© 1996-2007 National Geographic Society
By Stefan Lovgren

As any self-respecting science fiction fan knows, wormholes—theoretical shortcuts through space and time—make for excellent time travel portals. One such movie to transport people into the past is A Sound of Thunder, based on the classic 1952 Ray Bradbury novella. In it, a group of hunters build a time machine, which looks like a wormhole of sorts, to travel back to the dinosaur era. There, things go awry when one hunter kills a butterfly, which completely changes the course of history. The movie was widely panned by critics and seems to have quickly slipped out of theaters. But the questions it raises—the mystery of time and the possibilities of traveling through it—remain among the thorniest in physics, keeping a growing number of scientists occupied.

It's not like scientists are looking for a way to actually travel through time. But some believe that theorizing about how it could be done—maybe by using a wormhole in space—will help them understand and perhaps even revise the laws of physics. "Traversable wormholes are extremely useful as gedanken experiments"—the term describes experiments that can be reasoned theoretically but are impractical to carry out—"to probe the limitations of general relativity," said Francisco Lobo, an astrophysicist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal.

Quantum Leap : Albert Einstein's relativity theory set the speed of light as the universal speed limit and showed that distance and time are not absolute but instead are affected by one's motion. A clock in motion will always appear to run slowly compared with one at rest, because time is relative to the speed at which a body is moving. That fact would, in theory, allow for time travel—at least if you have a very fast spaceship. Consider this: If an astronaut travels into space for six months at a substantial fraction of light speed and takes another six months to return to Earth, he would land in the future. While a year will have elapsed on the astronaut's clock, tens of thousands of years may have gone by on Earth, depending on how close to light speed the astronaut traveled...

© AboveTopSecret.com

Does the United States Air Force or one of America's intelligence agencies have a secret hypersonic aircraft capable of a Mach 6 performance? Continually growing evidence suggests that the answer to this question is yes. Perhaps the most well-known event which provides evidence of such a craft's existence is the sighting of a triangular plane over the North Sea in August 1989 by oil-exploration engineer Chris Gibson. As well as the famous "skyquakes" heard over Los Angeles since the early 1990s, found to be heading for the secret Groom Lake (Area 51) installation in the Nevada desert, numerous other facts provide an understanding of how the aircraft's technology works. Rumored to exist but routinely denied by U.S. officials, the name of this aircraft is Aurora.

The outside world uses the name Aurora because a censor's slip let it appear below the SR-71 Blackbird and U-2 in the 1985 Pentagon budget request. Even if this was the actual name of the project, it would have by now been changed after being compromised in such a manner. The plane's real name has been kept a secret along with its existence. This is not unfamiliar though, the F-117a stealth fighter was kept a secret for over ten years after its first pre-production test flight. The project is what is technically known as a Special Access Program (SAP). More often, such projects are referred to as "black programs." So what was the first sign of the existence of such an aircraft? On 6 March 1990, one of the United States Air Force's Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spyplanes shattered the official air speed record from Los Angeles to Washington's Dulles Airport. There, a brief ceremony marked the end of the SR-71's operational career. Officially, the SR-71 was being retired to save the $200-$300 million a year it cost to operate the fleet. Some reporters were told the plane had been made redundant by sophisticated spy satellites. But there was one problem, the USAF made no opposition towards the plane's retirement, and congressional attempts to revive the program were discouraged...

© Crystalinks

The Montauk Project was purportedly a series of secret United States government projects conducted at Camp Hero and/or Montauk Air Force Station on Montauk, Long Island. It was claimed by a small number of conspiracy theorists to be secretly developing a powerful psychological war weapon. The Project is widely regarded by mainstream sources as fictional. The Montauk Project is believed by small numbers of people to be an extension or continuation of the controversial Philadelphia Experiment, which supposedly took place October 28, 1943. According to the legend, sometime in the 1950s, surviving researchers from Project Rainbow began to discuss the project with an eye to continuing the research into technical aspects of manipulating the electromagnetic bottle that had been used to make the USS Eldridge invisible, and the reasons and possible military applications of the psychological effects of a magnetic field.

The legend goes on to say that a report was supposedly prepared and presented to Congress, and was soundly rejected as far too dangerous. So a proposal was made directly to the Department of Defense promising a powerful new weapon that could drive an enemy insane, inducing the symptoms of schizophrenia at the touch of a button. Without congressional approval, the project would have to be top secret and secretly funded. The Department of Defense approved. Funding supposedly came from a cache of US$10 billion in Nazi gold recovered from a train found by U.S. soldiers in a train tunnel in France. The train was blown up and all the soldiers involved were killed. When those funds ran out, additional funding was secured from ITT and Krupp AG in Germany. Work began at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York under the name Phoenix Project, but it was soon realized that the project required a large radar dish, and installing one at Brookhaven would compromise the security of the project. Luckily, the U.S. Air Force had a decommissioned base at Montauk, New York, not far from Brookhaven, which had a complete SAGE radar installation...

© 2000, Colorado Springs Independent
by Malcolm Howard

Metaphysical leanings, scientific breakthroughs and conspiracy theories surround the life of Nikola Tesla, who did some of his most important and astonishing work in Colorado Springs. Somewhere on North Foote Avenue, just up the hill from its intersection with Pikes Peak Avenue, a small house stands on ground where 101 years ago, Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla built his famed, and now long-gone, Colorado Springs laboratory. It was a small, barn-like structure built on a once-grassy knoll, which then served as pasture land. From the center of the structure, an 80-foot tower loomed over the flat grasslands. Signs on the door reportedly read: "Keep Out, Great Danger" and "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," according to biographies of the man.

Where "here" is isn't exactly clear, and I'll avoid naming the address that is believed to be the location to spare the present-day homeowners a repeat of what happened the last time word leaked about the locus of the former lab: Strangly clad visitors meditated on the sidewalk. A man in a VW bus parked at the site for several days and tried to invoke Tesla's spirit. Pilgrims of physics -- and metaphysics -- had come to pay homage to the man who said he made his most important discoveries on the small rolling hill just adjacent to the Colorado Springs Deaf and Blind School.

While it would be easy to poke fun at those who migrated to North Foote hoping to absorb any lingering vibes or energy left by Tesla's experiments, it's undeniable that something unique and powerful happened at the site. Tesla himself felt that his work in Colorado Springs would change the planet. "It was on the 3rd of July -- the date I shall never forget -- when I obtained the first decisive experimental evidence of a truth of overwhelming importance for the advancement of humanity," Tesla wrote in his journal. In short, as lightning got farther away, the pulses being picked up by Tesla's equipment didn't fade. Tesla felt he had discovered evidence that the Earth itself contained "stationary waves" that could serve as a good conduit for electromagnetic energy, opening the possibility of worldwide, instantaneous communication and global transmission of power through the Earth's crust...

Strange Magazine #2, ©1988.

Madness At The Edge Of Science: What is it that we love about the mad scientists in our movies and history? Is it because their probing of the unknown piques our curiosity? Is it their seeming superiority to the common herd? Or is it that they -- at least for a while -- get away with more than we can? They do so in many realms of knowledge. Some of them are practical, and quest for better things for the human race. Others are decidedly less practical. One of their most prominent technologies has been advanced medicine. Filmic mad scientists of the 1930s and 1940s led the vanguard in such efforts as keeping organs alive outside the body, cryogenics, new methods of surgery, robotic parts for humans, and new serums. Others harnessed electricity for all sorts of uses, but mostly to bring dead flesh back to life (always a useful ability), or to power advanced robots and death rays.

In fact, their films have been hotbeds of fortean technology, introducing then-taboo ideas, preparing audiences for technological development in a world in which moral and scientific values would change and old taboos would be discarded. The movies render such taboo topics psychologically "safe" by making the inventions those of "madmen." The scientists who have uncovered the great secrets and developed the miraculous inventions in real life have been a decidedly less colorful lot -- if one disallows such exceptions as Nikola Tesla, Jack Parsons, Wilhelm Reich, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Sir Fred Hoyle and Prof. Kevin Warwick. Most of the "boffins" who helped develop the atomic bomb and other such wonders were reportedly all too normal. But their proclivities for blithe destruction have often left their cinematic versions far behind. It is the potential for cutting-edge science to wound that makes fictions about the subject relevant.In the movies, scientists are quite often "mad," and have been so since the silent movies.The things they do, however, have been fairly consistent...