On October 31, George Noory, using the popular message board BELLGAB.COM, changed his avatar to a crown..
People thought he was proclaiming himself the king of paranormal radio. Instead, it may have been a hidden message that, only last night, was revealed to the world..
When Art Bell quit DARK MATTER on Sirius XM 104, he said it was because of the timeouts and other user related problems. A week ago, he even proposed a solution: Stream through Artbell.com, become an independent broadcaster, take no salary from Sirius, but still be exclusive to them.. Though he, his producer Paul Bowman, and webmaster Keith Rowland, all said that Sirius was considering the deal, the suits in D.C. never responded to the request.
Last night, the first night that Art Bell's DARK MATTER had officially ended, Sirius XM replaced his program with Coast to Coast AM with George Noory.
As expected, message boards across the internet woke up with anger and confusion. Was this the hidden back story that Art Bell alluded to? For days now, he wrote cryptic statements on BELLGAB, wondering aloud if 'big money' had something to do with 'something' going on behind the scenes.
The ink on his deal with Sirius had never even dried before, apparently, some form of negotiation started to occur with Premiere Radio..
George Noory himself even took to BELLGAB last night to defend himself--some of the messages he was publicly receiving consisted of unabashed rage and anger. Noory said, in full:
Here you go folks. This is WHAT happened. As many of you know, we were on XM for years . The end of OCT that channel went away. We knew this was coming for months prior. WE began negotiations to get Sirius/XM to BUY the rights to air my show. When Art went on Sirius those negotiations continued. We didn't know what channel we'd be on, but I wanted to flow after Art's Dark Matter .It would have been a strong channel. He up and RESIGNED. We then got the offer we were waiting for and had two options for channels 104 and a truckers channel. We selected 104. We are NOT in Art's original 7pm-10pm PT slot. we start at 10PM PT. He RESIGNED. We never expected that...and frankly he made a mistake , I believe. Don't blame us for getting BACK on a satellite network we were ON in the past.What is interesting about Noory's statement is the time problem. Art Bell's original show was going to air from 7pm PDT to 10pm PDT, but he expanded it to four hours .. Additionally, the HORROR REPORT spoke to Art Bell in August, before his show began to air on Sirius, and he explained that he has the entire night and could, if he wanted to, expand the show to a full eight hours. The HORROR REPORT asked him, if there was a breaking news event, could he extend the program if he desired to cover it..
The fact that Sirius was negotiating with Noory, planning on taking away his hours of repeat (or potential live shows) and replace it with Coast to Coast AM, is beyond interesting. It may be paranormal radio treason!
It could explain some of the back story as to why Bell suddenly vanished from extraterrestrial radio.
In the 1990s, there were rumors and tales that Jay Leno would hide in closets to hear executive meetings on the TONIGHT SHOW and David Letterman's fate. In the 2000teens we have a whole new late night war, this one on radio...