secret report on time travel

What We Know About The CIA's Alleged Secret Time Travel Program

In October of 1943, an alleged experiment took place at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard that opened the proverbial door to time travel (via Military.com ). According to legend, the USS Eldridge (DE 173) — a Cannon-class battleship used primarily to hunt and destroy enemy submarines — left our timeline in an experiment in invisibility gone wrong, per USS Slater . Part of a CIA research project known as Project Rainbow , the alleged incident with the USS Eldridge at the Philadelphia Naval Yard has become unofficially known as "the Philadelphia Experiment," per  The Guardian .

In an effort to put an end to World War II, the story says that the U.S. military began experimenting with ways to end the dragging world war in the quickest, most efficient manner. One of the ideas floating around was the idea of cloaking — or making invisible to radar — battleships. Using a device called a "time zero generator," the military attempted to do just that, per  The Guardian . What allegedly happened, however, was completely unexpected.

Where did they go?

On October 28, 1943, the switch was allegedly thrown on the time zero generator. Eyewitness' claim to have seen the USS Eldridge suddenly begin to glow in a green-blue haze that surrounded the vessel (via Military.com ). The Eldridge began to fade, leaving just the outline of the ship remaining. And with that, the ship blinked out of existence, according to The Guardian . Time slowly ticked by. No one knew exactly what happened to the ship or where it went. After a long 20 minutes, the Eldridge reappeared, but with horrifying results. Much of the vessel was on fire, members of the crew — who allegedly left our reality along with the ship — were found insane. And those were the lucky ones. Reports swirl that many crew members of the Eldridge had "fused" with the ship upon its return to our reality; torsos, limbs, and other miscellaneous body parts were found amalgamated into the ship's steel hull.

A hoax or horrifying accident

According to the surviving members of the ship's crew, during the vessel's alleged 20-minute disappearance, the ship seemingly re-appeared 600 miles away in Newport News, located in Virginia. Of course,  The Guardian  calls the story "hokum" concocted by UFO enthusiast Carl Allen. And with no real concrete proof of the event ever taking place, the U.S. Navy outright denies the Philadelphia Experiment ever happened. 

Nevertheless, the USS Eldridge did exist — sold off to Greece in 1951 and finally decommissioned and sold for scrap in the '90s — and Project Rainbow did occur. But the Office of Naval Research (ONR) stated that force fields to make a ship invisible don't "conform to known physical laws" (via the Black Vault ).  Coupled with the fact that there are no official documents, military or otherwise about the event, it's very well likely the story of the Philadelphia Experiment is likely to remain just that ... a story.

The CIA’s Secret Plan to Build a Laser Beam Powered by the Human Mind

There are even instructions for decoding consciousness and transcending spacetime.

For many, hearing about this report was like finding out that the CIA tested clairvoyance as a spying tool , or that the U.S. Department of Defense secretly collected data on unidentified flying objects, even as it labeled UFO spotters as crazy. But one crucial piece of the document, page 25, was missing. The contents of that page, finally made public in 2021, reveal the report’s true nature.

The Gateway Process was originally the brainchild of radio producer Robert Monroe , who in the 1970s studied the effects of certain sound patterns on human consciousness. He claimed that his experiments led to out-of-body experiences through brain hemisphere synchronization, or “Hemi-Sync.” Here’s how it works: When a person listens to binaural beats (created by hearing different sounds in each ear), the contrast confuses the brain, causing it to shift out of its normal, somewhat scattered wave pattern into a coherent pattern shared between the left and right hemispheres. In other words, it syncs the hemispheres of the brain into a single, powerful stream of energy, like a laser.

McDonnell’s report for the CIA borrows heavily not only from Monroe’s research but also from the biomedical models of Itzhak Bentov , a Czech-born Israeli-American engineer. Bentov was known for such projects as designing a remote-controlled cardiac catheter, creating diet spaghetti, and writing detailed books about human consciousness. McDonnell uses various consciousness-altering methodologies—including biofeedback, transcendental meditation, hypnosis, and a style of yoga called Kundalini, which is meant to activate spiritual energy—to explain Gateway methodology.

✅ Know Your Terms : Biofeedback is a mind-body technique used to control physical processes like breathing patterns, heart rate, and muscle responses, according to the Mayo Clinic. Machines that monitor muscle tension, skin temperature, brain waves, and more collect data in order to help a person gain control over these functions. Transcendental mediation is meant to “settle your body down to a state of restful alertness,” per the Cleveland Clinic. This is achieved by silently repeating a mantra in your head. The thought is that this type of meditation can help a person achieve “a state of pure consciousness.” Kundalini yoga dates back to ancient Vedic texts from 1000 B.C., though its exact origin is unknown, per Healthline. Also known as “yoga of awareness,” this practice is meant to activate your Kundalini energy, or “shakti,” a spiritual energy believed to emanate from the base of your spine. Through breathing exercises, chanting, singing, and repetitive poses, Kundalini yoga is supposed to help you shed your ego—a concept aligned with transcendence. Hypnosis is a method for achieving “a waking state of awareness, (or consciousness), in which a person’s attention is detached from his or her immediate environment and is absorbed by inner experiences such as feelings, cognition and imagery,” according to a 2019 review published in the journal Palliative Care and Social Practice . In other words, therapist and patient create a “hypnotic reality” in which what is being imagined feels real.

McDonnell packaged the document in physical science lingo to avoid any unwanted connections to the occult. He leaned on quantum mechanics sources to “describe the nature and functioning of human consciousness,” and on theoretical physics to explain the character of the time-space dimension and the means by which expanded human consciousness transcends it. According to McDonnell’s report, “the entire human body functions as a tuned vibrational system that transfers energy in a range of between 6.8 and 7.5 hertz into the earth’s ionospheric cavity, which itself resonates at about 7 to 7.5 hertz.”

Some scientists call this ionospheric resonance “ the earth’s heartbeat .” Basically, this brain/body energy connects with the sounds of the earth’s ionosphere and can travel around the planet in one-seventh of a second.

Here’s where some of the report’s conclusions get dicey. In an attempt to explain the nature of the universe into which the brain sends these signals, McDonnell blithely layers accepted physics theories on top of statements so unsubstantiated that they sound made-up. For example: “Energy in infinity … retains its inherent capacity for consciousness in that it can receive and passively perceive holograms generated by energy in motion out in the various dimensions which make up the created universe.”

Much of the Gateway theory rests on what McDonnell calls the “Absolute”: an energy field that exists in all dimensions, has uniform energy throughout, and is infinite. It has no location and no momentum and is therefore outside of spacetime . Hemi-Sync aspires to connect people with the Absolute through a wavelength of consciousness that “clicks out” of spacetime at certain frequencies.

The world in which this process takes place is a giant cosmic egg, which McDonnell depicts in the document. From a white hole in the egg’s nucleus, the Absolute emits matter that travels around one side of the shell and exits through a black hole back at the nucleus. As McDonnell writes, “time begins as a measure of the cadence of this evolutionary movement as ‘reality’ goes around the shell of the egg on its journey to the black hole at the far end.”

This activity creates an interference pattern that “constitutes the universal hologram or Torus,” McDonnell writes. “Since the Torus is being simultaneously generated by matter in all the various phases of ‘time,’ it reflects the development of the universe in the past, present, and future (as it would be seen from our particular perspective in one phase of time).”

This Torus hologram seems to be based on string theorists’ views about a holographic universe . String theorists are inspired by equations showing that, while objects might fall into a black hole and be forever gone, the information about those objects must be retained, and is preserved in 2D form on the event horizon. When projected onto a surface, all the properties and information about the 3D object would be represented in a hologram . Likewise, all that happens with matter in one side of this egg-shaped universe is projected as a holographic experience.

Meanwhile, the document states that the human brain—which is a binary system like a computer—similarly projects itself as a 3D hologram. The interaction of our holograms with the universal hologram allows us to reflect back on ourselves with information from the Absolute, gaining a more complete understanding of ourselves.

McDonnell writes: “The out-of-body state involves projection of a major portion of the energy pattern that represents human consciousness, so that it may move either freely throughout the terrestrial sphere for purposes of information aquisition [sic] or into other dimensions outside of time-space, perhaps to interact with other forms of consciousness.... Consciousness is the organizing and sustaining principle that provides the impetus and guidance to bring and keep energy in motion within a given set of parameters so that a specific reality will result. When consciousness reaches a state of sophistication in which it can perceive itself (its own hologram), it reaches the point of self-cognition.”

In other words, the Absolute knows itself. Consciousness knows itself. When the material, physical reality plays out in spacetime, consciousness returns to the Absolute.

In the meantime, a small percentage of people can successfully use Hemi-Sync to slip the bounds of their own bodies and spacetime and check out other dimensions and consciousnesses. Though, like meditation, it requires a lot of practice.

As McDonnell’s report nears the infamous page that conspiracy theorists and CIA watchers speculated about for decades, he makes a sharp turn from spiritual ideas dressed in scientific language to explicit religious doctrine, comparing his findings to Christian concepts—and then cuts off mid-sentence, leaving a 38-year cliffhanger on page 24. But when page 25 finally surfaced in 2021, the contents weren’t all that astonishing.

“And the eternal thought or concept of self which results from this self-consciousness serves the Absolute as the model around which the evolution of time-space revolves to ultimately attain a reflection of and union with Him,” McDonnell wrote in the missing page’s first paragraph.

Let’s face it—even physicists don’t know whether many of their most revered mathematical equations and theorems actually describe the universe we live in, just as many spiritual traditions might be mistaken on the nature of consciousness. Nonscientists have understandably been frustrated by scientists claiming the exclusive right to pose inconceivable theories—like multiverses, dark matter , or string theory—with impunity.

Yet physicists tend to dismiss attempts to use scientific information to explain the meaning of human existence. It’s one thing to say, under quantum field theory, that energy fields connect everything in the universe. But it’s something else when the concept is applied to the idea of humans communing with trees.

Scientists’ theories are the result of mathematical equations that can be replicated. Human experience, on the other hand, can be easily faked or imagined. As far as many physicists are concerned, the answer to “Why are we here?” is the same for “By what process did we come into being?”

So a project like Gateway that marries science with the human yearning for meaning seemed awfully promising. But, as it turned out, the process was not a gateway between materialistic science and experiential consciousness ; it was more like an effort to write a technical manual for the ineffable.

Maybe one day, the CIA will figure it all out.

Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She's covered ocean wave energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery; healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.

.css-cuqpxl:before{padding-right:0.3125rem;content:'//';display:inline;} Pop Mech Pro: Science .css-xtujxj:before{padding-left:0.3125rem;content:'//';display:inline;}

Immortality Is Impossible Until We Beat Physics

How Vacuum Energy Could Help Us Reach Light Speed

Could the Chair You Sit on Have a Soul?

Here’s How We Could Live in Trees

The Engine Driving Our Oceans Could Die by 2100

Can AI Help Solve Math’s Thorniest Mysteries?

You Can Give Your Body Back to Nature When You Die

How Does UFO Footage Play Tricks on Your Mind?

Why Doesn’t the Living Human Body ‘Go Bad’?

Is the Room-Temperature Superconductor Back?

What 9 Months on a Cruise Ship Can Do to You

Is time travel possible? Why one scientist says we 'cannot ignore the possibility.'

A common theme in science-fiction media , time travel is captivating. It’s defined by the late philosopher David Lewis in his essay “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” as “[involving] a discrepancy between time and space time. Any traveler departs and then arrives at his destination; the time elapsed from departure to arrival … is the duration of the journey.”

Time travel is usually understood by most as going back to a bygone era or jumping forward to a point far in the future . But how much of the idea is based in reality? Is it possible to travel through time? 

Is time travel possible?

According to NASA, time travel is possible , just not in the way you might expect. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity says time and motion are relative to each other, and nothing can go faster than the speed of light , which is 186,000 miles per second. Time travel happens through what’s called “time dilation.”

Time dilation , according to Live Science, is how one’s perception of time is different to another's, depending on their motion or where they are. Hence, time being relative. 

Learn more: Best travel insurance

Dr. Ana Alonso-Serrano, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, explained the possibility of time travel and how researchers test theories. 

Space and time are not absolute values, Alonso-Serrano said. And what makes this all more complex is that you are able to carve space-time .

“In the moment that you carve the space-time, you can play with that curvature to make the time come in a circle and make a time machine,” Alonso-Serrano told USA TODAY. 

She explained how, theoretically, time travel is possible. The mathematics behind creating curvature of space-time are solid, but trying to re-create the strict physical conditions needed to prove these theories can be challenging. 

“The tricky point of that is if you can find a physical, realistic, way to do it,” she said. 

Alonso-Serrano said wormholes and warp drives are tools that are used to create this curvature. The matter needed to achieve curving space-time via a wormhole is exotic matter , which hasn’t been done successfully. Researchers don’t even know if this type of matter exists, she said.

“It's something that we work on because it's theoretically possible, and because it's a very nice way to test our theory, to look for possible paradoxes,” Alonso-Serrano added.

“I could not say that nothing is possible, but I cannot ignore the possibility,” she said. 

She also mentioned the anecdote of  Stephen Hawking’s Champagne party for time travelers . Hawking had a GPS-specific location for the party. He didn’t send out invites until the party had already happened, so only people who could travel to the past would be able to attend. No one showed up, and Hawking referred to this event as "experimental evidence" that time travel wasn't possible.

What did Albert Einstein invent?: Discoveries that changed the world

Just Curious for more? We've got you covered

USA TODAY is exploring the questions you and others ask every day. From "How to watch the Marvel movies in order" to "Why is Pluto not a planet?" to "What to do if your dog eats weed?" – we're striving to find answers to the most common questions you ask every day. Head to our Just Curious section to see what else we can answer for you. 

Time travel: Is it possible?

Science says time travel is possible, but probably not in the way you're thinking.

Albert Einstein's theory

• General relativity and GPS
• Wormhole travel
• Alternate theories

Science fiction

Is time travel possible? Short answer: Yes, and you're doing it right now — hurtling into the future at the impressive rate of one second per second. 

You're pretty much always moving through time at the same speed, whether you're watching paint dry or wishing you had more hours to visit with a friend from out of town. 

But this isn't the kind of time travel that's captivated countless science fiction writers, or spurred a genre so extensive that Wikipedia lists over 400 titles in the category "Movies about Time Travel." In franchises like " Doctor Who ," " Star Trek ," and "Back to the Future" characters climb into some wild vehicle to blast into the past or spin into the future. Once the characters have traveled through time, they grapple with what happens if you change the past or present based on information from the future (which is where time travel stories intersect with the idea of parallel universes or alternate timelines). 

Related: The best sci-fi time machines ever

Although many people are fascinated by the idea of changing the past or seeing the future before it's due, no person has ever demonstrated the kind of back-and-forth time travel seen in science fiction or proposed a method of sending a person through significant periods of time that wouldn't destroy them on the way. And, as physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out in his book " Black Holes and Baby Universes" (Bantam, 1994), "The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."

Science does support some amount of time-bending, though. For example, physicist Albert Einstein 's theory of special relativity proposes that time is an illusion that moves relative to an observer. An observer traveling near the speed of light will experience time, with all its aftereffects (boredom, aging, etc.) much more slowly than an observer at rest. That's why astronaut Scott Kelly aged ever so slightly less over the course of a year in orbit than his twin brother who stayed here on Earth. 

Related: Controversially, physicist argues that time is real

There are other scientific theories about time travel, including some weird physics that arise around wormholes , black holes and string theory . For the most part, though, time travel remains the domain of an ever-growing array of science fiction books, movies, television shows, comics, video games and more. 

Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905. Along with his later expansion, the theory of general relativity , it has become one of the foundational tenets of modern physics. Special relativity describes the relationship between space and time for objects moving at constant speeds in a straight line. 

The short version of the theory is deceptively simple. First, all things are measured in relation to something else — that is to say, there is no "absolute" frame of reference. Second, the speed of light is constant. It stays the same no matter what, and no matter where it's measured from. And third, nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

From those simple tenets unfolds actual, real-life time travel. An observer traveling at high velocity will experience time at a slower rate than an observer who isn't speeding through space. 

While we don't accelerate humans to near-light-speed, we do send them swinging around the planet at 17,500 mph (28,160 km/h) aboard the International Space Station . Astronaut Scott Kelly was born after his twin brother, and fellow astronaut, Mark Kelly . Scott Kelly spent 520 days in orbit, while Mark logged 54 days in space. The difference in the speed at which they experienced time over the course of their lifetimes has actually widened the age gap between the two men.

"So, where[as] I used to be just 6 minutes older, now I am 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds older," Mark Kelly said in a panel discussion on July 12, 2020, Space.com previously reported . "Now I've got that over his head."

General relativity and GPS time travel

The difference that low earth orbit makes in an astronaut's life span may be negligible — better suited for jokes among siblings than actual life extension or visiting the distant future — but the dilation in time between people on Earth and GPS satellites flying through space does make a difference. 

Read more: Can we stop time?

The Global Positioning System , or GPS, helps us know exactly where we are by communicating with a network of a few dozen satellites positioned in a high Earth orbit. The satellites circle the planet from 12,500 miles (20,100 kilometers) away, moving at 8,700 mph (14,000 km/h). 

According to special relativity, the faster an object moves relative to another object, the slower that first object experiences time. For GPS satellites with atomic clocks, this effect cuts 7 microseconds, or 7 millionths of a second, off each day, according to the American Physical Society publication Physics Central .  

Read more: Could Star Trek's faster-than-light warp drive actually work?

Then, according to general relativity, clocks closer to the center of a large gravitational mass like Earth tick more slowly than those farther away. So, because the GPS satellites are much farther from the center of Earth compared to clocks on the surface, Physics Central added, that adds another 45 microseconds onto the GPS satellite clocks each day. Combined with the negative 7 microseconds from the special relativity calculation, the net result is an added 38 microseconds. 

This means that in order to maintain the accuracy needed to pinpoint your car or phone — or, since the system is run by the U.S. Department of Defense, a military drone — engineers must account for an extra 38 microseconds in each satellite's day. The atomic clocks onboard don’t tick over to the next day until they have run 38 microseconds longer than comparable clocks on Earth.

Given those numbers, it would take more than seven years for the atomic clock in a GPS satellite to un-sync itself from an Earth clock by more than a blink of an eye. (We did the math: If you estimate a blink to last at least 100,000 microseconds, as the Harvard Database of Useful Biological Numbers does, it would take thousands of days for those 38 microsecond shifts to add up.) 

This kind of time travel may seem as negligible as the Kelly brothers' age gap, but given the hyper-accuracy of modern GPS technology, it actually does matter. If it can communicate with the satellites whizzing overhead, your phone can nail down your location in space and time with incredible accuracy. 

Can wormholes take us back in time?

General relativity might also provide scenarios that could allow travelers to go back in time, according to NASA . But the physical reality of those time-travel methods is no piece of cake. 

Wormholes are theoretical "tunnels" through the fabric of space-time that could connect different moments or locations in reality to others. Also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges or white holes, as opposed to black holes, speculation about wormholes abounds. But despite taking up a lot of space (or space-time) in science fiction, no wormholes of any kind have been identified in real life. 

Related: Best time travel movies

"The whole thing is very hypothetical at this point," Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, told Space.com sister site Live Science . "No one thinks we're going to find a wormhole anytime soon."

Primordial wormholes are predicted to be just 10^-34 inches (10^-33 centimeters) at the tunnel's "mouth". Previously, they were expected to be too unstable for anything to be able to travel through them. However, a study claims that this is not the case, Live Science reported . 

The theory, which suggests that wormholes could work as viable space-time shortcuts, was described by physicist Pascal Koiran. As part of the study, Koiran used the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, as opposed to the Schwarzschild metric which has been used in the majority of previous analyses.

In the past, the path of a particle could not be traced through a hypothetical wormhole. However, using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, the physicist was able to achieve just that.

Koiran's paper was described in October 2021, in the preprint database arXiv , before being published in the Journal of Modern Physics D.

Alternate time travel theories

While Einstein's theories appear to make time travel difficult, some researchers have proposed other solutions that could allow jumps back and forth in time. These alternate theories share one major flaw: As far as scientists can tell, there's no way a person could survive the kind of gravitational pulling and pushing that each solution requires.

Infinite cylinder theory

Astronomer Frank Tipler proposed a mechanism (sometimes known as a Tipler Cylinder ) where one could take matter that is 10 times the sun's mass, then roll it into a very long, but very dense cylinder. The Anderson Institute , a time travel research organization, described the cylinder as "a black hole that has passed through a spaghetti factory."

After spinning this black hole spaghetti a few billion revolutions per minute, a spaceship nearby — following a very precise spiral around the cylinder — could travel backward in time on a "closed, time-like curve," according to the Anderson Institute. 

The major problem is that in order for the Tipler Cylinder to become reality, the cylinder would need to be infinitely long or be made of some unknown kind of matter. At least for the foreseeable future, endless interstellar pasta is beyond our reach.

Time donuts

Theoretical physicist Amos Ori at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, proposed a model for a time machine made out of curved space-time — a donut-shaped vacuum surrounded by a sphere of normal matter.

"The machine is space-time itself," Ori told Live Science . "If we were to create an area with a warp like this in space that would enable time lines to close on themselves, it might enable future generations to return to visit our time."

Amos Ori is a theoretical physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. His research interests and publications span the fields of general relativity, black holes, gravitational waves and closed time lines.

There are a few caveats to Ori's time machine. First, visitors to the past wouldn't be able to travel to times earlier than the invention and construction of the time donut. Second, and more importantly, the invention and construction of this machine would depend on our ability to manipulate gravitational fields at will — a feat that may be theoretically possible but is certainly beyond our immediate reach.

Time travel has long occupied a significant place in fiction. Since as early as the "Mahabharata," an ancient Sanskrit epic poem compiled around 400 B.C., humans have dreamed of warping time, Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told Live Science .  

Every work of time-travel fiction creates its own version of space-time, glossing over one or more scientific hurdles and paradoxes to achieve its plot requirements. 

Some make a nod to research and physics, like " Interstellar ," a 2014 film directed by Christopher Nolan. In the movie, a character played by Matthew McConaughey spends a few hours on a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole, but because of time dilation, observers on Earth experience those hours as a matter of decades. 

Others take a more whimsical approach, like the "Doctor Who" television series. The series features the Doctor, an extraterrestrial "Time Lord" who travels in a spaceship resembling a blue British police box. "People assume," the Doctor explained in the show, "that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff." 

Long-standing franchises like the "Star Trek" movies and television series, as well as comic universes like DC and Marvel Comics, revisit the idea of time travel over and over. 

Related: Marvel movies in order: chronological & release order

Here is an incomplete (and deeply subjective) list of some influential or notable works of time travel fiction:

Books about time travel:

• Rip Van Winkle (Cornelius S. Van Winkle, 1819) by Washington Irving
• A Christmas Carol (Chapman & Hall, 1843) by Charles Dickens
• The Time Machine (William Heinemann, 1895) by H. G. Wells
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Charles L. Webster and Co., 1889) by Mark Twain
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Pan Books, 1980) by Douglas Adams
• A Tale of Time City (Methuen, 1987) by Diana Wynn Jones
• The Outlander series (Delacorte Press, 1991-present) by Diana Gabaldon
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury/Scholastic, 1999) by J. K. Rowling
• Thief of Time (Doubleday, 2001) by Terry Pratchett
• The Time Traveler's Wife (MacAdam/Cage, 2003) by Audrey Niffenegger
• All You Need is Kill (Shueisha, 2004) by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Movies about time travel:

• Planet of the Apes (1968)
• Superman (1978)
• Time Bandits (1981)
• The Terminator (1984)
• Back to the Future series (1985, 1989, 1990)
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
• Groundhog Day (1993)
• Galaxy Quest (1999)
• The Butterfly Effect (2004)
• 13 Going on 30 (2004)
• The Lake House (2006)
• Meet the Robinsons (2007)
• Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
• Midnight in Paris (2011)
• Looper (2012)
• X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
• Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
• Interstellar (2014)
• Doctor Strange (2016)
• A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
• The Last Sharknado: It's About Time (2018)
• Avengers: Endgame (2019)
• Tenet (2020)
• Palm Springs (2020)
• Zach Snyder's Justice League (2021)
• The Tomorrow War (2021)

Television about time travel:

• Doctor Who (1963-present)
• The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) (multiple episodes)
• Star Trek (multiple series, multiple episodes)
• Samurai Jack (2001-2004)
• Lost (2004-2010)
• Phil of the Future (2004-2006)
• Steins;Gate (2011)
• Outlander (2014-2023)
• Loki (2021-present)

Games about time travel:

• Chrono Trigger (1995)
• TimeSplitters (2000-2005)
• Kingdom Hearts (2002-2019)
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2003)
• God of War II (2007)
• Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack In Time (2009)
• Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (2013)
• Dishonored 2 (2016)
• Titanfall 2 (2016)
• Outer Wilds (2019)

Additional resources

Explore physicist Peter Millington's thoughts about Stephen Hawking's time travel theories at The Conversation . Check out a kid-friendly explanation of real-world time travel from NASA's Space Place . For an overview of time travel in fiction and the collective consciousness, read " Time Travel: A History " (Pantheon, 2016) by James Gleik. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Get the Space.com Newsletter

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

Ailsa is a staff writer for How It Works magazine, where she writes science, technology, space, history and environment features. Based in the U.K., she graduated from the University of Stirling with a BA (Hons) journalism degree. Previously, Ailsa has written for Cardiff Times magazine, Psychology Now and numerous science bookazines. 

Car-size asteroid gives Earth a super-close shave with flyby closer than some satellites

SpaceX launches advanced weather satellite for US Space Force (video)

Why I watched the solar eclipse with my kids, a goose and 2,000 trees

Most Popular

• 2 Rocket Lab to launch NASA's new solar sail technology no earlier than April 24
• 3 Nuclear fusion reactor in South Korea runs at 100 million degrees C for a record-breaking 48 seconds
• 4 1st female ISS program manager looks ahead to new spaceships, space stations (exclusive)
• 5 This little robot can hop in zero-gravity to explore asteroids

Time travel could be possible, but only with parallel timelines

Assistant Professor, Physics, Brock University

Disclosure statement

Barak Shoshany does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Brock University provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA-FR.

Brock University provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA.

View all partners

Have you ever made a mistake that you wish you could undo? Correcting past mistakes is one of the reasons we find the concept of time travel so fascinating. As often portrayed in science fiction, with a time machine, nothing is permanent anymore — you can always go back and change it. But is time travel really possible in our universe , or is it just science fiction?

Read more: Curious Kids: is time travel possible for humans?

Our modern understanding of time and causality comes from general relativity . Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein’s theory combines space and time into a single entity — “spacetime” — and provides a remarkably intricate explanation of how they both work, at a level unmatched by any other established theory. This theory has existed for more than 100 years, and has been experimentally verified to extremely high precision, so physicists are fairly certain it provides an accurate description of the causal structure of our universe.

For decades, physicists have been trying to use general relativity to figure out if time travel is possible . It turns out that you can write down equations that describe time travel and are fully compatible and consistent with relativity. But physics is not mathematics, and equations are meaningless if they do not correspond to anything in reality.

Arguments against time travel

There are two main issues which make us think these equations may be unrealistic. The first issue is a practical one: building a time machine seems to require exotic matter , which is matter with negative energy. All the matter we see in our daily lives has positive energy — matter with negative energy is not something you can just find lying around. From quantum mechanics, we know that such matter can theoretically be created, but in too small quantities and for too short times .

However, there is no proof that it is impossible to create exotic matter in sufficient quantities. Furthermore, other equations may be discovered that allow time travel without requiring exotic matter. Therefore, this issue may just be a limitation of our current technology or understanding of quantum mechanics.

The other main issue is less practical, but more significant: it is the observation that time travel seems to contradict logic, in the form of time travel paradoxes . There are several types of such paradoxes, but the most problematic are consistency paradoxes .

A popular trope in science fiction, consistency paradoxes happen whenever there is a certain event that leads to changing the past, but the change itself prevents this event from happening in the first place.

For example, consider a scenario where I enter my time machine, use it to go back in time five minutes, and destroy the machine as soon as I get to the past. Now that I destroyed the time machine, it would be impossible for me to use it five minutes later.

But if I cannot use the time machine, then I cannot go back in time and destroy it. Therefore, it is not destroyed, so I can go back in time and destroy it. In other words, the time machine is destroyed if and only if it is not destroyed. Since it cannot be both destroyed and not destroyed simultaneously, this scenario is inconsistent and paradoxical.

Eliminating the paradoxes

There’s a common misconception in science fiction that paradoxes can be “created.” Time travellers are usually warned not to make significant changes to the past and to avoid meeting their past selves for this exact reason. Examples of this may be found in many time travel movies, such as the Back to the Future trilogy.

But in physics, a paradox is not an event that can actually happen — it is a purely theoretical concept that points towards an inconsistency in the theory itself. In other words, consistency paradoxes don’t merely imply time travel is a dangerous endeavour, they imply it simply cannot be possible.

This was one of the motivations for theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking to formulate his chronology protection conjecture , which states that time travel should be impossible. However, this conjecture so far remains unproven. Furthermore, the universe would be a much more interesting place if instead of eliminating time travel due to paradoxes, we could just eliminate the paradoxes themselves.

One attempt at resolving time travel paradoxes is theoretical physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov’s self-consistency conjecture , which essentially states that you can travel to the past, but you cannot change it.

According to Novikov, if I tried to destroy my time machine five minutes in the past, I would find that it is impossible to do so. The laws of physics would somehow conspire to preserve consistency.

Introducing multiple histories

But what’s the point of going back in time if you cannot change the past? My recent work, together with my students Jacob Hauser and Jared Wogan, shows that there are time travel paradoxes that Novikov’s conjecture cannot resolve. This takes us back to square one, since if even just one paradox cannot be eliminated, time travel remains logically impossible.

So, is this the final nail in the coffin of time travel? Not quite. We showed that allowing for multiple histories (or in more familiar terms, parallel timelines) can resolve the paradoxes that Novikov’s conjecture cannot. In fact, it can resolve any paradox you throw at it.

The idea is very simple. When I exit the time machine, I exit into a different timeline. In that timeline, I can do whatever I want, including destroying the time machine, without changing anything in the original timeline I came from. Since I cannot destroy the time machine in the original timeline, which is the one I actually used to travel back in time, there is no paradox.

After working on time travel paradoxes for the last three years , I have become increasingly convinced that time travel could be possible, but only if our universe can allow multiple histories to coexist. So, can it?

Quantum mechanics certainly seems to imply so, at least if you subscribe to Everett’s “many-worlds” interpretation , where one history can “split” into multiple histories, one for each possible measurement outcome – for example, whether Schrödinger’s cat is alive or dead, or whether or not I arrived in the past.

But these are just speculations. My students and I are currently working on finding a concrete theory of time travel with multiple histories that is fully compatible with general relativity. Of course, even if we manage to find such a theory, this would not be sufficient to prove that time travel is possible, but it would at least mean that time travel is not ruled out by consistency paradoxes.

Time travel and parallel timelines almost always go hand-in-hand in science fiction, but now we have proof that they must go hand-in-hand in real science as well. General relativity and quantum mechanics tell us that time travel might be possible, but if it is, then multiple histories must also be possible.

• Time travel
• Theoretical physics
• Time machine
• Albert Einstein
• Listen to this article
• Time travel paradox

Senior Enrolment Advisor

Associate Professor, Occupational Therapy

GRAINS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION CHAIRPERSON

Faculty of Law - Academic Appointment Opportunities

Audience Development Coordinator (fixed-term maternity cover)

• The Inventory

All the Evidence that Time Travel is Happening All Around Us

This iconic footage of a person apparently talking on a cellphone in a Charlie Chaplin film is just one clue that time travel is happening all around us. People have seen the past, and the future — and there are tons of telltale photographs and films. Here are the clearest signs of real-life time travel.

Related Content

The mouberly-jourdain incident (or the ghosts of petit trianon) in the gardens of the petit trianon, a small château located on the grounds of the palace of versailles, france, august 10, 1901.

Two female academics, Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Anne Moberly allegedly experienced here a time slip, and saw Marie Antoinette, the Comte de Vaudreuil and some other people in the time of the French Revolution.

(via Myrabella and Wikimedia Commons )

An old woman using mobile phone in a short clip from the DVD extras of Charlie Chaplin's film The Circus, 1928, spotted only in 2010 by filmmaker George Clark

It could be a Siemens hearing instrument, patented in 1924 or a Western Electric Model 34A Audiphone Carbon Hearing Aid (pictured below).

And the same explanation for this video from 1938, showing a crowd exiting a factory in Massachusetts, 1938:

(via Hearing Aid Museum )

The time slip of Air Marshal Sir Robert Victor Goddard over the former Royal Air Force station Drem Airfield in 1935

"In 1935, while still a Wing Commander, he was sent to inspect a disused airfield near Edinburgh at a place called Drem. He found it in a very dilapidated state with cattle grazing on grass that had forced through cracks in the tarmac. Later that day, he ran into trouble while flying his biplane in heavy rain and decided to fly back to Drem to get his bearings. As he approached the airfield the torrential rain abruptly changed to bright sunlight. When he looked down he saw the airfield had been completely renovated and was now in use. There were mechanics in blue overalls walking around and four yellow planes parked on the runway. One of these was a model which, for all his aviation experience, he completely failed to recognize." – according to Time Travel: A New Perspective, by J. H. Brennan

Four years later, RAF began to paint their planes yellow and the mechanics uniforms were switched to blue.

(via Planes and Choppers and Scotlands Places )

The man often called Time Traveling Hipster from the reopening ceremony of South Forks Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia, Canada, 1941

That type of sunglasses with leather side shields were used since the 1920s and he's wearing the sweater of a hockey team instead of a modern T-shirt, but it's still a cool photo!

(via Forgetomori )

The Philadelphia Experiment, 1943

There were no such experiments, of course, but some reports stated that U.S. Navy destroyer escort USS Eldrige travelled back in time for about 10 seconds on October 28, 1943.

(via Wikimedia Commons )

Henry Fonda and Shirley Temple checking their stagecoach route on an iPhone in the movie Fort Apache (1948)

We promise that they used Google Maps instead of Apple's Maps app.

The Fentz legend, 1950s

This urban legend is about a man in his early thirties named Rudolph Fentz, who was hit by a taxi and fatally injured at New York City's Time Square in mid-June 1950, dressed in the fashion of the late 1800s. In his pockets there were a copper token for a beer, a bill for the care of a horse and the washing of a carriage, a letter from 1876, 70 dollars and business cards, all without any signs of aging. A NYPD policeman found a person who was disappeared in 1876 in the age of 29.

The story originated in a 1951 sci-fi short story by Jack Finney, but the legend has been reported since the 1970s as an evidence for the existence of time travel.

(via Transpress NZ )

The Mountauk Project conspiration theory

The Montauk Air Force Station reportedly has a real time tunnel in its subterranean laboratory that allowed scientists to travel back to 1943. This story started with two men, the author Preston B. Nichols and Al Bielek in the 1980s, when they had begun to "recover repressed memories of working in the lab".

Time-traveler busted for insider trading, March 2003

The story originated with the Weekly World News, but appeared in some newspapers after Yahoo reprinted it two weeks later:

[…]"The fact is, with an initial investment of only $800, in two weeks' time he had a portfolio valued at over $350 million. Every trade he made capitalized on unexpected business developments, which simply can't be pure luck."

"The only way he could pull it off is with illegal inside information. He's going to sit in a jail cell on Rikers Island until he agrees to give up his sources." The past year of nose-diving stock prices has left most investors crying in their beer. So when Carlssin made a flurry of 126 high-risk trades and came out the winner every time, it raised the eyebrows of Wall Street watchdogs. […] Carlssin declared that he had traveled back in time from over 200 years in the future, when it is common knowledge that our era experienced one of the worst stock plunges in history. Yet anyone armed with knowledge of the handful of stocks destined to go through the roof could make a fortune. "It was just too tempting to resist," Carlssin allegedly said in his videotaped confession. "I had planned to make it look natural, you know, lose a little here and there so it doesn't look too perfect. But I just got caught in the moment." […] – according to a Yahoo Entertainment article, found in the Internet Archive here.

(via Engelcast and Snopes )

The story of John Titor

A man, appeared on some online bulletin boards in 2000 and 2001, and claiming to be a time traveler from 2036. He made numerous predictions about events after 2004 and often described his time machine .

None of those events have happened yet.

(via Stranger Dimensions )

The story of Håkan Nordkvist, who just met with an older version of himself, 2006

Nordkvist slipped through a wormhole in his kitchen and met an older man who had the same tattoo as Håkan. He just knew that no one's going to believe this — so he filmed the encounter.

As everyone later discovered, this was just part of an advertising campaign of the Swedish insurance company AMF, made by Forsman & Bodenfors.

(via Forsman&Bodenfors )

Advertisement

Do you believe in time travel? I’m a skeptic myself — but if these people’s stories about time travel are to be believed, then I am apparently wrong. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll have to eat my words. In all honesty, that might not be so bad — because the tradeoff for being wrong in that case would be that time travel is real . That would be pretty rad if it were true.

Technically speaking time travel does exist right now — just not in the sci fi kind of way you’re probably thinking. According to a TED-Ed video by Colin Stuart, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev actually traveled 0.02 seconds into his own future due to time dilation during the time he spent on the International Space Station. For the curious, Krikalev has spent a total of 803 days, nine hours, and 39 minutes in space over the course of his career.

That said, though, many are convinced that time dilation isn’t the only kind of time travel that’s possible; some folks do also believe in time travel as depicted by everything from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine to Back to the Future . It’s difficult to find stories online that are actual accounts from real people — many of them are either urban legends ( hi there, Philadelphia Experiment ) or stories that center around people that I’ve been unable to verify actually exist — but if you dig hard enough, sincere accounts can be found.

Are the stories true? Are they false? Are they examples of people who believe with all their heart that they’re true, even if they might not actually be? You be the judge. These seven tales are all excellent yarns, at any rate.

The Moberly–Jourdain Incident

In 1901, two Englishwomen, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain , took a vacation to France. While they were there, they visited the Palace of Versailles (because, y’know, that’s what one does when one visits France ). And while they were at Versailles, they visited what’s known as the Petit Trianon — a little chateau on the palace grounds that Louis XVI gave to Marie Antoinette as a private space for her to hang out and do whatever it was that a teenaged queen did when she was relaxing back then.

But while they were there, they claimed, they saw some… odd occurrences. They said they spotted people wearing anachronistic clothing, heard mysterious voices, and saw buildings and other structures that were no longer present — and, indeed, hadn’t existed since the late 1700s. Finally, they said, they caught sight of Marie Antoinette herself , drawing in a sketchbook.

They claimed to have fallen into a “time slip” and been briefly transported back more than 100 years before being jolted back to the present by a tour guide.

Did they really travel back in time? Probably not; various explanations include everything from a folie a deux (basically a joint delusion) to a simple misinterpretation of what they actually saw. But for what it’s worth, in 1911 — roughly 10 years after what they said they had experienced occurred — the two women published a book about the whole thing under the names Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont simply called An Adventure. These days, it’s available as The Ghosts of Trianon ; check it out, if you like.

The Mystery Of John Titor

John Titor is perhaps the most famous person who claims he’s time traveled; trouble is, no one has heard from him for almost 17 years. Also, he claimed he came from the future.

The story is long and involved, but the short version is this: In a thread begun in the fall of 2000 about time travel paradoxes on the online forum the Time Travel Institute — now known as Curious Cosmos — a user responded to a comment about how a time machine could theoretically be built with the following message:

“Wow! Paul is right on the money. I was just about to give up hope on anyone knowing who Tipler or Kerr was on this worldline.

“By the way, #2 is the correct answer and the basics for time travel start at CERN in about a year and end in 2034 with the first ‘time machine’ built by GE. Too bad we can’t post pictures or I’d show it to you.”

The implication, of course, was that the user, who was going by the name TimeTravel_0, came from a point in the future during which such a machine had already been invented.

Over the course of many messages spanning from that first thread all the way through the early spring of 2001, the user, who became known as John Titor, told his story. He said that he had been sent back to 1975 in order to bring an IBM 5100 computer to his own time; he was just stopping in 2000 for a brief rest on his way back home. The computer, he said, was needed to debug “various legacy computer programs in 2036” in order to combat a known problem similar to Y2K called the Year 2038 Problem . (John didn’t refer to it as such, but he said that UNIX was going to have an issue in 2038 — which is what we thought was going to happen back when the calendar ticked over from 1999 to 2000.)

Opinions are divided on whether John Titor was real ; some folks think he was the only real example of time travel we’ve ever seen, while others think it’s one of the most enduring hoaxes we’ve ever seen. I fall on the side of hoax, but that’s just me.

Project Pegasus And The Chrononauts

In 2011, Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings stepped forward, claiming that they were former “chrononauts” who had worked with an alleged DARPA program called Project Pegasus. Project Pegasus, they said, had been developed in the 1970s; in 1980, they were taking a “Mars training class” at a community college in California (the college presumably functioning as a cover for the alleged program) when they were picked to go to Mars. The mode of transport? Teleportation.

It gets better, too. Basiago and Stillings also said that the then- 19-year-old Barack Obama , whom they claimed was going by the name “Barry Soetero” at the time, was also one of the students chosen to go to Mars. They said the teleportation occurred via something called a “jump room.”

The White House has denied that Obama has ever been to Mars . “Only if you count watching Marvin the Martian,” Tommy Vietor, then the spokesman for the National Security Council, told Wired’s Danger Room in 2012.

Victor Goddard’s Airfield Time Slip

Like Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, senior Royal Air Force commander Sir Robert Victor Goddard — widely known as Victor Goddard — claimed to have experienced a time slip.

In 1935, Goddard flew over what had been the RAF station Drem in Scotland on his way from Edinburgh to Andover, England. The Drem station was no longer in use; after demobilization efforts following WWI, it had mostly been left to its own devices. And, indeed, that’s what Goddard said he saw as he flew over it: A largely abandoned airfield.

On his return trip, though, things got… weird. He followed the same route he had on the way there, but during the flight, he got waylaid by a storm. As he struggled to regain control of his plane, however, he spotted the Drem airfield through a break in the clouds — and when he got closer to it, the bad weather suddenly dissipated. But the airfield… wasn’t abandoned this time. It was busy, with several planes on the runway and mechanics scurrying about.

Within seconds, though, the storm reappeared, and Goddard had to fight to keep his plane aloft again. He made it home just fine, and went on to live another 50 years — but the incident stuck with him; indeed, in 1975, he wrote a book called Flight Towards Reality which included discussion of the whole thing.

Here’s the really weird bit: In 1939, the Drem airfield was brought back to life. Did Goddard see a peek into the airfield's future via a time slip back in 1935? Who knows.

Space Barbie

I’ll be honest: I’m not totally sure what to do with thisone — but I’ll present it to you here, and then you can decide for yourself what you think about it. Here it is:

Valeria Lukyanova has made a name for herself as a “human Barbie doll” (who also has kind of scary opinions about some things ) — but a 2012 short documentary for Vice’s My Life Online series also posits that she believes she’s a time traveling space alien whose purpose on Earth is to aid us in moving “from the role of the ‘human consumer’ to the role of ‘human demi-god.’”

What I can’t quite figure out is whether this whole time traveling space alien thing is, like a piece of performance art created specifically for this Vice doc, or whether it’s what she actually thinks. I don’t believe she’s referenced it in many (or maybe even any) other interviews she’s given; the items I’ve found discussing Lukyanova and time travel specifically all point back to this video.

But, well… do with it all as you will. That’s the documentary up there; give it a watch and see what you think.

The Hipster Time Traveler

In the early 2010s, a photograph depicting the 1941 reopening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia in Canada went viral for seemingly depicting a man that looked… just a bit too modern to have been photographed in 1941. He looks, in fact, like a time traveling hipster : Graphic t-shirt, textured sweater, sunglasses, the works. The photo hadn’t been manipulated; the original can be seen here . So what the heck was going on?

Well, Snopes has plenty of reasonable explanations for the man’s appearance; each item he’s wearing, for example, could very easily have been acquired in 1941. Others have also backed up those facts. But the bottom line is that it’s never been definitively debunked, so the idea that this photograph could depict a man from our time who had traveled back to 1941 persists. What do you think?

Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor

According to two at least two books — Catholic priest Father Francois Brune’s 2002 book Le nouveau mystère du Vatican (in English, The Vatican’s New Mystery ) and Peter Krassa’s 2000 book Father Ernetti's Chronovisor : The Creation and Disappearance of the World's First Time Machine — Father Pellegrino Ernetti, who was a Catholic priest like Brune, invented a machine called a “chronovisor” that allowed him to view the past. Ernetti was real; however, the existence of the machine, or even whether he actually claimed to have invented it, has never been proven. Alas, he died in 1994, so we can’t ask him, either. I mean, if we were ever able to find his chronovisor, maybe we could… but at that point, wouldn’t we already have the information we need?

(I’m extremely skeptical of this story, by the way, but both Brune’s and Krassa’s books swear up, down, left, and right that it’s true, so…you be the judge.)

Although I'm fairly certain that these accounts and stories are either misinterpreted information or straight-up falsehoods, they're still entertaining to read about; after all, if you had access to a time machine, wouldn't you at least want to take it for a spin? Here's hoping that one day, science takes the idea from theory to reality. It's a big ol' universe out there.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Declassified documents reveal CIA has been sweeping up information on Americans

Civil liberties watchdogs condemn agency’s collection of domestic data without congressional or court approval or oversight

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been secretly collecting Americans’ private information in bulk, according to newly declassified documents that prompted condemnation from civil liberties watchdogs.

The surveillance program was exposed on Thursday by two Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico alleged that the CIA has long concealed it from the public and Congress.

The pair sent a letter to top intelligence officials arguing that the program operates “outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection”.

Wyden and Heinrich added: “It is critical that Congress not legislate without awareness of a … CIA program, and that the American public not be misled into believe that the reforms in any reauthorization legislation fully cover the IC’s collection of their records.”

The two senators, frequent critics of the CIA, said they are not allowed to reveal specifics about what type of data has been subject to bulk collection and called for more details about the program to be declassified.

Large parts of the letter, which was sent in April 2021 and declassified on Thursday, and documents released by the CIA were blacked out.

The CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) have a foreign mission and are generally barred from investigating Americans or US businesses. But the spy agencies’ sprawling collection of foreign communications often snares Americans’ messages and data incidentally.

The senators’ disclosure triggered fresh concerns about privacy protections. Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “These reports raise serious questions about the kinds of information the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans.

“The CIA conducts these sweeping surveillance activities without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress.”

Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, wrote on Twitter: “You are about to witness an enormous political debate in which the spy agencies and their apologists on TV tell you this is normal and OK and the CIA doesn’t know how many Americans are in the database or even how they got there anyway. But it is not ok.”

And Justin Amash, a former Republican congressman, tweeted: “Rogue agencies like the NSA, FBI, and CIA are a more serious threat to liberty in America than the enemies they claim to protect us from.”

There have long been concerns about what information the intelligence community collects domestically, driven in part by previous violations of Americans’ civil liberties. The FBI secretly recorded the conversations of Martin Luther King; the CIA investigated whether the anti-Vietnam war movement had links to foreign countries.

On Thursday the CIA released a series of redacted recommendations about the program issued by an oversight panel known as the privacy and civil liberties oversight board. According to the document, a pop-up box warns CIA analysts using the program that seeking any information about US citizens or others covered by privacy laws requires a foreign intelligence purpose.

Additional documents released by the CIA revealed limited details about a program to collect financial data against the Islamic State terrorist group. That program also has incidentally snared some records held by Americans.

Kristi Scott, the agency’s privacy and civil liberties officer, said in a statement: “CIA recognizes and takes very seriously our obligation to respect the privacy and civil liberties of US persons in the conduct of our vital national security mission. CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.”

Intelligence agencies are required to take steps to protect US information, including redacting the names of any Americans from reports unless they are deemed relevant to an investigation. The process of removing redactions is known as “unmasking.”

Wyden and Heinrich have previously pushed for more transparency. Nearly a decade ago, a question Wyden posed to America’s spy chief presaged Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s mass surveillance programs.

In 2013 Wyden asked then-national intelligence director James Clapper if the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper initially responded, “No.” He later said, “Not wittingly.”

Later that year Snowden revealed the NSA’s access to bulk data through US internet companies and hundreds of millions of call records from telecommunications providers. Reports in the Guardian and Washington Post generated worldwide controversy and new legislation in Congress.

Clapper would later apologise in a letter to the Senate intelligence committee, admitting that his response to Wyden was “clearly erroneous”.

• Surveillance

Most viewed

Seattle Attorney Andrew Basiago Claims U.S. Sent Him On Time Travels (VIDEO)

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

A lot of people have a hard time trusting lawyers as it is, but what about one who claims he was part of a secret government time travel program when he was a kid?

Since 2004, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been publicly claiming that from the time he was 7 to when he was 12, he participated in "Project Pegasus," a secret U.S. government program that he says worked on teleportation and time travel under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

"They trained children along with adults so they could test the mental and physical effects of time travel on kids," Basiago told The Huffington Post. "Also, children had an advantage over adults in terms of adapting to the strains of moving between past, present and future."

Skeptical? You're not alone. Hong Kong physicist Shengwang Du issued a paper last year saying time travel is impossible, because nothing moves faster than the speed of light, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Nevertheless, Basiago's claim gets support from Alfred Webre, a lawyer specializing in "exopolitics," or the political implications surrounding an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Webre said teleportation and time travel have been around for 40 years, but are hoarded by the Defense Department instead of being used to transfer goods and services faraway distances.

"It's an inexpensive, environmentally friendly means of transportation," Webre told The Huffington Post. "The Defense Department has had it for 40 years and [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld used it to transport troops to battle."

Basiago said he experienced eight different time travel technologies during his stint in the program. Mostly, he said, his travel involved a teleporter based on technical papers supposedly found in pioneering mechanical engineer Nikola Tesla's New York City apartment after his death in January 1943.

"The machine consisted of two gray elliptical booms about eight feet tall, separated by about 10 feet, between which a shimmering curtain of what Tesla called 'radiant energy' was broadcast," Basiago said. "Radiant energy is a form of energy that Tesla discovered that is latent and pervasive in the universe and has among its properties the capacity to bend time-space."

Basiago said project participants would jump through this field of radiant energy into a vortal tunnel and "when the tunnel closed, we found ourselves at our destination."

"One felt either as if one was moving at a great rate of speed or moving not at all, as the universe was wrapped around one's location," Basiago said.

Basiago claimed he can be seen in a photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863, which he said he visited in 1972 via a plasma confinement chamber located in East Hanover, N.J.

"I had been dressed in period clothing, as a Union bugle boy," he said. "I attracted so much attention at the Lincoln speech site at Gettysburg -- wearing over-sized men's street shoes -- that I left the area around the dais and walked about 100 paces over to where I was photographed in the Josephine Cogg image of Lincoln at Gettysburg." (The boy on the left in the photo below).

In addition, Basiago said he traveled to Ford's Theatre the night of Lincoln's assassination on five or six occasions. "I did not, however, witness the assassination," he said. "Once, I was on the theater level when he was shot and I heard the shot followed by a great commotion that arose from the crowd. It was terrible to hear."

Basiago said each of his visits to the past was different, "like they were sending us to slightly different alternative realities on adjacent timelines. As these visits began to accumulate, I twice ran into myself during two different visits."

Being sent back in time to the same place and moment, but from different starting points in the present, allowed two of himselves to be in Ford's Theatre at the same time in 1865.

"After the first of these two encounters with myself occurred, I was concerned that my cover might be blown," he recalled. "Unlike the jump to Gettysburg, in which I was clutching a letter to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles to offer me aid and assistance in the event I was arrested, I didn't have any explanatory materials when I was sent to Ford's Theatre."

And how did these alleged time travelers return to the present day or their point of origin? According to Basiago, some sort of holographic technology allowed them to travel both physically and virtually.

"If we were in the hologram for 15 minutes or fewer," he explained, "the hologram would collapse, and after about 60 seconds of standing in a field of super-charged particles ... we would find ourselves back on the stage ... in the present."

Basiago said the technology should only be used for real-time teleportation, not time travel, because, "It would be chaos."

Basiago and Webre recently held a seminar in Vancouver, B.C., focusing on the need to disclose, deploy and declassify the technology, as well as the public policy decisions that would be needed to use it.

Webre, for one, said he wants teleports installed in every major city where people and products would be transported through the time-space continuum. "This would free up a lot of urban space that is currently being used by train yards or airports," Webre said.

Of course, there are risks. Basiago remembered feeling extreme turbulence while going through the vortal time tunnel. Webre said one tragedy occurred in the early days of the technology in which a child in Project Pegasus arrived a few seconds before his legs.

"He was writhing in pain with just stumps where his legs had been," Webre said.

Webre said problems like that have since been solved. Still, he said teleportation needs strict legal controls to prevent it being used for "for political control, economic control or illegal surveillance."

All of this is fascinating stuff -- if true. But experts who include retired Army Col. John Alexander, former director for the Advanced System Concepts Office, U.S. Army Laboratory Command, are, to put it mildly, skeptical.

"If this could be done, if anyone could go even one second into the future, we'd own the world," Alexander told The Huffington Post. "There are computer programs on Wall Street that are hundredths of a second faster and provide a tremendous advantage."

Basiago said that as many as 100 people worked on Project Pegasus. Alexander said he doubts that many people could keep the secret for 40 minutes, much less 40 years.

"There's a saying in Washington: If two people know something, it's not a secret," said Alexander, author of "UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities." "If this was used by the Department of Defense, how did we miss the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the fall of the Shah of Iran?"

Basiago said Alexander's rhetorical questions can be explained by the paradoxes of the time-space continuum.

"I only know about how the time travel technology was used during my involvement with Project Pegasus, so this is only speculation," he said. "But it's possible that 'forward intelligence' showed [Iraq leader Saddam] Hussein using the weapons of mass destruction, but our military went in and toppled him before he could use them."

Support HuffPost

Our 2024 coverage needs you, your loyalty means the world to us.

At HuffPost, we believe that everyone needs high-quality journalism, but we understand that not everyone can afford to pay for expensive news subscriptions. That is why we are committed to providing deeply reported, carefully fact-checked news that is freely accessible to everyone.

Whether you come to HuffPost for updates on the 2024 presidential race, hard-hitting investigations into critical issues facing our country today, or trending stories that make you laugh, we appreciate you. The truth is, news costs money to produce, and we are proud that we have never put our stories behind an expensive paywall.

Would you join us to help keep our stories free for all? Your contribution of as little as $2 will go a long way.

Can't afford to donate? Support HuffPost by creating a free account and log in while you read.

As Americans head to the polls in 2024, the very future of our country is at stake. At HuffPost, we believe that a free press is critical to creating well-informed voters. That's why our journalism is free for everyone, even though other newsrooms retreat behind expensive paywalls.

Our journalists will continue to cover the twists and turns during this historic presidential election. With your help, we'll bring you hard-hitting investigations, well-researched analysis and timely takes you can't find elsewhere. Reporting in this current political climate is a responsibility we do not take lightly, and we thank you for your support.

Contribute as little as $2 to keep our news free for all.

Dear HuffPost Reader

Thank you for your past contribution to HuffPost. We are sincerely grateful for readers like you who help us ensure that we can keep our journalism free for everyone.

The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support. Would you consider becoming a regular HuffPost contributor?

The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support. If circumstances have changed since you last contributed, we hope you’ll consider contributing to HuffPost once more.

Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.

Before You Go

Popular in the community, from our partner, more in weird news.

We have emailed you a PDF version of the article you requested.

Can't find the email?

Please check your spam or junk folder

You can also add [email protected] to your safe senders list to ensure you never miss a message from us.

In 1983, The CIA Wrote A Bizarre Report About Transcending Spacetime With Your Mind

Complete the form below and we will email you a PDF version

Cancel and go back

IFLScience needs the contact information you provide to us to contact you about our products and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

For information on how to unsubscribe, as well as our privacy practices and commitment to protecting your privacy, check out our Privacy Policy

Complete the form below to listen to the audio version of this article

Advertisement

Sign up today to get weekly science coverage direct to your inbox

© 2024 IFLScience. All Rights Reserved

Newsletters  in your inbox!

Subscribe today for our  Weekly Newsletter  in your inbox!

Senior Journalist

Tom is a writer in London with a Master's degree in Journalism whose editorial work covers anything from health and the environment to technology and archaeology.

Book View full profile

Book Read IFLScience Editorial Policy

DOWNLOAD PDF VERSION

Remember, kids: the part encodes the whole. Image credit: Zelenov Iurii/Shutterstock.com

Back in 1983, the CIA wrote an obscure report looking to the "Gateway Experience," claiming that an altered state of human consciousness may be able to transcend space and time. Decades on, the document has since been declassified and is now experiencing a resurgence on social media.  However, despite what you saw on TikTok and YouTube, the document doesn’t provide proof of the “Law of Attraction,” nor does it reveal the benefits of sending “good vibes” out to the universe.

The 29-page document – titled " Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process "  – was declassified in 2003. It’s thought the report was part of the CIA’s wider investigation into whether concepts of mind control and hypnosis could be used in the espionage efforts of the Cold War.  It’s an intensely wordy and dense report that touches on everything from neuroscience to quantum mechanics, wavering between hard science and pseudoscience as if wobbling between the two on a tightrope. It essentially boils down to the CIA investigating the idea of inducing a profound out-of-body experience that could possibly tune into some kind of higher realm beyond reality. 

“Fundamentally, the Gateway experience is a training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness, moving it outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of time and space,” the report reads. 

The technique, called the Gateway Process, is based on ideas developed by the Monroe Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on the exploration of human consciousness. The theory is that certain exercises can allow the brain to “hemi-sync”, whereby brain waves in the right and left hemispheres synchronize at the same frequency and amplitude. Hemi-sync, the report argues, can be achieved through a series of meditation-like exercises while listening to a set bunch of soundwaves, known as the Gateway Tapes.

As per the report, the universe is a complex system of “interacting energy fields” in which states are simply variations in energy. Human consciousness is no different, it’s just a vibrational pattern of energy. Once hemi-sync is achieved, the report says, it can trigger an altered state of consciousness in which the vibration of a person’s consciousness is free from physical reality and tunes into this pure energy field. 

Drawing on ideas of quantum entanglement, the report claims it may be possible for human consciousness to profoundly alter the universe since reality is holographic projection; the part encodes the whole. In this understanding of reality, everything is deeply connected in a matrix of interconnected energy vibrations, from your consciousness to the depths of the universe. 

"This consciousness participates in the all-knowing infinite continuum of consciousness which is a characteristic of energy in the ever present," continues the report. "Consequently, it is accurate to observe that when a person experiences the out-of-body state he is, in fact, projecting that eternal spark of consciousness and memory which constitutes the ultimate source of his identity to let it play in and learn from dimensions both inside and outside the time-space world in which his physical component currently enjoys a short period of reality."

Some readers of the report have dug into this idea deeper and taken it as proof of the law of attraction – the philosophy that positive thoughts bring positive results into a person's life, while negative thoughts bring negative outcomes. 

So, what to make of all this? No doubt, the document makes for an interesting read, but it shouldn’t be treated as scientific, despite the scientific language and concept it draws influence on. Many of the ideas in the report are drawn from real scientific research, but when pieced all together, they aren’t testable. There's also a lot of questionable theories and leaps of logic chucked into the mix.

But hey, don’t let us stop you on your journey to the realm beyond this reality.

ARTICLE POSTED IN

Is Orange Cat Behavior A Real Thing?

Ligers V Tigons: What's The Difference?

The Pentagon Has Released Several Videos Of Unexplained Anomalous Phenomena

Jimmy Carter’s Colombia Blacklist Revealed

First Lady Rosalynn Carter meets with President Alfonso López Michelsen of Colombia, June 10, 1977. Mrs. Carter was the first in a series of presidential emissaries to deliver a tough message to López on drug corruption in the Colombian government. (U.S. National Archives)

National Security Archive Publishes “Ultra Secret” 1977 Narco Dossier for First Time

“Unprecedented” Intelligence Briefing for Colombian President Detailed Corruption Among Top Officials

Carter to Staff: “Do not send helicopters - Give me CIA info”

Washington, D.C., April 15, 2024 – A highly sensitive blacklist of allegedly corrupt Colombian officials assembled by the U.S. government and presented to Colombian President Alfonso López Michelsen in July 1977 as a way of gaining leverage over Colombian drug policy is the focus of a new Electronic Briefing Book published today by the National Security Archive. Located among records from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, the full text of the secret intelligence dossier, including the names of some three dozen officials believed to have ties to the drug trade, is published here today for the first time.

James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, who will be one hundred years old in October, is known around the world as the president who negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel, reached a major arms control agreement with the Soviet Union, signed the Panama Canal treaty, faced daunting foreign policy challenges in Iran and Afghanistan, and who has engaged in numerous acts of charity and goodwill in the 43 years since he left office. Less well known is President Carter’s personal involvement—and that of his wife, First Lady Rosalynn Carter—in for the first time focusing U.S. policy toward Colombia on narcotrafficking and its corrupting influence among government officials, an issue that would come to define the relationship.

The episode culminated in Carter’s authorization of what the CIA called an “unprecedented” briefing for President López in which he was presented with a dossier of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement information that linked “ministerial and judicial officials, military and law enforcement personnel, and other high-level figures” to the drug trade.

Key officials named in the document include the defense minister, Gen. Abraham Varón Valencia, the minister of labor, Óscar Montoya Montoya, and Col. Humberto Cardona Orozco, then the head of INDUMIL, a military weapons manufacturer run by the Colombian government (See Document 29 ). The most serious allegations—those against Varón, Montoya and presidential candidate Julio César Turbay, who became president later that year—were revealed in an April 1978 broadcast of the CBS television show 60 Minutes , which had obtained a copy of a June 1977 White House memo sent to President Carter by Peter Bourne, his chief narcotics adviser. Bourne had urged Carter to hold up the sale of three military helicopters to Colombia and attached a one-page summary of Colombian officials believed to be involved in cocaine trafficking, which was the focus of the 60 Minutes report. (See Document 11 ).

While a number of key documents from the episode have been declassified previously, including in the State Department’s 2018 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volume , today’s posting features several top-level documents from the Carter White House that have never before been published, including frank policy recommendations from key advisers. Some of the memos bear President Carter’s own handwritten annotations advocating for tougher drug policies and a more confrontational approach on corruption. These include the extraordinary decision to assemble and deliver an intelligence briefing to the Colombian president. [1]

Some of these records were part of the Remote Archives Capture (RAC) program at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. The RAC was a security review activity dating back to 1995 during which the CIA, National Archives, and other U.S. agencies scanned hundreds of thousands of records from Presidential Libraries for sensitive material and, in many cases, provided declassified copies. The Carter RAC files were later obtained in bulk by the National Security Archive when the Carter Library made a large tranche available in digital form.

More than 2,500 additional high-level memos from the Carter White House, mined from the RAC collection, are now available in U.S. Foreign Policy in the Carter Years, 1977-1981: Highest-Level Memos to the President , the most recent collection added to the Digital National Security Archive series from ProQuest, part of Clarivate.

Highlights from today’s posting include:

• The full text of the long-secret intelligence dossier delivered to President López by three top U.S. officials on July 21, 1977. ( Document 29 )
• President Carter’s handwritten annotation on White House drug adviser Bourne’s memo recommending linking the delivery of promised military helicopters to corruption: “Do not send helicopters - Give me CIA info.” ( Document 13 )
• White House drug adviser Peter Bourne’s briefing memo for Rosalynn Carter’s meeting with the Colombian president, including a one-page summary of “Colombian Officials Allegedly Profiting from Cocaine Traffic” that months later would be leaked to members of the international news media. ( Document 11 )
• A State Department memo citing the “possible narcotrafficking activities” of Alfonso López Caballero, the son of President López, who went on to have a long career as a diplomat and policymaker and to hold top positions in a number of Colombian presidential administrations, serving most recently as ambassador to Russia from 2016-2022. ( Document 35 )
• A memo from NSC Latin America specialist Robert Pastor indicating that “the President was so much stronger” than his staff on the Colombian corruption issue and was the person who most wanted to include the names of corrupt Colombian government Cabinet officials in his letter to López. Carter himself said “that it was curious that he should be bolder than his advisors,” according to Pastor. ( Document 25 )
• U.S. Embassy speculation that Defense Minister Varón “may decide to be especially helpful and cooperative in [narcotics] matters in order to help disprove the allegations against him” in the narco dossier. ( Document 37 )
• Chargé d’affaires Robert Drexler’s cable complaining that the López government had done the “bare, protocolary minimum in hosting Mrs. Carter’s visit” in June 1977, treating it as a “ladies-only social event.” ( Document 10 )

U.S. concern about high-level drug corruption in Colombia emerged early in the Carter administration, and a key moment occurred in late April 1977 when the President was apprised of intelligence on the rapidly increasing pace of Colombian cocaine smuggling. Carter’s response, according to National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s April 27 memo to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, was that the U.S. “should raise this officially and strongly with the Colombian Government.” ( Document 4 )

President Carter’s reaction set off a chain of events that after several months of preparations resulted in what the CIA said was an “unprecedented” high-level intelligence briefing in which the U.S. confronted the Colombian president, Alfonso López Michelsen, with information linking top Colombian officials—including two of his cabinet members, a leading presidential candidate, and ranking members of the security forces—to drug trafficking. ( Document 29 )

Revealed here for the first time, the long-hidden memo is a summary of information acquired by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement sources on narcotics corruption in the Colombian government and seems to address the Colombian president personally. [2] López is told that narcotics traffickers and their operations “are greatly facilitated by the cooperation and protection of influential Colombian officials” and that “further investigation by your Government would most valuable,” especially in cases of “high-level figures.”

The document lists some three dozen Colombian officials thought to have links to the illegal narcotics business, including prominent figures from political, judicial, law enforcement and military circles. The most well known person on the list, Julio César Turbay, who would go on to win the next election and serve as president from 1978-1982, is linked to narcotrafficking through his nephew, Anibal Turbay Bernal, who the report says is linked to narcotics traffickers who believed they would “be able to choose the heads of the Colombian law enforcement agencies should Julio Cesar Turbay become president.”

Top Colombian officials named in the report include two members of López’s cabinet: the Colombian defense minister, Gen. Abraham Varón Valencia, who the report says had “received narcotics and contraband payoffs,” and the minister of labor, Óscar Montoya Montoya, who is said to “have discussed illicit traffic in cocaine and coffee” with a known narcotics trafficker. Another key military official singled out in the report is Col. Humberto Cardona Orozco, then the head of INDUMIL, a military weapons manufacturer run by the Colombian government, a position that “lent itself to narcotics-related corruption,” according to the intelligence briefing. The former police intelligence chief in Cali, Capt. Harold Lozano Jaramillo, is said to be “operating a [cocaine] laboratory in his residence in Cali,” among other charges. The briefing also says that the former chief of the National Police, Gen. Henry García Bohórquez, used “his influence to facilitate the activities of several important Colombian narcotics traffickers.”

While some of the information in the dossier is derived from DEA investigations, other information would have come by way of the CIA, explaining why one of the Agency’s top officials for Latin America, Lawrence "Larry" Laser, participated in the López briefing. In a later interview, Robert Drexler, the Chargé d’affaires who led the U.S. Embassy during much of this period, described an early CIA counternarcotics operation that relied on “a very small number of trusted Colombian law enforcement officials” who the U.S. “could monitor closely” and through which the U.S. “collected intelligence on the contacts between the drug traffickers and high-level Colombian officials.” The intelligence was “horrifying,” Drexler recalled in an oral history interview with the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, “because it detailed the rapid spread of corruption.”

Whatever its exact origin, the alarming intelligence that sparked Carter’s heightened interest in Colombian corruption arrived at a transitional time for the U.S. Embassy in Colombia, amid what Drexler describes as a chaotic Embassy environment and growing diplomatic tensions over the naming of a new U.S. ambassador.

The previous ambassador, Philip Sanchez, who was appointed by President Gerald Ford, left the post on April 5, leaving Drexler in charge of the embassy. Sanchez, a Republican political appointee, was “a disaster” who “did virtually nothing,” according to Drexler. “[W]hile we could not get our act together, the Medellin Cartel did get its own act together.” The budding narcotics syndicate had begun to acquire “sophisticated equipment, planes, telecommunications, money, organization, and made better use of Colombian officials for their purposes than we could for ours,” Drexler recalled of his time working under Sanchez. On top of that, Sanchez had simply assumed that Carter, as the new president, “would keep him on because he was a Latin.” Drexler said that Sanchez “finally had to be ordered out of Bogota” by the State Department. Meanwhile, narcotraffickers grew in strength, numbers, and capabilities. “[A]s we got into 1977, they were well advanced in the cartelization of the supply side, and we were way behind in even recognizing, to say nothing of meeting[,] the problem.”

Carter’s first replacement for Sanchez, José A. Cabranes, a political appointee with personal ties to Secretary of State Vance, was “another slap in the face” to López, who for months refused to issue him credentials, and by the time he finally did so, Cabranes had withdrawn himself from consideration. It was thus left to Drexler, as Chargé d’affaires, to run the U.S. Embassy, as he put it, “for about 10 months in 1977” during “a formative period for the drug cartels.” As the ranking official, Drexler was a participant, notetaker and eyewitness as the Carter administration’s emissaries attempted to gain Colombia’s cooperation in narcotics enforcement by pressuring the Colombian president to clean house. [3]

Carter’s hands-on approach to López during this tumultuous time combined an apparent gesture of goodwill—Carter was sharing highly sensitive information from U.S. narcotics investigations with the Colombian president—with an intimidating show of strength—the U.S. was building law enforcement dossiers on corrupt officials in the López government. The Carter administration made clear that U.S. cooperation on other issues important to Colombia—the delivery of promised military helicopters; a favorable U.S. decision over disputed Caribbean islands—was contingent on the U.S. receiving assurances from López that Colombia was serious about taking on drugs.

Just as unprecedented as the presidential intelligence briefing was the role of First Lady Rosalynn Carter in setting the stage for the President’s confrontational approach to drug corruption in Colombia. The idea of employing Mrs. Carter to deliver a “substantive” message to López during her seven-country tour of Latin America in June 1977 seemed to surprise the Colombians during preparations for her visit, irking Drexler, who, in a cable to Washington, accused the López government of doing the “bare, protocolary minimum” for the First Lady’s planned stop in Bogotá and for treating her visit it as a “ladies-only social event.” ( Document 10 )

In fact, Mrs. Carter’s talks with López covered a wide range of policy issues, including nuclear nonproliferation, the Panama Canal treaty negotiations, U.S. relations with Cuba, and a new U.S. approach to foreign relations, emphasized by President Carter, that for the first time made human rights a factor in national security policymaking. ( Document 15 )

But her most important message to the Colombian president was about the alarmingly widespread nature of drug-related corruption at senior levels of the Colombian government and the need for López to act if he wanted to improve U.S.-Colombia counternarcotics cooperation. Mrs. Carter encouraged López to meet the following month with the head of the White House drug control office, Peter Bourne, and Mathea Falco, the State Department’s senior narcotics official, to discuss the matter further. It’s not clear from the available U.S. records whether Mrs. Carter mentioned—as López later claimed—that the U.S. emissaries would deliver him a dossier on narcotics corruption. The available evidence suggests not. [4] In any case, it is clear that corruption was a central focus of her meeting with the Colombian president, and that she told López to expect a more detailed briefing from the President’s emissaries soon.

Coming in the first few months of the Carter administration, the First Lady’s visit set the stage for a transformative period in U.S.-Colombia relations, as the new U.S. focus on human rights coincided with increasing U.S. pressure for Colombia to crack down on drug trafficking and narcotics-related corruption. But while Colombia’s human rights record at the time looked pretty good compared to some other countries, reports of widespread narcotics-related corruption in Bogotá made it necessary, in Carter’s view, to extract certain commitments from the Colombian president before the security relationship could resume.

At the time, the focus for Colombia was on three military helicopters promised by President Ford but held up by Carter as his administration reviewed the appropriateness of U.S. security commitments around the world. Narcotics had not been an important issue in U.S.-Colombia relations during the Ford administration, though the two countries did reach an initial agreement for the U.S. to provide the helicopters with the expectation that they would help Colombia find and destroy narcotics-related sites.

In a September 1975 meeting with Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, it was President López who brought up the subject of narcotics, lamenting how The New York Times had “blamed us” for the narcotics problem, while admitting that, “because of our situation, we are the center of traffic.” He said that Colombia was a “small country” that had been “invaded by people with and without passports, by planes, boats, etc.” and that were “heavily financed from within the U.S.” Throughout that year, the Times had published a four-part series on the international drug trade with Colombia as a primary focal point. [5]

“We don’t have the materials to fight back,” López said, leading Ford to ask, “How can we help?” The Colombian president did not hesitate: “We could use technology and economic help. We could use helicopters to find where the planes land. We catch them all the time.” Previous anti-narcotics aid had been too little, López said, noting that $900,000 from the U.S. was nothing compared to millions of dollars in bribes handed out by the traffickers. “The drug operators are worldwide,” said López. “You can’t deal with the problem by just dealing with it in the U.S.” ( Document 1 ) The next day, Ford told López that there would be $1.3 million in narcotics aid to Colombia in 1976, which he called “a huge increase,” and that his administration would also “look into the purchase of helicopters if necessary.” ( Document 2 )

Records from the first months of the Carter administration reveal that Carter took an active role in the initial decision to hold up delivery of the helicopters until they were confident that the Colombian government would crack down on corruption. Documents found in the RAC collection indicate that the issue came to a head during the first week of June and that Bourne, in particular, helped push the President to strike a more confrontational posture. Bourne’s June 2 memo to the President on “Cocaine trafficking in Colombia” provided talking points on the matter for the First Lady’s upcoming meeting with President López and pleaded with Carter to use the helicopter issue, “one of the only points of leverage we have,” lamenting that, “Some people at the State Department are willing to just give them the helicopters to avoid conflict.” Attached to Bourne’s memo was a one-page summary of “Colombian Officials Allegedly Profiting from Cocaine Traffic.” In the margins Bourne’s memo, Carter wrote: “Do not send helicopters - Give me CIA info.” ( Document 13 ) Around the same time, on June 3, the President asked the CIA director “if the Columbians [sic] were using the helicopters we gave them to run drugs,” according to a June 10, 1977, memo from Sayre Stevens, the Deputy Director for Intelligence at the CIA. [6] ( Document 16 )

The First Lady thus arrived in Colombia just as the Carter administration’s new tougher approach to Colombia, including a halt in the delivery of promised security assistance, was taking shape, and her trip was seen as a moment to begin a frank dialogue about corruption. In a reporting cable, the U.S. Embassy under Robert Drexler complemented Mrs. Carter’s diplomatic skills, saying that the First Lady “was especially effective in the manner in which she raised with Lopez and [Foreign Minister Indalecio] Lievano, firmly and forcefully, the [U.S. government’s] concern over corruption in the [Colombian government] … while not offending the thin-skinned Lopez’s sensibilities, which could well have caused a curtailment in [the Colombian government’s] cooperation in narcotics interdiction.” Drexler’s comment no doubt reflected his concern, expressed in an oral history, that taking too hard a line with the Colombian government on corruption could have derailed the entire U.S. counternarcotics effort there. ( Document 17 )

Several other documents from the RAC program published here for the first time show that the President continued to be personally involved in Colombia policy decision-making as the Intelligence Community prepared to brief López about narco-corruption in the Colombian government. Peter Bourne’s memo to Carter ahead of a June 20 Cabinet meeting on Colombia said that the group—consisting of officials from the White House Office of Drug Abuse Policy (ODAP), DEA, NSC, CIA and the Department of Justice—should consider what kinds of pressures the U.S. could apply toward Colombia and what “guarantees” the U.S. should “extract from the President of Colombia before releasing helicopters and other support.” Bourne noted that “Colombia has been a particular problem” with respect to “the lack of government effort in controlling narcotics and widespread corruption.” ( Document 18 )

One meeting participant, William Luers, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs (ARA), wrote in a memo that “the discussion centered around corruption: which ministers and high officials are involved and how much does Lopez Michelsen know himself.” Luers’ notes indicate agreement that Carter would send a “not timid” letter to López saying that “the President has knowledge of high level corruption” and warning that “the good name of Colombia” could be “damaged.” The letter, which would be hand-delivered to López during the upcoming visit of Bourne and Falco, would propose “the establishment of a high level joint commission to develop maximum cooperation and exchange intelligence information on trafficking and corruption.” ( Document 20 )

Later that day in his “Evening Report,” NSC Latin America adviser Robert Pastor noted how it had been Carter, at the June 20 Cabinet meeting, who had “asked us [Pastor and Falco] to revise the letter which Peter Bourne will deliver to President Lopez Michelsen on Wednesday.” The President wanted the letter and his emissaries “to make clear to Lopez that the President is aware of the degree of corruption in the Colombian Government and feels that further cooperation between our two governments will depend on whether President Lopez addresses this issue effectively.” According to Pastor, it was Carter who had wanted to name the Colombian defense minister. “[T]he President was so much stronger on this issue than the rest of us,” Pastor wrote in a June 27 memo, “that Mathea [Falco] and I thought we should include it.” According to Pastor, Carter himself thought “that it was curious that he should be bolder than his advisors.” ( Document 19 )

But Brzezinski was concerned that the letter drafted by Pastor and Falco and desired by Carter was too inflammatory, noting, in a June 21 memo to the President, that it made “a very serious accusation … but without any convincing proof.” The National Security Advisor shared his “strong reservations about the desirability of pointing so directly at a minister in President Lopez’s Cabinet,” recommending instead that Carter “state the proposition that we have cause to believe that ‘a number of high officials in the Colombian Government may be benefitting from the drug traffic, and go on to indicate that we are in a position to provide such information.” Brzezinski suggested that Bourne “could then point the finger more directly, and hopefully with greater effect.” ( Document 21 )

Dated June 21, the letter signed by Carter and later delivered to the Colombian president did not mention any Colombian officials by name, instead referring to “information which has come to my attention indicating that a number of high officials in the Colombian Government, and several important political figures, may be benefitting directly or indirectly from the illicit drug traffic” and offering him “a complete briefing” on the matter.

During their subsequent trip to Colombia, presidential envoys Bourne and Falco delivered the toned-down version of Carter’s letter to López (which he “immediately opened and read”) and told him that “President Carter has a list” of high-level Colombian officials involved in trafficking and “would be happy to arrange a private briefing” for López by “representatives of the Intelligence Community in Washington.” ( Document 22 )

Accepting the offer, the Colombian president, who was well aware of the Carter administration’s new emphasis on international human rights, seemed to draw a distinction between Colombia and the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina that were increasingly at odds with the Carter administration over its new emphasis on morality and justice in foreign policymaking. López explained that “if Colombia were a military dictatorship, action could be faster, but Colombia cannot move as easily as a country where there is no rule of law.” Interestingly, in his report to President Carter on the meeting, Bourne observed that the Colombian president “made no move to demand large amounts of money, as we thought he might” but it is not clear what sort of request they were expecting from López.

In any case, the Carter administration was pleased enough with the the outcome of the Bourne/Falco visit to approve delivery of the long-pending U.S. helicopters and several other items that had been held up while Carter sought the Colombian president’s assurances on narcotics corruption. [7] Some of these appear to be related to intelligence, including discussions of a “regional communications project” that got underway shortly after the Bourne/Falco visit, and the idea to include in the briefing for López additional intelligence on opium cultivations. The latter, according to Drexler, was “in the spirit of Bourne/Falco offers of intelligence sharing, would enlist necessary support at highest level for effective enforcement action,” and would prepare the way “for necessary political and bureaucratic decisions for cooperative development of further intelligence and for eradication efforts.” (Documents 24 , 26 and 27 )

The intelligence briefing was given to López on July 21 in Bogotá by Bourne, Bensinger, and Lawrence “Larry” Laser of the CIA. Bensinger told the Colombian president “there is no question that traffickers are helped and protected by some influential GOC officials,” adding that the U.S. government “wanted to share with President Lopez information which we had developed on such corruption, knowing that his sincere interest in attacking [the] narcotics problem will lead him to make further investigations of his own into these matters.” Bensinger then handed the Colombian president “information on about thirty cases which exemplified narcotics-related corruption involving ministerial and judicial officials, military and law enforcement personnel and high-level figures,” according to the Embassy’s cable on the meeting. (Documents 29 and 31 )

Bourne’s memo to Carter on the López briefing said the Colombian president “did not flinch at any of the information” they gave him but that he pushed back on allegations against the defense minister, Gen. Abraham Varón Valencia, who, as Bourne noted, “was the one person on the list he could not move against directly.” Regarding the “F-2” police intelligence directorate, the subject of various corruption allegations in the briefing, López called it “a nest of criminals” and promised “to move aggressively against these people.” Bourne characterized López as “a tired embattled old man depressed by his failure to accomplish more than 20 per cent of his administrations [sic] original program, who is not particularly popular with the people, and who was badly stung by accusations that his sons were involved in illicit financial transactions.” [8] López “had planned to drift through his remaining year in office,” according to Bourne, who credited Carter with reenergizing the Colombian president. “[T]he interest you and Rosalynn have taken in him has lighted a fire under him and given him the energy, clear goals and inspiration to try to redeem himself in the time he has left,” he said, adding, “We have also placed in his hands some powerful weapons.” ( Document 32 )

The news media and U.S. lawmakers continued to spotlight Colombia’s growing role in the international drug trade throughout 1977, and early the next year, first Le Monde and later 60 Minutes published stories in which they revealed the identities of several people named in the list that had been given to López, including presidential candidate Turbay and defense minister Varón. The leak prompted an exchange of letters between the U.S. Embassy and the two officials and considerable embarrassment for all involved. 60 MInutes correspondent Harry Moses said the episode “may turn out to be the Carter administration's biggest diplomatic blunder in Latin America,” and at least some of Turbay’s supporters thought the revelations may have actually boosted their candidate’s chances in the upcoming election. By then, the U.S., with a new ambassador finally in place, had eased the pressure on Colombia, hoping to start fresh with Turbay, whose victory, by that point, seemed certain. (Documents 37-42)

For his part, Drexler said he had come to regret being among those who had tried to tone down the Carter administration’s tougher approach to Colombia and corruption, fearing that a confrontation on the issue would jeopardize what progress they had made in focusing Colombia on the narcotics problem. Referring to Rosalynn Carter’s visit, Drexler said he had “pleaded with her to not follow her husband’s instructions “to take a very hard line with Colombia” and felt that, in the end, he had successfully persuaded the First Lady to downplay the issue: “She met with the President, she touched on the subject of corruption lightly, and went on with confirming that the helicopters would come, as they did.”

“Later I regretted this,” Drexler continued, “and I think I made a mistake, that they were right all along in Washington, that they should have drawn the line then, that it would have been better to have a confrontation with Lopez at that point.” After receiving the helicopters, Drexler said he “was immediately invited on a joy ride with the Colombian Military high command, who it was clear to me thought that they were getting some marvelous new toys, and that they were likely going to divert these helicopters to their own pursuits, rather than have them used for drug interdiction.”

Seven Secrets of Time Travel

Mystic voyages of the energy body.

Trade Paperback

LIST PRICE $14.95

Buy from Other Retailers

• Amazon logo
• Bookshop logo

Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Von Braschler, a former faculty member at Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, has led workshops through the United States and the United Kingdom. A lifetime member of the Theosophical Society, he is the author of several books, including Perfect Timing and Chakra Reading and Color Healing . He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Product Details

• Publisher: Destiny Books (February 22, 2012)
• Length: 176 pages
• ISBN13: 9781594774478

Browse Related Books

• Body, Mind & Spirit > Unexplained Phenomena
• Body, Mind & Spirit > Supernatural
• Body, Mind & Spirit > Mysticism

Raves and Reviews

“Thanks to the clarity of his insights and the freshness of his perspective, Von Braschler’s guide to time travel is our handbook to new, unchartered realms of experience and healing. The vehicle he offers is not a relatively crude ‘machine’ but the sublime human soul. In short, he tells us that we do not have to wait for the invention of some promised technology. On the contrary, we have been carrying around within us, since the day we were born, everything we need for visiting the past or future. He lays out seven secrets to access this wonderful mystery, clearly and convincingly describing them as the cornerstones of his practical guide.”

– Frank Joseph, author of Atlantis and 2012 and Gods of the Runes

“...a very thought-provoking book that gives the reader guidance and permission to explore the mysterious world of energy and spirit.”

– Brent Raynes, Alternate Perceptions April 2012

“Essential reading for anyone interested in transcending time. Von Braschler explains his ideas well and has illustrated them with fascinating anecdotes and exercises. His book is erudite, practical, and fascinating.”

– Richard Webster, author of Spirit and Dream Animals and Encyclopedia of Angels

Resources and Downloads

High resolution images.

• Book Cover Image (jpg): Seven Secrets of Time Travel Trade Paperback 9781594774478

Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today!

Plus, receive recommendations and exclusive offers on all of your favorite books and authors from Simon & Schuster.

More books from this author: Von Braschler

You may also like: Thriller and Mystery Staff Picks

More to Explore

Limited Time eBook Deals

Check out this month's discounted reads.

Our Summer Reading Recommendations

Red-hot romances, poolside fiction, and blockbuster picks, oh my! Start reading the hottest books of the summer.

This Month's New Releases

From heart-pounding thrillers to poignant memoirs and everything in between, check out what's new this month.

Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love.

Top 10 states with longest work commutes revealed — No. 1 may not surprise you

• View Author Archive
• Email the Author
• Get author RSS feed

Contact The Author

Thanks for contacting us. We've received your submission.

Thanks for contacting us. We've received your submission.

If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere — just consider extra time for travel.

Commuting to, from and around the “city so nice that they named it twice” can be a pain. Rush hour traffic, random street closures and mass transit delays are all daily grind nuisances.

But the harrowing hassle of hustling and busting isn’t limited to the city’s limits.  

“Workers in New York State [have] the longest commute times,” stated an April 2024 report from the US Department of Energy. 

The DOE, which manages the nation’s nuclear infrastructure and administers the country’s energy policy, used 2022 data on the average 9-to-5er’s one-way travel time to work to compile a list of the top 10 worst states for commuting. 

Researchers determined that most New Yorkers spend approximately 33.2 minutes during their trek to the office. 

And while riding in a train, bus or car for just over a half hour might not sound so terrible, the trip has yet earned the Empire State the No. 1 spot on the longest commute roster. 

Straphangers in Maryland, New Jersey and the District of Columbia have it almost as bad. 

The findings revealed that folks in each province, too, lose a little more than 30 minutes of their lives high-tailing it to their cubicles Monday through Friday. 

DOE analysts attributed the lengthy jaunts around the densely populated states to “traffic and urban sprawl.”

The experts also noted that the average one-way commute time across the US is approximately 27 minutes. 

But staffers in the Midwest have it the best. 

“South Dakota and North Dakota had average commute times of less than 18 minutes,” read the report. 

Workers in similarly provincial regions such as Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Montana also enjoy quickie shuffles just under the 20-minute mark.

However, some business bigwigs don’t mind a long haul. 

NYC “super commuter” Susan Miller gladly hops on a plane every week to work as a full-time professor at the University of Michigan.

And hairdresser Kaitlin Jay, 30, told The Post she’s perfectly content spending nearly six hours commuting door-to-door from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina to work at an Upper West Side salon on a biweekly basis. 

“I love what I do in New York and I love life in Charlotte,” she said. “I get the best of both worlds.”

Share this article:

Advertisement

Mindfulness

How time perspective affects travel, do you live in the past, present, or future.

Posted April 15, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• What Is Mindfulness?
• Find a mindfulness-based counsellor
• Understanding your own time perspective can enhance your life experience.
• Our characteristic types are neither good nor bad, just different from one another.
• Children are present-oriented, while adults favor the future. Seniors tend to preserve the past.

As an enjoyable vacation winds down, some of us become impatient to get home and move on to the next thing. Maybe that’s you. But, instead, you might be someone who tries to preserve, or even expand, every remaining moment. In either case, you’ll attempt to lock these precious flashes into your memory bank with mental snapshots. But without any effort, and all too quickly, the present quickly fades into the past. How we experience time is relevant to travel. Understanding your own time perspective can enhance your experience.

Stanford University Professor Emeritus Phil Zimbardo, author of The Time Paradox , notes that we are all oriented to time in one of the following characteristic ways—past, present, or future. According to his profile, I am future-oriented. What might your style be? Let’s see.

Those of us in the future category are goal-driven, focused on the future consequences of our actions, and forward-looking in general. Then there are the present-hedonic folks, the pleasure seekers who enjoy things in real-time, with less concern about tomorrow. Folks who live in the present tend to be open to experiences they didn’t necessarily plan, and they don’t need to check it off their bucket list. If this style fits, you’re probably most content with the moment-to-moment flow of your travel.

Past-oriented people make up the remaining category. This might be you if you compare current experiences with memories of past events or situations. Past-oriented folks determine the value of travel, according to Zimbardo, by assigning a pleasure quotient to the comparison—better or worse and by how much? This style is more analytic and rational, and based less on emotional factors than is true for present-focused folks. Does this sound like you?

Our characteristic types are neither good nor bad—just different from one another. Future- and past-oriented travelers provide a logical, systematic understanding of where travel fits into human experience. These styles have great evolutionary value. Our distant ancestors, who chronicled the past and predicted the future, tended to be the shaman and storytellers of the tribe. Reviewing the past and predicting the future was critical to human survival.

Present-oriented people tend to have more fun in the moment, and every society needs this type of person to keep things from getting too serious. Savoring the present is an acquired skill and is worth the effort to cultivate! Also, by expanding the present-pleasant and then reviewing a trip in the past-positive, you can have both good feelings and pleasurable memories. Since, as Zimbardo’s research indicates, we have characteristic ways of perceiving time, maintaining a present focus may require some work—if this isn’t naturally how you see the world.

Zimbardo points to another dimension of time—one that is age-related. In general, children are present-oriented while adults favor the future. Seniors tend to preserve the past. As a future-focused senior, I'm aware of the need to put my foot on the brake and try to prolong the present—particularly the pleasing moments while vacationing. This takes some work.

Regardless of the type that best explains you, here are some strategies to expand your time orientation:

• If you’re naturally drawn to the past or future , notice these tendencies and gently nudge yourself toward the present moment. When you catch yourself reminiscing about the last time you were in Paris, as you sit at an outdoor café savoring your steaming latte and munching on a croissant, remind yourself that the people you see strolling by are there right now—not last time or next time. The weather is uniquely now, not needing a contrast with a warmer or sunnier last visit. The present can be pleasant without any backward reference—or simply less.
• Future- oriented travelers tend to spend their present moments imagining future trips, which makes sense in planning life but can steal from the here and now. Recently, on a river cruise through Austria, I was struck by how much conversation I overheard about planning the next trip. Busily sharing these thoughts with fellow travelers, these vacationers sat by a large picture window as the ship sailed into a new city—totally missing the present moment, unnoticed outside of the window.
• Again, if future is your natural mode, keep that in mind as you travel. Learn to prolong the only moment that truly exists—this one that you anticipated for months or maybe years. The first step involves gently guiding your awareness back to the present. Practicing meditation even a few minutes a day will make this process easier.

This article is based on a chapter from my book: Inward Traveler: 51 Ways to Explore the World Mindfully, 2018.

Stanford University professor emeritus, Phil Zimbardo, authored The Time Paradox, Free Press, N.Y., 2008.

Francine Toder, Ph.D. , is an emeritus faculty member of California State University, Sacramento and is a clinical psychologist retired from private practice.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Support Group
• International
• New Zealand
• South Africa
• Switzerland
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Coronavirus Disease 2019
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Inside Donald Trump’s secret, long-shot plan to end the war in Ukraine

Foreign policy experts and some republicans warned that pressuring ukraine to cede land would reward putin.

Former president Donald Trump has privately said he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine by pressuring Ukraine to give up some territory, according to people familiar with the plan. Some foreign policy experts said Trump’s idea would reward Russian President Vladimir Putin and condone the violation of internationally recognized borders by force.

Trump’s proposal consists of pushing Ukraine to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia, according to people who discussed it with Trump or his advisers and spoke on the condition of anonymity because those conversations were confidential. That approach, which has not been previously reported, would dramatically reverse President Biden’s policy, which has emphasized curtailing Russian aggression and providing military aid to Ukraine.

As he seeks a return to power, the presumptive Republican nominee has frequently boasted that he could negotiate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours if elected, even before taking office. But he has repeatedly declined to specify publicly how he would quickly settle a war that has raged for more than two years and killed tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians.

Trump-aligned foreign-policy thinkers have emphasized addressing threats to U.S. interests from China and seeking ways to reverse Russia’s increasing dependence on China for military, industrial and economic assistance. They have also embraced limiting NATO expansion.

Privately, Trump has said that he thinks both Russia and Ukraine “want to save face, they want a way out,” and that people in parts of Ukraine would be okay with being part of Russia, according to a person who has discussed the matter directly with Trump.

Accepting Russian control over parts of Ukraine would expand the reach of Putin’s dictatorship after what has been the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. Some of Trump’s supporters have been trying to persuade him against such an outcome.

“I’ve been spending 100 percent of my time talking to Trump about Ukraine,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a onetime Trump critic turned ally. “He has to pay a price. He can’t win at the end of this,” Graham added, speaking of Putin.

Russia has previously declared it was annexing Ukrainian land beyond the Donbas region and Crimea, and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said he would not accept surrendering any territory. Exchanging territory for a cease-fire would put Ukraine in a worse position without assurances that Russia would not rearm and resume hostilities, as it has in the past, said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “That is a terrible deal,” she said of Trump’s proposal.

The Trump campaign declined to directly address questions for this article. “Any speculation about President Trump’s plan is coming from unnamed and uninformed sources who have no idea what is going on or what will happen,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “President Trump is the only one talking about stopping the killing.”

Biden said in his State of the Union address that Putin is “on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond,” and that Ukraine is trying to defend itself. The president has outlined a long-term plan of support for Ukraine that would build up its military capabilities this year so that it is in a better place to go on the offensive next year. But U.S. aid is already in jeopardy as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) faces a revolt from Republican hard-liners who are digging in against any more funding and clamoring to oust him.

Out of office, Trump has pressured congressional Republicans to resist additional U.S. support for Ukraine’s war effort and a return to the White House would significantly expand his influence over the debate. Seeing the political dynamics in the United States, European allies have jump-started military industry to a point where they hope to supplant a significant portion of the current U.S. assistance to Kyiv. But analysts said that realistically, Ukraine’s capacity to keep fighting would be weakened if Trump succeeds in blocking further U.S. aid.

In many ways, Trump’s plan is in line with his approach as president. His preference for splashy summits over policy details, confidence in his own negotiating skills and impatience with conventional diplomatic protocols were all hallmarks of how he approached foreign affairs in his first term.

In his eight years as the GOP’s standard-bearer, Trump has led a stark shift in the party’s prevailing orientation to become more skeptical of foreign intervention such as military aid to Ukraine. Trump has consistently complimented Putin, expressed admiration for his dictatorial rule and gone out of his way to avoid criticizing him, most recently for the death in jail of political opponent Alexei Navalny. He has not called for the release of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter held in Russia for a year without charges or a trial.

Trump has refused to acknowledge Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and falsely blamed Ukraine for trying to help Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — a smear spread by Russian spy services. His attempt in 2019 to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky announced an investigation into Biden led to Trump’s first impeachment.

In a phone call with Zelensky that year that Trump said was “perfect,” the U.S. president pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden and the discredited theory that Ukraine and not Russia sought to interfere with the 2016 election. The GOP-controlled Senate later acquitted Trump.

“Former president Trump’s inexplicable and admiring relationship with Putin, along with his unprecedented hostility to NATO, cannot give Europe or Ukraine any confidence in his dealings with Russia,” said Tom Donilon, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser. “Trump’s comments encouraging Russia to do whatever it wants with our European allies are among the most unsettling and dangerous statements made by a major party candidate for president. His position represents a clear and present danger to U.S. and European security.”

Graham said he has warned against giving Russia desired land and wants Trump to embrace a pathway forward for Ukraine to join NATO.

“The way you end this war to me is you make sure Ukraine gets into NATO and the E.U.,” he said. “He doesn’t say much about that. I don’t know if he’s thought too much about it.”

In his public promises to end the war, Trump has pointedly withheld the specifics on how he would negotiate with Putin and Zelensky. “I will say certain things to each one of them that I wouldn’t say to the rest of the world, and that’s why I can’t tell you much more than that,” Trump said in a March interview with former aide Sebastian Gorka.

His public silence on his negotiating tack has left room for others to fill in the blanks. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has antagonized European allies with his autocratic and pro-Russian tendencies, met with Trump last month and afterward claimed Trump told him he will force the war to end because “he will not give a penny” to help Ukraine. Orban’s statement was false, but the former president didn’t want to publicly contradict him after entertaining him all night at his Mar-a-Lago Club and admiring his toughness and anti-immigration positions, according to a person close to Trump, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

During the meeting, Orban spoke at length about Soviet history, Russia’s desire for Ukrainian territory and the military challenges facing Ukraine, the person said. Trump listened but was noncommittal, the person said. An Orban spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Word of Trump’s plan for Ukraine circulated in Washington last November at a meeting at the Heritage Foundation between right-of-center foreign policy figures and a visiting delegation from the European Council on Foreign Relations. Former Trump White House aide Michael Anton described the expected contours of Trump’s peace plan as Ukraine ceding territory in Crimea and Donbas, limiting NATO expansion and enticing Putin to loosen his growing reliance on China, according to multiple people present for the meeting, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion.

Reached by phone in March, Anton said he hadn’t spoken with Trump in 18 to 24 months and denied knowing anything about Trump’s plan for Ukraine. He did not respond to further questions.

James Carafano, a Heritage Foundation fellow who convened the meeting, declined to comment on the private discussion but criticized the idea of splitting Russia from China. “That is stupid idea 101,” he said. “Anything you could give Russia that they would really value would compromise all your other interests. The way to deal with the Russia-China relationship is to make Russia a weaker partner.”

Peeling Russia away from China would presumably involve sanctions relief, since the Kremlin has turned toward Beijing to try to offset broad-based Western sanctions on its energy, defense and financial sectors, said Jeremy Shapiro, head of the Washington office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who brought the group’s delegation to the meeting in November. Shapiro declined to comment on the specifics of the conversation, citing ground rules of the November event that prohibited attributing anything that was said, but he said that Trump’s Ukraine peace plan did not appear to be detailed.

“Trump people feel as if one of the great sins of the Ukrainian war and the Russia policy, generally speaking, is to push Russia toward China and to make it all the more dependent on China,” he said. Trump’s “fundamental approach with all things is to get men in a room together to discuss,” without necessarily having detailed plans in advance, Shapiro said.

Russia experts doubted Trump’s peace efforts could succeed. Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was Trump’s top Russia adviser and has since emerged as a prominent critic, said it reminded her of 2017 — when unvetted foreigners and business executives approached Trump with various peace plans, and he thought he could sit down with Russia and Ukraine and mediate on the strength of his personal charisma.

Trump’s team “is thinking about this very much in silos, that this is just a Ukraine-Russia thing,” Hill said. “They think of it as a territorial dispute, rather than one about the whole future of European security and the world order by extension.”

Even drawing an armistice line might not be so straightforward. The Kremlin in September 2022 declared that it was annexing four southern and eastern Ukrainian provinces, including the Donbas region but extending well beyond it. Since Kyiv still controls much of the territory, any attempt to resolve the war with territorial concessions is likely to involve extensive haggling — unless both sides simply agree to freeze the front lines that are in place at the moment of a deal.

Ukraine and European allies would probably resist Trump’s efforts to strike a deal with Moscow, Hill said. She added that the United States has limited leverage for a unilateral deal because meaningful sanctions relief would rely on European cooperation.

“No amount of leverage the United States has is likely to compel Ukrainian leadership to engage in policies that would constitute domestic political suicide,” said Michael Kofman, an analyst of the Russia-Ukraine war at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan research center. “And no amount of leverage the United States has can compel Ukraine to cede territory or engage in these types of concessions. This is a situation where if you’re willing to give a hand, the other side will very quickly want the rest of the arm.”

Election 2024

Get the latest news on the 2024 election from our reporters on the campaign trail and in Washington.

Who is running? President Biden and Donald Trump secured their parties’ nominations for the presidency , formalizing a general-election rematch.

Key dates and events: From January to June, voters in all states and U.S. territories will pick their party’s nominee for president ahead of the summer conventions. Here are key dates and events on the 2024 election calendar .

Abortion and the election: Voters in a dozen states in this pivotal election year could decide the fate of abortion rights with constitutional amendments on the ballot. Biden supports legal access to abortion , and he has encouraged Congress to pass a law that would codify abortion rights nationwide. After months of mixed signals about his position, Trump said the issue should be left to states . Here’s how Trump’s abortion stance has shifted over the years.

• Election 2024 latest news: Biden to greet steelworkers in battleground state of Pennsylvania Just now Election 2024 latest news: Biden to greet steelworkers in battleground state of Pennsylvania Just now
• In Arizona, Democrats remind voters Trump, GOP led to revival of abortion ban April 12, 2024 In Arizona, Democrats remind voters Trump, GOP led to revival of abortion ban April 12, 2024
• What Donald Trump wants in his next vice president — and who he’s considering April 12, 2024 What Donald Trump wants in his next vice president — and who he’s considering April 12, 2024

An official website of the United States government Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Air Travel Consumer Report: January 2024 Numbers

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) today released its Air Travel Consumer Report (ATCR) on airline operational data compiled for the month of January 2024 for on-time performance, mishandled baggage, and mishandled wheelchairs and scooters. The ATCR is designed to assist consumers with information on the quality of services provided by airlines. 

DOT expects that airlines will operate flights as scheduled and that when they do not, airlines will provide consumers the services consumers have been promised when a flight is canceled or delayed because of an airline issue. After a two-year DOT push to improve the passenger experience, the 10 largest airlines now guarantee meals and free rebooking on the same airline and nine guarantee hotel accommodations. Consumer-friendly information regarding airline commitments to their customers is available on the Department’s Airline Customer Service Dashboard at FlightRights.Gov. DOT also pushed airlines to provide fee-free family seating and rolled out a new family seating dashboard that highlights the airlines that guarantee fee-free family seating, and those of the 10 largest that do not, making it easier for parents to avoid paying junk fees to sit with their children when they fly.

In addition, DOT is improving transportation for individuals with disabilities. In July 2023, DOT finalized a rule which requires airlines to make lavatories on new, single-aisle aircraft more accessible. Then, in February 2024, DOT issued a proposal to address other barriers that Americans who use a wheelchair encounter when it comes to air travel by, among other things, mandating enhanced training for airline employees and contractors who physically assist passenger with disabilities and handle passengers’ wheelchairs.

Further, when necessary, DOT takes enforcement action against airlines and ticket agents that fail to comply with the Department’s aviation consumer protection requirements. In 2023, DOT issued the largest fines in the history of the consumer protection office. This includes a $140 million penalty against Southwest Airlines for failing passengers during the 2022 holiday meltdown. That penalty, which was in addition to over $600 million DOT already ensured was refunded by Southwest to passengers, requires Southwest to establish a $90 million compensation system for future passengers affected by significant delays and cancellations. DOT has helped return more than $3 billion in refunds to travelers since the pandemic began.

Flight Operations

The 560,352 flights operated in January 2024 were 99.56% of the 562,845 flights operated in January 2023. Operated flights in January 2024 were down 0.44% year-over-year from the 562,845 flights operated in January 2023 and down 7.18% month-over-month from 603,756 flights operated in December 2023. 

In January 2024, the 10 marketing network carriers reported 582,425 scheduled domestic flights, 22,073 (3.8%) of which were canceled. In December 2023, airlines scheduled 606,218 domestic flights, 2,462 (1.3%) of which were canceled. In January 2023, airlines scheduled 573,877 domestic flights, 11,032 (1.9%) of which were canceled.

On January 6, 2024, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft with a mid-cabin door plug installed operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory. On January 24, 2024, FAA cleared all such aircraft to return to service after each aircraft operator successfully completed a new inspection process approved by the FAA. Alaska Airlines and United Airlines have informed the DOT that the grounding of the 737 MAX9 aircraft with the mid-cabin door plug installed has impacted their on-time statistics during this reporting period.

January 2024 On-Time Arrival

In January 2024, reporting marketing carriers posted an on-time arrival rate of 72.8%, down from both 83.9% in December 2023 and from 76.2% in January 2023.

Highest Marketing Carrier On-Time Arrival Rates January 2024 (ATCR Table 1)

• Delta Airlines Network – 77.8%
• Allegiant Air – 75.6%
• Southwest Airlines – 73.9% 

Lowest Marketing Carrier On-Time Arrival Rates January 2024 (ATCR Table 1)

• Alaska Airlines Network – 64.7%
• JetBlue Airways – 69.5%
• American Airlines Network – 70.5%

January 2024 Flight Cancellations

In January 2024, reporting marketing carriers canceled 3.8% of their scheduled domestic flights, higher than both the rate of 0.4% in December 2023 and the rate of 1.9% in January 2023. 

Lowest Marketing Carrier Rates of Canceled Flights January 2024 (ATCR Table 6)

• Hawaiian Airlines – 1.5%  
• Spirit Airlines – 1.5%   
• JetBlue Airways – 1.7%    

Highest Marketing Carrier Rates of Canceled Flights January 2024 (ATCR Table 6)

• Alaska Airlines Network – 11.9%    
• United Airlines Network – 6.9%    
• Southwest Airlines – 3.1%    

Complaints About Airline Service

The release of air travel service complaint data in the Air Travel Consumer Report (ATCR) has been delayed primarily because of the continued high volume of complaints against airlines and ticket agents received by the Office of Aviation Consumer Protection (OACP) and the time needed to review and process these consumer complaints. The Department is investing in modernizing its system for handling consumer complaints with the support of a Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) investment to improve the customer experience for the tens of thousands of consumers who use the system each year and enable OACP to more effectively engage in oversight of the airline industry. 

As DOT modernizes its system, given the continued high volume of air travel service complaints concerning airlines and ticket agents, DOT has revised how it processes consumer complaints received after June 1, 2023. From June 2023 until the date its system is modernized, DOT intends to revise the ATCR to display consumer submissions (complaints, inquiries, and opinions) as opposed to complaints for this period. The Department will continue to display civil rights complaints in the ATCR in a similar manner as before and anticipates publishing submission and civil rights complaint numbers in spring.

Tarmac Delays

In January 2024, airlines reported 71 tarmac delays of more than three hours on domestic flights, compared to five tarmac delays of more than three hours on domestic flights reported in December 2023. In January 2024, airlines reported six tarmac delays of more than four hours on international flights, compared to zero tarmac delays of more than four hours on international flights reported in December 2023. 

Airlines are required to have and adhere to assurances that they will not allow aircraft to remain on the tarmac for more than three hours for domestic flights and four hours for international flights without providing passengers the option to deplane, subject to exceptions related to safety, security, and Air Traffic Control related reasons. An exception also exists for departure delays if the airline begins to return the aircraft to a suitable disembarkation point to deplane passengers by those times.

The Department investigates extended tarmac delays.

Mishandled Baggage

In January 2024, reporting marketing carriers handled 37.4 million bags and posted a mishandled baggage rate of 0.75%, higher than both the rate of 0.50% in December 2023 and the rate of 0.73% in January 2023.

The Department began displaying the mishandled baggage data as a percentage (i.e., per 100 bags enplaned) in January 2022. This is consistent with the manner that the mishandled wheelchairs and scooters rate is calculated and displayed.     In the prior three calendar year reports (2019 to 2021), the Department calculated the mishandled baggage rate based on the number of mishandled bags per 1,000 checked bags. 

Mishandled Wheelchairs and Scooters

In January 2024, reporting marketing carriers reported checking 56,659 wheelchairs and scooters and mishandling 836 for a rate of 1.48% mishandled wheelchairs and scooters, higher than the rate of 1.39% mishandled in December 2023 and lower than the rate of 1.47% mishandled in January 2023.

As described earlier, in February 2024, the Department announced its proposal to strengthen its rule implementing the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA) to address the serious problems that individuals with disabilities using wheelchairs and scooters face when traveling by air that impact their safety and dignity, including mishandled wheelchairs and scooters and improper transfers to and from aircraft seats, aisle chairs, and personal wheelchairs. The proposed rule would require that airlines meet strict standards in accommodating passengers with disabilities by setting new standards for prompt, safe, and dignified assistance, mandating enhanced training for airline employees and contractors who physically assist passengers with disabilities and handle passengers’ wheelchairs, and outlining actions that airlines must take to protect passengers when a wheelchair is damaged during transport. The proposed rule also clarifies that damaging or delaying the return of a wheelchair is an automatic violation of the ACAA.

Bumping/Oversales

Bumping/oversales data, unlike other air carrier data, are reported quarterly rather than monthly. For the fourth quarter of 2023, the 10 U.S. reporting marketing carriers posted an involuntary denied boarding, or bumping, rate of 0.20 per 10,000 passengers, lower than both the rate of 0.35 in the third quarter of 2023 and the rate of 0.30 in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Incidents Involving Animals

As part of its IT modernization, DOT’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection (OACP) is improving the options for covered carriers to submit their monthly and annual Reports on Incidents Involving Animals During Air Transport. While the new system is being developed, OACP is permitting covered carriers to delay submission of reports on incidents involving animals during air transport. Annual data on such incidents will be published when DOT receives carriers’ complete submissions of the 2023 data. 

In January 2024, carriers reported zero incidents involving the death, injury, or loss of an animal while traveling by air, equal to the zero reports filed in both December 2023 and in January 2023.

Consumers may file air travel consumer or civil rights complaints online at   https://secure.dot.gov/air-travel-complaint , or they may mail a complaint to the Office of Aviation Consumer Protection, U.S. Department of Transportation, C-70, W96-432, 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE, Washington, DC 20590.

The ATCR and other aviation consumer matters of interest to the public can be found at https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer .