The Long John Nebel Collection

History

The Long John Nebel Collection is the archive's holding of forty-four substantively-relevant WOR New York overnight radio broadcasts hosted by Long John Nebel between 21 June 1957 and 6 February 1974. The recordings are preserved as audio files compiled from the Internet Archive's TheLongJohnNebelCollection torrent. Nebel's overnight programme was the principal national radio venue across the late 1950s and 1960s for contactees, abductees, civilian-research figures, and the broader cultural figures whose work intersected with the UFO topic. The collection runs alongside the print civilian-research record of the same period (APRO Bulletin, NICAP UFO Investigator, Saucer News, the Cleveland Bulletin) as the radio-broadcast layer of the same documentary network.

Nebel was the only American national broadcast voice giving the saucer topic sustained airtime through the contactee era. The Frank Edwards Mutual Broadcasting line had ended with Edwards's 1954 firing (documented through the archive's Cleveland Flying Saucer Club Bulletin from December 1954). The Armstrong Circle Theatre television treatment of January 1958 (referenced in the 10 March 1958 Nebel episode of this collection) was a one-off CBS documentary. Nebel's WOR overnight slot was the only continuous broadcast venue, and the named contactees and researchers of the period were guests on it across years rather than in single appearances.

Contributors named in the broadcasts

The forty-four episodes draw on a recurring contributor network. The contactees include George Van Tassel (Giant Rock, College of Universal Wisdom), Dan Fry (Understanding Inc, the Alan-from-Mars contact), Otis T. Carr (OTC Enterprises, the Tesla-tradition prototype operation that ended in his 1961 securities fraud conviction), Major Wayne Aho (New Age Foundation), Bob Ewing (the Ambassador to Venus broadcasts), and Margaret Storm (whose 1959 Return of the Dove connects the contactee tradition to the archive's Tesla biography). The civilian-research and science-fiction figures include Arthur C. Clarke (a decade before 2001: A Space Odyssey), Lester Del Rey (the major science-fiction editor and author), Ivan T. Sanderson (whose later work on cryptozoology connects to the archive's Cryptozoology (ISC) collection), Charles Hapgood (the Keene State professor of Earth's Shifting Crust), Hans Stefan Santeson (editor of Fantastic Universe magazine), and Jim Moseley of Saucer News in the 23 January 1959 episode, eight years before he organised the 1967 Commodore Hotel Congress of Scientific Ufologists at which Nebel himself was a platform speaker.