John Titor Notes!

JOHN TITOR

by Lex Eff

https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/john-titor-time-traveler-predictions-story

-Look guys, I’m beginning to think I have ADD but also, to be fair, there’s a LOT of JFK books to read and also the LA Public Library had no more digital editions of this haunted house book I want to read.

-So last week, when we talked about Art Bell, it got me thinking again about one of his most classic quote-unquote “guests” , and when I googled it and found an awesome new oral history article about it on Thrillist, i knew it was time to finally talk about John Titor on Chilluminati.

-Some people say Tight-or, but I’m going to stick with Tee-tor because that’s how I’ve always known it.

-Also, shout out to Daniel Fishel and Evan Lockhart, who compiled this great selection of quotes, it’s probably the best article out there about this whole thing, and it had a bunch of stuff I hadn’t heard before, which we’ll eventually get to.

-But first, let’s get into the basics. Have either of you heard of John Titor before this?

(TALK TALK TALK BLAH BLAH BLAH)

-Even though it really kind of started on Coast to Coast, this guy felt like one of the earliest like, fully internet-based mysteries out there. it’s like, the Mario 1 of Creepypastas.

-Actually there IS another crazy EVENT/LIVING URBAN LEGEND that happened that people point to as the VERY first thing like this, but that’s a story for another show, even though we’ll touch on it extremely lightly a little later.

-Anyway, once upon a time, on November 2, 2000 there was this guy on a forum called John Titor, but unlike MOST people on the internet (not saying there aren’t others), he swore up and down that he was from some type of time traveling organization located in the near-ish future, that he was here to pick up some old computer that he needed as part of a mission, and for some reason, even though it kind of seems like the exact type of thing you WOULDN’T be allowed to do in his position, he was often known to go into depth about more juicy things, like the specifics of his time travel technology, classified details of his mission, and probably the spiciest of all, forewarning people of future events.

-Now obviously, and I can almost feel Jesse’s brain vault already slamming shut and locking as I speak, this is one of those things that’s impossible to truly verify, and as time went on, and certain things happened in our quote-unquote “timeline”, people would either become more and more convinced he was real, or peace out and write him off as a fake every time something he said turned out differently than predicted, but before I tell you what I think let’s take a closer look at how stuff went down, and then you guys can be the judge. Cool?

(OF COURSE ITS COOL)

-Anyway, on July 29, 1998, back when people actually still used these things, Art Bell read a fax from a listener of his legendary paranormal radio show, Coast to Coast AM.

-Here’s a quote about it from a quote-unquote researcher and “hoax hunter” called John Razimus:

“I was a huge Art Bell fan in the '90s. He would have the time-traveler [Open Lines] night, [where anyone could phone in with stories], and I actually heard the very first incarnation of John Titor live when Art read the faxes in 1998. I didn't have internet access for the next few years, so I missed the rest of it.”

-And anyway, here is an short edit of what he said in that Fax, since we’re gonna get into more of the specifics in a second:

-He started talking about all these crazy apocalyptic things, political upheavals, natural disasters, all that kind of stuff, but in real time, as the show was happening, I guess the dude heard his fax get read on the air, because he sent in another message through the fax which Art ALSO read. Here a little bit of that one too:

-So this is where the legend started. Nothing really important happened again for like two and half years, which is why I say that maybe without the internet, this never would have taken off, but like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, on November 2, 2000, posts began appearing from a user called “Time_Traveler_0” on the forums for the Time Travel Institute, which I guess at one point was like an actual place where people met up to talk seriously about time travel, and along with a lot of the same info that was read on the air a few years earlier, there was a lot of stuff like this:

-By January, we start seeing the name “John Titor” pop up more and more, and then we see a mirror post to the original November one pop up on the Coast to Coast Art Bell forums, which is where it really started to kick off, and for two full months, they got regular posts from someone everyone was now CONFIDENTLY calling “John Titor”.

-According to him, he originally came from the year 2036, traveling back 61 years to 1975, where he had some official business, and then jumped forward 25 years, part of the way back to his own time, to the year 2000, spending several years there for quote “personal reasons” while he waited for a quote “favorable window” to jump the other 35 years back to where he came from.

-There’s not really a consensus about what exactly his personal reasons were, but as you may have already noticed, it was sometimes heavily implied by Titor himself that it had SOMETHING to do with an event that went down on what he calls a “worldline”. Here’s a little more insight in his own words:

(THOUGHTS?)

-So let’s get into predictions. One of the main things John Titor posts would always focus on was like, preparedness and bravery. He’d always warn people that they were like too soft and complacent, and that danger is literally lurking around every corner all the time.

-At that time, near the end of the 90’s, the big scare on everyone’s mind was Y2K, and whether or not we actually experienced any disaster on this timeline or a previous one we may have all been on, one of the first big things people used to talk about was the fact that when John Titor went to 1975, he was able to do something that prevented Y2K from ending the world the way it was supposed to. John explained it thusly in February of 2001:

-But then, other stuff would get a little…off-base.

-Now that could be him being wrong, or it COULD be explained by his future being a little different than ours now that he stopped Y2K, or whatever you want to believe, but either way, every single post was just this with like a huge AMA afterward, and it’s really great in the Thrillist article because they got a couple quotes from other members of the forum as well:

“Charlotte Boren, in an Art Bell forum post from February 6, 2001: Please list the price of gold for the last 20 of your years and I can tell you the condition of the stock market in the future. Will it still be fairly lawful for me to own and use handguns when are beginning your time travel adventures? Is it possible for you to bump into yourself when you are time travelling? Saw a Jean Claude Van Dam [sic] movie about that once. I think it was called Time Cop. Whatever you do, don’t shake hands with yourself, if you do meet. You melt.

Mike Kolesik, in an Art Bell forum post from January 29, 2001: Ho hum... ANOTHER time traveler. Well, time to run him thru the BS o’meter.”

-Another one of the big things he would mention a lot was a giant outbreak of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD, a mad cow-like brain disorder which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands across the world. Here’s something oddly chilling that he had to say, considering how fucking wild 2020 has been so far:

-So now, the question I have for you guys is, how easy is it to predict the future?

(ANSWER ANSWER ANSWER)

-Alright, but now let’s talk about the time machine itself a little bit, because none of these facts matter at all if the science doesn’t add up, right?

-According to Titor time travel was discovered in the year 2034 and was based on the work of an actual time travel-related mathematician and physics genius called Frank Tipler, who you may know as the Tipler behind the Tipler cylinder, which he recognized as allowing closed timelike curvers in 1974, even though the cylinder itself was discovered earlier by WIllem Jacob van Stockum and Kornczos in 1946 and 1924, respectively.

-I’m not going to get too far into it here because it’s understandably kind of hard to understand and explain succinctly in any real meaningful way, but it is a real thing you can look up and read verifiable sources about. Here’s a quote Thrillist pulled from Tipler in an interview with Omni mag in October of 1994, which was fairly recent at the time:

“I don't think [I'm a crackpot]. But no crackpot thinks he is, right? An astronomer once published a list of the rules for determining a crackpot. Well, if you read Darwin's Origin of the Species, you'll find he was a crackpot by some of the criteria. I'm very conservative scientifically. I'm just changing the boundary conditions in cosmology from the beginning of time to the end of time. I accept all known physical laws, and just change the point of view.

Emmanuel Kant claimed the three fundamental problems of metaphysics are: Does God exist?; Do we have free will?; and Is there life after death? I turn those questions of metaphysics into problems of physics, and solve them, answering yes, yes, yes. The history of science is typically about turning insoluble problems of metaphysics into problems of physics and solving them. Like one of Kant's problems: Has the universe existed forever, or only a finite time? Kant thought this was fundamentally insoluble too, and had a purported proof of this. But in this century, we've turned this supposedly insoluble metaphysical problem into one of physics and solved it, to find the universe is 10 to 20 billion years old. I'm just taking the next step. My reductionist belief is that a problem that can be solved can be solved by physics. And only by physics.”

-According to Titor, the time travel application of this technology was created after a breakthrough at CERN using their particle accelerator, until it became such ubiquitous tech that by 2034, Titor had a model from General Electric that he installed and used from within a ’67 Corvette. Here’s an example of what he had to say about it:

-There were tons of diagrams and stuff, which people could clearly see were drawn up by people with legit knowledge, but no one could figure out how it could possibly function, but according to the Thrillist article, and this isn’t completely related but I think it’s pretty nuts anyway, a man called Marlin Pohlman applied for patents on them anyway in 2004. Here’s a quote from him about it from 2006:

“I have a degree in Physics and Engineering and back-engineered this based on John Titor’s post... I work for a large software company and have no profit motive. I just want one and don’t have the means to build it.

-And In 2013, he gave a little more insight, too:

“[I patented the time machine because] I had to do something while I was going through chemo [for Hodgkin's lymphoma about 2002]. I had nothing better to do. ... I think I made a mathematical error.”

-However, that’s probably the last we’re going to hear from that guy in a WHILE, because the last part of that interview came from when he was on trial in 2013 for the drugging four women with quote “LSD, ecstasy, and nitrous oxide [, which he mixed] into spring-loaded syringes and injected [into] his victims in their neck before having his way with them”. Yeah. Really.

-He pled guilty and was sentenced to 75 months in prison.

-And now that we KIND OF have an idea of HOW he came here, at least conceptually, maybe, let’s look a little closer at the WHY.

-According to Titor himself, his original purpose in travelling back to 1975 was to grab a computer that was almost impossible to come by in 2036, the IBM 5100. It weighed 55 pounds, it had a built in 5-inch CRT monitor, and it was one of the first portable computers ever built.

-According to Oliver Williams, who was interviewed as a John Titor archivist in 2012 by Kevin Moore, it was all part of a military operation that Titor was a part of, complete with a crazy Star Trekky insignia, and that the actual specific computer unit he needed was located in Rochester, Minnesota.

Titor’s Military Insignia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor#/media/File:Titor_insignia.jpg

-But people didn’t buy it. Here’s one outraged comment from a guy called Charles M:

“Why would you want a IBM 5100 I can find them at auctions for next to nothing, i think they were the first 286 CPU’s. Why didn’t you stop in this year first and buy one.Well I have a good question for you in 2036 do you still use toilet paper to wipe your ass.”

-But amazingly, unflappable as always, Titor had this to say in response:

-According to Oliver Williams, quote, “there was some special trick or technical issue inside this computer that allowed it to talk BASIC, APL and some system language…Some IBM engineers came forward and said "I don't know if that guy was a time traveler or not, but everything he said about that machine is true," and maybe only 20 people knew about [the computer's true functions].”

-John Titor’s last post came on March 24, 2001, and even though it DEFINITELY wouldn’t be the last we’d hear from Titor, it has a nice finality to it, and so to close out this SURPRISE PART ONE OF TWO, DUN DUN DUNNNNN! I’m gonna read it in it’s entirety for you now.

PART 2

-So okay, last time we talked about this, I left you with the image of this weird sort of mysterious figure who’s maybe on a mission/maybe trying to change history even though he’s technically not going to be around to see it for himself due to PHYSICS

-No one’s really sure if he’s talking out of his ass or if he believes the stuff he’s saying, some of the stuff he says like amazingly kind of checks out, but the overwhelming feeling I THINK is one of people doubting him, or looking at what was happening as some kind of joke or prank.

-But I haven’t exactly told you the whole story yet, and one person who DEFINITELY didn’t think it was some kind of prank was a woman called Pamela Moore.

-Of all the people who have sort of been caught up in the whirlwind of this crazy situation, everyone agrees that if anyone has had any sort of verifiable one on one contact with Titor, it’s Pamela, who apparently on multiple occasions engaged in well-documented private convos with him via chat.

-Here’s a quote from her describing herself from an interview from 2017:

“Everyone thinks I started out asking John too many detailed questions when he came in 2000. But the truth was I had a detailed dream of a time traveler in 1998.”

-Very quickly, she sort of maneuvered herself into being a contact point to John for others on the message board, so as sort of a safeguard against other people pretending to be him, he gave her a quote “secret song”, which if you have time, is an afternoon or two of going down rabbit holes itself, because so many people latched onto that romantic detail and have obsessed over trying to figure it out, that there’s a lot to read about tbh.

-Here’s a quote from Pamela about it from an email she wrote to that “hoax hunter” guy John Razimus I quoted at the beginning of the last episode:

“I honestly think only John himself knew it. Perhaps whoever he was he never told anyone else. He told me in a chat not an email. If John ever decides to come forth I will have the info to confirm it was the same John who posted as John Titor.”

-And apparently, at least since an interview she did in 2017, she’s STILL in contact with John Titor. Here’s a quote about it:

“The latest package I received had several things in it. A letter from Kay [John Titor's mother]. A letter from John. An album with a record inside and a CD with some songs on it but I’m keeping what was on it secret because I am not really sure why he sent those to me.  I more than likely will find out later. I received it in September of 2016.”

-(An album by the Beatles who never broke up, perhaps?)

-So whatever’s happening with Pamela, whatever you believe the actual answer is, it’s at LEAST likely she’s talking with SOMEONE, but the exact question of WHO THAT IS is a deceptively complicated question. 2017 Pamela Moore sums up this new element best I think when she said:

“He then went on to explain how I was communicating with more than one John. That other Johns may arrive and they need the posts to stay up as long as possible.”

-Now on the surface, this doesn’t seem THAT much wilder than anything else Titor’s told us. We already know that he creates a whole new timeline every time he time-travels, and since we know he’s done that multiple times in multiple decades by now, it kind of stands to reason, if you’re able to swallow the pill of time travel in the first place, that there might indeed be multiple Johns out there with their own motivations, shaking things up. Happens to the Doctor all the time in Dr. Who.

-And as Pamela soon found out, that secret song was going to start becoming pretty dang useful. Here’s what she wrote about it in a forum post from 2009:

“You would not believe how many people write to me and tell me they are John. Everyone seems to want to be John or they will post on a forum and say they were John.”

-And these people were literally everywhere. I remember being in this corner of the internet watching this crap happen back when I was in high school. But as often happens in these kinds of scenarios, one dude eventually separated himself from the pack and kind of rose to the top, and I think it was for one simple marketing-related reason: in order to like, not get confused with the other version of himself that was running around and posting on forums and junk, he called himself “John Titor II” (the second), like with a roman numeral, and I think people liked it because it kind of gives off like, Terminator vibes or something.

-Anyway, he was different than the original John Titor in a lot of ways, even Pamela Moore felt like something was slightly off about him, but one of the MAIN differences was that John Titor II LOVED taking pictures, LOVED going on tv and the radio, and even wrote an entire book about the whole deal. He was even making YouTube videos up until shelter in place started.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-1yWSfiSKKYtYnXDwMa0cg

-UNTIL December 2016, when Kevin Moore, the same John Titor archivist I quoted in the last episode, blew the lid off the whole John Titor II operation.

-Turns out, the dude was actually a career conman with many aliases and a criminal record called Dana Lee Stern Sr, and his whole part of the story was just some weird cuckoo bird added BS.

-But the whole thing had this extra spicy hot sauce all over it because Kevin Moore was one of the co-authors of a book about John Titor II called Disclosed, which was now just publicly and provably completely false.

-Anyway, Moore apparently made some kind of crazy meltdown video he uploaded when he found out about the whole thing, but once he calmed down, he recorded a nice level-headed explanation of what went down and directed people to his site, TheCrystalSun.com, for more information, which I OBVIOUSLY visited, and I’ll include the link for.

-It’s got a lot of what I was just talking about, lots of clear evidence showing Dana Stern’s picture attached to his name, as well as showing him as CEO of something called “JOHN TITOR II LLC, A NEVADA CORPORATION”, and a bunch of receipts and emails tying the whole thing together, showing him discussing how to trick people and trying to get other people to lie for him. You can see it all at the link.

https://thecrystalsun.com/re-victims-of-john-titor-ii-including-his-son-lee-stern/

-BUT…the one thing I did just want to read a little bit of was this absolutely INSANE blog post Kevin Moore links to at the bottom of his page for quote “research and information only. Judge for yourself.”

-It SEEMS to be from the the oldest son of Dana Lee Stern, who just goes by Lee Stern, and it’s multiple blog posts beyond just the one I’m about to read, and it’s filled with typos and it looks weird and fake, but it has so many specific details that only family members would know, that I’m tempted to say it’s at least BASED in truth, though I will say in the interest of keeping good journalism alive in my own small way, that you should probably take this with a HUGE grain of salt. Here’s what he wrote:

“My father Dan Lee Stern,AKA, Dana Lee Stern Sr, AKA, Dan Stern, AKA, Dana Sergrist, AKA Dan C Stern, AKA, Bob Hemstead,AKA, Bob Smith, AKA Danalee Stern, AKA, Dunalee Stern,AKA who knows? Is a pathalogicalliar who has deep seated mommy issues. he thinks everyone should worship hims and needs to dominate everyone around him. This is compounded by his cowardice of the first order. He fled the 82nd Airborne for Canada after stealing a car and wound up in a prison in Canada. His father had to make a deal to geet him out then he was unceremoniously booted out of the army , after betraying some of his fellow soldiers in order to escape getting a dishonorable discharge. this also makes him a traitor to some. While he looks impressive on paper , it is all an illusion and trickery on his part. His PHD was bought and paid for online for $120. His Pulitzer nomination for his coffee table book on  hacking was done by his agent. Who cares? As for his employment, he has many , amny co-workers that are now enemies. Even several of his co-workers talk about his attempts at extortion of the companies he worked for. His ex-wives have compared notes and found it very revealing. The lies he told about different ones to the new wives don't hold up under the light of day. His sons so despise him that most are considering changing their names. His oldest son is the only one to seriously catch him out and prove him to be the coward and liar he truly is. At the end of his miserable existence it has become apparent that almost nothing about the life of Dana Lee Stern Sr is true. There are some who believe that he may have even stolen the identity of his oldest son who has had to go on disability, why else would he start attacking his oldest son within 2 weeks of his oldest son signing up for his disability? A Private Investigator will help us find the truth! “

-So yeah, not looking so good for John Titor II, though it does get a little weirder. I can’t find any reference to this anywhere other than in the main Thrillist article I used to research this episode, maybe it’s from one of his many slanderous YouTube videos on is personal John Titor channel, where he calls someone out, like Mitt Romney or Robert DeNiro, or Kevin Moore himself, and talks shit about them, but apparently Dana Sr has said that that same son, Lee Stern, actually injected windex into his own brother’s brain in order to give him cancer.

(HUH?)

-Not sure if that’s just him firing back at his son for exposing him or what, but yeah, this is a wild journey, and we’ve come very far, but believe it or not, this mystery just keeps getting deeper and deeper. Because now that John Titor II’s done confusing things for people who care about this, what’s the deal with all that original John Titor stuff?

-Well, one thing I’ve left out of the show so far that the Thrillist article covers in depth are the comments of an extremely interesting dude called Joseph Matheny (Muh-thee-knee).

-He’s a transmedia writer and artist who’s primarily known for spearheading something called Ong’s Hat, which I briefly referred to in the first episode as the earliest internet mystery/proto-ARG thing out there, about a weird town in the New Jersey Pine Barrens and the weird sci-fi horror-y extradimensional stuff that went down at a secret laboratory that was hidden there. Maybe I’ll do an episode about it one day, hint-hint. He’s what he had to say:

“I'm going to be picky with what I say to you over what I've said in the past. [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 and these people wanted to do something like that. I was a consultant on the project, [but] it wasn't my project…We knew at some point this was going to get out from underneath us and we were going to have to let it go…I thought everybody would get this was a wink wink, nudge nudge, but when they didn't I went to the other people involved and said, "Let's come out and tell the truth." Nobody would.”

-According to Matheny, the people who came to him, who he STILL won’t reveal, were in it for the art, and were looking at the internet like a futuristic version of like, fairy tales and folklore and stuff. It seemed that like him, they were just super into the idea of INCUBATING and FORCING an urban legend into being with all these little secret in-jokes baked in.

-Like, you know the IBM 5100 Titor needed from 1975? According to Matheny’s version of the story, they were all just old IT people and thought it would be funny to include as a joke.

-The problem is though, while Matheny is a legit, verifiable guy who’s not know to be a liar and actually has done the things he says he has done, he still refuses to disclose the names of the people he supposedly worked on the project with, so unless they come forward with some kind of evidence that it’s been them all along, you just have to take Matheny at his word.

-However, he’s not the only person suspected of being at the center of all this. In fact, most people out there will tell you that this next version of events is the most likely one, and it all has to do with an attorney by the name of Larry Haber.

-Because see, according to Matheny, after a certain point, once the thing grew its own legs to stand on, he and the people he worked on it with, just stepped away and let it go. The interesting thing is, though, he says that moment came even before Titor ever started posting on the Art Bell forums. So what the heck was that about?

-During that period, it was almost impossible to verify the identity of anyone posting Titor-related stuff on the internet (without a custom secret song code, I guess) but almost immediately, once the message board posts were done, all quote “official” public communication since has been through Larry Haber, who claims to be the attorney for something called the John Titor Foundation, which according to him, belongs to John.

-Everyone who knows Larry Haber knows him as a specialist in Entertainment law, including Pamela Moore, and hoax hunter John Razimus has a theory about why that might be important:

“I think they were fans of Art Bell, they created one of the first internet hoaxes, and it blew out of proportion. Perhaps they have some book rights, movie rights they've been sitting on?”

-And weirdly, Larry Haber sometimes half supports this, except in the quote I have, he always refers to a “Kay” as the client making all these decisions about the John Titor story rights, which I assumed to be the same Kay as John Titor’s mom.

-According to Razimus’ extremely circular and repetitive 2 hour long documentary on the subject, the creation of John Titor can largely be credited to Larry Haber’s brother Morey, which is then sort of corroborated and supported by the other Haber brothers, Arthur and John Richard, and Larry’s son Benjamin, except for one little problem. Here’s a quote from a 2010 interview with Larry Haber:

“My son is not John Titor. My brother is not John Titor. There's no John Haber in my family.”

-And even worse, if Larry’s story IS true, then Matheny’s categorically ISN’T. Here’s what he had to say about it.

“I saw some people that were clearly using the story as an effort to make money, which I am not cool with…Larry Haber -- I don't know who he is. None of us do. He's not nor has he ever been involved with the group I was in. He's an entertainment attorney. He's somebody who jumped on the bandwagon.”

-Weirdly though, if this IS actually about money, the only commercial product ever released by the John Titor Foundation was a print-on-demand edition of all of the original Titor posts called “John Titor - A Time Traveler’s Tale” from 2003, which isn’t even in print anymore. You can still find a copy on Amazon for $900, but that money’s not even going to the Foundation.

-And yet…someone still sent Pamela Moore a copy. She said she doesn’t know who sent it, though whoever did left a song written in the back…which, unfortunately, did NOT match the secret song.

-And so here were are again in some kind of huge weird circle. Best I can see is either there really is evidence of a time travel visiting this timeline and saving us from Y2K among other things…OR…some neat artists made something cool that captured people’s imaginations and then some greedy people ruined it to sell a shitty book.

But according to Joseph Matheny, that’s all according to plan. He says:

“We achieved what we said we wanted to achieve. We wanted to take that legend and write it on the new sphere like graffiti…If anybody has decided to believe the John Titor legend, pay attention to anybody who is trying to sell you anything. Books, DVDs, or a belief system attached to this as leverage. Give it a real hard thought before you do any of that. Because John Titor would not approve.”

-And that, my friends after two fatty episodes…STILL isn’t the end of John Titor. Before we go today, I want to walk you guys through one last theory that surfaced from the depths of 4chan in 2016, and made it ALL the way to famed UK tabloid, the Daily Star, about how John Titor didn’t come to stop Y2K, he came to stop a nuclear war…with ISIS.

-It all begins in 1943, when the National Defence Research Committee needed to go through famous inventor Nikolai Tesla’s notes after his death to see if there was military applications for any of his research. The MIT professor they called in to look them over spent 3 days on the task before declaring there was nothing of worth to be found, but 4chan conspiracy theorists allege that it was during this investigation, that this professor actually found the plans for a Tesla-designed time machine.

-That Professor…was John George Trump, and soon, he would impart what he learned of the future to his nephew Donald, who would change history to set on course a chain of events leading to his eventual inauguration as the 45th, and possibly last President of the United States of America. The link to this shitty ass article will be in the description, thank you and good night.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/john-titor-donald-trump-time-16964379