About an hour’s drive west of the Las Vegas Strip lies a mecca for true believers. The late Art Bell’s house and radio station still stand in remote Pahrump, Nev., monuments to the still-syndicated daily radio show, “Coast to Coast AM,” that Bell founded in 1988.
The two adjacent radio towers have been powered off for decades and other residents have apparently made their own homes out of the the two houses that once comprised Bell’s broadcasting compound. But Bell remains a hero to everyone who has ever believed that the CIA murdered JFK, that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, and that alien abductions are real.
Bell didn’t necessarily believe all of his callers’ claims, but offered them an open forum to express them without fear of ridicule. That’s about as good as they ever got from the national media.
“The greatest question of all is whether our experience on this planet is it, or whether there is something else,” Bell, who was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2008, told Wired in 2009. “Things in the supernatural realm give support, strangely perhaps, to the things we take on faith.”
The Art of Bell
Bell grew up a radio nut in a military family, becoming an FCC-licensed radio technician when he was just 13. When he served as a medic in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, he started an on-base pirate radio station that aired anti-war music.
Bell began his professional career more conventionally, as a late-night rock music DJ, until he grew tired of introducing records for a living. The first talk show he hosted was a political call-in show, “West Coast AM,” that emanated from inside downtown Las Vegas’ Plaza Hotel and was broadcast by KDWN-AM in 1978.
It was during this stint that Bell met and married his third wife, Ramona, a KDWN producer.
Bell told Wired that he grew “crushingly bored talking about politics 30 hours a week.” So, in 1988, he switched formats and studios. He talked only about his favorite topics — conspiracy theories, UFOs and the paranormal — and relocated his operation to the home he and Ramona shared in Pahrump.
Bell purchased the house next door and converted it into his own KNYE 95.1 FM. (Pahrump is located in Nye County or, as Bell liked to put it, “the Kingdom of Nye.”) Bell hosted, produced and engineered the show, while Ramona handled the business end.
At the peak of its popularity, “Coast to Coast AM” was America’s highest-rated late night radio talk show, syndicated to more than 500 stations and claiming 15 million listeners nightly.
The juxtaposition between the number of people Bell reached and the number who surrounded him physically was stark. In 1988, the population of Pahrump, which covers more than 300 square miles, was only 5,000 people. (Today, it has exploded by a factor of almost 10, and yet still feels like a very small town.)
Bell Bottoms
In 2003, Bell semi-retired, making only occasional guest appearances on “Coast to Coast AM,” which was taken over by George Noory, through 2010. Bell later blamed his exit on undisclosed disagreements with the show’s syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks.
On Jan. 5, 2006, Ramona died of what appeared to be an asthma attack while on vacation in Laughlin, Nev. Exactly three months later, Bell married his fourth wife, Airyn Ruiz Bell.
By 2013, Bell launched a new show on Sirius XM Radio called “Art Bell’s Dark Matter,” but it only lasted six weeks. Two years later, he hosted another new show, “Midnight in the Desert,” but resigned five months later due to concerns about his family’s safety. (Bell had reported several incidents of trespassers shooting firearms at and near his property.)
Bell died on Friday, the 13th of April, 2018 at his Pahrump home. Befittingly, though his cause of death was initially reported as a heart attack, that was not the truth.
The Nye County Coroner’s Office ruled it to be an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. Bell was 72.
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