November 22, 2010 • 42 mins
From 2000 to 2001 someone calling himself John Titor claimed to have traveled to the past from the year 2036. His predictions caused a flurry of conspiracy theories, but whatever happened to him? Tune in to get Chris and Jonathan's take in this podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
text stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello, everyone,
Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and
(00:20):
I am an editor at how stuff works dot Com.
Sitting across from me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Last night, Darth Vader came down from Planet Vulcan and
told me if I didn't take Lorraine out that he'd
melt my brain. You got that one, Okay? Good, Hey,
(00:40):
we're gonna start it's your no, never mind, we're gonna
We're gonna start this off with a little Facebook feedback.
This comes from Kevin, who says podcast Idea, who is
John Tyder, the time traveler from twenty six who posted
on discussion boards back in two thousands, would love to
hear you guys talk about him slash hoax slash time traveler. Well, Kevin,
(01:04):
you're gonna get your wish. But before we get to John,
let's talk about about some other time traveling stories that
hit the internet over Actually the ones I'm talking about
hit recently. Yeah, I think that's why? Uh why John
has been in the news or on people's minds lately.
It's because of these other stories that have been in
the news. Yeah, so there's a there's a website called
(01:25):
Virtual Museum, and yes, Virtual Museum has a photo up
of the reopening of the South Fork Bridge after flood
in November nineteen. Now, in this photo you'll see a
whole bunch of typical nineteen forties style folks, mostly in
you know, like the men are all in suits and
(01:47):
the women are all in dresses, and they're all looking
off to the opening of the bridge, the reopening of
the bridge. Right in the towards the back of the group,
in the middle is a fellow who does not look
like he belongs with everybody else. So wait, wait, wait,
wait does he have a red and white striped shirt
and a hat with it? Is not Waldo? Um, I
(02:09):
keep looking for that guy. He never found it. He
looks mortal. He looks more like a racer head than Waldo.
Now he has he has medium to longish hair, but
it's not like down, you know, it's not worn down.
It's actually sticking up a bit. And he's got these
sunglasses on that have these weird uh side panels on them,
(02:30):
and he looks like he's wearing a sweater over a
silk screened T shirt. Okay, so it looks like, you know,
he's dressed down and his hairstyles a little funky for
the time period, and um, he just he doesn't look
like he fits well. There were some people who said,
is this is this a time traveler or was it
photoshopped in? It had to be photoshopped in, right, it
(02:53):
had to be. Uh. Upon closer examination, it did not
look like it had been photoshopped in. It looked like
this guy literally was there at that time. However, upon
even further examination, it was discovered this wasn't really a
mystery that the the elements that that people identified as
being from out of that time we're not actually uh anachronisms. Uh.
(03:18):
The glasses, for example, were these these hinged glasses that
had these little side panels on sunglasses that had been
around since the twenties. And uh, he was obviously holding
a camera as well, and it looked like it was
a period camera, like one camera that would have been around.
In the sweater was not really out of place, and
(03:40):
even the shirt upon closer examination, looked like one of
the kind of handmade shirts that uh that people made
at the time too, for various sports teams like a
college sports team or a high school sports team. So
upon further discussion, it appears that this guy was just
you know, he's just a guy of his time. It's
just he was not dressed up like everyone else. He
(04:01):
was more of a student slash artist kind of type. Yeah,
well before hippies, but yes, yes, the the precursor to
the hippie. So clearly I would have hated this person.
But the hippies and hipsters, man, don't get me started anyway.
So the the In fact, I had a friend who
(04:22):
who suggested that the camera was a Brownie Special one seven.
Really yeah, it's kind of crazy that someone was able
to identify that just by this, and the picture does
not show the guy holding the camera prominently. He's actually
it's got it's right around his stomach level, so it's
just barely in frame. But she picked that out pretty quickly.
Way to go rifka, So um, yeah, it's it's That
(04:46):
was one of those moments where there were enough things
in the picture that looked a little weird to make
people say, oh, this has got to be Uh, this
can't be from that time, but it just really shows
that we're far enough out of that time amera to
not be able to see what does and doesn't belong.
That's funny too, because it wasn't but a few days
(05:09):
ago as of the date we are recording this in
early November, um, when Charlie Chaplin was accused of capturing
a time traveler on film. Yeah, it's just the sort
of thing that little jerk would have done. That's why
I like you, Buster Keaton. You never would pull those shenanigans.
I really don't know that. Yeah, I know, but yeah, okay, No,
(05:34):
it's from the circus. It was drawn to our attention
by Irish filmmaker George Clark. Yes, it's important to note
this is a filmmaker who's making this big yeah his
uh and in the YouTube video he uploaded a YouTube video.
What happened was supposedly, um George as I like to
(05:56):
call him, uh post, you guys are on the same
you know, the first name basis there. Clearly he's an irishman.
I've seen Ireland as I flew over it to England.
Um So anyway, Georgia George, and he bought the these
collect this collection of Charlie Chaplin movies. Yeah, brought him home,
(06:19):
started watching the extras on the various DVDs, and one
of them had a newsreel from nineteen the premiere of
the Circus. Yes. And during this news reel, Yes, the
newsreel was showing the the the grand premiere at Man's
Chinese Theater. And uh. As part of this news reel,
(06:42):
there's a moment where a fellow walks into frame, followed
closely by a woman, uh, you know, kind of a
a large ish woman in a big coat and a
top hat walking behind the fellow, and she has her
her hand that's facing the she's she's walking in profile
to the camera. Essentially her hand that you can see. Yeah,
(07:04):
the hand that you can see is held up to
her face as if it's holding something like perhaps a phone,
but a cell phone. In nine that doesn't sound right,
So clearly the answer must be she was a time traveler.
At least that's the answer. George came to and he
said it's the only one that makes sense because he
(07:24):
didn't say it like that because he was irish. Um. Yes,
he said he should showed it to a crowd of
about a hundred people, and none of them could come
to any other conclusion. They didn't know clearly it was
a hundred people who were smashed on Guinness, because I
could think of a couple of different reasons off the
top of my head. He actually did um, he did
(07:46):
the the typical television uh thing that you do whenever
you have any footage, zoom in and enhance, zoom in
and enhance. So he zoomed in to try and get
look and see what was going on here. And it
kind of looks like she's holding something in her hand,
but it's I don't think it's really that obvious. It's
(08:08):
it could simply be that she was literally scratching the
side of her face. It does look at the end
of the little clip, just as she goes out of frame,
that she's saying something or her mouth at least is moving. Yes, yes,
now uh. There have been, of course, many attempts now
to explain what's going on part of them, and part
of it has to do with the fact that she
(08:29):
she or as Mr Clark suggests, it could be a
man wearing women's clothes. Um, whoever the person is is
is actually speaking, which confuses the matter even more. Hang on,
so it's a cross dressing time traveler. It's apparently that's
is it Frankenfurger because he he could travel through space
and time? Let's stop. Um. Possibly, but okay, So the
(08:51):
first explanation, and one of the more plausible ones that
I've seen, is that it's a compact hand trumpet. And now,
of course, lots of us, even our young for listeners,
have probably seen the hand trumpets that people used to
use before they were electrical hearing aids. Um. And these
would have been used towards the end of the nineteenth
century early part of the twentieth century. And um, it
(09:12):
is entirely possible. Actually, the the article I saw that
tried to explain that was from Jeremy Sue who wrote
for a Life science UM and he spoke with a
with the historian named Philip Scrasca, who was an archivist
at the Bernard Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis.
Or is those of us in competing schools column wash
(09:34):
you very good school, um, But basically, you know, we're
used to I'm used to thinking of the ones that
they used to see in pictures like Beethoven, where it's
a giant. It looks like you're holding the side of
a gramophone up to your head. You know that that
uh you're thinking of Pete Dragon where the character holds
(09:55):
the big Yeah, exactly exactly, but U and basically was
like it was like a funnel that you'd hold up
to your ear so maybe you could hear a little
bit better. And I think it did you know it
had some effect? Um no, no, it works. But but
apparently there were compact models and some people think that
it may have been a very small version. And really,
(10:17):
as a couple of commenters I saw online put it,
you wouldn't want to carry one of these big things
around with me you while you're walking. You want something
that's small and light and portable. So that is a
possible explanation. Well, and four years before that, premiere Semens
Yes produce the A handheld hearing aid essentially is what
(10:40):
it was. And um, yeah, they weren't the n ear
models that you see now which are all but invisible. Yeah.
It was actually was a microphone amplifier and you held
the amplifier side to your ear. The microphone side would
stay out facing the world, and that's you know, you
would hold it to your ear like the way we
do with cell phones. And they were about the same
(11:01):
size as cell phones are today, So it could and
and like I said, four years earlier those have been
introduced now they were expensive. But this is a lady
who's attending a film premiere in Hollywood. So clearly this
is someone who has at least some means, right, not
necessarily just not someone just walking on the street. She's
(11:23):
dressed up, she's ready to go to the theater um.
So it could very easily be someone who has one
of these hearing aids, and she may be talking in
a way of testing it, you know, trying to make
sure that it's working, like hello, Hello, to make sure
that she can hear before she interacts with anyone else,
or she's yammering to herself, which I do frequently so right,
(11:44):
or as one other person I saw pointed out, so
it could be as simple as the fact that her
jaw ached and she was moving her jaw and she
had her hand up to her face and nothing was
in the hand. Because the George says that's there's clearly
something that's black inside her hand. Um, I don't see
that quite as clearly as George does. I mean, and
(12:05):
I was trying to be as objective as possible, because
as soon as someone tells you that something is in
a picture, it's really hard to not see it. Yeah,
somebody was trying to, uh, to show where the the
part of the ear trumpet would be where you put
it in your ear canal and going I just don't
see that in here. The same sort of thing that
where someone shows you a picture and said, do you
(12:26):
see the face that's in here? And you're like uh,
and then they point out the face and then you're like, oh,
there it is, and then you cannot never not see it. Right.
But if they were just to show you that picture
and say do you see anything in here, and you
might look for a while and saying no, I don't
see anything and there's nothing here. Um, well, so it
could have been uh, a hearing aid, could have been
nothing at all, could have been a little ear trumpet
(12:47):
of some sort. Um. I like. My favorite part of
the video, by the way, is when George says specifically,
it's not an AM FM radio because it's night Oh, well,
that makes sense. Clearly, it has to be a cell
phone because it's nineteen twenty eight, it's the same thing.
And and how does she get reception in nineteen twenty
(13:07):
eight with a cellphone when there are no cell phone towers? Yeah?
That that is the biggest argument I've seen against it.
There's some interdimensional temporal cellphone tower that she's connecting to.
I'm I'm sure you've seen the The people who want
to hold onto this their argument to that. If they've
are society that hasn't invented something as sophisticated as a
(13:30):
time machine, surely they could invent something with an antenna
for cell phone communication that they would stick on the
outside of the time machine. Okay, I wonder if these
people have ever heard of something called Acam's razor. What
makes more sense that this lady exists in that time
frame that's exactly when she's supposed to exist, because that's
you know, she was born during that era and she's
(13:52):
walking down the street holding an object that had been
built four years before was known to exist. Is it
more likely that that's the answer, or that there was
somehow someone developed time travel, traveled back in time use
this cell phone, and was not smart enough to stay
out of the range of a camera it's not like
the camera was even secret they were filming the premier. Why, Like,
(14:17):
if I'm a time traveler and I go back to
an era that exists before cell phones, I'm not whipping
the cell phone out at a very public event where
there are cameras around. Yeah, And that leads me to
my favorite of the debunking attempts. Uh. Apparently some video
(14:37):
producers will put things into footage in order to make
them like a a non uh, a non obvious water mark.
So for the way that maps will sometimes include a
street that doesn't actually exist in order to prove that
it's their I p yes. So what what some people
(14:58):
have suggested, and very few people I might add, was
that this is literally an anomaly. It's supposed to make
you notice it so that if somebody else copies the video,
you remember our privacy, our privacy piracy. We've had both
our piracy broadcast. If you're copying DVDs, they can say, yes,
you took this, because see this anomalous person carrying a
(15:20):
cell phone in was something that I added and made
black and white. I would think that just the fact
that they showed the same video proves that they copied
it because they had to get it from somewhere. That
argument makes no sense to me. I just like that argument. Right,
you could do so much better. You have disappointed me.
(15:41):
Go to your rooms now. Most most people seem to
be going with the semen's hearing any thing. So let's
go on to uh John Titor yes or t tourds
T I T O R. I never really was clear
on exactly how you're supposed to pronounce that name. Well,
apparently it's not his real name, and I say it
is because le because he's he theoretically exists now he
(16:03):
lives in Florida. Right, well, he existed then he was
two years old. But no, okay, let's let's start at
the beginning. November two, two thousand, there was a web
form called the Time Travel Institute. Yes, and a person
who referred to himself or herself, possibly as time Travel
(16:25):
Underscore zero posted started to post on this forum, and
then later Time Travel Underscores zero became John Titre or Titour.
However you're supposed to pronounce that j JT JT said
eventually that he had traveled from the year two thousand
thirty six back in time. This was actually technically his
(16:48):
second stop. His first stop was back in nineteen seventy six.
I want to say, um, sorry it was And uh.
The re then why he was traveling back in time
was in two thousand thirty six, they realized they were
really close to a big event that was going to
be a huge problem for their computer systems. That's, of
(17:11):
course talking about two thousand thirty eight, which is a
going to be an issue with Unix UM and uh,
we actually talked about that in a previous episode. We
don't need to go into that again, but at any rate, Uh. Apparently,
and by two thousand thirty six, the technology was lost
to interface with these systems and to correct the problem
(17:34):
that existed. So he was sent back in time to
to get an IBM computer because that would allow him
to go back to his original time of six and
use that computer to fix the problem so that by
eight everything would run smoothly. Yes, apparently, the the IBM
(17:59):
had some functions that weren't included in the original documentation
for the machine, but had some bearing on what it
is that he needed to solve. Yeah. In fact, some
of that is what people who believe that JT really
did come from the future say, Well, I mean, how
would he know that could do these things if he
weren't from the future and hadn't discovered it. And the
(18:21):
answer to that is, actually that information was really available.
It just wasn't in the manual. But but computer engineers
knew all about it. Yeah, so it wasn't like it's
a documented thing, right, it actually does exist? Yes, Yes,
the computer that JT was supposedly going back in time
to retrieve did exist. Um, is a real thing, and
it could do the things JT said it could do. Uh.
(18:43):
The the plart where the argument breaks down is some
people said that those were secret and therefore j T
must have been telling the truth. But that's not the case.
Those those features were not secret, They just weren't widely
known outside of computer science circles. So that just means
that j he could be a computer scientist when I
what JT said he really was was, uh, he was
(19:05):
an officer in the army or a soldier in the
army who had been part of this sort of time
travel core. And uh, I think there were eight or
seven people other people besides him in his time travel unit,
and each of the members had a time travel device
machine that would allow them to go to different points
of time, and they each had their own assignments. His
(19:28):
assignment was to go back and get this computer, and
he pointed out that he could spend as much time
as he wanted to in the past, because when he
would go back to his present, it would appear as
if he had only been gone for a couple of seconds,
right like the machine would disappear, and that would immediately
reappear as if no time it all had had taken place.
But in reality he had spent maybe years away, So
(19:51):
really the only indication would be his apparent age once
he stepped out of the time travel machine, which by
the way, was it was a car that had the
time travel actual device installed, and it had to be
a car that had a really heavy um suspension so
they could handle a lot of weight. It happened to
be in nineteen sixty seven Chevrolet Corvette. If you're gonna
(20:12):
travel man doing in style DeLorean. But yeah, I was
gonna say, I feel like I've heard this one before.
It was a convertible too. It wasn't just a Chevrolet Corvette,
was a convertible. And he said that the way this
time travel device worked was by manipulating gravity, and that
it would actually create two micro singularities, which are essentially
(20:35):
like black holes, so to miniature black holes, would spend
them around and it would alter gravity, and that through
creating this gravity lock system, it could travel through time
and in subsequent messages because j T he he wrote
stuff from late two thousand to early two thousand one. Yeah,
(20:57):
he actually held court for a while. He was answering
people's questions about time travel and what the future was,
like how easy it is to time travel, And that's
how we know so much about this. It's they're like,
we found him somewhere and there there there there are
websites out there that will list all of his posts chronologically. Um. Yeah,
so you can actually read the whole story, and it
(21:18):
is it's long. Yeah, he was prolific with his with
his uh forum posts and that goes that goes against
what you were saying about the person holding the cell
phone in the Charlie Chaplin video. I mean, if I
agree with you, if I were in possession of some
future technology and trying to pass as somebody who belonged here,
(21:41):
I wouldn't want to flaunt this. And he's going not
not even you know, just casually using this, you know,
future technology in a public place and and trying to
be ignored. He's actually flaunting it like this is what
I got here on pictures and and that raises a
lot of questions right there, like we're asking him, doesn't
this make you worried that when you go back you're
(22:03):
gonna get in trouble because you revealed yourself And he's like,
why would I get in trouble? He wouldn't answer the question.
There were certain questions that j T was very good
at evading, and that was one of them. He would
never directly answer that. He's just like, why would they
be mad? I don't know the fact that you revealed
all this information? And you know, there were also times
where he would suggest that, like he was, his message
(22:27):
was really weird, and that sometimes he was talking about
things like in a hope of preventing tragedy, he wanted
to express certain information, but but in another post, just
a little further down, he'd say, yeah, there's no way
to alter the future. So you have these contradictory statements
saying like, oh, I want to try and head off
(22:48):
this this huge disaster that's coming, and boy, you guys
are gonna be sorry when it happens. And then he'd say,
you know, there's no way to really avoid it because
time is not elastic like that. Right. Well, I understand
that he was a Now I admit I had never
heard of of JT before um, this particular episode. But um,
(23:09):
you know, I understand though that he was a believer
in the many worlds theory. Yeah, the Everett Wheeler Graham
multiple world theory of quantum physics. Now, this theory in
general is you've probably heard about parallel dimensions. Yes, that's
essentially what this theory states is that there are an
infinite number of parallel dimensions, and that, uh, some of
(23:29):
these dimensions are almost almost identical to our own, right,
Like the differences between the two are very tiny, and
then of course the further away you get, the greater
the differences are. So you know, you could say, like, oh, well,
you know, you go five degrees of separation in the
South won the Civil War. You go ten degrees of
separation and humans never evolved, you know, and then you
(23:53):
go twenty and then Earth never even happened, Like, uh,
that that's a very simple way of putting this, you know,
and he actually said that he did not travel back
to his own time period of two thousand. He traveled
back to a parallel time period of two thousand UM.
And this was another thing that I found really confusing.
He said that he could travel huh, you know, using
(24:16):
the gravity thing. They would they would try and determine, uh,
the temporal divergence is what he called it, temporal divergence
being like how far away from his world line He
didn't use timeline, he called worldline um how far away
he would venture and he said, try to keep it
between one or two percent, and that you would be
(24:38):
similar enough to your own timeline that things would be
familiar to you and you could interact and you you know,
nothing would take you by surprise necessarily, Like there will
be minor differences, like someone might have won the World
Series in one reality and it would be the opposing
team in another reality, or maybe it was the same
team but I had totally different name and whatever, or
(25:00):
maybe it was a nice way to pass off, you know,
making predictions that don't come true. That's that was one
of the things that really bugged me because it was
one of those he wanted to be able to have
have it both ways, right. He wanted to be able
to say, Hey, this is what's going to happen to you, guys. Okay,
I'm telling you this is gonna happen in two thousand five.
This was one of his predictions. In two thousand five,
(25:22):
the United States is going to erupt in civil war,
which will eventually pull the rest of the world into
a conflict. And ultimately this would result in a nuclear
uh nuclear bomb exchange of you know, firing him at
each other between Russia and the United States and other
parts of the world, and then you would have this
(25:43):
new United States that would be five separate into five
major regions. And that was his reality, was that there
were these five major regions. Most of the other world
is pretty much whited out. Europe is gone, and China's gone,
and Russia's supposed is hurt really bad, and that the
entire social structure has changed dramatically because of that, as
(26:06):
you would imagine it would um and he would he
was saying like, this stuff is gonna happen to you,
but that's you know. He also would say like, oh, well,
I can't tell you who's gonna win the World Series,
because you know it might be different from when when
it happened in my worldline, it's not gonna be the
same for yours. Well, how how can you determine which
(26:27):
events are definitely gonna happen and which events are not
going to necessarily happen the way you remember them from
your world line? There was never any differentiation between those two.
There are other problems as well. Um. For one, in
two thousand five, we did not interrupt into civil war,
so that suggested that claim was rather inaccurate. Let's say,
(26:50):
at least, um, he didn't predict anything like you would think,
all right, it's two thousand when he appeared, and he
disappeared by March two thousand one, and uh, and actually
wrote a farewell post in March of two thousand one.
There was another major event in the United States that
happened in two thousand one, the World Trade Center tragedy,
(27:13):
the terrorist attack. He never mentioned that at all, And
you would think, like, this was something that really shook
America up and to some extent the rest of the
world as well, but really America, no mention of that
at all in his posts. You would think that that
would be you know, even even a vague mentioned saying
(27:36):
there's going to be a terrorist attack that happens this
year that's going to do No, that would be the thing, like,
that's going to be the domino effect that will set
the rest of these things in motion. But he didn't
say that. So he did say some other things that
did eventually come true, though, such as, yeah, yeah, he
was only off by about nine years on that one. Yes,
(27:58):
but they did imagine they did man do that. He
said that the certain facility, which by that I assume
he meant the Large Hadron Collider, would go online in
two thousand one. As you know, that was a little
optimistic cerns. LHC did not go online until really it
started going online around two thousand nine, and then kind
(28:18):
of kicked into gear in two thousand ten once birds
stopped dropping bread into it. I was going to say,
if it weren't for that bird, um, but yeah, the
the last Olympics being in two thousand four, Yeah, he
was wrong about that one. Wrong. Now there's one statement
that a lot of people point to as saying like, oh,
well this is what about this? What about mad cow disease?
Because one thing that JT said was that he was
(28:41):
scared of eating in the current time frame, because he
knew that there were UM the the the way that
ranchers were raising cattle and where we were getting food
and all that we're from unsafe sources, and he didn't
trust them. And he thought that people were crazy for um,
(29:01):
for eating the food, you know, without question. And he
was saying that it was going to lead to this
outbreak of UM what essentially ends up being mad cow disease,
which happens, of course, you know, you may have heard
about it when UM animals are fed feed that contained
(29:22):
the dead of their own species, like that can. That's
one way that gets transferred or transmitted, and then you
can catch it that way by eating tainted food UM.
And he talked about that a lot and uh. And
so people said, well, you know, later on, the mad
cow outbreak actually happened. You know, it actually happened while
(29:42):
he was still posting UM. And isn't that proof that
he at least had some form of being able to,
you know, to to see into the future. Not exactly UM.
The disease he was specifically talking about was quite spelt
Jacob disease or c j D, and it was already
(30:05):
well known by two thousand. In fact, it was first
identified or it was first observed in nine four. I
was accepted as a new disease in nine six. Uh.
When I say accepted, I'm talking specifically about mad cow disease,
which is a kind of a variant on c j D.
(30:25):
C j D we knew about well before. So anyway, anyway,
by six we knew about mad cow disease. That's not
what we called it necessarily, and it was called a
v c j D, which is a variant of kreitz
Felt Yakob disease. So in other words, this was not
a secret. It's not like he was giving us information
(30:46):
that we didn't already have access to. He was saying
that it was more important than what people believed, and
then it turned out that he was right. But we
already we you know, we had already known about this
for almost two decades. So I don't really come that.
Are that great evidence to support the JT was actually
from the future. Yeah, there, there's more evidence to the
(31:07):
contrary than there is for him. I fear. Yeah, the
there people would have like very serious questions about the
time travel techniques that he talked about, because some of
it was based upon theoretical physics and uh, and so
there there are theoretical physicists out there. Actually they're the
physicists are real, but the science, the science is theoretical.
(31:30):
So sore, there are these these physicists out there who
do think that there may be a way of being
creating these shortcuts through time or between dimensions or whatever
using similar methods to what JT was saying. But when
people would ask specifics, he would say, I'm not a physicist,
so I can't really answer that question, which was weird
because he could answer some physics questions in detail, and
(31:54):
you think, wow, that's remarkable because he said that he
was he grew up in central Florida, um that he
had essentially joined the army by age fourteen, that he
was either homeschooled or went to some university that had
been turned into a fort in Florida. So you wonder
where did you learn the basics of the physics stuff
(32:15):
you're talking about here that that are I mean, these
are complicated quantum physics, uh concepts, and yet you you know,
you can answer some of them very well and the
others you can't answer at all. It's kind of strange
and I also wondered, how could he if if when
you're traveling through time and it's all dependent upon gravity
(32:37):
and you can only get the percentage to around one
or two percent, that you're going to go to um
are or you're going to a dimension that's gonna be
only one or two percent degrees difference from your own,
how do you get back? Like, how do you how
do you travel back so you're at your back and
in what is legitimately your own world line. Yeah, he
(32:59):
wasn't very good at answering that. Also. Another question I
had was if if it's using gravity, like supposedly the
device was measuring gravity around it traveling through time but
not space, right, right? Yeah, they that's the difference in
the DeLorean in the Corvette. In this case, the Corvette
is basically just a shell. It's something for him to
sit in. Well, then it happened, Well, the Dolorean also
(33:23):
would travel through time but not space. It's just that, uh,
it is traveling through space, but it's not It's not
like you could travel in time from California and then
appear in Paris, right, you would go from California to California,
would just be a different type right, Yes, the tartist
can doctor who's tartists can travel through both time and space.
(33:44):
This thing could supposedly travel only through time, not space.
So the question people had was, wait a minute, how
is that even possible? Because the Earth isn't gonna be
where it was when you traveled, Like you hit start
and you're traveling back thirty years. Well, the Earth has
is not in the same position as it was, you
know when you left, so you would be appearing in
(34:06):
the middle of space. Nothing nothing there if if it
doesn't travel through space and only travels through time, and
he said, that's a great question by so it would
have been really good to get involved in that discussion.
I gotta go that was you know anyway. So my
my vote is that JT was a hoax, that the
(34:29):
person who was perpetuating the hoax did know at least,
you know, had a ground interest in quantum physics more
than a ground interest in computer science. I would say
that the person who posted this probably was a computer
scientist um, and that they also had some social commentary
that this person probably legitimately believed in. And this was
(34:52):
this was like things like you guys got to be
more vigilant about protecting the constitution, don't eat meat, that's
you know, be careful about the where your food comes from.
And like the warnings he were getting that he gave
were um, good warnings. It's just that everything was fabricated, right,
And like I said, the big predictions haven't panned out,
(35:15):
which kind of proves that. Now you could argue, well,
in his parallel time, they did pan out that way,
but that then you're just using an unfalsifiable argument, which
is ridiculous. You can't. That's not a debate, that's just
a way of making me go crazy. We all enjoy this.
Then I read an article on of all places, tour
(35:40):
dot com, which is really awesome for science fiction your fantasy.
By the way, many of you probably know that he
is our The website is uh decided for a major
science fiction fantasy publisher actually science fiction infinite. Yeah anyway, um,
speculative fiction published there we go. I was trying to
remember if they do both or if they split between
(36:00):
tournforge anyway. Uh. Pablo Stefanini wrote a blog post in
two thousand eight basically saying, Hey, the Olympics are over.
I guess he was wrong. Um, that was the basic
gist of it, but I mean that that really no,
that's how he got started and went into a lot
of things including, uh, he mentioned Mike Lynch. Did you here.
(36:22):
I haven't come across Mike Lynch. He's a private investigator.
An Italian TV show hired him. I think I did.
And they found the name of a lawyer named Larry Haber.
Uh has a brother who has a brother, John Rick Haber,
who has a computer expert and basically, uh, they came
(36:44):
to the conclusion, or at least suggested that these two,
the Haber brothers, may have actually come up with this
as a hoax. Um basically uh um, possibly as a
means for an entertainment deal of some kind, because there
have been uh subsequent books and things about JT. And
(37:07):
somebody pointed out that, uh, Larry Haber lives in Celebration, Florida,
which is a Disney community. I think that's probably coincidence.
But it's another thing that the Walt Disney is frozen
underneath his house, right and they're going to revive him
and be healthy. No, he's just he's always just frozen. Okay,
(37:32):
I suppose that's possible. I don't think that's true. Either
it's not true based on the factual stuff I've read,
but you know, I wasn't there to witness it, so
I can't confirm that. No. Um, so they this this
private investigator concluded that the whole thing was made up
by these guys. But uh, there's still this, this thing
(37:53):
keeps going around the internet as these things are wont
to do. Yeah, and they're more. I mean, I saw
one today about a guy who supposedly encountered his seventy
year old self, like a guy in his in his thirties,
while he was fixing the sink of all things. Uh,
ended up meeting his seventy year old version of himself.
(38:14):
And then they took a video using the guy's cell phone.
And in the video you see these two guys, these
these two bald guys standing out a Swedish fellow, uh,
standing out in the field. The sun is behind them,
so the light sources behind them, so you can't make
out details really well. And both of them show their
their right arms and they have identical tattoos. I did
(38:36):
it immediately raised questions for me. Light sources behind them,
so you can't make out details very well. That suggests
that this might not be on the up and up.
I mean, why put the light source behind you if
you want to get proof of this. The tattoo on
the older guy's arm, the seventy year old version looked
just as fresh, if not fresher, than the young guys
tattoo also raises some I happen to have a pair
(38:57):
of tattoos, folks, and I can tell you over time
they fade. And I don't imagine a seventy year old
going out and saying, you know what, I need to
get my ink refreshed. Um. So I'm just saying that
these time travel jokes and hoaxes and things are probably
gonna keep ongoing as people find more and more clever
ways of incorporating them. And of course, things like photo
editing software and video editing software are getting cheaper and
(39:20):
easier to use every year. So I would not be
surprised to see some incredibly convincing yet still completely fictional
time travel stories in the in the future on the web. Yeah,
even though uh, Einstein's theory of relativity does not rule
out time travel apparently, not that I understand it very
(39:40):
very well, um, but from what I understand the the
physics behind JTS machine are unlikely to work well. Just
the whole manipulating gravity thing at the very beginning makes
it difficult to I said, the energy it would take
to make that work would be at least at least
(40:04):
to nineteen sixty seven Chevrolet corvettes. Um. Actually what I
saw was in MRS Yeah, a Mr Fusion UM. But
the other thing is that apparently it's considered that a
time machine cannot travel past the date of its own creation.
So if it was actually built in and two thousand
(40:24):
thirty four, one wonders if the parallel makes up for
that though, because that's why he said the grandfather father
paradox didn't apply, was because he was not in his
own timeline. He was in a parallel timeline. I think
he's cheating. So he could go and kill himself if
he wanted to, because he was two years old when
he like his his his quote unquote real self would
(40:46):
be too. He could have technically killed himself and still
been fine because it was a parallel universe, not his own. Um. Yeah,
that's how he gets around a lot of those things.
I yeah, I called shenanigans. If you if you second
my Shenanigans, Go get a broom and we will storm
the castle. Meanwhile, if you guys have any suggestions, questions, comments,
(41:09):
things like that, you can contact us on Facebook and
Twitter are handled. There is tech Stuff hs W, or
you can email us in Our address is tech stuff
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(41:31):
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It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
text stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello, everyone,
Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and
(00:20):
I am an editor at how stuff works dot Com.
Sitting across from me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Last night, Darth Vader came down from Planet Vulcan and
told me if I didn't take Lorraine out that he'd
melt my brain. You got that one, Okay? Good, Hey,
(00:40):
we're gonna start it's your no, never mind, we're gonna
We're gonna start this off with a little Facebook feedback.
This comes from Kevin, who says podcast Idea, who is
John Tyder, the time traveler from twenty six who posted
on discussion boards back in two thousands, would love to
hear you guys talk about him slash hoax slash time traveler. Well, Kevin,
(01:04):
you're gonna get your wish. But before we get to John,
let's talk about about some other time traveling stories that
hit the internet over Actually the ones I'm talking about
hit recently. Yeah, I think that's why? Uh why John
has been in the news or on people's minds lately.
It's because of these other stories that have been in
the news. Yeah, so there's a there's a website called
(01:25):
Virtual Museum, and yes, Virtual Museum has a photo up
of the reopening of the South Fork Bridge after flood
in November nineteen. Now, in this photo you'll see a
whole bunch of typical nineteen forties style folks, mostly in
you know, like the men are all in suits and
(01:47):
the women are all in dresses, and they're all looking
off to the opening of the bridge, the reopening of
the bridge. Right in the towards the back of the group,
in the middle is a fellow who does not look
like he belongs with everybody else. So wait, wait, wait,
wait does he have a red and white striped shirt
and a hat with it? Is not Waldo? Um, I
(02:09):
keep looking for that guy. He never found it. He
looks mortal. He looks more like a racer head than Waldo.
Now he has he has medium to longish hair, but
it's not like down, you know, it's not worn down.
It's actually sticking up a bit. And he's got these
sunglasses on that have these weird uh side panels on them,
(02:30):
and he looks like he's wearing a sweater over a
silk screened T shirt. Okay, so it looks like, you know,
he's dressed down and his hairstyles a little funky for
the time period, and um, he just he doesn't look
like he fits well. There were some people who said,
is this is this a time traveler or was it
photoshopped in? It had to be photoshopped in, right, it
(02:53):
had to be. Uh. Upon closer examination, it did not
look like it had been photoshopped in. It looked like
this guy literally was there at that time. However, upon
even further examination, it was discovered this wasn't really a
mystery that the the elements that that people identified as
being from out of that time we're not actually uh anachronisms. Uh.
(03:18):
The glasses, for example, were these these hinged glasses that
had these little side panels on sunglasses that had been
around since the twenties. And uh, he was obviously holding
a camera as well, and it looked like it was
a period camera, like one camera that would have been around.
In the sweater was not really out of place, and
(03:40):
even the shirt upon closer examination, looked like one of
the kind of handmade shirts that uh that people made
at the time too, for various sports teams like a
college sports team or a high school sports team. So
upon further discussion, it appears that this guy was just
you know, he's just a guy of his time. It's
just he was not dressed up like everyone else. He
(04:01):
was more of a student slash artist kind of type. Yeah,
well before hippies, but yes, yes, the the precursor to
the hippie. So clearly I would have hated this person.
But the hippies and hipsters, man, don't get me started anyway.
So the the In fact, I had a friend who
(04:22):
who suggested that the camera was a Brownie Special one seven.
Really yeah, it's kind of crazy that someone was able
to identify that just by this, and the picture does
not show the guy holding the camera prominently. He's actually
it's got it's right around his stomach level, so it's
just barely in frame. But she picked that out pretty quickly.
Way to go rifka, So um, yeah, it's it's That
(04:46):
was one of those moments where there were enough things
in the picture that looked a little weird to make
people say, oh, this has got to be Uh, this
can't be from that time, but it just really shows
that we're far enough out of that time amera to
not be able to see what does and doesn't belong.
That's funny too, because it wasn't but a few days
(05:09):
ago as of the date we are recording this in
early November, um, when Charlie Chaplin was accused of capturing
a time traveler on film. Yeah, it's just the sort
of thing that little jerk would have done. That's why
I like you, Buster Keaton. You never would pull those shenanigans.
I really don't know that. Yeah, I know, but yeah, okay, No,
(05:34):
it's from the circus. It was drawn to our attention
by Irish filmmaker George Clark. Yes, it's important to note
this is a filmmaker who's making this big yeah his
uh and in the YouTube video he uploaded a YouTube video.
What happened was supposedly, um George as I like to
(05:56):
call him, uh post, you guys are on the same
you know, the first name basis there. Clearly he's an irishman.
I've seen Ireland as I flew over it to England.
Um So anyway, Georgia George, and he bought the these
collect this collection of Charlie Chaplin movies. Yeah, brought him home,
(06:19):
started watching the extras on the various DVDs, and one
of them had a newsreel from nineteen the premiere of
the Circus. Yes. And during this news reel, Yes, the
newsreel was showing the the the grand premiere at Man's
Chinese Theater. And uh. As part of this news reel,
(06:42):
there's a moment where a fellow walks into frame, followed
closely by a woman, uh, you know, kind of a
a large ish woman in a big coat and a
top hat walking behind the fellow, and she has her
her hand that's facing the she's she's walking in profile
to the camera. Essentially her hand that you can see. Yeah,
(07:04):
the hand that you can see is held up to
her face as if it's holding something like perhaps a phone,
but a cell phone. In nine that doesn't sound right,
So clearly the answer must be she was a time traveler.
At least that's the answer. George came to and he
said it's the only one that makes sense because he
(07:24):
didn't say it like that because he was irish. Um. Yes,
he said he should showed it to a crowd of
about a hundred people, and none of them could come
to any other conclusion. They didn't know clearly it was
a hundred people who were smashed on Guinness, because I
could think of a couple of different reasons off the
top of my head. He actually did um, he did
(07:46):
the the typical television uh thing that you do whenever
you have any footage, zoom in and enhance, zoom in
and enhance. So he zoomed in to try and get
look and see what was going on here. And it
kind of looks like she's holding something in her hand,
but it's I don't think it's really that obvious. It's
(08:08):
it could simply be that she was literally scratching the
side of her face. It does look at the end
of the little clip, just as she goes out of frame,
that she's saying something or her mouth at least is moving. Yes, yes,
now uh. There have been, of course, many attempts now
to explain what's going on part of them, and part
of it has to do with the fact that she
(08:29):
she or as Mr Clark suggests, it could be a
man wearing women's clothes. Um, whoever the person is is
is actually speaking, which confuses the matter even more. Hang on,
so it's a cross dressing time traveler. It's apparently that's
is it Frankenfurger because he he could travel through space
and time? Let's stop. Um. Possibly, but okay, So the
(08:51):
first explanation, and one of the more plausible ones that
I've seen, is that it's a compact hand trumpet. And now,
of course, lots of us, even our young for listeners,
have probably seen the hand trumpets that people used to
use before they were electrical hearing aids. Um. And these
would have been used towards the end of the nineteenth
century early part of the twentieth century. And um, it
(09:12):
is entirely possible. Actually, the the article I saw that
tried to explain that was from Jeremy Sue who wrote
for a Life science UM and he spoke with a
with the historian named Philip Scrasca, who was an archivist
at the Bernard Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis.
Or is those of us in competing schools column wash
(09:34):
you very good school, um, But basically, you know, we're
used to I'm used to thinking of the ones that
they used to see in pictures like Beethoven, where it's
a giant. It looks like you're holding the side of
a gramophone up to your head. You know that that
uh you're thinking of Pete Dragon where the character holds
(09:55):
the big Yeah, exactly exactly, but U and basically was
like it was like a funnel that you'd hold up
to your ear so maybe you could hear a little
bit better. And I think it did you know it
had some effect? Um no, no, it works. But but
apparently there were compact models and some people think that
it may have been a very small version. And really,
(10:17):
as a couple of commenters I saw online put it,
you wouldn't want to carry one of these big things
around with me you while you're walking. You want something
that's small and light and portable. So that is a
possible explanation. Well, and four years before that, premiere Semens
Yes produce the A handheld hearing aid essentially is what
(10:40):
it was. And um, yeah, they weren't the n ear
models that you see now which are all but invisible. Yeah.
It was actually was a microphone amplifier and you held
the amplifier side to your ear. The microphone side would
stay out facing the world, and that's you know, you
would hold it to your ear like the way we
do with cell phones. And they were about the same
(11:01):
size as cell phones are today, So it could and
and like I said, four years earlier those have been
introduced now they were expensive. But this is a lady
who's attending a film premiere in Hollywood. So clearly this
is someone who has at least some means, right, not
necessarily just not someone just walking on the street. She's
(11:23):
dressed up, she's ready to go to the theater um.
So it could very easily be someone who has one
of these hearing aids, and she may be talking in
a way of testing it, you know, trying to make
sure that it's working, like hello, Hello, to make sure
that she can hear before she interacts with anyone else,
or she's yammering to herself, which I do frequently so right,
(11:44):
or as one other person I saw pointed out, so
it could be as simple as the fact that her
jaw ached and she was moving her jaw and she
had her hand up to her face and nothing was
in the hand. Because the George says that's there's clearly
something that's black inside her hand. Um, I don't see
that quite as clearly as George does. I mean, and
(12:05):
I was trying to be as objective as possible, because
as soon as someone tells you that something is in
a picture, it's really hard to not see it. Yeah,
somebody was trying to, uh, to show where the the
part of the ear trumpet would be where you put
it in your ear canal and going I just don't
see that in here. The same sort of thing that
where someone shows you a picture and said, do you
(12:26):
see the face that's in here? And you're like uh,
and then they point out the face and then you're like, oh,
there it is, and then you cannot never not see it. Right.
But if they were just to show you that picture
and say do you see anything in here, and you
might look for a while and saying no, I don't
see anything and there's nothing here. Um, well, so it
could have been uh, a hearing aid, could have been
nothing at all, could have been a little ear trumpet
(12:47):
of some sort. Um. I like. My favorite part of
the video, by the way, is when George says specifically,
it's not an AM FM radio because it's night Oh, well,
that makes sense. Clearly, it has to be a cell
phone because it's nineteen twenty eight, it's the same thing.
And and how does she get reception in nineteen twenty
(13:07):
eight with a cellphone when there are no cell phone towers? Yeah?
That that is the biggest argument I've seen against it.
There's some interdimensional temporal cellphone tower that she's connecting to.
I'm I'm sure you've seen the The people who want
to hold onto this their argument to that. If they've
are society that hasn't invented something as sophisticated as a
(13:30):
time machine, surely they could invent something with an antenna
for cell phone communication that they would stick on the
outside of the time machine. Okay, I wonder if these
people have ever heard of something called Acam's razor. What
makes more sense that this lady exists in that time
frame that's exactly when she's supposed to exist, because that's
you know, she was born during that era and she's
(13:52):
walking down the street holding an object that had been
built four years before was known to exist. Is it
more likely that that's the answer, or that there was
somehow someone developed time travel, traveled back in time use
this cell phone, and was not smart enough to stay
out of the range of a camera it's not like
the camera was even secret they were filming the premier. Why, Like,
(14:17):
if I'm a time traveler and I go back to
an era that exists before cell phones, I'm not whipping
the cell phone out at a very public event where
there are cameras around. Yeah, And that leads me to
my favorite of the debunking attempts. Uh. Apparently some video
(14:37):
producers will put things into footage in order to make
them like a a non uh, a non obvious water mark.
So for the way that maps will sometimes include a
street that doesn't actually exist in order to prove that
it's their I p yes. So what what some people
(14:58):
have suggested, and very few people I might add, was
that this is literally an anomaly. It's supposed to make
you notice it so that if somebody else copies the video,
you remember our privacy, our privacy piracy. We've had both
our piracy broadcast. If you're copying DVDs, they can say, yes,
you took this, because see this anomalous person carrying a
(15:20):
cell phone in was something that I added and made
black and white. I would think that just the fact
that they showed the same video proves that they copied
it because they had to get it from somewhere. That
argument makes no sense to me. I just like that argument. Right,
you could do so much better. You have disappointed me.
(15:41):
Go to your rooms now. Most most people seem to
be going with the semen's hearing any thing. So let's
go on to uh John Titor yes or t tourds
T I T O R. I never really was clear
on exactly how you're supposed to pronounce that name. Well,
apparently it's not his real name, and I say it
is because le because he's he theoretically exists now he
(16:03):
lives in Florida. Right, well, he existed then he was
two years old. But no, okay, let's let's start at
the beginning. November two, two thousand, there was a web
form called the Time Travel Institute. Yes, and a person
who referred to himself or herself, possibly as time Travel
(16:25):
Underscore zero posted started to post on this forum, and
then later Time Travel Underscores zero became John Titre or Titour.
However you're supposed to pronounce that j JT JT said
eventually that he had traveled from the year two thousand
thirty six back in time. This was actually technically his
(16:48):
second stop. His first stop was back in nineteen seventy six.
I want to say, um, sorry it was And uh.
The re then why he was traveling back in time
was in two thousand thirty six, they realized they were
really close to a big event that was going to
be a huge problem for their computer systems. That's, of
(17:11):
course talking about two thousand thirty eight, which is a
going to be an issue with Unix UM and uh,
we actually talked about that in a previous episode. We
don't need to go into that again, but at any rate, Uh. Apparently,
and by two thousand thirty six, the technology was lost
to interface with these systems and to correct the problem
(17:34):
that existed. So he was sent back in time to
to get an IBM computer because that would allow him
to go back to his original time of six and
use that computer to fix the problem so that by
eight everything would run smoothly. Yes, apparently, the the IBM
(17:59):
had some functions that weren't included in the original documentation
for the machine, but had some bearing on what it
is that he needed to solve. Yeah. In fact, some
of that is what people who believe that JT really
did come from the future say, Well, I mean, how
would he know that could do these things if he
weren't from the future and hadn't discovered it. And the
(18:21):
answer to that is, actually that information was really available.
It just wasn't in the manual. But but computer engineers
knew all about it. Yeah, so it wasn't like it's
a documented thing, right, it actually does exist? Yes, Yes,
the computer that JT was supposedly going back in time
to retrieve did exist. Um, is a real thing, and
it could do the things JT said it could do. Uh.
(18:43):
The the plart where the argument breaks down is some
people said that those were secret and therefore j T
must have been telling the truth. But that's not the case.
Those those features were not secret, They just weren't widely
known outside of computer science circles. So that just means
that j he could be a computer scientist when I
what JT said he really was was, uh, he was
(19:05):
an officer in the army or a soldier in the
army who had been part of this sort of time
travel core. And uh, I think there were eight or
seven people other people besides him in his time travel unit,
and each of the members had a time travel device
machine that would allow them to go to different points
of time, and they each had their own assignments. His
(19:28):
assignment was to go back and get this computer, and
he pointed out that he could spend as much time
as he wanted to in the past, because when he
would go back to his present, it would appear as
if he had only been gone for a couple of seconds,
right like the machine would disappear, and that would immediately
reappear as if no time it all had had taken place.
But in reality he had spent maybe years away, So
(19:51):
really the only indication would be his apparent age once
he stepped out of the time travel machine, which by
the way, was it was a car that had the
time travel actual device installed, and it had to be
a car that had a really heavy um suspension so
they could handle a lot of weight. It happened to
be in nineteen sixty seven Chevrolet Corvette. If you're gonna
(20:12):
travel man doing in style DeLorean. But yeah, I was
gonna say, I feel like I've heard this one before.
It was a convertible too. It wasn't just a Chevrolet Corvette,
was a convertible. And he said that the way this
time travel device worked was by manipulating gravity, and that
it would actually create two micro singularities, which are essentially
(20:35):
like black holes, so to miniature black holes, would spend
them around and it would alter gravity, and that through
creating this gravity lock system, it could travel through time
and in subsequent messages because j T he he wrote
stuff from late two thousand to early two thousand one. Yeah,
(20:57):
he actually held court for a while. He was answering
people's questions about time travel and what the future was,
like how easy it is to time travel, And that's
how we know so much about this. It's they're like,
we found him somewhere and there there there there are
websites out there that will list all of his posts chronologically. Um. Yeah,
so you can actually read the whole story, and it
(21:18):
is it's long. Yeah, he was prolific with his with
his uh forum posts and that goes that goes against
what you were saying about the person holding the cell
phone in the Charlie Chaplin video. I mean, if I
agree with you, if I were in possession of some
future technology and trying to pass as somebody who belonged here,
(21:41):
I wouldn't want to flaunt this. And he's going not
not even you know, just casually using this, you know,
future technology in a public place and and trying to
be ignored. He's actually flaunting it like this is what
I got here on pictures and and that raises a
lot of questions right there, like we're asking him, doesn't
this make you worried that when you go back you're
(22:03):
gonna get in trouble because you revealed yourself And he's like,
why would I get in trouble? He wouldn't answer the question.
There were certain questions that j T was very good
at evading, and that was one of them. He would
never directly answer that. He's just like, why would they
be mad? I don't know the fact that you revealed
all this information? And you know, there were also times
where he would suggest that, like he was, his message
(22:27):
was really weird, and that sometimes he was talking about
things like in a hope of preventing tragedy, he wanted
to express certain information, but but in another post, just
a little further down, he'd say, yeah, there's no way
to alter the future. So you have these contradictory statements
saying like, oh, I want to try and head off
(22:48):
this this huge disaster that's coming, and boy, you guys
are gonna be sorry when it happens. And then he'd say,
you know, there's no way to really avoid it because
time is not elastic like that. Right. Well, I understand
that he was a Now I admit I had never
heard of of JT before um, this particular episode. But um,
(23:09):
you know, I understand though that he was a believer
in the many worlds theory. Yeah, the Everett Wheeler Graham
multiple world theory of quantum physics. Now, this theory in
general is you've probably heard about parallel dimensions. Yes, that's
essentially what this theory states is that there are an
infinite number of parallel dimensions, and that, uh, some of
(23:29):
these dimensions are almost almost identical to our own, right,
Like the differences between the two are very tiny, and
then of course the further away you get, the greater
the differences are. So you know, you could say, like, oh, well,
you know, you go five degrees of separation in the
South won the Civil War. You go ten degrees of
separation and humans never evolved, you know, and then you
(23:53):
go twenty and then Earth never even happened, Like, uh,
that that's a very simple way of putting this, you know,
and he actually said that he did not travel back
to his own time period of two thousand. He traveled
back to a parallel time period of two thousand UM.
And this was another thing that I found really confusing.
He said that he could travel huh, you know, using
(24:16):
the gravity thing. They would they would try and determine, uh,
the temporal divergence is what he called it, temporal divergence
being like how far away from his world line He
didn't use timeline, he called worldline um how far away
he would venture and he said, try to keep it
between one or two percent, and that you would be
(24:38):
similar enough to your own timeline that things would be
familiar to you and you could interact and you you know,
nothing would take you by surprise necessarily, Like there will
be minor differences, like someone might have won the World
Series in one reality and it would be the opposing
team in another reality, or maybe it was the same
team but I had totally different name and whatever, or
(25:00):
maybe it was a nice way to pass off, you know,
making predictions that don't come true. That's that was one
of the things that really bugged me because it was
one of those he wanted to be able to have
have it both ways, right. He wanted to be able
to say, Hey, this is what's going to happen to you, guys. Okay,
I'm telling you this is gonna happen in two thousand five.
This was one of his predictions. In two thousand five,
(25:22):
the United States is going to erupt in civil war,
which will eventually pull the rest of the world into
a conflict. And ultimately this would result in a nuclear
uh nuclear bomb exchange of you know, firing him at
each other between Russia and the United States and other
parts of the world, and then you would have this
(25:43):
new United States that would be five separate into five
major regions. And that was his reality, was that there
were these five major regions. Most of the other world
is pretty much whited out. Europe is gone, and China's gone,
and Russia's supposed is hurt really bad, and that the
entire social structure has changed dramatically because of that, as
(26:06):
you would imagine it would um and he would he
was saying like, this stuff is gonna happen to you,
but that's you know. He also would say like, oh, well,
I can't tell you who's gonna win the World Series,
because you know it might be different from when when
it happened in my worldline, it's not gonna be the
same for yours. Well, how how can you determine which
(26:27):
events are definitely gonna happen and which events are not
going to necessarily happen the way you remember them from
your world line? There was never any differentiation between those two.
There are other problems as well. Um. For one, in
two thousand five, we did not interrupt into civil war,
so that suggested that claim was rather inaccurate. Let's say,
(26:50):
at least, um, he didn't predict anything like you would think,
all right, it's two thousand when he appeared, and he
disappeared by March two thousand one, and uh, and actually
wrote a farewell post in March of two thousand one.
There was another major event in the United States that
happened in two thousand one, the World Trade Center tragedy,
(27:13):
the terrorist attack. He never mentioned that at all, And
you would think, like, this was something that really shook
America up and to some extent the rest of the
world as well, but really America, no mention of that
at all in his posts. You would think that that
would be you know, even even a vague mentioned saying
(27:36):
there's going to be a terrorist attack that happens this
year that's going to do No, that would be the thing, like,
that's going to be the domino effect that will set
the rest of these things in motion. But he didn't
say that. So he did say some other things that
did eventually come true, though, such as, yeah, yeah, he
was only off by about nine years on that one. Yes,
(27:58):
but they did imagine they did man do that. He
said that the certain facility, which by that I assume
he meant the Large Hadron Collider, would go online in
two thousand one. As you know, that was a little
optimistic cerns. LHC did not go online until really it
started going online around two thousand nine, and then kind
(28:18):
of kicked into gear in two thousand ten once birds
stopped dropping bread into it. I was going to say,
if it weren't for that bird, um, but yeah, the
the last Olympics being in two thousand four, Yeah, he
was wrong about that one. Wrong. Now there's one statement
that a lot of people point to as saying like, oh,
well this is what about this? What about mad cow disease?
Because one thing that JT said was that he was
(28:41):
scared of eating in the current time frame, because he
knew that there were UM the the the way that
ranchers were raising cattle and where we were getting food
and all that we're from unsafe sources, and he didn't
trust them. And he thought that people were crazy for um,
(29:01):
for eating the food, you know, without question. And he
was saying that it was going to lead to this
outbreak of UM what essentially ends up being mad cow disease,
which happens, of course, you know, you may have heard
about it when UM animals are fed feed that contained
(29:22):
the dead of their own species, like that can. That's
one way that gets transferred or transmitted, and then you
can catch it that way by eating tainted food UM.
And he talked about that a lot and uh. And
so people said, well, you know, later on, the mad
cow outbreak actually happened. You know, it actually happened while
(29:42):
he was still posting UM. And isn't that proof that
he at least had some form of being able to,
you know, to to see into the future. Not exactly UM.
The disease he was specifically talking about was quite spelt
Jacob disease or c j D, and it was already
(30:05):
well known by two thousand. In fact, it was first
identified or it was first observed in nine four. I
was accepted as a new disease in nine six. Uh.
When I say accepted, I'm talking specifically about mad cow disease,
which is a kind of a variant on c j D.
(30:25):
C j D we knew about well before. So anyway, anyway,
by six we knew about mad cow disease. That's not
what we called it necessarily, and it was called a
v c j D, which is a variant of kreitz
Felt Yakob disease. So in other words, this was not
a secret. It's not like he was giving us information
(30:46):
that we didn't already have access to. He was saying
that it was more important than what people believed, and
then it turned out that he was right. But we
already we you know, we had already known about this
for almost two decades. So I don't really come that.
Are that great evidence to support the JT was actually
from the future. Yeah, there, there's more evidence to the
(31:07):
contrary than there is for him. I fear. Yeah, the
there people would have like very serious questions about the
time travel techniques that he talked about, because some of
it was based upon theoretical physics and uh, and so
there there are theoretical physicists out there. Actually they're the
physicists are real, but the science, the science is theoretical.
(31:30):
So sore, there are these these physicists out there who
do think that there may be a way of being
creating these shortcuts through time or between dimensions or whatever
using similar methods to what JT was saying. But when
people would ask specifics, he would say, I'm not a physicist,
so I can't really answer that question, which was weird
because he could answer some physics questions in detail, and
(31:54):
you think, wow, that's remarkable because he said that he
was he grew up in central Florida, um that he
had essentially joined the army by age fourteen, that he
was either homeschooled or went to some university that had
been turned into a fort in Florida. So you wonder
where did you learn the basics of the physics stuff
(32:15):
you're talking about here that that are I mean, these
are complicated quantum physics, uh concepts, and yet you you know,
you can answer some of them very well and the
others you can't answer at all. It's kind of strange
and I also wondered, how could he if if when
you're traveling through time and it's all dependent upon gravity
(32:37):
and you can only get the percentage to around one
or two percent, that you're going to go to um
are or you're going to a dimension that's gonna be
only one or two percent degrees difference from your own,
how do you get back? Like, how do you how
do you travel back so you're at your back and
in what is legitimately your own world line. Yeah, he
(32:59):
wasn't very good at answering that. Also. Another question I
had was if if it's using gravity, like supposedly the
device was measuring gravity around it traveling through time but
not space, right, right? Yeah, they that's the difference in
the DeLorean in the Corvette. In this case, the Corvette
is basically just a shell. It's something for him to
sit in. Well, then it happened, Well, the Dolorean also
(33:23):
would travel through time but not space. It's just that, uh,
it is traveling through space, but it's not It's not
like you could travel in time from California and then
appear in Paris, right, you would go from California to California,
would just be a different type right, Yes, the tartist
can doctor who's tartists can travel through both time and space.
(33:44):
This thing could supposedly travel only through time, not space.
So the question people had was, wait a minute, how
is that even possible? Because the Earth isn't gonna be
where it was when you traveled, Like you hit start
and you're traveling back thirty years. Well, the Earth has
is not in the same position as it was, you
know when you left, so you would be appearing in
(34:06):
the middle of space. Nothing nothing there if if it
doesn't travel through space and only travels through time, and
he said, that's a great question by so it would
have been really good to get involved in that discussion.
I gotta go that was you know anyway. So my
my vote is that JT was a hoax, that the
(34:29):
person who was perpetuating the hoax did know at least,
you know, had a ground interest in quantum physics more
than a ground interest in computer science. I would say
that the person who posted this probably was a computer
scientist um, and that they also had some social commentary
that this person probably legitimately believed in. And this was
(34:52):
this was like things like you guys got to be
more vigilant about protecting the constitution, don't eat meat, that's
you know, be careful about the where your food comes from.
And like the warnings he were getting that he gave
were um, good warnings. It's just that everything was fabricated, right,
And like I said, the big predictions haven't panned out,
(35:15):
which kind of proves that. Now you could argue, well,
in his parallel time, they did pan out that way,
but that then you're just using an unfalsifiable argument, which
is ridiculous. You can't. That's not a debate, that's just
a way of making me go crazy. We all enjoy this.
Then I read an article on of all places, tour
(35:40):
dot com, which is really awesome for science fiction your fantasy.
By the way, many of you probably know that he
is our The website is uh decided for a major
science fiction fantasy publisher actually science fiction infinite. Yeah anyway, um,
speculative fiction published there we go. I was trying to
remember if they do both or if they split between
(36:00):
tournforge anyway. Uh. Pablo Stefanini wrote a blog post in
two thousand eight basically saying, Hey, the Olympics are over.
I guess he was wrong. Um, that was the basic
gist of it, but I mean that that really no,
that's how he got started and went into a lot
of things including, uh, he mentioned Mike Lynch. Did you here.
(36:22):
I haven't come across Mike Lynch. He's a private investigator.
An Italian TV show hired him. I think I did.
And they found the name of a lawyer named Larry Haber.
Uh has a brother who has a brother, John Rick Haber,
who has a computer expert and basically, uh, they came
(36:44):
to the conclusion, or at least suggested that these two,
the Haber brothers, may have actually come up with this
as a hoax. Um basically uh um, possibly as a
means for an entertainment deal of some kind, because there
have been uh subsequent books and things about JT. And
(37:07):
somebody pointed out that, uh, Larry Haber lives in Celebration, Florida,
which is a Disney community. I think that's probably coincidence.
But it's another thing that the Walt Disney is frozen
underneath his house, right and they're going to revive him
and be healthy. No, he's just he's always just frozen. Okay,
(37:32):
I suppose that's possible. I don't think that's true. Either
it's not true based on the factual stuff I've read,
but you know, I wasn't there to witness it, so
I can't confirm that. No. Um, so they this this
private investigator concluded that the whole thing was made up
by these guys. But uh, there's still this, this thing
(37:53):
keeps going around the internet as these things are wont
to do. Yeah, and they're more. I mean, I saw
one today about a guy who supposedly encountered his seventy
year old self, like a guy in his in his thirties,
while he was fixing the sink of all things. Uh,
ended up meeting his seventy year old version of himself.
(38:14):
And then they took a video using the guy's cell phone.
And in the video you see these two guys, these
these two bald guys standing out a Swedish fellow, uh,
standing out in the field. The sun is behind them,
so the light sources behind them, so you can't make
out details really well. And both of them show their
their right arms and they have identical tattoos. I did
(38:36):
it immediately raised questions for me. Light sources behind them,
so you can't make out details very well. That suggests
that this might not be on the up and up.
I mean, why put the light source behind you if
you want to get proof of this. The tattoo on
the older guy's arm, the seventy year old version looked
just as fresh, if not fresher, than the young guys
tattoo also raises some I happen to have a pair
(38:57):
of tattoos, folks, and I can tell you over time
they fade. And I don't imagine a seventy year old
going out and saying, you know what, I need to
get my ink refreshed. Um. So I'm just saying that
these time travel jokes and hoaxes and things are probably
gonna keep ongoing as people find more and more clever
ways of incorporating them. And of course, things like photo
editing software and video editing software are getting cheaper and
(39:20):
easier to use every year. So I would not be
surprised to see some incredibly convincing yet still completely fictional
time travel stories in the in the future on the web. Yeah,
even though uh, Einstein's theory of relativity does not rule
out time travel apparently, not that I understand it very
(39:40):
very well, um, but from what I understand the the
physics behind JTS machine are unlikely to work well. Just
the whole manipulating gravity thing at the very beginning makes
it difficult to I said, the energy it would take
to make that work would be at least at least
(40:04):
to nineteen sixty seven Chevrolet corvettes. Um. Actually what I
saw was in MRS Yeah, a Mr Fusion UM. But
the other thing is that apparently it's considered that a
time machine cannot travel past the date of its own creation.
So if it was actually built in and two thousand
(40:24):
thirty four, one wonders if the parallel makes up for
that though, because that's why he said the grandfather father
paradox didn't apply, was because he was not in his
own timeline. He was in a parallel timeline. I think
he's cheating. So he could go and kill himself if
he wanted to, because he was two years old when
he like his his his quote unquote real self would
(40:46):
be too. He could have technically killed himself and still
been fine because it was a parallel universe, not his own. Um. Yeah,
that's how he gets around a lot of those things.
I yeah, I called shenanigans. If you if you second
my Shenanigans, Go get a broom and we will storm
the castle. Meanwhile, if you guys have any suggestions, questions, comments,
(41:09):
things like that, you can contact us on Facebook and
Twitter are handled. There is tech Stuff hs W, or
you can email us in Our address is tech stuff
at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I
will talk to you again in the future really soon.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
(41:31):
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