The Outer Limits; A Lone Voice in the Desert Lures 10 Million Listeners
If you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you
are exercising a meaningful power. -- Don DeLillo in "Underworld"
There's a call on the Area 51 Caller Line. Art Bell answers on the air,
unscreened as always.
A panicked, nearly hysterical man says he was let go from the top-secret
government compound deep in the Nevada desert. The man cannot divulge his
location. He is in a hurry. "They'll triangulate on this position
really soon."
"Give us something, quick," Bell urges.
Through the miracle of satellite technology, the talk show host transmits
the disturbing call to more than 400 radio stations across the nation --
more than any other radio show but for Paul Harvey, Rush Limbaugh and Laura
Schlessinger. Bell broadcasts from a beige easy chair, sitting alone in a
tiny bedroom of his double-wide trailer deep in the desert, one mountain
range away from the mysteries of the black-budget Air Force base known as
Area 51.
"What we're thinking of as aliens, Art, they're extra-dimensional
beings that an earlier precursor of the space program made contact
with," the caller blurts out. "They have infiltrated a lot of
aspects of the military establishment, particularly Area 51. The
disasters that are coming, they -- the government -- knows about
them. . . . They want those major population centers wiped out so the
few who are left will be more easily controllable. I say we g -- "
The man is weeping now, and suddenly there is only silence. One, two,
three, four, five seconds of dead air -- a radio eternity. "Coast
to Coast AM," Bell's program, has vanished into the ether. And then
Bell's theme music swells, and the host's calm, resonant voice returns:
"Weird, weird, weird stuff. In all my life . . . . My uplink
transmitter was dead as a doornail." For the first time in all his
years of broadcasting, Bell had lost his connection to the transmitter.
Smack in the middle of that call.
Later that night, Bell offers listeners his take on the event: "That's
beyond coincidence. It was done to you."
The desert, it is said, does strange things to the eye. It is true: That
man with a straw hat, quivering in the remote distance, turns out to be a
clump of cactus. That cloud, on closer inspection, is a mountain. That fog
is faraway ice.
Eighty miles west of the nattering neon assault that is Las Vegas, a
narrow road leads to Pahrump, an ancient Indian settlement poised for
development as the next gambling paradise. Not far from the town's main
drawing cards -- legal brothels called Sheri's Ranch and the Chicken
Ranch -- Bell's trailer commands a plot of sand and rock, surrounded by
satellite dishes and a chain-link fence.
By day, it's nothing special, the hideout of just one more American who
found his piece of paradise and straightaway nailed up a "No
Trespassing" sign. But at night, when the crystal-black sky explodes
with stars and the mountains offer a scarf of darkness, this trailer is
transformed into a transmitter of freakish fear and the sweetest of hopes.
Kept company by a fistful of phone lines, a trio of computers, an
atomically synchronized clock and a framed, bare-breasted photo of the
actress Shannen Doherty, a 52-year-old man who hasn't had a good night's
sleep in nine years offers an insomniac nation a host of extravagant,
extraordinary, even extraterrestrial possibilities.
While the other big names of radio traffic in standard-issue news,
politics and family concerns, Bell's all-night talkfest concentrates on
conspiracies and coverups of the gravest order: alien abductions and crop
circles, cloning and bird flu, El Nin~o and pfiesteria, cattle mutilations
and anthrax scares. In Bell's world, visitors from other dimensions win
equal time with Clinton and Lewinsky. Callers who use remote viewing to
look ahead in time are taken as seriously as Washington pundits who
claim to peer into the presidential future.
Bell, heard in Washington on WRC (570 AM), asks that we embrace all
possibilities. He is a preacher of sorts, a purveyor of gloom and doom on
Earth, and of hope and possibility in the great beyond. He is a loner who
lives modestly even now that Jacor Communications, which owns the Limbaugh
and Schlessinger shows, has bought his weekday and weekend programs for $9
million. He is a grown-up geek who conducts his own search for meaning
before a rapidly growing audience of more than 10 million listeners. He
is an intelligent man who wears his gullibility proudly.
Last year, when a scientist told Bell that a UFO was hiding behind the
Hale-Bopp comet, he and many of his listeners took the claim at face
value. So did a purple-clad cult called Heaven's Gate, whose members
shortly before their mass suicide provided a link to Bell's World Wide
Web site on their own site.
Shaken by news accounts linking him to the suicide, Bell would eventually
spurn the notion of the secret spacecraft. Actually, he insists, he
"disproved" the claim on the air well before the Heaven's Gate
members took their lives. But his initial reaction was typical Bell: If
you say so, sure.
TRAVELERS
In bed late at night, a seven-transistor radio tucked under his pillow,
the adolescent Bell listened to the talkers who first gave voice to the
great American obsessions -- the eternal debate over the John F. Kennedy
assassination, the rumblings about CIA mind-control experiments, the
well-worn tales of ordinary people who said they'd been abducted by
creatures from outer space.
It would be many years before some of those issues would become acceptable
in daylight, but the great web of conspiracy was already being spun in the
privacy of the night, and Bell felt himself a part of that invisible
community. While his parents fought and meandered around the nation --
Bell, a Marine brat, says he attended 35 high schools -- radio was a
constant. Days, he raised hell, making bombs and rockets. Nights, he
pretended to be on the air, a rock deejay with a gaggle of groupies.
He got his FCC ham license at age 13. For most of his 38 years in radio,
Bell, a square-faced man with a thick salt-and-pepper mustache, big ears
and rectangular wire-rim glasses, had little opportunity to share his
interest in the bizarre. In college -- including a brief stop at the
University of Maryland -- he studied engineering before dropping out to
do radio. He was a rockin' boss jock spinning the hits on little stations
in New England, California, even in Okinawa, where he spent six years
working at a U.S. military station. He set a world record for seesawing
while broadcasting -- 57 hours. But mostly, it was time, temp, a couple
of quips, and bam into the music, mastering the deejay's tricks of the
period -- step right over the intro, but don't ever walk on that vocal!
Bell eventually tired of radio and became a cable guy, a job that brought
him to Las Vegas in the mid-'80s. An AM station asked him back to a
part-time, overnight job as a talk show host. For several years, he was
a West Coast phenomenon, popular enough, but among radio industry
executives, considered a regional oddity.
There was something about the West, with its great expanses of empty land
and sky. "Out here, everything is bigger," Bell says. "You
see strange things and that changes you."
DREAMLAND
Welcome to Dreamland, a program dedicated to an examination of areas of
the human experience not easily or neatly put in a box, things seen at
the edge of vision, awakening a part of the mind as yet not mapped. . .
-- Opening of Bell's Sunday night show
Dreamland is also the name used by military pilots for the expanse of
desert north of Bell's house, Area 51, where pilots get to fly experimental
craft they previously could only dream about.
It was on the way home to Pahrump from Vegas one summer night that Bell had
his own close encounter. Just before midnight, Art and his wife were about
a mile from home when Ramona blurted, "What the hell is that?"
Art cut the engine, and the two of them looked behind the car and up.
Hovering over the road was 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. The thing was
barely moving. And, Bell says, "It was silent. Dead silent. It did
not appear to have an engine."
After a few moments, the craft floated across the valley and out of sight.
Bell calls this his "UFO experience," and says flatly: "It
really doesn't matter that much to me if anyone believes me. Thousands
of people seeing the same thing cannot all be wrong."
VOICE OF NIGHT
The show ends at 3 a.m. Pacific time, and Bell steps out into the cool
desert air. He stares up at the mountains, walks around, then slips inside
the gray concrete building he has just erected behind the house. It looks
like a truncated barn; inside, it is a racquetball court and steam room.
It is where he goes to return to earthly reality.
"There is a difference in what people are willing to consider, daytime
versus nighttime," Bell says. "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 is not a sleepy sound; he is not the soothing FM deejay or
the romantic companion of a listener's dreams. No, there is a certain
formality to Bell's diction, a classic announcer's voice with an almost
Canadian enunciation, as if he were the Official Voice of Night.
He offers a defense against the sapping mystery of night. The listener
lies alone in bed, perhaps with only a 40-watt bulb and a clock radio as
protection from solitude. Bell's voice arrives as a beacon -- stiff yet
warm, distant yet close enough to comfort.
Overnight is the only time radio is not governed by focus groups and
audience surveys. It is one of radio's oldest traditions: Free from the
tyranny of time and temp, news and ads, an individual intelligence can
expose itself to listeners in cars and bars and empty offices and
wrinkled sheets.
For more than half a century, the great clear-channel stations have
carried 50,000-watt signals from the Northeast to the Midwest, from the
Mississippi to the Potomac, filling the night with voices such as Jean
Shepherd, who spun fabulously improvised tales of an Indiana childhood on
New York's WOR; or Herb Jepko, who presided over a gathering of truckers,
little old ladies and night clerks with his gentle Nightcappers club out
of Salt Lake City; or Larry King, who first from Miami and then from
Washington paved the way for an explosion in talk media.
But the king of the night was Long John Nebel, the onetime carnival
huckster who transfixed several generations of listeners with all-night
tales of UFOs and government conspiracies, multiple personalities and
parapsychology. Nebel, who once sold lucky numbers on the streets of
downtown Washington, used his New York talk show to sell sand dollars,
vitamins and life insurance. He might spend four or five hours on the
air probing the passions of a young radical such as Malcolm X, but
politics was secondary: Nebel was the first to make the connection
between the night and the eerie topics that could keep listeners saying
to themselves, "Well, just another 20 minutes."
It was Nebel's show that Bell listened to as a sleepless adolescent; it
was Nebel who first opened Bell's ears to the possibilities of a world
beyond. But while Nebel was first and foremost a pitchman, a
"magnificent charlatan," as his biographer, Donald Bain, put
it, Bell actually believes what he's saying. He is wedded to the night
not because it is where he finally hit it big, but because it is where
he is philosophically comfortable.
Everyone else in radio these days is a clone, Bell says. Limbaugh, Ollie
North, Gordon Liddy -- "famous criminals, morning shows that compete
to find the worst language you can manage to get on the air, the most
controversial topics. Guns! Abortion!"
Outside, the sagebrush flops around in the wind. Bell seems out of sorts
in the midday sun -- one reason he says he will never do TV or daytime
radio. "I talk about weird stuff," he says quietly. "What
I do only works at night, only on the radio."
Claire Reese, general manager of KDWN in Las Vegas, where Bell worked for
six years before his show went national three years ago, put Bell on days
for a brief period. The show bombed. "He didn't really tick until
he was on at night," she says. "Night people are just
different."
"Art is a loner," Reese says. "He's headstrong, wants to
do things his way. He's so engrossed in what he does that he doesn't
need anything but what he has out there in the desert."
HEARING IS BELIEVING
You will never hear Bell tell off a guest, no matter how harebrained the
tale, no matter how preposterous the claims. It's not that he believes
every word, but that he believes his job is "to help them get their
story out, no matter how wild. Unless someone is dangerously misinforming
my audience, that's not the role of this host. Let the audience
decide."
A guest predicts an explosion on the sun that will wipe out all plant life
in Africa. Bell acts as if he's just heard that tomorrow will be partly
cloudy with a chance of showers.
"That comes from a remote viewer, someone reporting from a discipline
that the U.S. military spent $20 million developing," he says.
"Just let them unwind their story."
Is there no limit to what Bell would put on the air? "Well," he
says, "I had Tom Metzger, the white supremacist, on the other night,
so pretty much no. "
At the end of that broadcast, Bell told Metzger, "I am married to a
brown-skinned Asian woman. What does that make me?"
A traitor to your race, Metzger said.
"Thanks very much, Tom," Bell replied. "Good night."
"He sunk his own ship," the host says a few days later. "And
I was only polite."
`CHILDISH INANITIES'
If Art Bell believes half of what is claimed on his program, he is either
the world's most gullible man or a raving lunatic. Or he is right, and the
people who call themselves rational are wrong.
The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal,
an organization of scientists and science buffs devoted to puncturing the
claims of believers in alternate realities, has dissected and dismissed
Bell's writings and radio rhetoric.
"The plague of pompous pieties, platitudes and propaganda never
ceases!" says Robert Baker, psychology professor emeritus at the
University of Kentucky, reviewing Bell's book, "The Quickening."
"It is very difficult for us to believe Bell . . . would have the
unmitigated gall to ask the public to pay $24.95 for 336 pages of childish
inanities or to have them read such drivel as, `Ghosts and apparitions
exist and houses can be haunted. Of that there is no doubt.' "
Baker and other scientists reject Bell's notions as irresponsible,
"inexhaustible ignorance," but the broadcaster is undaunted.
"Belief in the paranormal is like religious faith. It's something you
can't lay your hands on," he says. "I have something beyond
faith. I've gone beyond faith because I have seen these things."
Last March, Bell asked his listeners to "try to send mental
connective thoughts to ask these beings to show themselves." And on
March 13, he says, "a craft described as two miles long was seen and
photographed over Phoenix. There is something on the outer edge of what
I do."
Some devoted listeners hang on Bell's every word: In about 40 cities around
the country, and in London and Tokyo, Art Bell Chat Clubs meet regularly to
hear talks by UFOlogists and folks who claim to have had near-death and
past-life experiences. "The majority of the members are people who
are interested in finding the truth, no matter what it is," says Tim
Cannon, a former limo driver in Denver who launched the chat clubs.
"We're searching, trying to make a change in the world, like
Art."
Bell is grateful for such devotion, but cautious. He admits having fallen
for his own listeners' hoaxes, including a 1995 scenario called Project
Blackhole that predicted a Los Angeles earthquake. And he readily concedes
that some of his listeners have lost contact with the rails.
"The proportion of nuts is probably slightly in excess of what the
American people are, and according to the American Psychiatric Association,
one in every four Americans has a mental disorder of some type," Bell
says. "But I'll say this: What is weird and crackpot crazy tonight is
on the front page of The Washington Post three months later. I was talking
about El Nin~o and the weather changes we're going to face a year ago, and
I was a crackpot then. I'm a prophet now." He laughs.
BLACK OPS
Internet chat lines these days are abuzz with claims that Bell is "on
a secret government black ops payroll." Michael Hemmingson, a listener
who first proposed the notion, wonders whether the U.S. government uses
Bell to disseminate disinformation and keep tabs on what Americans
believe.
The conspiracy widens with the inevitable list of Bell's guests who
have mysteriously disappeared after appearing on his program. Why then,
the theorist asks, has no harm come to Bell himself?
Bell has played along, posting the entire exchange about his possible
government ties on his Web site and remarking on the air that "I'm not
afraid. If they're gonna come after me, they're gonna come after me."
When a Las Vegas newsman leaves a message asking about the rumor, Bell
puts this shouted reply on the reporter's voice mail: "I can't talk
to you! You're one of them!"
He manages to hold back his laughter until he's off the phone.
THE QUICKENING
Life is accelerating. Natural disasters and unnatural acts, invasions
from afar and disappointments from next door, a weakening social fabric
and frightening forces of destruction, emerging viruses and disturbing
weather patterns -- it all adds up to what Bell calls the Quickening.
"The world is not the same, not a place to feel safe in," he
writes in "The Quickening." The book catalogues the daily
advance of the forces of decline. Nearly everywhere Bell looks, he sees
doom: El Nin~o, U.N. peacekeepers, economic globalization, militias, cults,
stressed parents, unchecked consumerism.
"Most of us want to pretend we are the masters of our
environment," Bell writes. "But we are completely
vulnerable. . . ."
America in particular has gone soft, he believes, spoiled by wealth and
an exaggerated sense of security. Bell's interest in politics has waned.
He once supported Barry Goldwater, voted for Ross Perot last time around,
and has come to consider Clinton a good president, even if he is
"the monster from our id." Now, Bell considers himself a
libertarian. But more than that, he is a typical American -- increasingly
tuned out from things political, searching for something more.
"My hopes for America are virtually nonexistent," he writes in
his autobiography, "The Art of Bell."
Bell is dressed entirely in black. As he talks about his vision of the
future, his voice darkens, he scrunches his face so his skin bulges in
tight horizontal folds.
In his living room, the Weather Channel monitors the physical world.
Suddenly the screen goes dark. Every light in the house flickers. The
skies outside are clear.
"See that?" he shouts, then nervously picks up his pack of
Carltons. "That's what we deal with out here."
HOME ON THE RANGE
Ever since he was a kid, packing up over and over to follow his military
parents to a new assignment, Bell has craved a place like this. His. With
no one to tell him what to do, no one to tell him to pick up and move.
Trust, patriotism, respect -- these can all be stripped away. Bell,
for one, blames Richard Nixon for creating a nation of cynics, a people
who gave up on one reality and went off in search of another. "I've
created my stability right here," he says in his trailer, remote
control in hand. "This is my little Ozzie and Harriet world in a
world that's changing."
He and Ramona, who helps produce "Dreamland" and assists with
the torrent of calls, buy nothing on credit, practice their shooting to
fend off any intruders (none so far), and care for their cats.
"Everything you see around you isn't lavish," Bell says,
"but it's paid for."
"I move in and out of these two worlds every day. I need to have one
to balance the other. I can do my five hours of the present, pathetic
state of the world, and then I need the other hours to have my own
world."
In the middle of the night, in a trailer deep in the desert, with
Ramona asleep in the other room, Bell sits alone like the rest of us,
vulnerable. The desert remembers everything we want to forget, the bombs
and experiments, secrets and lies. The listener lies in bed, also
wanting to forget. Art Bell helps him to remember things he never knew.
Return to The Skeptic Tank's main Index page.
03/29/98
The Washington Post
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