Nexus - 1805 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page 60 of 93

Page 60 of 93
Nexus - 1805 - New Times Magazine-pages

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MIKE MARCUM’S TIME MACHINE EXPERIMENTS MARCUM’S MIKE TIME MACHINE EXPERIMENTS After electronics tinkerer Mike Marcum dived into the heat signature of his activated time machine, he woke up to find he had been teleported from Missouri to Ohio and had missed two years in the process. he machine, an array of wires attached to two vertical cylinders inside a rotating magnetic field, 3,000,000-volt arcs of electricity dancing through them, rose 35 feet above the floor of the Kansas City, Missouri, warehouse. Mike Marcum stood on a cherry picker 25 feet above the machine, staring into one of the cylinders at a four-foot-wide circular heat signature—an event horizon. He knew what that heat signature meant. He'd discovered it in the little northwestern Missouri town of Stanberry years earlier, and it was something that no one had found before. As the electric arcs crackled below him, he steadied himself, sweat beading on his face, After electronics tinkerer Mike Marcum dived into the heat signature of his activated time machine, he woke up to find he had been teleported from Missouri to Ohio and had missed two years in the process. Marcum was certain he'd built a time machine. So certain, he took a breath and jumped into the heat signature. Then he disappeared. To everyone—family, friends and people who followed his time travel experiments on paranormal radio and in the mainstream press—on that day in 1998, Mike Marcum was gone. In 2011, I found him. The First Test Mike Marcum’'s story, for our purposes here, began four years earlier. arcum, then a 21-year-old with two years of electrical training at Rio Grande College in Rio Grande, Ohio, followed a girl he'd met in 1993 in Lancaster, Ohio, to Albany, Missouri, a small community in the northwestern region of the state. "She made me promise to be there for her birthday,” arcum said. "I went and, long story short, I ended up staying there before getting my own place in Stanberry." Just south of Albany, Stanberry is neatly idden under a canopy of tall leafy trees. A cannon sits in the city park, and he local convenience store sells gasoline, pizza and fishing worms. In 1994, arcum moved into a trim white house at 401 East Third Street. In that little ouse, Marcum's time travel journey began. In December, Marcum built a Jacob's ladder—a device that allows electricity to arc between two vertical metal rods. "I'm basically a nerd. | was making a fancy Jacob's ladder that was started via laser pulses. Basically, a fancy light show," Marcum said. “Living in a small town in the middle of nowhere with no Internet or cable, you get bored. Some people build models or go fishing. | like to build electronic things." But something appened that he didn't expect...something anomalous. The device created a ball of heat the size of a dime that floated steadily in the air above the adder. "After a few pulses, the laser somehow got stuck in continuous mode," he said. "This in turn made the arc stick at the bottom of the electrodes. | noticed right above the arc there was the usual heat shimmering, but what was unusual about it was it was circular—sphere- shaped instead of random." Not knowing what to think, he picked up a screw from the kitchen table and tossed it into the tiny shimmering sphere. "It vanished, then reappeared a few feet away," Marcum said. "Then | thought, by Jason Offutt © 2011 Post Office Box 501 Maryville, MO 64468, USA Email: jasonoffutt@hotmail.com Blog: www.from-the-shadows.blogspot.com Post Office Box 501 Maryville, MO 64468, USA Email: NEXUS ¢ 59 by Jason Offutt © 2011 jasonoffutt@hotmail.com AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2011 www.nexusmagazine.com