William Holden stars in the series adaptation of one of the more important science fiction stories of that time. It was this story that helped fuel much of the interest in UFOs in the early 1950s. Listening today, it seems to grabbed every stereotypical aspect of UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors, and seems somewhat silly. It should, but it was this 1949 short story that started many of them in popular minds. So many of these details were new when that original story was published. It was this short story that fed the expectation about aliens and Earthlings would find each other and interact. Smart aliens always seem come with a warning about Earth’s interest in atomic bombs and our self-destructive nature. It’s rarely about conquest. The aliens are always upset about the lack of peace on the planet, as they had left violence behind very long ago, and earth stubbornly clings to such aggression. Aliens don’t have to know our language to communicate because they innately have the powers of telepathy of ideas, concepts, and grasp subtle nuance.
Holden plays a brilliant young Air Force pilot. He was selected to make the first test flight in a top secret experimental rocket-jet plane designed to take man into areas of space never before explored. The challenge is that this rocket will travel at a rate of speed to which no pilot has ever been subjected. All goes well until the he reaches an altitude of 210,000 feet, 40 miles straight up, when he suddenly sees another space ship coming towards him. There is a ping against his glass canopy, followed by the hissing of air as the pressurization inside his cabin begins to go down. He awakens in an alien ship and has the incredible experience of conversing, without speech, with its occupant. After receiving an important message that Earth is being watched and there is great concern for its future, he is returned to his ship and resumes his flight. There is great skepticism when he returns to report what happened. One lingering fact gives his amazing account credibility: he was away for 10 hours with only 10 minutes of fuel, yet landed safely, and told of the events competently and completely.
The dramatic portion was recorded on Sunday, February 7, 1954. Rehearsal began at 4:00pm and recording began at 8:30pm. The session closed at 9:00pm.
The Graham Doar story was adapted by Morton Fine and David Friedkin. It is a very curious how Doar’s story became adapted and broadcast so many times. Yes, it became that popular.
Doar was born and raised in North Carolina. The Doars were a somewhat well-known family in Charlotte. After attending UNC, he moved to Oregon in 1937 where he became a newspaper journalist and newspaper office manager, and returned there for his post-war life. He began writing short stories on a freelance basis, and his break came when The Saturday Evening Post accepted and published The Outer Limit in 1949. He did some other freelance writing, but his most active short story efforts seem to end by 1954. He continued his newspaper career. In the late 1960s, he was used in a national ad for “The Palmer Writers School.” Next to his picture was this text:
Publication in the Saturday Evening Post of "The Outer Limit" marked a milestone for Palmer Graduate Graham Doar: His first appearance in major magazine and his first really big check for something he had written.
Though already a college graduate, it seems that after his wartime service was over, Doar took a Palmer Writers course from this home study school as part of his post-war veterans benefits. Doar died in 1985 at 73, having retired from the newspaper and remaining there for retirement. The obituary back in his North Carolina birthplace mentioned that he was “an author of short stories,” but no mention of The Outer Limit and its success, in a very brief obituary that acknowledged his war service and family. His local Oregon obituary had a few more minor details of his life, and mentions The Outer Limit and that it was “widely reprinted in anthologies.”
There is an interesting monograph available that puts this story in historical perspective. It is online at Scribd by author James E. Elfers. It is worth reading. It is not known when it was written or when it was posted. The monograph is at https://www.scribd.com/document/60414342/Graham-Doar These are some highlights:
Graham Doar and the Collective Unconscious: How One Author Created the UFO Phenomenon We Know Today
By James E. Elfers
The UFO encounter story we know it today arrived in 1949. Do any of these elements of a “close encounter of the third kind” sound familiar? Earth man abducted by telepathic, beneficent aliens who impart dire warnings about the fate of mankind? “Missing time?” Miraculous alien science and medicine? A call for earth to abandon its nuclear ambitions? A galactic police force? A “quarantined” earth?
The December 24, 1949 issue of Saturday Evening Post introduced all of these concepts in a story titled The Outer Limit by a thoroughly mediocre American writer named Graham Doar. Coming just two years after first UFO report by Kenneth Amold on June 24, 1947, Doar managed to combine all of elements of post war angst, Cold War fears, saucer hysteria, and popular imagination to create the template of virtually every subsequent “close encounter” narrative. Doar's story was perfectly placed to launch itself into culture. The Saturday Evening Post was America's most widely circulated magazine for popular fiction in 1949. Although it published mostly serious stories by the likes of Hemingway and Steinbeck it was not adverse to publishing the occasional science fiction and fantasy story. Many of Ray Bradbury's early stories found their first publication between the covers of The Saturday Evening Post. Doar was an unlikely writer for the Post to publish. As it was, The Outer Limit would be his only sale to the Post and the Post would mark his zenith market. Never a prolific writer, the rest of Doar's fiction usually turned up in places like Startling Stories and Amazing Stories, magazines that generally did cross the coffee tables of middle story itself as much by today's standards.
Elfers continues in a detailed discussion about how after its publication, The Outer Limit was quickly picked up by Escape (1950-02-07), then Dimension X (1950-04-08). There’s one to add to his list, too. CBS used the story in its brief brush with sci-fi in its series Beyond Tomorrow (1950-04-18) and had even used it in their unbroadcast audition recording used internally and with potential advertising sponsors.
Elfers continues to explain that it was on television on an early sci-fi series Out There (1951-10-28), and we now know that the very popular anthology series Robert Montgomery Presents offered its own production (1953-01-26).
It affected many sci-fi movies, with some of its story elements inserted into the legendary movie The Day the Earth Stood Still even though its core story was published in 1940. It finally made it to Suspense for this 1954 broadcast. Its final radio productions of the era would be on X Minus One (1955-11-16) and then one final time on Suspense (1957-03-17).
This pre-Sputnik, pre-Space Race, pre-moon landing story seems very odd to listen to now considering how much has been learned about the difficulties of traveling in space, and how all these decades later, there remain harsh practicalities that limit travel between planets that push such endeavors further out to the future that the 1950s sci-fi writers, and scientists, believed. As the old joke has been, likely from curmudgeonly comedian Lewis Black when he would talk about the turn to this century, and having grown up with sci-fi and Star Trek, and even The Jetsons, “flying cars, flying cars, they promised me flying cars” or some rant of that sort.
The story obviously had great staying power, no matter what you think about it. It was on a CBS show twice and an NBC show once, and twice on television in two series (admittedly, around half of the US households did not own a television yet when they were broadcast). Yet, Lewis still ran with it, adjusting the Escape script as required, believing it was worthwhile to give it the larger audience of Suspense.
There are two copies of The Outer Limit that have survived. It’s more accurate to say it’s two versions of the same disc transfer. The original recording has a disc skip in the opening of the broadcast. An unknown collector from the recording tape era did a reasonable job of patching a clean opening from another program of the period onto the recording. It’s hard to get such things to match since not every disc had exactly the same sound, and variations in tape and equipment from collector to collector only made the chances of a match less likely. You notice the change in sound at “… bring you Mr. William Holden…” Both recordings are posted. The “patched” recording still has flaws but someone who is a new classic radio listener might be a little confused by hearing a recording with the skip at its open. It is certain that the recording with the skip is closer to the original disc source. For someone hearing the episode for the first time, the patched recording is probably the best one to use.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP540215
THE CAST
WILLIAM HOLDEN (Bill Westfall), Edgar Barrier (Guardian Yegton), Bill Johnstone (Colonel Henry), Jack Kruschen (Countdown / Alien Zzyl), Hy Averback (Joe), Joseph Kearns (Hargrove), Jerry Hausner (Tower Voice), Harry Bartell (The Major), Charles Calvert (Crew Chief), Larry Thor (Narrator)
COMMERCIAL: Tom Holland (Hap), Byron Kane (Judge J. Raymond Tiffany), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer)
GUEST FOR THE AUTO-LITE CHARITY PROMOTION: Judge Raymond Tiffany, President of the National Society for Crippled Children & Adults. The organization became better known for its Easter Seals fundraising campaigns. He was appointed to a judgeship in his late 20s and had a very fine career. He was a very influential judge and active in numerous local and national charitable organizations, especially Rotary International. In a tragic accident, his father-in-law was killed by gunfire while sitting on the front porch of Tiffany’s home in 1940. The murder was never solved, but it was theorized that the target of the shooting was Tiffany. He was legal counsel for the National Small Businessmen’s Association. The organization was engaged in an anti-Communist campaign at that time. Sadly, he would pass away just two years after this broadcast. He was 67.
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