George Noory Launches Dating Site for Fringe Believers

The only thing harder than finding Bigfoot is finding a date who also believes in Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, etc. So it was bound to happen sooner or later. We all knew it. Believers in ancient astronauts, Bigfoot, and other fringe topics naturally want to congregate together, and so it became inevitable that someone would start a dating site for fringe believers to help reproduce the species. After all, if ancient astronaut theorist Jason Martell could help to launch J-Date for Jews and Christian Mingle for Christians, surely there would be a market for a dating site for ancient astronaut theorists. But why wasn’t it Martell to do the deed? With his vast portfolio of (very) modestly successful solo web ventures like Ancient School he’d have been my guess for the force behind ParanormalDate.com, a site that does not match users to aliens but rather matches believers in aliens, ghosts, cryptids, and other fringe topics. Coast to Coast AM host George Noory launched ParanormalDate.com on Tuesday, according to a Huffington Post article.

“I did it because of my listeners,” Noory said in a YouTube video announcing the service. “They would come up to me at various speaking engagements all around the country. They’d come up and say, ‘Hey, George, we want to meet people of like minds, people who are into science, ghosts, UFOs, alternative medicine, conspiracies. We want to meet people like that. We might even want to date them, but we have no place to go.’”

Noory said that he wanted fringe believers to know that “you are not alone” when it comes to wanting to affiliate with people who share the same set of beliefs. He also promised that anyone who used the code “George” would receive a “huge discount” (50%) off of a service billed as “free to join” and “completely free” in publicity materials. Clearly, it costs money (to message other users or use the social network’s dating function), though the site won’t say how much except to registered users. Noory hopes to make a profit from matching some of what he says are his 3.5 million nightly listeners. (Talkers magazine, a trade journal, says that just 2.75 million listen to as little as five minutes of the show over the course of a given week.) Noory also claims that “billions” of people use online dating.

According to Match.com (hardly an unbiased source), 40 million Americans use some form of online dating, but a new survey from Pew Research says that just 17% of adults 35-44 and 22% of adults 25-34 have ever used online dating, let alone are currently active users of online dating services. Of those who use online dating services, one in three never actually goes on a date.

Noory has used Coast to Coast AM’s media properties, including its website, to promote the moneymaking venture, and the dating site purchased most of the advertising space on Coast to Coast’s website this week. (Talk radio has always had an uncomfortably close relationship with advertisers that blurs the line between content and promotion.)

According to Paranormal Date’s terms and conditions, the site also intends to subject its users to third party advertisements for additional profit. The site, owned by Noory and business partner Mark Rollings of the Talent On Hold telephone hold message advertising company (itself endorsed by Noory), is operated by Venntro Inc., a company founded last year that specializes in operating dating websites. Venntro is the current owner of Global Personals, Ltd., a British dating website operator. Venntro Inc. is part of the Venntro Media Group, a shadowy organization that reveals little about itself, probably because of the niche nature of many of its properties, such as Flirt Naughty, a “no-strings” hookup service for users to “get exactly what they want,” and other sites that have been scrubbed from the company’s various websites recently in favor of a more wholesome corporate image. The domain for Paranormal Date was registered by Rollings on behalf of Talent On Hold, according to ICANN DNS records.

Weirdly enough, Noory’s website launched just weeks after the Amazing Kreskin, the Johnny Carson-era mentalist, launched his own paranormal dating site, The Amazing Kreskin’s Supernatural Dating Society, which also focuses on matching believers in ghosts, psychic phenomena, and “the UFO thing” for a reasonable $15 per month.