Citation Needed - Time travel claims and urban legends

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_claims_and_urban_legends   Multiple accounts of people who allegedly travelled through time have been reported by the press or circulated online. These reports have turned out to be either hoaxes or else based on incorrect assumptions, incomplete information, or interpretation of fiction as fact. Many are now recognized as urban legends.

Oh, and welcome. Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and the best movie that has time travel is Hennet. Followed closely by Terminator One and Time Cop. And joining me to have aggressive counter-answeres are Tom, Noah, Cecil, and Eli.

You've always been more of a Donnie Darko man myself. That's the... I love that movie. All right. Well, if Tom is taking his thematic time travel movie, dark brooding, caught in a loop, I'm going to take my, I'm going to keep tenant. It's clever, hard to understand, and a financial disappointment. I didn't like Looper, but I was worried that other people were going to like it.

So I just didn't say anything. All right. Tom, what person place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? we're going to be talking about today. Today we're going to be talking about tales of time travel. Okay. So what are your thoughts on time travel? Like in general, positive, cheery?

What are you thinking? It's a cheery start. Time travel is bullshit. We know this because everyone pretty much agrees that if time travel were real, you'd be obligated to go back in time and kill Hitler. But then the very fact that you know who Hitler is is proof itself that no one has done this. And since time travel is, I mean, well, it's time travel. It's not like it just hasn't happened yet because you don't have to wait for the future to affect the past if you're capable of moving from the future into the past.

Now, look, I know if some people would say that you have to assume that any action undertaken through time travel would cause a rift in space time. You know, where in the reality where Hitler survives continues onward and the one where he doesn't is separately created. But that's fucking stupid too because that's just made up science fiction shit just like time travel. Like, time isn't a place you can go. As we all know, time is an inexorably erosive force that sucks from the marrow of all of us our joy and will to live. Hour and hour day by day, reaching its merciless hands into the deepest fabric of who we are and reminding us all of the temporal pointlessness of our own existence. He's going to find cheery. Give him a second. Which is why we're going to spend our time today making fun of those dumbfounded dipshits who lack enough imagination to understand.

understand what a fucking paradox is while still creating and living in a world of their own fictional imagining. And the irony of that last sentence is not lost on me. Okay. To be fair, when you've spilled as many hot piping bowls the tomato soup as I

am. I just love this show so. I'm so happy with it. Oh, I might not be able to do it. It might be lost to time Like my beautiful joke for patrons Not patrons.

Okay. Here we go. Tom, to be fair, when you've spilled as many Hot piping bowls of tomato soup as I have, the mind plays tricks on you. Okay, I just, I want to point out that time travel paradoxes

mostly disappear. If you assume that you just time travel to wherever you were at that moment, and an earth just isn't with you anymore. Right? There's just a bunch of frozen time travelers float around with a thought deep in space thinking like, man, I should have thought of this shit

froze into the tip of their brains. I like that answer. For pretty much ever, people have been claiming to be time travelers and for pretty much ever, people have been convinced that if you pay over close attention to stuff without understanding how context works, then there's evidence all around of time travelers. Of course, there's not because, again, there's still Hitler.

Okay, Tom, I'm not quite as optimistic as you are about the Hitler thing. Like, if somebody invents time travel, but let's say also eggs are expensive that year. Or like, woke people are correct, but also super fucking obnoxious. They're doing something else with the time machine than going back and killing Hitler. I feel like that's just going to happen. Apparently, they're going back and voting for him. All right, but let's take a close. closer look, beginning with Charlotte Ann Moberly and Eleanor Jordane, who in 1911 published a book entitled

An Adventure. In this book, the pair described a trip to see the Palace of Versailles, which they claimed to have found underwhelming. They decided instead to walk through the gardens to the Petit Trianon and then to the Grand Trianon, and then they just got all kinds of lost, which is when, it seems, they wandered back in time. Okay, if your use of time travel ability was to take a walk with your girls. You are actually worse than Hitler. People should go back in time to stop you. Now, according to their account, as they wandered around, things began to seem off.

Moberly claimed she saw a woman shaking a white cloth out a window. Jordaines said she saw an old plow outside of a farmhouse. And since farming and women in windows had obviously long since been abandoned by 1911, something was clearly amiss. Now, undeterred, the pair encountered a couple of guys they mistook for gardeners wearing funny, tri-cornered hats, who told them to keep walking, whereupon more strange and very definitive

and absolutely believable time travel proof stuff began to accumulate, such as both of them getting a feeling that things felt unnatural and seemed kind of flat and two-dimensional, like they were walking through a painting, or were in a painting, or had become, a painting, a time travel painting.

Or flat like a page in a book, a badly written time travel. It could be we were just hopelessly boring and time traveled. You don't know. You don't know. Then they encountered an ugly guy

and they got real judgy about it, describing him as, quote, most repulsive, its expression odious. His complexion was dark and rough. Jorraine noted, the man slowly turned his face, which was marked by smallpox. His complexion was very dark.

The expression was evil and yet unseeing. And though I did not feel that he was looking particularly at us, I felt a repugnance to going past him, end quote. Now here I'm beginning to believe because this actually seems like a good description of the mud peoples of peasant times. But since she didn't describe also a foul body odor, one cannot be entirely sure. And man, that description is not on Stephen Miller's bio page at the White House. She was right.

Gotcha there. They kept walking through the Garden of Times past or whatever until they came to a lady that might have been Marie Antoinette, but also absolutely wasn't. Moberly thought it was Antoinette because she just sort of got that vibe.

Jordane didn't even see the lady in question because when they were getting together to make up dumb lies for their stupid book, they didn't check each other's notes. Yeah. No, on page 64, it just says, quote, and then we met Marie Antoinette. No, we didn't. Yes, we did.

No, we didn't. Yes, we didn't. Dad never loved you. It's weird. End quote. She said, let them eat cake, but she didn't. So it wasn't. Then we didn't.

That was made up. We saw her not saying that. Yes, we did. Didn't. What? And that's it. They wrote a book about that. And while some people said that the path was haunted,

others thought the pair. actually traveled back in time and then forward again out of the past and back to the present. And lots of other people just thought nothing happened at all because come the fuck on. Right. Tom, I don't like to give notes on like the subject of an essay right in the middle of the show. But if people want to hear liars talk about their mushroom trip, they can just listen to all the other podcasts. That's what all the, Joe Rogan.

All the rest of them experience could do that. All right. Let's talk now about me tell you about ayahuasca. Let's talk now about Charlie Chaplin. In 2010, some guy named George uploaded a video to YouTube analyzing footage from the Chaplin film, The Circus. Now, in the clip, a woman is walking around holding a device to her ear, a device suggestive of a cell phone.

And since cell phones had not been invented in 1928, when the footage was created, that cell phone was iron-clad evidence of time travel. Hey, boss, yeah, no, he looks like Hitler. but he's just doing like wacky pratfalls and like bike tricks. Kill him? You want to kill him? It was a cell phone, but it was a shitty 2010 cell phone that only had that snake came on.

It was a waste of time. I'll stop a bullet, though. That's what happened. Somebody came in the phone. My Nokia. Didn't think of that. You are Hitler. You're Hitler.

I'd accept. that was not, in fact, ironclad evidence, although the credulous dipshits that make up the comment section of pretty much the entire internet went bananas. Then local news stations started reporting on it because, you know, journalism is hard. And all of which brought the whole dumb thing to the attention of an associate editor of the Atlantic,

who looked at the footage and suggested that the cell phone was actually a type of commonly available hearing aid called a rectangular ear trumpet. Okay, but even if it was a time traveler, talking on a cell phone. That means that people went back in time and built cell time.

And then called nobody because it was the past and they're the only one with the cell phone. Right. Well, and even if somebody else had a fucking cell phone and there was a different time traveler if she's from the future,

why wouldn't she just fucking text? Who could that? Gross. All right, if you are not convinced yet, good. This is not very convincing. But maybe you haven't seen the photo of the hipster on a bridge in British Columbia taken in 1941, which purports to show a regular looking modern dude standing in a crowd of the sepia peoples of yesteryear.

Guys, I've put the photo here for you to take a look at. We can go before we go further for your incredulous review. He doesn't look like a normal modern dude, whatever the fuck. No? Okay. All right. What do you guys think? He looks out of place, right?

No? No? Yeah, how the fuck would you know? You wouldn't? Other than Noah, none of you guys were around in 1941. Oh, mean. Did you know this guy, Noah? Yeah.

Mean. Those modern sunglasses, that style was introduced in 1920. The graphic tee he's wearing, it's not a graphic tee, just fucking zoom in on it. You'll see it's a sweater with a sports emblem sewn on it. Just exactly like you would expect in 1941. Specifically, it is an emblem of the Montreal Maroons, a hockey team from that exact era. Admittedly, he does have a small camera for the time, but the camera he's holding existed in 1941,

was manufactured by Kodak in 1938. My point here is that when you see something that feels out of place, always remember, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Yeah, from the looks of it, this dude would never travel to a time before macho lattes. Right? No, I just, I love that a significant amount of the internet spent a significant amount of time demanding an explanation

for the fact that a man in 1941 wasn't wearing a hat. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. That is exactly it. Some time travel stories originated as urban legends. Take the story of Rudolph Fence.

This tale has been going around since the 1950s and it still gets repeated by time travel true believers. The story here goes like this. In 1951, a guy wearing 19th century clothes was hit by a car. And when the police investigated, the identity of the stricken man, they discovered they had actually gone missing in 1876.

Poof, vanished without a trace, only to be hit by a Studebaker. Of course, to believe this, you'd have to believe that the police have missing persons records that in 1951, they were routinely cross-referencing back to 1876 on. They weren't. Or that there were even centralized records systems in 1876, or that there would even likely be a photo from 1876. of the missing man. And he'd also have to ignore the story

that this exact same thing was published in a fictional story in 1951. I mean, I feel like even if this wasn't an urban legend, this is how regular old time works with clothes. You could just wear clothes that were in style in the past. Like, that's allowed.

Are you trying to convince everyone you're a time traveler from a TGI Fridays in 2003? Because you do have to tell us. Black on black is timeless. And also in 03, I would have been more suspenders and the stripes. So it doesn't even make sense.

A lot of flare. Exactly. I have so many pieces of flare in my house right now still. I saved him. And now we arrive at the story that brought this topic to my attention. This is a story of Mike, Madman, Markham. I feel like everybody hated my flare. That's fine.

That's fine. Go ahead, John. I was actually reflecting on you, saving them. It's such a sentimental thing for you to do. I was honestly blown I had some good ones for my mom who she had like patches from the 60s when she was doing

Stop humanizing yourself I don't like I'm a person Just shut up and be tall Thank you In 1995 Mike Madman Markham called into the Art Bell show Now for the uninitiated

The Art Bell show was a syndicated talk radio show where callers regaled listeners and the ever-credulous Mr. Bell with rejected X-Files storylines. Madman to have used a Jacobs Ladder to travel through time, which he claims to have powered by stealing several power transformers

from the local power company and causing a local blackout, which caught the attention of the local police who arrested the madman. I feel like you could make a pretty good case for just preemptively arresting all of Art Bell's callers. It's a good heurist. By the way, a Jacobs Ladder, it's just two wires that make an arc of electrons go up the wires and then they disappear at the top. It's just like a cool thing to look at on a desk, like a lava lamp.

But this guy stole transformers, like industrial transporas. So he could zap himself with a giant lightning fork. And also quick clarification. When you steal the transformers, do they like store the power for you to use when you come up again?

Are they energon cubes? Because that cartoon lied to me if they are. Okay? police records actually do confirm that madman stole some power transformers and he was sentenced to 60 days in jail a year he's got like a big oven mid on he's holding it

doesn't want to get his hands too high so much power he's so lethal weapon right remember a lethal weapon they didn't know he's sunny too it's just going to drain so completes the circuit now a year later in 1996, Madman called up Art Bell again. His time in jail had reformed him. He was close to

completing a second time machine, but this time he had sourced all of the bits legally. Of course, before he was willing to hop in the way back machine, he had to test it. And according to what he told Art Bell, he had already just checked a bunch of stuff and small animals into the machine, and they all lived, except the inanimate stuff. That stuff stayed the same. Anyway, Madman was okay to got. Yeah, I mean, look, man, by all means, electrocate yourself to death on public access television. It turns out it's going to be way milder than what we put up within the future.

And he did go. Kind of. He disappeared, at least for a while, which if you think about it literally at all, doesn't really bolster the claim of traveling through time, since he could just leave and then come back without any of the normal linear passage of time stuff that would happen if you just went away for a while in the regular

time dimension. Yeah, we all go forward. So I guess anyway, he disappeared in 1997. He wasn't heard from again until 2015 when he again called Art Bell, claiming he had jumped ahead two years and 800 miles, finding himself suddenly in Fairfield, Ohio in

1999 after entering his time machine. Like, time travel is hard on the body and spirit. So, Madman also had amnesia, and he ended up in a homeless shelter for years until he remembered his social security number and his name, and he was able to reenter society. This story is often touted as one of the most convincing time travel tales.

And it is definitely not the story of a homeless man with a mental illness calling a quack radio show and then slipping through the cracks of society and then calling that radio show back later. It was probably time travel, whichever is most likely. Okay. All right. So it can be the story of a mentally ill homeless guy calling a quack and one of the most convincing time travel tales, Tom. There's not a lot of competition, that's what I'm saying. They're all pretty much tied. Who's touting that often as the most convincing tales of time travel?

Art Bell, I guess. All right, well, apparently somebody told Tom that time travel is real, and then that person vehemently argued with Tom about it. We'll find out how it goes when that guy gets punched very hard. But first, a quick break for some operable of nothing. Rock a pipe, baby. be on the street of and...

Aha! Johnson, we've done it. Indeed we did, Al. Indeed we did. Who are you? What are you doing in my home? Sorry, lady, but for history,

we've got to kill your baby. What? Yep, yeah, I'm afraid he's gonna grow up to be an evil tyrant, so we came back in time to stop him once and for all. Okay, well,

why don't you just, like, steal him him to the future. Oh. Yeah, no, I suppose we could just do that. Or like, pay me to move to a different city? That would probably change his life but he instrumentally.

Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah, that would actually work. Honestly, I'm a little shocked that the first solution you thought of was to travel back in time to kill a baby. We did that. Well, he was going to grow up to kill a lot of babies. So baby killing is bad or is it good?

Do you seem confused about what you're twisting it? You're doing it on purpose. Look, look, we're not going to kill your baby, okay? Just promise he won't grow up to be a politician, okay? I promise, okay, baby killing men from the future? That's, okay, that's, you know, ah, you know, we're going to go. We're going to go. But horrible men.

Now, what's a mommy teaches you to be a painter instead? Okay, but he better be good. He's, get up to sit time dimension. I'm, okay, sorry. And we're back. When we left off, there was a Jacobs Ladder, which is also the name for a series of underpeen piercings. That's a fun fact for everybody. No kidding.

What's next to? All right. Of course, there is next the almost famous story of John Tider. Between 2000 and 2001, an online bulletin board user going by the name John Titer popped into the chat, claiming to be a military time travel guy from the far off year of 2036. and he had a lot to say. He claimed that in 2008, there would be a devastating civil war in the United States,

which I must have slept through. More disturbingly, there was evidently a short nuclear World War III in 2015 that killed 3 billion people, a number of which, if there was actually a nuclear war, would be a severe undercount. You probably noticed that you didn't notice any of these world wars yet, guys.

Yeah. Another good tip off is the time traveler making a stop so he could use dial up to go on a bulletin board. Counterpoint, he is such a good time traveler that we did this as a short and he went back in time and made Tom forget him. Come on. See, he's aware of the show that time was on the show that week. Come on. That is true.

That is true. That is true. People reading the bulletin boards in 2001 were all over this nonsense. But when none of Tiders' predictions came true, critics began to really emerge and his popularity declined. Okay, so yeah, the Civil War of 2008. It never happened. People got skeptical of John. Cool, but I'm kind of hoping, like,

John would get caught in 2001 for missing something. Did they miss anything in 2001 that people reacted to? Something that people would. Now, other critics have pointed out that pretty much everything you said was fucking stupid, and so were the idiots who believed a faceless random name on the internet. And we all learned our lesson, and we never did that again. I remember in 2002 convincing a friend of mine that he wasn't real by saying

imagine you had a chance to talk to somebody from 1968 how long would it take for you to convince that person that you were from the future? Right? Like 16 fucking seconds. Sometimes time travelers use bulletin board, sometimes chain email, which was the case for Bob White. In 2003, a bunch of spam emails started circulating

claiming that an individual was looking for someone to supply them with a dimensional warp generator. Some iterations of the email claimed he was a stranded time traveler, while others claimed he was looking for fellow travelers who might just have surplus dimensional warp generators laying about. Hilariously, this sparked a brief cottage industry of grifters selling random shit online, claiming them to be warp generators or warp generator parts.

To who? It was later It was later Disclosed Time travel It was a bar soap With fucking electrodes That'd be amazing

It was later NFTs Thank you Same thing you did Yeah On the dip It was later It was later discovered

That the spammer Was a guy named Robbie Who claimed He was perfectly mentally stable But whose dad just wanted everyone

To stop emailing him back Because his son was mentally ill and you guys are not helping him. Yeah. And based on the chat GPT episode, what we know now is that that was Hotmail's fault, everybody. Hotmail should have stopped it.

Now, when I think of time travel, what I... Can it get so many nuts just for that one? From people at Hotmail. Oh, my God, please. Participants in the crime. And when I think of time travel, what I mostly think about is how I,

can use the machine to get rich. And I am not the only one. In 2003, the SEC arrested Andrew Carlson for making 126 high-risk stock trades and making it big on each one of those trades. Andrew started out with only $800 and ended up quickly parlaying that into $350 million. A pretty good return on his investment. After his arrest as part of his four-hour confession, Andrew offered investigators to location of Osama bin Laden and

the cure for AIDS in exchange for his freedom and to just allow him to return to his time machine. A mystery man then posted his bail and Carlson ditched his court hearing and he vanished. That mystery man Anthony Fauci.

All right. It feels like 126 is way too many high risk trades to make. And like if you know the future, but If you earned 15% on each trade, you'd have made $35 billion. Yeah, man, are you from the future and doing like hedges?

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, also, if you're from the future, just compounding interest will do all this work for you. Right, yeah, yeah, exactly. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to do anything. I like the idea that it's a real-time traveler, but he's an idiot who didn't know stocks before he went back. Right? So it's just a me being like, what company?

are good from 60 years ago. Fucking... Pan Am, I'm going to put all my money a Pan Am is. Was there a big car that everybody liked? Can I bet who's going to be the president? I'm going to bet on the Buffalo Bills.

They got to win this time. The only problem with that fascinating story is that it never happened. It was just some dumb bullshit from the weekly world news, a satirical newspaper famous for stories about the Bat Boy. Except the story then got picked up and repeated by Yahoo News and then other newspapers and then other magazines. And each time the story got retold and repeated, they all kept forgetting that the original source for the story was a satirical supermarket tabloid.

And after that, news reporting agencies adopted strict and scrupulous standards and never again were lies and misinformation laundered uncritically by a media environment more interested in quantity and public interest than journalistic integrity. Okay. Guys, maybe we shouldn't have fake newspapers at the grocery store. Maybe that's a weird thing to have any place, but the grocery store feels like the strangest possible place. Oh, sure. Blame the newspapers, Eli. Blame the newspapers. Yeah, the problem is the grocery store. And hot mail. Mm-hmm.

Now, the story of Hakkan Nordqvist is pretty perfectly written as written by Wikimabst. So I'm just going to straight up quote the damn thing right here. Quote, a video uploaded in 2006 shows a Swedish man named Hakkan Norkvist, claiming that he had been accidentally transported to 2046 when attempting to fix the sink in his kitchen. While there in the future, he immediately met someone who revealed and proved to be himself about 70 years old with whom he had a great time. He filmed short footage of the two smiling and hugging each other and showing the tattoo they had on their right arms. It feels like the perfect way to end this story because it is so obviously true. Also, it turns out, no, it was not.

That's an ad for an insurance company. Nobody went anywhere in time. It's just a nice story. It seems nice. It does. They seem like good friends. All right, if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence.

What would it be? For a lot of people, disbelief isn't so much suspended as dead and buried. Right. And are you ready for the quits. I am indeed. Hey, Tom. Everyone on this week's episode

is high. So what's the best drug-filled time machine movie? A, snooper, B, Donnie Narco, C, dime crimes, or D, 12 junkies. 12 junkies. Oh, that's good. Time crime. I'm a Donnie Narco fan. I got to go with Donnie Narcoe. Oh, you win. Pull it back again. There we go. All right. So I've got one for you, Tom. What would be the best use of time travel? A, going back to 2024 and showing American voters literally any headline from now. B, oh wait, we had that the form of Project 2020 fucking 5 and it didn't help. C, going back to 2005,

but warning everybody that lost wasn't really building towards anything in particular. C for me so far. Or D. Saddle training in angiosaurus and then riding them for the rest of your days in the late Cretaceous because fuck everybody and everything and I'm just going to storm on so many fucking butterflies

Oh, so good. Oh, two really good ones in there. I mean, lost. Lost was really disappointing. Really disappoint. Smoke monster is pretty much nothing. Okay, but still, I'm with you on the Ankylosaurus. Let's do it.

Noah. Yes, that is correct. It is, Dan, I thought for sure I was going to distract you with that. All right, Tom. So, no one might have beat me to the question of what the best use of a time machine is, but I want to know what you would go back to fix. A, wait, I don't want to ask Tom this question. Cicel, you're the host now, you answer.

See, man, tears are streaming down Tom's face really fast right now. Or D, buy Bitcoin. Don't ask me that question. I'm not answering. Eli, you won. I win. You stumped everybody. And I want a Noah.

say. Bitcoin. Or NFTs for Tom, Noah Cecil and Eli, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week, and Noah will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to cognitive dissonance, and no rogan experience, dear old dads,

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