(Please, let's not turn this into a political arena. You guys are off topic.)
In August 2004 "Rochester Magazine" posted an article about John Titor entitled, "Time Traveler Most Likely Spotted in Rochester". In 2009, they followed up with this story, "It's 2009, and no U.S. civil war". They spoke too soon, as seen by the Occupy Movement.
ARTICLE:
http://www.rochestermagazine.com/its/2009/and/no/us/civil/war/story-487.html
It's 2009, and no U.S. civil war
By Steve Lange
Credit: Jeff JohnsonBack in our August 2004 issue, we named John Titor—a self-proclaimed time traveler who has been burning up the fringe end of Internet discussion boards since late 2000—as “The Time Traveler Most Likely To Be Spotted In Rochester.”
And while we’re naturally skeptical, and didn’t really believe the guy was from the future, Titor’s Internet followers were busy documenting a number of his predictions from 2000 that they believed had turned out to be correct. A vague prediction in 2000 that the U.S. would go to war with Iraq over nuclear weapons? Check. China will put a man in orbit soon? Two years later, China became the third nation to put an astronaut into Earth orbit. Titor had also predicted that, by late 2008, there wouldn’t be any question that the U.S. would be in a civil war. (“The year 2008 was a general date by which time everyone will realize the world they thought they were living in was over.”) But it’s 2009. Could John Titor—the Internet’s most popular time traveler, the guy whose mission was to travel to Rochester to get an old IBM computer—have been a hoax?
Here’s the story:
In November 2000, messages from John Titor began to appear on Internet discussion boards. Titor claimed he’d traveled from 2036, a time in disrepair in the wake of a nuclear conflict that had killed three billion people worldwide, and that had resulted from an American civil war between rural and city dwellers—a civil war that would start in 2008.
To provide proof of his predictions and claims, Titor gave descriptions of the technology that had allowed him to move backward in time, and uploaded photos of the temporal components he’d installed into, of all vehicles, a 1966 Chevrolet.
Despite the surreal nature of Titor’s story, the intelligence and lucidity implicit within his messages were, to many, convincing. The story became the stuff of Internet legend.
Titor’s real mission, he claimed, had been to travel to Rochester, Minnesota in 1975 and make contact with his grandfather, an engineer on the team in charge of developing a computer called the IBM 5100, which Titor needed to acquire. He claimed the 5100’s future value came from an ability that hadn’t been revealed by IBM upon its release, and that this then unknown function was required by scientists in Titor’s time to resolve a computer problem they’d encountered.
Back in 2004, we talked to one of the former engineers on IBM’s 5100 team in Rochester, who acknowledged that the 5100 did, in fact, possess a secret function, which IBM suppressed because of worries about how their competition might use (some sort of interface that we don’t understand).
We contacted that same engineer for this follow-up story, but he asked that we not use his name (and we can’t blame him, he’s probably been inundated with calls and email from Titor-ites. After our 2004 story was posted online we had to temporarily shut down our website due to an insane amount of Titor-driven traffic). The engineer, though, told us then that Titor’s 5100 material was merely “derived from information available on the Internet. ... Somebody is trying to tickle somebody else,” he told us.
Titor’s posts ended in March 2001, after his supposed return to the future. In the wake of his disappearance, the claims he’d made about the 5100 became the starting point from which all manner of Internet kooks conducted searches for proof of his claims. Unlike his vague predictions of future doom, the information he’d relayed about the 5100 was concrete, and filled with statements that readers could research.
Despite skepticism, online debate over Titor continues to this day, now eight years after his redeparture for the future. “Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future,” he wrote in one of his final posts directed at those skeptics. “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.”
And while his U.S. civil war prediction didn’t come true, he was able to couch that one, too. His appearance in the past—and his Internet-posted warnings—may have, in themselves, changed the future.
