Is This Photographic Evidence of a Time Traveler? This post is based on material from chapter 2 of my new book, How to Time Travel.

If you do an Internet search with Google using the keyword phase “time travel evidence” (without the quotes), you will get about 258,000,000 search returns. Most of the “evidence” is not scientific evidence. It is anecdotal. However, the sheer volume of time travel anecdotal evidence on the internet makes it hard to ignore.

One category of evidence is old photographs. Many sites include old photographs that show people out of context, for example, wearing clothing that does not fit the time, such as modern sunglasses, or using devices, such as a 35mm camera, that did not exist at the time the photograph was taken. To see these results do a Google search using the phrase “time travel photo evidence” (without the quotes). You can find several websites that have a number of good examples such as the 1941 photograph of a person with Ray-Ban sunglasses,  a screen-print T-shirt and a 35mm camera (below).

10-18-2013 11-25-53 AM photo evidence

Let us  examine some of the photographic evidence. I have made two observations:

  1. Many of the old photographs are fuzzy. This is typical of old photographs, since cameras in the early part of the twentieth century were crude.
  2. The claims that something or someone is “out of context” are a bit of a stretch. For example, consider the man in the 1941 photograph. Some suggest he is wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses and a screen-print T-shirt, and holding a modern 35mm camera. I think the photograph is too fuzzy to make a solid case for these assertions, but that is just my opinion. I suggest you view the photograph and draw your own conclusion.

In addition, with today’s computer technology and state-of-the-art photograph-editing programs, such as Photoshop, it is possible to manipulate a photograph and have Elvis shaking hands with Albert Einstein. Only a highly trained computer photographic expert would be able to determine that the photograph is a computer-generated manipulation of pixels—in other words, a fake. The technology is that good. This makes me suspicious of all photographic evidence that has not been analyzed by a highly trained expert.

Although the photograph is intriguing, it is not conclusive. Therefore, you will have to be the judge. Is this photograph evidence of a time traveler?