The Writer of ‘Back to the Future’ Is Debunking Time-Travel Hoaxes on TikTok

Even more than a century after H.G. Wells first published Time Machine, people still haven’t lost their interest in time-travel stories. Hollywood especially just loves to churn out time-travel movies, from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to Timecop to the multiple movies in which Rob Corddry and Craig Robinson break the temporal barrier in a germ-ridden jacuzzi.

Perhaps this cultural obsession with time travel is why so many people on the internet have claimed to have time traveled for real. For years now, YouTube has been full of videos depicting amateur time travelers — one of whom insisted that they helped let 9/11 happen so that an American Civil War wouldn’t break out. 

But more recently, dubious time-travel claims have been popping up more and more on TikTok, such as the user named “Javier,” who declared that he was visiting from the year 2027, when humanity was extinct and he was the only survivor. As evidence, he posted videos of himself wandering through empty city streets. Which would have been pretty convincing had the videos not coincided with a global pandemic that prompted numerous cities to enact strict lockdowns. 

Now a TikToker named Alec Schaal is claiming that his Ring camera captured proof of a time traveler who, for some reason, was using Schaal’s backyard shed as a gateway to the future/past. The evidence consists of video footage of a young man entering the shed, then leaving the shed days later, now a senior citizen. 

For some reason, TMZ is taking a break from following Judge Reinhold to the Starbucks men’s room to get to the bottom of this time-travel story. As such, they contacted the co-writer of one of the greatest time-travel movies of all-time: Bob Gale of Back to the Future fame — and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Payback fame. 

In his comments to TMZ, Gale immediately called bullshit on the video, pointing out that Marty McFly never aged during his adventures with Doc Brown. “I think someone is unclear on the concept,” Gale told the celebrity gossip website. “As I see it, the guy either has an aging machine (maybe he spent a few hours watching the news), or a makeup kit to give him those looks, or it’s his father!”

In all fairness to this TikTok hoaxter, I think the idea is that the shed guy traveled to another time, and lived there for decades before returning. Like, if Marty McFly had traveled to the future year of 2015, then stayed there for 40 years before returning to the ‘80s, he too would look super-old. Perhaps the bigger question is why can this guy only time travel in a random stranger’s filthy shed and not literally anywhere else in the entire world? 

Hopefully Bob Gale he won’t be asked to comment on every single social media time-travel hoax that crops up. Especially when he has so much else to answer for… 

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