Faxes to Art Bell The earliest known communications attributed to the Titor persona were two faxes sent to
Art Bell, the host of the paranormal-focused radio show
Coast to Coast AM. The first fax, dated July 29, 1998, described the invention of time travel in 2034 as a byproduct of
CERN research, claiming the technology produced "a contained singularity engine" with rotating singularities controlled by magnetic fields. The fax predicted widespread devastation from the
Y2K disaster and the collapse of the United States government. It also described an impenetrable temporal barrier at the year 2564, beyond which "nothing exists." A second fax followed shortly after, in which the sender promised to provide pages from "the operations manual of my time machine" and photographs of the vehicle. The second fax also urged Bell to reconsider his views on Russia, claiming they would "eventually save this country and the lives of millions of Americans."
IRC Chats Before appearing on the Time Travel Institute forums, the individual using the name TimeTravel_0 participated in an IRC conversation on October 14, 2000, with several participants including users known as Yareisa, G°, and wyrmkin_37. In this conversation, TimeTravel_0 claimed to be 38 years old, from Florida, and based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. He stated he had been sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5110 computer, mentioning this model specifically four times during the chat. He predicted civil war in the United States and nuclear conflict involving Russia and China — claims that would later be repeated and elaborated upon in his forum posts. Beginning with his November 2, 2000 posts on the Time Travel Institute forums, TimeTravel_0 shifted to referring to the IBM 5100 instead, making no public acknowledgment of the discrepancy. The IBM 5100 was released in 1975, while the IBM 5110 was its successor released in 1978. TimeTravel_0 also sent correspondent Pamela Moore a physical piece of an IBM 5110 label with an Orlando postmark, consistent with his initial IRC claim.
Forum posts John Titor's military insignia appeared on the Time Travel Institute forums on November 2, 2000, under the username
TimeTravel_0. TimeTravel_0 responded that "the basics for time travel start at CERN in about a year and end in 2034 with the first 'time machine' built by GE." Forum members challenged the technical claims, questioned inconsistencies, and pressed for verifiable details throughout the exchanges. In January 2001,
TimeTravel_0 began referring to himself as "John Titor" and also started posting at the Art Bell Post-2-Post
BBS Forums. The final Titor post was made in late March 2001. Later, around 2003, various websites compiled Titor's posts, rearranging them into narratives. Not all of these sites refer to the original dates that the messages were posted on the forums.
Claims computer In his online postings, Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036, based in
Tampa, Florida. He said that he was assigned to a governmental time-travel project, and that as part of the project he was sent back to 1975 to retrieve an
IBM 5100 computer, which was needed to
debug various
legacy computer programs that existed in 2036 — a possible reference to the
UNIX year 2038 problem. In later posts, Titor stated that the device had been transferred to a 1987 truck with
four-wheel drive for his stopover in the year 2000. with
civil unrest surrounding the
presidential election of that year. According to Titor, this civil conflict, which he described as "having a
Waco type event every month that steadily gets worse", would be "pretty much at everyone's doorstep" and erupt into full-scale war by 2008. As a result, the United States would split into five
regions based on a variety of factors, including differing
military objectives. According to Titor, this civil war would end in 2015 with a brief but intense
World War III, in which
nuclear weapons were deployed against major cities — an event Titor referred to as "N Day". He specified
Washington, D.C. and
Jacksonville, Florida as cities that would be hit in the exchange, and said that after the war,
Omaha,
Nebraska would be the new U.S. capital. Titor did not detail the exact causes of this World War III scenario, but in one post said that the hostilities were led by "border clashes and
overpopulation". He also pointed to the contemporary
Arab-Israeli conflict not as a cause of the war, but as a
milestone that precedes it. Titor said that in 2011, when he was 13 years old, he joined a
Florida-based shotgun
infantry unit called the Fighting Diamondbacks for at least four years. In other posts, he described himself as hiding from the war. Titor also said that the "Everett–Wheeler model of quantum physics", better known as the
many-worlds interpretation, was correct. According to him, this meant that his time travel had caused the formation of a new
timestream, and that in this new (current) timestream, the events that Titor had described would occur somewhat differently than they had in his home timestream. This made his predictions non-
falsifiable. == Criticism and discussion ==