Blake & Mortimer and the Jenseitsflugmaschine

This morning for some reason – this strange memory of ours, isn’t it ? – we returned a number of years back in time. Not literally, we’re not that good, but in a manner of speaking: we namely saw pictures of a Blake and Mortimer-book. That book in which Mortimer travels through time … What was it again … Oh yeah, The time trap.

You remember that book ? Blake barely plays a part in it, but Mortimer is nicely tricked in professor Miloch’s play. Miloch, the brain behind the meteor shower in S.O.S. Meteors: Mortimer in Paris, has a nice little inheritance for Mortimer: a “time machine”. Sadly a sabotaged one, which almost kills Mortimer, but it is working.

Hmm, okay, not really original in the world of comics, of course, and that wasn’t the case either in 162 when the book was published. But we were thinking of exactly this “time machine” when, this morning, we read a piece about the so called Jenseitsflugmaschine (no good translation for this German word, but some call it “Interdimensional machine”)?

Only one picture of this Jenseitsflugmaschine (above) is known and that machine doesn’t look a lot like the one Miloch made (here), but apparently they both do exactly the same: make it possible for the pilot to travel through time …

December 1919: Karl Haushofer, head of the Thule Gesellschaft (Thule Society), has invited a handful of highly esteemed occultists to a cabin in the Alps near Berchtesgaden and introduces them to two beautiful women. One seems rather shy, is only 18 years old and is called Sigrun. The other one goes by the name of Maria Orsitsch and has, according to Haushofer, received a message from an extraterrestrial civilization. Both are, what is called, mediums.

Orsitsch has – using a technique called automatic writing - written the received message in two languages, being, again according to Haushofer, a secret Templar code and Sumerian. Haushofer has translated the texts already: they appear to contain the necessary instructions to build an anti-gravity engine. Viktor Schauberger, back then already a controversial scientist, had looked at the instructions and confirmed they had potential.

We’ll not digress on explanations on the origin of the instructions – Aldebaran -, but we will dwell on the fact that Orsitch and/or Haushofer claimed also that the machine had the possibility to alter time.

Knowing that Aldebaran is 65 light years away from us and the Jenseitsflugmaschine according to the instructions had to be used to transport “worthy” people over there, that claim fits the bill. And realizing that the Thule Gesellschaft was far from happy with the world created by the Industrial Revolution and would have done anything to finish that, that claim is exactly what made the story interesting for the group.

Just imagine them being able to return to a time in which “the Gods still walked the Earth”. We don’t have a clue when that was, but to which time does Mortimer initially return with professor Miloch’s Jenseitsflugmaschine – called a diachronator in the book ? Exactly, to a time passed by 150.000.000 years ago. He doesn’t meet Gods there, but has a close encounter with a number of dinosaurs that walked the Earth back then. The men and women gathered that evening at Haushofer’s cabin sure would have been astonished …

However, flying saucers play a certain role in Book 1 of The Maier-Files, but there’s nog Jenseitsflugmaschine there. Neither is in the free prequel on our website by the way, but it is worth reading it.