John Titor, the internet's most famous time traveler, vanished in 2001

Starting in November 2000, a poster using the handle TimeTravel_0 showed up on an internet forum called the Time Travel Institute claiming to be an American soldier from the year 2036. He said he'd been sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer, needed in his time to debug legacy code, because his grandfather had helped build the machine.

By January 2001 he was calling himself John Titor. He described his time machine in detail — "two top-spin, dual positive singularities" producing "a standard off-set Tipler sinusoid" — and predicted a US civil war starting in 2004, followed by a brief nuclear World War III in 2015 that would hit Washington, D.C. and Jacksonville, Florida. He said Omaha would become the new capital. His last post appeared in March 2001.

Titor claimed his knowledge came from a parallel timeline created the moment he traveled back, which meant his predictions could differ from ours — a built-in excuse that made them impossible to disprove. A 2009 investigation pointed to Larry Haber, a Florida entertainment lawyer, as the likely creator; he denied it. No one has ever publicly claimed credit, and the original forum threads are still online.

Previously:

• Searching the Internet for time travelers, the scientific paper
• Danish cemetery has a grave dated 1996–2064, for a time traveler
• Time traveler caught in 1940 photo?