Multiple accounts of people who allegedly travelled through time have been reported by the press or circulated online. These reports have turned out to be either hoaxes or else based on incorrect assumptions, incomplete information, or interpretation of fiction as fact. Many are now recognized as urban legends.
Alleged time travelers
Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain
In 1911, Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924) published a book entitled An Adventure, under the names of "Elizabeth Morison" and "Frances Lamont". They described a visit to the Petit Trianon, a small château in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where they claimed they saw ghosts, including that of Marie Antoinette and others. Their story caused a sensation but was not taken seriously.
"Chaplin's Time Traveller" In October 2010, Northern Irish filmmaker George Clarke uploaded a video clip entitled "Chaplin's Time Traveller" to YouTube. The clip analyzes bonus material in a DVD of the Charlie Chaplin film The Circus. Included in the DVD is footage from the film's Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in 1928. At one point, a woman is seen walking by, holding up an object to her ear. Clarke said that, on closer examination, she was talking into a thin, black device that appeared to be a cellphone. Clarke concluded that the woman was possibly a time traveller. The clip received millions of hits and was the subject of televised news stories. Nicholas Jackson, associate editor for The Atlantic, says the most likely answer is that she was using a portable hearing aid, a technology that was just being developed at the time. Philip Skroska, an archivist at the Bernard Becker Medical Library of Washington University School of Medicine, thought that the woman might have been holding a rectangular ear trumpet. New York Daily News writer Michael Sheridan said the device was probably an early hearing aid, perhaps an Acousticon manufactured by Miller Reese Hutchison.
Present-day hipster at 1941 bridge opening
A photograph from 1941 of genuine authenticity of the re-opening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia, is sometimes alleged on the internet to show a time traveler. It was claimed that his clothing and sunglasses were of the present day and not of the styles worn in the 1940s, while his camera was anachronistically small. Further research suggested that the man's present-day appearance would not necessarily have been out of place in 1941. The style of sunglasses he is wearing first appeared in the 1920s. On first glance, the man is taken by many to be wearing a printed T-shirt, but on closer inspection, it seems to be a sweater with a sewn-on emblem, the kind of clothing often worn by sports teams of the period. The shirt resembles one worn by the Montreal Maroons, an ice hockey team from that era. The remainder of his clothing would appear to have been available at the time, though his clothes are far more casual than those worn by the other individuals in the photograph. His camera is smaller than most of that era, but cameras of that size did exist; while it is unclear what make his camera was, Kodak had manufactured portable cameras of equivalent size since 1938. The "Time Traveling Hipster" became a case study in viral Internet phenomena which was presented at the Museums and the Web 2011 conference in Philadelphia.
Mobile device in 1943 A photograph from 1943 of genuine authenticity, showing a scene of holidaymakers on Towan Beach in Newquay, Cornwall, was uploaded to Twitter in November 2018 by multimedia artist Stuart Humphryes, which was alleged by some viewers to show a time traveller operating an anachronistic mobile device, such as a phone. This tweet was picked up by news outlets including Fox News in the US, and various tabloid newspapers in the UK, such as The Daily Mirror. Fuelled by media websites such as LADbible it gained global coverage via news outlets in Russia, Iran, Taiwan, Hungary, China and Vietnam, amongst others. Humphryes, the original uploader, was quoted in these stories as dismissing the time travel theories, stating that the man in question was probably just rolling a cigarette.
Rudolph Fentz The story of Rudolph Fentz is an urban legend from the early 1950s and has been repeated since as a reproduction of facts and presented as evidence for the existence of time travel. The essence of the legend is that in New York City in 1951 a man wearing 19th-century clothes was hit by a car. The subsequent investigation revealed that the man had disappeared without a trace in 1876. The items in his possession suggested that the man had traveled through time from 1876 to 1951 directly. The folklorist Chris Aubeck investigated the story and found it originated in a science fiction book, A Voice from the Gallery (1953) by Ralph M. Holland, which had copied the tale from "I'm Scared" (1951), a short story by Jack Finney (1911–1995).
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