When Art Bell came back on the air recently for the weekend editions of Coast to Coast AM, my interest was rekindled. He's very refreshing--he actually acknowledges that some of the things said by his guests are hard to believe, and sometimes even has real scientists on. Weekday host George Noory seems to believe just about anything that anyone says with neither questions nor a hint of incredulity, or he pretends to for the benefit of the show. And certainly there is a balance to be struck, so as not to alienate the guest or the audience. Additionally there isn't much that results from expressing doubt other than to let people like me know we're not alone in it, since during the show there's really no proving or providing of evidence to be done (often the theories of the guests seem almost carefully designed that way).

The best thing about Coast to Coast are the incredible stories woven by the guests, unbelievable as they are. Not many talk show guests can talk for 3 or 4 hours, but these people never run out of material, even when their beliefs are confined to one domain. The worst thing is when they bring bastardized science into the equation, sneakily making their story sound much more believable to the layman. There were several examples of this in the most recent show, whose guest was a crop circles guy. He held the unusual belief that the most complex ones are all created by humans, but that some of the simpler ones are created by 'some mysterious force.' I was disappointed that Mr. Bell didn't at least discuss these a bit more:

Guest: When I've walked through and near crop circles, I have seen balls of plasma flying around them at very high speeds, seeming to be attracted to the circles, and definitely looking like they are being mechanically controlled by something.

Reality: This sounds a lot like relatively rare, unexplained, but normal ball lightning. It's not too surprising he would witness it being out in fields in the middle of the night a lot. The appearance of being mechanically controlled is one of those things you just can't argue with.

Guest: I heard a story of someone who was with a group walking in a crop circle. He went to get something from their car, and to get there he went through the middle of the circle. But he couldn't find the car, instead in the woods he came upon a group of men around a campfire who were dressed rather primitively and were speaking an ancient-sounding language that he couldn't understand. He went back to the group, and though he felt he had been gone for about 3 hours, they said it had only been 5 minutes. (The implication is that he travelled back in time in the middle of the circle), and this agrees with the Theory of Relativity and time dilation!

Reality: Time dilation (the gravitational variety) is a phenomenon in which time passes more slowly (from an outside observer's point of view) when gravity is increased. On Earth, this is just barely measurable with atomic clocks, one on the ground and one in an airplane. If you took a spaceship out and flew it near a black hole and then came back to Earth, you would probably notice that quite a huge amount of time had passed on Earth while you were away (time had passed more slowly for you). So this could be called traveling forward in time. But this would never allow you travel back in time and then forward again, and even so, it would be rather noticeable if a circle in a field of wheat were exhibiting the gravitational properties of a black hole.

Guest: It's been observed in experiments that if a person kills a plant in one room, and then goes into another room where there are plants, those plants will respond, by turning away or drooping a little or something. This agrees with quantum entanglement.

Reality: Quantum entanglement, as one might expect, applies on the quantum scale. Entangled particles, when spatially separated, seem to influence one another instantaneously. A measurement of one appears to cause the other one to acquire the same measurement. This is crazy enough on its own, seeming to imply faster-than-light communication (although it doesn't for reasons I don't understand), but applying it to entire plants is...yeah. Again, one can't really argue with the guest's cited "experiments" while maintaining an interesting radio show.

Guest: If you arrange particles of certain materials on a surface, and project a sound on the surface, the particles form intricate and beautiful patterns. There's some mysterious energy within these particles making it happen.

Reality: We all saw this perfectly normal but interesting phenomenon in high school physics. He completely misrepresents it by saying it's the particles that matter, when of course it's the resonance properties of the surface material, and the sound, that create the patterns.

I don't want to be too much of a curmudgeon, of course part of the attraction of Coast to Coast is the ridiculousness. But things like this contribute to the sad state of science, and science education in particular, in this country. People clearly have some innate desire for the supernatural; no matter how strange reality is, if (somewhat) mainstream scientists are saying it, it's boring.

Later in the show, Art spontaneously called a British guy who disagreed strongly with the guest. The accent and vocabulary he used to trash the guest was hilarious. Unfortunately he ended up sounding like the asshole, an arrogant architecture professor who refused to believe that the charlatan circle-makers the guest said he had met were able to produce such beautiful patterns. Of course he didn't have any more evidence than the guest for his arguments, so it came down to bickering. He was hardly a voice of reason, since he thinks all the circles are being made by aliens. Of the crop circle that the guest said he had seen being made by normal people, he said: "I went and saw that circle. It's crap!"