But did he meet the incomparable Dejah Thoris?

Well, if this isn't the most entertaining piece of codswallop I've seen in a while. On closer look however, this codswallop may turn out to have a serious aspect.

Arthur Newman, allegedly a former NSA employee, and Andrew Basiago, a lawyer allegedly connected to DARPA, claim to have traveled through time. And to Mars -- via teleportation, just like John Carter, the hero of those wonderful old books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. (A lot of people forget that John Carter was also a time traveler.)

There are secret civilizations on Mars, you know. Newman has pictures.

Newmann previously advertised himself as a "Livermore physicist" named Henry Deacon. Under the Deacon imprint, he has left a fairly lengthy trail on the web. See, for example, here and here. Among his many other wacky claims -- the Roswell crash was real, and so was another UFO crash near Big Sur in 1972 -- Henry endorses the reality of Report From Iron Mountain, which was exposed a long time ago as a political satire written by Leonard Lewin.

As for Basiago: He claims to have been a "child participant" in secret experiments. Sounds to me like we're heading into "recovered memory" territory. You can listen to a six hour interview with the man on YouTube, here. The interviewer calls herself "Jessica Mystic," and she's a credit to journalism. She has her own set of videos out there, and she's quite cute, in a Gnostic Valley Girl sort of way. She believes in the Illuminati.

Normally I would not bother to report on such loopy claims, amusing as they are. But one passage in this account aroused my respectful attention:

This training, he said, culminated in 1981, when, as a 19-year-old, he teleported to Mars, first by himself after being prepared for the trip by CIA officer Courtney M. Hunt, and then a second time in the company of Hunt. Both trips, Mr. Basiago said, were made via a “jump room” located at a CIA facility in El Segundo, CA. The apparent purpose of the trips to Mars was to familiarize him with Mars because the CIA knew of his destiny as the discoverer of life on Mars and deemed it important that he visit Mars and experience it first-hand.

Mr. Basiago’s involvement in US time-space research as a child, as well as Courtney M. Hunt’s identity as a CIA officer, have been confirmed by Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo, an ethicist who works closely with US military and intelligence agencies, and by US Army Captain Ernest Garcia, whose storied career in US intelligence included both serving as a guard on the Dead Sea Scroll expeditions of Israeli archaeologist Yigal Yadin and as the Army security attaché to DARPA’s Project Pegasus.

Here's where things get kind of serious. Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo is a real person. In 2007, she gave an important speech featured by Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now broadcast archived here. Her words caused quite a stir.

You will surely recall the still-lingering controversy over the psychiatrists who participated in the torturous interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo. A team from the APA reviewed the procedures and concluded that the shrinks had behaved ethically. Dr. Arrigo revealed that most members of that team were from the military and intelligence agencies, a definite conflict of interest. She was one of only three civilians on that task force (although she is an expert on ethics in the field of intelligence). The APA team, in her view, had bowed to political pressures.

Her courageous stance earned her some rather serious enemies: See here and here.

Air Force Captain Garcia is probably not the same fellow pictured here. Note that Israeli archeologist Yigael Yadin (the correct spelling) died in 1984 and did his Dead Sea Scroll work in the 1950s. The guy in the photo is thus too young.

I can find no confirmation that a Courtney M. Hunt is connected with the CIA or any other branch of government. I would not be too terribly surprised to discover that such a person actually exists, although I obviously doubt that there are "jump rooms" in El Segundo. (Unless you count the Bare Elegance strip club.)

So, why did our John Carter wannabe drag the estimable Dr. Arrigo into this silliness? A couple of possibilities:

1. Arrigo has nothing to do with any of this. Basiago simply found her name on the internet.

2. Basiago -- or one of the toons pushing this story -- really did contact Arrigo, but soft-pedaled (or neglected to mention) the really wacky stuff.

Frankly, I would not dismiss out of hand the suggestion that one underlying purpose, perhaps the main purpose, of this whole silly affair is to smear the name of Dr. Arrigo. As I've mentioned in previous posts, Israelis have participated in brutal interrogations in Iraq -- though not, to my knowledge, at Gitmo.

Which means that I'd like to learn more about this Air Force Captain Garcia -- if he's real. Is he what Mossad calls a "helper"?

Incidentally, Air Force intelligence has a quasi-legendary unit called AFOSI-PJ, which has been known to use wild tales of the paranormal in their disinformation exercises. When it comes to pulling off elaborate mind fucks, these guys are the real-life equivalent of the "Mission Impossible" team. So I am something other than astonished to see the name of a putative AFOSI officer mentioned in connection with this bizarre affair.