Art Bell hosted the late-night radio programme Coast to Coast AM, on which he gave extensive coverage to ufology-adjacent topics, including the Face on Mars at Cydonia. In March 1998, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) received tens of thousands of faxes from Bell’s audience demanding new photographs of Cydonia at the earliest opportunity.1 On his 1998-04-06 show, Richard C. Hoagland explained that the low viewing angle in the newly released image was the best that could be hoped for, given the distance of the spacecraft’s track from the Face.2 Bell said he considered it a joke that the version produced by the Mission Image Processing Laboratory (MIPL) was the only one available when the television news went to air that day.3 He said that, looking at the MIPL image, he would have to conclude there was no Face on Mars, asking where it had gone.4 Bell said the image reminded him of a pattern his cat might scratch up in her litter box, giving rise to the nickname “Catbox” for that version - the MIPL “Catbox” image produced at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).5 Ahead of the second Cydonia image release on 1998-04-14, Hoagland’s team e-mailed their prediction of the release time to specific researchers and members of the press, including Tom Van Flandern and Bell.6
Bell’s coverage of Cydonia continued into the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) era. He abruptly retired from the air for family reasons and was replaced as host of Coast to Coast AM by Mike Siegel.7 According to Hoagland, Van Flandern spent nearly 90 minutes at an April 2001 press conference discussing Cydonia research already familiar to listeners of Bell’s show.8 Bell later returned to broadcasting and worked with Hoagland to apply public pressure for release of the Cydonia THEMIS data.9 Keith Laney briefed Bell in detail on the new THEMIS imagery and showed him a comparison with the earlier Phobos 2 infrared image.10 Bell had difficulty believing that Laney’s THEMIS images could not have been faked,11 and believed that Noel Gorelick or Philip Christensen had somehow embedded images of buildings and structures into the THEMIS Cydonia data.12
In April 1996, according to an account in In Plain Sight, an anonymous US Army sergeant who identified himself only as A Friend (anonymous army sergeant) wrote to Bell, enclosing a package of strange metallic samples allegedly recovered from the Roswell incident (1947) spacecraft - material that became known as Art’s Parts (alleged Roswell metal samples).13 The same account describes the sergeant sending five further letters over the following weeks, containing typed excerpts from his grandfather’s diary and later catalogued as the 1996 Art Bell letters from ‘A Friend’ about Roswell.14 When Bell told the story letter by letter on air, his listeners responded sceptically and did not believe it.15 In a second letter, per the same account, the sergeant wrote that he was surprised by the negative and close-minded response from some of Bell’s listeners.16 By 1996-05, in his fourth letter, he admitted that during one of the broadcasts he had in fact been aboard a flight to Hungary for the 1996 Joint Endeavor military operation flight to Hungary.17 He also told Bell, according to the same account, that his pilot friend was carrying a Roswell sample and that C-130 aircraft do not normally get struck by lightning and explode.18 The 1978-11-30 US military C-130 lightning crash referenced in the letters occurred four years after the grandfather’s diary account and eighteen years before the sergeant wrote to Bell and Linda Moulton Howe.19
Ross Coulthart said the 1996-11 US Defense Department scientist letter on ‘Art’s Parts’ metal artefact appeared to be written to a Los Angeles-based Hollywood TV show producer, possibly one collaborating with Howe or Bell, reporting the results of scientific tests on the material.20 Coulthart said he suspects the letter was later forwarded to Edgar Mitchell by Howe or Bell to keep him briefed, with identifying information about the scientist deleted.21 John Pendry, a British theoretical physicist, began conceiving the idea of metamaterials around the mid-1990s, at the same time Bell received the Art’s Parts samples.22 On 2019-07-30, Mick West identified the aluminium louvered sheets from Bell’s alleged “UFO” material as heat exchanger fins.23