John Titor is the name used on several Internet bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be a time traveller from 2036. He claimed to be an American soldier based in Tampa in Hillsborough County, Florida, who was assigned to a governmental time-travel project. He said he was on his way back to 1975 .... that he was using a device fitted to .... wait for it .... a 1987 Chevy Suburban.
Yeah I know, you were hoping for a Delorean. But here's the good news. According to Mr Titor the future involved the break up of the United States in 2013, an epidemic of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a Nuclear War and a Computer Virus destined to destroy the world in 2036. His time travelling mission was to get back to 1975 and obtain (steal?), an IBM 5100 computer to fight the computer virus, presumably as the old style computers weren't affected? ... the nuclear strikes were supposed to have been by Russia, and have happened in 2015 killing 3 billion .... (phew, we apparently missed them all).
Interestingly, the character 'John Titor' had actually emerged well before mainstream home computer ownership, when on the 29th of July 1998, two faxes were sent to Art Bell, the host of the overnight radio talk show Coast to Coast AM. The faxes told of both the discovery of time travel in 2034, and the devastation following the Y2K disaster (phew, we missed that one as well) ..... he then disappeared, before reappearing on forum postings in 2000 ( ... having apparently survived the Y2K collapse).
Although the hoaxer involved has been identified, defenders of his claims (and this being the nature of the world we live in, there are many of them), would simply suggest that the lawyer identified, and his scientist brother, are in fact just fronts ... that the Y2K and Nuclear War happened on different time lines after Titor had warned us, and thus changed events on this timeline. Titor had told the forums that he lives in a parallel timeline, one that varies 1-2% from ours, which was enough to be slightly different, however crucially he had said it was not so different as to diverge from the major societal events. Apparently he was wrong about that.
Whatever the purpose of the statements, and obviously accuracy wasn't one of them, the long time line involved, and the complicated supporting 'evidence' makes this time travelling claimant fairly interesting ...
Surprisingly there are quite a few claimed time travellers:
The Lawyer:
Perhaps the best known is Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings, who were/are government employees and claim to be US "Chrononauts" .... that's time travellers to you and me. Mr Basiago is a Washington state lawyer, so has to be taken as being serious in his claims says they they (and other individuals), were both recruited to the time travel program developed by Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in the 1970's, code-named 'Project Pegasus'. They were recruited in 1980 to help protect Earth from threats from space, to establish territorial sovereignty over Mars, and to acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to our presence
So far so strange. However it then gets really weird as Mr Basiago states that also on the program was a 19-year-old Barack Obama (who went by the name “Barry Soetero”), along with the current head of DARPA, Regina Dugan. They all went to Mars from a top secret teleportation "jump room." Needless to say they have both refuted the claims made by Mr Basiago.
The Priest:
Father Pellegrino Ernetti, was a Benedictine monk and authority on archaic music. He also said that he was part of a team that included Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi and German rocket scientist Werner von Braun, which invented the “Chronovisor,” a device that looked like a television but could tune in to events from the past. Through this they had observed many events including the Last Supper and Christ’s crucifixion. The team had later voluntarily dismantled the device, because in the wrong hands, it could create "the most fearsome dictatorship the world has ever seen.” ... the device had been inspired, he said, by Nostradamus—who had personally related to him the device’s possibilities. Ahh, that explains it then.
Ernetti later produced a picture of Christ on the cross reportedly photographed through the chronovisor but he was later forced to admit the photo was a fake. Nevertheless, Ernetti insisted the chronovisor was real for the rest of his life.
The Pilot:
Sir Victor Goddard was a RAF pilot who in 1935 experienced what many believe was a brief trip in to the future, when he flew over the old disused WWI Drem Airfield near Edinburgh, seeing it firstly in disrepair, and then later apparently fully repaired, and with an unknown mono-winged aircraft near the hangers. This occurred following a violent storm after the first fly past. The suggestion is that he had seen into the future ... 1939 to be exact, when the airfield had been recommissioned as WWII started.
The Sailor:
There is a well known urban myth called the 'the Philadelphia Experiment' in which in 1943 the 'USS Eldridge' was allegedly made invisible and teleported from Pennsylvania to Virginia killing all but one of the crew. Lots of films and books used the hoax as the basis of their story lines ... including the 1988 film 'The Philadelphia Experiment'. After watching it, Alfred Bielek said it released repressed memories that he was born in 1916 as Ed Cameron (and not as Alfred Bielek in 1927), who had been a member of Project Rainbow, whose purpose was to figure out how to make ships such the 'USS Eldridge' invisible. He was the sole survivor of that failed experiment ... apparently his memory regression and rebirth in another body was caused by aliens on Alpha Centauri.
Other Notable Instances:
Håkan Nordkvist claimed to have crawled through a tunnel under his sink and went to the future where he met his future self. Despite it being 2042 he noted no world events to support his claim and only filmed himself with his somewhat taller himself ...
August 10, 1901, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were at Versailles when they claimed to have seen the past, and Queen Marie Antoinette (they even wrote a book called 'An Adventure' on it) ..... later examination of their story showed that they had considerably embellished the original version of the story, after 'researching' what they claimed they had seen.
German newspaper reporter J. Bernard Hutton and photographer Joachim Brandt reportedly visited the Hamburg shipyards in 1932, when they heard the drone of aircraft engines. Looking up, they saw the sky filled with warplanes. Bombs began exploding around them, and within a short time, the area was a raging inferno. The photos they took of the carnage were all blank. Years later, in 1943 when Hutton was supposed to be back in London he read of a RAF raid on Hamburg and the air photos were just as he recalled events he had seen. Obviously his recall must have been from the ground ... strangely, both Hutton and Brandt seem to have never been heard of again, outside of this story.
 |
| John Titor's Time Machine in a 1987 Chevy Suburban |
Yeah I know, you were hoping for a Delorean. But here's the good news. According to Mr Titor the future involved the break up of the United States in 2013, an epidemic of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a Nuclear War and a Computer Virus destined to destroy the world in 2036. His time travelling mission was to get back to 1975 and obtain (steal?), an IBM 5100 computer to fight the computer virus, presumably as the old style computers weren't affected? ... the nuclear strikes were supposed to have been by Russia, and have happened in 2015 killing 3 billion .... (phew, we apparently missed them all).
Interestingly, the character 'John Titor' had actually emerged well before mainstream home computer ownership, when on the 29th of July 1998, two faxes were sent to Art Bell, the host of the overnight radio talk show Coast to Coast AM. The faxes told of both the discovery of time travel in 2034, and the devastation following the Y2K disaster (phew, we missed that one as well) ..... he then disappeared, before reappearing on forum postings in 2000 ( ... having apparently survived the Y2K collapse).
Although the hoaxer involved has been identified, defenders of his claims (and this being the nature of the world we live in, there are many of them), would simply suggest that the lawyer identified, and his scientist brother, are in fact just fronts ... that the Y2K and Nuclear War happened on different time lines after Titor had warned us, and thus changed events on this timeline. Titor had told the forums that he lives in a parallel timeline, one that varies 1-2% from ours, which was enough to be slightly different, however crucially he had said it was not so different as to diverge from the major societal events. Apparently he was wrong about that.
Whatever the purpose of the statements, and obviously accuracy wasn't one of them, the long time line involved, and the complicated supporting 'evidence' makes this time travelling claimant fairly interesting ...
Surprisingly there are quite a few claimed time travellers:
The Lawyer:
Perhaps the best known is Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings, who were/are government employees and claim to be US "Chrononauts" .... that's time travellers to you and me. Mr Basiago is a Washington state lawyer, so has to be taken as being serious in his claims says they they (and other individuals), were both recruited to the time travel program developed by Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in the 1970's, code-named 'Project Pegasus'. They were recruited in 1980 to help protect Earth from threats from space, to establish territorial sovereignty over Mars, and to acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to our presence
So far so strange. However it then gets really weird as Mr Basiago states that also on the program was a 19-year-old Barack Obama (who went by the name “Barry Soetero”), along with the current head of DARPA, Regina Dugan. They all went to Mars from a top secret teleportation "jump room." Needless to say they have both refuted the claims made by Mr Basiago.
The Priest:
Father Pellegrino Ernetti, was a Benedictine monk and authority on archaic music. He also said that he was part of a team that included Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi and German rocket scientist Werner von Braun, which invented the “Chronovisor,” a device that looked like a television but could tune in to events from the past. Through this they had observed many events including the Last Supper and Christ’s crucifixion. The team had later voluntarily dismantled the device, because in the wrong hands, it could create "the most fearsome dictatorship the world has ever seen.” ... the device had been inspired, he said, by Nostradamus—who had personally related to him the device’s possibilities. Ahh, that explains it then.
Ernetti later produced a picture of Christ on the cross reportedly photographed through the chronovisor but he was later forced to admit the photo was a fake. Nevertheless, Ernetti insisted the chronovisor was real for the rest of his life.
The Pilot:
Sir Victor Goddard was a RAF pilot who in 1935 experienced what many believe was a brief trip in to the future, when he flew over the old disused WWI Drem Airfield near Edinburgh, seeing it firstly in disrepair, and then later apparently fully repaired, and with an unknown mono-winged aircraft near the hangers. This occurred following a violent storm after the first fly past. The suggestion is that he had seen into the future ... 1939 to be exact, when the airfield had been recommissioned as WWII started.
The Sailor:
There is a well known urban myth called the 'the Philadelphia Experiment' in which in 1943 the 'USS Eldridge' was allegedly made invisible and teleported from Pennsylvania to Virginia killing all but one of the crew. Lots of films and books used the hoax as the basis of their story lines ... including the 1988 film 'The Philadelphia Experiment'. After watching it, Alfred Bielek said it released repressed memories that he was born in 1916 as Ed Cameron (and not as Alfred Bielek in 1927), who had been a member of Project Rainbow, whose purpose was to figure out how to make ships such the 'USS Eldridge' invisible. He was the sole survivor of that failed experiment ... apparently his memory regression and rebirth in another body was caused by aliens on Alpha Centauri.
 |
| USS Eldridge 1944 and in 1960's |
Other Notable Instances:
Håkan Nordkvist claimed to have crawled through a tunnel under his sink and went to the future where he met his future self. Despite it being 2042 he noted no world events to support his claim and only filmed himself with his somewhat taller himself ...
 |
| Man Out Of Time .... 1940's Picture in the Virtual Museum of Canada website |
August 10, 1901, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were at Versailles when they claimed to have seen the past, and Queen Marie Antoinette (they even wrote a book called 'An Adventure' on it) ..... later examination of their story showed that they had considerably embellished the original version of the story, after 'researching' what they claimed they had seen.
 |
| 1928 Woman Talking In To Her Cell Phone? .... .... I've Highlighted/Coloured To Illustrate Better |
German newspaper reporter J. Bernard Hutton and photographer Joachim Brandt reportedly visited the Hamburg shipyards in 1932, when they heard the drone of aircraft engines. Looking up, they saw the sky filled with warplanes. Bombs began exploding around them, and within a short time, the area was a raging inferno. The photos they took of the carnage were all blank. Years later, in 1943 when Hutton was supposed to be back in London he read of a RAF raid on Hamburg and the air photos were just as he recalled events he had seen. Obviously his recall must have been from the ground ... strangely, both Hutton and Brandt seem to have never been heard of again, outside of this story.
Excellent! My favourite subject and the best film scenario; I can't wait for Groundhog Day II.
ReplyDeleteI myself traveled from 1980 to 2001 via a long and tortuous path which took me 21 years and am currently on my way to 2021 by way of 2019.
I wonder who that woman was talking to with her cell phone in 1929?
Good question .... maybe it was an organised tour and she was ringing for pick up time after the Chaplin movie?
DeleteI remember back in the early 2000's being on the Art Bell forms and seeing John Titor talk about the future was pretty neat.
ReplyDeleteWhile forward Time Travel is possible (time-dilation effect of the theory of Special Relativity), backward time travel is more problematic, according to our current understanding of physics.
DeletePossibly using wormholes and giving one mouth of the wormhole a substantial velocity with respect to the other. This would create conditions that mean passage through the wormhole would then allow travel to the past. However were do you find and manipulate wormholes?
But at a quantum level, hypothetical Tachyons may appear to time travell as they are theorised to travel faster than light.
However, if human time travel was possible, we would probably be up to our necks in time travellers by now, and history would have been rewritten hundreds of times ... so probably for the best that it isn't possible.
Thanks for the comment.