John Titor - Time Traveler, Or Crazy-Ass?

In the two years that I've been bringing you this blog, I have enjoyed bringing you stories about some real loonies out there. Here are just a few members of the Phoenix's Hall of Crazies:

Prophet Yahweh, the UFO-whisperer.
John Locke, the inventor of headgear that prevents aliens from controlling your brain.
Les Knight, the founder of a group that advocates the extinction of the human race.
Prince Mongo, the millionare alien among us.
Sharon Tendler, the woman that married a dolphin.
Dr. Burda, the man that can telepathically cure you from afar.
Matt Feshbach, the scientologist that has developed superpowers.
Derek Ogilvie, the psychic that communicates with infants.
and Nancy Lieder, the cult leader of ZetaTalk.

I have yet one more to add to the crazy bin: John Titor

The story begins with some posts on a time traveling message board on November 2, 2000. Eventually, this mystery person with seemingly intimate knowledge of how a time machine works called himself John Titor. His posts finally ended on March of 2001. Since then, many of his "followers" have collected all of his posts and put them together into one crazy-ass pile of crap.

John Titor claimed to be a US solider from the year 2036 (snicker). His mission was to travel back in time to 1975 and bring back an IBM 5100 - one of the first portable computers ever made. Why do you ask? It seems there's some sort of error involved with the programming that eventually leads to a timeout error in 2038. I'm not a computer geek, but is traveling back in time really the easiest way to fix this problem???

How did John Titor travel in time? Easy...with a time machine, duh! In one of his posts, he described his time machine as being a "stationary mass, temporal displacement unit powered by two top-spin, dual positive singularities", producing a "standard off-set Tipler sinusoid." He must've been inspired by all the Back to the Future movies, since his machine was first installed inside a Corvette, and then later a pickup truck. On the left is an actual picture of his time machine already placed inside a Corvette.

Titor also gave several "predictions" in his posts:

He said America would be plunged into a real Civil War in 2004. Um...ok.

He said that CERN (the world's largest physics lab) would discover the fundamental basis for time travel in 2001. Oops. That didn't happen.

He also said that the 2004 Olympics would be the last one to ever be held. Yikes. Anyone remember Finland defeating Canada for the hocky gold last year? (2006 Winter Olympics).
Another topic John Titor posted about were the large quantities of nuclear weapons in Iraq. Darn! So much for that one.

Like all crackpots, there are always followers. Although John Titor went back to the future, there are some suckers...ahem...I mean...believers. And of course all the money-making schemes follow, such as books, newsletters, and of course T-shirts. There's even talk of some goofy movie inspired by this crap. Check out a little trailer HERE. And of course, there's a John Titor song HERE.

It's hard to imagine people actually fall for this stuff, but people are so desperate for the answers. But the John Titor story isn't compelling enough for me to even begin to take any of it seriously. In fact, I believe there are some fictional time travelers that I find more real. Here are my top three:

Number Three: Doc, from Back to the Future - Flux capacitor equipped Delorean.



Number Two: Bill & Ted, from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - Telephone booth, a la TARDIS

My Favorite Time Traverler: Ash, from Army of Darkness - Time vortex with his Oldmobile

In an age of darkness...at a time of evil...when the world needed a hero...what it got...was him.