But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

If you believe that all of history is a fabrication, every piece of evidence disputing that claim is also a fabrication. For example, Halley’s Comet was spotted in AD 837 (in multiple countries), which is exactly when it should have been seen, which indicates that the year 837 must have happened the way we generally assume . . . unless, of course, you believe that the Dark Ages are classified as “dark” because they didn’t happen at all, and all the ancillary details they encompass were manufactured by sinister people who made sure the math worked out. There is no way to irrefutably disprove either strain of the Phantom Time Hypothesis, as both are fundamentally grounded in the belief that all the information we possess about the distant past is unreal.