Andrew Basiago is now attempting to expose the top secret Project Pegasus, which he claims was a Pentagon-backed attempt to manipulate TIME at the height of the Cold War.
Pegasus was commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA and some of America’s best scientific brains worked on it.
He claims massive amounts of tax-payer cash was poured into Project Pegasus and Einstein’s theory of special relativity was twisted to create a time machine. However, the Government considered it so dangerous it was closed down.
Basiago, from Vancouver, in Washington State, said his father was involved in the programme which ran initially out of New Jersey in 1968.
He claimed he was selected to help conduct an experiment using wormhole technology – and was sent back in time to 1863, just minutes before Abraham Lincoln delivered the historic Gettysburg Address during the American Civil War.
Wormholes are an accepted part of theoretical physics capable of bending spacetime to allow travel over huge distances in an instant or travel through time itself.
In a detailed interview Mr Basiago explained that the technology was twofold.
In the early days, he claims, scientists created Chronovision – a system which he said “generates a hologram of a past or future event by driving an electromagnetic signal through an octagonal, an eight-sided array of bismuth crystals.”
However by 1972, when he says he travelled in time, Project Pegasus boffins had managed to bend the time-space continuum using a technique called “radiant energy.”
Basiago said the “latent and pervasive energy in the universe” was accessible through a machine made up of “two grey elliptical booms” measuring around eight feet tall which were built 10 feet apart and which the participant stepped into.
He said: “Chronovision later became a different technology called Plasma Confinement which they used to get me to Gettysburg in 1963.”
He claims his time jump took place in Spring 1972 at a time lab in East Hanover New Jersey under the direction of Dr Stirling Colgate. Dr. Colgate, who died in 2013. The docrtor was closely involved in the development of the US hydrogen bomb and much of his work remains classified to this day.
Mr Basiago added: “He was serving as the president of the New Mexico School of Science and Technology and had developed a methodology called Plasma Confinement where the time traveller stands in a clear Lucite chamber and walks into a cloud of plasma and is essentially wormholed.”
By this method he claims to have been flung back in time to 1863 and even says he has photographic evidence.
The lawyer turned conspiracy theorist said he had arrived just outside Gettysburg as a seven-year-old boy, but had been barefoot and badly dressed – before being taken in by a Union-backing shopkeeper and given a bugler uniform and over-sized shoes, the only ones left in the shop.
He added: “Wearing grossly over-sized men’s shoes as a time traveller from 1972 in darkest Project Pegasus I was photographed.
“And the photo, that until last year was the sole surviving photograph to show President Lincoln at Gettysburg on the day he gave the address.”
Mr Basiago has become a well-known conspiracy theorist in the United States and has even claimed to have visited Mars and been present at the assassination of Lincoln.
Mr Basiago intends to run for president in 2020 and has a website called http://andy2020.net/