UFO and time-slip accounts have many similarities. Witnesses often enter a mist and/or feel that their environment has become silent and still. They feel disorientated and are puzzled by what they experience - the 'Oz Factor'. Such events seem to occur in localised ‘hot spots’ such as Liverpool's Bold Street, and certain people often have repeat experiences.
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Both have a fair amount of people who make outrageous and usually implausible claims. The contributors to Weird Time provide us with many anecdotes about people who have suddenly found themselves briefly back in time. The most famous incidents like that of Annie Moberly and Dr Eleanor Frances Jourdain who thought they saw Marie Antoinette when visiting Versailles in 1901, are recounted along with tales of people who say they are actually time travellers.
The most famous time traveller is probably John Titor who claimed to come from 2036 on online bulletin boards in 2000 to 2001, and predicted a civil war in the USA in 2008 and WWIII in 2015. The actor and TV presenter Pale Dale Roberts sensibly regards him as a hoaxer, but does interview an individual whom he calls ‘John Titor 2.’ He says his original predictions did not come true because he was able to change the timeline, and like a good contactee says; “We must master the issues here on Earth.”
Roberts states, like Annie Moberly and Dr Eleanor Frances Jourdain, that Titor is a hoaxer wanting attention. Nonetheless he does think that UFOs are from the future and the binary code message from the UFO at Rendlesham Forest that says it is from the year 8100 sounds truthful. Oh well…
Another well known case is the Philadelphia Experiment that Tim Swartz says is so fantastic that we are still talking about it 80 years later. This allegedly used massive generators to create electromagnetic fields to send the US Navy ship USS Eldridge forwards in time to 2137.
A less well known story is that of Mike Arkliniski who invented a ‘Sonic Resonator’ that can send people through time. Using a natural grid point he was able to transport himself to 1945 for six hours and a couple of hours to the old Wild West in 1895. On his third trip he went to 1969 where he was chased and shot at by Men in Black. He was told to stop travelling through time, and after being shot in the leg he woke up to find a mark where the beam had hit him. This makes Sean Casteel wonder if MIB are time travellers who police our timeline to keep it under their control.
Not surprisingly tales like this are as hard to substantiate as alien abduction stories and mix technology with the paranormal. With the aid of the Internet creepy stories by self-confessed time travellers are easily spread and become more ‘real’ with their re-telling.
Gene Steinberg offers a brief guide to time travel in popular culture and Swartz writes about homemade time machines. Along with the many time travel anecdotes several of the contributors discuss the philosophy and physics of time, which involve talk of relativity and mind-boggling Quantum theories. Like UFOs, the concept of time travel does make us wonder about our place in this Universe, and the nature of reality. And. like ufology you need a good dose of salt to explore the mysteries of time and space.
Containing numerous black and white illustrations and an index, Weird Time is an ideal source of popular ideas about the concept of time travel and time slips, and for the more critical it is a good starting point.
- Nigel Watson
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