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Sept. 18, 2002 - Art Bell
02:45:49
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Underground Expeditions - Bonnie Crystal - Billy Rogers - Legalizing Marijuana
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From the high desert and the great American southwest, I could tell you that there is
no doubt that there is a great deal of hope for the future.
And this is Coast to Coast AM.
A couple things we're going to be doing tonight.
A lot, actually.
In the first hour, I told you I would go on a hunt for Billy Rogers.
He's the man spearheading the initiative.
The amazing initiative.
Here in Nevada, we've always been a very staunchly, in many ways... You know what?
Not conservative.
Libertarian kind of state.
In other words, people here have always been more More or less kind of rough, tough, out west libertarians they still are.
Believe me, in my town.
And marijuana has always been a very serious offense here.
In fact, marijuana was a felony.
And then, not too long ago, that suddenly became changed.
I mean, I live in a very unusual state, where we have legal gambling galore everywhere.
Where we have legal prostitution in many, more counties than not.
And things happen here that don't happen elsewhere.
It's just a very unusual state.
Soon we'll have all that nuclear waste here.
Now, I have for years said that the madness, really it's time the madness stopped.
I'm not talking about reefer, I'm talking about reefer madness.
And not the madness described by our government so long ago, but the madness of continuing to put people in jail for this.
Now, I know the money forces, and I know what's going on, and I really do.
Politically, I understand the forces aligned against marijuana, not the least of which is government.
But there are certain facts, in fact, most facts surrounding marijuana that have simply been lied about, misrepresented.
Use whatever word you want to use.
And along comes this AP story, and I just flipped out, and they're getting ready to try and legalize.
The voters have approved, signed enough signatures to approve a ballot on the, uh, a ballot question that would legalize three ounces of marijuana for personal use.
Now, this in a state where it was a felony not very long ago, and I flipped out.
And furthermore, the Associated Press story that I read to you said that the organizers and promoters of this, it's about 50-50 right now, you know, split down the middle, and the organizers are gaining ground.
And so I thought, let's find out what's going on.
And so here comes Billy Rogers.
Billy Rogers is campaign manager and spokesperson For Nevadans for Responsible Law Enforcement.
He's the man behind the drive to make Nevada the first state with legal marijuana.
An avid sports fan and blackjack player, he has made three or four trips a year to Las Vegas since he was 21.
Rogers moved to Las Vegas in May to take over the petition-gathering drive of Nevadans for Responsible Law Enforcement.
He had been hired in December by the Washington, D.C.-based Medical Marijuana Project as its Director of State Policies during the spring.
He worked on efforts so far unsuccessful to establish medical marijuana programs in Vermont and Massachusetts.
Then, the Marijuana Policy Project offered him a job here in Nevada for what we're about to talk about.
With passage of Question 9 in November, and again in 2004, adult Nevadans would be permitted under the state constitution to possess up to three ounces of marijuana in the privacy of their homes.
Nevadans have already approved the use of medical marijuana and about 200 have signed up for that program.
For the most part of his adult life, Rogers ran political campaigns.
That's what this is, after all, right?
He and his parents have all served as campaign managers for Democrats seeking the governor's office in Texas.
It's just like a political campaign when you're trying to get something through.
In the early 1990s, Rogers spent three years in Russia editing the Moscow Guardian magazine and conducting seminars To try to teach ex-communists the benefits of capitalism.
And so we shall have now a little capitalism, then we shall have Billy Rogers.
It seems to me we do incredible amounts of harm to our young people when we lie to them.
When we tell them lies about drugs like marijuana, when we tell them it's addictive, It will lead you down the long path to self-destruction and all the rest of that sort of thing.
It's not physically addictive.
We don't have to, I suppose, sell its properties here, but I would be sure proud to be the state, the first state, to tell its young people the truth.
And that doesn't mean marijuana or anything else you would smoke or any drug is good for you, because probably the answer is it's not.
But, you know, this is reality, folks, and people use things like alcohol and drugs and all the rest of it for at least some escape from what they consider to be their everyday reality.
I mean, it's always going to be around.
It's always been around.
It's probably the second world's oldest commodity.
Here is Billy Rogers.
Billy, hi.
Hi Art, it's good to be on your show.
I'm a long time fan and this is a real thrill for me to be on your show.
Really?
Absolutely.
So you've listened?
I've been listening for about six or seven years.
Especially on those long drives to Las Vegas from Texas.
You keep me awake at night and it's always a pleasure to listen to you.
Oh, I can hear the Texas in your voice.
Absolutely.
Hold on one sec, we have a little echo.
Let me see if I can get rid of that.
Might be better, I don't know.
Anyway, you obviously were brought in Well, it does a few things.
First of all, adults 21 and older would be allowed to possess 3 ounces or less of marijuana in the privacy of their own home.
what would it do that uh... question on it if he is past if it passes would it
virtually make marijuana legal well it it does a few things first of all adults twenty one
and older would be allowed to possess
three ounces or less of marijuana and the privacy of their own home
we also have a medical marijuana provision under the care of a doctor
or seriously ill patients cancer patients would have much easier access to uh... medical marijuana
But smoking marijuana would be prohibited in all public places.
Anyone who sold marijuana to children would go to prison under this initiative.
Marijuana would be taxed just like tobacco products, which should provide the state with millions and millions of dollars.
And most importantly, law enforcement officers wouldn't be wasting their time and resources arresting people for small amounts of marijuana.
Alright, now I want to understand how that would work.
In other words, people would assume, I think we'll assume, that when this passes, if it passes, there's no chance they're going to get arrested for getting caught with pot or being in possession of marijuana under three ounces.
Would that really be the case?
I was listening to Washington earlier today, and man, they're making all kinds of noise about The war on drugs continues to include marijuana, and marijuana being awful, and they're really going to bore in from the Fed side of things.
So where would that leave us if we did pass this?
Well, the federal drug czar was in Las Vegas a couple of months ago, and he was asked point blank, will you arrest people for small amounts of marijuana if this initiative becomes law?
And he said the federal government would not crack down on Nevada, that they would not arrest people for small amounts of marijuana.
Nevertheless, he said he was against it.
And I read in the newspaper this morning where the federal drug czars coming out here on October 9th and 10th to tell Nevadans how to vote.
Now, I offer today to pay for his plane ticket.
Now, we will put him on economy class, so we're not going to spend a lot of money to get him out here.
And I don't think they'll take us up on his offer, but the fact of the matter is what the federal government is doing right now... Very unlikely, Billy.
But what they're doing right now is using federal tax dollars to campaign against Question 9.
And our point was, if he's going to come out here, we'll go ahead and pay for his plane ticket so the taxpayers don't have to.
I see.
But my guess is he doesn't want to get in line on Southwest Germany.
You make a very, very good point.
The U.S.
tax dollars, then, are being used to effectively do what you're being paid to do on the other side.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, we have to go out and raise money, and we have to report all of our contributions and all of our expenditures, and the federal government doesn't have to do that.
We've already had the drug czar out here one time.
We've had the head of the DEA out here one time.
Yeah, I know they don't.
Nevadans, as I outlined at the beginning, are quite libertarian.
care what they think and and and about it don't like being told how to vote especially by a couple of
washington bureaucrat yeah i know they don't
uh... nevada's as i outlined at the beginning are quite libertarian i mean
there is a they tend to be conservative but they tend to be libertarian
conservatives and uh... it's kinda like say the hell out of my face and i'll
stay out of your And really that's what this is all about to a large degree, isn't it?
Absolutely.
It's my personal life and if I want to smoke pot, I'm an adult and privacy is my own home.
Just stay the hell away from me.
That's all it does.
Opponents will try to tell you a lot of different things that this will do, but ultimately it protects responsible adults and the privacy of their own home.
And most people in Nevada, as you know, You know, really don't have a problem with what people do in the privacy of their own homes.
Alright, so who would be allowed to possess marijuana should this pass?
Would it apply only to state residents or could Californians and others who come from, I don't know, all over the place?
Yeah, any adult over the age of 21 would be allowed to possess up to three ounces of marijuana.
So, yeah, somebody coming in from out of state could certainly buy a little marijuana and use it here in a private residence.
And one of the things we're looking at is how many tourists come into the state and what would be the economic impact of tourists buying marijuana when they came here.
What would be the impact?
Well, we've asked for an economic impact study.
The estimate that I got was about 1.5 million tourists who come through Las Vegas every year are regular users of marijuana.
The economists are putting together the economic model for us, but I think we're talking about millions and millions of dollars in tax revenue, not only from Nevada citizens, but also from people coming in from out of state.
Well, it's very nice hearing about it.
As it is, we have no state income tax.
That is thanks to gambling.
So you're saying this would even fatten the coffers a little more?
It probably, yeah.
I don't think there's any question that it'd be a good tax revenue source.
Of course, here in Nevada, like a lot of other states around the country, there's a budget deficit, and certainly that could help with the budget deficit, and certainly it could mean more money for education, more money for other government services, or maybe even a tax cut somewhere down the road.
What do you say to people about Children, you know, this is the reason that I'm so adamant about this and have been for all of my career.
And that is that we seem to lie to our children about this.
And I've always thought, you know, these poor children, they get up in a high school or even earlier now, I suppose, and they try marijuana and they say, damn, they lied.
This is OK.
There's nothing wrong with this.
They lie.
It's all a big lie.
And then what's worried me is that they tie this lie in With what I consider to be truth about crack cocaine, heroin, these harder drugs.
And so these poor kids, it's like if you lie to them once, they're going to figure, and who wouldn't, that you've lied to them about the rest of it.
And that makes it more likely they're going to go on and try these hard drugs and really get hooked.
I always thought we ought to tell these kids and the adults out there the truth instead of a lie.
I agree.
We ought to be telling kids that they shouldn't do any drugs, whether it be marijuana or alcohol or cigarettes.
Of course, yes.
I was watching ABC News did a little focus group after John Walters previewed his new anti-marijuana campaign and what the high school kids were saying Was, well, if that's really a problem, and the problem was that, you know, I don't know if you've seen the TV spots, but they say Joe bought a marijuana cigarette and that money was used to gun down eight people in Columbia.
Well, what the kids in the focus groups were saying is, well, if that's a problem, why don't you just legalize it?
Yeah, if you grow it here, nobody has to kill anybody in Columbia.
Well, exactly, especially in a regulated marketplace.
I mean, what happened when you got rid of Prohibition?
All the bootleggers are out of business.
You don't see people in front of schools trying to sell six-pack of beers to kids.
That just doesn't happen.
In a regulated marketplace, first of all, we believe that marijuana would be much less available to children.
There's a difference between the clerk at the 7-Eleven and a drug dealer.
The clerk at the 7-Eleven will card a 16-year-old kid.
trying to buy a beer the drug dealer doesn't cardy bodyguards there there's a
columbia university study uh... recently uh... they came out last month that
that said uh... that they've appalled more than a thousand kids between the
ages of twelve and seventeen and they reported that it was three times easier to buy
marijuana than it was to buy a beer
i imagine that to be true uh... so
so at least let us begin to tell the truth
And what is, you know, in a nutshell, Billy, what is the truth about marijuana versus what we're told?
Well, I don't think anybody on our campaign is going to advocate that people use marijuana.
I understand.
But what the scientific evidence shows is that marijuana is much less addictive than alcohol, much less addictive than cigarettes, much less addictive than cocaine.
Or heroin.
A small percentage of people do develop addiction, but the vast majority... Psychological addiction.
Absolutely.
But the vast majority of people who use marijuana, and 80 million Americans have tried marijuana.
80 million Americans haven't tried cocaine.
80 million Americans haven't tried heroin.
So, I think the evidence is pretty clear that marijuana is not a gateway drug and that marijuana certainly is not as dangerous as drinking alcohol.
Alright, well let's stay, for a second, let's stay with the question of marijuana.
With alcohol, people, some people get sad, some people get, more people get bold, people drive horrendously.
They, in other words, the effects of alcohol, pretty well known by everybody, you've got a lot of really nasty drunks Generally, what are the effects of marijuana versus alcohol?
I don't smoke marijuana now.
It's been a long time, but I would say probably the worst thing that happens when somebody's smoking marijuana is they watch a little bit too much television.
You don't hear stories about people smoking marijuana and getting in fights.
You don't have marijuana brawls like you've got bar brawls.
Again, I think 80 million Americans have tried it.
We've got two presidents who've tried it.
I think there's enough evidence out there to suggest that it is certainly not as dangerous as the other drugs.
Some of the worst consequences are probably gaining weight from the munchies.
Here in Nevada, we already have gambling, and we also, along with it, have a lot of drinking.
Now, what's the alcohol lobby like to take on?
Because in a sense, you are taking them on.
They must be very concerned about this.
We certainly haven't seen any evidence of that.
Really?
No, not at all.
The opponents, the most vocal opponents, in this campaign have been the federal drug czar and the head of the DEA.
We've got some local law enforcement officers who've taken it upon themselves to wage a campaign against us.
I think what's interesting though is of all the people who are opposing us, opposing us publicly, every single one of them gets a check from the taxpayers.
There is yet to be any vocal opposition from anyone who actually uh... arms their money in the private sector or through a
political campaign you know it's it's interesting to me that
that the opponents of this you know i guess if i had uh... you know
if it's my salary were paid by the taxpayers and i could fly around on an airplane across the country i'd
i'd guess i would want to set up a political action committee either to
wage campaign I was in Alaska and read the teletype on KENI when Alaska actually legalized small amounts of pot with a decision by the Alaskan Supreme Court.
And there was never a problem in Alaska with people using marijuana.
I was there, I know.
The problem came when the federal government came to town and said, this just can't be, and waged a real war until it was turned around.
Billy, hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back with a little more of this.
Bonnie Crystal up at the top of the hour.
Whoa, what a fascinating lady.
One of the more fascinating women you're ever going to meet in your whole life, Bonnie Crystal.
She's a caver, and she's a whole lot more.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM in the Night Time.
Mississippi in the middle of a dry spell Jimmy Rogers on the victrola up high Mama's dancing with baby on her shoulder A very old friend came by today Because he was telling everyone in town Of the love that he'd just found And the reasoning of his latest swing He talked and talked and I heard him say
That she had the longest, whitest hair, the prettiest green eyes anywhere, and Marie's name of his latest flame.
Though I smiled at tears inside a world burning, I wished him well, forgetting that he was 75.
He was gone, but still his words kept returning.
What else was there for me to do but cry?
To recharge Bell in the Kingdom of Nye, from west of the Rockies, dial 1-800-618-8255.
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I am Art Bell, and we are going to explore many mysteries.
them dial eight hundred eight nine three zero nine zero three this is coast to
coast am with art bell on the premier radio network a gigantic night ahead for
you I am art bell and we are going to explore many mysteries by the way
speaking of exploring mysteries the pyramid thing the other night I think
I've got the smoking gun on the pyramid show the other night
I really think I've got, I'm afraid I've got the Smoking Gun, and I'm not saying that the whole thing was staged and fake, because I'm a personal friend of Zahia Wass' and I don't want to believe that, but I'm going to have to send you to my website, and any of you who still have this program on tape are welcome to check it out for yourself.
At the beginning of the show, and at least five times at the beginning of the show, they showed the shaft that they were going to attempt to penetrate at the end of the program.
That is represented by the top photograph under what's new right now.
That's what they showed.
And then when they went live, and the program was in and out of live.
You know, they said when they were live.
There was no hanky-panky there.
They were live and then they went to tape segments, came back live.
When they finally came back live and penetrated the door in the pyramid, it wasn't the same.
And if you doubt that, go take a look.
Just go take a look.
Be my guest.
at the picture taken in 1993 in the picture taken in 2002 the the very same photographs that you could see on the television show itself and you're welcome to go back and compare and I don't know folks they didn't go through the same chamber unless these pictures lie unless the same pictures they had on the show lie they did not go through the same chamber and I've got the photographic smoking gun and if anybody has any Any argument with this?
You're welcome to make it.
Happy to have you.
In a moment, we'll return to Billy Rogers.
Stay right where you are.
Once again, here's Billy Rogers.
And as I explained, Billy, I was in Alaska.
I actually read the Associated Press bulletin when I came across the wire.
The Alaska Supreme Court allowed marijuana an ounce, I think it was, or whatever it was.
And this went on for a long time.
And after that Supreme Court decision in Alaska, And everything was just spiffy.
I mean, there really were not problems with it at all in Alaska for a long time.
That is until the government declared the War on Drugs.
When they declared War on Drugs, they sent people up to Alaska and got it overturned.
I mean, campaigned in chill, it was overturned.
Is that the way you recall it?
That's absolutely the way I recall it.
And, you know, again, they've got a lot invested in this War on Drugs.
I mean, John Walters just announced he's going to spend $1 billion.
Over the next 10 years on television commercials.
I mean, there's a whole bureaucracy behind this.
And, you know, they want to protect the money that they're getting.
I mean, I think that's a big part of the opposition.
And I think that's why you see that most of the opposition is not coming from just ordinary people, but they're coming from, the opposition's coming from people who work for the government.
I did want to let your listeners know, you know, we are going up You know, against the federal government on this issue, and it costs a lot of money to run a political campaign.
We're up on television right now, and we bought television ads through October 1st, but we're going to need more money to complete this television buy during the month of October.
And I did want to let your listeners know, if they want to make a contribution to our campaign, they can go to nre.org and make a contribution right on the internet.
Uh, to our campaign.
That's N-R-L-E dot org?
Dot org.
Nevadans for Responsible Law Enforcement.
Uh, acronym N-R-L-E.
I'm sorry, N-R-L-E.
N-R-L-E.
Okay, got it.
Nevadans for Responsible Law Enforcement.
N-R-L-E dot org.
You know, the federal government, I mean, they just launched, just this year, they're going to spend $120 million on these anti-marijuana ads.
So, in other words, you're in a political campaign, really, against federal dollars.
Exactly.
I mean, it's really interesting.
We've raised about $900,000 thus far for this campaign, but we're going up against the drug czar and his $1 billion advertising campaign over the next 10 years.
So it's really important that we stay on television through the month of October.
We're running dead even right now in the polls.
I was going to bring that up.
I read that in the Associated Press story.
It said dead even in the polls, but it said also that proponents, meaning yourself, are gaining.
Yeah, we're seeing it.
We went up on television last week.
I've got a lot of people in this town, some days 50 or 60 people, going door to door.
In Las Vegas, asking people to vote for Question 9.
The reports we get back from them are good.
We're also conducting our own polling in the campaign.
We've seen a surge over the last few days.
I mean, obviously our television commercials are having an impact.
We're defining what this issue is for voters.
This is about protecting people in the privacy of their own home or under the care of a doctor.
And I think when people understand what this initiative really does, Uh, we win.
And we're in a real fortunate position in this political campaign, and it's kind of unique to political campaigns.
All we have to do to win is get the truth out and tell the truth.
The only way they beat us is if people buy the lies of the opposition.
And what about local?
Let's say it passes.
What about local law enforcement?
If local law enforcement happened to be in your home or something and saw marijuana, what would they be able to do or not be able to do?
Nothing.
I mean, if this thing passes and you've got less than three ounces of marijuana in your house, it'd be like if a law enforcement officer walked into your living room and saw six packs of beer.
They wouldn't be able to do anything.
Alright, here's somebody in Lawrence, Kansas who fast blasted me.
It's like they say, the difference between a drunk driver and a stoned driver is that a drunk driver will run a stop sign while the stoned driver waits for it to turn green.
But you know, nobody is suggesting that anybody ought to be out driving under the influence of marijuana, are they?
Absolutely, and this initiative bans driving under the influence of marijuana.
As it should.
Absolutely as it should.
Basically, this is the way we look at it.
If you want to smoke marijuana in the privacy of your own home, the government shouldn't be banging down your front door and taking you to jail.
But if you take marijuana out of the house, and if you smoke it in a public place, or if you get in a car under the influence of marijuana, and you kill somebody, you should go to prison.
That's the current law, and that will be the law if this initiative passes.
I mean, it's real interesting, though, what opponents have been saying.
The assistant district attorney Uh, here in Las Vegas, initially made the claim that if this passed it would throw out all drunk driving laws.
And then he amended it and he said, well, it would throw out driving under the influence of marijuana.
And so we had a legal scholar go in and find 30 cases, 30 legal cases that prove that he was wrong and that DUI laws would remain in effect as they currently are.
Well, it says driving under the influence, right?
I mean, that's right.
Driving under the influence.
Absolutely.
It would remain illegal, but what our opponents are doing in this campaign, they can't argue on protecting people in the privacy of their own home.
Most people are with us on that.
So what our opponents do is they just start making things up.
From this will abolish all drug driving laws, they claim that three ounces of marijuana is 300 marijuana cigarettes, which is absurd.
The federal drug czar said The state of Nevada would be a mecca for drug dealers if this passed.
Oh yeah, what about that?
Well, the legislature in our... Oh no, no, no, wait a minute.
He said a mecca for drug dealers?
A mecca for drug dealers.
Well, no, wait a minute.
I think the drug dealers would leave the state.
Yeah, so do I. In other words, didn't you say that it would be sold in stores under control?
In state licensed shops.
And I guess here's my point.
I don't think the state of Nevada is going to license drug dealers to sell marijuana.
And I think what we know in a regulated marketplace, which is how this would work, that it puts the bootleggers, it puts the drug dealers out of business.
It would rip it out of their hands.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And when we rip it out of their hands, all of a sudden we are going to be able to reduce underage use of marijuana.
It's just simply not going to be available.
To kids in high school and up to the age of 21, because under our provision, if anyone sells marijuana to a minor, they'd go to prison.
So, you know, if you're a clerk at a 7-Eleven and you sell a beer to somebody, about the worst thing that can happen to you is that you'll get fired.
Now, if you're a clerk at one of these state-licensed shops and you sell marijuana to somebody under 21 years old, you know, you're looking at doing some time.
So, you know, I think there's evidence out there, based upon when the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21, underage drinking went down, simply because it was less available.
And I think the same thing would happen with this initiative.
Well, Billy, it would be my opinion that you have come to the right state for a number of reasons.
Number one, because Nevadans are so libertarian, so individualistic.
They're very likely to, and besides, we just got screwed by the federal government with regard to what's happening up at Yucca Mountain, and Nevadans are pretty ticked off at the federal government, and so, you know, the mood may be just right.
Well, yeah, and I'm surprised anyone from the federal government would come here and tell Nevadans how to vote.
I mean, when John Walters comes here in October, I think we're going to tell them to take that nuclear waste with them back to Washington.
Yeah, I mean, I think Nevadans are outraged at the federal government, and it surprises me how vocal these Washington politicians and bureaucrats have been.
But they've got big egos, and I'm sure they don't see what we see here in Nevada, that their opinions on this issue really aren't welcome here.
Alright, what is important in Nevada, I'll tell you right now, is tourism.
That is the most important thing.
That is what supports everything.
You know, hotel rooms, Gambling, all the rest of it.
There are ancillary industries in the state of Nevada, like prostitution, for example.
But what do you think this would do with regard to tourism?
I mean, you could make one case that it would hurt people with, oh my God, they're going to be smoking joints in casinos and stuff like that.
They won't, will they?
First of all, it's banned in all public places, and that includes anywhere where gaming is allowed.
Marijuana smoking would be banned, so you're not going to walk up to the blackjack table and have to sit next to some guy smoking a joint.
That's just not going to happen.
What the head of the Tourism and Convention Center here, what she said was that people come to Las Vegas To do things that they can't do at home.
What she said was that people in Las Vegas aren't exactly dropping their jaws over this issue.
She's a smart lady.
In terms of whether it would help or hurt tourism... There could be a case made that it would help.
I think it would.
I was up in Vermont working on the medical marijuana issue earlier in the year.
Whether you approve or disapprove of gay marriages, They have the civil union legislation up there, but what it has done is it has attracted tourism from all over the country, gay couples who come into Vermont to have a civil union.
If Nevada is the first state that actually does this, I do think you'd have people who might take a trip to Las Vegas or Reno.
Just to experience doing it legally.
What's that?
I say just to experience doing it legally.
To experience doing it legally and also I think it lets It lets the rest of the country know that Nevada really is in touch with the rest of the country.
The lady you spoke to about tourism, she hit it dead on the head.
People have always come to Las Vegas, and to Nevada in general, to do things that they cannot do elsewhere, and this would fall squarely in that category.
Absolutely.
I certainly don't see any evidence that it would hurt tourism.
If there were evidence out there that it would hurt tourism, I think the casino industry would probably be spending a lot of money to defeat this issue.
How many people are in jail across America because of marijuana?
I don't have an exact number in terms of the number of people currently in jail for marijuana possession, but what I can tell you, in the year 2000, the most recent year that they have records for, the FBI Uniform Crime Report, Says that almost 750,000 people across the country were arrested for possession of marijuana.
And here in Nevada, 3,742 people were arrested for small amounts of marijuana in the year 2000.
Law enforcement officers tell me that that took law enforcement officers off the street for 10,000 hours.
10,000 hours.
10,000 hours that could have been spent patrolling our neighborhoods to protect us from violent criminals, 10,000 hours that could have been spent on our on our roads and highways protecting us from drunk drivers.
That's an awful lot of time for law enforcement officers to spend going after a penny antichrist.
When you talk to the average cop, and I'm sure you have the opportunity to do that, I'm sure at the top there's one position, but at street level there's probably another position.
And I know a lot of cops turn their back on marijuana anyway, small amounts of marijuana, they just blow it off because They just are unwilling to give people a terrible record for that.
I mean, they're just unwilling to.
So, what kind of attitude do you see on the street level?
Yeah, I've talked to a lot of cops, and what cops will tell you privately is it's a tremendous waste of time.
What they'll also tell you is what's happened in recent years is they have a lot less discretion.
You know, if they come across somebody with a little over an ounce of marijuana, they have to arrest them here.
And charge them with a felony.
It's still a felony for more than an ounce of marijuana here.
Right.
So, they have very little discretion on the street.
And what's real interesting when you look at the national numbers, in 1990 only about 300,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession.
Ten years later it goes up to 750,000.
Well, marijuana use didn't increase.
What happened was, law enforcement officers have been given much less discretion Through the years in terms of who they can arrest and who they can't.
I mean, back in the 70s and 80s, I mean, you know, law enforcement officers generally have a pretty good idea of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
Sure.
And, you know, during the, you know, during the, certainly the 70s and 80s, I think what happened a lot was if a law enforcement officer caught an individual who possessed marijuana, was an otherwise law-abiding citizen, They pour out the marijuana or whatever and just tell them to go on their way, but what law enforcement officers are telling me now is they don't have that kind of discretion anymore, and that they do have to make arrests of otherwise law-abiding citizens.
Do you think there's quite a bit of grassroots support at the street level with cops for what you're doing?
I think there's some.
I think the law enforcement community is divided, just like the state is divided on this issue.
I mean, I've had a lot of cops tell me Uh, privately that they support this.
We've had people going door-to-door.
Obviously, we've been knocking on law enforcement officers' door.
They say, you know, we're supporting it, but I can't sign your volunteer card.
I can't sign your supporter card.
I might get fired.
You know, at the top, you know, and again, you have to look at law enforcement agencies and, you know, they make money off of this.
And it justifies their budgets.
It's not like police are going to be out of jobs if marijuana laws change.
There's plenty of crime out there.
Andy Anderson is the former president of the largest police union here.
I think he said it best when he said, you know, what law enforcement officers live for is to be there when the big one happens.
When the big crime happens.
They don't want to be in the station doing the paperwork On some guy for a small amount of marijuana.
I mean, law enforcement officers, what they want, what they tell me is they want to be out there to stop the big crimes, to stop the violent criminals.
And, you know, this has taken, you know, nationwide, you're talking about two and a half million hours a year.
Look, even locally, if you could talk about 10,000 hours devoted to finding children who have been snatched by somebody for God knows what horrible reason, maybe we'd solve more of those crimes.
Absolutely.
And again, I think law enforcement officers know this.
They've certainly told us this.
We briefly had the endorsement of a large police union here.
The board voted unanimously 9-0.
They got all this heat from the bosses.
They were street cops.
I think they had it right the first time and ultimately couldn't withstand the pressure and the heat from the law enforcement establishment here.
You know, but again, I think that will change.
I mean, you know, if you look at the medical marijuana initiatives around the country, I mean, in many of the states where it was passed, law enforcement initially opposed it, and then it became law and law enforcement became supportive of it.
Yeah, I saw the recent thing in Santa Cruz the last day or so.
Did that go alright without people getting arrested?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think that makes the case that Nevada can set up a program to distribute marijuana.
Uh, yeah, it went fine.
The Drug Enforcement Administration didn't show up and arrest the mayor.
And, you know, when people say the federal government's going to shut down, you know, the state from distributing marijuana, you know, I just kind of say, what are they going to do, arrest the governor?
I mean, the bottom line is I think there's a difference when... I wouldn't rule out anything, Billy.
Well, I know, and they've really gone overboard in California, but I do think there's a difference When between the government oppressing somebody who's growing medical marijuana in California and arresting them, and the federal government coming in and trying to stop the state government from doing it.
And also, there's one other issue.
Very quickly.
We're putting this in the Constitution.
And we believe the state Constitution trumps federal statutes.
All right, having said that, Billy, we are out of time.
Thank you for being here.
One more time, please, if people would like to make donations to your cause.
Absolutely.
Go to N-R-L-E dot org.
N-R-L-E dot org, and you can make a contribution right now.
Billy, thank you for being here.
Thank you so much, Art.
And we'll have you back.
I'm looking forward to it.
Take care, my friend.
We'll watch Question 9 on the ballot here in Nevada.
Nevada may be the first, and if it is, I'd be very proud That we'd be the first state that would say, not reefer madness, but stop the madness.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
Don't you love a bad day?
Don't you need her badly?
Don't you love her ways?
Tell me what you say.
Don't you love her badly?
Wanna be her daddy?
Don't you love her face?
Don't you love her as she's walking out the door?
Like she did one thousand times before Don't you love her ways?
Now tell me what you say Don't you love her as she's walking out the door?
All your love, all your love, all your love, all your love, all your love is gone
Sing a lonely song of a deep blue tree Seven horses seem to be on the moon
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-9-1-800
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First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
And the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
To reach out on the toll free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nine.
Ah, don't you love her face?
Don't you want to be her daddy?
This song goes out to Amy, a big brother.
Big brother television show.
You see, tomorrow, in all likelihood, or in all probability, she's going to be walking out the door, just like they say.
She's got to be one of the Cuties ever delivered to the face of the globe, actually.
I'm Art Bell.
Coming up in a moment, Bonnie Crystal, who first and foremost is a very close friend of mine, very good friend of mine, and she's an amazing woman.
I've been in electronics all my life, you know, microwave and broadcast and you name it, ham radio, and I've just been there all my life.
And so I know a fair amount about a fair amount.
But Bonnie Crystal, Puts me into the dirt.
I mean, this lady is... She's amazing.
This is an amazing... You're about to meet, if you didn't hear the first program, one of the more amazing women in the world.
Bonnie Crystal is a 21st century explorer and technologist.
As an explorer, She carries her unique viewpoint and quest for adventure to the far reaches of the globe.
She brings back amazing tales of the unknown, wonderful images of her expeditions into the underground world of caves.
While seeking to unlock the mysteries below ground, she is discovering deep caves and venturing into places inside the Earth where no human has gone before.
Sounds like Star Trek.
In a way it is, isn't it, for below ground.
Where no human has gone before.
Walk ever.
As a technologist, her inventions have touched our lives.
She continues to create new technology to benefit present and future generations.
Listen to this.
Bonnie is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Telegen Corporation, the Silicon Valley company known for its new flat panel television monitor called High Gain Emissive Displays, or HGED, We'll tell you about that.
It's going to revolutionize everything.
Ms.
Crystal is a prolific inventor.
Her invention, VNR, or Video Noise Reduction, listen now, shrunk the size of satellite dishes back in the 1980s, making satellite TV a household word.
She's the one who got the dishes down.
She was instrumental in the field of medical imaging, using magnetism by designing higher resolution MRI machines.
Used everywhere now.
I know about MRI.
Bonnie's most recent invention is for broadcasting digital television.
That's known as Telezar's Separate Video Program.
Bonnie is an advocate of personal communications.
She's a licensed ham radio operator with a call sign of KQ6XA.
That's KQ6XA.
Her station can be heard late at night all over North America on our 3830 group.
That's 3.830.
She's also the author of a bestseller book, The World of CB Radio.
Really?
With over 3.8 million copies sold, it is a humorous and informative look at the history and use of citizens banned radio in America.
Oh, we'll talk about that.
As a cave scientist, Bonnie Crystal has been involved in over a decade of cave exploration, cave mapping projects, leading the use of electronic technology for the advancement of cave science.
She wrote the standard for through-the-rock cave radio communication using low frequencies and was the cave technology columnist for America's Caving Magazine.
She is an amazing woman and she's coming up in a moment.
First, I would like to welcome Bonnie officially to the program.
Officially, welcome to the program, Bonnie.
Well, thank you, Art.
It's nice to be here with you.
You're up in the Bay Area?
Yes, I'm here just south of San Francisco.
Okay.
Bonnie, just so we have this straight for everybody in the audience, because this is an amazing story I'm about to tell, and I'm not sure how to tell it except just to briefly tell it again.
I put up a gigantic antenna.
I had I contract my contractor common poor you know
concrete and put up these big two-inch steel poles are made out of steel and
in preparation for what I my dream was my dream was put up this monster
biggest ever ham antenna was a cool idea yeah we did that anyway the contractor did his thing
a very proficiently and then you being a wonderful friend you are knowing the
condition of my back which is lousy came down and volunteered float flew down here
and volunteered to help put up the wire actual antenna itself
which you did it.
And this antenna is now in the air at the highest point, about 100 feet, and then the rest of it's about 60 feet in the air.
It's a big antenna, 1,000 feet in circumference.
It's a big mama.
And it performs as you would imagine such a magnificent antenna would perform.
I mean, the world is mine.
And I've made a couple changes since we first put it up, as you know.
But, Bonnie, there's this thing.
I began noticing that I was getting terrible shocks.
I mean, really electrical, big-time shocks from the antenna.
When I would touch the antenna, And then I would touch the ground, I would get these damn shocks, big shocks.
And so I measured the voltage with an automatic voltometer, probably 10 or 20k, I don't know what it was, and it showed 349, 350 volts on this wire.
Now, you told me, that's not good.
It's eventually going to blow up some of my equipment, or me.
So I, you're definitely right.
So I began a quest to get rid of this voltage.
But, and we'll get to that in a moment.
I have finally gotten rid of the voltage, thanks to you, thanks to your help.
But, you know, this is a pretty big question, Bonnie.
All I've got is a thousand feet of wire high up in the air.
And here's all of this intriguing voltage, enough to make, every time you touch ground with it, a big blue arc.
Now, with no wind outside, it's coated wire, you can take the antenna and tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Every time you tap, you get this nice little blue spark arc.
Actually, a blue arc.
And so that's quite a bit of voltage.
I mean, and the big question here is, where in the hell is it coming from?
Where is the voltage coming from?
Now, I called my local, I've got a power cooperative here in Perot, Nevada, and I called them today, Bonnie, and I spoke with their chief engineer, who was absolutely intrigued.
I said to the guy, look, you guys, you're a power company.
You've got probably two miles of wire sometimes up there that you're not running anything through.
It's just real high wire in the air.
And he said, yeah.
I said, what do you guys do?
He said, oh, we always ground it.
I told him what I've got out here.
And I said, is it possible I'm coupling somehow to your lines?
And he said, how far?
I said, well, about 20 or 30 feet horizontally and about 20 feet above yours.
Nah, that's a 12 kilovolt line.
He said it's loaded.
It wouldn't couple.
Right.
So.
He's so interested, Bonnie, in where this power is coming from.
In the next week or so, he's going to come out and do some tests, bring equipment and do some tests on this wire to ground and find out what the hell we've got here.
He doesn't know either.
I mean, I think we're perhaps talking about... I mean, Tesla was working on two things.
One, free power from the air.
And two, trying to transmit power through the air.
And maybe that's not what this is, but Bonnie, I think that it might be.
Could it be?
Well, you know, throughout the world, all in the atmosphere, there is an electric charge.
And it gets more and more as you get higher.
Above the surface of the earth and there's a and even a differential between your feet and your head as you stand
there Outside there's hundreds of volts of difference between
your head and your feet and now you've got this big wire That's stretched up high in the air
And it's picking up that voltage and it's probably enough to charge a battery charge up a flashlight or something
like that with it Okay, well for a ham like me. This is a monster antenna
But it works great I will vouch for that.
I was up in my car in Northern California, and you were as loud as the Voice of America on your hand station.
Really?
Yeah, as an antenna, it of course does its job.
At any rate, last night I finally took your advice.
I said, this is too much.
I can't stand getting shocked anymore.
So, I went out there with 10 megohms of... I had 10 one megohm resistances for each side of the line, and I put them in, and the voltage was still there.
I was still getting... I got shocked 10, 12 times last night, Bonnie.
I got so sick, I knocked everything over in the room from jumping around from these shocks.
Finally, I kept reducing the resistance until I got to about 250,000 ohms at 4 watts.
In other words, 4 of those resistors in parallel instead of 10 in series.
And that knocked out the voltage.
But the moment I take them out, it's going to be there again, and I can experiment, and I'm going to do that.
So, do you think this... Could this be what Tesla initially got onto when he began talking about free power, free power, free power?
Well, hell, this is free power, in a sense.
I mean, what if you had two or three miles of this wire up 300 feet?
Well, for sure, Tesla experimented with this, and a lot of other people experimented with this.
Ben Franklin, as a matter of fact, was an experimenter with electricity from the air, and he went a step further and actually started flying kites in thunderstorms and that sort of thing, which is not a very good idea.
No.
But certainly, you know, we get these kind of static charges, and the static charge just walking around, and you experience this You know when you're walking around on a carpet or something like that and touch metal arc across and every time you feel that arc anytime you can actually feel a shock whenever you walk across or get a spark you're up above 300 volts and although it's a very small amount of current it's a high voltage and your body just picks it up and metal in the air picks it up so I think
You know, there have been a lot of schemes as to how to harness this kind of power, but by and large, there hasn't really been a big effort in the alternative energy.
So, in other words, I could probably use this if I wanted to harness it to charge batteries or something or another, but I mean, it's virtually always there.
It's out of the air.
I think that's what Tesla was up to, and he may have gone further along with it than this, And then, of course, we know that the government came in and took all of Tesla's records.
Well, he was trying to broadcast power, too.
Yeah.
He was taking big generators and hooking them up to a giant tower and broadcasting at RF frequencies like we do on our ham radios and our AM radio stations and that sort of thing, only at much higher power levels.
And then picking them up, he would walk around with round globe filled with gas that would light up in the
presence of this radio frequency field.
And not connected to any wires, you just walk around with this sphere of glowing gas in a glass envelope.
No doubt while you're irradiating yourself as well.
Yes.
Bonnie, we're going to get to caves and the underground in a few moments because there's so much I want to ask you
about that.
But while we're on the subject of radio, you wrote a book about CB, huh?
I didn't know that.
It was the most popular book ever about Citizens Band Radio.
Oh, really?
And, you know, I was there during the real heyday of CB Radio, and At the time I was traveling a lot, out on the road a lot, and with my RV, and I used to talk to lots and lots of people on the CB radio, and it was a lot of fun.
And there was a whole culture that grew up around it.
It was like, in a way, it was like a predecessor to cellular phones or the internet, because people were talking to each other who had never come in contact with each other before.
So it became a way To exchange information, and of course, you know, you have a whole cross-section of society, so there was good and bad to it, too.
Well, what was the premise of your book?
I mean, was it just sort of the... It was like a how-to, and how it works, and about the culture of it.
Yeah, that's what I was going to ask, the culture of it.
What was the good of it and the bad of it?
Well, the good of it was that it's a free communication system for everyone in the world.
That, you know, has a country that allows it.
And that's a lot of countries now.
And it's independent communication.
Independent of the internet.
Independent of cellular phones.
Free.
You can talk to each other over short distances.
Less than, say, 20 miles.
Although, there is this guy, Bonnie, in Europe.
I think maybe France.
I can't remember.
Somewhere.
Italy, France.
And he's claiming that he's using FM to talk to American CBers.
I don't know if you've heard about that or not.
Oh, you have?
Yeah, well... Do you believe that?
Sure.
The Europeans adopted the FM system of CB, and the Americans originally had the first CB, and that was AM.
Just like FM television in Europe, they like FM in Europe.
So, Americans usually break ground first, and then the Europeans have followed along with the different ways of communicating.
So they did the same thing With CB radio and... But they put their FM illogically just where we did on 27 megahertz, huh?
Right.
And, you know, you can actually... A lot of people don't know the difference between AM and FM.
They know that when they punch their radio, if you reach down and punch your radio dial from AM to FM, you know that a different set of stations come in and it's kind of a different quality.
But the difference really is that AM is...
Amplitude modulation, which changes the power of the frequency that's being sent out.
And FM changes the frequency of the signal that's being sent out.
Should we have logically been FM here?
Would that have been a better deal?
I think it probably would have been good from the standpoint of clarity of communication.
But I think that when it started back in the late 50s, FM was a little more expensive to put together and it started out as a very small radio service and it just grew in such great proportions that it kind of took over itself.
What's the downside of CB that you wrote about?
Well, I guess the downside is that there are people who, just like somebody cuts you off as you're driving along or gets in front of you, there are people who They'll get on there and cuss you out, I guess.
You know, that sort of thing.
And then they tend to get out of hand, some of them with the big amplifiers.
And the fact that there was no licensing of it really made it sort of a renegade service.
It's been a thorn in the side of the Federal Communications Commission for years and years.
We're pretty tightly regulated as amateur operators, but CB is not particularly.
I mean, there are rules, but I've heard they have these shootouts, Bonnie, where they have people who have their amplifier on a trailer behind their vehicle running thousands of watts.
10,000 watts!
10,000 watts!
So much so that the antennas that are on their vehicles have coronal discharges coming from the tops of the antennas.
You mean like they're glowing?
glowing balls of plasma ionized gas glowing purple and fuchsia colored.
It's really amazing.
You can actually hear their voice modulating the air like a flame loudspeaker.
Is that right?
And they demonstrate these in these shootouts to see who's loudest?
Yes, they have big shootouts and people come from all around and get together in a parking lot or in a In a vacant area of a farm.
Why wouldn't the SEC come to visit one of these shootouts?
These people are only running.
They do turn out occasionally.
It's almost like a little black world of itself where they talk to each other and they get together and decide to do it.
It's almost like a secret organization, so to speak, amongst them.
You know, and then they talk about it afterwards.
Oh, really?
Isn't that interesting?
Well, I have a, you know, I have a RV, as you well know, and I have a ham rig in there, but I also have a CB rig in there.
I wouldn't be without it, because when you're out on the road, and the truckers are your best friends, and they've all got CB, and most of them... All the truckers talk to each other.
Yeah, that's right.
They have saved me more times than I can tell you.
If you really want to know what's happening out there on the freeway, Turn on the CB.
Listen to the truck drivers, because they know way ahead of time.
They can save you so much time.
They can save you so much effort.
And, you know, if you can put up with the way the rough manner that they talk, I know there's a lot of truckers out there listening right now.
It's a lot of fun.
I've talked with lots and lots of you guys out there.
Yeah, I've run with them on the highway.
And they also, by the way, know the very best places to eat.
They sure do.
And so this is all the kind of information you can get from TV.
Yeah.
And that's right.
The best, cheapest places to get gas.
And if there's an accident, you hear about it.
If there's a road problem, you hear about it.
If you've got to take a road to avoid an hour's wait, you hear about it.
That's what you get on CB.
Bonnie, hold on.
We'll be right back to Bonnie Crystal.
The big part of the show lying directly ahead of us.
I'm having Bonnie look at the photographs on my website of the thing from Egypt the other night.
We'll talk about that here in a moment because Bonnie's An underground cave explorer.
Some of the deepest caves in the entire world.
I'm Art Bell.
Be it sight, sound, smell or touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sand, or the strength of an oak when it's deep.
In the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing.
To have all these things in our memories home.
And they use them to help us to fight Bye!
Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at area code 775-727-1222.
Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Bonnie Crystal, an incredible woman, is my guest and a very good friend.
Now listen, do me a favor, do everybody a favor, go up to the website, if you happen to see this, even if you didn't see the special on the opening of the, or the drilling of the hole and the looking through the The stone block in this post-Ganton Brink chamber.
Of course, I had Gantt and Brink on the other night.
Now, I want you to look at these photographs.
Number one photograph is from 1993, and it's one they showed early on in the program of what was at the end of the shaft that Gantt and Brink explored, that they were just about to drill a hole in, in which they did drill a hole in, and then look through to another empty Sort of chamber in another door, you know, increasing the mystery.
The problem I have here is that the picture from 1993 and the reality of the program's video itself from now or this week, they're not the same thing.
Not to my eye.
And I have a listener who sent this in and shows us the two photographs, one above the other.
Now, if you can tell me that's the same.
Anyway, Bonnie's You know, somebody who explores underground.
Now, of course, this is above ground in the pyramids, but still locked in stone.
And so I asked her to take a look at it.
We'll get her evaluation, and no doubt yours, as the program continues.
But I think this is a smoking gun.
These cannot be the same doors.
All right, now we're going back to Bonnie Crystal, and she's got extensive experience underground.
The world's deepest caves, in fact.
She was in Peru the last time we had her on.
I talked to her from Peru and then I talked to her by ham radio when she was in Peru and since she was able to hear me very well.
Do you remember that, Bonnie?
That was a lot of fun talking to you from base camp.
We actually named our base camp Gringo Bamba.
We were the only gringos down there.
It was at an elevation of 14,000 feet and we had quite a good contact with you.
Over the ham radio and also by satellite phone on the show.
Yes.
That was in July of 99.
Was it that long ago?
Wow.
Bonnie, you know, my audience got all hyped up about this program coming on Fox about the pyramids.
I saw it.
And thank God you saw the show.
All right.
During the show, they showed the Scanton Brink Tunnel and the door, I don't know how many times, in the beginning of the show, in the first two thirds of the show.
And every time they would show it, They would show the top photograph, the one that we've got here under What's New on my website right now.
They'd show the top photograph, and then at the very end, and what we have here is a grab from the actual video.
Yeah.
Bonnie, are these the same or not?
Well, I'm looking at two rock blocks inside the pyramid, inside the Great Pyramid, which was Khufu's pyramid, the Pharaoh Khufu.
That's right.
Khufu was the pharaoh who claimed that he was the sun god incarnate.
And prior to that, all the other pharaohs had said that they were going to become the sun god after they died.
So maybe they did something different here with the construction of the pyramid with these different passages to let His spirit back out to go back up to the sun or something.
That's one of the theories about what they are, yes.
But I'm looking at these pictures of these blocks that are in the pyramid and I saw them on TV run the $250,000 robot up through this diagonal passage up into the pyramid.
That's right.
And there's two decayed metal handles on this block.
Right about the mid part of the block.
Right.
And you see the 1993 photo, and one of the handles on the right is a little bit longer than the one on the left.
And then you look at it in what they showed the other night, and it shows that the two handles are the same length.
How could that be?
Well, it looks to me, you know, I've been in these kind of situations where, you know, archaeologists get to a place and They start stumbling around, or they start doing stuff, and sometimes they break things.
And they try not to make a big deal out of it, and I can see why they wouldn't want to say on TV that they broke the handle off the block.
But it looks to me as if between 1993 and 2002, that they tried to grab a hold of that
right handle there and pull on it.
And it looks like it's broken off.
Otherwise, the block looks pretty similar if you look at the right side.
What I don't understand is that in the live picture on the bottom there, the block would be, in essence, repaired.
In other words, there's less of a hole than there was in 1993.
How can that be?
If there was damage inflicted, It would be larger or more ragged or somehow or another it would reflect the damage.
The dark objects that you're looking at that look like holes in the photo, they're actually metal pieces of metal sticking out from the block that have gotten dark over the ages.
Oh, so you think they might have hit one of those?
I think they might have either hit it or went up and grabbed it with a robot to pull on it or to check it out and see what it was.
So either that's true or it's not the same.
One of the two.
Right.
But if you look at the bottom right edge of the block and the top right edge of the block, it looks like the same block.
I was looking at it pretty closely between our commercial break there.
So you think they might have damaged it?
I think it's very possible.
It also looks like they've kind of gouged the top of that passage with the robot as well.
You know, if that really happened, Zahi would have gone ballistic.
I mean, Zahi was It took great pains to say, well, you know, we're going to do this, or we might do this, but safety comes first.
I don't want any damage whatsoever.
So if it was damage, then they didn't bother to mention it.
Yeah, that's true.
Well, I don't know if anybody else noticed on TV, I saw Zhang himself with a crowbar damage one of the sarcophagi.
Yeah, that's right.
I know, I saw that.
Did anybody else notice that?
I noticed that, yes.
The first plunge that he took.
Right?
That's true.
It happens in most archaeological digs.
It happens in caves.
People accidentally, or sometimes vandals on purpose, of course, do this kind of stuff.
But even with the best of intentions, I think it's very difficult for us to go through these ancient places and not be like elephants in a china shop.
Alright, I want to get a little bit more on technology.
You've been part of the Silicon Valley technological revolution.
It seems like, boy, you watch the stocks of the NASDAQ companies and computer companies and everybody's in so much trouble, more than even average the rest of the economy.
I mean, what's going on up in Silicon Valley now?
Well, there's a big temporary downturn in it right now, but The thing about it is that if you think about why Silicon Valley is here and what it's doing and the fact that it's creating new stuff and that the only stuff that can be of any real worth in the future is being created from people.
I like to say that there's really only two places in the world where property is being created every day.
One of them is over in Hawaii.
There's a volcano that's Spewing rock down and moving the ocean out.
And the other are these properties that are being created in the minds of inventors and technologists.
And I think that I'm kind of like a real estate developer of the intellectual property world, you know?
Alright, there was a rumor that went around that your company, Intelligent Was part of a government scientific program to recover extraterrestrial technology?
Where did that come from and is there any basis to any of it?
Well, that was part of it.
One of our trade shows, we went to the Consumer Electronics Show in 1997 when we first leaked out information about one of our new display technologies which is called HGED, High Gain Emissive Display, which is a combination of Vacuum technology and semiconductor technology.
Marrying vacuum tube and semiconductor?
That's right.
It's like the union of the two, you know?
And so we went to this trade show and we said, OK, we're going to make a big splash.
And this technology is so revolutionary that a lot of people think that, you know, it came from somewhere out of this world.
And so some of our marketing people said, yes, well, maybe we can play on that.
And so we built this giant metal disk spaceship.
And it was like 30 or 40 feet across.
Really?
And we rented out the whole parking lot of the Consumer Electronics Show down there near the Hilton in Las Vegas.
Put up a big barbed wire fence and chain link fence.
We hired actors to be with machine, fake machine guns to patrol in fatigues.
And, you know, military uniforms and that sort of thing.
We rented Robbie the Robot.
So you generated all this?
You did it yourself?
We bought the robot from the day the Earth stood still.
Oh, you did?
And we put it out there for everybody to see, and we called this place Area 51.
And we put a big restricted sign, and we converted the disk into a Well, it's so new and so revolutionary that I understand how people could believe that, but pretty good bit, I would say.
it got this the company got this myth around it that maybe it was a plane
recovered technology uh... well it's so new and so revolutionary that i
understand how people could believe that the pretty good bit i would say
so in other words the rumor
with the rumor was true in the sense that you generally uh... we don't want to go to the very first day we put up
this uh... trade show booth
we call it a really good that that although it was nothing like anyone had been before
People didn't want to come in.
They would walk by and it would say restricted area, you know, Area 51, and they'd go, well, you know, this is Las Vegas, maybe this really is restricted.
And so they didn't go in.
I came up and started asking about it, and the next day, there was a line a half a mile long to get into it.
All right, tell me a little bit about the reality of television.
You're producing these flats of panel displays.
What's the difference?
Why is what your company is producing, or invented, I guess you're not producing it, but invented, why is it revolutionary?
How is it different from, I don't know, the monitor I have in front of me, or my laptop, or whatever.
How is it different?
The way that it's different is that it's much less expensive.
And it's a new type of technology.
Previously, we've had television tubes.
That's right.
And those were invented over 50 years ago.
Well, a long, long time ago, back in the 20th century.
And they were used for about 50 or 60 years.
They're still one of the best displays there is for watching TV.
But they're bulky.
And they take up a lot of space on your desk, on your computer desk, and that sort of thing.
That's right.
So we said, okay, you can take this vacuum technology and shrink it down so that it's flat.
And then combine that with semiconductor technology to drive the electrons in it and make a display that looks like a regular TV, but it's flat.
But it's flat.
And it runs on low voltage comparatively.
Right, and lower voltage.
No longer is it thousands of volts.
It doesn't put out x-rays.
And what this is going to do is supplant or replace some of the existing expensive technologies like plasma and LCD that have drawbacks to them.
Like LCD is very sluggish.
You can't really... Although they have television pictures That run on LCD, and you can have LCD televisions.
They're not quite as fast as a regular television set.
That's right.
And the image is not quite as good.
So we developed this really brilliant image, and it's just good.
Everybody loves it.
We really had a great time.
I co-invented it with Jessica Stevens.
She's the original inventor of the first part of the technology.
We got together and produced A lot of prototypes of it.
We have development going on.
We've been working on it for the past 15 years.
And finally, now just recently, we've been able to start commercializing it.
And that's really one of the big breakthroughs.
It's going to be low cost.
It's going to be the cost of a regular TV set only flat.
Only flat.
Wow.
And it's as bright and as detailed as regular TV?
Right.
And eventually it's going to replace plasma.
You know, plasma is so expensive.
It's so bulky.
You put the plasma screen on your wall and it becomes a heater for your room.
It's so hot.
And it's just, you know, they have a short lifetime.
And so this new technology, high gain emissive display, will eventually replace plasma and CRT and a lot of applications.
We'll still have LCD on our cell phones and that sort of thing.
We'll still have it in our laptops.
But think about it.
Every 50 years or so, a new display technology comes along.
And typically they have a lifetime of about 50 useful years before they're replaced by a newer, better way to view images.
If you think about the very first projections of images They were done, this was like hundreds of years ago, a German priest figured out a way to make a candle display an image on the wall.
And the Chinese used shadow images to make plays and that sort of thing.
Every 50 years or so there's a new way, a new and better way.
And I like to think that my grandchildren are going to be watching The flat panel TVs that I'm creating today for the next 50 years.
And you and Jessica have found a better way?
We've found a better way.
Will you be able to prevail?
I mean, there's competitive forces all over the world, of course.
The Japanese... There is.
I mean, the Chinese... We're working with all of those people and we, you know, we feel that we are not like the Sony Betamax.
Okay?
We are not the Sony Beta.
We are the VHS.
We will Licensed to other countries.
We were licensed to other companies.
By the way, my understanding is in the vacuum tube technology aspect of what you were doing, it was so hard to find anybody who knew anything about vacuum tubes anymore that you had to go to Russia.
Right.
We brought some PhDs and a few other people who knew a lot about vacuum tubes over from Russia to work with us.
Here in America, In the 60s, vacuum tubes reached their zenith.
They reached the best that they could be over a long period of time.
And then, semiconductors came in.
And we forgot about vacuum tubes.
I mean, to the degree that people retired and died, and if you wanted to make a vacuum tube, you couldn't find anybody.
Yes, and it was a lost art.
And so we've had to recreate that here.
We brought in a lot of people that knew about vacuum technology.
I came from the old school.
I learned about vacuum tubes.
I worked with vacuum tubes.
And we got together a bunch of folks, engineers, scientists, who knew enough about vacuums and vacuum devices to be able to marry the latest inventions in semiconductors with the best parts of the vacuum tube and bring that into something that is more That's incredible.
Hold on, Bonnie.
We're at the top of the hour.
Take a breather.
We're going to talk a lot about the underground, the deepest caves in the world, and that sort of thing, with one of the most interesting women you're ever going to meet.
Her name is Bonnie Crystal, and she's a genius.
So is Jessica, by the way.
I'll have to have Jessica on sometime.
I could tell you stories, only I'd have to kill you.
from the high desert behind Markville.
I couldn't find the way. So I'll settle for one day, believe me.
Tell me, tell me lies. Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.
Go, go, go, ride.
I gave you love, I thought that we had made it to the top I gave you all I had to give, why did it have to stop?
You've blown it all sky high By telling me a lie Without a reason why You've blown it all sky high To recharge Bell in the Kingdom of Nye, from west of the Rockies, dial 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
800-618-8255, east of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222, or use the wildcard line at 1-775-727-1295.
To recharge on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
It certainly is.
My guest is my friend, Bonnie Crystal.
Her vocation is What you've been hearing about with this high-definition flat-screen technology that Intelligent Corporation is developing, which she is a part of, but her avocation is caving, going down into the deepest holes in the world, the deepest caves in the entire world.
I mean, that's freaky stuff, and we're going to talk about that coming up after one more flat-panel question from Chicago.
We'll be right back.
Going back now to Bonnie Crystal, and by the way, when we're done with the show tonight, maybe I can prevail upon Bonnie to jump on 3830, our favorite frequency.
We move around a little bit because of this odd thing coming out of the Far East.
We're going to talk about it a little bit.
This odd noise coming out of the Far East.
But 3830, we'll try 3830 at about 2 a.m.
Bonnie, can you get on for a brief period after we're done here?
Sure, we'll be on the air with you.
Really?
All right.
That'll be fun, so if you're a shortwave listener out there, or whatever, 3.830, 3830, a 75 meter band, and we'll do a little chatting of program and stuff.
So, one more question about your flat panel display from Chicago.
He says, look, the big one, here's the big one, is it going to be high definition?
That's a good question.
Yes, absolutely.
That's the wave of the future is high-definition, high-resolution, the new kind of television that is coming out, which is wide format, widescreen, and our Level 5 technology, Intelligence HGED Level 5, we have various levels of the technology, Level 3, Level 4, Level 5, is widescreen, high-definition, as big as a plasma display, Hang on the wall type thing.
And you can really see how all the technology is on the website.
There's like a little technology thing, diagrams of how it works.
Intelligent.com website.
Okay.
Can I ask you a question?
Is America bungling high definition?
I mean, in Japan, it's already well entrenched.
It's there.
It's operating.
I think in parts of Europe, it's already well underway.
Yes.
America went about it a different way.
What are we doing?
Are we going the right way?
Wrong way?
What?
Well, it's a little bit more difficult for America to change than it is for some of the other smaller countries.
They can make a mandate and they've only got a limited number of stations to change over, a smaller market, so it's easier for them to move quicker.
That's true.
America has a lot bigger area to cover and, you know, We picked our method of transmission a little earlier than the Europeans and the Japanese.
And I really think that, personally speaking, I think we picked the wrong type of transmission for this.
Although we're kind of stuck with it now.
That's like CB.
It's like CB, yes.
And now we've got this ATSC, they're calling it, and it's the American Transmission Standards Committee.
You know, we do things by committee, whereas these other countries, they get together and they just say, it's going to be this way.
Here's how you're going to do it.
Or else.
You know, you design something by committee and who knows what's going to happen, you know?
Well, we can see what's happening.
And it's a patchwork quilt of kind of insanity out there.
All right, well look, this is all your vocation.
Your application is what a lot of people are interested in.
When I did last week with you, you were down in Peru.
Getting ready to descend into what you thought would be the world's deepest cave, the world's deepest hole.
And there's something about holes that really fascinate people, including me.
But, Bonnie, I wouldn't, not for all the tea in China and all the money that could be offered, would I descend into a hole in the ground.
You do that kind of stuff for fun, don't you?
I go because no one's been there before and that's what I enjoy.
You know, seeing a deep hole in the ground where you shine a light down it and you can't
see the bottom, oh, it just makes me so happy to throw a rope down there and rappel down
the side of the cliff to get to it or down into the hole.
And you know, you get to the bottom of the rope and you have to tie another rope on that.
Oh, God.
Keep going, you know.
There's nothing I could think of that would be scarier than... I mean, bad enough you're going down to a hole and nobody's ever gone down into where light disappeared, but then you get to the bottom of your rope and you've got to attach another rope.
Oh, my God, Bonnie.
How do you... Well, that's exactly what happened the last time I talked to you.
This was in July of 99.
We were on the air talking by satellite phone for about an hour.
That's right.
On this show.
From Peru, yes.
yes and then the very next day we went out and we found the deepest freefall
pit in the southern hemisphere thousand feet straight down oh my god we threw it
We didn't know how deep it was at first.
You know, it's only about 8 feet in diameter.
Yes.
There's grass around the outside of it.
And it's just a hole in the ground.
It's just a hole in the ground.
You're walking along, unassuming.
Picture yourself walking along in a field.
Oh, geez.
And then there's this hole.
It's kind of got grass around the edges of it, and you can't see it until you're right up on it.
Oh, good Lord.
I wonder how many people and animals and stuff are at the bottom of it.
Well, we found the skeletons of some animals and some, you know, in some of the other pits nearby.
One of the other pits that was 850 feet deep, that was very near this pit, we found a complete horse and rider, hundreds of years old, together at the bottom of the skeleton of the horse with the rider on it.
Oh my God.
All right, so going back to this, you threw a rope down.
How long was the rope you threw down this Well, the first rope we had with us was a 650 foot rope, which is kind of a long rope for caving.
Usually you'd take a 300 foot rope or something.
That's a really long rope.
So we attached this with anchors up to the rock above the hole.
We didn't know how deep the hole was.
We threw a rock down, and it takes about 7 seconds to hear the rock hit the bottom from the time you drop it.
It's a 500 foot pit.
Well, we had only been seeing 500-foot pits prior to this, and so we threw this rock down.
We didn't hear it hit, and we figured, well, maybe there's some, you know, plant matter or something that the rock fell on that cushioned the rock, so we couldn't hear it.
And we started to walk away to get another rock to see if we could try it again, and we got a ways away, and we heard this kaboom!
Oh my!
Like 20 seconds later.
And so we figure, well, maybe we've got something here.
And so we threw this 650 feet of rope down the pit.
You tie a knot on the end of the rope so you don't slide off the end of the rope.
And then you get down there and it's nowhere close.
You can't even see the bottom.
It's real dark except for you looking up above you.
Were you the one who did that descent?
Uh-huh.
Several of us did it.
I mean, we're a team.
Caving is a team effort.
And we had nine people on this expedition.
Nine experienced cavers.
And I've got a picture of them, the whole group, on my website.
If you click on it.
We've got a link, as a matter of fact, we've got a couple things on the website.
If you'll go to my website, artbell.com, go to a program, tonight's guest info, You will see below Billy Rogers name you'll see Bonnie Crystal and then we're gonna get to the wild card cave diagram that's really cute you gotta see that and then of course a link to Bonnie's website and what all's on the website?
Well we've got the world that time forgot which I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the show but underground world of Bonnie Crystal we've got South American caving expedition And pictures, images of some of the different fantastic caves I've been in, such as Lechuguilla Cave, which is in New Mexico, the most beautiful cave in the world, where you've got hanging chandeliers made out of clear gypsum crystal that are 20 feet long, hanging down from the ceiling.
You've got flowing rivers underground, where you can swim, totally underground lakes, Uh, holes in the ceiling where you have to drop a rope down into this lake and then swim off the edge of that rope, uh, out into the lake underwater into flowing rivers.
You know, you've got vampire bats down there.
You've got fish swimming in.
Blind fish.
You've got reptiles, you know, 20 feet.
You've got the footprints of biped lizards.
What?
that you run into occasionally.
Two-legged lizards?
Yep, that's what it looks like.
How big are the footprints?
Well, we estimate that the lizards are only about 20 pounds.
20, 20 pounds.
I don't think I'd want to run into one, and I didn't run into one in that particular instance.
I just was right near it and saw the tracks of it.
Oh man, it's got to be on your mind though.
I mean, if you see the tracks, then obviously it's been there and might be there.
So you have to imagine you might run into it.
A 20 foot or 20 pound lizard on two legs.
You know, I'd have a heart attack.
I mean, if I saw something like that underground, that far underground, where no man has been, I would have, on the spot, a heart attack.
No question about it.
I mean, haven't you worried over this kind of thing and what you might meet that far underground?
Well, I don't think I'd want to get up real close to one first off before figuring out whether it was going to lunge at me or something like that.
But I would love to find one and see one, and I came so close to it that it was just, you know, we were looking all around to try and find where it was, but it had been there in the passage right before we walked through the passage.
And I've got a picture of the tracks on my website there.
Oh, you do?
And, you know, it's the world that time forgot.
This cave is just amazing.
You go through the jungle to get to this cave.
You come to an arroyo, which is kind of a river that flows occasionally.
There's a lot of rain, sort of like a wash.
Can I stop you for a second?
Can you guide me?
I'm on your website.
How would I get to the track pictures?
Sure.
Let's go to the underground world of Bondi Crystal, which is on the main website.
Boom!
I'm there.
I have a fast connection.
I would love to see these tracks.
Oh my God, these are cool pictures.
Okay.
Where it says, go thousands of feet under the earth.
Underground world of Bonacres is right below my picture there, on the right side.
Click on go thousands of feet under the earth.
Well, I see your picture.
And then you'll see, as soon as you click, on my picture.
On your picture?
Yes.
Well, there's your picture on the left or the right?
On the right.
I've got several pictures.
Explore the world of Bonnie Crystal.
Bonnie Crystal, 21st Century Exploring Technologist.
The underground world of Bonnie Crystal.
Your picture on the right.
Let me click on it at all.
Okay, do you see where it says go thousands of feet under the earth?
You're on intelligent.com slash crystal dot html.
Go thousands of feet, yes.
Click on that.
I'm there.
Okay, it brings up another one.
The underground world.
And then you will see Oh, I see.
I've got to click on an Underground World 1, World 2, Caving Information, The World That Time Forgot.
How about that?
Sure.
The World That Time Forgot.
Okay, I'm clicking on that.
Okay.
I don't know if that took you to it or not.
Okay.
Oh, here's the Wild Card Cave, and here's the Art Bell Chamber, and Ramona Rock!
I guess we'll have to explain all that, but where do I go now?
Okay.
Click on Underground World 1.
Okay, yeah, here it is.
Underground World 1.
Okay, I'm there.
And now if you page down, you'll see below the crystal chandeliers that are on the left.
You'll see the picture of the yellow helmet there.
Oh God, I see.
Alright, here they are.
Those are the footprints there of a biped lizard.
And my friend Ernie there, who I was taking a picture of, I had him point at the lizard tracks.
Yeah, I see him in there.
Get some scale.
Bonnie, what could be... I mean, you've been as far underground maybe as any human.
What could be really below the Earth?
I mean, I have a million questions.
When you get down 1,000 feet, has it cooled off or is it beginning to warm up?
I mean, we imagine the center of the Earth to be warm.
If you go down 1,000 feet, what begins to happen?
It does.
It starts to get hot.
Really?
It starts to get really hot the further down you go.
When you really take into account the historic nature of where we've gone under the crust of the Earth, we have only touched the very surface.
We've only explored down to less than 0.2% of the 4,000 miles that it is to the center of the Earth.
four thousand miles that it is to the center of the earth.
The deepest hole in the earth is 7.5 miles deep and it's a research project up in Russia's
Oh, yes.
And they're drilling a hole and they've gone down seven and a half miles.
But the deepest caves, the deepest natural caves, are not quite that deep.
They're only a little over a mile deep.
A mile deep.
But the nature of the way that caves are formed There's several different types of cave formations.
There's caves that are formed in volcanic rock by volcanoes.
And actually, sometimes right in the center of the volcano, you have these giant pits that go down very, very deep.
And I've rappelled down into these volcanic pits.
And they go real, real deep.
And then there are side fissures in the rock where the lava flows down the mountain.
And those form what's called lava tubes.
And the lava tubes, eventually the lava flows out of them, it's molten, and forms a shell.
And some islands in the Pacific, such as Hawaii, and various other volcanic islands, have been totally formed by caves.
The Hawaiian islands themselves are totally honeycombed with caves.
The lava tubes are what have formed the islands.
And you can go through these caves.
There's a couple of... Well, isn't it possible, Bonnie, that a lava tube, if you found the right one, could take you way down into the earth?
Because, after all, this lava has come up from way down below the earth, right?
It is very possible.
In fact, one of the lava tubes that I went in, in Hawaii, It was what's called a steam vent, where steam flows out of the lava.
And you went in there?
Well, we timed the steam.
It was sort of like Old Faithful.
Every 40 minutes, it would gush steam out.
Yeah?
And it was very, very hot, near what they call the Rift Zone, where magma flows up into the Kilauea Crater, and then eventually flows out of Kilauea, And on down to the sea and formed this new property, of course.
And so you timed it and descended?
Yes.
We went in for a certain amount of time back as far as we could and we accounted for the amount of time and we could only go in for less than 20 minutes at a time so that we could run back out.
Yeah, of course.
Oh, Bonnie.
You know, to the average person, that sounds like madness.
I mean, You're, I mean, if anything went wrong that were to delay you for 10 minutes, I mean, anything serious, then you would have to be ready for what would be coming, wouldn't you?
A big gush of steam.
Which would potentially, what, boil you alive or something?
That's very possible.
All right, hold on.
Bonnie Crystal is my guest.
Can you imagine that timing When the steam would come rushing out, not to count the possibility of lava, and then descending for 20 minutes, half the time, because you've got to get back up before Old Faithful there lets go.
How many of you would do that?
Lava tubes.
You can imagine, can't you, that a lava tube, if you found the right one, might take you down toward the center of the Earth.
I'm Art Bell.
White bird must fly, or she will die.
White bird must fly, or she will die.
The sunsets come, the sunsets go.
The clouds float by, the earth turns slow.
The young birds I do always roam And she must fly
She must fly She must fly
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-9-1-800
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
And the Wild Card Line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
To reach out on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them
dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nine.
Good morning.
Bonnie Crystal, cam radio operator, KQ6XA, and a very good friend is my guest, and she's At the top of the technological world in terms of innovation.
She's got many inventions and patents under her belt along with Jessica Stevens.
But her avocation is to go to the deepest pits, the deepest caves, get as close to the center of the earth as she can.
Alright, I'm trying to imagine, you know, getting my butt back up before the 20 minutes passes and this thing explodes on my butt, frying me alive.
That's incredible.
But is it possible, Bonnie, that one day you'll discover a lava tube that goes substantially toward, further toward the center of the Earth?
Well, it's very possible that we can get one that, you know, maybe could take us down to molten lava.
That's very possible.
How far down is that, probably?
Well, on some islands in the Pacific, such as Hawaii, that may not be very far.
That may be only 1,000 feet or hundreds of feet in some cases, depending on when the lava is there.
But there are definitely fissures in the earth in Iceland and in Hawaii that go 500 feet or so deep and have still not reached the lava.
Iceland.
Isn't that where Journey to the Center of the Earth, the old Papoon movie, isn't that where they went?
Iceland?
What a classic picture.
I love Journey to the Center of the Earth.
And as a little kid, I watched that Journey to the Center of the Earth, and I thought, take me there.
That's where I want to go.
Really?
Alright.
Here's something on my website that I would like to explain.
When I first saw it, of course we had proposed to do a show with you a long time ago, and my back prevented that.
But you have this diagram.
Again, folks, go to my website, rbel.com, program tonight's guest, Bonnie Crystal, and you'll see related info.
There's this wild card cave diagram.
And we've got it separately listed here.
And when I first saw this, I exploded laughing.
This is in the Andes in South America?
This is the cave that you talked about?
Yes, it's one of the caves.
The day that I talked to you, on the satellite phone, on this program, back in 99, in July 99, I discovered this cave, and I explored it through a rope down, and I was with my friend Cynthia, who's also on the expedition with me, just the two of us out there, and we nearly stumbled into this cave, literally.
You know, some of the places around there, you walk along and you have to really watch every step or you might drop down a hole like this.
But that very day that I talked to you, I found this cave and I thought, and it was right on the ridge, you know, if you consider the Rocky Mountains as they go down through North America and then they kind of go down and think of them as extending down through Central America and down into South America, and eventually become the Andes.
It's really, in a way, geologically speaking, it's kind of like a long mountain chain that goes down through the spine of the continents.
And you always say on your program, east of the Rockies called us, one number west of the Rockies called us, and the wild card line.
Well, here we were on the top of this continental divide down there.
And I said, this is the Wild Card Cave.
It's neither east of the Rockies nor west of the Rockies.
So you call it the Wild Card Cave.
How high up in the Andes were you when you found this?
This was at elevation 14,000 feet.
Oh man, that's pretty high already.
14,000 feet, that's way up there.
You breathe a little bit hard when you're climbing a rope.
I'm sure that's what, two miles?
Better than two miles up.
Yeah, and it's like three miles.
And so you go down this rope, and there's this rock that was sort of wedged on the side of the initial shaft as I went down into the pit, okay, on this rope.
And this rock was like, it was perched there.
It was kind of a heart-shaped rock, only about 30 feet across.
Okay.
And it was kind of wedged there with a little bit of dirt and pebbles holding it in place, almost like glued to there by mud.
Okay?
Glued by mud, huh?
And I thought, I'd better not touch this rock or it's just going to kind of heave over on me and go down in the pit.
Uh-huh.
Okay?
But it was heart-shaped, and I thought, okay, if this is the World Card Cave, then I'm, you know, I might just say, okay, this is, You know, a very interesting cave, and I'm going to have to tell Art about this.
Yeah.
And so I get down there, and I find this chamber.
Well, before you get to the chamber, wait a minute, you named this rock, Ramona Rock.
That was my wife's name.
It was a heart-shaped rock that was just teetering there.
And in there, you are dangling on this rope down below Ramona Rock.
And I'm thinking, Ramona's heart lets go, and she breaks you.
You mean the human pieces?
That must have been... I mean, when you got down below Ramona Rock, didn't you start thinking about it possibly, you know?
Yes, that's something you have to watch out for in any cave is rockfall.
There's a lot of danger in any cave.
It'll kill you, you know, and if you're not trained and, you know, this is extreme caving.
This is not something that I would say, you know, kids don't go out and do this.
I have to say that disclaimer.
You can get training through the Grottoes of the National Speleological Society.
You can learn about this and learn how to do it and learn how to not damage the cave and not damage yourself when you're doing this.
Okay, so you go down further and here's this giant art bell chamber.
It's an amazing chamber underneath there.
50 or 60 feet across and high and it was shaped like a bell.
And I thought, what a coincidence, what an amazing thing.
So I thought, okay, I'm going to call this the Bell Chamber.
Maybe I'll call it the Art Bell Chamber.
So it is labeled.
That's the nice thing about being an explorer, you get to name things.
You get to name stuff, yeah.
I appreciate it.
And then in the Art Bell Chamber, it says there's orange asparagus?
Well, as I was crawling into the Art Bell Chamber, okay, I found this plant life down there.
And sometimes we find new species of plants, animals, underground.
Sure.
And I'm not a botanist.
I'm not a biologist.
But I recognize strange plants and animals when I see them.
Sure.
Okay, so I saw this kind of orange-looking asparagus kind of plant.
Not that I would eat this or anything, but I cataloged and made some notes that we should have a scientist who knows plant life better than me study this eventually.
And that's one of the things we do as explorers is make maps of these caves.
And that's what this is.
And I think my audience would be interested to see it.
So again, go look at it.
The wild card came in.
And then after the art bell chamber, there's like this impassable area with a question mark on the other side.
Well, in cave maps, When we can't get to an area, or maybe we don't know what there is there, or we don't get a chance to survey it, we put a little question mark in there so that we can come back, either us, or maybe a future explorer can come back and go on from that point where the question mark is.
Okay.
That's an unknown.
Okay, and then there's across from my cave, well, the one named after me, there's Jessica Junction, and why did you name that Jessica Junction?
Well, Jessica, I also named a separate cave, Jessica's Cave, as well.
She's a very dear friend of mine.
She's the CEO of Teligent Corporation, who I started Teligent Corporation with, and she was who made it possible for me to go on this expedition through her support and her encouragement.
Okay.
And also, I think that she can see The crossroads of different kinds of technology in ways that... She's a genius, okay?
And so I thought, okay, this is the crossroads of this entire cave system here.
I'll call this Jessica Junction.
It had a catchy name.
You know, we like to name things in caves funny names.
Okay?
If you go into Lechuguilla Cave, which is an underground wilderness area, we have named it... There's a hundred miles of passage in this cave.
And all kinds of beautiful formations.
But because you're seeing these for the first time, there's no real reference point.
You don't get to say, okay, here's something that's previously on the map, because you make the map.
So you get to name these places as an explorer.
What happens to the map and the names?
I mean, when you get back and you register all this somewhere, or you send it in to some publication, or how does it get Remembered and reprinted so the next explorer can can take advantage of it.
These maps are generally closely guarded secrets of most cavers and explorers and they exchange them with each other.
We try to minimize the impact of the public on caves where there's a potential for either danger of the public or that they will be vandalized.
So we have Uh, separate storehouses, you might say, of cave maps.
In some cases, we let the National Park Service, if it's in a national park, know about the cave.
We give them the cave.
They hang on to it.
Sometimes these are used by archaeologists.
Sometimes they're used by other scientists studying bacteria or microbes in caves, or speleothems, paleomagnetism.
But we mark on the cave these little Needle names, because we get to do that.
It's a fun thing.
Places like Apricot Pit, the China Shop.
By the way, folks, Bonnie sent me this wonderful thing.
I just took a webcam photograph that you should see.
It is a wonderfully framed wild card cave diagram, Amazon Basin, Andes Mountains, South America.
I discovered and explored by Bonnie Crystal, and it's inscribed for me and signed.
It says, to Art and Ramona, for the inspiration in naming this cave, Bonnie Crystal, and we shall hang it reverently on our wall here in the house, Bonnie.
And so I just took a picture of it with my webcam, so anybody wanting to go up to my website and see, it's nicely framed.
This is so cool, Bonnie.
Nobody ever gets a cave named after them, or even a chamber.
Chamber, that really sounds good.
Aren't you to some degree concerned with dying?
Absolutely.
I train on a regular basis with other cavers who are also concerned about dying.
We depend upon each other for our lives.
We put a lot of trust in each other.
We carry three sources of light.
We carry backup equipment.
We go into caves in pairs or threes or fours.
It's not something that we'd like to do on a solo basis.
But at the same time, not a lot of people know because you have to keep these places secret, right?
Yes, for the public's protection, personal protection, and also because, to a certain extent, we feel that These caves have taken hundreds of thousands of years to form.
They are potentially very delicate formations in them.
It's real easy to break them off and they will never again be the same.
You know, caves are like a time machine.
You can go into a cave and see the footprints that a person made a little ways back into the entrance Thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago.
You can see the drawings they made on the cave walls.
These are priceless.
And anything that we do in a cave, you know, if we leave our footprints in there, they're going to be there 100,000 years from now.
And people talk about the cavemen of old, or the, you know, people who, in ancient history, or not prehistoric ages of humans.
They call them cavemen.
Okay?
But really, what I believe and from what I've seen of caves, we were not necessarily cave people or cavemen.
We went in some caves, some small number of people went into caves, and the cave preserved what was left of them there.
Their relics, That sort of thing.
But by and large, over the history of civilization and over the history of ancient prehistoric people, they have tended to stay away from Cain.
Well, you know, if there's an overall mission in what you do, what is, in other words, what ultimately would you like to do?
What do you expect or what would you like to find?
Or why are you doing this?
I think it's because of the unknown.
And people in this world, I think, there are certain people that search out the unknown and other people that are content to remain at home or content to do what they do without going out there.
But personally, myself, I want to go and be there in places where no one has gone before and learn things that no one has known before.
And I have a quest for knowledge, and it's something inside me.
And sometimes people say, well, you know, aren't you a little bit nuts for doing this kind of thing?
Aren't you scared of spiders, or aren't you scared of the dark, or claustrophobia, or that sort of thing?
And I say, well, you know, different people have their different phobias, you know?
And I think that caves are the intersection of Many people are phobias.
People are afraid of snakes.
They're afraid of the dark.
They're afraid of getting enclosures, enclosed in a tight space.
Spiders.
All of that.
And cavers, for the most part, if they're afraid of one of those things, they have to get over it real quick.
Or they have to not be scared of that kind of thing.
Are any of those things in your category of fear?
Those are not in my category of fear.
I don't know if I want to talk about what is my category of fear or not.
Well, let's talk about that.
Just for fun, because you said you don't know if you want to talk about it, what does make you afraid?
Come on, let's hear it.
I used to be afraid of needles.
Needles?
Such as getting a shot.
Like getting a shot?
Yeah, and there's a lot of people that have that phobia.
I used to give shots.
In the Air Force, I gave shots.
It's one of the things I did as a medic.
So I gave shots.
Lots, thousands of shots, in fact.
Well, then you know that some people are deathly scared of it.
Oh, I had people fall down in front of me, faint.
Well, I've fainted because of it, too.
But yet, you'll go down deep into the earth, braving God knows what, two-legged lizards, and falling to your death, and being buried alive, and claustrophobia, Spiders and oh my god knows what else, and you're afraid of needles?
You know, that's just the way it is with people.
People pick a different kind of phobia and they're scared of it the rest of their life.
I had to get over the fear of needles and that sort of thing.
And I did it because I attended cave rescue classes where we had to learn from doctors how to treat people if we were alone with one of our fellow cavers Who had an accident.
So, in other words, you had to have medical knowledge.
Right.
And that made me kind of get beyond it, but still, there's that little twinge back inside me, you know.
What are the hardships when you descend really far into the earth?
We hear a lot about, you know, the glamour side of it.
What about the hardship side of it?
Well, I think, to a certain extent, Caving is the dirty science.
A lot of scientists don't want to do it because you get muddy, sometimes covered in mud, or bat guano from head to toe.
You run into spiders as big as your hand.
Black snakes crawling on the cave wall.
Centipedes that can kill you.
You know, things like that.
It's the dirty science, and so there's no money in it.
People do it out of the joy of their heart and the conviction to learn things about it.
All right.
Hold on, Bonnie.
We're at the top of the hour, and we will be right back with Bonnie Crystal.
I've been where the eagle flies.
Rode his wings across autumn skies.
Kissed the sun.
Touched the moon, but he left me much too soon His ladybird, he left in a flash
I'm here waiting on the ground.
Lady Bird, I'll treat you good.
Lady Bird, I'll treat you good, ah, Lady Bird, I wish you would...
The End The End
The End The End
Writers of the Storm Writers of the Storm
Into this house we're born Into this world we're thrown
Oh Like a dog without a bone, an actor out of love, writers on the store.
Wanna take a ride?
Well, call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
to the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033. First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222. The
wild card line is open at 1-775-727-1295. And to reach out on the toll free international
line call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
It is indeed.
My guest is Bonnie Crystal.
For shortwave listeners or hands out there, we'll be on 3830, 75 meter band following program tonight.
We've talked her into that, so that should be kind of fun for a little while.
In the meantime, we've got another hour ahead of us.
We're going to begin taking questions from you on the phone from Bonnie Crystal in just a few minutes.
So you know the numbers.
We give them out all the time.
If you've got a question, that's what we're here for.
All right.
We're going to have to attempt to get Bonnie Crystal back on the phone.
Sorry about that.
The phone company, I think it comes to about one o'clock in the morning.
And what they do is just dump everything.
They make some change out there, and all lines die.
So I'm terribly sorry about that.
Let's first get Bonnie back, and then we'll sort of go from there.
Here we go.
Let's see if we can get a... Hello.
Oh, hi, Bonnie.
Hi.
The phone company just dumped every line I had.
Yeah, you know, they do that stuff in the middle of the night.
I'm sure somebody out there is listening to the show and they go to their buddy, hey, watch this.
Yeah, I think they run their little test sequence, automatic test sequence about that.
Yeah, well, they just test sequenced me.
All right.
Gosh, I've got so many questions, so many things I would like to cover.
Bonnie, there are underground noises, like they're called the towels hum.
There's another one back in the Middle West.
They just dumped my phone lines again.
They just dumped my phone lines again.
This is actually becoming fairly annoying.
Let me go ahead and dial here.
Just dumped everything again.
This is no fun at all.
Try and get Bonnie back.
Yeah, I guess I shouldn't joke, huh?
Let's see if we can do it.
We're back.
That's twice, Bonnie.
That's twice.
So, very humorous, guys.
Go test later, will ya?
Now... Hey guys, I used to work for the phone company.
Cut it out.
Alright, Bonnie.
The towel's hummed.
There's a hum back in the Middle West.
The Kokomo hum they're calling it now.
These underground hums that people are hearing and actually it bothers people to the point where they are moving out.
You've heard of these hums.
Do you have any thoughts?
Have you ever heard anything underground that was suspicious like that before?
Do you have any idea what it might be?
Well I've heard some pretty strange noises underground.
Normally when you get down in a cave it's so quiet It's the silence, you know, they say the silence is deafening.
Yes, of course.
Well, it is so quiet and so dark in a cave, it's almost like sensory deprivation.
You know, where you can't see anything, you can't hear anything except noises that you make.
It's so dark that, you know, they say you can't see your hand in front of your face.
But after you've been in a very cold cave for a very long time, You have a little bit of leftover from prehistoric ages.
It's like infrared vision, and you can actually, in a cold cave, see the heat from your hand after you get used to darkness.
But there are these strange noises that we've run into, occasionally.
One of them, in a particular area, where we were in a wilderness area, 20 miles from the nearest civilization, down deep, hundreds of feet down under the earth, Back in the bottom of this 12-mile long cave, and we started hearing this noise that sounded like a machine.
Like a machine?
Like some sort of a generator or something running underground.
And we thought, now this is really weird.
Yes, of course.
And we didn't know what it was, and we were back near the very back part of the cave where the passage ends.
And there's like a end of the, almost like the tunnel stops or something like that.
And we're hearing this very low noise.
We never did exactly figure out what it was that appeared to be coming from inside the rock.
And other cavers have experienced this, and we just don't know what it is.
Do you have any guesses?
Well, there are several different theories, and some of it has to do with the fact that Caves react to barometric pressure outside.
And any time that the barometric pressure changes, even a few parts of the barometric pressure, you have this enormous exchange of air with the cave and the outside world through the entrance.
And sometimes caves have micro-entrances that are smaller than a human Can fit through.
Places where it's just like very small fissures in the earth and that sort of thing.
And so you have this sometimes an oscillation of almost a standing wave of acoustic resonance underground.
And you go to a place like Wind Cave up in South Dakota.
There's some really neat caves all around the U.S.
where you can experience this sort of thing.
National Park System has tours and that sort of thing.
But Wind Cave is one place where it does this.
As for the Talos Hum or the Talos, you know, the noise that people are... Or Kokomo, yes.
I don't really know and I don't think anybody knows at this point exactly what it is.
But who knows?
Maybe it's some kind of secret military project or something down there.
Well, I have actually had a picture once on my website of a boring machine.
that was commissioned and that worked.
It was just like out of the movies, you know?
You'd point it at the ground and it would start boring its way in.
Have you ever heard of that?
Yes, there is a big boring machine and there are several other types of digging machines that are run for mine rescue and that sort of thing.
You remember just recently they dug down a well What can they do?
I mean, really, what can they do?
One of these big machines, how deep might one of these machines go?
at Scott Air Force Base, they have a group that can transport these giant machines for
underground rescue.
What can they do? I mean, really, what can they do? One of these big machines, how deep
might one of these machines go?
On the order of hundreds of feet. And they don't dig a very big hole in diameter, but
it's enough to get down there and get rescue and that sort of thing.
That's incredible.
But they are monster machines.
They take a lot of setup to bring them, and they take days to put them in position.
So it's not an instant fix if somebody's trapped underground or that sort of thing.
Bonnie, how much of the Earth have we explored?
Are we getting near the end of it?
I mean, is it where we almost know everything?
Are we only at the beginning of our own Earth?
We are less than a percent.
Less than one percent of the depth of the Earth has been explored.
Although a lot of the area on the surface has been explored, and probably most of it has been mapped, except for some areas of South America where they don't have topo maps.
But the underground world, we have just barely scratched the surface.
It's like, you compare it We know more about outer space than we do what's below our feet.
Although we know a lot about what's below our feet, we haven't been to the places that are below our feet and we can't see it.
Okay, well you've been down perhaps lower than any living human being or very close.
Now, you know, there are a lot of people who have theories that there have been civilizations on Earth before modern man.
And when I say that, I mean that achieved some level of technological development That we don't imagine today.
If that were true, Bonnie, there might be artifacts or suggestions of that far beneath the Earth that for one reason or another, geologically, God knows what went on in the Earth, you know, big asteroids hit, things happened, that might be, in other words, artifacts that might be found underground that would not be so easily explained.
Have you run into any?
We've certainly run into a lot of artifacts and that sort of thing and generally cave explorers don't touch those kind of things.
There is some, I will say, some amount of superstition involved among cave explorers as well as there is among other types of explorers.
And that's one of those?
You don't take anything out of a cave.
Really?
That's one of the number one rules because it's just part of the superstition.
You don't Change anything in the cave.
You try to go through with the least amount of disturbance of the cave and treat it with respect.
But, though, but, but, but, if you found something of, you know, great significance, some artifact that could be from some previous civilization or something of that magnitude, how could you leave it?
Well, we certainly would Talk with scientists, other scientists that are specialists in that particular field about it.
We would make a map that includes this and exchange that in secrecy, to begin with, with other scientists.
And eventually, after studies made by people who know more about it than they explore themselves, Information is exchanged through scientific circles and eventually makes its way out to the public.
All right.
Sometimes there's a lag of years before this all happens.
So, something major could occur and we wouldn't know until years later.
Look, you know, in space, or here on Earth, or God knows, even below the Earth, our government always wants to be out front.
You would think that various governments, certainly including ours, the Russians we know have done a lot of this kind of work, But ours, our government, would probably have done some below ground investigation.
Maybe they've gone deeper and drilled deeper than anybody knows at secret places.
I mean, they must want to know the nature of the inner earth in a way as much as we do for various reasons that might not be the same as yours.
Yeah.
But just to know about what we stand on, our own government must have done and must be doing secret stuff.
Is that unreasonable to conclude?
I think it's reasonable to conclude that there is a certain amount of underground research being done, but I think by and large they've been quite happy just saying, oh yeah, it was formed, the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, it has an outside crust, and it's mostly iron down there.
Now there's been recently Jay Marvin Herndon came up with a nuclear model which looks like a good model of what's happening down in the center of the earth and it may be due to nuclear fission because there was an instance of a uranium mine in Gabon in Africa where they found a natural nuclear reactor
In the veins of a uranium mine.
Ay yi yi!
But this occurred millions of years ago when the Earth was very young.
So there is that possibility that there could be a nuclear reactor at the center of the Earth, but there's a lot of geologists and physicists that still believe that it's mostly iron down there.
Being compressed by the enormous force of gravity.
Can I go back and ask something?
Remember I said that it gets hotter.
When you go down, how many feet do you go down?
In other words, first it gets colder, I would imagine, certainly, than the surface for some period of time.
And then you get to some sort of depth where that begins to change.
Is that a varying depth or is it always the same?
And how far down is it you go when you start to transition to hotter?
Well, the caves can go down maybe a mile down.
You have other places like the deep mines, like there's a copper mine up in Michigan that's very, very deep.
There's other mines in other areas in South Africa that are 9,000 feet deep.
You start to get very hot as you get that deep.
My question was, where does that transition usually begin?
Is it 100 feet?
200 feet?
500 feet, 1,000 feet, where does it begin to get hotter than cooler?
Well, it depends a lot on where you start, which part of the globe you're on, and what part of the geology, the local geology is.
Some places the magma is closer to the surface than others.
Even a couple hundred feet to a thousand feet deep, you can start to notice it starting to get hotter.
In some cases, you know, it can be much, much deeper than that that you notice it.
Other than the lava or the steam venting areas that you talked about, that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole, how hot can it get?
In other words, as deep as you're going to go, and it's starting to get hot, what do you mean by hot?
Well, for instance, in South Africa there's a gold mine there that's 10,000 feet deep.
It gets 155 degrees Fahrenheit.
And, you know, they have to air-condition it to allow the workers to go in there, too, to keep mining at that depth.
So they get down, oh my God, 155 degrees!
And they're following a seam of gold that goes down deep, deep, deep, deep towards the center of the Earth.
Those are Jessica temperatures!
Jessica!
Of course, it's funny it goes around.
I live adjacent to, I see them frequently because they love, Jessica loves Death Valley.
When it gets to be 126 degrees, Jessica's come on, let's go visit Arden Perumb and go to Death Valley and roast!
Yeah, I'm going to hike to the lowest point in Death Valley, you know, minus 130 feet below sea level, you know.
With 126 to 30 degrees or whatever.
Yeah, 282 feet below sea level, you know.
And you go along on these expeditions with her, right?
Oh, I sure do.
I enjoy those hikes out there in the hut.
In fact, we've been there on some of the hottest days in Death Valley, where it was 130 degrees there.
That's the lowest point.
And you enjoy that?
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
You take a couple of gallons of water with you, maybe you drink three gallons of water on your hike for a mile, but it sure is fun.
You get out there and you You see the way that the salt is boiling up out of the earth there, you know, evaporating and forming these little bubbles where spiders are spinning their little web in these little bubbles and they're like clear salt bubbles that are kind of coming up from the bottom of Death Valley.
Bonnie, have you ever underground run into anything that you shouldn't have?
Like, I don't know, like a government project or like I mean, I can imagine that you would get close to something and realize you're near something that you shouldn't be.
Has that ever occurred?
Well, a friend of mine did run into such a thing.
Evidently a military project at one of the caves.
I was not on that trip with him.
He was a very dear friend.
I did not go back to that cave because I didn't want to mess with anything there.
Those places are there and, you know, people with guns protect them, you know?
And it's not something I... I think... I run at the shadow of the whip, you know?
In other words, you really... So he did run into something, so then it is possible that underground you could meet a guy with a... God, what a thing that would be!
Break through something or another and there's a guy with a submachine gun.
Yeah.
Bonnie, hold on.
We're going to take calls.
I should have done it this afternoon.
We'll get to it directly coming up.
From the high desert, with Bonnie Crystal, I'm Art Bell.
I'm going to be playing a game called, The End of the World.
Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise.
Run in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies.
And if you don't love me now, you'll never love me again.
I can still hear you saying, you would never break the chamber.
I'm gonna sing it to you.
Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
800-618-8255, east of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach our debt 1-775-727-1222.
The wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1222.
And to call it on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nine.
Indeed it is.
Bonnie Crystal is my guest and I want to remind everybody, show wave listeners and hands, we'll be on 3830.
Or thereabouts, when we get off the air here for at least a brief time.
Bonnie Zaham, KQ6XA, as I am, I'm sure you're aware, W6OBB.
So that's where we'll be.
In the meantime, we've got Bonnie Crystal and lots of people who want to ask her questions.
So, stay right there.
Alright, once again, here is Bonnie Crystal, and I've been so fascinated, I know I've hogged it.
So, Bonnie, I want to take some calls, if that's alright?
Sure, let's talk to all those great people.
Sure, let's do it.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes sir, where are you?
I'm in Memphis, Tennessee.
Memphis, all right.
Yes sir.
Bonnie, I was wondering what your opinion is about two other flat screen technologies, the organic LED's and the flexible LCD screens with chips mounted on them.
Right, you're talking about OLED, the display technology.
Right.
And the flexible LCDs.
I think that the thing about OLED is that it's a very speculative technology right now, even though there's a lot of money being dumped into it.
There's some... It's really not proven yet.
It's a very high-cost technology.
Although, you know, more power to them if they can Produce something like that.
You know, OLED is sensitive to heat.
It can decay over a period of a short time.
There's a lot of stuff to be solved with it, you know.
All right.
Well, that one went right over in my head.
Well, a wild card line probably should have gone there first for tradition.
You're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hello.
Hi, my name is Catherine.
I'm in Oregon, but I live in Kauai, Hawaii.
Oh.
And on the North Shore there, we have a We have a wet cave, and it is an old lava tube, and they've done explorations, Jacques Cousteau and stuff, and they've made it, I think, something like 800 feet down, and they were going to send a thing even farther.
Do you know of that one?
Yes, and that's a very interesting cave, and there's quite a few very interesting things.
In fact, the longest lava cave in the world is there in Hawaii.
It's called Kazumura Cave and it's 41 miles long and 3,600 feet deep.
Oh my God!
Do you dive in wet caves or in water?
I swim in caves but I don't use scuba gear although I have friends who actually go under with scuba equipment and I've helped them and carried their tanks and that sort of thing.
I've gone on expeditions where we carried the scuba gear down To the underground lake and then the divers take it from there and they go even further down underwater and then maybe they pop up into a dry part of the cave and continue on from there.
By the way, Bonnie, speaking of all that, here in Nevada, not all that far from me, we have this unique weird underground water thing where there are these protected fish.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Yes.
Yes.
That's not far from you.
And it's part of Death Valley National Monument.
And what do we know about that?
Well, it's a it's a water filled.
I say Death Valley National Monument.
It's a park now.
I'm sorry.
Death Valley Park.
But it is a water filled cave.
And it is it has puff fish.
It has a strong current of water.
We lost some cave divers in that.
Three cave divers died about ten years ago in that cave.
So, it can be very dangerous.
So, is that the reason you don't... I mean, going down in a cave is bad enough, but then going down into water under a cave just seems like over the top to me.
Yeah, you can't come up for air very well with scuba, although, you know, there's not a whole lot of at-caving Cave diving accidents.
There's mostly just cave diving fatalities.
So, you know, I find that it's enough for me to just swim in caves and that's about as far as I'll take it.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Good morning.
Oh, good morning.
Where are you?
Currently I'm in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but I'm originally from Mamou.
Okay.
And my question just answered whether you enjoy cave diving.
Oh.
But since... Well, caves are very fascinating because some types of caves you go down and you get to hot lava, and other types of caves you go down into the cave and as you're further down you get to get to water.
Okay, because there's a lot of water and subsurface aquifers where there's this vast underground lakes are filled with water and so if you want to keep exploring deeper then the only way to do it is with scuba equipment or even what they call rebreathers now which were really originally developed to explore caves and to explore.
I'd love to get my hands on a rebreather.
How much does a rebreather run?
Uh, they're pretty expensive and they're very, very bulky.
And, uh, thousands of dollars.
What is the, uh, what's the concept behind a rebreather, uh, Bonnie?
What is it?
Well, you have the, uh, the regular oxygen tanks that, that a scuba diver has, but then when you exhale, you exhale a certain amount of, uh, CO2, and so you have this, uh, various combinations of scrubbers that scrub the, uh, exhaled gases that you exhale and pull out the oxygen out of that and feed it back to you.
And they use lithium hydroxide which is the same thing that they use up in the space shuttle to clean the air in the space shuttle and it removes CO2 from the air.
So how long does that mean you can stay like underwater?
It increases tremendously the length of time you can spend underwater.
12 to 24 hours.
Oh my god.
Really?
I have no idea.
It depends on how much work you're doing underwater.
You know, how much oxygen you're using.
How much you're inhaling, exhaling and that sort of thing.
Would the water in a cave, by nature because of how deep it is, either be cold or hot?
Generally, it's about the same temperature as the adjacent rock.
And that is close to the ambient temperature Of the area where the cave is.
Wherever you are.
So if it's hot, then it's hot.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hello.
Hi, Bonnie.
Hi, Art.
Hi.
Hi.
This is Kathy in Phoenix.
Got a question.
Recently, a friend told me about a Reader's Digest article, and they were talking about these gigantic crystals that had been recently discovered somewhere, and She said it looked like they were maybe 50 or 60 feet long.
Yes.
Do you know what that is?
Yes, those are in Lechickia Cave, which is an underground wilderness area.
In fact, just recently it was designated a protected environment by an act of Congress.
Oh my goodness.
And it's one of the very few caves to receive that kind of special protection.
And it is formed by The action of sulfuric acid in the ancient earth and it formed these gypsum crystals and the gypsum is amazingly clear but when you look at it all together in a photograph it looks like it's white.
There's a picture of those crystal chandeliers on my website.
Is there really?
I missed that.
And they're about 20 feet long, maybe 30 feet long and they're hanging from the ceiling of this cave and there's this There's a huge underground room.
It's near Carlsbad Caverns.
It's part of the Carlsbad Caverns National Park, where you can go yourself to Carlsbad Caverns.
It's in New Mexico, near Carlsbad, New Mexico.
And I would urge anyone who has an interest in caves, go to one of the national parks that has a cave, like Mammoth Cave, Wind Cave, Lehman Cave at Great Basin.
Or especially Carlsbad Caverns.
It's one of the most magnificent caves that you can go to.
I'll probably never get to see it.
I developed a... We entered the airlock on Blanchard Springs Cave in Arkansas.
And I froze.
Alright.
There you heard it.
We just lost every single telephone line here.
Did you hear that noise?
It just about blew my ears off.
So...
I should like to know, telephone company, what the hell are you doing out there?
Well, once again, of course, we've lost Bonnie, so let me try and get Bonnie back on first.
I'm terribly sorry about this.
There's nothing I can do about it.
The phone company, all of a sudden, just for whatever reason, dumps everything.
Let's see if we can get Bonnie back.
That'll be first.
That's three, Bonnie, that's three times in one show.
Three times a charm.
Three times a charm.
Was there anything else you wanted to finish saying?
Well, Carlsbad Caverns and also Mammoth Cave, the passages are so big that even people who tend to get claustrophobia will tend to be able to enjoy Carlsbad Caverns because it's as big as rooms that you walk in in the building.
That would be perhaps okay, depending on what it Hey, this is Miles from New Orleans.
can you walk right in literally or you can walk right in there trail as my
country has a cave in a huge that's my country all right let's continue a
wildcard line you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal good morning hey this is
miles from New Orleans yes miles what can I do for you yeah I was wondering if
she knew about the lizard people got that Irish that Irish Indian guys always
loving Jesus He was talking about some holes.
Lizard and lizard people.
Yeah, alright.
Why not?
I mean, you... Okay, let's talk about the lizard people.
You talked about, you know, big lizards, 20 pounds on two legs, and we've seen the tracks.
So, maybe it's outlandish, maybe it's over the top, but there are... We just lost the phone lines again.
I'm gonna...
I'm going to have to take a look at what's going on here.
This is ridiculous.
I am so sorry.
Alright, let me go ahead and redial Bonnie's number again.
We're losing the phone lines faster than I can dial.
Thank you.
Thank you.
you This is ridiculous.
This has never happened with this frequency.
I don't think it's my equipment here.
In fact, I heard the crackle, horrible telephone noise there.
Bonnie?
Yeah.
Okay, well, this has never happened this many times, I'm telling you.
I wonder if they're afraid you're going to say something.
Maybe they are.
Maybe it's my old friend Bob.
Your old friend Bob in the phone company?
Damn it, Bob!
Cut it out!
Well, you know, I was on a show that where They wanted to talk about lizard people and that sort of thing.
I was on the Conspiracy Zone with Kevin Nealon there on that time.
Does that show still survive?
Yes, in fact, it's in reruns now.
Is it?
So you could be on there again?
Yeah.
It's where they get serious people like Bonnie and get them on and ask them insane questions.
And they actually have comedians as part of the panel, right?
Oh, it's hilarious.
You know, a lot of good things come out about it, but you know, it's got so much There was somebody on the line that was going to ask you how to get in contact with you.
you gotta take it with a grain of salt but cavers tend to be humorous people i mean where
where else would you find people who call some underground place
the chandelier ballroom chandelier ballroom
uh... alright let's uh... oh there was somebody on the line that was going to ask you how
to get in contact with you do you have like a public email address or an
address or a way to be contacted my email address is
cave science Cave Science?
Cave Science.
C-A-V-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E at AOL.com.
Cave Science.
Cave Science at AOL.com.
That's easy.
Actually, that's plural, right?
You said caves.
Not plural.
Cave Science.
Okay.
Cave Science.
One word.
Cave Science at AOL.com.
Or just plug my name into Google or any search engine and you'll get lots of stuff up there.
Okay.
Alright.
Well, let's try a couple calls here and see what happens.
First time caller on the line.
You're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning, sir.
This is Tom from Detroit.
Hi, Tom.
I got a question for your guest there.
She likes going in the hole so much.
How about mouth hole?
Bonnie, have you heard the stories about Mel's Hole?
I've heard lots of stories about Mel's Hole.
In fact, I've heard stories about lots of other types of things like Mel's Hole.
Now, this is up in central eastern Washington area.
Right.
There are, in fact, a lot of very deep holes up in that area, aren't there?
Yes, and mostly volcanic lava tubes is mostly what's up there.
And it's very possible it could be a very deep hole there.
In fact, a lot of times as cavers go, you know, we hear from local farmers and people out in the boonies about so-called bottomless pits.
That's right.
And a lot of times, you know, they drop a flashlight and a string down there and it goes down and they can't see it.
And we tend to go and check these things out.
And we make maps of them.
You were talking about that incredible experience of throwing the rock and then walking away and 20 seconds later you hear this kaboom.
Would that be the best test to do?
I mean, drop a rock, and if you don't hear that rock land, then you don't know what you've got on your hands, right?
Right, or there could be just a bunch of leaves down at the bottom that are preventing it from being hurt, too, that we've had that happen to.
Now, there might be some people out there tonight listening, Bonnie, that know of a bottomless pit.
Essentially a bottomless pit.
I assume that you would be interested in exploring such a pit.
Absolutely.
So that if somebody were to contact you at cavescienceataol.com you would treat their information with respect and you wouldn't you wouldn't leave it confidentiality.
But yet you would explore.
Yes.
Alright folks, so if anybody's got one of those out there, and we know they're out there, we think they are, Just jot off a quick note to CaveScience at AOL.com.
That's Bonnie.
CaveScience, C-A-V-E, Science at AOL.com.
All right, running out of time quickly.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Crystal.
Hello.
Hi, this is Anthony in Fairbanks.
I was wondering, is there any known haunted caves or caves that have any sort of paranormal connection?
Good question.
Bonnie?
Well, we believe that there are quite a few.
In fact, There's a lot of caves.
We treat them as though they all have spirits in them.
Oh, you do?
And we certainly would respect spirits that are in any cave.
Up around Mount Shasta, of course, there are caves that have spirits.
In fact, a lot of the Native Americans consider certain caves to contain the spirits of ages past.
And, you know, they talk about the aliens underneath Mount Shasta.
Well, we've been in those caves under Mount Shasta.
And so far we haven't found many aliens, but we have recognized the spirit that is part of the earth.
Yeah, that's what we're part of.
We're all part of the earth, right?
We come from the earth, we come from the stars.
And we go back there.
We return to be part of it, and it seems like, it just seems, Bonnie, like we've gone out of space, we've gone into the oceans, we've explored the land masses pretty much now, but we've ignored all of that below us.
It seems incredible that we have, that there wouldn't be something like our space program only devoted to going down where Baboon went.
It's fascinating and it's an unknown and it's a frontier and it will continue to be a frontier probably as long as outer space is because it is so difficult to get down very far underground and we're continually finding new caves and finding new areas and if there is evidence of old civilizations it's very likely that we will find some of that in caves and it's like a time machine going But if that occurred, if you find that, Bonnie, you would turn that to science, and it might be years before the rest of us would know about it, and there would be solid reasons for that, right?
Absolutely.
You wouldn't just go to a newspaper and say, look what I found?
As scientists, we want to make sure that we've, you know, protected what we found, as well as make sure that people know about it in a good way, and that it's really covered, that we can Protect it and make it something that people can cherish for the rest of their lives.
All the way around.
You're an incredible person, Bonnie.
And I want to thank you for being on the program tonight.
And don't forget, folks, cavescienceataol.com is the way to get a hold of Bonnie.
And you will answer email?
I will answer email.
And I look forward to it.
Well, you're in for it.
All right, Bonnie.
Thank you for being on the program.
And in a few minutes here, five or ten minutes, see you on 3830, huh?
We'll see you on the other part of the air.
On the flip side.
Good night, Bonnie.
Good night.
That's it, folks.
As we just said, we'll be on 3830's 75 Meter Band here in a little bit.
I'm Art Bell from the high desert.
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