1. Unusual knowledge of historical events. Time travelers would have an extensive knowledge of historical events, people, phrases, and facts that occurred before they were born. They may drop subtle or not-so-subtle hints about knowing details of historical events that there would be no way for them to know without having actually experienced them firsthand.
2. Anachronistic phrases. Related to unusual historical knowledge, your partner may occasionally use words, phrases, or references that seem oddly outdated or don’t fit the current time period. For example, using 20th century slang or referencing people and events far in the past as if they were personal experiences.
3. Strange, unexplained injuries. Time travel and the means used to accomplish it are still theoretical and dangerous. Your partner may have scars, injuries, or elongated healing times for wounds that don’t align with their stories of how they were acquired. Unexplained burns, fractures, or radiation exposure could point to mishaps during time travel experiments or adventures.
4. Inconsistencies in personal history and backstory details. A time traveler’s own personal history may be fragmented, unclear, or inconsistent. They may not be able to provide detailed accounts of their childhood, family, education, career progression, etc. Missing or fraudulent documentation like birth certificates, school records, employment history could be signs they have altered identity details after coming from another time.
5. Anachronistic skills or abilities. Your partner excels in skills, crafts, technologies, or forms of knowledge well ahead of the current era. For example, being highly skilled at engineering steam-power machines, navigation by the stars, communicating in long-dead languages, or possessing medical knowledge beyond our modern understanding. Their skills don’t align with typical education and career paths for someone native to this time period.
6. Unusual interest in or knowledge of future events. While it would take highly responsible and discreet time travel to avoid altering the future, a chrononaut may let slip subtle hints they know more than they should about future cultural, technological, or world events. An intense interest in the long-term outcomes of current affairs or breakthroughs could indicate they’ve experienced things to come.
7. Attachment to antiques or out-of-date valuables. A time traveler may become emotionally invested in maintaining physical possessions they’ve brought from their native era. This could include books, clothing, tools, currencies, photos, or documents that seem unusually old for someone of their apparent age but hold personal significance for experiences in their home time.
8. Lack of extended family or permanent home base. While a nomadic upbringing or family estrangement can happen in anyone’s lifetime, a time traveler may lack deeper roots like childhood homes, multigenerational extended families, or lifelong connections in their community due to living a fragmented, mutable existence moving through time.
9. Unusual or suspicious identification and documentation processes. A time traveler’s records may show gaps, discrepancies, or signs of tampering when scrutinized to verify identity, citizenship, education, employment and other background details over long periods of their life. Maintaining an identity intact across temporal shifts requires cunning that may leave forensic traces of forgery or interference.
10. Avoidance of or skepticism about discussing the future. While excited to learn about the present, a chrononaut would know too much frank discussion about potential futures risks destabilizing timelines or creating unnecessary self-fulfilling prophecies. They may deflect deeply discussing predictions, ambitions, or curiosity about long-term life plans in ways the present cannot satisfactorily explain without considering temporal transcendence.
While unprovable without an admission, someone mysteriously evasive about their past yet knowledgeable about times before their apparent years could be a discreet time traveler adapting to live discreetly among us in the present day. Of course, alternative explanations may exist and one would need multiple corroborating signs to reasonably consider the hypothesis, but a pattern of historical, technological or documentation inconsistencies should not be entirely dismissed when speculating what secrets a loved one may keep.
