It would have been a lot more entertaining, IMO, if he had covered the same topics from at least a moderately skeptical perspective.

... but the fact is, Art Bell was responsible for a lot of people believing a lot of nonsense. Nonsense never did anyone any good.

Listening to Art Bell was science fiction, like watching the X-files.

Art Bell is also responsible for people like me believing that Art Bell filled peoples' heads with nonsense, and for believing that some people take the X-files as documentaries. If I'm wrong about that, blame people like Art Bell.

Hoover had those beady eyes. Fer sure he was a lizard person!

as if he was really Hoss and his family was really Little Joe, Pa, and whoever that other brother was. Apparently there were enough of these encounters that he was compelled to comment on it.

Its just a thing - out of so many people, x number of them are going to be stupid and/or gullible.

Face it, most of human culture is nonsense at some point in time.
Imagination is far to valuable to dismiss altogether.

... who knew how to test their hypotheses.

... another thing that people like Art Bell do is promote a distorted view of science and scientists. It's a pet peeve of mine that people who pitch woo cast scientists as stogie dogmatists who are opposed to new ideas, when in fact the fascination of science is the prospect of learning new things.

He and Dr. Kaku were good friends. Art LOVED science. I NEVER heard him act like you have described him. He was "fascinated by science" and "the prospect of learning new things" obviously intrigued and excited him - as well as many of his guests and listeners. Your pet peeve has no relation to the man Art actually was. Did you ever actually listen to him? Maybe go find a recording of a night when Michio was a guest and listen with an open mind. Those were awesome nights. You might be surprised.

Having scientists on the show on a co-equal footing with bullshit peddlers making fantastic and completely unsubstantiated claims of fact doesn't make Bell a science advocate.

Going back to HG Wells.
Imagination is a big part of why science exists. Its, in part, why theories are proposed and investigated. If only to disprove a myth.
As well there is a whole area between theory and hard proof, especially with quantum theory, where speculation and theorizing is imperative.

"... who knew how to test their hypotheses." Art Bell was neither a practitioner nor advocate of critical thinking, much less the scientific method -- something I put high value on. You want to listen to listen to anyone who has anything to say? That's great, and in fact that's why I sometimes tuned in late at night. But when people make fantastic factual claims, and I'm interested in more than laughing at how delusional and foolish people can be, then I'd like to see some convincing evidence. Not so Art Bell, whatever the reason.

You thought Art Bell was supposed to be a scientist. If you were listening to get peer reviewed conclusions you went to the wrong place. He was an entertainer. Or a facilitator of other entertainers. Guests he had on, or even callers that were adept at tall tale telling. Some listeners may have been taken by a guest or caller. Not myself, nor Art. At least he never really let on. He never really took sides or proclaimed his farout guests claims to be beyond doubt. He probably privately got a chuckle out of folks that actually believed a lot of the more outrageous stuff. But he also brought up subjects like UFOs and crop circles, both of which there are examples that are unexplained. He celebrated the human mind and all that it could come up with, both things that were unproven but had witnesses to effects with unexplained causes, and fantasical speculations ...ie. multiple dimensions etc..

It was not a show to celebrate past scientific accomplishments per say, it was to stimulate the possibilities of what could be, no matter how absurd they may sound, as walking on the moon sounded to HG Wells readers. That is the first step of scientific advancement.

I don't recollect Bell ever promoting such a view, in fact quite the opposite.
I suspect he aired more high wattage broadcasts of astronomers than any other
program in the history of the public airwaves.
Perhaps you didn't tune into those programs in addition to failing to get a laugh out of the various and sundry
nutjobs and conmen that peppered the programming.
You seem compelled to piss on the mans grave (before he's even in it) without really understanding
the nature of the program beyond an admittedly small sampling.

Relax, there are far more damaging things on the radio.

was/is not skeptical, and that was booooooring. (We called him Snoory.)

... but I listened to at least part of quite a few, and the only time I remember him turning skeptical (after first believing and promoting it for a long time) was when he started doubting Jose Escamilla's "rods" nonsense. ("Rods" are the motion-blurred streaks that bugs make when they fly in front of a video camera shooting at a slow shutter speed, but Escamilla claimed they were a mysterious rod-shaped lifeform flying too fast to be seen.) It's true he sometimes asked what seemed to be probing questions, but then he just accepted whatever answer he got.

But it was fun, and that was the whole point.

Anybody remember Mel's Hole? LOL

...smiled.... That damned hole was to be in the canyon i live in and I had Paranormal ppl from Seattle..groups of them...coming to my house and then they would explore the forests and the surrounding hills.. in their city shoes and high heals..Lord help them I would think...hope they dont step on a rattlesnake..

Thanks.

I'm not sure that makes it better, especially if Bell was actually using them as entertainment instead of believing them.

Sorry, but in a world awash in bullshit, I won't make a folk hero of Art Bell.

Especially that spiritual healing shit. His show is pretty much an unlistenable infomercial for psychic quacks.

Bell was a great entertainer and knew how to keep his listeners coming back for more!

RIP Art Bell!

I enjoyed his shows when I had a chance to listen, all with a grain of salt but good entertainment. He was a Ham radio op and I had a chance to talk to him over the years.

Equal parts Jean Shepard and P.T. Barnum.

Thanks for the divertissement, Sir.

Great for entertaining insomnia.
I loved his show when he was host. He kept politics out of it for the most part. What I liked about Art was that he'd accept everybodies experiences with the benefit of the doubt,no matter how shocking and out of this world. I think he was too smart to actually believe them all but he was great at mixing what he thought possible, and claimed to see a ufo himself, and what just sounded good for the show, including the bizarre guests he had on.

The one that took over for him George Noory is unlistenable. He used the same Coast to Coast strategy of humoring every caller, but it became a chore for him, so he started having on Tea Party organizers rave on about Obama, and last I heard when flipping stations I found out he has some InfoWars correspondent giving regular reports. He turned a gem of a show with aliens and shadow people and time travel and destroyed it.

Art Bell was Coast to Coast.

Mainly for the rightwing politics.

Bell was all over the map politically (a libertarian who voted for Obama), but for the most part, left it out of the show.

While his propgram was more or less harmless sci-fi wankery, it's clear he did contribute to the growing conspiracy culture.

Would have been interesting to see how he felt about Alex Jones weaponizing that sort of thing for the extreme right. Given his thoughts on Noory, one can assume he would not have been pleased.

Good to hear that.

That's an interesting position, that his program was one of the pioneers of conspiracy culture. Even though I think for him it was just about entertaining, and was more about the government keeping any alien contact a secret from the population. But I can see what you mean. Priming the audience, which was significant, to accept almost anything. Any secret government conspiracy especially.

Yeah last I heard he dashed off to live in the Philippines with his Wiccan wife.

He died in Pahrump.

And he had no idea what it would morph into

His previous wife, Ramona, was Wiccan. She died in 2006. He later married Airyn, who is Filipino. They moved to the Philippines to be near her family, but eventually came back to the US, to Art's ranch in Pahrump, NV. He and Airyn had a daughter together. Her name is Asia.

“We don’t do politics on this show” then offhandedly say “George W Bush seems like a nice guy!”. Never said that about Obama!

I remember Stanford Friedman giving him shit one night when he claimed he’s not political.

all sorts of things there. He was posting there earlier this week. He was also active on Twitter.

That's when I quite.

I loved those!

Kinda fitting he died on a Friday the 13th.

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I loved him but his thread of anti-government conspiracy topics and guests were a foundation and origin of Infowars, Glenn Beck and the Trump base.

And he decided that Alex Jones was too crazy and banned him from the show (Noory later let him come back, though).

Before Art Bell there was Long John Nebel, filling the nighttime airwaves with the same wild stories
that Coast to Coast brought to a newer generation. From the anti-government tales to saucer stories to strange tales of the hollow earth and CIA experiments, Nebel brought nightly audiences across the country face to face with the wildest imaginations in the country. And like Art Bell, he was a genuine character himself. Read up on him and hear for yourself.
Many recordings of Nebels' programs are available online.

Both broadcasters knew the magic of telling stories in the night on live radio with only a seven second delay between themselves and their licenses.

If you thought Bell was too credulous at times, then you might have missed his carefully whispered gasps and subtle questioning that in the end let the listener know when their legs were being pulled, or occasionally presented with something truly odd. Like all great broadcasters, the secret was in the voice. And Bell was a master. Don't forget all the great real scientists he interviewed who brought new ideas and discoveries to a vast overnight audience.

They both understood the immediacy of the medium, but I think Bell outshined all who came before, and certainly those that followed.

Every time Bell retired, it seemed a light went out of our collective imaginations. His deep love of the radio medium always shined though the weirdest nights in radio and though I miss his broadcasts, like Nebels they are still out there somewhere,
Flying at the speed of light.

One of my favorite Art Bell guests was Michio Kaku, the physicist. They were great friends, and those were always thought-provoking shows.

Art was also a great proponent of the idea of climate change, long before it was such a political issue as it is today. He co-wrote a book with another friend, Whitley Streiber, called The Coming Global Superstorm, that was published in 1999. That book became the basis for the Roland Emmerich film, The Day After Tomorrow, in 2004 (starring Dennis Quaid and a very young Jake Gyllenhaal).

he was a brilliant radio host and expressed great doubt about the various tales told by many of his guests. He had a great sense of humor and was interested in many various topics, from UFOs to politics. He hosted a debate between Madlyn Murray O'Hair and the Rev. Walter Martin, which was fascinating (one can easily find it on youtube.)

Modern society cannot handle entertainment anymore.

on the radio in her bedroom. she'd fall asleep, wake up and listen some more, then fall back to sleep again.

sometimes she'd get up to tell me what he'd been talking about.
some of the stuff kinda freaked her out.
but she was intrigued by it all.

I think here they would play the first 3 hours and then repeat the first hour in the final hour of the 4 hour slot.

I still keep the radio on in my bedroom overnight to go to sleep to.

I know conspiracy theories nowadays are complete horseshit and dumb aka Alex Jones making up crap out of his ass.

But Art had a style of going off more light hearted conspiracy theories like Area 51, Roswell and such. You know the type that couldn't get people hurt or killed? See idiot holds up that pizza place thinking that there was a sex ring going on in the non existent basement.

RIP Art Bell. Thanks for never stooping to a crazy level of Jones and his cult.

But as I got older, I loved listening to past broadcasts and seeing how really crazy things could be or if they were just really good actors calling in.

...dead. The aliens did leave "clues" tho... like him being removed on Friday the 13th. Probably, their mother ship was over Syria - which means the attacks there were a cover. I wonder if Art Bell went willingly, or was it a kidnapping?

He received a 'time machine' from Steven Gibbs, one of his guests one time. And he always said he was afraid to use it. IMO, him being the master entertainer, just used that excuse in order to NOT have disprove the idea.

but he also is a moron voter now.

It sort of kept you company in a way music could not.

In 2015, KNPR reported that “Radio host Art Bell suddenly ended his long-running program ... citing alleged threats made against him and his family.”

The site continued at that time, “Bell says shots have been fired outside his residency, and that he has spotted trespassers near his home late at night.”

However, authorities gave no indication that Bell died of unnatural causes.

https://heavy.com/news/2018/04/art-bell-dead-cause-of-death-dies-how/

My bet is on that playing a role.

Long time Art Bell/Coast-to-Coast listener - mostly because my Mom was. Lost track a bit when he had moved to the Philippines and then came back and was briefly back on the air again.

Sure much of the material discussed on Coast-to-Coast (no matter who was rotating host) was "out there", but the show was entertaining for the graveyard time slot listeners, competing with Jim Bohannon (who replaced Larry King's long stint in graveyard talk, where King eventually moving to CNN to do similar CT topics back in the day). It grabbed the audiences who used to watch Nimoy's "In Search Of..." or any of the iterations of Orson Welles' "Nostradamus".

What sortof cracked me up was the fact that he lived in Pahrump and anyone who was a fan of the film "Mars Attacks!" knows how that town was featured in the movie. I never realized it was a real place until I found out that Art Bell lived on a ranch there.

R.I.P.

...it's a small town, so the chances of my running into him on more than one occasion were high, although I was never aware of it. Everyone "knew of" him, but I wouldn't have known him if I were standing next to him. He was, and will most likely remain, a local legend.

R.I.P,

..apparently my house was in the middle of some blocked out area on a map the gvnt had

So refreshing and much needed in todays discourse.

I once told him there was no better way to pass the night than at the kitchen table with him and a bottle of whiskey. He was gullible but he was also open to every possibility, and there was something refreshing about that.

with Art Bell as my copilot...Good times. Too bad his replacement didn't understand what made the show great or have the skills to keep it going in the right direction.

He was always so good natured and loved his wife, Ramona, so much. They were both big fans of the movie "Somewhere in Time." I grew up in northern Michigan, and I remember what a big deal that movie was up there, being filmed on Mackinac Island. I think they even went to one of those "Somewhere in Time" weekends at the Grand Hotel. She died from an asthma attack a few years ago and I don't think he ever got over that. Noory is a goddamned crackpot and teabagger. I was glad when Art Bell disavowed him.

R.I.P., sir, and thank you for getting me through some sleepless nights.

Like hearing ghost stories around the campfire.

Rest in peace, Art. You were a legend.

I loved Art Bell's show. His replacement Noory did/does not compare. I'll be listening to a guest on Noory's show who will explain something and then Noory will ask a question about something the guest just said that shows that Noory wasn't listening!!! He doesn't ask as good of questions as Art did either. Art Bell really knew how to probe and pull things out of people that were unexpected and really interesting. Noory has too many right wing wackos on too. He says he gives equal time to both sides but he does not. RIP Art.

Yep, that's just like Art.

Art being a master interviewer for him being "gullible." If you listened much at all you know he often stated he purposely wanted to draw his guests out so that listeners could form their own opinion. Knowing what made a good story and how to tell it, he could ask questions and get people to tell their story in a way that was riveting - that was his skill. One which the current host totally lacks

One of my best memories that prob wont get much attention – the night of , or right after 911 he opened the lines up to everyone and anyone and basically took a cross section of America. He intentionally refrained from stating his own opinions in order to draw out the feelings and thoughts of callers. Yeah there were the “nuke em all” bunch but there were also a lot of thoughtful people of all political persuasions grappling with what had happened and why
.
I have not heard anything like it either before or since. By the time we got to attacking Iraq they were back to driving wedges between us and that sense of us all as Americans grappling together with our collective crisis had dissipated.

I really didn't care too much about the topics he discussed, but I loved listening to him interview anyone whomsoever as I was trying to fall asleep.

Someone actually mailed him some of the metal pieces from the Roswell UFO and he posted pictures and stuff on his website like 20 years ago. He was definitely one of the few people in the media that really kept the Roswell and other fun stories like those alive in the public consciousness.

Also his interviews with time traveler John Titor ( which you can find on YouTube) are great. Even though you knew these people were probably full of shit, Art had a way of still making it entertaining and keeping some hope there that you were actually listening to something world changing, much better than the sugar coated fluff that Noory does.

More classic Art Bell... love it. Thank you!

In a quick Google search a little while ago, the studies they did on them showed that they are elements we are familiar with but are used in a different way than humans have used them.

Many references to this person's death today. All from strangely named posters with no previous posts. Hmmmm?

Last edited Sat Apr 14, 2018, 10:56 PM - Edit history (1)

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