Art Bell’s episode features Billy Rogers, campaign manager for Nevadans for Responsible Law Enforcement (NRLE), detailing how Nevada’s 2002 Question 9 ballot legalizes up to three ounces of marijuana for adults 21+, taxing it like tobacco while exempting medical use, despite federal opposition led by DEA and drug czar John Walters. Rogers argues 10,000+ hours wasted on minor arrests in 2000 could fund violent crime prevention, dismissing claims of increased underage access or public smoking. Bonnie Crystal then discusses HGED flat-panel displays, co-invented with Jessica Stevens using Russian vacuum tube expertise, and how regulatory delays like the ATSC hindered U.S. adoption compared to Japan’s efficiency. She shares cave discoveries—Peru’s 1,000-foot pit (July 1999), Wildcard Cave’s "Art Bell Chamber"—and unexplained phenomena like the Taos hum, while cautioning against disturbing artifacts in sacred underground sites. Ultimately, the episode blends marijuana reform, fringe tech claims, and cave exploration’s scientific and speculative frontiers. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all.
Good evening, good afternoon, good morning, wherever you may be across the world's many time zones.
I'm Mark Bell.
This is postponement a.m.
Something 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 here heading 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 or less kind of rough, tough, outwest libertarians.
They still are.
Believe me, in my opinion.
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 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 the 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 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 a 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 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.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
It's good to be on your show.
I'm a longtime fan, and this is a real thrill for me to be on you.
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?
Or, you know, I was listening to Washington earlier today, and man, they're making all kinds of noise about the war on drugs continuing to include marijuana and marijuana being awful.
And, you know, they're really going to bore in from the Fed side of things.
So where would that leave us if we did pass this?
unidentified
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 czar is coming out here on October 9th and 10th to tell Nevadans how to vote.
Now, I offered 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.
The U.S. tax dollars then are being used to effectively do what you're being paid to do on the other side.
unidentified
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 campaigning against this.
The good news is most Nevadans really don't care what they think, and Nevadans don't like being told how to vote, especially by a couple of Washington bureaucrats.
My personal life, and if I want to smoke pot and I'm an adult in the privacy of my own home, just stay the hell away from me.
unidentified
That's all it does.
I mean, opponents will try to tell you a lot of different things that this will do, but ultimately it protects responsible adults in the privacy of their own home.
And most people in Nevada, as you know, really don't have a problem with what people do in the privacy of their own homes.
All right, 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?
unidentified
Yeah, 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.
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 that state.
So you're saying this would even offer is a little more?
unidentified
It probably, yeah.
Yeah, I don't think there's any question that it'd be a good tax revenue source.
And 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, you know, it could mean more money for education, more money for other government services, or maybe even a tax cut somewhere down the road.
You know, 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 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.
unidentified
Well, exactly, and especially in a regulated marketplace.
I mean, what happened when you got rid of prohibition?
All the bootleggers were out of business.
So, you know, and you don't see people, you know, you don't see people in front of schools trying to sell six pack of beers to kids.
I mean, that just doesn't happen.
So, you know, in a regulated marketplace, first of all, we believe that marijuana would be much less available to children.
I mean, 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 beer.
The drug dealer doesn't card anybody.
There's a Columbia University study recently.
It came out last month that said that they polled more than 1,000 kids between the ages of 12 and 17, and they reported that it was three times easier to buy marijuana than it was to buy beer.
And what is, you know, in a nutshell, Billy, what is the truth about marijuana versus what we're told?
unidentified
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...
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.
For a second, let's say with the question of marijuana, with alcohol, some people get sad, more people get bold.
People drive horrendously.
In other words, the effects of alcohol are pretty well known by everybody.
You've got a lot of really nasty drunks.
Generally, what are the effects of marijuana versus alcohol?
unidentified
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.
Bar brawls, yeah.
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.
Again, some of the worst consequences are probably gaining weight from the munchies.
The opponents, the most vocal opponents in this campaign have been the federal drug czar and the head of the DDA.
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 publicly, every single one of them gets a check from the taxpayers.
There is yet to be any vocal opposition from anyone who actually earns their money in the private sector or through a political campaign.
And it's interesting to me that the opponents of this measure, I guess if I had, if my salary were paid by the taxpayers and I could fly around on an airplane across the country, I guess I wouldn't want to set up a political action committee either to wage a campaign.
I was in Alaska and read the teletype on KENI when Alaska actually legalized small amounts of pot with a decision by the U.S., or rather 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 shaver, and she's a whole lot more.
I'm Arthell.
It's coast to coast AM in the nighttime.
unidentified
Mississippi in the middle of a dry spell.
Jimmy Raja on the victor up high.
I was dancing with baby on a shoulder.
It's time to step in my life.
A very old friend came by today.
Because he was telling everyone in town.
Of the love that he just found.
And Marie's name.
Of his latest friend.
He talked and talked.
And I heard him say.
That she had the longest, quietest hair.
The prettiest green guys anywhere.
And Marie's name.
Of his latest friend.
Though I smiled at tears inside the world.
Of burning.
I wished him luck.
And then he said, Bye.
He was gone.
But still his words kept returning.
What else was there for me to do?
We'd cry.
True.
Recharge bells in the Kingdom of Nine from west of the Rockies dial 1-800-6188255 East of the Rockies 1-800-8255033.
First time callers may recharge at 1-775-727-1222 or use the wildcard line at 1-775-727-1295.
To rechart 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.
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...
And I'm not saying that the whole thing was staged and fake, because I'm a personal friend of Zahia Wass's, and I don't want to believe that.
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 and the picture taken in 2002.
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 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 bullet when it came across the wire.
The Alaska Supreme Court allowed marijuana announce, I think it was, or whatever it was.
And this went on for a long time after the 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?
unidentified
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 that 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 the opposition is coming from people who work for the government.
I did want to let your listeners know, you know, we are going up 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 nrle.org and make a contribution right on the internet to our campaign.
So in other words, you're in a political campaign, really, against federal dollars.
unidentified
Exactly.
I mean, it's really interesting.
I mean, 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.
It said dead even in the polls, but it said also that proponents, meaning yourself, are gaining.
unidentified
Yeah, we're seeing it, and we went up on television last week, and 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, 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.
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?
unidentified
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 a six-pack of beer.
Here's somebody in Lawrence, Kansas, who fast blast me.
It's like they say, the difference between a drunk driver and a stone driver is that a drunk driver will run a stop sign while the stone 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?
unidentified
Absolutely.
And this initiative bans driving under the influence of marijuana.
And, you know, 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 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 proved that he was wrong and that DUI laws would remain in effect as they currently are.
Yeah, so do I. In other words, didn't you say that it would be sold in stores under control?
unidentified
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.
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 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're looking at doing some time.
So 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, Villa, 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.
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 the mood may be just right.
unidentified
well yeah and i'm surprised i'm surprised anyone from the federal government would come here and tell them that it's had a vote and uh...
with john walters comes here at comes here in october i think we're gonna tell this take that nuclear waste with the back of washington units it's uh...
yeah i mean i think nevadas are outraged federal government and you know it 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 think here in Nevada, that their opinions on this issue really aren't welcome here.
And, you know, so in terms of whether it would help or hurt tourism.
There could be a case made that would help.
I think it would.
And, you know, whether you was up in Vermont working on the medical marijuana issue earlier in the year, and 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.
So, you know, I think on a, you know, if Nevada is the first state that actually does this, you know, I do think you'd have people who might take a trip to Las Vegas or Reno instead of just to experience doing it legally.
The lady you spoke to at 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.
unidentified
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I certainly don't see any evidence that it would hurt tourism.
And I think 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?
unidentified
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.
When you talk to the average cop, and I'm sure you had 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?
unidentified
Well, 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.
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.
And during certainly the 70s and 80s, I think what happened a lot was if a law enforcement officer thought an individual who possessed marijuana was an otherwise law-abiding citizen, they'd 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.
Yeah, but it's not like police are going to be out of jobs if marijuana laws change.
There's plenty of crime out there.
unidentified
Andy Anderson, who's 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 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 2.5 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.
unidentified
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 had voted unanimously 9 to nothing.
And then they got all this heat from the bosses.
They were street cops.
And 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.
But again, I think that will change.
Excuse me, if you look at the medical marijuana initiatives around the country, 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 last day or so.
Does that go all right without people getting arrested?
unidentified
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, and I think that makes the case that Nevada can set up a program to distribute marijuana.
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 is going to shut down the state from distributing marijuana, 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 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.
We're putting this in the Constitution, and we believe the state constitution trumps federal statutes.
This song goes out to Amy of Big Brother, the 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 Arbell, 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 money crystal puts me into the dirt i mean this lady is she's amazing so this is an amazing year 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, and 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 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 3.3, excuse me, 3.830.
She's also the author of a Bessler 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.
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.
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 my contractor come and pour concrete and put up these big two-inch steel poles.
They're made out of steel.
And in preparation for what my dream was, my dream was to put up this monster biggest ever ham antenna.
I thought it was a cool idea.
Yeah, we did that.
Anyway, the contractor did his thing very proficiently.
And then you, being the wonderful friend you are, knowing the condition of my back, which is lousy, came down and volunteered, flew down here and volunteered to help put up the wire, the actual antenna itself, which you did.
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 is 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 you're definitely right.
So I began a quest to get rid of this voltage.
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 this is a pretty big question, Bonnie.
All I've got is 1,000 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.
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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 Peru, Nevada, and I called them today, Bonnie, and I spoke with their chief engineer who was absolutely intrigued.
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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 when I 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.
That's a 12-kilovolt Line.
He said it's loaded.
It wouldn't couple.
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.
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, you experience this, you know, when you're walking around on a carpet or something like that.
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, on 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 globes filled with gas that would light up in the presence of this radio frequency field.
And, you know, not connected to any wires.
You'd just walk around with this sphere of glowing gas in a glass envelope.
And, you know, it just, I was there during the real bad, the 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.
And, you know, you can actually, a lot of people don't know the difference between AM and FM, although 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 for 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.
Well, I guess the downside is that there are people who just like, you know, if somebody cuts you off as you're driving along or gets in front of you, there are people who will get on there and cuss you out, I guess.
But 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 of the FC.
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.
I'm not surprised if they do turn up occasionally.
But this is sort of, you know, under 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, you know, amongst them.
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 special, even if you didn't see this special on the opening of the, or the drilling of the hole and the looking through the stone block in the supposed Gent Brink chamber, of course, I had Gent 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 Ghent and Brink explored, that they were just about to drill a hole in, which they did drill a hole in, and then look through to another empty sort of chamber and 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.
We actually 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.
During the show, they showed the Scantonbrink 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, 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.
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.
Well, there's a big temporary downturn in it right now.
But the thing about it is, 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.
And 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 property that's 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.
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.
And so we went to this trade show and we said, okay, we're going to make a big splash, and this technology is so revolutionary that a lot of people think that it came from somewhere out of this world.
And so some of our marketing people said, yes, well, maybe we can play on that.
Well, you know, it was funny because the very first day we put up this trade show booth, we call it, or an exhibit, although it was nothing like anyone had seen before, people didn't want to come in.
They would walk by and it would say restricted.
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.
Then a few people came up and started asking about it.
And the next day, there was a line a half a mile long to get into it.
And those were invented over 50 years ago, well, way 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.
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 T V but it's flat.
And what this is going to do is supplant or replace some of the existing expensive technologies like plasma and L C D that have drawbacks to them.
Like L C D is very sluggish.
You can't really, although they have television pictures that run on L C D and you can have L C D 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 everybody loves it.
We really had a great time.
I co-invented it with Jessica Stevens.
She is 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.
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.
And 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 than just a semiconductor or a vacuum tube.
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's Jessica, by the way.
I have to have Jessica on sometime.
I could tell you stories, only I'd have to kill you.
From the high desk at High Mark Bell.
unidentified
But I couldn't find it.
So I'll settle for one day, you're leaving me.
Tell me, tell me lies.
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.
Go, go, go, round by the wind.
Throw, go, go, down in a spin.
I gave you love, I thought that we had made it to the top.
I gave you all, I have to give.
Why did it have to stop?
You blow it all sky high.
By telling me a lie.
Without a reason why.
You blow it all sky high.
Do Recharge Bell in the Kingdom of Nai.
From west of the Rockies, aisle 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may recharge at 1-775-727-1222.
Or use the wildcard line at 1-775-727-1295.
To rechart 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.
Her vocation is what you've been hearing about with this high-definition flat-screen technology that Television 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 ought 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?
And it's a patchwork quilt of kind of insanity out there.
All right, well, look, this is all your vocation.
Your avocation is what a lot of people are interested in.
When I did last speak 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.
I go because no one's been there before, and that's what I enjoy.
And, 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 and keep going.
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.
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.
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 plant matter or something that the rock fell on that cushioned the rock so we couldn't hear it.
So 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 had to go 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 get down, You tie a knot on the end of the rope so you don't slide off the end of the rope with your hands.
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're looking up above you.
Well, we've got the world that time forgot, which I'll talk a little bit more about this 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 Lachaguilla 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, holes in the ceiling where you have to drop a rope down into this lake and then swim off the edge of that rope out into the lake, underwater, into flowing rivers.
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 that you run into occasionally.
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, you know, 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.
And it was very, very hot near what they call the wrist zone where magma flows up into the Kilauea crater and then eventually flows out of Kilauea and on down to the sea and forms this new property, of course.
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.
You know, to the average person, that sounds like madness.
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?
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.
unidentified
I'm Art Bell.
I'm Art Bell.
The white bird drinks up the aster tree with his dying feet turning bold.
But the white bird just sits in her cage growing old White bird must fly or she will die
White bird must fly or she will die The sunsets come, the sunsets go The clouds blow by and the earth turn the soul And the young bird's eyes will always grow And she must
fly, she must fly She won't die Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222.
And the Wild Guard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
To rechart 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 Die.
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 explored it, threw a rope down, and I was with my friend Cynthia, who was also on the expedition with me.
It was just the two of us out there.
And we nearly stumbled into this cave.
Literally, 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.
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 call this one number, west of the Rockies call this.
And the wildcard line, well, here we were on the top of this continental divide down there.
And I said, this is the wildcard cave.
It's neither east of the Rockies nor west of the cave.
And I thought, I'd better not touch this rock or it's going to kind of heave over onto me and go down in the pit.
But it was heart-shaped, and I thought, okay, if this is the Wildcart Cave, then I might just say, okay, this is a very interesting cave, and I'm going to have to tell Art about this.
Yes, that's something you have to watch out for in any cave is rockfall.
There's a lot of danger in the cave.
It'll kill you.
And if you're not trained, this is extreme caving.
This is not something that I would say, kids don't go out and do this.
I have to say that disclaimer.
You can get training through the grottos 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 get 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.
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 in it 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.
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.
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 Telegen Corporation, who I started Telegen Corporation with.
And she was who made it possible for me to go on this expedition through her support and her encouragement.
And also, I think that she can see the crossroads of different kinds of technologies in ways that she's a genius.
And so I thought, okay, this is the crossroads of this entire cave system here.
I thought, I'll call this Jessica Junction.
And it had a catchy name.
You know, we like to name things in caves funny names.
If you go into Lechagia Cave, which is an underground wilderness area, we have named, there's 100 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.
I mean, when you get back and you register all this somewhere or you send it into some publication or how does it get remembered and reprinted so the next explorer can take advantage of it?
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 wildcard cave diagram, Amazon-based in Andes Mountains, South America, discovered and explored by Bonnie Crystal.
And it's inscribed for me inside.
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 have a well i took a picture of it with my webcam so anybody lying what my website and see is nicely framed Nobody ever gets a cave named after them, or even a chamber.
Chamber, that really sounds good.
Heartbell chamber.
You know, aren't you to some degree concerned with dying?
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, you know, 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 the old or the people who in ancient history or prehistoric ages of humans, they call them cavemen.
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 caves.
And people in this world, I think there's 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 caves are the intersection of many people's phobias.
People are afraid of snakes.
They're afraid of the dark.
They're afraid of getting enclosures, enclosed in a tight space, spiders.
And cavers, for the most part, have to get either, 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.
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, you know, claustrophobia and spiders and all my God knows what else.
Well, you know, that's just the way it is with people.
People pick a different kind of phobia and, you know, 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.
at the top of the hour, and we will be right back with Bonnie Crystal.
unidentified
I've been where the eagle flies, rode his wings across all the skies, kissed the sun, touched the moon, but he left me much too soon, his ladybird, he left his ladybird.
Ladybird, come on down, I'm here waiting on the ground, Ladybird, I'll treat you good, ah, Ladybird, I wish you would.
Riding from the storm, and I'll see you next time.
Riding from the storm, Riders on the Storm Riders on the Storm Into this house we're born Into this world we're thrown Like a dog without a bone And a actor out of love Riders on the Storm Wanna take a ride?
Well, call our bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222.
The wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
And to rechart 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.
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 the darkness.
But there are these strange noises that we've run into occasionally.
One of them, 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.
We were back near the very back part of the cave where the passage ends, and there's like an end of the, almost like the tunnel stops or something like that.
And we 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.
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 inches of mercury, 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 standing waves of acoustic resonance underground.
And you go to a place like Wind Cave up in South Dakota.
There are 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 this does this.
As for the Taos hum or the Taos, you know, the noise that people are.
We are less than a percent, less than 1% 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 to 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.
Big asteroids hit, things happened, that might be, in other words, artifacts that might be found underground that would not be so easily explained.
But, though, but, but, but, if you found something of 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 a study is made by people who know more about it than the explorer themselves, this information is exchanged to scientific circles and eventually makes its way out to the public.
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.
But just to know about what we stand on, our own government must have done and must be doing secret stuff.
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 J. Marvin Herndon came up with a nuclear Earth 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.
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.
Maybe you drink three gallons of water on your hike for a mile, but it sure is fun.
You get out there and you see the way the salt is boiling up out of the earth there, 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 Crystal is my guest, and I want to remind everybody, showwave listeners and hands, we'll be on 3830 or thereabouts when we get off the air here for at least a brief time.
Bonnie's a ham, 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.
Well, all right, once again, here is Bonnie Crystal, and I've been so fascinated I've no I've hogged it.
So Bonnie, I want to take some calls, if that's all right.
Bonnie, I was wondering what your opinion is about two other flat-screen technologies, that organic lab, organic LEDs, and the flexible L C D screens with chips mounted on them.
Right, you're talking about O LED, the display technology and the flexible L C D. I think that the thing about O LED is that it's a very speculative technology right now, even though there's a lot of money being dumped into it.
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, OLED is sensitive to heat.
It can decay over a period of short time.
There's a lot of stuff to be solved with it, you know.
And on the north shore there, we have a wet cave, and it is an old lava tube.
And they've done explorations, Jacques Houston and stuff, and they've made it, I think, something like 800 feet down, and they were going to send a thing even farther.
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.
And 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 pup fish.
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 further down, you get to get to water.
Okay, because there's a lot of water, subsurface aquifers where there's this vast underground lakes or 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, which were really originally developed to explore caves.
Well, you have the regular oxygen tanks that a scuba diver has, but then when you exhale, you exhale a certain amount of CO2, and so you have this various combinations of scrubbers that scrub the 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.
It depends on how much work you're doing underwater, you know, as to how much oxygen you're using, how much you're inhaling, exhaling, and that sort of thing.
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.
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 huge underground room.
It's near Carlsbad Caverns.
In fact, it's part of the Carlsbad Caverns National Park, where you can go yourself to Carlsbad Caverns.
It's in New Mexico and 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 Caves at Great Basin, or especially Carlsbad Caverns.
It's one of the most magnificent caves that you can go to.
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.
You know, a lot of good things come out about it, but, you know, it's got so many jokes associated with it that, you know, you've got to take it with a grain of salt.
But cavers tend to be humorous people.
I mean, where else would you find people who call some underground place the chandelier ballroom?
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 Pat Boone went.
As scientists, we want to make sure that we've, you know, protected what we found as well as making 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.