Time Travel Claims That Make Us Question Reality — and Sanity

Our world comes with rules. Gravity keeps us on the ground, the speed of light refuses to budge, and no matter how politely we ask, our toaster will not reveal next week’s lottery numbers. And yet, tucked between dusty archives and dubious message boards, you’ll occasionally find a story that looks at these supposedly unbreakable laws and says, “Sure, that’s cute,” before strolling straight through them like they’re merely suggestions.

Welcome to the weird world of time travel claims and the persistent legends that there are those among us who have figured out the secrets of the universe previously known only to Doctor Who.

Some people claim they’ve slipped through time by accident. Others insist they’ve traveled on purpose, usually with the kind of confidence you only see in people who have never feel the compulsion to double-check their appearance in the mirror before walking out the door. Photos appear with inexplicably modern bystanders. Travelers arrive with passports from countries that don’t exist. Pilots report glimpses of the future. And then there are the folks who show up on internet forums to announce, very matter-of-factly, that they’ve come from the year 2036 to pick up an obsolete computer.

Are these genuine tales of temporal tourism, or are they the sort of stories that happen when imagination, low-resolution photographs, and possibly mood-altering substances collide? Real news or urban legends? That’s for you to decide. Our job—and we say this with the solemn dignity befitting our decades of journalistic absurdity—is simply to guide you on a little tour of the strange, the suspicious, and the “maybe, but also probably not.”

Pack your bags. We’re about to take the TARDIS everywhere and everywhen.

The Time-Traveling Hipster in 1941

The internet has many beloved traditions: arguing with strangers, diagnosing each other’s pets, and pointing at old photographs to insist that someone in the background is obviously a time traveler. One of the most enduring examples is the so-called “Time Traveling Hipster,” spotted in a 1941 photograph documenting the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia.

The photo went viral in the early 2000s. Forums across the internet declared him a rogue traveler from the future, covertly trying to blend in.

The photo is completely authentic. The man inside it, however, became a minor celebrity after online sleuths declared that his outfit was “too modern,” his sunglasses were “too current,” and his camera was “too small” to have existed in 1941. In fairness, he does look like the only person in the crowd who has ever uttered the phrase “venti mocha Frappuccino.”

Was he a 21st-century researcher crashing a 1941 party, or is the explanation more mundane? Research quickly rained on the sci-fi parade. The sunglasses? That style had been around since the 1920s. His shirt, which the internet insisted was a printed T-shirt decades ahead of its time, appears instead to be a perfectly ordinary sweater with a sewn-on emblem—the kind sports teams (like the Montreal Maroons) wore routinely in that era. The rest of his clothing, while significantly more casual than the respectfully dressed Canadians around him, could all be purchased in 1941 without needing a DeLorean.

Even his allegedly “futuristic” camera checks out: Kodak had been producing compact models of that size since 1938. Admittedly, Kodak has a strange relationship with time since the company used a 13-month calendar for most of its history, but that’s hardly evidence of a secret temporal reconnaissance mission—unless the mission parameters required photographing bridges and confusing future Reddit users.

The “Time Traveling Hipster” eventually became a case study in viral internet culture and was even presented at the Museums and the Web conference in 2011. Which, honestly, is exactly the kind of long-term academic recognition most hipsters dream of anyway.

In other words: probably not a time traveler. Just a guy with better fashion sense than his neighbors. A rare thing in any century.

The 1943 Cornwall Beach Man on Mobile Phone

In 2018, a photograph resurfaced of beachgoers in Cornwall. The internet lost its collective mind over one person who appeared to be holding… a phone. A smart phone. In 1943.

Admittedly, it certainly looks like something distinctly anachronistic is going on. For one thing, the beachgoer seems to be more appropriately dressed for a corporate board meeting rather than catching a few rays. Secondly, he is in a posture that is very familiar to us but seemingly out of place for 1943 — his head is down, and he is focused on a small object in his hands that, despite its size, seems to require both of his hands to use. If you saw him today, you’d immediately assume he was texting someone on his mobile phone. But in 1943?

The image, uploaded to Twitter in 2018 by multimedia artist Stuart Humphryes, ignited a global flurry. News outlets eagerly amplified the theory—Fox News in the U.S. jumped aboard, followed by British tabloids like The Daily Mirror, and then media across Russia, Taiwan, Hungary, China, Vietnam, and more. Humphryes himself, to his credit, tried to point out that the man was almost certainly just rolling a cigarette. As it turns out, even in wartime Britain, nicotine cravings were a far more reliable constant than accidental time travel.

Still, the rumor persists, largely because people find it irresistible to suggest that time travelers go sightseeing in war zones. Which, frankly, tells us far more about the internet than the photograph.

The Moberly–Jourdain Timeslip: Two Professors, One Garden, and Possibly 1789

In August 1901, two very respectable English academics—Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain—decided to take a pleasant little walk through the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Nothing unusual there. Lots of people wander Versailles and experience nothing more supernatural than the price of bottled water. But Moberly and Jourdain later insisted that something was “off” almost immediately: the atmosphere shifted, the path felt wrong, and ordinary garden scenery began taking on the vibe of a museum diorama that had somehow started breathing.

As they continued down a quiet lane, they reported seeing figures who looked suspiciously like 18th-century staff—men in long coats and tricorn hats, a woman standing in a cottage doorway, and even a man with a dark, pockmarked face who Moberly found so unpleasant that she mentally filed him under “people you cross the street to avoid.” Finally, Moberly claimed she saw a fair-haired woman seated on the lawn sketching, dressed in clothing straight out of the late 1700s. Jourdain, for her part, didn’t see the sketching woman at all, which is the historical equivalent of one person saying they saw Elvis at Walmart while the other insists the store was closed.

Back in England, the two compared notes and realized their memories didn’t line up perfectly—but matched just well enough to convince themselves something genuinely strange had happened. Under the pseudonyms “Elizabeth Morison” and “Frances Lamont,” they published An Adventure in 1911, mapping out the gardens and arguing that their wanderings made more sense if they had, somehow, slipped into the Versailles of 1789. The book became a sensation, as any story tends to when it involves ghosts, lost time, and royalty wearing impractical hats.

Critics have since suggested far less magical explanations: maybe the women stumbled into a historical reenactment, or a private costume party, or maybe they were just tired and emotionally primed to misinterpret what they saw. Others chalk it up to memory drift or the kind of psychological syncing that can happen between close colleagues. Still, the story clings to the cultural imagination because it sits right on that perfect line between “implausible” and “well… maybe?” Whether they glimpsed 1789 or simply had a very odd afternoon, the Moberly–Jourdain incident remains one of history’s classiest and most polite alleged time slips.

John Titor: The Time Traveler Who Lived in a Message Board

In the years immediately before the turn of the millennium, when the internet was still figuring out whether it wanted to be a library or a food fight, a user calling himself “TimeTravel_0” appeared on a message board in November 2000. Before long, he adopted the name “John Titor” and calmly announced that he was a soldier from the year 2036. His stated mission? Travel back to 1975, pick up an IBM 5100 computer, and bring it home so the future could debug its ancient computer systems. And since he was passing through the year 2000 anyway, he thought he might as well visit family and log onto a forum or two. Naturally.

Titor wasn’t shy. He answered questions, shared long posts about how his time machine worked, and even supplied diagrams and technical jargon about “worldlines,” “time displacement units,” and the effects of gravitational fields on time travel. He described his machine as a modified 1967 Chevy with a time-travel unit installed, which sounds exactly like the sort of thing that happens when someone sees Back to the Future and decides to raise the stakes a bit.

Then came the predictions. Titor outlined a future in which the United States would descend into civil war, beginning in the mid-2000s and peaking around 2008. This would eventually give way to a brief but catastrophic global conflict in 2015 involving nuclear exchanges and massive devastation. He painted a picture of a fractured, militarized America, a world reshaped by war, and a culture permanently altered by disaster. It was bleak, vivid, and oddly specific—the kind of thing that makes you pause just long enough to wonder.

Eventually, in March 2001, Titor signed off with a simple farewell and vanished from the forums. Time passed, inconveniently refusing to match his storyline. No civil war broke out on his schedule, no nuclear conflict arrived on cue, and society stubbornly continued limping along in its usual, non-apocalyptic fashion. Researchers and curious fans later dug into the case and suggested that the whole saga might have been the creation of a Florida family with a flair for performance and an appreciation for early internet anonymity. No one has ever definitively proven who was behind “John Titor,” but the consensus has drifted gently toward “elaborate hoax” rather than “classified temporal mission.”

And yet, the legend refuses to die. John Titor has been referenced in books, documentaries, games, and countless conspiracy threads. He exists now as a kind of digital folklore figure: part urban legend, part cautionary tale, part wishful thinking. Whether you see him as a clever prank, a failed prophecy, or the one time traveler whose timeline simply diverged from ours, his story taps into the same persistent human question that fuels all of these tales: what if? The answer is probably “no,” but the fact that people still ask might be the most interesting part.

You can read all of the John Titor posts here.

The Andrew Carlssin Stock-Market Time Traveler

In 2003, a story hit tabloid newspapers claiming that the SEC had arrested a mysterious man who turned $800 into $350 million in a matter of weeks. During interrogation, he supposedly confessed to being a time traveler from the year 2256 and begged to return to his own time.

The entire report originated from The Weekly World News—home to Bat Boy, alien diplomats, and a surprising number of Elvis sightings. In other words, the most reliable part of the story is that the SEC exists.

The Man from Taured: A Passport, a Con Man, and a Legend That Refused to Stay Quiet

Every good time-travel anthology needs at least one mysterious traveler who shows up at an airport with paperwork from a country no one has heard of. In our case, the honor goes to John Allen Kuchar Zegrus, who arrived in Japan in 1959 carrying a passport that claimed he was a citizen of “Taured.” Immigration officers, displaying the sort of composure usually reserved for librarians and bomb-disposal technicians, politely pointed out that Taured was not, in fact, a country. Zegrus disagreed. Enthusiastically.

When questioned, he spun a biography so elaborate it could have fueled an entire season of prestige television: former pilot, globe-trotter, diplomat, part-time international mystery man. His passport even carried stamps from several embassies. Unfortunately for him, investigators discovered the stamps were forged, the story was stitched together from imagination and chutzpah, and the only thing real about Taured was how quickly it unraveled under basic scrutiny. Zegrus was arrested, tried, convicted of fraud and forgery, and eventually deported. Not quite the multiversal odyssey the legend later promised.

But this is where folklore steps in with its favorite hobby: ignoring the boring parts and polishing the rest into something gleaming. Over the decades, the Zegrus case morphed into the famous “Man from Taured” legend — the version where a man arrives in 1954 (not 1959), insists his country lies between France and Spain, is placed under guard in a hotel room, and then mysteriously vanishes overnight along with all his belongings. In this telling, the Japanese government is baffled, the passport is unexplainable, and the man himself seems to have slipped calmly back into whatever dimension he wandered in from.

The trouble is none of that actually happened. The real man didn’t disappear from a locked room; he disappeared into prison paperwork. The passport wasn’t interdimensional; it was just a spectacular forgery. And the only court involved wasn’t debating quantum gateways but rather sentencing him for creating fake documents. Still, the Taured tale persists because it hits that sweet spot between “provably false” and “delightfully spooky.” Maybe we just like the idea that somewhere out there — beyond Andorra, beyond the Pyrenees, beyond our own sense of direction — there’s a missing country full of misplaced travelers waiting for someone to find it.

The 1860 “iPhone Painting” That Wasn’t

Every so often, the internet rediscovers a painting and collectively decides that the artist must have been a time traveler, a prophet, or at least someone who really should have invested in whatever company invented the smartphone. One of the most popular examples is The Expected, an 1860 work by Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. The painting shows a young woman walking along a sunlit path, head bowed, hands clasped around a small rectangular object. Naturally, the internet took one look and declared: “She’s checking her phone!”

To be fair, once someone suggests it, you can’t unsee it. The woman is doing that exact posture we all do when trying to read a text while pretending we aren’t reading a text. She has the same downward gaze of a person judging whether her battery will last until she gets to the charger. It’s uncanny… until someone with actual art credentials shows up and gently reminds the rest of us that mobile phones did not, in fact, exist in 1860.

Art historians quickly stepped forward to explain that the young woman is holding a small devotional prayer book, not a smartphone. Waldmüller, a meticulous painter of Biedermeier-era sentimentality, often depicted young women with prayer books, hymnals, and tokens of piety. The painting is not a commentary on screen addiction but on spiritual reflection—though, admittedly, both can involve ignoring the world around you while staring at a tiny rectangle.

Still, the idea stuck because it’s irresistible: the notion that a 19th-century artist accidentally painted the iPhone a century and a half early. Maybe it’s our way of comforting ourselves—proof that humans have always stared vacantly at small objects, oblivious to nature, beauty, and the long-suffering friends trying to talk to them. Prayer book or not, the painting will probably continue making the rounds every few years, reminding us that good art is always open to interpretation… but not always to time travel.

The Curious Case of Jophar Vorin: A Traveler With No Country on Earth

In 1851, near Frankfurt an der Oder, local authorities encountered a bewildered man who introduced himself as Jophar Vorin. He spoke broken German, carried no identifying papers, and claimed he was from a country called Laxaria on a continent named Sakria—neither of which appear on any earthly map, antique or modern. He also insisted he spoke two additional languages, “Laxarian” and “Abramian,” which, unsurprisingly, linguists have never encountered outside this one report. It is the 19th-century equivalent of showing up at customs and declaring your nationality as “from somewhere beyond the edges of your puny cartography.”

According to the accounts, Vorin said he had been shipwrecked while traveling to Europe in search of a long-lost brother. When officials presented him with maps to identify his homeland, he reportedly couldn’t recognize anything at all—not even major landmasses—because, he claimed, his world was arranged differently. Whether this indicated a talent for improvisation, a cognitive break, or an exceptionally committed bit of interdimensional role-play remains a matter of spirited debate among those who enjoy spirited debates.

He was eventually placed under escort for further questioning, possibly bound for Berlin, but the journey took an unexpected turn. As one version of the story goes, Vorin escaped—or simply wandered off—into the forest and vanished without a trace. No body, no follow-up, no dramatic confession. He simply disappeared from the historical record as abruptly as he entered it, leaving behind a handful of bewildered officials and one of the most intriguing one-chapter mysteries of the 19th century.

Today, the tale of Jophar Vorin occupies that irresistible overlap between folklore, travelogue, campfire mystery, and—if we’re being honest—something that may have started life as a 19th-century clickbait hoax. Skeptics suggest he was probably a con artist, a wanderer with a good imagination, or someone trying very hard to avoid legal trouble. Believers lean toward more exotic possibilities, from parallel worlds to alternate timelines brushing up against ours. Whatever the origin, the story endures because it hits that deeply human nerve: the hope, however slim, that someone might wander into our world from a place we’ve never mapped and can’t quite explain.

Sir Victor Goddard: Air Marshal, Pilot, and the Man Who May Have Looked Four Years Into the Future

Sir Robert Victor Goddard wasn’t exactly the type you’d expect to report a paranormal aviation incident. Born in 1897, educated at the Royal Naval Colleges Osborne and Dartmouth, and later trained at Cambridge and Imperial College, he spent his early career in the Royal Naval Air Service during World War I before joining the newly formed RAF. By 1935 he had risen to deputy director of intelligence at the Air Ministry—a post not generally associated with whimsical daydreamers or people who get excited about haunted airstrips. He was also credited to have been the one responsible for the creation of the term “blimp.” In other words, his résumé reads like a checklist for “highly reliable source.”

That may be why his story from that same year still turns heads. In 1935, Goddard flew over the disused Drem Airfield in Scotland. At the time, the airfield was abandoned and overgrown, with cattle wandering where aircraft once taxied. Later that day, while flying back through a violent, disorienting storm, Goddard emerged from the clouds to find Drem suddenly restored, bustling, and—if his account is to be believed—several years ahead of schedule. He described mechanics in blue overalls, shiny yellow training aircraft, and even a monoplane that did not exist in RAF service at the time. The entire scene, he claimed, looked fully operational… just not in 1935.

The strangest part? Four years later, in 1939, many of Goddard’s alleged details lined up with reality. Drem was refurbished. The RAF adopted yellow paint schemes for training aircraft. Mechanics wore blue overalls. Even the type of aircraft he didn’t recognize in 1935 matched models introduced later. To some, this was evidence that Goddard had slipped through time or briefly glimpsed the future. To others, it was simply a case of misperception under stress, memory contamination, or the human brain doing gymnastics while flying through a storm.

Goddard himself never shied away from the mysterious. After serving in high command roles during World War II—including leading air operations in the South Pacific—he retired into a second career involving public advocacy for the paranormal. He wrote books on precognition, argued that ESP deserved serious study, and became an outspoken supporter of UFO research. Not exactly the standard post-retirement hobbies of your average Air Marshal, but undeniably on-brand for someone who claimed to have flown through a temporal detour.

Sir Victor’s alleged time travel even inspired the 1955 film The Night My Number Came Up, which is one of those situations where real life is so dramatic that Hollywood shrugs and says, “Close enough.” We’re a little conflicted about it, honestly. On one hand, here’s a decorated air marshal with a résumé that could knock over a filing cabinet; on the other hand, he’s now best known for fueling a science-fiction script. We find this both mildly insulting and, if we’re being honest, deeply enviable.

So, did Sir Victor experience a bona fide time travel phenomenon, or did an exhausted pilot misinterpret a chaotic moment in bad weather? Historians, pilots, physicists, and armchair chrononauts all have their theories. What remains is a story told by a decorated officer with nothing to gain from fabrication—and everything to add to our collection of delightfully confounding maybe-true, maybe-not time-travel tales.

So… Are Any of These Real?

No. But also yes. The stories are real; the time travel bit is still lacking a wee bit in terms of believability. And honestly, that’s the best part. Time-travel claims reveal more about human creativity than hypothetical physics. They show our desire to imagine a world bigger than the one we’re stuck with—and our willingness to chase a mystery even when the evidence is about as convincing as a squirrel wearing a jetpack.

Until someone shows up with receipts (or at least a verifiable photo of tomorrow’s lottery numbers), we’ll keep treating time-travel tales exactly where they belong: in the delightful overlap of legend, curiosity, and “bless their hearts.”

If your future self ever appears and hands you a USB stick, though—email us. The truth is out there, and we’re listening.

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