Recording of Woman on Art Bell Who Flatlined 5 Times and Had Death Experience
Art Bong, Radio Host Who Tuned In to the Nighttime Side, Dies at 72
Art Bell, an campaigner of the paranormal whose disembodied voice drew millions to his tardily-night radio discourse beamed from the Mojave Desert, died on Apr 13 at his dwelling in Pahrump, Nev. He was 72.
Lt. David Boruchowitz, a spokesman for the Nye County sheriff'south office, said an autopsy would exist conducted to determine the crusade of death. An declaration on Mr. Bell's website said he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
"Art had a fascination with the afterlife," the annunciation said, "and it'southward heartwarming to know he peacefully slipped into the adjacent world and now knows the answers he sought for so long."
From a abode studio 65 miles westward of Las Vegas, Mr. Bell personally fielded unscreened telephone calls on five lines during a five-hour nightly marathon on KNYE-FM called "Coast to Coast." At its peak, in the 1990s, the bear witness was broadcast on hundreds of stations and reached as many as x million listeners a week.
Mr. Bong once had the third-largest radio audience amidst talk-show hosts, after Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
In riveting narratives punctuated by convincing details, his guests spun bystander accounts of by lives, contacts with aliens, time travel, crop circles and other ostensibly inexplicable phenomena, most of which were accompanied by a knowing affirmation from the host himself.
He had reason to be credulous. One summertime night, he recalled, he and his wife were driving home when a 150-foot-long triangular arts and crafts silently hovered over their car earlier disappearing.
"It really doesn't matter that much to me if anyone believes me," Mr. Bell explained later on. "Thousands of people seeing the aforementioned affair cannot all be wrong."
Just how much Mr. Bell believed was a matter of conjecture.
He one time described his program as "absolute amusement." When he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2008, his quondam business organisation partner, Alan Corbeth, said Mr. Bell had thoroughly understood "how to create theater of the mind."
On one memorable program in 1997, a human being who said he had been discharged for medical reasons from Surface area 51 — the storied Nevada air base that has long stoked rumors of unidentified flying objects — was mysteriously cutting off in mid-interview.
"What we're thinking of as aliens, Art, they're extra-dimensional beings," the homo started to say, his voice choking. "They've infiltrated a lot of aspects of, of the military institution."
On another plan, Mr. Bong introduced his guest, identified as Alex Collier, by maxim he had been "in contact with a human being race from the constellation Andromeda, located in our milky way."
"His feel has been both telepathic and concrete," Mr. Bell added. "His relationship with the Andromedans has been based on trust and friendship. Alex's gratis will has never been violated, and his feel must non in whatsoever way exist associated with abduction."
In 1998, Mr. Bong received the ignominious Snuffed Candle Honour from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a group, co-founded by Carl Sagan and based in Amherst, N.Y., that promotes scientific inquiry and critical thinking. The group cited him "for encouraging credulity, presenting pseudoscience as genuine, and contributing to the public'southward lack of understanding of the methods of scientific research."
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To which Mr. Bong replied: "A mind should not be so open up that the brains autumn out; however, it should not exist and then closed that whatever gray matter which does reside may not be reached. On behalf of those with the smallest remaining open aperture, I accept with honour."
Arthur William Bong Three was built-in on June 17, 1945, in Jacksonville, Due north.C., while his parents were stationed at Camp Lejeune there. His father, a Marine Corps captain, was descended from one of the original settlers of Stamford, Conn., in the 1640s. His mother, the one-time Jane Lee Gumaer, was a Marine sergeant.
At 13, Fine art became a licensed apprentice radio operator. He was an Air Strength medic during the Vietnam War and later a disc jockey for an English-language station in Okinawa.
There, he was said to have gear up a record for continuous dissemination — 116 hours and 15 minutes — to heighten coin to ferry stranded Vietnamese orphans from Saigon to the Us for adoption by American families. (He also claimed a tape of 57 hours of uninterrupted seesawing while dissemination.)
Mr. Bong enrolled as an engineering science major at the University of Maryland but dropped out to render to radio, first as a disc jockey in California and Nevada. Students of numerology were mindful that he began his political talk show in 1984 — and as well that he died on a Friday the 13th.
Mr. Bong is survived by his fourth wife, Airyn Ruiz; their children, Asia and Alexander; and three children from his earlier marriages, Vincent Pontius, Lisa Pontius Minei and Arthur Bell 4.
His "Declension to Coast" show was syndicated and broadcast from 1989 to 2003, followed by episodic returns on satellite radio and online with a plan called "Midnight in the Desert," which he canceled in 2015 after he said shots had been fired at his home.
Mr. Bong said he kept a .40-caliber Glock 22 in a desk drawer of his isolated desert domicile.
"If I had a trouble out here," he told Fourth dimension magazine in 2012, "well, the police force would arrive only in time to draw the chalk outline on my flooring."
While some critics accused him of laying the foundation for right-wing conspiracists on talk radio, Mr. Bong'due south politics were not hands pigeonholed. He described himself as a libertarian, only his passion was directed less at politicians or ideology than at debunking scientific doctrine and preaching apocalyptic prophecy.
"He was unlike, fed up with the government not because of some tax increase or a bad vote but because of what they were hiding," the journalist Jack Dickey wrote in Time magazine in 2013. "Where others had rage, he had skepticism, and lots of it."
With the horror novelist Whitley Strieber, Mr. Bell wrote "The Coming Global Superstorm" (1999), in which fierce climate disruptions lead to a global deep freeze. The director Roland Emmerich adapted it for the 2004 motion-picture show "The Solar day Afterwards Tomorrow," starring Dennis Quaid.
(Writing nigh the picture show in The New York Times, Andrew C. Revkin noted, "Most experts on climate modify say a switch from tedious warming to an instant hemispheric deep freeze like the one posited in the book is impossible.")
Mr. Bell wrote several other books, including "The Quickening: Today's Trends, Tomorrow's World" (1997) and a memoir, "The Art of Talk" (1998).
His spoken words had a much wider reach, however. "His Marlboro-Lights-weathered vocalisation blanketed the continent after dark, reliably chilling his audience," one reviewer wrote.
Mr. Bell acknowledged that he had a certain hold on his nocturnal audience. As he told The Washington Postal service in 1998, "There is a difference in what people are willing to consider, daytime versus nighttime. It's night, and you don't know what's out there.
"And the way things are now," he added, "there may be something."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/obituaries/art-bell-radio-host-who-tuned-in-to-the-dark-side-dies-at-72.html