On the evening of September 11, 1997, the highly popular Art Bell radio show received a call from a disturbed, frantic man who claimed to have been employed at Area 51. This is a transcript of the phone call that took place:

Caller: Hello, Art?

Art: Yes

Caller: Hi..umm..I… I don’t have a whole lot of time. Um.

Art: Well, look, let’s begin by finding out whether you’re using this line properly or not.

Caller [frantic]: Ar..Area 51

Art: Yes that’s right. Were you an employee or are you now?

Caller[breathing heavily, and frightened]: I’m a former employee. I, I was let go on a medical discharge about a week ago and, and… I kind of been running across the country. Um oh man, I don’t know where to start, they’re, they’re gonna, they’ll triangulate on this position really, really soon.

Art: So you can’t spend a lot of time on the phone, so give us something quick. (It can be listened to in full here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee3bld4lTG0)

At this point the radio station suffered a mysterious loss of transmission and when they got back on the air with their backup system the caller was gone. Adding even more room for speculation, days later a man claiming to be Area 51 caller called in again and confessed it had all been a hoax and that even he was frightened by the loss of signal at the time of the call. He claimed he often called in acting as “wacky characters”. Although, some say the caller was forced to make that claim or that an actor was hired to impersonate the previous caller.