American radio broadcaster who built Coast to Coast AM from a Nevada studio into an overnight national programme, and who, through the 1990s, was the main channel by which UFO and paranormal claims reached a mass American audience.
Why the name is in the evidence
Art’s Parts, the metal samples mailed anonymously to Bell in 1996 and claimed to be from the Roswell Incident 1947, are named after him and were tested and argued over for years. The vault carries the samples and did not carry the broadcaster, which is the wrong way round: the reason the material was analysed at all is that it arrived at the one address in America where an anonymous package about a crashed disc would be taken seriously and discussed on air.
What the show did to the record
It gave the subject a nightly national platform with almost no filtering, which brought forward genuine witnesses and an enormous volume of invention through the same door, and it set the tone of the field for a decade. In Plain Sight devotes a chapter to demolishing Art’s Parts, which is a fair measure of how much the show shaped what had to be cleared away afterwards.
Connections
Art’s Parts · Roswell Incident 1947 · In Plain Sight · Ross Coulthart · Linda Moulton Howe · George Knapp · Whitley Strieber