The run
- Network
- NBC / CBS
- Years active
- 1930–1955
- Surviving broadcasts
- 364
- Genre
- variety
Ripley's cabinet of curiosities, read aloud: the unlikeliest true stories in the world, dramatised for a nation that wanted to be astonished. Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive, harvested from the Old Time Radio Researchers collections and indexed episode by episode.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
85 dated broadcasts across 97 years on the air, with 89 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2024, in original transmission order.
- 1. Night Broadcast · 19 Nov 2024
- 2. The Case of the Missing Hour · 26 Nov 2024
- 3. Sign Off · 3 Dec 2024
The Case of the Missing Hour
4 Aug 2026 · 18 min
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
Night Broadcast
28 Jul 2026 · 33 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
The Last Train Out
21 Jul 2026 · 48 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
Signal at Midnight
14 Jul 2026 · 1h 3m
The one everybody argues about.
A Room Above the Street
7 Jul 2026 · 26 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
The Long Silence
30 Jun 2026 · 41 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Dead Air
23 Jun 2026 · 56 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
Sign Off
16 Jun 2026 · 19 min
The one everybody argues about.
Also on NBC / CBS
NBC / CBS in 1930–1955
Other series the network carried while Believe It or Not was on the air.
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Same seasons
variety on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
Friends in front of a microphone
Jack Benny and Fibber McGee sold intimacy: recurring characters, in-jokes, a house style. The modern hang-out show is the same trick without the script.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of Believe It or Not
Modern series carrying this form forward.
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