Some of the Stranger Tales of Time Travel: Surfing the Past and Future

From 2000 to 2001, the world of conspiracy-theorizing was rocked when a man using the name of John Titor came forward, claiming to be a time-traveler from the future, specifically from 2036. Such was the fascination with Titor’s story, conspiracy researchers took deep notice of what he had to say, to the point that what began as an interesting series of claims quickly became a veritable phenomenon. But, was Titor all that he claimed to be? Was his story of being a member of the U.S. military true? Was he really a man from the future? Or, was the whole thing a strange hoax? Well, that's the problem: tales of time travel are pretty much unable to confirm. Or not. But, that doesn't take away the fact that there are huge numbers of alleged time travel. So, with that said, let's look at some intriguing of the past and the present. In the final days of December 1980 multiple, strange encounters and wild incidents occurred in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England. And across a period of three nights, no less. Based upon their personal encounters, many of those who were present believed that something almost unbelievable came down in the near-pitch-black woods on the night of December 26. Lives were altered forever – and for the most part not for the better, I need to stress. Many of those who were present on those fantastic nights found their minds dazzled, tossed and turned – and incredibly quickly, too. 

One of the key figures in the Rendlesham affair was Jim Penniston. He entered the U.S. Air Force in 1973. At the time all hell broke loose in Rendlesham Forest, Penniston was a Senior Security Officer. Both he and Halt had startling encounters in those December nights. Penniston actually touched the whatever-it-was; something that he now believes caused him to receive a binary code message that was, essentially, downloaded into his mind. Techopedia explains what, precisely, binary codes are: “Binary code is the most simplistic form of data. It is represented entirely by a binary system of digits consisting of a string of consecutive zeros and ones. Binary code is often associated with machine code in that binary sets can be combined to form raw code, which is interpreted by a computer or other piece of hardware.”  

Formerly of the U.S. Air Force, and one of the key military players in the famous UFO encounter at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1980, Sergeant Jim Penniston – in 1994 – underwent hypnotic regression, as part of an attempt to try and recall deeply buried data relative to what occurred to him during one of Britain’s closest encounters. Very interestingly, and while under hypnosis, Penniston stated that our presumed aliens are, in reality, visitors from a far-flung future. Our future. That future, Penniston added, is very dark, in infinitely deep trouble, polluted and where the Human Race is overwhelmingly blighted by reproductive problems. The answer to those same, massive problems, Penniston was told by the entities he met in the woods, is that they travel into the distant past – to our present day – to secure sperm, eggs and chromosomes, all as part of an effort to try and ensure the continuation of the severely waning Human Race of tomorrow. Now, to another intriguing affair. Namely, Roswell:

Despite the fact that many have championed the late Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso as a solid proponent of the idea that extraterrestrials plunged to earth in New Mexico in 1947, in reality, Corso was willing to consider something very different. The unusual bodies found within the wreckage of the craft, Corso maintained, were genetically created beings designed to withstand the rigors of space flight, but they were not the actual creators of the UFO itself. Right up to the time of his death in 1998, Corso speculated on the distinct possibility that the U.S. Government might still have no real idea of who constructed the craft, or who genetically engineered the bodies found aboard or in the vicinity of the wreckage. Notably, Corso gave much consideration to the idea that the Roswell UFO was a form of time machine, possibly even one designed and built by the denizens of an Earth of the distant future, rather than by the people of a faraway solar-system. Of course, it’s vital that I make it clear Corso’s story has been the subject of a great deal of intense debate. His account relative to Roswell has been both vocally championed and loudly denounced. Others seem unsure what to make of it all. But, unfortunately for those trying to make some sense of the situation, Ufology has always been like that when it comes to matters of a highly volatile nature. We never get a definitive answer. 

One of the most famous examples of what some researchers think may have been a definitive Time-Slip involved two British women: Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who, it has been suggested, traveled through time while visiting the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, France. It was August 10, 1901 when the pair paid a trip to the Palace of Versailles. While walking through the grounds, both Moberly and Jourdain were overcome by distinctly oppressive feelings of gloom and uneasiness. They would later claim to have met with a wide variety of individuals, all garbed in 18th Century clothing, and who they came to believe had been members of the court of none other than Marie Antoinette. More controversially, the pair said they saw a figure they thought may very well have been Marie Antoinette herself. Did Moberly and Jourdain really cross the time-barrier into centuries-past? To this day, the story has as many believers as it does detractors. But there is one important factor of which to take careful note: their amazing story does not stand alone. Indeed, there are numerous reports on record of people apparently passing through time – entirely at random, and without the benefit of any form of out-of-this-world technology.

A key event of the First English Civil War, the Battle of Hopton Heath (a small village in south Shropshire) was fought on Sunday, March 19, 1643 between Parliamentarian and Royalist forces. The battle ended at nightfall, with the actual victory and outcome still remaining matters of very much personal opinion. The Royalists, for example, had succeeded in capturing eight enemy-guns; while the Parliamentarians believed that their successful killing of the enemy commander, the Earl of Northampton, was of equal – if not even greater – significance. But, without doubt of even more significance was a startling event that occurred at some point in the winter of 1974. It was late at night and then-thirty-six-year-old John ‘Davy’ Davis, a Lichfield, Staffordshire-based house-painter at the time, was driving near Hopton Heath when he began to feel unwell: an ominous tightness developed in his chest, he felt lightheaded, and, as he succinctly put it, “my left ear hurt and felt hot.”

Quickly pulling over to the side of the road, Davis was amazed to see the night-sky suddenly transform into daylight, while the road in front of him no longer existed: instead, it had been replaced by a mass of fields, heath-land and tangled trees. And, in front of him, countless soldiers adorned in what was clearly Civil War-clothing waged harsh war upon one another. Notably, Davis said that although at one point he was “nearly bloody surrounded” by the soldiers, it was almost as if they could neither see him nor his vehicle. This afforded Davis a degree of relief, as he was practically frozen to the spot, and “couldn’t have run if I had wanted to.” As it transpired, Davis didn’t need to run anywhere: just a few seconds later, the bizarre scene suddenly vanished, and Davis found himself sat at the edge of the road, with his car squashed against a large line of hedge, and with complete and utter normality returned.

Since the 1980s, sightings of large, triangular-shaped UFOs, usually described as being black in color, making a low humming noise, and very often with rounded rather than angled corners, have been reported throughout the world. The sheer proliferation of such reports has led some ufological commentators to strongly suspect that the Flying Triangles (as they have come to be known) are prime examples of still-classified aircraft, the development of which was secretly begun in the 1980s by elements of the U.S. Department of Defense. Largely, UFO researchers are split into two camps: that the Flying Triangles are the creations of the American military or that they were flown by extraterrestrials. There is, however, another theory for all of this mystery. 

The late Omar Fowler, a UFO expert who died in 2017, had a theory that the Flying Triangles just might be nothing less than the aerial vehicles of time travelers. Fowler had a good reason for that. On one occasion, in September 1992, over a large area of woodland in central England called the Cannock Chase, Omar secured a piece of testimony from a man named Alan Ball. He agreed to meet Ball on the Chase one morning. Incredibly, Ball claimed that he was taken on-board a huge, black, Flying Triangle late one night – and while he was driving home – when he was “beamed into” the craft and subjected to a series of medical experiments by three small, humanoid figures in what “looked like a medical lab.” Ten or fifteen minutes into the experimentation, Ball claimed that his mind was flooded by images of the U.K., in ruins. It was a definitive Armageddon: buildings, in all directions, were destroyed; charred human bodies lay everywhere; and it was clear that a nuclear event occurred. And the assumption was that the event was not alone. That the U.K. – and possible everywhere else – had been destroyed. After having the terrifying vision, Ball was dropped off the craft – literally, from a door about five feet above the woods. Ball was in a state of terror – and for several days.

Particularly of interest is the fact that Fowler had in his files two extremely similar cases – and also at the Cannock Chase woods – of people taken onto Flying Triangles and exposed to images in their minds of a massive apocalypse. Fowler was still open on the idea that the Flying Triangles could be extraterrestrial in nature. However, he wasn’t able to shake off the disturbing possibility the craft were piloted by time travelers, and that what Ball and the two other people were seeing was a future still to come – and that all three victims had been taken to the future and then returned to in 1992. 

This incident I’m about to share with you occurred in 1989 and involved a man named Paul Farrant and a Woman in Black. Paul is someone who I met in the U.K. back in the summer of 1997. At the time, Paul spent ten days checking out the Crop Circles that had appeared during that summer in the county of Wiltshire, England – which is where most of the formations are made on a yearly basis. I was there for two weeks, with Irene Bott, who created the Staffordshire UFO Group, and gave a few lectures in the area at the same time, which is how I got to know Paul. He had a story to tell that involved missing time, but not at all of the type associated with alien abductions. Paul told me that he had been walking around one of the formations just as the sun was starting to rise when a woman appeared – seemingly out of nowhere. She was dressed in a long black cape that had a black hood. Paul said her skin was extremely pale and her face was very thin. She engaged him in what seemed to be a very short conversation, warning him not to dig too deep into the subject. 

The Woman in Black then turned and exited the huge and intricate formation. For reasons that he was unable to understand, Paul felt both nauseous and frightened. Here’s the strangest part of the story: Paul found himself quite confused, due to the fact that although it seemed to have been a brief encounter, when he checked he realized there was far more to it. According to his watch, close to three-quarters-of-an-hour were missing from Paul’s memory. And, although the woman had something to say to Paul of a warning nature, he couldn’t remember exactly what he said in response to her. It puzzled, and worried, him for weeks. One final thing: not only had Paul lost forty-five minutes of his life, but his watch had gone forward three hours. There’s no doubt this is a very strange story, but it demonstrates that when one is in Crop Circles, time-based anomalies are not unknown.

And, finally: One of the strangest stories of paranormal weirdness at Loch Ness comes from an author on all manner of mysteries, Andrew Collins. As Christmas 1979 loomed, Collins – with colleagues Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman spent a week in Scotland, investigating the Nessie enigma. It involved interviewing witnesses, spending time poring over old archives in Inverness' library, and checking out the loch itself. It was while they were deep in the heart of their investigation that the trio uncovered a very weird story. Back in the early 18th century a young couple inexplicably vanished while riding a horse and trap near Loch End, on the south shores of Loch Ness. Rumors circulated that the pair was either murdered or abducted. And neither the horse nor the trap were ever seen again. It would have remained a complete mystery, were it not for one thing; a very uncanny thing.

More than one hundred years later, and at the height of tumultuous thunderstorm, a young man and woman walked into a local almshouse, inquiring if the priest that oversaw it would give them shelter for the night, which he did. The priest couldn’t fail to see that the pair was dressed in the kind of clothing that was popular around a century or so earlier. Plus, they seemed very confused, dazed and bewildered, and completely unable to explain where they were from. They remained in that odd, altered state for a couple of days, after which they simply walked out of the almshouse and were never seen again. When the story got out, however, several of the locals recalled old tales of the events of a century earlier, and the missing pair of young lovers. Was this, perhaps, a case of a slip in time having occurred? It might have been. Of course, it's very difficult to prove matters relative to time travel. But, at least, we have a body of material that makes the subject very intriguing.