A century-old picnic photograph from Canada has sent the internet into a spin, after viewers spotted a man who looks as if he wandered in from a much later era. Some people say he proves that time travel is real, while others have an explanation that is far more down to earth.
The image is titled ‘Last Picnic’ and dates from 1917. It shows adults and children posed on a hillside, dressed just as you would expect for the time. The women wear long skirts, and the men wear formal jackets and bowler hats.
The man who does not fit
One figure breaks the pattern completely. He wears a loose T-shirt and shorts, and his hair looks untidy. Online, some people have nicknamed him the ‘surfer man’ or ‘surfer dude’.
The others in the picture seem to have noticed him too. A man in the group is looking at him with what appears to be disbelief, and the woman beside him seems to be pointing straight at him.
The photograph was found by content creator Jamie D. Grant in a book called The Great Cape Scott Story by Lester Ray Peterson, published in 1974. Grant shared it in an online video, asking whether a mysterious traveller has proved the impossible and journeyed through time.
Viewers split on the mystery
People watching the clip were quick to share their thoughts. One person said they had looked through the same book as a small child and noticed the picture. They said that at the time they felt his clothes were ‘a little ahead’ for the photo, and that it still gives them the chills.
Another viewer said the man looks as if he was caught off guard and ‘definitely’ seems to belong to another time period.
Not everyone was convinced. A Goodreads user pointed to a newspaper article and its comments section, where someone noted that T-shirts already existed back then, with the word entering the dictionary in the 1920s.
A more ordinary explanation
The same Goodreads user also noticed that other men in the picture appear to be wearing shorts as well, and concluded that he is not a time traveller at all.
They added a joke of their own. Other than Bill and Ted, the fictional time-travelling pair, what time traveller would decide that a T-shirt and shorts were the best outfit for a trip into the past?
How things stand
There is no confirmed explanation for who the man in the photograph really is, and nothing in the story points to any proof of time travel.
For some, the man in shorts is a puzzle that is hard to shake. For others, he is simply a man in casual summer clothes who happened to be standing at the wrong end of a camera in 1917. Whichever side you take, ‘Last Picnic’ has certainly found a new audience more than a hundred years later.
Image credit: Youtube
Source: The Mirror US
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