Some people have come to believe that time travel is real thanks to creepy footage from 1938.
Watch the eerie footage below:
The video, which was uploaded to YouTube by user ScoopView, features people approaching the camera in black and white.
One of the individuals, a young woman, appears to be speaking while cradling something close to her ear. She lowers her hand as the video comes to a close, flashing the device at the camera, revealing that it is remarkably similar to a current phone.
Conspiracy theorists claim that she can be seen talking on a cell phone, a device that would not be created for several years. “Time Traveler in 1938 film spotted chatting on a cell phone in 1938 [coming] out of a Dupont Factory in Massachusetts,” the YouTuber wrote in the description of the video.
This notion was absurd enough on its own, but according to reports, a YouTube user going by the moniker of Planetcheck made the clip even stranger by identifying who the woman was.
According to The Mirror, the user reacted revealing that she was his great-grandmother and that at the time, industrial juggernaut Dupont was developing an experimental mobile phone.
“The lady you see is my great-grandmother Gertrude Jones,” they said.
“She was 17 years old. I asked her about this video and she remembers it quite clearly. She says Dupont had a telephone communications section in the factory,” Planetcheck continued.
“They were experimenting with wireless telephones. Gertrude and five other women were given these wireless phones to test out for a week. Gertrude is talking to one of the scientists holding another wireless phone who is off to her right as she walks by,” they added.
(However, a second YouTuber who questioned whether the woman was a time traveller also published the tape and stated that it was shot in 1938 at the Massena New York Aluminum Company of America.)
There is no way to confirm Platcheck’s assertions or even to be certain that the woman in the video is speaking on a phone, despite the fact that it may be alluring to accept this crazy scenario.
The woman was just as likely to be clutching a handkerchief as a phone, according to internet theory analyst David Mikkelson, who spoke to The Huffington Post.
“You can take any piece of WWII footage showing someone holding something to the side of their head talking, and claim it is a time-traveling cell phone user,” Mikkelson said. “Film clips aren’t of sufficient resolution to see what the people are carrying.
“It could be anything from a handkerchief to a hearing aid, or who knows what. And this video is silent, so you can’t even tell if the person is engaged in a two-way conversation,” he added.
Mikkelson’s hypothesis appears to be in line with many of the comments on the YouTube video, where several commenters speculated that the object held by the woman might be a “prototype radio receiver” or “hearing aid.”
As one commenter puts it, “If it actually was a phone, I would be more curious about how she managed to receive a signal from a non-existent network provider.”
Then again, I suppose we can’t predict what future cell phones will look like.
Featured Image Credit: YouTube (various sources)
