Knocking On The Door Of Time

An Interview With Author Tim Swartz

By Sean Casteel

Tim Swartz, along with being an Emmy Award winning television news producer, is an author with several books to his credit on subjects like the secret history of Nikola Tesla, levitation, and UFO-related conspiracies. The title of his book, “Time Travel: A How-To Insiders Guide” (Global Communications), co-authored with the mysterious personage known only as Commander X, sounds amusingly confident in its declaration that time travel is a skill that can be taught and learned.

Which, given what little we actually know about time, is probably not totally out of the realm of possibility.

In a recent interview conducted for this special issue of “UFO Magazine” on time travel, Swartz recounted anecdotes about time travel that ranged from something he calls “time slips” to accidental time machines created in the garages of eccentrics tinkering with homemade electronic devices.

But first, Swartz grappled with some of the weightier issues involved in time travel, beginning with the essential questions, “What is time?” and “What is reality?”

“Those are probably the two most asked questions,” Swartz said, “throughout history by both scientist and philosopher alike. And I don’t think anybody has come up with a definitive answer yet. A lot of theories, a lot of conjecture, but nobody really knows. Much of the ancient Greek philosophy was concerned with understanding the concept of ‘eternity,’ and then of course the subject of time is central to all the world’s religions and cultures. Probably the earliest concept of time and its relationship with us involves the question, ‘Is it eternal? Or can the flow of time be stopped? Or does it just continue onwards?’

“A lot of mystics think that time can be affected,” Swartz continued. “A sixth century philosopher and poet by the name of Angelus Silesius said something that I think is pretty significant. He thought the flow of time could be suspended by mental powers. He said, ‘Time is of your own making. It’s clock ticks in your head. The moment you stop thought, time too stops dead.’ So the line between science and mysticism sometimes grows pretty thin. Today physicists would agree that out of all the properties of our universe, time is the strangest. The best we can say is that we all know what time is intuitively, but it really can’t be expressed in terms of other things.”

Swartz went on in that vein.

“We think of time based on our perception of outside events,” he said. “The sun rises, the sun goes down. If you were to take somebody and put him in a dark cave, with no outside stimulus of any kind, the concept of time would disappear. It would become kind of a virtual state of ‘Now.’

“Meanwhile, the universe is in a continual process of change and evolution. These changes are brought about by the motion of matter, a phenomenon whose description requires the introduction of the concept of time. So if you take that idea, that time is a measure of the expansion of the universe, then it goes beyond our simple, everyday perceptions of time and becomes in fact an abstract concept of time and space as it expands from its central beginning at the Big Bang.”

Moving on from the indefinable nature of time, Swartz next attacked the even murkier question of “What is reality?”

“Again, we’re talking about something that is really beyond our comprehension,” he said. “Einstein said that the human mind is not capable of grasping the universe. He said we’re like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written the books, but it does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.

“I think that’s a pretty good description of how we look at reality. Or, as the late science-fiction author, Philip K. Dick, said, ‘Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.’

“There is a branch of quantum physics,” Swartz went on, “that posits the theory that reality and the nature of reality are not independent from us, and that the universe requires intelligence. It requires someone to be there to observe it, or it wouldn’t exist. As I said, you’re walking a thin line between science and philosophy when you start talking about time and the nature of reality. I think that someday we’ll get to a point where the two paths will cross and we’ll realize that science, philosophy and even mysticism are all aspects of one central idea.”

Having laid some basic groundwork on the subject of time, Swartz next took up the tale of a couple that had experienced something that is sometimes called ‘retro-cognition,’ or the actual movement backward in time.

“This was somebody who read the book,” Swartz said, “and then contacted me with a story of their own. This took place in the year 2000, in Anderson, Indiana. This young couple had gone to the Mounds State Park, a place where there are a number of Indian mounds. They had to wait in the parking lot for a while because there was a thunderstorm going on. When the storm passed, they left the parking lot and went off down one of the main paths that led to the central area of the Indian mounds. This is a fairly heavily forested area. They walked down this path and passed some smaller mounds that were mostly tree-covered along the way.

“But when they rounded a corner, instead of Indian mounds, they saw in front of them a flood plain, which is a flat area that surrounds a river. There was now a river where there shouldn’t be one. Instead of the mounds, they could see people that looked like Native-Americans walking around like they were doing their normal, daily activities. Closer to the tree line, they could see what they described as small huts. They thought that maybe the park was doing a reenactment of the days that Native-Americans originally lived in this area and fished in the river, etc.

“But they told me that as they tried to get closer, they couldn’t. The more they walked forward, it seemed that the scene kept one step ahead of them. They could never get close to it, and that kind of frightened them. Then they also started to notice that they weren’t hearing anything, whereas before there had still been some distant thunder from the storm and the birds were singing. But now there was no thunder. They couldn’t hear any birds. They also couldn’t hear the sounds of the Native-Americans in front of them, though they were obviously talking to each other and there were children running around playing.

“So they decided to get out of there. They turned around, walked back up the path, and when they went around the same corner again, everything appeared back to normal. As they put it, they came out of a zone of silence. When they heard the birds start singing again, they turned around and walked back, but the scene was gone. Instead, there were the old Indian mounds covered with trees, and there was no river. The river was actually a couple of miles to the west of them, but at one time it had been at that location. So this is a perfect story of what’s called a ‘time slip,’ where people seem to be observing or sometimes even participating in past or occasionally even future events.”

Swartz related a similar story he had run across in a 1969 issue of “Strange Magazine” while researching his book.

“In October of 1969,” Swartz began, “a man identified only as ‘L.C.’ and his business partner Charley were driving north from Abbeville, Louisiana, towards Lafayette on Highway 167. As they were driving along the nearly empty road, they began to overtake what appeared to be an antique car traveling very slowly. The two men were impressed by the mint condition of the nearly 30-year-old car. It looked virtually new, they said. They were puzzled by its bright orange license plate, on which was stamped only ‘1940.’ They figured that the car had been part of an antique auto show.

“As they passed the slow-moving vehicle, they slowed their car to get a good look at the old model. The driver of the car was a young woman dressed in vintage 1940s clothing, and her passenger was a small child likewise dressed. The woman seemed panicked and confused. L.C. asked if she needed help, and through her rolled up window, she indicated yes. L.C. motioned to her to pull off to the side of the road. The businessmen pulled ahead of the old car and turned onto the shoulder. When they got out, the old car had vanished without a trace. There was no turnoff anywhere, and the vehicle was just gone.

“Moments later, another car pulled up to the businessmen, and the driver, quite puzzled, said that he had seen their car pull off to the side and the old car simply vanish into thin air. So you have to ask, is this a ghostly encounter or a time slip? With ghost visitations, you usually only have one observer, but time slips generally always seem to have more than one. And this is another very good example of the flexibility of time. It appears that time isn’t an inflexible straight line but possibly could be thought of more like a river with flows and eddies that can back up onto themselves and even go forward past the original streams, so to speak.”

Along with anecdotes that seem to point to natural portals in time, Swartz also related stories of manmade time machines, albeit accidentally stumbled upon. This one began with a letter received by an organization called the Emanon Inventors Association.

“The author of the letter,” Swartz said, “stated that a friend of his decided to build a short wave receiver for his stepson as a Christmas gift. However, he didn’t want just any radio. He wanted a full wave, full frequency radio. One night, as he was attempting to build this, he was fiddling with the radio while a thunderstorm was in progress. About 3 A.M., all of a sudden, the loudspeaker of his radio started making ‘a god-awful, obnoxious loud noise.’

“As he continued working on it, he noticed that there was a very peculiar glowing electrical field just above the center of the coils. The anomaly appeared completely circular, with three to four inch glowing blue bands of light separated by bands of space. The space between the glowing bands seemed to be pulsating, from complete transparency to semi-opaqueness. During this process, he noticed that his clock seemed to be ‘jumping around,’ as he called it. After this field disappeared, all the clocks in the apartment had moved from 3:55 A.M. to 10 P.M. He was able to use the radio to tune in a local radio station, and was just in time to hear the beginning of the 10 o’clock news.

“The author of the letter then goes on to speculate about why, if his friend was actually jumping back and forth in time, why he didn’t run into himself? Of course, he had no good explanation for it, and neither do I. Again, it just seems to be one of those localized anomalous time effects that can take place either through natural means or through manmade electronic manipulation.

“A lot of these garage mechanic time machines that I talk about in the book seem to produce an effect that’s very localized, within no further than a small room. It’s not something where you would flip a switch and your entire neighborhood would find itself moving faster or slower than normal time. Instead, it seems to be within like a bubble almost of electromagnetic energy.”

But Swartz said that he feels time travel is more often a consequence of the aforementioned natural portals in time.

“While there have been, and probably still are, attempts to build a time machine either by basement mechanics or top secret government and military scientists,” he said, “there does seem to be a natural phenomenon that causes time slips, or windows to other times. This type of phenomenon appears to happen during times of lightning storms or in areas that have natural magnetic anomalies. These magnetic anomalies occur all over the planet and often are also associated with ancient structures, burial grounds and religious sites. The story I told about the couple that saw Native-Americans occurred around ancient manmade mounds. That area around Anderson, Indiana, has also seen numerous reports over the years of UFOs and strange creatures.

“Perhaps these are ‘window areas’ where, under the right natural conditions, temporary holes in time and space can open. Sometimes things from the past or future can intrude on our time for a while, which may explain sightings of weird creatures, larger than life birds, or even Bigfoot. Maybe they are from our past and have temporarily crossed the boundaries of time and space to exist in our world. That is, until the energy gives out and they find themselves back in their own time.

“This could be what has happened to people who experience times slips. They accidentally get caught up in a natural event where time and space fold backwards or forwards on themselves. Maybe this is what happens to some people who mysteriously disappear, never to be seen again. Perhaps they have walked out of their own time and into another. History does present us with a number of interesting cases where strange people, speaking unknown languages and dressed oddly, have mysteriously appeared. Often these poor souls find themselves committed to the local insane asylum or even executed.

“But my point is that Mother Nature may be providing us with the mechanism of time travel that we have sought all these years-a natural phenomenon that occurs with some regularity in the same places during electrical and natural magnetic conditions. So perhaps we are looking at the wrong methods to try and theorize a time machine that operates using black holes or energies on a universal scale or rotating gravitational fields and so on. Perhaps Mother Nature has a simpler method that we have overlooked.”

Included among those simpler methods provided by Mother Nature is traveling in time using simply the mind itself, according to Swartz.

“Eastern religions have taught for centuries,” Swartz said, “that we can visit any place in time, any place in the universe, with just our mind. If we could learn to detach our mind from physical reality then the rest of the realities of the universe would be open and available to us. And throughout the centuries, there have been a number of methods conceived to loosen your mind from its physical restraints.

“Now of course you have to make the leap of faith, first of all, that the mind is separate from the body, that the mind is more than just the chemical engines of our body, and that once those engines are turned off, the mind goes with it. Then there are methods, using dreams and astral projection, that can allow you to visit the past or the future.

“One method that I talked about in the book,” he continued, “involves lucid dreaming, which is the process of trying to control your dreams. What you have to do is, as you’re dreaming, you have to learn to recognize the fact that you’re dreaming while you’re in your dream. From that point, you can learn to control your dream so that the events that take place in the dream can be manipulated by you. Rather than the dream affecting you, you affect the dream.

“And once that is accomplished, you then have the ability to take your dream state anywhere that you want to go. One of the most popular methods is to attempt to travel to the past or the future, and then bring the information back to your waking state. Many people who have attempted this have trouble bringing information that they glean from their dream state time travels back to their waking state in a comprehensible fashion. You know as well as I do that dreams will fade very quickly from your memory after you’ve been awake for a while. So it’s always encouraged for anyone attempting to dream travel to keep a pad and paper or even a little tape recorder next to their bed, and as soon as they wake up to record immediately their experiences. A number of people have reported that after a while they are able to control their dreams to such an extent that they feel they actually are able to send themselves mentally to predetermined locations in the past or the future.”

And what of the relationship between time travel and UFOs? Swartz said that is an approach to UFOs that is too often neglected by the experts.

“Somebody ran a poll one time among UFO investigators,” Swartz said, “and the time travel theory of UFOs was as always at the bottom of the list. It doesn’t seem to be a favorite theory. But I think that’s just as valid a theory as the idea that we’re being visited by extraterrestrial creatures from another galaxy. From what we know of modern physics, it’s just as impossible to travel the millions of light years from one galaxy to another as it is to travel back and forth through time. I think we should seriously look at reports that could be indicative of us being visited by time travelers.

“These time travelers may not necessarily be from our future, okay? It could be that interstellar travel is impossible WITHOUT [italics] time travel, that it’s impossible to travel from solar system to galaxy without using time travel as part of the process of crossing these vast distances. In fact, there have been a number of witnesses who have claimed contact with creatures who come out of UFOs, and these beings have told them that they use time as their mode of travel.

“Then again, UFOs could very well represent time travelers from our future, because what better way to travel back into time basically unnoticed than to come back during a time when you know from your history books that people were seeing strange things flying around in the sky and having contacts with humanoid creatures. You could then travel back into that time and take on those roles, without creating any sort of time paradox problem. Why, as some scientists have pointed out, if time travel is possible, why haven’t we been visited by our future selves? Maybe we have been. Maybe they’re flying around in our skies right now in highly sophisticated disc-shaped craft.

“That would also explain why the majority of creatures seen coming out of UFOs are humanoid in shape,” Swartz concluded, “and in fact seem to be shaped in a way much like scientists have said that evolution will take mankind, with the large head, smaller extremities, lighter in weight, that sort of thing. So I think that at least some aspects of the UFO phenomenon could represent time travelers, either from our own future or extraterrestrial time travelers who are using time as a method of propulsion.”

Are the aliens that much of this magazine is focused on really our future selves, as Tim Swartz theorizes? Like the discussion of the indefinable nature of time and reality that began this article, that question remains unanswered, along with a seemingly infinite number of other mysteries that continue to beckon to us from somewhere dark and deep and just outside our range of vision.

[To subscribe to a free newsletter edited by Tim Swartz, go to <http://www.ConspiracyJournal.com> Also, visit Sean Casteel’s “UFO Journalist” website at <http://www.phantombookshop.com/seancasteel> ]

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