John Titor: A Visitor From The Future?

We've dealt with time travel before, thanks to those two famous French time slips the Moberly-Jourdain incident and the Simpson-Gisby incident.

But those two tales were of people who had supposedly accidentally slipped back in time. This tale is of a man who claimed he had travelled through time.... and he had a mission.

Part Kyle Reese and part Sarah Connor, John Titor first posted a message online on the 2nd November 2000. At first he posted under the username Timetravel_0 on sites such as Art Bell and the Time Travel Institute. Soon, having had to register a new account somewhere else, he adopted   the name John Titor. Among discussion of time travel in general, John Titor claimed to be a time traveller himself.

He said he was born in 1998, and that by 2036 was working in a government time travel project. Sent back to 1975, his mission was to retrieve an IBM 5100 portable computer which was needed to translate between some legacy IBM systems and UNIX. He claimed the IBM 5100 was able to do this due to certain in-built functions that were not documented when it was manufactured.

On his way he made a stop off for personal reasons in 1998-2001 to see his family. He also claimed to be attempting to gauge, for research purposes of course, the reaction of others to encountering a person from their future. Hence the posts on random internet forums...

John warned of a coming Second American Civil War, which would lead to a destructive Third World War. Wiki has a brief synopsis of this future history:

The most immediate of Titor's predictions was of an upcoming civil war in the United States having to do with "order and rights". He described it as beginning in 2004, with civil unrest surrounding the United States presidential election, 2004. This civil conflict that he characterizes as "having a Waco type event every month that steadily gets worse" will be "pretty much at everyone's doorstep" and erupts by 2008.

Fighting Diamondbacks Insignia 

Titor claimed that as a 13-year old, in 2011, he fought with the "Fighting Diamondbacks", a shotgun infantry unit of Florida, for at least four years. However, in other posts he describes himself as hiding from the war. As a result of the war, the United States splits into five regions based on various factors and differing military objectives. This civil war, according to Titor, will then end in 2015 with a brief, but intense, World War III:

"In 2015, Russia launches a nuclear strike against the major cities in the United States (which is the "other side" of the civil war from my perspective), China, and Europe. The United States counter attacks. The US cities are destroyed along with the AFE (American Federal Empire)...thus we (in the country) won. The European Union and China were also destroyed."

Titor refers to the exchange as "N Day". Washington, D.C. and Jacksonville, Florida are specifically mentioned as being hit. After the war, Omaha, Nebraska is the nation's new capital city.

Titor is vague as to the exact motivations and causes for World War III. At one point he characterized hostilities as being led by "border clashes and overpopulation" but also points to the present conflict between Arabs and Jews as a harbinger of World War III.

The complete forum posts, pictures and predictions of John Titor can be found here. His last forum post was in March 2001, and he has not been heard from since...

Now, you may be thinking, this is just a bunch of old tosh (and you wouldn't find me disagreeing there either!). But John explained that his presence here in our "worldline" means that we have already diverged from the timeline and in affect he came from an alternative dimension. Hence the fact things haven't turned out quite the way he says they would is not something that can be used to criticise him. But there is plenty of other criticism out there.

With most people today claiming John Titor is in fact John Rick Haber, brother of the owner of the commercial rights to all things John Titor, Larry Haber.

But perhaps, just perhaps, John Titor really was a traveller from the future who came in order to warn us all of the future we faced. Maybe he succeeded in averting disaster.

Further Reading

John Titor A Time Traveler's Tale - Written by the "John Titor Foundation" in 2003


Time Travel - Journeys into Time - DVD 


Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time - J. Richard Gott 


If you feel benevolent and particularly generous, this writer always appreciates things bought for him from his wishlist

Another Slip In Time In France

A trip to Spain in the 1970s was still a rather exotic adventure for many, but two British couples travelling there in 1970s had a far more exciting experience on the journey down than any they had on the holiday itself....

Their trip began in Dover at the beginning of October 1979. Geoff and Pauline Simpson and their friends Len and Cynthia Gisby were to get a ferry to France and drive down to Spain, stopping off on the way for a break at any hotel they could find.

That is how, on October the 3rd, they found themselves exhausted and looking for somewhere to stay near the French town of Montelimar, France.


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The local Ibis was full, but a helpful man dressed in an old fashioned plum coloured suit in the lobby pointed them down the road to a hotel that might be able to put them up for the night.

The road they travelled down was cobbled and narrow and they couldn't help noticing very old fashioned posters for a circus lining their route, they stopped at an inn for further directions and eventually found themselves by two buildings, one a police station, the other an old fashioned two storey building marked "Hotel". Upon entering the Hotel they found themselves in the hotel bar and discovered that although the owner couldn't speak English he understood their requests for a room and after dinner they headed up to see them.

They found the rooms to be clean but very outdated. There was no glass in the window but wooden shutters instead, the door could be locked only by means of a wooden catch, there was no telephone, there were bolsters but no pillows and the plumbing was antique. But though basic it was perfectly acceptable for their purposes; a nice long sleep.

In the morning they awoke and headed down for breakfast. They were startled by the appearance of a few others in the hotel. One was a woman wearing a long dress and button-boots and carrying a little dog. Two gendarmes came into the hotel wearing clothes unlike any other gendarmes the couples had seen.

The couples finished up and prepared to leave. They asked one of the gendarmes for directions back to the autoroute and on to Avignon but he didn't seem to understand the word. The couples put this down to their poor pronunciation. He gave them some directions which they later found led them onto an old out of the way road.

When they settled up their bill they were in for another, not unwelcome, surprise. In total their bill came to 19 francs, which was about 1/13 of what they would have expected. They enquired with the gendarme again as they felt there may have been some mistake but he assured them all was well and they handed over the paltry sum and were off to sunny Spain.

On their return trip they were unable to locate this hotel, despite "finding the right road" and, when they enquired at the Ibis, they were told that they knew of no such nearby hotel and they denied the existence of anyone in a plum coloured suit working for them.

The couples were forced to stay in a hotel in Lyon and pay over 200 francs for a room. When they got home they found the pictures they had taken in the hotel were missing. Not blank, nor obscured but gone and the reel had been filled with other pictures. Later investigation found the reel showed markings half way along showing the camera had tried to take pictures but had failed.

They have been back to visit since but they have found no trace of the hotel, although somewhere similar was found they denied this was the hotel they stayed in. They later identified the uniforms worn by the gendarme as those used before 1905.

So what happened to them? Did they travel back through time? Was this an entire ghost building?

Alas, again, I feel there is little evidence to prove that they experienced anything truly weird. I stayed at a "hotel" in Paris in 2001 which was actually not too dissimilar. I entered the bar to find the furnishings would not have been out of place in the 18th Century and the clientele were... interestingly eccentric. I was desperate for a room as all the other hotels were full so despite my misgivings handed over 19 euros (about 10 quid, for a room for the night!!) and found my room to be.... basic... if there was ever a hotel out of time that was it! Although mine didn't even have the benefit of being clean...

Why didn't anyone remark on their odd mode of transport (a 1970s car in pre 1905 France? Would this have not brought crowds??)? Why did the hotel owner not refuse to take their strange, foreign money (as a coin collector I can tell you that francs had changed quite a bit between 1905 and 1979)? Could the fact that they had driven down the road at night lead to their inability to find it during daylight? Things can look a lot different in the light of day.

Alas I feel this time slip might again have been caused by confused foreign visitors allowing their imaginations to go wild in a country that might have seemed strange and unusual to them. France is still strange and unusual when compared to Britain with it's much quieter countryside and intelligent populace.

A camera malfunction? Well we are in the seventies here, I remember my old film cameras which proved to be unreliable... although mine were very cheap...

So yet again I find myself sceptical of their claims. One day I'll find a story I'm not sceptical about... I promise!!

Focus On: The Time Slip At Versailles

The following, rather notorious, case of "time travel" is usually referred to as the  Moberly-Jourdain incident.

On 10 August 1901 two British travelers, Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846-1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863-1924), were wandering the gardens of the Petit Trianon after a disappointing visit to the Palace of Versailles. They became slightly lost despite their handy Baedeker guidebook and that is when things became a little... strange.

According to their account of the events they started to experience a feeling of disquiet.

Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees

From here they met a man who they considered to be vile and "evil" and among the many people costumed in period dress one of the women claimed to see a lady she thought might be Marie Antoinette. Shortly after this they rejoined a group of people and continued their trip.

They didn't even discuss the incident until some time afterwards and it was a decade before their book about the incident "An Adventure" (1911) was published.

Now I don't mean to dismiss this story out of hand but:

1) some claim that things the women describe couldn't have been where the women say they were in 1901. This seems to be proof in the favour of the women's story except they were lost so their later descriptions of where they were cannot be reliably used as evidence of a time slip.
2) It is know that the aristocratic, and rather decadent, French poet Robert de Montesquiou held period parties in the grounds and given the character of the attendees the atmosphere at these gatherings may well have been otherworldly to two British tourists stumbling upon the scene.

I've often felt in parts of Europe a feeling of otherworldliness and oppression. But I've always felt this stems from the unusual quiet many streets on the continent seem to exude (unlike Britain's noise polluted cities!) and the great difference in architecture and surroundings. If these ladies were lost and disoriented, in a foreign country after a quiet walk and they just so happened to wander into a party of decadent excess I have no reason not to believe this would have confused and upset the women to the point of causing them to believe they had traveled to a different time. They appear to be susceptible to suggestion and Jordain died before she could be removed from her position at a college due to her anti-German paranoia.

Sadly, and it is with sadness as I have every desire to believe such an amazing experience could be possible, I suspect this tale of a time slip is either nothing more than a hoax or nothing less than a manic episode of confusion.

Further Reading

An Adventure - Elizabeth Morison and Frances Grant The ladies own account written under pen names to protect them from ridicule.

Robert De Montesquiou : A Prince of the Nineties - Philippe Jullian