December 15, 1999: Open Lines - Y2K
Dec 15, 1999
2h 51m
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell opens the phone lines with Y2K just sixteen days away, fielding calls from across North America as anxiety builds toward the millennium rollover. He reports that a Nebraska bank posted signs limiting cash withdrawals to three thousand dollars, sparking the very panic officials hoped to avoid. Massachusetts officials, meanwhile, prepare to monitor the transition from a concrete bunker forty feet underground.
Callers from Alaska describe glaciers in unprecedented retreat, with mountain rocks exposed for the first time in 25,000 years. A New Hampshire listener reports 106-mile-per-hour winds and 150-mile-per-hour gusts in the White Mountains. Art connects these weather extremes to his new book with Whitley Strieber, arguing that the signs of a coming climate catastrophe are already visible. He reads listener accounts of Lake Erie water levels rising unevenly and solar wind anomalies that NASA kept quiet for months.
The night takes an unexpected turn when a caller describes telling a Christian minister his theory that grey aliens are humans from the future. The minister responded not with disbelief but with the question, "How did you find that out?" Art promises to track down the minister for a future interview. Between calls, he promotes the final night of autographed book sales and fields reports from a Canadian donut baker and a Colorado police officer preparing for New Year's Eve duty.
Callers from Alaska describe glaciers in unprecedented retreat, with mountain rocks exposed for the first time in 25,000 years. A New Hampshire listener reports 106-mile-per-hour winds and 150-mile-per-hour gusts in the White Mountains. Art connects these weather extremes to his new book with Whitley Strieber, arguing that the signs of a coming climate catastrophe are already visible. He reads listener accounts of Lake Erie water levels rising unevenly and solar wind anomalies that NASA kept quiet for months.
The night takes an unexpected turn when a caller describes telling a Christian minister his theory that grey aliens are humans from the future. The minister responded not with disbelief but with the question, "How did you find that out?" Art promises to track down the minister for a future interview. Between calls, he promotes the final night of autographed book sales and fields reports from a Canadian donut baker and a Colorado police officer preparing for New Year's Eve duty.
Key Moments
Alaska Marine Highway Glacier Letter: Bell reads a listener letter from a former purser on the Alaska Marine Highway who would tell tourists in 70-80 degree Skagway that they were seeing global warming firsthand - that the gray gravel atop the high mountains had not seen daylight for 25,000 years and the glaciers that covered them just twenty years earlier were gone.
Bell Says It Is Too Late: When a Chicago caller (Joe on WLS) asks whether people coming together could reverse the climate change underway, Bell answers flatly that he thinks it is too late, while saying he has not ruled out trying.