It’s no coincidence that Scott Bakula, well-known for his starring role in “Quantum Leap” was appointed to portray “Captain Jonathan Archer” in “Star Trek: Enterprise.”
The first episode of “Enterprise” was titled “Broken Bow.” I have written about how Broken Bow, OK, was in the middle of the route between Antlers, OK, and Ashdown, AR. It was from that episode I developed my “April 16” theory.
The precise mid-point between the fictional date of the first episode "Quantum Leap" and the actual air date of that first episode is 12/19/72 - the day Apollo 17 returned to Earth. The Apollo 17 flight was the last known mission to land on Earth’s moon.
From 9/13/1956 to 3/26/1989 is: 11882 days
11882 / 2 = 5941
From 9/13/1956 to 12/19/1972 is: 5941 days
"Quantum Leap"
Genesis - September 13, 1956
Original Air Date:26 March 1989 (Season 1, Episode 1)
Apollo 17
Apollo 17 was the eleventh manned space mission in the NASA Apollo program. It was the first night launch and the final lunar landing mission of the Apollo program.
Launch: December 7, 1972
Landing: December 19, 1972
Quantum Leap is an American science fiction television series that ran for 95 episodes from March 1989 to May 1993 on the NBC network. Each episode of the series begins with a spoken introduction which explains the series' premise:
Theorizing that one could time-travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett led an elite group of scientists into the desert, to develop a top-secret project known as Quantum Leap. Pressured to prove his theories or lose funding, Dr. Beckett prematurely stepped into the project accelerator, and vanished...
He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next Leap...will be the Leap home...
Originally shown on Easter Sunday, 1989, the pilot was a two-hour movie simply known as Quantum Leap. When the show returned for new episodes in September of that year, however, NBC aired a severely edited (90-minute) version of the pilot called "Genesis."
Original airdate 1989-03-26
…
A man wakes up in a bed, thinking, "I did it!" His next thought is, "Did what?" His name is Tom Stratton. It's 1956. He works for the Air Force flying planes, and he's got a beautiful wife and a nice son. There's just one problem: he's pretty sure that his name's not Tom Stratton, it's Sam. But he can't even remember his last name. In fact, he's also pretty sure that the year shouldn't be 1956. And worst of all, he's never flown a plane in his life. (OK, make that more than one problem.)
Help (such as it is) comes along in the form of a man named Al. There's just one problem with Al: he's not really there. He's just a hologram. And holograms didn't exist back in 1956. And Al has the tendency to walk through invisible doors. Sam -- whoever he is -- is having a very bad day.
Eventually, Al explains to Sam that he's a part of a time-travel experiment from the future. He "leaped" into the past, but somehow wound up as Tom Stratton. But Tom Stratton died when attempting to fly the Mach-2...which, for Sam, is coming up in just a couple of days. If Sam can survive that, he'll change history, Al says, and hopefully "leap" again.
However, the leap doesn't take Sam home, as he hopes. Instead, he winds up as a minor-league baseball player back in 1968, trying to win his last game for his team.
Sam is really fed up with Al, and wants to know whose hairbrain idea this whole project was in the first place. Al tells him: it's Sam himself. Project Quantum Leap was his idea. "If anyone can figure out how to get you home," Al tells Sam, "it's you."
