By Barry Link

Paulina Zelitsky of Advanced Digital Communications, if you’re out there, please contact me. I want to thank you for putting B.C. on the high weirdness map.

If you listen to Art Bell’s nightly talk show, you probably know what I’m talking about. For those who don’t: Bell is the American host of a radio show specializing in the weird, the arcane, the cryptic and anything related to UFOs. Heard locally on CFUN or through Bell’s website via streaming broadcast, it features an array of guests talking about everything from alien abductions to why ghosts appear in photographs. It’s the show to listen to if you want to know the latest about the NASA coverup of the "face" structure on Mars, or why thousands of Americans are reporting sightings of "shadow people," ephemeral beings who are suddenly spotted out of the corner of your eye (the chances of seeing one increase if you’ve been watching DVDs, according to one source quoted on the show).

Bell is a master ringleader of the improbable, but it’s not always spooky. As I write this, Bell is broadcasting a previously unknown audio tape of the famous 1982 flight of Larry Walters, an L.A. eccentric who flew over the city in a lawnchair hoisted by 45 weather balloons.

Bell’s show is popular here, and for good reason. As anyone who’s looked at a publication like Common Ground knows, Lotusland has a healthy share of New Age kooks poking into cryptic secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know. That we hosted The X-Files is no accident. Unfortunately, B.C., and Vancouver in particular, seldom if ever show up on Bell’s radar and everyone else in the world seems to be having fun except us.

Until Zelitsky came along. Zelitsky, described as a Ukrainian-born naturalized Canadian, came to the attention of Bell’s show two weeks ago when Reuters carried a tantalizing story from Havana about her company Advanced Digital Communications (or ADC) exploring the waters off Cuba in conjunction with the Cuban government. Their goal is to map what could be a $3 trillion treasure trove of shipwrecks dating back to Spanish colonization of the Americas. American news wires became interested in the story when ADC reported finding the century-old wreck of the battleship Maine, the mysterious sinking of which was the pretext for the U.S. invasion of Cuba in the Spanish-American War. But that’s not the interesting part.

What got Bell and his listeners entranced was Zelitsky’s further revelation that ADC’s underwater sonar equipment may have found a lost city deep in the waters off Cuba’s west coast. According to the Reuters story, Zelitsky and her colleagues discovered a huge land plateau about 2,200 feet down dotted with what they think are pyramids, roads and buildings. "[T]here are clear manmade large-size architectural designs," Zelitsky is quoted as saying. No videotaped evidence of the landscape has yet been produced, but Zelitsky said the city appeared to be "built in the pre-classic period and populated by an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of Yucatan."

For Bell and his science reporter (and animal mutilation conspiracy theorist) Linda J. Moulton who followed up on the story, an underwater city in the Caribbean can mean only one thing: Atlantis. The Reuters story didn’t go anywhere near the A-word, but Bell and Moulton ate up that angle anyway. The Atlantis story is a key ingredient for people who believe in a universe in which the Giza pyramids, structures on Mars and Roswell are more important facts than say, unemployment rates. Finding Atlantis would go a long way to proving that their fetish for the weird wasn’t a waste.

The weirdness comes home. ADC is described by Reuters as a British Columbia-based company." Where in B.C. was not specified, and neither Moulton nor my own probings have turned up phone or office numbers for Zelitsky or ADC anywhere in the province. (Weird, indeed.) However, organizations from the U.S. National Geographic Society to the Cuban government have confirmed that these people and the project do indeed exist. And hey, they’re on Art Bell’s show, so it must be true.

As for me, I’m just happy to have my little part of the world finally connected to all that great Bell strangeness appearing on my radio nightly.