UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Time travel. It is a staple of science fiction and has long captured the imagination. It seems as if that is the realm in which it should stay, within movies and books, and entertaining yarn but far from reality. Yet in this day and age of the Internet there have been people given a voice that they never had before, and cases have come out of the woodwork of people who actually claim to be time travelers. Not only that, but some of them actually say that they have the evidence to prove it. Outlandish, surreal, and always bizarre, here are some cases of self-professed time travelers who say they can prove it.

A very strange individual came forward in November of 2017 with quite a bizarre and colorful tale to tell, and would go on to become quite the media and viral video sensation at the time. The man calls himself Noah, and claims that he is in fact from the future, the year 2030 to be exact, becoming stranded here in the present due to a “failed mission” in which he got “fired” and stuck in our present and decided to tell the world of the realities of time travel and of his experiences in a series of videos on YouTube. Of the machine that he used to jump through time, he has explained to news.com.au:

I have many body implications and things all over myself, and I step in this giant dome and these things fire up and basically a large electronic weight basically pushes you through time. It feels like if you got electrocuted.

The range of stories he has to tell of these adventures is as outlandish as it is entertaining. Noah claims that he was recruited into the government’s top secret time travel program at a very young age, and that he regularly took anti-aging pills to fight the aging effects that time travel had on his body, saying “When you time travel you gain time. When I was in junior high and I was a time traveler, I had to take these pills to make sure I don’t grow old while time travelling.” He also has made numerous predictions about the future, including that Trump will win a second term of presidency, that the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., Yolanda Renee King, will become president at some point, and many others. According to Noah there will be a cure for cancer, that scientists will live on Mars in 2028, incidentally the same year we figure out time travel, and that we get into contact with extraterrestrials.

It all sounds pretty vague, rather unimaginative and not really that hard to guess, but what really made his story take off in the news is that he supposedly passed a lie detector test on all of this. He has also shown footage that he claims is from the future. At one point during his interview on YouTube he produces a smartphone and shows a futuristic looking city with red clouds ominously hanging over it, which he claims to be Las Vegas in the year 2120. It looks pretty questionable, as the video is stationary and doesn’t show much that couldn’t be altered through digital manipulation, but Noah has other
“evidence” as well, such as an X-ray image showing a device within his hand that he says is integral for the time travel process, and he has claimed that he has even better evidence that he sadly cannot share for fear of triggering a paradox.

Still from “Noah’s” video

Throughout his whole video interview his face is obscured as he says he is in danger of being assassinated for what he is telling the rather skeptical interviewers, and many confessed time travelers do so. He also explains that he is alone, and that although he has family in the present he cannot meet them out of danger of meeting his younger self and causing a massive paradox. It is all a completely off the wall tale that has understandably drawn a lot of criticism, not only for its sheer bizarreness, but also from the fact that the video appears on the Apex TV YouTube channel, a paranormal research organization which is popular for its numerous time traveler stories and which many accuse of being full of hoaxes.

YouTube in general, and Apex TV in particular, are fertile grounds for such wild tales, and it is in this unchecked medium that alleged time travelers have come out of the woodwork. One is an anonymous man who says he worked out of London, where there was a secret laboratory called Globus, involved with testing and experimenting with all manner of bizarre technology, such as teleportation devices and of course time travel. He claims that the mysterious machine used to travel through time is called “The Time Queen,” and that a main component to its inner workings is powerful stone that emits some sort of alien, misunderstood energy. He has explained of this Time Queen:

The most important part in that machine was the piece of asteroid which has a radiation maker. The radiation of uranium is even weaker. The power of the stone has such energy it can destroy the whole planet. Fortunately, that energy only can be used in laboratory. Otherwise, the planet could be already destroyed. That energy can create time borders. We can outsmart computers to that energy and get an algorithm which transforms time to the mathematics, and this let us to travel through the time.

The machine was used to travel to the past in the United States, Russia and Britain, and frequently to 17th century China, but that certain limitations of the technology meant he could only travel a maximum of 4,000 years back in time. It all sounds completely off the rails, but this time traveler claims to have evidence in the form of a photo of a Swiss made watch that was allegedly found in the tomb of a 17th century Chinese soldier and which he says was a watch he lost on one of his many jaunts through time, of which he would say:

It is just that watch that I had lost in China in 16th to 17th centuries. I was running at the time from Chinese soldiers. A few months ago this watch was found in soldier’s tomb. I think, while I was running, he found and took it. Scientists were shocked.

It is actually striking how many of these self-professed time travelers bring forth what they say is evidence of their time bending adventures, such as photographs, videos, and others. Another man called simply Edward claimed in a video to have been part of a top secret time travel experiment in 2004, and that his travels had taken him far into the future to the year 5000, when much of the planet had been submerged due to global warming and vast wooden cities floated upon the seas of what once was. One of these cities doomed to a watery grave was apparently Los Angeles, California, a fact which Edward “proves” with a photo he produces from his pocket that he claims shows the submerged city but is actually pretty hard to make out. Edward explains of this photo to The Sun, “I was standing on a huge wooden platform. Not only me, houses, building of course all made from wood. And after, I realized it was the same city, Los Angeles, but under water.”

Edward’s photo

There is also the claim from a time traveler calling himself John, from the year 4,000. John says that he has been living in this present for the past 6 years, and that in his home time he is the president of a company that produces flying cars, and that their use of AI had resulted in a potential threat to humanity. According to John, in the year 4000 all birds have been wiped out in order to reduce the danger to the widely used flying cars, and that animals in general, even dogs and cats, are rare. It is due to concerns over the spread of AI that he says he has traveled back to the past, and as evidence of all of this he has shown a picture of what appear to be spider-like robots putting together a future vehicle called the “DR-18.”

Similarly, to John is a man identified as Alexander Smith, who says he is one of the first time travelers and appears in his video looking decidedly disheveled and harried. Smith then goes on to say that the world is in dire danger from AI running amok, and that global warming and floods are also a prominent threat. As proof of his claims he produces a photo from his crumpled suit and holds it up, saying that it is a picture of a city center form the year 2118. The photo looks very blurry and indistinct, and he assures us that this is merely an artifact from the time traveling process, not in any way because it could be a hoax. There is also the photo presented by an unidentified Greek man who in 2017 claimed that he had been recruited by a professor for time travel experiments. One of these experiments saw him launched to the year 10000, where there was a war raging between humans and robots. This man also shows a picture of this future landscape, but it is not clear what it is supposed to be of, and of course the low quality is blamed on the effects of time travel.

The picture from the year 10000

It’s not only photographs or video clips that have been offered up as evidence by time travelers either. One man calling himself W.D. Davis says he is from the year 2200, which he paints a colorful picture of indeed. According to him, in this future not only have all diseases been cured, but humans live on Mars and in great underwater cities, and that we peacefully coexist with aliens that can change shape at will. Davis, who claims to be 103 years old, said that in the future there are “miracle food pellets,” one of which can sustain an adult for a week, and he presented one of these pellets as proof. He says that in the future these pellets will be available to people all over the planet and have solved world hunger. Unfortunately, he would not allow it to be analyzed due to the paradoxical ramifications it could have, so I suppose we will just have to take his word for it.

Another anonymous time traveler is a woman who says she is from the year 3780, and that the use of the time technology is based on chips that these travelers have implanted into their arms. These devices supposedly do something to warp the space-time continuum, and she even produces one of the chips as evidence, which she calls a “skin.” It looks sort of like a big computer chip, and it is hard to tell if that is exactly what it is. The woman rambles for some time on the technology, but it is very hard to understand, and in the end it is hard to tell if any of it makes sense or not.

In the end it is hard to know how much truth any of these bizarre and quite frankly outlandish claims have. It is unfortunate that many such cases come to light on these YouTube videos, a place that is a magnet for those looking to get attention and pull hoaxes, yet there are plenty of people who give these claims serious thought, and they have become a hotbed for discussion and conspiracy theories. It is equally regrettable that the “evidence” that these supposed time travelers present in these cases is circumstantial at best, and clearly faked at worst. Yet is still gets a lot of play in discussions and debates on time travelers. Ultimately, if time travel really does exist, then these cases certainly don’t prove it in any way. It is up to the reader to make up their own mind.

The warping of spacetime, in the General Relativistic picture, by gravitational masses is what causes the gravitational force. It is assumed, but not experimentally verified, that antimatter masses will behave the same as matter masses in a gravitational field.

LIGO/T. PYLE

One of the most astonishing facts about science is how universally applicable the laws of nature are. Every particle obeys the same rules, experiences the same forces, and sees the same fundamental constants, no matter where or when they exist. Gravitationally, every single entity in the Universe experiences, depending on how you look at it, either the same gravitational acceleration or the same curvature of spacetime, no matter what properties it possesses.

At least, that's what things are like in theory. In practice, some things are notoriously difficult to measure. Photons and normal, stable particles both fall as expected in a gravitational field, with Earth causing any massive particle to accelerate towards its center at 9.8 m/s². Despite our best efforts, though, we have never measured the gravitational acceleration of antimatter. It ought to accelerate the exact same way, but until we measure it, we can't know. One experiment is attempting to decide the matter, once-and-for-all. Depending on what it finds, it just might be the key to a scientific and technological revolution.

Trajectories of antihydrogen atoms from the ALPHA experiment. We can hold them stable for up to 20 minutes at a time now, and measuring how they behave in a gravitational field is the next logical step.

CHUKMAN SO/UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

You might not realize it, but there are two entirely different ways of thinking about mass. On the one hand, there's the mass that accelerates when you apply a force to it: the m in Newton's famous equation, F = ma. This is the same as the m in Einstein's E = mc², which tells you how much energy you need to create a particle (or antiparticle) and how much energy you get when you annihilate it away.

But there's another mass out there: gravitational mass. This is the mass, m, that appears in the equation for weight at Earth's surface (W = mg), or in Newton's gravitational law, F = GmM/r². For normal matter, we know that these two masses — inertial mass and gravitational mass — must be equal to something like 1 part in 100 billion, thanks to experimental constraints from a setup designed over 100 years ago by Loránd Eötvös.

Newton's law of universal gravitation (L) and Coulomb's law for electrostatics (R) have almost identical forms. If the 'm' in the gravitational force obtains a negative sign for antimatter, upcoming experiments ought to reveal it.

DENNIS NILSSON / RJB1 / E. SIEGEL

For antimatter, though, we've never been able to measure this at all. We've applied non-gravitational forces to antimatter and seen it accelerate, and we've created and annihilated antimatter as well; we're certain how its inertial mass behaves, and it's exactly the same as normal matter's inertial mass. Both F = ma and E = mc² work just the same for antimatter as they do for normal matter.

But if we want to know how antimatter behaves gravitationally, we can't just go off of what we theoretically expect; we have to measure it. Fortunately, there's an experiment that's running now which was designed to do exactly that: the ALPHA experiment at CERN.

The ALPHA collaboration has come the closest of any experiment to measuring the behavior of neutral antimatter in a gravitational field. With the upcoming ALPHA-g detector, we might finally know the answer.

MAXIMILIEN BRICE/CERN

One of the great strides that's been taken recently is the creation of not just particles of antimatter, but neutral, stable bound states of it. Anti-protons and positrons (anti-electrons) can be created, slowed down, and forced to interact with each other, where they form neutral anti-hydrogen. By using a combination of electric and magnetic fields, we can confine these anti-atoms and keep them stable, away from the matter that would cause them to annihilate.

We've successfully held them stable for around 20 minutes at a time, far exceeding the microsecond timescales that unstable, fundamental particles survive. We've struck them with photons, discovering that they have the same emission and absorption spectra as atoms. In every way that matters, we've determined that antimatter's properties are exactly as standard physics predicts them to be.

The ALPHA-g detector, built at Canada’s particle accelerator facility, TRIUMF, is the first of its kind designed to measure the effect of gravity on antimatter. When oriented vertically, it should be able to measure which direction antimatter falls, and at what magnitude.

STU SHEPHERD/TRIUMF

Except, of course, gravitationally. The new ALPHA-g detector, built at Canada's TRIUMF facility and shipped to CERN earlier this year, should improve the limits on the gravitational acceleration of antimatter down to the critical threshold. Does antimatter accelerate, in the presence of the gravitational field on the surface of Earth, at +9.8 m/s² (down), at -9.8 m/s²(up), at 0 m/s² (no gravitational acceleration at all), or some other value?

From both a theoretical and an applications perspective, any result other than the expected +9.8 m/s² would be absolutely revolutionary.

If there were some type of matter that had negative gravitational charge, it would be repelled by the matter and energy that we are aware of.

MUU-KARHU OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The antimatter counterpart of every matter particle should have:

the same mass,
the same acceleration in a gravitational field,
the opposite electric charge,
the opposite spin,
the same magnetic properties,
should bind together the same way into atoms, molecules and larger structures,
and should have the same spectrum of positron transitions in those varied configurations.

Some of these have been measured for a long time: antimatter's inertial mass, electric charge, spin and magnetic properties are well-known. Its binding and transitional properties have been measured by other detectors at the ALPHA experiment, and line up with what particle physics predicts.

But if the gravitational acceleration comes back negative instead of positive, it would literally turn the world upside down.

The possibility of having artificial gravity is tantalizing, but it is predicated on the existence of negative gravitational mass. Antimatter may be that mass, but we don't yet know, experimentally.

ROLF LANDUA / CERN

Currently, there is no such thing as a gravitational conductor. On an electrical conductor, free charges live on the surface and can move around, redistributing themselves in response to whatever other charges are around. If you have an electric charge outside an electrical conductor, the inside of the conductor will be shielded from that electric source.

But there's no way to shield yourself from the gravitational force. There's no way to set up a uniform gravitational field in a region of space, either, like you can between the parallel plates of an electrical capacitor. The reason? Because unlike the electric force, which is generated by positive and negative charges, there's only one type of gravitational "charge," and that's mass-and-energy. The gravitational force is always attractive, and there's simply no way around that.

Schematic diagram of a capacitor, where two parallel conducting plates have equal and opposite charges, creating a uniform electric field between them. This configuration is impossible for gravity, unless there's some form of negative gravitational mass.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER PAPA NOVEMBER

But if you have negative gravitational mass, all of that changes. If antimatter actually anti-gravitates, falling up instead of down, then gravity sees it as though it were made of anti-mass or anti-energy. Under the laws of physics that we currently understand, quantities like anti-mass or anti-energy don't exist. We can imagine them and talk about how they would behave, but we expect antimatter to have normal mass and normal energy when it comes to gravity.

If anti-mass does exist, though, then a slew of great technological advances, imagined by science-fiction writers for generations, would suddenly become physically possible.

The Virtual IronBird tool for the CAM (Centrifuge Accommodation Module) is one way to create artificial gravity, but requires a lot of energy and only allows a very specific, center-seeking type of force. True artificial gravity would require something to behave with negative mass.

NASA AMES

We can build a gravitational conductor, and shield ourselves from the gravitational force.

We can set up a gravitational capacitor in space, creating a uniform artificial gravity field.

We could even create warp drive, since we'd gain the ability to deform spacetime in exactly the way that a mathematical solution to General Relativity, discovered by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, requires.

The Alcubierre solution to General Relativity, enabling motion similar to warp drive. This solution requires negative gravitational mass, which could be exactly what antimatter might provide.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER ALLENMCC

It's an incredible possibility, one that's considered wildly unlikely by practically all theoretical physicists. But no matter how wild or tame your theories are, you must absolutely confront them with experimental data; only through measuring the Universe and putting it to the test can you ever accurately determine how the laws of nature work.

Until we measure the gravitational acceleration of antimatter to the precision necessary to determine whether it falls up or down, we must keep ourselves open to the possibility that nature might not behave as we expect. The equivalence principle may not be true for antimatter; it may, in fact, be 100% anti-true. But if that's the case, a whole new world of possibilities will be unlocked. We could change the currently-known limits of what humans can create in the Universe. And we'll learn the answer in just a few years through the simplest of all experiments: putting an anti-atom in a gravitational field, and watching which way it falls.