But what is time? Does it really have something to do with the clocks and watches which dictate our lives, or is it all in the mind? We all know that if you're having an unpleasant experience, time drags by, but if you're enjoying yourself, the hours fly; it's as if time is a subjective experience. Neurologists now claim that the brain's complex architecture may be partly responsible for our experience of personal time. If you have a personal computer nowadays, the manufacturer often states how 'fast' the PC is by quoting the speed of its processor, which is usually measured in megahertz (MHz). One megahertz is a measure of frequency equal to one million cycles per second. Personal computers have a component containing a quartz crystal which vibrates millions of times a second and acts as the heart of a clock for the computer system to work by. Most computers have a processor speed of 200 MHz, but believe it or not, the human brain - the most complex computer known to man - has a much slower frequency of just 18 Hz - or eighteen cycles per second. The eminent neurologist J. Hughlings Jackson recently stated that 'Time in the form of some minimum duration is required for consciousness.' Many other prominent neurologists concur, and believe that psychological time - our experience of the present - is merely an illusionary side-effect created by the ticking of the brain's electrical 18 Hz clock. This would mean that the ego of the reader only exists in relatively slow measurable pulses of 18 cycles per second. In other words, the ego is discontinuous, like a number of beads spaced out on a thread. Curiously, the Buddhists have long asserted that the ego is a flickering, virtually non-existent illusion of continuity. A good analogy to illustrate this concept of discontinuity is the way we are fooled into believing we are watching a continuous 'motion' film in the cinema when we are in fact only looking at 24 still frames being swiftly flashed onto the screen in succession each second. The audience experiences a sense of 'now' unfolding each moment in the film's time frame, when in reality, it is just a discontinuous illusion full of blank gaps and static images. The clock theory of the brain would also explain why certain people suffer convulsions and seizures when they are bombarded with rapid flashes of light from a strobe. Most of the seizures take place when the strobe flashes at a frequency of 15 to 20 Hz. It's as if the flashes are sending high-speed signals down the eye's optic nerve which throws the brain out of synchronization with its 18 Hz rhythm, just like a drummer losing his beat. Despite these intriguing mechanistic theories of consciousness, I still suspect that the neurologists are grossly underestimating the complex workings of the psyche and are merely skirting the fringes of the human mindscape.
So much for psychological time. Does time exist outside of our brains in the physical universe? The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c.540-c.480 BC) was one of the earliest people to ponder the nature of time, and he observed that 'All things flow, nothing stays still; nothing endures but change.' Heraclitus was remarking on the apparent constant 'arrow of time' which travels into the future from the past, relentlessly in one direction. Empires rise and crumble, the baby grows into an old person and expires, and the eternal seasons roll on. In the midst of this ever-changing universe, the nostalgic animal homo sapiens longs for the familiar golden days of yesteryear, often yearning to turn back the clock. The receding out-of-reach past, which rouses Shakespeare's Richard II to cry: 'O! Call back yesterday, bid time return.' Thanks to the development of photography, films and video technology, we can call back yesterday in limited form. We can re-visit a wedding captured years back on video, be enthralled by films starring actors and actresses who have been dead for decades, just as we can listen to tapes and CDs featuring performers who have long gone to their graves. And of course, leafing through the simple family photograph album never fails to evoke some emotion or memory of days gone by. But can we somehow circumvent the seemingly cast-iron laws of nature and actually visit the past (or the future for that matter) in person? This is a seductive notion that has occupied minds for thousands of years. We are now venturing into the territory of the theoretical physicist, because we are posing the age-old question: is time-travel possible? I say it is.
We are all time travellers, moving into the future at a rate of sixty seconds a minute, although we often think that it is time that is going by. No, time stays, we move on. In each second which goes by as you read these words, the earth is whizzing through space in its orbit around the sun at a phenomenal speed of eighteen miles per second, but no one is aware of this. Nor are most people aware that the when they look at the incandescent orange disk of the setting sun, they are seeing it not as it is 'now', but as it was eight minutes ago. The rays which travel from the sun across 93 million miles of space take eight minutes to reach us here on earth. So we are looking eight minutes into the past when we see the sun. The stars in the sky are even further away than the sun (which is the nearest star to us), and the light from them can take anything from 4 years to billions of years to reach us. For example, if you go out on a cloudless night and look up at Polaris, the so-called 'North Star', your eyes will be seeing it as it was 680 years ago when Edward II was king of England. And, if by some remote chance, there are aliens peering at us through their version of a super-Hubble telescope on some planet orbiting a star 932 light years away, they will be witnessing the Battle of Hastings. Sadly, if the extraterrestrials take another look at us 900 years on, they will see there are still conflicts going on down here.
So, just by gazing at the stars we can look into the remote past, which illustrates how our perspective on time changes when we look at it from beyond the petty confines of our day-to-day mundane world of clockwatching. But looking at stars is hardly physical time travel; isn't there a nuts and bolts way of visiting the past down here on earth? The surprising answer is yes.
Viewers of all ages have been terrified by Dr Who with his grisly gallery of outlandish monsters (and low-budget egg-box sets). The good Doctor and his Tardis were once regarded as pure science fiction but there are many distinguished scientists with impeccable academic credentials who believe that time travel will be a reality one day. Indeed, some boffins think Timelords like the Doctor may have already visited history. Before I examine the blueprints for hypothetical time machines, let me mention just one curious historical character of the 18th century who may have been a real-life timelord: the mysterious Count of St Germain. Various books refer to this enigmatic aristocratic-looking individual as nothing more than some oddball adventurer. In the Century of Enlightenment, the French police suspected him of being a Prussian spy, but the Prussians surmised he was a Russian agent. The English thought he was a Jacobite sympathiser when he was arrested in London in 1745, but whenever he was interrogated, it became clear that the Count was not in the pay of anybody, and made many disturbing and seemingly astounding claims.
He said he had met Jesus of Nazareth and had been a wedding guest at Cana, where he actually witnessed the water-into-wine miracle. The Count added that he had always known that Christ would meet a bad end, and many were outraged by his sacrilegious claims. The Count said he had also met Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Henry VIII, Shakespeare, and many other historical personages. Stranger still, when quizzed by bemused historians about his meetings with celebrated characters from the past, the Count of St Germain always went into amazing detail about his encounters, and could even describe the food, weather and trivialities of the age he had lived in. All of these details would be thoroughly checked by the academics and always found to be true. Another mystery was the Count's wealth. He was incredibly rich and had an abundant supply of unusually large gemstones, which he used as currency.
Then there is the puzzle of his multi-linguistical talents. He spoke fluent, Greek, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Portugese, French, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, English and the language of Christ - Aramaic. The Count was also a gifted violinist, pianist, sculptor (in the ancient Greek tradition), painter, and an accomplished chemist. He set up many laboratories during his extensive travels throughout Europe, Russia and India, but his work was always shrouded in secrecy, although many thought he was an alchemist trying to turn base metals into gold. The great French writer and philosopher Voltaire quizzed the Count, initially suspecting him to be a silver-tongued charlatan, but ended up declaring: 'He is truly a man who never dies and knows so much.' But the greatest conundrum concerning the Count of St Germain is his incredible longevity.
According to reliable eye-witness reports and the numerous entries in aristrocrats' diaries, the Count appeared to be 45 to 50 years of age in 1710, yet he is known to have been active in the French Revolution of 1789. In fact, he was even mentioned in the diary of one condemned Marie Antoinette, who recorded her regret at not taking the advice of the 'Comte de St Germain, as he had long ago warned of the gigantic conspiracy which would overthrow the order of things'. During the Reign of Terror in France, the unfathomable nobleman from nowhere still looked no older than 50. The last reliable documented sighting of him took place in 1821, 111 years after he appeared on the European scene, and the Count still looked like a 50-year-old man. Shortly before he vanished from the Continent, he told a writer named Franz Graeffer: 'Tomorrow night I am off; I am much needed in Constantinople, then in England, there to prepare two inventions which you will have in the next century - trains and steamboats.' After his arrival in England, the Count of St Germain travelled north, and there were several reports of him collaborating with the engineers and promoters of the early Liverpool to Manchester railway. There were even sightings of the mystifying Count in Cheshire around 1829.
The only document that can be attributed to the Count is now kept in the Library at Troyes. It contains strange, apparently symbolic diagrams and a baffling text. One paragraph reads: 'We moved through space at a speed that can be compared with nothing but itself. Within a fraction of a second the plains below us were out of sight, and the earth had become a faint nebula. I was carried up, and I travelled through the empyrean for an incalculable time at an immeasurable height. Heavenly bodies revolved, and worlds vanished below me.' The Count St Germain's lifespan seems incredible to us today, when the average expectation of life is seventy. How much more phenomenal it must have seemed in the 18th century when reaching 35 was an achievement.
The Count's true identity will probably never be known, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he was a traveller in the realm of time, and may have really met Jesus and Henry VIII. If he was a timelord, what sort of technology would have allowed his trek through history? At the moment, there are two spheres of modern science which might allow a limited form of time travel: subatomic physics and cosmology.
The world of subatomic particles is a topsy-turvy one which would have delighted Lewis Carroll. In the surreal 'inner space' universe of positrons, quarks and electrons, a ray of light consists of photons which paradoxically act as particles and waves. There are also elementary particles called muons which are incredibly short-lived and unstable. After 2.2 microseconds the muon decays into an electron, neutrino and and anti-neutrino. However, if the muon is pushed towards the speed of light in a particle accelerator, its lifetime is stretched a little. Travelling at 0.99% of light's speed, the muon's life is extended from a couple of microseconds to 155 microseconds. This strange effect is known in scientific circles as time dilation, and was predicted by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (published in 1905). Time dilation not only stretches the lifetime of a particle; it can also extend the lifetime of a human, although the energy output and technology to achieve this would present engineering difficulties at this moment in time.
To illustrate the weird world of time dilation, consider the following example, which was forseen by Einstein before space travel was a reality. Picture identical twins named Jack and Joe - both aged 25. Joe stays on Earth and Jack embarks on a 5-year tour of outer space in a rocket that travels close to the speed of light. When Jack returns to his home planet, he is five years older, but Joe is 75 years old, because 50 years have elapsed on Earth since Jack set out on his relativistic journey. People accustomed to relying on 'common sense' down here on Earth are usually puzzled at this twin brother paradox, but it is totally in accordance with relativity. Atomic clocks have been carried on Concorde, and at the end of their journey, the clocks have been compared with synchronized high-precision time-pieces left on the ground. The results are always the same; the clocks moving on the supersonic Concorde jet ticked slower compared to their stationary counterparts on the ground. Building a rocket that travels near the speed of light is not exactly a realistic option to propel a person into another time. In fact, time dilation can only send the traveller into the future. To travel into the past you would obviously need to go backwards through time, and this would appear a trifle trickier to achieve.
The universe we are familiar with is made up of 'tardyons' - particles that travel slower than the speed of light. But for some time now, scientists have been speculating upon the existence of an intriguing particle they have dubbed the 'tachyon' - a subatomic particle that travels faster than light. The tachyon only exists in theory at the moment, but there is mounting evidence which suggests that it is at large in the universe. Tachyons, because of their incredible velocities, travel backwards in time, and seem to fly in the face of terrestrial common sense. An encounter with a spacecraft made of tachyons would play havoc with our sense of reality. We would see it in our vicinity first, then the spacecraft's slower light image would catch up some time later, so that we would perceive the tachyon ship as moving backwards in time, and could subsequently witness its launch! This would not be some weird optical illusion, but the effect of tachyonic dynamics as predicted by the Theory of Relativity. Should scientists of the future discover a way to convert the hull of a spaceship or time machine into tachyons, the door to the past will be open and the long-held dream of returning to yesterday will become a reality. Unfortunately, the military and intelligence forces of any country would surely regard a time machine as a threat to national and global security. And sadly, they'd have a point. Imagine some future Hitler in the 22nd century abusing time travel to alter the past; perhaps to massacre his adversaries' ancestors.
For all we know, these assassins from the future could already be at work in history, carrying out murders which would seem motiveless to us , yet have far-reaching influences in the politics of the future. Would this chilling possibility explain why certain people (who are always alone) have been struck down by an incredible energy force which has literally reduced them to ashes? I am referring to the hundreds of recorded deaths from so-called spontaneous human combustion, where victims have been charred to death - sometimes within seconds - often leaving their clothes and surroundings unscorched. Cremating a human body requires a considerable amount of heat. In the crematorium a temperature of 2,500-3,000 degrees Fahrenheit is required for up to four hours. But a majority of the people who die from spontaneous combustion are incinerated to powder in minutes or seconds, and the fierce burning is usually so localized, a victim can be seated on a chair which remains untouched by the heat; one victim's nylon tights were not even singed. Then there is the sinister disturbance in the earth's magnetic field which precipitates the lethal self-contained inferno. Each day, observatories from all over the world record readings of the earth's magnetic field. Researchers in spontaneous human combustion have discovered that in many areas where people have turned into human incendiary bombs, 'something' has disturbed the magnetic field of the earth in those regions, making it more intense. The sun's solar activity was initially blamed, but the real source of the disturbance remains elusive and seemingly impossible to pin down. It's as if something 'comes through' from out of the blue to strike down the unsuspecting and apparently well-targeted victim with an unimaginable burst of powerful yet containable energy. Could that energy be the beam of some deadly tachyonic laser-device of the future, aimed through a tiny aperture in the space-time fabric? Is this just all paranoia - or could someone up the timeline be targeting you soon?
Getting back to the physics of time travel; most physicists have now accepted that black holes are a reality and exist in our own galaxy. A black hole is created when a massive object, such as a star, collapses in on itself, resulting in a highly compressed sphere of super-condensed matter. The gravity is also condensed in the collapsed star, and is concentrated to such an extent that even light cannot escape from it; hence it is known as a black hole. Einstein taught us that space and time are inseparable, so a hole in time is a hole in space, and a whole new generation of theorists now believe that black holes are gateways to the past and future. However, a static black hole is to be avoided. Amateur time-travellers entering black holes that do not spin would be simply crushed out of existence at the central point of the black hole - a nightmarish point of super-condensed time and space called a singularity, where the laws of physics break down. A rotating black hole is more hospitable and offers an incredible option: travel into the remote past and future of the universe. These amazing possibilities are not pie in the sky; all the equations have been worked out and put to the test in computer simulations; all we need is a rotating black hole, but finding one near enough in the interstellar neighbourhood is a daunting problem. Locating a black hole is fairly easy, as they are usually pulling apart other stars, and as the stellar material goes down the event horizon plughole at an incredible velocity, massive emissions of X-rays are generated which we can pick up on earth. There are many suspiciouslooking sites in the sky which look like black holes, but all of these objects are simply too remote to be of any practical use to the enthusiastic time-traveller. This predicament has cornered some scientists into considering alternative forms of time-tampering.
One respected American scientist named Frank Tipler has published several ideas for time machines in reputable journals such as the Physical Review and Annals of Physics. Tipler's design for a time machine involves a lot of abstruse mathematics, and the dynamics of rotating cylinders. All of the work centres on twisting time and space with high-speed rotation devices, but as far as we know, no one has tried out Tipler's machines. The technology does exist to make some headway with Tipler's designs however. NASA technicians are currently developing high-speed dynamo flywheels to power satellites and manned spacecraft. These flywheels are the size of a bicycle wheel and capable of 90,000 revolutions per minute. The outer rim of the wheel travels at more than 7000 miles per hour, generating kilowatts of electricity to power up the space stations of the future. Some wheels are now on the drawing board which will be magnetically suspended on frictionless, superconducting axles. The speeds of these flywheels will be even more phenomenal, and it will be interesting to see if they produce any time distortion as predicted by Tipler. Of course, we have only been concentrating on man-made time-travel. Could it be that time occasionally malfunctions all by herself through some poorly-understood phenomenon? Also, could the fabric of space-time down here on earth have weak spots or holes which could provide us with an opportunity to explore another era? With a magnification of 30 million, the electron microscope taught us that nothing in the universe has a smooth surface. The apparent flat level smoothness of a pane of glass or the veneered top of a coffe table is in reality pitted and pockmarked with grooves and chasms. Could the same be true of the spacetime fabric? If the space-time continuum does have weak spots and holes in it, it could explain some of the following timewarp cases.
In the summer of 1992, a successful Cestrian entrepreneur and experienced pilot named Mr Davies took off from a private airfield on the outskirts of Chester. Mr Davies was at the controls of a Cessna and was headed for Liverpool's Speke airport. As the Cessna was passing over the Stamford Bridge area, Mr Davies noticed something quite strange. Thousands of feet below there were no signs of the M53 or M56 motorways. Nor was there any sign of a single A or B road.
Intrigued and somewhat alarmed at the apparent missing roads, Mr Davies descended in his plane to take a closer look at the now unfamiliar territory. What he saw made his heart somersalt: a tight formation of men were marching down a road towards a long rectangular squat building. Mr Davies located a pair of 10 x 50 binoculars and trained them on the marching figures. They were Roman soldiers, and the building they were walking towards looked like some sort of Roman villa. At this point, a strange low mist seemed to materialise and enshrouded the landscape below. When it cleared, there was the A548 motorway and Mr Davies saw to his relief that everything had returned to normal. He flew over the M56 and decided to circle back to see if he could get a glimpse of the soldiers again, but they were nowhere to be seen. Mr Davies subsequently made extensive inquiries to ascertain if the soldiers had been extras in some film. But there were no films about Romans being shot anywhere in Cheshire, or anywhere in Britain for that matter. Mr Davies gradually realised that he had somehow ventured into the airspace of Cheshire during the Roman occupation of over a thousand years ago. Mr Davies has since heard that several other pilots have experienced strange time-displacements in the skies over Cheshire. One highly-respected helicopter pilot with a military background lost radio communication during his 'episode', but has never gone into detail over just what exactly happened to him. He did state that his greatest fear was being stranded in the past. Perhaps this was the fate of Flying Officer Brian Holding.
On March 7, 1922, Holding took off from the airfield at Chester on what was intended to be a short flight over the border to an airstrip in Wales. On the return journey from Wales, Holding's plane was spotted by scores of witnesses droning through the skies back towards Chester. That plane and its experienced pilot never reached the airfield and was never seen again. A massive search for the wreckage of the missing plane was launched but not a trace of the craft was ever found. Stranger still, weeks before Holding flew into limbo, peculiar lights were seen flying in formation over North Wales.
Some timeslips have apparently given witnesses glimpses of the future. Between 1995 and 1997, a number of people in the vicinity of the Runcorn Bridge reported seeing a breathtaking futuristic vista on the horizon towards Hale Bank, near Speke Airport.
The incredible sight that greeted the eyes of Frank Jones at 4 am on the morning of December 5th, 1995 was not the lights of Liverpool Airport. Mr Jones thought it looked more like Liverpool Spaceport. The scene was like something from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Enormous lenticular ships dotted with bright blue and red lights were rising into the dark sky until they were out of sight. The domed ships were taking off silently from an enormous circular area which was lit with an actinic glow from powerful lights. Dotted about this launch area, Mr Jones could see towers and buildings speckled with a myriad coloured lights. As Mr Jones travelled north along Queensway on the other side of the Mersey, he lost sight of the breathtaking spectacle, but knew dozens of other early morning commuters must have witnessed the 'UFOs'.
Several reports did trickle into the radio stations and newspaper offices of the region. That same week, a man crossing the Runcorn Bridge said an enormous craft shaped like 'an upturned basin' had hovered over his vehicle until he reached the Bridgewater Expressway. The spectacular sightings abated for a while then returned throughout 1996. Early in 1997, a woman from Halton Lodge, Warrington was 'terrorized' by a gigantic spacecraft which loomed over her car as she crossed the Runcorn Bridge. The terrified woman said the craft looked like the ominous 'Death Star' out of Star Wars. In a state of total panic the woman deliberately sped across the bridge at a speed of 80 miles per hour because she hoped that a policeman would see her speeding and come to her aid. Throughout the desperate getaway attempt, the colossal ship overhead matched her speed, and the woman thought she would be abducted, but the circular spacecraft left her alone and continued on a slow trajectory towards Hale Bank, where Mr Jones had seen the mirage of a spaceport.
Several local Ufologists quizzed the witnesses and descended on Hale Bank in search of physical evidence left by the giant UFOs, but found nothing. Were the ships UFOs from another planet, or did the witnesses see some future spaceport which will one day stand near Hale Bank and Speke Airport? Time will tell.
Without a doubt, one of the most intriguing timewarp incidents of recent years unfolded in the autumn of 1984 at a small terraced house known as Meadow Cottage in the village of Dodleston near Chester. A schoolteacher named Ken Webster was working on his BBC 'B' personal computer at the cottage late one night and accidently left it on. When he returned to the computer some time later, Webster was surprised to see that a poem of some sort had been typed out on the VDU screen. At first, Webster suspected someone was pulling his leg, but hoax was soon ruled out when further messages came through. There was no modem connected to the computer (which only had 32K memory), and even the floppy disk in the machine's drive was checked, but there were no suspicious hidden files hidden on it. Webster's home also became the focus of poltergeist activity. The cooker and heavy furniture were hurled about by the invisible force, and cups and cans of food were stacked into towers and arranged side by side. Strange messages were also scratched on the floor and wall in an elegant calligraphy, signed by one 'Tomas'. The eerie messages continued, most of them written in a 'quirky mockTudor' style. Webster tried to communicate with the mysterious writer via his computer keyboard and received several startling replies.
There were six people communicating with him from somewhere (or somewhen) back in the 17th century. But how could people from the Elizabethan period contact a teacher in the 20th century by computer? That was never answered. The main communicator identified himself as Tomas Harden, and the following message, which occupied three screens of the computer, was analysed by experts in archaic language and even the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary, who could not detect a hoaxer at work. The message from Mr Harden runs: 'Myne goodly friend, I muste needs say, how cometh this, that there are manye thyngs for whiche I hath no rekenyng. Me thinketh it, that if thou cannot telle thee for what art in myne home, then I can namoor helpe yow than if myne witts had gone. I hath no kinfolk to fynd, myne wif was wreched with thy pestilence and the Lord didst take here soule and her unbore son (1517). Myne farme 'tis humble but it hath a pretty parcel o land, it hath redstoon footyngs and cleen rushes on myne beeten floor. This season I hath much to do, I hath to sow myne barly for myne ale, 'tis this that is myne craft and for whiche I am beste atte I fancy. Also I hath to go to Nantwhiche to myne cowthe freend Richard Wishal whois farme be so greet as to turn a four yeer rotacion o fallow. I do do envye him he hath much there, but nought that delits me moor than his cheese it cannot be equalled by any other for pleasantness of taste and wholesomness of digestion. I shall als calle atte Nantwyche Market 'tis not so greet as Cestre market by thy crios but 'tis of som desport. I shal need to go to Cestre this season to get myne soes, myne goodly freend Tomas Aldersay, a tailor by craft, makes them sometymes, I als mayketh soes but non of myne swyne are reedy 'tis far costly unlest I need kil one. Do you knoweth the country of Cestre the Water Gate is a plas that bringeth manye traders 'tis a shame the port doth shrynk I can record greet shipps now they grow small by each tyde, but Cestre port is still greeter than that o Leverpoole I am oft to the east wall of Cestre. Cow Lane, 'tis not so tyresome than that by the crois that it when myne fowl or swyne doth not trip up myne poore body I hear telle that thou art a teache in Hawardine doth yow meeneth Haodine cloth, thou stil earn thy greetly sum of twenty pounds per yeer I recorde myne unfavourable dean Henry Mann, who is likened to a fissh 'If any boy shal appear naturally avers to learning aft fair trial he shalt be expelled else wher lest lik a drone he should devour the bees honey'. Ney I cannot make merry on holy day for feer of myne lif myne freen was once a floytinge on a holy day did hath hus ears pinned to thy wood bloc methinks when thou sayeth Dodleston yow meeneth Dudlestun. Myne Queen is of cource Katherine Parr.'
The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) were invited to investigate, and accepted the invitation. The SPR is a highly professional and unbiased investigative body of scholars and scientists who look into alleged paranormal incidents. The Society was founded in 1882 and has investigated thousands of hauntings and mediums with strict scientific method. Many mediums were debunked by the SPR and a lot of hauntings were also discredited, but the SPR investigation into Ken Webster's seemingly haunted computer resulted in an electrifying development. The SPR investigators left ten secret questions on the computer screen, out of sight of Mr Webster, and although the questions were not answered directly. Messages came through on the screen refering to the questions, which naturally fazed the SPR people. This ruled out any deception, and an SPR investigator urged the sinister communicator to reply to the questions. A chilling reply came back. The communicator would give an answer to the SPR investigator - if he was willing to lose his soul.
The SPR man backed off. The BBC micro was later stripped and experts scrutinised its printed circuit boards, its monitor, disk drive, keyboard, every inch of the machine, but there were no hidden radio transcievers and no modem. In those days, the Internet in Britain was just a programmer's pipe dream. The SPR people were completely baffled and withdrew from the cottage without even making a report. The chief investigator never got back to Webster and became uncontactable for years. Ken Webster became frustrated at the ham-fisted inquiry and wrote a book about his bizarre experience called The Vertical Plane. In April 1986, Tomas Harden said he was going to 'leave the area' and after a few more messages, the 17th century computer hacker ceased communication.
The aforementioned timewarp cases seem to indicate that all time is eternally present, so to speak; that all of the historical periods of the past, present and future are contained within each other like Russian dolls. As you read this screen right now, perhaps beyond the wafer-thin dimension of the present, a ravenous sabre-toothed tiger of the Pleistocene Era is prowling through your room. Until we learn how to manipulate time, we will go through this life as if our heads were facing back to front; we only know where we have been and where we are, but can never know where we are going.

For more information on Tom, go to: www.ghostcity19.freeserve.co.uk
or e-mail him personally: TSlemen@excite.com

Tom Slemen Appreciation Group, Los Angeles.