Time is one of those universal forces that still has many of us scratching our heads with wonder. While some suggest time is nothing more than the speed and sequence of events as they happen, the more advanced in physics we come the more names are attached to the idea that time may be more fluid than we once thought. But is it possible that a person could find themselves displaced in time, completely thrown back to an earlier or later time and come back with an incredible story? A handful of people have claimed just that.
While sitting around telling ghost stories, occasionally people will claim to have seen more than the apparition of a single person, suggesting that their very setting could have been affected by this curious transformation of the normal into the paranormal. And a few of the symptoms reported alongside these time displacements seem eerily familiar when you take a look at other things like UFO sightings. Is it possible these time jumps could actually be coming as the result of a similar phenomenon? Or are they merely common threads in a tapestry of mystery man was not meant to fully unravel?
The Bermuda Triangle, for years thought to be a place afflicted with altered laws of nature, reportedly has sent mariners and pilots tumbling through the void of space-time to locations and times not well understood.
But there is an even more localized place known as Bold Street in Liverpool that reportedly sometimes scoops up visitors and sends them hurtling back in time to the 1950’s briefly before returning them (presumably every time) to the present day. The events themselves don’t seem to have much impact on the people from the alternate time.
Accounts generally involve briefly talking to people and seeing the changed street and cars and hearing strange music from the era. Before the victims of this strange phenomenon find themselves able to interact with their environment in any meaningful way, they return to their normal time, with no sign that anything unusual had taken place. Interestingly enough the time slips do seem to correct the amount of time lost. For example, an individual who time slips back to the 1950’s for fifteen minutes will find themselves in the future once again, only fifteen minutes in the future from their starting point. Does this suggest the change happens in perception? Or do they actually physically transport back to another time before snapping to their original “track?”
We’ve all heard of the paradoxes inherent in time travel. Even the simplest interaction with the world around an individual could eventually cascade in a sort of butterfly effect that could have far reaching and dramatic consequences on those individuals involved and the world around them. Of course there is the grandfather paradox, where an individual who goes back in time and kills their grandfather would ensure they were never actually born, but there are others that might affect their existence even if they simply walked around in the past and were seen by the wrong people at the wrong time. And it is virtually impossible to tell how these changes would affect the future as the only ones to tell us would have a story so fantastic it would be nearly impossible to believe. The future could, in theory, be undergoing constant revision at the hands of a hapless few travelers dipping into the past and unwittingly undoing history as we know it.