Beyond the Beyond
(Trouble) In Time
Great Scott!
Have you ever heard of John Titor? You’re not alone.
On November 2, 2000, a man going by the name of “TimeTravel_0” started posting on the Time Travel Institute forums discussing how a time machine could conceivably work. This particular website is “dedicated to research and exploration of the temporal sciences,” so naturally it is where one would go to discuss such things.
This is what 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.
Over the next four months, the poster (who would later identify himself as one John Titor) would go on to write about all manner of events that would happen between the year 2000 and 2036.
These include, but are not limited to:
The emergence of a deadly virus in 2015 that would lead to mass quarantines and a reduction in world population.
Discovery of time travel by CERN in 2034, leading to a new era in technological and scientific progress.
The United States government becoming more authoritarian in nature and civil liberties being eroded.
A civil war in 2004, leading to the break up of the USA into five smaller countries.
Artificial Intelligence becoming more integrated into everyday life.
He claimed he was taking a detour on his way back to his own time to pick up some family photos and visit some family members in Tampa and Rochester. Over the course of the next four months, Titor made over five hundred posts.
Needless to say, a certain faction of the internet was very interested in his story.
Titor claimed that his time machine was called a “C204 unit” or “gravity distortion unit” and was powered by a pair of mini black holes, something he called micro singularities. At the time, Stephen Hawking believed that miniature black holes could not exist because they would evaporate and disappear into something called Hawking Radiation. When someone mentioned this fact, Titor replied:
YES, THAT IS TRUE. IF YOU FIRMLY BELIEVE THAT HAWKING RADIATION CANNOT BE CONTROLLED OR GOES ON EVEN WITHOUT THE PRESENCE OF VIRTUAL PARTICLES FOREVER UNTIL THE SINGULARITY EXPLODES THEN YOU ARE CORRECT.
Funnily enough, Hawking changed his mind on the subject a few years later. So did a lot of other people. https://www.livescience.com/
In 2009, a man named John Hughston from the website Hoax Hunters claimed he had found the real John Titor in an entertainment lawyer named Larry Haber and his brother Morey Haber. There was speculation that the same person making the Titor posts was also creating fake accounts to reply to those same posts. John Titor’s IP address was traced back to the town of Celebration, Florida, which is where Morey was said to be living at the time that the posts were made. Case closed, right? Not so fast.
What about the predictions of worsening relations with Russia? That in 2009 there would be another great depression? A pandemic killing millions? Granted, Titor missed many things with his predictions, but he got more than a few right. Could his mere being in this timeline have impacted and perhaps changed it?
And what about that IBM computer? Titor claimed that the 5100 had a special feature that would allow it to emulate and debug legacy programming languages. He said this program would be crucial to fix a problem that would arise in the future.
Oddly enough, one of the engineers who originally worked on the 5100 gave an interview where he said that the computer had capabilities that very few people knew about. Bob Duke, the second engineer on the computer, said a secret design that allows the 5100 to communicate with newer models was suppressed because IBM had worries about what competitors might do with the information.
Let’s go ahead and add a thinking emoji riiiight here: 
Was John Titor a legit, living/breathing time traveller making a pit stop to grab some polaroids and post on the internet? Or was he one of the world wide web’s first internet hoaxes, pulled off so eloquently that people are still talking about it twenty-five years in the future?
One thing’s for sure. All this time travel talk is making my head hurt. Yours, too? I guess you guys aren’t ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it.
Have you had a sighting? Text 702-875-1848 or message @beyondthebeyond1 on Instagram.
– Tanner Rush
