Per Basiago's account, the machine descended from papers seized from Nikola Tesla's New York apartment after his death in January 1943: two elliptical booms eight feet high, ten feet apart, generating a field of radiant energy that bent space-time into a vortal tunnel. His father Raymond allegedly joined him on the first jump. DARPA has no record of any such program.
The lore says the 140 children were scattered back into ordinary life, some to meetings with Lincoln, some to a base in 2045, some maimed in accidents, one boy allegedly losing both feet. The community treats the silence of the other 139 as witness protection rather than absence.
The stranger turn: Pegasus as cold-war psychological theater, real children, real facilities, fake missions, an experiment in manufacturing belief in time travel to see what such belief does to a mind. In this version the program existed precisely to be unbelievable.
Why would a government use children for the most sensitive technology ever built?