5 ancient artworks which prove once and for all that time travel is real.

'If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?’ Stephen Hawking asked in A Brief History Of Time.
Hawking also famously staged a party for time travellers, complete with champagne and a banner saying, ‘Welcome time travellers’.
None showed up, in case you were wondering.
But there ARE certain old paintings which have convinced online conspiracy fans that time travel must be real – otherwise, how did people in the past have iPhones?
And isn’t the flying saucer at Jesus Christ’s birth a dead giveaway that Our Lord’s demise was watched by either time-travelling tourists from the future – or extraterrestrials?

The iPhone in the 1930s

Picture: National Postal Museum
A native American appears to be staring at an iPhone – but the painting Mr. Pynchon and the Settling of Springfield was actually made in 1937.
Is it proof of time travel, or just proof we’re all obsessed with iPhones and need to get out more?

The flying saucer at Jesus’s crucifixion.

Several religious paintings show distinctly odd things in the sky alongside Jesus – and UFO fans seize on these as evidence of extraterrestrial involvement.
Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, says, ‘An explanation for these Biblical paintings is that they are symbolic representations of angels and that the beams of light from them represent the Holy Spirit.’

The Ancient Greek statue using a laptop.

Picture: Getty
Does an ancient Greek statue thought to date from 100BC really show a woman using a laptop?
For a brief moment earlier this year, the internet believed it.
The statue, ‘Grave Naiskos of an Enthroned Woman with an Attendant’ in The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, became the focus of a huge amount of gossip after a video posted by YouTuber StillSpeakingOut highlighed the strange ‘device’.
Jeffrey Spier, the senior curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, said that it’s more likely to be a jewellery box, or a hinged mirror.

God, Jesus and the satellite.

The painting ‘Glorification of the Eucharist’ by Bonaventura Salimbeni seems to show God and Jesus fiddling with what looks like a Sputnik satellite.
Naturally, it’s beloved by UFO fans – but the real explanation is a little more prosaic.
The strange ‘ball’ is a representation of the Celestial Sphere – ie the universe, and the wands are meant to depict God’s control over it, experts have said.

The 19th Century woman with the smartphone.

Die_Erwartete_1860
The smartphone-toting woman was spotted in the painting, ‘The Expected One’ by Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüllerin painting at the Neue Pinakothek museum in Munich
Retired Glasgow local government worker Peter Russell highlighted the strange image in an interview with Motherboard – saying it showed how our interpretation was coloured by our views.
Russell said, ‘‘What strikes me most is how much a change in technology has changed the interpretation of the painting, and in a way has leveraged its entire context.
‘The big change is that in 1850 or 1860, every single viewer would have identified the item that the girl is absorbed in as a hymnal or prayer book.

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