One thing I’ve thought about while choosing what to write about on this site has been the difference between a story and a lie. Some might say that the essential difference is that a lie sets out to deceive – but that isn’t really the whole truth.

Storytelling began as a way of passing down knowledge and wisdom and as far as we can tell metaphor and symbolism have been a part of the process since the very beginning. Did the wise old man really think the wide-eyed children who huddled around him to hear his tales would believe the stories of gods who took the form of animals, or spirits who took the form of plants or rivers? Or was he simply content that valuable wisdom would be passed on, regardless of the spark of rational disbelief he caught in the eyes of the quicker-witted children?

So for the purpose of this blog I am taking the stance that stories are quite capable of being, and very often are, dishonest.

I don’t think that whoever authored the intriguing saga of internet time traveller John Titor necessarily set out to deceive, or for that matter to impart much in the way of wisdom, but for the other reason we have always told stories, which is to entertain.

The story was one that could only ever have been told with the help of the internet. It’s mix of time-travel, quantum physics and computer geekery was perfectly pitched for the techies, philosophers and paranoids who pioneered the social internet on bulletin boards and forums, before everyone else joined in on Facebook.

The earliest chapters seem to have taken the form of faxes sent in 1998 to the North American late-night radio talk show Coast to Coast, which being British I have never heard, and which in the words of Wikipedia “deals with a variety of topics, but most frequently ones that relate to either the paranormal or conspiracy theories”.

Although he was not yet using the name, he claimed to be a time-traveller from the year 1998, who had returned to warn of the dangers of the Y2K bug.

The mass-failure of computer systems as the clock ticked over to January 1, 2000, would be the beginning of the end of civilisation, he warned, with millions starving to death and war following soon after.

By the time Y2K came and went without any of the threatened carnage, the internet had exploded. Probably very few people remembered the oddly entertaining faxes and certainly no one would have connected them to a user calling himself TimeTravel_0 who began posting on several forums.

The initial postings to a now-dead forum set up by Arthur Bell, the founder and host of Coast to Coast, as well as the Time Travel Institute forums were simply presented as an explanation of “a gravity distortion system that will allow time travel”

As time went on he began using the name John Titor, and once again resumed the story of being a time-traveller from 2036, here to warn humanity away from the path leading to apocalypse.

Titor stated that what he referred to as the “Everett–Wheeler model of quantum physics” – but is better known and understood to most of us as the “Back To The Future 2” model – is essentially correct.

Basically, travelling back in time doesn’t change the future, but leads to the creation of parallel universes, is the gist of it – and hence he was able to explain why the devastation he had predicted would be caused by the Y2K millenium bug had not occurred.

(The BTTF similarities do not end there – Titor’s time machine was eventually explained as being mounted in a 20th century automobile, in this case initially a Chevrolet Corvette, and then later moved to a four-wheel drive truck).

There then began a long stream of imaginative and to some extent plausible predictions – civil war would break out in the United States. CERN would announce a major breakthrough in the development of time travel in 2001. The CJD-scare, much publicised in the media, would have dire consequences.

An interesting element – possibly revealing some clues as to the identity of the author – was that an essential objective of his mission through time was supposedly to return to 1976 and retrieve a specific early model IBM computer – an IBM 5100.

This particular computer, he claimed, was required to avert another upcoming catastrophe caused by limitations of the Unix operating system – apparently widely used in 2036 – and set to fail on Tuesday, January 19, 2038 (See the Unix 2038 Problem, if you are interested).

He wrote of fighting in a US civil war, beginning in 2004, as part of a “shotgun militia” based in Florida known as the Fighting Diamondbacks and surviving nuclear holocaust in 2015, before being selected by the government for his mission due to being a descendant of one of the designers of the IBM 5100.

His posts were met with a mix of scepticism and credulity, with questions flying back at him quickly from the online community asking him to describe the experience of time travel (“…only lasts a second … like driving through a tunnel and being in total black…”) and divulge more about his own time (“ …little things like news events that happen at different times, football games won by other teams…”)

Many questioned the apparent inconsistencies in his story – for example, if infinite parallel universes exist, in which every possible outcome of every possible event transpire – wasn’t his mission back in time to change the past essentially impossible, not to mention pointless?

Inevitably, as this was the internet, others took another tack, insisting that it was well-known that the government was already in possession of time-travel technology, acquired from aliens, and that Titor was simply a “disinformation agent” acting to obfuscate the truth.

But the replies came back, some explanations more plausible and lucidly stated than others – until March 24, 2001, when he announced in what he said would be the last we would hear of him that he would be returning to his own time.

Before he left he answered a final barrage of questions and departed with the observation that “What amazes me is why no one here wonders why Y2K didn’t hit them at all?”

The story is still found on the internet – collections of his posts and responses are archived on various websites, at least one book has been written on the subject of Titor and a play – Time Traveller Zero Zero – written by Kirby Malone, was performed in New York in 2004.

A further clue to the identity of the author emerged following a 2008 Italian television documentary in which it was said that a company called the John Titor Foundation was registered in Florida in 2003.

Although I wasn’t able to find the documentary and would be unlikely to understand much of it anyway, not speaking Italian, according to Wikipedia it speculates that the creator of Titor may be John Haber, a computer expert brother of Rick Haber, listed as that company’s CEO.

The Foundation published a book in 2003 titled John Titor A Time Traveler’s Tale. It’s out of print now but Amazon apparently has two used copies left, starting at $761.12.

The saga of John Titor is now widely considered to be a hoax, and discussed in scoffing tones by those irritated at having “fallen for it”, or in tones of smug self-congratulation by those pleased with themselves for having seen through from the start. .

But it’s more than that – and I have never really seen it discussed for what it is before – which is a story.

Links

www.johntitor.com Big collection of Titor posts

Conviction of a time traveler Another big collection of Titor posts

John Titor A Time Traveler’s Tale at Amazon (if you have $700 spare to spend on a book)

Time Traveler Zero Zero A page about the 2004 play, including prologue