Art Bell became infamous for his interview with Ben Chertoff of Popular Mechanics in March 2005, which was a poor attempt to debunk 9/11 'Conspiracy Theories'.

It capped quite an amazing change in attitude by Art Bell who, about 15 months earlier, seemed quite eager to get on air, the comments of famous professional pilot John Lear who did not at all beleive the official version of the 9/11 attacks. In fact, at the time of that show, Bell seemed quite convinced of Lear's expert opinions.

Streaming audio: Art Bell & John Lear - official 9/11 story impossible Length 11 minutes, 15 seconds

Download: Art Bell and John Lear - A professional pilot's perspective on the events on 911.mp3 1.9 MBs,  11 minutes, 15 seconds

NOTE: the recording is generally clean but has one or two noises from the Windows operating system which was being used at the time, that the show was being recorded.

Also a bit of the introduction was somewhat garbled at the very start and therefore removed. The part of the interview concerning 9/11 is intact and has not been altered in anyway.

Coast To Coast AM - Sunday November 2nd, 2003 Host: Art Bell with guest John Lear

Show title: 'Aerial Revelations'

"John Lear, a Lockheed L-1011 Captain, known for his revelations about aerial phenomena and UFOs, caught up with Art for the full 4-hour broadcast."
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2003/11/

"John Lear is the son of the famous inventor of the Lear Jet. He is a Lockheed L-1011 Captain and is highly regarded in aviation circles. He has flown over 150 test aircraft and has won every award granted by the Federal Aviation Administration. John also holds 18 world speed records and has worked for 28 different Aircraft Corporations. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, John began coming forward with some startling revelations concerning the subject of aerial phenomena and Unidentified Flying Objects."
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/guests/684.html

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TRANSCRIPT:

(Art reads John Lear's Bio):

"John Lear, retired airline captain, with over 19,000 hours of flight-time, has flown in over 100 different types of planes in 60 different counties around the world.

Son of Lear Jet inventor, Bill Lear, John is the only pilot to hold every FAA airplane certificate, to include airplane transport rating, flight instructor, ground instructor, flight navigator, engineer, aircraft dispatcher, airframe powerplant mechanic, parachute rigger, and tower operator.

He flew secret missions for the CIA in Central and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa between 1966 and 1983. He has flown as Captain and check pilot for over 10 different airlines.

John held 17 world records including speed around the world in a Lear Jet Model 24 set in 1966. He was presented with the PATCO award for outstanding airmanship in 1968, and the Symons Wave memorial. He was the youngest American to climb the Matterhorn in Switzerland in 1959 and in the 1970's owned and skippered the Americas Cup boat, the Soliloquy, out of Marina Del Rey.

In 1968, John raced a Douglas B-26 Invader in the unlimited class at the Reno air races.

He was a Senior Vice Commander of the China Post 1, the American Legion Post for Soldiers of Fortune. He is a 20 year member of the Special Operations Association.

John is the currently owner and operator of the only permitted gold mine operation Cutthroat Mining Corporation in Clarke County, Nevada. His efforts to clean up the Treasure Hawk mine in Gold Butte won him the state of Nevada's Award for Excellence in mining reclamation in 1999. John is a M.S.H.A. (Mine, Safety, and Health Administration) and holds a Blaster License from the Nevada certified mining instructor from the Nevada State Fire Marshall.

John's passion for the preservation and documentation of the history of the Gold Butte has made him a authority on the area.

John has been a resident of Las Vegas since 1994 and was a republican State Senate candidate in 1980.

John has 4 daughters..."

[SNIP]

Art Bell: Uh... all right! You know... before we launch into the whole spectrum of things we have to talk about John, uh... when you and I were on the phone the other day, you began to tell me about 9/11 and I'd really would like to talk about that. Uh... you have a perspective on the 9/11 thing that people should at least hear. I mean... everybody can make up their own minds about it, but you're a commercial pilot and there are certain things you know. So.. how about it?

John Lear: Well! This is a sensitive subject, and... I told you that I was hesitant to talk about it.

Art Bell: That's why I'm bringing it up first! (laughs)

John Lear: But whoever concocted 9/11, and it certainly wasn't Osama Bin Laden, they had two objectives:

One was to polarize American's opinion against Arab-Muslims.

And, number two was to get the U.S. ... to trick the U.S. essentially to get Osama out of Afghanistan because Osama, as bad as he was, he was shutting down all the heroin poppy fields, and was causing a disastrous monetary loss, to the illegal drug industry, and last year, which was a year after we went into Afghanistan, National Geographic did a special on TV, that ran for several months and documented the uh... 500% increase in drugs flowing out of Afghanistan... 'after' we went in there and eliminated Osama.

Art Bell: They actually did. I recall that. I remember that report. Umm... several... so you are sort of charging that we went in there after Osama... to... rescue the drug trade.

John Lear: No. Well - that wasn't what 'we' thought - we were sort of tricked into doing that. We were tricked into thinking that Osama was responsible for 9/11, but to get a proper perspective on who 'did' the World Trade Center ... uh ... you have to understand what a magnificent feat of airmanship this was. It was 'disastrous' and was horrible for this country, but... this was not accomplished by some guys who went to Florida and got some instructions on a Cessna or a Piper. And this was not accomplished by somebody who had a right seat on a 727.

Art Bell: What about simulators? Flight simulators?

John Lear: This had to be accomplished by... pilots who were taken to 'honest-to-God' Boeing 757 simulators which is... you know... the 757 and 767 the same cockpit essentially and you get the same rating and whoever concocted this whole thing knew that... on a particular day that airliners themselves could be switched because of maintenance problems, and by selecting airlines that had that airplane, they had everything covered.

Art Bell: So... it actually took a fair amount of skill to 'plow' into those buildings?

John Lear: I would say that...ahh... it took about 200 or 300 hours for each pilot, and we're talking about...

Art Bell: 200 or 300 hours? Oh, but.. you mean of simulator time?

John Lear: Of simulator time. They had to learn how to step into the cockpit... and and that's a whole thing: getting into the airplane, but that's separate from that... they had to get into the cockpit and pull the circuit breaker for the transponder, sit in the pilot seat, disconnect the auto-pilot from the flight management system, turn the airplane, push the throttles all the way forward, find Manhattan, then line up on a pre-planned course, doing 10 miles a minute. They were clocked by air traffic control doing 600 miles an hour at 700 feet above the ground and fly directly into the middle the center of the World Trade Center. Now that, you know and the air races only fly 400 miles an hour and that's difficult, but to fly an airliner (!) ...like the size of a 757 at 700 feet, I mean that... that took some... that took some skill, and that took a long time to train that. Probably a year.

Art Bell: Hmm! That's wild... (unintelligible)

John Lear: In addition to that, hitting the Trade Center was a feat. But hitting the Pentagon was even more of a feat, because when you are going that fast there is a tremendous amount of air creating this lift and as you head towards the ground, that air reacts against the wing and pushes you up, so whoever... whoever hit that... trained to hit the Pentagon at the 3rd story was highly trained because when he came towards the ground... there was a tremendous amount of lift and you would have to trim forward and push with an incredible amount of strength to not be pushed up and over the Pentagon to hit the 3rd story.

Art Bell: But what about the plane that went down that didn't make it, that was probably headed towards the Whitehouse?

John Lear: uh... Well that was shot down by an F-16 out of a base south of New York and uh ...

Art Bell: How can you be so sure?

John Lear: Well because there were parts found 5 miles away... uh... because there were eye-witnesses to it being shot down... uh... there is corroborating evidence somebody who was listening to a... uh... cell phone conversation at the time this was going on who said they heard the rapid... like the ... described it as a pilot rapidly turning pages. Well, that's not what was happening. That was the cannon fire hitting the fuselage and that's what accounted for... what they called the 'smoke' in the air in the cabin. Well it wasn't smoke. That was the depressurization causing the condensation.

Art Bell: So you are saying definitely that you feel it was shot down?

John Lear: But you have to understand the governments position. Number one, they couldn't 'possibly' reveal this information because, you know, it was something they had to do. The problem was that once the passengers got control of the airplane, there was no way to communicate with air traffic control, or communicate with whoever was directing the attack for the airforce.

Art Bell: Now you say Osama Bin Laden wasn't responsible but there are video tapes showing Osama with his Lieutenant, sort of laughing and joking... they didn't expect such a grand result and all that baloney. What about that?

John Lear: He may have been told at the last minute that... but if that's all we've got... people say 'how come we haven't got Osama Bin Laden?' But the bottom line is, we don't want to get him. We'd have to put him on trial and... other than that video tape, we don't have a 'shred' - not a 'shred' - of evidence.

Art Bell: Uhh... Yet, it might be enough in a court of law!

John Lear: In a world court?

Art Bell: You might be right. Well... uh.. I don't know. You've shocked me with some of your views... on the 9/11 business. No question about that! Uh ... you just ... I mean... 100's of hours of simmu.... uh... John ... where would they get simulator training like that? ...that many hours...?

John Lear: Therein lies the problem. Because they 'certainly' couldn't waltz into any airline in the United States and get that kind of time. I mean, most of the airliners... uh ... airlines... who have 757's, use them 24 hours a day... and they certainly aren't in the habit of granting ... uh... to unauthorized people, like somebody going in there and saying "hey, give me 1500 hours of time!" Its just not going to happen. They would have to find another 757 elsewhere in the world and if you look around in the Middle-East and there's certainly none there, because... at least, ...not in any arab country... because, they have airbuses... strictly airbuses from France. They would have to find some place else.... that has a 757 simulator.

Art Bell: How many simulators are there?

John Lear: Well, there's of them, but uh... you know... not lots of them, but you know they're certainly around... and they'd have to make a deal somewhere... obviously they got training because they couldn't do it without training.

Art Bell: But what we've been given by the media... the mass media... you know... they were down in Florida... getting a few hours on lighter aircraft... that doesn't wash at all ...?

John Lear: No possibility! You talk to any... pilot... who knows 'anything' about this... and that was... that was, that was a feat of airmanship! With the benefit with 19,000 hours in all the airplanes I've flown including air races... the Douglas B-26... I doubt that I could have done that the 1st time...

Art Bell: Really ...?

John Lear: ...what you are doing, you are going a mile every 6 seconds! So, you had to learn where to line up ... which reference points to get... you know... where to be at a particular time hit, to that building. It had to be... planned for a long, long time. So this is a tremendous amount of skill, and it took a long time to do, particularly... you know... they probably... got somebody who didn't have thousands of hours. They probably had to train them from the ground up, and in this case it was relatively easy, because they didn't have to learn how to take off and land. He didn't have to learn how do a single engine approach. He didn't have to learn to do a (unintelligible) or MBD approach, or anything like that...

Art Bell: Just hit a building ...

John Lear: Yeah!

Art Bell: John, hold on. We're at the bottom of the hour....

[Newsbreak]