Conspiracy culture has long been an interest of mine. Not individual conspiracy theories as such although some of them do have their moments. Mix one part creativity to three parts paranoia, stir gently and phone in if you will, lines are open. Or at least they were, the show is still going of course but in this respect it's very much the late 90's heyday I have in mind. This period seemingly seen as a definitive one for the show in many respects. It was a different time to be sure. Dial-up internet, Batman Forever, the first PlayStation, phones that could fell a man with a single swipe of their bulky form. A golden age to be sure.
But you see, it actually wasn't. Not on this show. Pre-millenial forecasts of doom loomed large. We were on the cusp of something terrible, vast and self-defeating. Humanity's collective sins were catching up with us. It was game over writ large, all the signs of global catastrophe bearing down fast. Crops were about to fail, the weather was broken and to believe an ongoing thread by the shows host Art Bell, time itself was accelerating to an untenable point. He called it The Quickening. I call this quality radio.
Not because of its truth or otherwise. I make no claim as to the veracity of the many, many claims made on this show. Rather this is my own personal salute to the entertainment on offer here. Conspiracy theories were trading at an all time high in late 90's popular culture. The X-Files hadn't run out of plot or goodwill just yet, the millennium bug was a thing, global warming was presenting a bleak view of the very near future. In short it was the perfect time to be the host of a late night early morning veil-lifting radio show that simply let its guests really go for it and wax forth on their subject of choice.
Daily descriptions of on-site life in Area 51, you got it! An alternative description of the nature of time itself, why not? Mind controlled CIA assassins assassinating other CIA assassins in the process of assassinating someone. Cross it off your bingo card, full house! Truly it was a melting pot of fringe subjects so fringe as to be in the distant orbit of your casual base-level paranoia.
Harmless for the most part, the closest it came to controversy arrived with the proclamation that a spaceship was tailgating the Hale-Bopp comet of 1997. Distant cosmic forces pulled the strings of events closer to home resulting in the very real tragedy of the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult. The same cult known for their very snazzy, very 90's website still online now. Indeed the internet was just about shifting into a form we would recognise as such today, this stuff was out in the wild now, feeding off itself and growing in the public mindset.
The ideas on this show could take root online in a less fleeting way. They could be discussed, shared and debated online. For all the predictions made of the dark near future, no one took a stab at the notion of ideas and mindsets proliferating on a medium that ages but never grows old. I mean sure we can guffaw at the marvels of the late 90's information superhighway but its the snowball to the avalanche of online discussion we have today for both good and ill.
Search hard enough and I'm sure you will find tales aplenty of the lizard people and the collapse of society from back in the day. It's all there on some dusty old URL that hasn't seen much action lately. What was confined to obscure literature and monthly zines became more immediate, widespread, dare I say even popular? Even as this was unfolding live on the air, the show knew its market. Everyone has a book, tape or 12 part course you can buy for a low, low price. Myself I was tempted by the seminar on remote viewing, using one's mind to delve into far away places, see the plains of Mars, check out the inner workings of the Illuminati, flip through their emails and spill the beans on their favourite pizza toppings.
Credit to the show, it never lifts an eyebrow or winks at you. It is all presented sincerely, as-is, without any attempt at reducing it or its guests to a crude sideshow. By what most suspect to be a carefully crafted on-air persona, the show's host takes his guests at face value, engages with them, teases out the more compelling threads of their claims. Art Bell kept the show grounded, lest it attempted take off at high speed. A sturdy counterweight that kept the whole thing from falling in on itself and a consummate showman who knew how to keep the plates spinning even as they hovered over the horizon.
As I say, this is not the place to deliberate on the real truth of the claims made on this show. I approach it with an open mind no matter how far fetched it sounds. That said, there is something of an issue when it comes to corroboration and empirical evidence here. It's often cited but isn't exactly a bedrock of the irrefutable when it makes an appearance. Questions of authenticity soon become mired in the claims and counter-claims of larger intrigues. If it's fake its because you have been deliberately misinformed and so on. A caller can reveal the secrets of secret government installations on one call, reveal it to be a hoax on another and both calls become the subject of further suspicion. Its not really an exercise in evidencing claims though, but it is an entertaining example of how the mind can fill in the blanks to the nth degree. The picture never completes, it only expands.
Coast to Coast AM was and is a radio show and a thought experiment all at once. An exercise in opening the mind to possibilities whilst simultaneously teetering on the edge of credibility, often falling over in the process. It's entertaining and at some level, I would say its benign. This arena has never been free of politics but unlike the QAnons and Pizzagates of today, there is almost something quite quaint about a show that gives its guests ample airtime to discuss Bigfoot sightings, the shadow people and the practicalities of taking a naval ship back through time.
in it's current iteration, the show has its detractors to be sure but overall its fine from what I've checked out myself. If anything can be said to its detriment, it's just not as full throttle as it once was but then again, I feel the late 90's heyday was very much a case of the right show at the right time and place. All the pieces fit man, they were through the looking glass. Out of sight and possibly out of their mind, so naturally, at the time they fitted right in.
Now it's altogether a more populated space than it was before so shows like these stick out less. Podcasts, Youtube channels and Reddits galore on every facet of every subject you can imagine. I will leave it up to better minds than mine to determine if the conversation got smarter or just louder along the way here. That said, long may there be enterprising late night radio shows shining a light into corners unknown, unseen and quite possibly, nonexistent. The truth may or may not be out there but the audience certainly is.
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