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A man who goes only by Edward claims he was recruited in 2004 to participate in a classified time travel experiment at a Los Angeles laboratory. He says the mission sent him 3,000 years into the future and that he came back with a photograph. The photo, he claims, shows a familiar city transformed beyond recognition. In footage filmed in a park in Armenia, with his face pixelated and his voice distorted to hide his identity, Edward held up what he described as proof.
Edward’s account was originally recorded by ApexTV, a YouTube channel that has built a following producing interviews with self-proclaimed time travelers, in February 2018. The footage circulated online at the time and has been periodically resurfaced in the years since. His claim is straightforward: the photograph in his hands shows Los Angeles in the year 5,000, not as a sprawling coastal metropolis but as a submerged city, with its residents living on wooden platforms above water. According to Edward, melting polar ice caps caused the flooding that consumed the city.
Edward described arriving in the future and standing on a massive wooden platform. “Not only me,” he said in the interview, “houses, buildings of course, all made from wood. And after, I realised it was the same city, Los Angeles, but underwater.” He attributed the flooding to a buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere that gradually destroyed the planet’s natural shield. There is no verified identity attached to Edward, no corroboration for his claims, and no scientific institution that has confirmed his account. What he does have is a photograph that he says he carried back through time, and an audience that keeps finding it.
What Edward Claims, What the Photo Shows, and What Scientists Actually Say
The photograph Edward presents in the footage appears to show an underwater scene with blue hues and shapes that could suggest submerged structures. Edward claims this is documentary evidence of a future catastrophic flood. He says the experiment that sent him forward in time was run out of a Los Angeles lab where he worked under a supervisor he refers to only as Jackson. He said he was given a specific assignment: travel to the future, observe, and photograph what he found. The image he brought back, he insists, is the result of that mission.
No scientific institution has verified the photograph or the claims surrounding it. NASA has stated on record that while the mathematics of time travel do have practical applications in technologies such as GPS satellites, the kind of travel through time depicted in stories like Edward’s remains beyond current scientific reach. Traveling thousands of years into the future and returning with physical evidence is not something any known physics framework supports as possible with current or near-future technology. Edward’s claims exist entirely outside of verified science.
What is real, and documented by scientists across multiple institutions, is the underlying concern Edward’s story gestures toward. Rising sea levels caused by melting ice caps and increased greenhouse gas concentrations are subjects of ongoing, peer-reviewed scientific research. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has documented measurable sea level rise along the California coast. Whether Los Angeles faces flooding in 100 years or 1,000 is a matter of active scientific modeling, not time travel testimony. Edward’s photograph cannot be verified. The climate data behind the concern he dramatizes can be.
The Second Time Traveler in This Story Was Proven to Be a Hoax. That Matters.
The source article also features a second self-proclaimed time traveler named Noah, who claimed to come from the year 2030. Noah appeared on ApexTV in multiple videos beginning in late 2017 and was cited by international media outlets after passing what ApexTV presented as a lie detector test. His most circulated prediction was that Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., would become President of the United States in 2030, requiring a new law lowering the minimum age from 35. That prediction was reported widely as a curiosity.
In July 2019, the person behind Noah admitted publicly that the entire character was fabricated. In a video uploaded to ApexTV, he revealed his real name as Jason, said he was not a time traveler, and apologized to anyone who had taken the videos seriously. A separate individual named Denis Bel also came forward claiming to have portrayed Noah in some videos, telling outlets that ApexTV had paid him to make the content and had asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. ApexTV denied Bel’s version of events and maintained that Jason was the only person who played Noah. The fact that Noah was a confirmed fictional character is not mentioned in the source article.
Yolanda Renee King is currently 17 years old. She has not announced any candidacy for any public office. The constitutional requirement for the presidency, that a candidate must be at least 35 years of age and a natural-born U.S. citizen, remains in effect and unchanged. A prediction attributed to a person who publicly admitted to fabricating a time travel story is not a reliable basis for any expectation about American political life. Readers encountering that prediction in coverage of this story deserve to know it came from a source that was debunked years before the article was published.
Why Stories Like This Keep Circulating
ApexTV launched its YouTube channel in 2014 and has grown to over 1.3 million subscribers by producing interviews with a rotating cast of self-described time travelers, each with blurred faces, distorted voices, and unverifiable claims. Edward’s February 2018 interview is one of dozens the channel has produced. The format is consistent: an unknown individual filmed in an undisclosed location, identity concealed, claiming access to information about the future that cannot be checked. The channel has described its subjects as “supposed time travelers” while continuing to publish their accounts.
The recurring appeal of these stories is not difficult to understand. Climate anxiety, uncertainty about the future of American cities, and questions about what the country will look like for the next generation are genuinely present concerns for many people. A story in which someone claims to have seen what happens next, even a disturbing version, offers a kind of narrative closure that scientific projections, with their ranges of probability and margins of uncertainty, do not. Edward’s flooded Los Angeles is a concrete image. The NOAA sea level projections are graphs. Both point toward the same coastal reality. Only one of them is verifiable.
Edward has never come forward publicly, never been identified, and never provided his photograph for independent analysis. The image he holds up in the ApexTV footage has not been examined or authenticated by any institution. His claim that he participated in a classified 2004 time travel experiment at a Los Angeles lab has not been corroborated by any source. What remains is a recurring viral moment, a blurred face on a park bench in Armenia, holding a photograph of blue water and promising it is the future. Whether that image reflects anything real depends entirely on who is looking at it and what they are willing to believe.