Come on guys… If you think such stories are BS, give me a cite or two and prove it. To make sarcastic responses because “of course it can’t be true” isn’t very productive. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read about all these incidents and don’t necessarily believe them. But I think it’s a little much to assume that we, as a species, are to the point where we understand completely what may or may not be possible.
I do think such stories are BS, but I would be absolutely willing to believe them if JUST ONCE one of the people who have seen some of these figures from the past would get one of them to come out of the forest and talk to a number of disinterested third parties. When someone can get Marie Antoinette to go on CNN, I will be a 100% convert.
Hey I was on CNN-VH1 last night, well at least in 2280! It seems an asteroid hits the Earth in 2004, Dec 12th I think. They wanted to interview on the new “Before they were stars”. They wouldn’t tell me what I did, the jerks!
Polycarp:
There’s one minor problem. The Petit Trianon is ALWAYS busy when the public parks of Versailles are open. More people must have seen it. Either that, or it was just these two ladies that got beamed back in time. In which case, there is no evidence other than their (shaky) claim.
Look, brainbox; the basic rule of thumb is: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The burden of proof is firmly on the person making the extraordinary claim. We don’t have to prove anything; you do.
No need to get insulting. Did I make any claims? Did I insist that these stories were true until proven false? No. All I’m saying is that dismissive and sarcastic remarks because a claim “can’t be true” don’t go very far, especially in cases where there IS in fact a large body of evidence. Neither of the cases mentioned in this thread really qualify, but many people people have similar reactions to things like UFO sightings in which there is a considerable amount of documentation. I just don’t think it’s wise to be completely dismissive just because a claim doesn’t jibe with what you know or assume you know to be true.
There is a non-zero chance that time travel is possible. I would not say that any of the claims are impossible, I just wouldnt bet more then a penny on any of the claims. I myself recently defined time independently, so if someone else came up with this, then I am sorry.
(my theory of time)
Time may either move forward, stop, or collapse upon itself. The present is not only a barrier between the past and the future, but it is a fixed position. It infers that there is either a past, a future, or both. However, as time is, to all apperences, expanding, something must be happening to the past and future. Thus, the past and future are becoming longer and longer at the same rate. I hope I explained it well enough, I have a tought time explaining concepts.
Yes, very impressive. But unfortunately they only got a B+, as the kid with the diagram of how bees dance (done with three different colored crayons!) pulled the best grade.
Let’s see…does this mean that there is no arrow in your time zone? Events may simply flow and swirl around the ‘present’ willy-nilly?
YOu brought up an interesting point, how does time move forward, does it do so in a line, or is it more like the never ending VHS tape. To me how it moves is irrelivent, the relivent thing is that time moves forward, that the present is a fixed spot, that time may grow, shrink, or stand still, and that while one cannot move where the present is, its possible to move the past forwards and the future backwards.
The story about David Lang who disappeared while walking across his field in Tennessee always weirded me out greatly. Especially the part about his faint voice calling out near the site of his disappearance and slowly fading away. Gave me the creeps, it did.
Thanks to the Internet I was able to investigate. Turns out that the newspaper cited as a source for the story never published it, and that no “David Lang” was ever on the tax rolls in that county. Some lady author embellished the story in the 1940s; the idea was stolen from a couple short stories by Ambrose Bierce. One of them titled “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.” Pure fiction.
Here’s the link:
http://www.sonic.net/~anomaly/articles/sa00010.shtml
Anomalies is a great investigative site if you have a taste for The Weird.
Thanks for the link, Ishmintingas. Not only do I have a taste for the weird, but I also have an entire folder in my Favorites list devoted to it, to which the Anomalies site has now been added.
EG, I’ve been doing some reading on the story of the two old ladies, and IMHO there’s no doubt that they saw SOMETHING, but my WAG would be that it was real people in real costumes, for whatever reason, having a tea party. I’m sure that the current trend towards costumed interpreters speaking archaic slang at places like Old Sturbridge Village is nothing new. Maybe the ladies stumbled on a 1910 version of this, or maybe it was just a private party.
And saying breathlessly, “Nobody else at the Petit Trianon that day even noticed ANYTHING at ALL like this!!” doesn’t really signify, because maybe it’s just that nobody happened to notice. If I were having my own picnic in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, I might not have noticed somebody else’s party, especially if they were all acting weird by wearing costumes and saying things like the French equivalent of “wherefore art thou, Romeo?”
“Theater people,” I would have said dismissively, and made sure to keep my kids away, and then have gone home and forgotten all about it. Your brain is awfully good at filtering out things like that, after the fact.
And you’d have to have had it all over the newspapers the very next day, to have a hope of spotting any other witnesses. “Please come forward…” etc. And even then, someone who DID see the tea party might have his own reasons for not wanting it known that he’d been there that day. The people who were holding it, might have had good reasons for not coming forward.
Thanks for the replies. I have always wondered about this story…unfortunately, I’ve never been able to read any more about this. For examples, did these two ladies ever give any interviews? And, were any french sources consulted? I don’t know why anybody would expose themslves to ridicule by coming up with such a story…but who knows the mind of someone else?
Travel is usually motion through space as a function of time. The Statue of Liberty of August 3, 2000 occupies a certain specifiable chunk of 3-dimensional space. It does not also exist somewhere else; it is where it is. But at a different time, it occupied a different space (France, before being shipped across the Atlantic).
Time travel would imply motion through time as a function of some other dimension, a dimension in which reality as we know it occupies (or seems to us to occupy) a single point at all times. If you wish to describe the Statue of Liberty’s existence in NY Harbor in 1776, reality as we know it does not support that description; it wasn’t there then.
Possibly there is a dimension such that, if you could traverse it, you would find the Statue of Liberty to exist in places at times when and where, in the reality that we know, it isn’t (or wasn’t or won’t be). But would the statue retain about itself its fundamental identity as a copper statue created in France in the 1800s and serving as an icon of political freedom and rights in NY harbor if it exists/existed in Rome in 216 B.C.? What would it mean?
Or, suppose it were possible to move YOU across this dimension until we reach a coordinate in that dimension where YOU exist in Rome in 216 B.C. – who the heck ARE you? The you that is “self” to you, the one of this reality, sure as heck wasn’t there then, and for you to be there at this coordinate implies WHAT about the contents of your memory as you stand (stood?) there?
We don’t know because we experience our own mental thinking processes as a function of time; in science-fiction mode, we imagine time travel as “I get to go to a ‘different time’ while the process of travelling and the experience of the passage of time once I arrive ‘then’ will continue to unfold as a linear sequence of events”.
Or, to play paradox with it, let’s suppose you can go back in time to yesterday. In this reality, you DID exist yesterday, at a specific spatial location; if “you” could “travel” backwards in this reality, the thoughts in your head would be the thoughts that were in your head yesterday, and you’d rethink them in the same consecutive order, therefore not being at all aware that you’d been here today already as of yesterday…and in fact, the concept of “travel” versus “not traveling” is meaningless in that sense. (You “are” always at that location in xyz space at time coordinate t with those thoughts in your head). If on the other hand you travel through time and space as a function of that hypothetical other dimension, thereby occupying some other place yesterday, what can we can say of the contents of your head (and your ability to know that you are somewhere at a ‘when’ that you weren’t the ‘last time’ you were at that ‘when’)?
I’d assume that, at this other-dimensional coordinate we had to reach to put you in Rome circa 215 BC or yesterday 40 feet away from where you were in this reality, the “you” at that position had a history, too – a history specific to and coherent in that other-dimensional coordinate – and that history, not the one of this reality, would be responsible for the contents of your head “there” and that therefore you would not be aware of having traveled.
Uh, how’s your head?
I always look forward to being able to tell the story of my time travelling raisin. Most people scoff at this heartwarming story, but I assure you all that it is true.
One day several years ago I was watching TV and eating a box of raisin. I dropped one on the floor and I, not being raised by animals, went to pick it up. As I was bending down I heard a strange whooshing noise that I had never heard before. The raisin had vanished. It was nowhere to be seen. One long gone raisin. I moved the couch, I moved the coffee table but that raisin was not to be found.
Now flash forward to about 3 years later. I was sitting on the couch and watching TV, again. (Don’t get me wrong, I do other things than just watch TV) Out of the blue I heard that same whooshing noise (for only the second time in my life) that marked the disappearance of my raisin years earlier. On a lark I figured that I would take a look and see if my deeply missed raisin had returned to me. After moving the couch, imagine my surprise when I found my raisin. I squeezed it and it still felt fresh (I didn’t eat it though-I wasn’t raised by animals you know).
I am usually skeptical of * In Search Of * type of crap, but since this happened to me and not AFOAF or anything I am unsure what to think. The only thing that I know is that my raisin traveled about 3 years into the future.
Interesting theory, AHunter3, but you don’t actually need any further dimensions to be able to support SF-style time travel; all you need is to bend the ones that you’ve already got in different ways. Unfortunately, in order to bend them in such a way as to permit SF-style time travel, you’d need to use something with a negative mass, and not only do we not have any such stuff, we’re not even sure if it’s possible.
By the way, Space Vampire, two eyewitness reports does not constitute a “large body of evidence”. If you’re referring to UFOs, then I can say confidently that of course unidentified flying objects exist. The question is just whether there’s anyone else on the planet who can identify them. If I see an experimental (or even not-so-experimental) aircraft, or a weather baloon, or a Frisbee, and I don’t know what it is, then so far as I’m concerned, it’s a UFO. Big deal.