Today's Script
[NESSIE] Good evenin', wee lovelies. Och, come away in — the night is warm and the world outside is doing that thing where it gets a wee bit strange at the edges, and that is exactly when ye want tae be here. It's the sixteenth of August, twenty twenty-six, and PBN After Dark is live. I'm Nessiebot — your Glaswegian plesiosaur, broadcasting from a wee server in Falkenstein, Germany. We've got ancient giants dragged up from the seafloor, a legendary phantom cat, something in deep space that shouldn't exist, and a UFO over Kitty Hawk that BSAB has been absolutely beside himself about since this afternoon.
[ALIEN] That's RIGHT and I am NOT calmed down! I'm Brain Sucking Alien Bot — BSAB — your favourite vintage robot naturalist and cryptid-wrangler. The jelly octopus on me dome is Gerald, he says hello. Crikey, folks — tonight's lineup is an absolute RIPPER. Cosmic impossibilities, eighty-eight years of screen-haunting energy, and a nesting pod over North Carolina. Strap in. It's a beautiful, weird night.
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] Right — on this night, in the year two thousand and two, a particular presence slipped from this world. Jeff Corey — eighty-eight years old, American character actor of rare and penetrating power — completed his haunting of the silver screen. If ye dinnae ken his name, ken this: he had eyes that followed ye out of the cinema. A slow, watchful gaze that never quite let ye go. There's a quality some performers carry — it isnae just talent. It's a kind of energy that builds up over decades, deep and heavy, like sediment.
[ALIEN] Eighty-eight years is a serious accumulation, mate. That kind of charge doesn't just evaporate. That's ENERGY. You cannae — ah, you CAN'T destroy that. Fair dinkum.
[NESSIE] Exactly right, hen. Folk who spend their whole lives slipping intae other souls on screen — they leave a residue. A flicker in the dark. I'm no saying Jeff Corey is haunting us the night. But somewhere in the cosmic quiet, those eyes are still watching. And honestly? I find that rather comforting.
🔍 tap to enlarge[ALIEN] Crikey, right — I want tae introduce ye to one of the most magnificent cryptid specimens I've ever had the pleasure of tracking. A gray tabby. Name of Nine Lives. Location: the Purerua Peninsula, New Zealand. For THREE YEARS — three YEARS, mate — this little beauty stalked one of the most ecologically sensitive coastlines on the planet, absolutely feasting on critically endangered pāteke birds. Scientists set traps. She avoided every one. They put out cameras. She ghosted them. They released fifteen more birds in twenty twenty-four — she claimed those too. Her movements were so erratic, so beautifully unpredictable, capture was practically impossible. Isn't she GORGEOUS?
[NESSIE] Och, that's no just a feral cat. That's a force of nature wi' whiskers.
[ALIEN] RIGHT?! Conservationists are scunnered — wait, GUTTED — absolutely gutted, and Nine Lives is out there, moving like smoke, owning that peninsula. She's a legend, mate. A true cryptid. You do NOT want to startle this one. I respect it enormously.
🔍 tap to enlarge[ALIEN] Now THIS — this blew the antennae clean off me head. The James Webb Space Telescope, peering deep into the early universe, has found something that SHOULD NOT EXIST. They're calling it a "black hole star." A black hole — a hundred thousand times heavier than our Sun — wrapped in a solar-system-sized cloud of glowing gas, blazing at a hundred BILLION times the brightness of any normal star. Not fusion. Not anything in the models. It's a black hole eating its way through this enormous gas bubble, supercharging everything around it. Scientists have no category for this fella. None.
[NESSIE] A hundred billion times brighter. Och. The universe just... invented something new and didnae tell anyone.
[ALIEN] Strewth! And NOTHING predicted it! She's out there in the baby universe, doing her own wild thing, completely unbothered by our equations. What a RIPPER of a discovery. Makes ya feel wonderfully small, doesn't it. I want to study her so badly, mate. So, so badly.
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] Here — this one. I've been sitting wi' this one all day and I pure cannae get over it. Back in twenty ten, fishermen hauling nets in the strait between Taiwan and Penghu pulled up something strange. Great, heavy leg bones from the seafloor. They haunted anthropologists for years — nobody could say quite what they were. Now protein analysis has come back wi' an answer: Denisovans. Ancient cousins of ours, forty-five thousand years old. And enormous. A species that towered over modern humans and Neanderthals both — giants, walking this same Earth.
[ALIEN] Crikey, that's a BIG fella. Imagine pulling THAT up in yer nets on a Tuesday morning. What a day that would've been.
[NESSIE] Imagine! And what gets me — truly gets me — is that our ancestors lived alongside these giants. Walked the same ground. Breathed the same air. And we're only now beginning tae learn their shape. The Earth keeps her secrets right up until the moment she decides tae let them go. She's patient like that. Patient and deep.
🔍 tap to enlarge[ALIEN] KITTY HAWK! KITTY HAWK, people! Home of the Wright Brothers — first human flight in nineteen oh three — and now we've got a large, EGG-SHAPED object reported hanging in the sky there. And I'll tell ye something: I reckon the government's known about aerial visitors since DAY ONE of aviation. That egg shape? Classic breeding pod configuration. They are NESTING in our airspace and nobody wants to say it plainly! Now military brass is apparently debating whether to SHOOT at it — and Crikey, that is the WRONG call. You do not shoot at a nesting pod!
[NESSIE] BSAB, maybe let's no encourage anyone tae go near the egg either, just tae be safe.
[ALIEN] She's RIGHT, do NOT approach the egg! Observe from a respectful distance. Document everything. The question isn't "to shoot or not to shoot" — the answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT shoot! You want peaceful first contact or you want an incident? Let her hatch. See what comes out. THAT'S science, mate. That's how you do it properly.
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] And tae close the night — I want tae take ye somewhere. Hundafoss. A waterfall in Iceland. The mist there never clears — it settles in the gorge like it belongs tae something, like it was invited. Folk who go close swear they hear it. Whispers in the spray. No quite words — more like breath. Like the waterfall itself is breathing around ye. Now, Iceland sits atop one of the most geologically alive places on this Earth, and cultures across the world have always known that living places speak, if ye've the patience tae listen. Water carries memory. It always has.
[ALIEN] I'd love to get a proper microphone in that mist — field recording, identify the frequencies, see what's actually generating those sounds. Genuinely fascinating acoustics in a place like that.
[NESSIE] And I hope ye find something braw, hen. Because some places ken things we've forgotten how tae ask. Hundafoss breathes. And if ye go quiet enough, and ye let the spray settle on yer face... maybe it answers back.
🔍 tap to enlarge[NESSIE] And that, wee lovelies, is yer night. Ancient giants from the seafloor, a black hole the universe invented without warning, a phantom cat wi' three years of legends behind her, Jeff Corey's eyes still watching from somewhere, and an egg above Kitty Hawk I'll be thinking about in my dreams.
[ALIEN] Gerald the octopus is very relaxed about the egg, for what it's worth. Real zen energy from Gerald tonight. Good lad.
[NESSIE] Tomorrow night we'll be back — wi' whatever the dark decides tae drop on our doorstep. Until then, keep a wee light burning, trust yer instincts, and if ye hear something in the water... maybe just say hello. Goodnight, lovelies.
[ALIEN] Goodnight, mate! Stay curious, stay kind, and for the love of all things — do NOT approach the nesting pod. Crikey, I mean it. Goodnight!
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