As Abhi posted, Amal Dorai of MIT threw a party for time travelers last Saturday. He begged visitors to bring a cure for cancer or some other proof of their travels. Here’s a report from Afua, the Samoan particle physicist-slash-bouncer:

“Two surfer dudes named Bill and Ted showed up claiming to be from the year 1989. I asked them to prove it, but all they said was ‘way!’ and ‘bogus.’ So I threw ’em out. They yelled ‘Party on, dudes!’ and disappeared into a phone booth.

“A crazy-eyed old man with Van der Graaf hair showed up in a DeLorean. I ejected him, and he peeled out at 88 mph stuffing garbage scraps into a blender.

“Some huge thug showed up in a monster suit. He gave his name as Moore Locke, shrieked loudly and bit someone’s head off.

“A tall, thin man with pointy ears wandered by muttering something about a whale.

“A guy named Spicoli showed up stoned out of his mind. ‘Dude, I’m, like, from 30 seconds in the past,’ he said, adding, ‘huh-huh-huh.’

“So there were no time travelers at the party.”

By the end of the party, the only confirmed time travelers were Dorai’s purple leisure suit and zebra-stripe shirt. No other travelers showed up, so the party was a bust. The MIT boys squabbled over the only female-like creature in the room, a girl from BU who took a wrong turn and got trapped in Morss Hall like a dinosaur surrounded by velociraptors. Thousands of years later, they will find her bones.

 But the partiers did triumph over their perennial rivals, the jocks of the Alpha Beta fraternity. Dorai got loads of publicity, started a nanotech company and took it public the day before the party. A new game, Playboy Mansion: Amal Dorai Edition, comes out next month. The title character is played by Anthony Michael Hall. I’m told it’s hot.

Update: Wired actually attended the party:

MIT’s Dorai gave interviews ahead of time to major media outlets to ensure that no one in the future missed his invitation: to share chips and soda with people sporting tweed jackets and canes, and those dressed-up as their favorite science fiction and fantasy characters.

But when attendees gathered outside for a raucous countdown at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, nothing appeared on the makeshift landing pad at the coordinates Dorai set for the time travelers. Fog from an aqueous smoke machine rolled across the empty landing area, which lay at one end of a sand volleyball court in the East Campus courtyard. One person in the crowd shouted, “Happy New Year…”

It’s actually a blessing that no one from the future showed up on Saturday night, said David Batchelor, the NASA physicist who wrote The Science of Star Trek… Batchelor noted the same potential risks mentioned by speakers at the convention, such as the displacement of matter in a finite universe caused by the introduction of someone from another time. He also touched on the paradoxes arising from such acts as going back in time and killing one’s own ancestors.

He wrote a book on Star Trek, and his name is Batchelor? Figures 😉