The Why Files: Operation Podcast
632: Science Behind Time Storms | Time Isn't What You Think It Is
06 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What happened to Corporal Armando Valdez in the Chilean mountains?
On April 25th, 1977, Corporal Armando Valdez was guarding a campfire in the Chilean mountains. Just before dawn, he saw a glowing purple mist. Valdez walked into the mist and vanished. Fifteen minutes later, he stumbled back into camp. He was shaking. He collapsed. His men checked him over. He seemed fine, except for one detail. When Valdez left, he was clean-shaven.
When he returned, he had a short beard. And his watch had jumped ahead to April 30th. He was gone for 15 minutes, but he lived for five days. And Valdez's story isn't unique. This phenomenon has appeared all over the world for centuries. Different cultures call them different names. We know them as time storms.
The Valdez case follows a pattern that has repeated around the world for hundreds of years. In 1947, a British military convoy was driving through the mountains of Nepal. This was dangerous territory. Bandits were everywhere. The group included local soldiers, a British Colonel and his wife, Donna. Donna was sitting in the back of a truck when the temperature dropped instantly.
She said it felt like someone flung open the door to a glacier. Oh, I just walked into my second ex-wife's bedroom. She was so cold in the bedroom that I got frostbite on my honeymoon. Will you at least let me get the story set up, please? Oh, fine, but that joke was solid and you know it. Donna looked up.
A reddish cloud was floating just above the ground, about the size of a two-story house, and it was moving toward them. The local villagers took one look and ran. They called it a vision, and they knew the only way to survive was to hide. The colonel ran toward the cloud to investigate. He got about 20 feet before he collapsed. It looked like he hit an invisible wall.
Then the red cloud got brighter. It circled the truck where Donna was sitting. She felt electricity in the air. Her skin tingled. Her hair stood up. A low voltage current ran through her body. Then the world went silent. No wind, no birds, no engine noise. Donna saw one final image. Soldiers frozen mid-stride, her husband motionless on the ground. Then everything went dark.
When she opened her eyes, the cloud was gone and hours had passed. For Donna, it had just been seconds. The convoy regrouped. Everyone had a red rash on their exposed skin, like a severe sunburn. Soldiers were vomiting. The colonel was dizzy and couldn't walk. 11 witnesses, physical symptoms consistent with radiation exposure, and a gap in time nobody could explain.
British researcher Jenny Randall spent decades collecting cases that shared the same symptoms. First, the silence. All natural sound stops. No crickets, no traffic, just dead air. Then the tingling, like static electricity before a lightning strike. Then the mist. sometimes red, sometimes green or white, but it always glows. Then time breaks.
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Chapter 2: What are the common symptoms associated with time storms?
Hours vanish. People find themselves in places they can't explain, sometimes hundreds of miles away. And after, the physical toll, nausea, rashes, headaches, disorientation. Medical exams documented burns and rashes that appeared during these episodes. Electronics die, car engines stall, radios only play static, watches stop or leap forward, cell phones lose signal.
And then there's the isolation. Even people surrounded by crowds report feeling utterly alone. The rest of humanity fades away like they've stepped into a pocket universe. Randles calls this the Oz Factor. Like Dorothy ripped out of Kansas, suddenly you're somewhere else, a different place, and a different time. Randles had plenty of witnesses who lost time, minutes, hours, sometimes days.
But she did find one case where a pilot didn't lose time, He outran it. A thoughtfully built wardrobe comes down to pieces that mix well and last. That's where Quince shines. Premium fabrics, thoughtful design, and everyday essentials that feel effortless to wear and dependable even as the seasons change. Quince makes the staples I reach for constantly.
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The flight is exactly 75 minutes. Halfway to Florida, Gernon saw a cloud formation ahead. A lenticular cloud. A testicular cloud? I didn't make a cream for that. Lenticular cloud. That's the one that looks kind of like a flying saucer. That makes more sense. But this cloud was massive, and it was growing. Gernon tried to climb over it. The cloud rose with him. He banked to go around it.
It expanded to block his path. The cloud wrapped around the plane, a swirling tunnel of gray mist with bright flashes of light. His compass started spinning. His navigational instruments failed. The artificial horizon began to roll. Gernon looked ahead, a small patch of blue sky at the end of the tunnel, his only way out. He pushed the throttle forward. The tunnel started to close.
The 10-mile gap shrank to one mile, then a half mile, then smaller and smaller. The wings scraped the edges of the cloud. He shot through the gap just as it collapsed behind him. He expected to see the ocean, but he didn't. Just gray haze. No horizon, no sea, no sky. Just gray in every direction. His instruments were dead. He grabbed the radio and called Miami Air Traffic Control.
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Chapter 3: How did Bruce Gernon experience the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon?
Infinite versions of you. And sometimes those timelines bleed together. Now, if Many Worlds is true, a time storm isn't a glitch in a clock. It's a collision between universes. So when Goddard saw the airfield of the future, he wasn't looking forward in time. He was looking sideways, into a parallel world where the war had already started.
When the family in France found the hotel, they weren't in the past. They were in a reality where that hotel never closed. The framework for travel between worlds exists. These aren't just storms, they're doorways. And some people have accidentally learned to walk through. The Valdez case, the Nepal convoy, the electronic fog, the hotel in France, great stories. But are they true?
Well, let's start with the skeptics. The biggest problem with the time storm theory is the lack of hard data. We have stories, but we don't have a single recording, no video of a teleporting car, no footage of a glowing cloud. In the age of smartphones and dash cams, you'd think we'd have caught one by now. Then there's the brain.
Temporal lobe epilepsy explains almost every symptom of the Oz Factor. The silence, the feeling of a presence, the time distortion, the vivid hallucinations. Persinger proved in a lab that you can induce these feelings with magnets. If you're driving through a magnetic field caused by tectonic stress, your brain might glitch. You might feel like you lost an hour.
You might hallucinate a glowing cloud. The geology where Valdez disappeared creates electromagnetic anomalies, which could explain his experience. The Gernon case also has a logical explanation. The jet stream. Catch a 100 mile an hour tailwind, and you're going to get to Florida early. If you're stressed and flying through clouds, your perception of time is unreliable.
34 minutes can feel like 70. And the Goddard case? He wrote that book in 1975. That's 40 years after the event. Memory is tricky. He saw a storm in 1935. He saw the airfield renovations in 1939. Over 40 years, his brain might have merged those two memories into one great story. So, case closed? It's all in our imagination? Well, not so fast. Hallucinations don't leave physical traces.
In the Nepal case, 11 people saw the same cloud and got the same radiation burns. Mass hallucinations don't cause sunburns. In the Hungary case, a woman's car door was fused shut. These are documented. Mark Henshaw's leather jacket was smoking. A brain glitch doesn't melt metal or leather. And then there's Valdez. Valdez left with a clean face. He came back 15 minutes later with a short beard.
Now, you can hallucinate a purple light and even a time jump. But you can't grow five days worth of stubble in 15 minutes. Anyway, that's biological evidence documented by his own men. And if Philip K. Dick was right about orthogonal time, then hallucination is the wrong word. He spent his life trying to warn us that our world wasn't solid, that other worlds, other timelines press against us.
The glitch isn't in our brains. The glitch is in the barrier between worlds. I have a strong sense there is a lot more to reality, and I bet you do too. PKD believe that what we call reality is just a collective illusion that keeps us from seeing the chaos underneath. But every once in a while, the illusion breaks, the signal drops, and the storm rolls in.
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Chapter 4: What unusual events occurred during the RAF Commander’s flight?
Good enough to dance. Good enough to dance. Good enough to dance. Good enough to dance. Yeah, Gertie loves to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel. And camels love to dance when the feeling is right on wasting time. Gertie loves it.