The Why Files: Operation Podcast - 632: Science Behind Time Storms | Time Isn't What You Think It Is

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

In 1977, a soldier walked into a glowing mist in the Chilean mountains and returned fifteen minutes later with five days of stubble on his face. A pilot flew 250 miles in 34 minutes through a luminous fog over the Bermuda Triangle. An RAF Commander looked down from his biplane and saw an airfield four years before it existed. Two families checked into a French hotel that vanished two weeks later — along with every photo they took inside it. British researcher Jenny Randles spent decades collecting these cases and found they all share the same symptoms: silence, tingling, glowing mist, and broken time. Her conclusion connects UFOs, ghosts, and alien abductions to one phenomenon. The physics backs her up.

On April 25, 1977, Corporal Armando Valdez was guarding a campfire in the Chilean mountains. Just before dawn, he saw a glowing purple mist. Valdez walked into the mist and vanished. Fifteen minutes later, he stumbled back into camp. He was shaking. He collapsed. His men checked him over. He seemed fine, except for one detail.

When Valdez left, he was clean-shaven. When he returned, he had a short beard. and his watch had jumped ahead to April 30th. He was gone for 15 minutes, but he lived for five days. And Valdez's story isn't unique. This phenomenon has appeared all over the world for centuries. Different cultures call them different names. We know them as time storms.

The Valdez case follows a pattern that has repeated around the world for hundreds of years. In 1947, a British military convoy was driving through the mountains of Nepal. This was dangerous territory. Bandits were everywhere. The group included local soldiers, a British colonel, and his wife Donna. Donna was sitting in the back of a truck when the temperature dropped instantly. She said it felt like someone flung open the door to a glacier. Oh, I just walked into my second ex-wife's bedroom.

She was so cold in the bedroom that I got frostbite on my honeymoon. Will you at least let me get the story set up, please? Well, fine, but that joke was solid and you know it. Donna looked up. A reddish cloud was floating just above the ground, about the size of a two-story house, and it was moving toward them. The local villagers took one look and ran. They called it a vision, and they knew the only way to survive was to hide.

The colonel ran toward the cloud to investigate. He got about 20 feet before he collapsed. It looked like he hit an invisible wall. Then the red cloud got brighter. It circled the truck where Donna was sitting. She felt electricity in the air. her skin tingled, her hair stood up, a low-voltage current ran through her body.

Then the world went silent. No wind, no birds, no engine noise. Donna saw one final image. Soldiers frozen mid-stride. Her husband motionless on the ground. Then everything went dark. When she opened her eyes, the cloud was gone, and hours had passed.

For Donna, it had just been seconds. The convoy regrouped. Everyone had a rederable. rash on their exposed skin, like a severe sunburn. Soldiers were vomiting. The colonel was dizzy and couldn't walk. Eleven witnesses, physical symptoms consistent with radiation exposure, and a gap in time nobody could explain. British researcher Jenny Randall spent decades collecting cases that shared the same symptoms. First, the silence. All-natural sound stops. No crickets, no traffic, just dead air. Then the tingling, like static electricity before a lightning strike.

Then the mist. Sometimes red, sometimes green or white, but it always glows. Then time breaks. Hours vanish. People find themselves in places they can't explain, sometimes hundreds of miles away. And after, the physical toll, nausea, rashes, headaches, disorientation. Medical exams documented burns and rashes that appeared during these episodes. Electronics die, car engines stall, radios only play static, watches stop or leap forward, cell phones lose signal.

And then there's the isolation. Even people surrounded by crowds report feeling utterly alone. The rest of humanity fades away like they've stepped into a pocket universe. Randall's calls this the Oz Factor, like Dorothy ripped out of Kansas, suddenly you're somewhere else, a different place and a different time. Randall's had plenty of witnesses who lost time, minutes, hours, sometimes days. But she did find one case where a pilot didn't lose time, he outran it. A thoughtfully built wardrobe comes down to pieces that mix well and last. That's where Quince shines, premium fabrics, thoughtful design,

and everyday essentials that feel effortless to wear and dependable even as the seasons change. Quince makes the staples I reach for constantly, lightweight cashmere sweaters, linen pants and shorts, and teas made from 100% Pima Cotton and European Jersey linen. These are the versatile pieces that make a wardrobe actually works season to season. Lately, the Mongolian cashmere polo has become a go-to for me. I can wear it in the studio, then head straight out to dinner and still look completely put together. It's incredibly soft, looks polished, and honestly feels way more expensive than it is.

And Quince keeps things affordable by working directly with top factories and cutting out the middleman. So you're not paying for big brand markups or fancy retail stores. Right now, go to quince.com slash the Y files for free shipping and 365-day returns. That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it, and you will. Now available in Canada, too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to QI-N-C-E.com slash the Y files for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash the Y-Files.

Bruce Gernan was an experienced pilot. He'd flown this route dozens of times. His destination was Palm Beach, Florida. The weather was clear. the flight is exactly 75 minutes. Halfway to Florida, Gernan saw a cloud formation ahead, a lenticular cloud.

Testicular cloud? I didn't make a cream for that. Lenticular cloud. That's the one that looks kind of like a flying saucer. That makes more sense. But this cloud was massive, and it was growing. Gernan tried to climb over it.

The cloud rose with him. He banked to go around him. It expanded to block his path. The cloud wrapped around the plane, a swirling tunnel. of gray mist with bright flashes of light. His compass started spinning. His navigational instruments failed.

The artificial horizon began to roll. Gernan looked ahead. A small patch of blue sky at the end of the tunnel, his only way out. He pushed the throttle forward. The tunnel started to close. The 10-mile gap shrank to one mile, then a half-mile,

then smaller and smaller. The wings scraped the edges of the cloud. He shot through the gap just as it collapsed behind him. He expected to see the ocean, but he didn't. Just gray haze. No horizon, no sea, no sky. Just gray in every direction. His instruments were dead.

He grabbed the radio and called Miami Air Traffic Control. They couldn't find him on radar. No aircraft appeared anywhere between Miami, Bimini, and Andros. He was a ghost. Then the radio crackled. Miami picked him up. The controller said, I have a target directly over Miami Beach. But that was impossible.

Miami Beach was 250 miles from where he entered the cloud. Top speed of a beachcraft bonanza is 200 miles per hour. That flight takes 75 minutes minimum. Gernan checked his watch. He'd been in the air for 34 minutes. Then the fog dissolved, and Miami Beach was right below him. He landed at Palm Beach shortly after. Total flight time, 37 minutes.

He saved nearly half an hour. Gernan spent the rest of his life researching that day. He wrote two books and documented over 75 similar encounters in the same area. We call this area the Bermuda Triangle. Yatsy! The Bermuda Triangle! Otherwise known as the Lizard People's Sub-Equatic Parking Garage. Pilots and sailors have reported the same luminous fog for decades, the same instrument failures. Some traveled impossible distances in impossible times, someone went into the storm and never came out. Bruce Gernan entered the storm and moved fast.

faster than physics allows. The next witness was a Royal Air Force commander. He also survived the storm. But while he was in it, he didn't just move fast. He saw the future. In 1935, wing commander Victor Goddard flew his biplane over an abandoned airfield called Drem. He knew the place.

Hanger is falling apart, tarmac cracked and full of weeds, cows grazing on the runway. A few days later, he flew back along the same route when the weather turned and a storm hit. But this wasn't a normal storm. The clouds weren't gray or white. They were glowing yellow. His biplane was tossed around like a toy.

Rain hammered the open cockpit. The plane dropped toward the ground and Goddard braced for a crash. Then, in an instant, the storm vanished. The rain stopped. The sky turned bright and sunny. Goddard looked down. He was directly over Drem Airfield. But it wasn't abandoned anymore.

The hangars were repaired. Mechanics and blue overalls were working on the tarmac, and four aircraft sat on the runway, each painted bright yellow. One of them was a monoplane, a single wing design Goddard had never seen before. None of this made sense. In 1935, RAF mechanics wore brown overalls. RIF training planes were unpainted aluminum. Monoplanes hadn't entered the fleet.

Seconds later, the storm slammed back. He fought through it and landed at Andover. He reported what he saw, but nobody believed him. Four years later, in 1939, the RAF reopened Drem for World War II. They painted their training aircraft yellow. They introduced a new monoplane trainer called the Miles Magister, and they changed the mechanic uniforms from brown to blue. Every detail Goddard saw in 1935 became reality in 1939.

This is a wing commander, not a crackpot, but a decorated officer in the Royal Air Force. He looked through a gap in a storm and saw four years into the future. He wrote about it in his book, Flight Towards Reality. Now, most witnesses lose time. Goddard gained it. But if you can slip into the future, can you also slip into the past? Well, according to two families in France, you can. October 1979.

The Simpson and Gisbee families were driving through France, heading for a vacation in Spain. They were looking for a place to sleep near Mont Lamar. As they drove down a rural road, the Oz Factor hit. The car engine faded, the traffic vanished. They drove an eerie silence until they saw an old-looking hotel. They pulled in. The road wasn't paved, it was cobblestone.

Inside there were no phones, no elevators. The windows had wooden shutters, but no glass. The staff wore uniforms that looked like they were out of an old movie. A policeman walked by wearing a heavy cape at hat from the First World War. They had dinner, took photos in the dining room, and stayed the night. The next morning, the bill for four adults and children, including dinner and breakfast, was 19 francs, less than a cup of coffee in 1979. Mr. Simpson asked the policeman for directions to the highway. The officer looked confused.

He'd never heard of a highway. They left, got back on the main road, and the sounds of the world returned. Two weeks later, on their way home, they decided to stop at the hotel again. cheap, good food? Why not? They drove down the same road, found the same turnoff, but the hotel wasn't there. No cobblestone road, no old building, just a grove trees. And when they developed their film, the photos of the families in the dining room didn't exist. The negatives were blank. When they drove down that road, they ended up 70 years in the past. But Randalls found something worse than blank film. These storms leave physical scars. In 1916,

In 2017, teenager Mark Henshaw was riding his motorcycle near Barnard Castle in England. Suddenly, a purple glow swallowed him. His motor died, but he kept rolling. Then he was pulled uphill, about 300 feet against gravity. When the glow vanished, Henshaw's leather jacket was smoking. He wore a smoking jacket like Heth. Did he also have a captain's hat and a harem of hens fighting over his inheritance? Not a smoking jacket, a leather jacket that was soaked a minute earlier.

The water evaporated instantly from. from intense heat. The metal on his bike was so hot that he got third degree burns. And another one, in 1992 in Hungary, a woman driving saw a white light rush toward her windshield, her engine and lights died. She woke up hours later in a snowy field. No tire tracks led to the car.

There was no road nearby. Doctors found burn marks on her body consistent with electrical discharge. And when they checked the car, the door handle had been fused to the bike. body by heat. Then there's a case of Steve in Kansas. Steve was on a road trip with friends in 1979. They pulled over at a construction site so he can use a port-a-potty. When he went in, the sounds of his friends disappeared. The air went silent. He felt a wave of dizziness. He unlocked the door, stepped out, and fell face-first into the dirt. The construction site was gone. The port-a-potty

was gone. His friends were gone. He was standing in an empty field. He walked to the nearest road, flagged down a car, and found out he was 600 miles from where he started. He teleported 600 miles in a porta potty. Oh, it's like a tortoise. It was a portapotty. Oh, so a tortoise. Get it, get it. Yeah.

Randall's realized that if you step back and look at the big picture, these stories sound familiar. UFOs, alien abductions, ghosts, missing time. They aren't different mysteries. They're all connected, and they're all timing. storms. Jenny Randalls looked at her 300 cases, then she looked at the entire history of paranormal research, UFO sightings, alien abductions, ghost encounters, near-death experiences, missing time, poltergeist activity. She made an argument that nobody considered. They were all the same thing. Betty and Barney Hill may be the most famous alien abduction case in history. In 1961, they drove

through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. They saw a strange light. They felt disoriented. They arrived home two hours late with no memory of what happened. Now strip away the UFO narrative and look at the raw facts. A couple driving a night encountered a light. Disorientation, missing time, amnesia. Their car's instruments malfunctioned. They later recalled the experience as a vivid dreamlike episode. That's a time storm.

But what about the aliens, the entities people see? Well, Randall's found a clue. People who walked into these storms often, report a specific sensation right before the time shift, a pressure. Witnesses describe a heavy pressure from above, not like wind, like a weight pressing down on them. And the pressure feels alive. One witness described it as an intense feeling of being watched, like an invader, a consciousness pressing against them. So the storm isn't just weather, or at least our brain doesn't interpret it as weather. Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger built a device nicknamed

the god helmet to test this. He aimed weak electromagnetic fields at the temporal lobe. Test subjects reported exactly what time storm witnesses described. The sense of a presence, time distortion, feelings of floating, out-of-body experiences, vivid hallucinations

of beings. Yeah, I feel like this is after eating bloops gummies. If you walk into a strong electromagnetic field like a time storm, your brain might interpret that energy as a person, or a ghost, or an alien. Jacques Valet came to the same conclusion from a completely different direction. He argued that UFO encounters weren't extraterrestrial.

There were signs of some other phenomenon, something that interacted with human consciousness and operated by rules we didn't understand. Three researchers, three countries, completely different methods, but the same conclusion. The phenomenon is real, the popular interpretation is wrong. If electromagnetic fields could produce these experiences in a lab, the natural electromagnetic events, time storms, could produce them in the wild. So time isn't as stable as we believe,

and now we have the science to prove it. This isn't folklore, it's physics. The laws of the universe actually support the existence of time storms. Einstein's theory of relativity prove that time is not constant, it's flexible. Time passes differently depending on speed and gravity. An astronaut traveling near light speed ages slower than people on Earth. GPS satellites experience time faster than we do on the ground.

Engineers adjust the satellite clocks every day to adjust for this. At the speed of light, time stops completely. From the perspective of a photon, the moment it's created and the moment it's destroyed, happen at the same instant. A photon can travel across the universe for billions of years, but for the photon, zero time has passed. Time storms are electromagnetic phenomenon, but so is light. Randall's believes these storms are pockets where the rules of light speed physics take over,

bubbles of electromagnetic dominance. Inside the bubble, local time could be frozen. Minutes outside could equal days inside, or days outside could equal seconds inside. But there's something else going on here, something you've probably felt yourself. You walk into a room and freeze. You know this room. You know this moment. You know exactly what someone is about to say before they say it.

Deja vu. Scientists tell us it's a brain glitch, a misfire between short-term and long-term memory. But what if it's not? What if DejaVu is a micro time storm, a momentary slip where your consciousness brushes against the moment you've already lived? This ties into the block universe theory. Many physicists believe the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. Imagine a love of bread. The past is the heel at one end. The future is the heel at the other. We're just a slice in the middle. But the whole loaf exists at once. Every moment that has ever happened or will ever happened is already there. So the universe is a loaf of bread. It's a metaphor. What kind of bread? Because if it's a King's Hawaiian role, I'm interested. If it's that government subsidized white bread,

yeah, I don't trust it. We experience time as flowing, but that's a limitation of our consciousness. Our mind moves to the block universe like a cursor scanning a document. A time storm could knock that cursor loose. An intense electromagnetic anomaly could disconnect a person from their normal timeline. They might skip forward, loop backward, experience hours while the world experiences seconds. Then there's the many worlds interpretation. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick was obsessed with this. He believed time wasn't real.

He believed what we experience as time is, actually us moving through different versions of reality. He called it orthogonal time. He believed parallel timelines ran right next to ours, infinite versions of Earth, infinite versions of you, and sometimes those timelines bleed together. Now, if many worlds is true, a time storm isn't a glitch in a clock. It's a collision between universes. So when Goddard saw the airfield of the future, he wasn't looking forward in time, he was looking sideways into a parallel world where the war had already started. When the family in France found the hotel, they weren't in the past. They were in a reality where that hotel never closed. The framework for travel between worlds exists. These

aren't just storms, they're doorways, and some people have accidentally learned to walk through. The Valdez case, the Nepal convoy, the electronic fog, the hotel in France, great stories. But are they true? Well, let's start with the skeptics. The biggest problem with the time storm theory is the lack of heart data. We have stories, but we don't have a single recording. No video of a teleporting car. No footage of a glowing cloud. In the age of smartphones and dash cams,

you'd think we'd have caught one by now. Then there's the brain. Temporal lobe epilepsy explains almost every symptom of the Oz factor. The silence, the feeling of a presence, the time distortion, the vivid hallucinations. Persing approved in a lab that you can induce these feelings with magnets. If you're driving through a magnetic field caused by tectonic stress, your brain might glitch. You might feel like you lost an hour.

You might hallucinate a glowing cloud. The geology where Valdez disappeared creates electromagnetic anomalies, which could explain his experience. The Gernan case also has a logical explanation. The jet stream. Catch a hundred mile an hour tailwind, and you're going to get to Florida early. If you're stressed and flying through clouds, your perception of time is unreliable. 34 minutes can feel like 70. In the Goddard case, he wrote that book in 1975.

That's 40 years after the event. Memory is tricky. He saw a storm in 1935. He saw the airfield renovations in 1939. Over 40 years, his brain might have merged those two memories into one great story. So case closed, it's all in our imagination? Well, not so fast. Hallucinations don't leave physical traces.

In the Nepal case, 11 people saw the same cloud and got the same radiation burns. Mass hallucinations don't cause sunburns. In the hungry case, a woman's car door was fused shut. These are documented. Mark Henshaw's leather jacket was smoking. A brain glitch doesn't melt metal or leather. And then there's Valdez. Valdez left with a clean face.

He came back 15 minutes later with a short beard. Now, you can hallucinate a purple light and even a time jump, but you can't grow five days worth of stubble in 15 minutes. Oh, yeah, turn it to my ex-wice legs. Anyway, that's biological evidence, documented by his own men. And if Philip K. Dick was right about orthogonal time, then hallucination is the wrong word. He spent his life trying to warn us that our world wasn't solid,

that other worlds, other timelines press against us. The glitch isn't in our brains, the glitch is in the barrier between worlds. I have a strong sense there is a lot, more to reality, and I bet you do too. PKD believe that what we call reality is just a collective illusion that keeps us from seeing the chaos

underneath. But every once in a while, the illusion breaks, the signal drops, and the storm rolls in. And for just a few seconds, you can see the truth. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is A.J. That's cyclefish.

Please excuse me. I'm about to have an emergency, so I have to go find a tortoise. This has been the Wi-Files. Get fun or learn to anything, do us a favor, like, subscribe, comment, share. I know I ask, I've been asking for years, but that stuff really helps the channel. And like most topics we cover on the channel, today's was recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to see, go to thewifiles.com slash tips, or email us, or hop on Discord, or members only, or Patreon. There's a lot of

ways to get in touch, and we're always looking for topics. And remember, the YFiles is also a podcast. About twice a week, I post deep dives into the stories we cover here, and I also post episodes that are a little too hot for YouTube. The podcast is called, wait for it, the Wi-Files Operation Podcasts, and it's available everywhere. And look, if you are listening on an audio platform, if you hit the thumbs up, the like, follow, all that stuff, it really does help a lot. If you need more wildfiles of your life, you might need therapy. No, I'm kidding.

You're fine. If you need more, check out our Discord. We are over 100,000 strong over there, and people are on there 24-7 talking about the same stuff we talk about here on the show. It's a supportive community. It's a lot of fun and it's free to join. And speaking of 24-7 and make sure you check out our 24-7 stream on the Live Files backstage. Over there, we run episodes back-to-back with a lot of fun content in between. And actually, the live chat is more entertaining than the videos. Now, if you enjoy the stories I tell on the Live Files, check out my other show on the channel. It's called The Basement.

It's a conversation show where I chat with the interesting people behind the episodes. Some of them you know, some you don't, but they're all people I find fascinating. Experts on fun topics like the Knights Templar, the Moon Landing hoax, the JFK conspiracy, and all kinds of random stuff. And if there's someone you'd like to see on the show, let me know. I'm always on the hunt for good guests. Now special thanks to our patrons who made this channel possible. Every episode of the Y files is dedicated to our Patreon members. I couldn't do any of this without your support, so thank you. And if you'd like to support the channel, keep us going, join this community. Consider becoming a member. On Patreon, it's only

only three bucks a month and you get access to perks like videos early with no commercials exclusive merch only available to members plus you get two private live streams every week just for you and the whole wife house team is on the stream me victoria gino gen hybrid everybody's on there so you get to see us and meet us as people and if you want to turn on your camera hop up on stage ask a question tell a joke learn more about a topic you can do that i think it's the best perk there is another great way to support the channel is buy something for the whitefow store shirt. Oh, what are these visible coffee mugs? Stick your fist in and

time may go slower on your fist inside the mug. I can't guarantee you that, though. Don't hold me to that. Or a hoodie? Or something I even might want my face on it? Oh, what are these? Look how cute. What are these crazy animal? Oh, he just warms my little hot. What are these squeaky animal? Heck of his talking Kordogles.

But if you're going to buy merch, make sure you become a member on YouTube. I know another membership, but hear me out. YouTube members get 10% off everything in the Wafel Store forever. Every month you get a new And it's only three bucks. So if you're going to go to the store and spend 40 bucks on t-shirts and fistible mugs, join on YouTube, get the code, and it pays for itself.

And look, if you just want to use the code and cancel, that's fine too. The membership is there to save you money, not make me money. In fact, all that revenue goes to the team. I don't touch any of it. Keep that secret close to your gills, that? Those are the plugs, and that's going to do it. Until next time, be safe. Be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

A secret code inside the Bible said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing the like I shus. And it never ends. No, it never ends. Oh, with them K-L truck being only two of a well. Were the shadow people? You just thought the smiling name was cold. The secret city undercrime.

Watchers back