On Oct. 24, 1593, a man suddenly appeared in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City. He was wearing the uniform of the guards of Malacanang Palace in the Philippines, and he claimed he had no idea how he had arrived in Mexico.

The man said that his name was Gil Perez and that was a Spanish soldier of the Filipino Guardia Civil. Moments earlier, he said, he had been on sentry duty at the governor’s palace in Manila. He said the governor, Don Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, had been assassinated.

Perez refused to believe he was in Mexico City, as he had received his orders in Manila on the morning of Oct. 25, which now lay in the future. The Inquisition questioned Perez, but he could only repeat that he had traveled from Manila to Mexico “in less time than it takes a cock to crow.”

Two months later, news arrived by a Filipino ship that Manila’s governor had indeed been assassinated on Oct. 23, and witnesses confirmed that Gil Perez had indeed been on duty in Manila. One of the ship’s passengers said he recognized Perez and swore that he had seen him in the Philippines on the day of the assassination. Perez eventually returned to the Philippines and took up his former position as a palace guard.

Historians point out that this story didn’t appear in writing until a century after it supposedly happened, and no records of Perez’s imprisonment or interrogation have been found, so there’s no way to know what the truth is.