DARK WEB: John Titor, The Internet's Time Traveler

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Tell me I'm not the only one who does this.

Sometimes when I can't sleep at night, I mentally replay the mistakes I've made.

Some are big, most of them are really small, and probably only things I would remember, like, how was my tone when I said that?

Did my joke land or oh my god, could they have thought that I was serious and now they think I'm a total weirdo?

I can't believe I hit reply all instead of sending it to just the one person.

And often I find myself thinking, what if I had a second chance to go back and change those moments, to undo those mistakes?

What would I do differently, if anything at all?

Like, could I travel back into the past and set things right and live an unregrettable life?

Seems impossible, but if reports are to be believed, someone's already done something like that.

His name is John Teeter, and from November 2000 to March 2001, he appeared in online forums claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036.

He said he'd come back to the past to visit his family.

In fact, it's his last chance to see them because war is coming.

Then he gives other dark predictions about the future, involving civil unrest, pandemics, death, and destruction.

Many dismissed his claims, figuring he was just some hoaxer pretending to be from the future.

And then, several of his predictions actually came true.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and I am excited to be back for a solo episode of So Supernatural.

You guys, times feel uncertain.

I mean, you've doom scrolled, right?

So, when I'm asked to think about what the world might look like in the year 2036, my brain literally shuts down.

I have no idea what's going to happen politically, culturally, or in terms of technology breakthroughs.

The only way to know for sure would be to hop in a time machine and visit the future for myself.

But also, I've seen the butterfly effect.

Like, who knows what kinds of problems that might cause?

So what's coming in 2036?

I would throw my hands up, shrug, and tell you there's just no way to know.

But that was before I heard today's story.

In the fall of 2000, there was a debate raging online.

A bunch of people on a site called the Time Travel Institute were talking about how time travel might work.

Now, this forum is still around today.

It's mostly for fans of science fiction, but people gather here to talk about their favorite books, TV shows, movies, and to speculate about the topic as a whole.

But on October 23rd, 2000, a user creates a new thread to talk about the technicalities of time travel, particularly paradoxes.

He asks a lot of questions like, what if you traveled back in time and killed your own grandmother before your parents could be conceived?

Would you cease to exist?

And if you don't exist, who killed your grandma?

A bunch of people reply with their theories.

Maybe it's impossible to go back and kill your grandparents because fate would stop you from changing the past.

Or maybe this just goes to show that time travel can't exist.

The debate rages on.

Then after a week of posts, someone with the username timetravel underscore zero joins the discussion.

And this person seems to be more than just a fan of sci-fi, because on November 2nd, they say something no one was anticipating.

The user writes: Greetings, I am a time traveler from the year 2036.

Naturally, the very first reply is from someone asking for proof because they don't believe time travel underscore zero for a second.

So, to demonstrate they're telling the truth, they weigh in on the debate about how the technology is supposed to function.

They say, quote,

Basics for time travel start at CERN in about a year and end in 2034 with the first time machine built by GE.

GE is General Electric.

And CERN is the name of a highly advanced research lab in Geneva, Switzerland.

It was founded back in 1954 as a response to the United States developing the nuclear bomb.

Basically, European scientists wanted to stay on the cutting edge of research and stop the, quote, brain drain of gifted physicists to the US.

So they founded the international organization with the intention of making all kinds of breakthroughs in the world of physics.

It's also where the Large Hadron Collider is, which is a huge ring that lets scientists hurl subatomic particles at one another.

Back in late 2000, when this anonymous user was posting, CERN researchers were using the collider to look for new kinds of subatomic particles that hadn't been discovered yet.

25 years later, now in 2025, scientists at CERN are still doing wild experiments.

According to their own website, they are trying to create miniature black holes and are even turning lead into gold like some medieval alchemist.

Seriously.

So if anyone ever was going to invent a time machine, it makes sense that CERN would be the one to help with it.

But that's not all this user says.

A few messages later, he offers his name, John Teeter.

Then he posts a link to another website where he's uploaded some photos and diagrams of his time machine.

And they're pretty impressive.

I mean, if you haven't had a chance to look at them, I suggest sneaking a peek.

I'm going to post them in the show notes.

A lot of the graphics show exactly how time travel supposedly works.

And listen, I'm not a physicist, so I don't know how accurate these charts are.

But they show different waves and energies intersecting in a complex way.

John also explains that his machine generates a ton of gravity, enough to warp space-time.

Which I did a little digging and I learned that this could theoretically work.

Some physicists believe that if you apply enough gravity to a person or an object, it might travel into the past or the distant future.

The problem is that it takes a ton of force to do this, like the kind of pressure you might be under if, say, a black hole was crushing you to death.

So nobody has ever been able to test this theory.

At least not as of 2025, where and when we are.

Even more convincing though, John's files include blueprints detailing exactly what parts go into a time machine and how they're all put together.

He also uploads photographs of the device that he used to travel back to 2000.

And I'm not talking like a sketch or a chart or a graphic, but multiple honest to God photos.

They're taken from different angles and they show a device that looks like it's about the size of a toolbox.

It's crammed full of cables and like knobs and buttons, switches, like little monitors, and it does match the diagrams perfectly.

So, I mean, if this was all a prank, then whoever did this did a lot of work.

And yes, it is possible that some practical joker with a lot of free time on their hands could have designed a time machine that could theoretically work, drew a blueprint for it, and then built a prototype.

Then they would have photographed it and posted it online.

But some people take one look at these images and decide, this is not a hoax.

It's real.

Now, in fairness, there are just as many users who aren't convinced.

After all, lots of people go on this board and pretend to be time travelers from the future.

But they don't expect anyone to believe them, like it's all in good fun.

But still, even the skeptics play along a little and ask John questions too.

Things about the mechanics of time travel and how it actually works.

I'm talking like the nitty-gritty details about the physics of it all.

Things that aren't already covered by the blueprints.

But John's answers are pretty vague.

He says he's not a physicist, so he doesn't fully understand the machine's inner workings, which...

Fair enough, like I can't even explain to you the magic of how the internet works.

And yet here I am transmitting a story to you through what, fibers, air, question mark?

It shouldn't be possible if you ask me, but here I am doing it.

So that whole thing doesn't throw me about John, especially because what John can share is concrete information about the future.

And the more he talks, the more convincing he gets.

Which is how he turns a lot of those skeptics into full-on believers.

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For the next five months or so, from early November to late March of 2001, John Teeter keeps coming back to the online board to chat with other users.

He talks a lot about what life is like in 2036.

And honestly, parts of it sound pretty nice.

Actually, really nice right about now.

Because John says it's no longer culturally acceptable to fight about religion, race, or politics.

Instead, everyone focuses on building healthy communities, befriending their neighbor, and forging stronger bonds with their family members.

Everyone is well-educated, enough that literally everybody can solve complicated math problems in their head.

Nobody needs to pull out a calculator to double-check their numbers.

People also take climate change seriously, and they're making big changes to protect the environment.

A lot of technology runs on sustainable fuel sources like hydrogen cells or solar panels instead of gas engines.

Most people eat what they produce as huge factory farms have been replaced with small local operations.

But it seems like life is still pretty fragile there because he says there's really only two jobs people can get in the future.

farmer or soldier with the Army.

John is enlisted and he lives on a base in Florida, which is why he's allowed to go to the past.

The Army controls access to the time machines.

But apparently, it's not some big government secret.

According to him, pretty much everyone knows time travel exists and it's fairly routine.

Although only a handful of trained soldiers are allowed to use these machines, John included.

But as promising as all that sounds, John acknowledges that humanity had to go through the ringer to get to this point, which I'll touch on in a bit.

As for what he's doing back in 2000, well, John basically says that the people of the future are facing a grave threat.

It has to do with computer programming, and the issue is pretty technical.

The gist is that every computer on Earth uses some very old code that was written in the 1970s.

Apparently, programmers in those days didn't think that we'd still be using their work like 60 odd years later.

So they didn't bother to give computers the ability to process dates after 2038.

But now that 2038's getting closer, at least for John, he and his colleagues are worried that their machines are all gonna crash.

The issue has the potential to destroy the world's digital infrastructure.

And apparently they can only solve the problem with a machine called an IBM 5100.

That's a model that was first introduced in 1975 and hasn't been made since the early 80s.

But it has special capabilities that are too technical to explain here.

You just need to know that it is the only machine that can fix the 2038 date problem.

So the Army sent John back to 1975 because his grandfather was actually involved in designing the IBM 5100.

The plan was for John to track down his own grandpa, explain who he was and why he needed this particular computer, and persuade his grandfather to give him one.

And the plan supposedly worked.

John has an IBM 5100 now and he can take it back to his life in 2036.

But instead of heading straight home, he decided to make a little pit stop in the year 2000.

This way he can grab copies of some old photos and spend some quality time with his parents.

This is really important to him because John says that his mother is alive in 2000, but she's not alive in his time in 2036.

So this is one of the only chances he will ever have to see her again.

In fact, John explains that he's not just visiting his parents, he's staying with them somewhere in Florida and with his two-year-old self since he was born in 1998.

He's apparently told his parents the truth and they've come to accept that he's their adult son from the future.

However, he admits that little John doesn't fully understand who he is.

He thinks of adult John as like an uncle.

Now, naturally, a lot of the people on the forum find a lot of this pretty hard to accept.

I mean, if some random woman showed up at my house and said that she was an adult version of my daughter, it would take a lot of evidence to get me on board.

But John insists that his parents just get it.

He doesn't say exactly how long he'll be in the present time or when he plans to return to the future.

But he does tell people on the forum that he's got a while to hang out and chat.

So he'll answer whatever questions he can while he's here.

And the more he says, the more people start buying his story.

While others try even harder to refute it.

Some of the skeptics ask him these gotcha-style questions, like if he can tell them what stocks to buy so they can make a quick buck in the next few weeks.

or which teams are going to win upcoming sporting events.

But John doesn't answer those, and he has two reasons for for that.

First, he doesn't believe in taking shortcuts in life or get rich quick schemes.

In his mind, if people make money using his information from the future, they're missing out on the chance to develop real skills, learn and grow as people.

But also, he admits that he doesn't know which stocks are going to take off or how certain games are going to shake out.

I mean, do you memorize sports stats from 36 years ago?

Or could you recite every stock's performance for some random week when you were two years old?

Probably not, and John can't either.

And when John explains all of this, you know, it's divisive.

Some people think his answers make sense.

Others say it's a little too convenient that he won't make any predictions that can be tested in the short term.

But he has made a lot of claims about the more distant future.

I touched on some of the optimistic ones about renewable energy and a culture built around cooperation.

The problem is that a lot of John's predictions are a lot darker.

For example, he says that there is a huge war coming involving conflict between the United States and Iraq.

And it will center on accusations that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

Keep in mind, he is writing this in late 2000 and early 2001.

months before 9-11, the invasion of Iraq, and the war on terror.

And sure enough, by 2003, the US is at war with Iraq, looking for weapons of mass destruction, though they never locate them because they don't exist.

But it's all just like John said.

John makes another accurate prediction on February 13th, 2001.

He's chatting with another user, someone who also claims to be a time traveler.

Like I said, there are a lot of people on this board who say they're from the future.

The problem is that this other user is making predictions that completely contradict John's.

It's obvious that at least one of them is lying.

And John's working hard to debunk the other user and prove that he's the legit one, right?

So when the other supposed time traveler mentions that in their future, people go to space regularly, John asks one question.

Care to share with me how you solve the overheating problem on your space plane?

Some people seeing this post probably wonder, what overheating problem?

After all, NASA has been sending shuttles to space regularly for decades.

And there hasn't been a serious issue since 1986 with the Challenger disaster.

So as far as anyone can tell, there aren't any troubles with our spacecraft in terms of overheating or anything else.

So nobody asked John directly what he means in that thread.

But almost two years later, on February 1st, 2003, it all makes sense.

On that day, a shuttle called Columbia is returning to Earth after a mission to space.

Due to an equipment failure, it overheats and then breaks up in the atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board.

It's one of the deadliest incidents in NASA history.

So serious, in fact, that the U.S.

government discontinues that model of shuttle.

They just can't confirm it's safe anymore.

But it gets wilder because John also warns people about an upcoming outbreak of mad cow disease.

He says that a lot of modern food handling practices aren't very hygienic, and a bunch of people are going to die in the coming years after eating meat that hasn't been prepared correctly.

A few months after he posts that, health officials in Japan report the first ever case of mad cow disease in their country.

Then in April of 2002, it's detected in the United States for the first time.

The next few years bring more outbreaks in Canada, the UK, and the US.

Meaning that once again, one of John's scary predictions are correct.

He says that certain presidential elections are going to be highly contentious and controversial.

And that happens too, though I guess that's not necessarily a prediction, just kind of how elections typically go.

But here's another claim he makes that's smaller stakes, but still pretty impressive in my book.

On February 18th, 2001, John says that in 2036, traditional televisions are a thing of the past.

If anyone wants to watch a movie or a show, they just go online to see it.

Keep in mind that when these posts go up, streaming television isn't a thing yet.

The iPhone won't be invented for six more years.

Most people either don't own a cell phone or their phones aren't even capable of much more than making calls and playing snake and Tetris.

But in this day and age, when almost everyone uses YouTube or Netflix, yeah, John was pretty spot on.

The last point I want to touch on isn't a prediction necessarily, but it's still pretty eerie.

Like I mentioned before, John says that the whole reason he's traveling into the past is because he has to fix a massive computer glitch.

The only way he could resolve it was with this very old, nearly obsolete computer that was released in 1975 called the IBM 5100.

Now, the problem is, is that when John says this, a lot of people in the forum are like,

there's no reason that you would need that specific model.

Like, it's not special.

But fast forward four years, in 2004, one engineer formerly at IBM comes forward and basically says, hey, guess what?

Back in 1975, we invented a computer called the IBM 5100, and it can communicate with older forms of computers in a way that later computers can't.

including issues exactly like the ones that John described online.

In fact, a year after John posted posted this, so in 2002, a bunch of scientists with NASA had to quietly buy multiple outdated computers like the IBM 5100.

Because again, there's some certain kind of old system that only those outdated models could fix.

I mean, how could John possibly have known that?

And I could go on.

John posts regularly for five months, so there are hundreds of statements to comb through.

A lot of his predictions come true, and others haven't yet, thank God.

Like how he says that civil unrest is going to get so bad that the Olympics will have to be canceled and never come back, or that Western civilization as a whole will collapse before 2036.

Then there's his scariest claim of all: that a nuclear war is right around the corner.

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John says that before long, a civil war was going to break out in the United States.

He doesn't say exactly what everyone is fighting over or how the boundaries are drawn between one side and the other.

But I do know that according to John, each army will make alliances with other countries, meaning China and most of Europe are helping one faction.

and Russia is teaming up with the other.

Then the war apparently ends with Russia nuking their enemies.

They drop bombs on the United States, China, most of Europe, meaning mushroom clouds, are going up all over the world.

According to John, though, the good news is that in the future, people can apparently design nuclear bombs that don't pollute the atmosphere or release lots of radiation.

So we don't end up with like a nuclear winter or widespread deaths due to radiation poisoning.

But still, he says roughly 3 billion people die in the conflict.

John says the mass casualties are a big part of why things are so utopian by 2036.

His theory is that you need to see humanity at its absolute worst to understand just how senseless violence is.

Once the war is over, everyone is fully committed to getting along with one another and improving the world for everybody.

That seems to be part of why John is posting now, because he wants to help people.

He cares about saving lives and making the world a better place.

And since John has all of this knowledge from the future, he feels like he's in a unique position to help those in our time.

After all, he knows what's coming so he can tell people how to prepare for or avoid the worst of the worst.

As he puts it, the captain of the ship knows where the lifeboats are.

But he can't stick around to advise people forever.

Eventually, John needs to go home.

So after five months of talking about the future, he puts up his final post, which once again includes a helpful tip.

It's March 23rd, 2001, and his farewell message reads: Bring a can of gas with you when your car dies on the side of the road.

Basically, implying that we should expect people to get so violent and fearful that they won't stop and help us if we run out of gas.

After that, John is never heard from again,

which means his predictions are still very controversial, even to this day.

Some people still believe everything John said, and that by 2036, just 11 years from now, we'll be living in a world with renewable energy and a culture where bigotry is completely unacceptable.

But I gotta say, that is a ton of huge changes to make in just a little over a decade.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but every year that ticks by without these things, it gets harder to accept John's claims.

Or at least for me, it gets scarier to think of the swift destruction that might have to come to usher that in.

But here's the thing.

There were a lot of inaccuracies in how John talked about the future, too.

Things that he shouldn't have gotten wrong if he really knew what he was talking about.

Because the discrepancies are major.

Like how John predicted a second American civil war that erupted into a global nuclear conflict.

I mean, I mentioned it earlier, but I failed to clarify that John said exactly when that war was supposed to start.

In 2015.

And we all know that didn't happen.

But let's talk about the mad cow disease outbreak that John foresaw.

Yes, it is true that some people did get sick after he made that prediction.

But there were also a lot of cases of mad cow disease in the UK all through the late 1990s.

So it's not like John was predicting something something brand new.

I mean, he could have just assumed that the current trends were going to continue.

In fact, John foresaw a much worse outcome than what actually happened

because he posted that the outbreak was going to be a horrible pandemic.

I mean, he implied that more than 100,000 people would die of the disease in a matter of days.

But by the time John was posting his warnings about the mad cow disease outbreak, that condition was mostly under control.

And at its worst, 146 people got sick in the UK in over a decade.

It wasn't the tens of thousands of deaths that John predicted.

So once you hear all that, it's tempting to think that maybe John's time travel claims were just a hoax, right?

He got things wrong because he didn't actually know what the future held.

He's just some guy on the internet making wild guesses.

Except, there is just one more piece of information that I haven't touched on yet.

See, John claimed that when a person travels back in time, it automatically changes things.

It's inevitable.

Whatever you do or say in the past is going to have a ripple effect, and eventually huge parts of the future will be different,

which also means the past that you go back to will have a different future than the one you came from.

Basically, it creates a whole new timeline.

In other words, a parallel universe.

You can't change your own past, but you can reshape history for another reality and set the people in that dimension on a different path.

So according to John, when he went back to 1975 and then 2000, he was visiting a nearly identical parallel universe that wasn't his own.

It had the same people, the same technology, and the same culture.

But some things were inevitably going to be off.

He acknowledged that there were certain books that he'd read and enjoyed in his own universe, but it seems they were never written or published in this reality.

And apparently John was a bit of a football fan too, even though we know he wouldn't talk sports on those forums.

But he knew which teams weren't supposed to win the bigger games.

Except in this version of 2000, the other team won.

In other words, something he did in 1975 set our reality on a new course.

By 2000, his universe and our universe were very similar, but they weren't the same.

And if John is just from a possible future, but not our future, then of course some of his predictions will be wrong because they don't apply to the universe that we live in.

In fact, it's possible that his visit is exactly the thing that prevented his dystopian future.

Because John acknowledged that maybe people could avoid some of his darkest predictions if they knew they were coming.

I mean, he even shared advice on how to avoid becoming a casualty of the Civil War or the mad cow disease epidemic.

One of his posts warned everyone not to eat meat that hadn't been handled according to certain specifications.

And he advised everyone to learn how to purify their own drinking water.

John also said that individuals would have a much better shot at surviving the Civil War if they knew how to use a gun and a first aid kit.

He added that it would be better to know how to ride a bike than to know how to drive a car.

That's because bikes can't run out of gas on a deserted highway or fail to start because of a bad battery.

And he suggested that everyone should have a bag full of necessities ready at all times in case they need to flee in a hurry.

Most importantly, he encouraged people to build a network.

because trusted allies can keep you safe and alive and make your life worth living.

And bear with me because I can't prove this actually happened, but it does seem like a possibility.

What if one of the people who regularly visited or monitored the Time Travel Institute forum was a government official, someone with authority over agriculture and food regulations?

Maybe they took John's warnings to heart and found a way to stop the spread of mad cow disease before it could turn into a full-blown pandemic.

And perhaps the people who read the suggestions about building a community also took that seriously.

And they helped smooth out any tensions that might have otherwise escalated into a civil war.

What I'm saying is, maybe John's advice is exactly what we needed to avoid war, disease, death, doom, and destruction.

If that's the case, then maybe,

just maybe, we may have John Teeter to thank for the world we live in today.

Sure, it is far from perfect, but at least it's filled with hope.

And if there's one lesson to take away from all this, it's that the future is not set in stone, it's still a blank canvas, and we have the power to avert disaster, to choose compassion over conflict, and to rewrite tomorrow with the choices we're making today.

This is So Supernatural, an audio chuck original produced by Crime House.

You can connect with us on Instagram at SoSupernatural Pod and visit our website, so supernaturalpodcast.com.

Come back next Friday to join Rasha and Yvette for a brand new episode.

I think Chuck would approve.

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