Truly Mysterious Cases of Spontaneous Human Teleportation

One very bizarre facet of the world of the weird is reports of people who have seemingly had the ability to teleport. In the blink of an eye they seemingly instantaneously go from one place to another, traveling past the bounds of space and time as we know it through means beyond our understanding, sometimes on purpose and sometimes just as surprised as those around them. What do we make of such fantastic tales and the possibilities they represent? Are there forces at work in this reality that allow for a person to shift between disparate locations? Can it be harnessed or controlled somehow or is this just a "hiccup" in reality that happens without rhyme or reason? I have covered this topic of teleportation here at Mysterious Universe before, but it is an area rich with cases, more of which I will present here. It is a realm full of bizarre cases and amazing possibilities.

One very bizarre early account of teleportation revolves around a young, 13-year-old girl known only as Lucy J. In 1865, Lucy had already exhibited some strange powers indeed. She had once fallen ill and supposedly used her skills as a powerful medium to scrawl out her own treatment through a process known as “automatic writing,” wherein a person’s hand is allegedly controlled by outside forces and made to write things down. The treatment and diet suggested by whatever forces were gripping her pen turned out to be absolutely correct, and Lucy was cured. Although she did continue to suffer to some extent from a glandular disorder, apparently the medicines she needed would suddenly appear in her mouth without any rational explanation to keep her healthy.

Another power Lucy supposedly had was to materialize a myriad of flowery, perfumed scents from out of nowhere. She was known to keep about her various aromatic essences and flowers in vases, but could apparently invoke these scents and aromas wherever she wished, on several occasions presented with a blank handkerchief only to mysteriously imbue it with flowery scents seemingly at will. Indeed, Lucy was often described as walking about within a “sphere of perfume,” which she could apparently turn off and on when she liked. She also seemed to be able to conjure up actual flowers out of nowhere.

Lucy also had the rather disconcerting habit of making objects spontaneously disappear without a trace, or to conversely have them appear out of nowhere. In one account given by a researcher named John S. Ladd, he claimed he had gone to visit Lucy in a sitting room when flowers and a cherry were reported as suddenly falling into his lap from the ceiling. During this visit there were also luminous hands observed that rapped on the table, moved objects around, removed things from closed boxes, and even grabbed Ladd’s hand. He would later describe the scene thus:

While I am making the examination Lucy is stand­ ing near at my left, and, as I turn from the window, I observe a luminous appearance, as of a hand, for a moment behind her. At first I think it an illusion. But immediately the phenomenon is repeated, and spectral hands are momentarily darting from behind her. I do not speak of what I am observing, but say: “ Sit down here a moment, Lucy,” placing a chair for her at the end of the dining table standing against the wall, while I occupy a seat at the front. Mrs.N. has just lighted her lamps,—one stands on the mantel just behind Lucy, another inside the glass door opening into the shop, and throwing a strong light upon the table. I am scarcely seated when the folds of the damask cover upon the table are agitated, and my hand is grasped from beneath the table by a large hand infolded in the cover. I extend my hand. It is touched again and again by smaller fingers, which elude my grasp. The cherry, which a moment before lay upon the table, is removed and put into my hand. Scarcely have I replaced it on the table when a fancy toy-cake is projected from under the table. “ They must have taken that from my cake-box in the shop,” says Mrs. N., who, with Miss E., is sitting at a short distance from the table, witnessing the proceedings. “ Let us see,” I remark, and I follow Mrs. N. into the shop. On a shelf is a large tin box closely covered, containing fancy cakes of the same description. Resuming our seats, a large number of cakes are put into my hand, which I place on the table. During this time Lucy's hands are fully in view. She is delighted with the novelty; none besides ourselves are within reach of the table. In the meantime, the hand, as yet invisible,—at first vagrant, cold, and clammy, —becomes firm and warm, and is repeatedly placed in mine, but melts away as I grasp it.

Perhaps Lucy’s most impressive power was teleportation. On many occasions she was seen to simply blink out of existence, only to return later just as abruptly, often carrying objects such as flowers, branches, or plants from far away places, among other things. She would claim that while she was away, those in these far-flung places were unable to actually see her, although she was fully aware of everything around her and could mostly interact with her environment. Little was known about how she did it other than it seemed to involve unseen "intelligences." Ladd would describe what he called these “aerial excursions” thus:

Her reappearance was instantaneous,—in the twinkling of an eye she stood before you,— fresh and blooming, and without any indications of exhaustion, although her absence may have been from the morning into the evening, and sometimes during heavy showers. Usually in sum­mer she reappeared with her arms filled with flowers or fruit, and at other seasons with bouquets of rare flowers, which she said the intelligences had placed in her hand. On these excursions she appeared to have fully retained her consciousness and powers of observation, and expressed her surprise why she was not noticed, while she, in the full exercise of her senses, saw and heard what was occurring in the places, and among the people, to which she was carried,—even to noticing the striking of the hour and read­ing the figures on the dial of the clock of a distant city, or witnessing of an afternoon a dramatic performance in the theatre, into which she had been floated, as she described it, and given a prominent seat, and had a programme put into her hands by the intelligences who accompanied her; such play-bills she always retained. I have examined them on her return.

In one odd case of this teleportation in July, 1865, Lucy spontaneously appeared at a lecture at at the City Hall in Charlestown. When asked by the startled people around her how she had so miraculously arrived, she calmly explained that she had come down through the roof. She would later describe how she had been whisked away and carried into the air over trees and houses, which she could clearly see flying and blurring by below her. She then claimed she was transported to the Cambridge cemetery, adjoining Mount Auburn, where she had met her dead grandmother and been given an oak branch, which she still carried with her when she mysteriously appeared. She also claimed to have met a mysterious girl, who through her description seemed to be the deceased daughter of one of the attendees of the lecture, a Mrs. N. It is all very bizarre, and Ladd would say on the matter of these odd teleportations:

She seemed to wonder at the novelty of her adventures, and, notwithstanding she was timid and sensitive beyond most persons of her age, and could hardly be induced to visit strange places or persons without an attendant, such was her confidence in her invisible friends, she uniformly said that she felt no fear on these excursions, although exposed in situations, as subsequent relations may show, which might well appall the most intrepid.

Another curious case of what undoubtedly seems to be human teleportation occurred on the evening of March 16, 1878. On this night, a seance was being held at a residence at 21 Green Street, Grosvenor Square, W1, in London, England. Gathered about at this particular seance were the two rather well-known mediums Arthur Colman and J.W. Fletcher, as well as four others, including a William Eglinton, a W.H. Harrison, and a Mr. Coleman. The doors were all purportedly firmly closed and locked throughout the session, leaving the room cloaked in a dim haze of quiet darkness which was not broken throughout.

At one point during the proceedings, Harrison called out to the spirits to take someone up through the ceiling as proof of their power, and although it was somewhat in jest, at this point Eglinton was found to no longer be amongst them. The whole group had been holding hands and the ones holding those of the missing man let out a sudden gasp of sheer astonishment when he seemed to just fade away into nothing. Immediaely afterwards, a loud thump was heard directly upstairs. It did not take long for someone to turn on the lights and discover that Eglinton was no longer there in the room, and that inexplicable bump from upstairs weighed heavily on everyone’s mind. The door to the room was unlocked and when the upper floors of the residence were searched, Mr. Eglinton was reportedly found sprawled across the floor in what was described as some sort of deep trance, with his arms still extended as if holding hands with those beside him. He would wake up a few minutes later complaining about how the back of his head hurt, as if he had been struck from behind.

Spirit mediums and seances seem to have a habit of attracting stories of human teleportation, as a similarly bizarre case concerns the Italian aristocrat and avid early 20th century spirit medium Marquis Carlo Centurione Scotto, who claimed he had come into his power to communicate with spirits in the aftermath of the death of his eldest son Vittorio in 1926. Scotto was said to often exercise his powers to communicate with the dead, perhaps in his obsessive quest to reach his dead son, and one such seance on July 29, 1928 found him in a darkened room of Millesimo Castle, in northwestern Italy. The seance was attended by the famous psychic researcher and professor Ernesto Bozzano, as well as nine others, who sat huddled around in the dark and surrounded by ancient walls, trying to talk to ghosts.

During the proceedings the group was met with various unexplained phenomena, such as sudden blasts of icy air, a heavy table which allegedly moved about on its own, and an assortment of inexplicable thumps, thuds, and bangs that seemed to come from all around. Others around Scotto reported that they thought they had heard him move from his chair, but when they called out to him he assured them he was still sitting there. Then, out of nowhere Scotto blurted out that he could not feel his legs, after which the room fell into a deathly silence. Calls to the man went unanswered and attempts to reach out and touch him in the murky, impenetrably dark room also met with nothing. It was then that Professor Bozzano explained that he had probably “asported” from the room. When the lights were turned on, Scotto was nowhere to be seen, which was odd considering that the door had been closed and locked the whole time and no one had heard it open or seen the sliver of light that would have surely pierced in if it had been. The group proceeded to spend the next 2 and a half hours meticulously searching the entire castle, checking every room, cellar, stable, as well as the surrounding grounds, yet no sign of the missing man could be found.

Desperate for answers, a woman in the group named Mrs. Hack reached out to the spirits for help and was told that Scotto could be found in an outbuilding in a place they had overlooked. This new information from the other side spurred a renewed search of the premises, and sure enough when the stables were checked again a tiny door that they had not seen before was found, behind which snoring could be heard. Oddly, the door was locked from the outside, with the key still in the keyhole. When the door was opened, Scotto was reportedly found fast asleep upon a pile of hay. When he awoke, he was heavily confused, dazed, and disoriented, to the point that he supposedly broke down in tears in shock. The strange spontaneous teleportation of Marquis Carlo Centurione Scotto was witnessed by many well educated adults and remains unexplained.

Another medium known for his purported power to teleport was Carlo Mirabelli, from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Mirabelli was rather well-known for being able to perform a wide variety of seemingly supernatural feats, such as levitation and telekinesis, but the most impressive was perhaps his spontaneous teleportation. In 1926, Mirabelli was about to board a train headed from Sao Paulo to the port of Santos with some friends when one of his companions claimed that he had walked towards the platform and simply began to vanish into thin air, fading in a foggy haze as if he were being slowly erased from existence, all in the middle of the day in front of dozens of witnesses.

Mirabelli’s friends were understandably both shocked and worried by the sudden spontaneous vanishing, but things would get stranger when a station master came to them 15 minutes later saying they had a call from Mirabelli himself. When the worried friends spoke to him on the phone, he claimed that he had suddenly appeared in the town of Sao Vincente, which lies 56 miles away near the train’s destination of Santos. He claimed that when he had materialized there and gotten his bearings he had realized that only 2 minutes had gone by, meaning that he had been practically instantaneously transported there. He had then tried to figure out what was going on, where he was, and then tried to find a phone before calling them. Although it had all happened suddenly and against his will, he reported that he felt no particular disorientation or deep sense of confusion upon teleporting, but rather a strong curiosity as to how it had occurred.

In the 1940s there was a curious account written of by a psychiatrist allegedly stationed at Fort Leavenworth prison by the name of Donald Powell Wilson, who wrote of some of his more interesting and stranger experiences there in his 1951 book My Six Convicts. One of the accounts is particularly odd, as it involves an inmate who seems to have had powers far beyond our current understanding. The prisoner in question was a man called simply Hadad, who was supposedly originally of Senegalese descent and who made various bold claims, such as that he had been educated at Harvard and Carthage universities, that he was a "Chaldean astrologer" with direct lineage reaching back to 400 B.C. , and he also happened to claim to be a Haitian Zombi priest. Indeed it was said that the other inmates were quite afraid of Hadad, claiming that he engaged in Voodoo rituals and devil worshipping, rumors which the mysterious man did little to discourage as they kept people away from him. His real origins and history were unknown and mysterious, and no one really knew much about him at all other than that he had been part of a gang in the Southwest United States and was in for a murder charge.

Hadad was claimed to have been through three separate penitentiaries, and to have a wide variety of strange powers, (which could probably constitute their own article) which depending on who you asked were due to either his Voodoo magic or simply sleight of hand and trickery. He was said to be able to hypnotically influence others, using this power to do things as varied as merely getting extra bread from guards, to having them hand over their belts so that he might attempt to commit suicide with them, all objects which the guards themselves would later have no recollection of giving to him. This hypnotism could also be used to apparently make people forget things they had seen or heard, or to induce a trance-like state. Other various abilities he was said to possess were telepathy, healing, and the power to control the seizures of epileptics from a distance, a power which he once demonstrated to skeptical prison officials as proof of what he was capable of. One report on record from before when Hadad was arrested even suggested that he had the power to deflect bullets, when it was written that police had completely peppered his car with bullets, yet he had remained completely unscathed, later cryptically explaining: “I found it expedient to deflect the bullets from the anatomical headquarters of my spirit.”

A more ominous ability was Hadad’s power to actually seemingly come back from the dead, or at least put himself into some sort of catatonic state that perfectly mimicked physical death. Once he was found hung in his cell by the belt of a guard who could not remember having given it to him, and he was declared dead. Hadad’s body was brought to the morgue, confirmed to be dead once more, and preparations were made for an autopsy. The following day, Hadad’s body was still splayed out over the gurney and seemingly just as dead as ever. As a visiting neurologist and the prison doctor prepared to cut into his skull to take a look at his brain, Hadad reportedly twitched, slowly sat up “as if propelled by invisible gears," and calmly said “Gentlemen, I would rather not, if you don't mind,” before asking for a glass of water. He later said that he had been totally aware of everything going on around him the entire time. Wilson would write of the bizarre incident:

The neurologist tried to hide his shock, but he choked on a nervous cough. Gordon sucked in a startled breath and swore sharply. I began to breathe again at the sound of Gordon's voice. There was not a man around the table who had not had some experience, either in his practice or in medical school, with catatonic trances, and who did not have some knowledge of Hadad's corporeal heterodoxy. Nevertheless, in spite of our scientific smugness, none of us were prepared for what had just happened. We had all thought Hadad was respectably dead.

Hadad would achieve this death-like state on on another occasion as well, in full view of medical professionals, in order to prove that the first time was no fluke. At this time, he once again went into the catatonic trance-like state that was deep enough to emulate clinical death in every respect, to the point that even puncturing the skin produced little blood. For good measure, and projecting an added layer of the weird over the whole situation, to prove that he was in total control of the process Hadad had claimed that while he was under he would produce welts in the shape of Zodiac symbols on his body, which he did. Wilson wrote of this event:

This was no ordinary trance or simple suspended animation. It was beyond the usual psychotic catatonia or catalepsy. This was the second time Hadad had retained both consciousness and memory while in a trance, and had terminated it at will. It was not a statistical accident.

All of these purported powers made both the other prisoners and the prison guards more than a little nervous, and many felt that Hadad was a bad omen. Yet even more unsettling for the authorities were his alleged abilities to teleport and seemingly phase through solid physical objects. He was said to be able to leave his cell at will, often seen walking around the halls by startled guards but apparently always returning to his cell of his own volition. He did not seem to be interested in eluding capture or escaping off to freedom at all. He was likewise supposedly able to instantly escape from any handcuffs, straightjackets, or other methods of restraint; a feat which no one could quite figure out how he pulled off. Whenever he was restrained in such a way it seemed to be Hadad’s apparent lack of any real interest in escaping and his genuine desire to put everyone at ease that kept him bound more than anything else, and handcuffs and straightjackets seemed to be a formality more than anything with him, as it seemed he could remove them at any time if he so wished.

Some of the paddy wagons that had assisted in transferring Hadad from place to place had similar stories. They said that when they had arrived at their destination they had looked into the fully locked and secured wagon to find Hadad nowhere to be seen. This would send the police into an utter panic, but just as they were gearing up for a manhunt Hadad would saunter up to the prison front door and calmly ask to be let in, again showing no desire to really escape, although the stunts cost him 15 days in solitary confinement each time. On one such occasion, when asked why he had decided to vanish himself from a paddy wagon only to return right back to the prison, Hadad reportedly said in his own defense:

It has been some time since I have been to a concert, and I felt it would be such a shame not to go. After all, I am just a short distance from the city. But sir, I came back, as I always do. I have no intention of avoiding my sentence. Whom did I harm in doing this? No one even knew I was gone.

Wilson would move on from Leavenworth and this is where we lose the story of Hadad. Although he was claimed to still be a prisoner at Leavenworth when Wilson left, it is not clear what ultimately became him. Also unclear is how he managed to pull off his many incredible feats, teleportation included. Was there something to this or was it all trickery, mind games, and escape artistry? Indeed, was Hadad every even real at all, or is this a partially or fully fictionalized account? We may never know.

Our next bizarre case brings us to Manila, in the Philippines. In 1951, a 6th grader at Zamora Elementary School, 13-year-old Cornelio Closa, experienced a rather strange series of events. It began when he was walking home from school one day with a friend and suddenly encountered what he described as a beautiful young girl of around his age, who had on a flowing white dress, with long blonde hair down to her waist, and was standing there barefoot, before moving beside the frightened boy by apparently floating over the ground rather than actually walking. He claimed that she spoke to him quite clearly, but did not move her lips when she did so, and that when she touched his hand he felt light and unaware of what was going on around him. Although his friend could not see the entity, he did claim that Cornelio suddenly vanished into thin air right in front of his eyes, only to be found at home later.

Cornelio Closa as an adult

The oddness would only escalate from there. The mysterious blonde-haired girl began to make herself known to Cornelio on a regular basis, and whenever she appeared weirdness was sure to follow. Some of it was even quite sinister. He would become uncharacteristically unruly at school, picking fights with boys much bigger than he, yet managing to win with what seemed to be superhuman strength. One time when he was admonished by his father for coming home late, Cornelio apparently growled at him as if nothing more than a savage beast. He would also spend much time ignoring his studies and sulking in a corner, refusing any food that was offered to him. At school he was known to disturb both teachers and classmates with sudden eruptions into maniacal laughter that seemed to be in a voice not his own.

This was around the time that Cornelio started teleporting as he had done in front of his friend when he had first met the girl. In one early instance his mother noticed that he looked sickly and flushed, before suddenly and spectacularly disappearing in full sight. This became such a common occurrence that Cornelio’s father had all of the doors and windows nailed shut, yet still the boy managed to teleport away from and back to the house, disappearing and reappearing out of thin air at a moment's notice. The same thing happened at school, starting with an instance in which Cornelio’s teacher called him to the front of the class, where he proceeded to completely vanish in front of everyone. He began to suddenly disappear from classrooms on a regular basis, and it was so upsetting that one of his teachers would apparently have a nervous breakdown in response, forcing her to quit. The teacher would later explain:

I was terribly affected by these happenings in my class. I decided before I lost my mind completely, I should resign. I remember how the chain of events made Cornelio laugh and laugh. It was a hideous kind of laugh. It didn’t belong to a boy. In fact, it didn’t belong to a human being.

In every one of these instances, he would later claim that the strange little girl had come to him and taken his hand, a gesture he had been unable to resist even though he knew what it meant and what it would lead to. When he made contact with her he claimed that he was overcome with a strange sensation that he was no longer real and that the world felt ethereal and as if it was “made of glass,” before blinking away. His school began to accuse him of skipping classes and desertion, but nothing anyone could do could keep him from these bizarre vanishing acts. Even more ominous than the disappearances themselves were the effects they sometimes had on others. At times a horrific stench would be purportedly left pervading the air in the wake of these vanishings, causing violent retching and vomiting in the startled classmates. Many times Cornelio would be found later asleep in bed in his room a short time later, but sometimes he would be gone for days on end. He was always able to get back into his home regardless of whether the doors and windows were locked by his frightened family or not. When he returned, he would claim that the girl he was with had made him promise not to say anything about what had happened.

For his part, Cornelio later explained that he began to live for these moments when the girl would come, mostly staring morosely at the wall, obsessively awaiting her return, like an addict. Some part of him needed this, even if he himself did not particularly understand why. During these strange absences, he claimed that the girl spoke to him a lot but that he could later not recall much of what she had actually said. What he did recall was that being with her made him feel as if he were in a dream world where time stood still, and that he would somehow no longer feel real. He said that they would go all over town, floating up in the sky and descending to partake in a variety of pursuits, always appearing out of thin air and vanishing once again just as mysteriously, often in front of many surprised witnesses. He would explain of these journeys:

There were many times when the girl and I would float around and go to many places in the city. We went many times to movie houses and visited the International Fair that was being held in the city. When I was with her, I didn't feel exhausted or hungry.

He also spoke of going to movies and restaurants only to vanish without paying, or even appearing and disappearing in front of people merely to see what they would do. In the meantime, Cornelio continued to exhibit brutish, violent behavior, and began stealing money from home and arguing or fighting with people completely unprovoked. He would also revel in deliberately misplacing items around the house such as his father’s reading glasses, slippers, and keys, and he would also teleport to the kitchen to eat everything in the fridge before teleporting back out. There was also his uncontrollable urge to smash dishes and pretty much anything that was around him.

Cornelio’s health began to deteriorate, to the point that he would eat barely anything at all, and he devolved into a sullen, wraith-like visage of his former self. Cornelio’s father had him brought to several psychiatric specialists but everyone told him that there was nothing wrong with his son, even though Cornelio was very often quite unruly during these visits. There was not much anyone could do about keeping him confined because he was still prone to disappearing and reappearing at a moment’s notice, no walls could contain him. It was then that a a Methodist pastor came forth to try to help the family through this tough time. Cornelio was at the time of this visit overcome with an irrational urge to flee. He would say:

I could hear evil laughter outside the house. It was the alien entity. It was the voice of the girl saying I should run away. The pastor told my father he knew someone who would help me, someone who had helped others. He said I needed help badly and that I had to be prayed for immediately. He told me the devil himself was in my body.

The pastor informed the family that he believed the girl their son was seeing was actually a demon, and referred them to an American evangelist working in the Philippines by the name of Lester Sumrall. Cornelio was brought to Sumrall’s church and felt immediately uncomfortable there, as if he did not belong. He reported that it was during his stay there that he looked at his strange companion and noticed that she was no longer a pretty little girl, but rather a hideous abomination beyond description. Sumrall then spent some time praying for the boy, and after a time Cornelio claimed that he felt cleansed. After this, the girl, demon, whatever it was that had been teleporting him all over the place, did not appear to him again and he was able to lead a somewhat normal life once more. The case of Cornelio Closa is curious in that these events were well documented, and were witnessed by many people and verified by many of those involved, yet no one can make any sense of it.

So far we have looked at cases of teleportation that seem to have a rather supernatural and unexplained forces, but there are other cases that seem to stem possibly from actual man-made inventions; teleportation machines, if you will. One case that has long drawn rumors of such a machine is that of an engineer and inventor from the Isle of Wight by the name of William Cantelo. In the 1870s he was well-known for his many enigmatic inventions, which he kept on display at his shop on French Street in Southampton, and he spent much of his time in his secret workshop located underground and connected via tunnel to a pub he owned called the Old Tower Inn. Indeed it was claimed that Cantelo would sometimes lock himself away in this workshop for weeks on end, heavily absorbed in some sort of mysterious research that most could only guess at, although some people claimed that he had nifty gadgets, like “strange light machines,” “humming globes,” and unearthly weapons down there, along with who knew what else. The only thing he would actually admit to developing was a type of fully automatic machine gun in early 1880. Everything else was mystery punctuated by the very often strange noises that could not be identified emanating from out of the darkness of the tunnel, but no one dared interrupt him when he was working or go down into that murk.

At some point in late 1880, Cantelo would enter his tunnel for one of his sessions and never come out. Although some people claimed that he had merely taken a vacation, there were others who claimed that he had never exited that tunnel, but had rather vanished in a hail of flashing lights and mist in the darkness. Either way, Cantelo was never heard from again. A thorough search was conducted for the missing inventor but the only thing that could be turned up was that he had apparently withdrawn a healthy sum of money shortly before his disappearance, and a private investigator believed he had headed to the United States, but other than that there was nothing. However, things would take a turn for the odd a year later.

In 1881, an American inventor by the name of Hiram Maxim began making a name for himself in the UK. He showcased quite a few far-out inventions, including a fire sprinkler, a type of mousetrap, hair-curling irons, and many others, with one of them being, oddly, a machine gun very much like the one that Cantelo had been talking about shortly before his vanishing, and which was called the “Maxim Gun”. Hiram made some bold claims to be sure, such as that he had been experimenting with powered flight, that he had invented the lightbulb, and most bizarrely of all, that he had found a way to fashion a teleportation machine. Just as Hiram was getting into the public limelight, Canttelo’s two sons noticed that the American bore a striking resemblance to their father, and they even suspected that the two were one in the same, but Hiram would not meet them and claimed that not only was he from America rather than the Isle of Wight, but that he was in no way their father.

Interestingly, the two sons claimed that only their immediate family would have known that they were from the Isle of Wight, as they had kept that information confidential from the public. Also curious was the fact that the plans for their father’s machine gun looked strikingly similar to the Maxim Gun. The sons became convinced that their father had found a way to truly teleport and that he was making jumps back and forth across the Atlantic to lead a double life. It would have fit in perfectly to all of the claims and the available information, but despite various pieces of circumstantial evidence such as an admittedly similarity in physical appearance and some coincidences, there is currently no evidence to prove whether William Cantello, Hiram Maxim, whoever he was, actually achieved teleportation technology or not, or if the two are the same person. It is a curious story all the same.

To many teleportation may seem to still be firmly in the realm of science fiction, yet for some it has allegedly been a reality. What are we to make of these cases? Is there some chance that these people have managed to slip through some crack in our reality, to somehow shift through space to instantly travel from one point to another? If so, how did they do it? What secrets did they know or what powers or technology were they privy to that allowed them to transcend the borders of what we know? These are questions we will perhaps forever be doomed to ponder, but these stories and accounts provide much to speculate about and think on. If human teleportation were indeed achievable it would change civilization itself. It at least had a large impact on those said to have actually done it.

Special thanks to my friend Loes Modderman for her contributions to this article.