Longtime radio host of night’s ‘Coast to Coast AM’ dies at 72

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, Nevada, 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.

In about 40 cities around the country, and in London and Tokyo, Art Bell Chat Clubs met regularly to hear talks by ufologists and by ordinary people who described their near-death and past-life experiences. He also had more prominent guests on the show — singers, comedians, actors, scientists.

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.

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.

Art Bell