A 2,000-year-old Greek statue at the J Paul Getty Museum in California has become the center of a wave of online claims that time travel is real, with some social media users insisting the carved figure is using a laptop computer.
The statue, known as the Grave Naiskos of an Enthroned Woman with an Attendant, dates to around 100 BC and stands roughly 37 inches high. It depicts a woman of high status seated on an elaborate, throne-like chair, with her left arm resting on the chair and her right arm extended forward to lift the lid of a rectangular object held by a young servant girl.
Conspiracy theorists argue the object is too shallow to be a jewelry box and have pointed to a pair of holes in its side, which they claim resemble USB ports on a modern laptop. "Is this ancient Greek statue showing a laptop proof of time travel?" one person asked online. Another wrote, "Look it even has two USB ports."
A third commenter linked the statue to the myth of the Oracle of Delphi, which was said to let priests communicate with gods, aliens or time travelers and receive advanced knowledge. "Oracle, it all adds up," the commenter wrote.
Museum says it's a jewelry box
Curators at the Getty Museum have rejected the time-travel theory, saying the object is a jewelry box rather than any kind of device. In a statement, curators said that although the box appears too shallow to hold anything substantial, they can identify it as a jewelry box by comparison with other funerary reliefs that depict women pulling ribbons or jewelry out of larger, more naturalistic boxes.
Other ancient artworks show similar objects
The Getty statue is not the only piece of Ancient Greek art to spark such claims. Multiple artworks from around 500 BC, found on drinking cups, appear to show people holding an open device roughly the size and shape of a modern laptop while writing on it with a stylus, similar to how people today use a digital stylus, such as the Surface Pen, on touchscreen tablets and laptops.
Those images have generally been dismissed as depictions of wax tablets, which the Greeks used as primitive notebooks. Even so, they have contributed to ongoing claims that people from the future brought phones and computers into the past.
Modern photos and footage add to the claims
A resurfaced recording of Elvis Presley's final concert, in 1977, has also fed the theories after a fan in the crowd appeared to be holding what looked like an iPhone during the performance.
Other supposed evidence includes a photograph from World War II appearing to show a man in Reykjavik, Iceland, talking on a cellphone, and a spectator at a 1995 Mike Tyson boxing match appearing to hold up a smartphone in the front row.
Self-proclaimed time travelers make their claims
The renewed interest follows a surge of stories from people describing themselves as time travelers from the future. One, who calls himself Adam Archon, has said the ability to travel back and witness historical events will be commonplace by 2028.
In 2019, Archon said, "Time travel was released to the public in 2028, but it was invented in 1981. It was just kept secret until they released it publicly." Archon, who says he is from 2045, made the claim in an interview with the YouTube channel Apex TV, during which his voice and face were obscured. He added that people in the future can simulate past events but often prefer visiting the actual time periods to experience history in person.
Another self-proclaimed time traveler, Alexander Smith, has told a similar story. Smith, who says he jumped into the past from the year 2118, told Apex TV in a 2018 interview that the CIA possesses advanced technologies hidden from the public, including a secret time machine.
Smith claimed he was a carpenter in 1981 who was recruited by the CIA for a secret experiment that sent him forward to 2118, where he said he saw a dystopian future ruled by artificial intelligence, with flying cars, floating robots and major global changes following a third world war. Like Archon, Smith said time travel technology existed decades before the public knew about it and predicted it would become available for both commercial and non-commercial use "beginning in the year 2028."
What scientists say
Scientists have said that time travel into the past is not only theoretically possible but that the math involved aligns with Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. Despite this, there is no concrete evidence that humans can regularly move backward through time or that a machine capable of doing so exists.
