Art Bell and Supernatural Radio

While the focus of this class (and, indeed, its very title) is on supernatural television, I want to take a moment to look at an ill-used medium that has always had a special place in my heart: radio.

Back in the early 90's, around the same time that the X-Files became popular, a radio personality in Las Vegas named Art Bell got tired of his political call in show. At the time, Rush Limbaugh was just getting popular, and Bell figured that there was too much of that sort of dreck on the AM dial already. Thus, he began taking calls about the occult, paranormal encounters, ghost stories, aliens, monsters, and other things that go bump in the night. He called his new show Coast to Coast AM, and it soon began to sweep the nation. Running for four hours a night, at the height of Coast to Coast's popularity in 1997 it claimed to have over 30 million listeners each evening.

Each night, the show would start out with Art reading the news (highlighting anything spooky or weird), and then move on to a combination of guests as well as callers from all over the world. No theory was too crazy, no subject too weird. Art played his part beautifully - he usually had just enough skepticism to poke holes in the obvious fabrications, but believed in enough of what he heard so that the listener would, too. The usual sentiment for people listening to Coast to Coast was the same that echoed in Mulder's voice every Sunday night: "I want to believe".

Art has since retired from Coast to Coast, but the show is still very much on the air. Here is a list of every local syndicate and many of their internet streams. You can also learn more about Art and the history of Coast to Coast on the sci-fi channel website.

Before, I go, though, let me leave you with one of the most iconic stories to come out of Coast to Coast AM.

In February of 1997, a man from a farm in Washington state called up Art Bell's show. His name was Mel Waters, and he claimed to have a large pit on his property - so deep that seventeen miles of high-test carbon fiber fishing line went down the hole and still no bottom was found. He claimed the hole had other supernatural properties too - a dead dog, for example, was thrown down the hole and seen alive in the woods a few days later.

Shortly after the initial broadcast, Mel claimed that the government came in, cordoned off the land, and started paying him a quarter-million dollars a month in rent. After that, things got even weirder. Mel was contacted by a native American tribe in Nevada who had discovered a similar hole, and the entire story devolves into a five-year-long epic involving possible parallel universes, alternate timelines, and a mysterious chemical process that may provide infinite energy but also might destroy the fabric of reality. If you can find a copy of any of the Mel's Hole shows (sadly, I don't have a link), do listen. It's wildly entertaining.

Of course, people have searched for Mel's Hole, but no one's ever found it. The hunt is chronicled here.

At any rate, that's the sort of stuff the show dealt with. Crackpots and lunatics? Probably. But...(and always but)

What If?

That very question is what kept millions of people tuned to their radios, night after night, hoping and dreaming that our world is so much cooler than it seems to be.