The Long John Nebel Collection

The Long John Nebel Collection

For your listening pleasure here then is a fella who as far back as the mid 1950s was doing radio in ways that were not surpassed until decades down the road.

He was an early pioneer of what we might now call talk radio. In new territory he let all topics on the air, allowed the guest to go on for hours about their passions and on occasion would simply leave the studio and let the guests take over.

He quickly become the show that took on the topics most people of that time hardly heard on the airwaves. UFOs, government cover ups, psychic telepathy as well as skeptics to put all claims to the flame.

Jackie Gleason was on one night talking about his brush with UFOs, authors Lester Del Rey and Arthur C Clarke would show up to be the skeptics voice, Jean Shepherd would drop by to spin more yarns and over several shows Otis T Carr planned, built and tested his flying saucer. Spoiler, not so much flying was to be had.

Long John would not only cover hoaxes, pranksters and various charlatans he would often dive right in with his own creations. One show of note gets to the bottoms of the famous I Libertine book publishing hoax.

Give it a whirl, I pushed a cleaned up set up onto archive.org.

Enjoy.