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OUT OF THIN AIR

·44 min·3 clips

Cleeg claims electricity can make living creatures invisible and has already tested it on animals.

1. Hot Copy Radio Theater's 'Out of Thin Air' adapts an August 13, 1944 Hot Copy broadcast from the NBC radio network about disappearances on the Newville Highway. 2. Anne Rogers, the columnist behind Second Glance, pushes Inspector Collins for a usable angle on the Wilson case. 3. Collins says twelve men and women vanished in five weeks, but only five of those disappearances made the headlines. 4. The missing group includes five businessmen, two wives, two soldiers on furlough, one factory worker, and the Wilson honeymoon couple. 5. Collins says the police found no shared criminal history, no embezzlement, and no obvious reason any of them would vanish. 6. The only pattern he can name is that every car disappeared on the Newville Highway after dark. 7. Mike Flanagan's theory about dark-of-the-moon nights and rainy weather gives Collins one last superstition to mention. 8. Anne and Spritely later drive that same highway in a thunderstorm after a detour sign sends them onto a back road. 9. Two headlights appear on the wrong side of the road, and the car skids into Dr. Anton Cleeg's path. 10. Cleeg and Emil bring the women to a house with locked doors and barred windows, then keep a gun in sight. 11. Once inside the laboratory, Cleeg shows them a cage that appears empty until the wheel inside it starts moving. 12. Cleeg says the squirrel in the cage is real and claims no wires run to the apparatus. 13. He explains that electricity can make living creatures invisible by changing their vibrations. 14. He says he has already done the same thing to rats, white mice, rabbits, cats, and other small animals. 15. Cleeg admits the vanished people were his subjects and says some died in the machine while others never came back out. 16. Anne argues that the cabinet sounds less like invisibility and more like an incinerator that destroys bodies completely. 17. The episode uses clipped newsroom banter, roadside menace, and laboratory threats to keep the pace moving. 18. The old-time radio performances lean into melodrama, with exclamations, reversals, and a sponsor break in the middle. 19. Listeners who like old-time radio, science-fiction premises, and newspaper reporters will fit this episode. 20. Listeners who want contemporary realism or slow character study may skip it.

As heard by us

Hot Copy Radio Theater turns a polite rescue into a tight old-time-radio mystery with a strong period feel.

Hot Copy Radio Theater gives a 1944 Hot Copy script a lean mystery frame, centering Anne Rogers, a young newspaper reporter, a wrecked car, and Dr. Cleeg's overly neat hospitality.

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Why you'd press play

A wrecked car, an oddball doctor, and a locked house that turns prison fast.

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