By: David Mayne

This week on Cap’n Horatio, we dig deep into the highly mysterious case of the strange phone call received by paranormal broadcaster, Art Bell, on the night of September 11th, 1997.

During Bell’s show that night (Coast To Coast AM), the caller, only identifying himself as a former employee at “Area 51“, frantically states that his employment there had been recently terminated and that he was being pursued by unknown persons. Sounding audibly distressed and extremely frightened, the man goes on to claim that “sinister forces” have plans underway for wide scale destruction, wanting “major population centers wiped out”. The call is then interrupted, and suddenly Coast To Coast AM went completely off-air. After a short period, the station came back and aired a previously recorded interview while they worked out “technical difficulties”.

When the LIVE show restarted, Bell commented that the man, in his opinion, sounded genuinely terrified, and that before the call was ended, but after the broadcast was dropped, that the man had screamed.

Several weeks later, a man claiming to be the “Area 51″ caller, called back into the show and explained to Bell that it had all been a hoax and even offered to replicate the frenzied voice of the original call. Although sounding similar, many notice distinct discrepancies in both tone and delivery in the second caller’s voice. Other callers that night displayed similar skepticism of the caller being the same person as the original Area 51 call, others offering up additional hypothesis, some even as far as to say that he had been captured by government authorities, and “re-programmed” to forget, deny, and perhaps even call back in to the show with the aforementioned “hoax” explanation.

Transcript (Listen to the show to hear the audio!)

“Hello Art? Art? Hi….I don’t have a whole lot of time..um…I was a former employee of Area 51…I was let go on a medical discharge about a week ago…and…and…(starts to cry)…I kinda been running across the country…um…um….man….I don’t know WHERE to start……they’ll triangulate on this position really, really soon… (starting to break up and get more frantic–Art tells him to give us something quick>)…OK…um…um….What we’re thinking of as Aliens …they’re EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL BEINGS…that an earlier precursor of the SPACE PROGRAM MADE CONTACT WITH…uh…they are NOT what they claim to be…uh…they have INFILTRATED a lot of aspects of the MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT particularly Area 51…uh…the DISASTERS that are coming…the GOVERNMENT knows about them….and there’s a lot of SAFE AREAS in this WORLD THAT THEY COULD BEGIN MOVING THE POPULATION TO…N O W – Art…..but they are NOT doing anything about it… THEY WANT THE MAJOR POPULATION CENTERS – WIPED OUT SO THAT THE FEW THAT ARE LEFT WILL BE MORE EASILY CONTROLLABLE….(breaking up more, starting to cry…)…I started getting….”

At this point, Coast To Coast AM suddenly goes off-air for over 30 minutes.

Some food for thought:

• The call happened on September 11th, 1997, 4 years before the tragic events of September 11th, 2001.
• The caller spoke of sinister forces that had plans underway for wide scale destruction, wanting “major population centers wiped out” and “DISASTERS that are coming”.
• The official line from the FCC concerning the radio outage was that the satellite had “lost Earth lock”. Only a few things cause satellites to lose what is referred to as Earth-lock:  manual shutdown of momentum wheels on board the satellite, solar flares from the sun, and physical impacts. Free-space Path Loss is also a possible culprit, although signal loss coupled with the subject matter of the caller in-question raises eyebrows.

Reasons to think this is bogus:

• Art Bell’s show was and is known to play host to untold troves of UFO nuts, paranoid conspiracy theorists, and outright hoaxers.
• Although not documented, it is said that over 50 other local stations were also knocked off-air for approximately 30 minutes, leading some to believe that Coast To Coast AM wasn’t the target of Men in Black.
• It would be incredibly easy to call-in, on a night when Bell was openly asking any employees of Area 51 to call, and stage a couple of minutes of freak-out.

Wrap-Up

The main thing here is to listen to the audio and make up your own mind. To be honest, it’s hard to listen to the caller and not feel on some level that he is realistically terrified of something. Given the ultra-secret installation known as Area 51, it’s not in the realm of the impossible to think that something like this would happen if an ex-employee were to spill the beans. For a place that airlifts its employees via Boeing 747s (JANET) from Las Vegas everyday and allows NO one to get close, let alone see the installation, they must take security pretty seriously. If loose lips do indeed sink ships, then the Area 51 caller might be considered a 700 foot long torpedo! Better to get that torpedo out of the water before it hits anything, right?

From Wikipedia:  This incident formed the basis of the song “Faaip de Oiad” by the rock band Tool, which features said interview (with Art Bell’s part cut out), over frantic drumming and buzzing static.

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