Inside the Other Worldly World of George Noory

Last week I came across this January 2010 profile in The Atlantic on George Noory, the host of the AM radio sensation, Coast to Coast AM with George Noory.

Years ago I played guitar for a mentor and good friend of mine, Mike Brandow. We would travel throughout the Northwest playing different churches and conferences. This required a decent amount of driving in whatever van became available to us. The Pickle. The Nugget. The Handy. These were favorites in our arsenol.

Often times we would drive in the middle of the night from one church to another. We would play at a Saturday night service and then a Sunday morning service somewhere else and make it back to our home church to play a Sunday night youth group. Needless to say, there always was the challenge of finding entertainment during these drives.

I can remember one night, early in my time playing with Brandow, when he dialed in to a radio show he had been telling us about amidst his own giggling: Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. He kept telling me how crazy this guy was, reporting on the supernatural and the unknown of our universe.

We tried to stifle our laughter in order to further hear his thoughts on "star children," who were born on the outer regions of our solar system. Noory's voice fit perfectly with his subject matter. And while what he spoke of was, in our minds, entirely absurd, a strange and long silence would fill the van as we listened in.

I never really understood what makes his show so listenable, except for perhaps the idea that we were listening in on something unearthly -- Like tapping into another species' radio waves, we could not afford to turn it off. Or maybe because it was just so dang strange.

This profile brings Noory down to earth, from showing us his past and what he's like out at dinner to his conference speaking schedule and daily routine. I appreciate this quote, about the tone of the conversation at dinner:

"Before long, the impulse to tell funny stories about life within the Coast to Coast universe—which extends past the studio’s orbit and into conferences, TV appearances, and speaking engagements, and is expanding—proved irresistible. And I realized, as I listened, that all the stories were funny in a particular way: it’s never clear, in their world, where the demarcation between fantasy and reality is drawn—or, indeed, if such a line can really be said to exist anymore."