Time Travel Stories: Strange Missions Into the Past

There’s always a mission.

Whether it be John Titor and his quest to retrieve the IBM 5100, or Project Pegasus and their covert experiments to gather data on future events, most alleged time travelers journey with a purpose.

And sometimes, that purpose is a bit hard to explain. You’ll see what I mean. Let’s have a look at some missions through time and space…

Single Seven Needs Tomatoes

One of the most memorable episodes of Coast to Coast AM involved Art Bell interviewing a man identified only as Single Seven. He was a time traveler from the year 2063, a “paleo ag tech,” as he called himself. “In the future,” he said, “they’re trying to change the weather.”

His mission, however, involved traveling to the past to retrieve samples of crops that could be grown in his time.

“I was sent back to find the earlier cousins of corn, wheat, tomatoes, things that can survive in a hotter temperature so that we can have them…we’ll use them to splice and make hybrids into the future…because we need to raise the temperature of the earth in the future to keep the MIM away…”

The MIM, as Single Seven explained, were beings not unlike what we’d call the grey aliens. These extraterrestrials — or, perhaps, beings from another dimension — could also travel through time, though not in a way we’d easily comprehend. Single Seven claimed they hunted him during his missions through time.

They also couldn’t deal with heat very well, which is why the humans of the future were trying to raise the planet’s temperature.

The Carrot Soup Contingency

The Carrot Soup Contingency

Next up, believe it or not, more vegetables.

First, some backstory: I recently made a few changes to the website’s comments section, and took the opportunity to look over the (thousands of) comments left here at Stranger Dimensions over the years.

I noticed a few that, let’s say, stood out, particularly involving time travel. This one’s at the top.

December 23, 2012. A commenter using the alias “A man” left a strange response on my post about time travel images. “I promise time travel is possible,” he wrote, “I have been visited by a traveler from the future. I know its not something i can prove a.t.m. but its true. This man’s mission was to have me eat 4 bowls of carrot soup.”

To this day, I don’t think anyone knows exactly what he meant by that. Why would someone from the future reach out to this person specifically? And why would his goal be to serve carrot soup? These are questions we’ll likely never have the answers to.

However, “A man” went on to say that the strange traveler told him “of certain future events” that actually happened, and seemed to know his family, even though his appearance was unfamiliar.

Perhaps the act of eating four bowls of carrot soup in one sitting irreversibly altered the timeline, changing the commenter’s life forever (though he did claim that nothing changed for him).

Alien Observer

Another strange comment (one that got lost in the shuffle for about five years) was left by someone calling himself Bigbuddak. “Time travel as you perceive it is wrong,” he wrote, “A person cannot go back and forth through time.” No, he said, it’s a “one way trip.”

That, however, hasn’t stopped groups in his future from harnessing time travel.

“Various organizations in the far future have sent back people, observers if you will to study human achievements first hand. These observers are to note events, not change them. They are even forbidden to have contact [with] one another.”

The people sent back in time, claimed Bigbuddak, never return home, instead living out their lives in the past and recording historical events. Their observations and notes are hidden in “preassigned areas,” where those in the future eventually retrieve them.

The travelers are also rigorously vetted:

“The people who are selected to travel back have to meet several criteria before they are chosen. They cannot be married, have children or alot of close family. They must be ordinary looking so they can blend in easier and they must have studied ancient history and the texts of the time into which they’ll be inserted.”

It doesn’t always work out, though, or so he claimed. “Even though the screening process is very precise,” he wrote, “mistakes are sometimes made such as a person being sent back with items that are not used in that time.” And yet, the project continues:

“Despite these mistakes the program has had overwhelmingly great success. The purpose of the program was not just to document historic events from first person accounts but more to study the daily life of past generations.” 

Another John Titor Says Hello

Many of the stranger quirks in the John Titor story happened after he allegedly left our worldline. Others came forward, claiming to be John Titor or to have known him in the future. Some even claimed to be on his “time travel team,” so to speak. Might have had something to do with that mysterious website, but who’s to say?

On December 12, 2012 (odd year, that one), yet another commenter chimed in claiming to not only be a time traveler, but to be one of many operating under the moniker John.

“I am not John, but you may call be John being as how popular his conquests have become. His legend, as it [were], grew so big that all of our [volunteers] were code named ‘John’ from the beginning, our beginning.”

The existence of the first John Titor, he wrote, had a direct influence on the development of their technology, leading to the discovery of time travel (or, really, worldline travel) sooner on his worldline than on Titor’s (or ours).

His team was also assisted by other time travelers who arrived from his future. They had a keen interest in John Titor and his influence on the worldline, which led to their stated mission:

“Our first task was to travel to a list of dates and times to assess if other time travelers had been there. Unlike what John has said, when you go back in one dimension it does effect the next…
Our research concluded that not only had others visited these dates, but they were not all from our future. What we discovered is that time distortion can be achieved a number of ways, and not all of them are mechanical.”

He didn’t say much else, other than that the changes in worldlines would “be discussed at a later date.”

The Black Eyed Kids’ Mysterious Motives

I want to end with this, because I still think it’s pretty interesting, even though it may (like many things) be a hoax.

On July 24, 2015, in the early days of Art Bell’s Midnight in the Desert, a strange caller phoned in with a bizarre tale involving the black-eyed kids. These are alleged paranormal entities who appear in the form of mysterious children with completely black eyes.

There have been many reports of BEK over the years, but no one knows who they are or what they want. Most alleged encounters involve the children appearing out of nowhere, perhaps asking for help or, worse, requesting to be let inside a person’s home. Witnesses have reported feeling a sense of death in their presence, or losing time, or other inexplicable phenomena. Generally, they experience the sensation that, being near the BEK, something terrible is about to happen.

While, as I said, no one knows what the BEK are (if not just an urban legend), that one caller in 2015 shared an unusual possibility: He claimed he had been taken by a group of black-eyed children and forced to travel through time.

“…every time that it happens to me, I lose a little bit of who I used to be, Mr. Bell. Every time they force me to time travel, I lose a little bit of myself…I need to warn your listeners. Do not answer for these children with black eyes.”

He claimed to have been sent to both the past and the future, hundreds of years either way, losing his sense of humanity with every trip.

Why? That part was never clear, but the anonymous caller’s tale reminds me somewhat of the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. These were statue-like creatures who sent people through time to feast on their “potential energies,” created from their displacement in the timeline and the resulting paradoxes.

Perhaps, if real, the BEK did something comparable to the caller — they harvested his energies as they sent him back and forth through time. “They will take your soul,” he said, after all.

* * *

And there you have it, the strange missions of a handful of time travelers. What do you think? Would you sign up to travel through time? Would you eat carrot soup if a random time traveler gave you some? Who knows — it might happen to you!

Oh, and if you’re a time traveler on a mission, feel free to leave your story in the comments below…