John Titor
John Titor is the name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be a time traveler from 2036.
In these posts, Titor made numerous predictions about events in the near future, a number of them vague and some quite specific, starting with events in 2004. He described a drastically changed future in which the United States had broken up into five smaller regions, the environment and infrastructure had been devastated by a nuclear attack, and most other world powers had been destroyed.
History
The first posts using John Titor's military symbol appeared on the Time Travel Institute forums on November 2, 2000, under the name TimeTravel_0. At that time the name "John Titor" was not being used. The posts discussed time travel in general, the first one being the "six parts" description of what a time machine would need to have to work (see below) and responses to questions about how such a machine would work. Early messages tended to be short.
The name "John Titor" was not introduced until January 2001, when TimeTravel_0 began posting at the Art Bell BBS Forums (which required a name or pseudonym for every account). The Titor posts ended in late March 2001. Eventually, a number of the threads became corrupted; but Titor's posts had been saved on subscribers' hard drives and were copied to Anomalies.net, along with new discussions of the science behind Titor's time traveling as well as his predictions. It was later stated in an article that "many people are [still] counting down the days until World War 3".