10 People Who Claimed To Be Time Travelers

“The distinction between the past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” – Albert Einstein

These days, even respected physicists like Stephen Hawking are being forced to admit that time travel may be possible. But has it already happened? These people say it has.

10 A Visit To Mars With Barack Obama

Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago says that when he was a child, he and William Stillings were “chrononauts” in a secret United States government time travel program called Project Pegasus. The purpose of the program was threefold—to protect Earth from threats from space, to establish territorial sovereignty over Mars, and to acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to our presence.

The best part of Basiago’s and Stillings’ claim, however, is that one of their fellow time travelers was none other than a 19-year-old Barack Obama, who went by the name “Barry Soetero.” In 1980, the three men and seven other youths from their “Mars training class” at California’s College of the Siskiyous (a real institution) traveled to Mars via a top-secret teleportation “jump room” modeled on technical papers found in Nikola Tesla’s apartment after his death. They jumped through a field of radiant energy into a tunnel, and when the tunnel closed, found themselves at their destination.

The White House has officially denied that Obama ever went to Mars.

9 An American Soldier From The Future

In late 2000, posts began appearing on the Internet from someone claiming to be an American soldier from the year 2036. John Titor, as he called himself, was on his way back to 1975—using a device installed in a 1987 Chevy Suburban, naturally—to obtain an IBM 5100 computer to fight a computer virus destined to destroy the world. Titor hinted at a world beset by conflicts, culminating in a series of Russian nuclear strikes in 2015 that would kill almost three billion people.

Titor’s posts abruptly ceased in 2001, but Titormania continued. In 2003, a bound edition of Titor’s 151 message board posts was released under the title John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale. Though no longer in print, one can still buy a new copy for an eye-popping $1,775, or a used one at a more modest $150. The book was published by the John Titor Foundation, a for-profit corporation run by Florida entertainment attorney Lawrence Haber. The Foundation also owns the copyright to the purported insignia of Titor’s military unit, the Fighting Diamondbacks, which is inscribed with a quote from Ovid: tempus edax rerum, meaning “time devours all things.”

Except, it would seem, the myth of John Titor.

8 Christ’s Personal Photographer

Father Pellegrino Ernetti was a Benedictine monk and respected authority on archaic music. He also claimed to have co-invented—as part of a team that included Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi and German rocket scientist Werner von Braun—the “chronovisor,” a device that looked like a television but could tune in to events from the past.

According to Ernetti, he had observed the last supper and Christ’s crucifixion, as well as Napoleon and Cicero. The team had later voluntarily dismantled the device, because in the wrong hands, it could create “the most fearsome dictatorship the world has ever seen.” It had been inspired, he said, by Nostradamus—who had personally related to him the device’s possibilities.

When pressed for evidence, Ernetti produced a picture of Christ on the cross reportedly photographed through the chronovisor. After the photo’s resemblance to a carving by Cullot Valera was noticed, however, Ernetti was forced to admit the photo was a fake. Nevertheless, Ernetti insisted the chronovisor was real.

7 The Pilot Who Entered A Parallel Dimension

In 1935, a wing commander with Britain’s Royal Air Force named Sir Victor Goddard flew his open-cockpit biplane from Scotland to England on weekend leave. On the way, he passed over Drem Airfield near Edinburgh, which had been constructed during World War I. The tarmac and four hangars were in disrepair and barbed wire divided the field into numerous pastures filled with grazing cattle. Returning home a day later, Goddard ran into a violent storm and lost control of his plane. When he finally recovered from a downward spiral that should have resulted in his death, he was just several feet above a stony beach.

As Goddard climbed back up through the rain and fog, the sky suddenly filled with sunlight. Below him was the Drem Airfield—only the farm had disappeared, and the hangars were no longer decrepit. At the end of the restored tarmac stood four bright yellow planes, one an unfamiliar monoplane. These were surrounded by mechanics in blue overalls, notable to Goddard since RAF mechanics only ever wore brown.

Had Goddard—considered one of the founders of the RAF—simply been confused about his location, as some skeptics suggest? Or had he traveled forward in time? Goddard died in 1987, so we may never know the truth. Unless, of course, he returns from the past to tell us.

6 The Sole Survivor Of The Philadelphia Experiment

In the fall of 1943, the USS Eldridge was allegedly made invisible and teleported from Pennsylvania to Virginia in an incident that came to be known as the Philadelphia Experiment. Of course, the incident never occurred—but that didn’t stop Alfred Bielek from achieving notoriety as Eldridge’s reputed lone survivor. His memories were “buried” until he saw the movie The Philadelphia Experiment in 1988, at which time he “remembered” that he was born in 1916 as Ed Cameron.

As Cameron, he’d been recruited in 1940 for an alleged Navy Project called Project Rainbow, whose purpose was to figure out how to make ships invisible. For reasons not entirely clear, “black ops” soldiers later sent Cameron through a portal at the Pentagon to Alpha Centauri One, where aliens interrogated him and then “physically regressed” him into one-year-old Al Bielek in 1927. Bialek claimed he later became director of mind control for the Montauk Project, whose members in the ‘80s traveled through a time vortex and changed the outcomes of various wars. When they returned to their own time, they would decide if they’d changed things for the better. If not, they would simply restore the status quo.

5 Håkan Nordkvist Met His Future Self

On August 30, 2006, 36-year-old Håkan Nordkvist came home to find water pooling on his kitchen floor. Assuming it was a leak, he gathered his tools and crawled under the sink, but couldn’t reach the pipes. He explained what happened next: “I had to crawl inside the cabinet, and as I did so, I discovered that it just continued. So I kept on crawling further and further into the cabinet. In the end of the tunnel I saw a light, and when I got there, I realized I was in the future.”

The year 2042, to be precise, which is where—or rather, when—Nordkvist met his 72-year-old self. To his surprise, future Nordkvist knew things that only he could know, like where he’d hidden his secret things in the first grade. The two selves even had the same tattoo, though future Nordkvist’s was a little faded. The men posed for a selfie on the younger Nordkvist’s phone. The photo, which was the only one Nordkvist apparently thought to take in 2042, showed that Nordkvist had some physical changes to look forward to—including, notably, growing a couple of inches over the next 36 years.

4 The Women Who Visited A Queen’s Memories

On August 10, 1901, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain—both academics at St. Hugh’s College in Oxford—were spending a day at Versailles. As they searched for the Petit Trianon, they became lost. They began to feel strange, like something was oppressing their spirits. Two men in long green coats and three-cornered hats directed them across a bridge, where Moberly saw a woman in 18th-century clothing sitting on a stool, sketching.

Back in England, the women investigated the mystery. Neither of them knew anything about 18th-century France, so imagine their astonishment when they discovered a picture of Marie Antoinette and saw that it was she whom Moberly had seen sketching. The queen had been sitting outside the Petit Trianon at the very moment she’d learned a Parisian mob was marching toward Versailles.

The women were convinced they’d experienced a ghost trace of Marie Antoinette’s memories. Under the pseudonyms Miss Morison and Miss Lamont, they published an account of their experience called An Adventure, which became a best-seller. It wasn’t until 1950—by which time Jourdain and Moberly were both long dead—that an examination of their correspondence with the Society for Psychical Research proved that the women had added numerous details to their account only after they had done their research.

3 The Baby-Stealing Alien Military

Michael and Stephanie Relfe report that aliens using fractal time technology abducted them and “stole” their two-month pre-term daughter. But the worst part, according to their website, is that the same thing could happen to us!

We can prevent this, however, through prayer and recognition of the signs of abduction: exhaustion, bruises, missing time, and areas of the body which appear brightly colored when viewed under a black light. The Relfes are a bit vague, however, on what actually happens after an alien abduction, but their understanding of the technology involved is surprisingly comprehensive. The aliens—aided by the US military—use jump gates, teleporters, wormholes, dimensional travel, fractal resonance, and even magic to travel through time and space.

Other evils perpetrated by the aliens include vaccinations, fluoride, and genetically modified food, all of which damage our metaphysical abilities and keep us from being able to fight the “attempted occupation by the predatory hyperdimensional species”—or at least our ability to understand what the heck the Relfes are talking about.

2 The Men Who Foresaw The Firebombing Of Hamburg

In 1932, German newspaper reporter J. Bernard Hutton and photographer Joachim Brandt reportedly visited the Hamburg shipyard to do interviews for a story. As they were leaving, they heard the drone of aircraft engines. Looking up, they saw the sky filled with warplanes. Bombs began exploding around them, and within a short time, the area was a raging inferno.

Brandt snapped pictures of the devastation and the two drove back into Hamburg, but when the film was developed, there was no evidence of the attack. The pairs’ editor accused the men of being drunk and discounted their story. Afterward, Hutton moved to London, where he supposedly saw a newspaper story in 1943 about a Royal Air Force raid on Hamburg. The accompanying photos showed the shipyard just as he and Brandt had seen it 11 years earlier.

The RAF did, in fact, bomb Hamburg in 1943. In a series of raids known as Operation Gomorrah, approximately 550–600 bombs turned the city into a firestorm which killed 40,000 people. It was World War II’s first widespread destruction of a major city—and the last anyone heard of Hutton and Brandt.

1 Space Barbie

With her tiny waist, large breasts, and doll-like features, Valeria Lykyanova has been called a “real-life Barbie.” She insists, however, that she is really an alien time-traveler come to Earth to save the world from superficiality. The Ukrainian-born Lukyanova—who says her spiritual name is Amatue—shot to Internet fame in 2012 with her 20-minute video, “Space Barbie,” in which she said she is here to help move us “from the role of the ‘human consumer’ to the role of ‘human demi-god.’ ”

Lykyanova said she started seeing spirits from “other dimensions” when she was 12 or 13 and developed the ability to travel outside of her body to other planets and universes. She communicates with these otherworldly beings not verbally, but in “the language of light.” While she has already published a book about her astral trips, Lukyanova’s real goal is to become a pop star.

And the Grammy goes to Amatue for best performance in the language of light.

Jackie Fuchs is a writer and attorney with a BA in linguistics from UCLA and a JD from Harvard. She played bass (as Jackie Fox) for the ‘70s all-girl rock band The Runaways with Joan Jett and Lita Ford.

Jackie is a former journalist and Huffington Post blogger with an interest in word origins and medieval history. Her blog, Nothing Too Trivial (Interesting Things for Interested People), can be found at jackiefox1976.wordpress.com.