Gettysburg photograph (Basiago)
The Gettysburg photograph is an 1863 glass-plate photograph of the Soldiers' National Cemetery dedication ceremony at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863 — the day Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address — in which Andrew Basiago claims to be visible as a young boy in the foreground, which he presents as photographic evidence of his alleged Tesla teleportation transit from 1972 to that date as part of DARPA's Project Pegasus. The photograph is held at the Library of Congress (reproduction number LC-DIG-ds-03106; catalog number 2012648250) and was the first photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg to be identified as such, recognized in 1952 by Josephine Cobb, chief of the Still Pictures Branch at the National Archives and Records Administration.
The transit claim
In 1972, at approximately age ten, Basiago stepped into the plasma confinement chamber in East Hanover, New Jersey and was teleported to Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. Upon arriving barefoot in the brisk autumn air, he received replacement shoes from Gettysburg cobbler John Burns — accounting for the oversized footwear visible in the photograph. He identifies himself as the small boy standing to the left of center in the foreground of the image, and notes that his original shoes vanished during the transit — a phenomenon he compares to effects described in accounts of the Philadelphia Experiment.
Sterling Colgate and the plasma confinement technology
Basiago identified the scientist who sent him to Gettysburg as Sterling Colgate — president and dean of physics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech) in Socorro, and a signatory to the Colgate-Palmolive fortune who delivered funding for the project. As corroboration, Basiago described travelling to the Sterling Colgate archive at New Mexico Tech and finding a newspaper clipping dated February 5, 1972, reading: "Sterling Colgate will give a public lecture on Tuesday about his advances in plasma confinement." Colgate, who was alive during some of Basiago's investigations, declined to meet with him; his wife acknowledged Basiago as "very articulate" and said she could "see where you may have been on one of these special access programs as a child," but stated that Colgate would not return home if the meeting were about classified material.
Additional personnel named by Basiago as associated with the Gettysburg transit and surrounding Project Pegasus activity include Ed Dames — who Basiago says worked with him in the Montauk chair in the summer of 1973 in an auxiliary gym at Los Alamos Public High School — and Ivan B. Browning, identified as a director of science and technology for the CIA.
The photograph
The 1863 Gettysburg Address crowd photograph (David Bachrach), in which Andrew Basiago claims to appear as a child, having allegedly been teleported there via Project Pegasus.
The glass-plate negative is attributed variously to Mathew Brady (National Archives), David Bachrach (Center for Civil War Photography), or an unidentified photographer (historian William Frassanito); the Library of Congress lists the photograph under the title "[Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Gettysburg]." A high-resolution TIFF (138 MB) is publicly available at https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/ds/03100/03106u.tif and carries no known restrictions on publication. The photograph was also the subject of a 2013 Smithsonian Magazine interactive feature on efforts to identify Lincoln's position within the crowd.
The photograph was the first to be identified as showing Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg — recognised in 1952 by Josephine Cobb of the National Archives. It is this same glass-plate image, widely available and publicly authenticated, that Basiago points to as independently verifiable physical evidence of his presence at the event, since the image predates any possibility of digital manipulation and is held in a controlled archive.
Art Bell interview
Basiago described the Gettysburg transit in detail to Art Bell on Midnight in the Desert, noting that the transit was one of multiple jumps to the same or adjacent historical events — a practice he described as standard for Project Pegasus chrononauts, who were sent to historically significant events repeatedly, sometimes meeting earlier or later versions of themselves in the process. Basiago recounted seeing himself at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865 on what he identified as his sixth or seventh jump to that event: "I looked to my right and I saw myself walking through the theater and only later on the 6th or 7th jump I looked to my left and completed that meeting with myself."
DARPA and the eight modalities
Basiago characterises the Gettysburg transit as one deployment of one of eight distinct "modalities" of time travel that DARPA's Project Pegasus had "reduced to practice" by 1970 — ranging from psychic time travel through conventional remote viewing to various forms of physical displacement. The plasma confinement technology used for the Gettysburg transit represented the physical displacement category: a chamber constructed in East Hanover, New Jersey that used plasma confinement to open a temporal window. The involvement of the Ralph M. Parsons Company as primary defence contractor, and DARPA as coordinating agency, places the programme within a documented multi-agency special access programme structure.
Verification and the Colgate archive
Basiago's primary corroborating evidence for the Gettysburg transit — beyond the photograph itself — is the newspaper clipping he located at the Sterling Colgate archive at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology: a February 5, 1972 announcement of a public lecture by Colgate on "his advances in plasma confinement." The proximity of this date to the Gettysburg transit (which Basiago places in spring 1972), combined with the specificity of the subject matter, constitutes for Basiago the key evidentiary convergence: "You can't say that you time-traveled under a Sterling Colgate via plasma confinement and then ferret out some obscure newspaper clipping about his advances in plasma confinement. You don't have enough time to do that kind of research."