Art Bell dissects the 1996 GOP primaries, where Steve Forbes leads in delegates despite Bob Dole’s higher vote count, while Pat Buchanan clashes with critics like William Bennett over immigration. A $400M NASA satellite tether snaps inexplicably, defying orbital mechanics, sparking theories of HAARP or alien interference. Callers debate prophecies—magma shifts, Boston earthquakes, and volcanic darkness—while Bell muses on "the quickening" amid seismic oddities near Mexico’s border. Masonic secrecy, Perot’s irrelevance, and talk radio’s future collide as Bell confirms his 99th-degree status but warns the medium must evolve or risk fading into obscurity. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, or good morning as the case may be, as nighttime races across America.
I guess the light races, nighttime does too, right?
This is Coast to Coast A.M., a conglomeration of unscreened, spontaneous talk radio that radiates roughly from the actually it goes a lot further, but solidly from the Tahitian and Hawaiian islands in the west, all the way across this great land to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the east, south into South America, north, all the way to the pole.
Ten points in between.
It's good to be here.
I'm Mark Bell.
And we're going to let tonight's show, I think, go anywhere you want.
He has more delegates than any of the other candidates.
Bob Dole has more votes, but Steve Forbes has more delegates.
South Carolina, a couple days away now.
Dole is described as confident going into South Carolina.
Buchanan planning another ambush.
Alexander would just like to show up again someplace or another.
In Arizona, Mr. Forbes spent $40 per vote.
Don't you feel flattered down there in Arizona?
It costs $40 for you to go and vote for him.
Bob Dole says that he's only got $4 million left.
Now, this is a real problem.
He's now saying he's got a very strong message for America.
It's too bad he can't seem to articulate it to Americans.
For him, South Carolina would be a must-win.
Buchanan will go to South Carolina and appeal to the textile workers there, who have lost a lot of jobs, of course, overseas.
Lamar Alexander is in friendly territory for him in the South, and so he's hoping for something better than has been.
Now, Jack Kemp and William Bennett were the people taking off after Buchanan yesterday, subject immigration.
Bennett called the plan to stop all legal immigration for five years a quote, get this, stinking, rotten attitude about immigrants.
As a child of immigrants, it's hypocritical and ungrateful, end quote, referring to Mr. Buchanan, who is a child indeed of immigrants.
Stinking, rotten attitude.
And he also said, by the way, that if Buchanan is the nominee, there's going to be a third party.
Now, isn't that interesting?
If Buchanan is the nominee, there's going to be a third party.
The rebel moderates, they could call themselves.
The rebel moderates.
In other words, if Buchanan takes over, the moderates in the party are going to rebel and go elsewhere.
On the other hand, if Mr. Buchanan doesn't get in because the moderates squeeze him out, then there will be a Pat Buchanan third party.
Kemp said the Republican Party had better be awfully, awfully careful when it has the possibility of finally reaching out to men and women of color and minority status.
And of course, by that, he is referring to Buchanan as well.
Buchanan called Bennett a Beltway blowhard, a beltway blowhard.
And Pat likes the term beltway.
And, you know, he should be careful as he slings it because he's been there all his life, too.
And I'm still wondering who could come along on a horse and save the Republican Party if it is to be saved from the current field of candidates.
Here's a nice fact.
Our thanks for the entertainment during the night.
First night you were on in Minneapolis.
I called KSTP and said, you've got to keep this new show.
I had never heard of you before that night.
And then he, well, I don't need to read that self-serving.
He says, primary, several months ago, I faxed you and encouraged you to keep an eye on Forbes.
If we can catch the media's attention and his message gets out, he'll go all the way to the White House.
Several years ago, Bennett Kemp and Vin Weber formed an organization to promote conservative politics.
Though it looks like Forbes is an independent tycoon, I think what happened was that Bennett, Kemp, Weber, and Forbes and others went into the war room, said, okay, guys, which one of us is going to run?
They came up with Forbes.
Kemp will not jump in the ring with Forbes because they are teammates.
I could see Kemp perhaps as his vice president.
The Cuba story continues to be interesting.
There are now more sanctions that we're going to pile on to Cuba and squeeze their economy a little harder and see if a bearded person pops out.
Bring back teenage memories, does it?
Now, get this, the pilot who defected to Cuba just before the shootdown, the FBI had to come out today and admit that that pilot had been on their payroll, the FBI payroll, had received $6,000, as a matter of fact.
This guy is apparently a Cuban agent, right, who, let me get this straight, belonged to the Brothers to the Rescue, reported to Fidel, and somehow got on our FBI payroll to the tune of $6,000.
What's wrong with this picture?
I swear it's tragic, but it's almost funny.
Anyway, Brothers to the Rescue, as you know, is headed back this Saturday.
And I think the president's going to have to put some airplanes in the area in the air.
It's a pretty strange deal, frankly.
Mr. Bell, with regard to the Cuban situation, first of all, I would like to know where this incident actually took place.
Both parties are telling different stories.
It couldn't be that our government is lying to us, could it?
Of the courses of action suggested on last night's program, it is my opinion that A, ignoring the situation is probably the worst thing that could be done.
B, sending in F-16 or 15 aircraft is dangerous and or unwarranted.
C, sending a military task force to conduct, quote, exercises, end quote, in the area may also be unnecessarily provoking a showdown.
There's only one way to handle it.
If I were the president, here's what I do, one suggest to the brothers that it would be in their best interest to refrain from filing false flight plans and flying over Cuban sovereign territory, and that if they choose to fly into the unfriendly skies, they ought to be ready to suffer the consequences, no matter how extreme they might be by our standards.
By executive order, I would have one plane launched into the area of question, an AWACS.
Their prime directive would be to monitor the activities on both sides of Cuba's 12-mile limit.
If a confrontation were to happen, we would exactly know where it took place.
That's reasonable.
Three, I would then place a person-to-person, maybe collect call to that bearded cigar-smoking dictator and advise him that if any of his fighter jocks so much as mus the hair on any of the heads of a pilot in a U.S. aircraft in international airspace, it would be obliged to reduce Havana to the Caribbean's largest parking lot.
Well, sir, you were doing okay until you hit the last number three there.
I'm not sure the shooting down, much as I think there ought to be a response.
I'm not sure the shooting down of one or even two unarmed Cessna's would necessarily justify reducing Havana to a, as you put it, parking lot.
I don't know about that.
Then there is television.
And there is something kind of interesting going on here.
36 television execs are going to the White House tomorrow, all the networks, all the cable, all the broadcast people.
And what they're going to do is establish a new ratings system to be used with this V-chip.
Now, this is really, really interesting, and I'll tell you why.
Hollywood presently rates their movies G, PG, PG-13, R, and X. Hollywood rates about 650 movies every year.
Just one TV channel alone broadcasts seven times that every year.
Seven times.
That's one lone TV station.
So I'll tell you what, that's a lot of rating to do.
Now, it's already being done in Canada.
As a matter of fact, an American TV station up in the state of Washington is also doing it.
Now, here's where I see the rub.
And they showed how they rated a couple of things, which seemed reasonable.
Disney's Alatin, rated as 1,000.
That's 1000.
The one for general interest, 0 for violence, 0 for language, 0 for sexuality.
Had none of that.
On the other hand, Baywatch, full of curvaceous eye candy, was rated 2 in the general category for PG, I guess.
Violence was a 2.
Language A 0 means it was pretty clean.
Sexuality, A1.
The curvaceous eye candy.
Now, the people that are going to do the rating are going to be at the individual TV stations, which is pretty cool, in a way, because they can decide about community standards.
If you live in a town where your community standards are rather conservative, the local station could rate more things into an area that would not be seen by children because the V-CHIP would lock it all out.
Now, the broadcasters don't much like this idea.
And the only thing I wonder about is, aren't you putting the wolf into the chicken house here?
The TV stations, when they rate something as violent or with a lot of sexual content, once the V-CHIP is in, are going to be destroying their own audience.
In other words, a lot of parents will lock out the violence and the sex.
One wonders how much TV would actually make it through.
But after they rate it, there's an awful lot of sex out there.
Maybe not as much.
Well, there's a lot of violence, too.
So once the parents lock out these shows that are rated beyond a certain point, beyond a one, say, for a kid, the TV station is going to have its ratings hit the basement floor.
In other words, there's going to be an awful lot of pressure on them to leave it as open as possible.
That's what they're going to want to do.
To make close calls go the easily rated way, so their TV shows will make it into homes.
So if we're going to have a rating, it seems to me it ought to be done at an earlier stage.
It probably ought to be done at the creation of the program.
Then they're going to put a little digital signal on here that responds to the V-CHIP.
And if you have ordered, as a parent, that it be so, that show will not come on the TV.
The only thing your little tyke will get is a black void TV screen.
No audio, no picture, boring.
So they won't watch it.
They won't even be able to receive it.
So I wonder how you feel about that.
I have somebody who has written my epitaph for which I am grateful.
And in a moment, I am going to read this person's version of my epitaph to you.
And maybe we'll talk about epitaphs a little bit because this person did a wonderful job on mine.
unidentified
Well, you know, my feeling tonight is that I've had enough politics.
I don't mind talking about it, but it's like I get to a certain level with politics, and then I want to talk about something else.
Saturday, I guess, there'll be another reason to talk about it.
But, you know, really, my attitude is the field of candidates out there is just not all that interesting.
Pat Buchanan, of course, has put a little spice into the whole thing, but I frankly don't think he's going to be the candidate.
And I'm not excited about any of the other candidates becoming the nominee.
You know, I'm not jumping up and down right now for any of them.
So, do you realize how much politics we're going to get?
In other words, if we follow it all the way through the primary process, and then we'll get our nominee.
That'll be exciting when it occurs.
Then, though, there is the general election, and we're going to have to put up with all of that election stuff right up until election day, and then a new controversy will begin.
But, I mean, it's really going to be hot and heavy.
Between now and election day, there's going to be so much politics.
Anyway, here it is: my epitaph.
Date line, it says, Perump, Nevada, October 21st of 45.
Oh, October 21, 45.
He doesn't give me an exact day.
Well, no man shall know the day, right?
It says, beloved ether talk show host Art Bell succumbs after all internal pig part organs fail, following a brief but futile battle with an Australian rabbit Kiwi swine virus and nearly two centuries of chain smoking.
The deceased was roasted at a lovely ceremony over Mount Vesuvius, only stopping once every hour to baste the guest of honor.
The highlight being sweet and sour art.
His few remaining unswine remains that were not consumed were promptly dipped in beautiful 24-carat gold by one of Art's longtime sponsors, the Gold Rose and Body Parts Company, for only $139.95.
The lovely tear-filled event was followed by a 9.8 earthquake in Los Angeles in his honor.
Guest eulogists, G. Gordon, Michael Scion, and Stan Deo, even they are still alive, delivered eulogies filled with heartwarming memories of art and predictions for his future in the afterlife.
Foot-tapping music provided by Cusco and selected songs, Don't Fear the Reaper, in the year 2525, and Eve of Destruction were all performed by Linda Moulton Howe and her 1200-voice Alien Choir.
Gee, it seems like everybody outlived you.
The send-off was attended by thousands of friends and fans, a myriad of aliens, a small tribe of Sasquatch, and 40 immortals, the latter group quickly changing their names and relocating to parts unknown following the ceremony due to the impending threat of a raid by rogue IRS agents after them for several thousand years of unpaid back taxes.
The only other incident marring the near-flawless event was the issuance of a new traffic ticket to alien mourners for hovering their craft too close to a fire hydrant.
Art's widow, he could have said Art's beautiful widow Ramona, concluded the ceremony by unveiling a large memorial stone shaped like an ancient AM radio.
The stone memorial was engraved with a fitting epitaph to the man that kept us up at night through so many, many, many years.
Dear Lard, dear Lord, Art was all talk, but his talk was art.
I have a feeling earthquakes are on the way, folks.
Just a feeling, very strong one.
And it's backed up by a lot of others.
I'm getting a ton of faxes.
And if you have been tracing where they have been in the Western Pacific, moving then to South America and Mexico, then it's fairly obvious there's going to be one on the west coast or on up through Alaska, somewhere.
And it's coming in the next pretty soon.
That doesn't do you a bit of good, I'm sure, the next pretty soon.
That's all I can feel.
And I do feel there is going to be a pretty soon event.
Hey, Art, my vote is for Steve Forbes.
He's a kind of 90s doctor.
Strange love, don't you think?
I can just see him in a wheelchair smoking a cigarette with the other hand totally out of control.
He also has the same wild look in his eye.
Can't wait for the first presidential press conference.
Forbes is interesting, but I want to hear more of Forbes.
In other words, if I hear him talk about the same one paragraph one more time on television, I'm going to throw up hope for America, positive message, blah, blah, blah.
But you never get any of the details.
You get that same little speech, and then, of course, given a second opportunity, he immediately throws in the flat tax, and you don't hear anymore.
It's sort of all he's about.
I'm sure he's about more than that, but we're not getting it.
Do any of you out there, other than an occasional debate, you don't get any more than the little paragraph Mr. Forbes has.
He almost looks like a marionette sometimes when he says it.
I'm just, I'm not entranced with any of these candidates.
I think that's what's wrong with me.
I do occasionally get excited when a primary occurs, but this last primary just shuffled the cards.
It's going to be interesting because I'm doing the show Friday night, Saturday.
So we'll do the show Friday night, Saturday, get on an airplane Saturday morning and go up and do book signing all day.
Then I suppose by late night they will pour me into bed.
There's not going to be a lot of time.
I will take that Sunday's Dreamland and do a repeat.
But I'll tell you, you know, we've got years and years now of programs, of wonderful Dreamland shows worthy of repeating that so many of you have never heard.
They do have a tendency, I noticed, especially that program, like other regular TV commercial programs, to edit out things that don't support your point.
And I'll illustrate it this way.
I mentioned this to you before, but I ran out of time when I was talking to you.
The Four Seasons apartment house building that collapsed during the Anchorage earthquake, I was there with my dad when he was taking photographs of the surrounding building.
What they didn't point out, they took a nice aerial photograph of that thing flying around in a helicopter, but they didn't show the hospital right across the street that did not collapse.
And I mean, this is, you know, I'll write to you about this, but there's a point to this that there's a lot of these buildings built after 1955 under what they call the ultimate system of design.
They're more probable to fail than the ones built prior to that.
And that was a very, very good piece, and I did enjoy it.
And They did point out, though, that when they look at Los Angeles or they look at San Francisco, they see a very great number of buildings that would absolutely come down.
There's no question about that.
And it's almost as though I can see, and I've said this before, I can see the Senate hearings in my head now that will occur, all the hand-winging and all the heads that are going to go on the chopping block about why we weren't ready, why it was such a disaster, why so many buildings fell down, what we're going to do to prevent it from occurring in the future.
I mean, I could almost, like a movie reel, run those Senate hearings in my head right now before any event occurs.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Oh, yes, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind if I deviated from the usual topics of politics, aliens, and fresh-cut flowers to talk about something a little different.
Because, I mean, at some point, I think there's going to be some kind of political fault line in both parties between the masses and the people who purport to represent them.
Thank you very much for the call, but I think you're wrong, and I will explain myself.
You don't see any of these fringe candidates.
I mean, even though Buchanan is, compared to what's there right now, a little fringey, the real fringe candidates have not caught on.
And if there was going to be this great quake, political quake, this great political awakening, and we would reach out and grab somebody from two or three levels under the current pack and raise him up as America's hero and savior.
I just don't see the American electorate doing that, obviously.
And what you're talking about would require they would do that, suddenly get fed up and reach out and get somebody like that.
Or just tear the establishment down.
They're not really doing that.
All right.
How would you construct the perfect political candidate?
Now, here I am talking about politics.
He'd have the fire and conviction and plain spoken ability of Hap Buchanan.
He'd have the conservative, calm wisdom of the William Bennett.
He'd have the money of Steve Forbes, so he wouldn't have to use any public money.
He'd have the tempered, easy-going nature of Lamar Alexander, wouldn't he?
The only thing I don't guess he would have the barbed wit of Bob Dole.
I was trying to figure out what it was we could take from Bob Dole, and that's as hard as understanding why he's running for president.
God, that's mean.
But the barbed wit of Bob Dole, I think, works just fine.
He does have that.
Bob Dole actually has a very dry, funny sense of humor if you let him go.
I'm kind of getting to the point where I would like to interview Bob Dole just to give him the time to relax, sit on the phone at home somewhere, and kind of get into a good discussion on radio.
Not just a short appearance, but a good deep discussion.
Wouldn't that be fun?
Well, I would hope it would be.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More Somewhere in Time coming out.
Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 28, 1996.
And as I told the audience last hour, though we did cover a lot of it, I'm kind of getting tired of politics again.
I don't know why.
The current field is kind of here's somebody apparently agreeing.
Art, strap all the candidates down, extract a bit of DNA from all of them, combine all the samples together, add a smidgen of frog DNA to fill in many blanks, add a safety so the end result cannot breed on its own, and send the matured biopolitical animal to San Diego.
And this, hey, Art, on CNN tonight, they had a segment on about this Cuban issue.
Seems that Cuba says, and here's our answer: I told you so, their airspace extends up to the 24th parallel.
Now, that's 12 to 15 miles north of the 12-mile international limit.
I cannot see how there's not going to be a confrontation.
Art, they also reported on how the Cuban exiles went down in their boats last year.
Their boats were rammed by Cuban boats.
No one was killed, but a few people hurt.
I think that Clinton ought to send air and sea forces to ensure the Cuban exiles do not stray into Cuban waters and to protect if Cuba decides to attack these people, Bert, in Houston.
Saturday is likely to be a very event-filled day, folks.
So don't fade away when Saturday comes.
There's going to be the primary, there'll be the primary, and then there'll be this.
The Cuban crisis will be back on page one.
And then this response: somebody last hour sent a fact saying that if they do attack us, we should level Havana and turn it into a parking lot.
And so here's a response.
I thought that was a little radical.
Reducing Havana to a parking lot seems somewhat extreme.
Perhaps the Jewish Christian Islam admonition of sevenfold is a reasonable retaliation: seven planes and 28 lives.
Two, if you wonder why you get all these pointless faxes, it's partly because we get a chance to see if our fax programs will send properly.
Well, thank you for that.
Dear Art, on the V-CHIP, what happens if I remove it myself?
Will I be subject to prosecution?
I can hear it now.
Man arrested for repairing his own TV, film at 11.
Long live the UFC, DJ in Phoenix.
This is from Texas Bob Dear Art.
I hope this message, as ever, finds you and your family healthy, wealthy.
Well, it doesn't say wealthy, healthy.
Roshop test.
And with peace of mind.
Oh, by the way, did you see the Roshak test they did for the political candidates?
Here I go again, but it was pretty funny, really.
They did it for Forbes, and everybody said money, In other words, respond with one word.
And for Bob Dole, they came up with old and too old.
And for Pat Buchanan, naturally the extremist right-winger, extreme right-winger, that sort of thing.
Lamar Alexander, they came up with nice guy, good guy, that kind of thing.
So that was the political.
CNN was running that.
It was kind of interesting.
Would you respond roughly the same way I suspect most people would?
So what we need is sort of a mixture of all of these candidates' best qualities.
And when I got Bob Dole, I was thinking real hard.
I got stuck for a minute, but he does have a good quality.
He's got a wonderful, truly wonderful, dry sense of humor.
And I still would like to interview Bob Dole just to do what I haven't seen anybody else do.
I haven't seen him do it on Meet the Press.
I haven't seen him do it on Brinkley or any other show or any CNN interview show.
You know, they're always so stiff.
It's like you never get to know the man.
And a long radio interview would give you an opportunity to get to know the man.
Wouldn't that be cool to have Bob Dole?
I would think it would be.
Either that or would be horrible.
I don't know which.
But, see, I believe there really is something to him.
It's just the public, somehow he can't translate it to the public, not on TV.
So I'll tell you, if you're in the Dole headquarters somewhere out there, have him get in touch with me or my network.
And I'll put him on the air.
And if he's got the time, we'll explore the real Bob Dole.
And I'm willing to do that with the other, even Forbes.
Look at Forbes.
It's like watching a marionette.
The guy has a good message, but he repeats it incessantly, endlessly.
Surely there must be more to Steve Forbes than the roughly one paragraph you see him say again and again.
So well, everybody that's in Portland, southwest Washington, probably not Eugene and Salem, they're kind of cloudy right now.
But uh, going outside, if they can handle the 50 mile an hour east wind, what you're having, 50 mile an hour winds, oh yeah Portland yeah, East County, Multnomah County Portland Oregon, we get the east wind all the time.
unidentified
People say oh, 30 mile an hour wind is windy, heck.
Well, we'll send everybody out then and we'll get some reports from the Portland area.
The mental picture of him and his boxers flapping in the breeze, looking to the west, jaw dropped open, observing a UFO and sort of leaning into the wind to do it west of the Rockies.
Um, we're hoping one of these days to actually be on the on the air in Vancouver 14 C Fund right now, how did you know that I'm the one trying to get you on the air?
unidentified
I've been phoning them and phoning them, and phoning them, and bugging them, and bugging them.
I'm getting 150 to 200 pieces of regular snail mail a day.
Right, I'm getting more than that in email, and it's not humanly possible.
Yeah yeah, I respond to the important stuff and when I can, but you know, with hundreds of pieces a day, it's really grown out of my control right right yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, I'm sure you are right right on now about oh boy, oh boy.
I'm just suddenly on the air here.
I've been dialing for so long and I just can't remember what I wanted to say, except if you got a date or something on, maybe one you might be on the air up here in Vancouver, or what.
I know the talks are underway so right, all I can say is, you know, keep politely talking to them right right, did you also receive my email with a whole list of different stations?
This was back several months ago, about eight months ago.
Right.
And on it, they were showing that these guys used one of these electron microscopes, and they picked up separate atoms and they stood, they took made two stacks of atoms.
One, I think, was like silver, and the other one was copper or something, and they were like about 20 atoms apart from each other.
Yes.
And they stacked them up, and what they noticed several days later when they looked at it again is that one stack had gotten smaller and the other one larger.
I'd like to say I was listening to you the other day about not the other day but about a couple of months ago about you were talking about using the power of our minds to maybe eliminate some of these dictators and this and that.
Well, no, all I'm saying is that I think that it would be awful hard for us to all say tonight that we could put our minds together and then tomorrow Castro wake up dead.
We really don't know, and we really could do it, except that it would be, would you accept the responsibility of that we just eliminated a dictator by doing that?
I mean, would you wake up in the morning feeling good that we did it?
Is all I'm saying.
Well, yeah, I could do it.
Okay, well, one other thing then, I would like to say that if we could do it.
Well, look, first of all, I think that your reference to his being a dictator and a wild man with women and all the rest of it, that there's not very much to stand behind that.
I don't think, as a general rule, Castro has run an immoral, has been an immoral leader to his people.
Well, of course, he really has, because he has murdered people.
But in terms of what he has tried to do for his people, he is making a sincerely misdirected communist effort.
And I don't know that he's the kind of demon that you portrayed him to be sexually fostering incest and all the rest of it.
I don't think I've heard that of Castro.
However, he has certainly murdered, and a good recent example are the four people who were shot down in that aircraft, in those aircraft.
Anyway, you must have called for some other reason.
unidentified
Oh, yes, I did.
I get a couple of things.
This flat tax that Steve Forbes is supposedly talking about.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the way he's got it written, or where I've heard about it earlier today, was that it protects capital gains, investments, and return of income.
Yep, yep, yep.
So, you know, it's the working people that are going to pay the taxes that earn wages.
However, in order to be revenue neutral, which means the government still receives as much money as it was the year before, the flat tax has to get its money somewhere.
And if you look across the spectrum, it would arguably reduce taxes greatly on the rich, those who derive their income from interest or investments.
And then they say it would give the little guy a big break.
So if you still have to be revenue neutral, then it's got to go to the middle, which is where the money is, to get the money.
That would mean that those who spend, those who consume, support those who, to a lesser degree, do not.
And it would be interesting to know what percentage you would need on everything sold in order to make that one revenue neutral and what that would do to inflation.
A lot of good questions.
We'll be back, I think.
unidentified
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
Proof of the quickening, perhaps a natural process, just now coming back.
The image, he says, of our stable Earth being solid and anchored in place was completely shattered when at the end of the broadcast, Mother Earth was demonstrated to be a sphere of stratified Jell-O.
And apparently, yeah, I know.
I had the same exact reaction, Bob.
Somehow you don't want to think of yourself as a sort of a crusty little piece of earth on top resting on top of what is virtually jello.
Then this.
Art, this story, if it were not true, would be a joke, but it is not.
It happened.
CNN had George Bush on the other night.
Yes, they did.
To defend, among other things, the bombing of that supposed baby milk factory during the Gulf War in Iran.
He explained they had photos and proof that the factory was really a chemical weapons factory.
His counterpart, a CNN reporter who was in Iran during the war, said that Bush was wrong and he had proof.
This reporter said that he went to the bombed out factory the next day and was given a plastic package of baby milk as proof.
But in addition, he had even more damaging proof.
It seems that on the devastated floor of the factory, the reporter picked up a work apron.
This reporter picked up the apron and took it back with him to the U.S.
The work apron, which the reporter held up in front of CNN's TV cameras that night, had the words, baby milk factory, across the breast area of this bib.
He claimed that he was convinced this apron was once worn by a now-dead factory worker.
Don't you get it yet, Art?
That's right.
It had the words, baby milk factory on this apron spelled in English.
Who does this reporter think we are?
Does he think I'm going to believe that an Iranian baby milk factory would, a factory worker would wear a bib with English on it?
Does this reporter have a clue, or does he just report what he's told to?
The Portland UDO is NASA's, oh, UFO, I suppose, is NASA's lost satellite.
I heard a news report that it would be quite visible this week, with people able to see both the satellite and the broken tether trailing behind it.
And it's up there right now, rotating out of control.
And that brings up a little bit deeper probe into that subject.
And I want to challenge some of you to think about the following.
Hey, Art, have you noticed that NASA is not telling us what really happened to the cable attached to the satellite?
If there is no atmosphere in space, then there shouldn't have been any resistance from the satellites being towed.
Therefore, the cable would not just snap.
Why do the astronauts keep talking about not being scared?
If the cable did snap, as they claim it did, would have floated away from them, not being of any concern.
So why did fear become an issue?
Did something hit the cable?
You know, NASA tapes everything they say and do.
They had the astronauts watching the cable and the satellite through a video camera.
So, why only video of the frayed cable attached to the shuttle and the satellite drifting away?
I want to know where the video is of the satellite when the cable broke.
Oh, right on, sir.
Why are the astronauts talking about no time to be afraid because they had much to do to compensate for losing the satellite?
Well, maybe they're talking about at the moment it broke.
If the cable broke from resistance, all they would have to do is wave bye-bye.
Something fishy is going on here.
He makes a good point.
Number one, there is not supposed to be friction in space.
Remember the old expression, nobody can hear you scream because there is no air, hence no friction, and that's how, or at least so small an amount of friction that, I mean, this guy is right.
Something's fishy.
And if there was a lot of friction and a lot of tug and pull, oh, well, there just should not have been.
That was a real thick, real strong tether, and you would think that if there was that kind of friction, that the shuttle itself would have been literally pulled along, possibly even out of orbit.
Now, there may be something obvious that I'm missing here.
But I don't get any of it.
I mean, I get that they could string a satellite out on a very long tether, and they would almost, in order to bring it taut, seems to me, they'd almost have to move away from it or set the satellite when they released it in a slightly lower orbit so that eventually there would be tension.
There would be a delta, a difference between the two orbits, and that would naturally take it out.
So what in the world, and then, too, if it was strong enough that it would actually snap that tether, I saw it was a pretty thick tether.
Wouldn't that have jerked the shuttle capsule literally out of orbit or sent it tumbling?
Wouldn't that kind of force have affected them in some very major way?
But I have written a book that summarizes my very weird, bizarre life.
It also summarizes a lot of years behind the microphone, and I talked a lot about things that I can't talk about on the air.
And I talked about a whole lot of very personal things.
That's all in my book.
And if you order now, and I am told now we are two-thirds of the way through the special edition.
That didn't last long, did it?
If you order my hard edition, hardcover edition of The Art of Talk, or the audio version, which I did myself, I thought about that really hard, and then I thought, man, can I go through all this again?
And I did.
So there is now an audio version.
If you order either one, you get the five by seven glossy photograph of me standing upon my porch, and you get to see my desert.
I like the photo.
And I signed it in a gold pen, as the lady said.
And that goes free of charge with an order of either my regular hardcover book or the audio tape.
Perhaps the Honorable Secretary Rubin has determined that being February 29th, it is, of course, the leap year day, and this is the day that time will stop.
He doesn't have to worry about it.
I have no idea otherwise.
You are correct.
It is the day, the official day.
So we'll have to see what happens.
unidentified
Maybe some of your other listeners have heard anything about it.
Well, maybe he's found some more pension funds somewhere.
unidentified
You know, I did notice yesterday on CNN that they said that, well, they just reiterated basically what Andrew Galv had said about that the Republicans were going to be sending him the bill and that it had so many stipulations that nobody knew what he was going to do with it.
There's somebody on video right now that typed me out a message watching me on video.
And it's somebody named Christian.
He says, Art, I am an alien, and I eat humans.
Now I know what you look like.
I've got to regard that last sentence as a threat in view of the first.
Well, it's been that kind of day.
I opened up a letter earlier today and outrolled some human or animal hair with ashes and a simple piece of paper.
It says, I've been cursed, so I've got a curse on me tonight.
For all I know, for all the rest of my life.
And we're having a very strange conversation about all kinds of very strange things, including why the satellite snapped at the end of the tether, the shuttle end, actually, in the tether.
And I've got some faxes on that.
It's a very interesting question.
And we'll get to all of that in a second.
Politics, we're talking about that tonight somehow as little as possible.
Dear Art, I've worked closely with NASA and the Caltech Jet Propulsion Lab.
My field is orbital mechanics.
This is the guy I was looking for.
The strain on the satellite tether was expected.
The strain comes from the difference in orbital height, slim as it might be.
See, that's what my guess was.
Therefore, the velocity to maintain orbit is greater for the shuttle as opposed to the satellite.
Remember, the further the object is from the center of the Earth's gravity, the less pull gravity has on it.
The less pull equates to a slower velocity needed to keep it in orbit.
One of the experiments would have tested the ability for raising the shuttle to a higher orbit by passing an electric current through the conducting tether.
This current in the tether, which is passing through a magnetic field, in other words, the Earth's magnetic field, would exert a force or a pull on that tether, raising the shuttle to a higher orbit.
Obviously, the strain was too much.
Sincerely, Dr. Warren, I won't give his last name.
And, Doctor, that is a good explanation of how the tether had a strain.
Now, the part that I don't get, Doctor, and you can put this in another facts if you would like.
But, Doctor, I saw the tether.
That was a pretty big tether, Doctor.
That was a very strong tether, Doctor.
And the shuttle itself, it seems to me, a couple of things would have happened.
In other words, where you've got a reaction, an action, you should have a reaction.
Now, explain this to me, Doctor.
The shuttle should have been exerting a pull, a force, to maintain its position against the drag that you've described of the satellite.
So, therefore, when it snapped, it should have had a rubber band kind of effect.
The shuttle should have then moved higher in orbit, I would presume.
Yes, higher in orbit.
Suddenly, it should have jerked.
It should have begun to spin.
In other words, the force exerted to actually snap that should have had an effect on the shuttle.
I have heard nothing.
So explain that one to me, Doctor.
And then, Ms. Dear Art, with respect to the question regarding the tethered satellite failure, during deployment of the satellite, dry gas jets are used initially to maintain tension in the tether as it is reeled out.
After the satellite reaches a sufficient distance, several hundred meters, gravity gradient differences between the satellite and the shuttle orbiter takes over, resulting in tension in the tether.
In addition, the tether tension is maintained within prescribed limits by an active feedback control system located in the tether deployer within the payload bay.
This control results in minute reeling out and reeling in of the tether.
Hence, the tether is always in tension.
Also, a very good explanation from Robert in Denver.
But again, for both of you, explain to me why there was not more of a reaction when the tether broke.
There was obviously established then a pretty severe tension because that was a big mama of a tether.
So when it broke, there should have been some kind of reaction.
If the forces you describe were in place, then when they were instantly released, there certainly should have been some sort of reaction of the shuttle.
Even in relatively low orbit, you've got to actually use fuel to get back down to re-enter, to go back down to where you will re-enter.
I mean, it's a very minute influence.
unidentified
Right.
It just seems to me that there would be, if, you know, a satellite's a pretty big thing, and there would be some sort of momentum there that they would have to, you know, the shuttle's moving, the satellite's not.
Even if there is no friction, you've got to have some sort of a pull to get it to the point where it's moving in the middle.
I've got a friend of mine called you about two weeks ago, and just a real quick kernel of information.
He was talking about barbarians at the gate and that sort of thing, and you were trying to figure out a movie by that name or a movie that was available.
Yeah, I haven't seen it, but I'm going to have to now.
I've got a lot of guys that listen to you at nighttime.
I'm part owner of a security company up here, and we're driving around all night long in our patrol cars listening, and I know probably some of them are listening right now.
So I just want to say we're all listening and we enjoy your show nicely.
I mean, they could have gone for MRIs and X-rays and had psychological battery tests done and all kinds of things they could have done to back up their assertion that all of this is some sort of false memory syndrome or mass hypnotic effect.
This is Carl Sagan saying that.
Whatever it was, they had a grand opportunity to actually do a good exploration of that possibility and have a show with great impact.
Instead, they decided to offer a kind of collective opinion without scientific portfolio that it's all baloney.
Well, that adds up to hatchet jobs.
Back now to the unknown.
On the first time, call our line, you're on the air.
Now, that doesn't mean they're going to start tomorrow or this Sunday, but sometime I forget during the month around, two-thirds of the way through the month or something, they're going to start carrying Dreamland.
Whether you look at it from a biblical perspective, or you imagine that on earth now there seems to be an exception to anything you can name, even with AIDS, which is supposed to be 100% fatal, there are prostitutes in Africa immune to AIDS.
They have proven this now.
So if there's an exception to everything we can think about, then surely there are some humans walking around out there who had a little genetic switch thrown in another direction, however it was done, and they're not aging.
Yeah, so it could be.
I don't rule it out biblically or scientifically.
unidentified
Right.
Well, scientifically, let's say just from the aspect of scientifically, someone was walking around who was immortal.
What would keep them from coming out and saying, I'm an immortal, and going on talk shows and saying, clock me for 200 years and watch, I won't die, barring a train wreck or something like that.
Hazel O'Leary's admission that we fed radiation to children, old people, pregnant women.
Would that be the same government you're talking about?
unidentified
Well, it would be the same government, but we would, I mean, the press on it would be as such so early that they wouldn't have a chance to do something like that.
You know what I'm saying?
If you come out and you say I'm immortal and you go to the news stations and you say I'm immortal and you say clock me for a hundred years NBC and NBC clocks you for a hundred years and you don't age in a hundred years, the government is not going to be able to come and just say okay we're going to snatch this guy up grind him up and see what made it that way.
And, you know, I think that they say his program is coming back, isn't it?
Again?
I used to live outside Philadelphia in a place called Media, Pennsylvania, so I saw Bandstand from its very inception.
We had it very early in Philadelphia.
Anyway, Dick Clark, yeah, he may be an immortal.
But I really do think that anybody who would really be immortal, and I'm not ruling it in or out, but if the answer is in for the sake of our discussion, I do think that any person that the government actually decided was immortal would be in little bitty petri-sized dishes before you could say the next hundred years.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 28th, 1996.
Works presents Art Bell,
Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 28th, 1996.
From the high desert, where finally it's kind of clear out there this morning.
It's been very wet here.
I'm getting the full range of response to the question about the shuttle.
For example, Art, who the hell cares what went wrong with the shuttle?
NASA screws up again.
I, as a taxpayer, have had it.
I want my money back in the space program now.
It's a pathetic joke.
Dan, the future teller and Eugene.
Dan and Eugene, actually.
Gee, Dan, that's kind of a limited attitude there, as far as I'm concerned.
I think it was a neat experiment.
The idea was to create power by, I guess, creating a delta in the orbit between the tethered satellite and the shuttle.
And then that friction would generate, which it did for a very short time until it broke, would generate immense amounts of electrical power, making a lot of things easier in space.
You've got to wonder if a version of a tethered something or another could be used for interplanetary travel.
And I'm sure that's what they're thinking about when they try this experiment.
You would think, certainly so, wouldn't you?
Though, when you leave the orbit of a planet, then you don't have the dynamics necessary, perhaps, unless Richard Hoagland is right, and you know he might be, to generate the electricity needed.
It's all very interesting.
Art, please call me Jim in Honolulu.
This is from the NASA World Wide webpage.
notice there are gravitational forces contact with the upper atmosphere and electrical charge and an admission that nasa doesn't get no quite what they're doing or this aren't the now this is from the doctor that called uh...
taxed earlier And he's probably right.
Dear Art, the reaction when the tether broke was minimal due to the obviously much greater mass of the shuttle as compared to the satellite.
On several orders of magnitude, as a matter of fact, no doubt the satellite experienced the brunt of the reaction.
In other words, MV equals MV, or large mass times slow velocity must equal small mass times high velocity, conservation of momentum.
Sincerely, Dr. Warren, we will call him.
And then, so that we get the full range of response, this.
Art, we've all been duped.
NASA just launched a top-secret satellite that was reported as a failed scientific experiment.
A bowling ball tied to the end of a tether would have worked just as well.
But the experiment was not the only objective.
For a moment, the 12-mile copper wire generated electricity, so the experiment worked.
The fully operational satellite is now headed into space at 100 miles an hour.
Well, again, I would like to know what did he say?
unidentified
Hold on just a minute.
I got my notes.
let me see when scallion speaks there would be a magma displacement and uh dispersion of the earth would be displaced And he saw massive earthquakes in Boston.
Actually, that'd be a fitting way to go, wouldn't it?
Don't you think that'd be a fitting way for me to go doing my book signing up in Oregon?
Somebody sent me my own epitaph, which I thought was pretty cool.
I read it at the beginning of the program.
I really should read it again.
I think it's kind of cute.
Are you ready?
Dateline for Ump, Nevada, October of the year 2145.
At least I've got a, well, according to this.
Beloved ether talk show host, Art Bell, succumbs after all.
Internal pig part organs fail following a brief but futile battle with an Australian rabbit, Kiwi swine virus and nearly two centuries of chain smoking.
A large wake was held for Mr. Talk by his widow, Ramona.
Isn't it interesting that even in the future, after nearly 200 years, the female still manages to outlive us.
The deceased was roasted at a lovely ceremony over Mount Vesuvius, only stopping once every hour to baste the guest of honor.
Unswine remains that were not consumed were promptly dipped in beautiful 24 carat gold by one of Art's longtime sponsors, the GOLD ROSE AND BODY Parts company, for just 139 dollars and 95 cents.
The lovely, tear-filled event was followed by a 9.8 earthquake in Los Angeles.
In his honor, Guests, eulogists, G. Gordon Scallion and Stan Deo, even they are still alive, delivered eulogies filled with heartwarming memories of art and predictions for his future in the afterlife.
Foot-tapping music provided by Cusco and selected songs, Don't Fear the Reaper in the year 2525 and Eve of Destruction, were performed by Linda M. Howe and her 1,200-voice alien choir.
The send-off was attended by thousands of friends, fans, a myriad of aliens, a small tribe of Sasquatch, and 40 immortals.
The latter group quickly changing their names and relocating to parts unknown following the ceremony due to the impending threat of a raid by rogue IRS agents after them for several thousand years of unpaid-back taxes.
The only incident marring the near-flawless event was the issuance of a few traffic tickets to alien mourners for hovering their craft too close to a fire hydrant.
Art's widow Ramona concluded that ceremony by unveiling a large memorial stone shaped like an ancient AM radio.
The stone memorial was engraved with a fitting epitaph to the man who kept us up at night through so many, many years.
Dear Lord, art was all talk, but his talk was art.
And then there's a little asterisk down at the bottom here in which he reminds me, you never know, it could happen.
And unfortunately, I didn't retain the pages with the person's name because they certainly deserve credit one way or the other for this little epitaph.
And as they went into their version of Houston, we have a problem on the bottom part of the screen, a little bit to the left, and way in the distance on a black and white TV, I saw a little white dot just kind of shoot across.
Well, what I want to know is, how is this cautious nature you described going to translate into the way he's going to handle the Cuban thing on the weekend?
Live all-night talk radio because this radio station cares enough to have it on.
Instead of the others that repeat endlessly, we are here, actually here right now.
Flesh and blood.
Have somebody named Jim on video, and I brought my 17-pound cat in, showed him to Jim here a few minutes ago.
Aloha, Art.
Did you ever stop to think that the cursed envelope you received yesterday contained the curse of immortality?
That's Dean from Kauai, the islands, where they know about these things.
And the person who sent me this envelope curse should really, really be wary.
Because my wife is from the islands.
And my wife, well, I hate while I might be a 99th degree Mason, what arrived in that envelope is going to go powering its way back to the sender with a lightning bolt delivered by my wife, who knows how to deliver these kinds of things.
Dear Art, there have been a number of occurrences where young children have died of old age.
This is really an interesting fact.
And this person is correct.
There have been a number of occurrences where young children have died of old age.
There is a genetic foul-up in their genes, causing them to age rapidly.
That's absolutely correct.
This same genetic anomaly could probably mutate in the opposite direction and cause longevity, if not immortality.
Sign Jim.
Jim, you're exactly right.
It is the argument that I have been making right along.
We know that the aging process is keyed genetically.
And as you point out, the aging children are evidence of that fact.
And as I've tried to point out, there seems to be an exception to nearly any rule anybody talks about on the face of the globe.
Escalion would, if you get a hold of him, I'd like to know if he has any more predictions about maybe perhaps central Louisiana around Louisiana and the New Madrid fault line.
But I'm not somehow, for me, thank you very much, as a Ross Baro supporter at one time, I don't translate that support to Pat Buchanan.
I don't know why, because Buchanan was supposed to pick up a lot of support from Perot people.
And I was at one time a Perot person.
God, I thrashed it out.
That killed me.
That election killed me in more ways than one.
I thought about that every night for the longest time and agonized over how I was going to vote.
And I'm sure it'll come to that again.
But, you know, there's a lot of time between now and Election Day.
And I don't know about you, but I can't stand the possibility of being able to talk about nothing else between now and Election Day, and I'm not going to let it happen.
It's like tonight, it's like I had it right up to here with politics, and all of a sudden I needed a break.
And the reason I ask is right before, I believe that sometime during that particular program, Dr. Begich mentioned that he wanted to go into the application of lasers and acupuncture points.
The voice face that belongs to a journalist reporter.
It does a nightly radio show.
We reach the entire western United States.
He read Mrs. Tix's article in the Chronicle.
I'd like to talk to you about it on the air, since I don't feel much like driving to San Francisco for a broadcast, which runs from 8 p.m. to midnight, and it goes on.
Well, I think I know they filed a flight plan for elsewhere and then flew down to below the 24th parallel, but still apparently outside of the 12-mile claim limit of Cuba, right?
unidentified
That's correct, but as I understand, it was a warning area.
But what I was going to say was, if they took a flight plan from point A to point A and round robin into the warning area, as long as they have the controlling facility's approval, that's okay.
Now, I'm sure they didn't, sir.
Oh, they didn't?
Well, if they went from point A to point B with a BFR flight plan, they could go through there, but they should only have their hands flapped.
Because the warning area is used, it's either hot or cold.
And if the governing facility, which is the United States, which more than likely it was, and if it were cold and they went through there, DFR, they shouldn't have any problem.
And as far as let me tell you, if the Megs come out to play and we shoot a couple of them down, the man you referred to as Bozo, his stock is going to go up about 20%.
And what gets me, Art, is people won't stop to think.
Our founding fathers that wrote up the Constitution, most of them were Masons.
That's right.
And the ones at the Boston Tea Party, they officially closed the meeting 20 years ago because they couldn't get back to their lodge in time to close the meeting.
And people won't stop to think.
Shriners are Masons.
They have children's burn hospitals.
The Scottish Rite, your fourth through 32nd degree Masons.
They sponsor speech clinics for kids who got correct.
I mean, they do, thank you very much, Bus Driver Dave.
They do all kinds of good things.
But you see, you cannot tell the people who think that the Masons have a very secret sub-agenda that is covered up by the apparent good works that they do.
And so I have given up trying.
I don't fight that fight anymore.
If you want to think that there's a great conspiracy involving the Masons, then fine.
Go right ahead.
Nothing I say is going to change your mind anyway.
People used to call me up all the time and tell me that I'm a CIA agent.
Nothing that specifically addresses that, but it is a very interesting topic, and I would like to get a copy of your paper when you're done.
Talk radio has indeed saved AM radio.
There is no question about it.
But if talk radio, and this is my little philosophy about it, if talk radio wants to remain on top, it is going to have to diversify, and everybody is going to have to stop marching down the same trail that Rush Limbaugh has gone.
And if they don't do that, it's not going to be on top very much longer.
I tried to figure out the fairer way to do it, and they cycle, you know.
And after you've been ringing for a while, as you well know, you get cut off.
unidentified
Right.
In fact, earlier tonight, you answered, you know, I've been trying just here on the West of the Rockies line, and you answered, I think, just as I was cut off because you're like, West of the Rockies.
And if you consider that we really are moving into the area of Nostradamus' predictions for the final brouha-ha, then you know who might really be perfect to lead us there?
Here's more or less something that's been bothering me for a long time that legislators, when they get elected, you'd think that, you know, they should have a little knowledge as to what they're getting into and that they do.