In the mid-90s, a man named Mike “Madman” Marcum claimed he was building a time machine… in his backyard. Mike was just 21 when he started experimenting with something called a Jacob’s Ladder—a high-voltage arc setup. But he didn’t stop there. He added a laser and believed he had opened a small “time vortex.”🧐🤔 He told his story on the late-night radio show Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell and said he was planning to build a full-scale version. To power it, he used giant transformers—some of which weren’t exactly his. That led to a blackout and a brief stay behind bars. After getting out, he went back on the show in 1996 and said he was just 30 days away from testing his machine on himself. Then… he disappeared. For years, no one heard from him. Some believed he traveled through time. Others thought he vanished for good. But in 2015, he resurfaced and claimed he had reappeared two years in the future, hundreds of miles away, with no memory of how he got there. To this day, no one can say for sure what happened. Mike’s story remains one of the most mysterious—and talked-about—time travel claims in history.