SPEAKER_00 0:00

Boy, do we have a great segment for you tonight, my friends? I've been uh looking forward to this for a long time. And uh if you have not been following the story of Carville, Art Bell's alien statue at the Asheville Mystery Museum, let me just give you a little recap. It's almost an unbelievable story, but uh a few years ago I was in California appearing on an episode of Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel, and uh while I was out there, I received a phone call from Mr. Mobius, our associate producer, who told me, amazingly enough, the Art Bell, creator of Coast to Coast AM, had an alien that he needed to get out of his house as soon as possible. And I said, What are you talking about? And uh Mobius assured me this was true, that Art Bell had this hundred-pound, four-foot-tall alien statue that had been right there in his home and studio for years as he was broadcasting these classic coast-to-coast AM shows. And that um Art of, as you may or may not know, uh I mean, uh several years ago, his wife tragically died, and so he remarried, and Art had uh claimed that his new wife and the new little daughter were terrified because they said this alien statue was coming to life at night and running around the house, and uh it was just scaring them half to death, and Art was not the least bit uh uh humorous about this. He was very serious, and he said that he had to get it out of there because it was just causing too many problems at home. And I told Mobius, I said, you know, uh, I'm not gonna believe this unless Art Bell himself calls me and tells me. And sure enough, not too long after that, the phone rang. It was Art Bell, and uh, of course, Art had interviewed me over the uh years a number of times, but this was the first time Art had ever just called me up to talk about something personally, and he repeated to me the exact same thing that Movius had told me, and um Art said, you know, uh it's got to be out of here, ASAP, and uh I explained, well, I'm on a uh set here and there's no way I can come right now. Can you wait just a week? Art wasn't even able to wait a week, and so uh it will always pain me that I was not able to go and pick this up in person, but I contacted Jim Castle, a TV producer friend of mine who lived uh a few hours away. Jim and an assistant drove to Art's ranch in Perump, Nevada. Art was a very gracious host, he invited them inside, took them on a tour of his place, and it was all true. You know, here's the statue. Art even wrote this letter, a handwritten letter verifying the uh identity and the story of the statue. Art even got down on his hands and knees and signed the base of the statue. We have photographs of all this, and uh Jim Castle took uh Carville the Alien and shipped him to me. And uh the story behind the the alien, as far as we knew at that time, was that the alien had belonged to Rush Limbaugh, and at some point uh Art Bell apparently was at some kind of a broadcasting conference and met Rush Limbaugh, not that the two have anything in common politically, but as a little broadcaster's gift, uh Limbaugh to send the alien to Art. And so one day this truck came rumbling up into Art's uh estate and out came the statue, and Art loved it, and it was a fixture in his home for many years, uh up until the point when this thing had started coming to life. Uh and so I was just delighted to have it in the museum, and I'll never forget the day it arrived, I took the alien out, we set it up in the corner of the museum, and I had a major display arranged for it with signs, with pictures, and I was adjusting all the lighting and making sure everything was just right. I was there by myself eventually up until about eleven o'clock at night, uh, making sure everything was oriented just right, the lighting was positioned just so, so that we could do a big grand unveiling. And I left the museum that night, and the next morning I came back in. I had to run by the museum real quick before I ran another errand downtown. So about nine, nine thirty in the morning, I walk into the museum, I look over, and I was instantly angry because the entire statue in the night had shifted about twenty to twenty-five degrees to its right, and I thought somebody came in here during the night after all my work, and they uh twisted this uh statue around just to mess with me. But then I checked the security footage from the lobby, I checked the security logs, and I was able to confirm that nobody had gone in or out of that museum during the night. Nothing else was disturbed, and to this day I cannot explain how in the world this hundred-pound statue shifted twenty-twenty-five degrees in the night. Uh, of course, after that we put a camera on the thing, monitoring it 24-7, and thus far since then we've not been able to capture him moving again. Um but it was just such a weird story. We wanted to know a lot more about the origin of this thing. And uh and of course, I've always been interested in how inanimate objects might somehow gain a a life or a spirit and and do these things, similar to my research with Robert the Doll down in Key West. So anyway, Art Bell said he didn't know anything other than the fact it came from Rush Limbaugh. And Rush Limbaugh did not respond to requests from him uh uh or to him um regarding how he got it. So it was a big mystery, you know, where did this statue come from? What was the story of Carville? And it seemed like for a long time we might never know. Uh I will tell you this, however, it was called Carville because Rush Limbaugh, being um a politically oriented radio host, uh he and his friends would make fun of the statue, claiming that it looked like James Carville, the Democratic political pundit. And and and the name kind of stuck, but we didn't know prior to Limbaugh where it came from. And uh fortunately for us, Vance Pollock, our chief historian there at the Asheville Mystery Museum, uh diligently spent time tracking down the origin of Carville, and you can't imagine how excited I was when he confirmed that Carville the Alien was carved by an artist named Darren Hussey. And uh he is a very well-known professional sculptor who works now especially with bronze. He travels all around the world. Um his website is bigbronze.com. And I ended up contacting Darren, and sure enough, now the final piece has fallen into place, and I I could not be more excited than I am right now to welcome him onto this program to get the scoop on the origin of this statue. So uh Darren Hussey, welcome, sir, to Speaking of Strange.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Hi, how are you doing tonight?

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Uh, you know, this uh this is such a delight. I I thought this show would never happen, Darren. I gotta be honest with you. And uh, too, so they astound me. Hey, am I pronouncing your last name correctly, Darren Hussey? Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Yep, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Okay, very good. So now, Darren, first off, tell us a little bit about how you became a professional sculptor.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Well, I we originally started out making wooden duck decoys. I I lived down in Maryland around the Chesapeake Bay, and that was sort of a popular thing, and I found that people wanted to buy 'em, and uh they they took a lot of work and they were small and you couldn't make much money on them, so I kind of started moving into larger carvings, which I like doing better. Um I was making cigar store Indians, and then all of a sudden that uh everybody was smoking cigars in the nineties, if you remember that.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

And uh well what happened is the demand, you know, you can make one every, you know, maybe one a month, and then all of a sudden everybody had to have a cigar store Indian. So I I was engaged to a woman from Thailand at the time, and we went over to her country, and uh we we happened to be lucky and find a uh somebody who worked for the Department of Interior, and they took me where they did professional wood carving. And most of these guys at the time their their main thing that they were carving were Buddhist statues for the Buddhist temples. This is way up in in northern Thailand, so it's it's quite agricultural up there. But uh how do they make these? And and and you know, I worked with them on the first one to get it, you know, the way we want it so they understand, you know, what we're gonna make and how many. Um at that time, the way they made a wood carving is they go out into the jungle or forest there, it's it's a very thick forest, and they'd cut down a tree and they would use elephants to hold them um wide back and they'd lay it down on the ground and they'd start hammering and chiseling it away. I mean it's it's a hundred percent by hand. And um you know, I made a lot of cigars for Indians. I still we still make them up there. It's a lot more modern of an area twenty twenty years later. And uh I kind of have a bit of a sense of humor. I like to make off-beat things just off of a whim, and you know, I'm I've always been interested in aliens and offbeat type of things, so we made some aliens.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

And so now what kind of wood do you think that this statue was made out of? Do you recall?

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Well, it it's a breed of mahogany, it's a soft carving mahogany. Um up there they call it chamcha wood, which literally means crab claw. And they call it crab claw wood because it's a leaf uh similar similar here would be like um sassafras. It's an irregular shaped leaf, and it almost looks like a crab claw with the two pincers. So they call it um you know, crab claw tree.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

And is did all of your aliens look the same or or were each one uh is sort of unique, so to speak?

SPEAKER_01 11:23

Um, well they're all hand-done, so they are unique. We made I think we made two of them that were my size to, you know, an adult, about 70 inches high. Um, and I think we made four or five of them that were maybe fifty or sixty inches high to my memory. Now, this is all back in the early nineties we did this, so um it's it's it's not, you know, I I I remember them. I had one in my own house for years, and uh, we moved and I wound up doing something else with it.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

But uh, well, I tell you what, we're gonna go ahead and take our first break. When we come back, we're gonna talk a little bit about how in the world this particular alien statue ended up in the realm of Rush Limbaugh. Who would have ever imagined that, not to mention the journey that would follow? Folks, I'm talking right now with Darren Hussey. He is an artist, he is a sculptor, he travels the world. He just got back from Asia where he was working on a sculpting project. His website is bigbronze.com, and we will continue solving this mystery. On Speaking of Strange, I'm Joshua P. Warren. We'll be back right after this. And we are talking right now about Cariville, Art Bell's alien statue that is now on display at the Asheville Mystery Museum, adored by thousands of people from around the world every year. And uh amazingly enough, well, thanks to Vance Pollock, we have the man who carved, the man who created the alien statue right here with us tonight, Darren Hussey. He is with BigBronze.com, and you'll find the link at speakingofstrange.com, bigbronze.com, because most of his work now is in bronze, but there was a period in the 90s when he was carving a lot of stuff out of wood. And Darren, how long do you think it took you to carve Carville the alien?

SPEAKER_01 13:23

Well, I think each one took a couple weeks each.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Wow, so that there's a lot of attention and time and detail paid to each one of these. How in the world did Carville end up in the hands of Rush Limbaugh?

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Well, as I said, I made cigar store Indians, and in the early nineties when the whole cigar and tobacco trade really had a big boom, there were cigar stores opening up all over. And also in New York City, a lot of the main tobacco companies are located, and they wanted to buy some of my cigar store Indians also, and I was delivering a bunch of stuff up up there. Particularly there was a House of Oxford was a cigar store right there by the flat iron building on Fifth Avenue. And uh it was like an old school cigar store that was in the middle of New York City. We were delivering some things to him. And I was in his store and I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the uh radio. And uh I have a bit of a sense of humor. I I like to do some you know fun things and and I like I don't mind donating or giving something to somebody out of just for a kick. And um there was a paper in there, uh, The Inquirer, which is geez, uh it's it's an old scandal here. I remember seeing it around since I was a kid. It you know, they had these bizarre things in there and they would touch up all the photos and everything. And they had a picture of Rush Limbaugh talking to the aliens. And apparently every election, I'm not a real political person, but but every election, I guess the inquirer would put make a story that the aliens wanted so-and-so to run because they thought that he should be president. And I guess this election, I think it was in '94 or '98, uh, they wanted Rush Limbaugh to to to run for president. And there were pictures of him on there with the alien. I happen to have one on my truck. So I said, well, just for grins, why don't we, you know, his movie studio's right up the street. We'll go up and just drop one off and say, here, take it. So that's what we did. Um I didn't bring it in. The the guy working for me at the time bought it in, and he said it was quite a fuss because it was in a wooden crate, and they were like, What is it? We you can't just leave this here and and and you know, he said, Well, here's the guy's, you know, my car, and he wants to give Rush Limbaugh this gift. And you know, we just left it there, and then and then I I never even got a chance to listen to the rad rest of the radio show, but apparently he talked about it and he put it up in his studio. And that's pretty much the last I heard of him. Uh I didn't know what happened to him after that, whether he ended up as firewood or or what.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

How how amazing is that so okay, in the nineties there were two presidential elections in ninety-two and ninety-six. So do you have a you have an idea of which one of those uh elections it would have been? Okay. And of course, Bill Clinton won both of those. And um so w uh you you draw and of course uh uh nowadays, probably if you had dropped off a big crate like that, they would have called the bomb squad, but especially at Rush Limbaugh's office, right? Right. Um but so so obviously uh there was a big fuss. It's a shame you weren't around to see the look on Rush Limbaugh's face when they opened this thing and he saw this alien, and uh obviously he uh fell in love with it enough to to name it and start joking about it as as being uh Carville. Um and uh so now that you know the rest of the story, you know that it it made its way from from Rush to Art Bell, from Art Bell to me and my museum. Uh first off, let me ask you uh how as an artist does that make you feel? Because you said, you know, this thing could have ended up as firewood. How does that compare to uh to your expectations for this thing?

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Well, I'm really flattered, you know. I n I never thought it would have made that kind of a journey. I figured, you know, maybe Rush Limbaugh would have it for a while as a gag, you know, kind of a gag gift, and you know, who knows what would happen to it after that. I mean, valuable, precious car, you know, antique cars and stuff go missing. So, you know, what's what's an alien gonna do?

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Well, that's right. And of course, nowadays, when people go to the museum and they they see this alien, they have an immediate reaction. Um, either they love him, and I've seen people, I'm not kidding you, just start crying, I've seen people laughing, even though they're not supposed to touch him. Uh yeah, I've seen people run up and and hug him. Some other people are just terrified of him, but everybody seems to agree that he has this kind of uh sincere, lifelike quality. Now, as a person who has worked on a lot of statues, what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 18:31

Well, you know, any wood carver will tell you that wood is an organic product, and it does have a life of its own. Um, you know, things like flooring and stuff, you know, they get really, really oven-dried and and you know, they become just a clunk of wood. But these were these were actually just taken out of the forest, hand-carved, and they were basically air-dried, and they had some, you know, oven drying, which was basically a a fire in a in a concrete room. And any any wood carver will tell you there's certain pieces of wood that inspire them, and there's certain type of pieces of wood they don't like carving. Um wood has a a life and a personality of its own. And you know, I've been dealing in cigar store Indians for a long time, and I I would walk into a you know storage room where I may have thirty or forty of these six foot-high cigar store Indians, and it's you know, they're just clunks of wood. But there has been time over the years when there's been one or two times that there's been one particular Indian that just seemed to have a life of his own. Um one time my wife uh said she and we both agreed at which Indian it was and everything, my wife said she heard the traditional music from the hill tribes in her country at night. And I'm like, Well, where's the sounds like it comes from? She goes, Well, it sounds like it's down in the garage. And I said, Yeah, this one Indian in there really gives me the creeps. I mean, it just I feel like it's watching me. So, wood has, you know, sometimes you get a piece of wood, it it it may have a life of its own. And and any wood carver will agree with me on that, I'm pretty sure.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Now, you know, a Carville is in remarkably good shape. Uh the paint still looks great on him. I'm assuming you painted him as well, right? Mm-hmm. Yep. Okay, so uh before we come up on our next break here in about a minute, um, he he is getting some little cracks here and there. How do you think we should uh should we do anything to try to make sure he's preserved, or how would you handle the statue uh to make sure he stays good and healthy and intact?

SPEAKER_01 20:43

Well, wood it the cracks in wood are caused by rapid and uneven drying. And probably being out in Art Bell's house out there in the in the dry desert of Nevada is probably really where he got the cracks. Probably the best thing is to keep them in a cool and damp area. I tell a lot of people, I say, well, they ask me, is it gonna crack? I say, nobody knows if it's gonna crack. But you can kind of steer it a little bit, keep it away from radiators, keep it away from, you know, if you have a house in in the winter time and it's you heat it up to 72 degrees and it's twenty twenty percent humidity outside. Well, once you heat that up to 72 degrees, you probably have two or three percent humidity. So when you get a low humidity, it makes the wood dry really fast, and that's when it starts losing adhesion. The the splinters of wood start breaking loose of each other and cracking.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

All right. Well, we've got to go ahead and take a break. When we come back, um I I want to talk a little bit about the the value of Carville, because I mean aside from the fact that he has been in the possession of two giants in the broadcasting field, um how much Did he cost originally? How much money be worth today? And uh also, we're gonna talk more about the work that Darren is doing right now in bronze. I'm Joshua P. Warren. You are listening to Speaking, and I'm talking right now with Darren Hutsey. He is an artist, a sculptor, he is the creator of the alien statue we know as Art Bell's Alien, Carville's Alien, which you can see now, or who you can see now, at the Asheville Mystery Museum. Darren's website is bigbronze.com. That's uh B-I-G-B-R-O-N-C-E. Bigbronze.com. He's joining us tonight from Delaware. And of course, Darren, to us, Carville the Alien is priceless. And in fact, when it comes to the idea that this alien was owned by Rush Limbaugh and then Art Bell and is now in the museum, I mean Art Bell and Limbaugh are both in the broadcasting hall of fame. There's no way to put a price on that. So we we will never know what the real value of Carville is. But just out of curiosity, um if you had sold a statue like that in 1996, how much would it have cost? And and what do you think without all of the uh celebrity uh connection the statue uh just by itself in a store would be worth today?

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Well, if I ever get to be a celebrity and become a famous artist, it'll be priceless. But most most of my market, um, I do a lot of production and wholesale. Um so probably Carville um that alien probably would retail for about a thousand dollars. And I probably would have would wholesale something like that at about half that cost.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

And then that was when you created it or now?

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Um it's about the same as when I created it. It's about the same now.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

Yeah. And of course, uh there's no way that we can calculate the uh the degree of what celebrity adds to its history, its provenance. And believe me, my friend, uh if you yeah, you're already a pretty famous sculptor and you're becoming more famous as we speak. Um so let's talk a little bit about some of the work that you do now. I mean, you travel around the world. Do you work exclusively in bronze now?

SPEAKER_01 24:35

No, I still do the uh cigar store Indians are still uh kind of following uh guys who have their man caves and they have their uh old gas pump and uh classic car and you know, all that in a garage at a cigar store Indian.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

Yeah. Well, um uh so uh uh when you travel to Asia, for example, um, what kind of work do you usually do there?

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Well, uh what I uh you know, I was actually up at the wood carving studios just a couple weeks ago, and I spent some time up there, you know, doing some design work with some new ideas. Um I also spent a lot of time doing bronze sculpture. Um that takes quite a bit of time and it and there's a lot of hands-on involved in that. I'm making I'm actually making a 15-foot-high hand that's supposed to look like a hand coming out of the ground. And it's for a fellow in Texas who has a uh building called the Hand Building. He wants to put it out in front of his building. But I I do a lot of stuff for uh universities and things. Uh they have the uh like we have a local university here, Towson, they have a Towson Tiger. Well, we made a big ten foot-high leaping tiger for their school mascot as uh sort of a rally around point on their campus. So that that seems to be a popular part of business right now.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

And when you are working on these pieces of art, um uh do you feel almost like you are channeling something from beyond, or I mean, where does this talent come from?

SPEAKER_01 26:10

Well, I'm kind of a dreamer, and I always have been, so I'm always thinking of these ideas. Um, you know, uh as an artist I often do things that are customers' ideas or requests. But I often um a recent thing I made, I just started reading about the Tasmanian tiger. And uh, I just made a bronze Tasmanian tiger, and it's just like, well, you know. Let's make a you know, from all the information I gathered about it, the way it looked in the size, you know, we made a bronze Tasmanian tiger. Um I do a life-size T-Rex skull in bronze too, and it's you know, museums like it because they can leave it outside and they don't have to worry about somebody breaking it, it's that strong. So I'm just trying new things. I mean, it's it's you you gotta keep reinventing yourself today. It's a pretty tough economy.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

Yeah, oh yeah, you're right, and uh and obviously you are doing a very good job at that. And and given your vast experience in creating these types of um uh visages, these bodies, these representations, what is your opinion on something like voodoo dolls?

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Well, I I tend to be more scientific oriented, but I also um I have a you know a respect for some of the other things that go on in this world that don't really have an explanation. Um I've seen a lot of things happen that there's really no scientific explanation and I can't prove it all the time, but you know, there is something to it, and people believe in it that gives it more all the more power.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

Yeah. And of course, one of the great things about uh Carville the alien is that he is in an environment now where he he's being studied, there is ongoing study of him, and uh if there is something to this idea that inanimate figures can become lifelike from time to time, uh Carville may be uh absolutely spearheading that study, which is uh you know, another one of the reasons that he's priceless to us. And you know, it's funny because if you if you think about it, um Art Bell's a big hero of of mine. Uh obviously, you know, I I do a lot of work on Coast to Coast AM and uh if one were to try to figure out a way uh to capture the essence or you know, embody a representation of art and what he did, we might think, well, we'll get one of his microphones or maybe his headphones or something like that. But that's the same thing you could apply to any broadcaster. What is more perfect, what is more fitting than to have an alien statue that was right there absorbing uh that incredible uh uh wattage uh that Art Bell was pumping out for years to millions of people around the world who are up at night with him as he sat there with his pot of coffee and his pack of cigarettes taking us on these imaginative journeys. Um there's there's nothing more uh uh suitable, more perfect to represent that uh than this alien that we have. And even though you had no idea where it would end up, um you know, I d I want to thank you for creating that thing and having the vision and in fact the generosity to drop it off there at Rush Limbaugh's place because uh you started a journey there with your piece of art and uh I guarantee you long after you and I are both gone, um, people are still going to be traveling to that museum or wherever else he may be and appreciating him. And I you have my word, as long as I'm alive, he will never be firewood, okay?

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Well, you know, he's really if you think about it, he's really ended up where he belongs. Um I kind of donated him because I felt that's where he belonged at that moment. That's where you know Rush Limbaugh was on that cover of that magazine, and he got it to uh Art Bell and pioneered the the whole supernatural you know nighttime experience on the radio and often talked about aliens, and now he's in your museum, so I pretty much say that's where he belongs right now, and that's where he'll stay for now.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Well, you did a good job. Now, your website again is bigbronze.com. Uh before we come up on this break and have to uh wrap up our conversation, anything else you want to tell our listeners you want to learn more about you and your work?

SPEAKER_01 30:39

Um Well, I have another website, allclassics.com, which is pretty much the same as bigbronze.com. And you know, if somebody needs uh I'm commercial, I work cheap, I go overseas to the factories to get my customers the lowest cost on making a bronze statue, and and that's where bronze casting was created thousands of years ago. And you know, some people say, Oh, well, I've been made over Asia. Well, being made in Asia is what where the whole bronze casting process started. But if anyone needs anything, especially large statues, well, I can really accommodate them and uh get them something really nice at a at a great price and you know make their dream come true.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

All right, well, again, that's allclassics.com or bigbronze.com. And uh, Darren, this has been a dream come true for me and a lot of people tonight. So thank you so much, sir, for creating Carble and for being on this program, speaking of strange this evening.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Well, thank you, Warren. I'm gonna make sure and get down to your museum next time I'm down in Carolina. So I I guess everyone else go down there and check this out. It's a pretty amazing piece.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

That'll be a big celebration. You come to the museum, we'll have a big party, and uh yeah, we'll invite the media. We'll it'll be it'll be just be fun for everyone. Um folks, there you have it. Uh the man who created Carville, the alien, Darren Hussey, big bronze dot com. We're gonna take a break. When we come back