10 Most Compelling Pieces Of Evidence That Prove Time Travel Exists

9. The Moberly-Jourdain Incident

Moberley Jordain Incident
Wikimedia Commons

Not that all the evidence of time travel is contemporary, mind you. That wouldn't really make sense. It is time travel, after all, so presumably it's been occurring for decades. Or will be. Again, the whole thing messes with our tenses. One of the oldest and most confusing, unexplained stories about travelling through time comes from a small château located on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in France.

During the evening of 10th August, 1901, a couple of academics found themselves untethered from history and hanging out with Marie Antoinette - no word on whether they chowed done on some cake with her or not. They were probably busy being freaked out that they were hanging with a lady who died a century beforehand.

Unfamiliar with the Versailles area, the well-traveled Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain decided they would swing by and check out the Petit Trianon. They ended up getting lost and more than a little confused, as they passed by an abandoned farmhouse and a woman waving a white cloth out of a window, reporting that a feeling of oppression and dreariness began to come over them. We get that when we're lost, too. Usually we're lost geographically, rather than historically, however.

Moberly and Jourdain ended up stumbling across groups of people wearing old-timey clothes, a dude suffering from smallpox, and somebody they thought to be Marie Antoinette herself. "Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant," Jourdain later wrote. "Even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees." The pair published a pseudonymous book about their time slip, which ended when they returned to their rented apartment. They were widely mocked for what many thought to be a hoax, or hallucination, whilst others suggested they were encountering ghosts. Outside of a mistake or something else supernatural, however, nobody's given a better explanation than that these two old dears had accidentally traveled through time.

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Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/