Is John Titor, The Time Traveling Soldier Real or Fake?

On November 2, 2000, people perusing the Time Travel Institute message boards got a surprise. A member uploaded a message suggesting that he was a soldier in the United States Army and a real-life time traveler.

In the initial posts, the user went by the name TimeTravel_O and described the mechanics that made the time machines work. The user answered questions from other users, albeit in short replies. Most people believed that this was a genuine time traveler and took the poster at their word.

These messages stopped. People were curious about what happened to the poster. However, they theorized that the person must have gone back to his own time and therefore didn’t attempt to debunk the story that they were told.

Without new information, the story began to fade away.

But it was renewed in January 2001. The poster created a new thread on the Art Bell Post-to-Post forums. This time, the name John Titor was attached to it. The forums required a name or a pseudonym.

His posts were a bit more elaborate this time. He once again cited the fact that he was with the U.S. Army, but this time claimed that he was from the year 2036. The reason he traveled back to 2001 was that he had a mission.

Initially, the mission he said was to travel back to 1975 and retrieve an IBM 5100 computer. He claimed that his paternal grandpa had been on the team that created the device and that was the reason the government had asked him.

He provided details of the computer that weren’t publicly known. Because of this, people began to grow skeptical of the poster. They theorized that he was a computer scientist and that he was just writing a story.

“I don’t care if people believe me; that’s not my goal,” the poster said when faced with the criticism.

But there was more to the story.

John Titor claimed that he was born in 1998, in a small Florida town. He went on to say that the other version of himself was only 2 years old. This made people even more skeptical than they already were about the story.

Titor explained that time travel played into the Many Worlds theory that branches out from quantum physics. He claimed that anyone who time travels creates a new timeline. The past can be changed, but it has a butterfly effect on events.

He wrote in a post:

All possible quantum states, events, possibilities, and outcomes are real, eventual, and occurring. The chances of everything happening someplace at some time in the superverse is 100%.

This theory was also used to explain why some of his “predictions” didn’t come to fruition. He and his supporters claimed that he was right, but it happened in one of the other timelines.

Since there are multiple timelines, people began to say that everything he said probably did happen, but we aren’t aware of it because it didn’t occur in our timeline.

What were these predictions that turned out to be false? And did any of them prove to be true?

Titor claimed that in 2004 the United States would see a second Civil War. That war would not end until 2015, when a third world war would break out. That war would end when nuclear weapons were used, and billions of people were killed.

The Civil War would split the United States into five separate regions, each with its own President. Each elected leader served the Federal Government in the nation’s new capital, Omaha, Nebraska.

Society would be more communal, with people helping one another. The wars brought everyone together. Families lived close together, with nearly no one leaving the community unless they enlisted in the army as Titor did.

“The people that survived grew closer together. Life is centered on family and then the community. I cannot imagine living even a few hundred miles from my parents,” Titor said.

They farm their own food. Titor claimed that the food industry was destroyed. Everyone grew enough food to survive and stay healthy. The survivors were also health-conscious.

Of course, the United States has not had another Civil War. Nor has World War III happened, though some claim that any minute it could break out.

Titor did accurately predict the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease. He claimed that it is one of the reasons that people of the future begin to farm and grow their own food.

Some people grew skeptical of the man when he refused to tell them who would win the Super Bowl or other major sporting events. He countered that because time travelers impacted the timeline, things could be changed enough to affect the outcome.

And those who doubted John Titor were about to be surprised by what he showed them next.

Some of the posters who thought Titor wasn’t being truthful asked about his time machine. They pushed to see if they could see pictures of it and if he would tell them how it worked.

Turned out he had no problem answering those questions.

“The hard part of traveling through time is not the bending of gravity, but the plotting of your course and holding to the same basic “position” in your environment. This is done through a system called VGL (Variable Gravity Lock). In effect, it holds you to the “Earth.”

As it happened, the science actually checked out. Some of the more skeptical people began to believe that he was telling the truth.

The time machine was mounted into vehicles. First, a ’67 Chevy and then a truck because the equipment to time travel was so heavy.

He explained that there were no side effects. However, he did concede that when he was going on a “flight,” he would avoid eating. Most believe that was because of motion sickness.

Despite all the evidence he presented, there were groups of people who thought that he was a fraud. This appeared to anger him.

“Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future. This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centered, civically ignorant sheep. Perhaps you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about that.”

Just as it seemed like things were about to tip in the skeptics' favor, something happened. A romantic interest presented herself and seemingly verified that John Titor was telling the truth.

Pamela Moore claimed to have had very intimate conversations with Titor. She was active on the message boards, and most people seemed to like her. At least, they didn’t doubt what she said when she claimed that she and the time traveler were involved with one another.

Before Titor left this timeline for his own, he promised that he would leave her a video. To prove that it came from him and wasn’t a hoax, he told her that it would include a song that only the two of them knew.

Adding to the skeptics’ argument, the departure video never showed up. Pamela, for her part, has not shared what the song was that he told her about.

In his last post, Titor lambasted people. He said that their unwillingness to help others was deplorable. The selfishness, he claimed, scared him more than anything. Then, he said he was glad to be leaving. There was also one last dig at those who doubted him.

“I already know you won’t pay any attention or believe me because we’ve already been taught it on this worldline. Besides, I think the walk to the gas station will do you some good,” he said in a callback to a story he shared about why people said they wouldn’t help someone stranded on the side of the road. “I also want to thank Pamela for helping me with the email and everyone else who asked intelligent and insightful questions.”

But were the skeptics right to doubt this alleged military man’s time-traveling story?

The short answer is, those who doubted the story had good reason to. Even accepting the multiverse theory as the reason for his predictions being wrong, he missed quite a few big ones.

And the ones that he got right are easily discarded. Mad Cow Disease was already working its way through the United Kingdom in 1986, more than 16 years before the pandemic hit the US. An educated person would have been well aware of this.

If the Titor story is a myth, who started it?

Joseph Matheny, a writer and game developer, claims that he worked with three other people to craft the story. Their goal, he said, was to create one of the first internet myths. Something that he arguably has done.

Matheny said that he won’t name the people who worked with him because they were higher-ups in the entertainment industry. As evidence, he said the pictures were staged by a prop master who has worked on some of Hollywood’s biggest films. He went on to say that the different tones in the messages were because there were three people writing them.

To bolster his argument, he said that the similarities to John Connor from the Terminator franchise were intentional.

Another similarity is the tone of Matheny. When he is asked about the Titor myth now, he gives an eerily familiar answer:

“Believe me or don’t, I don’t care.”

Which sounds nearly identical to some of the messages Titor sent.

But Matheny doesn’t own the business attached to John Titor. Someone else does.

Larry Haber is a Florida-based entertainment lawyer. He claims that he represented Kaye Titor, John’s mother. However, there is no evidence to back up these claims.

Working in his favor is that he doesn’t have the science or technology background to create John Titor. His studies were in law and particularly within copyright.

However, his brothers Morey and Richard have a lot of experience in the technology industries. And there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the Titor myth could have come from them.

Not the least of which is that Larry Haber registered The John Titor Foundation, LLC in 2003. The business is a for-profit organization.

One of the first moves of the company was to publish John Titor’s posts as a book.

Following that up, Haber registered the John Titor name as a trademark in 2007. This allows him full control of the name. Or at least it would seem that way.

Despite the business moves, Matheny contacted the publisher of the book and had it pulled. Haber acknowledged the move.

“The book is out of print, and I don’t know why,” he said.

There’s one more turn with the book. Pamela said that she got a copy of the book signed by John Titor. As part of the message, the name of a song was included.

But it was not the secret song that she was told it would be.

Despite his claim that he didn’t care if people believed him, Titor’s messages seemed to show he did care. He last posted in 2001 and has not been heard from since, which points to the story being real. But the inconsistencies cannot be ignored.

Is John Titor real or a character created for the internet?