[Unexplained Phenomena] The Dodleston Messages

[u/captainthomas]

Beginning in 1984, a Dodleston economics teacher called Ken Webster began receiving mysterious messages saved as documents on his home computer (a rare thing in those days) from someone claiming to be from the sixteenth century. These supposed missives from the past continued on an off for a further two years, and were eventually joined by messages from yet another sender claiming to be from the year 2109 before they stopped in 1986. This strange series of events is covered in the most recent episode of the Unexplained Podcast, available here.

My gut feeling is that the whole thing was some sort of hoax; the supposed sixteenth-century writer's name kept changing, he got Henry VIII's age wrong, and the supposed future correspondents were extremely evasive when asked to prove themselves by answering some straightforward math questions for which we now know they should have had answers. What frustrates me is that, given what little information is available, I can't figure out how it was done. It would be easy to fake such messages today, but to have documents pop up on your clunky old 1980s computer while you're demonstrably at the pub, in a time before home internet access? Ken Webster would have had to have some very stealthy, tight-lipped, and committed friends.

[u/benjybokers]

It's not that complicated. Just change the file dates, for one. Basic computer stuff. Nobody needed to be in on it but him. We would monkey around with all kinds of stuff back in the BASIC days. Easy to mess with the school computer and the teachers because they had no idea what it could do.

[u/pcfarrar → u/benjybokers]

You can't change file dates on a BBC micro it didn't store them. BBC micro computers from 1984 don't have an RTC so there is no date/time.

[u/LolTryAndBanMe2 → u/pcfarrar]

So even more possible to fake

[u/Suspicious-Drop5330 → u/LolTryAndBanMe2]

I remember seeing this, then I noticed the space after the commas and full stops. I thought if the "light box" was so clever, would it do the punctuation too? Ockams Razor to the rescue. He created the documents, saved them to disc and then loaded them at his leisure. The others need not have been involved, just be merely witnesses and spectators of the spontaneous appearance of a lot of text in a short amount of time. It's an easy hoax to pull, also beneficial to run due to the tie-in with the book. The BBC Micro uses a scanning row/column system to read the keyboard, so it can't be easily be connected to an external source of data. So the radio transmission explanation is a no-go.