In 1998, two unsigned faxes arrived at Coast to Coast AM. They described time travel, CERN, singularity engines, and a temporal barrier at 2564. 

The first was dated July 29, 1998. It predicted Y2K devastation. The second promised photographs and manual pages. Nothing came of them at the time.

His first message appeared in an existing thread on the Time Travel Institute forum. It was called “Time-travel Paradoxes! .” A longtime and founding member named Paul had started it. TimeTravel_0 responded with messages describing the component physics of a working time machine; Tipler cylinders, Kerr black holes, worldline divergence, variable gravity lock systems.

The community pushed back immediately. They questioned the physics. They demanded falsifiable predictions. They pressed on the ethics of sharing time machine schematics. We were not a passive audience, and never became one.

Three threads ran through November and December 2000 on this forum: Time Travel Paradoxes, Parallel Universe, and Topics Limited to 11 Pages. In January 2001, the discussion moved to Art Bell’s Post2Post BBS. That became the primary thread — 800+ posts over three months. He began signing his name as “John Titor.”

He described a future defined by civil war. It becomes apparent around the 2004 presidential election — “Waco-type events every month.” Western stability collapses in 2005. By 2008, full-scale conflict. The United States fragments into five regions, each with its own president. In 2015, a brief nuclear exchange — “N Day.” Washington, D.C. and Jacksonville destroyed. Omaha, Nebraska becomes the new capital. He joined a shotgun infantry unit at thirteen. In the four years he served as a “rebel,” he watched hundreds of people get shot, burn, and bleed to death.

But the story wasn’t only catastrophe. He described what came after. Communities of 1,000 to 4,000 people. No income taxes. No multinational banks. Work organized around family and community contribution — his family picked, sorted, and shipped oranges by sailboat up and down the coast of Florida. Books were still published. He read history. He played piano classics and liked older rock and roll. His hobby was sorting through old magazines and videos of life before the war. The healthcare system resembled a frontier: family doctors, house calls, broken legs and snake bites. “If you get a serious disease, you die.” The presidency was split into five — one for each region — and the education system was “no longer a political indoctrination system.”

The 2009 visual novel Steins;Gate made Titor a household name in Japan and globally — the IBM 5100 mission, the forum posts, the worldline theory, all woven into the plot. The 2011 anime adaptation cemented it.

Marvel Comics used “John Titor” as an alias for Kang the Conqueror. The 2003 book is out of print and collector-priced. Coverage in Thrillist, The New Republic, and The Telegraph has kept the name in circulation for a quarter century. The legend persists because no final answer exists.

On October 14, 2000, a conversation took place on IRC. A user calling himself TimeTravel_0 said he was 38 years old, from Florida, stationed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. He said he’d been sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 portable computer. He predicted civil war, nuclear conflict, the fragmentation of the United States.

The original threads — the forum conversations where the posts were made — are still in the Time Travel Institute’s archive. Some external sources survive only as transcriptions. Here is the complete record:

Pamela compiled his answers into a list. It became one of the most widely shared Titor artifacts — ten instructions for surviving what was coming. No details about bunkers or weapons caches. Just this:

It was installed in a 1967 Chevrolet Corvette for the trip to 1975, then transferred to a 1987 four-wheel-drive truck. “The vehicle needs a strong suspension system to handle the weight of the distortion unit.”

He described persistent operational problems — electron manifold issues, cooling malfunctions, instability in singularity containment. “If the unit has a serious problem it’s not as if anyone can use those drawings to take the electron manifold off the singularity housing with a flat head screw driver.” In other words — if it breaks, you’re not fixing it in the field.

He wore a standard civilian service uniform during instruction and training. In the field, “sort of a cross between an army uniform and overalls.” There was a patch. He described it: round, with a graphic of a Kerr singularity — “sort of looks like an eye with gravity waves around it” — and two spiral paths running through the center. “One path represents the ‘safe’ way and the other is the path to God.” The bottom read TEMPORAL RECON with his unit number. “We remove any identification and patches before we go anywhere.”

He said he was living with his parents on this worldline. They knew exactly who he was and how he got there. His two-year-old self was in the house. He said he did not plan on leaving for a while. “I very much enjoy spending time with my family.”

In the IRC chat, he talked about a woman he loved. “I fell in love once and she passed away. She died of brain cancer.” Jacksonville, where she lived, took a direct hit. “I told myself to get married before she died. Something I was unable to do.” He talked about his promise to his grandfather in 1975. He mentioned that his father liked Blue Oyster Cult. None of that had anything to do with proving he was a time traveler. He kept offering it anyway.

The 2.5% Divergence

His stated mission: retrieve an IBM 5100 portable computer from 1975 and return it to 2036. The 5100, he said, had an undocumented ability to emulate IBM System/370 mainframes. His era needed it to debug systems facing collapse — a problem with UNIX timestamps at the year 2038.

The IBM 5100 was real. Manufactured 1975–1978. 55 pounds, built-in 5-inch display. What Titor described — an internal microcode layer that could emulate System/370 instructions — was real, and it was not publicly documented by IBM at the time of his posts. A member of the original engineering team later confirmed the feature existed and that IBM had deliberately suppressed it.

Years later, a former IBM engineer identified only as “B.D.” — one of the original 5100 team members in Rochester, Minnesota — confirmed to the Post Bulletin that the hidden emulation feature was real and that it was his contribution to the machine’s design. IBM had suppressed it, he said, “because of worries about how their competition might use it.” He was dismissive of Titor himself — “Somebody is just trying to tickle somebody else” — but he confirmed the technical claim.

How someone posting on a fringe time travel forum in 2000 knew about an undocumented hardware feature of a 25-year-old computer — that’s the part nobody has been able to answer.

No one has publicly claimed to be the author. Private investigator Mike Lynch, working for the Italian TV program Voyager in 2008, found no registry evidence of anyone named John Titor. He did find the John Titor Foundation — a for-profit company formed September 2003 in Kissimmee, Florida, with no physical office. The IP address geolocated there.

In 2009, John Hughston of the Hoax Hunter website identified Florida entertainment lawyer Larry Haber as the foundation’s registered agent. Haber published John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale in 2003 (ISBN 1-59196-436-9). The trademark is now classified as abandoned. Lynch’s investigation concluded Haber and his brother — a computer scientist — were “very likely” responsible. The evidence was circumstantial.

In 2009, John Hughston of the Hoax Hunter website identified Florida entertainment lawyer Larry Haber as the foundation’s registered agent. Haber published John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale in 2003 (ISBN 1-59196-436-9). The trademark is now classified as abandoned. Lynch’s investigation concluded Haber and his brother — a computer scientist — were “very likely” responsible. The evidence was circumstantial.

In 2018, multimedia artist Joseph Matheny — creator of the alternate reality game Ong’s Hat — told Thrillist he had consulted on the project. “John Titor is a story that was created as a literary experiment by people who were observing what I was doing with Ong’s Hat. I was a consultant on the project. It wasn’t my project.”

That’s the closest thing to a public explanation that exists. It doesn’t explain the IBM 5100 detail. Matheny has offered no further comment.

Pamela was the closest thing Titor had to a confidant. She emailed with him outside the forum and relayed his answers back to the group when others wouldn’t engage. She scolded the thread when nobody would answer his questions in return. She printed out the Constitution after reading his posts. When the site hit 4,026 views in its first month, she was the one who reported it.

After his final post, she destroyed every message. Her own words, posted November 12, 2000: “I have deleted all of your e-mails from my computer to protect you. noone will ever know your email address. that is my promise to you.”

But she didn’t destroy everything. Before he left, Titor mailed her something physical — a piece of the label from the IBM 5100 he said he’d come back in time to get. No return address. Postmarked out of Orlando. It’s one of the only things you can hold in your hand from the entire story.

And then there was the photograph. Two days before his last post, he uploaded an image of a Florida state document dated March 26, 2001. Three days that hadn’t happened yet. He called it “final proof.” Could you fake that? Sure. Has anyone shown how, or why you’d bother for an audience of forty people on a time travel forum? No.

The Secret Song
Titor gave Pamela one more thing: a song. The idea was simple — if anyone ever showed up claiming to be him, she could ask them to name it. Only the real person would know. She has never told anyone what it was. She’s had twenty-five years of people asking, and she hasn’t.

The day after his final post, Pamela wrote her own: “goodbye my friend…safe journey home.”

Nobody in the entire story carried it further than she did.