The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled

The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled

by Chris Wheatley 

On a hot August afternoon in France, 1901, Miss Elizabeth Morison and Miss Frances Lamont, on holiday from England, took a trip to visit the Palace of Versailles, a former royal residence some twelve miles west of Paris. “We went by train,” they would later recall, “and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace with interest.” But it was not to be the pleasant day out that the ladies had anticipated.


As they started to explore the gardens, an inexplicable feeling of depression descended upon them, a melancholic atmosphere they described as “a dreamy haziness” and “eerie and unpleasant.” They began to encounter people clothed in strange attire. They saw “two men dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats,” and later a man whose “face was most repulsive, —its expression odious. His complexion was very dark and rough.” Passing over a bridge, they found: “a lady was sitting. I supposed her to be sketching. She turned and looked full at us. Her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual.” Eventually, they found their way out of the gardens, and returned to their accommodation in a daze.

The oddness of their experience stayed with them. Later, returning to the palace to retrace their steps, they found this impossible. Buildings had changed, lanes had disappeared, and the bridge was no longer present. In fact, the whole layout was unfamiliar. Through diligent research, Morison and Lamont came to believe that, on that fateful day, somehow they had experienced the grounds as they had been in the late eighteenth century, and that the lady they had come across had been the infamous Queen Marie Antoinette.

The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions...

A review in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (unsigned but known to have been written by Eleanor Sidgwick), attributed the experience to memory error and insisted that ‘a good deal of evidence would be required before a phenomenon of this kind could be accepted as a fact.’ Four decades later, William Salter, a senior member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was troubled that the pair had written no immediate account of the experiences and their two original accounts, written some months after the first event, were destroyed after having been copied for publication. He also noted that successive editions seemed to have beeen embellished and suspected that subsequent research had informed some of the putative memories. ‘The authors recorded, investigated, and published their experience in such a way as to leave the whole affair in an impenetrable fog of uncertainty’, he commented.

A similar critique was made after a careful analysis in 1988 by Michael Coleman, again for the SPR.

Later commentators thought that some supernormal event might have occurred, but not necessarily as interpreted by Moberly and Jourdain.

In papers published between 1953 and 1962, psychical researcher GW Lambert argued that Moberly and Jourdain, both in trance, did perceive in a paranormal way scenes from the past – but misplaced them in time in their interpretation. He laid out a detailed argument for the scenes originating around 1774 rather than 1789, and for some of the scenery having existed only in the imagination of a gardener of the time, Antoine Richard.

In his biography of the French poet Robert de Montesquiou, Philippe Jullian pointed out that he lived near Versailles and liked to throw parties in the grounds, for which his friends dressed in period costumes and created ‘tableaux vivants’, which could have been mistaken for apparitions

https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/artic...p%E2%80%99

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid researched much of the evidence and concluded that "Moberly and Jourdain were simply human" and were mistaken. He notes that in the second edition of An Adventure, it is revealed that Moberly did not mention the sketching woman until three months after their visit to Versailles, while Jourdain did not remember such a thing, and that Moberly did not remember much of what Jourdain described. "It was only after much discussion, note-sharing, and historical research that Moberly and Jourdain came up with the time period as 1789 and assigned identities to a few of the characters they saw, including Marie Antoinette herself as the lady sketching on the lawn."

Dame Joan Evans, who owned the copyright to An Adventure, accepted the Jullian explanation and forbade any further editions. However, after the work came out of copyright, it was republished in 1988 as The Ghosts of Trianon: The Complete 'An Adventure' by Thoth Publication and again in 2008 by CreateSpace, both times crediting Moberly and Jourdain as the authors.

Historian Roy Strong has noted that although the Moberly-Jourdain story has been debunked it "retained its hold on the public imagination for half a century.

https://handwiki.org/wiki/Physics:Moberl...n_incident

The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled

by Chris Wheatley 

An Adventure by Eleanor F. Jourdain and C. A. E. Moberly
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64809

https://handwiki.org/wiki/Physics:Moberl...n_incident

Dunning went to prison for fraud though....

Dunning co-founded Buylink, a business-to-business service provider, in 1996, and served at the company until 2002. He later became eBay's second biggest affiliate marketer; he has since been convicted of wire fraud through a cookie stuffing scheme, for his company fraudulently obtaining between $200,000 and $400,000 from eBay. In August 2014, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison, followed by three years of supervision.[3]

See also this thread:

Ghosts or time travel? - "the Ghosts of Petit Trianon"