Spooky footage from 1938 has convinced some people that time travel is real.
The clip - which was shared on YouTube by user ScoopView - shows black and white footage of people walking towards the camera.
One of the people - a young woman - appears to be talking while holding a small object to her ear. As the clip ends, she lowers her hand, flashing the object at the camera, and revealing that it bears a remarkable likeness to a modern phone.
Watch the eerie video below:According to conspiracy theorists, she can be seen chatting on a cell phone - a piece of technology that would not be invented for several decades. In the video description, the YouTuber writes: "Time Traveler in 1938 film caught talking on a cell phone in 1938 [coming] out of a Dupont Factory in Massachusetts."
While this theory was wild enough on its own, another YouTuber named Planetcheck reportedly made the clip even more mysterious by revealing who the woman was.
Per The Mirror, the user commented explaining that she was his great-grandmother - and that she was using an experimental mobile phone which was being developed by industrial giant Dupont at the time.
"The lady you see is my great-grandmother Gertrude Jones," they said.
"She was 17 years old. I asked her about this video and she remembers it quite clearly. She says Dupont had a telephone communications section in the factory," Planetcheck continued.
"They were experimenting with wireless telephones. Gertrude and five other women were given these wireless phones to test out for a week. Gertrude is talking to one of the scientists holding another wireless phone who is off to her right as she walks by," they added.
(However, another YouTuber who questioned if the woman was a time traveler also shared the clip, but claimed that the footage was filmed in 1938 at the Massena New York Aluminum Company of America.)
While it may be tempting to believe this wild story, there is no way to verify Platcheck's claims - or even to be sure that the woman in the video is speaking on a phone.
David Mikkelson - who specializes in analyzing internet theories - told The Huffington Post that the woman was as likely to be holding a handkerchief as she was a phone.
"You can take any piece of WWII footage showing someone holding something to the side of their head talking, and claim it is a time-traveling cell phone user," Mikkelson said. "Film clips aren't of sufficient resolution to see what the people are carrying.
"It could be anything from a handkerchief to a hearing aid, or who knows what. And this video is silent, so you can't even tell if the person is engaged in a two-way conversation," he added.
Mikkelson's suggestion seems to align with many of the comments on the YouTube video, with some people suggesting that the item in the woman's hand could be a "hearing aid" or "prototype radio receiver".
In fact, as one person points out: "If it really was a phone, I would be more curious about how she managed to get a signal from a non-existent network provider."
Then again... I guess we don't know what cell phones are going to be like in the future.
