Art Bell: Ringing in the New Age



Terrestrial Planet Finder (NASA)

Nevill Drury, author of The New Age: Searching for the Spiritual Self, describes “New Age” as being a blend of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions that is infused with “influences from self-help and motivational psychology, holistic health, parapsychology, consciousness research, and quantum physics.”

Sounds like a synopsis of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast radio

shows…

Bell wasn’t always preoccupied with such matters.  His Coast to Coast biography describes his upbringing as “unusually traditional” - in that he was “the son of a Marine Colonel father and a Drill Sergeant mother.”  Because international politics could have such a direct bearing upon the life of a military family, Bell was much more concerned with world news than with otherworld news.

Perhaps the military environment also awakened a love of technology in him.  At 13, Bell was already licensed by the FCC as a radio technician.  Wikipedia reports that he later studied engineering at the University of Maryland, became a radio board operator and chief engineer, worked in cable television, and was a disc jockey before switching into talk radio. 

Bell’s talk-radio career began quite conventionally with standard political themes.  However, this didn’t yield as many ratings as his later talk about gun control and conspiracies.  Bell then upped the ante even further with conversations about the paranormal, the occult, and UFOs.

Bell and his then-wife Ramona described a UFO incident of their own.  One late night in August 1994, they were driving home through the Nevada desert.  The sky was clear, and the moon was nearly full.  They noted a large triangular craft floating slowly and silently above them.  It did not resemble anything that they were familiar with.  A subsequent Air Force report called it a C-130, but aircraft-savvy Bell claimed that C-130s are louder and faster.

Not everyone is enamored with Bell’s nonjudgmental stance regarding the startling claims of his unscreened

callers.  In 1998, Thomas Genoni wondered aloud whether Bell’s lack of skepticism was contributing to the “dumbing down” of America.  The gist of Bell’s response was this:  Allowing people the all-too-rare

opportunity to be heard is not the same thing as condoning all that they say.  Besides, there’s already more-than-enough skepticism to go around Mars (and maybe even Jupiter)…

Resources

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/pages/art-bell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Bell

http://artbell.net/pages/arts-ufo-story

http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/peddling_the_paranormal_late-night_radios_art_bell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age#CITEREFDrury2004

Copyright June 17, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved