https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/obituaries/art-bell-radio-host-who-tuned-in-to-the-dark-side-dies-at-72.html

Art Bell, Radio Host Who Tuned In to the Dark Side, Dies at 72

Art Bell, an apostle of the paranormal whose disembodied voice drew millions to his late-night radio soapbox beamed from the Mojave Desert, died on Friday at his home in Pahrump, Nev. He was 72.

Lt. David Boruchowitz, a spokesman for the Nye County sheriff’s office, said an autopsy would be conducted to determine the cause of death. An announcement on Mr. Bell’s website said he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“Art had a fascination with the afterlife,” the announcement said, “and it’s heartwarming to know he peacefully slipped into the next world and now knows the answers he sought for so long.”

From a home studio 65 miles west 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 show was broadcast on hundreds of stations and reached as many as 10 million listeners a week.

Mr. Bell once had the third-largest radio audience among talk-show hosts, after Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

In riveting narratives punctuated by convincing details, his guests spun eyewitness accounts of past 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 summer night, he recalled, he and his wife were driving home when a 150-foot-long triangular craft silently hovered over their car before disappearing.

“It really doesn’t matter that much to me if anyone believes me,” Mr. Bell explained later. “Thousands of people seeing the same thing cannot all be wrong.”

Just how much Mr. Bell believed was a matter of conjecture.

He once described his program as “absolute entertainment.” When he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2008, his former business partner, Alan Corbeth, said Mr. Bell had thoroughly understood “how to create theater of the mind.”

On one memorable program in 1997, a man who said he had been discharged for medical reasons from Area 51 — the storied Nevada air base that has long stoked rumors of unidentified flying objects — was mysteriously cut off in mid-interview.

“What we’re thinking of as aliens, Art, they’re extra-dimensional beings,” the man started to say, his voice choking. “They’ve infiltrated a lot of aspects of, of the military establishment.”

On another program, Mr. Bell introduced his guest, identified as Alex Collier, by saying he had been “in contact with a human race from the constellation Andromeda, located in our galaxy.”

“His experience has been both telepathic and physical,” Mr. Bell added. “His relationship with the Andromedans has been based on trust and friendship. Alex’s free will has never been violated, and his experience must not in any way be associated with abduction.”

In 1998, Mr. Bell received the ignominious Snuffed Candle Award 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’s lack of understanding of the methods of scientific inquiry.”
To which Mr. Bell replied: “A mind should not be so open that the brains fall out; however, it should not be so 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 honor.”

Arthur William Bell III was born on June 17, 1945, in Jacksonville, N.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 former Jane Lee Gumaer, was a Marine sergeant.

At 13, Art became a licensed amateur radio operator. He was an Air Force medic during the Vietnam War and later a disc jockey for an English-language station in Okinawa.

There, he was said to have set a record for continuous broadcasting — 116 hours and 15 minutes — to raise money to ferry stranded Vietnamese orphans from Saigon to the United States for adoption by American families. (He also claimed a record of 57 hours of uninterrupted seesawing while broadcasting.)

Mr. Bell enrolled as an engineering major at the University of Maryland but dropped out to return 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 also that he died on a Friday the 13th.

Mr. Bell 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 IV.

His “Coast to Coast” show was syndicated and broadcast from 1989 to 2003, followed by episodic returns on satellite radio and online with a program called “Midnight in the Desert,” which he canceled in 2015 after he said shots had been fired at his home.

Mr. Bell said he kept a .40-caliber Glock 22 in a desk drawer of his isolated desert home.

“If I had a problem out here,” he told Time magazine in 2012, “well, the police would arrive just in time to draw the chalk outline on my floor.”

While some critics accused him of laying the foundation for right-wing conspiracists on talk radio, Mr. Bell’s politics were not easily pigeonholed. He described himself as a libertarian, but his passion was directed less at politicians or ideology than at debunking scientific doctrine and preaching apocalyptic prophecy.

“He was different, 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 violent climate disruptions lead to a global deep freeze. The director Roland Emmerich adapted it for the 2004 film “The Day After Tomorrow,” starring Dennis Quaid.

(Writing about the film in The New York Times, Andrew C. Revkin noted, “Most experts on climate change say a switch from slow 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 voice 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 Post in 1998, “There is a difference in what people are willing to consider, daytime versus nighttime. It’s dark, and you don’t know what’s out there.

“And the way things are now,” he added, “there may be something.”

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/17/528656453/npr-newscaster-carl-kasell-dies-at-84-after-a-lifelong-career-on-air
NPR Newscaster Carl Kasell Dies At 84, After A Lifelong Career On-Air

Every weekday for more than three decades, his baritone steadied our mornings. Even in moments of chaos and crisis, Carl Kasell brought unflappable authority to the news. But behind that hid a lively sense of humor, revealed to listeners late in his career, when he became the beloved judge and official scorekeeper for Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! NPR's news quiz show.

Kasell died Tuesday from complications from Alzheimer's disease in Potomac, Md. He was 84.

He started preparing for the role of newscaster as a child. "I sometimes would hide behind the radio and pretend I was on the air," he said in 2009, remembering his boyhood in Goldsboro, N.C.

He also used to play with his grandmother's windup Victrola and her collection of records. "I would sit there sometimes and play those records, and I'd put in commercials between them," he recalled. "And I would do a newscast just like the guy on the radio did."

Kasell became a real guy on the radio at age 16, DJ-ing a late-night music show on his local station.

At the University of North Carolina, Kasell was, unsurprisingly, one of the very first students to work at its brand-new station, WUNC. After graduation he served in the military. But a job was waiting for him back home at his old station in Goldsboro. He moved to Northern Virginia to spin records but a friend persuaded him to take a job at an all-news station.

"I kind of left the records behind," Kasell said. "It came at a time when so much was happening; we had the Vietnam War, the demonstrations downtown in Washington, the [Martin Luther King] and Bobby Kennedy assassinations. And so it was a great learning period even though [there were] bad times in there."

In 1975, Kasell joined NPR as a part-time employee. Four years later, he announced the news for the first broadcast of a new show called Morning Edition. Over three decades, he became one of the network's most recognized voices.

Bob Edwards, Morning Edition's former host, says he relied on Kasell, especially on days such as Sept. 11, when news broke early. "That morning and a thousand others, awful things happened in the morning," Edwards says.

Sure, Edwards was the morning host, but he says Kasell was — in every way — its anchor. "Seven newscasts, every morning ... nobody in the business does that," Edwards said. "That is incredible."

And then came a surprise second act; after decades of being super-serious, Kasell got a chance to let his hair down as the official judge and scorekeeper for Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!

Host Peter Sagal says no one could have guessed that Kasell would be so funny. "The greatest thing about Carl was anything we came up with, he was game," Sagal says. "When we were in Las Vegas, we had him come onstage in a showgirl's headdress. No matter what we asked him to do — silly voices, or weird stunts; we had him jump out of a cake once to make his entrance onstage — he did it [with] such joy and such dignity."

At the beginning, Wait Wait didn't have a budget for actual prizes, so the "prize" for listeners was to have Kasell record the outgoing message on their answering machines. He ended up recording more than 2,000 messages. (You can hear some favorites below.)

Kasell may have been known for his measured, on-air newscast persona, but behind the scenes, the kind, witty newsman had plenty of surprises. He loved magic tricks, and at one memorable company holiday party, he sawed Nina Totenberg in half.

"We laid her out on the table, got out that saw and grrrr ... ran it straight through her midsection," he recalled. "She said it tickled and she got up and walked away in one piece."

In all that he did, Carl Kasell was magic.