Time Travelers Call Art Bell.
C2C Am Time Travelers Call Art Bell
Coast to Coast AM: Somewhere in Time
Time Travelers Call Art Bell
by NetCentrum
Watch the Show:
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Prologue: The Voice in the Static
There are nights when the world feels thin.
When the veil between what is and what might have been grows gossamer-thin, and you can almost hear the whispers of other times bleeding through the static of the present. Such nights were Art Bell’s domain. From his self-built radio station in the high desert of Pahrump, Nevada, he would sit alone in the darkness, surrounded by the hum of vacuum tubes and the ghostly glow of analog dials, and he would open the door to the impossible. From the Kingdom of Nye, he would call out across the wastelands of the night, and millions would listen.
But some nights, the impossible called back.
This is the story of one such night. A night when the time travelers came home.
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Part One: The Line That Should Not Exist
It was July 29, 1998, and the desert heat hung over Pahrump like a shroud. Art Bell sat in his studio, the same studio where he had broadcast for years, the one with the blue-lit windows and the towering antenna that reached toward the stars like a prayer. The clock on the wall read 11:47 PM Pacific Time, and Art was preparing for what he called his “Open Time Lines” segment—a designated hotline for callers who claimed to have slipped the surly bonds of chronology.
He had done this before, of course. Many times. There was “Mad Man Marcum,” the aspiring time traveler from 1995 who had detailed his frantic attempts to build a machine to journey into the past. There was Al Bielek, who had recounted his participation in the Philadelphia Experiment, the 1943 military project that had allegedly rendered the USS Eldridge invisible and hurled its crew through time. There was the Cherokee woman who called herself Nunnehi—”The Little People”—who had spoken of previewing her own death along a chain-link fence.
But tonight felt different. Tonight, the air itself seemed charged with something electric. Something hungry.
“From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I’m Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM,” he intoned, his voice a familiar comfort to the sleepless millions. “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we’re opening the time traveler line. If you’ve been to the past or the future, if you’ve seen what lies beyond the arrow of time, I want to hear from you. The number is 1-800-… well, you know the number. And remember—we are live. We are unscreened. And we are ready for anything.”
The first caller was a woman from Sacramento who claimed she had been visited by beings from the year 2564. She spoke in hushed, breathless tones about a “temporal barrier” that prevented anyone from seeing beyond that year, as though history itself came to a brick wall at that date. Art listened patiently, asking his careful questions, but something in the woman’s voice made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. She wasn’t lying. He had been doing this long enough to know when someone was fabricating. This woman believed every word she said.
Then came the fax.
It arrived in the middle of the hour, emerging from the ancient machine in the corner with its distinctive screech and whir. Art glanced at it while a caller from Minnesota described being taken to the year 2045 by an entity named Malachi, in a world where “technology has washed away”. The fax was unsigned, typed on what appeared to be an old-fashioned manual typewriter, and its contents made Art’s blood run cold.
“Dear Art,” it began. “When I heard other time travelers calling in from any time past the year 2500 AD, I had to fax”.
And then the words that would haunt Art Bell for the rest of his life:
“Time travel is invented in 2034. The scientists at CERN, using breakthroughs in fusion reactor research, have created the world’s first singularity engine”.
The fax went on to describe in alarming detail the mechanics of temporal displacement—how rotating a singularity in a magnetic field could bend the fabric of spacetime, how altering the rotation speed and direction could propel a traveler forward or backward through history. It spoke of alternate timelines, of parallel universes created whenever the engine was switched off, of a future so bleak that the year 2564 held “no visible future” at all.
Art read the fax twice. Then he read it a third time.
“I’m going to read this to you,” he said into the microphone, his voice uncharacteristically shaken. “And I want you to listen carefully. Because I think… I think this might be real.”
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Part Two: The Man Who Wasn’t There
The phone lines exploded.
Within minutes, calls were flooding in from across the continent. A man from Denver claimed he had been part of a secret government program that had successfully sent agents into the past to “correct” historical anomalies. A woman from New York insisted that she was from the year 2097 and had come back to prevent the assassination of a world leader whose name she refused to reveal. A trucker from somewhere in the Midwest, his voice crackling with static, said he had seen things on the road—things that shouldn’t exist, things from other times bleeding through like ghosts in the machine.
But it was the third hour that changed everything.
The call came in just after 2:00 AM. Art picked up the line, expecting another wild tale, another fantastical claim. What he got was something else entirely.
“Art Bell?” The voice on the other end was calm, measured, almost clinical. It was the voice of a man who had seen too much and was trying very hard to sound normal. “My name is… well, you can call me John. I’m calling from Florida.”
“Welcome to the show, John,” Art said, his voice steady despite the unease creeping up his spine. “What’s your story?”
“I’m a time traveler, Art. But I’m not here to tell you about the future. I’m here to tell you about a mistake. A mistake that’s about to happen.”
Art leaned forward, his hand instinctively going to the volume dial. “Go on.”
“I was part of a team,” John continued. “We were sent back to observe. To document. We weren’t supposed to interfere. But something went wrong. A… a fracture in the timeline. And now there are things coming through. Things that shouldn’t exist. Things from the spaces between time.”
“What kind of things?”
There was a long pause. When John spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. “The kind that don’t have names, Art. The kind that don’t have faces. The kind that exist only because someone, somewhere, made a choice they shouldn’t have made, and now the universe is trying to correct itself. And it’s using us to do it.”
The line went silent. Art looked at the board—the call was still connected, but there was nothing but dead air on the other end.
“John? Are you still there?”
The voice that came back was different. Deeper. Older. As though centuries had passed in the space of a heartbeat.
“I’m here, Art. But I’m not the same John who called you. I’m… later. Much later. And I need you to listen very carefully, because what I’m about to tell you could save everything—or destroy it all.”
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Part Three: The Bumper Music of the Damned
If you ever listened to Coast to Coast AM in those golden years, you remember the bumper music. The ethereal strains of “Tubular Bells,” the haunting melody of “The X-Files” theme, the ominous synth of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Art Bell had a gift for choosing music that seemed to reach into your soul and pull out the darkness you didn’t know was there.
But on this night, the music seemed to be playing itself. The CD changer would skip, the tapes would rewind without warning, and once, in the middle of a caller’s testimony, the theme from “The Twilight Zone” began to play on its own, the volume slowly increasing until Art had to physically pull the plug.
“That’s never happened before,” he said, and for once, the master of the macabre sounded genuinely unnerved.
The calls kept coming. A man from Kansas City described being struck by lightning forty-four years earlier and finding himself floating above his own body, watching his past self moments before the accident. “I actually saw the electrical pulse come in through the phone line,” he said, “and I watched in very slow motion as the phone line began to melt and the lightning came out of the phone and struck me”.
“Such a large electromagnetic occurrence just might do something exactly like that,” Art commented. But even as he said it, he knew there was more to the story than science could explain.
Then came the caller who would become legend.
He identified himself only as “Steve,” and he claimed to have been part of a team of time travelers who regularly visited the past to make small changes—”tweaks,” he called them—in order to prevent a catastrophic future where the Earth ceased to exist in 2564. He spoke of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider as a temporal gateway, of quantum entanglement as a means of communication across centuries, of a world government that existed in the future and sent agents back to ensure its own creation.
But it was what he said next that made Art’s blood freeze.
“They’re coming through, Art. Not just us. Them. The ones who exist in the spaces between. The ones who were never meant to be. They’re using the fractures in time to enter our world, and once they’re here, they can’t be sent back. They don’t belong anywhere. They don’t belong anywhere.”
“What are they?” Art asked, his voice barely a whisper.
“They’re the echoes of choices that were never made. The ghosts of paths not taken. Every time a time traveler changes the past, they create a new timeline, a new universe. But the old timeline doesn’t disappear. It just… becomes a ghost. And sometimes, those ghosts find their way back.”
The line went dead. But before it did, Art heard something that would haunt him for the rest of his life: the sound of a child crying in the distance, and the slow, deliberate ticking of a clock that was counting backward.
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Part Four: The Fax That Changed Everything
At 3:47 AM, the fax machine whirred to life again. This time, the message was longer, more detailed, and even more disturbing.
“Dear Mr. Bell,” it read. “I am writing to you from the year 2034. By the time you receive this, I will have already been born, lived my life, and died—but from your perspective, I do not yet exist. Please do not let that trouble you. Time is not the river you think it is. It is an ocean, and we are all swimming in it, sometimes forward, sometimes backward, sometimes sideways.”
“I am writing to warn you about what is coming. In your year 1998, you will receive a fax from someone claiming to be a time traveler. That fax is real. But it is also a trap. The information it contains is accurate, but it has been designed to lead you down a path that ends in disaster.”
“You must not publish the contents of that fax. You must not discuss it on your show. You must let it be forgotten, as though it never existed. If you do not, then the timeline will fracture, and the things that live in the fractures will come through. They will not be kind.”
“I am sorry to be so cryptic, but I cannot tell you more. The very act of revealing too much could change the future in ways I cannot predict. Just know this: you are being watched. They are watching you. And they are waiting.”
“Signed, a friend.”
Art stared at the fax for a long time. Then he looked at the clock. 3:52 AM. He had less than an hour left in his broadcast.
He made a decision.
“I’m going to read this to you,” he said, his voice heavy with exhaustion and something that might have been fear. “I think you need to hear it. I think we all need to hear it.”
And he did. He read the entire fax, word for word, to his millions of listeners. He read it slowly, deliberately, giving each word the weight it deserved. When he finished, there was silence on the line. Not the silence of dead air, but the silence of a million people holding their breath.
Then the phones started ringing again. But this time, the calls were different. The callers weren’t telling stories. They were asking questions. They were demanding answers. They wanted to know who had sent the fax, how it could possibly be real, and what they could do to protect themselves from the things that lived in the fractures of time.
Art did his best to answer them. But even he knew that some questions had no answers.
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Part Five: The Aftermath
The show ended at 4:00 AM, as it always did. Art sat in his studio, the blue lights of his equipment casting long shadows across the walls. The fax machine was silent. The phones were quiet. The world outside was dark and still.
But Art couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed. Something fundamental. Something that couldn’t be undone.
He looked at the faxes, still sitting on his desk. The first one, the one that had started it all. The second one, the warning. He read them both again, and then he did something he had never done before. He locked them in his safe, along with a recording of the night’s broadcast, and he made a promise to himself that he would never speak of them again.
But the story didn’t end there.
In the weeks that followed, Art received dozens of letters and faxes from listeners who claimed to have experienced strange phenomena on the night of July 29, 1998. One woman said her clock had run backward for an hour. A man in Texas reported seeing a figure in his living room that vanished when he turned on the light. A trucker in Nevada said he had picked up a hitchhiker who gave him directions to a town that didn’t exist on any map.
And then there was the letter that arrived in September, postmarked from a town that had been abandoned since 1952. It was written in handwriting that seemed to shift and change as you looked at it, and it contained only four words:
“We are still watching.”
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Epilogue: Somewhere in Time
Art Bell passed away on April 13, 2018. But his legacy lives on in the archives of Coast to Coast AM, in the “Somewhere in Time” rebroadcasts that air to this day. Millions still listen to his voice in the darkness, still find comfort in his calm demeanor and his willingness to ask the questions that others were afraid to ask.
And sometimes, on certain nights, when the static is just right and the moon is hidden behind the clouds, the time traveler line still rings. The callers are different now—they speak of different futures, different pasts, different worlds that might have been. But the pattern is always the same. The stories are always the same.
And somewhere, in a studio in the high desert, a fax machine begins to whir.
“Dear Art,” it reads. “I know you’re gone. But I also know you’re listening. You’re always listening. Because time is not a river, Art. It is an ocean. And we are all swimming in it, together, forever.”
“See you soon.”
The fax machine falls silent. The clock ticks forward. And somewhere in the darkness, a million sleepless souls lean a little closer to their radios, waiting for the next call from somewhere in time.
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THE END
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Author’s Note: This story is a work of creative fiction inspired by the real phenomena and callers associated with Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM. The “Mad Man Marcum”, Al Bielek and the Philadelphia Experiment, the faxes from John Titor, and the Open Time Lines segments are all documented elements of the show’s history. The mysterious faxes described in this story are inspired by actual correspondence received by Art Bell in 1998. Whether the callers were genuine time travelers, elaborate hoaxers, or something in between remains one of the great mysteries of the golden age of late-night radio. As Art Bell would say, some truths are stranger than fiction—and some lies are more true than we dare to admit.
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NetCentrum
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