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May 5, 1999 - Art Bell
02:40:35
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Caving - Bonnie Crystal
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Welcome to Art Bell.
Some more in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 5th, 1999.
From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, wherever you may be across this great land of ours, all these time zones stretching from the exotic Tahitian and Hawaiian islands in the west, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the pole, and worldwide on the internet, Thanks to Broadcast.com and also Intel.
Don't forget, folks, G2.
Go get the G2 program.
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F-R-E-E.
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Come back to my website.
Click on Streaming Video.
And there I will be doing the program in almost TV.
That's what I... It really is almost TV.
You see movement.
You see me moving around.
You see whatever it is that a talking head does.
Pretty much just talk.
But it's a lot of fun to see the video of the program.
I would suggest to those of you with computers that you check my website immediately for the first item under the latest headlines.
I repeat, the first item under the latest headlines.
We've got a link up to a very interesting webpage that may clear a few things up for you.
Then comes Bonnie Crystal.
Bonnie Crystal is an amazing woman, CEO of a big company, and she's a caver.
Now, some might say spelunker, others would say caver.
She says caver.
Somebody sent me something earlier that said, well, you know, our cavers rescue spelunkers, so I don't know.
These are people who go underground.
And Bonnie doesn't just go a little bit underground.
Bonnie goes 10,000 feet underground.
She's something of a scientist, actually.
And so, if you've ever wondered about inner space, you know, what's down there, somebody who goes down 10,000 feet Ought to be one of the people you'd want to listen to.
And that's Bonnie Crystal.
And I met her, by the way, on Ham Radio.
On 75 Meters, I met Bonnie.
And I thought, oh boy, there seems to be quite a bit to this lady.
And I thought, let's get her on the air and talk to her about going down.
Way down.
So that's what's on the agenda this night.
Otherwise, Amy Fisher, who they called, you'll recall, the Long Island Lolita, He's going to be paroled, apparently.
The insanity continues in Yugoslavia.
We say we will step it up.
Kosovo, meanwhile, that was a place we were going to go into, and remember the exit strategy was, well, we'll be out in a year.
Of course, as the years roll by, headline, Kosovo may need more peacekeepers.
In fact, more than the 28,000 troops originally envisioned.
We've got a lot of our army overseas trying to keep the peace in all these places.
In Oklahoma, where people have gone back to their homes, sadly, for the most part, what they have found is no homes.
The F5 tornadoes raged across Oklahoma, raged across Kansas.
It was a little unnerving even for somebody who wrote the book The Quickening.
In a moment we're going underground.
We are going way underground.
Bonnie Crystal is going to take us there and in a moment I will tell you more about Bonnie Crystal.
She is really quite something.
I met her on As a matter of fact, on 75 meters, you know, the hand band, I met her on the hand bands, oh, I don't know, two, three weeks ago, something like that.
And the more I learned about Bonnie, the more I went, wow, I guess I need to know more about this.
She is a caver.
You know, somebody who goes underground.
Can you imagine going underground 10,000 feet?
I have no idea what's underground 10,000 feet.
Do you?
She does.
We'll talk to her in a moment.
Bonnie Crystal is co-founder of Telogen, I think it is.
Telgen?
It could be Telgen or Telgen Corporation.
1990.
It is the first woman-founded company to go public on NASDAQ, where she is the Executive Vice President and CEO, Chief Technology Officer, Telgen is the pioneering Silicon Valley company which developed the new flat panel display technology called High Gain Emissive Display.
H-G-E-D.
She has devoted the last ten years to bringing this amazing display technology to market.
That's about to happen.
Prior to founding the company, she co-founded several other high-tech companies.
Is the inventor of VNR, Video Noise Reduction.
I'll be damned, I didn't know that.
A technology which shrunk the size of satellite dishes in the late 1980s.
Wow!
She was instrumental, I see I'm reading this cold, she was instrumental in researching at UCSF, University of California San Francisco, to bring MRI, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, to a higher resolution at a lower cost, so that diagnostic medicine can now see, of course, the fine details inside the living body.
My, my, beginning her professional career in the 1960s in Japan as a disc jockey for Armed Forces Radio.
We share some background there.
She quickly gravitated toward the engineering side of the biz, designing, building, and maintaining broadcast radio stations as a broadcast engineer.
Bonnie is a proponent of personal and amateur radio.
She's K6-XA, licensed in 1967.
She's also an author.
The World of CB Radio, which, check this out, sold 3.5 million copies, making it the best-selling CB book ever.
As a child, Bonnie longed to explore the void of outer space.
Kind of like Jodie Foster in Contact No Doubt, but at the time, it seemed like an unreachable goal.
During a family trip to beautiful Carlsbad Caverns, when the ranger turned all the lights off in the cave, that experience sparked a lifelong love for caves and the darkness of the underground.
As an exploration... a speologist, I'm no item of slaughtering that, she has been actively involved for a decade in cave exploration, Caving projects and expeditions and leading the use of electronic technology and communication in caving.
The science of caves.
That word that I'm slaughtering.
She wrote the standard for through-the-rock, get this, through-the-rock cave radio communications using low frequency, 185 kilohertz frequencies.
The pursuit of caving has led her to explore strange underground worlds Never before seen by humans in far-flung areas of the globe.
And these particular names and places and caves, I'm not even going to endeavor to try and pronounce.
I'll slaughter them.
Hey, Bonnie, welcome to the program.
Thank you very much, Art.
I don't know how much you heard, but I read as much of your bio as I could before I got to words that I dare not try to pronounce.
Like speleology.
Yeah, that's one of them right there.
Speleology, huh?
And then, of course, the caves where you have been.
I looked down there and I said, no way.
Some of the caves are in very far away places, and some are actually close to some of the people in your listening audience.
Well, we'll get to all that.
There's a couple of things that I really, really have got to ask you about.
As I read your bio, kind of cold on the air, I started going, wow!
Now, you have developed and have a patent for something called High Gain Emissive Display, H-G-E-D, which is what for the uninitiated?
What is that really?
Well, High Gain Emissive Display is a new type of flat panel display Which is the type of screen that you have on computers and televisions these days, that's very thin.
Rather than being like the old television sets, a big box, it's very thin, like a picture frame.
And this is something that we see now in the market, or we're going to see in the market?
This is something that we are going to see more and more of in the market, and our technology Has been under development for over 10 years here and we're just about ready to start bringing it out here.
Alright, what does it mean?
In other words, I'm used to looking at televisions and I've even seen flat displays and I know that as you move off to the left, to the left or the right, they begin to degrade to your eye.
And so what does, what change does this mean for us?
Well, the LCD display, which is the kind that degrades when you get off of being directly in front of it, is the common display that's seen in laptops today.
That's right.
It has a very narrow viewing angle.
That means you can only see it in its optimum way when you're right in front of it.
But with our new type of technology, the high-gain emissive display, it's like the old older-style television sets, The kind of desktop monitors.
You can see it from any angle.
And it's the same from any angle.
So, in other words, you're about to be a multi-millionaire.
Well, I guess there's that possibility in there.
Alright.
You invented... Now, this one really blew me away.
Video noise reduction?
Right.
Well, back in the early 80s, Backyard dishes for satellite reception were just starting to come in.
Right.
And I embarked on a project to make the dishes smaller.
And the satellites at the time were in orbit in the Clark Belt.
They were putting out a certain level of power and normally it took a 12-foot dish Or something around that size.
I've still got a twelve-and-a-half footer in my backyard.
So you know about this real well?
Oh, I know.
Listen, I had one of the first private TV ROs in the country, Bonnie.
I was into that long, long ago.
It was a passion.
It still is a passion of mine.
I still have that dish.
Now I've got it loaded with a KU band and C-band LNB and it's a screamer at twelve-and-a-half feet, believe me.
But you're right.
That long ago, the satellites were underpowered, the dishes had to be big, and even at that, you had noise.
Yes, there was a lot of noise when you got to smaller dishes.
And it made it impossible at that time to have anything smaller than about a six-foot dish.
So what I did was, I said, okay, well, there must be something that can be done in the satellite receiver itself to improve it.
and i went about trying to discover what it could be done
and eventually invented video noise reduction which
went into just about every satellite tv in america absolutely
then you should already be a millionaire well at that particular time i was working
uh... for company didn't have a a great agreement for my intellectual property
I see.
I got $500 and a handshake.
$500 and a handshake.
And they had a banquet in my honor.
A banquet in your honor.
But I've got a little bit different agreement now with the present company I'm with, which is Teligent.
Okay.
Now, you also wrote a book.
Now, of all things, you're a ham.
I told everybody that's how we met.
On 75 Meters, was it about three or four weeks ago, something like that?
Yes, about three or four weeks ago, down on 75 Meters, and on single sideband, and I heard you on there, tuned across, and we started up a conversation.
And away we went.
Alright, now, also, you wrote a book on CB radio, and it sold 3.5 million copies.
Now that's, in fact, a gigantic How did that happen?
Well, CB is more popular than most people realize.
It's especially in the middle part of the country and it used to be even more popular back in the seventies before cellular phones.
And just about every truck in America has a CB in it.
That's a lot of trucks, a lot of people who use CB for their personal communications between
their house and their car or for their business.
People wanted to know in layman's terms how it works.
What can I do to improve how it works?
What can I do to make it work in such a way that people can use it on a daily basis?
We came out with a book, it was immensely successful, and it's been selling ever since.
Three and a half million copies?
I was amazed myself that it became that popular.
Did you have a good deal with your publisher?
Yeah, I sure did.
You are one of the most diverse ladies I've ever met in my whole life.
By the way, what is the present state of Citizens Band Radio?
The present state of CB is kind of a hodgepodge.
of various different kinds of communication going on of course there's the regular channel 19 that a lot of people are most familiar with which is the truckers talking to each other a lot of people out there listening right now are using 19 believe me and they're probably listening to me in their truck and riding down the road listening to channel 19 at the same time exactly correct yes but there's another aspect of CB2 which is the mom and pop CB where Families use it to communicate with each other between their house and their car, and they use the other channels.
And then there's the part of CB that's known as sideband.
Sideband is for those people that want to talk further.
And there's a lot of sidebanders on there now because the cost of single sideband radios has been going down so much over the past years.
It's now possible, using regular CB single sideband, To talk on a regular basis out to about 30 miles.
And then there's also the new sunspot cycle, which is coming in, which you've talked about on your show.
That's right.
And you can get skip.
And then you might talk as far as?
Thousands of miles or around the world.
Now, seabeers aren't really supposed to do that, are they?
They're not supposed to do it under FCC regulations.
But they do.
It just happens to them.
They're sitting there talking, minding their own business, and all of a sudden, someone from Sweden comes in.
And all of a sudden they're talking to someone from Britain.
And so how do you resist?
It's hard to resist that, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
We'll talk more about that, and then we'll get to the main topic for the evening here shortly.
Bonnie Crystal is my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
And you're listening to Coast to Coast AM.
Good morning.
You're listening to ArcBell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from May 5th, 1999.
This is a presentation of the Coast to Coast Amphitheatre.
This is a presentation of the Coast to Coast Amphitheatre.
The Coast to Coast Amphitheatre is a concert hall.
The concert hall is a large, multi-storied building.
Vimeo Radio Networks presents Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired May 5th, 1999.
Bonnie Crystal is here.
What a woman, huh?
If you look at what she has accomplished, what she has done in her life, and you have not yet heard the half of it, with just the half of it, you've got to say, holy mackerel!
What a lady!
We'll get back to her in a moment.
Sound of jet taking off.
All right.
Back now to Bonnie Crystal.
Bonnie, welcome back.
Thanks, Mark.
I see our phones held together through this break.
That's a good sign.
Yes.
Let's hope it keeps that way.
All right.
Now, somehow from all of this, which is a background that would exceed the accomplishments of most men who have climbed the technical ladder, and it really does exceed that, I don't know how you... How do you make time in your life for all of that, by the way?
Well, it is difficult to fit it all in.
And I do other stuff, like I'm a recording engineer, too.
You are?
And I work with Stevens Productions, and that's kind of a local thing here, but it's national, too.
And I enjoy that, and that's part of my life that really has stemmed from originally being in broadcast.
Where, by the way, are you, Bonnie?
I'm near San Francisco.
Near San Francisco, all right.
On the peninsula, as they call it.
Beautiful area, yes.
All right.
There is, some people say spelunkers, some say cavers, and maybe they are the same thing.
Maybe there is a difference.
Somebody sent me a fact earlier tonight.
I think I mentioned yesterday you were a spelunker.
Somebody said, look, cavers save the lives of spelunkers.
So this is some sort of inside thing.
Can you clear that up for me?
Sure, Art.
The thing about calling it spelunker or caver is really a matter of those that are cavers Call each other cavers.
Those that don't really know, they usually call us spelunkers.
Back in grade school, we learned the word spelunker.
It comes from the Latin and Greek spelunk and cave, which is spelio.
Spelunker is kind of an American adaptation for one who goes Narrowly on their way through a cave.
But cavers, the ones who actually do the cave exploration and study caves, they look at spelunkers as someone who's a flashlight caver, who carries a flashlight and goes into a cave and maybe ends up, you know, partying or getting lost in the cave.
Oh, really?
And there's an old joke amongst Spelunk is the sound that's made when a spelunker falls down in the pit of a cave.
So I should not have called you a spelunker, should I?
Well, you get it all the time amongst the general public.
There is a lot of cavers who consider themselves speleologists.
Let's try this.
Is spelunking to caving as CB is to hemorrhage?
I think you just about hit it on the nose there.
I see.
We'll leave it at that for those who know what we're talking about.
So you're a caver.
Now, you said something to me on the air on 75 meters that blew me away.
You said you're going to go down 10,000 feet.
Now, Excuse me, but I didn't know anybody went down 10,000 feet.
My God, that's almost two miles down into the earth.
How in the hell can you go down that far, and what's down there, and all that stuff?
Well, you know, cavers have been doing this for quite a number of years, and there's a lot of history of caving that goes from just very small caves to more and more exploring the depths of the deepest caves in the world.
And some caves are very very long.
You know you have the Mammoth Cave System there in Kentucky and that's 355 miles long.
So you enter and you can travel for 355 miles staying underground.
Of course maybe that's not directly in one direction.
It maybe winds and goes down and branches out and you You know go through these passages that are maybe barely able to fit the size of your body through it to huge subway tunnel size passages and enormous grottoes and passages that are chambers that are just big enough to fit the astrodome in.
So there's all these sorts of caves around the world and what cavers do And what I do as an exploration speleologist is to go and try to find caves that no one has been in before or passages that no one has gone through before in a cave.
In other words, the first human steps.
The first human to ever step.
And you said, I've got to slow you down a little, you said there are places where you can go 300 miles Underground 300 miles?
That's right.
Where?
This is Mammoth Cave.
It's a big cave system in Kentucky.
And it's a national park, right?
But the tourist part of the cave is very big and you can take wild caving tours that are part of the national park system.
And anyone who's really interested in getting into caving, that's a good place to start.
is on one of the wild cave tours either at Carlsbad Caverns National Park or Mammoth Cave National Park and they have guided tours and then they have these wild cave tours where you put on your helmet and light and go crawling through the cave in the area where the normal tourist doesn't see.
Alright, for me There's no chance I would do that.
You know, I'm claustrophobic.
I can't imagine being 100 feet, much less, 10,000 feet under the earth.
I just simply, in my mind, I can't imagine it.
I imagine I would have a severe, severe panic attack.
And I think I speak for a lot of people.
Well, I've had one of those before.
I've been claustrophobic before.
At some time or another, In my caving experience, I have experienced that, so I know what you're talking about.
It was in a situation where I was underground, and I'd been there for a long time.
I was fatigued from climbing underground, and there was this one spot.
It was just a body-sized tube, barely big enough to fit my body through, and I was trying to get back out of the cave.
How far down were you?
I was only a couple hundred feet below the surface.
Right.
But when you're in a cave, a couple hundred feet below the surface is complete darkness.
Doesn't matter, I guess at that point a couple hundred, a couple thousand.
Right.
No difference.
And I just couldn't quite get up the energy to climb up through this, well for one thing the passage was up above my head and I had to climb up to this passage and then start to snake my body through with my hands above my head.
And pushing with my toes.
And I couldn't quite do it, and I got really, really frustrated and felt claustrophobic.
Like you might not ever get out of there?
Right.
And I backed back down and got... You know, a lot of cavers don't want to talk about this kind of experience, and some of them never experience it.
Others have experienced it.
But I experienced it, got over it, and I've been caving ever since.
How much in common, out of curiosity, You know, I've done a number of shows recently on Everest and on the disastrous 96th expedition to Everest to summit on Everest and I wonder how much, in a way, in some ways, caving and mountaineering have in common.
They're opposite.
I mean, you're going down, they're going up.
But there are some similarities, aren't there?
There's a lot of similarities to it.
In fact, cavers and mountaineers Our cousins in the same sort of technical endeavor.
And we use a lot of similar equipment.
A lot of similar techniques.
Like you say, the difference is that cavers go down before they go up.
And it's just the opposite with mountaineers.
So a lot of times... But the other thing that's basically different about caving from mountaineering is that we don't get to pick our route.
Mother Nature has picked a route for us, and if we're going to pursue it, we have to take whatever Mother Nature has handed us.
Bonnie, are there frequently many choices that you can make?
I mean, when you get, for example, into a cave that not a human foot has traversed before, are there kind of, you know, forks in the road as you go down, various You're going to have to excuse me because the amount of caving I've done is restricted to journey to the center of the earth with Pat Boone.
I'm going to sit here and remember a lot of that but there were a lot of sort of forks in the road as they went down.
There is a lot of forks in the road.
Passages you can decide to take the left passage or the right passage or the one above or the one below and Sometimes your choice of passage can lead to wonderful, beautiful places, and sometimes your choice of passage can lead to really slimy, muddy, guano-filled passages.
Really?
Well, that, of course, was going to be my next question.
No, my next question is, Bonnie, How the hell do you go down 10,000 feet?
In my wildest dreams I can't imagine how that can be done.
Please explain.
Well, you start out from the entrance and usually with a cave system that's very deep.
It normally involves a lot of what's called vertical caving.
And there's two types of caving.
There's horizontal caving and vertical caving.
And some people like vertical caving Other people like horizontal caving.
Which one are you?
I'm a vertical caver.
That means that's kind of like the climbers going up the vertical side of a cliff, except you're going down, right?
Right.
On the way down.
And we use nylon rope.
It's about as big around as your little finger, but it's able to support about 10,000 pounds.
The reason that we use this kind of high-tech rope is so that we can carry very lightweight rope down into the passages with us and then when we come to a drop off that goes very deep we throw this rope down the pit and tie it on to something up above or else we have to install a bolt or something which we don't like to do unless we have to because we like to preserve the cave as it is but sometimes we need to install like a little anchor to hold the rope and then we slide down the rope
Which is called rappelling or abseiling.
Using a harness and you see this on movies and that sort of thing.
People rappelling off the side of buildings and hopping down the building on a rope.
It's kind of like as you go down you push off, right?
Right.
And you slide down this rope and it's a wonderful feeling going down there.
But one of the things that One of the things when you go down that deep is that you have to have a lot of rope with you.
And you carry it with you and you keep successively putting more and more rope down more and more pits in the cave.
How many of you typically might be on such a deep expedition?
Usually we go in groups of four.
And there's a good reason for that.
Four is like the magic number for a caving expedition.
Why?
Well you have to have, according to caver lore and caver superstition and also really our best judgment, we use what's called the rule of three, which means that for the necessities of your expedition you have to have three of everything.
So you carry three lights, you carry Three separate sources of light and go with at least three people.
But you take four.
Is the working assumption that you might lose one?
That is the working assumption.
If one person gets in a bind, and by the way, we rely upon each other for our life in many cases while we're traversing the underground.
If one person should have an accident, which we don't like to think about ahead of time, but we plan for, If that one person should have an accident, there is still one person left to stay with that person and two other people left to go out of the cave together to get more cavers to come in and make a rescue.
Again, though, I've got to ask, I didn't know anything went down 10,000 feet.
I mean, I know that people have been down, I guess, hundreds and maybe thousands.
I didn't even think thousands, to be honest with you, Bonnie, but 10,000 feet?
How?
Now, I want to specify that we've talked on the handbands, and I know you don't want to give away the exact location of where you're going to be doing this.
Do you want to generally say where it is?
Yes.
The next place that I'm headed to is in South America to the Andes Mountains.
Okay.
And in the Andes Mountains, now previously a lot of cavers and speleologists have studied geographic maps, geologic maps, to find the places where it's likely to be deep caves.
Now this particular area where I'm going to is an area that has good potential.
for deep caves. Although it was not known before to have that, but we've sent over the past couple
years a couple of scouting expeditions and found some entrances and caves that started to go very
deep. Is this general knowledge now or not exactly general knowledge? Well it's not exactly general
knowledge, but of course after this program it will be.
Well, I know very much more specifically where you're going, and I'm not going to say.
What is the reason that you don't want to say, out of curiosity?
Well, amongst the top cavers of the world, just like, let's say, the America's Cup competitions, there's kind of a friendly competition amongst different countries, the top cavers, The top expeditionary groups for finding the possible deep caves and finding the possible long caves.
I see.
And going to those places and generally the exact location is kept a secret to everyone except for the people who are actually going on the trip and their emergency backup people.
I see.
So there is a competition.
So, okay, that absolutely makes sense to me.
It's not real, real competitive, but it's kind of a friendly kind of competition.
Is it as friendly as the competition among mountain climbers?
Yes, it's about like that.
Actually, it's a little better because we tend to share the results more than they do.
And also, with caving, You don't know exactly where you're going until you get there.
Yeah, but we're gonna get all of that in a moment.
Hold on, Bonnie.
Bonnie Crystal is my guest.
She... She goes way down into the earth we're gonna talk more about.
I wonder, what do you think's down there?
And does it get hot?
Is there water?
I mean, what's down there?
We're gonna find out tonight.
Stay right where you are.
You're listening to Arc Bell, somewhere in time.
tonight featuring a replay of coast to coast am from may 5th 1999
it's all clear to me now my heart is on fire
my soul's like a wheel that's turning my love is alive
my love is alive yeah, yeah, yeah
yeah something inside
that's making me mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm
You could read my mind, love What a tale my thoughts could tell Just like an old time movie About a ghost from a wishing well In a castle dark or a fortress strong With chains upon my feet You know that ghost is me And I will never be set free As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see If I could read your mind, love What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel, the kind the drugstore sells.
When you reach the part where the heartaches come, the hero would be me.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from May 5th, 1999.
It's almost, to me, unimaginable to go down 10,000 feet.
Go down into the earth 10,000 feet.
Bonnie Crystal either has or is about to do that.
We'll get back to her in a moment.
Well, I think I'll try this.
Speleologist?
Is that close?
Speleologist.
Say that three times fast.
No, thank you.
No, thank you.
Now, how far down have you been?
Well, it depends on how you look at it.
There's depth from the entrance and depth from the surface.
Okay, let's talk about... As well as number of miles inside.
Right.
Let's talk about from the entrance to the cave.
Right.
Well, that's definitely in the thousands of feet.
Thousands of feet.
Right.
You designed a way to communicate with the surface from thousands of feet below ground, didn't you?
Yes.
Tell us a little about that.
It uses low frequency, similar to what submarines use to communicate with other submarines and their bases.
Right.
It's a radio communication on sideband, low frequency, and what it does is it talks right through the rock.
How?
In other words, to me, as a ham, rock, I mean real rock, that's ground.
And how do radio waves propagate through rock?
Well, it's mostly through magnetic energy rather than electrical energy.
Really?
And we use big coils on you know a coil about three feet in diameter that's collapsible it's in a little backpack and we have a radio that's like a walkie-talkie and the radio hooks up to these coils and then we when we get to the spot where we want to communicate let's say we're a thousand feet under the surface or something we will open this coil up and make it just lay it down in the passage and someone up on the surface will do the same thing and we will talk
Through magnetic energy to each other.
So, if I understand properly then, what we know as RF, radio frequency, is not propagating as it does exactly through the air.
It's, you said, magnetic.
Right.
Well, RF, or radio frequency energy, what everyone's listening to us now on, comes through and it's both magnetic and electric.
Correct.
It's a field.
emanating from the transmitters from the towers.
And we mostly pick up the electric field, although the little coil inside the AM radios that probably the majority of the listening audience is listening to us on, is actually picking up that magnetic energy.
And it's kind of discarding the electric energy.
I've got a question for you, Bonnie.
When you're down there several thousand feet Can you pick up AM broadcast stations?
When we get down several thousand feet, normally we cannot pick up the AM stations.
No.
If we're just below the surface, say a few hundred feet, we can, if there's a very strong local AM station, we can pick it up.
Alright.
And again, that's the magnetic transference.
Right.
Oh, that's fascinating.
And so, so you're actually able, even down perhaps as far as 10,000 feet, To still communicate with the surface, is that correct?
Or does voice communication begin to fade, and then you have to go to alternate means?
We have an alternate means, and sometimes we use Morse code for it, when we can't communicate by voice.
And there's newer methods that we're trying to explore, which is data communications underground.
But, the other way we do it is, we will take two pieces of wire, hook them up to our little cave radio walkie-talkie, And stretch them out in the passage.
Stick one end in the mud, if we can find any, and then stick the other end in the mud and load up the earth itself with a signal.
We will inject a signal and talk through the earth itself using what's called current injection.
Wow!
So you load the earth itself?
Tesla would be proud of us.
Tesla?
Nikola Tesla pioneered this basic concept way, way back.
Just never got a chance to perfect it.
I know what a radio signal sounds like at line of sight and what it sounds like as it bounces off the ionosphere.
Are there any unusual characteristics that you could ascribe to a signal that you hear that's coming through thousands of feet of rock?
Well, for one thing, it's very, very weak sometimes.
We can barely pick it up if it's 3,000 feet.
But generally, it's a fairly stable transmission, and it's not fading in and out.
Of course, we don't hear a lot of that background noise that you would normally hear when we're down in the cave, because the Earth is shielding us from the cosmic radio waves.
Actually, I've heard there are Radio emissions from the Earth itself, do you hear any of those?
Yes.
We can hear what's called whistlers.
What are those?
And we think that those are caused by lightning strikes around the Earth.
And they occur at the very, very low frequencies.
Uh-huh.
But nobody knows for sure, I guess, huh?
It's still sort of one of those phenomena that It is not really well known or I mean a lot of people have heard it and there's a lot of theories about it.
Whistlers.
That's really interesting because they've done a lot of research lately on lightning that goes from space.
They are now seeing it going much higher into our atmosphere or even beyond than they ever did before and apparently it has the same sort of opposite effect in the earth as well and those might be whistlers.
Oh, that's fascinating.
Look, most people out there are, I guess, like me.
I'll get complaints about this, but again, Journey into the Center of the Earth with Pat Boone, that's all I know.
A great movie.
It was a great movie, actually, in a lot of ways, but what the hell's underground?
I mean, when you really get that far underground, is there... does it begin to get hot?
Does it start to get colder?
Does it get wet?
Does it get dry?
A million questions.
What's down there?
Well, I have some pictures of what's down there on my website for those who want to go to it.
But really, the key thing to remember is that there's all kinds of different caves, and some of them are very, very cold, and some of them are very, very hot.
And some places, like when we go to volcanic caves, such as out in the Pacific, there are some islands which have active volcanoes on them.
And we go in these caves, And we go down there and they get very, very hot.
And some of the ones that I've been in there are close to where the magma is flowing.
Really?
And you maybe get these bursts of steam coming through the cave.
So you have to take, in some cases this can be very, very dangerous.
In fact, caving in general can be very, very dangerous if you are not trained.
How hot does it get?
I mean, what's the hottest point you've been close to or in?
Well, it got so hot I had to retreat out of one of the caves, and it was over 120, 140 degrees, somewhere around in there.
Oh, that'll kill you.
I had to get back out of that passage, and there was steam coming, bursting through the passage in waves.
That was near a volcano.
Okay, so then you're telling me though that there are other caves where you can go down thousands of feet and I mean we all think somehow that the earth gets warmer and warmer and warmer as you go down.
Is that a general truth or is it false?
Well it does get warmer and warmer as you get to the center of the earth.
In fact Some of the very deep mines that are in South Africa, the gold mines, where they've dug 6 miles deep, 12 miles deep, and they have these very, very long elevators that take them down there, and they keep digging further and further to get to gold.
And it gets very, very hot.
I had no idea they had gone down that far.
They've dug their way down there.
You're telling me they went down how far now?
Twelve miles deep.
And I have slides of it.
You do?
It's so hot down there and the workers can't work for very long.
It's a very uncomfortable environment.
But caves, generally speaking, we're still searching for those kind of caves that are that deep.
We know that it's possible, but we haven't quite found Caves that are that deep.
My God, that would be, that would be how deep in feet?
Roughly 70,000 feet?
Something like that?
60,000.
60,000 feet.
60,000 feet.
And you believe these exist?
The mines?
Yes.
Well the mines certainly exist and we believe that caves can certainly exist into the 15,000 feet at least.
Because, well we already know We've surveyed and mapped caves that are thousands and thousands of feet.
A couple miles deep.
A mile deep.
I don't know where to begin.
Is there life down there?
Of any kind?
Yes, and we've found such strange life down there.
Like what?
It's amazing.
Like what?
Well, number one, everybody knows there's bats.
Bats, yes.
Bats in caves.
And we find all different kinds of bats.
And they're in there in such huge numbers in some of these caves.
As well as birds in some caves, some of the tropical caves like in Borneo where the biggest passages in the world are.
Birds?
And there's spiders as big as your fist.
Oh now I really want to go down.
There's blind fish swimming in the rivers underground.
And in one cave that I was in We discovered the footprints of some kind of lizard that walked upright and weighed about 20 pounds.
Say what?
This must have been some kind of dinosaur relic that, you know, but this was alive, had made tracks in the passage.
This was reason?
I took pictures of these prints that were in the mud bank.
We swam through In order to get to this spot where this strange animal tracks were found, it took hours and hours, a full day, to get underground.
We would slide down ropes, swim for a while underground in these underground lakes, go over to the side of the lake and go through another passage.
The side of the lake?
Wait, wait, wait!
Here we go again!
That sounds like journey to the center of the earth.
I remember them standing at the end of a lake, an underground lake, almost like an ocean or something.
Now, I bet you've not run into anything that big, but underground lakes, large open areas underground, is there such a thing?
There are lots of them.
Really?
There's these huge water tables underground and when you go down and hit the water table, well like for instance, there's this Huge chamber that's basically in a hollow mountain in Borneo.
You could fit 14 U.S.
capitals, dome and all, inside this thing.
And there's waterfalls and flowing rivers coming out of it.
Really?
It's amazing.
And there's cave divers.
I don't dive myself.
I've been on dive trips where I've been a sherpa for a friend who is a diver.
and gone first we would go down to say minus 1500 feet below ground and you know hours and hours take a whole day to go miles into the earth carrying tanks and then the divers would get in the water in this underground lake and explore further down and find passages that are underwater and continue on Underwater.
What about plant life?
Now, where there's water, you would think that there is some kind of plant life that can exist without sun, isn't there?
There is a lot of plant life that exists without sun.
Some of it under the ocean and certainly in caves.
In fact, in Lechuguilla Cave, which is a fairly recently found cave, that's one of the longer caves in the U.S.
It's like a hundred miles long and in that cave we have found microbes that don't exist anywhere else in the world and scientists from NASA have been there to to check this out and because it is similar to what may be found on other planets and they have checked out these microbes these bacteria and other types of microbes that are in these pools and growing on slimy rock and various places like that amongst the formations of the cave.
Well, it is thought, Bonnie, turning to space for a moment and planets, that there is internal heat, as there is in our planet, despite the fact that there may not be an atmosphere, despite the fact there may not be surface water, Or in some cases there is surface water, but scientists now are beginning to believe, astronomers, that there is internal heat in a lot of these planets and moons.
And so, based on what you're telling me about our own planet, wouldn't conditions 10,000, 20,000 feet, 60,000 feet underground possibly be somewhat similar, and doesn't that bode the strong possibility of life elsewhere?
It sure does.
In fact, these sort of places where we go to underground are very similar to maybe what you might find on another planet or maybe underground in another planet like on Jupiter's moon Io or someplace like that where we go into these caves that have a sulfur environment or were made by the action of sulfuric acid underground and you have these These life forms that are maybe more based on sulfur than they are on oxygen and light and they don't make chlorophyll but they use sulfur to interact with oxygen and exist in this sort of environment that is very much like some of the caves that are sure to be found in the future on other planets or the moon or
There's even a branch of speleology called astrospeleology, which is like a futuristic branch in trying to figure out what caves may be like on other planets.
Well, oxygen.
What happens when you get way the hell down there?
Is there oxygen?
Well, you have to watch out for that sort of thing.
There can be buildup of carbon dioxide.
In some of these caves, which makes it a very dangerous endeavor.
I bet.
Not something to be taken lightly.
But is that the exception with regard to what you run into?
Or could you actually have breathable oxygen at 5,000 feet down?
Oh, absolutely.
We have breathable oxygen.
In fact, it's wonderful air down there.
It is?
It's maybe air that... The thing about these caves are, they breathe.
Because of pressure changes at the entrance, there is air flow in and out of these caves on a daily basis.
And some of these caves change their air once an hour.
It's really amazing.
And I've been in caves where there were 50, 60 mile an hour winds flowing through the passage.
Oh, this is incredible.
Hold on, Bonnie.
Bonnie Crystal is my guest.
She's a caver.
And she's telling me things about caves that I never knew and I would imagine you too.
So there's a whole world below our world.
A world that we don't know a damn thing about.
Except what Bonnie can tell us.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to ArcBell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from May 5th, 1999.
This is a presentation of the Coast to Coast AMX-CX-2.
Watching his promotion, that future's out to stay Take my breath away
Take my breath away I can't watch it, I can't wait, till anticipation
Never hesitate to be crazy But, it's not really a surprise to you, is it?
It certainly isn't to me.
Bonnie, you used to be a disc jockey long ago, right?
God, this is scary stuff.
But, it's not really a surprise to you, is it?
It certainly isn't to me.
Sound of a jet taking off.
Bonnie, you used to be a disc jockey long ago, right?
Right.
You know what dead air is, right?
Sure do.
It's a no-no.
Yeah, these damn computers.
I've got computers that run commercials, and there's this little dead air between one and another, and I just can't keep my mouth shut.
I mean, one second of dead air, and I'm there.
That's all there is to it.
I'm not thinking about the commercials.
I'm thinking about what I'm going to talk to you about, and so away I go.
Anyway, light.
So many things I need to know about this far underground.
Are there ever sources of natural light that far underground?
The only sources that I've run into are from worms.
Worms?
There are glow worms in some caves.
Really?
And they're sort of like fireflies.
And they emit their own light.
It's really neat.
I remember fireflies from when I was very young back in the East Coast.
We don't have them here.
And fireflies really are neat.
Is it the same mechanism in the worm that's in the firefly that allows the phosphorescence or whatever it is that creates a light?
I believe it is.
Science doesn't know a lot about that.
I don't study bugs.
But I know that it's like a chemical light process.
It produces a light very similar to fireflies.
Bonnie, could a person live underground?
Oh yes.
In fact, people have lived underground and there's been people that have done it for various reasons for long extended periods of time in caves.
But whether it was to get away from something on the surface, or just to do it as an experiment, The problem with living underground is that of course there's no sun, there's no natural light there other than a few glow worms occasionally and that's only in certain cases.
But people need light and when we go down into these caves we carry light sources with us and we carry three separate sources of light and all this backup equipment but really we don't live down there for very long.
In fact You know maybe we will stay down there we call it bivouacking or bivy down in the cave for maybe a day or two or a week or ten days at the most.
That's a long time.
It is and what we have found from that is when you stay down there for those extended periods of time you start to gravitate more towards a longer day Like, it's almost as if the human body was really made to have a 30-hour, 32-hour long day.
Really?
In other words, without the cycle of light and darkness and light and darkness, other than that that you bring with you, you... a 30-hour day, huh?
Right, and you just, you know, you end up sleeping some of that time, and maybe exploring some of the time, and you make a little camp under there, under, you know, really environmental procedures that we use for camping
underground.
But the day, the natural cycle of people, tends to be more longer than
the 24-hour day on the surface.
And it's just like a natural thing, the cavers end up being up longer.
Do you think it's natural or unnatural? In other words, of course we're fooling with some strange words here.
What is natural?
I have no idea.
But on the surface, we regulate our sleep and our awake time based generally on darkness and light.
But when you're in pure darkness, all of that changes.
That's really weird.
It is.
And it's something that has been looked at in the way of space travel and that sort of thing as well.
And you know, when the astronauts Do you have any sense of why that would be?
I don't really know for sure as a scientist.
Tell them to wake up and they try to keep their schedule on a regular basis
Because they will tend to start having these longer days and they will be out of sync with the people on the ground
Do you have any sense of why that would be I Don't really know for sure as a scientist I can imagine
that maybe If it's our way of preservation of the species to be able
to have a longer day and therefore to
Deal with the day as being a 24-hour day Okay.
We can do the 24-hour day with more energy than we could if we were to have a 30-hour day.
It's just guessing.
Boy, there is so much we don't know and apparently so much we don't know about our own Earth.
Why has there been So relatively little money spent from government agencies to NASA to whatever to go into space and it's not, and I love the space program, I'm certainly not against that in any way, but why hasn't there been at least something on a par with that looking into our own Earth?
The only reason that I can think of is that it's not glamorous.
The glamour's not there.
The caver goes in the cave.
They get all muddy.
They come out looking like the cookie people, covered in crud and slime and dirt.
And it's not glamorous at all.
You don't go, hey, look at me underground.
Nobody cares.
Nobody even thinks twice.
There's nobody to say it to.
Here's somebody from Illinois who asks, could Bonnie please tell us how they determine exactly how far below surface they are?
In other words, do you have any sort of instrumentation that tells you how low you have gone?
Yes, we do.
There's several methods that we use.
In fact, when we go and explore these caves for the first time, we also As we are exploring them, we make a map of where we are in the cave.
For one reason, it helps to be able to get back out.
But, we make a map so that future people, when they come and explore the cave, can tell where they are in relationship to what has already been found.
And we use a clinometer, which measures the angle, and we survey it.
And we use tape measure.
It's a very old-fashioned means, but it's a very good means that we use and we make our maps using these tried and true methods that we've developed over the years.
We also use cave radio.
With the cave radios, we can determine the exact point on the surface where we are underground.
In other words, the above point.
Yeah, I was about to ask.
Now obviously, you don't have access to GPS, the Global Positioning Satellite System, underground.
That's right, we don't.
So if you go a very long way, both horizontally and vertically, dumb question, but how the hell do you keep from getting lost?
Well, the spelunkers use balls of string, and that's a very bad idea, because they end up with all this string going through the passage, and it gets all, you know, it's something that bad organisms can grow on the string, and it's messy, and they don't usually pick it up.
But what we do is, experienced cavers, when they go through the cave, we look at what the cave passage looks like and we try to remember
that in our mind and we also look back occasionally to look at what the cave passage looks
like coming from the other direction as we are going in.
Well, great, but how the heck do you remember?
I mean, you must, to get to thousands of feet below, some of it horizontal, some vertical, you've made a lot of choices, a lot of turns.
Yeah, when you're under there, you've gone a hundred miles underground, you know?
A lot of places look the same, you know?
One speleothem, or cave formation, they look pretty much similar to the other one, but there are differences, and the experienced caver learned to tell the differences between these two and there are names for separate kinds of cave formations and we use these names to remember where we were.
I even got to name a new type of cave formation that we found in the bottom of Lechuguilla Cave and called a Mammalagmite and you know These different kinds of stalactites, stalagmites that we see, some of them are very, very beautiful and translucent.
They're dripping water on them, and that's how they get formed a lot.
Well, I like your name, by the way, much better than NASA's stupid cartoon names for the rocks up on Mars.
That's kind of neat.
You actually get to name formations.
And there are a lot of stalactites and stalagmites and caves and all that, because that's what we all learned in school.
We saw the photographs.
By the way, speaking of photographs, tell me what's up on your website, would you?
Okay, on my website at www.telegen.com.
And we've got a link.
T-E-L-E-G-E-N dot com.
There is links to all the best Photographs of caves in the world and we have pictures right there on my website There's a picture of me in a cave and a friend of mine in a cave and if you click on those you will find links to all the great caves of the world and photographers who have taken pictures of all the wonderful caves like the caves of Borneo and Some of the very very deep caves that are found in Europe one that's called
It's a 5,000 foot deep cave.
There are other deep caves in France and there are caves that have cave paintings that were made by people thousands and thousands of years ago before the Ice Age.
Before the Ice Age?
Indicating that there were people on the surface who did caving, right?
Not that there were people... There were people who ventured into these caves with pine torches and other kinds of animal fat torches that they would burn and bring into the cave, make paintings using foot, make paintings using animal blood, This may sound a little gross, but that's what they did.
These were prehistoric people who lived around, let's say, the Mediterranean shores of France, who ventured back into these caves.
The caves later on ended up getting filled up with water from the entrance, but maybe the area where they made the paintings were not filled with water.
How many places are there that you can go?
I mean, you do hit... that's another thing that most of us have thought.
You know, you dig down not all that far and you find water.
You hit a water table.
Now, how do you as a caver avoid water tables or what do you do when you get to them?
Well, one of the things we do, and this is called a thump, when you are going through a passage and you hit a water table that is basically covering the entire passage and the only way to do is to go well you don't know for sure if there's any passage beyond that right if you need to get scuba equipment special diving equipment and and by the way cave diving is one of the most dangerous endeavors I'm sure it is around I'm sure it is you can't come up for air you know and they carry three tanks and they carry three of the
The breathing apparatus that they use in three of everything and they are laid in down with all this gear plus having to wear helmets and carry three lights and a re-breathing apparatus was developed for caving diving that enabled them to push the underground areas of caves that were totally submerged in water.
I wouldn't do that for a million dollars.
I mean, you could barely get me to scuba dive, but much less to go down with oxygen, and then inside of a place where there's no top, where you can't come up for air, because there is no air, there's only rock, it's all locked in, and you're hoping to find something over on the other side.
My God, that's dangerous!
There are miles and miles of underwater caves that have the most fabulous formations and beautiful areas of them
that no one but cave divers will ever see except for the fact that they take some photographs and bring them up
and put them on websites for everyone to see.
So everybody should take a look at your website and folks on my site we've
got a link to Bonnie's site. Go take a look. You really, really are
going to want to see this now.
Bonnie, this is again a layman's question but have you ever, I guess all cavers,
somehow in their imagination and in their fantasy moments, imagine finding that magic
cave that really heads toward the center of the earth.
with.
Could there be such a thing?
dream for all the cavers. Could there be such a thing?
Certainly there are ones that go very, very, very deep.
Yes. For instance, there's a cave that the very first drop-off that you hit
in this cave is deeper than the Empire State Building is high.
The first drop-off?
Right.
And you need a rope that is that long to rappel down it.
You know we have fun rappelling down.
Then we remember we have to climb this rope back out.
Right so when you go down you're a caver but when you come back up you're really a mountain climber.
Right and we use special gadgets and this is the new technology that's been able to do this was developed Beginning in the 50s, 60s, 70s, honed to a fine art, these methods of going down these deep caves on ropes and then climbing back out of them using this specialized ascending equipment.
But still, it takes a lot of muscle, a lot of... You know, it can take four hours to climb up a rope.
And you know, you climb for a ways, you have to rest, you're suspended in the darkness In the middle of this passage, in the ground, in a deep, deep cave.
And there's nothing around you.
So then, what I suggested is not impossible.
We've not found all the caves.
We've not found all the entrances to the earth, have we?
We haven't found them all.
In fact, the group that I caved with, we find an average of three or four caves a year.
That have never before.
Or new passages.
Brand new things that people have never seen.
Right.
There's sort of a umbrella organization that a lot of the cavers are a member of and that's, you know, the NSS, National Speleological Society, and it was formed to conserve these caves.
Alright, now hold on, Bonnie.
We're at the top of the hour.
I'm going to open the lines for the audience when we come back, because I could just go right on dominating your time.
This is fascinating stuff.
There is something down there.
And this is a lady who's been there.
We'll be right back.
Coast to Coast AM raging on.
You're listening to ArcBell, somewhere in time.
featuring a replay of Osterkost AM from May 5th, 1999.
The Saders have the time of the way to talk about their homes.
There's a girl in this harbor town, she works laying whiskey down.
They say, Brandy, fetch another round. She serves them whiskey and wine.
The Saders say, Brandy, fetch another round. She serves them whiskey and wine.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from May 5th, 1999.
You know, you really ought to know who you're listening to.
Bonnie Crystal is the founder of Trojan Corporation, the first woman-founded company to go public on NASDAQ.
She's invented a new display that doesn't fade from side to side.
You'll be using it in years to come.
Bonnie has invented video noise reduction.
Many of you should know what that is.
Bonnie has written a book that sold three and a half million copies about CB radio.
She's a ham, but most of all, she's a caver.
A serious gamer.
We're talking about what's under us.
What's way under us.
If you have questions, we're going to open the lines now and let you ask them.
Bonnie Crystal, my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
And this of course is Coast to Coast AM.
Well if you want to see what it really looks like down there, she's got photographs.
They're on her website.
That's on my website.
www.artbell.com.
There's something brand new you need to, believe me, you need to check out in our headline section.
This is the first item in the headline section.
But then go on down to the guest section where you'll find Bonnie Crystal's name.
And for heaven's sakes, click on that.
Aren't you curious what it's like way down there?
We've been listening tonight to what it's like way down there.
And I'm going to let you ask some questions.
Bonnie, are you there?
I'm here.
Are you still awake?
Oh, yeah.
You're, you know, I talk to you on 75 meters.
It seems like two and three o'clock in the morning.
So you must be a late bird.
I like the darkness.
You know, so do I. Yeah, I'm a late person.
All right, here comes the general public.
Are you ready?
Sure.
All right, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hi.
Hi, my name's Margo.
Margo, where are you?
I'm in El Cerrito.
El Cerrito, okay.
I'm actually a neighbor of yours.
Okay, so anyways, Bonnie, I saw this show, I guess it was a couple years back, and these two men, they went down this cave, I'm not sure.
Had anybody ever gone in there before?
Anyway, it was this really, really deep hole.
It was a vertical caving thing.
Usually, it fills up with water because I guess it rains there a lot.
It was really dangerous for them to go in.
They didn't go in for very long.
They had a camera with them, obviously, because I saw it on TV.
There were these crystal formations in there that looked like orchids.
Have you ever seen anything like that?
I'll hang up and listen to you on the air.
All right.
Thank you.
Like orchids.
Almost like a crystal flower.
Have you seen that?
Yes.
And they're very, very beautiful.
Even as beautiful as some of the real orchids.
There are various types of crystal formations.
Some of them are called halactites.
And minerals make these.
They combine with the water.
And through capillary action of successive water droplets, depositing minute quantities of crystallized minerals, they build up these flowers and branches like a tree, beautiful white, orange, even green and blue, all the colors It's really a sight to behold.
That is astounding.
Do you ever bring them back?
I don't, no.
Actually, it's a federal crime to do that in the U.S.
Oh, it is?
To take anything out of a cave.
But cave explorers are somewhat superstitious about this.
We believe that if you take anything out of the cave, that it's bad luck.
Bad luck you don't want.
We don't need any bad luck.
It's dangerous enough as it is.
I know climbers have their own superstitions also.
Very strong ones in fact.
To imagine that.
Do you have any photographs of any of this on your site?
Yes, there's quite a few up there and you just follow the links to the various ones.
It's just, you know, you see these wonderful formations and there are some cavers that really like to go and see the formations.
And different people have their different reasons for doing it.
But... What are yours?
I think going where no one has gone before is one of my reasons.
Star Trek underground.
It's Star Trek Underground, really, it is.
All right.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Good morning.
Good morning, Bonnie and Art.
This is Steve in Montero, California.
Hi, Steve.
And I wanted to ask Bonnie a question, and I wanted to relate an experience in a cave that I thought Art would be interested in.
Okay.
I wanted to ask Bonnie, had she ever been In Franklin, I don't think I've been in one right there in Franklin.
The breathing cave you're talking about, I know of the system of caves there, but not that particular one.
I haven't been in that one.
It's a very, very awesome place to go.
We spent our longest time in there.
It was about 18 hours.
There are very few people who have had an opportunity to get back there and sign the register.
That was a very great experience for me.
Amongst cavers, West Virginia is known as Swiss cheese.
It should be a lot of limestone.
A lot of limestone is full of holes.
I want to tell Art, if he ever has an opportunity to be in a cave, one really Fantastic thing to do is to extinguish all your light and not speak, but just sit in the dark.
That's like sensory deprivation.
Actually, your senses are a little more heightened.
You'd be surprised.
I'll be happy to take you on a caving trip, Art.
Really?
I'll bear that in mind.
Maybe 20 feet in.
And Bonnie?
Horizontally.
Bonnie?
Yeah?
I wanted to ask you, and I'll listen off the air.
If you've had any experience running into any lost critters in caves?
Thank you.
I want to go back to what you said earlier.
You said you found the tracks of a lizard that walked on two legs, maybe 10 feet.
Did you say 10 feet long?
We believe that it weighed about 10 to 20 pounds, depending on... We couldn't tell exactly, but I had Some people who study reptiles, scientists, look at the tracks, the pictures of the tracks, and we took close-ups of them.
And what did they say?
And I put it up on a website for a long time and had various scientists looking at the close-ups and narrowed it down to this.
And back in 1960, a group of cavers went in the first part of this cave and was part of a scientific expedition to find out what kind of animals lived in this cave because this cave was known as the world that time forgot and they trapped with a glue trap which is made by you pour out sort of a cookie sheet of glue and then hope that an animal walks across it and they captured
A twenty pound lizard.
A twenty pound lizard.
Right.
Now, this is going out on a limb again, Bonnie, but we all think we know that at one time dinosaurs walked the earth.
Right?
Right.
There have been many changes on the earth and maybe not so many changes in the earth so is it outrageous to ask you whether there is the possibility that if one were to get far enough down or in the right place whichever whatever one might find something that has survived the ages from prehistoric or earlier times that might live within our earth absolutely in fact we have we've already found species of animals
that only exist underground species that are unknown on the surface and these are being found in caves now and almost as we speak there are scientists cave explorers who are finding these type of things and this is you know not really well publicized in fact Caving itself doesn't get a lot of publicity.
And the discoveries that are made in caves of these new species, they go into the scientific journals and that sort of thing.
But not a lot gets said in the general media about the discovery of these different species.
Bonnie, I'm not surprised.
Because in archaeology, when something is... I'm going to have a guest next week named Michael Cremo.
When something is found in archaeology that doesn't fit into the paradigm that the archaeologists say must be, they literally put it up on the shelf and forget about it because it challenges long cherished belief systems that would be shattered should this be true.
And sometimes the people who present this evidence, archaeologists even, are ostracized And can't get jobs, can't get government grants, can't get grant money at all.
They're just, you know, if they say something that doesn't fit in, they're out.
Right.
And to a certain extent, caving in general is almost like that because it's looked at as the dirty science.
The science that Generally people above ground because it's such an intersection of phobias that you have people who don't grow up saying, I want to be a cave scientist.
You just don't hear much of that.
That's true.
You're so right.
There's not funding like there is for going and exploring the undersea or Hi Art, this is Andy from Largo, Florida.
Hi Andy!
Hi, good to talk to you.
Well, pretty much you just answered my question about the forbidden archaeology.
Remember last year or the year before you had a gal who was, I guess the university tried to find a way to fire her because she was Getting into some forbidden archaeology?
That's right.
Okay, now, would this... I mean, okay, you've got a 20-pound lizard.
Now, how far could it possibly get?
I mean, in the laws of physics, would it get to the point where the government would say, okay, we've got to keep a cap on some of this?
I mean, in your opinion, what do you think... I mean, you've got a 20-pound creature down there.
Do you think else could be down there, in your opinion, without getting into too science?
Yeah, if you just move into speculation forward from a 20-pound lizard, which I wouldn't want to see, thank you very much.
I wouldn't even want to see its footprints, actually.
But if you move forward from that and speculate about what other life might exist at great depths, maybe depths we've not even yet been to, What would you speculate about?
Well, there has to be food for that 20-pound lizard.
That's true.
In this particular case where we found this, there was a lot of fish.
Blind fish.
Rather small, maybe only about 2-3 inches long.
But nourishment.
Right.
And these fish were existing on some of the bacteria and other algae and that sort of thing that were down there.
And when I was swimming in the lake with these fish where this thing lived, I noticed that the fish, even though they couldn't see me, they would find me and come up and kind of nibble at my wetsuit.
Really?
It was kind of strange and kind of funny.
Even though they're blind?
Even though they're blind, they go, they attract themselves to things that maybe have a smell in the water or movement or something.
Or heat?
Maybe heat.
Blind fish nibbling on you way below the ground in an underground lake.
Right.
No way!
It was so fun getting down to this lake because we came down this passage and we had to get on rope and go down a vertical drop.
We didn't know where the bottom of the drop was.
We had this long, long rope.
Well, what about that?
In other words, when you're going down a rope, and the rope... How do you know the rope, once it's long enough, even hits the bottom?
How do you know that?
And how do you know that you're just not going to get to the bottom of the rope and fall?
We don't know that for sure, so we tie a big knot on the end of the rope.
We try to look down the passage, but sometimes our lights are not bright enough.
to view the bottom of the rope or maybe it's a crooked sort of a passage down below or
crevice and so we came down out of the ceiling into this huge expanse of a chamber and we
were dropping down in the middle of this chamber and then all of a sudden we're in the water
and you had to swim from there.
Oh my gosh.
So you get off this rope and you start swimming and you make it over to the bank of this underground
lake where it's kind of muddy on the bank and sandy and we noticed these tracks.
And we said, well we thought we were the first ones here and we noticed, well, you know,
it was animal tracks.
Animal tracks.
Lizard tracks.
Yeah.
Biped lizards.
Yeah.
But yeah, east of the Rockies you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hello.
Hi Art and Bonnie.
This is Steven in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Yes, sir.
And I was curious, well, perhaps you could use some underwater night vision if you were under there.
Of course, being that they're blind, you don't have to worry about blinding them like in some of the other deep sea excavations.
But I was curious.
They've retrieved a lot here recently, 7,000 feet, near the thermal vents.
And they're really not all that pressure sensitive if they don't have gas bladders.
And being that they're not light sensitive, with special species like I was saying, pharmaceuticals or geneticists might use for new drugs or whatever other agents, it would be pretty invaluable or would require special permission to retrieve such creatures.
Well, there has been some retrieval of these creatures by various speleologists that study this. It's generally kept
to a minimum for the study purposes and usually they try to study these animals
or plants in situ which means that they try to study as much as
possible down in the cave without taking it out of it.
In the case of the new organisms that were found down in Lechuguilla that are maybe a possible cure for cancer, who knows?
They have tried to cordon off this from the caving world.
Really?
Certain passages of Lechuguilla.
Really?
To make sure that no one goes in these to contaminate these with surface.
Microbes, which could contaminate in such a way as to ruin the environment that these things have existed in for eons and eons, who knows how long.
So then, Bonnie, you're saying the cure for cancer, which many speculate, is in the rapidly diminishing rainforest.
May not be there at all, but may be 10,000 feet underground.
It's very possible, and there have been experiments done towards that direction.
Not in humans, but in the laboratory using some of these microbes, and it shows promise.
The particular organisms are in a protected cave deep underneath the New Mexico desert.
Bonnie, how would a 10 or 20 pound lizard walk on two feet?
Well, certainly dinosaurs did it back, and they were tons.
They weighed tons.
I mean, there are other ones that are on the surface, smaller lizards than that, that run on two feet.
You know, biped lizards.
And there are iguanas in Mexico that are huge.
I mean, as big as a person, walking around on some of the Caribbean islands.
And they're found in the caves.
All right.
Hold on, Bonnie.
So, you think about that.
A 20-pound lizard strolling around on two feet.
How would you like to meet that about 8,000 feet under the earth?
You're going to want to take a look at Bonnie's website.
Just scroll down to the guest area, Bonnie Crystal's name, and we've got the link right there.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM Above and Below.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Costa a Costa Yan, from May 5th, 1999.
The Costa a Costa Yan, from May 5th, 1999.
And I'm gonna make it through the night I'm gonna make it through the night
I'm gonna make it through the night I'm gonna make it through the night
Take the long way home You never see what you wanna see
Forever playing to the gathering Take the long way home
Take the long way home When you're up on the stage
It's so unbelievable Oh unforgettable
I may adore you But then you watch things you think you do
Think you're sad and mean Oh calamity
Take the long way home Oh yeah
Take the long way home Is it real, is it real?
We're talking about not what's up there, but what's down here.
Actually down below us, which may be very much like what's up there.
to coast AM from May 5th, 1999.
And my guest is Bonnie Crystal.
We're talking about not what's up there, but what's down here, actually down below us,
which may be very much like what's up there.
Has that occurred to you?
All right, back it is to Bonnie Crystal.
All right, back it is to Bonnie Crystal.
You hanging in there?
Oh yeah, I like that commercial about the LED flashlights.
What kind of lights do you all carry down there?
We mainly carry electric.
Lights, battery-powered headlamps that are mounted on our helmets, but we also carry LED flashlights as a backup.
Oh, you do?
We do, and... They are amazing, aren't they?
They are truly amazing and wonderful because they last hundreds and hundreds of hours on a set of batteries.
I know.
And for us, that's a matter of life or death sometimes.
Whoever invented the white light, whoever finally got around to the ability to create white light, And they do that with a little array.
I mean, that was an amazing, to me, an amazing invention.
Right, that was a Japanese invention.
Was it?
And originally, we were using amber lights, amber LEDs, for caving.
And I worked on these about ten years ago, and we were using those, but then the white ones came out, and now we use the white ones a lot now.
I can imagine having a few of those in your backpack.
Is a comforting feeling.
I mean, if all else fails.
It certainly is.
And in fact, this kind of relates.
Here's a fact.
Hey Art, how many pounds of gear does Bonnie carry on a typical trip?
I mean, or even a wild one.
Say you're going down 10,000 feet.
How much weight are you carrying with you as you're rappelling away?
We usually, the vertical gear is heavy.
Although there's been technological advancements to make it lighter.
The actual ropes itself, you know, we have to sometimes make several trips to bring in enough rope.
I'm usually wearing on my body about, oh, 25 pounds of gear.
Oh boy.
Plus I carry a pack that has backup batteries, the LED flashlight, various extra headlamps, some food.
And water.
There's the next question.
Do you ever cook underground?
Yes, we do.
You do?
Sometimes we do.
We bring a tiny little stove and burn some sterno or something like that or use carbide.
Right.
Then the question is, does the smoke from that cause any problems?
Well, there's usually enough ventilation and we would do it in a place in the cave where there's enough movement of air through the cave that it wouldn't cause a problem.
And here's a really wild question.
Is there such a thing underground as a flash flood?
Yes, and that's one of the dangers.
You talk about flash floods with cavers and it's one of those things that gives you the heebie-jeebies.
It's very dangerous and we usually, if possible, and this is one of the great things about cavery is you can keep in touch with the surface as to whether it's raining or not up there, but sometimes you can have a flash flood That will start filling up the cave with water.
You have to make your way out of the cave or into higher passages that don't fill up.
You learn to look for these kind of signs.
You listen for water running through the cave.
It's a real danger.
Really, cave exploration is not something that you just want to run out there and go do.
It takes training.
Real knowledge that can't be an instant sort of a thing.
It also takes great big things that I thought only guys had.
First time caller on the line, you're on there with Bonnie Crystal, hi.
Hello there, I can barely hear you sir.
Hi Bonnie, how are you?
Great, how are you?
Where are you?
I am in Las Vegas.
Okay, over the hill.
Well, I wanted to call Well, let's see.
I would say that everything that she does, everything you do, Bonnie, for the earth and
for what the earth is all about and educating people on what the earth is about is amazing.
I haven't seen this since I was in high school.
Also, I tend to read runes.
And when is your next exhibition going to be?
In other words, well, let's see, you're not exactly able to tell people where you're going
because it's a competitive kind of thing.
But can you tell us when it's going to be?
My next major expedition will be in July.
And it's about a month long.
We go up to a base camp thousands of feet up in the mountains to a place where there's a lot of limestone.
And the limestone area will go down to maybe an elevation of 3,000 feet or below and starts up in the 14,000, 15,000 feet area.
So the potential for the cave is deep there.
I'm not saying that it will for sure be a cave that is that deep.
We don't know.
And it's bad luck to forecast that.
I hear you.
But we like to go to the places where there is that potential.
Now let me tell the audience, you're going to be in an unspecified part of South America.
A very remote area.
Bonnie, you and I are going to try and keep contact by ham radio, huh?
Right.
Now, I don't know what the current laws are regarding what can and cannot be broadcast.
I'm going to have to check into it.
It's a very gray area.
But, Bonnie, I would love to be able to either do a live broadcast or do a tape and actually bring you on the air from South America via ham radio.
I'd love to do that.
And you've got a great station there with your log periodic antenna.
Oh, we could do it.
And I'll be at the base camp being able to talk to you, maybe even relaying from cave radio up to a repeater on the surface.
Oh, now that would really, that'd really be, in other words, you could be several thousand feet below ground talking to me here.
Right.
Aye, aye, aye.
Alright.
And I look forward to talking with you, and hopefully maybe you can put some of that on the air there.
Um, you know that if the FCC won't come in and Chomp on me, I'll do it.
And I think I can.
I think we can get away with it.
Yeah, I think it is too.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hi.
Yeah, hi Art and Bonnie.
I've been checking out your website and a couple of things.
First of all, Art, maybe it might be helpful to have or use an internet phone out of South America.
No way, Jose.
You see, she's going to be not exactly close to a phone line.
Okay.
It's a remote area.
There are no phones.
In fact, the edge of the topographic maps is where I'll be.
It'll be in an uncharted area of the surface, next to the edge of the Amazon Basin.
Okay.
I just thought maybe with one of the repeaters down here, there perhaps.
But anyhow, I'm an amateur radio operator.
I also do research for Richard Hoagland, and that's for my call to you.
Actually, I spent the last day or two with Michael Kreml, by the way.
of Forbidden Archaeology up here in the state of Washington.
He'll be on there next week.
Right, he told me about that today.
Anyhow, my question is regarding the underwater smokers that we've had beneath our seas and what you were relating to maybe in the caves and also on the moon of Europa.
You mean volcanic venting?
Yes, what Richard has referred to in the past and talked to you about is called underwater smokers.
And that's where we have the life beneath either the oceans of our planet or perhaps the oceans of Europa, where there's no light existing, that sort of thing.
Solar-based life forms.
Yeah, maybe what Bonnie has found in some of these cases, she's got some pictures of something that might resemble that kind of a scene as well.
We sort of covered that a little earlier, but the answer to the question is, yes, there's microbial life and maybe a lot more, actually a lot more that Bonnie's already identified, way down deep here on our Earth.
And so it would make sense, where there is heat, where there is energy, there's probably going to be life.
And so, under the surface of Europa, for example, it's probably quite likely there's some Kind of life.
And that's, you know, that's close in.
That's near us.
And if there is life up there, it's likely to be in the caves that are on those moons or planets.
Why did you not aim toward the astronaut training program as a matter of curiosity?
I know you wanted to.
It was kind of one of those sort of experiences that I would have loved to have done.
And I've met some astronauts and had a lot of the same common thing that they have.
But, you know, just caving sort of took over my life.
And it was much easier, much more accessible than to try and get into a NASA program or something, although I would have loved it.
And what NASA is doing, they're having to come back to the cavers and go, what are you seeing down in caves?
Because they want to know what to expect when they go to look for life on, let's say, Mars, They are saying it probably had water during the first 500 million years of its existence.
And they believe it may be underground.
Right.
It may be under the permafrost.
Or there may be prehistoric ice down in the caves on Mars.
Just like there is prehistoric ice here on the caves in the Earth.
Are the laws in South America vastly different with regard to what you can do in caves than they are here in the U.S.
There's not a lot of legislation having to do with caves around the world and you know because we are cave explorers we wouldn't want to take anything out although we find archaeological things in caves we don't touch them and we don't tell anyone about them.
Oh?
That's one of the things about caving.
It's part of our, our... Freedom?
Our superstition, you might say.
You don't want to attract anyone to the cave, because caves get vandalized.
And it's a very bad thing, because Mother Nature created these caves, and it took thousands and thousands of years to create them.
They've existed through earthquakes, through floods, through all kinds of cataclysmic events in the earth, and they're still there.
What about precious things like, for example, going down that far, have you ever found gold, diamonds, that sort of thing?
If I did, I probably wouldn't talk about it.
But personally, I've never found any of those riches or anything, and most of that buried treasure or treasure in caves is just a matter of urban legend or legend.
And yet there is gold.
I mean, you talk about the gold mines in Africa.
Most of the rock that gold tends to be in is not conducive to the formation of caves.
There is exceptions to that.
Isn't gold typically found near quartz for example?
Yes.
And that's not conducive to caving?
Although you can find quartz in and around caves.
So in other words... Most of the caves occur in limestone.
So in other words, you could run into a whole bunch of quartz and you could stumble one day into a gold vein.
I guess it's possible.
But I don't know of any of those situations that me or my friends have done.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hi.
Yeah, all right.
This is John from New Jersey.
Hello, John.
I find your topics and guests fascinating.
Thank you.
That was my first point.
Thank you.
And if you bear with me, I wanted to tie a comment into a question I have for Bonnie.
Sure.
It's pretty much accepted as common knowledge that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but as we all know, at one time, that was not the case.
It was considered heresy.
Yeah, it was thought that everything revolved about us.
And Galileo, I'm sure if he were alive, would attest to that fact.
But that being said, why did that not set a precedent in the scientific community to how little we know about this universe?
And from what I've heard Bonnie describe tonight, it just sounds like just yet another frontier that could probably teach us so much and we have so much to learn about.
Why would there, you'd think the scientific community would be chomping at the bit to go down there and find out and discover and explore.
I couldn't agree more.
I just don't understand it.
And maybe Bonnie could maybe give me some insight onto that.
Yeah, awfully good question, Bonnie.
Why is there not more grant money, more interest?
Obviously, there's a lot of science.
There's a lot of unexplored territory.
There are places where man has never put a foot before that you go to.
Why isn't there more interest?
I wondered that myself a lot, and it's really a shame that there isn't more funding channeled into the cave sciences.
In fact, a lot of the scientists are just absolutely, you know, living on the edge.
And, you know, they're not making very much money.
They maybe struggle to get some kind of a position where they can do this.
And it's considered, I guess, one of the outcast sciences.
You get 30 doing it and there's a lot of phobias.
So, and it's not glamorous at all, like, say, climbing a mountain at the summit that everybody knows about.
Well, the summits below ground are invisible.
But it is glamorous.
And as you have described it tonight, it's glamorous, it's dangerous, it's a new frontier, it's all of those things.
And once you've heard somebody like yourself describe it, It's like you want to write to your congressperson and demand grant money.
Well, fortunately, we had the Cave Protection Act finally went into effect in the mid-eighties.
Before that, we were having people go in and cut out, saw up all these formations underground, disturb caves, vandalize them at will, go in and have parties down in these caves.
And as if they were, it was going to somehow miraculously, their effect was going to go away.
It never goes away.
When the cave is trashed by someone, it never goes away.
It stays like that forever.
These caves took thousands, sometimes millions of years to form.
Bonnie, I've got one more hour of the show.
Can you stay?
Sure, I'd be glad to.
You can, alright.
You know, there's something I would like to ask you about.
The nightmare I would have, being several thousand feet underground, particularly in the area that you're going to, there are occasionally earthquakes.
Now, what would happen, and I know that earthquakes occur at varying depths, some of them rather quite deep, and there's nothing I could think of that would be more horrible than to be underground, And to feel the beginning of an earthquake.
So I'm going to just put you on hold, let you relax.
And when we come back, I'm going to ask you if you've ever been underground when it began to shake and the rocks began to fall.
Unimaginable, huh?
Bonnie Crystal is my guest.
We're talking about What's Down There.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight featuring a replay of coast to coast am from may 5th 1999
and you can just feel the sunshine.
You can feel it.
Higher and higher, baby.
It's a living thing.
It's a terrible thing to lose.
It's a given thing.
What a terrible thing to lose My mind had fallen loose and slowly it did surrender
Oh yeah, and I had left my destiny in quite a similar way For the history books on the shelf, it's all to be said
Premier Radio Networks presents Heart Fair, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired May 5, 1999.
And Bonnie Crystal.
She goes underground, way, way underground.
Here's an interesting question.
We'll get to it in a moment.
Art, you know we have military no-fly zones.
I wonder if we have military no-caving zones, from Karen in Houston.
In a moment, I think we'll pop that question.
military no caving the
That's all.
I've always been such an ABBA fan, all my life.
Anyway, we'll be right back with Bonnie Crystal.
so don't move.
Back now to Bonnie Crystal and uh... this has been really some program
You know, I don't think, Bonnie, that I have ever heard a radio program on this subject done before.
Do you know if it's been done?
I don't know of any other ones, Art.
We may be one of the first, except for maybe possibly a couple of local, little, local interest sort of things that might have occurred.
Yeah, I love being first, at least above ground.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal and Art Bell.
Good morning.
Yes, good morning.
Yes, sir.
Welcome back, Art.
Thank you.
You're a genius.
None.
I'm Ed calling you from up your INC in Miami.
O-W-I-N-Z in Miami, yes sir.
Yes, most of the earth below Florida is limestone and I would like to ask Bonnie if she comes in contact with limestone where say about 10,000 feet of brimstones or limestone or sediment or what, what is the composition of that depth?
Yeah, good question.
In other words, mainly limestone, Bonnie, or what do you encounter?
Well, the area below Florida is indeed limestone, and the water table is down there also, so there's some cave divers exploring the caves below Florida.
It's very dangerous for a regular diver to go in that sort of an environment, and it's really a bad idea for that.
But if you're a trained cave diver, you can go in the caves below Florida.
But once you get down below the limestone, if you think of the earth as a billiard ball, the size of a billiard ball, and you put, say, a coating of nail polish over a paint around that billiard ball, That's about the area of the Earth that the little coating that you put on that billiard ball is equivalent to the amount of the Earth that's been explored of the Earth.
One more question.
Five Mile Island, is that comparable to the meltdown that was going to China?
Three Mile Island.
On the island in the Susquehanna River, right?
The China Syndrome you're talking about, right?
If a nuclear reactor melts down, then they say that it will burn a hole all the way to China, right?
Well, one of the connecting points of the caves that are below the earth, if they're caves, how could there be a possibility of a meltdown all the way to China?
Alright, in a lot of ways that's an interesting question.
Of course we've talked about, you know, the scientists tell us, the atomic scientists, that there could be a nuclear reactor that would melt down and then potentially that would keep literally going right on through the earth.
Could that, or is that science fiction?
It's actually fiction.
It's science fiction and it's kind of Sensationalism.
But it can melt down quite a ways, but it wouldn't go down to the center of the earth, and there would be something to stop it.
I mean, it's not that powerful.
But there are vents that volcanoes are occurring that is the molten rock from the center of the earth that comes up through crevices in the earth.
places where you have active volcanoes and that molten rock at two thousand five thousand degrees is flowing out through these fissures and there is a certain area if you dig deep enough anywhere on the earth you will get to this molten rock the magma or what people call brimstone Hey, Bonnie, I said I would ask you about earthquakes.
I want to ask about that.
You are, after all, going into a region where there have been lots of earthquakes.
I mean, what happens if you're several thousand feet, many thousand feet below the surface, and there's an earthquake, a deep one?
Well, it happened to me once.
It did happen to you once?
I was about 15 years old at the time, living in Japan.
I thought well I'll go and explore around there.
I want to find some caves and I went to an area where there had been some tunnels built to house old bomb works where they made bombs and stored them underground.
Right.
I broke off the lock to the front of this tunnel system and I took along a friend of mine at the time and we were just exploring with some flashlights.
Didn't really know about How to go caving and how to do it safely.
And while we were under there, we were hundreds of yards back into the passages, down these old, dank tunnels.
Right.
And all of a sudden, everything started to shake.
Oh my God.
And I thought I was a goner.
I thought that was the end.
And, you know, nobody was ever going to find me.
And that could have happened?
It could have happened, fortunately.
And there was a lot of rock and debris coming down from the ceiling.
It wasn't an earthquake.
It was only about a 4.7 to 5 on the Richter scale.
Oh, that's funny.
But it was enough to scare me to the point where I went running out of there.
Of course, by the time I got out of the cave, And I had so much adrenaline that I just kept going.
The earthquake was over.
You just kept going?
And I just kept going, and I never went in those bomb tunnels again.
Maybe you know a little something about earthquakes.
I mean, when an earthquake occurs, I watch the USGS site.
They always set the preliminary depth at 33 kilometers.
Then later, they give you the real depth.
And earthquakes seem to occur Usually closer to the surface, not that far down, but you know there were some earthquakes I think about a year ago that occurred down in the area where you're going, incidentally, that were hundreds of miles beneath the earth.
You aware of that?
There were, yes, and that is areas where caves are a lot of times are areas where there's been a lot of tectonic activity and Places where there's been tremendous activity of the plates of the earth, the tectonic plates, which is what forms the earth.
They sort of float on the surface of the earth geologically.
And where these crumple together and form these mountains are prone to earthquakes.
And they also is a good place to find caves.
But the thing about caves are most of the ones that I've been in have existed for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.
Somewhat comforting.
And they've been formed out of the action of water flowing through the earth
or magma flowing through the earth.
And they're somewhat stable because of that.
Okay.
Uh, yeah, sure.
Anything there hundreds of thousands of years, that's a pretty safe bet, I guess.
Uh, wildcard line, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal and Art Bell.
Good morning.
Art Bell.
Yes, sir.
Good morning.
How are you?
Fine.
Dave in St.
Louis.
Hi, Dave.
I have a question for Bonnie.
Sure.
Bonnie, good morning.
Are you familiar with Admiral Byrd and his theory of the hollow earth?
And when he traveled there, uh, he came across life forms and things that, uh, well, Aliens, to be exact.
Do you have an opinion about that?
Or do cavers talk about that?
Well, yeah, actually, let's modify the question a little bit.
I doubt you've met aliens other than big lizards, right?
Right.
However, there's a lot of myth that is passed between cavers, right?
There is a lot of myth.
There's various kinds of humorous things.
We have a thing called a hoedag, which is a mythical creature that supposedly comes in and steals your pack when you're caving, or maybe makes your light go out, or something like that.
We call it hoedags, but it's sort of like the little gremlins of cavers, but it's usually set in humor.
Although, if you go to one of the links on my website, I'm sure you'll get to the Hodag site.
If you can go to that, you'll find it.
There's a search engine on the link for my site and just put in Hodag and you'll find it.
They're not real, but cavers think of them as sort of a way to make the caver humble and to know that The earth and forces of the earth are much more powerful than a human and sort of put the human in their place.
I haven't met any aliens underground and I know that there's a lot of myths about under Mount Shasta.
Oh yes.
All this kind of thing.
I can tell you I've been under Mount Shasta.
No aliens?
Haven't met an alien under there yet.
And if you think about it a little bit, if you did meet one, probably you would be regarded as the alien.
Right.
If that was their home and... That's right.
You know, I would be the alien to them.
Yeah, that's right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hi.
Hello there.
Yes, sir.
Oh, hi.
Is Ralph in Austin?
Austin, Texas.
Yes, Ralph.
And my question, I caught it.
Caught the show right after, or just as she was talking about, a glue trap set out at an underground lake?
Oh yes!
Okay, and they, did I hear correctly, they caught a 20 pound lizard, and this was sometime in the 60's?
Right, they also caught a 25 pound rat.
What?
What?
Are there any pictures of this lizard?
I raise monitor lizards, and I'm thinking that the only lizards that really get Cupboards of 20-25 pounds would be your varieted species.
Are there any pictures of this animal available?
Well, you know, originally there were small dinosaurs that were about the size of a chicken.
And there's been a lot of connection made between birds and prehistoric lizards and that sort of thing.
And there still are very large lizards.
The particular one that I was talking about, we found the tracks of it.
And it was identified as being that from people who studied the tracks of animals, scientists who studied the tracks of animals.
We went looking as much as we could, but it didn't want to be found by us.
Or we likely would have found it in the cave.
How could a rat Get to 25 pounds.
I mean, how could that happen?
Well, I guess it had a lot to eat there.
You know, there was these fish, and obviously they were part of its diet, or maybe some of the... How many spelunkers disappear?
There's a few that disappear every once in a while, and maybe are found years later.
There was one that was found dead of course some years back who had been missing for about five years underground and you know some some cavers had gone into an area cave to explore an area of the cave that wasn't on the cave map and found the caver laying there in a passage
Any idea what had happened?
Why he was laying there in a passage, dead?
He probably ran out of light.
Was caving solo.
Which is really kind of frowned upon in the caving community.
The buddy system always... The buddy system works.
It's tried and true.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Good morning.
Am I on?
You're on.
Oh, okay.
I was listening to one of your shows not too long ago.
You were talking about him digging his hole in Siberia.
Oh, yes.
I was just wondering, when Bonnie is underground sometimes, has she ever heard any weird noises or sounds or anything like that?
Good question.
Noises or sound underground.
Is it generally utterly, totally quiet, or are there sounds to be heard?
In most caves, it is utterly and totally the most quiet place you have ever been in your life.
It is like the perfect recording studio.
Well, I know that here where I live, Bonnie, I live sort of in the middle of the serious desert out here, and you can walk outside, for example, after my program, I frequently do, and I just stand there and it's so quiet that you can hear the humming in your own ears.
Now, normally you would never notice that because there would be enough ambient something or another going on around you to prevent that.
But when you got into utter, total quiet, for a while you hear the humming of your own ears.
Do your ears adjust to that absolute silence after a while, or because you're with a group, does that not occur?
Being with a group there are noises moving through the passage.
Now there is one or two exceptions to finding noises underground.
Sometimes there is the flow of water.
Right.
And some of the waterfalls that are underground hundreds and hundreds of feet of drop of water coming through makes deafening sounds.
Wow!
And there was one other situation which was really kind of eerie and we were in a cave up in an alpine area where we had to climb a mountain to get into this cave entrance and then went hundreds of feet below the mountain in this very cold cave about 35 degrees with water running through it and we heard this kind of strange kind of humming sound that was sort of coming through the rock and we were out in a wilderness area
30 miles from the nearest civilization.
Right.
And we had no idea what it was and couldn't figure out what it was.
Did you ever figure out what it was?
We never did.
Because we've had some pretty strange reports of underground homes.
We have them near me.
Taos, New Mexico has had one that still remains a mystery.
So serious that A friend of mine, I've told this story before on the other side of town here, Bonnie, built a porch and, you know, he sunk the two befores, or whatever they were, into the ground to build the porch.
And when he did that, the hum that he would get at night was so bad that he couldn't sleep.
And so, there are things that go on underground that we just don't know about, aren't there?
Certainly, that's a possibility that there is something man-made that's causing this.
Maybe it's something having to do with secret projects or something.
I know that, for instance, you have a lot of things about Area 51, Area 51 on your program, Art.
And we're close to it, and so that might be exactly it.
By the way, he ended up tearing down the porch.
Yeah, he put like a resonator into the earth.
You've got it.
I'm sorry, somebody asked earlier, Bonnie, if I might.
I want to get this in.
We have military no-fly zones, remember this?
Do we have military no-caving zones?
Yes, there are some military no-caving zones, as a matter of fact.
Really?
I've been to some of them.
Oh, really?
There's an area on a Pacific Island.
The Pacific Island is sometimes used as a demolition area.
But there are some great caves in this demolition area, and certain times it's possible to go in there if you make special arrangements for scientific purposes.
But normally it is considered a no-caving area.
I wouldn't want to get blown up while I was caving.
Oh, no.
No, you wouldn't want to get blown up.
And then, of course, you know, you can't go in the caves that are under Area 51 or under China Lake or one of those sort of places, you know.
So, there are some caves that are off limits.
Fascinating.
Well, for the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal and Art Bell.
Hi.
Yeah, hi.
I have two questions.
All right.
Where are you?
Oh, I'm in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Fairbanks.
Way up there.
Okay.
Okay, my first question was about snakes.
You often run into snakes and how far down are they?
Good question.
Yes, snakes do live in caves.
They mostly stay close to the entrance because they feed on surface food.
Good.
So generally the danger of caves, both rattlesnakes and also in some areas of the world asps or cobra-like Uh, snakes.
And one called a Cave Racer, which is a long black...
make about ten feet long alright listen to a joke
uh... hold on money with bob they are called a lot of what you ask question
number two after the break alright alright alright this is where we take a break you're
listening to coast to coast a m where
anything listing for bills so we're in time
on three radio networks
tonight's an encore presentation of coast to coast a m from may fifth
nineteen ninety nine highway
and me the
the the
the You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Welcome to the program, those of you who joined at this hour.
Anything is possible tonight, anything at all.
Who knows?
Coast to Coast AM from May 5th, 1999. Welcome to the program those of you who
join at this hour. Anything is possible tonight, anything at all. Who knows? But
then again, that's kind of the way I like it.
Once again, the world beneath and Bonnie Crystal.
Bonnie, welcome back.
You've been here a long time.
Bet you've never done a four-hour talk show before, huh?
Well, it's certainly a good time here, and I've never reached this many listeners before on this sort of station.
By the way, can they email you on your site?
Yes, you can email me at Caverwoman, C-A-V-E-R-W-O-M-A-N, at AOL.com.
Excellent.
Caverwoman.
And you can get to the site through the link at the Artbell.com site.
All right.
Let's bring back our caller.
Sir, you're back on the air.
You had two questions.
You got one out.
What's the other?
Okay, my other one was, your guest mentioned spiders before in the caves, large ones.
Yes, and I was wondering, especially at the lower levels, do you run across many poisonous species of insect or animal life?
Yes, I have.
Fortunately, none of them have stung me yet, but in the tropics where you have jungle caves, some of these jungle caves have some of the most life forms as far as crawly animals and that sort of thing you find in this one area like place where I was in Borneo where there was in the in the cave there were these fire centipedes fire centipedes and they have the sting of death and then you know the spiders some of the poisonous spiders are as big as your outstretched hand when you look at them with your headlamp they have green eyes
You sort of have retro-reflected green eyes and you can look through the cave and see all these little bitty green eyes looking at you.
Oh, no.
Really?
You need to wear gloves so you watch where you, you know, put your hands and stuff when you're climbing around in that environment or swimming through it.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
Little green eyes while you're swimming underground.
No way.
But it's a lot of fun.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
Hmm.
That and jumping from the Empire State Building onto a tack.
Listen, the jungles of Borneo, you mentioned here, are places where they have headhunters.
Now, these are people who Do exactly what it sounds like they do.
They hunt heads.
Human heads.
That's true.
Have you ever run into a group of these folks?
Yes, in fact, one of them was a Sherpa for me to help me carry some of the gear to the entrance of the cave.
Really?
He wouldn't go in the cave.
He was afraid of going in the cave.
Did you find him sort of longingly looking at your neck?
Well, you know, I couldn't speak his language.
He understood that I would give him money if he carried some of my video equipment that I wanted to video the cave with.
But if he had your head, then he'd have your video equipment and your money.
Yeah, I gave him an LED flashlight.
He was satisfied with that.
It's part of their religion.
They still practice this.
But it's not as much as before.
Good!
What is the concept between taking one's head?
I mean, obviously it's some sort of religious or spiritual thing for them.
What does it mean to them?
Do you have any idea to take a person's head?
It's part of a ritual to gain power.
I don't totally understand their religion.
If I did, I might be able to speak better on the subject, but as I know it, the only thing that is still practiced there is maybe the taking of a head to put underneath the foundation of a house to make sure that the house will be blessed for its existence.
But other than that, it's been illegal in Borneo since the Early 1900s to practice this.
But speaking with some people who know, they still do it.
Well, a lot of things here are illegal and they still are done too.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal and Art Bell.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Bonnie.
You're going to have to speak up good and loud, sir.
Where are you?
I'm in Santa Rosa, California listening on KSRO 1350.
Yes, indeed.
Bonnie gets my vote for most interesting guest in the time I've been listening to you.
Alright.
Two questions for Bonnie.
Thirty-five years ago in Kentucky, I crawled into a shallow, horizontal dirt cave.
It wasn't a limestone cave, and it was twice my body size and got narrower quickly, twenty or thirty feet back in there.
There were tree roots growing through the cave and through the open air in the cave and back into the other wall and there was a little water dripping from them and I assumed it was live tree roots and unfortunately I reached up and touched them and about a three inch section broke off and it was a hollow tube where stone, they were actually stone roots but the coloration looked live And I had a tube in my hand of stone that was about a 32nd, maybe only a 64th of an inch thick.
And I'm wondering, how long would it take for that to have formed?
Do you have any idea?
Probably about 20,000 years.
What a shame I touched it.
The other question was, I'm coming to a stage in my life where I'm going to have time to Do some caving again, which I've done very little.
How do you get involved with modern cave groups?
Where would you look?
The main organization here in the USA is called the NSS, National Speleological Society.
It is a group that you can join and there's a link to it from my website to your local grotto of the NSS or local chapter of the NSS.
Through the local grottoes you can get to know other cavers and also a really great way of doing it is going to one of the national parks that has a cave, like Wind Cave, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, or Mammoth Cave, and going on one of their wild cave tours.
Now the NSS, you can reach them at their number at 8-5-2-1-3-0-0.
2-5-6-8-5-2-1-3-0-0.
one three zero zero two five six eight five two
thirteen hundred and that's the and i think that
in huntsville alabama well i think you very much
all right thank you for calling sir take care of wildcard line you're on the air
with bonnie crystal and art bell good morning uh... good morning now this is larry from fort lauderdale
high larry i'd just wanted to put a second of that vote that this is
one of the most interesting shows
and uh... i think it's caught up all by surprise uh...
I think, like you said earlier, a lot of our thoughts about Down Under was just taken from the old Journey to the Center of the Earth movie, and I think that her descriptions are so good, it just sort of revitalizes the old art of storytelling, you know, from one person to another.
Indeed.
Telling us, you know, in places that we haven't gone.
My question, I had a couple questions for Bonnie, and one was, has she ever brought any equipment down and got Like barometric pressures, does that change as you go deep into the earth or even under the lake?
Right, right.
Yes, we use a barometer, actually it's called an altimeter.
We use it to tell how deep we've gone.
So yes, we carry, in some cases we carry altimeters and now you can get them on wristwatches.
Does it work like in reverse?
Yes, it does.
And as you go deeper it corresponds to approximately how deep you are in the cave.
So the pressure increases?
Right, as you get lower down towards the surface of the earth or under the surface of the earth.
What about in each?
Any magnetic changes?
Have you ever seen anything strange?
Actually, let me modify that color.
She mentioned that there may be mines that go down 60,000 feet in Africa.
Now, if you go up 60,000 feet, there's serious changes that begin to occur.
If you go down 60,000 feet, one could almost imagine gravitational changes.
Well, there certainly is radiation down there.
There's radon.
And I, that's one of my, the aspects of science that I, I'm a radiospeleologist and I study the radiation that's in caves.
Now the gravity itself is about the same as the rest of the earth.
There is a difference in magnetism in some caves like volcanic caves that are in basalt rock that's been formed by volcanoes and that tends to have its own kind of magnetic deflection.
So you have to watch out if you're using a compass underground in those situations.
But, and there's also a study of paleomagnetism that can only be done in caves.
And what that does is it shows how the Earth's magnetic field has shifted over the eons.
So the North Pole hasn't always been exactly where the North Pole is now.
It's shifted.
And the study of Paleomagnetism or ancient magnetism through taking the lag
mites and core samples of stalagmites in caves Can tell us among other things where the magnetic field was
situated as well as what the climate was like in different areas of the earth's history
Wow Thank you very much sir
Anything else?
Well, I was going to ask if she ever ran into that Air Force digging machine going by when she was down there, but we'll save that for another time.
All right.
We actually had a photograph of an Air Force boring machine.
Right.
You've seen it?
Oh, yeah.
It is available for cave rescue.
We've never had to use it before, but... It is?
It's available for cave rescue.
You mean like a DSRV for underwater?
It's an amazing machine.
They can deliver it by helicopter to a place.
You need a big landing zone to use it.
I can't think of an instance where we would want to call one in because it would totally obliterate the cave and there's other ways to do it.
There is the National Cave Rescue Commission which is an organization that trains cave rescuers Has this at their disposal?
Bonnie, kind of a far-out question, but do you think that our government, or any governments on the earth, have done any secret, serious, far underground research and experimentation that we don't know about?
It's very possible, Art.
There's been a lot of experimentation done with not only communication through the rock, but I mean they load up the Upper Peninsula and Lower Peninsula of Michigan with a signal and communicate with stuff right through the rock.
So I don't know what other countries have done in secret, but certainly In Nevada and New Mexico, there's been a lot of underground activity.
Plus, they want to store nuclear waste underground.
Yes, I know.
So they're doing all this study in order to do that.
Do you have any comments on that?
I mean, I live not that far from Yucca.
The proposed nuclear site, right?
The Yucca area, yeah.
Well, what are they going to do with it, you know?
It's a dilemma for everyone.
It would be better if they didn't make it in the first place, but the fact of the matter is, it's already in existence.
Okay, but from what I understand, it's going to require that this stuff be stored safely for, in many cases, tens of thousands of years.
Now, it's not that I don't have faith in our government.
But we haven't ever done anything for tens of thousands of years as a human race.
Not that I'm aware of, anyway.
Right.
So to safely store this stuff and to assume that it will not reach a water table in some Earth movement over a period of tens of thousands of years... I don't know, Bonnie.
I'm not real happy about having it in my backyard.
Yes, and you know, there are better places to put it, like the salt caves in Texas that are more stable.
Yeah, I know, but they see they've got more political oomph down there.
Yeah.
And we've got less.
So guess who loses?
Yeah.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hi.
Hello, Bonnie.
Hello, Art.
Hi.
This goes along with the caller before with the barometric pressure.
Yes.
The content of air, Bonnie, Does it have more oxygen?
Have you done any testing with that?
There's been a lot of study of that.
And it depends a lot on whether or not there is any kind of organic material growing in the cave.
Sometimes the organic material or organisms can make more CO2, carbon dioxide,
or sulfuric acid in the environment can make some changes.
the environment somewhat of the air. But by and large it's pretty good air down there.
I would think so. And there's a certain amount of air that comes and goes throughout the cave
because... Do you ever bring any seismic equipment to like if you're in a cave to see if there's
another chamber you know that isn't far? Oh yeah. There's been some amount of study
towards finding a cave through electronic means.
X-ray, topography, that sort of thing?
Right.
You know, one of the stated goals of the HAARP project in Alaska, believe it or not, is to find underground tunnels and caves.
And I don't know if you're caught up on, are you caught up on HAARP at all?
Yes.
That is one of the purposes, the supposed purposes of it.
It may be possible to do that, and I'd sure like to use some of those techniques to find some of the deeper case.
I wonder if they'll tell us what they find.
Somehow I have serious doubts.
One more.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes.
Where are you?
There was a very big noise on the line right before you answered.
I'm at Chula Vista, California.
Chula Vista.
Robert.
Alright, Robert.
Hello, Bonnie.
Hello, Art.
Hi.
A question about the Point On Palms area of California.
You do anything on caves there?
There's supposed to be a large underground lake up there.
Well the ones that are on military facilities we don't have access to.
But there are caves in just about every area of the U.S.
What about Santa Monica Mountains area?
I couldn't really say exactly.
of the things that cabers don't give out exact locations, but yeah, there are.
What about here near where I am?
It's a place called Crystal.
Oh yeah, there's definitely caves around there.
And, you know, some of the caves around there are actually fairly dangerous.
I don't know which ones you are.
Well, there's one there with a seemingly bottomless pit filled with water and with a pupfish, the endangered pupfish.
Right, yes, that's part of Death Valley.
That's correct.
It's a very small part of, uh, area of Death Valley where they've, uh, got it, uh, fenced in.
And, uh, actually they lost a couple of cave divers in that a while back.
Yeah, very dangerous.
That's amazing.
Alright, well listen, you've been a real sweetheart.
What would you like to plug?
Anything you want to plug?
Well, just the fact that it's such a dangerous activity.
Don't go out there and go caving without getting good training and good knowledge of it.
If you want more information, you can go to my site, go to Art Bell's website, or call the National Speleological Society.
And one more time, you've got an email address too, right?
Yes.
Caverwoman at AOL.com.
Caverwoman at AOL.com.
You want to have some fun, Bonnie?
When you get off here, why don't you go on 75 meters on 3830 and talk to some hams?
OK, we'll do that.
We'll be on lower side bend.
3.830.
3830, folks.
Bonnie will be there in about 10 minutes.
I might be there in 15 or so.
So if you want to talk to Bonnie and your ham, 3830, following the show, which is just about right now.
Bonnie, what a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Sure has, Ken Ark.
Good night.
That's Bonnie Crystal.
And if you'd like to talk to her, and you're a ham, she's gonna be on 3830 in a minute or so.
For me, that's it this night.
I'll see you tomorrow night.
We're gonna be talking about contrails.
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