Alone in his office, the Night Editor of a Boston newspaper (Soames) hears a series of deafening explosions, accompanied by violent shockwaves that throw him to the floor. In a trance, he scribbles down a few meaningless shapes that turn out to be seismographic readings, before filing a story about a giant explosion on the South Sea island of Krakatoa, giving precise details of casualties and damage.
The directors of the paper immediately clear the front page and rush into print, believing they've scooped every paper in America. But they can't find any source for the story, so they have to go and wake up Soames at his hotel, only to find that he has no memory whatever of having filed the report in the first place. Since no other paper has any knowledge of the story (this was 1883, when undersea telegraphy was a slow business), the management reluctantly kills it, and angrily puts Soames out on the street. But within hours, the news is confirmed and Soames is suddenly the hero of the hour, with the whole town ringing him for stock-market tips. He loathes this cynical attitude, and resigns the job after all, seeking peace and anonymity. Many years later he's working for an obscure newspaper well away from Boston, when fate decides to repeat the trick, in a way we can't reveal...
The casting of Soames is the triumph of this episode, lifting it out of mediocrity. He is played by the Australian John Meillon - truly brilliant as the ordinary guy, baffled by the workings of the supernatural.
This was the farewell episode of the series, which never quite claimed that these were real-life events. ("Drawn from human record" is the weasel term that some have found unconvincing.) The story may have been adapted from a similar cataclysm at Martinique in the Caribbean, which was the subject of a precognitive dream by a major time theorist, J. W. Dunne.