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But in a sense, Bell couldn't be more contemporary. For one thing, he practically invented Y2K anxiety by spinning doomsday scenarios since early '98. More generally, his show taps into the millennial malaise; in the wake of Monicagate, it connects with people tired of little adulterous conspiracies and ready for a big interplanetary one. Americans have soured on political haranguing yet find issues like Kosovo too dense or distant. So where do they go? Out There, where The X-Files' Fox Mulder says the Truth is. And Bell, who says he once saw a triangular UFO hovering so low over his car that "I could have thrown a rock at the damned thing," is way Out There as the channeler of cosmic creepiness. What Limbaugh was to the beginning of the decade, Bell is to the end. From his home-studio in the desert of Pahrump, Nev., he takes the oddest calls--on the X phones.
Pahrump (also the noise that skeptics make when listening to Bell's show) is small but, for the nexus of show biz and star biz, centrally located. It's 50 miles west of Las Vegas and just over the hill from Area 51, the secret military base at the center of so much UFO lore. In a double-wide trailer complex off a dirt road, there is Bell, the son of married Marines, a man who has loved radio all his life and, as a disc jockey or talk host, is a professional who has wooed audiences for 35 years. His wife Ramona may sit in the studio with him, but Bell mans the controls, cues the commercials, poses for live shots on the website (this is a radio program you can watch). He pretty much does it all.
He also takes calls at random, which can spell radio democracy--or chaos. "I have a lot of open lines," Bell says, "and I don't screen calls. As a result, I'm as likely to be as surprised as the audience when something comes out of left field." A few call-in segments have a theme: "I'll open a line for vampires or time travelers." And tonight: Antichrists only, please.
The show isn't all about out-of-body (and out-of-mind) experiences. Michio Kaku, the noted theoretical physicist from the City University of New York, has discussed string theory and other weighty issues. But pure Bell is a show with some earnest gent patiently explaining, as frequent guest Richard C. Hoagland does, that humans are descended from Martians who fled their planet a million years ago. Last December, Major Ed Dames, the leading remote viewer, predicted terrorists would set off biological weapons in Shea or Yankee stadium in July (didn't happen--whew!) and announced that he was locked in a psychic battle with...Satan.
"I assume my audience is made up of adults who can take in what they will and reject what they wish," Bell says. But some adults are not worthy of that assumption. Bell learned that firsthand through a long ordeal involving his son, Art IV, who lives nearby in Pahrump with his mother, Art's ex-wife. Only now has Bell chosen to speak to the press about the situation.