So Supernatural - THE UNKNOWN: Time Travel

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Time travel seems to be firmly in the realm of science fiction, and yet history is filled with alleged cases — from a traveler who broke the internet, to an Italian priest peering into the past.  

We've all got regrets, choices we made that we wish we could take back. That feeling of, if I could just tell younger me to do this one thing differently. But sci-fi stories have warned us about all the dangers of time travel. You change one little thing in the past and centuries of history could unravel. If you aren't careful, there might not be a future to go back to. So maybe it's a good thing we haven't discovered the secrets of time travel. Unless'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, I'm looking into time travel, real cases of people who claimed to visit the past and future. I'll look at the evidence and try to figure out whether time travel is actually possible,

or at least whether we can prove it's impossible. All that and more is coming up. Stay with us. Ironically, the concept of time travel has been around pretty much since humans started keeping time. The earliest time travel stories are from 400 BCE. Over the centuries, they've become a favorite sci-fi trope. In a lot of the older stories, though, there are no time machines or high-stakes missions. People end up traveling through time by accident. They fall asleep, and when they wake up, it's decades later. But at the turn of the 20th century, there was a case where two women claimed to fall through time when they were awake. And the first story I'm going to tell you today is actually one I've talked about before.

The Moberly-Jordain incident. It's a fascinating story on its own, but I also think it makes a great jumping off point for a discussion on time travel. On August 10th, 1901, English scholars Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain decided to take a holiday to Versailles. Back in the 18th century, this was the home of the last king of France before the revolution, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette. During Anne and Eleanor's visit to the palace grounds, they head for Marie Antoinette's private residence, called the Petit Trianon. It's supposedly a quick walk down a road through the park grounds surrounding the palace, but this property is huge, and on the way they get lost. Anne and Eleanor keep wandering through the garden, and eventually this dark sense of dread settles over them.

They pick up the pace, trying to find a landmark they recognize, but all they see is a farmhouse nearby. It's deserted. There's even broken down farm equipment. It doesn't look at all like the Royal Palace Park. Luckily, there are two men in uniform coming up the road toward them who look like tour guides. The uniforms are old, like the kind of thing you'd see in a play or battle reenactment. Long overcoats and tricorn hats. Anne and Eleanor figure, okay, they must be in costume. No big deal for a historic site like this. They ask for directions to the Petit Trianon, and the two men point them down

a nearby path. Anne and Eleanor follow the path, but the further they get, the more lost and uncomfortable they feel. Eleanor says the oppressive feeling is like sleepwalking. A few minutes later, this anxious man comes hustling up the path. Anne and Eleanor still have no idea where they're going, so they ask him for help. He speaks to the women in a strange accent and tells them to cross a little bridge nearby. Then, still in a hurry, he takes off down the road. So by now, Anne and Eleanor are probably freaked out. I mean, I would be. Something just seems off about this place. But just across the bridge, they finally reach the Petit Trianon.

It's a square stone mansion with beautiful flowers all around. On the patio terrace, Anne sees a blonde woman sketching. She's also dressed in an old-fashioned costume with a wide-brimmed hat. The weird thing is Anne is like staring at her, but the woman never acknowledges the two women. It's like they aren't even there. Anne and Eleanor are overcome by that strange sense of dread again. And they're like, okay, that's it. We're getting out of here. After a quick walk around the building, they head home.

And they sort of forget about the whole visit for a while. They just assume they missed the memo about whatever costume event was happening that day. But then three months later, Anne mentions the sketching woman to Eleanor. And Eleanor says that she never saw her. And Anne's like, you were right there. What else did you miss? So they compare memories. It turns out Eleanor and Anne both remember seeing some things that the other didn't. But there's one thing they can definitely agree on. They both remember this weird, heavy sadness they both felt that day. A few weeks later, Eleanor is looking over a textbook as she gets ready to teach a class, and she finds a strange coincidence.

August 10th, the day she and Anne visited Versailles, was the exact date that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were captured by revolutionaries more than a century earlier. Eventually, Anne looks up a portrait of Marie Antoinette, and it is a spitting image of the woman she saw sketching outside of the Petit Trianon. This is so spooky, the two women decide to go back to Versailles a couple years later for another look. They try to retrace their steps from the palace gardens to the Petit Trianon, but they can't find the path. Everything has changed. It's smaller, there's no little bridge, the whole layout of the garden is different,

so Anne and Eleanor are totally confused. But when they get back, they look up old drawings of the palace and gardens from pre-revolution days, and then they find the little bridge. They even find portraits of the old royal guard, and they're wearing long green coats just like the two men Anne and Eleanor saw on the path. The two women start to consider that somehow they walked back in time. Anne and Eleanor are convinced that Marie Antoinette created some kind of psychological tunnel on August 10th that allowed them to slip into the past. Which kind of makes sense. Getting captured and imprisoned by revolutionaries must have been terrifying. She must have been thinking about her happy memories at the Petit Trianon and how much she wanted to go home.

Fear and terror are hugely powerful forces in human psychology, and powerful emotions are often thought to play a role in supernatural phenomena. So what if Marie's thoughts of home were strong enough to actually open a psychic portal through time? A portal that nearly 110 years later, Anne and Eleanor got caught in. Obviously, they can't prove this theory, but Anne and Eleanor gather all the historical evidence they can, and a few years later, they publish a book about their experiences. It isn't met with much enthusiasm. Critics noted that there was plenty of time for Anne and Eleanor to do some deep research into the Petit Trianon's history, and then make up the story about their visit after the fact. You pretty much have to take

the women at their word that any of this actually happened. For the next few decades, Anne and Eleanor's story is taken with a huge grain of salt. But then, a similar time slip happens again, hundreds of miles away. In October 1957, three teenage naval cadets are on a training exercise in rural England. They're supposed to follow their map through a field to the small village of Kersey. The three cadets, William, Ray, and Michael, follow the map perfectly. They're coming up on Kersey, and they can see the smoke from chimneys and hear church bells ringing in the distance. But as they get closer to the town, everything goes silent. No bells, no breeze, not even a single bird call in the forest around them. Then the boys get this eerie feeling. The air around

them feels heavy and sad, just like it did for Anne and Eleanor in Versailles. And when they get to the outskirts of Kersey, the village looks totally wrong. There are no smoking chimneys, and more alarmingly, there's no church. The boys just heard the church bell ring, but now it's nowhere to be found. Then they notice other things that are missing, like there's no cars parked on the streets, no street lights, no television antennas or electrical wires running between the buildings. Even the buildings look weird. They're all practically the same, these whitewashed old wooden structures that look like they were nailed together by hand. I mean, the town looks ancient, like it's medieval.

And worst of all, the whole town is empty. There is not a living person in sight. William snaps out of his daze and leads the other boys to the closest building. They peek through the grimy old windows but it's really dark inside. The room looks abandoned with cobwebs everywhere. Then in the back of the room William and Michael see several cow carcasses just sitting out in the open. They've been skinned and just left there to rot. It's like the butcher left in a hurry. They peek in a few more windows, but it's always the same. Abandoned rooms with crude furniture

and cobwebs. The boys are sufficiently freaked out now. None of this looks right and they're out here totally alone. So at that point they're like, yeah, enough of Kirsi. They run down the main street out of town, but the oppressive feeling in the air is getting worse. The boys feel like they're being watched. They don't quit running until they get to the top of the hill outside of town. William looks back over his shoulder and that's when the town is completely changed. The chimneys, the church, the streetlights, it's all there. They don't stop or turn around though. They just hightail it back to headquarters where they check in with their superior officers. They tell them about the weird experience in Kersey but the officers just laugh off, like they must have just been imagining it,

and there's no way the boys can prove what they saw, since everything in Kersey is back to normal now. The three boys part ways after that, and nobody really talks about it again. They just get on with their lives and try to pretend none of it ever happened. But in the 1980s, William and Michael reunite. They're both living in Australia now, and they trade memories of their time in the Navy. William brings up the training exercise in Kersey, saying that it still bugs him. And Michael totally remembers. Not as much detail, but he definitely recalls the butcher shop and the silent town and that sad, heavy feeling in the air. It's enough to make William reach out to the Society for Psychical Research, a group that studies supernatural phenomena. One of the Society's leading members, a writer named Andrew McKenzie, investigates the case, and he discovers some bonkers evidence about Kersey. It turns out

the spot where the boys peeked in the window actually was a butcher shop back in 1790, and the building itself dated back to the 1300s. The church tower wasn't constructed until after the Black Plague of 1348, and notably, the plague killed over half of Kersey's residents. And it's not like all of that information is easy to find. If the three cadets were trying to pull a fast one on their superiors back in the 50s, they'd have had to have done some serious research to come up with such an accurate story. So McKinsey is convinced that these guys are telling the truth. And he ends up landing on a theory. He believes that William, Michael, and Ray actually walked into the past in a time slip.

McKinsey calls this retrocognition, one of the rarest psychic phenomena he's studied. Basically, retrocognition is when you experience an event from the past as if it were actually occurring in the present. It's like your brain travels through time, but your body just has this strange feeling like something isn't right. McKenzie only knows of a few other cases like this in history, one of which is Anne and Eleanor's experience at the Petit Trianon. McKenzie even shows William the description Anne wrote about the feelings she had at the Petit Trianon, that it all felt flat and lifeless. William said it was spot on with what he'd experienced. So even if retrocognition is real, can we say it's actual time travel? None of them physically

traveled into the past and they weren't able to change anything. They were just kind of moving along like they were trapped in a movie. If you wanted to actually go back in time, the real living, breathing past, you'd probably need some very advanced technology. But it might not be that futuristic. In fact, a time machine might already be here, in the last place you'd think to look. Coming up, a time-traveling tomb. Now, back to the story. Back in the 1840s, London is the center of scientific development. It's the Victorian era and people are obsessed with new technology. One of the city's most eccentric inventors is this guy named Sam Warner. He builds futuristic weapons for the British Navy and supposedly he's a literal genius.

He claimed to invent a bomb that could be teleported to a target and then remotely detonated. The prospect was so enticing that the Royal Navy even invited him to do a test demonstration. The teleporting bomb never actually appeared, but Sam's other weapons were effective. He sank a ship during the test. But weapons aren't his only interest. Supposedly, Sam has this business partner, an Egyptologist named Joseph Benomi. At the time, British archaeologists are studying all the astounding technological achievements of ancient Egypt, like the giant pyramids and the recently deciphered language of hieroglyphics. Joe works to decode hieroglyphics, and like a lot of people at the

time, he probably believes that the Egyptians were even more scientifically advanced than anyone knows. In fact, he apparently thinks they may have even discovered time travel. Many of their hieroglyphics seem to describe the passage of time in strange non-linear ways. Not only that, some of them appear to depict machines that as far as we know didn't exist in ancient Egypt like helicopters and motorized boats. So Joe has these ancient secrets of time travel and Sam allegedly has teleportation technology. So they set out to meld the two into a teleporter that moves objects through time, otherwise known as the world's first time machine. It's likely that it was Joe's idea to build the time machine in a mausoleum. After all, like the Egyptian pyramids, a tomb will be there for a really, really long time, which means plenty of opportunity to use

the machine without it being discovered or disturbed. As the story goes, they convince a rich widow named Hannah Courtois to back their project. Joe, Sam, and Hannah manage to start construction on this mausoleum sometime in the late 1840s. We don't actually know when because there are no blueprints or records of the construction. And even weirder is Joe's design. The whole thing looks like a tribute to Egyptology. It's covered in hieroglyphs, which nobody but Joe seems to understand. The granite is carved into strange shapes and the whole building kind of looks like an obelisk. Unfortunately, before they can finish building it, Sam dies under mysterious circumstances in 1848. He's buried in an unmarked grave about 70 feet from the mausoleum, which is finished soon after his death.

In the end, it's 20 feet tall with a huge locked bronze door. And of course, it's covered in strange symbols that no one except Joe can make sense of. A year later, Hannah dies too, and she's buried in the mausoleum along with two of her daughters a few years later. Joe survives another 30 years before dying in 1878. And this is where things get weird. Before he dies, Joe plans out his burial. He chooses a specific spot near both Hannah's and Sam's graves. And his tombstone? It has a picture of the mausoleum and an image of the Egyptian god Anubis,

with its head pointing to the tomb. For the next century or so, nobody bothers to ask any questions about the mausoleum that's covered in strange hieroglyphs. It's just a weird, out-of-place landmark. Hannah's surviving family comes to visit the tomb occasionally over the years. Until the key to the mausoleum goes missing in 1980. It's been locked up ever since, and the heavy bronze door is impossible to open without a key. It would take a bulldozer to get through, and of course nobody's going to authorize breaking

into this grave just to see if there's a time machine inside. So we don't actually know what happened to the alleged time machine. Some people wonder if Sam actually faked his death as soon as the machine was complete. This would have allowed him to use the machine without anyone wondering why he was gone. Who knows, maybe Hannah and her daughters did the same thing. As for the missing key, it's possible that at some point Sam traveled into the future to steal the key from Hannah's family to make sure it didn't fall into the wrong hands. Or, you know, maybe it just got lost. The thing is, the theory about this mausoleum being a time machine didn't actually appear until around Halloween of 1998, when a story about it was published in a London newspaper. It's widely believed that the writer

made some pretty big assumptions about Sam and Joe's history, or simply made the whole thing up. But since nobody's got the key to the tomb, the truth might be locked up forever. So we're kind of back to square one, right? Time travel is just a theory with no evidence. But just because we don't have evidence now, that doesn't mean we won't discover it someday. In fact, we already know that time travel into the future actually is theoretically possible, but it's a one-way trip. Basically, when you travel at close to the speed of light, time actually slows down for you. This is called time dilation. Astrophysicist Andrew May explains it like this. Say a spaceship leaves the earth and comes back exactly one year later. But if the ship

was traveling at 99% of the speed of light, only seven weeks would pass for the astronauts on board. So when they step out onto the landing pad, they would have effectively traveled 10 months into the future. It's hard to wrap your head around, but it's true. Of course, we don't have the technology to travel at such high speeds yet, but someday we might. A bigger question is whether it's possible to travel backwards in time, into the past. For that, we only have anecdotal evidence. And one of the most controversial cases involves a traveler who claimed to be from the year 2036. He laid out exactly what's coming in the near future, and his predictions don't look good for mankind. Coming up, a time traveler breaks the internet.

Now, back to the story. In the late 90s and early 2000s, people everywhere were signing on to the World Wide Web. This was the era long before social media, where personal websites and community forums were all the rage. On November 2nd, 2000, a new user pops up on the Time Travel Institute, a forum for people interested in time travel. This mysterious newbie's first message says, I am a time traveler from the year 2036. The other users are like, yeah, right, and my name's Marty McFly. So they dive in with questions for the alleged time traveler who's going by the name John Titor. They figure Titor is just wanting to have a bit of fun, and he'll bail as soon as he gets caught in a lie. But Titor doubles down. He answers each

question with far more detail than somebody would just come up with off the top of their head. He's pouring out details about himself, the future, and his mission. And that's the kicker. John Titor says he's a soldier sent back in time to save humanity. So yeah, this sounds like a Terminator sequel, but John's got proof. He posts a picture of his military insignia and a diagram of his time machine. He calls it a temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. It's this super detailed diagram with a ton of strange technology inside. This is way more effort than somebody would put into a joke. So now everyone on the forum is like, OK, if you're from the future, what happens between now and then?

And Titor's answers get dark. He says that in his future, the United States is divided after a second civil war with a new government based in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2015, World War III breaks out between the weakened U.S. and Russia, and each side uses nuclear weapons. Three billion people are killed, almost half the global population. But none of that is what Titor came back to stop. As if that wasn't bad enough, 20 years after World War III, a super virus wipes out the vast majority of computers around the world. It's like Y2K on steroids.

And that's what Titor traveled back in time to prevent. Titor claims he needed a very specific type of computer to stop the future virus. It's this obscure IBM model from the 1970s, and luckily, Titor finally got his hands on one. By this point, Titor's been answering every question posed to him for four months, but some of the other users are still not convinced. They ask him why he's in the year 2000

if his mission was focused in the 1970s. Then Titor drops a final bombshell. There are parallel timelines. He says he comes from a timeline that's less than 2% different than ours. So most everything is the same. His stop in 2000 was simply to check on the similarities. After that, the questions keep on coming,

and eventually, Titor's answers get shorter and shorter. You can tell he's irritated that more people don't believe him, or that he's getting bored of his own story. Then, on Marchth, 2001, Titor signs off permanently. His account goes dormant and nobody ever hears from John Titor ever again. So was he telling the truth?

Who knows? It's been over 20 years and plenty of his prophecies haven't come true. Titor said there wouldn't be any more Olympic Games after 2004. And since 2015 has come and gone without World War III, he was wrong there too. But Titor did say there were parallel timelines. It's possible that our timeline is more different than Titor thought. However, I followed the money trail behind John Titor's story and found some interesting coincidences. In 2003, just two years after Titor vanishes,

an LLC called the John Titor Foundation is created. The CEO is a lawyer and his brother is a computer scientist. The LLC publishes a book documenting all of Titor's posts and prophecies, and they make a bit of money. Then in 2004, somebody files a patent for Titor's alleged time machine technology. Now on the surface, this just looks like a couple of guys trying to capitalize on some internet drama. But reportedly, it turns out that one of the IP addresses Titor used for his posts is based in the same town where the lawyer lives. So to me, it sounds like the lawyer and his computer scientist brother cooked up the whole Titor story from the beginning. It was probably all a hoax to make some money. Then again, if time travel is real, whoever filed

that patent might be the real winner in the end. A working time machine would be a cash cow, assuming it ever saw the light of day. There's one more time travel device I want to talk about, or time viewing device might be more accurate. It's allegedly created in the early 1970s by an Italian priest named Ernetti. He calls it the chronovisor, and he says it's able to see into the past. And here's the thing, before he was a priest, Ernetti was a physicist. He claims that a dozen other scientists helped him develop the chronovisor, including Wernher von Braun, one of the rocket scientists behind the moon landings. Ernetti never reveals the actual chronovisor device to the public, but he does give some

details on how it works. Allegedly, the team of physicists merged three key metals to pick up light and sound waves through time and then transmit them on a screen. Kind of like a television set that shows you scenes from the past. Ernetti claims that his team witnessed the Last Supper and the crucifixion of Jesus, among other things. He even offers proof, a photo of Jesus during his crucifixion taken from the chronovisor. He also reveals a fragment of a long-lost ancient Roman play called Thaestes. No copies of the play exist today, so the only way he could know the missing script is to use the chronovisor to see an original copy in the distant past. Of course, since nobody else has ever seen the missing script either,

he could have simply made it up. But Ernetti insists, not only is the chronovisor real, it's more dangerous than they intended. It can see anything, from private moments to state secrets. So allegedly, after the first few experiments, Ernetti and his team destroy the machine. But there's another version of the story that says the chronovisor wasn't dismantled. Instead, it was hidden away in the Vatican archives, and Pope Pius XII forbade the scientists from disclosing any

more details about it. In 1994, when Ernetti is on his deathbed, he makes a strange confession. He supposedly tells one of his relatives that the photo of Jesus and the ancient play were fake, but he maintains that the chronovisor itself was 100% real. From there, rumors fly about a cover-up. Some believers say that Ernetti's deathbed confession was forced by church officials. And if the chronovisor really exists, the Vatican could still be hiding it, which the church has never confirmed or denied. For all we know, the truth might be locked up forever inside the Vatican's secret vaults.

Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.