Dozens of our fellow illuminators have sent us the link to this viral video, and I thought it was time that we here at the Flashlight put our two cents in:
I encourage you to watch the video for yourself, but the long and the short of it is, Belfast filmmaker George Clarke has identified an intriguing bit of behind-the-scenes footage on the DVD for the Charlie Chaplin film “The Circus.” The footage shows a woman at the 1928 premiere of said film speaking into a small handheld device that she’s holding up to her ear, a device that Clarke believes is incontrovertibly a cellular phone. He concludes that there is only one way that this woman could be in possession of a piece of technology that wouldn’t be invented for more than half a century… she must be a time traveler.
Some have suggested that the woman is testing an ear trumpet or some other manner of hearing aid. But the footage does not seem to bear that out. Some savvy skeptics have pointed out that there certainly were no cell towers in 1928. Even allowing for the possibility that a time traveler had brought back with them a piece of future technology, it is their contention that the lack of broadcast towers would have rendered the phone a useless hunk of plastic. On the other hand, a culture that is sufficiently advanced as to have invented time travel could surely have created a two-way communications device which is beyond our current means.
But the prospect that this woman is a time traveler is not what scares us here at the Flashlight. The mere fact that this woman appears to be talking on a cell phone (or some comparable communications device) suggests that there is someone on the other end of the line, which would suggest that this time-travel event was not an isolated incident. The implications of this are obvious: a conspiracy of an unknown number of time travelers, hiding their true identities from the general public, advancing some agenda that we can only guess at. Any number of future-dwellers could be walking in our midst as we speak, pulling on the time stream like so many puppet strings.
In fact, the possibility of time travel has been discounted by many scientists because we have, as of yet, not seen any evidence of it. Because if the technology for time travel is discovered at any point in our future, visitors would have likely already visited some point in our past. The fact that there is no historical record of any such visitors suggests one of two things: either the notion of a time-travel device is nothing but a pipedream, or the world’s timelords (for lack of a better term) have so keenly disguised their presence that they remain, thus far, all but undetected. So the very existence of time travel would be dependent on a conspiracy of silence.
Who this woman is, and what effects she’s had on how many eras of human history we may never know. But know this, Constant Readers: If there is a secret cabal of time-jumping history makers, we at the Flashlight will remain ever vigilant in our attempts to bring their temporal machinations to light.
The Flashlight 