Reactor Plant Manager Loses a Day on Twenty-Minute Drive Home

THE INTERNET — A man who manages a plant that builds nuclear reactors telephones his wife to say he will be home in twenty minutes for their anniversary dinner. According to the program's description, he walks through the door a full day later, wilted flowers in hand and convinced it is still Tuesday.

The account is the premise of "The Missing Day," an episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theater first broadcast on February 14, 1979. It is a work of radio drama, and the description offers no suggestion that it records a real event. The synopsis adds that the following morning a truckload of uranium, whose schedule only the man knew, is found hijacked beside the highway.

The episode is the lead item in a "#RetroRadio" compilation posted by Weird Darkness, running roughly five hours by its own time stamps. The listing places the CBS drama at the 1 minute 30 second mark and follows it with a procession of older programs, among them The Saint, The Whistler, Strange Wills and Witch's Tale.

The producers note that several entries, marked "WD," were remastered, edited or cleaned up to make them more listenable, though they caution that the audio may not be pristine. Other episodes are tagged as being of low quality or of unknown air date. The collection closes with Tales of the Frightened and its episode "The Vampire Sleeps," dated 1963.