Alleged time-traveler; fictional human described on bulletin boards
Titor's purported military insignia
John Titor and TimeTravel_0 are pseudonyms used in communications and on internet forums between 1998 and 2001 by an individual claiming to be an American military time traveler from the year 2036.[1][2] His posts discussed various aspects of time travel, and described future calamitous events, including a global nuclear war. The uniform inaccuracy of their predictions and inconsistencies in their explanations has led many to view the story with skepticism. A 2009 investigation suggested that the entire affair was a hoax created by Larry Haber, a Florida entertainment lawyer, and his brother John Rick Haber, a computer scientist.[3] These claims have never been verified.
The first posts using John Titor's military symbol appeared on the Time Travel Institute forums on November 2, 2000, under the username TimeTravel_0[1] (The name "John Titor" was not used at that time.) The posts discussed time travel in general, the first one being the "six parts" description of the components required for a working time machine and responses to questions from other posters about how such a machine might work. These early posts tended to be short. A second thread was also made due to shortcomings of the forum software used at the time.[4]
Titor first appeared on July 29, 1998, and sent two faxes to Art Bell, the host of a very popular and nationally broadcast radio talk show Coast to Coast AM. The two faxes told the story of the discovery of time travel in 2034 and the devastation that followed the Y2K disaster.
In January 2001, the person calling themself “John Titor” used the pseudonym TimeTravel_0 and began posting at the Art Bell Post-2-Post BBS Forums,[citation needed]. The final Titor post was made in late March 2001.
Later, around 2003, various websites compiled Titor's posts, re-arranging them into narratives. Not all of these sites refer to the original dates that the messages were posted on the forums.[5]
In his online postings, Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036, based in Tampa, Florida. He said that he was assigned to a governmental time-travel project, and that as part of the project he was sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer, which was needed to debug various legacy computer programs that existed in 2036 – a possible reference to the UNIXyear 2038 problem.[3] The IBM 5100 runs the APL and/or BASIC programming languages, depending on the model.[further explanation needed]
Titor said that he had been selected for this mission because his paternal grandfather was directly involved in the original assembly and programming of the 5100. He attempted to provide proof of this by describing unpublicized features of the 5100, which led some people to believe that a computer scientist must have been behind the postings.[3]
Titor said that he was on a stopover in the year 2000 for "personal reasons":[3] to collect pictures lost in the (future) civil war, and to visit his family, of whom he spoke often.
Titor also said that for several months he had been trying to warn anyone who would listen about the potential threat of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease spread through beef products, and about the possibility of an upcoming civil war within the United States.
When questioned about the topic, Titor also expressed interest in mysteries such as UFOs, which he said remained unexplained in his time. Titor suggested that UFOs and extraterrestrials might be time travelers with superior time machines, from much further into the future than his own time.
Time machine
Titor described his time machine on several occasions. In one early post, he described it as a "stationary mass, temporal displacement unit powered by two top-spin, dual positive singularities", and producing a "standard off-set Tipler sinusoid".[3]
The earliest post was more explicit, detailing the components of the machine:
Two magnetic housing units for the dual micro singularities
Although he frequently invoked the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, whereby events from his timeline may differ from our own, Titor also said that the differences would be minimal. As such, some have interpreted his descriptions of his timeline as predictions, and have compared them with actual historical events that have occurred since Titor's final post in 2001.
The most immediate of Titor's predictions foretold a civil war in the United States having to do with "order and rights". The war as Titor described it would begin in 2005[7] with civil unrest surrounding the presidential election of the previous year. According to Titor, this civil conflict, which he described as "having a Waco type event every month that steadily gets worse",[7] would be "pretty much at everyone's doorstep" and erupt into war by 2008. As a result, the United States would split into five regions based on a variety of factors, including differing military objectives.
According to Titor, this civil war would end in 2015 with a brief but intense World War III[specify], which Titor referred to as "N Day". He specified Washington, D.C. and Jacksonville, Florida as cities that would be hit in the exchange, and said that after the war, Omaha, Nebraska would be the new U.S. capital. Titor did not detail the exact causes of this World War III scenario, but in one post he said that the hostilities were led by "border clashes and overpopulation".[8] He also pointed to the contemporary Arab-Israeli conflict not as a cause of the war, but as a milestone that precedes it.
Titor said that in 2011, when he was 13 years old, he joined a Florida-based shotgun infantry unit called the Fighting Diamondbacks for at least four years. In other posts, he described himself as hiding from the war.
Titor also said that the "Everett–Wheeler model of quantum physics", better known as the many-worlds interpretation, was correct. According to him, this meant that his time travel had caused the formation of a new timestream, and that in this new (current) timestream, the events that Titor had described would occur somewhat differently than they had in his home timestream. This made his predictions non-falsifiable.[3]
Criticism and discussion
The New Republic described Titor as the most famous of several internet forum posters who claimed to be time travelers.[6]
An Italian television program, Voyager – Ai confini della conoscenza, aired the results of an investigation of John Titor on May 19, 2008. Private investigator Mike Lynch found no registry evidence, past or present, of any individual named John Titor. He did, however, identify the John Titor Foundation, which was a for-profit company formed on September 16, 2003, and had no office or address other than a rented post box in Kissimmee, Florida. An IP address connected with Titor also geolocated to Kissimmee.[9]
In 2009, a report by John Hughston of the Hoax Hunter website pointed to Larry Haber, a Florida entertainment lawyer, as the CEO of the foundation.[10][11] Lynch concluded that Larry Haber and his brother Richard, a computer scientist, were very likely the men behind John Titor, whom they actually introduced in 1998, accompanied by different predictions, including chaos due to the Y2K "bug".[3] John Hughston also reported that John Titor is a trademark registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office; the Titor trademark is now classified as "Abandoned".[12]
In 2018, multimedia artist Joseph Matheny, creator of the alternate reality game Ong's Hat,[13] said that he worked as a consultant for the unnamed individuals responsible for the legend. John Titor "is a story that was created as a literary experiment by people who were observing what I was doing with Ong's Hat and these people wanted to do something like that. I was a consultant on the project, [but] it wasn't my project."[14]
In popular culture
In 2003, the John Titor Foundation published a book, John Titor: A Time Traveler's Tale ( ISBN1-59196-436-9), discussing his claims; the book is now out of print.
The 2009 visual novel Steins;Gate, which was adapted into an anime in 2011, heavily features time travel and has John Titor as a major part of the plot.[15]
In 2009, a docudrama was created about John Titor called Timetravel_0[16] directed by Scott Norwood.[17]
In the video game Reverse: 1999, John Titor is a senior computer engineer from IBM claiming to be a time traveler who speaks in Hexadecimal code and was also behind the development of IBM 5100.[20]
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