I listened to Coast to Coast once while on a long car trip – and I admit with some embarassment that he had me almost convinced of the conspiracy of the day he was talking about until I went home and did some reading and discovered it was all hogwash. He has such a convincing way of speaking and presents his facts as if they were well established by all sorts of credible experts. If you aren’t willing to check what he says – and what his listeners say – then you would be convinced. Points out again why a bit of skepticism and a desire to fact check is necessary. I do think an element in those who wholeheartedly buy into such things is obsession – they often tend to be people who get obsessive about things. And sometimes – conspiracy theories can be fun sort of like a puzzle one can solve. It also can satisfy a desire to belong – you have the other devotees as a community of shared believers. Conspiracy and doom and gloom notions also give people an “enemy” they can identify instead of having to deal with the vagueries of human behavior. I think part of the persistence of Kennedy conspiracies is that it seems too trivial for this one loony guy to have killed a President – there just must be more to it.
Re: Jung and the “savior” theory – granted there are some who understand religious belief that way but I was certainly raised with the notion that God helps those who help themselves. As the old saying goes – pray to God but keep rowing to shore. Jesus was not after all sent to save us from hurricanes or stupid decisions – he was sent to save our souls. I think the importance of belief in God relates to the notion that through prayer we can ask for the strength and wisdom to deal with whatever we find ourselves confronted with. Of course – it seems given the recent release of UK government records that some UFO sightings were legitimate so I guess it is true that even paranoids do have enemies.
Andrew Greeley wrote that we are a “other haunted” people and I suppose the notion of some powerful other continues to haunt even those who have no religious belief because there is so much we have no or little control over. .
For some people who buy into various and assorted conspiracy theories or doom and gloom scenarios it is clear facts do not alter their beliefs – that suggest to me that there are other reasons which make adherence to the conspiracy theory or doom and gloom thing important to them. I think this is why we have to be careful about falling for some of the doom and gloom prognasticators – they have a vested interest in their beliefs which affects their ability to prognosticate accurately.

I used to listen off and on. Personally, I just took it as a more modern incarnation of sitting around the camp fire telling ghost stories. There’s a reason the show is on so late at night.

I listen to it frequently unless/until I fall asleep. George Noory is a very fair interviewer, and often features alternative viewpoints (i.e: Christian world views) to his show’s other-world programming.
But the devil comes at night they say, and his radio show is proof of it. Lots and lots of questionably stable people call in, but Noory gets them off the air quickly and is often subversively hilarious while doing so.
The show is sometimes riveting and sometimes dull. I never thought I’d ever hear myself say this but, I feel sorry for Whitley Strieber. He has an alien implant, you know.

I listened to it quite a bit over the course of a year when I was working third shift. I’m with Geoff on this – ghost stories around the campfire. Good fun at night – kind of goofy by the light of day.

Hofstadter came up with a doozy of a title, but his argument is the usual, “My opponents are not merely mistaken, but crazy (or evil).”
This approach was also taken in the “Authoritarian Personality” literature–pathologize, rather than refute, one’s opponents.
“Conspiracy theorists” can be mistaken and even silly, but there ARE conspiracies and have been throughout history.
This whole rhetorical approach reflects the snobbism of the academy, especially the Ivies and the other big research universities, to whom the rubes in the flyover states are deranged thugs out of “Deliverance.” There’s a reason so many people prefer Sarah Palin to John Kerry. For that matter, in spite of her faults, so do I.

Then, during the Goldwater campaign, a bunch of psychiatrists who had never interviewed him responded to inquiries about Barry Goldwater, opining in essence that the man was crazy. This sort of thing is now considered unethical without an interview and informed consent by the subject.
Hofstadter, of course, was a historian, and constrained by no such rules, and the “data” upon which the “authoritarian personality” business was founded derived from anonymous test instruments. Still, the idea is, if you reject the leftish consensus, your father probably beat you, or you’re a paranoid schizophrenic.
Pseudoscience at its worst.

My husband and I used to listen to Art Bell years ago, just for kicks. The phrase used by Jung “dark problem of UFO sightings” brought to mind my first encounter with Roswell, NM. We were on our way to Ruidoso, NM, for the horse races and stopped in Roswell for lunch. Little did we know that we had happened upon the 50th anniversary celebration of the “UFO landing”. So, we decided to do the tourist thing and check out the museum and expo. Yes, there really was an alien expo where I purchased a bottle of blue alien fingernail polish. Anyway, my husband and I assumed that most people were there out of good-natured curiosity and fun. We soon realized that we were surrounded by true believers and conspiracy theorists, though. After touring the museum and listening to the conversations around me, I was more than a little creeped out and felt like it was somewhere I shouldn’t be. There was something almost evil about it and I am as unable to articulate the feeling that I had now as I was then, when I was trying to get us out of there and back on the road.
All I know was that I was glad to be out of there and back under the clear blue New Mexico sky and seeing Roswell in my rear view mirror. I don’t believe the people there were evil, but there was something very dark about the whole thing.

Rod, mentioning Hofstadter and his work isn’t exactly the most non-partisan way to discuss “coast to coast”. I know it is a quote, but by bringing in Mr. “All Conservatives Are Insane Crypto Nazis” to the discussion, you kind of set the wheels in motion for a less than non-partisan discussion thread. Perhaps you should be more careful about who you cite on the new, kinder and gentler non-partisan weblog?
As for Coast to Coast, people who stop believing in God will believe in anything. And they do…

It just occurred to me that we are missing an opportunity to compare and contrast Haitian belief in voudon with belief in whatever is on Coast to Coast nowadays. Anyone want to take a crack at it?

I’m very Roman Catholic. I’ve been listening to Coast for years. Perhaps there is something about the paranormal and religion that goes hand in hand. After all, religion is the supernatural, isn’t it?
George Noory has been hosting it for 7 years now. He’s carried on Art Bell’s legacy (which Art comes back from time to time to host) and there are many people who like the “new” direction of the show. I enjoy it, but there are many shows that I just won’t listen to because of the topics. Instead of a heavy focus on the paranormal, conspiracies and UFO’s, it seems that George mixed in more “new age” topics – reincarnation, psychics, remote viewing, etc. Not that these topics weren’t a part of it before, their frequency just seems to have grown over the years. George even suggested and planned a live Ouija board session on the air – until people wrote in and complained, myself included, of the spiritual danger of doing such a thing. He didn’t go through with it and warns against using the board to this day.
But a religious aspect exists to the show – Ian Punnett, a talk radio host and Epispcopal deacon, hosts the show on Saturday nights. His wit and dry humor mixed with unique topics are what made me subscribe to their mp3 downloads of the show. He ends each show with the latin phrase for “God loves you” and says “and I do too.” George Knapp, out of Las Vegas, fills in on Sunday nights sometimes. He’s more of the line of Art Bell – very much in to UFOs and conspiracies. He is the reporter who first ran the Bob Lazar/Area 51 story in the late 80s, early 90s.
I can’t help but sometimes wonder how serious Noory is about the topics. He loves his job and you can tell it by his on-air personality. Seems like a great guy. But every once in a while there are certain callers that continually call in. JC is one of them – an over zealous, extreme right wing character who says he is God’s 10 Star General on the war against pornography. He is so animated that I can’t help but suspect he’s a plant – a character made up by a producer or staff member.
Who knows. I just see the show as plain fun and it captures a sense of wonderment that our society has lost.

I’m a confessional Reformed Protestant, and I’ve listened to Noory for years now since I work at night. He is very entertaining and a good interviewer, but I’ve heard that he’s no Art Bell (who still occasionally hosts). I agree with the commentator above who mentions the strong “new age” religious connection… virtually every discussion of UFOs or anything comes with a load of occult and new age baggage. While Noory comes off as a fair interviewer, it is difficult to listen after a while because he bends over backwards to entertain the most outlandish ideas, to the point you think he almost believes everything (like the guy who thinks the earth is hollow and wanted to fly a helicopter across the inside of it, to the “2012 is the end of the world!” stuff). Noory clearly does have “new age” / occultic type beliefs that you can discern if you listen enough.
And you’re right, the ‘conspiracy’ mindset of fear is huge and unrelenting on the show, to the point that if you share the “worldview of fear” your words will be heard and to an extent believed, no matter how outlandish, because the government/Illuminati/etc. are controlling everything (but are somehow powerless to shut down “Coast to Coast Radio… hah).
(A decent book that discusses some of these connections between the occult and UFOlogy is “Alien Intrusion” by Gary Bates… I hesitate to mention it because he is an ‘Answers in Genesis’ type Young Earth Creationist (which I don’t agree with). However, most of the book is about UFO sitings / alien encounters / abductions / etc., discussing some of the background, some of the ‘bunk’, and yet how some things are unexplained and likely have some truth to them, albeit demonic, as much as most Westerners can’t stomach the idea that there may be demonic things.)

I used to drive from Chicago to Akron late on Sunday nights for a couple of years, and this show came on right after Matt Drudge on the only station I could listen to for most of the commute. I listened because it was weird. It had a few thought-provoking segments, honestly, but mostly it was just so bizarre and surreal that it kept me awake. I’m rather disturbed at the thought that people might have a genuine interest in the topics discussed.

I used to be a regular Coast to Coast listener, back in the time of Art Bell. During those days there were few options for insomniacs. It was so dark and depressing, that I begged our local radio station to put something else on, but they wouldn’t, it was just too popular. It wasn’t so much the presented material that was depressing, as it was the solid wall of faithful who called in. The fact that today one can instead listen to foreign language news streamed online is truly incredible.

Well, I have never listened to the show, but I once had a bizarre connection to it. At one time years ago, I worked as a distribution center (a tiny office in the back of the house) for Carla Emery, author of The Encyclopedia of Country Living. She also wrote a much lesser-known book about abusive hypnotism called Secret, Don’t Tell. We mostly shipped her homesteading books. However, she was once interviewed on Art Bell about the hypnotism book, but did not inform us in advance. In contrast to the one or two calls per day to which we were accustomed, we were on the phone for days taking orders.
Boy was that a strange experience. We talked to people who had really bizarre encounters with hypnosis, as well as some undoubtedly psychotic individuals who were convinced everyone in their office was after them. Nothing like taking an order and having the customer run to hide while whispering, “Oh no! Here comes one of them now!” Definitely surreal.

I once had a long conversation with an Art Bell listener who believed we had been visited once before(and would be once again) by benevolent aliens on a mission to save us from ourselves. And that the US government had captured, and eventually somehow killed, the first alien emissaries, in secret, and was trying to reverse-engineer their ship.
This was a sane, ordinary person with a very responsible job, in nursing. When I tried to talk about the parallels to Christianity – what she believed practically was Christianity, but with aliens for Christ – she refused to see any parallel, and got rather annoyed. I didn’t use the word “substitute”, as I was trying to be polite.
But, well, yeah. What some UFO-ers is obviously derived from the Christian story.

Sometimes Noory can sound like a rational man, but then he says things that are just crazy. I listen to him sometimes late at night when I can’t sleep, and once heard him discussing the idea that aliens have come to live on earth, and are presently inhabiting “camps” several miles underground. He actually referred to them as “little green aliens” and took his guest totally seriously.

Er – make that “what some UFO-ers *believe*”

Mike writes:
Sometimes Noory can sound like a rational man, but then he says things that are just crazy. I listen to him sometimes late at night when I can’t sleep, and once heard him discussing the idea that aliens have come to live on earth, and are presently inhabiting “camps” several miles underground. He actually referred to them as “little green aliens” and took his guest totally seriously.
I ran into the claim of “aliens living in habitats miles underground” back in the 1990′s, sometime around 1994-1995, on an otherwise serious email list. The person who posted it had previously posted only technically related and political observations that were quite cogent. It was similar to the above experience, except the aliens in question were “greys”, not green.
Another experience involved a retired military NCO who worked as a systems administrator, who had interesting stories about West Germany, Greece, Italy when he was in the military, as well as a lot of bitterness about his ex wife (unfortunately). One day he told me flat out that he knew of a secret landing field on a military reservation in the Southwest that was surrounded by a large gully. The gully was circular, because the force field over the landing field caused the rain to run off during thunderstorms (and the aliens only landed during thunderstorms for some reason). This was delivered to me in his office in a calm, matter of fact voice, the same way he would have talked about needing to reformat some hard drives that had been virus infected, or some other ordinary topic. He had been raised as a Roman Catholic but was intensely, angrily, seriously opposed to any organized religion.
We humans need to believe in something bigger than ourselves. If not God, then it will be something else. Maybe “historical inevitability of the proletarian state”, maybe UFO’s, maybe a sports team…but there will be something we fasten on to.

I used to listen to the program while commuting up I-95 in the early morning hours as there was nothing else on at that time. the program never ceased to amaze me and many times I could just imagine first Art Bell then Noory sitting there at the mike wondering where did these callers come from?

I listen on occasion, and I agree with the above that it’s campfire stories (or X-Files or the old TV show In Search Of). The callers, on the other hand, are usually sincere in their various accounts of conspiracy theories, UFO sightings, ghosts, Egyptology, astrology, Big Foot, remote viewing, Illuminati, Mothman prophecies, etc. The show is usually non-political, and it strays away from current political and cultural events or controversies. It’s generally New Agey. Regardless of how outlandish a particular caller’s ideas or recount of events, Noory always accepts the account with complete acceptance. I think people like to be taken seriously in this.
On the show Edgar Cayce is a common topic. Sometimes Malachi Martin. Whitley Streiber or Maryanne Williams appear on the show. When Noory does stray into politics, Alex Jones is unfortunately his go to guest. I’m surprised Noory hasn’t discovered Monk Lewis, Ignatius Donnelly, Madame Blavatsky, or Carlos Cateneda (although Art Bell used to talk about “shadow people”) as topics. Hopefully he doesn’t start doing shows on Rene Guenon or Julius Evola.
Except in the broadest of strokes regarding paranoia, I don’t think Hofstadter is appropriate for understanding Noory.

I listen to the problem religiously. George Noory is quite spiritual. I love the show

Noory is an imbecile. The Atlantic article’s attempt to sanitize his incompetency is laughable. If you want to see how people with a shred of critical thinking ability thing about him visit the link below my name. There’s 400+ pages of the Chronicle of Noory.

I hate to come to your blog in dissent, but the Atlantic article has left long time listeners to the show confused. Noory is a definite low point of the show and the interest in the paranormal has nearly slammed shut since the late 90s. (Witness the recenent closure of Paranoia magazine.) At it’s peak, the show had no guests — it was a late night clearing house of rumor. You could call in and say anything — you’d travelled here from the future or the past, grey aliens were stalking you, invite people to help you raid Area 51. People liked it because it challenged what they knew and made them wonder. Now the show consists mostly of fearmongering in an attempt to sell gold. Noory seems intent on not embarrassing his guests, whereas before the embarrassment of foolish predictions was part of the fun. Sorry… You’ve been led astray by the Atlantic. This fruit withered about 7-8 years ago. In a post 9-11 world, discussing what the government isn’t discussing is no longer titillating. It’s too close to news — it’s not fun. Collectively, American musings have moved from aliens and time-travel to security risks and uncontrolled nuclear stockpiles.

Poor George Noory….dim witted but earnest. Bell took on the fringe with questions that reflected an IQ. Not the same without Bell nightly. Bell fills in too infrequently — almost wonder why he’s not invited to fill in more? Last night was as good as Nova!

i’m a long time listener, the streamlink account is a great thing to buy if you have an office job and are into the content – as for george, hes my favorite of the three guys now – ian punnett comes off as a guy who loves hearing himself talk, and george knapp seems like an amazing guy but pretty dull for radio; you can’t rely as much on george as art, but george is very good at making his guests shine. in that respect he does his job pretty well i would think.

Lots of comments about Coast to Coast with George Noory at :
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message807580/pg429

I had stopped listening to the show years before George Noory took it over and when I found out there was a new host I tuned in again…now I rarely miss a program…a great show and George is why it has become so popular. As for the people here who don’t care for him…it would appear that your whining is more indicative of your own IQ’s than his.
As for why I listen…probably the same reason that many people listen…we’ve seen things, that are not from this world…and if you’re lucky, YOU never will………all the best.

I have been a listener for years even back when art bell was the host. I liked george for a long while and things were interesting.
now that he is a right wing friend of glenn beck and plants his calls,talks about God all the time and is running for president, I am sad as it was a refuge for me at night.
the only one that I enjoy now is George Knapp and he is very intelligent and hope not on verge of running for anything. Ian punnett is pretty good but I think is pushing George Noory’s agenda too much. Art is on rarely and is still great.