In the dark, in the night, over the airwaves of 486 radio stations, they march: a parade of alien abductees and remote viewers ("scientific" psychics), students of contrails and crop circles and reverse speech. Then there was the fellow who found and, he thought, killed an alien being in the Cascade Mountains. He stuffed the creature in a freezer in his garage and later heard it screaming to get out. A week afterward he saw three vans in front of his house and unknown men going in. He drove away. When he came back, they were all gone. The men. The vans. The alien. And the freezer.
That tale consumed three enthralling hours a while back on Coast to Coast AM, the 5-hr.-a-night radio show devoted to all things weird and shepherded by Art Bell, a genial host shrouded, until recently, in his own poignant mystery. Photo "evidence" of the parchment-skinned ET can be seen on Bell's busy website www.artbell.com (44 million hits since January '97). When he is asked about the alien in the freezer, Bell laughs heartily. "Do I have doubts about that story? Yes! Was it entertaining? Oh, absolutely!" Bell, 54, offers a forum for all manner of amazing stories--then, like Ripley, challenges you to believe it or not.
Believe who will, but a lot of people are listening: about 9 million a week. That makes Bell the fourth highest-rated radio talker, behind Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Howard Stern. And Bell corrals his huge audience in a night-owl slot (the show starts at 1 a.m. in the East) when only the sleep-disordered should be listening. Yet the loose formula, and Bell's intimate symbiosis with the listener, works handsomely. The show is so popular that on many stations, each night's program is re-aired at an earlier hour the next evening.
But nighttime is the right time to enjoy these campfire tales about UFO sightings. They time-trip the ear medium back to its spooky prime, when Orson Welles scared America witless with a Martian Halloween prank, when Arch Oboler intoned sepulchrally, "And now, Lights Out." A typical Coast to Coast is an all-night ghost story disguised as a talk show. The story being told may be the truth; it may be a crock. But it's often great radio.
Bell is a throwback. Unlike other broadcast biggies, he doesn't bully his callers or sensationalize his material. He knows it's sensational enough, so he sells it with a soothing baritone and the coaxing, folksy manner of a modern Arthur Godfrey. He doesn't whine or blurt, even if melodrama is swirling around him. When Bell abruptly left Coast to Coast last October for three weeks and took another hiatus this April, he showed old-fashioned reserve in keeping his private anguish private.