Sergei Ponomarenko: The Man Who Walked Out of 1958 in Kyiv

On the morning of April 23, 2006, a young man appeared on a street in Kyiv, Ukraine. He wore clothes associated with the Soviet era, carried an old film camera, and kept asking what year it was. When police checked his papers, he identified himself as Sergei Ponomarenko, born in 1932, while insisting that he was only 25 or 26. He said that minutes earlier he had been in Kyiv in 1958.

That is the opening of a story that spread across the Internet: a photographer had been taking a picture of a bell-shaped object in the sky when he was pushed through time. His camera still held a roll of film. Soviet documents and photographs of old Kyiv were presented as proof. Sergei was then taken to a psychiatric facility and disappeared from a monitored room. Years later, a photograph allegedly sent to his girlfriend was said to show Kyiv in 2050.