Welcome to this month’s Time Travel Nexus Investigates! At TTNI, we’re playing detective, hunting the TTTs (time-travelling tourists), and attempting to solve some much-talked-about cases of real-life time travel.
So… did a TTT pay a visit to a country estate in Yorkshire, England in 1924?
Origin of the claim
In 2014, a photograph was posted on Instagram and immediately attracted the attention of the world’s media. Some cried “special effects trickery” and “hoax”, while others cried “time travel”. Dubbed the “time travelling water bottle”, it has since become one of the most significant time travel urban legends of the digital era.
Analysis of the photo by experts confirms that it is authentic and has not been tampered with. It is considered by some to be the best evidence there is that time-travelling tourists are real.
Nature of the claim
The photo is a portrait of Robert Crawley, 7th Earl of Grantham, and his daughter, Lady Edith Crawley. It was taken in 1924 at the Crawleys’ grand country estate, Downton Abbey, which is located on the outskirts of Downton, Yorkshire.
In the photo, shown below, the Earl and Lady Edith are standing in front of one of their home’s lavish fireplaces. Look closely and you’ll notice that there’s something out of place. On the mantelpiece, next to an ornate vase, is a very modern-looking plastic water bottle.
Plastic bottles were not in wide use in the UK until the 1960s. That’s nearly four decades after this photo was taken. Paranormal researchers believe that the bottle was left behind by a TTT exploring the house to see how our aristocracy used to live.
Stephen Hawking once asked, “If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” Paranormal researchers argue that the photo of the Crawleys is Hawking’s answer. They’re here. Just like the Charlie Chaplin Time Traveller, the Time Travelling Hipster (which I’ll be covering in a future article), the TTTs are cruising through history, leaving artifacts for us to find. (In my last article, I looked at another of these artifacts, the Antikythera mechanism.)
Paranormal expert Prof. Alid Loyas says, “The fact that it is a water bottle conjures up images of a time-travelling backpacker, a sightseer, touring the past.”
Alternatively, author Daisy O’Farllop says, “For all we know, skipping backwards and forwards in time uses up the body’s water, so time travellers have to bring bottles of water to stay hydrated. That’s total speculation, of course. Then again, none of us has any idea what form time travel will take when it is invented.”
The evidence
Careful analysis of the photo and reflections on the water bottle shows that it was not inserted digitally; it was actually there on the mantelpiece when Crawley and his daughter were photographed. It’s a wonder nobody noticed it at the time. And where did it go? Did the time traveller come back for it?
If the photo and the plastic bottle are real, which the experts say they are, then we’re left in a quandary. The scientific community is refusing to concede that time travel is responsible, but cannot offer an alternative explanation.
When the photo hit the internet and got tongues wagging globally, one person tweeted, “Obviously the Crawley family invented the water bottle, and that’s how they were able to support the estate.” This caused Violet Watson, great-granddaughter of Robert Crawley, to personally weigh in. She told the Guardian newspaper, “I cannot tell you how this mysterious water bottle made its way into one of my family’s portraits. There is no reference to the bottle or its owner in my family’s records. What I can confirm that the Crawley family did not invent the plastic water bottle. If we had, why would we have kept it a secret for nearly 40 years?”
What’s interesting is that the plastic bottle is just one of several anachronisms witnesses have spotted in old images of the Downton estate and its vicinity. One witness claims to have seen images from the 1920s of a nearby house with a TV aerial, decades before TVs were invented. Apparently there are also 1920s pictures showing modern street signs and double yellow lines on roads before we had them.
While I haven’t been able to track down these images or verify these claims, the multiplicity of them does suggest that something rather untoward was going on in Downton in the 1920s. I wonder if the truth is more complicated that a single TTT doing a bit of sightseeing at an aristocratic country house. I wonder if Downton is situated on a fissure in the space-time continuum, which is causing future objects to ‘slip through’ to the 1920s or become visible somehow during that time.
Conclusions
I can’t say how true the other claims are, but to me, the plastic bottle is indisputable evidence that time travel does, in fact, exist. Or will exist. I can’t profess to know how the bottle ended up in the Crawleys’ portrait, but the fact remains that it is there, decades before such bottles existed.
The pieces of a jigsaw are coming together. What the picture will look like, only time will tell (no pun intended).
Case: OPEN.
Next month: did time travellers touch down in the Rendlesham Forest?
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