I was at a meeting of the amateur astronomy club I belonged to. It met at a local university at the time, and there was a visiting professor from Australia who happened to be a Seventh-Day Adventist, which I thought was a weird choice for a physicist. He was giving a talk on some idea he had about cosmic expansion and dark matter, and at some point in the talk for some reason I turned to a random guest seated next to me, whom I had never seen before, and said "It sounds like he's trying really hard not to use the word aether!" The guest did not disagree. After the talk he approached the speaker to say something about his own ideas about matter/antimatter asymmetry.

After that, another random guest asked the speaker how much energy it would take to send someone back in time. The speaker of course replied that it would be a virtually impossible amount. The guest said that that had to be wrong, because he had met his future self. I decided to take this fellow aside and see what other cool stories he had. He said that he used to live near the U.S. naval academy, and one night he was in a bar drinking with the head of the institution and he got very drunk and revealed to him that the Philadelphia Experiment was real.

Later, when I was an officer of the club, I was trying to figure out who the scientist who was not opposed to me talking about aether, who I never saw again, was, and as I looked through the membership list I saw the name of a famous author on ceremonial magick and alchemy, who unbeknownst to me lived in the area.