Am I supposed to believe that evidence of time travel is hiding in plain sight? You don’t have to dig too deep to find artifacts that don’t belong, photos of people dressed for the wrong century, or those claiming to have blinked from one time to another. Was Doc Brown on to something? Is the space-time continuum breaking apart?
Time travel is a liminal thing. That idea of being caught between eras, temporarily visiting a time you were never meant to be in. Could it happen? Maybe some time travelers left footprints, maybe some were mistakenly caught on camera. Most of these are just urban legends, but a few make me think. So let’s dive in, but remember: If you ever do time travel, leave your smartphone behind!
A time traveler in a photograph from 1917?
It’s an odd thing when something doesn’t quite fit in with its time. At first, you may not even notice. So is the case with this seemingly ordinary photograph taken in 1917 Canada, found in a 1974 book titled The Great History of Cape Scott. It shows a group of people sitting upon the rocks of a beach, but among the crowd is a man who appears suspiciously out of place. His clothes don’t seem to match those of the other beach-goers. He’s wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and sporting a hair style that seems pretty modern in comparison.
In the photo, one man appears to look at him, maybe in confusion. He’s just sitting there, an accidental visitor in someone else’s era, the photo itself a frozen liminal moment where past and future collide. Maybe. He’s known as the “surfer dude.” But was he surfing fashion…or time itself?
Did a time traveler visit a bridge?
The Virtual Museum of Canada has closed, but at one time it held in its collection a peculiar photo of the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in 1941. The bridge was located in British Columbia, Canada, and quite a few people showed up for it. But like the 1917 Canadian surfer dude, someone in this photo seemingly didn’t belong. Who was this oddly out-of-place man in the hip glasses and strangely modern clothing?
The photo went absolutely viral sometime around 2010, and the fellow in question became dubbed the “Time Traveling Hipster.” What’s fun here is that, time traveler or not, this is a real photo. The man certainly stands out from his cohorts – he’s wearing sunglasses, possibly a hoodie or light jacket, and what appears to be a branded t-shirt. He’s also holding a relatively small camera. Was he simply ahead of his time? Or out of it? We can’t be sure, but the story of his photograph is one to remember.
Smartphones in the past?
Modern fashion might make you suspicious, but smartphones are the bane of any would-be time traveling tourist. They seem like the most obvious thing to be spotted in photos, videos, and even paintings. This video shows a clip from a special feature found on the DVD edition of the Charlie Chaplin film The Circus. It’s from the movie’s premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in 1928. A woman in a dark coat walks behind a zebra, and some think she might be talking on a smartphone.
Meanwhile, over in 1938 Massachusetts, this video shows off another woman who people think looks suspiciously like she’s using a smartphone. She’s leaving a DuPont factory along with a group of others. Smartphones, brushes, other handheld rectangular objects of a dubious nature. Could be anything, I guess.
Is this a compact disc case in the 1800s?
Some would say this painting from the 1800s shows off a man holding a fancy CD box. I really don’t know what it is, but another man is shown lifting up what looks like a square plastic sleeve or something similar. The earliest form of plastic didn’t exist until the mid-1800s, and Compact Discs wouldn’t arrive on the scene until the 1980s. What was this box for?
Safety Not Guaranteed
A classified ad in a 1997 issue of Backwood Home Magazine made a strange request. “WANTED,” it read, “Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview, CA 93022. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.”
That was a bit odd. In 2012, they made a film based on this called, well, Safety Not Guaranteed. If you’d like to take a break from time travel proof and check out some other time travel movies instead, head over to my movie list.
Nikola Tesla’s jump room
For years, Andrew Basiago has told the story of Project Pegasus, an alleged covert time travel initiative that was funded and maintained by the United States government throughout the 1960s and 70s. But perhaps the most interesting detail of his peculiar story is the existence of the so-called Jump Room. It was in this room that Basiago claimed participants such as himself performed their secretive time travel experiments.
Allegedly built using designs by the late Nikola Tesla, recovered from his New York apartment shortly after his death, the room housed what some would call a teleportation machine. Basiago claimed it consisted of a “shimmering curtain” made of “radiant energy,” a special form of energy that is “latent and pervasive” throughout the cosmos. It is, if this story is to be believed, what makes time travel possible. Basiago claims to have visited Gettysburg using the jump room, and that the experiments even took him as far as the planet Mars.
Did they find a modern watch in an ancient Chinese tomb?
Another Daily Mail story from 2008 claimed that Chinese archeologists found a watch in a 400-year-old Si Qing tomb, located in Shangsi County, China. Images show a group of archeologists examining a stone block within a room, as well as the singular photo of someone holding up a tiny piece of metal in the shape of a watch. If you ask me, the watch looks like it’s also made of stone and only big enough to fit on a pinky finger, but the so-called timepiece has its “hands” frozen at 10:06, along with the word “Swiss” engraved on the back. Was this a fossilized watch from the future? Should we be taking the Shrinking Man Project seriously? Your guess is as good as mine.
Was a man saved by a time traveler?
In 2019, a video from Turkey showed a man nearly meeting his end, only to be saved in the strangest way by a mysterious passerby. According to Demirören News Agency (check here for the video), the event happened in late February in the Turkish city of Adana. Serdar Binici was standing outside of his store when another man, who happened to be walking by, tapped his left shoulder. Binici, for reasons even he claims not to understand, instinctively looked over to his right, and in that moment a truck drove by, and its rear metal door swung open toward his head. Binici was able to move out of the way just in time.
During a follow-up interview, Binici questioned how and why the events played out as they did. Why did he look over his opposite shoulder, and not the one he’d been tapped on? Why did the stranger tap his shoulder at all? Binici supposes the stranger may not, himself, know why any of this happened. However, the peculiarity of this video has led many to speculate that the passing stranger wasn’t just some random person, but actually a time traveler – possibly one on a mission from the future, striving to put right what once went wrong, alongside his companion Al. I’d like to think so, anyway.
The mummy’s modern boots
Have you heard of the Adidas Mummy? We like to give these alleged temporal anomalies fun names. The shoes were found on the preserved body of a 30 to 40-year-old woman discovered in the Altai mountains region of Mongolia in 2016. She had been buried there for about 1,100 years, the likely victim of a “blow to the head.” But her feet drew the most attention, because she wore shoes that looked like they could have been pulled out of a modern day Foot Locker.
In 2017, The Daily Mail (check there for photos) mused that they resembled a pair of snowboarding boots. They were “knee length” and made of felt, with splashes of bright red. People thought they looked like Adidas. Among her other belongings was what archaeologists described as a “beauty kit,” including a mirror, a comb, and a knife. They brushed off any claims that she was a time traveler, but did admit her style was “very modern.” Coincidence? Or proof that good design is timeless?
The time slip hotel: Proof that even buildings time travel?
In 1979, two couples were on their way to Spain, leaving England and venturing through France. While near Montelimar, they decided to stop and search for a hotel. Their original choices were packed, but eventually they did find one – an old two-story building with the single word “HOTEL” above the entrance. They got a room, and stayed for the night, despite everything seeming particularly old-fashioned. The bed was hard, the place didn’t have a telephone, and there was no glass in the windows. Likely out of bemusement, they took a number of photographs.
When they went down to the dining room the next morning, they had a chance to see the hotel’s other customers. They too looked strangely out of place, dressed in outmoded clothing, two in old uniforms. Strangest of all was the bill for their stay – 19 francs, far less than they had anticipated. All in all, it was a somewhat strange experience, but not unpleasant. They’d found a place to rest for the night, and continued on their way to Spain, where they presumably had a decent time. It wasn’t until they returned to France and looked for the hotel again that they knew something was truly amiss. The hotel didn’t exist.
This wasn’t a matter of the hotel simply shutting down, or their being unable to find it again. It simply was not there. They even asked around in Montelimar, and no one had ever heard of it. When they returned to England, the mystery deepened: Their photographs of the hotel were gone. Not only was there no proof that the hotel existed, but there was no proof that they’d ever been there at all. Their odd tale was later featured on an episode of the television series Strange But True.
Untangling the Mandela Effect
The Mandela Effect takes time travel urban legends into stranger tides. Do you remember the Berenstain Bears actually being spelled “Berenstein?” Or maybe that nonexistant Sinbad genie movie from the 90s? Collective wrong memories seem to pile up, and one out-there explanation that gets floated around often is that our timeline has been disrupted somehow. Like the echoing memories of the tangent universe at the end of Donnie Darko, or the alternate reality memories some characters hold in The Man In the High Castle.
Is everyone just remembering incorrectly? If time travelers are careful, maybe they don’t leave footprints like tiny watches or strange photos. Maybe they just become ripples in memory, like half-remembered dreams. Check out my post on the Mandela Effect for more on that.
Somewhere In Time
So is the timeline broken? Probably not. But these little glitches, whether they’re hoaxes or overhyped or maybe something stranger, carry a liminal weight. There’s a quiet dread to items being displaced from their own times, or the idea that your timeline has been changed, somehow. If you’re in the mood for more, check out the curated channels over at 3am Static, where you’ll find some scifi time travel shorts and liminal vibes.
And if you want more on alleged time travelers, check out the following:
- Rudolph Fentz, an accidental time traveler from a series of short stories
- John Titor, the alleged time traveler from 2036
- Other Time Travel Urban Legends
