Time Travel: The Science and Science Fiction

ISBN-13: 9781578597239

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Visible Ink Press

Publication Date: 10-05-2021

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

Series: Real Unexplained! Collection

Nick Redfern works full time as an author, lecturer, and journalist. He writes about a wide range of unsolved mysteries, including UFOs, alien encounters, government conspiracies, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster. His many books include Visible Ink Press’ The Bigfoot Book: The Encyclopedia of Sasquatch, Yeti, and Cryptid Primates; Area 51: The Revealing Truth of UFOs, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies; The Alien Book: A Guide to Extraterrestrial Beings on Earth; Secret History: Conspiracies from Ancient Aliens to the New World Order; Cover-Ups & Secrets: The Complete Guide to Government Conspiracies, Manipulations & Deceptions; The Monster Book: Creatures, Beasts, and Fiends of Nature; and Monsters of the Deep. He has appeared on numerous television shows, including History Channel’s Monster Quest and UFO Hunters; VH1’s Legend Hunters; National Geographic Channel’s The Truth about UFOs and Paranatural; BBC’s Out of this World; MSNBC’s Countdown; and SyFy Channel’s Proof Positive. Nick lives just a few miles from Dallas, Texas’ infamous Grassy Knoll.

Read an Excerpt

Doppelgängers and Multiple Timelines

Ever heard of “doppelgängers”? You’re about to. We’re talking about exact doubles of ourselves and how these tie in with the matter of time travel—specifically in relation to the previously discussed controversy surrounding time lines. The Britannica website says that the doppelgänger is, “in German folklore, a wraith or apparition of a living person, as distinguished from a ghost. The concept of the existence of a spirit double, an exact but usually invisible replica of every man, bird, or beast, is an ancient and widespread belief. To meet one’s double is a sign that one’s death is imminent. The doppelgänger became a popular symbol of horror literature, and the theme took on considerable complexity. In The Double (1846), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example, a poor clerk, Golyadkin, driven to madness by poverty and unrequited love, beholds his own wraith, who succeeds in everything at which Golyadkin has failed. Finally the wraith succeeds in disposing of his original.”

The BBC has addressed this issue, too: “Folk wisdom has it that everyone has a doppelgänger; somewhere out there there’s a perfect duplicate of you, with your mother’s eyes, your father’s nose and that annoying mole you’ve always meant to have removed. The notion has gripped the popular imagination for millennia—it was the subject of one of the oldest known works of literature—inspiring the work of poets and scaring queens to death.

“But is there any truth in it? We live on a planet of over seven billion people, so surely someone else is bound to have been born with your face? It’s a silly question with serious implications—and the answer is more complicated than you might think.

“In fact until recently no one had ever even tried to find out. Then last year Teghan Lucas set out to test the risk of mistaking an innocent double for a killer.

“Armed with a public collection of photographs of U.S. military personnel and the help of colleagues from the Universityof Adelaide, Teghan painstakingly analyzed the faces of nearly four thousand individuals, measuring the distances between key features such as the eyes and ears. Next she calculated the probability that two peoples’ faces would match.

“What she found was good news for the criminal justice system, but likely to disappoint anyone pining for their long-lost double: the chances of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion. Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that’s only a one in 135 chance that there’s a single pair of doppelgängers.”

Ancient Origins provides the following: “The mythology of spirit doubles can be traced back thousands of years and was present in many cultures of the past, holding a prominent place in ancient legends, stories, artworks, and in books by various authors. Perhaps the most well-known reference to spirit doubles or ‘alter egos’ is the doppelgänger, a word still used today to refer to a person that is physically or behaviorally similar to another person.

“Doppelgänger is a German word [meaning] ‘double goer’ and refers to a wraith or apparition that casts no shadows and is a replica or double of a living person. They were generally considered omens of bad luck or even signs of impending death—a doppelgänger seen by a person's relative or friend was said to signify that illness or danger would befall that person, while seeing one’s own doppelgänger was said to be an omen of death.

“Some accounts of doppelgängers, sometimes called the ‘evil twin’ suggests that they might attempt to provide advice to the person they shadow, but that this advice can be misleading or malicious. They may also attempt to plant sinister ideas in their victim’s mind or cause them confusion. For this reason, people were advised to avoid communicating with their own doppelgänger at all costs.”

Consider these words, too, from Atlas Obscura: “Doppelgänger encounters continued in the U.S., with several cases following a pattern of three sightings preceding death. Soon after his election in 1860, Abraham Lincoln saw his reflection doubled in the mirror, with one face beside the other with a ghostly pallor. He tied to show his wife the apparition, which appeared two more times when she was not present. While Mary Todd was at first worried about this behavior, she took the vision as a sign that he would serve two terms, but would die before the end of the second.

“Lincoln is far from the only American to meet their double in the 1800s. The antebellum South was home to numerous accounts of fateful sightings, each under similar circumstances. Linda Derry, site director at the Old Cahawba ghost town in Alabama, is a curator of folklore originating from that region. She has uncovered several cases with similar circumstances as Lincoln’s sightings.”

And how about this, from Paranormal Guide? It states: “Although the combining of the words to form the term is relatively recent, a little over two centuries old, the idea of a spiritual, ghostly or demonic double (will just use the term ‘ghostly’ from here) of living people have existed for millennia. These doubles may at times be seen by others as performing a person’s actions before the real person makes them, or they may be a shadow, performing the same movements, but after they have happened. They may also be seen in ones’ reflection; however the reflection is facing away. Much of the time a doppelgänger is viewed as an omen for a tragedy, illness or death of the person who is copied. If someone sees their own ghostly double it generally bodes very badly for them, and a number of quite famous people have had the ghastly experience.”

Now, let’s get to the issue of time travel and doppelgängers. Outer Places states: “Traveling to the past at the risk of destroying oneself is a common staple of science fiction, not to mention the central concern behind the Grandfather Paradox. In real life, we still have no idea if time travel is really possible, but a physicist determined in a recent study that if it were possible to travel to the past, it would likely involve the creation of a pair of ghostly twins that ultimately annihilate each other.”

It’s this issue of twins being created as a result of traveling through time that may have a significant bearing upon the matter of doppelgängers. In other words, maneuvering through time just might result in the manifestation of countless versions of ourselves, every time a new time line is created. And if one of those time travelers just happens to intrude upon our time line, then—hey, presto—there is another incarnation of you, of me, and of who knows how many people?

One of those who suspected that the doppelgänger phenomenon was caused by time-traveling doubles was the late paranormal authority and author Brad Steiger. He had a very good reason to suspect that was the answer to the mystery. And why might that be? Well, I’ll tell you: Brad had a fascinating story of his own to tell. He shared the story with me just a few years before he died. It goes as follows:

“The cases above are baffling, but in the following cases I suspect a human agency involved in a strange campaign that was conducted regarding Steiger imposters who spoke at various conferences around the United States. On occasions the imposters allegedly conducted themselves very well, thus making the whole enterprise of Counterfeit Steigers a seemingly futile project. On other occasions, the imposter’s assignment was quite obviously to taint my reputation.

“On an unfortunate number of occasions, I received letters complaining of my outrageous and insulting behavior while speaking at a conference. There were claims that I had openly berated my audience, calling them stupid for accepting the very premise of UFOs. A close friend happened to arrive on the scene after one pseudo-Steiger had departed and tried his best to assure the sponsors of the event that the rowdy, disrespectful speaker could not have been the real Brad. In his letter, my friend warned me that he had visited a number of lecture halls where the imposter had damned his audiences. ‘Someone seems out to damage your reputation,’ he advised.

“In a most bizarre twist, dozens of men and women have approached me at various lectures and seminars, congratulating me about the manner in which I bested Dr. Carl Sagan in debate. The event allegedly occurred after a lecture when I happened to bump into the great scientist in a restaurant. The eatery, according to the witnesses, was crowded with those who had attended the seminar, and they egged on a debate between myself and Dr. Sagan. I mopped up the floor with him, countering his every argument against the reality of UFOs.

“The truth is that I never met Dr. Sagan, therefore, neither had I ever debated him. But from coast to coast, there are those who claim to have witnessed my triumphal bout. Even more individuals claim to have been in the audience when I delivered a rousing message from the Space Brothers in Seattle. Regardless of how often I deny that I was not in Seattle at that time and have never channeled the Space Brothers, those who were at that event are puzzled why I would deny my eloquence.”

Multiple Brad Steigers wildly careering their collective way throughout the time lines? Don’t bet against it.

Table of Contents

1. Worming around the Universe
2. The Mystery of Black Holes
3. How to Find Time Travelers
4. Time Travel and Pop Culture
5. From Invisibility to Time Leaps
6. Through a Time Tunnel
7. Time Travelers Dressed in Black
8. Cars of the Men in Black
9. Not Quite a DeLorean
10. Prophetic Dreams of a Nightmare Future
11. UFOs from the Future
12. Heading into the Past
13. Remote Viewing Millennia Long Gone
14. Time Traveling to Mars
15. The Roswell Incident and Time Lines
16. Little Green Time Surfers
17. The Mystery of the Missing Thunderbird Photo
18. Doppelgängers and Multiple Futures
19. Disaster in the Skies
20. Mothman and Future Events
21. The Man Who Came in from the Cold
22. Robots from Centuries Ahead
23. A Crop Circle Connection to Time Travel
24. The Dark Side of Moving through Time
25. The Most Famous Time Traveler
26. When Animals Go through Time
27. Some of Them Are Tourists
28. The 11:11 Phenomenon
29. Loch Ness and Time Portals
30. Déjà Vu and the Matrix
31. A Bigfoot Connection
32. Conclusions

Further Reading
Index