I was never a big science fiction fan. But now that I have begun to discover that many of the top physicists, astronomers, scientists and government intelligence folks are - strangely, at least in my view - big science fiction fans. I decided to see what all the fuss is about. It reminded me of when I learned the senior partner in my old law firm was a serious chess player. I didn't understand (at the time) why a lawyer would be so interested in chess, but I decided to study the game by reading chess books. I learned that chess, like litigation, is war. Today, I heard a presentation by Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess Grandmaster and former World Chess Champion, considered by many to be the greatest chess player of all time. Was he talking about chess? Not at all. He was talking about politics and war.
It occurred to me that I should start to read science fiction classics for the same reason. They might provide a clue as to scientific and military "strategies" of our day. This thought solidified in my mind after a recent visit with my son to the USS Nautilus (SSN 571), the first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1954. The name "Nautilus" is, in fact, a nod to the renowned French science fiction author Jules Verne whose protagonist, Captain Nemo, commanded a submarine named in Nautilus in his book "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." In 1870, when the book was published, there were only a tiny handful of primitive and experimental submarines in existence. Verne's science "fiction" became a science "reality" in the span of only two generations.
Time travel has always been a mainstay of science fiction. Is time travel already part of our "reality"? If you plunge deeply into the various accounts available in the field of ufology about the American secret military exploration into time travel, you will find bizarre and seemingly unbelievable assertions made by occasional whistleblowers (it's always difficult to know if they are brave or merely disinfo plants). I once interviewed a lawyer named Andrew Basiago who claimed to have been part of a secret military program as a child and was able to time travel (Project Pegasus) by walking into certain military installations on the East Coast and exiting moments later on the West Coast. Others made similar assertions. There are the astounding claims made by the military microbiologist Dr. Dan Burisch about a time travel machine utilizing secret extraterrestrial technologies at Area 51 near Las Vegas (Project Looking Glass). And, of course, there are the famous stories of the Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Chair, both allegedly efforts by secret military programs to explore time travel with limited success according to people I know. Have we actually verified physicist Hugh Everett's 1950's theory of a multiverse? I know physicists today who claim to have found the quantum explanation for retrocausality in which the future interacts with and creates the past. Have we found real "Stargates" and worm holes on planet earth? Did the rocket scientist Jack Parsons, who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, actually open an inter-dimensional portal in California?
If our secret military and government has found the key to what we all still believe is just science fiction - namely time travel - then they have found the ultimate weapon. He who controls the course of history, controls the world. Imagine you could change the outcome of World War II. You could undo Hiroshima. You could plant spies in the places where they were needed. Ah yes, chess and war.
But where are the clues? A year ago I experienced a very funky glitch in time. While taking my normal two mile walk around the lake near my home, I fell on the sidewalk. My shoe got caught in a large crevice in the pavement at the top of a small hill and down I went. Aside from a bloody knee and bruised pride, I was fine. I continued to do my almost daily walk around the lake. Each time I carefully avoided the crevice at the top of the hill. It became a ritual. Then one day, I did my walk around the lake and when I came to the place where the crevice should have been, it was gone! Strangely, the sidewalk was perfectly paved over. I tripled checked just to be sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me. In fact, the entire sidewalk seemed strangely smooth. The only cracks in the pavement were at the very bottom of the hill. I thought to myself: This is wonderful. The town must have finally gotten around to repaving the stupid sidewalk. A couple of days later, I walked around the lake again. However, this time I was shocked to discover the crevice was back. All the cracks in the pavement were back. It was as if time undid itself. Or I had reverted to present time again. I felt slightly insane.
I am not the only person to have had this odd sensation. Famous UFO contactee Whitley Strieber described his drive down Route 17 in Northern New Jersey that suddenly transformed itself into an entirely unknown landscape before reverting to its normal scenery. I have many friends and colleagues who have described being suddenly transported into different time zones. One friend who was visiting Russia suddenly found herself, as she looked out the window of her train, looking at a battlefield landscape with fallen soldiers. Another friend, took a train from Westchester to New York City, and was shocked to find herself looking at a landscape filled with dinosaurs! Yet another friend has received emails and photos from himself, properly time-stamped, about 10 years in the future. He is baffled by them. Many of my paranormal investigator friends who have visited Gettysburg have seen soldiers marching, heard horses hooves clattering with carriage wheels, spoken with men dressed in Confederate uniforms. Even I once heard a canon boom across the deserted battlefield and at night, during a stay in a haunted inn once used as a makeshift Civil War infirmary, was awoken by a horrific screeching noise that I was able to later positively identify as a Confederate rebel call. My point is: our present time is often interrupted when we are suddenly dropped in the past somewhere. Is this because time has been altered by someone and an adjustment is being made?
I have never lost time, as many UFO abductees claim. But I have gained time. And time has played tricks. Once I was emailing with a friend who was visiting Mexico. She had gone shopping and sent me a bunch of photos of jewelry. She offered to buy whatever I liked since she could get a good price. We emailed back and forth for a while, but before I was able to select the necklace I wanted, I had to do a one hour private reading for a client at 8 PM. At 9 PM, I resumed the emailing and told my friend which necklace I wanted. I didn't think anything about this interaction until several months later when I looked carefully at our email thread. Amazingly, while my friend's emails were chronologically time-stamped with the earliest ones (starting about 5 PM) at the bottom of the email thread and the latest ones on top (this is the normal way email threads are displayed), mine were the opposite! It was as if I was going backwards in time! Her emails went forward in time and mine went backward in time! It was the strangest thing! I brought this to the attention of many IT professionals but no one was ever able to solve this mystery for me.
I think time has been altered. We have tiny clues in our daily life. As a friend of mine, a highly placed FAA security official, said to me recently: Imagine that you could fiddle around with time and change history, and yet it could only be done in between the tiniest moments of consciousness. It would be kind of like a security camera that only takes a photo every 10 seconds. You think you are looking at a fluid chronological reality, but you aren't. Think of all the reality changes you could make during each of those unseen, un-photographed 10 second intervals. You could change everything. And you would never know what happened...
Or just read the science fiction story "VALIS" (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) by Philip K. Dick. An intriguing story of time interweaving past, present and future intrusions on the protagonist, Horselover Fat a/k/a Philip K. Dick. Fat suddenly assumes the personality of an ancient historical personage and speaks perfect koine Greek (of which he has no prior knowledge), and at other points, seems to be mind-melded with three-eyed telepathic extraterrestrials who are likely just his future human self. At what point in time does fiction become reality?
