Bonnie Crystal, CEO of Telegen (NASDAQ’s first woman-founded public company), pioneered flat panel displays and MRI tech while exploring extreme caves—Andes depths over 10,000 feet, South Africa mines at 60,000 feet, and Lechaguia Cave’s 100-mile microbial ecosystems studied by NASA. She details illegal crystal formations, 20-pound blind lizards, and military no-caving zones near Area 51, hinting at suppressed research like Michigan’s rock communication experiments or Nevada’s nuclear waste studies. With only 0.01% of Earth’s caves mapped—like Florida’s limestone depths—she dismisses global magma connections but warns of hidden dangers, from Death Valley’s fenced-off caverns to lost divers. Caving’s "dirty science" status and secrecy reveal a frontier where discovery clashes with bureaucracy and myth. [Automatically generated summary]
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 Cahitian and Hawaiian Islands in the west, eastward in 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 Rumcamp.com and also Intel, don't forget, folks, G2, go get the G2 program.
It is free, M-R-E-3.
come back to my website click on streaming video and there i will be program in almost cv that's what i 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 not a 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 Spelunker.
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, is 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 F-5 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 Hamband.
I met her on the Hambands, well, 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.
She was instrumental in researching at UCSF, University of California, San Francisco, to bring MRI magnetic resonance imaging to a higher resolution at 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 K6XA, 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, Monty longed to explore the void of outer space.
Kind of like Jody Foster and Kodak, 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, I'm no idea 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.
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.
Well, the L C D display, which is the kind that degrades when you get off of the being directly in front of it, is the common display that's seen in laptops today.
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.
But there's another aspect of CB too, 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.
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.
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.
And back in grade school, we learned the word spelunker and comes from the Latin and Greek of spelunk and cave, which is speleo.
And spelunker is kind of an American adaptation for one who goes merrily 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 partying or getting lost in the cave.
Oh, really?
And there's an old joke amongst cavers that spelunk is the sound that's made when a spelunker falls down in the pit of a cave.
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 go through these passages that are maybe barely able to fit the size of your body through it to huge subway tunnel-sized passages and enormous grottos and passages 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.
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 there.
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 caves in the area where the normal tourist doesn't see.
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.
How much in common, out of curiosity, you know, I've done a number of shows recently on Everest and on the disastrous 96 expedition to Everest, to summit on Everest.
And I wonder how much, in a way, in some ways, caving and mountaineering have in common.
Bonnie, are there frequently many choices that you can make?
when you get for example into a cave that didn't not a human foot has traversed before are there you know forks in the road as you go down various uh...
And so I'm going to sit here and I'm going to remember a lot of that, but there were a lot of sort of forks in the road as they went down.
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 have the you carry three lights, you carry three separate sources of light, and go with at least three people.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from May 5th, 1999.
Coast to Coast AM from May
Coast to Coast AM from May 5th, 1999.
5th, 1999.
there's If you could read my mind, love what a tale my thoughts could tell.
Just like an old-time movie, out of ghost from wish him well.
In a castle dark or a portrait 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.
You can see I could read your mind, love what a tale your thoughts could tell Just like a paper matto The guy who trusts yourself When you reach the part where the heartaches come the hero 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 by crystal either has or is about to do that We'll get back to her in a moment Well,
well i think i'll try this speleologist is that the only object and a lot of that three times back nothing to you uh...
no thank you now arm how far down have you been it depends on how you look at it there's depth from the entrance and depth from the surface there was a lot of number of miles right right let's talk about from uh...
the entrance to the case right well that that definitely in uh...
the thousands of feet thousands of feet right you designed the way to communicate with the surface from thousands of feet below ground in you tell us a little about that if you have a low frequency similar to what submarines used to communicate with uh...
other submarines and their bases right and good it 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 and how do radio waves propagate through rock well it's mostly through magnetic energy rather than electrical energy really
and we use big coil on you know a coil about three feet in diameter that's collapsible since it's in a little backpack and we have a radio that's like a walkie-talkie and the radio looks 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 right 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 it's
you said magnetic magnetic right well rf or radio frequency energy what everyone's listening to us now on right comes through and it's both magnetic and electric correct it's a field emanating from the transmitters from the towers 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 station
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 all right and again that's the magnetic transference right oh that's fascinating and and so so you're actually able even down perhaps as far as 10,000 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.
Well, for one thing, it's very, very weak sometimes.
We can just barely pick it up it's through thousands of 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 uh.
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.
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.
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.
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 six 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.
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.
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 1,500 feet below ground and 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.
There is a lot of plant life that exists without sun, some of it under the ocean and certainly in caves.
In fact, in Lechaguia Cave, which is a fairly recently found cave that's one of the longer caves in the U.S., it's, oh, how long is this?
It's like 100 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 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?
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 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.
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?
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 glowworms occasionally, and that's only in certain caves.
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 bivvy down in the cave for maybe a day or two or a week or ten days at the most.
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 that cavers end up being up longer.
I can imagine that maybe 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.
We can do the 24-hour day with more energy than we could if we were to have a 30-hour day.
The only reason that I can think of is that it's not glamorous.
The glamour is 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.
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.
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're going in.
Yeah, when you're under there, you've gone 100 miles underground.
A lot of places look the same, you know.
One philiosm or cave formation may look pretty much similar to the other one, but there are differences, and the experienced caver learns to tell the differences between these different.
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 Lechaguea 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.
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 Lamprechtsoffen-Voge that's in Austria.
And 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.
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 what another thing that most of us have thought that 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 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.
If you need to get scuba equipment, special diving equipment.
And by the way, cave diving is one of the most dangerous endeavors around.
You know, and they carry three tanks and they carry three of the breathing apparatus that they use in three of everything.
And they are laden 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 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.
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.
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...
And 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.
Some of them are called helectites or various, 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.
And 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.
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 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.
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?
Because in archaeology, when something is found, I'm going to have a guest next week named Michael Cremo.
And 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, you know, 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.
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.
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?
Okay, now would this, I mean, okay, you got a 20-pound lizard.
Now, how far could it possibly get?
And 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, what, Bonnie, in your opinion, what do you think, I mean, if you've got a 20-pound creature down here, what do you think else could be down here, in your opinion, without getting into too science fiction?
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 speculated about what other life might exist at great depths, maybe depths we've not even yet been to, what would you speculate about?
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.
We don't know that for sure, so we tie a big knot on the end of the rope.
And 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.
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 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 in plenty 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 Lechagia that are maybe a possible cure for cancer, who knows, they have tried to cordon off this from the caving world,
certain passages of Lechagia 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.
How'd you like to meet that about 8,000 feet under the earth?
If 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.
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You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of...
Coast to Coast AM from May 5, 1999.
The End
Take a long way home You never see what you wanna see River plain to the gallery Take a long way home Take a long way home When you're up on the
stage, it's so unbelievable Oh, unforgettable I may ignore you Then your wife seems to think you're losing the sanity Oh, calamity With a long way Oh, yeah Oh, yeah
Oh, yeah Does it feel like you let's become You just need Mark Bell somewhere in time.
The night featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from May 5th, 1999.
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.
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.
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 cave radias, 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.
And you have to make your way out of the cave or into higher passages that don't fill up.
And you learn to look for these kind of signs.
You listen for water running through the cave.
And it's a real danger.
And really, cave exploration is not something that you just want to run out there and go do.
It takes training.
It takes real knowledge that can't be an instant sort of a thing.
And, well, I wanted to call and 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.
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 I, 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.
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.
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.
We sort of covered that a little earlier, but the answer to your question is, yes, there is 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.
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, which they are saying probably had water during the first 500 million years of its existence.
There's not a lot of legislation having to do with caves around the world.
And, you know, because we are cave explorers and 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.
Yes, it was thought that everything revolved about us.
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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 bid to go down there and find out and discover and explore?
Well, fortunately, we had the Cave Protection Act finally went into effect in the mid-80s.
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 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.
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.
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 are brimstones or limestone or sediment, or what is the composition of that depth?
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.
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One more question.
Five Mile Island, is that it comparable to the meltdown that was going to China?
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.
I was about 15 years old at the time, living in Japan.
And 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.
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.
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.
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.
We have a thing called a hodag, 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.
And we call it hodags, but it's sort of like the little gremlins of cavers.
But it's usually said in humor.
Although there's, you know, 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 just, there's a search engine on the link for my site and just put in HODAG and you'll find it.
But, you know, 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 myth about under Mount Shasta.
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.
Because we've had some pretty strange reports of underground hums.
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?
But in the tropics, where you have jungle caves, some of these jungle caves have some of the the most life forms as far as crawly animals and that sort of thing.
You find in in this one area, like the place where I was in Borneo, where there was in the in the cave there were these fire centipedes.
If I did, you know, 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.
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But speaking with some people who know, they still do.
Yeah, 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.
And through the local grottos, 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 256-852-1300.
And one was, has she ever brought any equipment down and got barometric pressures is that change as you go deep into the earth or under the lake 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 I mean yes
it does and as you go deeper it 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 any any magnetic changes have you ever seen anything strange where actually I was gonna let me modify that color if 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'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 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 stalagmites 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.
Well, I was going to ask her 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.
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?
And 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.
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.
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 change the environment somewhat of the air.
But by and large, it's pretty good air down there.
you know one of the one of the stated goals of the heart project in alaska believe it or not is to find underground tunnels and caves i don't know if you caught up on Yes.