If you’ve ever looked into time travel on the internet, chances are you’ll be familiar with the name John Titor.
Titor claimed he was from the year 2036 and he came back in time in the early days of the internet.
He began posting on message boards claiming to warn us about our future.
The first posts using his ‘military symbol’ appeared on the Time Travel Institute forums on November 2, 2000.
Titor, who posted online under the username Timetravel_0, claimed to be an American soldier, based in Tampa, Florida.
According to The Telegraph, he wrote:
Greetings. I am a time traveller from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975.
My ‘time’ machine is a stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two top-spin dual-positive singularities that produce a standard off-set Tipler sinusoid.
I will be happy to post pictures of the unit.
Adding:
In 2036, I live in central Florida with my family and I’m currently stationed at an Army base in Tampa… the people that survived grew closer together. Life is centered on the family and then the community. I cannot imagine living even a few hundred miles away from my parents.
There is no large industrial complex creating masses of useless food and recreational items. Food and livestock is grown and sold locally. People spend much more time reading and talking together face to face. Religion is taken seriously and everyone can multiply and divide in their heads.
He also claimed he was assigned to a governmental time-travel project, and sent back to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer because he needed it to debug ‘various legacy computer programs in 2036’.
Many believe this could be a reference to the UNIX Year 2038 problem, a coding problem that’ll ‘break all the world’s computers’ at 3:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038 – because the algorithm the majority of computers use can’t function after that date, apparently.
Titor claimed the 5100 was needed in the future due to a ‘special feature’. An engineer by the name of Bob Dubke, confirmed the feature existed.
As you can image, people were sceptical of his claims, but his goal was ‘not to be believed’.
He wrote:
Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future. This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centred, civically ignorant sheep. Perhaps you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about that.
Titor offered his advice to people at the time.
He wrote:
Learn basic sanitation. Learn to shoot and clean a gun. Consider what you would bring with you if you had to leave your home in ten minutes and never return.
Titor also said he had been trying to alert anyone that would listen about the threat of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) – known as ‘mad cow disease’ – spread through beef products and about the possibility of civil war in the US.
He also expressed an interest in mysteries such as UFOs, which ‘remained unexplained’ in his time, but suggested UFOs and extraterrestrials might be travellers from much further into the future than his own time, with even more superior time machines.
Titor stopped posting in March 2001 claiming he had to go home – and that was that. He left a lot of people wondering whether he truly existed in the first place.
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