Berry Kroeger stars in a combination fantasy, science fiction, and love triangle story that is engaging as long as the story doesn’t last too long. In this case, it’s just about right and ends just as it was about to test our patience. The desire to know someone else’s thoughts has always been a situational human desire, but taking a pill to create such ability is another matter. The enterprise backfires when Kroeger’s character realizes he can’t filter the thoughts of the many people around him, and crowds create one massive noise of voices that can’t be sorted out. The telepathic ability has no on-off switch, only increasing the distance from someone can make it stop.
Like a many of these stories, you have to buy into an unlikely premise and then proceed from there. It starts well. Like The Invisible Ape, the animal testing was just fine, so what could possibly go wrong when a human just takes the intellectual leap. It should go well, if not better. The developer of the pill takes it, saying “it’s perfectly safe.” That’s the set-up for a range unintended consequences that make good story, assuming you bought into the premise. Some of the story is very amusing as a listener because you can anticipate the consequences but the supposedly educated people in the story are so myopic and consumed with themselves that they cannot. The wife and her love interest set up what looks like a drug heist from the lab to cover up the murder of her husband. The murder is done, the drugs are thrown away to make it look like they were stolen… but when the telepathy drug effects are no longer needed, that act is realized to be a very big mistake.
The story is by Morris Lee Green and William Walker. The pair collaborated on three Suspense episodes in 1958. Green was a newspaper reporter who tried his hand at screenwriting. The 1960 teenage gang war movie, The Rebel Breed, was co-written by him. The movie starred Rita Moreno and Gerald Mohr. Not much can be found about William Walker.
At about 5:20 it is said that Duke University studies “established telepathy as a fact.” That’s not really the case, but the Duke University Parapsychology Lab was getting a lot of news coverage in the 1950s. There was a great desire to prove that telepathy was possible. This was of special interest during the Cold War to the US Department of Defense and the Soviet Union, too. There was always a level of intrigue about it beyond any casual public interest. In research, you always have to be careful that the desire to obtain a particular result will corrupt the design of the research methods to deliver the desired result rather than being objective. Many of such ESP testing efforts offered weak statistical proof, but they kept going as failures were counted as progress in understanding a difficult and complex subject. That Parapsychology Lab was eventually closed, decades later. This link to Duke University has information about it, now treated as a museum-like curiosity rather that a research success https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/parapsychology/about-the-exhibit The lead researcher, Joseph Banks Rhine, has an interesting and unflattering Wikipedia summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine The Duke Lab has an offshoot that continues today as the Rhine Research Center https://www.rhineonline.org/
The program was recorded on Wednesday, July 9, 1958. Rehearsal began at 2:00pm and recording started at 4:30pm and with in-studio edits concluded at 6:00pm. Production edits continued until 8:00pm.
There is no surviving network broadcast recording. Of the four ad segments, Sterling Drug and GMC Trucks were signed before the recording date. The other two would be allocated before broadcast.
The surviving recording of this episode is from the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS#989) and is in excellent sound. It replaces many different recordings that were in poor sound, were highly edited airchecks from an Armed Forces Radio station, or both.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP580720
THE CAST
BERRY KROEGER (Jack Benton), Larry Dobkin (Howard Laramie), Shirley Mitchell (Anne / Woman), Mary Alice Rivard (Girl), Lou Krugman (Man’s Voice / Driver), Sam Pierce (News announcer / Joe), George Walsh (Narrator)
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