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Am I supposed to believe that evidence of time travel is hiding in plain sight? You don’t have to dig too deep to find artifacts that don’t belong, photos of people dressed for the wrong century, or those claiming to have blinked from one time to another. Was Doc Brown on to something? Is the space-time continuum breaking apart? Time travel is a liminal thing. That idea of being caught between eras, temporarily visiting a time you were never meant to be in. Could it happen? Maybe some time travelers left footprints, maybe some were mistakenly caught on camera. Most of these are just urban legends, but a few make me think. So let’s dive in, but remember: If you ever do time travel, leave your smartphone behind! A time traveler in a photograph from 1917? It’s an odd thing when something doesn’t quite fit in with its time. At first, you may not even notice. So is the case with this seemingly ordinary photograph taken in 1917 Canada, found in a 1974 book titled The Great History of Cape Scott. It shows a group of people sitting upon the rocks of a beach, but among the crowd is a man who appears suspiciously out of place. His clothes don’t seem to match those of the other beach-goers. He’s wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and sporting a hair style that seems pretty modern in comparison. In the photo, one man appears to look at him, maybe in confusion. He’s just sitting there, an accidental visitor in someone else’s era, the photo itself a frozen liminal moment where past and future collide. Maybe. He’s known as the “surfer dude.” But was he surfing fashion…or time itself? Did a time traveler visit a bridge? The Virtual Museum of Canada has closed, but at one time it held in its collection a peculiar photo of the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in 1941. The bridge was located in British Columbia, Canada, and quite a few people showed up for it. But like the 1917 Canadian surfer dude, someone in this photo seemingly didn’t belong. Who was this oddly out-of-place man in the hip glasses and strangely modern clothing? The photo went absolutely viral sometime around 2010, and the fellow in question became dubbed the “Time Traveling Hipster.” What’s fun here is that, time traveler or not, this is a real photo. The man certainly stands out from his cohorts – he’s wearing sunglasses, possibly a hoodie or light jacket, and what appears to be a branded t-shirt. He’s also holding a relatively small camera. Was he simply ahead of his time? Or out of it? We can’t be sure, but the story of his photograph is one to remember. Smartphones in the past? Modern fashion might make you suspicious, but smartphones are the bane of any would-be time traveling tourist. They seem like the most obvious thing to be spotted in photos, videos, and even paintings. This video shows a clip from a special feature found on the DVD edition of the Charlie Chaplin film The Circus. It’s from the movie’s premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in 1928. A woman in a dark coat walks behind a zebra, and some think she might be talking on a smartphone. Meanwhile, over in 1938 Massachusetts, this video shows off another woman who people think looks suspiciously like she’s using a smartphone. She’s leaving a DuPont factory along with a group of others. Smartphones, brushes, other handheld rectangular objects of a dubious nature. Could be anything, I guess. Is this a compact disc case in the 1800s? Image: 1800s Painting/Public Domain Some would say this painting from the 1800s shows off a man holding a fancy CD box. I really don’t know what it is, but another man is shown lifting up what looks like a square plastic sleeve or something similar. The earliest form of plastic didn’t exist until the mid-1800s, and Compact Discs wouldn’t arrive on the scene until the 1980s. What was this box for? Safety Not Guaranteed A classified ad in a 1997 issue of Backwood Home Magazine made a strange request. “WANTED,” it read, “Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview, CA 93022. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.” That was a bit odd. In 2012, they made a film based on this called, well, Safety Not Guaranteed. If you’d like to take a break from time travel proof and check out some other time travel movies instead, head over to my movie list. Nikola Tesla’s jump room For years, Andrew Basiago has told the story of Project Pegasus, an alleged covert time travel initiative that was funded and maintained by the United States government throughout the 1960s and 70s. But perhaps the most interesting detail of his peculiar story is the existence of the so-called Jump Room. It was in this room that Basiago claimed participants such as himself performed their secretive time travel experiments. Allegedly built using designs by the late Nikola Tesla, recovered from his New York apartment shortly after his death, the room housed what some would call a teleportation machi...

Time Travel Proof: Classic Anomalies & Urban Legends (Updated 2026)