Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain claimed they could travel through time
People have always wanted to master time travel. It seemed that if you could build a time machine, you could press one button and travel to the past to fix all your mistakes. Or press another button and travel to the future to see what awaits us there. A time machine hasn’t been created yet, but scientists believe that there are at least two ways to travel through time. And there are people who claim they have succeeded in doing so.
John Titor
In the early 2000s, when the internet was just making its way into every home, a character appeared on forums who seemed to have stepped right off the screen of “The Terminator.” You remember that movie about the machine uprising, right? After it, we’ve been afraid that robots might start killing people.
John Titor, under the nickname TimeTravel_0, claimed he was a soldier from the year 2036. His mission sounded impressive: travel back to 1975 to find an ancient IBM 5100 computer. Why? To use it in the future to eliminate a virus that was supposed to destroy the world. But on the way, he decided to stop by the year 2000 — to visit his family and, while he was at it, warn humanity that World War III with a nuclear bombardment of the USA was coming soon.
Apparently, the nuclear apocalypse in the future had ruined everything so badly that there was no getting by without an antiquated computer from the ’70s. It sounds insane, but many people still wonder: was he a troll or a prophet?
A photograph of John Titor in the past. Image source: thrillist.com
Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain
In 1901, two Englishwomen, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, went for a stroll through Versailles.
The route was simple, but the women managed to get lost and accidentally step from the 20th century straight into 1792, at the height of the French Revolution. They saw Marie Antoinette with their own eyes, sitting sadly by the Petit Trianon just before she was arrested. The teachers described everything in their book “An Adventure,” but they were immediately ridiculed. Critics pointed to maps and proved that the bridge they had crossed simply could not have existed.
And then an old 18th-century map was found, and the bridge was on it. However, skeptics quickly cooled the excitement: before sitting down to write the book, the ladies had meticulously studied all of French history. So it’s unclear — did they really visit the past, or did they simply mistake their wishful thinking for reality?
Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain. Image source: wikipedia.org
Pellegrino Ernetti
In the 20th century, Catholic priest Pellegrino Ernetti lived on the island of San Giorgio and combined the incompatible: during the day he cast out demons as an exorcist, and in the evenings he headed the department of ancient music.
But his true passion was time travel. The monk invented the chronovisor — a device that allowed one not to travel through time personally, but to watch the past as if on a television screen. His dream was to witness an opera that had caused a stir in Rome back in 169 BC.
His fellow priests even confirmed that the device worked: one of them, François Brune, wrote a book in which he swore he had heard Napoleon’s speeches and witnessed the crucifixion of Christ. Today, the chronovisor has vanished without a trace. They say the Vatican is hiding something. But if you happen to see a listing for one on a classifieds site — don’t believe it, it’s a fake.
Pellegrino Ernetti. Image source: wikipedia.org
Billy Meier
Swiss native Billy Meier knew from childhood that he was different from everyone else. At the age of five, an alien named Sfath from the Pleiades constellation appeared to him and became a father figure for the boy. When Sfath died, he was replaced by a female alien named Asket, and the grown-up Billy was taken under the wing of the alien’s granddaughter — a beauty named Semjase.
What she taught him — history doesn’t say, but Billy snapped plenty of photos of starships and humanoids. The aliens, according to him, traveled through time and space and regularly warned humanity about World War III. First, the war was supposed to start in 2006, then in 2008, then in 2010…
Billy Meier. Image source: mungfali.com
Victor Goddard
British Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard was a serious man, but fate treated him to encounters with the unexplained as well.
In 1935, he was flying over an abandoned airfield when he suddenly saw it come to life: hangars full of aircraft, mechanics in blue uniforms bustling about. The strange thing was that in those years, mechanics wore brown uniforms. Nobody believed Goddard, but four years later the Royal Air Force officially changed the uniform color to that very same blue.
That very mysterious photograph. Image source: reddit.com
And in 1975, the marshal showed a photo from 1919 taken at the funeral of mechanic Freddy Jackson. If you look closely, in the top row stands the deceased Freddy himself. The photograph is part of the official archive, and Photoshop didn’t exist back then. Coincidence? Or did Freddy simply decide to visit his colleagues after death?
