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cover of episode 99: Sergei Ponomarenko : The UFO Time Traveler

99: Sergei Ponomarenko : The UFO Time Traveler

2023/2/10
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The Why Files: Operation Podcast

Key Insights

Why did Sergei Ponomarenko appear confused and anxious in Kyiv?

He was asking for directions to a place that no longer existed.

Why were there problems with Sergei Ponomarenko's identification?

His documents were issued by the Soviet Union, which no longer existed, and his birth date indicated he was born in 1932.

Why did Sergei Ponomarenko's clothing and camera catch the attention of the police officers?

His clothes were new but 50 years out of fashion, and his antique camera looked brand new.

Why did Dr. Kritikov find Sergei Ponomarenko's story intriguing?

The photographs from Sergei's camera showed Kiev in the late 1950s, and his clothes matched those in the photos.

Why did Sergei Ponomarenko disappear from the clinic?

Despite being monitored by cameras and having barred windows, he vanished without a trace.

Why did the police find discrepancies in Sergei Ponomarenko's story?

The dates and times mentioned in the documentary were inconsistent, and the photo of Sergei sent to Valentina was digitally aged.

Why is time travel a popular concept in science fiction?

It explores the possibilities of the future and the impossibilities of the past, reflecting on decisions and regrets.

Chapters

Sergei Ponomarenko, a man who appeared to be in his early 20s but was born in 1932, was seen in Kiev, Ukraine, looking confused and asking for directions to a non-existent place. His identification documents were from the Soviet Union and his birth date raised questions about his true age.

Shownotes Transcript

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On April 23rd, 2006, a man in his early 20s was seen in Kiev, Ukraine, staring at a high-rise apartment building. Witnesses described him as looking confused and anxious. They thought he might have been a lost tourist. The man approached two police officers and nervously asked for directions to a place that didn't exist. The officers asked the young man for identification, but there were two problems with his ID. One, his documents were issued by the Soviet Union, which no longer existed.

The second problem, according to his birth date, this young man was born in 1932.

In 2011, a Russian documentary called The Time Traveler told the story of Sergei Ponomarenko, a man who seemed to be slipping in and out of time. Eyewitnesses first saw Ponomarenko standing at an intersection in Kiev looking confused and a little frightened. He was described as being in his early 20s and wearing clothes that looked new but were 50 years out of fashion. Ponomarenko was asking everyone he met how to get to Peshnia Street, but nobody heard of it.

His strange behavior caught the attention of police officer Sergei Onopanko and his partner who approached him. Again, Panamarenko wanted directions to Peshniah Street. When he tried to find the street on a map, all that was there was a landfill. Officer Onopanko now took notice of Sergei's vintage clothing that looked brand new. He noticed that Sergei was wearing an antique camera around his neck, which also looked new. But what really caught the police officer's attention was Sergei's identification.

According to the document, Sergei was born in Kiev in 1932. That should make him 74 years old, but here he was looking no older than 25. What surprised me most was his identification papers. The papers were dated 1958, but they were like new. There was a photograph that looked similar to this man, but I didn't see how it could be him. I assumed this person was out of his mind and had to get him to a psychiatrist.

Sergei Ponomarenko didn't want to see a psychiatrist, but his options were that or be arrested for vagrancy. An easy choice. So Sergei was taken to a private psychiatric clinic where everything is captured on video. And that's when things get really strange. Sergei Ponomarenko didn't want to go to a psychiatric clinic. You can see him on CCTV acting agitated and nervous. The receptionist said when he arrived, he became even more confused.

I remember he kept looking at my mobile phone, just staring at it. He didn't want to give me his code or his camera or any of his belongings. I knew he was going to be a difficult patient. After a few minutes, Dr. Pavel Kritikov called Sergei into his office. Please, take a seat. When he first came into my office, I asked him to sit down. He seemed nervous.

Then he focused on the clock on the wall, which said half past one. Tell me, what's going on with you? How do you feel? If you don't talk to me, I can't help you. I'm not sure you can help me. Why not? What day is it today? April 23, 2006. The last thing I remember, it was Wednesday in 1958.

Are you saying that this is the future for you? I don't know. Dr. Kritikov said he had seen patients who create stories like this as a defense mechanism. Some people who experience severe trauma or stress sometimes try to escape from reality, and they get lost in their delusion. But in Sergei's case, something was different. What's your name and where are you from? My name is Sergei Padomarenko. I was born in Kiev on June 20, 1932.

Espe, you don't look older than maybe 30 years old. I'm 25 years old. Do you remember how you ended up here?

Sergey told the doctor that he had a day off from work, so he took his camera and walked around the city. At some point, he looked up into the sky and saw an object shaped like a bell moving very erratically. Well, the doctor asked if he was describing a UFO, but Sergey had never heard that word before. Sergey said it's too hard to describe. It would be easier to just develop the film. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Kritikov agreed to develop Sergei's film. While waiting for the photographs, Kritikov wanted Sergei to stay in the clinic a few days for observation. At that point, the doctor realized that Sergei kept looking at the clock on the wall. The clock stopped. How long have we been here?

So Dr. Kritikov checks his watch and notices that it also has stopped. The clock on the wall showed half past one, the same time as when Sergey came in. But we had been talking for at least half an hour.

When Sergei went back into the lobby, the clocks in the doctor's office started working again. At this point, Dr. Kritikov didn't fully believe Sergei's story, but he was intrigued by what might be on the film. But developing the film would be its own challenge. Sergei's camera was a Yashima Flex. This would have been a new camera in 1958, but it hadn't been manufactured in 40 years.

To be honest, I was surprised. This camera stopped being made in the 70s. I've had film that was only 2 or 3 years old that had to be thrown out. But this film was over 40 years old.

But the film wasn't over 40 years old. From Sergei's perspective, he just bought it. It was practically brand new, and unsurprisingly, it developed just fine. The pictures looked familiar to Dr. Kritikov. He recognized Kiev, but the photographs were of Kiev in the late 1950s. Another photo showed Sergei Ponomarenko sitting in front of a house. Dr. Kritikov noticed that Sergei came to his office wearing the same clothes as in the photograph.

Clothes that looked clean and new. Another picture showed a young woman in her early 20s. Kritikov assumed this was Sergei's girlfriend. The final photograph from the film was the most amazing one of all. An object shaped like a bell, just as Sergei described, was in the sky above the city. On Sergei's third day in the clinic, he had another session with Dr. Kritikov to discuss the photos. So, can you tell me what's wrong with me? I don't really think you're sick, but there are some things we still need to figure out.

I just want to go home. We need to talk about the photographs taken from your camera. I'm most interested in this one. Please take a look. Yes, I took this, but I don't understand what it is. I took this picture and then I seem to appear in a different world. After the session, Sergei went to his room in the clinic, but that was the last time anyone would see him. Sergei Ponomarenko was gone.

When Sergei Ponomarenko went to his room at the clinic, that was the last time anyone would see him. Even though there were cameras on the only exit and his windows were covered with metal bars, he somehow disappeared. Even if the window is open, it's impossible to climb through the bars. There's only one entrance and exit.

All that was left is a newspaper and his notes with the doctor's questions. Dr. Krutikov contacted the police to locate him. Officer Onopanko went to the address that Sergei put on his intake form at the clinic. Of course, nothing was there. But they learned that Sergei's apartment building was torn down and the residents were moved to a larger building nearby that was built in the early 1960s. And that building was still standing.

And by digging through the building's records, on a panko found that Sergei did in fact live in that building and he lived there for 20 years. And that's where Sergei's story hits another snag, because according to police records, Sergei Ponomarenko was missing. The police report contained a picture of Sergei, who certainly looks like the man we saw earlier, but about 20 years older. He was last seen leaving his building in 1978 with his camera and was never seen again. But Sergei's file contains something else interesting.

In 1958, he was interviewed on a radio program where he made predictions about the future. Hello, listeners. Today, our guest is an inventor, the head of the young technicians group, Sergei Potomarenko. He has some incredible predictions about the science of the future. Hello, Sergei. Sergei went on to describe how in the future, artificial hearts will be used and that phones will no longer need wires. But what really fascinated Sergei was the microwave.

In the future, cooking will become convenient and fast. It's a device reminiscent of an alarm clock that goes off at the right time. And in just a couple of minutes, your dinner will be ready. Though there was plenty of information about Sergei and old Soviet files, they were no closer to locating him than the police had an idea. There might be a person who could shed some light on Sergei Ponomarenko and what might have happened to him. The woman in the photographs, her name was Valentina Kulis, and she was still alive.

Tracking Sergei Ponomarenko was difficult. He shows up in the year 2006 out of nowhere, then disappears a few days later. He reappears sometime in the past, makes accurate predictions about the future and then disappears again. But Sergei did leave behind the photographs he took before he went missing the first time.

And in those photographs was the picture of a young woman. Her name was Valentina Koulis, and she was living in the apartment building where Sergei was last seen. Valentina said that she and Sergei were good friends for many years, but he went missing in 1978 and was presumed dead. His belongings were thrown away and his apartment was sold. But Valentina did have a picture of him. It was a long time ago, but I have one good picture left. This was taken in 1958.

They compared Valentina's photo to the pictures on Sergei's camera. They were pictures of the same people, wearing the same clothes, taken on the same day. Valentina asked what this was about, and the police and Dr. Kritikov said they thought someone could be impersonating Sergei, that it could be someone mentally ill claiming they had traveled in time. Then Valentina took out an envelope.

She said that a few years ago she came home one day and in her mailbox was an envelope with no postmark or writing of any kind. Inside the envelope was a picture of Sergei. When compared to the picture at the time of his disappearance, he hasn't aged at all. But even more strange is the background of the photograph.

You can see the Mother Motherland statue over Sergei's right shoulder. There's no question that this is Kyiv. Investigators went to the exact spot where Sergei took the picture. They found the location, but the rest of the skyline is wrong. Kyiv doesn't have all those skyscrapers, at least not yet. On the back of the photograph was a message to Valentina written in Sergei's own hand. "Dearest Valentina, everything is fine with me. I'll try to return when I can. Yours, Sergei."

It would seem that Sergei Ponomarenko had jumped into the future once again. But considering how big Kiev looks in the photos and given what the city has endured recently, there's no way to tell just how far into the future Sergei's traveled. But it's obviously pretty far. As of 2011, when this documentary was released, Sergei had not reached out to Valentina, nor was he spotted anywhere in the city. So if we're going to solve this mystery, we're apparently going to have to wait a long, long time.

The concept of time travel has been a staple of science fiction for a long time. In 1770, Louis Sebastian Mercier wrote the book The Year 2440, where the hero travels centuries into the future. A Christmas Carol written by Charles Dickens in 1843 explored time travel in both directions. But the story that really kicked off the genre was The Time Machine written by H.G. Wells in 1895. But those are works of fiction. Is time travel really possible?

And if so, how? Well, we know that traveling into the future is possible. In 1905, Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Einstein described how moving clocks tick more slowly than stationary ones. The faster you move, the slower time moves. So if you want to travel 100 years into the future, what you do is take a spaceship that can travel at 99.995% the speed of light, then fly somewhere 50 light years away, turn around and come back.

On Earth, a hundred years have passed, but because you were going so fast, the trip only took you a year. Time travel. This theory has been proven in the real world. If you put an extremely accurate clock on a plane and fly it in the same direction that the Earth spins, when you land, that clock will be slightly behind the clocks on Earth. That's special relativity. In 1915, Einstein published the theory of general relativity.

This describes gravity as a geometric property of space-time, otherwise known as four-dimensional space, and how space-time is like a fabric or continuum that curves around whatever matter happens to be present. Um, a word? What's up? Obviously, I understand all this. Obviously.

But maybe dumb it down a little. You know, not everyone out there is as smart as a goldfish. Well, general relativity is a lot. But for the purposes of this episode, it boils down to this. The higher the gravity, the slower time moves. This is called gravitational time dilation. Even dumber, please. Fine. Remember in Interstellar, there's that scene where Matthew McConaughey and the crew... All right, all right, all right. What? That's my McConaughey impression. Do you have to? What? I'm helping you dumb it down. You most certainly are.

Anyway, when the crew lands on that planet near the black hole, the gravity is so severe that for every hour they're on the planet, seven years pass on Earth. A less McConaughey example is...

GPS satellites. They're about 12,000 miles above the Earth's surface. So less gravity, which means time moves faster up there. Time on the satellites has to be adjusted to match the slower moving time down here on the surface. Otherwise, GPS wouldn't work. But all of that is about time travel into the future. What about time travel to the past?

Well, that's a bit more theoretical and controversial. Not all physicists believe it's possible. Einstein's theories say it is possible in theory. How it's achieved is by bending or warping space time so much that you can take a shortcut from point A to point B, a shortcut that lets you move faster than light. And if you can somehow move faster than light and get space time to wrap around itself like a cylinder, you can travel back in time.

In theory. Your path through time like this, this is your world line, your path through time, you're going toward the future always. But what can happen here is that the space-time is sufficiently twisted so that you, while going toward the future all the time, yet circle back and visit an event in your own past.

But doing something like this would require a tremendous amount of energy, possibly all the energy of an exploding star. Now, obviously, our civilization can't do this, but maybe a very advanced civilization could. Maybe that type of civilization flies vehicles like this. So is that what happened to Sergei Ponomarenko when he took a picture of the UFO? Did he somehow enter a wormhole or a tear in the fabric of space-time? Well...

Now we've heard the story of Sergey Ponomarenko and we've determined that time travel is theoretically possible. So is this story true?

But every article and video I found that covers the story seems to be just a retelling of each other's version of the story. And none of those versions are right. Today you learned the real story because I was able to track down the original full-length documentary, which I had translated from Russian, which wasn't easy. Oh, I could have done that for you. Oh, you speak Russian? Everyone knows that word. Um, okay. Okay.

Anyway, there are a few things in the documentary that point to a hoax. First, in the credits, there's a casting director. But maybe that's for the scenes that were dramatized. Fine.

But the police officer says Sergei appeared on Tuesday, April 23rd, 2006. The camera in the lobby says Wednesday, April 23rd. But they're both wrong. That was actually a Sunday. And during his first visit, Sergei tells the doctor that he was born in June 1932. But his ID says he was born in March. During Sergei's second visit to the doctor, the time is 1039 a.m., April 25th.

So the dates and times are all over the place. You think if you were writing a time travel story, you'd try to be correct about the, you know, time. I know that was disappointing. Next, the picture of Sergei that the police have on the missing persons report. Look at the picture Sergei sends to Valentina. Look at his clothes. Look at his collar. They're the same clothes and his collar is flipped the same exact way in both photos. This is the same picture.

His expressions are different, but he's been digitally aged, so the producers probably did that to make it seem more real. But these are details they probably should have caught. So, yeah, this story is fake. But still, I think it's one of the best time travel stories I've come across. The actors were convincing, and as long as you don't pay too close attention, the pictures are great. So why are we so fascinated with time travel?

Well, I think it's because time is one of the few things in our lives that is equal for everyone and that no one can control. No matter how much wealth or power you may accumulate, eventually time wins. Time travel makes us think of the possibilities of the future, of what may exist after we're gone. Time travel also reminds us of the impossibilities of the past, of decisions made, of mistakes, regrets. How many things in your life would you go back and change?

Maybe you wouldn't have said that stupid thing in class. Maybe you would have stood up to that bully in your neighborhood or been nicer to that nerd on the bus. Stop reliving your childhood. Or maybe you would have taken a chance on that business idea, learned a foreign language, traveled the world. But there is a trick we can play on ourselves to take back a little bit of control of time. It's something I try to do whenever I have a difficult decision to make.

10 years from now or 20 years from now, your future self is going to think back to today, right now, and you're going to have regrets. Your future self will say, I'd give anything to go back and make different choices. Well, you're here now. Now is your chance. Be good to your future self by taking chances, by being kinder, by not sweating the small stuff.

Because look, time eventually runs out for all of us. And when you get to the end, whether that's next year or 50 years from now, you don't want to look back on your life with regret, saying I should have done this or I wish I did that. Don't do that to your future self. When you finally get to the end, your only thought should be, man, that was a hell of a ride.

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