Beyond the Time Barrier

by Andrew Tomas

In his new book the author of We Are Not The First and Atlantis turns his attention to the nature and enigmas of time. Time, he argues, is not an abstraction: yesterday and tomorrow are as real as today. To illustrate his thesis, he quotes a number of temporal anomalies and poses some highly provocative questions.

Is it true that astronauts in an interstellar rocket will travel straight into the future? How is it that when an empty parking lot was photographed with a special infra-red camera, the developed film showed cars that had been there before, thus photographing the past?

Did ancient Egyptian sages leave a coded forecast of all future events from 100BC to 2100AD? How in modern times have prophets from Nostradamus to Jeane Dixon predicted future events with such uncanny accuracy?

Can the Time Barrier be broken? Is Time Television a scientific possibility? These and many other equally fascinating problems are answered in this book, written on that thin borderline which separates science from science fiction, fact from fantasy.

Genres: Science, Pseudoscience

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Andrew Thomas (1906-2001) was born in St. Petersburg in Russia, but after stopovers in Finland, Machuria, China and the USA, he later became an Australian citizen. He has written a number of books on the theme of ancient technology and wisdom.
His book on Atlantis is fairly pedestrian fare that purports to link Plato's city with an age of long lost high-technology.

Reviews

[Nadienne Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why do I like this pseudoscience garbage?

In the first part of this book, Mr. Tomas lays out his passing understanding of the Theory of Relativity to illustrate that Space-Time can be curved, while failing to mention that it is Mass which curves Space-Time. He is right, in that Time is relative and mutable, but it needs a large force acting upon it, like Mass, and the more Mass, the more the effect. Mr. Tomas is secure in his belief that someone's own mind is capable of producing this curve...somehow...without explanation...it just does okay. He also goes off on a philosophical tangent about the nature of Time and like, wow, man, what if D-O-G really spells God...

In the second part of this book he touches upon the existence of anti-matter and positrons (the opposite of electrons - which hypothetically moved backwards in time), proposing that they are inexorably linked and thus proves that there are anti-planets full of anti-people living anti-lives which move through anti-time. Thus further proving that our future is their history. There is something not too far off in Quantum Theory that all events are already happening, Time is just what takes us from event to event, but he's more into the Sci-Fi B Movie Anti-Time aspect at this point.

Having laid this groundwork he begins to talk about psychics, prophets, and seers, and showing how they can somehow use their brains to see the future - or rather, the past in anti-time - which is how they are able to be so accurate. Of course, he cherry picks his "psychics" and further cherry picks their "prophecies" to prove his point. And he only relates the predictions to major events in history from a very Euro-Centric viewpoint. The world outside of France and England just must not matter to the Space-Time Continuum. And then goes on to show the future predictions (from the perspective of 1974) of his hand-picked team of super-psychics to paint a picture for the upcoming quarter century.

Like, remember that catastrophic war between the USA/USSR Alliance and the People's Republic of China in the 1980s...oh, right...oh, wait, remember that large asteroid that crashed into the Earth in the 1980s which led to a series of climate and ecological disasters that changed the very face of the planet, up to and including a shift in the poles...oh, yah...um...well, you must remember when the lost continent of Atlantis rose from the waves of the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1990s, altering the Gulf Stream, plunging Europe into an Ice Age, and revealing a series of archaeological discoveries which changed our view of history and the actuality of what happened? Ooh, ooh, remember that world and spiritual leader who appeared in the 1980s who went on to unite all of the world in harmony underneath him, combining all world governments into one, and all world religions into one and we've lived in peace and joy ever since 1999....? And also, remember how under his reign we've established colonies on all the various moons and planets in our own Solar System and have made contact with the natives of Venus, who look and act exactly like Humans, except that their eyes are in a different place and they use them different (whatever the hell that means)? What do you mean you don't remember that?

Right, okay...well, I mean...I'm sure there's some kind of rational explanation for that right? There was one prediction still outstanding: that there would only be four Popes after Paul VI, and we're on Pope four right now, so, who knows. Maybe they'll get one right...although, I don't see the Catholic Church dissolving any time soon.

Funnily, in his conclusion he states that if we took our history books and combined them with the history books of the anti-people, we'd get a complete view of Time. Then immediately goes on to state that these are all just "predictions" and that they may or may not come true. It's just fun to think about...

Oh no, no, no, Mr. Tomas. You have explicitly talked about anti-time and that your Prophets are all remembering future events because they've tapped into the curvature of Space-Time and are seeing the Anti-History or the Anti-People. You can't prevaricate and back down now. That throws your entire thesis out the window. It's almost like you don't actually believe the garbage your peddling...

Anyway, you can pass on this one. There wasn't anything that fun in here, unless you like researching quack-job psychics, there's a few more names in here to look up and see what their batting average is for predictions. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the cover of this 1976 paperback, the title and author are set in a typeface similar to that of the paperback edition of Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, the bestseller about ancient extraterrestrial visits to earth. So right away readers know they’re in for some unbelievable revelations.

Part one, “The Problem of Time” discusses the nature of time, describing it as a fourth dimension which can theoretically be traversed like the other three. Tomas also summarizes various ideas of post-Einstein physics such as the relativity of time’s passage based on velocity and the strange temporal behavior of subatomic particles and antimatter (a footnote misspells Richard Feynman’s name). Matters get less scientifically anchored as the section proceeds and the author cites various Soviet PK experiments, speculates on the possible invention of a “time television”, and describes the experience of a “friend” who was shown a kind of movie summarizing his future life by a Chinese herbalist.

Tomas describes a kind of spaceship / time machine invented by “French engineer and astronomer” Emile Drouet, who has worked out many of the details of this device, with the apparent exception of how exactly it’s going to travel in time. “Daring as the project is, its theoretical basis is not faultless.”

Part two, “They Broke the Time Barrier”, discusses incidents when people actually saw through time. There are not many incidents where people have claimed to visit the past. The best known, covered here in some detail, involves the visit of two middle-aged English ladies, Misses Moberley and Jourdain, to Versailles in 1901 where they claim to have seen events from 1789, a time-shift they were not aware of until discussing their experiences afterward. Other than that frequently cited incident, the author is left with the mirage-like vision of 14th century ships supposedly seen by a French film crew in Morocco in 1928 and descriptions of sightings of the Flying Dutchman, incidents taken from a novel by Captain Marryat.

But prophets have also “broken the time barrier” by seeing the future and recording their visions. The usual suspects are here: Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and Jeanne Dixon, as well as two figures I’ve only encountered during this month’s paranormal reading binge: Nicholas Roerich and Robert Charles “Doc” Anderson, both cited in This Hollow Earth. All the predictions cited by the author that refer to events that occurred before the book’s publication are eerily accurate, albeit sometimes with interpretive help from Tomas, especially on the quatrains of Nostradamus, where, for example, the word noir gets (kind of) anagrammatized to roi. Perhaps, er, predictably, none of the events forecast to occur between the book’s publication date and the date of my reading, such as war between China and an allied US and Russia, have taken place.

The author has two chapters devoted to series of enigmatic predictions which I found interesting if not convincing. In the first, apparently the author’s own discovery, the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot are said to be an encoded prophecy from Ancient Egypt, each card covering one century of the Piscean Age, which the author defines as extending from the first century BCE through the present 21st century. Some of his interpretations are kind of ingenious, but when one has a century worth of events to draw from in interpreting a single highly symbolic image, probably not particularly difficult to devise. For those who want to try this at home, he orders the trumps from 1 through 21, with “The Fool” card in penultimate position, between 20, “Judgment” and 21, “The World” – not the standard order, but sanctioned by no less an authority than Arthur Edward Waite.

The second series of predictions is a series of Latin phrases with which St Malachi, in the 12th century, supposedly characterized all the popes who would sit in the chair of St. Peter from his time forward. The prophecies were first published in 1595, and Tomas looks at each prediction and the corresponding pope from that date forward. He finds then largely accurate, some almost uncannily so, but gives wide latitude for interpretation. For example, here are two he finds “striking”: “ROSA UMBRIAE” (The Rose of Umbria) for Clement XIII (1758 - 1769), who had been governor of Rieti in Umbria (“The rose is the badge of that city.”) and “AQUILA RAPAX” for Pius VII (1806 – 1823), “The Rapacious Eagle refers, of course, to the standard of Napoleon I”. Again, if you’re playing along at home, the last four popes were still in the future at the time this book was published. Their Latin tags are: “DE MEDIETATE LUNAE” (Concerning the Half-Moon, John Paul I), “DE LABORE SOLIS” (Of the Labor of the Sun, John Paul II), “DE GLORIA OLIVAE” (Of the Glory of the Olive, Benedict XVI), and “PETRO ROMANO” (Peter the Roman, Francis I, the last of the popes according to St. Malachi).

No translator is credited here, though the book was first published by Editions René Julliard in Paris. The English seems OK, though there are occasional oddities, like this unidiomatic use of cliché: [“Doc” Anderson] “decided to study Time clichés of people’s lives with a view to helping them solve problems.”

[Fran · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this back in 1974 when I was rather young, but I still have it and have fond memories of it. Yes, perhaps it does border on pseudo science, but there's nothing wrong with speculation, away from the dogmatic approaches of so called modern science, which is itself, in my opinion, a form of religion and not truly open minded. I particularly like the author's speculation about the Tarot, and the possibility of time travel. This book was naturally of its time, and all the better for it.

[Jeff Mayo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pseudoscience crap. I understand that it was written in 1969, but even then this could be seen for what it is, conspiratorial nonsense. It only gets one star because zero isn’t a thing.