Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that you’ve already listened to.

I’m your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I’m Shea, and this week I learned that Easter Bunnies are hollow to represent God’s promises.

Round Table

I dunno, give money to WyoAIDS.

This Week’s Beer

• Junior Astronaut Juice: Double Dry-hopped IPA.


• https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/36739/364677/

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The Great Dick-ceaver

Over the years astute listeners will have noticed that Shea and I occasionally watch Dr. Who.

As long as by occasionally you mean “all of” and by watching you mean “get tattoos.”

So how could I resist when I stumbled across a collection of stories from way back to nearly now of people who claim to be time travelers?

This story is going to be a little different than what we usually do. Normally, we do one long story with a bit of research. We’ve deviated from that a few times, like the Funny and Unusual Deaths episode, and this week I’m doing a similar thing with a collection of short stories.

Enjoy all the Dr. Who and Terminator jokes that are about to happen.

Speaking of The TheAter!, we should begin with Chaplin’s Time Traveller, and YouTube.

In October of 2010, Northern Irish filmmaker George Clarke — producer of award-winning, $200, zombie movies — uploaded a video onto YouTube. It was a clip of a DVD extra (well, bonus footage) from the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s film, The Circus. In the clip, you can see what appears to be a woman on a cell phone — something of an accomplishment in 1928. The footage is from outside the Manns Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

But even if the phone is from the future, who does it get a signal? Talk about roaming fees…

If you look at your phones now, you’ll see the jpg I’ve embedded anyway. The woman is on the right by the “zebra’s” nose. I’m not sure this constitutes evidence but I am sure that Steven Moffat can make it stupid.

From Mr. Clark:

‘I have studied this film for over a year now – showing it to over 100 people and at a film festival, yet no one can give any explanation as to what she is doing. My only theory – as well as many others – is simple… a time traveler on a mobile phone. See for yourself and feel free to leave a comment on your own explanation or thoughts about it.’

To that, the internet at large has another theory: Mr. Clark is full of shit. Remember, he’s a filmmaker and… not a popular one. A viral ghost hoax is a good way to drum up some attention and sure enough, this went viral. The Daily Mail ran a story that was “just asking the question,” the Telegraph, Vulture, and HuffPo did the same thing. CBS, ABC, and the BBC ran slightly more critical stories but were just in it for the slow-news-day-lolz. Even Know Your Meme has a write-up. The Atlantic, at least, called their article a debunking.

Following the YouTube sensation, Clark made like 3 more, cheap-ass, handy-cam horror movies, and then, I assume, The TVA got him.

When shown to people who know what the fuck they’re talking about, the answer is pretty straightforward. From the Atlantic, there most probably explanation is a portable hearing aid, a new and bulk technology. Philip Skroska, an archivist at the Bernard Becker Medical Library of Washington University in St. Louis, thought that the woman might have been holding a rectangular ear trumpet. A few more folks chime in, but the answer always seems to be “hearing aid.”

• https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1324132/Time-traveller-woman-mobile-phone-1928-Charlie-Chaplin-film.html


• https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/charlie-chaplins-time-traveler


• https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/charlie-chaplins-time-traveler


• https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/debunking-the-charlie-chaplin-time-travel-video/65486/

Story 2: Hipsters In Time and Space

If you look at your phones now you’ll see a photo of Hipster McGee palling it up with one ye-oldie old guy.

Looks like every asshole who tells you about how they’re gonna be the next Elon Musk right before asking you for a fiver and weed

The photo is authentic. Our hipster is on the right, the guy wearing Oakleys and a screen-printed T. The image is courtesy of the Bralorne Pioneer Museum in Gold Bridge, British Columbia, from their “Their Past Lives Here” exhibit.

It was taken at the re-opening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia in 1941. The allegations are, essentially, that he’s wearing modern clothing.

If he is a time traveler, it begs the question: of all of time and space, everything that ever was or will be, you chose to start at a bridge re-opening in 1940s BC? Really?

The trick to debunking this claim is remembering that fashion is cyclical. And if you don’t believe me go look at some pictures of your parents in the 80s and then cry yourself to sleep in your cool new Fonsey cosplay.

So what’s up with Cool Hand Chad here? Well, for one the glasses you see him wearing look kinda MIB, kinda Oakley was first made in the 1920s. The T-Shirt that looks like a screen-printed band shirt is actually, upon closer inspection, a hand-stitched hockey jersey that looks an awful lot like the ye-oldie, 1924 – 1938, logo for the Montreal Maroons.

What many online, super credulous, super sleuths, say is the clincher is the camera he appears to be holding. Now, we all know that in the 1940s everything was made out of lead and gumption so having a camera that small must mean it’s from the future. Except that Kodak made the popular Kodak 35, the quintessential, 35mm, tourist camera. If you’ve seen a period movie or show where any character takes a picture, it’s with this camera.

The only real debate here seems to be how this hoser got into the frame with all these other fine, upstanding, suits.

• https://www.communitystories.ca/v1/pm_v2.php?id=record_detail&fl=0&lg=English&ex=00000470&rd=117666#


• https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/time-traveling-hipster


• https://issuu.com/photoedmagazine/docs/photoed_spring_18_digital_issuu/s/10369985


• https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/time-traveling-hipster/

Fritzy Fentz

Our next story is an urban legend of sorts. Or, at least, that’s the explanation.

The story of Rudolph Fentz is right out of Torchwood’s archive. We begin around 11:15 pm on a warm, mid-June night in 1951. Passers-by in New York’s Times Square was suddenly aware of a man who, to everyone’s recollection, wasn’t there but a moment ago. Further, he was described as appearing confused and, probably the reason everyone remembered seeing him, he was confused… while standing in the intersection when he was quickly struck by a taxi and killed.

Officials searched his body and found:

• A copper token for a beer at an unknown saloon,


• A bill for the care of a horse at a long-gone Lexington Ave stable,


• $70 in old banknotes,


• A business card with “Rudolph Fentz” on it,


• A letter to the address on his business card, sent in June of 1876, from Philadelphia,


• And a medal for coming in 3rd in a three-legged race.

The odd part was that all the items appeared as new. For collectibles, that’s one thing, but for the rubbish in a dead man’s pockets, it’s quite another.

Through an amount of detective work, Captain Hubert V. Rihm of the Missing Persons Department of NYPD found Rudolph Fentz Jr… in an old phone book from 1939.

While Jr. had passed four years earlier his widow confirmed to Rihm that her husband’s father (Rudolph Fentz) had disappeared in 1876, aged 29, without a trace, never to be seen again.

Dun dun dunnnnnn! If that ain’t some Cardiff Rift stuff I don’t know what is.

Captain Rihm then checked missing persons from 1876, which they just had laying around, and found that the dead man’s description, clothing, and possessions matched exactly to the missing Fentz. The only conclusion is that he was yeeted out of the 1800s by forces beyond our imaginings, to his tragic death in the 1950s. However, fearing he would appear incompetent, Rihm noted his findings officially and the case remained unsolved.

Storie of the Times Squire Time Traveler is told to this day… because that’s how novels work.

What is now an urban legend with just enough detail to seem plausible is a science fiction short story by Jack Finney published in Collier’s magazine on Sept. 15th, 1951, called “I’m Scared.” In which a 19th-century-looking young man with a handful of pocket junk is found dead in contemporary Times