Why Did Art Bell Leave Midnight in the Desert
Art Bell, Radio Host Who Tuned In to the Dark Side, Dies at 72
Art Bell, an apostle of the paranormal whose disembodied phonation drew millions to his late-night radio soapbox beamed from the Mojave Desert, died on April 13 at his home in Pahrump, Nev. He was 72.
Lt. David Boruchowitz, a spokesman for the Nye County sheriff's office, said an autopsy would be conducted to determine the cause of death. An declaration on Mr. Bell'southward website said he had chronic obstructive pulmonary affliction.
"Art had a fascination with the afterlife," the announcement said, "and it'southward heartwarming to know he peacefully slipped into the next world and now knows the answers he sought for so long."
From a home studio 65 miles due west of Las Vegas, Mr. Bell personally fielded unscreened telephone calls on five lines during a v-hr nightly marathon on KNYE-FM called "Coast to Coast." At its height, in the 1990s, the prove was circulate on hundreds of stations and reached as many as x million listeners a week.
Mr. Bell once had the 3rd-largest radio audience amidst talk-show hosts, afterward Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
In riveting narratives punctuated by disarming details, his guests spun eyewitness accounts of past lives, contacts with aliens, time travel, crop circles and other ostensibly inexplicable phenomena, well-nigh of which were accompanied by a knowing affidavit from the host himself.
He had reason to be credulous. Ane summertime dark, he recalled, he and his wife were driving home when a 150-human foot-long triangular craft silently hovered over their car before disappearing.
"It really doesn't matter that much to me if anyone believes me," Mr. Bell explained later on. "Thousands of people seeing the same affair cannot all exist incorrect."
Just how much Mr. Bong believed was a thing of conjecture.
He one time described his program as "absolute amusement." When he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2008, his one-time concern partner, Alan Corbeth, said Mr. Bell had thoroughly understood "how to create theater of the listen."
On one memorable program in 1997, a man who said he had been discharged for medical reasons from Surface area 51 — the storied Nevada air base that has long stoked rumors of unidentified flying objects — was mysteriously cut off in mid-interview.
"What we're thinking of every bit aliens, Fine art, they're extra-dimensional beings," the homo started to say, his vocalism choking. "They've infiltrated a lot of aspects of, of the military institution."
On another program, Mr. Bell introduced his invitee, identified as Alex Collier, by maxim he had been "in contact with a human race from the constellation Andromeda, located in our milky way."
"His experience has been both telepathic and physical," Mr. Bell added. "His human relationship with the Andromedans has been based on trust and friendship. Alex'due south complimentary will has never been violated, and his experience must not in any manner be associated with abduction."
In 1998, Mr. Bell received the ignominious Snuffed Candle Accolade from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a group, co-founded by Carl Sagan and based in Amherst, North.Y., that promotes scientific enquiry and critical thinking. The grouping cited him "for encouraging credulity, presenting pseudoscience equally genuine, and contributing to the public's lack of agreement of the methods of scientific inquiry."
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To which Mr. Bell replied: "A mind should not be and so open up that the brains autumn out; however, it should not be so airtight that whatever gray matter which does reside may not be reached. On behalf of those with the smallest remaining open aperture, I accept with award."
Arthur William Bell Three was born on June 17, 1945, in Jacksonville, N.C., while his parents were stationed at Camp Lejeune at that place. His begetter, a Marine Corps captain, was descended from one of the original settlers of Stamford, Conn., in the 1640s. His mother, the one-time Jane Lee Gumaer, was a Marine sergeant.
At 13, Art became a licensed amateur radio operator. He was an Air Force medic during the Vietnam War and later a disc jockey for an English-language station in Okinawa.
There, he was said to have fix a record for continuous broadcasting — 116 hours and 15 minutes — to raise money to ferry stranded Vietnamese orphans from Saigon to the The states for adoption by American families. (He likewise claimed a tape of 57 hours of uninterrupted seesawing while broadcasting.)
Mr. Bell enrolled as an engineering major at the University of Maryland but dropped out to render to radio, offset as a disc jockey in California and Nevada. Students of numerology were mindful that he began his political talk evidence in 1984 — and also that he died on a Fri the 13th.
Mr. Bell is survived by his fourth wife, Airyn Ruiz; their children, Asia and Alexander; and three children from his earlier marriages, Vincent Pontius, Lisa Pontius Minei and Arthur Bell IV.
His "Coast to Declension" bear witness was syndicated and circulate from 1989 to 2003, followed by episodic returns on satellite radio and online with a programme chosen "Midnight in the Desert," which he canceled in 2015 after he said shots had been fired at his home.
Mr. Bell said he kept a .40-caliber Glock 22 in a desk-bound drawer of his isolated desert abode.
"If I had a problem out here," he told Time magazine in 2012, "well, the police force would go far just in time to draw the chalk outline on my floor."
While some critics defendant him of laying the foundation for right-wing conspiracists on talk radio, Mr. Bell's politics were non easily pigeonholed. He described himself equally a libertarian, but his passion was directed less at politicians or credo than at debunking scientific doctrine and preaching apocalyptic prophecy.
"He was different, fed upward with the government not because of some tax increase or a bad vote but because of what they were hiding," the journalist Jack Dickey wrote in Time magazine in 2013. "Where others had rage, he had skepticism, and lots of it."
With the horror novelist Whitley Strieber, Mr. Bell wrote "The Coming Global Superstorm" (1999), in which violent climate disruptions lead to a global deep freeze. The director Roland Emmerich adapted it for the 2004 film "The Day Afterward Tomorrow," starring Dennis Quaid.
(Writing most the motion-picture show in The New York Times, Andrew C. Revkin noted, "Well-nigh experts on climate alter say a switch from wearisome warming to an instant hemispheric deep freeze like the one posited in the book is incommunicable.")
Mr. Bong wrote several other books, including "The Quickening: Today's Trends, Tomorrow's World" (1997) and a memoir, "The Art of Talk" (1998).
His spoken words had a much wider reach, however. "His Marlboro-Lights-weathered voice blanketed the continent later night, reliably chilling his audition," one reviewer wrote.
Mr. Bell acknowledged that he had a certain hold on his nocturnal audience. As he told The Washington Post in 1998, "There is a divergence in what people are willing to consider, daytime versus nighttime. It'southward dark, and you don't know what's out there.
"And the way things are now," he added, "there may exist something."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/obituaries/art-bell-radio-host-who-tuned-in-to-the-dark-side-dies-at-72.html
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