John Titor
John Titor's military insignia John Titor is the name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster
claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036.[1] In these posts he made numerous
predictions (a number of them vague, some quite specific[2]) about events in the near future,
starting with events in 2004.
However, as of 2011, these
events appear not to have
taken place; he described a
drastically changed future in which the United States had broken into five smaller regions,
the environment and
infrastructure had been
devastated by a nuclear attack,
and most other world powers
had been destroyed. To date, the story has been
retold on numerous web sites, in
a book, and in a play. He has also
been discussed occasionally on
the radio show Coast to Coast AM.[3] In this respect, the Titor story may be unique in terms of
broad appeal from an originally
limited medium, an Internet
discussion board. Titor's posts The first post appeared on the
Time Travel Institute forums on
November 2, 2000, under the
name TimeTravel_0. At the time
the posts had nothing to do with
future events and the name "John Titor" was not being used.
Instead, the posts discussed time
travel in general, the first one
being the "six parts" description
of what a time machine would
need to have to work (see below) and responses to
questions about how such a
machine would work. Early
messages tended to be short. The name "John Titor" was not
introduced until January 2001,
when TimeTravel_0 began
posting at the Art Bell BBS Forums (which required a name
or pseudonym for every account). The Titor posts ended
in late March 2001. Eventually, a
number of the threads became
corrupted; but Titor's posts had
been saved on subscribers' hard
drives and were copied to Anomalies.net, along with new
discussions of the science behind
Titor's time travelling as well as his predictions.[4] Around 2003, various websites reproduced
Titor's posts, re-arranging them
into narratives. Not all refer to the original dates posted.[5] Outline In his online postings, Titor
claimed to be an American soldier
from the year 2036, based in Tampa in Hillsborough County, Florida, who was assigned to a governmental time-travel
project. Purportedly, Titor had
been sent back to 1975 to
retrieve an IBM 5100 computer which he said was needed to
"debug" various legacy computer programs in 2036; a reference
to the UNIX 2038 problem. The 5100 runs the APL and BASIC programming languages. Titor
had been selected for this
mission specifically, given that his
paternal grandfather was
directly involved with the
assembly and programming of the 5100. Titor claimed to be on a
stopover in the year 2000 for
"personal reasons"; i.e., to collect
pictures lost in the (future) civil
war and to visit his family, of
whom he spoke often. Titor also said he had been, for a few
months, trying to alert anyone
that would listen about the
threat of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease spread through beef products and about the
possibility of civil war within the
United States. When questioned
about them by an online
subscriber, Titor also expressed
an interest in unexplained mysteries such as UFOs (which in his time were still as yet
unexplained). Titor suggested
that UFOs and alien visitors may
well be time travelers from much
further into the future than his
own time, who possessed superior time machines to his
own. Time machine Titor described the time machine
on several occasions. In an early
post, he described it as a
"stationary mass, temporal
displacement unit powered by
two top-spin, dual positive singularities", producing a
"standard off-set Tipler sinusoid".
The earliest post was more
explicit, saying it contained the
following: Two magnetic housing units
for the dual micro
singularities An electron injection manifold to alter mass and gravity
micro singularities A cooling and X-ray venting system Gravity sensors, or a variable
gravity lock Four main cesium clocks Three main computer units According to the posts, the
device was installed in the rear
of a 1967 Chevrolet Corvette convertible and later moved to a
1987 truck having four-wheel
drive. Titor further claimed that the
"Everett-Wheeler model of
quantum physics" was correct.
This model, better known as the many-worlds interpretation, posits that every possible
outcome of a quantum decision
actually occurs in a separate
"universe". Titor stated that this
was the reason the grandfather paradox would not occur; following the logic of the
argument, Titor would be killing a
different John Titor's
grandfather in a timeline other
than his own. ...The grandfather paradox
is impossible. In fact, all
paradox is impossible. The
Everett-Wheeler-Graham or multiple world theory is correct. All possible quantum states, events, possibilities, and outcomes
are real, eventual, and
occurring. The chances of
everything happening
someplace at sometime in the superverse is 100%.[6] Predictions The most immediate of Titor's
predictions was of an upcoming civil war in the United States having to do with "order and rights".[7] He described it as beginning in 2004,[8] with civil unrest surrounding the presidential election of that
year. This civil conflict that he characterizes as "having a Waco type event every month that steadily gets worse"[8] will be "pretty much at everyone's doorstep"[7] and erupts by 2008. Titor claimed that as a 13-year
old in 2011, he fought with the
Fighting Diamondbacks, a shotgun
infantry unit of Florida, for at
least four years. However, in
other posts he describes himself as hiding from the war. As a
result of the war, the United
States splits into five regions
based on various factors and
differing military objectives. This
civil war, according to Titor, will end in 2015 with a brief but
intense World War III: In 2015, Russia launches a nuclear strike against the
major cities in the United
States (which is the "other
side" of the civil war from
my perspective), China, and Europe. The United States counter attacks. The US
cities are destroyed along
with the AFE (American
Federal Empire)...thus we (in
the country) won. The European Union and China were also destroyed.[9] Titor refers to the exchange as
N Day. Washington, D.C. and Jacksonville, Florida are specifically mentioned as being
hit. After the war, Omaha, Nebraska is the nation's new capital city. Titor is vague as to the exact
motivations and causes for World
War III. At one point he
characterized hostilities as being
led by "border clashes and overpopulation"[10] but also points to the present conflict
between Arabs and Jews as a harbinger of World War III. Examination of the claims Predictive Failures The posts were met with
skepticism when they were being
posted, but it was impossible to
prove beforehand that the
predicted events would not
happen. Because Titor claimed the many-worlds interpretation
of quantum physics was correct,
effectively meaning that his
travel was from a parallel universe and that things could occur differently than he had
predicted, the details he
presented were unfalsifiable. One of Titor's earliest assertions
was that CERN would discover the basis for time travel
sometime around 2001, with the
creation of miniature black holes
about half a year after his
departure. This did not occur. An
article occurring generally around the time he had
predicted about miniature black holes being created by CERN (a recurring theme, also ascribed to Fermilab and Brookhaven at various times[11]) was taken by some to be evidence of this
claim; but these events did not
occur either. Civil war was not
even remotely close to breaking
out after the 2004 presidential
election, with no further conflict in 2008 in the way Titor
described. A particularly obvious example
involves the Olympics, whereof
Titor claimed: "As a result of the
many conflicts, no, there were
no official Olympics after 2004."[12] The politically uneventful staging of the 2006 Winter Olympics,[13] the 2008 Summer Olympics, and the 2010 Winter Olympics refute this claim. Problems with the
Technology In the context of the
demonstration image provided by
John Titor, the laser pointer's beam being "bent" reveals the
obvious inconsistency of objects
near the beam not appearing to
be bent as well. The framing of
the window visible in the
background, for instance, should appear distorted in proximity to
a large gravity gradient, but it does not. Some have speculated the "beam" is an optical fiber.[14] Titor claimed that he was sent
back to obtain an IBM 5100 because it could translate
several types of computer code.
According to IBM engineer Bob
Dubke, Titor's statements
regarding the IBM 5100's little-
known ability to emulate and debug mainframe systems were correct.[15] Supporters state that this information was not
publicly available in 2000 or 2001
when Titor made his declaration, [16] and Titor himself stated that this feature was
"discovered" as late as 2036
when Unix, as the underlying source behind all computer
operating systems still running
local infrastructures and other
computational tasks, was only two years away from no longer
functioning due to 32-bit integer limitations. [17] However, this emulation
capability was widely known in
the industry and commented on
in depth in numerous publications
dealing with both the 5100 and
programmable microcode in general.[18] References to this fact were also available on the
Internet as early as 1999 and
therefore predated Titor's
postings. This is a fairly obscure
bit of trivia, however, which
suggests that whoever was making the posts either was
familiar with the machine
specifically or else had at least a
general interest in retrocomputing.[19] Apparently, APL was a
difficult task for IBM to
accomplish with an
interpreter in the 5100, so
instead they wrote an
emulation program so that the S/360 mainframe
version of APL could be run
instead -- The 5100 is like
a desktop IBM S/360
mainframe computer which only runs APL.[20] Problems with the story Numerous commentators have
pointed out the extensive
similarities between the Titor
story and Pat Frank's classic post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Alas, Babylon.[21] Among other similarities, Alas, Babylon
takes place in a small river-side
town in Florida just before and
after a nuclear war and
describes the struggle to survive
as a family in the aftermath. In the book, the protagonist lives
in the mythical town of "Fort
Repose", while Titor claimed to
live in the "Fort", formerly the University of Florida (UF). The internal consistency of
Titor's story has been
questioned: For instance, in some
posts he claims that money is
widely used and people still have credit cards, despite his statement that centralized
banking no longer exists (this is
either an inconsistency or implies
the rise of private currencies). In another posting he speculated
that today's dollar would be usable in his time, but that this
would be after the
reorganization of the federal
government according to his own
history, potentially making the currency worthless.[22] Other problems with the story
include inconsistencies relative to
Titor's comments. His first
appearance appears to have
been, not in 2000, but in the
summer of 1998 through two faxes to Art Bell's radio program Coast to Coast AM. When he began posting the online story,
Y2K (1-1-2000) had come and
gone without any real problems.
Yet in the 1998 faxes to Art Bell
he said, "Y2K is a disaster. Many
people freeze to death trying to get to warmer weather. The
gov. tries to keep power by
instituting marshall [sic] law..." [23] In the online story he stated
that a part of his mission was to
prevent the coming world war
by changing history. Yet during
October 2000, a month before
he began posting, he appeared in the UK IRC chatroom. In the
chat log his response to
Yariesa's question (asking if we
could change the future from his
prediction) was, "It's too late. I
just wish things didn't have to happen the way they will." [24] Inquiry on the story An Italian TV program (Voyager -
Ai confini della conoscenza) aired
an investigation of the John Titor story on May 19, 2008.[25] Mike Lynch, the private
detective hired to investigate,
found that there were no
registry traces, even far in the
past, of any John Titor or Titor
family. In addition, the John Titor Foundation had no office and its
address is a rented post box; no
tapes, recordings, or evidence of
Titor were found; and only Larry
Haber (an advocate and owner
of the commercial rights about all concerns involving John Titor)
confirmed his existence. Lynch's
conclusion is that John Titor may
be John Rick Haber, a computer
expert who is or was Larry
Haber's brother. In other media In 2003, the John Titor
Foundation published a book,
John Titor: A Time Traveler's
Tale (ISBN 1-59196-436-9), discussing his claims; the book
is now out of print. In 2004, a play based on the John Titor story was staged. In the Japanese Visual Novel
and Anime Steins;Gate, both the legend of Titor and a
character using his name as a pseudonym play vital roles in the story.
