After becoming the first human to travel faster than light and vanishing for eighteen months on what was supposed to be a twelve-hour mission, test pilot Billy Enright finally returns to Earth — only to find himself hauled before a Board of Inquiry demanding to know exactly what took him so long. His explanation is one of the great punchlines in classic pulp sci-fi, and it turns a “missing persons” story into something far funnier and stranger.

If you have a story you’d like to contribute to the series, you can visit https://submissions.soundconceptmedia.com/

You can support the show by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack: https://auditoryanthology.substack.com

By becoming a paid subscriber you can listen to every episode completely ad-free!

Curator: Keith Conrad linktr.ee/keithrconrad

Narrator: Darren Marlar https://darrenmarlar.com/

Other shows hosted by Darren:

Weird Darkness: https://weirddarkness.com/

Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/paranormalitymag

Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/microterrors

Retro Radio – Old Time Radio In The Dark: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/retroradio

Church of the Undead: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/churchoftheundead

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When aliens who secretly engineered human evolution announce they’re shutting the whole experiment down, world leaders and scientists gather at the UN with nothing left to offer but excuses. Tony Tidwell delivers a sharp, darkly funny fable about squandered potential — and what happens when the universe finally decides humanity has run out of chances.

If you have a story you’d like to contribute to the series, you can visit https://submissions.soundconceptmedia.com/

You can support the show by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack: https://auditoryanthology.substack.com

By becoming a paid subscriber you can listen to every episode completely ad-free!

Curator: Keith Conrad linktr.ee/keithrconrad

Narrator: Darren Marlar https://darrenmarlar.com/

Other shows hosted by Darren:

Weird Darkness: https://weirddarkness.com/

Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/paranormalitymag

Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/microterrors

Retro Radio – Old Time Radio In The Dark: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/retroradio

Church of the Undead: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/churchoftheundead

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Unfortunately we were not able to put together our normal Sunday episode with Chapter Five of Maiden Voyage, our audiobook for paid subscribers on Substack. We’ll have that for you next week, but in the meantime to tide you over, here’s one of my favorite episodes of X Minus One, the series that inspired our podcast. It’s “Early Model,” an episode that originally aired July 11, 1957, based on the short story of the same name by Robert Sheckley

If you have a story you’d like to contribute to the series, you can visit https://submissions.soundconceptmedia.com/

You can support the show by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack: https://auditoryanthology.substack.com

By becoming a paid subscriber you can listen to every episode completely ad-free!

Curator: Keith Conrad linktr.ee/keithrconrad

Narrator: Darren Marlar https://darrenmarlar.com/

Other shows hosted by Darren:

Weird Darkness: https://weirddarkness.com/

Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/paranormalitymag

Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/microterrors

Retro Radio – Old Time Radio In The Dark: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/retroradio

Church of the Undead: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/churchoftheundead

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.