Category: History

You Don’t Need a Tardis for Time Travel

Twice, I have been suspected of being a CIA Remote Viewer. I have no idea why.

Harold Puthoff

However, I have hosted the Ph.D. physicist and engineer Dr. Harold Puthoff, who initiated the CIA’s Remote Viewing program. Puthoff, best known currently as a theoretician in UFO propulsion systems within the UAP Disclosure effort, came to our laboratory to lecture our Navy scientists on advanced physics, namely scalar energy.

He had been slated to speak elsewhere, but at the last minute, that Navy venue became unavailable. Only after Puthoff returned to the Stanford Research Institute did I discover his past involvement in the dark side of national intelligence

Stargate Project

After the U.S. Army showed an interest in the CIA’s remote viewing results, the program became known as the Stargate Project. Not surprisingly, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was involved. Since Stargate has been declassified, the internet is awash with information about this unique intelligence-gathering technique.

What does that have to do with the Tardis?

As the “Doctor Who” fandom knows, the Tardis is a fictional time machine/spaceship. Even though the Tardis looks like a nondescript British Police phone booth, it is anything but.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Remote Viewing as a Literary Device

Thanks to declassification, we know that Stargate Project remote viewers could reportedly “view” past and future events. That is, the viewers could travel through time sans Tardis.

But just imagine what Remote Viewing can contribute to storytelling. Based on what we know about real-life remote viewing, a character in a book or short story can be bestowed with seemingly magical powers to see clearly at a distance, both backward and forward in time. Best of all, the reader does not need to suspend disbelief because those powers are real, at least in trained viewers. 

This author could not resist using that literary device in books two and three of the Jason Parker Trilogy. In Triangle and Atmosphere, a blind remote viewer keeps distant tabs on the series’ protagonist and his female accomplice.

Borrowing again from Remote Viewing, there is the new $2.99 novelette Soul Has No Name.

Soul Has No Name

The above history, including my serendipitous nexus with the avowed father of the Remote Viewing programs, provides a little background on my latest publication. Soul Has No Name, A Story of Soul Travel is a longish short story (aka novelette) about a specialized, boutique form of time travel from the comfort of a padded recliner. No phone booth is required.

That makes it yet another form of time travel using remote viewing. Of course, such a thing is entirely fictional.

Unless it isn’t.

Soulmates

The story’s premise differs from other time travel stories because it’s dependent on future technology that can identify the “fingerprint” of human souls. After all, based on known physics, energy cannot be created or destroyed. Likewise, a soul’s energy is unique and everlasting. Knowing those soul fingerprints, technology can be applied to match those unique energies throughout time. One’s fingerprints can lead to “meetings” with soul mates. Past lives literally become alive, at least for a brief soul-travel interval.

(Please remember the previous paragraph includes some fiction. It only makes sense to the reader after the requisite “suspension of disbelief.” For the reader (and this author), there is no requisite belief in past lives, reincarnation, or anything else. Like any good science fiction, the story assumes certain things can happen, whether they actually can or not. It’s “make-believe.”)

Of course, no time travel story would be complete without someone screwing things up. In this case, the protagonist has his entire life upended for a reason and in a way that no one would suspect.

All things considered, Soul Has No Name is unique in the science fiction time-travel genre.

Review

Commercialized Time Travel as a boutique industry.

“In all the millions of words I’ve read, I never came across Clarke’s time travel concept. This story ranks near the top of my long list of science fiction short stories.” Robert G. Williscroft, Bestselling author of The Starchild Saga and The Oort Chronicles.

Shortly after Time Travel is commercialized, a boutique specialty focuses on identifying and tracking human souls through their unique energy “fingerprints”—fingerprints that remain unchanged through all incarnations of that soul, swapping from one gender to the next, and even while inhabiting other Earth or off-planet locations.

In the mid-21st Century, commercial time travel to experience a soul’s previous lifetimes becomes a most exotic and expensive recreational adventure, taking the explorer on individualized trips back through time. Through Spirit Writing, a fallout of time travel, we follow a Tennessee family that drops in on its Scottish Highlander forebears in the 1620s, rebounding back to Atlanta in 2040, then on to Boston and Hungary in 2080. Soul connections, multi-generational romance, and devastating foibles highlight this tale.”

Header image credit: Photo by Dingzeyu Li on Unsplash

Nighttime Prayers in War and Peace

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought clarity to many things we have long taken for granted. One of those is the ritual of putting children to bed at night. For most of a century, parents have had the security of knowing their children were likely to survive the night.

Now, as before, that is no longer a sure thing.

A summer bed on the porch. Photo by Dr. Albert S.J. Clarke.

World War II

I was born two months after World War II ended. Throughout my early years, echoes of the war still reverberated. Although knowing no violence first hand, I grew up with a book of poetry and prayers for children. One page featured a graphic of orphaned children saying night prayers during the London Blitz of 1940. The photo below is not exactly what was in my book, but it is similar.

Homeless and orphaned children settle down to sleep in the air-raid shelter at John Keble Church, Mill Hill, London, during the Blitz in 1940. Public Domain.

On that page of wartime horror were the words I had been taught as a nighttime prayer.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

During my wife’s childhood, she recited that same prayer. Mirroring our own bedtime ritual, we taught our children the same words.

According to this source, this children’s prayer originated in the 1700s, inspired by Psalm 4:8. “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only make me dwell in safety.”  

1700s to 1900s

When that childhood prayer was still new to the world, high infant mortality was a fact of life. During the first months of the Covid 19 pandemic, I received a stark reminder of that statistic as I walked through the North Cemetery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

North Cemetery Marker, Portsmouth, NH. Own photo.

I came across a tombstone marking the deaths of all three of the children of Seth and Temperance Walker in a matter of four days in 1798.

According to the marker, Nancy, Temperance, and Samuel Walker were “promising children … who were lovely and pleasant in life and in their deaths were not divided.” The children were 12, 6, and 4 years old. Presumably, a contagion of some sort took those young lives in quick succession.

War brings its own contagion of horror and uncertainty to parents and children alike.

September 1940. Photo of East End of London during the Blitz. WWII. Public Domain

A Brighter View

When our youngest was five or six years of age, she was invited to a sleepover with my wife’s aunt. When her aunt heard our daughter’s prayer, she thought the words were anything but comforting for a child. So, she taught her a new version of the nighttime prayer, the same one she had taught her child.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Guard me Jesus through the night,
And wake me with the morning light.

Our little one taught that version to us parents, and we adopted it henceforth as an improved nighttime prayer for both our children.

A Darker Reality

However, over the past seventy years, humans have not evolved as much as we had thought. We had been deluded by a long period of relative peace into believing that over time, mankind had become more spiritual, more humane.

Clearly, that is not the case. The dark side of humanity, inhumanity, has risen its loathsome head once again.

As always, innocent children are being devastated, either bodily or emotionally. So, I expect that to the childhood victims of war, the blander version of the nighttime prayer that our daughter taught us seems out of touch with reality. 

Whereas my family, historical and present, never put much thought into the last two lines of this 300-year-old prayer, Ukrainian children probably do.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

According to Google translate, the prayer I recited as a young child looks like this in Ukrainian.

Тепер я лягаю спати,
Молю Господа, щоб моя душа збереглася.
Якби я померла, не прокинувшись,
Молю Господа душу мою взяти.

Teper ya lyahayu spaty,
Molyu Hospoda, shchob moya dusha zberehlasya.
Yakby ya pomerla, ne prokynuvshysʹ,

Translated back to English, we get the following.

Now I go to bed,
I pray to the Lord that my soul will be preserved.
If I died without waking up,
I ask the Lord to take my soul.

Arguably, prayers can’t stop bombs and missiles from destroying human lives. However, bombs and missiles can’t destroy souls, especially those of the most precious human beings, children.

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash