‘Coast to Coast AM’ show dealt in mysterious topics
In the small of the night, when the mind is open and the defenses are eased, mysteries blossom and conspiracies run wild. In the darkest of hours, Art Bell was a light left on for the lonely, the insomniacs, the Americans searching for answers in a society they believed was spinning out of control.
For more than two decades, Bell, who died April 13 at 72, stayed up all night talking to those people on the radio, patiently encouraging them to tell their stories about alien abductions, crop circles, anthrax scares and, as he put it, all things “seen at the edge of vision.” The Nye County sheriff’s office said an autopsy will be conducted to determine the cause of death.
At Bell’s peak in the 1990s, his show, “Coast to Coast AM,” was on more than 400 radio stations. He took calls all night long, alone in the studio he built on his isolated homestead in Pahrump, in the Nevada desert. He punched up the callers himself, unscreened, keeping one line just for those who wanted to talk about what really happened at Area 51, the U.S. government reserve that for decades has been a locus of UFO sightings and purported encounters with alien beings.
Long before fake news became a political topic, Bell made a good living encouraging Americans to accept the most fantastic and unlikely tales, to believe that we are not alone, to accept that in a world where the pace of life seemed to quicken with every passing year, there were forces from beyond that were trying to tell us something.
Bell started his show in 1984 doing a standard-issue political talk program, but he quickly tired of the predictable, emotionally distanced debates over the issues of the day. For Bell, the questions of the night were infinitely more powerful.
In 1996, Bell suggested that the Hale-Bopp comet, then the subject of great popular fascination, was being trailed by a UFO — a theory cited as a possible reason why members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide the next year.
“There is a difference in what people are willing to consider, daytime versus nighttime,” Bell said in 1998. “It’s dark and you don’t know what’s out there. And the way things are now, there may be something.”
Bell’s voice was unusually formal, with a classic announcer’s cadence, patient and crystalline, by no means a sleepy sound. What he offered listeners was companionship and a therapeutic acceptance.
Bell, who drew an audience of about 10 million listeners a week, saw himself not as an authority, but as a fellow explorer. He wore his gullibility proudly. He believed in possibilities, and he loved the idea that his openness to paranormal events had helped build the nation’s appetite for “Twin Peaks,” “The X-Files” and other expressions of the edges of reality.
He wrote a book, “The Quickening,” spelling out his theory that every aspect of life was “accelerating and changing” so dramatically that the world was hurtling toward doom.
Of course, Bell had his own experiences that matched those of his callers. On the way home to Pahrump from Las Vegas, Nev., one summer night, he and his wife, Ramona, were about a mile from home when she blurted, “What the hell is that?”
The couple gazed up. Hovering over the road, they saw an enormous triangular craft, each side about 150 feet long, with two bright lights at each point of the triangle.
After a while, the craft floated directly over the Bells. “It was silent,” Bell recounted. “Dead silent. It did not appear to have an engine.” After a few moments, the craft floated across the valley and out of sight.
On the radio, when he told such stories, he would ask listeners to “try to send mental connective thoughts to ask these beings to show themselves.”
“It really doesn’t matter that much to me if anyone believes me,” Bell said years later. “Thousands of people seeing the same thing cannot all be wrong.”