AM Radio After Dark

One problem with working until late at night is the lack of things to do after a shift is done. Most people are asleep, businesses are closed, and it's not too long that I get tired and go to bed. I veg out with YouTube and Netflix most work nights, posted on the sofa and getting my fill of The IT Crowd reruns and whatever TED Talk might be interesting to check out, but the local internet provider sometimes falls short in the whole "providing internet" aspect of their services and I'm left to branch out from beyond my laptop. Sometimes I'll sit and read Outside Magazine. Other times I grab a book off one of my shelves and listen to a record. Every so often I'll fire up my Super Nintendo and play video games that haven't been relevant in over 20 years, but one night awhile back I decided to play around with a radio.

I got a nice wood paneled entertainment center thing for my birthday last year (thanks, Dad and Colleen) that has a CD player, a tape deck, a turntable, and a radio. I've played my vinyl on it quite a bit, and I've popped in a few long-lost mix CDs, but the lack of radio stations in the area makes for an unused tuner most of the time. I get my fill of country music and muzak pretty quickly, so I rely on either the music I already have or Pandora when I want to listen to tunes or have some background noise. The internet wasn't working the other night, so I opted to sift through the static on the FM waves to see if anything interesting would come up.

Gospel music. Muzak. Country. Pop through a haze of static. As expected.

I tried the AM frequencies afterward, not expecting anything to come up, but through the squelching and static came a clear voice. Curious, I listened to the DJ talk to a caller about some recent event. It sounded like they were talking about a torrential rainstorm or something, but then the DJ asked about "noises" the caller had mentioned earlier in the program before I'd tuned in, and I then realized that the rainstorm was only part of a multifaceted story about various UFO encounters throughout the US and Canada.

Apparently there's a radio show called Coast to Coast AM. Since the mid-80s, it's been a call-in show covering "UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (and often inexplicable) phenomena*" which I find really entertaining to listen to after midnight. I was a huge sucker for stories and "facts" about aliens and UFOs, ghosts, demons, and other spooky-scary crap that usually comes up on Halloween and on The X Files, so finding an AM radio show that caters to my hilarious, conspiracy-theorist, whack-job childhood interests prompted me to grab a beer, sit by the radio, and listen to loose logic from hearsay accounts of the supernatural on a radio station that I wasn't aware existed.

I've tuned in a few times since finding the mysterious radio station and the kind of spooky radio show. It's not like I believe extraterrestrials have any reason to go out of their way to shove probes up cow butts, or that little imp-like demons are possessing dogs or whatever in rural Kansas, or that the Illuminati is having game night this Friday at so-and-so's place, but sometimes it's fun to drop reality for an evening and listen to unusual accounts and cases from an AM signal at 1 in the morning.

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