A person named "John Titor" started posting on the Internet one day, claiming to be from the future and predicting the end of the world. Then he suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again.
This is our planet’s bleak future: a second Civil War splinters America into five factions, leaving the new capital based in Omaha. World War III breaks out in 2015, starting with Russia and the U.S. trading nukes and ending with three billion dead. Then, to top it all off, a computer bug delivers where Y2K sputtered, destroying our world as we know it. That is, unless an audacious time traveler successfully traverses the space-time continuum to change the course of future history.
In late 2000, that person signed onto the Internet.
A poster going by the screennames “TimeTravel_0” and “John Titor” on a variety of message boards, beginning with the forum at the Time Travel Institute, claimed he was a soldier sent from 2036, the year the computer virus wiped the world. His mission was to head back to 1975 in order to snatch-and-grab an IBM 5100 computer, which had the necessary equipment to fight the future virus. (His detour to the year 2000 was simply to get a little R&R while visiting his three-year-old self, ignoring every fabric-of-time paradox rule from time-travel stories.) Over the next four months, Titor responded to every question other posters had, describing future events in poetically-phrased ways, always submitted with a general disclaimer that alternate realities do exist, so his reality may not be our own. In between dire urgings to learn first aid and stop eating beef—Mad Cow was a serious threat in his reality—Titor provided a number of technical specs regarding how time travel worked, with overly complex algorithms and grainy, hard-to-make-out photos of his actual machine. (Which, yes, of course, was an automobile: a 1987 Chevy Suburban.) He even showed off his cool futuristic military insignia.
On March 24, 2001, Titor offered his final piece of advice (“Bring a gas can with you when the car dies on the side of the road”), signed off forever, and returned home. He was never heard from again.
TODAY, EVERYTHING POSTED ONLINE GETS A HEALTHY DOSE OF SKEPTICISM. LET'S CALL IT THE POST-SNOPES ERA. WE'VE BEEN CONDITIONED TO SUSPECT EVERYTHING.
IN 2003, TITOR FAN Oliver Williams—some may want to put “fan” in quotation marks, simply because of the numerous unsubstantiated theories that Williams himself is/was Titor—launched JohnTitor.com, which tracks Titor’s predictions and offers a compendium of all of his 151 posts. In 2004, members of George Mason University threw together a multimedia rock opera based on Titor. A summary of the tale at io9.com garnered over 103,000 hits in 2011. And, according to IMDB, a feature-length film about Titor is in the pipeline. What seemingly should have been dismissed as a four-month hoax, the work of some nerd killing time at his boring temp job, somehow turned into a phenomenon.
Since the beginning of the mysterious posts, Art Bell's popular late-night radio program “Coast to Coast AM,” a nationally-syndicated show that covers pretty much everything that'd fit comfortably into an episode of The X-Files, has been the go-to place for all things Titor. George Noory, who replaced Bell in 2003, has continued carrying the torch, devoting entire episodes to the ongoing mystery, fielding inane questions from callers and somehow answering with a straight face. (Examples: “Is there any way that Titor could be a godsend, sent as an angel, to warn us?” and “Do you think there's any possibility he was a space alien? I'll hang up and listen.”) In 2006, a lawyer named Lawrence Haber, who claimed to represent Kay Titor, a woman alleging to be John's mother, contacted Noory. An interview followed between Noory and Kay—with Haber acting as a phone go-between—and it ended up answering, well, pretty much nothing at all.
After that episode, the show intermittently tracked Titor's proposed timeline, looking at current events like tea leaves, possible harbingers of a nuclear armageddon. But as the false predictions piled up—while many of Titor's descriptions are vague enough to be considered “not yet disproved,” he did also claim there would be no Olympic Games after 2004—the search for Titor shifted from “Is this real?” to “Who deceived us?”
IN 2003, THE JOHN Titor Foundation, a for-profit Limited Liability Corporation, self-published John Titor: A Time Traveler's Tale, which is essentially a bound copy of the message board posts. (Used copies of this are currently going for $130 a pop on Amazon.) The Italian investigative TV show Voyager took up the case in 2008, hiring a private eye to locate the folks behind the LLC, and a search led back to the aforementioned Lawrence Haber, who was listed as the company's CEO. An investigation by amateur sleuth John Hughston, who also goes by the name “Razimus,” uncovered a mysterious P.O. Box in Celebration, Florida, belonging to the LLC. A group of friends with some downtime between gigs at their production company checked out the P.O. Box themselves but found nothing worthwhile. At some point, JohnTitorFoundation.com was created, offering some kind of nonsensical secret code to digital passersby. And just a week ago, Hughston released another video—this one 40 minutes long—in which he names Haber’s brother, Morey, as his prime suspect by using a side-by-side analysis of phrase-usage, which, to be kind, is not exactly a slam dunk.
(Weirder side note: In 2004, a computer engineer named Marlin Pohlman filed a patent for a time travel machine that “back-engineered” concepts in the Titor posts. This started another round of speculation that Pohlman, himself, was the original Titor poster. Last March, he was arrested for drugging and sexually assaulting four women.)
The search for Titor, then, has become more convoluted than Oliver Stone taking on the 9/11 conspiracy. A new piece of information comes out, a tech-savvy kid with some time to kill sees it, decides to give the puzzle a shot, and on and on it goes, the cycle never reaching an end. The trail burns hot, the trail goes cold, but the trail never disappears. There have been countless blog posts and armchair investigations—a Google search for “John Titor solution” bounces back with 325,000 results—but nothing’s come close to finding a worthwhile solution. An itch in the back of the throat remains, unscratched.
But why?
THE TITOR LEGEND PERSISTS BECAUSE NO ONE EVER CLAIMED TO BE BEHIND IT. NOW THAT WE WON’T BE FOOLED, WE NEED AN ANSWER. IT’S THE ZEIGARNIK EFFECT; WHEN SOMETHING’S NOT WRAPPED UP, IT PREOCCUPIES OUR MEMORY.
LAST MONTH, BRIAN DUNNING, a writer and producer specializing on the subject of skepticism, devoted an entire episode of his aptly-named podcast Skeptoid to the John Titor phenomenon, less focused on who it might have been and more about that question: why does something without any merit still have legs as an urban legend?
“Now that the number of unsubstantiated claims on the Internet is somewhat larger than the factorial of the square of all the large numbers ever conceived separated by arrow notation,” said Dunning on his podcast, “it would be a lot harder to achieve John Titor's celebrity.”
Today, everything posted online gets a healthy dose of skepticism. Let's call it the Post-Snopes Era. We've been conditioned—from everyone having access to Photoshop, to Punk'd and Jackass, to found footage films, to big budget viral marketing campaigns, to emails from faux Nigerian princes offering a portion of their riches if we simply send them our bank account number—to suspect everything. Every video of a cat performing a spectacular feat is met with at least one commenter decrying “FAKE!” The Titor story, from a time when we were all so innocent, a time that was less than 15 years ago, came right before things started to change.
And the Titor legend persists, in part, because no one ever claimed to be behind it. Now that we won’t be fooled, we need an answer. It’s the Zeigarnik effect; when something’s not wrapped up, it preoccupies our memory. Our skepticism needs a party responsible, a grand designer that allows it to make sense. When we find out—think the wizard behind the curtain in Oz, or whoever Jacob was supposed to be in that final season of Lost—the mystery ends. No one has claimed Titor, so the story continues.
There are some obvious connections for conspiracy theorists—the fracturing of governments, underground bunkers—but, for everyone else, there’s this: time travel stories are freaking cool. “This is a superpower that everyone would love to have,” said Dunning. “We all want John Titor to actually be from the future.” Who among us didn't spend idle moments of our youth wondering about flying cars and hoverboards, or what life was like back in the Old West. In fact, when I asked Hughston, the sleuth blogger, why he was initially drawn to Titor, he said that he'd been “a big fan of time travel since about 1985,” the year Back to the Future was released.
But there's also a much easier explanation. “The John Titor story is popular,” Dunning said, “simply because that happens to be one of the stories that became popular.” If Titor wasn't leading conspiracy-minded white dudes in their post-graduate years of boredom and confusion down a rabbit hole of mystery, something else would. It's Urban Legend Darwinism. Among all of the hoaxes, Internet rumors, ghost stories, and Satanic voices you can hear if you play the vinyl backwards, some have to become popular. Might as well be Titor.
There is one other (distant, remote, nearly scientifically impossible) possibility, though.
“ONE OF THE KEYS to cracking the Titor question,” starts an email by someone who goes by the name Temporal Recon, “is to just allow for the possibility that time travel very well could be true.”
The great thing about time travel: the story cannot be refuted. If events don't happen as the traveler says, that's because the traveler changed the timeline. “Many never even get off the ground in their research due to this very limiting view,” T.R. said. “They simply don't believe that the human race will ever conquer time. 'Ever' is a very long time, Rick.”
There's a particular point-of-view that seems to evolve within every amateur Titor investigator I encountered. As the puzzle fails to be solved, when no serious candidates present themselves, the goal of locating the hoaxster morphs ever so slightly, allowing in the possibility that maybe, just maybe, time travel could be real. “Look, of course John Titor didn't travel through time,” they’ll say, only to dramatically shift with the addendum, “but let's say he did.”
If you squint hard enough—and forget about the last four Olympics—things will always begin to resemble what you want to see, especially when reality’s only a minor quibble.
I mean, couldn't the political differences that continue to separate America into red states and blue states be precursors to the Second Civil War?U.S.–Russian relations have been kind of strange lately, haven't they?The history of 2015, when Russia and the U.S. nuke each other into oblivion, is still yet to be written!
Then T.R. writes a sentence that haunts me, one that will no doubt tip me over the edge on a course to try to solve the mystery, to locate the poster, or maybe a precocious kid now armed with a learner's permit who once met his future self. Graphs and charts will mass, blanketing my small studio apartment, where I'll only need a bare mattress in the corner, a pizza on the way, and a computer with browser tabs parked on obscure pages of note, set to auto-refresh. Friendships and relationships and family will drift into the ether; there are only so many hours in the day. Hands will blister, fingers will ink-stain, eyes will learn to scan for men in black suits, or white coats, or some combination thereof.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences.
In recent years, the world has seen a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to approximately 200 events annually. These events are increasing, and they are disruptive to health, economies, and society. Managing these events already strains global capacity, even absent a pandemic threat. Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,” would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.
When the whites arrived in the Ohio Valley and Midwest regions , thousands of burial mounds dotted the landscape. Today, most have been destroyed as a result of development, looting, and natural forces. Archaeologists have assigned the mounds to various prehistoric cultures based upon their shapes and artifacts contained within.
Scholars have debated the origin of these mounds. The Smithsonian Institution investigated them and conducted excavations in order to determine their origins . The mounds were apparently built by a series of prehistoric Indigenous American cultures spanning thousands of years.
Many were not built by the race of people we have come to know as "Amer-Indians" , but by a race of prehistoric Giant Human beings. Both Legend and Archaeological evidence supports this statement.
Native Legends
The Ronnongwetowanca
Among the legends of the ancient native Americans there was once a powerful tribe called Ronnongwetowanca. The Ronnongwetowanca were giants, and had a "considerable habitation." David Cusick, a Tuscorora Indian states that " when the Great Spirit made the people, some of them became giants. They made themselves feared by attacking when most unexpected.
After having endured the outrages of these giants for a great long time, the people banded together to destroy them. With a final force of about 800 warriors, they successfully annihilated the abhorrent Ronnongwetowanca. There were no giants anywhere after this, it was said." This supposedly occurred circa 1,000 B.C.
Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations David Cusick Circa. 1780 - 1840
"Cusicks Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations has been proposed as a possible source for or influence on the Book of Mormon; it has also been advanced as evidence for the existence of Bigfoot and the Lake Champlain monster." Paul Royster Univ. of Nebraska
The Adenas and the Archaics
Other Indian Legends report two distinct races of unusual peoples that pre-existed their culture. The first was a slender bodied race with long narrow heads.. The other was a race with a massive bone structure and short heads. The first race, labeled by some as the Archaics were living in the Ohio River Valley around 1000 BC. The second race, labeled the Adenas moved into the area from the South at a later date and claimed control of the territory.. A great war was fought in which the Archaics were destroyed by the more advanced Adenas.
It is believed that the Adena were related to the tribes of ancient Mexico. DNA testing has found no specific match between the Adena and any existing Native American group of the region, but does show a relationship to the tribes of ancient Mexico. - [ Adena People by William S. Webb, Charles E. Snow ]
".. In this connection I would say that Mr. Jonathan Brooks, now living in town, stated to me, that his father, Benjamin Brooks, who lived with the Indians fourteen years, and was well-acquainted with their language and traditions, told him and others that it was a tradition of the Indians that the first tribe occupying this whole country, was a black- bearded race, very large in size, and subsequently a red bearded race or tribe came and killed or drove off all the black beards, as they called them." The Firelands Pioneer 1858
Many burial mounds have yielded remains of relatively Giant Human Beings, as well- artifacts and randomly discovered remains have lent much support to the Indian legends. The Indians know nothing of the origins of these mounds, as per the Scientific American when an investigator asked an aged Indian in the 19th Century what his people knew of these ancient grave yards. He answered: "
"We know nothing about them. They were here before the red man".
It is believed that the practice of mound building was established by the Adenas. These "mounds" were burial mounds in which the remains of many native American remains have been discovered over the years. What is unusual about these remains is that they support the Indian legends of Giants as the remains are frequently of people 8 to 12 feet tall. In addition to their height there are at times other physical anomalies which would tends to point to the fact that they are not of the same race as the current peoples labeled "native Americans". Findings such as Red hair, and double rows of teeth, not found in the known indigenous populations
Timeline of Documented Giant Discoveries in America
Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, describes "very large" bones in stone graves found in Williamson County, Tennessee. Author John Haywood describes "very large" bones in stone graves found in Williamson County, Tennessee, in 1821. In White County, Tennessee, an "ancient fortification" contained skeletons averaging at least 7 feet in length.
In Braton Tennessee footprints believed to be human were found in solid rock 33 inches log and one foot wide. These have six toes each.
1792 New York, Buffalo: Turners History of the Holland Purchase reports that 7 and 8 foot skeletons were found at an earthen fort in Orleans county with broad flat topped skulls.
1800 Ohio, Conneaut: Among the normal size skeletons found in the remains of mounds were found gigantic bones. Some of the skulls and jaws were large enough to fit over the head and face of a normal man.
1829. During the construction of a Hotel in Chesterville. Workers digging up a mound discovered a large human skeleton. The local doctor examining the skeleton said that the skull could have easily fit over a normal man's head , In addition , the skeleton had more teeth than modern man.
1856 A decayed human skeleton claimed by eyewitnesses to measure around 3.28 metres (10 feet 9 inches tall), was unearthed by laborers while ploughing a vineyard in November 1856 in East Wheeling, now in West Virginia. Forbidden land by Robert Lyman
1872 Seneca Township, Noble County, Ohio, 3 skeletons , all were at the very least eight feet tall , with bone structure in proportion to their height. These skeletons all had double rows of teeth.
1875 Workmen were constructing a bridge near the mouth of Paw Paw Creek at Rivesville. While digging through heavy clay soil they were astonished to uncover three giant skeletons strands of reddish hair clinging to the skulls. A local doctor was called to examine the remains.
1876 J.N. DeHart, M.D. found vertebrae "larger than those of the present type" in Wisconsin mounds in 1876.
1877 W.H.R. Lykins uncovered skull bones "of great size and thickness" in mounds of Kansas City area in 1877.
1878 Ashtabula County, Ohio. Mounds were excavated on land belonging to Peleg Sweet, yielded askull and jaw large enough that the skull would cover Sweet's head and the jaw could be easily slipped over his face. Excavating further, they discovered these mounds contained the graves estimated between two and three thousand. Many of the other skeletons found were of gigantic proportions.
In 1879, a 9'8'' skeleton was excavated from a mound near Brewersville, Indiana by George W. Hill, M.D., . A mica necklace still hung around the giant's neck. The bones, which were stored in a grain mill, were swept away in the 1937 flood. .....Indianapolis News, Nov 10, 1975 .... "The giant skeleton was examined by scientists from Indiana and New York, and it remained in the possession of Mr. Robinson, who owned the land on which the mound stood. Unfortunately, the curious bones were washed away in a flood in 1937."
1880 "A skeleton which is reported to have been of enormous dimensions" was found in a clay coffin, with a sandstone slab containing hieroglyphics, during mound explorations by a Dr Everhart near Zanesville, Ohio. (American Antiquarian, v3, 1880, pg61).
1880 An excavation in Brush Creek Township, Muskingurn County yielded the bones of men and women, buried in couples. The length of their skeletons exceeding eight and even nine feet! The excavation was started in early December 1870.
The Brush Creek Tablet was found among skeletons of people over 8 and 9 feet tall
in Muskigum County, Ohio, in the early 1880's. The whereabouts of the Tablet today are unknown.
1881 "In digging the cellar of the house, nine human skeletons were found, and, like such specimens from other ancient mounds of the country, they showed that the Mound Builders were men of large stature. The skeletons were not found lying in such a manner as would indicate any arrangement of the bodies on the part of the entombers. In describing the tomb, Mr. Albert Harris said: "it looked as if the bodies had been dumped into a ditch. Some of them were buried deeper than others, the lower one being about seven feet below the surface." When the skeletons were found, Mr. Harris was twenty years of age, yet he states that he could put one of the skulls over his head, and let it rest upon his shoulders, while wearing a fur cap at the same time. The large size of all the bones was remarked, and the teeth were described as "double all the way round." ... History of Medina County, Ohio, 1812-1889
1883 "Two miles from Mandan, on the bluffs near the junction of the Hart and Missouri Rivers, says the local newspaper, the Pioneer, is an old Cemetery of fully 100 acres in extent filled with bones of a giant race. This vast city of the dead lies just east of the Fort Lincoln road. The ground has the appearance of having been filled with trenches piled full of dead bodies, both man and beast, and covered with several feet of earth. In many places mounds from 8 to 10 feet high, and some of them 100 feet or more in length, have been thrown up and are filled with bones, broken pottery, vases of various bright colored flint, and agates ... showing the work of a people skilled in the arts and possessed of a high state of civilization. This has evidently been a grand battlefield, where thousands of men ... have fallen. ...Five miles above Mandan, on the opposite side of the Missouri, is another vast cemetery, as yet unexplored. We asked an aged Indian what his people knew of these ancient grave yards. He answered: "We know nothing about them. They were here before the red man." The Scientific American
1883 Ten skeletons "of both sexes and of gigantic size" were taken from a mound at Warren, Minnesota, 1883. (St. Paul Pioneer Press, May 23, 1883)
1884 A skeleton 7 feet 6 inches long was found in a massive stone structure that was likened to a temple chamber within a mound in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1884. (American Antiquarian, v6, 1884 133f. Cyrus Thomas, Report on Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, 12th Annual Report, Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology, 1890-91).
1888 In Minnesota, 1888, were discovered remains of seven skeletons 7 to 8 feet tall. (St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 29, 1888). 7 skeletons, placed in a sitting position, were uncovered from a burial mound near Clearwater, Minnesota. The highly unusual skulls had double rows of teeth in both the upper and lower jaws. It was also noted that the foreheads were low and sloping, compared to "normal" human skulls.
1892 "Where Proctorville now stands was one day part of a well paved city, but I think the greatest part of it is now in the Ohio river. Only a few mounds, there; one of which was near the C. Wilgus mansion and contained a skeleton of a very large person, all double teeth, and sound, in a jaw bone that would go over the jaw with the flesh on, of a large man; The common burying ground was well filled with skeletons at a depth of about 6 feet. Part of the pavement was of boulder stone and part of well preserved brick." Ironton Register
1895 A mound on the outskirts of Toledo, Ohio, yielded 20 skeletons, seated and facing east with jaws and teeth "twice as large as those of present day people," each skeleton had a large bowl with "curiously wrought hieroglyphic figures." (Chicago Record, Oct. 24, 1895; cited by Ron G. Dobbins, NEARA Journal, v13, fall 1978).
1896 The skeleton of a huge man was uncovered at the Beckley farm, Lake Koronis, Minnesota; while at Moose Island and Pine City, bones of other giants came to light. (St. Paul Globe, Aug. 12, 1896).
"In 1903, at Fish Creek, Montana, Professor S. Farr and his group of Princeton University students came across several burial mounds. They unearthed the skeleton of a man about 9 feet long. Next to him lay the bones of a woman, who had been almost as tall" Roy Norvill- Giants : The Vanished Race Of Mighty Men
Kentucky folklore writer Michael Paul Henson (1984) relates how he actually examined a body dug out from under a large rock ledge along Holly Creek in east-central Kentucky. In 1965, a landowner, was building cattle stalls when he found a "perfectly preserved skeleton" which measured 8 feet, 9 inches in length when reassembled. "...The arms were extremely long and the hands were large. By comparison, the feet were very small." The skull was "30 inches in circumference. The eye and nose sockets were slits rather than cavities, and the area where the jaw bone hinges to the skull was solid bone. It would seem that the person could not have opened his mouth." The skull was 30 inches in circumference. A powdery white substance covered the skeleton, but no tools, weapons, or other human implements were found with the bones. The body was buried approximately five feet underground. The skeleton was assumed to be that of a large, deformed Indian. White reburied the bones rather than taking them to a university for examination. Henson died in 1995, and any further notes he may have had on this fascinating story are unavailable
Bluffton Chronicle, July 22, 1903 pg 2. A report of Giant skeletons unearthed in a gravel pit in Anderson Indiana is described. If these accounts do not come from excavations of burial mounds then they come from earth moving operations, well digging, railroad construction, washouts and other earth disturbing activities. As would be expected or is often unexpected as far as the finder is concerned when they encounter giant remains and report them. From the article, "workmen unearthed half a dozen skeletons, most of which were eight feet tall and over. One in particular was that of a man of great stature and all were far above the height of tall persons. Two of the skeletons were those of women. In the graves were found pieces of pottery, such as were unknown by the Indians, which leads to the conclusion that the bones are those of people of a prehistoric race. Two bodies were found close to an ancient mound." - Stone Builders, Mound Builders and the Giants of Ancient America -Facebook
"... three skeletons were found at the mouth of the Paw Paw Creek ... some men were digging for a bridge foundation and found these bones at the lower end of the old buffalo wallow. She thought it was Dr. Kidwell, of Fairmont, who examined them and said they were very old, perhaps thousands of years old. She said that when the skeletons were exposed to the weather for a few days, their bones turned black and began to crumble, that Squire Satterfield had them buried in the Joliffe graveyard (Rivesville). All these skeletons, she said, were measured, and found to be about eight feet long. Now and long ago;: A history of the Marion County area by Glen Lough
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the place of sepulture raised by the Mound Builders from the more modem graves of the Indians. The tombs of the former were in general larger than those of the latter, and were used as receptacles for a greater number of bodies, and contained relics of art, evincing a higher decree of civilization than that attained by the Indians. The ancient earthworks of the Mound Builders have occasionally been appropriated as burial places by the Indians, but the skeletons of the latter may be distinguished from the osteological remains of the former by their greater stature. ...History of Logan County, Illinois
Suggested Reading
"It is time to consider the third, last, and most highly interesting class of Antiquities, which comprehends those belonging to that people who erected our ancient forts and tumuli; those military works, whose walls and ditches cost so much labour, in their structure, those numerous and sometimes lofty mounds, which owe their origin to a people far more civilized than our Indians, but far less so than Europeans. These works are interesting, on many accounts, to the Antiquarian, the Philosopher, and the Divine, especially when we consider the immense extent of country which they cover .. " Caleb Atwater {1778 -1867}
Travels of William Bartram William Bartram 1729-1823 naturalist/artist/botanist . Wrote frequently and in detail about the mounds which dotted the landscape in his day.