More on Art Bell....
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, Mr. Bell, who was 72 when he died April 13 at his home in Pahrump, Nev., 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, Nev., sheriff’s office said an autopsy will be conducted to determine the cause of death.
At Mr. 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, Mr. 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 was born in Jacksonville, North Carolina, on June 17, 1945. The only **09** in a military family, he moved around a lot as a kid.
He later served in the the Air Force as a medic during the Vietnam War, but his love for radio was always there. According to Coast to Coast AM, he was an FCC licensed radio technician at age 13, and while in the Air Force, he created an on-base pirate radio station that played anti-war music.
It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when he returned to the United States and joined KDWN-AM in Las Vegas, that talk radio captivated Bell. There, he mastered his famous blend of contemporary and unsettling.
“I want to bring topics on radio you otherwise might not hear,” Bell, then 50, told the Pahrump Valley Times in January 1996.
Bell was inducted into the Nevada Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame in 2006 and into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2008, the same year he sold KNYE to Karen Jackson.
Bell’s genuine interest in the topics he discussed contributed to the interest and entertainment his show generated, she said in a press release to the Review-Journal.
“Art was a pioneer in broadcasting taking overnight talk radio to new heights which generated huge audiences,” Jackson said. “He was a master at creating spell binding, intriguing, sometimes frightening and thoroughly compelling talk radio.”
“No one has been more loved by their family, friends and listening audience,” she said.
“As he begins his journey on the ‘other side,’ we take solace in the hope that he is now finding out all of the answers to the mysteries he pursued for so many nights with all of us,” Coast to Coast said in a statement Saturday.