Updated: April 20, 2026

Project Tic-Toc is a top-secret U.S. government effort to build an experimental time machine, known as "The Time Tunnel" due to its appearance as an elliptical passageway. The base for Project Tic-Toc is a huge, hidden underground complex in Arizona, 800 floors deep and employing more than 12,000 specialized personnel. The directors of the project are Dr. Douglas Phillips ( Robert Colbert ), Dr. Anthony Newman ( James Darren ), and Lt. General Heywood Kirk ( Whit Bissell ). The specialists assisting them are Dr. Raymond Swain ( John Zaremba ), a foremost expert in electronics, and Dr. Ann MacGregor ( Lee Meriwether ), an electrobiologist supervising the unit that determines how much force and heat a time traveler is able to withstand. The series is set in 1968, two years into the future from the actual broadcast season, 1966 to 1967.