**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“GLITCH IN THE MATRIX” OR PROOF OF TIME TRAVEL? TOM KANE’S FINGERPRINTS FOUND ON A 500-YEAR-OLD PARCHMENT

LONDON – In what tech analysts are calling a “statistical impossibility,” a routine digital preservation scan of a 15th-century papal decree has returned a result that has sent shivers down the spine of the academic world.

Buried in the marginalia of a document penned in 1492—the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue—a set of latent fingerprints was recovered using advanced multispectral imaging. When cross-referenced against global biometric databases, the system returned a 99.97% match.

The owner of those prints?

Thomas “Tom” Kane, a 42-year-old data recovery technician living in a flat in Leeds, England.

“I ran the check three times, thinking it was a calibration error,” said Dr. Helena Rousse, the lead analyst on the project. “I even had the team replace the scanning hardware. The prints are identical—down to the minutiae of the ridge flow and the unique scar pattern on the left index finger. Tom Kane has a scar from a bike accident in 2003. That exact scar appears on the parchment.”

The document in question is a previously unremarkable land grant from Pope Alexander VI. But the presence of Kane’s prints—which he has never submitted to any historical research database—has left experts scrambling for explanations.

“It’s a glitch in the matrix,” reads the internal analysis report, obtained exclusively by this outlet. “The probability of this occurring naturally is less than one in 64 billion. Either Tom Kane is a time traveler, or we have discovered a fundamental corruption in our understanding of linear time.”

Tom Kane, reached for comment outside his local Tesco, seemed as baffled as the scientists. “I