While you drive along in your hillbilly truck listening to the various radio talkshows, you probably are unaware that there is a fierce battle going on behind the scenes, and on the net. These nighttime talkshow hosts and their guests can be meaner and more ornery than pole cats! This is the latest...

Bad stuff has been happening to talkshow host Art Bell. For some reason the owner of Art's program, Premiere Radio Networks/Jacor, has been trying out horrible replacement hosts for Art's show, Coast to Coast.

None of these trial replacement hosts have the intelligence or showmanship that Art has. They aren't even in the same league. First they had the insanely boring Hilly Rose who doesn't even bother to pretend he believes any of the good hoohaw that Art's show is all about, i.e.: aliens, remote viewing, ghosts, pyramid machines, and whatnot. Then they had that kiss-ass Witley Strieber on who acts like everyone on Earth has been abducted and horked by aliens. He's the guy who wrote Communion, which was a semi-scary autobiographical account of getting buggered by aliens (also made into an awesome movie starring Christopher Walken, by the way). The problem with Witley, besides the fact that he's namby-pamby and whiny, is that he gets such complete nutjobs for guests that they make Art's guest lineup look normal and respectable...

Nobody knows why the network might be gearing up to replace Art. Does it have anything to do with the mysterious events last year that caused Art to walk off the air for several weeks, and claim that he was going to quit the talkshow business? Nobody seems to know what that's all about either. Matt Drudge wrote a report about how Art's son was involved with drugs, so maybe that's it, but that report has never been confirmed (we do know that Art's kid cracked up Art's Geo Metro, though, so maybe he is a little wild).

Or could it have to do with "The Feud"?

Art has been doing battle with David John Oates, the Australian "Reverse Speech" freak who was booted off of Coast to Coast for making inflammatory comments about another one of Art's guests, Major Ed Dames, a "remote viewer" with a Prince Valiant bowl cut. A remote viewer is a type of super special spy who uses ESP. Oates claimed that the reversals of Major Dames showed signs -- specifically, metaphors -- of deception, and involvement in some sort of government disinformation campaign. Art claims that he repeatedly warned Oates not to talk about any metaphors that impugned Major Dames' credibility, but Oates refused to shut up, so he was banned from Art's program forever, and all signs that Oates had ever been a guest were removed from Art's web site.

That's when Oates went on a rampage, teaming up with another arch foe of Art's, the mysterious Robert A.M. Stevens, who was also a former Coast to Coast guest permanently booted from the show because his interview was so sideways that Art abruptly terminated it after only 12 minutes of air time. Meanwhile, Oates took over the Saturday night slot of the Art Bell knockoff show, Sightings On The Radio, normally hosted by Jeff Rense. Besides boring the universe to death with speech reversals, and hawking his reverse tape recorders, Oates has been providing Stevens a platform to smear the hell out of Art. Stevens has been making wild claims (RealAudio Index: 01:55:00) that Art is everything from a former convict to the head of pornography ring using Filipino women, and a pathological liar.

But the big question is: who the hell is Robert A.M. Stevens? A spook? A fraud? Mentally ill? Or just a debunker? He came out of nowhere six months ago, and his claims about his background, such as that he is a former Navy SEAL and a NASA contractor, either cannot be verified, or have been thoroughly debunked. All we really know about him is that he's been involved in a feverish, junkyard-dog style shit slinging campaign against Art and some of his main guests, especially Richard "Face on Mars" Hoagland.

Stevens has darkly alluded that he's working for a group of "anonymous attorneys" who have something to do with the families of those involved in the Heaven's Gate mass suicide, as well as NASA, who want to sue Art and Premiere Radio Networks/Jacor for as much as 250 million dollars. He also claimed to be working with a group of "anonymous private investigators" who are investigating the backgrounds of Art and all of his main guests. He put up several strange documents about Art's alleged dirty deeds on his bizarre web site. And Art has put up documents of his own refuting them.

What's going on here? Is Premiere Radio Networks/Jacor running scared? Are they going to dump Art to avoid becoming enmeshed in a massive law suit? Who could be behind such a law suit? Is this part of an elaborate scheme to silence Art Bell and his guests? Or is it just more bad craziness?

zales@pigdog.org