For whom Art Bell tolls
by Michael Maiello

Art Bell is gone. For those who don't know, Art was a late night talk show host. Late late night. In Albuquerque, he broadcasts from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. He talked about UFO's, and government conspiracies, interviewed military "remote viewers" (psychic spooks!) and talked about pyramids in the Cydonia region of Mars. But a few nights ago he closed his broadcast by making mention of some forthcoming threat to his family and then quit broadcasting.

Apparently, he didn't even tell his syndicate. They're running reruns until they can find out what's going on. But Art Bell, who didn't screen his calls and broadcast out of his home in the Nevada desert, is gone. Okay, so he may be nuts.

I saw some footage of his home on CNN. It's a compound, surrounded by high fences with barbed wire and it looks like it has an electronic gate. Basically, it looks like the kind of place a paranoid would live in. Art Bell, after all, did tell us that he bought night vision goggles for home security. He's into security.

I never listened to his whole show, start to finish. What I did was put it on low volume whenever I went to bed. I probably drowned my brain with subliminal nuttiness in doing so. But, it's a great show to sleep to. Because it's imaginative, if anything.

Recently, I heard bits and pieces of an interview with a satanist witch named Harlot (it's disconcerting to be jarred awake by a person on the radio screaming about the coming of the Great Evil One), an interview with a time traveler, and last night, a rerun of an interview with some guy who's convinced that scientific experiments at the quantum level are going to send our sun into super nova. So, you can see why I find all this more interesting than MSNBC right?

Art got blamed for those cultists killing themselves when Hale Bopp came by. You see, he had a lot of Hale Bopp shows, and he got these people called "remote viewers" who can basically psychically see anything, anywhere, at any time, and they all said Hale Bopp had a weird companion craft. Which, is what the cultists thought they could get onto by--dying. What the cultists didn't hear is that the remote viewer said the companion was going to drop a mutagenic virus on the Earth, wiping out all plant life and eventually killing everyone. Or maybe they did hear that part. Anyway, guests on that show always seem to come up with some doomsday scenario. This one was stolen from the Hopi Indians, who have legends of something like a comet wiping the "great white scourge" off the face of the Earth. I just hope the Hopi aren't talking about the same people that Public Enemy tends to talk about...

So, maybe the show was a bit irresponsible. But isn't that the point of free speech? A little irresponsibility is fun. A little "out there" thought is fun. And, probably a good exercise for all of us. One of my favorite writers, Robert Anton Wilson, suggests that it's worthwhile to force yourself to believe things you'd ordinarily dismiss--just as an exercise. It helps you question your own assumptions, and it helps broaden perspective. For example, I don't buy that the Bavarian Illuminati run the world thought he trilateral commission using Masonic lodges as fronts for bringing about a one world government. But, I wouldn't have believed Iran/Contra if I heard it on the Art Bell show. Everyone and then, it seems, things happen that are just implausible enough to be true.

I don't know what happened to Art. Maybe he's finally flipped. Maybe he got bored and wanted to end on a note of mystery. Or maybe he knows something...

Michael Maiello has resumed his search for effective sleep-inducing sounds.

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