Speaker 1: Okay, so let's just dive right in. We're talking about
what is I think the ultimate human fantasy, knowing the future,
like having absolute certainty.
Speaker 2: It really is. It's the ultimate cheat code.
Speaker 1: For life exactly. Yeah, if you could know exactly how
everything was going to play out, not just you know
vay trends, but the specific actionable details. What would you
even do with that power?
Speaker 2: Well, that's the central question, isn't it. It's the highest
form of power because it basically grants you total control.
We're not talking about like good financial modeling. We mean
knowing the exact final score of a game, or when
a stock is going to crash to the penny.
Speaker 1: Its knowledge as a weapon, and that brings up the
big temptation. Do you use it to prevent some huge disaster?
Do you try to fix a historical wrong, or and
let's be honest about people, do you just go for immediate, uncraceable,
insane financial wealth.
Speaker 2: I think if you look at the stories we're about
to unpack, the lure of profit seems to win out
pretty consistently over altruism. It's an immediate, verifiable reward for
doing something completely unbelievable, and the.
Speaker 1: Sources we have for this deep dive are just a
wild collection of accounts. We are exploring these incredible stories
from individuals who claim to be, for lack of a
better term, temporal tourists.
Speaker 2: People who say they've come from the future, and their
stories cover everything financial schemes, secret military ops, and some
just astonishing physical disappearances that are really hard to explain.
Speaker 1: Right, So our mission today isn't to prove or disprove
these We're not a court, we're not.
Speaker 2: A physics lab, no, not at all. Our goal is
to really analyze the stories themselves, the narrative structure, what
specific details do they use, what anxieties are they tapping into,
and maybe most importantly, what are the psychological hooks that
make some of these stories, even the totally unverified ones,
stick around and become modern myths.
Speaker 1: So for you listening, we're trying to find those little
nuggets of insight hidden these really compelling but fundamentally unproven stories.
What does the whole idea do you have a time
traveler tell? Look about right now? About our own anxieties
and our desire to control our own destiny.
Speaker 2: It's a fascinating lens to look through it really is.
Speaker 1: So let's start with the most obvious temptation money. The
moment you bring up time travel, everyone's mind immediately goes
to the stock market.
Speaker 2: Of course, you wouldn't even need to travel that far.
Just knowing yesterday's closing prices would make you a fortune.
Speaker 1: But our first case, this one involves a leap of
two hundred years for what sounds like absolute financial perfection.
It really sets the bar high.
Speaker 2: We're starting with Andrew Carlson. This is a man arrested
back in two thousand and three. The SEC the Securities
and Exchange Commission flagged his treading activity as well. Highly suspicious.
Speaker 1: Highly suspicious doesn't even begin to cover it. The reports
I read said it was a statistical impossibility.
Speaker 2: Mathematically impossible. Yeah, the details are staggering. So Carlson, this
forty four year old guy, starts with an initial investment
of just eight hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: Eight hundred dollars. I just want to repeat that, in
two weeks he turned that eight hundred bucks into a
portfolio worth over three hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 2: I mean, just think about that return rate. To do that,
you don't just make a few good trades. Every single
trade has to be flawless. You have to perfectly time
these high risk leverage trades on market shifts that nobody
else is coming.
Speaker 1: The investigator's reports confirmed it. Every single trade he made
was perfect. He was capitalizing on these completely unexpected business
developments that you know, weren't public knowledge. Yet they flat
out said it could not have been pure luck.
Speaker 2: It was absolute certainty. And in leverage trading, that's the
tell that kind of trading is so risky because you're
borrowing money. One bad move, one unexpected event, and your
entire portfolio just evaporates.
Speaker 1: But he didn't make a single mistake. He navigated the
market like he was reading from a history book.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And when they finally cornered him and demanded to
know his source, he didn't claim to have some secret
algorithm or an inside man. His explanation will, uh, well,
much bolder.
Speaker 1: He just said he was a time traveler from two
hundred years in the future. He knew how it was
all going to play out, because for him it was already.
Speaker 2: History, which creates this incredible legal paradox. I mean, how
does the SEC even charge a man whose insider source
is the twenty third century. They put him in a
cell on Riker's Island and said he wasn't leaving until
he gave up his sources.
Speaker 1: But if your source is the timeline itself, it can't.
So what happened next is where the story goes from
weird to truly bizarre. The Vanishing Act.
Speaker 2: A mysterious unidentified man shows up and posts Carlson's bail,
No one knows who he was, and then before his
court hearing, Andrew Carlson just vanishes without.
Speaker 1: A trace, and the kicker the real twist.
Speaker 2: Records checks later showed that Andrew Carlson never officially existed,
the name, the identity. It was all a fabrication, a
ghost created just to execute the trades, make the money,
and then disappear.
Speaker 1: That's the perfect crime. It's not just about the wealth,
it's about the completer rature of your identity afterward, the
ability to just hit reset.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful idea, and if Carlson represents that immediate
financial temptation, our next character, John Teeter, represents something else,
the power of a really good technological secret.
Speaker 1: Ooh, John Teeter an absolute legend. If you were online
in the late nineties early two thousands, he showed up
on these old forums claiming to be a US soldier
from the year twenty thirty.
Speaker 2: Six, right, and his story wasn't about personal profit, It
was a mission, and the mission was so incredibly oddly specific.
Speaker 1: He talked about his time machine, right, the temporal displacement.
Speaker 2: Unit he did. He said it was in the back
of an old Chevy truck, powered by dual micro singularities,
you know, just plausible enough to hook the amateur physics crowd.
But the reason for his trip was the key. He claimed.
He traveled back to nineteen seventy five to retrieve a
very specific computer and IBM fifty one hundred.
Speaker 1: Which is the question that defines the whole story. Why
on Earth would a soldier from twenty thirty six need
a huge, ancient computer from nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 2: According to that seccific machine was desperately needed in his
time to fix major programming problems. He said, the IBM
fifty one hundred had these secret, undocumented hardware features that
let it emulate and debug code from older IBM mainframes.
Speaker 1: And here's where it gets really clever.
Speaker 2: This is the masterstroke that claim that the IBM fifty
one hundred had this hidden feature was not widely known
at all back then. It was an obscure bit of
technical trivia known only to a handful of the original
IBM engineers who designed it.
Speaker 1: So when he dropped that detail, it gave his whole
frankly unbelievable story, this sudden, shocking bit of credibility. People
started asking, how did this random guy on a message
board know that?
Speaker 2: It implied he had access to some deep, hidden knowledge.
He wasn't just making vague predictions. He was using insider language.
It's the power of one specific, obscure, verifiable fact.
Speaker 1: But he also made some much bigger claims, right. He
said he stopped over in the year two thousand for
personal reasons, to.
Speaker 2: Is it family, and to issue warnings. He warned about
mad cow disease. But the big ones were his predictions
of a coming US civil war starting around two thousand
and five, which would then escalate into a global nuclear
war in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: And this, of course, is where the whole narrative kind
of falls apart.
Speaker 2: It completely unravels. The civil war never happened, the nuclear
exchange never happened. It's the double edged sword of being specific.
Speaker 1: The IBM detail was brilliant. It hooked everyone, but the
failed prophecies basically blew up his credibility.
Speaker 2: Right. It forces you to either decide he was a
very clever hoaxer, or you have to fall back on
the idea that he came from a different timeline, a
parallel universe where those things did happen.
Speaker 1: But what's so interesting is that even after the big
predictions failed, people still talk about the IBM fifty to
one hundred detail. Yeah, that's what's stuck. It suggests we're
less interested in knowing the future and more invested in
the idea that someone somewhere has access to this secret truth.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful hook, and that idea of secret knowledge
brings us neatly into our next theme, government sponsored time travel.
Speaker 1: Right. This is where the story shifts from a guy
in a Chevy to huge, classified military projects.
Speaker 2: A lot of these claims revolve around the idea that
time travel isn't some personal garage project, but a state
sponsored capability. It taps into that deep public skepticism, that
feeling that if this technology existed, the government would absolutely
classify it and weaponize it.
Speaker 1: And the two big ones in this category are the
Montalk Project and Project Pegasus. These are sprawling conspiracies.
Speaker 2: Let's start with al Blick and the Montalk Project. His
story is a lot. He immediately sets himself up as special,
claiming his first memory was from when he was nine
months old.
Speaker 1: So he's establishing himself as someone with extraordinary recall, the
perfect person to remember classified secrets.
Speaker 2: Later on exactly, he grows up, gets in some military electronics,
and eventually claims he was recruited into this secret program
at Montauk, Long Island in the late fifties and sixties,
a program dealing with everything from mind control to time travel.
Speaker 1: The details he gives are so specific. He talks about
his commute to the secret base.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the Long Island railroad, that's for sure. First
he claimed he used hidden underground tunnels to get from
California to Montalk. Then, once they perfected their time tunnel
in the seventies, he says he was just teleported directly
into the base.
Speaker 1: It paints this picture of a massive, hidden infrastructure operating
completely outside the known laws of physics.
Speaker 2: And he didn't just claim to be a technician. He
said he ran the psychic operations. He talks about using
the Montalk chair, this device that supposedly amplified psychic powers,
to conduct mind control experiments.
Speaker 1: From there, the missions just get more and more extreme.
Speaker 2: By the eighties, he claimed they were doing deep time travel.
He said he went on missions to Mars back to
one hundred thousand BCE and all the way forward to
the year sixty thirty seven. Just pure unrestrained temporal exploration.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's mon talk. How does that compare to
the other big one, Project Pegasus.
Speaker 2: Project Pegasus is the story told by Andrew Basiago, a lawyer.
He claimed that DARPA was secretly working on time travel
and teleportation back in the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1: This one is less about psychic powers and more about
physics much more.
Speaker 2: Baciago's story centers on the work of Nikola Tesla. He
claimed the government built a machine called a Cronaviser based
on Tesla's research. This thing could not only view passed
in future events, but actually send.
Speaker 1: People there, and he claimed he was one of the
tests subjects.
Speaker 2: As a child, yes, a child participant. His missions were
incredibly ambitious. He claims he was sent back to witness
the Gettysburg address firsthand.
Speaker 1: Which is just an audacious claim.
Speaker 2: And he also tried to tie it to the present
day by claiming that other famous people were involved in
the project as kids, including a young Barack Obama.
Speaker 1: So you have these two massive secret government narratives. They
both rely on classified tech time travel for intelligence gathering.
It's common trope, it really is.
Speaker 2: They both feed that deep cultural belief that the real
scientific breakthroughs are hidden from us, locked away on underground bases.
It comes from a profound sense of distrust in official institutions.
Speaker 1: So let's shift from how they supposedly traveled to what
they saw the future itself, and the accounts are what
they're wildly different. Let's start with William Taylor.
Speaker 2: William Taylor claimed he was part of a secret British
intelligence project and that he traveled to the year eight
nine hundred and seventy three. His vision of the future
is frankly utopian.
Speaker 1: You say, humans as we know them are gone right.
Speaker 2: Replaced by human robot hybrids. These beings live forever. There's
no crime, no disease, no death. It's a peaceful, advanced
transhumanist society.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate, happy ending for humanity, I guess, but
it also sounds a little sterile. The source of the
technology is interesting too.
Speaker 2: He claims it wasn't human innovation. The time travel tech
was reverse engineered from captured alien spacecraft and has been
in use since nineteen eighty one. So he's weaving together
the time travel story with the UFO conspiracy.
Speaker 1: And there's an usual detail here. He reportedly passed a lie.
Speaker 2: Detector test, which we have to be cleared does not
prove he's telling the truth, but it does suggest a
very high level of personal conviction in his story.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's the peaceful hybrid utopia. But then you
have these other accounts from Greece that paint a much
darker picture, a much darker one.
Speaker 2: There was a Greek military man in twenty seventeen who
claimed he traveled to the year three two oh seven.
But the more detailed story came from a Greek student
back in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: He said a professor recruited him for an experiment and.
Speaker 2: Sent him all the way to the year ten thousand,
his mission to gather data on a future war between
humans and artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: Wow. So, on one hand, a peaceful utopia achieved through technology.
On the other, a catastrophic, millennia long war against our
own creations.
Speaker 2: And it perfectly reflects our current anxieties, doesn't it. Taylor's
story is the dream of technology solving all our problems.
The Greek student's story is the nightmare, the fear of AI,
the Skynet scenario. It shows how these stories always filter
the future through the fears of the present.
Speaker 1: That AI war story feels a lot more resonant right
now than the peaceful robot hybrid one. That's for sure.
Speaker 2: It taps right into our current headlines.
Speaker 1: Okay, so moving on from these grand unverifiable government missions,
let's talk about the claims that actually left behind physical evidence,
or at least what looks like evidence.
Speaker 2: This is where things get really interesting, because now we
have tangible artifacts. And the gold standard for this kind
of story is the case of Sergei Pontomerino.
Speaker 1: This was in Kiev back in two thousand and six.
A man just appears looking confused.
Speaker 2: Right, He's asking police for directions to streets that don't
exist anymore. He's wearing old fashioned clothes and he's carrying
a Soviet era id that says he's twenty five years old,
born in nineteen thirty two, So.
Speaker 1: Right away the police are dealing with something deeply strange.
Speaker 2: And he's got a vintage camera with him. When they
questioned him, he insists he was transported to the year
twenty fifty and then somehow sent back here. The authorities
checked his ID and it was a genuine document from
the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: But the cameras where the story gets its power. They
developed the film.
Speaker 2: Most of the photos were what you'd expect, black and
white shots from the fifties. There was a picture of
him with a young woman he said was his fiance.
But there was one very strange image, the UFO, a
picture of what looks like a UFO hovering near a building,
and Ponomerno claimed that the moment he took that picture,
he felt a weird sensation and was suddenly thrown into
the future.
Speaker 1: What makes this case so compelling, though, is that they
didn't stop there. They tried to corroborate the human side
of it.
Speaker 2: They tracked down the woman from the photo. She was
in her seventies by them, and she confirmed it. She
told them her fiance, Sergei Ponamreno, had vanished without a
trace decades earlier.
Speaker 1: That's the part that just grounds this unbelievable story in
a real human tragedy. It's not just the weird guy
with an old ID anymore. It's a story of loss.
It is.
Speaker 2: So you have these layers of evidence, the authentic ID,
the photos, and now a living witness confirming his disappearance.
Does that make it more convincing than a story like
John Teeters?
Speaker 1: I think so. We're wired to twist physical objects. A
photograph feels real, even if it could be faked. But
that testimony from the fiance that's powerful.
Speaker 2: And the story wasn't over. Before they could finish their investigation,
Ponta Moreno vanished again, just as mysteriously as he'd appeared.
Speaker 1: But he left one last thing behind.
Speaker 2: One final photograph, this one allegedly taken in twenty fifty,
showing an older version of himself standing in front of
a futuristic Kiev skyline. A perfect circular mystery.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's the high end artifacts story. Now let's
go to the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the
DII lo fi legally questionable time trap.
Speaker 2: We're talking about Mike Markham. This story is brilliant because
it grounds the impossible and something very mundane, stealing electricity.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety five, he called into Arc Bell's radio
show Coast to Coast am a legendary show for this
kind of thing.
Speaker 2: And he claimed he'd figured out how to travel through
time using a device based on it Jacob's.
Speaker 1: Ladder, which is that thing you see in old Frankenstein
movies with the electric arc climbing up the two.
Speaker 2: Wires, pure uncontrolled high voltage. He decided to build a
bigger version, which of course needed a lot more power
than his house could provide, so he admitted on the
radio that he stole power transformers from the local utility
in King City, Missouri.
Speaker 1: Which did not go unnoticing.
Speaker 2: No, it caused a massive blackout. The police got involved
and he was arrested. He got jail time a suspended sentence.
So we have an actual police report for a would
be time traveler.
Speaker 1: The contrast is just amazing. You have these secret billion
dollar government projects and then you have Mike Markham in
Missouri causing a blackout.
Speaker 2: A year later, he calls the showback. He says he's
building a new machine legally. This time he claimed he'd
successfully sent small items and even animals through it, and
he said his next trip.
Speaker 1: Was going to be him, and then he was gone.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety seven, Mike Markham disappeared for almost twenty years,
and we're left with the question was he a hoaxer
who just skipped down, did he have an accident, or
did his machine actually work.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate cliffhanger for the DIY inventor, it really is.
Speaker 2: It captures that reckless individual spirit of discovery, completely separate
from the government conspiracy narrative.
Speaker 1: So we've done money, government and evidence. Let's move into
our last section, where the claims get truly wild and
we really question the nature of credibility itself.
Speaker 2: This is where the stories move away from technology and
deep into the personal psychological landscape of the claimant.
Speaker 1: And there's no better example than David Huggins. His story
doesn't start with a time machine. It starts with him
meeting aliens when he was eight years old.
Speaker 2: By seventeen, he claims he had what he called a
frisky encounter with an alien named Crescent, who wore a
black wig, and.
Speaker 1: He claimed he fathered hybrid alien human children with her.
Speaker 2: Right for him time travel is just one part of
this much bigger story about alien contact and hybrid biology,
and he documents all of it through his paintings. There's
even a documentary about him called Love and Saucers.
Speaker 1: His goal seems completely different. It's not about wealth for power.
It's about documenting this deeply personal internal experience through art.
Speaker 2: The kind of credibility he's looking for is based on
emotional conviction, not verifiable facts. He's asking you to believe
in the intensity of his experience.
Speaker 1: But no matter what kind of story you're telling, government agent,
financial wizard, alien contact, d there's one thing that trips
up almost all of them.
Speaker 2: The predictions specificity is the Achilles heel of the time traveler.
You have to make predictions to prove your real but
the passage of time will almost certainly prove you wrong.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to John Tire for a second. That
IBM detail was so powerful, but his big predictions of
civil war, the nuclear war, they all failed spectacularly.
Speaker 2: And that failure undermines everything else. It forces you to
question the entire narrative. If he was wrong about something
so huge, can you really trust the small detail that
seems so right and.
Speaker 1: Then you have people who just lean into the specificity
so hard they almost guarantee their own failure immediately, which
brings us to Elvis Thompson.
Speaker 2: Oh Thompson, he took specific predictions to a whole new
level of absurdity. He put out a video with a
list of dated events for a single year, and they
were all extreme.
Speaker 1: Like for April sixth, he predicted a tornado in Oklahoma
that would be twenty four kilometers across, which is.
Speaker 2: Just meteorologically impossible. A tornado that big is beyond anything
ever recorded or even theorized. It's designed for shock value,
but it's instantly disprovable.
Speaker 1: Then on September first, aliens were supposed to arrive. He
even named one champion who would take twelve thousand people
to another planet.
Speaker 2: And then a massive storm on the East Coast on
September nineteenth, and a sea creature six times bigger than
a blue whale discovered.
Speaker 1: On November third, none of which happened. Obviously. It makes
you wonder about the psychology. Why be so specific when
it's so easy to be proven wrong. Why not just
stick to vague prophecies.
Speaker 2: It's a bid for maximum attention in a crowded. I
think you get immediate notoriety, but you trade it for
any chance at long term credibility. It's the fundamental paradox.
You have to be specific to be compelling, but that
very specificity is what makes your claim so fragile.
Speaker 1: It's like time itself is the ultimate fact checker.
Speaker 2: And it always wins.
Speaker 1: What a ride. We've gone from stock market fortunes to
psychic chairs in montac and all the way to hybrid
alien babies.
Speaker 2: I think when you boil it all down, these claims
really do fall into a few distinct categories. You've got
the financial fraudster like Andrew Carlson, who represents pure self interest.
Speaker 1: Then you have the government agent, the blex Imbossiagos, who
tap into our distrust of authority in secret technology.
Speaker 2: And finally, you have the earnest individual like Sergei Pontamarino,
the one who leaves behind these strange, tangible artifacts that
seem to ground the impossible in reality.
Speaker 1: But the thread that connects all of them is this
deep human fascination with controlling knowledge, with controlling destiny. And
these stories, whether you believe them or not, are perfect
case studies in how modern myths get built.
Speaker 2: They're built with a clever mix of obscure facts like
the IBM computer, tangible artifacts like the Soviet ID, and
these powerful story tropes that prey on our deepest anxieties
and hopes.
Speaker 1: It's really not about the amount of proof, It's about
the quality of that one single detail that feels true.
Speaker 2: That's the hook, that's what captures our imagination.
Speaker 1: So we want to leave you with a final thought
to chew on. Imagine you knew, with one hundred percent
undeniable certainty, a single historical event that happens fifty years
from now, but something minor, not world altering.
Speaker 2: Like the final score of some random championship game in
the year twenty seventy four, or the exact date a
local bridge finally gets repainted. Just a simple verifiable fact.
Would you even share it?
Speaker 1: And if you did, how would you convince anyone? How
would you prove it without being called a fraud or
without creating some paradox where your very prediction prevents it
from happening.
Speaker 2: What would be your single piece of verifiable evidence, What
tiny future fact would you choose to convince the world.
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think in the comments. We'd
love to hear your piece of temporal proof