August 22, 2004: Open Lines | Time Travel
Callers deliver extraordinary stories throughout the night. A woman in West Palm Beach reports communicating with UFOs using a flashlight, claiming the objects move up and down for yes and side to side for no. A trucker recounts hauling a mysterious drum from the Navy Research Lab to Miami, told only it contained diesel fuel. A father in Alabama describes stumbling onto an underground government facility when his children crawled through a deactivated missile silo ventilation fan.
Art reads a report about a Russian scientist claiming to have found debris from an extraterrestrial vehicle at the Tunguska blast site, including two stone cubes of non-natural origin. He highlights a warning about La Palma in the Canary Islands, where a volcanic flank collapse could send 300-foot mega-tsunami waves into the U.S. East Coast.
Key Moments
Why Art always leaves a line open for time travelers: Art explains his standing invitation to time travelers and his rationale: if humanity does not destroy itself, time travel is almost an inevitability, so the travelers should already be among us.
Mandela memory and Kaku's bubble theory of time disruption: Art uses a caller's lost-time experience to riff on collective false memories of Nelson Mandela's death and on Michio Kaku's idea that a time disruption splits us into a new bubble while leaving traces of the old timeline in memory.
Roswell-area kids detained inside an underground complex: A caller from Roswell, New Mexico says her friend's children crawled past a stopped ventilation fan into a missile-silo corridor near Laluz Canyon and were returned hours later by men in black who threatened indefinite detention.
Caller claims he tinkered his way from the mid-1970s: On the time-traveler-only line, a caller says he came from the mid-1970s by manipulating electromagnetic fields and radio frequencies, was found by an organization that controls time travel, and was given strict ground rules.
He bet the sports page and got grounded: The traveler says he jumped to 1993, briefly went to the future and saw a sports section, but his handlers blocked him from going back to bet, kept him out of Vegas, and harnessed him with a job. He'd still like to jump past 2025.