A mystery surrounding a "time traveler" video may have been solved. A video surfaced recently from 1938 in which a woman appears to be talking on a cellphone. Some speculated that the woman was a time traveler , but it turns out that she may have actually been using a cell phone over 70 years ago.
The black-and-white footage video shows a group of young factory workers. A brunette woman in a dress has her hand against her ear and appears to be talking on a portable phone.
Some conspiracy theorists started to believe that the woman was a time traveler, but the woman may have really been carrying a cell phone, The Huffington Post reports.
A YouTube user called Planetcheck claimed to be a relative of the woman and they had a story to explain the mystery. The user said they were the grandchild of the woman whose name is Gertrude Jones.
"She was 17 years old," Planetcheck writes. "I asked her about this video and she remembers it quite clearly. She says Dupont [the company that reportedly owns the factory in the video] had a telephone communications section in the factory. 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."
Despite the explanation, some were still skeptical about there being cell phones in 1938. Planetcheck tried their best to explain further and they even claimed to have the device stored somewhere.
"Maybe they decided it was too far advanced for people and they abandoned the idea. ... Ideas are hatched, prototypes are made and sometimes like this phone they are forgotten until somebody discovers some long lost film of the world first wireless phone and marvels at it," Planetcheck said.
The Huffington Post reached out David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes.com, a website that specializes in analyzing popular Internet theories, to get his input. Mikkelson says Planetcheck's claim is hard to prove and disprove.
"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 told HuffPost. "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."
Mikkelson said it was possible that Dupont was working on a prototype like this at the time but he still had doubts and questions.
"I doubt it would have just been handed out to a young woman working at the factory," he said. "And why isn't there documentation?"
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