John Titor | The Time Traveler Paradox & Internet Folklore

November 2nd in the year 2000. You sit down at your desktop and insert the free AOL disc. You hear the beeps and garbled tones of the dial up Internet. Connecting. Finally, you can connect to your favorite message boards. You click on Paul's post about paradoxes on the Time Travel Institute board. The same responses from the usual suspects. A lot of back to the future references. But then a new user appears and his posts are about to get interesting. Timetravel0 proclaims Paul is right on the money. The basics for time travel are about to start at CERN with the first time machine being built in 2034 by General Electric. Was our world saved by this mystery man? Or was the slow moving Internet duped by a hoaxer with nothing better to do? This mystery will take us from the year 2036 back to 1975. And where we're going, we don't need roads.

Welcome to the no Such Things Ghost podcast. My name is Greg. You just heard Andy in the intro talking about a time machine.

Well, it's the story of John Titor. He is a time traveler.

Is he cool? Can't wait to hear. Can't wait to hear more about that.

I bet you can't first.

I'm listening. I am a hardline skeptic. Andy. How would you best describe yourself?

Well, I'm just going to say that you guys might not be ready for this yet, but your kids are going to love it.

Back to the future references. I love it. Okay.

All right.

Okay. Oh, yeah. Really? That's not what you were intending?

I don't know. I don't know.

So basically the show's premise, Andy explains the paranormal or the strange. And then I usually dislike it a lot. Yeah. All right, go ahead, man.

So before we talk about the message boards, we need to go back even further.

Oh.

From the year 2000, we need to go back to 1998 on July 29th on the show coast to Coast AM, which. Are you familiar with that show? Yes, the overnight radio show hosted by Art Bell at the time.

Yeah, I've heard about this. Yes.

Okay. All right, well, good. Not a lot of explaining to do here.

Well, I mean, go ahead and explain it.

Oh, oh, should I?

Yes. Yeah.

Well, so they're iconic in the paranormal community. Art Bell began the show in 1988. Originally it was just regional out of California, so in the Southwest. They were the only ones that got it. First broadcast nationally in 1993. Call in show format where people would call and discuss their paranormal encounters. Art would tell stories of other things that he had heard about. Kind of what we do here with. Without Greg.

Yeah. Minus me.

Yeah. They would go over some different topics at times, including time travel. At one point, the show boasted over 10 million listeners weekly, making it the most popular late night show on radio. Bell hosted from 1988 until the 2000s. He began taking some breaks. He was getting older and his wife's health declined. He finally passed away in 2018. The show is now hosted by one of Art's constant guest hosts, George Norrie. I don't know if you've heard of him. I have not. He's pretty popular in the community. Obviously by hosting this show, I would say that this show, along with Unsolved Mysteries and In Search of. Have you heard of those?

I have.

I know you've heard of. Okay.

Yeah.

That would kind of shape the paranormal minds of almost everybody, especially of my age, a little bit younger in the paranormal world. You know, you pretty much ask somebody who the voice of their paranormal stories, it would be Art Bell, Leonard Nimoy or Robert Stack.

Okay, yeah.

So, you know, those are the three big names. So Art Bell was very influential. Even back at that time, before the Internet was really popular, everybody was listening to his shows. So back to July 29, 1998. Art Bell reads a fax from a listener on an episode dedicated to time travel. The facts details a man claiming to be a time traveler. He had said he heard others on the show claiming to be time travelers discussing traveling forward in time past the year 2500. Well, according to his faxes, we're going to call him John Titor. If I mention his name, it's John, but at this point we don't know a name. He doesn't reveal that until later on. But people from his time discovered that if you traveled past the year 2564, there's nothing. Oh, darkness, silence. Just blackness.

So talking about, like the earth, like there is no earth left.

Right. There's apparently nothing left after the year 2564.

Blackness. Not a black hole. The sun's gone. Everything apparently okay.

Like you just go. If you tried to go past that point, you would just end up in nothing.

Gotcha.

Which apparently wasn't a problem because apparently people told this tale to him and others. So they made it to that point and then were able to come back.

Okay.

Which we'll get. We'll get to the descriptions of the time machines that Mr. Titor describes. And that might explain some of that. He tells us that time travel was invented in 2034. After successful fusion reactor research allowed scientists at CERN to produce the world's first contained singularity engine. Now, apparently this has not been done yet.

Right.

There could be reasons why. We'll get into that a little bit. It's time travel. So we got to take in some different accounts of how time travel might work.

I can't wait to hear about that.

Oh, yeah, but basically we can't make anything related to black holes right now. We don't really want to.

Right.

That might be a little dangerous. So everything in that area is kind of science fiction right now.

Yeah.

So his prediction there hasn't happened as of yet.

When did you predict that was going to happen?

He just said in the next few years. According to his post in 2000 it was within a couple of years.

Right.

As far as CERN establishing the first steps of this research.

Okay, do, do. Should we talk a little bit about cern?

Yeah, we can. What do you know about cern?

I, I know that CERN is a base area and they have a like particle collider.

Correct.

And that's about it.

That's really all you need to know for this. Okay, we'll go with that.

Where's it at?

I would be in Geneva.

Geneva, so Switzerland. Switzerland.

It's right on the border between Switzerland and France.

Gotcha. O. Okay. Yeah. So they have a, what's, what's it called? A Hydron Collider?

Yes.

Is that what it's called?

Yes, they have the Large Hydron Collider. It's a 27 kilometer ring that sits 50 to 175 meters underground across both countries.

Okay.

So I, I was going to say we're not going to go a lot into the science part of it because.

Who would want to do that? Well, especially when it comes to saying that time travel is a thing and they have a singularity engine and then CERN's going to find it. Let's not worry the science because that's just.

We're going to go a little bit into the science part of it. But as you know, I am not a scientist.

Neither am I. But I mean, if you're.

So there's going to be a lot of terms that we say that we don't know what we're talking about.

That's great. But I mean, if, if we're going to say, oh yeah, there is a singularity engine that was built and it was built by CERN because they discovered time travel and a few years after 2000. So I guess 2003. And, but don't worry. Don't bog yourself down to the science too much, because we don't want to.

Say we weren't going to talk any science. I said we were going to go very deep into it.

Don't worry.

Because we don't want to give information that we don't really have knowledge of.

That's fine.

We want to talk about things like ghosts and time travel.

Okay, great. All right. Don't worry too much about the specifics of anything.

So time travel is explained like this. Going backward in time creates a new timeline as soon as you shut off the engine.

Okay.

You can get back to your original timeline by simply traveling a split second before you originally arrived and throwing the engine into forward without turning off the engine.

Okay, wait a second. Hold on. All right, all right. So I travel back in time. That creates a parallel timeline, which makes sense. Which would make sense, right, because you didn't technically exist there.

And now you do.

And now you do. But that, in turn, alters your. Your future from that point.

Well, it makes a new timeline, so it doesn't alter your future. It alters the new timeline's future.

Why? Because I would have to. If I exist in the present, I travel back into time. Right. And then you said that creates that branch of reality. Then I can get out of that timeline by doing what again, going back.

A split second before you originally arrived and throw the engine into forward without turning the engine off. The key is turning the engine off, because I believe the ways he's explaining it, you don't actually exist in that.

Time until the engine is turned off. You're mostly just passing through it. In a way, you're there, but you. You stay within your own current loop, so you're able to go there. You don't occupy time or space in the past until you turn the engine off.

Correct.

Okay, great.

And I'm saying engine a lot.

Yes.

I'm surprised that didn't bring up a question.

It's singularity. It's. It's some kind of.

Well, it's also a 1967 Chevy, but we'll get to that.

What? So it's basically a DeLorean. We put it in a car because we had to put it.

Well, Deloreans weren't really common in 2036. We'll get. I wanted to throw that in there for you.

Wild.

All right.

I thought this was an actual machine and not a flux capacitor in a car.

Well, it is a heavy machine. Now, going on to this, continuing with this facts, he claims that you can meet yourself.

Uh huh.

And he's even taken a younger version of himself for a few rides.

How?

Because it's a different timeline. As soon as he opened it up, it's a different timeline. It doesn't matter how.

Okay, question. How you're able to not turn the engine off and scoop somebody up?

No, he turned it off, went and found himself, picked him up, said, you want to go for a ride? And you know, little kid version of himself was like, cool older man, let me hop in your 67 Chevy.

He's got candy. And so, okay, so then he drives him around through time apparently. Then he travels.

He doesn't really go into specifics here. He just puts him back where he was.

They puts him back where he was,.

Then he goes back a second.

If he puts him back where he was, does that create another branching timeline?

Well, I would think if he puts him back exactly where he was, he just comes back. That would be the same timeline that he already created by appearing there.

Right. But then he has to, I'm assuming he's traveling through time again with the younger version himself. And then if he has to go back to that same timeline that kid was on, that creates his younger self, that creates another one because he has to. He's dropping that kid off on another split timeline.

Maybe just move on. Just say wibbly wobbly.

Yeah. Okay, cool.

You can alter history in the new timeline so it doesn't affect yours. Obviously because your timeline is still staying the same. You're just screwing with somebody else's timeline.

Again, back to branching timelines.

Yes.

I'm gonna go cross eyed.

At a certain point he says that most times it's just subtle differences. He claims that at one point he saw some car models that didn't exist. Books that weren't published at the same time they were published later. Said the biggest example of a problem that he caused was that a skyscraper didn't exist near a favorite store of his in New York.

Uh huh.

Which this is 1998.

Oh. So let's not even get into that.

That's kind of what people were pointing at, that maybe he didn't, you know, in his time, but he was young, he should have known that one. So I don't know that they're actually, that he was actually pointing to that.

Okay. All right.

Because I mean if he was, he was a kid at this time, so he should have known about what buildings might have, might or might not have been there at later date. I don't know, he was pretty young.

Okay.

Most importantly, you must compensate for the orbit of the Earth, since the time machine does not move. In other words, you could end up sitting in the middle of space.

So you got in a 67 Chevy.

In a 67 Chevy, which would. Would do you not. It wouldn't do you a lot of good.

No. Okay, so. All right. Going back to the. Yes. To the. They traveled so far.

Yeah.

In time. That there. The Earth was gone. There was nothing. So they were just parked in the middle of space in a 67 Chevy.

You.

With no atmosphere.

Well, the machine itself does create an atmosphere.

How?

There's like a bubble.

There's a bubble around it now.

Yeah.

So it has a bubble.

This is not explained in this section.

Okay.

Explains it later on, but we'll go.

Ahead and discuss very little things being explained here.

So basically, when the time machine takes off, it creates a small bubble around.

It, some kind of distortion field.

You take oxygen with you. Also is another thing that he points out because someone ends up questioning him on that.

You take oxygen with you inside of a bubble. Bubble breathing inside of a bubble you're creating. You're replacing the oxygen with carbon dioxide.

Well, the oxygen is a backup. You have a limited amount of time that you can survive. He explains at one point that it's basically. I think it's an hour for every 10 years.

Okay.

So to you, it seems like an hour, but you've gone back 10 years.

That's a long time.

So you need a little bit of. You need a little bit of help just in case, especially if you're going further back. There's also a bit of a discrepancy. You could end up on a crazy timeline. If you go too far, they were accurate about 50 or 60 years.

Okay.

So if you, you know, he at one point talks about if you wanted to go back and meet Jesus, there would be. They're really into religion in 2036, so. Oh, Jesus comes up a lot on his point. But if you wanted to go back, you know, that was over 2, 000 years. You're risking going to a point where he wasn't born.

So do you set like a stopwatch?

You gotta.

And then you go.

I think there's a little digital calendar that you punch on the dashboard.

Oh, right on the dashboard.

Yeah.

Anyway, gotta get that darn thing fixed. Yeah, you gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta hit it with. Yeah.

He says most of the time time travelers are traveling back to find out why the world is gone in 2564. Like, that's their main mission. From the future. They want to find out what. What happens to officially in the world. They think it happened somewhere near the year 2000.

Oh.

Which is maybe why he's here. There's. There's a few key things that he's doing.

Okay.

That we'll get to. Doesn't explain all those here. They. They connect the dots. Later on, he gives a list of things that might happen in the near future. So this is 1998.

Give it to me.

First of all, Y2K. It's a disaster.

Oh, my God. Well, it wasn't.

People die on the highway after freezing to death trying to get to warmer weather.

Wait, from what. What's the context there?

That's. That's all he says.

Okay, great.

The government tries to keep power on by instituting martial law. Unfortunately, that doesn't work and the power grid collapses. They can't bring the power back up until one facility in Denver is restored, but it's immediately mobbed by thousands of people and it's destroyed a few years later.

Let's stop for a second.

Yep.

Gonna have to explain something to me. Declare martial law to keep the power on.

Because there's apparently.

Because everybody hates power.

Apparently. I don't know.

And then they. The government tries to go, okay, we got to restore power. One place in Denver for the United States.

Well, that's the only one they could get on, apparently. And then people didn't like.

But then everybody from Denver's like, turn.

This power plane off. They were happy without it.

That doesn't make any sense. But okay, go ahead. This is stupid.

Well, and once again, this is not an interview. This was a fax that was sent to our Bell.

Great.

So there's no. He. He couldn't get any context out of this whatsoever.

Future man knows Future man relies a lot on faxes. Go ahead.

Well, he went back to 1998. He couldn't just get a phone call.

He could have gave Art Bell a phone call.

Well, they relied a lot on faxes,.

So that just tells you already that this is nonsense. Go ahead.

So the. The. Where were we? Denver. The power plant is destroyed. A few years later, a communal government system is developed. After the Constitution takes a few twists.

I want to.

In quotes.

Okay?

That's. That's the information it gives.

What's the twist in the Constitution?

Maybe we'll get some more info later. I don't know.

Boy, oh, boy.

All right. China retakes Taiwan. Israel wins the largest battle of their life against who? And Russia is covered in nuclear snow from Their collapsed reactors.

That one's just low hanging fruit.

He believes that a nuclear weapon set off by Iraq in the war with Israel might be the reason for the timeline damage. Okay, so I mean he. In 1998, those are some things that could have happened, but luckily on our timeline we avoided that.

Oh yeah, Are we on another branch here?

That seems to be the case. Okay, we can, we can actually listen to this episode if you want to. It is on YouTube. No, no, I didn't say we were going to, but I'll listen to it. Yeah. The second fax was also read in October of 1998. And who we're calling John states that he had been in our time since April of 1998. And normally they don't stay so long. But he had become attached to the people that he had met. He wants Art to help save our future. He urges Art to transcribe. Transcribe his episodes, particularly this one. The ones dealing with military technology and new physics theories and put them somewhere safe. He recommends the Midwest.

Oh, why?

He urges Art to reconsider his paranoia about the Russians. To which Art says he's not paranoid about the Russians. He doesn't know what he's talking about. They're not preparing for war with the average US citizen. They are preparing for war with the US government.

Uh huh. Okay.

Seems like we'd still be in danger, but you know.

Yeah, war.

But eventually, usually eventually the Russians will save our country. Oh, so this guy's a communist and millions of Americans. Oh yeah.

Okay.

John realizes that his claims are a bit difficult to accept. So he will send a few pages of the operations manual and a few photos once he knows the facts has been received.

Oh, I want this.

He leaves a number. Be here with the natural time, the physics of time travel.

What?

A dose of the events and a dose of the events of the future.

What?

It's a weird. Yeah, it's a weird statement.

I don't know what that means. Yeah, okay.

Basically he's going to give him more information.

Oh, okay.

And then Art after reading this, replies, oh God, I didn't read this earlier.

What does that mean?

That means he got the facts before this and didn't read it. So he missed. He thinks he missed the time frame. He does actually give a number and Art ends up trying to contact to no avail. Okay, so Art was a little delayed. He was probably backlogged. It was one of the most popular shows in the country at this point.

Right? Yeah.

He didn't have time to read every facts ahead of time and oopsie.

Oh, no.

But maybe Art helped us, you know, avoid this Y2K disaster, which triggered other multiple events.

I don't think so.

It's a possibility.

No, it's not.

So we got lucky.

No, we didn't.

Well, okay, maybe our timeline was different.

It was, but it's fine.

So at this point, we just have an unnamed man. We don't have John Titor yet. So we're going to jump two years ahead. He never reaches back out to Art Bell, at least as far as we know. Art never mentioned him again on at least another facts from him on the show. Now we're up to the year 2000. We've passed Y2K. No real issues. The Internet is alive and well, and.

So now no one froze on a highway.

No, nobody froze. Warmer weather.

Nobody stormed a power plant in Denver.

No, power plants are safe. All the power is on. You can use your AOL freely. And the Time Travel Institute message board. It was originally created in 1997, but in October of 2000, a member only known as Paul makes a post titled the Paradoxes. Now, on this message board, you didn't have to really put a name. You had like a username or whatever. So Paul is all we know this guy by. A lot of people have just vague names, right? So he posts some ideas about what not to do if you could time travel. This is just, you know, message board. People are floating ideas.

But this is the rules, right? Yeah, kind of the rules of time travel.

We've had plenty of time travel movies at this point, and so they're just floating some things, you know. He says, first of all, don't kill your granny.

Why would I do that?

Well, because there's the old grandfather grandmother paradox trope, right? He theorizes you really couldn't do it. He says, number one, the universe would either stop you or you'd create a different timeline. Number two, if you did kill your granny, it was actually a different version ever. So you were still born, but in the other universe, you don't exist. You were never born because the grandmother that went into that timeline was killed. And number three, he says you can't use this paradox to disprove time travel. He goes on to some of the science that could make time travel possible. He mentions Frank Tipler, who proposed using long rotating cylinders of matter, and Roy Kerr, who he proposed using black holes. Since most stars spin like a black hole, you could use that to travel through weird. Okay, weird, obscure science, not mentioned a lot. Theoretical, theoretical science. Very Correct.

Now I'm dying.

That was in October. A month later, Time Traveler 0 shows up.

Okay.

He says, paul got a lot right. He says number two is the correct answer. You would end up creating a different timeline. He then says that he doesn't think anyone on this world line was ever going to remember Tipler and Kerr.

Worldline.

Correct. He will continue to use the word worldline throughout all these posts.

Okay.

Now, before, in the faxes, we didn't get any of that. We didn't get timeline, worldline, none of that. He will use it all the time in this.

Okay.

As he's discussing.

So there's a positive, distinct possibility these are two different people with the same.

Mental illness or could just be a continuation.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah. He didn't mention it before. It didn't come up. Like I said, it wasn't an interview. He puts Worldline in here. And then he does go on to explain it. He finishes the first post by saying that the basics of time travel would begin in about a year at CERN and end in 2034, when the first time machine is built by General Electric. Like we went over earlier, he would say that his. He would post pictures. But you can't do it on this message board. Okay, so that's the end of the first post. Now, this is November. Throughout November, there is hundreds of posts back and forth which are still archived. Somebody bought the Time Travel Institute board later on in, like, 2014. So it is still active.

Okay.

It's still there.

Right.

I can't say that people are still posting on it, but you can go back and look at every single post that was made. We are not going to go through every single post that was made. No, even the parts that we're going through is, like, too much.

Yeah, I'm. I'm fading pretty fast. There's no way that I could. This is. This is already a very goofy story and I guess a fun creative writing exercise or somebody has a problem.

We're gonna get to some points that you're gonna like.

Okay.

It's gonna be a minute, but okay. Then somebody else on the. On the message board steps in to try and condenses a little bit. She goes by Pamela. And, you know, she tells him, hey, there's other boards. You can post pictures. He's basically like, I want to stay anonymous.

Of course you can't have pictures.

You know, we don't want to put. I don't want to put my name up. She's like, well, I can do it for you. You know, what if we do a Q and A? And so they have, they exchange emails.

Okay.

And Pamela gets a real good in depth interview. Mr. Time Traveler, underscore zero, gives her all kinds of information that some people like and some people don't like.

Okay.

So he, he, he goes ahead and he, he's. Yeah, I'll do this. You know, I, I don't want to give out too much. The first question she asked him is how it feels to time travel. What do you see in here? Good question. He replies that the unit has a ramp up time. After the destination coordinates are fed into the computers, an alarm sounds and a small light starts a countdown. The gravity field generated by the unit overtakes you quickly. You feel a tug toward the unit similar to a rising elevator, and it continues to rise based on the power setting the unit is working under. At 100% power, the constant pull of gravity can be as high as two GS or even more, depending on how close you are to the unit. There are no serious side effects, but I try to avoid eating before a flight.

You don't throw up?

Yeah. There's no bright flashes of light outside the vehicle. It appears to accelerate as the air is bent around it. The sky. We have to wear sunglasses or close our eyes as this happens due to a short burst of ultraviolet radiation. Personally, I think it looks like you're driving under a rainbow. After that, it appears to fade to black and remains totally black until the unit is turned off. We are advised to keep the windows closed as a great deal of heat builds up outside the car.

Why is it built in a car? Why did GE build a car, a 1967 Chevrolet, that time travels.

He does go on to say that the unit itself is kind of heavy, and so you need something that can. Why just carry it? A 1967.67 Chevy was his choice.

He gets to choose what he wants.

To drive, and we're gonna get to it. But there's. I don't know why a 67 Chevy was still around, but there's reasons why you kind of have a limited choice of things I hate to choose from.

This is really stupid. All right, go ahead.

So the gravity field traps a small air pocket around the car that acts as our only O2 supply. Unless you bring compressed air with you.

All right, so your only O2 supply. And you said if every. Every. How. What was the. How long did it take? The time travel? You said an hour. X amount of years. 10 Years.

About 10 years. An hour.

10 Years an hour. So in one hour a gravity pocket around a significantly large car that stores oxygen. If I have to go back one year, if I go back one year, that's an hour. I'm dead.

You're dead in an hour.

Oxygen supply. That's not enough oxygen supply.

Well, he said you can bring compressed air with you. It's accurate for a 50 to 60 year jump. Travels at 10 years an hour. At 100% power, you hear a slight hum as the unit operates. When the power changes and the unit turns off, there's a great deal of electrical crackling from static electricity. Okay, so let's talk about some of the things that happened. We'll skip some of these other questions that she asked completely.

Is there anything of interest in any of this?

So in 2005, apparently the United States goes into another civil war.

No, go ahead.

So that didn't happen.

Yeah, because he saved us. Go ahead. I can see where this is going.

That lasted 10 years. And then Russia stepped in and saved us all and nuked the country, which caused a great disaster and it caused World War three. Or he just says another world war. So in his time, maybe this, maybe this five. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, but that war destroyed about 3 billion people across the world.

Nice.

So we've, we've really cut down the population.

Yep.

America has to use, has to move the Capitol. Washington D.C. is destroyed. So now the capital of the United States is Omaha, Nebraska. Like you said, you might want to move all your files to the Midwest.

Oh, okay.

So we got a little connection there.

I see.

Back to the arsenal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pamela does ask him. This is where we get the answer to what he time travels in. For some reason. She asked if it's in a Jeep.

Why did she ask that question to begin with?

I do not know why specifically. She asked if it was in a Jeep. That's where he replies. It's a 67 Chevy. Now I would like to point out that at some point when he was in the. Possibly in 1998, or it could be when he went back to 70. Couldn't have been when he went back to 75. But maybe when he bounced around in there somewhere, he did switch to a 19 to 87 Chevy four wheel drive pickup.

Oh, why?

To fit in better.

Okay.

I mean, he was driving a 67 Chevy. Now he's driving a pickup that's a little more modern. He's riding around in 1988. He did stick around in the late 90s, early 2000s for a while, apparently. She asked if you can control he says, yes, you can control it pretty precisely. Like we talked about. It could be off if you go in the wrong one, you go too far back. Then you're in a crazy timeline where weird things happen. She asked, do your people know where you are and can you communicate with them? And he says, no, they have no idea where he's at. He can basically do whatever he wants, because when he returns, it's only been, like a second to them. So he disappears. If he programs it right, he comes right back to when he left. Nobody knows the difference, which is why he can hop around.

Right.

And do whatever he wants. He believes his goal is not to change the future of the worldline. He can only affect what happens here as easily as we can. So he's like, people were asking him, are you here to screw with us? And why are you here? He's like, I don't know why you all are concerned with time travelers messing up your timeline, because you're gonna do it. This is the first point where he starts getting a little bit.

Little defensive, a little harsh on.

On our. Our time period. He says, you got no problem doing this every day. That's the end of that post. That's an answer to somebody's question. They ask him if he works for GE or any other company, and he says, no, he is in the military, and so he's recruited to do this. He's a special team. And then somebody asked him for some stock tips.

Yeah.

To which he also gets upset. He says, as a representative of your time period, do you realize what that says about you? You should probably know that this time is not remembered for selflessness, charity, or ability to work together. They're really getting to him. But this is only a couple of weeks in.

Right? Right.

And they're really starting to get to him. And you've got some people that are kind of, like, going along with it.

Other people are just trolling.

And there's some people really getting into troll mode. Yeah. And they're giving it to him. And these are people that are purposely on the Time Travelers Institute message board.

Right.

Like, I mean, maybe they were there specifically to troll.

Yeah.

But, like, a lot of them are asking serious questions, and then they turn around and go bullets. So, yeah. So they're really doing a good job.

What else are you supposed to do to a crazy person that's making stuff up?

He does turn some of them around a little bit, though.

Great. That's their fault.

Yeah.

This is dumb. This is really stupid. And I don't. I Say this all the time. I don't understand why you're telling me the story. And a lot of time you're like, you just post. It's a good story.

You're supposed to enjoy it or whatever. But I'm enjoying it.

I hate this. Like, it. It's just because it's so stupid. This is anybody. This is. This could be a creative writing exercise or it could be schizophrenia, and I don't know which one it is. And it's probably a mixture of both. This is baby stuff that we're doing here that we're. We're talking about. Baby stuff.

Well, do you want to know the answer to a really important question that we all want to know?

Sure.

So Pamela comes back and she asked him, did you ever discover what aliens or UFOs were?

Oh, we're making. Okay, we're making a turn here.

No new info. Sorry. In his opinion, UFOs are time travelers with very sophisticated units. But that might be a little wacky.

That's way. That's. Yeah, it's way too far out there for him.

So, you know, that's just.

That's too far.

We've.

You gotta draw a line somewhere.

We're in 2036 and we still don't know, at least on his world line, whether. So maybe disclosure didn't happen on his. Maybe by avoiding the civil war, we get disclosed.

Disclosure didn't happen here either.

We're not a 2036 yet. Oh, I guess depending on. Whenever you're listening to this, you might know. You can come back and tell us nothing. They still don't know anything?

No, because it's all make believe. But go ahead.

They want to know about how they live. So since the war, the communities have gathered around the universities. There's still business, there's still money, People still have credit cards, you still buy things, but it's more localized, so people are farming more. He describes it more as a bunch of farm communities. The universities have changed, though. They're. Because that's where all the libraries were. A lot of the communities based around that, you know, so the knowledge stayed, I guess. And they also became military bases. So now all the universities, including where he went, the University of Florida, that's now Fort uf. Okay, so they've taken over all that. And that's how he ended up getting into the time travel division by going to the University of Florida at Fort uf.

Gotcha. Okay, great.

No thoughts of that.

None of this is compelling to me. I'm not engaged in any of this.

Okay, so finally somebody gets to the point and they're like, look, you said you were. You were sent to 1975.

Why.

Why would you need to go back to 1975? And he says, well, you know, we're. We're trying. We're having some issues. We still have Internet. We still have a little bit of that. We've gotten that reactivated, but we're having some computer issues. So he was sent back to 1975 to get a specific computer system, the IBM 5100. It was one of the first portable computers made, and it has the ability to read older IBM programming languages in addition to APL and basic. So according to the poster, we need the system to debug various legacy computer programs in 2036, and Unix in particular will have a very serious problem in 2038. So he needs this computer, this one specific IBM 5100, to solve that problem. And he thinks this might be pertaining to the, I guess, the end of the world.

So all their stuff is based off of.

Well, he's saying multiple program languages. I know what you're saying. It's like 1975 technology.

Correct.

And he.

So nothing progressed past that point?

No, no, no, no, there is. It's just this particular computer apparently can communicate and decipher multiple languages. So, I mean, maybe there's some adjustments they have to make to it to talk to future programming languages.

It also sounds like nonsense because modern computers are able to do all those programming languages.

Now. At the time, it was going around that, you know, of course, this is hindsight from now.

Correct.

But the future from our. We're time traveling by talking about this era. But, you know, it was thought that a lot of people didn't know at that time that this computer could do that. So it was kind of a. Like a backdoor thing that they put in there, you know. So at the time, it looked like he was telling something that a lot of people didn't know. And it was confirmed by, you know, other people that were familiar with it that, well, yeah, that computer could do that.

I just don't understand why finding that specific computer mattered. Because all of his stuff was based off of 1970s, late 1970s computer technology.

And I was. Built a time machine. Had to have some adjustments.

They built a time machine based off 1978.

Well, it wasn't fixing the time machine. It was fixing what computer systems in the future.

Okay, this just sounds.

So once again, he's a little bit vague.

Great. All right, move on.

So we're gonna fast Forward to January of 2001, and Time Traveler 0 has done all he can do on the Time Traveler Institute boards. He's gone back and forth with people. You know, they're saying, you know, people aren't going to believe you. It's unrealistic. You know, how can you prove it? Can you give us stock tips? He's done arguing all that stuff. And he decides, you know what, in order to make an impact, I'm going to have to expand my reach. So he's going to switch message boards now. He's going to go back to his friend Art Bell. Oh, Art Bell has a forum now and he's going to go on there now. On this forum, you have to give a name. You have to register as a person. Okay, so this is where we get the name John Titor. He registers on Art Bell's forums and he starts pretty much feeding out the same information. So we're connecting dots. All these. These posts from the two different forums and somewhat the faxes from 1998. Tart Bell, I believe probably most people that had heard the episode and we're on Art Bell's forums in 2001 probably made the connection there. Even though it's a little bit more loose than these two threads. Like, he's posting a lot of the exact same information. When he gets into Art Bells forums that he had been posting over the past couple of months, he just wants to get it out to more people. He wants to really help our worldline avoid.

I hate how you keep saying worldline.

Well, I'm using his words.

I know, I just hate it, but good.

Would you like me to say timeline?

No, you can say whatever.

Would you like me to say?

Yeah, okay, might as well.

All right, well, he wants to help our worldline.

So.

A bunch of retellings begins accumulating people who knew of the coast to Coast AM show. That's where we make the connection. The narrative was similar. The terminology was similar. John Titors, obviously the guy that faxed our bill. Obviously, yeah.

Couldn't be somebody else who read all the other stuff and then posted on this other forum and, and just kind of expanded upon it because it doesn't take a lot to read a bunch of forums and then write the same thing that another person wrote.

I'm not gonna argue that. Okay, maybe he. Maybe he just didn't release all the information.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

That's another argument that you sure you can have. He did point out that it's not an easy thing for people to believe. He Compares it at one point to if you went back to 1900, if you were able to time travel, you went back to 1900 and you were trying to explain to somebody how a jet airplane worked.

According.

Yeah, it would be. That would be similar. You know, they might buy into the fact that, you know, we've got maybe commercial flight or, you know, readily available flight technology, but a jet, oh, that's. That's too much. I can't believe that. You know, you'd have to do a lot of. A lot of convincing. And he doesn't necessarily want to give out all the information. So he posts on Art Bells forum up Until March of 2001, a bunch more questioning, a bunch more the same kind of answers. He does reveal that he was sticking around in this time period to hang out with his family and his younger self. So this is maybe where he's taking him, his little kid self on little time travel adventures and bringing him back and.

Right.

He. He wanted to get some photos too that were damaged in their civil war. Okay. He lost. Lost a lot of memories. He was feeling nostalgic. You know, he was stuck here, so. Well, not stuck here, but he liked it here.

Yeah.

On March 21, 2001, he finally makes his final post. He says he's returning to Tampa to make his return to 2036. The final line of his final post. Bring a gas can when your car dies on the side of the road. So, you know, keep that in mind.

Great. What does that mean?

I'm hoping it's cryptic. I'm hoping it means something else that we just don't understand.

Anybody that runs out of gas happens all the time, every day.

It would be nice if he was like talking specifically and he was like, hey, Greg, on.

Yeah.

December 3rd, 2028, you are going to run out of gas. So make sure on that day you bring a gas can. It would have been much better if he was.

That's just a tip. That's what he gave, was just a normal tip. Roadside emergency tip.

Well, could be helpful to someone that.

Yeah. To a lot of people. You know what that time travel told me that I probably should carry some spare gas with me in case I'd run out of gas. But that's. It's so stupid. What a generic thing. I expect a time traveler to say something more than that.

Well, he obviously didn't want to, you know, way too much. He didn't want to mess with the, the.

He's messing with it anyway. He's traveling through time. What does that matter? If we're on, if, if all this is branching timelines because we didn't experience any of these things that he has said so far. It doesn't matter what you say because the timeline's already changed because you're here. You're not going to be on this timeline anymore because you're saying that I'll jump back to mine and go to this and do it. Doesn't matter what you have to say.

He's jumping off our world line.

I'm sorry, world line. It doesn't matter what you change here. You've already changed it. Well, what does it matter? It just creates another branching timeline, worldline off of this current worldline. So what you're doing makes no sense. You can tell everybody everything.

Some people are going to be doomed no matter what.

But you could tell everybody.

Some versions of those people would be safe. So you should feel better about telling everybody everything.

I feel nothing. Go ahead.

That was an anchor. This is the part that you're going to be more interested in.

Great.

Who could have been behind this if it was just an elaborate hoax?

Anybody? It's the Internet.

We do have a main suspect. Oh, we do? Yeah. And I'm going to hand him to you on a silver platter.

Go for it.

What is it? So there is a John Titor Foundation. It was an organization founded to promote and protect the Titor name and property in many ways.

Okay.

The founder also claims to be a legal representation for John Titor's mother on our timeline, Worldline since 2003. So shortly after the last post.

Sure.

So this founder is a Florida attorney. His name is Larry Haber. The foundation published a book called John Titor A Time Traveler's Tale.

Oh, it's marketing.

Which now for used copies, if you go online from where I just looked around a little bit. 250 To over $500 for a. For this book and for a new untouched copy, over eleven hundred dollars. Now that's resale value. And according to what I can see, they're not really making any money right now. Not for a few years.

Right.

They do have a website that is. You can still access. However, the website is just a table with some numbers on it. Don Titor's name and it does have the emblem which he posted and used as his icon, which is his division and they copyrighted that. They own the rights to that symbol.

So this is a, this is an early Internet marketing, like viral marketing.

Possibly.

Now I find that more interesting about marketing techniques in the beginning of, you know, the Widespread Internet.

I thought you might like this.

Yeah, I do kind of like that.

Now, Haber himself claims that he was contacted by an unnamed acquaintance about a woman named Kay who claimed to be Titor's mother. Haver claimed to know nothing of the posts. He was just told to set up a business and a foundation. And eventually he was given a video to post, which I will show you. It is still available on his YouTube.

I can't wait.

Oh, yeah. It's a voice to text.

Oh.

So there's no way to know who sent it. Now, Haber has done some interviews. He did for a long time. Did interviews, but he's kind of stepped out of the scene now. K. She just stayed in the shadows. She reportedly lived in Omaha, which is not where Titor claimed to live. He claimed to live in Florida.

Right.

But New Worldline. So possibly she decided to go ahead and move to the Midwest to prepare.

Prepare for.

Yes, imminent war. Haber has been on coast to Coast Am now. One little side note to Haber's brother, John Rick Haber, he is a computer scientist. So maybe he had some knowledge that.

Right.

Don didn't have to put in.

To put in there.

Put in a little pizzazz. You want to see the video now?

Sure. So I watched the video.

So any takes from that 2009 post from. I tore.

Don't know what the. Is going on.

So you guys will have to. We'll post this for you to listen to. It's a little bit lengthy. Basically, in 2009, John reveals that himself and other versions of himself had been bouncing around from 1998 to 2001 and all the way up to other time periods. Possibly, we're not sure yet. He hadn't revealed it there because he left this message for his mother to reveal in 2009. But basically they needed to put in codes for the coordinates they needed to get back to 2036 properly. And something about the B52s.

There's some significance in the music of.

The B52 that we are not aware of yet. Now, there is a key thing that I did leave out with Pamela. He told her that he would reach out to her again when the time was right and she would know it was him because he would put a special song at the end of it. I don't know if that's also a B52 song or if. I just don't know if we should be searching for the love shack and find out exactly where it is or, you know, I don't know what the significance of that is.

Well, I can tell you one thing that was the most dumb things I've ever seen. Like, it's just. It's a black screen with some text in it written by a speech to text.

Yeah, but it is stupid.

God, is that stupid. It's full of things trying to be complicated, but not complicated.

He does say in there that he fears that we are on track for that civil war to happen.

And he feels sorry.

Maybe later, but he feels sorry for us. And I don't know when you're listening to this, but maybe we're on the verge of that. And maybe John needs to trade in his four wheel pickup, his 87 Chevy that he already traded a 67 Chevy for. Maybe he needs to get like a. A sweet 95 Honda Civic or you know, if he's worried about the environment, maybe a 2006 Toyota Prius, something like that. Hop back in to our world line at this current time and you know, maybe he could get on TikTok or something and give us a message. No, he could do that in a certain way, Greg. How could he do that?

Oh, he. He could go to no Such Thing as Ghost.

Or maybe he prefers Instagram.

No Such Thing as Ghost Pod.

Or the Facebook.

That's no Such Thing as Ghosts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he could email us at no.

Such Thing as Ghost Pod Gmail dot com.

Yep. And we have a website, John.

Yeah, it's no Such Thing as Ghost Show.

While you're there, you could pick up a T shirt or a hoodie.

That's right.

Or you can click on the microphone and tell us how our future has changed.

You can leave us a voicemail from right there and we will gladly play it.

And any of you all can do that. You can reach out at all those. Any of you other John's, any John's, any whoever's. It doesn't matter. You can call yourself John and just tell us a story and you know, we'll talk about it.

Right? This story was dumb.

Well, it might have been significant in our Worldline. We don't know. We might not ever know.

Yes, we'll never know and no one will care. That's it. We'll see you guys next time. Sa.