Time Travelers: Witnesses to the Impossible

Time is one of those things we all take for granted.  It’s a man-made conception of how events relate to one another.  One event happens before another and so on.  But what if our conception of time was incomplete as so many physicists believe?  What if the true nature of time could be altered so we could find ourselves working outside of time and space?  Witnesses from all over the world have weighed in on this rare but intriguing phenomenon.

Imagine you’re walking down the street minding your own business when suddenly you find yourself no longer in familiar territory.  The cars look different somehow.  Strangely you even notice the people look like they’re from an old movie or are wearing clothes that seem altogether strange to you.  You may suddenly notice people speaking oddly and using mannerisms that have not been in practice for several decades.  You have just slipped into that Twilight Zone experience that so many call time displacement.

And when it comes to people traveling through time this is actually fairly mundane.  The incredible difference between decades is immediately apparent to some who experience the phenomenon and not so apparent to others.  Jason Offutt recently covered a fascinating story from Oregon where Michael Reed found himself in one such predicament while catering at a hotel in the summer of 2006.  In Reed’s account a trip to the basement suddenly landed him in what could only be described as a different time or possibly an alternate universe.  And though the event lasted only a few seconds in Reed’s case, there have been some that have not been so quickly resolved.

Earlier this year a man reported to police that he had come from the year 31 AD and that he was the second coming of Jesus.  The police asked him to seek psychological counseling.  No further details on the event were released in the general media.  But while there are no doubt several people who falsely believe themselves to have traveled to a different time due to a psychological disorder, there are others who come across as perfectly rational and reasonable.  In fact there is even one man who claims he not only visited the future, but actually videotaped images of himself and his older future self standing side by side in a field.

Hakan Nordkvist says he climbed through some sort of portal beneath his sink when he suddenly found himself on the other side looking into his own kitchen in the near future.  And he even found himself in the future and took cell phone footage of the two of them standing side by side with the exact same tattoo.  Though it’s interesting, there is little documentation of the incident so it cannot be confirmed as genuine.  Still, it has many looking for answers and still scratching their heads.

Perhaps we will find out at some time in the future that time travel is really possible.  And if that’s the case, we’re only one wrong turn away from traveling to that future early.