In the summer of 1901, two English women walking the grounds of the Palace of Versailles noticed small distortions in their reality, such as the wind not blowing in the trees, a lack of light and shade effect, and the world taking on a lifeless and flat appearance. Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain are recorded as the first people to experience a timeslip during their visit to Paris in the summer of 1901. They wrote a book, called An Adventure, in 1911 to describe their experience.
Timeslips are a paranormal phenomenon where people go about their day and are temporarily transported into either the past or future. However, they typically remain in the same location through supernatural means instead of technological means.
According to their book, as Moberly and Jourdain continued the “unnatural” appearance of their surroundings started to fade away. They encountered a man they found “repulsive” with “rough skin” and a young woman, wearing outdated clothing, who was sketching on the grass. One of the women felt the need to turn away from the sketching woman as her presence made the woman feel incredibly annoyed. They were directed to an entrance hall by a jaunty man, where they witnessed a wedding party. From there, the women decided to take a carriage back to Jourdain’s apartment. They found this experience strange so they decided to return to the Palace of Versailles on a later date. Upon their return, the women realized that many landmarks they had encountered during their initial visit were no longer there and noticed large numbers of people crowding the areas of the palace that had been empty the day of their initial visit. They found this odd, as they had gone during the day and spent hours in the Palace without encountering people other than the aforementioned characters. They made inquiries, checking if the palace had been booked on the day of their initial visit, but there were no private bookings that day. They realized later that the people they encountered resembled members of Marie Antoinette’s court. The man with the “rough skin” was the 18th-century French nobleman, Comte de Vaudreuil. The woman on the grass is believed to have been Marie Antoniette herself, on the same day she learned of the mob that stormed the Palace of Tuileries. How these women “slipped” into the start of the French Revolution remains unclear.
There are a multitude of explanations for the phenomenon Moberly and Jourdain, and thousands more experienced. Some are rooted in the paranormal, ranging from alien intervention to those who experience said phenomena being born with supernatural “gifts”. Other explanations point towards hysteria, severe mental illness, or some kind of psychological disturbance that altered one’s perception of their present reality. Different arguments conclude that cunning individuals are putting up a facade for public attention. The most plausible explanation seems to be a mixture of hoaxes and possible psychological and mental ailments. A variety of different and seemingly harmless factors can contribute to disturbances in the nervous system, which may send mixed signals to the brain which could alter one’s perception of reality. Timeslips make us think if our conscience can be trusted to be honest at all times.
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