Naman Shrestha
In ‘Merris Monday: Time Traveler or Wild Grifter, the Tale of Madman Mike Marcum,’ the listeners are transported back in time to the year 1995 when a curious 21-year-old man, Mike Marcum, began building a time machine. To realize his vision, he had to resort to stealing, for which he spent some time in jail. A couple of years later, he vanished without any trace, giving rise to all kinds of speculations and questions about his experiment and disappearance. So, is Mike Marcum real? And is the podcast itself based on a true story? Let’s find out.
Mike Marcum Was a Missouri Resident Who Wanted to Build a Time Machine
In 1995, the 21-year-old electrical engineering student, Mike Marcum, residing in Stanberry, Missouri, began formulating the idea of building a time machine from scratch on his house’s porch. It is said that his main motive behind it was to be able to learn and use the future lottery numbers to make himself rich. While experimenting with a contraption known as Jacob’s ladder, he claimed that he had noticed something surreal — a circular vortex.
Mike checked the effect by throwing a metal screw and said that it vanished before reappearing a few feet away a second or two later. Believing that the screw traveled through time, he decided to level up his work but the setup caught fire, destroying the contraception. This setback only fueled his determination further as, due to the need for $20,000 worth of transformers, he broke into the St. Joseph Light and Power Generating Station in King City, Missouri, and robbed six transformers for his project.
Later, while Mike was testing a few things, he caused a power outage in his neighborhood, attracting the attention of the authorities. When they found out about the stolen transformers, he was arrested. Shortly after his release a few months later, he received an invitation from Art Bell to talk about his time machine on Coast to Coast Radio. He explained his plans to build a time machine in detail and got the nickname “Madman” on the radio show. As the word spread about his bigger and improved project, he received donations to realize his vision of creating an electromagnetic vortex big enough to fit a human through it.
A year after his first appearance, Mike made another appearance on the Coast to Coast Radio show in 1996, where he revealed that he was only a month or so away from completing his legal time machine project, and would only take his phone with him when he finally tests the machine himself. However, in 1997, under some mysterious circumstances, he disappeared without any warning, leaving the whole world wondering if his time machine actually worked or if he vaporized himself in the process.
Where is Mike Marcum Now?
After Mike Marcum’s disappearance, a listener on the radio show highlighted a 1930 case where the police found a dead man on a California beach inside a strange metal tube with a mobile-like device in his possession. Implications were made that it could have been Mike, but the theory was later debunked when it turned out that he decided to stay away from the public eye deliberately, which was made clear on his third public appearance on Art Bell’s new Midnight in the Desert radio segment on September 4, 2015.
Being his first public interview in 18 years, Mike had quite a lot of updates he wanted to share with the listeners, including the fact that he lost his house to a fire and how all the pieces of equipment were destroyed again. According to sources, he was homeless for a short period of time and lived in Hawaii in the late 2010s. Still dedicated to building a time machine, he reportedly launched a GoFundMe campaign in 2016 to get sufficient funds to continue his experiments.
More recently, in February 2022, Mike posted his update on the Reddit page Paranormal Forum and confirmed that he was alive and well, still residing in Hawaii. In the post, he wrote, “Rumors are a-blazing that I am dead, not well, and had time traveled to 1930 something where I died on a beach in a tube. Whoever posted those pictures of a redhead, that is also not me. It was some school kid with my name that someone long ago attributed to me. Whatever was found in the 1930s was not me and I’ve read that was debunked but can’t find the article.” Later in the year, by September 2022, Mike reportedly moved to Ohio, where he continues to pursue his same old goal of building a time machine.
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