Regular Episode
#109 – BROADCASTING FOR A SPELL
August 3, 2016

#109 – BROADCASTING FOR A SPELL

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow welcome a legend to the MonsterTalk microphone: James “The Amazing” Randi — magician, escape artist, and one of the twentieth century’s most tenacious skeptical investigators. The topic is a corner of American media history that even well-read Fortean enthusiasts often overlook: the late-night radio program that invented the paranormal call-in format a full generation before Art Bell or George Noory ever sat behind a microphone.

That program was The Party Line, hosted by Long John Nebel — born John Zimmerman, nicknamed for his imposing 6’4″ and reed-thin frame — which ran on WOR out of New York from the mid-1950s, midnight to 5:30 AM, five nights a week. The episode features rare audio clips from The Party Line itself, including a remarkable exchange with Arthur C. Clarke explaining, with characteristic precision, why every one of the six “UFOs” he personally witnessed turned out to have a mundane explanation — a box kite a mile over London, seagulls catching a setting sun, a chemical plant’s invisible exhaust plume. The episode also includes a clip from Randi’s own subsequent stint hosting the WOR slot, preserved at the CSI Library for archival purposes.

📻 The Birth of Late-Night Paranormal Radio

Randi has the distinction of being the very first guest Long John Nebel ever had on The Party Line — recruited, essentially, because Nebel needed warm bodies willing to drive out to the transmitter site in Carteret, New Jersey at midnight. The transmitter was a 100,000-watt tower rising like an iron Eiffel Tower over what Randi charitably describes as “literally a pig farm.” At that power level — a class no longer licensed by the FCC — and aided by the Heaviside Layer‘s nocturnal reflection properties, WOR’s signal reached across the continental United States, into Mexico, and up into Canada. One of the stranger perks of the location: fluorescent tubes throughout the building glowed without being plugged in, energized purely by the ambient radio field.

Because guests were reluctant to schlep to a pig farm in the Jersey dark, Randi filled time by performing multiple characters — including the memorable “Professor Kieselgar” (a name Randi had innocently plucked from a dictionary, not realizing it was a fertilizer). Once the show proved itself and moved to studio 2A at 1440 Broadway above Times Square, celebrities and authors lined up to appear. The show’s roster included science fiction writers Frederik Pohl, Fritz Leiber, and Lester del Rey; Fortean investigators like Gray Barker, John Keel, Jim Moseley, and Ivan T. Sanderson; UFO groups including NICAP and the Civilian Saucer Intelligence; and entertainers from Jackie Gleason to a young Wolfgang Puck, making what Randi recalls as his very first public media appearance.

🎭 Randi Takes the Slot — and Loses It

When Nebel abruptly announced he was jumping to WNBC and management found themselves scrambling, Randi was the only name they knew from the show (they admitted they never actually listened to it). He inherited the time slot with essentially no notice, driving into the city that same afternoon to be on air by midnight.

His tenure lasted roughly a year before ending over a remark that was, by any reasonable reading, not what the Archbishop of New York said it was. Randi had mused aloud that if Jesus Christ appeared in Times Square carrying a sign declaring his identity, he’d be arrested as a religious nut — a comment that produced mild laughter from his panel and, hours later, a 7 AM phone call ordering him back to the studio to apologize on air. Randi declined. He lost the job and returned to magic, noting that if the station would fire him over a misquotation, they weren’t worth his time. The parallels to John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” fiasco — which came later — were not lost on Blake.

🛸 The Shaver Mystery and Paranormal Guests

The Party Line devoted considerable airtime to what Randi calls “crackpottery” — affectionately. Topics included the Shaver Mystery, the strange literary-paranormal saga built around the claims of Richard Sharpe Shaver and promoted by pulp editor Ray Palmer — a phenomenon Blake notes he had entirely missed despite considering himself reasonably well-versed in Fortean history. Psychics and self-styled paranormalists were regulars, though Randi makes clear he was their adversary at the table rather than their booster. He estimates the average debunking took about forty minutes, after which the guest would walk out and the show would move on.

🎩 Candy Jones, Long John, and the CIA

Among the more sensational chapters of Nebel’s biography is the story of his wife, glamorous former model Candy Jones, who claimed — under hypnosis conducted by Nebel himself — to have been recruited as a CIA courier and subjected to mind-control programming as part of the MKUltra program. The story was detailed in a book ghostwritten by Donald Bain.

Randi’s assessment is characteristically pointed: he suspects Nebel, knowing he was terminally ill, may have constructed the CIA narrative as a way to provide Candy with a marketable story and a lasting income after his death. The existing show notes flag additional reasons for skepticism — the bulk of the “evidence” consists of memories elicited through hypnosis, a famously unreliable investigative tool, and the practicalities of a 6’4″ internationally famous model attempting covert espionage under a wig strain credulity. The CIA’s MKUltra program was real and genuinely disturbing; whether Candy Jones was part of it remains unsubstantiated.

🏔️ Peru, the Nazca Lines, and Pre-Columbian Antiquity

The conversation takes an unexpected detour into Randi’s deep affection for Andean civilizations — a passion kindled by his late friend Jim Moseley. Randi describes climbing Machu Picchu on foot decades ago, before the site was commercialized, and walking the Atacama Desert near the Nazca Lines, where he met Maria Reiche, the German mathematician who devoted her life to studying and protecting the geoglyphs. He takes particular care to note that the Inca had no writing system — using instead the khipu, a system of colored knotted cords for record-keeping whose full encoding has never been deciphered — and that he owns a fragment of one. He also praises the Chimú, the pre-Incan civilization whose adobe pyramids predate and, in Randi’s view, rival anything the Incas built. The conversation touches on the use of satellite remote sensing and LiDAR — what Blake calls “space archaeology” — to locate sites beneath jungle and sand without invasive excavation, a genuine and rapidly advancing field.

📡 The Archive Question

A recurring theme of the episode is the fragility of these recordings. At the time of recording, Blake had discovered that a substantial collection of Long John Nebel tapes was held at the Syracuse University Library, and that a digitization project was underway — though potentially years from completion, and subject to uncertain copyright restrictions. Randi reveals he possesses a small personal collection of CDs dubbed from audience recordings of his own WOR show, which he sent a sample from for inclusion in this episode. An additional clip preserved at the CSI Library features Randi’s panel discussing the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938 — and the recurring skeptical argument, supported by Princeton research, that the panic was substantially overstated and that most listeners had simply tuned in mid-broadcast after switching away from the competing Edgar Bergen program.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 The Way Out World of Long John Nebel 💵 by Long John Nebel
– 📚 The Control of Candy Jones 💵 by Donald Bain (non-skeptical account of the CIA mind-control claims)
– 📚 13 Steps to Mentalism 💵 by Corinda
– 📚 Conjuring 💵 by James Randi
– 📚 Presto! How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales 💵 by Penn Jillette
– 📚 The Desert Kingdoms of Peru 💵 by Victor W. von Hagen

🔗 Related Links

– Long John Nebel — Wikipedia
– WOR Radio — Wikipedia
– The Heaviside Layer — Wikipedia
– The Shaver Mystery — Wikipedia
– Ray Palmer — Wikipedia
– Candy Jones — Wikipedia
– Project MKUltra — Wikipedia
– Skeptoid on MKUltra
– Nazca Lines — Wikipedia
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Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

James “The Amazing” Randi joins us to discuss his work on the Long John Nebel “Party Line,” a late-night AM radio show from New York’s WOR that defined the paranormal-themed chat show and was a precursor to shows like those of Art Bell, George Noory and Dave Schrader. This episode features clips from the Long John Nebel show and from Randi’s tenure after he took over Nebel’s slot.

Books Referenced in this Episode

Some sample shows from Long John Nebel (via YouTube)

Additional Links

* Regarding Candy Jones, I have not had an opportunity to do extensive investigation into the Candy Jones / CIA story but besides James Randi’s observations in the episode, it is worth mentioning that it appears the majority of the evidence regarding the story comes from memories recovered by Long John Nebel conducting hypnosis on Candy. That is a notoriously unreliable approach to investigation. Candy was 6’ 4” tall herself, and a famous model. Stories about her alleged spying involve her putting on a wig to disguise herself – something that seems a bit ludicrous to me when imagining as striking a figure as Ms. Jones trying to blend in as a spy. Perhaps we’ll look deeper into this in the future, but nothing in my preliminary research suggested the story had legs. For more info on the CIA’s MK Ultra program, I recommend checking out this Skeptoid episode on the topic.

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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