Time travel claims and urban legends
These reports have turned out either to be hoaxes or to be based on incorrect assumptions, incomplete information, or interpretation of fiction as fact, many being now recognized as urban legends.
In 1911, Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924) published a book entitled An Adventure, under the names of "Elizabeth Morison" and "Frances Lamont".
They described a visit to the Petit Trianon, a small château in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where they claimed they saw ghosts including Marie Antoinette and others.
In October 2010, Northern Irish filmmaker George Clarke uploaded a video clip entitled "Chaplin's Time Traveller" to YouTube.
[2] Philip Skroska, an archivist at the Bernard Becker Medical Library of Washington University School of Medicine, thought that the woman might have been holding a rectangular ear trumpet.
[4] New York Daily News writer Michael Sheridan said the device was probably an early hearing aid, perhaps an Acousticon manufactured by Miller Reese Hutchison.
On first glance the man is taken by many to be wearing a printed T-shirt, but on closer inspection it seems to be a sweater with a sewn-on emblem, the kind of clothing often worn by sports teams of the period.
[7][8] The "Time Traveling Hipster" became a case study in viral Internet phenomena which was presented at the Museums and the Web 2011 conference in Philadelphia.
[12] Fuelled by media websites such as LADbible[13] it gained global coverage via news outlets in Russia, Iran,[citation needed] Taiwan,[14] Hungary,[15] China[16] and Vietnam.
Humphryes, the original uploader, was quoted in these stories as dismissing the time travel theories, stating that the man in question was probably just rolling a cigarette.
The story of Rudolph Fentz is an urban legend from the early 1950s and has been repeated since as a reproduction of facts and presented as evidence for the existence of time travel.
[20] In 2015 Bell interviewed him again on his radio show, Midnight in the Desert, where Marcum claimed that he had been transported two years into the future and 800 miles away, landing near Fairfield, Ohio, but suffered amnesia.
While living in a homeless shelter, Marcum slowly remembered his name, his social security number, and other memories that enabled him to re-enter society.
[21] Between 2000 and 2001, an online bulletin board user self-identified as John Titor became popular as he claimed to be a time traveler from 2036 on a military mission.
[33] A video uploaded in 2006 shows a Swedish man named Håkan Nordkvist claiming that he had been accidentally transported to 2046 when attempting to fix the sink in his kitchen.
[35] Some online viewers claimed that an 1860 painting by Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller titled The Expected depicted a woman holding and staring down at a mobile phone while strolling along a path in the countryside.
Italian Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti [fr] claimed to have used a time viewer which could film the past without sound called a chronovisor to obtain a photograph of the Crucifixion of Jesus and view scenes from ancient Rome, including a performance of the lost play Thyestes.
[37][38] According to author Paul J. Nahin, a short story by Horace Gold (using the penname Dudley Dell) called "The Biography Project" published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine may have influenced Ernetti's claim.
