Before there was YouTube conspiracy content, before Reddit threads spiralled into madness, there was just Art and his callers, spinning tales that felt simultaneously absurd and terrifyingly plausible. Coast to Coast AM was less a radio show and more a cultural phenomenon — the sort of thing that made you question reality whilst simultaneously knowing full well you were probably listening to someone having you on.
These are the calls that became legend. The ones people still discuss in hushed tones on internet forums. The ones that, even now, make you wonder... what if?
This is the big one. The call that had people ringing their mates at three in the morning going "are you listening to this?"
It was September 11, 1997 — years before that date would take on an entirely different significance — and Art had opened a special phone line exclusively for Area 51 employees. Smart bit of radio, that. Create anticipation, make it exclusive, see what crawls out of the woodwork.
What he got was a man who sounded absolutely terrified. Not the theatrical kind of scared, mind you, but genuinely, viscerally frightened. The caller claimed he'd been medically discharged from Area 51 just days earlier, and he was on the run. Said he'd been driving across the country, paranoid they were tracking him.
The content was wild enough — something about extra-dimensional beings rather than traditional aliens, infiltrating the military, planning to eliminate major population centres — but what really sold it was the delivery. This bloke was crying, his voice breaking, insisting he didn't have much time because "they'll triangulate on this position really soon."
And then, right in the middle of the call, as the panic in his voice reached a crescendo, the entire satellite feed went dead.
Complete silence. Nothing. Art came back online clearly rattled, explaining they'd lost the satellite connection. The timing was so perfect it felt orchestrated, yet the technical failure was apparently legitimate.
The progressive metal band Tool later sampled the call for their track "Faaip de Oiad," immortalising that frantic voice forever. Seven months later, someone rang back claiming to be the same caller, saying it had all been a hoax that went too far. But listeners noted the voices sounded different. To this day, people argue about whether it was real, staged, or something stranger — two different hoaxers capitalising on the same legend.
If you want a proper Pacific Northwest mystery, Mel's Hole is where it's at. February 1997, a chap calling himself Mel Waters rang Art Bell with what might be the most wonderfully bonkers claim ever made on radio.
He had, he said, a bottomless pit on his property near Ellensburg, Washington. Not just deep — bottomless. About nine feet across, and he and his neighbours had been chucking rubbish into it for decades. Old furniture, bin bags, even dead cows when they couldn't be bothered with proper disposal. The hole never filled up. Never made a sound when things went in. Just... nothing.
Mel claimed he'd got properly obsessed with working out how deep it went. He was apparently a former semi-pro shark fisherman, so he had access to serious amounts of fishing line. Said he'd lowered 80,000 feet of the stuff down there — that's over 15 miles, if you're counting — without hitting bottom. He'd tied Lifesavers to the line, thinking if there was water down there they'd dissolve. They came back intact.
But wait, there's more. Animals wouldn't go near it. Dogs would be happily trotting along, then suddenly refuse to get any closer. The hole produced no echo whatsoever. And one neighbour swore he'd seen a "blacker than black" beam shooting up from it into the night sky.
Waters spoke with such detailed knowledge of the Ellensburg area that he had to be a local. He knew the roads, the landmarks, the way people talked about the region. It felt authentic.
Then, the day after his first call, he rang back with an update: armed military personnel had seized his land. Wouldn't let him near the place, made veiled threats, brought in heavy equipment. The classic government cover-up scenario, delivered with just enough paranoia to be convincing.
He'd call back twice more over the following years, and the story got progressively madder. Something about being relocated to Nevada, finding a second hole, a sheep that went in and came out as some sort of paranormal creature with healing properties. It went off the rails, honestly.
Here's the thing, though: no one named Mel Waters ever lived in Kittitas County. No property records, no tax records, nothing. And geologists will tell you such a hole is physically impossible — the pressure and heat would cause it to collapse into itself.
Didn't stop it becoming legend. People still go looking for Mel's Hole, convinced it's out there somewhere on Manastash Ridge, waiting to be rediscovered.
John Titor is perhaps the most famous time traveller who never existed. And he didn't even start as a caller — he sent faxes.
July 29, 1998. Art's doing one of his "Open Time Lines" shows, inviting alleged time travellers to call in. Instead, he gets two faxes from someone claiming to be from 2036. The writer explained that time travel had been invented in 2034 through some business involving contained singularity engines at CERN. He warned about a nuclear incident in the Middle East that might have "damaged the timeline" and created a mysterious blackness that appeared in 2564 — beyond which no time traveller could pass.
But Titor really came into his own in late 2000 when he started posting on internet forums. His story was remarkably detailed: he was a military time traveller sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer, which contained some crucial functionality needed to debug legacy systems in his war-ravaged future. On his way, he'd stopped in the year 2000 for personal reasons — to visit his family and collect photographs lost in a coming civil war.
The future he described was properly grim. America torn apart by civil war starting in 2004, World War III in 2015 with Russia and the US on the same side, three billion people dead. But it wasn't all doom — he also described a more rural, community-focused society that had emerged from the ashes, with pockets of advanced technology including time machines.
For four months, Titor answered every question thrown at him. He provided technical specifications for his time machine — a "stationary mass temporal displacement unit" installed in a 1987 Chevy Suburban. He shared grainy photos. He discussed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, explaining why his predictions might not come true on our timeline.
Then, in March 2001, he announced he had to return to 2036 and vanished completely.
The aftermath was mental. Books were published. Investigators tried to track down who created the persona. The leading theory pointed to a Florida entertainment lawyer named Larry Haber and his brothers, though they've denied it. Some reckon it was an early alternate reality game, an elaborate piece of collaborative fiction.
What's brilliant about Titor is that he got people thinking seriously about the mechanics of time travel, about branching timelines, about the butterfly effect. Even if it was a hoax, it was a remarkably sophisticated one.
Just over a week before Titor sent his first fax, another time traveller called in. This one identified himself as "Single Seven" — his rank, apparently — or sometimes "Jonathon." He claimed to be from 2063.
What made Single Seven memorable wasn't drama or panic — it was how utterly mundane he made time travel sound. He described himself as a "paleo ag tech," basically an agricultural scientist sent back to collect seeds. In his future, global warming had made Earth significantly hotter, and they needed earlier versions of crops — corn, wheat, tomatoes — that could survive higher temperatures. These would be spliced into modern varieties to create heat-resistant hybrids.
It was such a practical, unglamorous reason for time travel. Not saving the world, not preventing disasters — just collecting plant samples for crop development. The sort of mission a government would actually fund, if time travel were real.
He also mentioned an alien invasion scheduled for 2054, which he spoke about with the same casual tone someone might use to discuss a scheduled dental appointment. The juxtaposition was brilliant.
Years later, things got weird. Art Bell apparently received a letter from someone claiming to be Single Seven, warning him about his wife Ramona's death before it happened. Whether this was the original caller or someone capitalising on the character is anyone's guess.
In 2024, someone came forward claiming to be the original Single Seven, ready to reveal the hoax after years in the shadows. Though that, of course, could be yet another layer to the story.
This one sits in that beautiful grey area between obvious prank and brilliant radio theatre. The kind of call that had Art Bell written all over it.
A pilot rang in, claiming to be flying a Cessna toward Area 51 at night. Said he wanted to find out "what's really going on" at the classified facility. Art, to his credit, immediately started warning him off. Don't do it, they'll shoot you down, turn around now while you still can.
But the caller pressed on, describing the scene below him — searchlights sweeping the darkness, his altitude dropping to around a thousand feet. Then he reported an F-16 being scrambled, could hear it approaching. The military was trying to force him down using the jet's exhaust to create a vortex.
Art's getting increasingly agitated, the caller's describing something opening up in the ground below him, bright lights, something coming up at him. Then he shouts that he has to make a hard turn and... silence. Dead air.
Art came back on, explaining to the audience he didn't know what to make of what they'd just heard. The timing was perfect, the sound effects — if that's what they were — sounded authentic enough over a mobile phone connection.
Most sources identify this as an April Fools' prank from 1996, and that makes sense. Art loved April Fools' Day, would always have at least one story designed to keep listeners guessing. But that's what made it brilliant — you knew it was probably fake, yet there was just enough plausibility to make you wonder.
For pure "theatre of the mind" entertainment, it was absolutely top-drawer radio.
Every Halloween, without fail, Art Bell would transform Coast to Coast AM into "Ghost to Ghost AM." The phone lines opened exclusively for people to share their real ghost encounters, and bloody hell, did they have stories.
What made Ghost to Ghost special wasn't any single call but the cumulative effect of dozens of them over the course of a night. Long-haul truckers describing shadow figures at rest stops. Night shift workers encountering the impossible. Families living in houses that seemed determined to drive them out.
The calls had a texture you don't get from written creepypastas. You could hear the tremor in people's voices, the pauses where they were reliving the moment, the genuine fear or confusion or wonder. Art had this gift for knowing when to ask questions and when to just let someone tell their story.
There'd be tales of children with imaginary friends who knew things they couldn't possibly know. Houses where doors opened and closed on their own. Electronics going haywire. Objects moving. The feeling of being watched. And occasionally, something genuinely unsettling — like the caller who described seeing a figure at the foot of their bed that they somehow knew was death itself.
What's interesting is that these weren't polished narratives. People would ramble, lose their thread, circle back. It felt authentic in a way scripted content never quite manages. You got the sense these were real experiences being processed in real time, whether you believed in the paranormal or not.
Art would occasionally share his own stories too, though he was famously tight-lipped about an Ouija board incident that apparently terrified him so badly he never spoke about it publicly. That restraint, that sense of boundaries even in a show dedicated to the strange, made the whole thing feel more credible.
Ghost to Ghost became an institution, the show people waited for all year. When Art retired and George Noory took over, fans mourned the loss of that particular Halloween magic. There was something about Art's voice in the dead of night, broadcasting from the Kingdom of Nye, that made the impossible feel momentarily real.
The Art Bell Legacy
What made these calls legendary wasn't just their content but the context — Art Bell's show existed in that brief window between the end of mainstream media's monopoly and the rise of social media. It was participatory but not yet digital, wild but not yet weaponised.
People could ring in anonymously, spin a tale, and disappear back into the night. The internet was young enough that fact-checking took effort. Mysteries could linger. Stories could spread without immediately being debunked or torn apart by forensic analysis.
Art himself was the perfect host for this peculiar moment. He never claimed to believe everything — often explicitly said he was providing entertainment — yet he gave callers the respect of being heard. He'd push back when things seemed too outlandish, but he wouldn't humiliate. That balance kept the calls coming and the stories flowing.
Looking back now, Coast to Coast AM feels almost quaint. The idea that someone could describe extra-dimensional beings infiltrating the military or bottomless pits in Washington or time machines in Chevy Suburbans, and the main way to verify it was... just ringing back later to say it was a hoax? It's from a different era entirely.
But those calls remain compelling precisely because of their ambiguity. No definitive answers, no resolution, just strange tales told in the small hours when the world feels slightly unreal anyway. That's the art of it, really — knowing when to believe and when to simply enjoy the story.
Art Bell died in 2018, but these calls live on. People still discuss them, still debate them, still go looking for Mel's Hole or trace John Titor's timeline predictions. In the end, maybe that's the real legacy — not whether any of it was true, but that it made us wonder.
