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On April 23, 2006, a man named Sergei Ponomarenko gained the attention of authorities in Kyiv, Ukraine.
The reason for this is because Ponomarenko claimed to have used time travel to appear there straight from the year 1958.
Ponomarekno, in his mid 20s, was spotted in Kiev acting suspiciously confused and dressed in an outfit from the 1950s, carrying an old-fashioned camera.
When he asked two police officers for directions to a place that no longer existed and was detained.
At the time of his detainment, Sergei Ponomarenko claimed to not know what year it was. When asked to present identification, he produced a Soviet national ID card from the 1950s with his photo on it. It also claimed he was 25-years-old and born in the year 1932.
Thinking him mad, authorities took to a psychiatric clinic in Kyiv.
There the time traveler claimed his name was Sergei Valentinovich Ponomarenko and that he was born in Kyiv on June 16, 1932.
He also told the doctor there that the last thing he remembered was that he was taking a walk in Kyiv with his fiance, Valentina Curish.
While on the walk he said he stopped to take a photo of a strange bell-shaped object “flying in a strange way” in the sky. As soon as he snapped the picture, he was suddenly in the year 2006.
When authorities developed the photographs on his old camera, they too appeared to be taken in the 1950s and the photo of the UFO was in one of the photos.
Further investigation by authorities revealed that a man by the same name had actually gone missing in 1958.
They also were able to track down Valentina Curish and she did turn out to be the woman in the photos. Not only that, she was in her 70s.
She also claimed that Ponomarenko disappeared in the 1950s, returned a few days later, then vanished again in the 1970s.
Curish also had in her possession a photo of what appeared to be an older Sergei Ponomarenko that was taken in the year 2050, further solidifying his claims of time travel.
In April of 2006 after meeting with Dr. Pablo Kutrikov to discuss his bizarre claimes, Ponomarenko was seen on the security camera entering his room at the clinic.
That was the last time he was seen.
Security camera footage showed that he never left the room and there were bars on the windows.
Several people have attempted to debunk the story of Sergei Ponomarenko over the years and they have discovered some compelling discrepancies.
No one, however, has ever been able to pin down the man who claimed to be the time traveler therefore he has never come to admit it was a hoax or how he was able to fabricate so many of the items he presented to authorities.
So the mystery continues.