September 4, 2015: Time Traveler - Michael "Mad Man" Marcum
Markham describes building a teleportation apparatus in an Overland Park warehouse: concentric cylinders surrounded by electromagnets producing three million volts across 24 phases, standing 17 feet wide and elevated 35 feet to prevent arcing. After over 200 tests displacing objects and animals up to 150 yards along an east-west axis attributed to Earth's magnetic field, Markham rode a cherry picker to the top and jumped. He woke in a field near Fairfield, Ohio, 800 miles east, with total amnesia. At a Cincinnati homeless shelter, a newspaper revealed he had skipped two years. His fingernails were unchanged, with no facial hair growth or burns. When he returned to the warehouse, a new tenant occupied the space. The machine, footage, and journal were gone. A caller who heard the original broadcasts confirms the story has remained consistent across 20 years.
Art Bell urges Markham not to fry himself but not to give up, because the world needs people willing to push boundaries.
Key Moments
The screw that vanished: Marcum describes his accidental discovery: a small shimmering spherical region appeared above his laser-ignited Jacob's Ladder, and a tossed screw disappeared mid-air for half a second before reappearing where it would have landed.
Stealing utility pole transformers: Marcum recounts driving to a King City, Missouri substation with two friends and hauling away pole transformers (220-350 lbs each) from outside the fence so he could push his experiment to higher voltages.
Browning out the town: Wired backwards, the stolen pole transformer drew so much current it browned out a chunk of Stanberry, Missouri, dropping 120-volt outlets to 80-90 volts and prompting the utility supervisor to canvass town hunting the cause.
Animals disappearing 50-150 yards away: Inside a 17-foot-wide plasma 'tornado' driven by 24-phase, 3-million-volt cascaded transformers, Marcum claims hamsters and guinea pigs vanished for one to two minutes and reappeared 50 to 150 yards east or west - never north or south.
Jumping in - 800 miles and two years: Marcum describes leaping from a cherry-picker bucket into the activated device cranked to maximum: 'it feels like I got hit with a flashbang, and I wake up, and I'm 800 miles east of there, and two years later.'