Carter Roy (18:56)
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why Lifelock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off. Terms apply. We're now taking off. In 1935, Victor Goddard is already a seasoned war veteran. He fought in World War I for the Royal Navy service in the Royal Air Force or raf. During these interwar years, he's become a wing commander. Outside of work, Goddard enjoys golfing. So he flies himself in a two seater airplane to Scotland to play a few rounds. While he's there, he takes a short drive to visit Drem Air Airfield. He's curious if next time he plans to golf, he can just land here. Closer to the course, he can see right away it's fallen into too much disrepair to use as a landing strip. Drem had been used as a training base throughout World War I, but ever since, the land it sits on has been reclaimed for agricultural use. The old tarmac has become a pasture and the decrepit hangars that once housed warplanes are now glorified barns. They're occupied by cows, chickens and farming equipment. It's clearly a no go. The next day, Goddard is flying back home when he gets caught in a storm. Thick gray clouds and intense rain obscure his path and he knows he's probably a few miles off course. So he dips lower, flying just three 30ft or so over sparsely populated farmland to get a better view. He's looking for Drem. If he can find the old airfield he just visited, he'll be able to course correct. Moments later, he spots it off in the distance. As he approaches, though, the storm comes to an abrupt stop. Out of nowhere, the airfield lights up. It's so bright, he thinks the light source could only be the sun. Not too difficult to imagine. But the next change he notices is downright bizarre. The dilapidated spot he saw just yesterday is replaced by a restored airfield. The overgrown pasture is now trimmed and tidied. The tarmac is is freshly paved and the hangars have been returned to their former glory. Drem Airfield is actually back in operation. Goddard spots five planes. Three biplanes with their two wings stacked on top of one another, and two monoplanes with single wings that look a little something like this. All of them are painted yellow, so it's likely they're in use as training aircraft. Flying at such a low altitude, he can also see two mechanics in blue overalls wheeling out one of these monoplanes. Out of the whole inexplicable scene below him, two details stand out to Goddard. One, he's never seen monoplanes of this particular design before, and he can't recall any monoplanes being used for training. Two, as he flies over the airfield, the mechanics never look up at him. It's as if they're totally unaware of his presence. Beyond the airfield, the rainstorm picks back up. Goddard climbs above the clouds to a safer cruising altitude because now he's got his bearings, but he has no idea what he's just seen. After he gets home, he tells this story to a colleague who jokes that Goddard might have had a little too much whiskey. The second person he tells doesn't even acknowledge his strange tale. So he resolves not to talk about it for years out of fear that it will make him seem unfit for duty until 1939. It's the year World War II formally begins and the year that Goddard realizes the unexplained visions he saw four years earlier have all become reality. By now, Drem Airfield has been renovated and reopened as a training school in a monoplane called the Miles Magister, or Maggie, is now in use. According to Goddard, it's the exact design he spotted on his strange flight. He says the overalls worn by airmen have even changed and they now match the ones he saw those two mechanics wearing. It's a sobering realization, not just because Goddard thinks it's possible he saw the Future Somehow in 1935, he saw the airfield as it would later exist, around 1939. But also he grapples with what this means for humankind's free will. He wonders, do the fatalists have it right? Is everything preordained? And if not, then was he somehow chosen to have that vision of the future? Ultimately, he doesn't come up with a good answer. Although he decides not to lose faith in free will over time, Goddard becomes a staunch believer in paranormal phenomena. He gives lectures and writes about his experiences. Today, he's often associated with this photograph, which purports to show a ghost caught on camera. Now, there are some inaccuracies out there about this ghost story, but here's what he writes. In his book Flight Towards Reality, Goddard recounts an anecdote he got from a friend about a large group photograph of military personnel. It was taken around the time of the World War I armistice in 1918. He claims the photo shows the face of air mechanic Freddy Jackson, a man who had died three days before the picture was was taken. In later years, Goddard allegedly has another encounter with a vision of the future. One that possibly saves him from dying in a plane crash. He's also largely remembered as a hero. Goddard goes on to play an instrumental role for the RAF in World War II. According to his obituary in the Independent, he helps to pull off the Dunkirk evacuation, serves as the Chief of Air Staff in New Zealand, and in 1943, he's knighted sir Goddard is made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, one of Britain's most senior orders of chivalry, which makes him perhaps the most decorated person ever to claim he experienced a time slip. But he's not the only service member to find himself in a place that seems eerily out of time. Coming up, two cadets go on a routine mission and come back feeling changed. The summer is heating up with Marvel Studios. The Fantastic Four. Line em Up Johnny Woo this Friday. Time to save the planet. What's the plan? Trust me, I hate that. Bad plan. Come on. Terrible. That's a stupid plan. Prepare for Fantastic. We will face this together as a family. Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four First Steps only. Theaters Friday. Rate PG13 some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. Get tickets now. Rated T for Teen each year, thousands of adults lose their shred. It's an epidemic simply known as shred loss. But it doesn't have to be this way, because rekindling your shred is as easy as playing the new Tony hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4. With new parks, cross platform multiplayer and sick new game modes, we can put an end to shred loss everywhere. Hit the new Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4 and show the world that the shred's not dead. Get Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4 available now. In 1957, three 15 year old boys traipse through the English countryside. William Bill Lang, Michael Crowley and Ray Baker just joined the Royal Navy and the cadets are in the middle of a miles long training mission. Follow the map, spot the checkpoint and report back to base camp. On this clear October morning, BIRDS sing as the cadets march up a steep hill. They find themselves overlooking the quaint village of Kersey, located in Suffolk, a place none of them has ever laid eyes on before. The boys can see rows of smoking chimneys in the imposing stone tower of St. Mary's Church. Its loud bells seem to mark their arrival. They press onward to their destination. And as they descend the hill, two of the boys grow uneasy. Lang and Crowley notice the noise all around them cuts out. The church bells and birdsong are replaced with dull silence. The only noise they can make out is a stream flowing nearby. That's when they realize the town looks weird too. The ducks over by the water don't seem to be moving. Even the trees, which were just rippling in the breeze, appear motionless. On closer inspection, the leaves have actually shifted from bright fall colors to a vivid green. The moment is reminiscent of Moberly and Jourdain's alleged time slip in Versailles. Just like in that account, Bill Lang, one of the cadets, reports feeling overcome with sadness. And he and Crowley noticed the buildings around Kersey have changed. The immense tower at St. Mary's is gone. They don't see it anywhere. The chimneys are still there, but there's no longer smoke coming out. All around them they see wood framed buildings like something out of a movie set during the Middle Ages. Entering the village, they realize the place has no signs of modern conveniences either, like street lamps, TV antennas or telephone poles. Also missing. The villagers Kersee appears to be deserted, but strangely enough, the cadets get a sense that they're being watched. On one road, they stop and peek through a window. It's dirty and hard to see through, but they can make out what appears to be a butcher shop. Only it's not like any butcher shop the boys have seen. There are no counters, no display case stocked with meat, no cash register. There are no employees or even customers. The shop is practically empty except for two or three whole oxen skinned that have been sitting there for so long they've spoiled. The cadets peer inside another building. It too has small, grimy windowpanes and looks deserted inside. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and the boys don't stick around long enough to figure out what's going on. They hightail it out of Kersey and back up the hill, never pausing until they reach the top. When they finally turn around, everything seems back to normal. The church tower and chimney smoke have reappeared. The cadets make it back to base camp with their mission successfully completed. They found the village of Kersee. But when Lang and Crowley try to talk about how mysterious the trip was, their superiors brush off their story with a laugh. And so decades pass before the story resurfaces. Now it's the late 1980s. Lang and Crowley have both grown up and moved to Australia. One day they're catching up over the phone when the conversation turns to Kersey village. All these years later, the two remember how eerily silent it was. And they never forgot the deserted butcher shop with the rotting oxen inside. Lange recounts more details of that day, many of which Crowley has forgotten over time. But he always had the sense that something odd happened to them that day. Back in 1957. Again mirroring the Moberly Jourdain story, Lang reaches out to the Society for Psychical Research. And he's actually successful. He gets the attention of Andrew McKenzie, a longtime member of the organization with years of experience investigating psychical claims. Especially ghost sightings. Mackenzie and Lang spend a couple of years writing back and forth about the Kersee incident, and in that time, Mackenzie starts compiling research. He learns the village is extremely old. It dates back to at least the nine hundreds. During the Middle Ages, Kersey became the prosperous epicenter of the wool trade. Wood framed buildings sprang up all over town that were actually still standing when the cadets arrived in 1957. So parts of Kersey still look medieval, which could logically explain why Lang and Crowley thought they might have entered a different time period. Mackenzie, however, thinks something else happened in 1990. He travels to Kersey to see it for himself. Lang even flies in to meet him, all the way from Australia. Together they walk the streets, and Lang points out where he and Crowley saw the butcher shop. To Mackenzie, it's incredible, because nowadays the building is a private residence, and it had been a private residence back in 1957 when the boys first saw it. But Mackenzie learns something he finds mind blowing. That same building was actually registered as a butcher shop from about 1790 to 1905. And the place itself is much older. It's been there since the mid 14th century. MacKenzie theorizes it could have been in the butcher trade since around that time. At the conclusion of his investigation, Mackenzie thinks he's finally found an answer for what happened to Lange and Crowley, something he called retrocognition. It's a term in parapsychology that describes seeing a past event take place in front of you as if it's happening right now in the present. In a sense, time slipping. The whole event has come to be known as the Kersey time slip. He even thinks he knows why the village appeared deserted and why the church tower disappeared. Mackenzie suggests the cadets had seen Kersey in the year 1420 or thereabouts. In those years, the village, like much of Europe, had been devastated by the Black Death. Kersee may have lost about half of its population. Renovations to St. Mary's Church were put on pause, like the building of its tower, which sat unfinished for decades. Mackenzie thinks the boys traveled to Kersey during this specific time. In the stillness of the plague's aftermath, skeptics have other explanations. They say it's hard to ignore the fact that modern Kersee looks like a medieval town. Many of its current buildings date from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Then there's the fact that the third cadet present that day, Ray Baker, apparently did not remember anything strange about the trip to Kersey. Writing for Smithsonian magazine, journalist and historian Mike Dash offers even more analysis. His research suggests why the boys saw no modern day telephone wires. They were hidden behind buildings and under underground, thanks to the local preservation society. They didn't want some telephone poles ugling up the prettiest village in Suffolk. Dasch also points out that nothing became of the story until Lange and Crowley shared their memories 30 years later, when time could have altered some of the details. So far, we've covered just three instances of alleged time slips. If you look at all the stories out there, it's hard not to notice so many of them happened in Europe. There's another report from Germany. In 1932, two journalists were working on a story in Hamburg that took them to the shipyards when out of nowhere, bombs began dropping from the sky. They made a run for it, snapping photographs as they got away. When they developed the photos, nothing looked amiss. There was no evidence of the bombing they thought they'd just captured on camera. Eleven years later, in the midst of World War II, one of those journalists opened the newspaper and saw a report of a bombing at the same shipyards. It was precisely as he'd witnessed it years before the outbreak of the war. He got the sinking feeling he and his colleague had time slipped to the future. And there are actually a series of reports from multiple witnesses, all concentrated along Bold street in Liverpool, England. The area is a popular shopping destination right in the middle of the city, and supposedly it's a hotspot for time slips. One of the most popular accounts concerns a police officer, Frank, who traveled there with his wife for some retail therapy. While she went off to browse the bookstore, Frank popped over to another street. When he returned, he walked through a part of Bold street that seemed too quiet. Right afterward, he realized the bookstore where he had left his wife had vanished. The building was still there, but in its place was a department store, and it looked like something out of the 1950s. The busy street was still heavily populated, but Frank realized everybody was wearing clothing that went out of style 40 years ago. As he entered the department store, though, it changed back into the bookstore. He reunited with his wife and everything went back to normal. At this point, you might guess what happened next. Frank later learned that the bookstore used to be a department store back in the 50s. Some say the Bold street time slips are urban legends, and some of the accounts like Frank's probably are. But that doesn't change the fact that so many people claim it's happened to them too. Ok, so let's assume for a moment that some or all of these claims are real. How could time slips theoretically happen? Some experts say there is a rational explanation and it doesn't involve physics. It has to do with psychology, meaning people who witness these events believe they're real, but they're actually experiencing tricks of the mind. Dr. Kieran O', Keefe, a professor and investigative parapsychologist, says time slips can be explained through natural errors in thinking. Situations like tiredness or conflating daydreams with reality could provide a rational explanation for what seem to be time slips, or cognitive bias could be to blame. Dr. O' Keefe says you might see a woman randomly wearing a period costume. She appears out of place, so your brain starts looking for other details that seem out of place. It doesn't necessarily mean that you time traveled. No matter what you think about the credibility of these time slipping claims, the fact is there's so much we don't know about the nature of time and how it works. We can't say for certain that time travel isn't possible, or that it will never be possible. Scientists can already explain hypothetical time travel to the the future. Right now, we are moving forward in time at the rate of 1 second per second. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, that rate can change based on extreme gravity or very high speeds. This effect is known as time dilation, where time itself can effectively stretch or slow down for an observer under the right conditions. You might have seen it in sci fi movies like Interstellar or Flight of the Navigator. But for time dilation to cause a significant, significant difference, you'd have to be going really, really fast, close to the speed of light, or experience a dangerously strong gravitational field. And it seems safe to say that's not what happened in the time slip cases we're discussing. To explain those cases, we have to turn to some time travel theories that are still unproven, like the closed time like curve. In this hypothetical situation, gravity causes a part of spacetime to curve so much that it loops in on itself. It would allow you to move forward in time as usual, but end up somewhere in the past. Another theory suggests there are wormholes, Essentially shortcuts from one point in spacetime to another. But there are major roadblocks to time travel that make it unlikely. Even if we could stabilize a wormhole, A human body almost certainly could not move through it because it would be way too small. Stephen Hawking knew these scenarios all rely on our current understanding of gravity as described by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Basically, high concentrations of mass and energy cause spacetime to curve, and that's how we get gravity. But Hawking also knew that science changes with new breakthroughs, and our understanding of these concepts could evolve. That's why he threw the time travelers party, the one where nobody showed up. Discover magazine offers some takeaways from Hawking's experiment. Maybe it does mean that we never figure out how to time travel intentionally to a specific year. Or maybe we do. But time travel to the past is heavily regulated by some future government agency. It might even be prohibited because it can result in dangerous paradoxes and other timeline changes. The time slipping cases we've covered today offer another theory. Perhaps we can only time travel when and if the universe dictates it. Thank you for watching Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram heconspiracypod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Amongst the many sources we used, we found Moberly and Jourdain's An Adventure, Victor Goddard's Flight Towards Reality, and Mike Dash's article When Three British Boys Traveled to Medieval England. Or Did They? For Smithsonian Magazine. Extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. This Episode this episode was researched and written by Miki Taylor, edited by Connor Sampson, engineered by Sam Mezqua, and video edited and sound designed by Ryan Contra. Special thanks to Nick Johnson, Paige Ransberry, Andrew Byrne and Jonathan Ratliff. I'm your host, Carter Roy. Mama Papa Mikorpo Crese bajos de la vuelta Classes Amazon Amazon Gastamenos Sonrimas.
