Sebastian Garrido experienced a ‘Time Slip’ that Doctors Say Is Impossible. He said his all-too-real ‘time slip’ hit him on the street when he noticed a mysterious figure standing nearby. He was traveling to visit his dying grandfather in the hospital when he had what he calls a ‘time slip’ that changed his views on what happens after we die.
These “time slips” are paranormal episodes during which someone—or a group of people—somehow experiences traveling through time without knowing how or why it occurred.
The nature of time is one of the biggest mysteries in science. Scientists do not understand what time is, at least partially, because it does not behave the same way in all circumstances. For example, did you know that clocks installed on airplanes—or even further away, on satellites—record time at different rates than here on Earth?
Garrido, 26, told Dailymail that a mysterious figure appeared by the side of the road, and when he looked closer, he saw it was his grandfather—only younger, as he might have looked in his 40s or 50s. “Funny to see you here,” his grandfather said. “Everything will be fine. Tell your dad I’ll be okay.” Then, he vanished.
The strange moment gave Garrido chills, and he even felt sick and threw up. He ran to the hospital to check on his current-day grandfather, who was still alive and resting but only had a few weeks left to live.
When Garrido got to the hospital, his grandfather said, “I saw you in a dream.” Though there’s no scientific evidence to back up “time slips,” doctors say such experiences might be linked to déjà vu, brain responses to outside triggers, or just a way some people deal with trauma.
Time slips might be explained by electromagnetic fields,’ according to Buckinghamshire New University psychologist Dr Ciaran O’Keeffe.“’Research from Canadian academics shows that such energy fields can produce hallucinations,’ Dr O’Keeffe explained, ‘by toying with signals in the brain.’ But, while the psychologist does not himself believe in the phenomena of time slips, he admits that modern physics does not rule it out. “
Garrido, like many others who have had similar experiences, said it felt very real. The life-changing event happened in 2021 when he was in college, with support from his grandfather, Hiram Garrido, who he was very close to. Hiram passed away at 86. He described the event as the ‘strangest experience of his life,’ saying he has never experienced anything like it before or since, except for one time in childhood when he saw someone in a dream and later saw someone who looked just like them in real life.
Garrido, who now works at Vibe Adventures, a travel company, said that this ‘time slip’ experience and other difficult times around then helped shape him as a person.
‘The experience deeply affected me; I was shaken and didn’t know what to think,’ Garrido confessed. ‘I was very emotional during those weeks…I felt closer to my grandfather, and even though it was strange, I think it was his way of reassuring me that everything would be okay, despite his impending passing,’ he said. ‘It was a difficult time.’
Garrido says the experience changed how he sees life and made it easier to believe there might be some kind of life or awareness after death. Before this, he wasn’t sure what he believed, but meeting a younger version of his grandfather made him question reality. “It gave me a different view on life and death,” he said.
Stories about “time slips” first appeared in 19th-century fiction, like Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” But today, many people online truly believe they’ve briefly slipped through time.
The internet is filled with stories about people insisting they experienced jumps in time which are not merely one second per second, but decades or even hundreds of years.
In one account in Oklahoma in the 1970s, three workers were picking up cattle feeder equipment from a farm and noticed a white house on the property. When they came back the next day, however, the house was not only not there but there was no sign of it ever having been there—yet all three workers saw the same thing the prior day. One possible explanation: the house had existed at a different moment in time, which they collectively experienced as reality.
One explanation is a credible but controversial scientific theory called the multiverse theory. The multiverse theory supposes that an infinite number of worlds exist along different paths in time which arise out of each passing moment, suggesting that different things happen in each universe.
It sounds not only preposterous but also like a lot of work for the universe. Imagine: a new universe traveling along its own, unique timeline created out of every moment. This theory suggests there may be an infinite number of universes. It also explains how “time slips” might be real.
According to podcasters Carrie and Sean McCabe, the most famous one and the craziest story is the turn-of-the-century “Moberly-Jordain Incident. ” ITV made the supposed event, witnessed by Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, into a TV drama in 1981.
As they would later claim in their best-selling 1911 book, An Adventure, the pair were lost in the Petit Trianon château located on the grounds when all of a sudden they traveled back in time to Marie Antoinette’s garden party.
In August 1901, two English teachers, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, visited Versailles. While walking to the Petit Trianon, they got lost and started to feel an eerie sense of unreality. They saw people dressed in old-fashioned clothing, and each noticed figures that the other did not, including a woman sketching, whom Moberly later thought was Marie Antoinette.
When they compared notes, they agreed that the place seemed haunted. This led them to spend the next decade researching the history of the area. On later visits to Versailles, they noticed changes in the landscape from what they had originally seen, but their research suggested these changes matched the late eighteenth century. In 1911, they published their story and findings under the names “Elizabeth Morison” and “Frances Lamont.”
Their experience doesn’t fit neatly as a hoax like the Cottingley Fairies. Possible explanations include a shared delusion or that they wandered into a staged historical scene, but both ideas seem unusual, even making time travel seem plausible by comparison.
Both women held traditional Christian beliefs, didn’t believe in ghosts, and avoided spiritualism. Moberly admitted she sometimes had “second sight” and other psychic moments. In 1902, they submitted their story to the Society for Psychical Research, which later reviewed their book skeptically, suggesting they may have misinterpreted events. However, Moberly and Jourdain concluded that they had somehow tapped into the “memory” of Queen Marie Antoinette, experiencing a blend of history and psychology rather than straightforward time travel or a haunting.
The book, published with fake names, caused a big stir. Later, the authors claimed to have had other supernatural experiences, like seeing Emperor Constantine at the Louvre. There are many theories about what might have happened to Moberly and Jordain on their strange trip to Versailles.
In 1965, a biographer of the French poet and aristocrat Robert de Montesquiou, named Philippe Jullian, suggested that the women may have accidentally walked into an 18th-century-themed party thrown by the poet and his quirky friends.
While this isn’t proven, Jullian argues that de Montesquiou held such parties, and his friends were the kind of people who would stay in character even with strangers.
But for Garrido, and others like him, a concrete explanation for what happened during their curious episode is often less important than the life-changing shift in their way of thinking, that grew out of their perceived ‘time slip.’
“No one knows what happens after death, but this experience changed my view,’ Garrido said. It made grief a little easier — although grief is never easy.”
