Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM episode ends early after a Sprint outage at 5:30 PT cuts off all but local Pahrump, Nevada calls, leaving him with only residents reporting extreme winds and flooding. A caller near Area 51 recalls a "green particle beam" in 1998, while a telecom expert blames switching equipment failure—no Y2K clock issues despite Bell’s "Y2K" warnings. Local callers share wind damage and the sudden return of service, but Bell shifts to pre-recorded tapes as the crisis persists, marking a rare technical breakdown in his decades-long show. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of Mars.
From the Cahitian 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, maybe this is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
Well, hello there, everybody.
I have a rather unusual announcement to make.
There's probably not going to be a talk show for me tonight because we have no long-distance service as nearly as we can figure out since about 5.30, 5.30 Pacific time today.
All long distance service to Harump, Nevada, where I live, is down.
Down, down, down.
So I'm talking to you in the blind, as it were.
The only calls that I think that I could take would be from other people here in Harump, Nevada.
Nobody from the outside world is able to get through.
The entire sprint service, we understand, is down.
That is a long-distance carrier that provides service to Las Vegas.
We have been experiencing high winds, really high winds, all day long.
And so it's just, it's beyond weird, as I can tell you.
I'm going to hang in for as long as I can and see if I can get this done.
And try and see if it comes back up.
But I really don't expect it to.
They're running a backup tape at my network, which on my instruction they will run.
But as of right now, I'm talking to you totally in the blind.
Unable to take any phone calls at all, with the exception of those here in Perump, Nevada.
Now, if you're in Perump, Nevada, what the hell?
Give me a call.
You're the only ones I can talk to.
talking to, when you think about it, the entire nation, America, beyond Canada, the islands to the west, the Caribbean, but you can't talk to me.
All of the, maybe it's a little, I want I have no idea, but we're now going on certainly in excess of five hours without any long-distance service here.
It's really, really weird.
We were due to have Whitley Streeber here in the first hour because there are obvious developments regarding the book we wrote, The Coming Global Super Storm.
In Venezuela now, as I'm sure you're aware, you've seen the photographs on CNN.
There may be 30,000 people dead in Venezuela.
Some of the worst flooding may be the worst in the history of Venezuela.
Tens of thousands of survivors evacuating the hardest hit areas.
About 150,000 people's homes are gone.
They've only found 1,500 bodies so far, but they're suspecting as many as 30,000 may have perished.
Wow.
And this is a definite continuing indicator of what we have written about in the coming global superstorm, which again, I plug, you can get on my website.
Just go to my website and you can go to amazon.com and order that book.
And you better do it because it has gone out so fast.
The book has sold so fast that there may be a crunch on getting it to you.
So you really need to get it ordered if you're going to.
It's taking off like a banshee.
And I want to thank all of you for that.
But beyond that, it's a very, very important book.
We are obviously undergoing a climate change, and a fairly rapid one at that.
And that is what the coming global superstorm addresses is exactly that, a rapid, sudden, violent climate change.
And so I would urge you to grab that book and take a read.
It's a good read.
It will scare the hell out of you.
But maybe a little bit of that is appropriate.
And by the way, those of you who have not prepared for Y2K, prepare.
Let me do the only thing that I can do right now, and that is open a line for people here in Pahrump, Nevada.
If you're able to hear me on one of our stations, actually, if I wasn't on the air right now, I wouldn't even know it because I have no talk back to my network, no lines I can call them on.
So if you're in Pahrump, Nevada, call me at 727-1222.
Let me give out that number again.
I'm just going to try it just on the off chance that some of you here in Perrump are able to hear me.
And that number in Perrump is 727-1222.
Or 727-1295.
You'll notice I'm not giving any prefixes because nobody, there's no point.
So 7272 or 727-1295.
And that would apply to prump only.
And I see those lines are ringing.
So let me do a quick commercial break here.
Boy, I'll tell you, folks, I've been through some strange stuff in radio, but this one takes the cake.
We'll be right back.
If you want to lose weight, just eating low-fat is not the answer anymore.
You see, new research shows that carbohydrates found in foods like breads, potatoes.
Well, All right, once again, to you in the blind, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, and I think we are indeed Coast to Coast, but the only people who can call us are here in Perrump, Nevada.
And I'm giving out two phone numbers for that right now: 727-1222 and 727-1295.
Now, let's talk to a couple of Prumbians.
That's all I can do right now.
Hello there.
First time callers, area code 775-727-1222.
We don't want you to give your number on the air.
unidentified
No, I'm not going to give my telephone number on the air.
You ought to be able to, you ought to be able to get me on.
Did you hear the last guy I was on?
unidentified
Well, yeah, I have a little tiny clock radio that I've had for 20 years, and I've just kept going up and down.
And finally, I picked you up.
But I mean, I went over here to our little electronic store that we have here in Prompt, and I picked up a radio there tonight with one of those loop antennas and came over.
I'm off of 372, just on the way to Shoshone.
Right.
And I don't know if there's a difference in the area of Prompt, but the CC radio wouldn't pick you up out of 840.
And I tried that loop antenna and everything else.
but as the last fellow said, you really ought to be able to get us over a wide swath of stations if you've got a good radio, but apparently you're in some sort of extremely weird dead area because...
Oh, absolutely.
unidentified
That should have been the end of the story right there.
Maybe we're getting, I'm getting a little taste, Parumpa's getting a little taste of Y2K.
Who knows?
We have no idea, actually, why the service is out right now.
We are having extremely high winds here in the desert, and that may be the cause, or it may be something else.
But, you know, whether it's the weather or it's Y2K, having a little storable food around is a really good idea.
Now, if I wanted to call J. Michael Stevens right now, I couldn't do it.
But you can.
And I would advise it.
They're saying, let's see, what is today's date?
The 22nd.
They're saying, well, actually, the 21st going into the 22nd here.
And they're saying that if you order before December 28th, a few days from now, they will get food to you before January 1st if you have decided it's a good idea to prepare you and your family for whatever may be coming.
Yeah, that was pizza punch, and I've never really told you about that.
That's what we decided to call it.
If we ever put the stuff on the market, we would have to somehow travel back to Paris and find this little tiny Italian restaurant.
I think it was about like 20 miles outside of Paris, the center of Paris, and thank the guy or compensate him in some way if we ever decided to market what we call pisa ponche.
It's the damnedest thing on pisa you have ever tasted.
A friend of mine went up to the winery and had dinner and tried to pay for it with a credit card.
And that's when we found out that nothing was working.
unidentified
Well, I found out also when you mentioned that lady was calling from Smith's, I was just coming out of there and going, oh, that's why the credit card wasn't working.
Well, if it was microwave, I could imagine these incredible winds we were having, you know, turned a dish or blew one over somewhere.
unidentified
Yeah, on the fiber, you know, you have a possibility of it being cut.
But we have self-healing rings most of the time anymore that we install so that...
Yeah, if you get a cut on one end, instead of launching the laser the short direction, say like straight from here to Vegas, we turn around and send it up through radio and bring it back down into Vegas.
Well then, if they had alternate switching possibilities, what kind of catastrophic failure can you imagine that would do this?
unidentified
Well, one of the things that I would suspect is that, you know, there could be a, I've noticed a problem, it appeared to be a switching problem earlier in the week where I was starting to run into a lot of trunking blockages, which is what you would normally be routed through on a long-distance call, either from here to Vegas or anywhere in the world.
The only baffling part to me right now is why you said they could switch and head things toward Reno.
unidentified
Right, but if they had a catastrophic failure on the switch here in Perrunk, you know, it would automatically block the traffic period because no process local calls as far as the trunking abilities on the toll calls, the long-distance calls, it, you know, we can block that real easy.
Wow.
The switch is a fair-sized machine that's in here that's a computer, but it has a lot of functions going on simultaneously as your desktop does.
Sure.
And if you get one glitch in there, you know, they can isolate it to one area.
It could affect just the trunking portion of the switch.
So in other words, we're probably Y2K compliant, but we've had a massive failure.
unidentified
Well, there's lots of things that can cause a failure besides a timing problem with the clock.
And we certainly haven't switched the clock yet to the year 2000.
We've done the tests like that on the upgrades where we go ahead and switch the system during off-peak hours and test it to make sure that it follows through on the switch after we upgrade the system.
Well, so there is somebody involved with the phone company, and so there's been apparently some sort of massive coronary of the system, somehow or another.
All right.
Well, the only thing I've got open lines for is prompt.
And as I said, what I'm going to do, because obviously, you know, we can't go on like this forever, what I'm going to do is go to tape here at the top of the hour if we've not had our service returned.
And I'm not too hopeful considering how long it's been from 5.30 now coming up on 11 o'clock here in the Pacific time zone.