Thursday, March 27, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
"This is Friday night, 11:30," the voice on the videotape narrates as the point of light jitterbugs wildly around the screen. "I don't know what it is."
The voice belongs to Bob, the man who did the taping, and if he doesn't know what it is he taped in the sky over Las Vegas that night, at least he doesn't believe what you think he believes -- that it's a UFO. "If it was a spaceship, why would it be moving like that?" he asks.
Good question, Bob. One of many that have cropped up in the wake of my recent profile of talk-radio star Art Bell, who, from his studio in deepest Pahrump, broadcasts several late-night hours of paranormal, extraterrestrial speculation every weeknight.
"I need to know, is that guy he has on his show, Major Danes, really who he says he is?" comes a call from an Oregon trailer park, the woman's thirst for verification clearly unslaked by my article.
"After reading 'Art Bell's strange universe,' I have decided to drop the LV Sun Paper," goes one bit of e-mail. Apparently I took it too easy on Bell. "He's even more whacked out than you think," confirms another.
Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Arti Krsnas wonders why I didn't mention that "some people worship him," signing off with a benevolent "Art bless you."
Then there's the one that begins, "Let me enlighten you on the newly stepped-up procedures of the International Banking Cartel," and proceeds, over the course of 11 screens of large numbers and bad writing, to endarken me. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad e-world, all right.
As I have a low screed limit and no patience for broken English other than my own, I generally ignore such stuff. Despite the popularity of the Internet and talk radio, the two generally intersect in the scuzzy margins where unmarked black helicopters whirr through the imaginations of people who fancy themselves overtaxed victims of the military-media-extraterrestrial complex ... which, as you know, is really just softening us up for the inevitable United Nations takeover (America 2000: red, white and powder blue!). Or something like that.
Then Bob called.
Said he'd videotaped a strange light jerking and swooping in the sky above the Stardust and Mirage on March 14. Said he'd looked me up after another news outlet had brushed him off with the suggestion he take his story to the "guy who wrote about Art Bell." Said he'd like me to take a peep.
Why did I go? Despite the lavish pay, the real compensation in feature writing lies in arm-wrestling offbeat stories into print. I'm a sucker for the odd, the quirky, and sometimes even for strange tales from the scuzzy margin, at least when they're relayed by someone like Bob, who sounded sane enough.
"It was right over there," Bob says, standing on the balcony of his high-rise apartment and pointing out over the Strip. He describes it as a little diamond of light, of flickering luminescence, that wiggled beneath the late-night cloud cover. When it suddenly lurched in a Z-shaped pattern, he dashed for his camcorder. Darn! Dead battery! He finally loaded a fresh one and, fortunately, the light was still there. He caught about 4 1/2 minutes of it on video.
He slips the tape into his player. The mystery light swivels and jitters. Occasionally, the camera pans down to the Strip or over to the moon; Bob is trying to clarify the light's position in relation to recognizable landmarks. The lessons of post-Rodney King camcorder savvy haven't been lost on him.
"I was standing perfectly still," he says. Then why are the buildings, moon and passing planes jittery too? "Being 60 years old, I move a little..."
We watch it again, and while it seems clear that some of the light's motion is actually Bob's, the thing seems to swing too wildly for that to be the only explanation. Tape over, Bob bids me farewell, offering as I leave his formula for winning at craps.
"Like I said," he says in parting, "I don't think it's a spaceship. I don't believe in that stuff." He's just curious as to what it is. No plane moves like that! A hotel testing a new laser show? Some atmospheric condition?
"There's not enough information to come up with any conclusion," says Dale Etheridge, planetarium director at the Community College of Southern Nevada, an expert in skyborne phenomena. He viewed the tape a few days after the filming.
That zigzaggy movement? "All of the motion on the screen can be attributed to the fact that the camera was hand-held," he says. "He had his telephoto cranked out to the longest focal length," exaggerating the shakiness of Bob's grip.
As for the light itself, while Etheridge wouldn't commit to any explanation, he suggested perhaps it was a plane traveling directly toward Bob. Add videocam jitters and you have instant unidentified flying object.
It doesn't jibe with Bob's description -- he went for his camera, remember, after the light swerved in a big Z -- but those are the sort of conflicting accounts that make sky lights so difficult to explain. Sorry, Bob. For all we'll ever know, it was a black helicopter dropping off another cash shipment for the International Banking Cartel or a spaceship whisking away the last of the Arti Krsnas to spend eternity with their deity in his big trailer in Pahrump.
But let's have Bob rewind that tape a minute. A few scenes before the dancing light, he has footage of another mystery hovering over the Strip: a glowing disk-like object, bulged in the center in a classic flying-saucer profile. Before you can say At last, Scully, proof!, it comes into focus, disappointingly, as the Fuji blimp.
Or maybe that's just what the U.N. wants us to think.
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