Caught a few minutes of Art Bell last night or Please tell me I'm being whooshed.

Cafe Society
1

I’m driving home last night about 11:30 and flipping around the radio and I hear this guy. Ok, I have to be honest, I have heard of the Art Bell show and have listened for a second or two. Last night, however, I logged about 20-30 minutes.

Are you kidding me?

There was a guest host, George something. The topic? Rodent like creatures he was seeing in Northern California. The “chief” of them had antennae. They scurried away. They were ghostlike.

My first thought was this has to be a joke, like Phil Hendrie. Negative. He takes a call from a woman who claims that a translucent porcupine appeared in her car one day, sat up on the passenger seat and promptly disappeared. She also claimed that soon afterwards an earthquake occured. These two events were obviously linked. She rambled and rambled and rambled and used phrases like “higher energies” and “animal soul”. I was sitting there with my mouth agape. It gets better.

The next call:

George: “Hi, you’re on coast to coast.”

Caller: “Hi George, thanks for taking my call.”

George: “No problem, what’s on your mind?”

Caller: “Are you familiar with Freddy Crueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies?”

George: “Of course. One of the wickedest . . . I’m not sure what the word is, but yeah.”

Caller: "I sometimes have dreams with Freddy in them. They seem very realistic compared to my other dreams and I just wonder how many people out there have dreams with Freddy in them and does that make him more real?

At this point I did a very dangerous thing to do while driving down the interstate. I stared at my radio.

The next caller had the dumbest ouija board story you’ve ever heard. (something being in grade school and the girls on the playground spelling out “preacher’s kid” when asked why he didn’t “like” any girls. He was a preacher’s kid.)

The next caller was reincarnated from the 50s and he knew this because he had dreams about the 50s and how else could this be? He also believes he’s being “tested”.

There were more but seriously, tell me that this is all set up and there aren’t people out there who are like this. Tell me it’s a hoax. Tell me translucent ghost-like porcupines are not going to invade my car.

2

Congratulations, you’ve been exposed to the lower half of the intellectual bell-curve.

The curve dips innocently enough, with people who believe that John Edwards really can speak with the dead on “Crossing Over” (He’s a con man, go see him in person without the benefit of an edit suite).

Then, the curve slides downards a little bit to pick up those who believe in ghosts, guardian angels, alien abductions, and fortune tellers.

Then, you start sliding into the real pit of cognitive despair, and you find yourself in the company of those paying homage to ethereal erethizon dorsatum, and you’re left scratching your head.

Stupidity is amazing, isn’t it? Call-in talk shows seem to bring the yahoos out of the woodwoork, too. Sometimes I wonder if they don’t just keep such shows on the air to help identify they wackos.

This morning, while driving in, there was commentary from callers on one of the morning crew shows out of Atlanta regarding a new high-school in NYC for gay/bisexual students. The two callers they took consisted of one man who was obsessive about “What happens when a gay decides the line is too long in the men’s room and he decides to use the women’s room because after all he’s gay”, and one guy complaining that “they’re never going to fix these people if they cater to them like that by giving them a school where gay is considered normal”.

Now, I know this is the south, but I grew up here, and believe me… very few of us are that stupid, and that narrow-minded to believe that “different equals wrong”.

I wonder if we put all of the yahoos in a school together, if anyone would complain.

3

Yes, I would. I think it could be dangerous. They could attain critical mass.

4

Voila, Congress!

5

Never heard of phantom vermin with antennae. I’ve only listened to Coast To Coast a few times, but once it really pulled me in with the WTF factor.

One night I was scanning the AM dial driving home from work, trying to see how far away something interesting would come in like I do from time to time. Not finding much Mexican radio music or any news/talk stations from 2000 miles away coming in, I let the scan stop at the local station that carries CtoC.

Art Bell had a guest who was talking about backmasking in rock music. I kind of laughed and decided to stop, it seemed quiant to still hear somebody taling about this in the CD age, since the whole “satanic messages hidden in the music” trope kind of died out once vinyl records were replaced as a primary form of listening to music in mainstream circles.

The guy would play a passage from old rock and metal records forwards then tell you what to listen for when he played it backwards. Sometimes Art agreed that he could hear it , sometimes not. I’m still laughing at that point, wondering why bring up messages supposedly buried in 30 year old records anyway.

After the break the guest began to explain, he believed that if there could be messages buried in music that the artists were unaware of, then there could also be messages in ordinary conversation and speech. He then began to play tapes of excerpts of speeches by some government UFO denier who I guess is well known in conspiracy theory circles and to regular listeners. The guest would then play the excerpts backwards and claim that the man was revealing the government’s coverups with these cryptic clues and phrases that could be “clearly heard” by anyone listening. All I ever heard was backwards gibberish.

I gave up at that point, hoping the guy was a prankster, but figuring he was one more kook determined to expose the truths about UFOs/Roswell/Area 51 by whatever asinine method he could dream up under his tinfoil hat.

6

Last Fourth of July the Art Bell show did a bit on ghosts, y’know where you tape an empty room and when you listen to it there is supposedly a ghost talking? I don’t believe in that sort of thing but the show still creeped me out, especially as my father had it playing in his truck as we drove around the deserted countryside at midnight.

7

My God, I love this show. The station I hear it on plays two back to back shows between 1 & 5 AM. When the lights are off and the shadows seem to make shapes, this show freaks me out. Of course, if the lights are on, I’m just laughing my ass off.

Anyway, didn’t Art Bell retire, or at least quit the show?

8

My father, btw, believes in this stuff. I don’t know how I’m related to him. :rolleyes: There was an ongoing issue on the Art Bell show about “shadow people” once. Black shapes you see from the corner of your eyes, “movement” in your peripheral vision, which are IRL due to some completely mundane thing about the way your eyes work. (Peripheral vision is really only there TO detect movement, not color, so black shapes there are pretty normal.) My father became convinced that he was seeing these “shadow people” and nothing I could say would change his mind. Sigh. Some ignorance you just can’t fight.

9

Art Bell has “retired” or whatever several times and come back. I think he’s on extended vaction right now.

I know at least one of his “retirements” was supposedly because someone from the future came back and told him to go into hiding for a while or something like that.

10

That’s John Edward. John Edwards is a Senator from South Carolina. This correction has probably been made several dozen times on the SDMB.

Bear in mind that these folks aren’t necessarily stupid. Some people have high IQ’s and yet believe the most ridiculous things; the ability to maintain a strict separation between fantasy and reality isn’t proportional to basic intelligence. Some of the most creative people are also, shall we say, “fantasy-prone”.

11

“Bear in mind that these folks aren’t necessarily stupid. Some people have high IQ’s and yet believe the most ridiculous things; the ability to maintain a strict separation between fantasy and reality isn’t proportional to basic intelligence. Some of the most creative people are also, shall we say, “fantasy-prone”.”

I think it is relative. I would consider myself stupid when it comes to astrophysics, but an astrophysicist would be stupid to believe Jon Edward converses with the dead.

12

The only thing that scares me more than the callers on Art Bell is the realization that they vote.

I mean, screw foreign policy or economic plans or whatever, I wouldn’t be surprised that some numbnuts are out there voting for candidates based on how they feel about invisible teleporting porcupines and their plans with dealing with the ROUSWA (Rodents of Unusual Size With Antennae) problem.

13

I highly recommend the book Kooks, by Donna Kossy. Available from Feral House publishing. It’s a sort of compendium of especially famous and/or interesting … um… “paradigms”, I guess you’d call them. “Nontraditional belief systems.”

“Weird-assed shit that people chose to believe in,” is perhaps cruel and blunt, but descriptive.

There is no bottom level to what people will choose to believe.

14

Crap. I seriously was hoping this was radio theater. I better start listening so I can know what I better be looking for.

I have to go now. I think they’re watching me.