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Art Bell is Dead

I used to listen to him at night while drifting off to sleep, back before I started studying conspiracy theories. I always found him entertaining, though I occasionally worried that some of the things he discussed might actually be true. :eek:
 
Years back on our department we had an officer who’d listen to Bell constantly when we were on midnights.... Believed every word...
 
or is he?????
How many of his previous psychics guests will now be delivering messages from Art to George Noory? Or claiming they post predicted his death?
 
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I remember being in the alt.fan.art-bell usenet group. Total rejection of the mans antics. Good times.
 
shemp said:
"They" finally got him.
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"They" finally get everyone. :p

RIP Art Bell. Though a skeptic at heart I listened an uncountable number of times and never once despised the fact he's able to broadcast a belief in anything he wants to millions and get rich doing it. Which seems to be the issue with many of the public rocket scientists "who would never listen to him." How dare he talk about things too incredible to be true. As if fantasy isn't the main running theme in the lives of many of his shut-in Zelda/CoD/WoW playing detractors. He was a talk radio guy, not a scientist. ;)
 
Coast to Coast is what led to me emailing Phil Plait and finding the whole skeptical community.

Phil was on debunking Nancy Lieder's Niburu. I sent him an email because I was interested in debunking bad medicine. He emailed me back and from there I found Randi's Foundation.

I always thought the show was neutral toward its guests. IOW they didn't try to make Plait or the CTers look bad. Each was allowed to make their case.
 
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I think he was a liar and a con artist enabler.

He would present his guests as though he'd vetted them for signs of obvious fraud when he clearly hadn't...people claiming to be former NASA scientists who had their record of existence totally scrubbed by "the man", etc.

Even the night before y2k he was interviewing "government whistle-blowers" predicting nuclear Armageddon and hawking hand crank radios.
 
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Skeptic Ginger said:
Coast to Coast is what led to me emailing Phil Plait and finding the whole skeptical community.

Phil was on debunking Nancy Lieder's Niburu. I sent him an email because I was interested in debunking bad medicine. He emailed me back and from there I found Randi's Foundation.

I always thought the show was neutral toward its guests. IOW they didn't try to make Plait or the CTers look bad. Each was allowed to make their case.
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That would have been George Noory, after Art retired, right?
 
While I found his show iffy at best when looking at it from the perspective of filling gullible listeners' heads with nonsense, it was entertaining as hell. Listening to it while driving in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night could be pleasantly spooky, even though I didn't believe a word of it. I also listened every night during a brief stint working the graveyard shift in a low-traffic convenience store.

Whether he was a believer, a con artist, and/or an unrepentant enabler of con artists, Art gave me something and for that I'll choose to remember him fondly.
 
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I’d hardly consider Art to be neutral. He’d milk a thing to death and when it was obvious that it was going nowhere he turn on it and pretend to be skeptical.

Examples: when the new space probe reached Mars he had Hoagland on almost every night who would tell everyone it was a fake to protect his book sales. When it was obvious that there was no way NASA could be faking this Art blew up at Hoagland and had Phil Plaitt on later in the week.

He did the same thing with the Hale-Bopp “companion” nonsense. When it was apparent that he could milk no more out of it he suddenly had Alan Hale on the show.

The guy who promoted ‘reverse-speech’ was given praise and leeway in interviews until the guys antics made him indefensible and Art dropped and pretended it never happened.

Art milked Y2K for all it was worth and then quit radio just before he might have had to face consequences for being so very, very wrong.
 
Bell filed a $60,000,000 lawsuit against the free speech guy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...c39-9836-22b863f43e6e/?utm_term=.468101a9c00e

In fact, he sued a couple of folks.

Yes, Bell would milk a topic for all it was worth: The Face on Mars, JFK, Area 51, Men in Black, Gulf War Syndrome/Vaccines. I remember he told a caller that the idea of 9/11 being an inside job was ridiculous.

Bell was just great radio. The night some guy called in saying he was in a small plane flying into Area 51 was entertaining as hell, who cares if it was true?

Shadow People were an Art Bell invention too.
 
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