7 People Who Claimed To Be Time Travelers

A few years back a man named Alexander Smith claimed that he once travelled to the year 2118 as part of a top secret CIA mission.

As with all top secret CIA missions, Smith was able to share its details in a 20-minute YouTube video uploaded to ApexTV, in which he fielded a number of viewer questions on subjects including alien invasion, global warming, and artificial intelligence.

Ordinarily, you'd dismiss stories such as this one as a cautionary tale of the dangers of dabbling in hard drugs - but Smith, to his credit, was not without evidence to support his outlandish claim. He actually produced a photograph of a futuristic cityscape (which, by coincidence, looked not dissimilar to those depicted in Blade Runner).

Granted, it's probably going to take more than this to make believers of the skeptics. After Back to the Future Part II, bringing back anything less than a sports almanac and a hoverboard is always going to seem like you're not really trying.

But, at the very least, you have to concede that it's kind of intriguing. We've been fascinated by tales of alleged time travel since the moment the idea was conceived of by writers of science fiction - and one or two of them seem halfway plausible if you are prepared to disregard so-called "facts" and "logic".

Seven years ago, a filmmaker from Northern Ireland by the name of George Clarke claimed that he had discovered evidence for time travel in the DVD extras of The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie released in 1928.

The clip he uploaded to YouTube - taken from a video of the film's premiere in Los Angeles - purports to show a woman speaking into a small, black device held up to the side of her head like one would a mobile phone.

How and to whom she would have been communicating with is anyone's guess. Needless to say, they didn't have any service carriers in the 1920s, and even if they did, this woman, whomever she was, would have been the only person to actually own a mobile.

It also seems slightly odd that she should have used the device so brazenly in such a public setting. This is perhaps a sign that, at some point in the future, time travel is no longer the preserve of shadowy government agencies but instead completely open to any member of the general public with enough money. A terrifying thought.