For 25 years, a Moscow State University institute researched teleportation. Then the media took notice — and its website vanished.
An obscure group studying teleportation and time travel operated for decades out of Moscow State University (MSU) — until a media report prompted its sudden disappearance from the web.
For more than 25 years, Russia’s prestigious Moscow State University has hosted a group calling itself the “Institute for the Study of the Nature of Time,” which claimed to research teleportation. After journalists from the Russian-language broadcaster RTVI recently reported on its existence, however, the institute’s website stopped loading.
For years, the group reportedly held pseudo-scientific seminars in MSU lecture halls on topics like time machines, teleportation, and ways to access information about the future.
According to its mission statement, the institute aimed to “understand the nature of the world’s variability and develop adequate methods to measure that variability,” as well as to create “conditions for uniting researchers of time.”
The institute had its own page on an MSU subdomain, which listed its address as the Biophysics Department within the university’s School of Biology.
Mikhail Kirpichnikov, the School of Biology’s dean, told RTVI that no such organization is officially affiliated with the university, though he said “some structure calling itself that” does exist.
Soon after RTVI contacted MSU’s press office, the institute’s website went offline.