Time traveling is something that all of us wish we had access too, I’d go back to third grade during the pledge of allegiance when Patrick Quin threw up all over my back mid pledge. Shoutout to Patrick if you’re reading this, hope all is well. If I had the steady hands and the technology to pull of a procedure like time travel I’d be super selfish. Sure, I’d help some folks along the way but I’m mostly gambling and redoing all my mistakes and avoiding a few questionable relationships on my way. Well, I’m certainly not sold that all this time travel is true, theoretically, some smart people think it’s possible but again, that’s all in theory. Here are 11 of the most well-known and downright bizarre claims of time travel.
1. Pilot sees plane that’s not invented
Air Marshall Sir Robert Victor Goddard was sent to inspect an abandoned airfield in Edinburgh in 1935. It was dilapidated, of which he made a note. He got back in the cockpit of his plane and took off. Heavy rain and low visibility prevented him from going too far, so he turned around and headed back to the airfield to wait out the storm. As he approached the landing strip, though, something very strange happened. The clouds cleared and he saw that the previously abandoned land was now bustling with mechanics in blue jumpsuits. There were four yellow planes on the tarmac, and one of them was a kind he had never seen before. Keep in mind, this guy was a military pilot. He was pretty familiar with all the different plane models available at the time.
Goddard was obviously extremely confused until about four years later, he was sent back to the airfield. Far from being abandoned, it was now in full use, complete with blue-jumpsuited mechanics and yellow planes. And sitting on the runway was the plane he couldn’t identify in 1934: a Miles Magister. The Magister was first manufactured in 1937, three years after Goddard recalls seeing it.
2. Two professors stumble across Marie Antoinette at her palace.
In 1901, two professors from St. Hugh’s College in Oxford, England, went to visit the Palace of Versailles. Versailles was the French royal home until the monarchy was abolished in 1792. Marie Antoinette, one of the last royals to live there, was executed in 1793. So on that day in 1901, when professors Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were walking the grounds of the palace, it’s pretty safe to say they did not expect to see Marie Antoinette in the flesh just chillin’ on a stool outside the home which was a private retreat built for Antoinette by her hubby Louis XVI.
And yet, there she was, sitting and sketching and completely oblivious to the fact that two women were gaping at her and all the other people in 1780s period attire who had appeared just as suddenly as Antoinette. Antoinette and everyone else disappeared when a tour guide approached Moberly and Jourdain. Together, they wrote a book, An Adventure, about their experience, and the story gained notoriety because of how grounded it seemed.
3. Journalist experiences air raid over 10 years before it happened.
Journalist J. Bernard Hutton and photographer Joachim Brandt were sent by a German newspaper to do a story on the Hamburg shipyard in 1932. It was an uneventful visit until the bombs began raining down. Hutton and Brandt realized they were caught in the middle of an air raid and high-tailed it out of there, but not before snapping some photographs. When they got back to the center of Hamburg, no one believed their story. They developed the photos they took, intending to prove to everyone that they weren’t crazy. In fact, they proved the opposite: the photos showed no signs of an air raid.
Eleven years later, Hutton was living in London when he opened up a newspaper and probably nearly spit his coffee across his desk. There was a story about Operation Gomorrah, an air raid on Hamburg. The accompanying photos looked exactly like what he experienced in 1932.