John Titor is the name that was used on several Internet bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a person claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036. In these posts, numerous predictions were made about occurrences in the near future, starting with events in 2004. The person 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. The first post appeared on the Time Travel Institute forums on November 2, 2000, under the name TimeTravel_0. The original posts discussed time travel in general, the first one being a “six part” description of what a time machine would need to work and responses to questions about how such a machine would be created. The information was extremely accurate and was written by someone familiar with scientific theory. The time machine was described as a “stationary mass, temporal displacement unit powered by two top-spin, dual positive singularities,” producing a “standard off-set Tippler sinusoid.”
Other posts were even more specific, indicating that the time machine held 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, four main cesium clocks, and three main computer units. Claims were made that the “Everett-Wheeler model of quantum physics” was correct. This model, better known as the many- worlds interpretation, states that every possible outcome of a quantum decision actually occurs in a separate universe.
The name “John Titor” was not introduced until January 2001, when TimeTravel_0 began posting at the Art Bell BBS Forums. He began answering questions and started to reveal a more complex picture of his future. He sometimes talked about current events; for instance, in an early post John Titor stated that “The breakthrough that will allow for time travel technology will occur within a year or so (2001) when CERN brings their larger facility online.” CERN is also known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world’s largest particle ph
ysics laboratory. The Titor posts ended in late March of 2001. Eventually, a number of his threads became corrupted, but many of the posts had been saved on subscribers’ hard drives and were copied to various websites. In his online postings, John Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 203
6, based 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. This is a clear reference to the UNIX 2038 timeout error. In the year 2038, a problem similar to the Y2K bug may cause some computer software to fail.
The problem affects all software and systems that store time as a signed 32- bit integer, and interprets the number of seconds since Thursday, January 1, 1970. The latest time that can be represented this way is 03:14:07 on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Time beyond this moment will “wrap around” and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems will interpret as a date in 1901 rather than 2038.
Titor claimed to be on a stopover in the year 2000 for “personal reasons,” to collect pictures lost in the (future) civil war and to visit his family. He was also trying to alert anyone who would listen about the threat of Creutzfeldt- Jakob (mad cow) Disease spreading through beef products and about the possibility of civil war within the United States. Titor also expressed an interest in unexplained mysteries such as UFOs. The most immediate of Titor’s predictions was of an upcoming civil war in the United States having to do with “order and rights.” He described it as beginning in 2004, with civil unrest surrounding the United States presidential election.
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. According to his claims, as a result of the war, the United St
ates splits into five regions based on various factors and differing military objectives. According to Titor, this civil war 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, China, and Europe. The United States counter attacks. The U.S. cities are destroyed along with the American Federal Empire. The
European Union and China were also destroyed.” 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. He 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,” but also points to the present conflict between Arabs and Jews as a harbinger of World War III. His assertion that CERN would discover the basis for time travel with the creation of miniature black holes about half a year after his departure did not occur and has never been reported.
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. Titor also claimed that there would be no international Olympic Games after 2004, which is clearly not true. He 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. This information was not publicly available in 2000 or 2001 when Titor made his declaration. The true identity of John Titor was never found.
~GaryGoza