A few years ago, online entrepreneur Jack Mord made a curious discovery in an album of American Civil War-era portraits — a 140-year-old photograph of Nicolas Cage!
According to Mord, the photo is an original carte de visite (a type of small photograph) from circa 1870, taken by Professor G.B. Smith, a Confederate Civil War prisoner of war photographer. It shows a man, apparently from Tennessee, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Face-Off and National Treasure star. Jack Mord believes it really is Nicolas Cage and that Cage is a member of the “walking undead” or an immortal vampire who “reinvents himself once every 75 years or so”.
It’s true that the man in the photo does look remarkably like the Hollywood actor. Jack Mord also noticed an inconsistency between this photo and the rest of the photos in the album — everybody else was named, this man was not.
So could this mysterious nameless man actually be Nicolas Cage?
On discovering the photo, Mr Mord stuck it straight on eBay, selling it for the princely sum of $1million because he believed it constituted proof of a major Hollywood star’s immortality. He also said he’d allow the buyer to authenticate the photo’s age before the sale went through.
His listing was immediately met with scepticism and ridicule. eBay users questioned why Cage has aged so much over the last couple of decades if he really is immortal.
Jack Mord counter-argued, “He allows himself to age to a certain point, maybe 70, 80 or so, then the actor ‘Nicolas Cage’ will ‘die’… but in reality, the undead vampire ‘Nicolas Cage’ will have rejuvenated himself and appeared in some other part of the world, young again, and ready to start all over.”
Mord then added, “150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host.”
Sadly for Mord, the photo didn’t sell and was eventually removed. But his theory spread like wildfire across the internet, eventually leading Cage himself to weigh in. On The David Letterman Show on February 9th 2012, Cage gave his thoughts on Mord’s photo and vampiric accusations.
He pointed out, “You can’t take pictures of vampires.” When Letterman pushed him on the striking similarities between him and the man in the photo, Cage said, “Now look, I don’t drink blood and last time I looked in the mirror I had a reflection, so I’m not going with this vampire theory.”
Not exactly a denial, is it? Cage is referring to stereotypes about vampires and saying they don’t apply to him. But since those stereotypes come from fiction, folklore and ancient legend, what if Cage is suggesting that real vampires are nothing like that? Or what if, by saying “I’m not going with this vampire theory”, he’s hinting that he’s not a vampire at all, but some other kind of immortal being?
There is, of course, another very big OR that no one seems to have mentioned. Perhaps by dismissing the “vampire theory”, Cage is insinuating that we’re barking up totally the wrong tree.
And what might the right tree be? Time travel! Clearly Nicolas Cage is a time traveller. That would explain why he’s been ageing—he’s not immortal at all. He just owns a time machine and, at some point when he was younger, used it to take a jaunt to the 1870s and have his photo taken.
Alright, so the other alternatives are that Cage and the man share some common ancestry, or the resemblance is purely coincidental.
But hey, that’s boring. I’m going with time travel. 😀
Next week: mysterious buildings that aren’t what they seem
C.R. Berry 