Thread by @malinablue

Here's a strange story to make you question whatever certainty in reality you have left.

Did you know a guy claiming to be a time traveler appeared on Internet message boards in 2000, warning of a coming US Civil War that would begin with a disputed election & mass violence?

He said America would be divided politically & see "a Waco type event every month that gets steadily worse” until erupting in large-scale violence affecting every part of the country. The US Civil War would destabilize the world & lead to a nuclear WWIII initiated by Russia.

"John Titor" claimed to be a soldier sent in 2036 on a mission back to 1975 to obtain an IBM 5100 computer. He was stopping off in 2000 for personal reasons & briefly staying with his family & 3-year-old self.

Titor said the IBM computer he was sent to get had a secret function on it that allowed it to talk BASIC, APL & a system language, translating any language. No one in 2036 knew how to access it. (Years later in 2004, IBM came forward & said this function did, in fact, exist.)

For four months, before disappearing forever, Titor answered questions. He posted pics & diagrams of his machine - which were reasonable for a time machine - & explained how it worked, demonstrating considerable knowledge of physics. Some of his predictions eerily came true.

He said his time machine - the size of a suitcase & 500 pounds (so it needed to be transported in a car) was powered by artificial black holes the size of an electron that together created a micro-singularity, altering the gravity field and allowing you to move through time.

He said the technology would be created by CERN in 2034. The research institute did, in fact, announce years later (in 2005) it is pursuing such work into black holes.

When told by another poster that his description of black holes contradicted what Stephen Hawking said about them, Titor contended that Hawking would later publicly admit he was wrong about black holes, which is exactly what happened in 2014.

Titor correctly predicted the crash of the Columbia spaceship in 2003 (& why it would crash) & the invention of wireless Internet, which at the time seemed crazy. He even described how wireless Internet would work, which - again - was unbelievable at the time.

He also predicted - back before they existed - sites like YouTube and social media & how individual people would begin to put out their own news & change how media works.

He said we live in a multiverse (a web of parallel universes) & when you travel through time, you can never get back to the exact universe you left. Because of that, he cautioned his predictions could be off because the parallel universes were not identical & differed 1-2%.

He described it like a fun house: you look in the mirrors & see different versions of yourself living in different parallel universes at the same time. When you step forward in time, the other versions of yourself do the same.

(A multiverse would explain the Mandala Effect - a phenomenon in which large numbers of people mis-remember a significant event or share a memory of an event that never happened. More on that soon.)

He predicted Olympics would end & we wouldn't have one in 2008 because "many conflicts" would lead to cancellation. We DID have an Olympics in 2008 in Beijing, but there were, in fact, many conflicts over Chinese human rights abuses & security concerns that threatened the games.

Titor was discredited primarily by his Civil War predictions because he predicted the division between factions in the US would begin a few years after the 2004 election & the nuclear war would begin in 2015. That obviously didn't happen. Then.

Titor himself said times & details could be off. "In each parallel time line, things will be altered by a fraction," he warned. "I've noticed little things like news events that happen at different times, football games won by other teams ... things like that."

Whatever you think about him, it's incredible someone in 2000 - when few of us were even on the Internet - could imagine then what's happening now. Did any of you in your wildest imaginings contemplate "US Civil War" two decades ago?

I know I didn't. So whoever Titor was, we know this much about him - he had advanced knowledge of both physics & computer science & a pretty intuitive grasp of where the new-fangled Internet would lead. He also seemed to have rare insight into America's political future.

Among other Titor reveals - UFOs probably aren't alien spacecraft, but time travelers from a future even beyond his future.

Don't eat red meat! Titor talked a lot about a future scary epidemic of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (Mad Cow disease) & pleaded with readers to quit beef.

Titor says the US Civil War leads to the destruction of DC & Jacksonville, FL (among other cities). The new US Capitol will be in Omaha, NE (which, Constitutionally-speaking, makes sense because the Capitol is supposed to be centrally located. DC was the center then. NE is now.)

WWIII will be brief, but horrifying, killing 3 billion & collapsing most of the world's governments. Titor didn't predict climate catastrophe, but if his other predictions are true, it would make sense. The loss of half the population would stave off climate disaster.

Humanity does survive after WWIII & is a kinder, gentler place with small communities focused on simpler things. Oh, and hats make a big come-back & are super-popular in 2036.

I’m skeptical of time travel myself, but if we start seeing large domestic terrorist attacks monthly & the US further splinters into multiple factions - as predicted - I’m moving to Omaha.

Forgot to add - those who take John Titor & time travel seriously speculate his trip back to 1975 for an old computer is related to Y2K & why the predicted doomsday DIDN’T happen. After all, Titor appeared in 2000 right after. If true - why was no traveler sent to stop Trump?

Here are links to all of Titor's posts: reddit.com/r/JohnTitor/co…

If you're a skeptic like me who nonetheless enjoys tales of the strange & unexplained & just plain weird, subscribe to the Fortean Times. @forteantimes

I didn't draw this story from there, but they are all about tales like this one (& probably covered it at some point).

"Fortean" phenomena are events which seem to challenge the boundaries of accepted scientific knowledge. Fortean Times (founded as The News in 1973) investigates such phenomena.

I agreed to date my husband 30 years ago because he read Fortean Times, too, when few had heard of it.