However, it is one particular man, roughly in the center of the image, wearing a light colored raincoat and casually leaning against the corner of the building, which has gotten everyone talking.
This man appears to be staring directly down the camera lens, despite everyone else in the scene appearing completely unaware their picture is being taken.
The man also happens to have his hand to his ear, in a fashion that looks like he must be speaking on the phone.
And, the fact the man is outdoors and doesn’t seem to be standing anywhere near a telephone, has prompted some social media users to theorize that he could be holding a mobile phone to his ear.
Photo sparks time travel theories
It comes after the photo was shared in the Facebook group Gamlar ljósmyndir – which means ‘old photographs’ in Icelandic – by Kristjan Hoffmann.
First posting the image back in 2016, Hoffman suggested the man in the photo was ‘far ahead in technology,’ the Mirror reports.
After several social media users suggested the man at the center of the image could be clutching a mobile phone, conspiracy theorists started suggesting something wild.
Time travel.
Of course, the only possible explanation for a man seemingly holding a mobile phone in the 1940s is for him to have traveled through time, right?
Especially since the first public handheld mobile phone wasn’t invented until 1973 and it wasn’t commercially available until a full decade later.
One Facebook user jokingly called the man Dr Who, the title character British drama who uses a phone box as a time machine.
Another joked that Iceland had ‘already invented the mobile phone way before anyone else’.
But many were quick to come up with plausible explanations, such as: “He’s checking if the watch works.”
Another suggested the man was scratching his ear, while a third thought he was putting his tobacco pipe behind his ear.
While it’s unclear exactly what the man is holding, this digitally remastered close up shows that he definitely is holding something – mobile phone or not – close up to his face.
Evidence of time travel
While there has been many theories regarding time travel over the years, there has never been any verified evidence that anyone has ever traveled through time in the way that most people have imagined.
However, there are some science-backed theories that could be interpreted as time travel, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, which says that time doesn’t pass at the same rate for everyone.
In fact, this has been experimentally confirmed on a number of different occasions, including astronauts onboard the International Space Station aging ever so slightly more slowly than those of us on Earth.
Another example would be the fact that atomic clocks flown on airplanes and satellites end up measuring slightly different amounts of time than identical clocks left on the ground.
But, in terms of a person literally traveling through time, like Dr Who, sadly we have no evidence of this ever being the case.
However, that hasn’t stopped people from claiming they are time travelers, such as John Titor, who claimed to be soldier from the year 2036 back in 2000, making several future predictions that have so far failed to come true.
And more recently, a self-titled time traveler claimed to have been to the World Cup 2026 final and even offered up detailed accounts of who won.