January 19, 1996: Open Lines

Art Bell opens the Friday night program with a wide-ranging monologue covering the severe winter weather battering the United States, from record flooding in the Northeast to wind chill readings of minus eighty degrees in Minnesota. He discusses the political fallout from a deadly Chicago apartment fire, the baby boomer retirement crisis with ten thousand Americans turning fifty every day, and a tantalizing announcement from NASA that Galileo probe data from Jupiter may force a re-evaluation of how the solar system was formed.

Art Bell devotes an hour to international DX calls, hearing from near the Arctic Circle, Spitsbergen, Monterey Mexico, Winnipeg Beach Manitoba, and Perth Australia. A ship captain calling from off the coast of Trinidad describes a startling encounter where his seismic survey equipment was damaged by a large submerged metallic object that illuminated the sea with brilliant white light and appeared as a massive target on radar before vanishing.

Art Bell reopens the alien and immortal phone line, fielding calls from a self-described stranded extraterrestrial scientist, a thousand-year-old immortal in Nevada who warns of a radiation plague connected to Project HAARP, and various callers speculating about what life from Jupiter-sized planets might look like.