The web has been pondering this question recently after an Irish filmmaker posted a video to YouTube allegedly showing the person from the future talking into what appears to be a cell phone.
"I've screened this to about 100 people at a film festival I run here in Belfast, and nobody could give me an explanation," said George Clarke, in the opening moments of his video.
The Northern Ireland father of two, who proclaims himself a fan of Chaplin and Jackie Chan, claims no one has been able to explain the odd character.
"Right now the only conclusion I can come to, which sounds absolutely ridiculous I'm sure to some people, but it's a time traveler," Clarke said.
The strangely dressed person is only on screen for a few moments in an extra found on the DVD of "The Circus," a 1928 silent film by Chaplin. She steps into frame outside Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, where the film premiered, then the image dissolves away.
She stops momentarily, and appears to be talking into something in her hand, which she holds as if it were a cell phone (a technology that didn't exist at that time at all, which begs the question even if it were such a device, how could it work?).
Mobile communication devices such as the "walkie-talkie" were not invented until more than a decade later in the 1940s, and even then were chiefly for military use.
However, while this fantastical theory is fun to ponder, in all likelihood the woman is actually using a hearing aid. The device was invented in the 1920s, and by 1928 there were a few small devices available, such as ones manufactured by Acousticon, that could explain the device in her hand.
A photo from the 1940s was also treated with similar speculation earlier this year.
In it, a man wearing a t-shirt, sweater and wearing sunglasses, who seemed to some out of place from the men in suits and fedoras standing around him, had some believing he was a man from the future.
