Slips in Time

In August of 1901, two Englishwomen, Annie Moberly and her colleague Dr. Eleanor Frances Jourdain, were on a trip visiting Paris. The first stop on their tour was the capital. After a short visit there, the two then went to Versailles. At Versailles, the women would have a remarkable experience which has become a timeless tale. The two women would later recount the following story. Blogger Naomi tells us the story:

The two Englishwomen visited the palace at Versailles, where after touring the building itself they descended the steps into the gardens, walking toward the Petit Trianon. There they turned off along a track and passed by some deserted farm buildings, in front of which there was an old plough. On the path stood two men in long green coats wearing three-cornered hats. Eleanor Jourdain asked them the way and they replied with dignified gestures, from which the two Englishwomen gathered that they should go straight on. They went on their way without giving another thought to the strangers' period costume, assuming it to be intended as a tourist attraction. They strolled up to an isolated cottage where a woman and a 12- or 13-year-old girl were standing at the doorway, both wearing white kerchiefs fastened under their bodices. As Eleanor Jourdain described the scene, the woman was standing at the top of the steps, holding a jug and leaning slightly forwards, while the girl stood beneath her, looking up at her and stretching out her empty hands.

"She might have been just going to take the jug or have just given it up. I remember that both seemed to pause for an instant, as in a motion picture," wrote Dr. Jourdain.

The two Oxford ladies went on their way and soon reached a pavilion that stood in the middle of an enclosure. The place had a god-forsaken air about it and the atmosphere was depressing and unpleasant.

A man was sitting outside the pavilion, his face repulsively disfigured by smallpox, wearing a coat and a straw hat. He seemed not to notice the two women; at any rate, he paid no attention to them.

Suddenly, a young man in a dark coat and buckle shoes appeared and ran past shouting something like, "You can't go through there." He pointed toward the right and added, "You'll find the house over there."

Although the Englishwomen spoke French they could only partly understand the man's speech. He bowed with a curious smile and disappeared. The sound of his hurrying footsteps hung in the air for a long time.

The Englishwomen walked on in silence and after a while reached a narrow, rustic bridge, which led over a ravine. A small waterfall made its way between stones and fern leaves, down a slope covered in vegetation. On the other side of the bridge, the path wound along the edge of a meadow surrounded by trees. Some way away stood a small country house with shuttered windows and with terraces on either side. A lady was sitting on the lawn with her back to the house. She held a large sheet of paper or cardboard in her hand and seemed to be working at or looking at a drawing. She was no longer in the bloom of youth but looked most attractive. She wore a summer dress with a long bodice and a very full, apparently short skirt, which was extremely unusual. She had a pale green fichu or kerchief draped around her shoulders, and a large white hat covered her fair hair.

At the end of the terraces was a second house. As the two women drew near, a door suddenly flew open and slammed shut again. A young man with the demeanor of a servant, but not wearing livery, came out. As the two Englishwomen thought they had trespassed on private property, they followed the man toward the Petit Trianon. Quite unexpectedly, from one moment to the next, they found themselves in the middle of a crowd--apparently a wedding party--all dressed in the fashions of 1901.

This account is a classic example of what is known as the time slip phenomenon. Simply defined, a time slip is an event where a persona is momentarily, and involuntarily, outside of the normal flow of time. They appear to have traveled either forward, or backwards, in time. Time slips stories have interested me for years. Although, I haven’t quite made up my mind as to what might be causing these events to occur. There seems to be some evidence that time may not be as linear as we perceive it. Is it possible that we can accidently travel through time? The following cases seem to make that suggestion.

Sir Victor Goddard’s Flight

On the Uk Paranormal Events forum page, member Sir JGP relates the following tale involving RAF Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard:

in 1935 Sir Victor Goddard who at the time was a Wing Commander in the British Air Force was flying back to Andover, England from Edinburgh, Scotland, he decided to fly over an abandoned airfield at Drem which is not to far from Edinburgh.  The old disused airfield looked battered, its runways were overgrown with foliage, the hangers were all falling down and once where planes stood ready for action was now a grazing area for cows.

Having flown over the old airbase Goddard continued on his way back to Andover, however not long into the continued flight he encountered a strange storm, he reported later that there were high winds and that the storm had strange brown-yellow clouds, the storm took him by surprise and he was unable avoid flying into the storm, he lost control of his plane which started to spiral towards the ground.

Goddard managed to get the plane under control narrowly avoiding a crash, Once he got his bearings again he realised that they were heading back the way they had come and towards the Drem airfield again, as he approached the old airfield the storm suddenly vanished and Goddard's plane emerged into brilliant sunshine.  

This time as they flew over the airfield, he noticed how different it looked, the hangers that moments before had been falling down now looked brand new, there were four planes parked on the ground, three of which he recognised as biplanes but the fourth was a monoplane, in 1935 the RAF had not yet acquired a monoplane, the planes were all painted in an unfamiliar yellow, the runways were clear of foliage and he noticed mechanics dressed in blue overalls walking around, He thought it strange that none of the people on the ground appeared to notice him flying over.

Conscious of his fuel level he set course back to Andover, but once again encountered the strange storm this time though he was aware he was approaching it and was ready for it, he made it through the storm

without losing control of the aircraft and made his way safely back to Andover.

The intriguing epilogue to this tale is that it wasn’t until 1939, some 4 yrs after the incident, that the RAF painted their planes yellow, started using the monoplane of the type that Goddard had seen, and the mechanics had their uniforms switched to blue.

The cafe that wasn’t there

Blogger Naomi at the Time Slips Account blog recounts another interesting, almost classic, time slip tale of a woman who visited an antique looking coffee shop. Wishing to bring her husband to this coffee shop on their next trip into town, she discovered it had been closed for years. From the blog:

On the morning of 18th June 1968, and elderly lady, Mrs Charlotte Warburton, went shopping with her husband in the town. They decided to go their separate ways for a while and to meet up later. That morning, unable for find a particular brand of coffee from her usual grocer she went into a supermarket in Calverley Road. As she entered the shop she saw a small café through an entrance in the left-hand wall. She had never before realised that there was a café there. It was rather old-fashioned with wood panelled walls. There were no windows and the room was lit by a number of electric bulbs with frosted shades

There was at the time, she thought, nothing especially odd about the scene. 'Two woman in rather long dresses were sitting at one table and about half a dozen men, all in dark lounge suits, were sitting at the other tables further back in the room,' she said. 'All the people seemed to be drinking coffee and chatting ... a normal sight for a country town at eleven o'clock in the morning.'

When they came to Tunbridge Wells on their next shopping expedition Mrs Warburton decided to take her husband to the café. Or rather, she hoped to take his [sic] there. But, of course, they never did find the place though they searched the street up and down. No, they were told in the supermarket, there was no café there. She must be in the wrong building. It was then that they learned about the Kosmos Kinema which had stood on the site of the supermarket.

They were directed to the Tunbridge Wells Constitutional Club, where the steward told them that at one time the Constitutional Club had owned the premises adjoining the Kosmos, which was now incorporated into the supermarket.

The club had had an assembly room in those days and to the rear a small bar with tables for refreshments. Mrs Warburton's description tallied exactly with the club's old refreshment room.

The bar, the cinema and the assembly room had all vanished years ago, Mrs Warburton was told.

This kind of scenario is a classic example of a time slip. It even has the return visit to the location which is no longer there. It’s possible that the woman had simply gone back to the wrong cafe, that perhaps the one she visited still existed on another street. Still, her description did seem to match exactly with the refreshment room which had not existed for years.

Highway to the Past

The following story comes by way of Stephen Wagner at paranormal.about.com. He relates an account of two gentlemen who were making their way on Highway 167. Here is their story:

In October, 1969, a man identified only as L.C. and his business associate, Charlie, were driving north from Abbeville, Louisiana toward Lafayette on Highway 167. As they were driving along the nearly empty road, they began to overtake what appeared to be an antique car traveling very slowly. The two men were impressed by the mint condition of the nearly 30-year-old car - it looked virtually new - and puzzled by its bright orange license plate on which was stamped only "1940."

They figured, however, that the car had been part of some antique auto show. As they passed the slow-moving vehicle, they slowed their car to get a good look at the old model. The driver of the old car was a young woman dressed in vintage 1940s clothing, and her passenger was a small child likewise dressed. The woman seemed panicked and confused. L.C. asked if she needed help and, through her rolled up window, indicated "yes."

L.C. motioned for her to pull off to the side of the road. The businessmen pulled ahead of the old car and turned onto the shoulder of the road. When they got out... the old car had vanished without a trace. There were no turnoffs or anywhere else the vehicle could have gone. Moments later, another car pulled up to the businessmen and, quite puzzled, said he had seen their car pull off to the side... and the old car simply vanish into thin air.

In this case it sounds more like the driver from the 1940’s had the time slip and had found herself temporarily in the future.

Conclusions

Time slips are fascinating pieces of paranormal literature. They seem to suggest that time may not exist in quite the way we perceive it.  By what mechanism are these people slipping through time? In Goddard’s case, there is mention of a “strange storm”, but the others make no mention of anything out of the ordinary. Except for the experience itself. I’m left with so many questions after reading accounts like those listed above.

But there’s one which sticks out in my mind the most. Are their reciprocal time slip accounts? For instance in the case of the woman driving with the young child on Highway 167, did she later go home and tell her husband about the two men in a strange looking vehicle she saw? Or with the Englishwomen at Versailles. Are there reports from the time they were supposed to have visited of people seeing strange-garbed women speaking english?

I’m interested to hear what you readers have to say. Be sure to comment below and tell me your thoughts!

Sources and additional readings:

If you wish to read more accounts of time slips, I recommend you check out the following sites.

Inadvertent Time Travelers

Time Travelers

Bizarre Time Slip Cases

Time Slip Accounts Blog

Living Dinosaurs!

As a kid I was extremely fascinated by Dinosaurs and read voraciously on the topic. Every book on the topic I could find I would read. At one point I even thought I would grow up to be a Paleontologist when I was older so that I could spend everyday with these wonderfully fascinating beasts. As with many of my childhood ambitions, my dream of being a paleontologist was abandoned when I found out how terribly boring their day-to-day lives were, and as I discovered the wild and crazy world of Fortean phenomena.

Imagine my surprise when I found that these two seemingly disparate passions found an interesting intersection in the form of modern sightings of living dinosaurs! The current scientific theories suggest that the demise of the dinosaurs began some 65 million years ago, give a take a few years for stragglers to completely die out. This allowed our ancestors, the mammals, to gain a foothold on the planet and for humans to eventually arrive on the scene (thanks to the intervention of the Annunaki of course wink, wink).  

Since when has science ever had the final answer on anything? After all, prior to 1938 it was generally believed that the Coelacanth, a close relative to the lungfish, had been extent since the Cretaceous period. This turned out to not quite be the case as fisherman began collecting very-much alive specimens of the species. Who’s to say that some other dinosaurs also didn’t survive the decimation of their fellows and continued flourishing to this very day (aside from conventional wisdom, but who needs that?)

With this in mind I offer to you dear reader the following tales and accounts of interactions with giant terrible lizards who certainly should not be roaming around any longer. As always draw your own conclusions as to the validity of the reports. For myself, I will take these people by their word until sufficient evidence comes in to the contrary. 

Mokele-mbembe

Perhaps the most (in)famous of all living dinosaurs is Mokele-Mbembe which translates as "one who stops the flow of rivers" in the language of the people of the Congo river basin. Mokele is a favorite dinosaur of my wife and many others for that matter. Sightings of the creature have been reported in Western sources for a few hundred years. Mokele makes his home in the Congo River basin of Africa traditionally in Lake Tele. Local tradition holds that Mokele is an herbivore which seems to prefer shallow waters. The creature most clearly resembles a Sauropod.  

Some sightings:

One of the earlier “modern” accounts comes from just over 100 years ago. Commissioned by the German government, which had a colony in the area of the Congo, Capt. Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz came in the area to do a survey of the land. His writings report the following.

The animal is said to be of a brownish-gray color with a smooth skin, its size is approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus. It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn. A few spoke about a long, muscular tail like that of an alligator. Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed; the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies. The creature is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends. It is said to climb the shores even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable. This feature disagrees with a possible explanation as a myth. The preferred plant was shown to me, it is a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and applelike fruits. At the Ssombo River I was shown a path said to have been made by this animal in order to get at its food. The path was fresh and there were plants of the described type nearby. But since there were too many tracks of elephants, hippos, and other large mammals it was impossible to make out a particular spoor with any amount of certainty

The above was reported by Jerome Clark in his Unexplained! 2nd edition, which as I’ve pointed out previously on this blog has a newly printed 3rd edition.

Expedition after expedition has been mounted to find this creature over time, all clearly unsuccessful. The thing that allows this creature to remain a possibility is the fact that this area is home to the second largest rainforest in the world. This is all to say that it’s not terribly unlikely that a small population of sauropods could have survived to this day. 

Pterosaurs

Relatively large-winged reptiles which took the skies some time in the late Jurassic Period. Some of them had wingspans upwards of 16 ft or more, with one of the largest being Hatzegopteryx thambema(having 33-36 ft). Like other dinosaurs, the Pterosaurs died out near the end of the Cretaceous period, or did they?

Writing for paranormal.about.com, Stephen Wagner relates the following accounts of people that claimed to have seen the Pterosaur very much alive.

January, 1976, Harlingen, Texas - Jackie Davis (14) and Tracey Lawson (11) reported seeing a "bird" on the ground that stood five feet tall, was dark in color with a bald head and a face like a gorilla's with a sharp, six-inch-long beak. A subsequent investigation by their parents uncovered tracks that had three toes and were eight inches across.

February, 1976, San Antonio, Texas - Three elementary school teachers saw what they described as a pterodactyl swooping low over their cars as they drove. They said its wingspan was between 15 and 20 feet. One of the teachers commented that it glided through the air on huge, bony wings - like a bat's.

September, 1982, Los Fresnos, Texas - An ambulance driver named James Thompson was stopped while driving on Highway 100 by his sighting of a "large birdlike object" flying low over the area. He described it as black or grayish with a rough texture, but no feathers. It had a five- to six-foot wingspan, a hump on the back of its head, and almost no neck at all. After consulting some books to identify the creature, he decided it most looked like a pterosaur.

These stories are anecdotal to the extreme of course, but as always I’m not sure what more we have to go on besides the stories. The accounts are interesting to say the least, but who knows how much validity there is to them.

Loch Ness ‘Monster’

Plesiosaurs first arrived on the scene, the scene being Earth’s oceans of course, some 205 million years ago during the the Triassic period. They officially lived until about 66 million years ago going extinct about the same time as all of their reptile brethren did. Except that one of them didn’t get the extinction memo and has shown up a number of times over the years in a lake in Scotland. The earliest “sighting” allegedly happened to a Saint Columba in the 6th century, who used his god powers to keep the beast at bay. The modern version of Nessie begins in 1933 with the following account by a George Spicer and his wife who claim to have seen  a creature which they described as “having a large body (about 1.2 metres (3 ft 11 in) high and 7.6 metres (25 ft) long), and long, narrow neck, slightly thicker than an elephant's trunk and as long as the 10–12-foot (3–4 m) width of the road; the neck had undulations in it. They saw no limbs, possibly because of a dip in the road obscuring the animal's lower portion” (Wikipedia).

1934 brought us the so called “Surgeon’s Photograph” (shown above) which was purportedly captured by Robert Kenneth Wilson and was later to be published in the Daily Mail on April 21, 1934. The good doctor claimed to have taken the picture after sighting the creature in the Loch, although the photo is generally believed to be a hoax.

As with Mokele, many expeditions have been mounted to capture on film Nessie and all have proven fruitless. The reason for this may be that Nessie isn’t as corporeal as one may assume. A blogger over at the aptly named LOCH NESS MONSTER blogspot page discusses the author, Ted Holiday’s more interesting explanation for the Loch Ness Monster posited in his 1979 work The Goblin Universe.

The blogger writes:

This theory essentially borrowed from the obscure work of a Professor Harold Burr in positing that Nessie was a three dimensional form which could be formed and held by something Burr called Life Fields which were electrical in nature and had some organic organising properties.

Burr proposed this as a biological principle but Holiday took it further in suggesting that a mind could control the process and cause unexpected forms to materialise. Indeed, he proposed a universal mind akin to God as the controller of these phenomemon though the discussion also included the human mind and the collective subconciousness of the entire human race.

I don’t have much more to say on the topic of Nessie, the creature is so iconic at this point I’m not too sure what I could add that hasn’t already been said. Although I do wish to point the reader towards something Greg Taylor wrote up about a Nick Redfern article for the Dark Lore Vol 2 anthology entitled “"What Lies Beneath"

Burrunjor

We come now to our final stop on today’s tour of “living dinosaurs” and what better place to wrap it up than with the ‘king’ himself? At some point during the Cretaceous period our friend the Tyrannosaurus Rex arrived on the scene instilling in all creatures living at the time mixed feelings. On the one hand, T. Rex was one of the largest land carnivores ever known to have lived. On the other, their arms were almost comically tiny. I digress. T. Rex were known to have roamed of much of what is now North America and, as with most of our other friends we’ve spoken about today,  to have gone extinct around 65 million years ago. Or perhaps not? Blogger Peter James Theiss, relates the following accounts on his Dinoplaza blog about sightings of a creature in Australia called the Burrunjor. This creature, by all accounts, sounds strikingly like our friend the T. Rex. Here are some of the accounts Theiss shares:

In 1922, north of Cloncurry, stock men saw a "big lizard monster" that was bipedal and moved its tail from side to side when walking.

In 1950, in the Burketown region, two reptile tracks were sighted by ranchers.

Back in 1950, cattlemen lost stock to some mysterious beast that left the mutilated, half-eaten remains of cows and bulls in its wake over a wide area, stretching between the border country and Burketown.  At first the cattlemen suspected crocodiles, but, Charles Waterman, a cattleman, described a "fearsome", mottled 20 foot tall beast carrying a cow in its jaws that bounded out of sight as he hid behind a bush.

Searchers on horseback found huge reptilian tracks of some bipedal-walking beast.  They followed these three-toed tracks with their cattle dogs through some rough jungle terrain until they entered swampland beyond which was more dense scrub.

However, it was at this point that the cattle dogs became uneasy and ran off.  The horses were also uneasy and obviously did not want to cross the swamp.  While most of the cattlemen decided their animals knew best, two men set off on foot with their carbines.

The story goes that they soon came across further tracks in an open area beyond the swamp.  While his mate searched about, the other man briefly spotted the dark form of an enormous creature, perhaps 30 ft. in height, further off in dense timber.  The men left the scene in haste.

Be sure to head over to Theiss’ blog in order to read more of the accounts that he shares. What is going on here? Is there some kind of Dinosaur living in Australia? We all know that the country has all sorts of bizarre and kooky animals, maybe living dinosaurs are just another part of the fauna of the land?

Conclusions?

One of the biggest criticisms of the continued existence of our friends the Pterosaurs, Mokele-Mbembe, T-Rex or Burrunjor, and the Loch Ness Monster are the locations where they are sighted don’t necessarily have a lot of good hiding places for them. Mokele could, at least in theory, hide in the rain forest, Pterosaurs? Not so much. After all, most of them are sighted in the Midwest of the United States. There aren't too many places for a giant flying creature to hide. Honestly the same can be said of the Loch Ness Monster. Yes, Loch Ness is actually quite large and deep. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a big enough population of creatures living in the Loch to sustain a Plesiosaur or family of them. Of course this is working under the assumption that these are actual physical creatures and not phantoms from another time. Which, seeing as this is the world of the Fortean, who can say they aren't?

For all we know these creatures could be slipping temporarily from their own time and invading ours. And really, is this any crazier than their existing currently living dinosaurs? That’s all for now dear readers, be sure to check back in on Monday for more from the strange world of the Fortean!

Great Scott!! Family Guy does Time Travel....again!

As I am typing this I am watching the latest episode of Family Guy. Once again they are delving into the murky world of time travel. This time however it appears that Stewie may be the cause of the Big Bang because of a Temporal Causality Loop. I bring this up only because I have been fascinated with time travel for years.

Movies such as Terminator and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures were among some of my favorites as a kid. The concept of Time Travel isn't nearly as foreign or esoteric as it used to be. Because of advances in Quantum Physics, physicists are coming to accept that Time Travel (at least in theory) is entirely within the realm of possibility.

Authors have also long used Time Travel as a means of telling stories, one of the better known examples is of H.G. Wells The Time Machine. In the story an the protagonist events a device that allows him to travel outside of the 'normal' flow of time and to travel forwards and past as he sees fit.

Of course Time Travel also rears it's head in the UFO enigma as well. Although less popular than the oft lauded Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, Visitors from the future or Time Traveler's have been fingered as the culprits behind the flying saucers and cigars that have plagued man kind since time immemorial. The reasoning being that they are here to in some way investigate the past. For the people that are proponents of the Visitors from the future theory, this can also explain the very enigmatic Alien Abduction Phenomena.

Since the UFOnauts are so fascinated by collecting sperm and ovum samples the reasoning goes that Future Man has somehow lost some vital piece of genetic information and so they are coming back to us their ancestors in order to reclaim what they need in order to survive. And to get around the problems of Paradoxes, such as the Grandfather Paradox, the Future Humans have devised the clever ruse that they are in fact aliens from Zeti Reticuli.

Either way you look at it its unlikely that the Time Travel Meme will ever leave our subconscious. And as long as good movies are still put out, and not crappy remakes (New Bill and Ted), I for one couldn't be happier.

 

Michio Kaku speaking on Time Travel

News Articles about time travel:

The Physics of Time Travel, by Michio Kaku

Science Embraces Time Travel by Lee Spiegel