The Spectral Voyager Episode 3: Mike “Mad Man” Marcum (Sample)
Time Travel. We’ve all fantasized about what could be possible if we possessed the ability to travel backwards or forwards through time; perhaps to see your favorite band in some small smokey venue before they were famous, or to prevent a horrible tragedy from taking place. But what if you stumbled upon time travel completely by accident? Where would you go? What would you do? This week, Jake, Brad, and Julian dive into the wondrous case of Mike “Mad Man” Marcum, a Coast to Coast AM caller who claimed to have built a Time Machine on his back porch in 1995. We’ll follow Mike from his humble beginnings working in a cardboard box factory all the way through his rise to fame as one of Art Bell’s most memorable callers. And of course, try to answer the most pertinent question of all: Did the madman actually do it?
To listen to the full episode, and gain access to our other mini-series such as Manclan and Trickle Down, you can subscribe for just five bucks a month at: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
The Spectral Voyager theme composed by Nick Sena.
Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky.
Editing by Corey Klotz.
QAA’s website: http://qanonanonymous.com
Behind the cracking wallpaper of our reality, there exists another world that science has yet to explain.
In here dwell monsters and madness, and potentially, the answers to our most important questions.
In this world, gravity intensifies, time slows down, and your heart rate quickens.
I'm Jake Rakitansky.
And I'm Brad Abrahams.
and you're listening to The Spectral Voyager.
For today's episode, we're going to be talking about time travel.
Now, for those who know me, you know this is one of my most cherished topics.
It appears in some of my favorite movies from growing up, obviously the Back to the Future, future series, but also stranger films like Time Crimes and
television shows like Dark.
You know, I've always just been fascinated, not necessarily with the concept of time travel,
but actually the method in which somebody achieves it. I love seeing artists' representations of
the machine, what it looks like, what it does, how does it work.
And so today we're going to be talking about the very strange case of Mike Madman Markham.
Now this is a story you might have heard before.
It went pretty viral on social media a couple months ago, I believe on TikTok, and people were talking about it.
But what I've prepared for you today is a very comprehensive look.
At Mad Mike's journey, you know, from beginning to end.
But before we get started, Julian, welcome to your first appearance on The Spectral Voyager.
Thank you, Jake.
I've actually appeared on a future episode, and so this is my second or I think even third.
I can't remember very well because obviously the timelines are crossing in my head, but I'm excited to be here.
Awesome.
And you're a time travel enthusiast, right?
Yeah, I've been trying to get the technology to work at home.
I want to travel forward to my deathbed.
Fair enough.
And Brad, what about you?
I mean, in all of your sort of esoteric explorations, have you ever really kind of hit on something time travel related that got, like, you know, stuck in your craw and, you know, lingered in your brain for longer than a minute or so?
Why, yes.
There's actually two cases that I think are irrefutable that I think are going to act as a good primer before we get into this episode.
Sure, yeah, go for it.
And it's about these two pieces of technology that I've been researching.
Cool.
Instead of sending people themselves into different space-times, they instead transmit imagery from the past into the now.
Ooh.
Yeah.
Yes, color me intrigued!
So, Father Pellegrino Ernetti was a respected Roman Catholic priest of the Benedictine Order.
He was a famed exorcist, but his passion was archaic music.
While experimenting on techniques of filtering out harmonics from Gregorian chants, he and Father Augusto Gemelli said they heard Gemelli's dead father speaking back on the recorder afterwards.
Intrigued, Ernetti wondered if all the sights and sounds humans made throughout history stuck around somehow.
Sometime in the 50s, he secretly assembled a crack team of scientists including...
Enrico Fermi and Werner Von Braun to figure it out.
Oh boy.
The result was what they called a chronovisor.
Oh, great, great band name.
Oh my God.
Hey, if you're looking for a name, I'll bet somebody's already got it probably, but if they don't, you better take that name and you better make something synthy and dope.
And you better be a Nazi.
The chronovisor was a sort of television that could tune into any event from any time.
Ernetti insisted that it worked, saying, But because he never showed the device to anyone, skepticism grew.
He was urged to produce some proof, and that he did.
One of the two pieces he provided was an actual photo of Jesus dying on the cross.
Astounding.
And there's the photo there, for both of you to see.
That is irrefutable.
I mean, it almost sort of looks like a wooden mask with a painted face on it.
Well, yes, so it was soon exposed as just a closely cropped photo of a wooden carving of Jesus that was flipped from left to right.
So after this debacle, the church told him to just shut up about it, and it seemed to fade into history.
But according to Ernetti, the real reason was that he and his team voluntarily dismantled it because it would be too much power in the wrong hands.
Like, say, a Hitler or, you know, some kind of fascist leader to have this power.
Sure.
But according to an anonymous source claiming to have been a relative of Ernetti, Ernetti did confess on his deathbed that the artifacts were fake, but insisted that the chronovisor did indeed work.
Wow, that's good stuff.
So that makes sense.
I mean, it worked, but, you know, maybe the proof didn't really look like great proof and they were concerned of being, you know, called out as fraud.
So they tried to create a more believable piece of fake evidence, which unfortunately seems like that also didn't work out for them.
Yeah, when something works, you want to create a fake piece of evidence and then continue to claim it still does work.
Moving over to the epicenter of paranormal technology, we meet Director of the Geophysical Laboratory of Voronezh, Russia, Genrikh Mikhailovich Silanov.
Similar to Ernetti, Silenov believed that people, places, and events from the past are forever preserved in a sort of field memory.
And considering that everything we see with the human eye is technically from the past, because of the time it takes for light to travel, would the concept of seeing scenes from the past really be all that impossible?
We all know that the stars we see in the sky above, for example, are from a long time ago.
He stumbled upon this idea while trying to improve camera equipment for filming invisible UFOs.
He invented what he called a retro camera to photograph these memories of the field.
But of course, and for obvious reasons, he kept the technology a secret.
However, he did reveal some of the underlying concepts to a reporter.
Photographic film is sharper than the human eye in the ultraviolet and infrared spectral ranges.
A lot of information inaccessible to us can be found in a narrow band of the ultraviolet region
of the spectrum near the lower limit of the visible range.
The most important parts of a retro camera are a special lens and a plate or film where
there is practically no gelatin layer that delays the passage of ultraviolet waves.
The photos from the camera are very murky and open to interpretation.
The most famous of which is below, which is claimed to be that of a Czech soldier from the Great Patriotic War, 50 years in the past from when the photo was taken.
Yeah.
That looks like, um, looks like an elephant.
Looks like he has two noses.
Yeah, he's like a two-nosed elephant.
It's maybe a bit of a leap that they ascribed that this was somehow a Czech soldier from the Great Patriotic War, but who knows?
I'm not a historian.
Me neither.
You're not an elephant expert either.
And so, um, to sort of end this little section on the retro camera, it should be noted that all of the info that I found about it was on an enthusiast sport fishing website from Russia.
Oh yeah, okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sometimes, you know, big things come in small packages, you know?
Yeah.
To this day, neither of these technologies have been proven false.
Yeah.
I mean, hearing about Italian time travel just makes me think I would probably actually travel back to like 2006, a little bit before the final of the World Cup, and give the entire Italian soccer team COVID.
Well, that is if the virus could survive time travel.
You don't know that.
I don't.
The gravity alone could, you know, just make it disintegrate.
I'd settle for just pushing the Matarazzi who screwed with Zidane on his final game down the stairs.
Well, the following story does contain a time travel device, but it's a little bit different than the two that you've described here, Brad.
This one was built over the course of many years and with the help of many donors and volunteers.
And so, without further ado, let's get into the story of Mike Madman Markham.
The day was January 20th, 1995.
The song Creep by TLC was the number one song in the United States.
And The Hot Zone by Richard Preston was the best-selling book.
And in the small town of Stanbury, situated north of Kansas City, Missouri, Sheriff Eugene Lupfer was on his way to check on a routine call.
A resident living on East 3rd Street had called the local police to complain that someone had shot a BB gun round through their sliding glass door.
When the police arrived at the scene to check out the damage, they were able to quickly trace the origin of the BB to a small house directly across the street.
But as soon as they crossed to see if the perpetrator was still hiding out at the residence, they noticed something odd.
On the back porch, one of the officers could just make out what looked like an electrical transformer.
The piece of machinery was clearly industrial grade and looked about 4 feet high.
Something clicked.
The police had been getting a number of complaints over the last couple weeks concerning electrical surges in the area.
In addition to that, there had also been a recent blackout spanning an entire two block radius.
One of the officers on the scene, Tom Hampton, cruised back to police headquarters and began cold calling all of the factories and electrical plants in the surrounding areas.
Was anyone missing a transformer?
Turns out, someone was missing a couple.
St.
Joseph Light and Power confirmed to Hampton that six Transformers had been stolen recently from their King City location earlier in the month.
This was enough evidence to procure a search warrant, and that evening at approximately 11pm, eight police officers approached the residence.
What they found inside shocked them.
No pun intended.
Wow.
You have been listening to a sample from The Spectral Voyager, a new miniseries from the folks at QAA, where we explore true tales from the edge of reality.
To listen to the full episode and gain access to our other miniseries, such as Man Clan and Trickle Down, you can subscribe for just five bucks a month at patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous.
