Strange Cases Of Slippage Through Time

By on November 11, 2012 in News 41

Mysterious Universe ponders times slips — cases in which people temporarily experience the future or past, or briefly interact with people or objects from a different era:

Physicists like Albert Einstein, Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking have all said time travel is theoretically possible; our science just can’t achieve it. But what if nature can?

Time slips have been reported throughout history. English women vacationing in France in 1901 claimed they stepped into the French Revolution, and two English couples traveling in Spain in the 1970s stayed at an oddly archaic hotel that was simply gone on their return journey. RAF pilot Sir Victor Goddard encountered airplanes in 1935 that didn’t exist until 1939, and a 100-year-old Swiss watch found in a Chinese Ming dynasty tomb. People may slip like this all the time.

During the Aurora Borealis of 2004, visible in North America as far south as the lower Midwest, Jake, 15, stood outside his parents home in the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, around 10 p.m. “A bright white glow suddenly filled the northern horizon,” he said. “This looked nothing like the northern lights, nor did it behave like them.”

“I thought that I should maybe go inside at this time, and found myself unable to move,” he said. Numbness grew in his arms and legs and he blacked out. When he woke, he knew he’d been somewhere else.

He walked into the house to find he’d been outside an hour. “It took most of the night for me to tell my parents what happened, and most of the time I kept telling them that I thought the calendar was wrong, it should at least be after 2008,” he said. “To this day, my mother remembers bits of this, mainly because I looked at her and asked point blank, ‘Is the black man president?’”

What happened to Jake? Seizure? Psychological phenomena? Or did Jake accidentally take a brief, four-year step into 2008? Jake’s slip is just one in a long line of stories from people who have brushed against a different time. These stories are not so rare as people think [...] But the stories are so bizarre that I don’t think anyone would want to come foreword to tell it. Who would believe you?

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  • David Howe

    People sometimes lie or misremember things.

    • the invisible man

      Therefore, everyone who has experienced an event like this is either lying or misremembering because, obviously, with our vast understanding of the nature of the universe (we’ve pretty much got it all figured out by now) this sort of thing just is not possible.

      That about right?

      • Bluebird_of_Fastidiousness

        The ontology of time is a slippery fish. Some fishers… embellish their catch. Hemingway’s old man got a big one, if memory serves, but I can’t recall how the book ends.

        Who knows what swims in the Depths?

      • David Howe

        pretty much yes. Oddly, there’s no proof of any of the time travel stuff. Not a bit.

        • JerGuy

          What proof do we have that the ideas you share came from your own mind? Or that you had a specific dream you claimed to? Do these “things” not influence your life and others’ perhaps more than the tangible around you? The scientific method has been shown flawed by our mere observation of an experiment (in search of proof) changes the results of that experiment. How do you expect to prove things in a purely subjective universe where our the lightest intentions of observation alters the result? That is the question you may want to help answer. Try reading any article on quantum mechanics/physics and put down the 7th grade science book.

          • http://twitter.com/Ubiquitousnewt Randall

            “The scientific method has been shown flawed by our mere observation of an experiment”

            Bullshit. You’re talking about observer effect, and that’s a function of the quality and finesse of your instrumentation and technique. When you’re measuring gross characteristics, or a large effect, minor experimental error doesn’t affect the outcome. (If you’re measuring a minor effect, you need better instrumentation or a different experiment, ideally…)

            Quantum physics doesn’t apply because it’s very small forces – and a moderate amount of pure bullshit as well. When you get into higher level physics, the conjecture and untestable theory levels skyrocket. If you can’t test it, it’s not science, I don’t care what the degree of the person proposing it is.

            I’m a graduate student biosciences major with a chem minor, so don’t bother with the “7th grade science” ad hominems, either.

        • SS

          It didn’t happen to you. Unless it happened to you then you would think differently.

          Just saying.

      • Irony lost

        I love the two negative votes

  • Steve Jacques

    Once, back in 1999, I was in the basement of a local coffee house, several people were there and we can all recall something strange happening. Looking around the room it appeared that we were all wearing clothing from the french revolution. There was a wooden door that led into an underground tunnel that connected with other areas of the town. And then it was all back to normal. And yes sometimes people do lie and don’t recall correctly, this wasn’t one of those instances.

    • David Howe

      can you prove it?

    • Artor

      …And then someone changed the channel and Doctor Who wasn’t on the TV any more.

  • “Big” Richard Johnson

    I travel forward in time whenever I drink too much, does that count?

  • BrianApocalypse

    Over a long period of time I had a series of dreams, separated by years, where I saw images of things I later went on to experience in reality. These were very specific things, nothing that could be generalized, and each of them somehow alluded to a different reality interacting with this one.

    Of course, there is no way for me to prove any of it.

    • http://www.facebook.com/steff.hall.thats.who Steff Hall

      I know that feel brah, I have had dreams about jobs, and later have the most intense deja vu EVER. But i know that it was the dreams man.

  • Robin T

    Pretty much any experience like this can be fabricated by the brain.

    Hallucinations can be fun or disturbing, but please just think about what you thought happened and use your power of reason when thinking about it afterwards.

    If you`ve ever had one of those dreams that appears to last hours in the timespan of a real life minute you know how little trouble it is for your brain to fabricate experiences.

    Really now, what is more likely, that you traveled through time for no apparent reason ? or that your brain had a hiccup and got a little creative with your perception of reality.

    • Bluebird_of_Fastidiousness

      Thanks Robin T. I believe yours to be a valid skeptical argument. I remain open to all sorts of possibilities about this crazy multiverse, but your response mirrors my own at face value.

      OTOH, maybe consuming psilocybin mushrooms does effect space-time. Who’s to say what’s more real?

      • David Howe

        reality is more real. if you’re ever uncertain, ask someone who is NOT on mushrooms.

        • Know_the_ledge

          What exactly is reality?

        • http://www.facebook.com/billy.stilson Billy Stilson

          Many dont realize just how important Mushrooms were to all life on this planet. Mushrooms were the first living organisms to live on land, and without them, plants or animals may have never left the water. They turned rock into soil. The largest biological organism on the earth is a giant web of a mushroom spore. Of course Im talking about all mushrooms here, not just psychedelics, but I think its funny when people put psychedelic mushrooms in a sort of escapist drug category, when if you talk to someone thoughtful who has done mushrooms, they will probably tell you it was a spiritual, enlightening look into the true reality of their subconscious.
          check it…

          http://youtu.be/XI5frPV58tY

    • Know_the_ledge

      But everything we experience is through our brains. How can you distinguish what is fabrication?

  • BuzzCoastin

    when somebody comes back from the future with the winning Power Ball number
    or comes back from the past with info that leads to a buried treasure
    then we have an interesting event
    however
    technically, now is the only time there is
    when I type this it’s right now
    & when you read this it’s right now

    everything else is a memory or a conjecture

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Brady-Bever/40305560 Brady Bever

    Why is it that people who experience the so-called events always arrive in a time period that is easily discernible to modern observers? Also, why is it they are always apart of the most influential circles in society (I.e. French Revolution, opposite the pharaoh, around assassinations or participating in celebrated escapades)? Has anybody claimed to go back in time and ended up as a peasant on the end of a plow or shovel? The odds would seem to suggest the latter.

    • Simiantongue

      Interesting questions, but lets start more simply. How is it that when people are whisked away into the future or past they still end up on the surface of the Earth? Lets say two hundred years either way. The Earth rotates, orbits the sun, the sun orbits the galaxy, the galaxy flies through spacetime. Two hundred years in the past or into the future the Earth will be far far away from where it is now. Yet there seems to be some type of astronomically improbable aiming device that shoots people not only through time, but through space, to exacting coordinates that the Earth will be, or was, inhabiting two hundred years from the present.

      Stories about time travel usually suffer from a lack of imagination, unfortunately mimicking what is read in books seen on TV or movies.

      • Spiderguest

        Time and space are on separate planes

    • Artor

      Like a 15 y/o from Missouri, who probably never saw an aurora before, knowing with certainty what does & doesn’t look like the Northern Lights, also instantly knowing about a black President after a few seconds transport to 2008? It sounds fishy to me too.

  • earaches

    P.K.D.

    • BrianApocalypse

      Just before I wrote the above comment and read this article I was watching a video about PKD. Then immediately after reading this I saw a suggested youtube video with a title about freezing time.

  • Jasa

    As long as there are zero outside sources or reference provided, I’m going to assume this is 100% bullshit.

  • todd southern

    The problem with experience in most cases is that it cannot be proved. Hell’s bells most things in anyone’s life cannot be proven. How do you prove something you alone or with a small group of folks experienced? Coffee shop slips through time or you saw a man walking toward you that suddenly was not there, How is either one one provable?

    We can even get more mundane in terms of proof. Prove something that you alone experienced, from walking down the block to hiding in a closet. We only have the word of the the person that experienced the the alleged incident. To them this experience may be very real. What does that make the experience?

    Perhaps what they thought they experienced was not the way it happened at all. Is does not discount the experience in any way. Information only provides context, the memory if genuine or otherwise can still exist regardless if someone thinks it is utter crap.

    • http://twitter.com/Ubiquitousnewt Randall

      Videotape it with footage of your GPS and a remote-broadcast time and you’ll get pretty close to proof.

  • Roark

    Plant Psychedelics dilate time when used by man and their active ingredient comes from nature herself. It’s possible, that plants at least, live in the eternal now, and we exp that perception when ingesting them.

  • Camolice

    I’ve never experienced a ‘time slip’ but when I experience ‘de ja vu’ I always know what’s going to happen next. It’s like I suddenly realize I’ve done this all before, and know that the person to my right is about to ask me the time; and sure enough, she shortly will.

  • ransomdave

    If you really did temporarily slip into another time you would die in the cold vacuum of space before you had time to slip back. The Earth is constantly in motion, so is the sun for that matter.

  • Dr_Dmo

    When I was about 6 I looked out of my bedroom window one morning and saw buildings with white domes on top where there was usually only a field. I told my Gran about it and she jokingly said that I must have been seeing the future. 30 years later I went back past where I used to live and what was then a field now has a mall built on it with, you’ve guessed it, white buildings with domed roofs. It was exactly as I remembered it all those years ago and I felt just like I did as a 6 year old kid looking at it again. Very odd. Not claiming any superpowers or anything, but just thought I’d share.

  • thawalkingman

    If you have experienced it, you know that linear time is an oversimplification.

    If you have not experienced it, you know that it can’t happen.

    Either way you’re right.

  • Gwen

    The instances I’ve had of this phenomenon were all dreams. I didn’t realize they were dreams until I grew up and started understanding and remembering the dreams. Dreams of places and furniture and such I had never seen before, then months later, seeing them, and remembering the dream I had of them. I am one of those that have one instance of proof, (not court-worthy, of course), but had a dream about a friend in a bad car accident, and yes, the friend was in a bad accident. About a week later, after the accident, sitting with friends, talking about the accident, suddenly I remembered the dream, AND the fact that I had told all of them, (the accident victim too), of the dream, at least a month before it happened. Needless to say, they were all creeped out….I DO remember you telling us about that!….(“don’t you go having any dreams about ME!”).

    In any case, the dreams that come true afterward seem to have slacked off as I’ve gotten older, which I am a little relieved by, don’t want to have anymore scary dreams come true! As far as believing in time slippage, well I don’t believe in ghosts, but that does not mean they do not exist.

  • http://twitter.com/Ubiquitousnewt Randall

    Convenient how this never happens to anyone with a videocamera or timekeeping device, isn’t it?

    C’mon. We all know it’s just your brain playing games with itself, just like 90% of the other “unexplainable” things out there.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1310463182 Bruce Johnson

    IF time travel were possible we still have an insurmountable problem. The earth moves through space at quite a rapid pace in multiple directions. eg; Orbiting the sun while the sun itself moves through our galaxy while our galaxy moves through space. The result being that if one traveled in time he or she would find themselves in space, far from earth… So on a scale of probibility of one to ten I give time travel a negative three.

    • Spiderguest

      For one, you can’t spell probability. Also, “slipping” time suggests that there is a specific exit point, which would most likely place you in the exact location you are RELATIVE to the position of the earth. Being flung into space is the unlikely candidate here.

  • Benjamin

    I always wondered what my experience was about. I thought I was traveling beyond this world thats for sure. I was walking on the sidewalk down my street and I was just repeating the same thing to myself but I am not quite sure why. I was used to travelling out of body at will since I had a kundalini awakening experience but this time it was different. Everything went white and I was not even existent. I was a form of energy which has become one with a much bigger loving energy. I think of it as god now when I look back on it. Yes I remained independent of it as well. I heard a low humming sound and I could feel joy and blissful love. I may not have time travelled but for a long time I thought maybe I was. One would think I died for a brief moment but here I was again back in normal life walking down the street. I stopped where I stood and wondered where the hell did I go for the quick moment. That and the Kundalini awakening experience was the best blissful moments of my life. I don’t need to prove this to anyone because I know my own experience and I would never question any one else of their own experiences because I will never know unless I was them. In the end we will all know.