Midnight in the Desert Art Bell Final Send Off Show
Fine art Bell, Radio Host Who Tuned In to the Night Side, Dies at 72
Art Bell, an campaigner of the paranormal whose disembodied phonation drew millions to his late-night radio discourse beamed from the Mojave Desert, died on April thirteen 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 expiry. An declaration on Mr. Bong'southward website said he had chronic obstructive pulmonary affliction.
"Art had a fascination with the afterlife," the announcement said, "and it'due south heartwarming to know he peacefully slipped into the side by side earth and now knows the answers he sought for then long."
From a home studio 65 miles westward of Las Vegas, Mr. Bong personally fielded unscreened telephone calls on five lines during a 5-hour nightly marathon on KNYE-FM called "Coast to Coast." At its top, in the 1990s, the prove was broadcast on hundreds of stations and reached every bit many equally x million listeners a week.
Mr. Bong in one case had the tertiary-largest radio audience among talk-show hosts, subsequently Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
In riveting narratives punctuated by convincing details, his guests spun eyewitness accounts of past lives, contacts with aliens, fourth dimension travel, ingather circles and other ostensibly inexplicable phenomena, nearly of which were accompanied by a knowing affirmation from the host himself.
He had reason to be credulous. One summer night, he recalled, he and his married woman were driving home when a 150-foot-long triangular craft silently hovered over their car before disappearing.
"It really doesn't thing that much to me if anyone believes me," Mr. Bell explained after. "Thousands of people seeing the same thing cannot all exist wrong."
Just how much Mr. Bell believed was a matter of theorize.
He once described his program as "absolute entertainment." When he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2008, his one-time business partner, Alan Corbeth, said Mr. Bong had thoroughly understood "how to create theater of the listen."
On one memorable plan in 1997, a human being who said he had been discharged for medical reasons from Area 51 — the storied Nevada air base that has long stoked rumors of unidentified flight objects — was mysteriously cut off in mid-interview.
"What we're thinking of as aliens, Art, they're actress-dimensional beings," the man started to say, his voice choking. "They've infiltrated a lot of aspects of, of the military establishment."
On another program, Mr. Bell introduced his guest, identified as Alex Collier, past saying 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. Bong added. "His human relationship with the Andromedans has been based on trust and friendship. Alex'southward gratuitous will has never been violated, and his feel must non in whatsoever manner be associated with abduction."
In 1998, Mr. Bell received the ignominious Snuffed Candle Award from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a grouping, co-founded past Carl Sagan and based in Amherst, North.Y., that promotes scientific enquiry and critical thinking. The group cited him "for encouraging credulity, presenting pseudoscience equally genuine, and contributing to the public's lack of understanding of the methods of scientific inquiry."
Prototype
To which Mr. Bong replied: "A listen should non be so open up that the brains fall out; nonetheless, it should not be and so closed that whatever grey thing which does reside may not exist reached. On behalf of those with the smallest remaining open aperture, I accept with honor."
Arthur William Bell III was born on June 17, 1945, in Jacksonville, Northward.C., while his parents were stationed at Camp Lejeune there. His begetter, a Marine Corps captain, was descended from one of the original settlers of Stamford, Conn., in the 1640s. His mother, the quondam Jane Lee Gumaer, was a Marine sergeant.
At thirteen, Fine art became a licensed amateur radio operator. He was an Air Force medic during the Vietnam State of war and later a disc jockey for an English language-language station in Okinawa.
There, he was said to have set a record for continuous broadcasting — 116 hours and 15 minutes — to raise money to ferry stranded Vietnamese orphans from Saigon to the United States for adoption by American families. (He too claimed a record of 57 hours of uninterrupted seesawing while broadcasting.)
Mr. Bell enrolled as an engineering major at the University of Maryland simply dropped out to return to radio, first as a disc jockey in California and Nevada. Students of numerology were mindful that he began his political talk show in 1984 — and also that he died on a Friday 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 Bong IV.
His "Coast to Coast" show was syndicated and circulate from 1989 to 2003, followed past episodic returns on satellite radio and online with a program called "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 drawer of his isolated desert domicile.
"If I had a problem out here," he told Time magazine in 2012, "well, the police would arrive just in time to draw the chalk outline on my floor."
While some critics accused him of laying the foundation for correct-wing conspiracists on talk radio, Mr. Bong'south politics were not easily pigeonholed. He described himself every bit a libertarian, but his passion was directed less at politicians or ideology than at debunking scientific doctrine and preaching apocalyptic prophecy.
"He was unlike, fed up with the government not because of some tax increment or a bad vote merely because of what they were hiding," the journalist Jack Dickey wrote in Fourth dimension mag 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 trigger-happy climate disruptions atomic number 82 to a global deep freeze. The managing director Roland Emmerich adjusted it for the 2004 film "The Day After Tomorrow," starring Dennis Quaid.
(Writing about the motion-picture show in The New York Times, Andrew C. Revkin noted, "Most experts on climate alter say a switch from slow warming to an instant hemispheric deep freeze like the one posited in the book is impossible.")
Mr. Bell wrote several other books, including "The Quickening: Today's Trends, Tomorrow'southward Globe" (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 after dark, reliably spooky his audience," one reviewer wrote.
Mr. Bell best-selling that he had a certain hold on his nocturnal audience. Every bit he told The Washington Post in 1998, "There is a difference in what people are willing to consider, daytime versus nighttime. Information technology'southward night, and you don't know what'south out there.
"And the manner things are now," he added, "there may be 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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