I’m usually the first to rise at my house. This time of year I check the temperature immediately and if it’s comfortably cool (like today) I open a few windows before starting the coffee brewing and feeding the dog. The next stop is normally the radio shack where, with the flip of a few switches, the HF transceiver comes to life. There is one particular daily net on 40 meters that I enjoy listening to while checking email and scanning the overnight news.

I did all that today too until a tangent took me to my archive of Art Bell audio files in search of a particular program I never found. I began listening to a different program from 2009 and was drawn in enough that I muted the HF net to listen to the program on my laptop.

This was set into motion because last night during dinner I dropped a spoon in the kitchen. I heard it clang around on the tile as it vibrated to a stop. Then I couldn’t find it. I sat down to eat figuring I’d find it later but it kept bugging me. There weren’t that many places where it could have fallen. I got up from the table three or four times to look for it, once on my hands and knees. No success.

I chuckled out loud as I recalled an old Art Bell program where this same thing happened. A famous musician called into Art’s radio show one evening on an open line and related a similar experience. This person was enjoying a dinner party with guests when someone dropped a fork on the floor and they all spent the next thirty minutes crawling around under the table looking for the dropped utensil. They finally gave up the search, but the next morning there sat the fork on the floor in clear view. How six people could have missed seeing it the night before was a great mystery and the rest of the radio program focused on the possibility that at select times and under the right circumstance, objects can fall into an alternate dimension and then sometimes return later.

I know. Sounds crazy. But that was the joy of the Art Bell radio program. Crazy things could be discussed without prejudice and it obviously held audience attention as the widely syndicated program was heard by millions of listeners.

So when I walked into the kitchen this morning I half-expected to see the spoon lying in plain view. No such luck. I still don’t know where it went. Perhaps it’s still being used in that other universe? I’m not sure that’s a solid theory, but now I’m drinking my morning coffee while listening to a paranormal radio program from nearly twenty years ago.

The staying power of Art Bell, W6OBB might be an even bigger mystery.