Regular Episode
#163 – THE TOLL OF A. BELL
Blake’s framing is affectionate but clear-eyed: Bell was a gifted entertainer who gave voice to fringe ideas at a scale no one had managed before, and the consequences of that megaphone were genuinely mixed.
📻 The Night People & the Shape of the Show
Blake traces the lineage of late-night paranormal radio back to Long John Nebel, the New York broadcaster who pioneered UFO- and Fortean-themed late-night talk in the 1950s and whom MonsterTalk discussed with James Randi back in episode 109. The parallels between Nebel and Bell look more like convergent evolution than direct emulation — Bell’s show grew organically from a general late-night talk format into its distinctive fringe identity.
Blake also invokes Jean Shepherd — best known as the narrator of A Christmas Story — who coined the phrase “night people” in the 1950s to describe his late-night AM audience. The label fits Bell’s listeners perfectly: long-haul truckers, shift workers, IT administrators doing late-night server maintenance, retirees, students — anyone tuned in while the rest of the world slept.
Broadcasting from a fenced compound in Pahrump, Nevada, complete with solar panels, shortwave license, and power generators, Bell cultivated the image of the plucky independent outsider. He was also an early adopter of the digital tools that now define podcasting: newsletters, message boards, email, webcam footage, and digital back-catalog subscriptions — all of it routine now, all of it trail-blazing in the mid-1990s.
The deep-voiced phone-number announcements were the work of veteran radio broadcaster Ross Mitchell — not, Blake confesses with some embarrassment, a slowed-down recording of Bell himself.
👥 Shadow People & the Paranormal Vocabulary Bell Built
One of Bell’s most lasting contributions was helping normalize — and arguably popularize — the term shadow people for the shadowy humanoid figures reported at the edge of sleep. Blake’s own research puts the phrase in paranormal literature as early as 1985 (it appears in the Encyclopedia of Occult and Parapsychology), but it was Bell’s coverage that made the moniker pervasive.
Blake notes the curious omission of Black Eyed Kids from Bell’s repertoire — a phenomenon that would have fit his format perfectly, but which Bell said in a 2015 interview he’d only recently heard of.
🛸 Bob Lazar, George Knapp & the Area 51 Mythology
Bell’s friendship with George Knapp, a Las Vegas television journalist with a deep interest in UFOs, channeled two durable conspiracy narratives onto Coast to Coast. Knapp’s interviews with Bob Lazar pushed the claim that the government was back-engineering extraterrestrial craft at Area 51 into mainstream fringe culture. Lazar’s educational credentials, however, never checked out, and the most extraordinary claims in his story remain unverifiable. Knapp would eventually become a part-time host of Bell’s Sunday evening show Dreamland — a guest-host arrangement Blake suggests should have been rebranded “Knapp Time.”
Knapp also helped bring Skinwalker Ranch to a national audience — the Utah cattle ranch allegedly plagued by extra-dimensional entities, cattle mutilations, and general high strangeness.
☄️ Hale-Bopp, Remote Viewing & the Heaven’s Gate Tragedy
The most consequential — and most controversial — chapter of Bell’s broadcast career centered on the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997. Bell had become deeply invested in remote viewing as a topic, regularly hosting figures like Major Ed Dames. When Courtney Brown, a political science professor at Emory University turned remote-viewing instructor, appeared on the show, he described a remote-viewing session that had detected a massive artificial object — allegedly four times the size of Earth — traveling alongside the comet. Brown then supplied Bell with photographs purporting to show the companion object. Those photos turned out to be doctored.
Frequent Bell guest Richard Hoagland — the independent researcher who believed the Face on Mars represented a real Martian civilization and that monuments dotted the lunar surface — lent his endorsement to the companion-object claim. Blake’s assessment: having Hoagland validate your fringe theory is roughly as reassuring as having Colonel Sanders endorse your fried-food diet.
In California, the Heaven’s Gate cult, led by Marshall Applewhite, had already been teaching that a spacecraft was coming to carry members to the “Level Above Human.” The Hale-Bopp companion narrative fed directly into Applewhite’s theology. In March 1997, 39 members of the cult died by mass suicide. Bell distanced himself from responsibility, noting that his show was entertainment and that the cult’s own materials acknowledged the companion object had been debunked before they acted. Several of the relevant episodes quietly disappeared from Bell’s archives. The question of moral culpability — for the show, for the remote viewers, for the photo forgers — remains genuinely uncomfortable.
💻 Y2K, Scaremongering & the Economy of the Show
Blake speaks from direct professional experience about Bell’s relentless parade of Y2K doom. As an IT administrator for a telecommunications company in the late 1990s, he was part of the unglamorous army of technicians who actually tested, patched, and replaced systems to ensure compliance. His take: Y2K didn’t fail because it was overblown — it didn’t fail because thousands of people worked very hard to make sure it didn’t. Bell’s contribution was to have on guest after guest predicting civilizational collapse, including psychonaut Terence McKenna (who would be diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1999 and die in April 2000, never having witnessed the disaster he’d forecast).
Blake also flags the advertising ecosystem that sustained the show — products promising the impossible, herbal remedies skirting regulatory language, cures aimed squarely at an audience primed to distrust mainstream medicine. That economy, he argues, is where entertainment shades into genuine harm.
Bell also collaborated with Whitley Strieber on 📚 The Coming Global Superstorm 💵, which inspired the disaster film 🎬 The Day After Tomorrow 💵. And Bell spent years referencing a vague, never-quite-defined sense of accelerating global change he called “the quickening” — an intuition, Blake notes, that apparently had nothing to do with him secretly being a Highlander-style immortal.
🎃 What Bell Got Right (And What Blake Will Miss)
For all the skeptical accounting, Blake is clear that most of what he heard on Coast to Coast was just fun. Bell had on George Carlin, physicist Michio Kaku, scientific paranormal investigator Joe Nickell, and Skeptic Magazine publisher Michael Shermer. The show introduced Blake to the Chupacabra, John Titor, Mel’s Hole, and the famous panicked caller who claimed to be a former Area 51 employee on the run — a call that concluded, memorably, with the entire radio transmitter going dead.
Bell’s annual Halloween Ghost to Ghost AM specials — listeners calling in with their personal ghost stories — remain some of Blake’s favorite audio, still genuinely creepy to listen to in the dark despite a thorough skepticism about ghosts. Bell’s New Year’s Eve prediction shows, his eclectic bumper music (including ABBA, Cusco, Loreena McKennitt, and the Moody Blues), and the iconic theme from the Midnight Express soundtrack — Giorgio Moroder’s “Chase” — are all part of the sensory memory of being one of the night people.
At his peak, Bell commanded an estimated audience of 15 million nightly listeners. His shadow falls across The X-Files, across video games, across every subsequent paranormal podcast including this one. Coast to Coast AM continues today under George Noory. The verdict: bittersweet, complicated, and the world would have been a less interesting place without him.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 The Coming Global Superstorm 💵 by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber
– 🎬 The Day After Tomorrow 💵 (film inspired by the book)
🔗 Related Links
– Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM bumper music (Spotify playlist)
– Coast to Coast AM — Wikipedia
– Heaven’s Gate cult — Wikipedia
– Comet Hale-Bopp — Wikipedia
– Bob Lazar — Wikipedia
– Remote viewing — Wikipedia
– Y2K / Year 2000 Problem —
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
MonsterTalk host Blake Smith looks back at the career and impact of radio-host Art Bell who passed away on April 13, 2018 at the age of 72. Bell’s influential radio show Coast to Coast AM (still being produced today with George Noory at the microphone) was the launching pad for thousands of stories of the bizarre, the mysterious and the conspiratorial. Was he simply an entertainer? Was he harmful to the American radio listener? Some thoughts on the cultural impact of this titan of the night.
Related Links
- Ross Mitchell—the deep voice behind Coast-to-Coast-AM’s phone lines
- Art Bell’s Coast to Coast bumper music
- Use of “Shadow People” in 1985 in the Encyclopedia of Occult and Parapsychology
- The controversial Hale-Bopp Comet episodes—a detailed look
- Art Bell & Bigfoot shot in Texas
- Art Bell—Cattle Mutilations
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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