Rudolph Fentz and Time Travel

A decades-old time travel hoax has been unravelling in Ohio this past week. It started with an article about Chris Aubeck, a researcher who was investigating the case of Rudolph Fentz. Fentz was a man who had supposedly time-travelled from 1876 to 1950, only to get struck down by a car and killed. The story has gained wide credence in many European circles. But Aubeck tracked the source of the tale down to an Akron-based writer, Ralph M. Holland, who wrote a story about this incident in 1953.But when Rev. George Murphy read about Aubeck's research, he recognized that the tale had an even earlier source. It turned out that Holland had lifted the tale from a short story by Jack Finney that appeared in a science fiction anthology titled Tomorrow, The Stars edited by Robert Heinlein that was published in 1951. So a 1951 science fiction story had somehow become accepted as fact by many, until Aubeck and Rev. Murphy debunked it.

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