Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories BEST OF 2025: Time-Slipping Through Europe About this episode Every December we step back and reflect on some favorite episodes from the year…today we're declassifying our best of 2025 picks.
This summer we traveled to every continent… and through time. For our second pick, we’re revisiting Time-Slipping Through Europe. Our team is already digging deep into stories we want to tell in 2026, so drop us a suggestion in the Spotify comments or on social.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hi, Carter here, back to declassify my second best of 2025. 2025, big year for fluoride and for us, big year for Antarctica and theater kids. Topics I didn't expect the show to mention multiple times. Our stories span from King Henry VIII to Larry King, diving into MI6 operations, MKUltra secrets, and Miguel and Manuel's mysterious masks. And of course, we ran our big summer series Conspiracy Theories World Tour. We traveled to every continent and through time. For my second pick, we're revisiting time slipping through Europe.
0:45 Speaker 00 Our team is already digging deep into stories we want to tell in 2026, but we would love to hear your ideas for any future series or new deep dives. So drop us a line in the Spotify comments or on social. We really, truly appreciate you all. Thank you so much again for an incredible 2025 and can't wait to see you next year.
1:12 Speaker 00 In 2009, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking threw a party at Cambridge University and nobody came. Maybe it was because he intentionally sent out the invitations after the party was over. Why? It was all part of an experiment. The party he threw was a celebration for time travelers. Theoretically, anybody who unlocks the secret of time travel in the future can go back to 2009 and attend Hawking's get together. But no one showed up, which Hawking took as, quote, "experimental evidence that time travel is not possible."
1:55 Speaker 00 But what if humans have already time traveled? By accident? What if we can move through time? We just have no control over when that happens or what year we visit? What if we can time slip?
2:15 Speaker 00 Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. You can watch our episodes and more on our new YouTube channel at ConspiracyTheoriesPodcast. And check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. This summer, we're jet setting through history on a world tour of mystery and motives. Today, we're stopping on the continent of Europe, specifically England, France, Scotland, and Germany. But when exactly we're stopping?
2:59 Speaker 00 Well, that question is a little harder to answer because our stories today focus on people who've claimed to travel through time involuntarily. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by Petivity. Every cat has a few unsolved mysteries. Why the 3 a.m. Zoomies? What's so fascinating about that one empty box? And at mealtime, are they actually eating differently? Or does it just seem that way? The new Petivity Smart Feeder for cats turns everyday meals into meaningful health insights, helping you identify changes in your cat's habits and be more proactive
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4:59 Speaker 00 Let's say you suddenly time-traveled and found yourself in the same location, but in a different year from the past. How would you be able to tell? Maybe the buildings or trees would look a little off. Clothing on passersby might seem old-fashioned. Perhaps you'd notice everyday items around you are out of date, but they look brand-new. Or maybe you'd get a sickening feeling down in the pit of your stomach telling you, "Something isn't right." That's exactly what happened, supposedly, during the Moberly-Jordaine Incident.
5:43 Speaker 00 In the summer of 1901, Charlotte Ann Elizabeth Moberly looks for a new vice-principal. She's currently 15 years into her tenure as the head of St. Hughes Hall, a prestigious all-women's college in Oxford, England. Moberly comes from a large family of academics, and her contemporaries describe her as "shy, demanding, and quote, incapable of silliness." It's maybe the reason her vice-principals don't stick around for too long, but she thinks she's found a good candidate in Eleanor Francis Jordaine, a seasoned educator with experience running her own private school.
6:26 Speaker 00 Jordaine is charming, but not impulsive, and she's extremely serious when it comes to academics and the arts. And perhaps most important to Moberly, she's loyal. It seems like the two might make a good team. Before they make it official, though, they decide to get to know one another. Jordanne suggests a trip to Paris. She's already renting an apartment there and has barely gotten the chance to explore. It seems like a good opportunity to do some entertaining and impress her future boss. After a few days in Paris, the two women make a day trip to Versailles.
7:07 Speaker 00 Now a tourist destination, it once served as the royal palace to France's kings and queens of years past. That's where the trip takes a turn that will change their lives forever. After viewing the main palace, the women set out to find Petit Trionon, a smaller but still lavish palace commissioned by Louis XV. His successor then gifted it to his queen, Marie Antoinette. Walking the grounds, Moberly and Jordanne don't know exactly how to get there, but they're also in no hurry. The day is overcast, providing some relief from the usual August heat. And besides, they're deep in conversation.
7:52 Speaker 00 When Jordanne accidentally passes the path to the main entrance and turns down a gated trail, well, neither of them notices or really cares. They step through the gate and into a series of strange events. They later recreate this diagram of their route, but for now, they realize they're lost. They stop to get directions from two men whom they refer to as gardeners. And that's because they're standing next to a wheelbarrow and other landscaping tools. Right away, both women notice the gardener's outfits are unusually formal and warm for August.
8:35 Speaker 00 They're wearing long, greenish-gray coats and tricorn hats. But neither woman mentions the odd clothing. Without comment, they follow the gardener's directions farther down the path. As they do, their emotions start to shift without explanation. Moberly later describes feeling despondent, even depressed, while Jordanne likens her own state to walking through a dream. But once again, in the moment, neither mentions anything to the other.
9:11 Speaker 00 Next, they approach a small circular structure ringed by columns with a roof on top. They describe it as a kiosk, but it looks like a bandstand you might see in the middle of a town square. It would be charming, except for what happens next. Everything goes still and silent. The cool breeze disappears. The woods behind the kiosk turn flat, as if they're now painted on a backdrop, and suddenly, they're not alone. A man in an unseasonably heavy black cloak sits by the kiosk, facing the other way.
9:52 Speaker 00 When he turns toward them, both women feel a strong sense of foreboding. Jordane thinks it's almost like he's looking through them. His face is grotesque. They find it hard to describe, but it looks like he's disfigured by smallpox. Moberly and Jordane pause, unsure where to go. That's when they hear footsteps running up behind them. It's another man. He's young and handsome, with long hair worn in an old-fashioned style. He kindly urges them to follow a different path, and then he runs off again, disappearing with uncanny speed.
10:34 Speaker 00 Happy to get away from the man at the kiosk, the women pass over a small bridge. A bit farther along, Moberly sees a woman sketching a landscape. She's properly dressed for summer, although her long, full skirt seems outdated. Finally, they reach the Petite Triennon. When they do, all of the strange feelings they've experienced over the last half hour or so disappear. They go on with their day as if nothing out of the ordinary happened. As weird as the story may sound, everything they experienced came down to a few bizarre details.
11:15 Speaker 00 Moberly estimates their walk took half an hour, a small blip in their busy vacation. They might have never spoken about this strange experience again, except one day about a week later, Moberly writes a letter to her friend recounting her trip to Paris. As she puts her memories to paper, that same oppressive sinking feeling that came over her at Versailles comes back. Jordanne happens to be working in the same room. Moberly turns to her and asks if she thinks the Petite Triennone is haunted. Without hesitation, Jordanne replies, "Yes, I do."
11:59 Speaker 00 Once they start talking about Versailles, Moberly realizes it wasn't just her. Jordanne had all the same unexplained feelings. They'd been through that uncanny ordeal together. And that's pretty much where they leave it for the next three months. Then, one day in November, they decide to separately record their accounts of walking through Versailles. Their stories align almost perfectly, although Jordanne insists she never saw a woman sketching a landscape. Not long after that, Jordanne realizes the day they visited, August 10th, marked a significant
12:43 Speaker 00 anniversary in French history. Back in 1792, during the French Revolution, a mob stormed the Tuileries Palace on that date. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were forced to flee and were later arrested. It marked a major turning point in the revolution. According to one legend, it's also a day that the Petite Triennone, Marie Antoinette's old stomping grounds, is more susceptible to supernatural conditions.
13:18 Speaker 00 The two academics know logically they visited Versailles in the year 1901.
13:26 Speaker 00 But they also think it's possible that the people they saw, and even the buildings and objects around them, were from another time period entirely. They just can't figure out why.
13:42 Speaker 00 They decide to submit their story to the Society for Psychical Research, but it gets rejected. In a way, Moberly understands the rejection. She'd often dismissed other people's strange or supernatural tales. She used to think, if they'd just bothered to do a little research, they'd surely find a viable explanation. So she and Jordane launch an investigation into their own experience, one that lasts nine years. Since she has an apartment in Paris, Jordane makes a few return trips to Versailles and reports back to Moberly. Every time she visits, she tries to retrace their steps from that day,
14:28 Speaker 00 but she can never do it. The area looks too different now. She can't find the kiosk where they saw the scary cloaked man, or the bridge they passed over. The paths, and even the density of the trees around them, look unrecognizable. She's relatively certain the area they walked through together now looks smaller, much smaller. She has no idea how it could have taken them half an hour to get to the Petite Rienonne.
15:01 Speaker 00 She also brings back photographs. One shows the Belvedere, an eight-sided pavilion close to where the kiosk should be. It's smallish and rounded, but they agree, there's no way they could have confused the two structures. Moberly makes her own return trip in 1904 and confirms all of her vice-principal's findings. So, they get serious about researching Versailles during Marie Antoinette's time because they think somehow, some way, they caught a glimpse of the 18th century.
15:42 Speaker 00 They investigate the clothing that was in style and what the gardeners would have worn, concluding it's a close match to what they saw on the grounds during their strange trip. Then they learn the history of the buildings they passed and try to figure out who lived and worked there back in the day. Perhaps they can identify someone they passed as a real historical figure. Turns out, they think they can. Remember the frightening man at the kiosk? Moberly and Jourdain theorize it was a nobleman named Du Voudre. He was one of Marie Antoinette's closest friends, until they had a falling out.
16:25 Speaker 00 As for the woman Moberly saw sketching, Moberly thinks there's a strong chance it was the queen herself, Marie Antoinette. Of course, it's a hard theory to prove. One big focus of their research involves trying to figure out what happened to the kiosk they saw and some of the other landmarks that no longer seem to exist. That might help them pinpoint the year they saw. They seek out experts, maps, architectural plans and notes, looking for old structures that were torn down before 1901. Eventually, they conclude they had seen Versailles as it existed in the years just before Marie
17:10 Speaker 00 Antoinette's idyllic life was upended by the Revolution. They even theorize that what they saw was like an echo of Marie Antoinette's memories, a psychic imprint of her last peaceful days at the Petite Rienonne that became visible in 1911. Moberly and Jourdain publish their research and recollections in a book titled "An Adventure."
17:35 Speaker 00 It's a huge hit, and over the years, revised editions are printed with new research. They sell thousands of copies, gaining both fans and detractors. Some critics even publish their own books, attempting to debunk an adventure. In 1957, an author named Lucille Iremonger claims the women were never trustworthy sources in the first place. She paints Moberly as a superstitious religious zealot and reports that Jordan once held a grudge against a student she allegedly thought had a threatening red aura.
18:19 Speaker 00 By the time Iremonger's book comes out, Moberly and Jordan are both already dead, but the interest in their story still hasn't waned. And get this: the official website of Versailles acknowledges that, decades after an adventure came out, old plans are discovered that seem to back up at least part of their story. They show evidence that a Chinese kiosk stood on the grounds back in 1774, which has long since been taken down, right around the spot where Moberly and Jordan's lost kiosk would have been.
19:03 Speaker 00 Now, some call their experience time travel, others a ghost story, or maybe it's a little bit of both. With time slipping, it seems all bets are off, like in our next story, when a British war hero gets a glimpse of the future, right below his very eyes.
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20:33 Speaker 00 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 and 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 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.
21:18 Speaker 00 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.
21:44 Speaker 00 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 thirty feet 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.
22:27 Speaker 00 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 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,
23:11 Speaker 00 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.
23:35 Speaker 00 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.
24:17 Speaker 00 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,
25:03 Speaker 00 and 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?
25:47 Speaker 00 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.
26:02 Speaker 00 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.
26:44 Speaker 00 He claims the photo shows the face of air mechanic Freddie Jackson, a man who had died three days before the picture 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,
27:26 Speaker 00 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.
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29:09 Speaker 00 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 Cursey, located in Suffolk, a place none of them has ever laid eyes on before. The boys can see rows of smoking chimneys and the imposing stone tower of St. Mary's
29:54 Speaker 00 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.
30:32 Speaker 00 On closer inspection, the leaves have actually shifted from bright fall colors to a vivid green. The moment is reminiscent of Moberly and Jordan'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 notice the buildings around Kersey have changed. The immense tower at Saint Mary's is gone. They don't see it anywhere. The chimneys are still there, but there's no longer smoke coming out.
31:10 Speaker 00 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. Kersey 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.
31:54 Speaker 00 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.
32:22 Speaker 00 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 high-tail it out of Cursey 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 Cursey, 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.
33:04 Speaker 00 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 Cursey Village. All these years later, the two remember how eerily silent it was, and they never forgot the deserted butcher shop with a rotting oxen inside. Lang 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-Jordane story, Lang reaches out to the Society for Psychical
33:47 Speaker 00 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. McKenzie and Lang spend a couple of years writing back and forth about the Cursey incident, and in that time, McKenzie starts compiling research. He learns the village is extremely old. It dates back to at least the 900s. During the Middle Ages, Cursey became the prosperous epicenter of the wool trade. Wood-framed buildings sprang up all over town that were actually still standing when
34:31 Speaker 00 the cadets arrived in 1957. So, parts of Cursey 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,
35:12 Speaker 00 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 Lang and Crowley, something he called "retro-cognition."
35:56 Speaker 00 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. Kersey may have lost about half of its population. Renovations to St. Mary's Church were put on pause,
36:39 Speaker 00 like the building of its tower, which sat unfinished for decades.
36:45 Speaker 00 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 Kersey looks like a medieval town. Many of its current buildings date from the 14th to the 16th centuries. And 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.
37:27 Speaker 00 His research suggests why the boys saw no modern-day telephone wires. They were hidden behind buildings and underground, thanks to the local preservation society. They didn't want some telephone poles ugling up the prettiest village in Suffolk. Dash also points out that nothing became of the story until Lang 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.
38:09 Speaker 00 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.
38:53 Speaker 00 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.
39:37 Speaker 00 Right afterward, he realized the bookstore where he'd 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.
40:20 Speaker 00 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. Okay, 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 witnessed these events believe they're real, but they're actually experiencing tricks of the mind. Dr. Kieran O'Keefe, a professor and investigative parapsychologist,
41:05 Speaker 00 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-s slipping claims, the fact is, there's so much we don't know about the nature of time and how it works.
41:49 Speaker 00 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 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 difference, you'd have to be going really,
42:31 Speaker 00 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.
43:16 Speaker 00 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. And that's why he threw the "time travelers" party, the one where nobody showed up.
44:01 Speaker 00 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.
44:47 Speaker 00 Thank you for watching Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram @TheConspiracyPod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Amongst the many sources we used, we found Moberly and Jordan'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.
45:29 Speaker 00 This episode was researched and written by Mickey Taylor, edited by Connor Sampson, engineered by Sam Amesqua, 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.
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