Radio: Fire on Air

Not content to wait for television to convert radio into eye and ear entertainment, U. S. broadcasters strain the microphone by trying to make it report inaudible events at second hand. Sponsors’ favorite among the second-hand reporters is Oddities Collector Robert Ripley, whose Believe It Or Not programs have missed only one broadcasting season since 1930.

Last week the Ripley program took its microphones to Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center parking lot to tell listeners that a Hindu mystic, Kuda Bux, was walking barefoot over burning coals. When Kuda Bux demonstrated his fire-walking to British scientists three years ago, they found this stunt genuine, favored the theory that his power is athletic, not psychic, lie in a trained ability to step lightly, quickly.

For the Ripley broadcast, frenzied Announcer Graham McNamee took the microphone and, with customary hysteria, burbled his story of Kuda Bux walking twice through 20 feet of fire. Actually, the fire was in two separate ten-foot pits.

Kindled eight hours earlier, it had been fed by three cords of oak, 500 lb. of charcoal. When flames flickered over the glowing coals and a pyrometer recorded the heat at 1,220° F., light-footed Kuda Bux took three long hoppity steps through one pit, hopped out on solid ground. Later he tried it again, again achieved only half of what Fictioneer McNamee reported.

Attending physicians examined the fire-walker’s feet, found only one small burn where a coal had stuck to his sole, marveled.