What happens
Ken Thurston, known as the Man Called X, travels to the Belgian Congo after a mining engineer friend, Fred Stevenson, asked him to look into trouble at a uranium operation. Native workers have stopped reporting for work, and mines have been burned and abandoned. Ken meets Tanya Stevenson, Fred's widow, who has taken a bookkeeping job at the mine, and a Geiger counter-carrying passenger named Piggins joins them on a riverboat. At a village reduced to ashes, Ken finds that the natives are following a leopard-skinned witch doctor whose drums send a message of destruction. The episode is part of the NBC series The Man Called X, first broadcast on December 30, 1950, starring Herbert Marshall.
The Belgian Congo, including Leopoldville, a riverboat on the Congo River, the village of Lucala, and a uranium mine near Lucala
Characters: Ken Thurston, Tanya Stevenson, Fred Stevenson, Piggins, Jerry Pickens, Mbo, Galu
Listen for: The talking drums that carry the witch doctor's message, and the ominous rhythm of the native drums
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.