Unraveling the Enigma: The Time Traveler Who Sent a Photo From the Future

The Ukrainian Time Traveler

Not long ago, back in 2006, a young guy was found in a really confused state in the capital of Ukraine. He was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, and there was an old camera hanging around his neck. People thought he was just some crazy guy, but little did they know they were witnessing a story about time travel. He introduced himself as Sergey. When the police asked for his ID, he presented one from a country that doesn’t even exist anymore. Yeah, you heard that right—an ID from a vanished nation!

A Man Out of Time

You all know that Ukraine used to be a part of the Soviet Union. By the time this incident happened, it had been over two decades since the Soviet Union broke apart. It's not like the Ukrainian police didn't have any IDs from the Soviet era, but this guy looked to be around 20-25 years old, while his ID showed he was born in 1932. Not just the birth date, but even the picture on the ID was clearly him. The police couldn’t wrap their heads around it—how could someone born in 1932 be 74 years old in 2006?

After about 20-25 years, he looked like he was still in his twenties. He asked Sargi what the date was, and after a bit of dozing off, she replied, "April 23, 1958." That was the moment the police thought he was definitely some kind of crazy person. They took him to a mental hospital where Dr. Babloo checked his mental health. Sargi was also confused about what was happening to him. The doctor asked if he remembered how he jumped straight from 1958 to 2006. He said he had gone out during the day to take some good photographs on a city walk.

"I saw a weird thing in the sky. When the doctor asked what it looked like, I said I couldn't really explain it, but I had taken a picture of it with my camera. As I said this, I held out my camera. The doctor was really surprised, but his shock turned to disbelief when he saw the camera—it was an old Yashica Flex. Looking at the condition of the camera, you wouldn’t guess it was that old. The problem was getting a photo out of it since the film it used was from the 1970s."

The investigation was continued, and an expert named Adam Poison was called in. He checked the date written on the camera roll and found out it was manufactured in 1956. He developed the photographs, and things got even more confusing. The photos showed really old pictures of Kyiv city—cars, buildings, and streets. There were some buildings that had been torn down later, and there were also some pictures of Sergi and his girlfriend in front of one of those buildings. This was the same Sergi who looked like he did in those 48-year-old photos.

In this situation, I was sitting in front of the doctor in those clothes, and just like Sirki mentioned in the last photo of the roll, there was an unidentified flying object visible. It was hard for the doctor to believe what he was seeing. By this point, the doctor had no choice but to accept that this guy had time-traveled from 1958 to 2006. The doctor was still struggling with this when the guy walked out of the room, closed the door, and never came back. Sirki had vanished without a trace, leaving behind just a camera.

The Mystery Deepens

The photographs and their bizarre story just kept getting more complicated the more we tried to understand it. When the police investigated, they found out that a well-known figure had actually gone missing in 1960. They also tracked down the girl who was in the photos with him, and she’s now a 70-year-old woman. She told the police that he really went missing in 1958, but he came back after a short time. He was only gone for as long as it took for him to reappear in 2006, but that lady…

According to the story, he went missing again in 1960 and hasn't returned since. But there's another twist: years later, he received a photo of Surgi with a note that said "2015." In this photo, there's more of Surgi visible, and the city in the background looks different—it's full of skyscrapers now. He also wrote that he'd be back soon, but for some reason, that never happened. This interesting tale about the missing person was featured on a Ukrainian TV show and quickly went viral online. But the big question is, is this story really true?

The Science of Time Travel

Before we dive in, let's first figure out if time travel is actually possible. There's no doubt that we're all, in a way, time traveling. Our daily schedules show that we're moving into the future, one hour at a time. But if someone could somehow experience an hour in just half an hour, they would be half an hour ahead of everyone else in the future. This idea was first introduced by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity, which talks about space.

Time doesn’t pass the same for everyone; it really depends on the speed of an object and its mass. Just like how oxygen levels change at different altitudes, time in space is also affected by an object’s speed and mass. Since we live on Earth, our time is influenced by Earth’s mass and its speed. But if we were on Jupiter, where the mass is much greater, time would pass more slowly. According to the theory, the faster you go, the slower time moves. So, if we were in some spaceship traveling at high speed…

If light travels at high speeds in the universe for 5 years and then comes back to Earth, according to our clocks, only 5 years would have passed, but on Earth, 36 years would have gone by. The difference in time measured on both sides is called time dilation. To prove Einstein's theory, an experiment called the Hafele-Keating experiment was conducted in 1971. In this, a total of 12 atomic clocks were set to the same time, then one set of clocks was loaded onto a plane and sent east, another set was sent west, and the last set was left on Earth. When both planes returned…

When they came back after going around the whole Earth, they noticed a significant difference in their clocks. The ships that went east were 59 nanoseconds slower compared to the clocks on the ground, meaning time was passing slower for them. On the other hand, the ship that went west was 273 nanoseconds ahead. This difference between east and west happened because the Earth rotates counterclockwise. Another way to think about time travel is through gravity. According to Einstein's general relativity, the stronger the gravity, the slower time goes.

Slowly, this theory was proven with an experiment in 2010. An atomic clock was placed on the bottom shelf, and another one was put 33 centimeters higher on the next shelf. The clock closer to the ground experienced more gravity, so it was running slower compared to the one above it. The difference was really small since 33 centimeters isn't a huge difference, but it shows that if we were to go to a place with much stronger gravity, like near a black hole, our time would pass way slower compared to time on Earth. This concept was explored in "Interstellar."

In the movie, they show a scenario where people are on a planet close to a black hole, and an hour there is equivalent to a year on Earth. Due to the effects of speed and gravity, time changes so much that GPS satellites, which have the most accurate clocks in the world, have to constantly adjust their time to match Earth’s. These satellites orbit Earth at a speed of 11,300 kilometers per hour, which is why their clocks fall behind. If their time isn’t reset regularly, our phones wouldn’t work properly.

"We discussed that we can't pinpoint the exact location. Time travel in the future is theoretically possible, but according to science, making it practical is impossible. Creating a spacecraft that can travel at the speed of light is something that seems like a movie to us. To time travel under gravity, we would need to get close to a black hole, which is almost 1560 light-years away. Maybe in the future, humans will figure something out, and we might solve the chemistry of time travel, but that's a whole different story."

Unraveling the Truth

How true is this story? It was broadcast in 2012 on a Ukrainian TV show called "Aliens." In the third episode, titled "Time Traveler," this story was featured. There was a CCTV video of Dr. Poonam Marinko that revealed a huge loophole. The date shown in the video is Wednesday, April 23, 2006, but if you check the calendar, that's actually a Sunday. This means the video was recorded separately, and the date was added later. Also, there’s something about Dr. Poonam Ringo’s ID.

But the stamp that can be good, experts believe it's different from the distant stem, and finally, in the 2015 photo, you can see a lot of buildings in the background. But if you look closely, many of the buildings look the same, which means this image has been photoshopped. Any police investigation related to this incident doesn't seem to have any record in the story either. And if Dr. Pablo is such a famous doctor, why isn't his name on any internet website? The whole story was very well planted, but on the internet…

Users believe that this was created just for the show's ratings. Confusion around time travel comes up when we start thinking that if time travel is possible in the future, it must have been possible in the past too. This concept has been shown in a lot of science fiction movies, but the scientific community thinks it’s not feasible because it leads to paradoxes. For example, if you sit in a time machine and jump 10 years into the future and then throw the machine into a rock, how did you even get to that point? That’s the situation with time travel.

In 2009, Stephen Hawking threw a party that he ended up attending all by himself. The weird part? He shared the invitations a year later and said that if there were any time travelers out there, they could just pop back a year into the past to join the party. It was his way of showing that time travel to the past isn't possible.