If you’re someone who spends a lot of time online, you may have stumbled upon the story of Sergei Ponomarenko, who appeared in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2006, claiming to be a time traveler.
According to the story, this man, wearing a strange outfit for the time and carrying an old-fashioned camera in his hand, was spotted wandering the streets of Kiev. He told authorities he was born in 1932 and claimed to be 25 years old. The story got even weirder when the man presented his Soviet passport from the 1950s with a photo of him still looking 25 years old.
Ponomarenko told police he was taking pictures of Kiev before he suddenly appeared 49 years later. According to the story, the police then looked at his camera and determined that it was an old product that had not been produced since the 70s and that the film inside could only be developed by an expert.
Noticing that the film was surprisingly well preserved, they recruited someone who began developing the photographs. It was noticed that the pictures showed Kiev as it was in the 1950s and included pictures of Sergei and another woman. Of course, Sergei was wearing the same clothes he wore when he stopped to ask the police for directions.
The last photo showed a UFO in the sky, which Ponomarenko said was the last thing he photographed before suddenly finding himself in the future.
The last frame from Sergei Ponomarenko’s camera.While the story is bizarre enough, articles on the internet underline that surveillance footage of Sergei walked into his room at the police station, but was never seen again. Also, the police examined historical records and found that there was a man by that name who went missing in 1958. They tracked down his girlfriend, who was in her 70s at the time, and found that she was the woman in the photos.
The woman told police that Sergei had disappeared for two years before reappearing. Then in the 1970s, he disappeared forever, but a photo he took years later showed Sergei much older and supposedly in 2050, in the now-large city of Kiev.
…And the truth of Sergei Ponomarenko is revealed
All this may sound too strange to be true; it’s not real anyway… YouTuber Joe Scott studied the so-called footage and “recordings” taken at that time and found a few problems. The first is that in the “future” photo the skyscrapers behind Sergei look like they were cloned and even include the Empire State Building. Another is that all of the photos were taken from a Ukrainian TV show called Aliens.
Sergei PonomarenkoThe series is similar to series about aliens around the world and comes with a heavy disclaimer. A translation of the statement reads, “The Alien series aims to restore scenes of controversial issues. Any proposed theory or hypothesis cannot be considered correct and further scientific research is needed. All scene restorations are based on the testimonies of ‘witnesses’. There is no conclusive evidence to prove the existence of aliens. Your opinion on this is up to you.”
While supposedly a “restoration” of real events, the origin of the story seems to be this series. In other words, Sergei Ponomarenko came across a similar story, as Scott predicted, and decided to make it a reality.
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