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Speaker 1: Okay, so let's just dive right in. We're talking about

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what is I think the ultimate human fantasy, knowing the future,

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like having absolute certainty.

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Speaker 2: It really is. It's the ultimate cheat code.

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Speaker 1: For life exactly. Yeah, if you could know exactly how

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everything was going to play out, not just you know

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vay trends, but the specific actionable details. What would you

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even do with that power?

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Speaker 2: Well, that's the central question, isn't it. It's the highest

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form of power because it basically grants you total control.

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We're not talking about like good financial modeling. We mean

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knowing the exact final score of a game, or when

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a stock is going to crash to the penny.

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Speaker 1: Its knowledge as a weapon, and that brings up the

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big temptation. Do you use it to prevent some huge disaster?

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Do you try to fix a historical wrong, or and

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let's be honest about people, do you just go for immediate, uncraceable,

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insane financial wealth.

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Speaker 2: I think if you look at the stories we're about

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to unpack, the lure of profit seems to win out

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pretty consistently over altruism. It's an immediate, verifiable reward for

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doing something completely unbelievable, and the.

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Speaker 1: Sources we have for this deep dive are just a

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wild collection of accounts. We are exploring these incredible stories

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from individuals who claim to be, for lack of a

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better term, temporal tourists.

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Speaker 2: People who say they've come from the future, and their

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stories cover everything financial schemes, secret military ops, and some

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just astonishing physical disappearances that are really hard to explain.

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Speaker 1: Right, So our mission today isn't to prove or disprove

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these We're not a court, we're not.

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Speaker 2: A physics lab, no, not at all. Our goal is

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to really analyze the stories themselves, the narrative structure, what

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specific details do they use, what anxieties are they tapping into,

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and maybe most importantly, what are the psychological hooks that

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make some of these stories, even the totally unverified ones,

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stick around and become modern myths.

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Speaker 1: So for you listening, we're trying to find those little

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nuggets of insight hidden these really compelling but fundamentally unproven stories.

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What does the whole idea do you have a time

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traveler tell? Look about right now? About our own anxieties

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and our desire to control our own destiny.

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Speaker 2: It's a fascinating lens to look through it really is.

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Speaker 1: So let's start with the most obvious temptation money. The

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moment you bring up time travel, everyone's mind immediately goes

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to the stock market.

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Speaker 2: Of course, you wouldn't even need to travel that far.

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Just knowing yesterday's closing prices would make you a fortune.

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Speaker 1: But our first case, this one involves a leap of

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two hundred years for what sounds like absolute financial perfection.

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It really sets the bar high.

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Speaker 2: We're starting with Andrew Carlson. This is a man arrested

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back in two thousand and three. The SEC the Securities

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and Exchange Commission flagged his treading activity as well. Highly suspicious.

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Speaker 1: Highly suspicious doesn't even begin to cover it. The reports

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I read said it was a statistical impossibility.

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Speaker 2: Mathematically impossible. Yeah, the details are staggering. So Carlson, this

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forty four year old guy, starts with an initial investment

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of just eight hundred dollars.

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Speaker 1: Eight hundred dollars. I just want to repeat that, in

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two weeks he turned that eight hundred bucks into a

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portfolio worth over three hundred and fifty million dollars.

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Speaker 2: I mean, just think about that return rate. To do that,

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you don't just make a few good trades. Every single

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trade has to be flawless. You have to perfectly time

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these high risk leverage trades on market shifts that nobody

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else is coming.

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Speaker 1: The investigator's reports confirmed it. Every single trade he made

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was perfect. He was capitalizing on these completely unexpected business

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developments that you know, weren't public knowledge. Yet they flat

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out said it could not have been pure luck.

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Speaker 2: It was absolute certainty. And in leverage trading, that's the

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tell that kind of trading is so risky because you're

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borrowing money. One bad move, one unexpected event, and your

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entire portfolio just evaporates.

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Speaker 1: But he didn't make a single mistake. He navigated the

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market like he was reading from a history book.

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Speaker 2: Exactly, And when they finally cornered him and demanded to

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know his source, he didn't claim to have some secret

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algorithm or an inside man. His explanation will, uh, well,

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much bolder.

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Speaker 1: He just said he was a time traveler from two

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hundred years in the future. He knew how it was

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all going to play out, because for him it was already.

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Speaker 2: History, which creates this incredible legal paradox. I mean, how

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does the SEC even charge a man whose insider source

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is the twenty third century. They put him in a

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cell on Riker's Island and said he wasn't leaving until

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he gave up his sources.

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Speaker 1: But if your source is the timeline itself, it can't.

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So what happened next is where the story goes from

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weird to truly bizarre. The Vanishing Act.

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Speaker 2: A mysterious unidentified man shows up and posts Carlson's bail,

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No one knows who he was, and then before his

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court hearing, Andrew Carlson just vanishes without.

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Speaker 1: A trace, and the kicker the real twist.

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Speaker 2: Records checks later showed that Andrew Carlson never officially existed,

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the name, the identity. It was all a fabrication, a

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ghost created just to execute the trades, make the money,

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and then disappear.

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Speaker 1: That's the perfect crime. It's not just about the wealth,

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it's about the completer rature of your identity afterward, the

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ability to just hit reset.

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Speaker 2: It's a powerful idea, and if Carlson represents that immediate

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financial temptation, our next character, John Teeter, represents something else,

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the power of a really good technological secret.

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Speaker 1: Ooh, John Teeter an absolute legend. If you were online

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in the late nineties early two thousands, he showed up

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on these old forums claiming to be a US soldier

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from the year twenty thirty.

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Speaker 2: Six, right, and his story wasn't about personal profit, It

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was a mission, and the mission was so incredibly oddly specific.

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Speaker 1: He talked about his time machine, right, the temporal displacement.

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Speaker 2: Unit he did. He said it was in the back

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of an old Chevy truck, powered by dual micro singularities,

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you know, just plausible enough to hook the amateur physics crowd.

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But the reason for his trip was the key. He claimed.

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He traveled back to nineteen seventy five to retrieve a

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very specific computer and IBM fifty one hundred.

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Speaker 1: Which is the question that defines the whole story. Why

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on Earth would a soldier from twenty thirty six need

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a huge, ancient computer from nineteen seventy five.

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Speaker 2: According to that seccific machine was desperately needed in his

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time to fix major programming problems. He said, the IBM

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fifty one hundred had these secret, undocumented hardware features that

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let it emulate and debug code from older IBM mainframes.

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Speaker 1: And here's where it gets really clever.

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Speaker 2: This is the masterstroke that claim that the IBM fifty

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one hundred had this hidden feature was not widely known

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at all back then. It was an obscure bit of

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technical trivia known only to a handful of the original

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IBM engineers who designed it.

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Speaker 1: So when he dropped that detail, it gave his whole

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frankly unbelievable story, this sudden, shocking bit of credibility. People

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started asking, how did this random guy on a message

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board know that?

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Speaker 2: It implied he had access to some deep, hidden knowledge.

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He wasn't just making vague predictions. He was using insider language.

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It's the power of one specific, obscure, verifiable fact.

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Speaker 1: But he also made some much bigger claims, right. He

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said he stopped over in the year two thousand for

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personal reasons, to.

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Speaker 2: Is it family, and to issue warnings. He warned about

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mad cow disease. But the big ones were his predictions

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of a coming US civil war starting around two thousand

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and five, which would then escalate into a global nuclear

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war in twenty fifteen.

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Speaker 1: And this, of course, is where the whole narrative kind

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of falls apart.

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Speaker 2: It completely unravels. The civil war never happened, the nuclear

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exchange never happened. It's the double edged sword of being specific.

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Speaker 1: The IBM detail was brilliant. It hooked everyone, but the

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failed prophecies basically blew up his credibility.

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Speaker 2: Right. It forces you to either decide he was a

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very clever hoaxer, or you have to fall back on

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the idea that he came from a different timeline, a

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parallel universe where those things did happen.

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Speaker 1: But what's so interesting is that even after the big

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predictions failed, people still talk about the IBM fifty to

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one hundred detail. Yeah, that's what's stuck. It suggests we're

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less interested in knowing the future and more invested in

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the idea that someone somewhere has access to this secret truth.

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Speaker 2: It's a powerful hook, and that idea of secret knowledge

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brings us neatly into our next theme, government sponsored time travel.

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Speaker 1: Right. This is where the story shifts from a guy

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in a Chevy to huge, classified military projects.

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Speaker 2: A lot of these claims revolve around the idea that

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time travel isn't some personal garage project, but a state

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sponsored capability. It taps into that deep public skepticism, that

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feeling that if this technology existed, the government would absolutely

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classify it and weaponize it.

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Speaker 1: And the two big ones in this category are the

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Montalk Project and Project Pegasus. These are sprawling conspiracies.

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Speaker 2: Let's start with al Blick and the Montalk Project. His

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story is a lot. He immediately sets himself up as special,

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claiming his first memory was from when he was nine

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months old.

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Speaker 1: So he's establishing himself as someone with extraordinary recall, the

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perfect person to remember classified secrets.

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Speaker 2: Later on exactly, he grows up, gets in some military electronics,

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and eventually claims he was recruited into this secret program

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at Montauk, Long Island in the late fifties and sixties,

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a program dealing with everything from mind control to time travel.

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Speaker 1: The details he gives are so specific. He talks about

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his commute to the secret base.

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Speaker 2: It wasn't the Long Island railroad, that's for sure. First

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he claimed he used hidden underground tunnels to get from

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California to Montalk. Then, once they perfected their time tunnel

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in the seventies, he says he was just teleported directly

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into the base.

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Speaker 1: It paints this picture of a massive, hidden infrastructure operating

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completely outside the known laws of physics.

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Speaker 2: And he didn't just claim to be a technician. He

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said he ran the psychic operations. He talks about using

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the Montalk chair, this device that supposedly amplified psychic powers,

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to conduct mind control experiments.

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Speaker 1: From there, the missions just get more and more extreme.

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Speaker 2: By the eighties, he claimed they were doing deep time travel.

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He said he went on missions to Mars back to

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one hundred thousand BCE and all the way forward to

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the year sixty thirty seven. Just pure unrestrained temporal exploration.

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Speaker 1: Okay, so that's mon talk. How does that compare to

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the other big one, Project Pegasus.

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Speaker 2: Project Pegasus is the story told by Andrew Basiago, a lawyer.

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He claimed that DARPA was secretly working on time travel

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and teleportation back in the sixties and seventies.

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Speaker 1: This one is less about psychic powers and more about

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physics much more.

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Speaker 2: Baciago's story centers on the work of Nikola Tesla. He

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claimed the government built a machine called a Cronaviser based

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on Tesla's research. This thing could not only view passed

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in future events, but actually send.

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Speaker 1: People there, and he claimed he was one of the

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tests subjects.

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Speaker 2: As a child, yes, a child participant. His missions were

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incredibly ambitious. He claims he was sent back to witness

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the Gettysburg address firsthand.

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Speaker 1: Which is just an audacious claim.

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Speaker 2: And he also tried to tie it to the present

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day by claiming that other famous people were involved in

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the project as kids, including a young Barack Obama.

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Speaker 1: So you have these two massive secret government narratives. They

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both rely on classified tech time travel for intelligence gathering.

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It's common trope, it really is.

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Speaker 2: They both feed that deep cultural belief that the real

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scientific breakthroughs are hidden from us, locked away on underground bases.

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It comes from a profound sense of distrust in official institutions.

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Speaker 1: So let's shift from how they supposedly traveled to what

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they saw the future itself, and the accounts are what

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they're wildly different. Let's start with William Taylor.

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Speaker 2: William Taylor claimed he was part of a secret British

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intelligence project and that he traveled to the year eight

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nine hundred and seventy three. His vision of the future

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is frankly utopian.

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Speaker 1: You say, humans as we know them are gone right.

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Speaker 2: Replaced by human robot hybrids. These beings live forever. There's

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no crime, no disease, no death. It's a peaceful, advanced

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transhumanist society.

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Speaker 1: It's the ultimate, happy ending for humanity, I guess, but

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it also sounds a little sterile. The source of the

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technology is interesting too.

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Speaker 2: He claims it wasn't human innovation. The time travel tech

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was reverse engineered from captured alien spacecraft and has been

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in use since nineteen eighty one. So he's weaving together

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the time travel story with the UFO conspiracy.

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Speaker 1: And there's an usual detail here. He reportedly passed a lie.

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Speaker 2: Detector test, which we have to be cleared does not

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prove he's telling the truth, but it does suggest a

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very high level of personal conviction in his story.

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Speaker 1: Okay, so that's the peaceful hybrid utopia. But then you

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have these other accounts from Greece that paint a much

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darker picture, a much darker one.

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Speaker 2: There was a Greek military man in twenty seventeen who

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claimed he traveled to the year three two oh seven.

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But the more detailed story came from a Greek student

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back in two thousand and eight.

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Speaker 1: He said a professor recruited him for an experiment and.

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Speaker 2: Sent him all the way to the year ten thousand,

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his mission to gather data on a future war between

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humans and artificial intelligence.

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Speaker 1: Wow. So, on one hand, a peaceful utopia achieved through technology.

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On the other, a catastrophic, millennia long war against our

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own creations.

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Speaker 2: And it perfectly reflects our current anxieties, doesn't it. Taylor's

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story is the dream of technology solving all our problems.

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The Greek student's story is the nightmare, the fear of AI,

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the Skynet scenario. It shows how these stories always filter

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the future through the fears of the present.

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Speaker 1: That AI war story feels a lot more resonant right

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now than the peaceful robot hybrid one. That's for sure.

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Speaker 2: It taps right into our current headlines.

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Speaker 1: Okay, so moving on from these grand unverifiable government missions,

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let's talk about the claims that actually left behind physical evidence,

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or at least what looks like evidence.

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Speaker 2: This is where things get really interesting, because now we

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have tangible artifacts. And the gold standard for this kind

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of story is the case of Sergei Pontomerino.

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Speaker 1: This was in Kiev back in two thousand and six.

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A man just appears looking confused.

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Speaker 2: Right, He's asking police for directions to streets that don't

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exist anymore. He's wearing old fashioned clothes and he's carrying

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a Soviet era id that says he's twenty five years old,

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born in nineteen thirty two, So.

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Speaker 1: Right away the police are dealing with something deeply strange.

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Speaker 2: And he's got a vintage camera with him. When they

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questioned him, he insists he was transported to the year

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twenty fifty and then somehow sent back here. The authorities

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checked his ID and it was a genuine document from

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the nineteen fifties.

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Speaker 1: But the cameras where the story gets its power. They

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developed the film.

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Speaker 2: Most of the photos were what you'd expect, black and

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white shots from the fifties. There was a picture of

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him with a young woman he said was his fiance.

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But there was one very strange image, the UFO, a

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picture of what looks like a UFO hovering near a building,

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and Ponomerno claimed that the moment he took that picture,

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he felt a weird sensation and was suddenly thrown into

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the future.

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Speaker 1: What makes this case so compelling, though, is that they

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didn't stop there. They tried to corroborate the human side

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of it.

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Speaker 2: They tracked down the woman from the photo. She was

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in her seventies by them, and she confirmed it. She

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told them her fiance, Sergei Ponamreno, had vanished without a

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trace decades earlier.

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Speaker 1: That's the part that just grounds this unbelievable story in

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a real human tragedy. It's not just the weird guy

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with an old ID anymore. It's a story of loss.

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It is.

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Speaker 2: So you have these layers of evidence, the authentic ID,

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the photos, and now a living witness confirming his disappearance.

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Does that make it more convincing than a story like

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John Teeters?

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Speaker 1: I think so. We're wired to twist physical objects. A

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photograph feels real, even if it could be faked. But

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that testimony from the fiance that's powerful.

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Speaker 2: And the story wasn't over. Before they could finish their investigation,

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Ponta Moreno vanished again, just as mysteriously as he'd appeared.

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Speaker 1: But he left one last thing behind.

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Speaker 2: One final photograph, this one allegedly taken in twenty fifty,

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showing an older version of himself standing in front of

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a futuristic Kiev skyline. A perfect circular mystery.

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Speaker 1: Okay, so that's the high end artifacts story. Now let's

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go to the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the

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DII lo fi legally questionable time trap.

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Speaker 2: We're talking about Mike Markham. This story is brilliant because

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it grounds the impossible and something very mundane, stealing electricity.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety five, he called into Arc Bell's radio

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show Coast to Coast am a legendary show for this

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kind of thing.

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Speaker 2: And he claimed he'd figured out how to travel through

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time using a device based on it Jacob's.

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Speaker 1: Ladder, which is that thing you see in old Frankenstein

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movies with the electric arc climbing up the two.

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Speaker 2: Wires, pure uncontrolled high voltage. He decided to build a

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bigger version, which of course needed a lot more power

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than his house could provide, so he admitted on the

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radio that he stole power transformers from the local utility

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in King City, Missouri.

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Speaker 1: Which did not go unnoticing.

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Speaker 2: No, it caused a massive blackout. The police got involved

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and he was arrested. He got jail time a suspended sentence.

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So we have an actual police report for a would

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be time traveler.

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Speaker 1: The contrast is just amazing. You have these secret billion

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dollar government projects and then you have Mike Markham in

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Missouri causing a blackout.

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Speaker 2: A year later, he calls the showback. He says he's

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building a new machine legally. This time he claimed he'd

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successfully sent small items and even animals through it, and

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he said his next trip.

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Speaker 1: Was going to be him, and then he was gone.

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Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety seven, Mike Markham disappeared for almost twenty years,

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and we're left with the question was he a hoaxer

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who just skipped down, did he have an accident, or

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did his machine actually work.

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Speaker 1: It's the ultimate cliffhanger for the DIY inventor, it really is.

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Speaker 2: It captures that reckless individual spirit of discovery, completely separate

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from the government conspiracy narrative.

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Speaker 1: So we've done money, government and evidence. Let's move into

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our last section, where the claims get truly wild and

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we really question the nature of credibility itself.

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Speaker 2: This is where the stories move away from technology and

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deep into the personal psychological landscape of the claimant.

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Speaker 1: And there's no better example than David Huggins. His story

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doesn't start with a time machine. It starts with him

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meeting aliens when he was eight years old.

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Speaker 2: By seventeen, he claims he had what he called a

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frisky encounter with an alien named Crescent, who wore a

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black wig, and.

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Speaker 1: He claimed he fathered hybrid alien human children with her.

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Speaker 2: Right for him time travel is just one part of

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this much bigger story about alien contact and hybrid biology,

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and he documents all of it through his paintings. There's

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even a documentary about him called Love and Saucers.

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Speaker 1: His goal seems completely different. It's not about wealth for power.

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It's about documenting this deeply personal internal experience through art.

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Speaker 2: The kind of credibility he's looking for is based on

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emotional conviction, not verifiable facts. He's asking you to believe

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in the intensity of his experience.

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Speaker 1: But no matter what kind of story you're telling, government agent,

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financial wizard, alien contact, d there's one thing that trips

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up almost all of them.

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Speaker 2: The predictions specificity is the Achilles heel of the time traveler.

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You have to make predictions to prove your real but

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the passage of time will almost certainly prove you wrong.

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Speaker 1: Let's go back to John Tire for a second. That

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IBM detail was so powerful, but his big predictions of

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civil war, the nuclear war, they all failed spectacularly.

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Speaker 2: And that failure undermines everything else. It forces you to

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question the entire narrative. If he was wrong about something

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so huge, can you really trust the small detail that

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seems so right and.

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Speaker 1: Then you have people who just lean into the specificity

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so hard they almost guarantee their own failure immediately, which

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brings us to Elvis Thompson.

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Speaker 2: Oh Thompson, he took specific predictions to a whole new

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level of absurdity. He put out a video with a

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list of dated events for a single year, and they

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were all extreme.

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Speaker 1: Like for April sixth, he predicted a tornado in Oklahoma

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that would be twenty four kilometers across, which is.

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Speaker 2: Just meteorologically impossible. A tornado that big is beyond anything

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ever recorded or even theorized. It's designed for shock value,

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but it's instantly disprovable.

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Speaker 1: Then on September first, aliens were supposed to arrive. He

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even named one champion who would take twelve thousand people

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to another planet.

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Speaker 2: And then a massive storm on the East Coast on

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September nineteenth, and a sea creature six times bigger than

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a blue whale discovered.

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Speaker 1: On November third, none of which happened. Obviously. It makes

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you wonder about the psychology. Why be so specific when

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it's so easy to be proven wrong. Why not just

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stick to vague prophecies.

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Speaker 2: It's a bid for maximum attention in a crowded. I

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think you get immediate notoriety, but you trade it for

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any chance at long term credibility. It's the fundamental paradox.

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You have to be specific to be compelling, but that

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very specificity is what makes your claim so fragile.

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Speaker 1: It's like time itself is the ultimate fact checker.

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Speaker 2: And it always wins.

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Speaker 1: What a ride. We've gone from stock market fortunes to

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psychic chairs in montac and all the way to hybrid

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alien babies.

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Speaker 2: I think when you boil it all down, these claims

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really do fall into a few distinct categories. You've got

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the financial fraudster like Andrew Carlson, who represents pure self interest.

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Speaker 1: Then you have the government agent, the blex Imbossiagos, who

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tap into our distrust of authority in secret technology.

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Speaker 2: And finally, you have the earnest individual like Sergei Pontamarino,

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the one who leaves behind these strange, tangible artifacts that

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seem to ground the impossible in reality.

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Speaker 1: But the thread that connects all of them is this

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deep human fascination with controlling knowledge, with controlling destiny. And

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these stories, whether you believe them or not, are perfect

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case studies in how modern myths get built.

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Speaker 2: They're built with a clever mix of obscure facts like

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the IBM computer, tangible artifacts like the Soviet ID, and

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these powerful story tropes that prey on our deepest anxieties

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and hopes.

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Speaker 1: It's really not about the amount of proof, It's about

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the quality of that one single detail that feels true.

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Speaker 2: That's the hook, that's what captures our imagination.

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Speaker 1: So we want to leave you with a final thought

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to chew on. Imagine you knew, with one hundred percent

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undeniable certainty, a single historical event that happens fifty years

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from now, but something minor, not world altering.

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Speaker 2: Like the final score of some random championship game in

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the year twenty seventy four, or the exact date a

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local bridge finally gets repainted. Just a simple verifiable fact.

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Would you even share it?

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Speaker 1: And if you did, how would you convince anyone? How

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would you prove it without being called a fraud or

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without creating some paradox where your very prediction prevents it

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from happening.

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Speaker 2: What would be your single piece of verifiable evidence, What

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tiny future fact would you choose to convince the world.

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Speaker 1: Let us know what you think in the comments. We'd

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love to hear your piece of temporal proof