Perhaps she really is a time-traveller, sent back through the decades to make a jaw-dropping cameo appearance. Or maybe she was a maverick genius, secretly testing out advanced technology for the government and caught on camera at the wrong moment. Whatever the explanation, this footage from a Charlie Chaplin filmed in 1928 which shows a woman apparently using a mobile phone has left viewers stumped. The baffling footage is found in the extras section of The Circus and shows members of the public attending the premiere of the film at Manns Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The short piece of footage shows an older woman dressed in a coat and hat with her hand held up to the left-hand side of her face as she talks. There is no one around for her to be speaking to apart from a suited man who strides on ahead at the beginning of the shot.
Even her gestures and behaviour as she 'talks' will be eerily familiar to modern-day viewers as she appears to stop, mid-sentence, during her apparent conversation. The bizarre anachronism was unearthed by film buff George Clark on his Charlie Chaplin box set. He says he has shown it to more than 100 people and still no one can come up with a convincing explanation. Some viewers have suggested that she is listening to a portable radio close to her face, although this would not explain why she appears to be talking. Some viewers say that she may be displaying signs of schizophrenia and may be covering her face to hide the fact that she is talking aloud to herself.
Others suggest that she is simply trying to hide her face from the camera so she is not filmed.
Still others, rather more sceptically, believe the footage is just a stunt created by George lark to publicise his film festival.
The first device that could be likened to a mobile phone was Motorola’s first ‘Walkie-Talkie’ which was developed in the 1940s, but that was the size of a man’s arm and still came more than a decade after the Chaplin film. Portable mobile phones that we would recognise today did not appear until the 1980s and even then they were still too big to hide in the palm of your hand.
In a video that Mr Clark has posted on YouTube he jokes that the only plausible theory is that the woman is a time traveller. (Daily Mail)