Time Out of Mind

Did a man travel back in time to try and stop assassination of John Lennon in 1980? A top physicist has made a series of extraordinary claims regarding his mysteriously vanished colleague. “I hadn’t seen Tony for weeks – nobody seemed to know where he had gone. Then, one day as I was working in the lab, there was this crackling sound, followed by a huge bang and flash of light – and there was Tony, stumbling out of a locker, unkempt and unshaven, his hair and clothes smouldering,” Dr Albert Hockstone, a research scientist at the UK’s National Physics Lab in Thatcham told tabloid The Daily Norks. “At first I couldn’t get anything out of him, he was gibbering wildly, but finally he started to become a bit more coherent.” The colleague – Dr Tony Flonn, an expert in temporal physics – claimed that he had just returned from 1980, where he had prevented the death of former Beatle John Lennon at the hands of deranged fan Mark Chapman. “He actually claimed that he had gone back much further than 1980, in order to try and meet the young Chapman and try to dissuade him from ever becoming a fan of Lennon,” Hockstone told the tabloid. “His plan was to try and get him to instead fixate upon a different celebrity, one that, if he were to kill them, he would be doing the world a favour. You know, like Gary Glitter, perhaps.” In the event, Flonn succeeded in persuading Chapman into developing a fixation on British DJ Jimmy Savile. “Of course, back then, it wasn’t public knowledge that Savile was a prolific sex offender,” muses Hockstone. “So when Chapman travelled to London in 1980 and gunned him down on the steps of Broadcasting House, there was a public outcry at the murder of a much beloved broadcaster who had done so much for charity!”

Still bemused by his colleague’s wild tale, Hockstone pressed Flonn as to how he had achieved his alleged time travelling feat. “Tony claimed that he had built what he described as a ‘time slingshot’ in the locker that he had stumbled out of,” he recalls. “It sounded incredible but he reckoned that his research had shown that the only way that he could travel back in time was by first travelling forwards at an accelerated pace in order to build up sufficient temporal momentum to catapult himself back into the past. Basically, he had been in that locker travelling forwards, then back in time all the time that he had been missing! Obviously, as he moved forward, his perception of time was accelerated, so that although he went twenty years into the future, it was only a couple of days for him in the locker!” Coming back to the present involved the reverse procedure, with Flonn going back to the fifties before being flung back to the present. Intrigued by his colleague’s story, Hockstone examined the interior of the locker. “It was full of electronics,” he says. “From what I saw and my knowledge of the subject, it did look as if it might be a development of Tony’s research into the possibility of time travel, so while I started out thinking that he’d suffered a breakdown, I now started to think that perhaps there was some truth to his claims!” But still, much of Flonn’s story didn’t make sense – if he travelled back in time inside a locker in Thatcham, how did he end up in the US in the seventies? Most crucially, despite his claims that he had saved John Lennon and cut short Jimmy Savile’s reign of terror as a sexual predator, back in the present, Lennon had still been killed in 1980 and Savile hadn’t died that year.

“While I knew that these things were factually true, I still checked online, just in case my proximity to Tony’s time machine had somehow protected my memories from being changed,” says Hockstone. “But everything was still as it was before Tony had taken his supposed voyage through time. I tell you, he was heartbroken when realised that Lennon really was still dead – he was in tears, telling me that Lennon had been his boyhood idol and his inspiration for going into temporal physics, with the sole aim of being able to go back and save him from assassination!” At this point, Flonn was prepared to accept that his whole time trip had, in fact been a delusion, the result of a mental breakdown brought on by his obsessive attempts to perfect his time machine, “He agreed to take sick leave and go into some kind of institute for therapy,” explains Hockstone. “Obviously, I thought that would be the end of it all, that Tony would come back to work in a few months and get back to work.” But the saga was about take a bizarre new twist. “About a month after he took leave, Tony phoned me up, telling me that, thanks to his therapy, he now knew that it was all real, that he had gone back in time and had saved John Lennon,” the scientist told the Daily Norks. “Instead, though, of changing his own present, he had created a new parallel time line where Lennon still lived!”

One of Flonn’s therapies at the clinic where he was treated involved a form of tantric masturbation. “Tony reckoned that, when in the tantric state, on hitting the vinegar stroke, he could perceive visions of various alternate realities,” says Hockstone. “In one of these, John Lennon still lived and Jimmy Savile was a near forgotten victim of an assassination in the early eighties, whose secret life as a sex offender was uncovered as, after his death, victims came forward to tell their tales!” According to these visions, an aged John Lennon was still active in the entertainment world, white haired and accompanied by Yoko, he presented the BBC’s religious programme Songs of Praise every Sunday. “While Tony was a bit disappointed that his hero had sold out and got God, not to mention having fronted a Tory Party election broadcast for David Cameron in 2010, he was still happy to see him alive and well,” says Hockstone. “He told me that he was determined to find a way to jump the time lines, so that he could go and live in that version of reality!”

Flonn told Hockstone that a spiritual Guru he had met at the clinic had told him that there was a technique whereby, during intercourse, the combined sexual energies of the two participants could, under the right conditions, project one of them, at the moment of orgasm, into a parallel time line. “I remember that, after he left the clinic, Tony called me and said that he’d met this girl who was willing to participate in an experiment to see if he could shag his way into the Lennon time line,” says Hockstone. “Then he just seemed to vanish from the face of the earth. The police looked into it after I reported him as a missing person, but there was no trace of him. He had no family and none of his friends or colleagues had any idea of where he had gone – his bank account remained untouched and his bills unpaid. Everybody assumed he was dead.” Unsatisfied with the police investigation, Hockstone managed to track down the girl his colleague had spoken about. “Well, she told me a fantastic tale,” he ponders. “She reckoned that he had her wired up to some sort of scientific apparatus before he started bonking her. He was banging away furiously, gasping for breath, when suddenly this look of ecstasy came into his eyes then, as he was about to ejaculate, there was a huge flash and he vanished into thin air!”