This Paranormal Life - #313 Madman Mike's Time Machine

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

What would you do if you accidentally invented a time machine? Go back in time to avert both world wars? Stop James Corden from entering a career in television? Well one man, Mike Marcum, was faced with that predicament as a young engineering student in the 1990s. Several guinea pigs later, not to mention millions of dollars of technological equipment and late night appearances on Coast to Coast AM - Mike 'successfully' travelled time, changing history forever. But is there any truth to the story? It's time for Kit and Rory to find out!Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTubeJoin our Secret Society Facebook CommunitySupport us on Patreon.com/ThisParanormalLife to get access to weekly bonus episodes!Buy Official TPL Merch! - thisparanormallife.com/storeIntro music by www.purple-planet.comResearch by Amy GrisdaleEdited by Philip Shacklady Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do we live in the Truman Show? If the Earth isn't hollow, how is it floating? Answers to these questions and more on this episode of This Paranormal Life! Hello. Hey! And welcome back to This Paranormal Life, the weekly comedy podcast wherein every Tuesday we get to the bottom of a different paranormal case

and decide by the end of the episode whether it is really paranormal or not. My name is Kit Greer-Molvena, and I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, co-investigator, co-conspirator, Mr. Rory Powers. How are you doing today, Rory? I'm doing fantastic, Kit. I'm so excited today to be on this podcast and ready to dive into a new paranormal tale. Was it a late one last night? Sure. Did I have a bagel at 3 a.m. from the corner store?

Sure. Did I have another bagel for breakfast that was left over from the corner store? Sure. Did I realize that you were actually bringing bagels to the office this morning for breakfast for everyone? No. Have I now had six plus bagels? I thought you were talking about the breakfast bagel that i brought you

oh my god i'm 98 bagel at this point i'm borderline welcome to the bagel cast today we're gonna be talking bagels everything to do with bagels best ingredients poppy seed or plain i mean there's a great intro question so far what happens to the middle of the bagel where does that go? Do they just chuck it? I think they are actually, the dough is crafted into a ring. They don't like cut them out like a cookie cutter. There's a hole in the middle of it.

Yeah, right. It's just, right. But if you imagine you get the dough. Yeah. This is bad podcasting, but we do need to just clear the air here. There's dough and you get the dough and you kind of roll it into like a kind of a short kind of cylinder. Speed this up.

Just turn it, connecting the ends like a snake eating its own tail. Got it. Creating a ring. Punch a hole right in the middle. No. Okay. How could you have eaten so many? You've eaten so many bagels and yet you don't understand the first thing about them.

I mean, the thing is you said you had a late night bagel. Not necessarily like the worst food choice. Let's face it, in Britain, we're pretty expert here at terrible late night food choices after a few scoops. I guess I just have to ask what was inside it, because if we're going smoked salmon or a cream cheese or an avocado, we're all set. But look, I know we don't like to chit chat too much at the start of the podcast we do like to get into the paranormal that being said this is an important psa to people who reside here in the uk beware the salt beef bagel beware it because listen up americans if you have mustard on your your bagel over here in the, it is not what you think it is.

It is poison. It is mustard gas. You drank too much. There's no way the bagel is responsible for whatever you're about to say. Have you had mustard on a bagel before? I guess. It's like someone shooting wasabi down your throat. It's like drinking gasoline.

It is so... The first time I ever had it i took one bite the mustard spewed out the sides and all of a sudden i am like it felt like i'd been tear gassed like nose running eyes puffy it was so overwhelming mentally in dunkirk in the trenches all all noisy on the western front but let me put it that way are you sure that this isn't just down to kind of notoriously bland white people taste buds this isn't just a spice intolerance of some sure because not very good i don't know i'm not very good at spicy foods sure until i was 14 i had to use children's toothpaste that tasted like strawberries because i couldn't handle spearmint yeah one day rory got curious and he took a swig of his mom's Listerine mouthwash and he was

in A&E for seven to ten days. It took me three weeks just to be brave enough to have mayonnaise. Until then I was dipping my chips in water and putting them in my mouth. Yeah, you were like i understand listen i intellectually understand that it is eggs whipped with milk but i i can't take i can't take any precautions i can't take too many precautions oh spicy spicy rory you are right i mean here on this part of my life we do like to give advice psa survival tips to our listeners. So I think this class is as that. And as long as we keep giving PSA, health PSAs, we get given money from the government. Yeah, those grants.

But we are here ultimately to talk about the paranormal, which the government doesn't want us to do. But we have a brand new paranormal case for you to get stuck into. Bit of a different one today, I will say. Yeah, we've been taking a lot of money for the government recently. Just kind of ticking all the boxes where we classify ourselves as a health podcast. Yeah. Where we give kind of tips on how people can stay healthy. And the government's like, okay, this sounds like a great idea. Here's, you know, 5,000 pounds.

And we say, oh, thank you so much. Welcome to the podcast. Don't eat glass. Right. Today we're talking about the UFOfo that crashed in 1984 they're like that doesn't i mean that is a health tip technically but i feel like this is more about the paranormal talk for free i'm gonna need another 5k if we're gonna continue this conversation or i'm gonna start telling people to eat glass it's really more of a blackmail if you stop paying

me a lot more listeners are going to start eating glass because guess what this episode is brought to you by broken glass the case we are about to get into you could say it is a bit of a uh warning fable a tale of a man flying too close to the sun and getting burned so what i'm saying is the government can keep sending us money for the health advice. Okay. We're going to get right into this story after a few words from today's sponsors and it should be said, new episodes of This Paranormal Life on Patreon are ad free. Check it

out. Alright, let's get into today's story. Thank you firstly to Patrick Keeling for suggesting this case. Thanks Patrick. Today we're in a little town called Stanbury, Missouri, and we're going back in time to January 1995. Michael Markham was an electrical engineering student

two years into his education. Here he is. All right, regular looking dude, very long hair. I don't know how regular he is. He's f***ing sick looking. He's got a kind of a Guy Fawkes facial hair going on. He looks like the rhythm guitarist in Megadeth. I don't know who that guy is or what he looks like, but I'm imagining this.

So who is this individual? This is the fastest I've ever been shown a picture on this podcast before. The protagonist of our case. He has extremely long red red hair beard and mustache super skinny uh arms folded in a cool kind of metal band way um and he's wearing an extremely 90s outfit of the digital casio wristwatch very cool but mike wasn't your typical college student he wasn't out all night playing beer pong and hacky sack at the frat house. He spent most of his evenings at home on his front porch, messing around with electronics, circuit boards,

transistors, all kinds of components on his homemade workbench. Rory, is this something you could relate to? You know, what did your university experience look like? Well, I can relate to us on some degree because, you degree because I'm the oldest of two sons in my family. And for some reason, at some point, I became the son that everyone decided loved the build your own radio kits and build your ship in a bottle. I got this shit too.

And it's like, all right, Rory, Merry Christmas. Here's how you build your own microscope. And it's like, why the fuck? I've never once expressed any interest in this at all.

I'm dumb. I understand you're trying to up my IQ points, but I don't think a build your own microscope is the way to do that. And then they'd be like, quiet down, quiet down.

Your little brother's opening his toy now. Wow, a remote control rocket ship. It's like, yeah, we just thought it would be a blast so go ahead go go do it and he would get all this cool shit and i'm stuck with all this nerd stuff that i had zero interest in i mean i didn't have the brain to put it together i mean do you think it was that they thought you were dumber than him and they needed to make you smart or was it the other way around he was a lost cause and you were the one they needed to you know get through harvard and uh kind of make you smart? Or was it the other way around? He was a lost cause and you were the one they needed to, you know, get through Harvard

and kind of make money for the rest of the family. Now that I think about it, I think they were just giving me math lessons for Christmas because I needed to catch up. Now, like I said, Michael was at home on the porch, listening to Pearl Jam and tinkering with electronics. This evening, he had a hold of a device called a Jacob's Ladder. It had two long wires running straight up, parallel to one another, made from an old clothes hanger.

When he powered it up, it worked just like he expected. The electrical current jumped from node to node, gradually climbing to the top. See, Mike was a scientist. He wasn't interested in what he already understood. He was trying to make something new. He started tinkering with an old CD player, removing the laser and attaching it to his Jacob's ladder. He fired it up again, watching the spark pop back and forth. Something was different.

He looked at the space between the wires and saw something strange. It looked like a patch of heat, but it was perfectly spherical. That's weird. It almost looks like a portal. His curiosity had been piqued, so he fumbled around on the table for something to throw at it. Naturally, as you do. His fingers found a little pile of screws, so he tossed one up towards the weird patch in the air before him. Well, that was pointless. He thought, why did I pick something so small? He didn't see where it landed. He was about to put this thing down and go search for the screw

when he suddenly heard it land on the other side of the table. Wait, what? How did that stay in the air so long? It was almost as if this little portal had tampered with the very fabric of time. He grabbed another screw and did it again. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five. Well, I'll be. Something very odd was happening, Rory. The addition of the laser had somehow given this Jacob's ladder the power to bend space and time.

He was holding in his hands a time machine. Let's slow down a little bit because this is just a weird thing making a screw do something a little strange. So we had a nice thing there going. We were hearing some pretty cool music that was actually building the tension up and I just don't want to slow it down too much.

Yeah, let's slow that music down. Let's cut that music out, actually. Come on, this is my episode. Can we get... F*** this. Get the music back up. No, turn the music down. You haven't earned the music.

You haven't earned the music yet. Like, if I put a piece of bread in a toaster and I'm like, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, and it pops out and the bread isn't as toasted as I thought it was going to be

at this point in time, I don't go, well, my God, it seems the device has created some sort of time machine. Just something weird happens. Maybe the settings are off. Maybe something's different. I think this is more like putting the bread in the toaster saying, one Mississippi, and then it appearing 30 minutes later in your underwear.

That's what this is brother that's the equivalent of putting the bread into the toaster counting to 30 and then a dinosaur pops out because you went back in time that's the level i would need to be certain at this point in our story that we have created some sort of paranormal machine right now it's odd sure, but I I'm still coming at this from the point of the skeptic Let's get the music back up. All right I've gotta film this Mike put the device down and ran inside to grab this video camera. Oh Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Got it. Oh need batteries batteries batteries

This feels like unnecessary dialogue. can you stop stopping the music dude it's my episode we're trying to have you have you martin scorsese once said that the key to i understand we're not making a film here i understand that we're this is the medium of but this is my this is this is my you're on my movie set this is the this is this is i just think the pacing of this is a little weird like he just created professional he just created a machine that can apparently change time and it's like all right so what happened next in the story and he's like uh uh lunchtime lunchtime uh pizza pizza um uh pepperoni cheese ham um call call now uh deliver for home it's like we don't need to know this we don't know need to know what he ate for lunch that the the camera needed batteries or he couldn't

find it talk about the time machine again let's go back to the time machine i think don't run the music spielberg do you think anyone said to steven spielberg uh luke skywalker actually we don't even need to see him walking around let's just cut straight to the lightsaber bit i think a lot of people said that about some of the later ones to be fair this is art this is movie making this is storytelling i don't know if you don't understand that that's really something that it's a podcast i guess that's gonna hold you back for winning an academy award but it's not gonna hold it's sure as not going to hold me back i'm sure this podcast has both of our names on it so i guess if if i won the award for best international feature i guess you would technically have to come on stage two

it would probably be hard for me to cut you out of if you win it you can you can go up yourself it's fine thank you yeah thank you because i was getting a bit worried now that i was saying it out loud he was about to film the Jacob's Ladder in action, but before he could hit record, the contraption on the table suddenly caught fire. Mike had been seconds from capturing some truly groundbreaking science on video, but that wasn't going to stop him.

This setback was only an opportunity to rebuild and he would do it bigger and better than the first time. Gotta be honest, this was a little more than I was getting up to at university. I did an arts degree so a day in the life was normally getting up, drinking so much coffee I had a panic attack, then playing Mario Kart for three to four hours, racking up a few gold trophies and then going to my probably one lecture of the day

which was about vibes. Yeah, it was a different kind of experiment for sure. Mostly on the human body and how much coffee and beer it could consume in 24 hours. But an experiment nonetheless. Hey there, I'm interested in buying your Transformers. All right. Well, of course, we can help you with that. What do you need? I think I need some jumbo ones. I think I need six of them.

All right. Well, we got the first one. Megan Fox and the other guy from Even Stevens. We got the second one, which I would not recommend. It was not as good. Sorry, I'm confused. Am I through to the St. Louis Electrical Supplies Company? No. What? This is Stevie's DVDs.

I'm so sorry. I'm looking at the yellow pages right now, though, and did I call 9779? No, this is 9729. This is Stevie's DVDs for all your DVD needs. Okay. I'm so sorry, Stevie. I assume you're Stevie. No.

Oh. I'm Craig. Sorry. I'm all turned around, Craig. Stevie's the guy that owns the Transformer Shop. Okay. Well, that could save me some time. Do you maybe have the number?

Needless to say, I am trying to get through to Stevie's. Is it called Stevie's Transformer Shop? Stevie's Transformer Shop. That is correct. They need to update the yellow pages, I think. I just work here at Stevie's DVDs, but my name is Craig. Thanks for clarifying this incredibly convoluted situation, Craig. Is there any way, is Stevie around?

Of course. Stevie! Stevie! No, he's not, actually. You're going to have to call. He cannot hear me. See, I am sure that I called. Do you know what? Sorry, Craig. I'm going to call back another time. I'm going to go back and call 9779.

All right. I'll talk to you later. Hi there. Stevie's DVDs? There's no f***ing way. Which number did you call? Craig. Oh, right.

Yeah, this is him. Craig, I called 9779. You're clearly not whatever you said we are. 9799. You said 9729 last time. 9799. Do you want a DVD or not, sir? You've called twice now.

Craig, I don't know what to do here. I hung up the phone and I am deadly certain that I dialed 9779, which is in the yellow pages as the St. Louis Electric Supplies Company. 9799? No, 9779. Then call what I'm saying. 9799. Whose number is that?

Stevie's. But not Stevie's DVDs. Stevie's Transformer Electrical Shop. This is Craig. I'm sorry to bother you, Craig. I'm going to have a nap or something. I'm going to hang up and I'm going to call 97... Nine.

Nine. Nine. Nine seven nine nine. Nine seven nine nine. Hello. This is Craig. I work at Stevie's Transformer Shop and Electrical Units. Hi, Craig.

I'm interested in buying some Transformers. Of course. What do you need uh i i need uh sorry i've just been talking to the strangest gentleman uh this is great i need i need some big ones the jumbo ones i need about six all right we can help you with that now just to clarify we were talking about transformers is in the electrical equipment not the popular movie franchise or no 90s cartoon series. Nothing to do with Megafox, Shia LaBeouf. Fantastic, because this is an electrical shop.

We do not store DVDs. You want DVDs? I know exactly who you need. That is Stevie's DVDs for all your DVD needs. I do not. Let's get back on the Transformers. Sorry, all right. I've got their number, actually.

Did you tell him about the DVDs? I did, Craig. I told him to tell him about that. We are very close by. There's two Craigs? We're both called Craig. We both work at Stevie's. Where's Stevie? I think he's in Barbados. Okay, well, as I said, I need six

of these things. How much would that be? $20,000. For six generators? No, that's for one generator. That's the price for one? Craig, I'm gonna have to call you back. What a ripoff. Jeez, how am I gonna do this? He frowned, looking out into the street from his porch, hoping that inspiration might strike. His eyes landed on the power lines crisscrossing above the houses in his neighborhood. That's it, the power plant. They'll have tons of transformers, way more than they need.

I could probably help myself to a few and if i'm sneaky they won't even notice they're gone isn't it saying that not that long ago you had to call somewhere to do anything everything was a phone call i did not do a lot of things because of that reason alone i'm not a phone call yeah i'm not a phone call guy okay you're a you're a classic Gen Z slash young millennial. You do not feel comfortable on the phone. Don't like it. I don't like to text either.

I don't like to talk to people. I've just realized. Oh, yeah. I actually couldn't be less on the same page, Rory. I think you might have seen my new burner phone. No, I haven't. I think it's a kind of- A drug dealer?

Necessary part of the toolkit of a paranormal investigator. Right. It's having a kind of number that no one can trace. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got to be able to disappear and just have a string of numbers that people can call to get in contact with you. That's all you need. So late that night, Mike snuck his truck down to St. Joseph Light and Power in King City, Missouri,

dressed all in black and armed with a set of bolt cutters. He parked up and watched the scene for a little while. He didn't see any security guards patrolling the perimeter, or even a single camera pointed at the chain link fence. So he took his chance. He bent back the fence and slipped behind it, hot footing it towards the building, creeping along the wall. Jackpot! He'd been right. There were a whole bunch of huge Transformers right there by the dumpster. All he had to do now was not get caught. He hurried with them as quickly as he could, sticking them on the bed of his pickup. He bent back the fence to cover his tracks, leapt into his truck, and started it up. He was about

to peel away at top speed, but at that exact moment, a security guard rounded the corner. Hey! Hey, you! Mike's heart started pounding as the security guard lit him up in his rearview mirror. You dropped this, son. Looks like a crowbar. Uh, hello. I don't know if that's mine. I think it is. I'm just waiting on a mate. I don't know if that... That must have been... That must have been...

That must have been there already, I think. You okay, son? You need a beer or coffee or something? Do you need a drink of water, sir? Actually, here you go. It's from my canteen. Thank you. Sorry, I'm just waiting on a mate.

Can I guide you back to the road or something? I don't know why you're here. Are you lost? There was a Yu-Gi-Oh swap meet nearby. A kind of 2 a.m. Yu-Gi-Oh swap meet. So I'm just kind of... I don't know if you know, if you're familiar with the trading cards or the series, but... Yu-Gi-Oh?

Yeah, it's kind of like a little man with the kind of ancient Egyptian powers. I'm getting off topic. But needless to say, I was just up to was meeting some friends i don't think that's my crowbar though oh if you say so i could take it with me uh yeah i guess i guess i'll be taking off now thank you uh thanks for the water sir hold on there i mean it looks like there's some electrical equipment in the back of your pickup truck uh this thing's this thing's turbocharged it's uh this thing's like a it's like an electric car we got a bunch of wires and shit back there ah one of those teslas i've heard about yeah something like that something like that so uh

i'll be taking my crowbar and going i think so it is yours you didn't see me bye we drove off heart pounding and heading home all right rory mike has now got his hands on in theory the missing pieces of the puzzle of building a time machine huge leap huge leap when we're talking about what's happened so far that's what you think what we've done when you're about to see what happens in part two he made a screw disappear for a second allegedly stole some government property and now we're saying in just a moment he will have completed a functioning time machine that's insane gentlemen we're gonna show rory a thing or two right after the break from a couple words from today's sponsors. So Mike managed to get back and load the transformers into his garage, quickly setting about doing a kind of test to make sure he could make these things work. All right, all I gotta do

now is plug in the power and yes! No! The room was pitch black. He swung open the garage door and could see that the entire city was blacked out. Except there was one light coming over the horizon. Mr. Markham, I'm Sheriff Lutfer. I have a warrant for your arrest for trespassing and theft. You have the right to remain silent. Come this way, please. In court, the judge asked him. Jesus, that leapt forward. Why do we spend so much time on these tiny little details? He opened the gate. He bent the gate backwards.

The gate swung over a puddle just by two inches. And then of a sudden an mib agent shows up to his door and the next thing you know it's like so anyway they slapped him to the electric chair and that was it we leapt so far ahead this is called hollywood pacing i wouldn't really expect you to know anything about it but uh so he was arrested imprisoned and now he's on why do you think we see indiana jones you know all the little details of him teaching his class and then, you know, someone leaving an apple on his table and him talking about all these boring details of shit. And then we gloss right over the fact that he flies 10,000 miles to the middle of the Amazonian jungle. That's a huge part of the story is, yeah, the actual exploration bit. If anything, the shit in the classroom is really small and minimal.

I have just one question, Mr. Markham. Why did you do this? I did it to, uh, make money. Were you gonna sell this machine? No, your honor. I was gonna travel back in time and win the lottery. Uh, all right. You're sentenced to five months of county. Take him away. Maybe get him a shrink. Mike served his time.

But if the judge thought that he learned anything from the errors of his ways, he was dead wrong. Once he was released, Mike was determined to finish this time machine. And in order to do that, he needed money. This was before GoFundMe or Patreon. So he had no choice but to call up radio stations and put out an appeal to their listeners. He chose Art Bell's Paranormal Show, which was broadcast across the nation. Now I have on the line an unbelievable young man His name is Michael Markham But I think we're gonna call you Madman

And when you hear his story You'll hear why Mike was able to catch Art and the audience up to speed And then made an appeal for cold hard cash He was so desperate That he gave out his real home phone number Hoping that anybody with an interest In time travel

Would call him up Mike hasn't done a single thing paranormal by the way yet mike has just stolen shit from the government gone to jail and now he's he's going on radio shows to try and get people to give him money he made a screw disappear for a few seconds and that's actually definitively paranormal i'll have you find yeah there's there's a few more screws loose, I think, in this situation than just the ones that got lost in the time machine. Let me ask you, Mike, if you managed to create a path to another time, what are you taking with you? Just my cell phone, nothing else. I like to travel light. He gave out his home address too, promising he was on the cusp of being up and running he just needed a way to generate a high enough voltage to move back and

forwards in time the phone rang off the hook for three straight days after which he had more than enough money spare parts and advice from other engineers and enthusiasts from around the world to build his machine. That is insane that that actually worked. That is like me going on radio and saying, my goal is to build a small rocket to send a hamster to the moon. I need three million dollars. You actually work at NASA and if you want to craft small enough

to send a hamster, then you're going to need to completely reevaluate these blueprints. Why are people indulging in this? This is insane. He's a criminal. Is it a crime to prove the paranormal real? Is it a crime to go where no man has gone before?

Was it a crime for Neil Armstrong to set has gone before is it was it a crime for neil armstrong to set foot in the moon no moon people would probably say yes but humans we know that that was the right thing to do you can't just say you're trying to prove the paranormal's real by stealing shit well that doesn't that doesn't work is it is it a crime for a man to steal a loaf of bread to feed his family no is it a crime for mike to steal transformers from a government facility to build a time machine i think not what if that man were to go forward in time to a point where the bread didn't exist yet and take it back to the past to feed his family is that some sort of future crime this is mike trying to represent himself in court his his court assigned lawyer desperately trying to get him to sit down yeah i'm gonna go

to the future and kill your descendants judge i'm gonna do it i'm gonna get i'm gonna bring a katana i'm gonna chop off their heads judge i'm gonna go back in time bang your mom so i'm your dad and i say you're grounded go to your room actually no he's just talking to himself in his cell yeah should have said that god damn it well rory like any good kickstarter founder he got the cash he got the support now he needed to put rubber on the road and come up with some plans which is exactly what he did check this shit out okay um when kid said rubber hitting the road i was expecting to see a picture of the device built and completed maybe in a garage emitting some sort of electricity like we're only in the days following his appearance on Art Bell, so he obviously has to show everyone what the plan is.

So it's a drawing. It's a blueprint. To get people invested in a Kickstarter, this should be on the Kickstarter. This should be kind of a page, an illustration of what to do. It's kind of exceptional circumstances if you've already proven an existence of time travel. This is a blueprint.

And I'm using that. I'm being very generous when i say that because it's a doodle it's not it's not blue but it's a doodle it's a print of something uh a few blocks a few wires some arrows some objects labeled like horseshoe magnet spark gap is magnetized a piece just says wood yeah well that's wood wood is inert it's a valuable property some other notes here free energy and no moving parts outside copper plates that sounds amazing and underneath it all in a writing that looks like it was possibly done by an eight-year-old child it says copyright mike yeah well you got to protect your ideas when you got something this

valuable when you're sitting on the next billion dollar unicorn, it's pretty cool, right? I love that he had to write not to scale at the top of it. It fits on an A4 page, so I assume it's not fit to scale if that is, if it's a time machine. You've got to be honest.

It's more than you were expecting. It's less. It's much less. I think that was the first thing I said. It's more than you were expecting. It's less. It's much less. I think that was the first thing I said. It's more than I was expecting. You got to admit, it's a double yes. No, I don't. It's a no. I was expecting Mike to drop off the face of the earth with a bag of cash and never be seen again.

Of course. So the fact that he still exists, it's pretty cool. never be seen again of course so the fact that he still exists it's pretty cool yeah you thought you thought mike was gonna take everyone's cash and then all of a sudden the history books were gonna change and there was a medieval future knight who just had a bunch of cash who's now in all of the ancient history books so this machine was supposed to be more than three times more powerful than what he did before and it used a similar technology to allegedly some kind of rotating magnetic field similar to what was used in the philadelphia experiment same principles applying here a case which sure we didn't necessarily say

was true but great case also another time traveling. One that really should not be replicated. No. That one went horrifically bad for everyone involved. So to build a machine kind of based off of its success is going to be problematic. And Art Bell had Mike back on the show, I think even a couple of times, updating everyone on how it was going. He said it was more sophisticated than he had even imagined. The most exciting part is that I'm right on the precipice of completing the machine. 30 days, tops.

And this time, he wouldn't be dicking about throwing little screws in there. He was going to test it on himself. Except Art and his listeners were keen for an update after that. But nothing came. It was as if Mike himself had disappeared. Art Bell's community of listeners

to the paranormal were desperate, desperate to find out what had gone on. Why were there no more updates? What had happened? About a year later, a listener called in to Art Bell's show to share a strange story that he'd found. So I found this police report about a body they found on a beach in California in 1930. A red-haired guy. And it was long, too. He wasn't wearing clothing that the police recognized. And the circumstances of his death appeared to be suspicious. This body had been found crushed to death in a strange metal tube.

The cops didn't have a clue what it was. He was so badly beaten up he was unrecognizable. The only other clue at the scene was a small silver device. To the modern listener, the description sounds quite similar to a mobile phone. The very thing Mike said he would time travel with. Could it be possible that he went back to 1930, but was killed by his own machine? What was the metal tube?

What could explain this mysterious device he was found with that might have not even existed back then? That's pretty wild. So you're saying that he managed to complete the machine, went back in time, the machine killed him somehow but did send him back. Right. It sent him back but just not in one piece, let's say. That's a pretty big con, I would say, to the machine. Right, the time machine killing you instantly.

Yeah, I mean it would be great for like the mob. It's like, not only will it kill the dude you put in it but it sends him back in time you're saying it gets rid of the body what we will we'll pay anything we'll pay anything for this yeah we'll take five well we don't even know where it goes it just pops into existence somewhere that could be like oh you don't know where it goes oh that's ideal yeah it's like a family could just be eating dinner one sunday night and a corpse drops out of the sky from the future hits the table um yeah this is this is a difficult it's a difficult machine to test isn't it because if if you just think it'll send you back in time to a random point you can throw a chicken in there or some kind of animal but no one's writing a news report about a dead chicken that washes up on a beach. That's just a dead bird. So what happens?

You got to sense something in there that if something goes wrong, some people are going to write about it. It's very true. I mean, this isn't a new idea, the idea of time travel being too dangerous to perform. I mean, this is the big problem with time travel is, you know, even modern physicists, they say that, okay, technically, maybe if two black holes collided and created a wormhole, it might actually connect two different parts

of the universe with each other, which would, I suppose, technically, allow you to travel through space-time. But problem is, nothing would ever survive the journey. Right, exactly. It would be completely destroyed in the process. And we're talking about incredibly impenetrable space technology, not some dude called Mike who weighs 60 kgs,

had a hot pocket for dinner, and then jumped into a time machine. Yeah, his studded belt got caught in one of the wires, ripped it to shreds, and sent him to 1930s San Diego. He actually twisted his ankle before hopping in, banged his... He was dead before he went into the machine. He hit his head on the railing, and his limp corpse went back 40 years and washed up on a beach right i see what you're saying like even if you were a trained nasa astronaut it's going to be tough to time travel but if you're if you're if you're a college freshman called mike it's going to be even tougher for you probably even harder yeah rumors circulated about what the hell happened to mike

legends ranged from that he had died and washed up on that beach or that he actually did live. He had blasted into the future and he was living in Hawaii somewhere. Others saying he was homeless, living on a beach. Just in the current day?

I think so. Okay. But Rory, 18 years later, he broke the silence. Whoa! He came out to dispel the rumors about what had happened to him. The idea that he had gone back in time and washed up dead. I mean, I don't know, maybe he had and that was a doppelganger or some kind of clone. But he was alive as of 2015 when he called back in to art bell's radio station

and it's quite cool to listen to i was listening to some of it again even just today and like you could you could tell art is so stoked right he's like he's just like mike dude where have you been that's a long been 18 years. Yeah, that's crazy. Where do I begin? Like, let's remind everyone what happened. Yeah. And like, tell us like what's gone on.

Like I say, he broke the silence on exactly what happened after he received the money. After everyone had wondered what happened to him. He had been able to build the machine. As part of the gear that he was loaned by other people, he was given a bunch of cash just to help build it and given a bunch of stuff. He claims that he probably received about $20,000 in cash donations to help build the thing. But he said, if I actually counted up

all the stuff people donated, it would have run into a few million dollars. Jesus. He said, I would have never been able few million dollars jesus he said i was i would have never been able to actually do it on my own one fun thing is uh rory mentioned earlier that uh you might actually test the thing using hamsters he got some guinea pigs okay is that a metaphor or uh no these were literal guinea pigs he said he% sure it would work, which I guess is just short of the 100% he would need to jump in himself first. He claimed that when the machine was operational and

the portal opened up, he tossed his first guinea pig through it saying, I didn't want to use any animal larger than a guinea pig. I didn't want PETA knocking on my door. So you know you're doing a bad thing. He says the only, he said the only test that failed was a grapefruit went missing and they never found it. Oh my God. He was at pains to say that, quote, the animals always survived. Although granted, I had no idea what the long-term effects were because they couldn't tell me how much pain they felt. Part of a snag to do with building this thing was,

for reasons I can't really determine uh for how this machine was built it had to be kind of suspended uh quite high in the air uh the actual portal itself so he said he was arguably whenever it came to him jumping through it was more worried about uh just missing the portal and falling 60 feet to break his legs. 60 feet? Than actually getting lost in time. I assume this thing was in his basement. How has he managed to get to a point where it's 60 feet in the air? As part of all the stuff he was gifted,

he was actually loaned the use of a warehouse to build it in. Oh my god. When he came to do the jump inside the machine he didn't know if he'd be quote fried crushed or pulled apart or if like in the case of the philadelphia experiment that if he'd be fused to a physical object but he says quote from my point of view it was like getting hit with a flashbang a loud crack thud and a bright light to where you can't see, hear, or walk well for several minutes, but as far as he could tell, no permanent physical damage. Saying, I'm sure the people who donated the equipment were quite worried because it probably looked like I was

exploded into pieces. When Mike finally regained his senses, he turned up in the middle of a farm near Fairfield, Ohio, cold and hungry. He turned up cold, hungry, weak, smelly, just as he'd entered. He remained unchanged. He said the first thing he started to do once he could was just start walking. He ended up in a downtown cincinnati

homeless shelter because to begin with he couldn't even remember his own name damn he worked out quickly he'd woken up in the year 2000 so only two years later okay he said i was hoping to travel maybe five minutes ahead and up to 75 to 100 yards of distance. But it ended up being two years and 800 plus miles. So the calibration maybe needs tweaking a little bit. Which, Mike, I'm sorry, buddy. I love you. But you had no right to expect 75 yards and five minutes into the future.

Yeah. You designed this thing on a McDonald's napkin and got spare parts out of a junkyard you're lucky you didn't end up in a dinosaur dimension yeah he's like one of the guinea pigs came back with a ray gun so i think the calibration needs to be tweaked a little bit but why he like he should be counting his lucky stars he ended up in ohio right and not even si Siberia or literally anywhere else on Earth. Planet Gorgon, where he's turned into a spaghetti man. It's a miracle that he's still alive. He's like, I was hungry, so I was kind of hoping to teleport into a Five Guys burger and fries.

But unfortunately, I ended up in an Applebee's, which I don't honestly care for that much. Right. It was like, be happy you're there. Look, I mean, that's basically the headline. He says that, which I think is pretty interesting, this idea of what would you literally do if that happened? He had lost some part of his memory, but by the time he had got enough memory back

to remember what had happened with the warehouse, where he had been, he made his way back to the warehouse, discovering, disappointed that it was completely empty. As he put it, his investors and the people who had helped him build the thing assumed him dead instantly, just vaporized. Of course. So they probably just, as he put it, sold the shit on eBay and moved on with their lives. Probably just, as he put it, sold the shit on eBay and moved on with their lives. And as he says, maybe some of the people who followed the story and were more interested in it. He says, I'm sure they'll probably say the men in black came and abducted everyone and everything, taking the parts to Area 51. But crucially, as he's been trying to piece his life together ever since the jump, he said that he is intent on trying to do it again and on that art bell appearance the

most recent one in 2015 he uh he made the appeal and thankfully uh gofundme did exist at this point so he launched a page to try and uh build the next machine uh to further his research and experiments the link is sadly now dead but but allegedly he raised $10 before it ended. Yeah, that's to be expected. I mean, was there ever any proof that he raised what he claimed was millions of dollars the first time? Well, he said he was given stuff,

which, as he said, would have cost millions if he'd had to buy it. That's convenient. So no receipts for that. He's like, I made made 20 on the kickstarter but i was given millions in knowledge and advice and this next bit is what i absolutely love about sometimes on this paranormal life we've taken a while of rory to get around to some cases and sometimes we think we should have covered these sooner but with this case i'm glad we've got to it when we have because as of uh 2023 he's on reddit

wow and he's been jumping on to a couple different threads about the paranormal and specifically about his case and all the people who still know about it and trying to set the record straight namely trying to let everyone know that he didn't die in 1930 washed up on a beach sure um he said that photo uh that i showed you at the beginning isn't me he's like he's like i think that's just another guy called mike markham uh who everyone does everyone decided to start sharing that photo what there's something just extremely funny about just going through all his comments and him just being like i didn't die i'm literally in ohio right now these are stupid rumors right but i will say in a in a in a twist of fate that does feel um suspiciously like mib behavior you might notice mike's account has been suspended uh do do we know why probably

him trying to spill the beans but it's a paranormal shit or trying to solicit funds from strangers online no no i don't think i don't think that's true and i don't think crowd fundings that take money from backers i don't know that's against reddit's terms and conditions uh i just think it's pretty interesting but it's kind of nice to know that even now i mean he was this story isn't that old in the scheme of things. He was about 21 years old when he first attempted all this. So he's now in his 50s, I think. Yeah.

And apparently working hard on his next time machine. So I guess while we have kind of the history and the story and the legend of Madman Mike Markham to digest, maybe we'll have more to look at in future too. Yeah, because while he is getting older, you got a time machine. There's a lot you can do with that. As we discussed, going back in time and banging people's grandmothers.

Yeah. Struggling to think of other things right now, but that was a good one. It seems like the machine that he created can only go forward, which is really the worst kind of time machine. You know, I think I've read scientists talking about this, and look,

I'm a dum-dum. Don't take this seriously. But I feel like I've read a scientist talking about that, that they're like, look, yes, time and space are linked. If we can bend space, we can bend time. We can f*** about the edges here, and we can achieve something that's close to time travel. But I feel like people have

argued that, that you could only go forward. I i can't think why that is but apparently there's some reason right like you can like accelerate and slow down the passage of time in yeah i guess that's it but it's like going back is that's where it's like all right we're kind of entering magic world where it's like these are events that have transpired in the existence of the dot moving in one direction yeah so it's like all right to to return to that time is is something else completely but being able to go faster than than time maybe that is a more scientific theory it sounds like it is on paper yeah like isn't that the plot of an interstellar or something it's like they're traveling so fast through space that time is essentially standing still for them and that's why it's like they're traveling so fast through space that time is essentially standing

still for them and that's why it's f***ed up and sad because their family are just aging and dying back home yeah yeah yeah i think that's the idea you can at best stand still almost which kind of sucks because it means that you could build a time machine test it out go forward 100 years and you're like oh my god it works i made a time machine and they're like dude it's God, it works. I made a time machine. And they're like, dude, it's 2300. Everyone's got a time machine. We all have time machines. Some dude, we don't know. He disappeared.

He cracked it like a hundred years ago. It was like, that was me. I cracked it. They're like, we don't know you. Do you have a job? Do you have a communications chip implanted in your head? Who the are you, bro? You're going to get incinerated by a ray gun.

Like day one. Yeah. Unless you can go back, which we don't know if you can, then the machine is basically a go-forward machine. Yeah, you're right. If we're talking about the benefits of going forward or back, everyone wants to go back because going back means you are smarter, cooler, better than everyone else.

Going forward, it's like being Fry in fucking Futurama. You're a dumbass. You don't know anything that's going on exactly i can go forward in time i drink a liter of jack daniels and hit my head on a coffee table then i'm transported into the future 15 to 16 hours that's time travel yeah you can't remember your name you can't remember where you live you can't find your keys. You pissed yourself. I think these are all symptoms of... I'm covered in a strange sort of urine-scented goo. All symptoms of time travel. Rory, you make an excellent point about our own pretty fantastic abilities to travel through time right here and now without any transformers.

But we do need to decide, like every week, whether the case that we're talking about is paranormal or not. This has been a bit of a wild one into the life and times of madman Mike Markham. Do we think that this kind of time travel is possible? And do we think Mike actually achieved it? Look, we've talked about time travel a lot on this podcast before in many different forms. TikTokers that say they have gone ahead and they are now in a world where humans don't exist because they're so far in the future. We also have time travelers that have gone back into the past. And we have, I think we've talked about it on bonus episodes, discoveries that have been made in ancient civilizations of allegedly technology that exists now. They'll find an ancient Egyptian pharaoh and he has a Walkman.

And it's like, all right, that that's pretty weird how did he have that you know or some ancient king will have a ring on his finger and it looks like a casio wristwatch yeah like down to the point where you can see that like hands on the clock so it's made in japan it's insane uh so there's the the world of time travel is a fun and diverse one. I mean, one of our most famous cases is one of our oldest also, where we investigated the D7D mode time machine. A classic, yeah. You know, and I don't want to draw too many comparisons between that and this case, but have you tried to find the D7D mode time machine online?

You can't. It's gone, really. The website's gone. All the links are gone. I couldn't even find, annoyingly, any of the screenshots or pictures. My cash deposit, gone. That I took. Yeah, I think that thing cost $50,000 to order one. So that might have been Mike, who was involved in the production of that machine um so it's it's a weird and wonderful world and always a joy to talk about on the podcast that being said i wish i had a time machine so i could go back before this story because we want to hear it again for the first

time this was just so good and maybe we could just pitch another case to i could maybe say let's try something else today but what's the problem he made a time machine and sure he might have gone back in time but then he came out and said he didn't he went forward in time yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean the fact that the first thing you showed me was a lie that's a bad way to start the case is like here's a picture of the guy we're talking about it's like okay great this is weird why are you showing it to me liar i am i'm a liar that's not him at all it's like i don't know that i didn't know that you can't trust your instincts with this story you don't know what's real and what's fake i think today's case is a very fun weird and wonderful story uh but unfortunately you know

yeah i think that's uh probably probably fair to say that it might be a no i think mike doesn't leave us i would love to believe this one uh but he doesn't leave us a lot of choice no in the fact that his first time machine went on fire and was destroyed. His second time machine was, Chex Notes, quote, sold on eBay for parts after they thought he died. No pictures, no videos. No, no, no, no. Nothing. A blueprint at best. Copyright Mike.

So it's hard. It's hard for us to on a case that is on a show that is based on handing out yeses to physical evidence, we're stuck with a no. But this has rekindled my love of time travel cases. It's so fun. And I think the reason it's so fun is because it's so dumb, yet it's actually technically maybe possible someday. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we all live in hope, basically. Love when you sprinkle a bit of science into the world of the paranormal because it's great that i'm even looking here as one of the pieces of evidence i had was you know this nexus magazine article shout out nexus magazine and they have like it's like they don't need to do this but there's like three paragraphs where they interview scientists and they're just like electricity has nothing to do with time or space there's no voltage that bends time yeah none of his ideas made any sense they're like yes maybe someday if we travel fast enough we could but they're like but it's like it's like very cute that they have to per scientist

that has to sit there and read madman mike's ideas i love that we we we were not even entertaining it to a level where we had to debunk the blueprints or anything. It's like, we all can, we don't have to talk about it. We all know that's nonsense. We don't need to explain why he doesn't need electrical transformers to build a time machine. It's nonsense. It's just one of those things. It sounds real to dum-dums like us.

But I hope, even though it was a no, that you enjoyed this investigation into madman Mike Markham. So cool that these stories, which just turn up in the 90s or whatever, people still care about these stories to the present day on places like Reddit. It is fascinating. I want to say a quick RIP to those guinea pigs,

because let's be real, they definitely died. 100%. I think if we've learned one thing is that those guinea pigs exploded immediately. And for all the people out there who say PETA are a waste of time, and that they're dumb, and that they don't do anything right, I want to say shout out to PETA. Because it sounds like if PETA didn't exist, Mike was going to throw monkeys in that portal.

So thank God he only threw it sounds like one guinea pig we don't need a madman monkey we do not need it we don't need to send a monkey back to the civil war that would just confuse things i i understand that yes they were around at the time of the civil war but not in the middle of it they weren't in the trenches yeah with bayonets uh if you've got your own time machine blueprints please god send them through rory i i was really thinking you know we simply have to print out those blueprints and get them on the wall of evidence behind you it's just perfect yeah we'll see you print them out and then we'll see if they make it onto the wall

all right i think that's a smart idea rude but okay uh send through your blueprints to this paranormal life podcast at gmail.com guys you know the score um there's a plethora a cornucopia a treasure trove of paranormal bonus episodes available over on patreon.com forward slash this paranormal life you can hear about time travel you can hear about crypt. You can hear about time travel. You can hear about cryptids. You can hear about vampires, ghouls, ghosts, and demons. And sometimes just what we get up to after dark. There are cases in there that are silly and they're fun where we don't

come down on a conclusion. There was one not too long ago where it was so convincing that we did actually give it a double yes on the bonus episode. Which is not something we've maybe ever done. No, it was insane. We need to release that one.

We've also had guests on the bonus episodes. Yeah. One, actually, only one. A southern gentleman called Juke Jackson. Yeah. Who gave us kind of the paranormal history rundown of Savannah, Georgia, the most haunted town in all of America. three rundown of savannah georgia the most haunted town in all of america it's a fan favorite and a kit low light of the show it really is and that was my madman mike and if that isn't going to

get you on board i don't know what will um there is a ton of different rewards available on patreon one of which which you might be quite familiar with if you listen to tpl is that you might get a shout out at the end of an episode uh i say we just get into it let's do it okay so super special thank you to leonie perrette leonie you are truly the only one for me in the bottom of my heart your support means the world to us if you would just take a few steps backwards uh closer towards the time machine um the guinea pigs were fine. The guinea pigs were fine. So I just think, Leone, if you were to... I think stay put.

I don't know where Rory's going with this. I just... If you could just close your eyes and if you could just... Oh, no! She's gone. She's gone. The guinea pigs were not fine. I lied.

So you know you shouldn't have put her into it. Sorry, Leone. Thank you to Landon Hill. Landon, I hope for the love of god you don't live in landon because that would be tough that would really be tough if you're hanging out in the east end and you have to explain that you're landon from landon right yeah what's your name land landon where you from? Landon. Is that all you can say? Are you a f***ing Pokemon, bro? Because you got one word only. Thanks to the art chest. The art chest? Do you have an art chest?

I'm talking about a big box of crayons, pencils, anything that you can do to make doodles and artwork to put up on the walls of our studio. Because Kit has just been putting up blueprint after blueprint of time machine i just think there's something here to the point yeah i'm starting to get worried i know that's why you're just think if we get a big enough transformer yeah so just anything that you can give us to put over it smiley faces sunflowers anything would be great thanks to aiden decelio aiden nice to see you nice to you again. Would you like to take a few steps backwards, Aiden?

No, Aiden. Aiden, run. Just a few steps backwards. And if you could hold this little hamster while you do it, because I think maybe two... Why both of them? Maybe two souls will appease the Time Lords. He's already calling you a soul.

That tells you everything you need to know. Thanks, lastly. Today, to Bruna Diaz. We don't talk about Bruna, nah, nah, nah, nah. Because Bruna disappeared in Rory's time machine. And the police are sniffing around. And I don't know what to tell them. Don't talk about it.

And it's all your problem. So I don't want to talk to them because it's none of my business. I don't want to talk to them either. They say, like, do you know whereabouts of a Mrs. Bruna? But we don't talk about Bruna, nah, nah everyone's into it yeah i spent a couple nights in jail i did the dance can only do so much good so thank you bruna thank you to everyone we've shouted out uh we've got more shout outs coming next week bruna you'll be hearing this in 15 years oh when you arrive in the future so we're sorry we. We're sorry. I hope you're doing alright.

We're taking your stuff, by the way, because you don't need it for the next 15 years. We'll give it back. We promise. We'll be back, of course, on Tuesday with a brand new Paranormal Tale. And before then, over on Patreon. Have a great week, everyone. Remember to live fast, investigate, and

die young, baby.