True Mysteries of the Internet
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. It's just us. There's no Jerry. There maybe never was. Camp. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Camp. What? Camp. Oh, camp. Inside joke. Yeah. Jerry's at camp right now. Can I do a quick COA at the head here? Sure.

The things we're going to be talking about today, folks, Internet mysteries times three. There are a lot of people who get very into this stuff. Specifically, you know, the three things we're talking about, as with most Internet mysteries. But we are certainly not going to get into it in the detail that will satisfy you. Right.

If this is something that you have researched a lot and have been super into because, you know, they're getting about 15 minutes apiece and, you know, just give us a break. We're doing our best to kind of cover it in a short amount of time. Yeah, for sure. I think that was a good COA. That was like a true bona fide COA.

Yeah, because I've answered the question that you're probably going to want to email, which is how could you not talk about blank? Right, exactly. We're going to talk about as much as we can. Like you said, we got three amazing unsolved mysteries of the Internet to discuss. There's plenty out there, but in my book, these are probably the three best, I think. All right. I mean, there's a lot out there. And I'm saying I'm excluding true crime, obviously. These are just oddities that...

have not been solved at this point. Maybe never will be solved, but probably could be at some point. You never know. Well, now we're just eating into our Cicada 3301. Okay, I'm sorry. So let's talk first, I guess, then, yes, about Cicada 3301, shall we? Sure. This was a series of three puzzles.

that were put out starting January 4th, 2012, then a year later, same date on the 13th, and then again, same date on the 14th on 4chan. And then eventually some clues would come out on Twitter

But they were posted online under the banner 3301 and have since become known as Cicada 3301 because many of the messages and clues ended up containing an image of a cicada. Yeah, kind of like a stylized line drawing of a cicada. I've seen it compared very much to like the moth on the Silence of the Lambs poster.

Yeah, totally. Especially the first image had a cicada in it. And cicadas are important because they come out every...

certain number of years, but those years are always prime numbers. It's very interesting. And in that first message that they sent out, they posted it on 4chan, and the post said, hello, we are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.

It was super cryptic, but it definitely caught the attention of people. They posted it on the right social media platform. 4chan was a great one to post it on to get the attention of people who would want to do this. And the whole thing spread pretty quickly. People obviously immediately started trying to figure out what the hidden message was. Steganography is what it's called, hiding a message inside something else, usually an image.

And it turns out there's all sorts of like tools out there on the Internet that you can use to decode stuff like this. And so people just kind of set about getting getting busy with it, as some people say. Yeah. And one of those kids did. I assume you read the Rolling Stone article or now. I don't know. I don't think so. No, not for this one.

Okay, they had a really big super long one that talked to two of the guys who were teenagers at the time who were the I mean, I think probably the some of the first people that solved it I'm not gonna go on record and say the first but one guy would only go by tech tekk and Another guy's name was Marcus Warner. Mm-hmm And they would eventually hook up online but initially this kid tech was

as a 15-year-old, learned that when he copied that image as a text document in Notepad, that you got what you would expect, which is a wall of text. But part of it was readable text that said, Tiberius Claudius Caesar says, and then it had a bunch of alphanumeric text. He knew that the Caesar cipher is one of the oldest ciphers, one of the oldest kinds of encryption, which is a

a substitution cipher where like this, I don't know if the Caesar was literally a is one B is two, but you can apply it to different, you know, numbers. And he knew that Caesar was the fourth emperor. So he substituted four letters down from each of the letters that followed and discovered a hidden message. Yeah. A website in fact. Yeah. That was the thing. So one of the reasons why the cicada 3301 puzzles is,

captured the attention of some really smart and capable people is because they were multi-layered. Like if you wanted to unlock one puzzle, you had to kind of go off over here and unlock a couple of other puzzles to unlock the key that you would take back to unlock the first puzzle, essentially. It was multi-layered, multi-step process.

And this was no exception to it. That cipher that you had to decode from the first image took you to a website, I guess an imager, image of a duck that just said, only decoys over here. And so you would think you just were sent intentionally down a blind alley. No, there was another hidden message in there, even though it didn't say that there was one. And so people would decipher that. It turned out that there was an encoded book

And then you could also find a link to a subreddit. And there were more passages from that book. And it turned out that book was a Welsh Arthurian legend.

And another Reddit post contained some Mayan numerals that you had to decode. That became a key that you could use to analyze the Arthurian legend with. And then you got another solution or another hint, I guess, to use from that point on. And what it said when you used that key to decode the Arthurian legend, it said, hey, here's a phone number. Give us a call.

Yes. All this to say that some super smart nerdy people were doing some super smart nerdy stuff. Yeah. Having a good time figuring this stuff out. And when they eventually got that phone number and called it, they got a message that said, very good. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original JPEG image. 3301 is one of them. You will have to find the other two. Then

Then multiply all three of these numbers together and add a dot com at the end to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye. Yeah. And I didn't read the Rolling Stone profile, but another solver, I think he was profiled in a National Post or Telegraph article. His name was Joel Erickson. He was from Sweden. I'm not sure how old he was at the time.

But he figured out that probably the other prime numbers were the dimensions of that image, 509 pixels by 503 pixels. And it turned out he was right. So he multiplied all those, took the answer, put a dot com on the end, and it took him to a website that had a countdown clock and a picture of a cicada. So he knew he was at the right spot. He'd multiplied correctly and guessed correctly.

And when that clock finished counting down, the website updated and there were a bunch of GPS coordinates that were posted all of a sudden. Yeah. And all of a sudden it said, find our symbol at the location nearest you. So all of a sudden this thing jumped.

from the internet out into the real world with real physical coordinates and it turned into kind of a scavenger hunt. There were 14 telephone poles all around the world, America, France, Japan, Poland, Russia, Spain, and other places.

And all of a sudden, like you would I mean, if you could afford to and had the time, I guess you would go to the one closest to you. Find that telephone pole flyer. And that had a QR coded again with a picture of that cicada. And that led to another cicada image with another riddle. And this one contained some some poetry. I think it was from.

cyberpunk writer William Gibson's poem Agrippa that was from 1992. And if you applied the key that they originally came up with to that poem, it led to another puzzle that would eventually lead to a website. Wow. Yeah, the website was the end. And so the guy Joel Erickson made it to the website.

By the time he got there, it had been shut down for a couple of reasons. One, I think it was shut down a little under a month ago.

And I guess they had posted on that website that they were disappointed that some people were collaborating. And they said they wanted the best, not followers. So they stopped the game. But apparently in the meantime, they had, some people had solved it and gotten to the site because a month later on that Reddit subreddit that they'd been posting Arthurian legends and Mayan codes on, they said, we found the intelligent individuals we were looking for.

Right. So but the fact that Joel Erickson made it to that site, that was it. Like he solved everything. He's considered a solver. He just got there too late because he heard about this after other people who started before him did.

Yeah, like Marcus Wanner and Tech. Exactly. And Marcus Wanner is one of the few people who's known to have made it past that site or gotten to that site within the time frame, the allotted time frame, and actually was in communication with the people who were behind Cicada 3301. He still has no idea exactly what they were doing or what they wanted, but based on the interview that they subjected him to and some of the interactions he had with them, he guessed

that they are some sort of hacker collective that is very much interested in promoting Internet privacy and Internet freedom. Yeah, it sounds like they may have been looking for code breakers because they gave him a private test of creating a decryption mechanism. And he failed that, I guess, or wasn't able to do it. So they, you know, they got rid of him. I had the impression he blew it off.

Oh, really? I saw that he didn't wasn't able to do it. Yeah, he just didn't deliver the goods. But I for some reason, one of the readings I had about him, it just made it sound like he was just like he lost interest. Maybe I don't know.

Oh, interesting. So to be clear, I believe what we just described was just that first puzzle. Right. And, you know, we don't have the time to get into the rest of the puzzles. I don't think I think the first two were solved. I don't think anyone ever solved the third. Really? Before they they permanently just removed every reference to it. I think about a month after that final puzzle was removed, they did post a message on 4chan once again that said,

We have now found the individuals we sought, sort of like that original message. Thus, our month-long journey ends. You are undoubtedly wondering what it is that we do. We are much like a think tank in that our primary focus is on researching and developing techniques to aid the ideas we advocate. Liberty, privacy, security. Yeah. And you could tell it was written by a computer person because there's like very little punctuation and lots of run-ons and all that. So it seems legit. It checks out.

So who is it? NSA or CIA or somebody? A lot of people say that, that it was an elaborate scheme to recruit, you know, cybersecurity people and hackers from like the dark reaches of the Internet. Somebody said that doesn't really make sense because they posted on 4chan and this was the era of Snowden. So.

They probably wouldn't have wanted people from 4chan at the time. That's not true. Snowden leaked in 2013 and the first puzzle was 2012. So it's possible it was the government.

entirely possible. But there were some other aspects of the whole contest that suggest it might have been otherwise, although some of this seems to have been purposely, deliberately misleading, right? Like there was a poster named Wind from Michigan, and she was kind of joining in like these collaborations on different sites until somebody figured out that she seemed to deliberately be giving out misleading information.

And then there was a claim on Pastebin from somebody who said that they were an ex-Cicada member, that they were a military officer from a non-English speaking country that had been recruited by a superior. And that he said Cicada is actually a left-hand path religion disguised as a progressive scientific organization. And that it was comprised of very smart people who weren't happy with the way the world was going. So they wanted to transform humanity into the Nietzschean Ubermensch.

Well, I did see stuff about religion. I saw some people posit that it was Julian Assange there. I mean, there's all kinds of fun theories out there on who it might have been. I think the one thing is pretty clear. It I feel really, really strongly that it probably wasn't just some like.

Somebody having fun doing some cool scavenger hunt mystery puzzle thing on the Internet. Like it seemed like it was probably some kind of legit recruitment. I agree. But I think my money's on a hacker collective, whether white hat or black hat. I don't know. But a group of hackers. Does that mean good guys or bad guys? Yeah. I don't know all this terminology. Well, I mean, it's pretty straightforward. You know, you can guess you just did.

All right. There you go. Did I pass the test? You did. You made it on to the next riddle. Why did you just text me a wooden duck picture then? That's right. Just decoys here. I say we take a break and we move on to the next mystery of the Internet. How about that? Ooh, tension builds. Stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck.

Stuff you should know. This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back.

Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's Hip Hop Beat Station. All right. So mystery number two, and I'm shocked I've never heard of this one.

As a music guy. Had you ever heard of it? Yes. I don't remember exactly where, but I'd never really researched it until we started researching this. So for all intents and purposes, not really. Okay. We're going to be talking about what's become known as the most mysterious song in the Internet. And this was a song that sometime between 82 and 84, a guy named Darius S.,

um recorded in germany on the north coast the coast of germany josh there's no such thing they mean some sort of landlocked border i think i think so uh reference to old bearer by the way um but yeah this guy did what all of us did in the early 80s is we would sit around listen to the radio and record songs from the radio onto our cassette deck so we could take them on the road with us and he was doing this

Had a big mixtape of all these things from, you know, the people that you would expect to hear from in 1984. About 25 of them, he wasn't sure who the songs were. And it sounds like he figured out who all of those songs came from, save one. Yeah, I think so. I think that was the only one that he did never figure out. He called those unknown ones his unknown pleasures, a Joy Division reference, right? Because most of this music was post-punk, new wave. Yeah.

And this song, this most mysterious song on the internet, is no exception. It sounds like a Rolling Stone writer put it. It has a rigid beat and dry monotone vocals and sounds like a synth pop hit you would have heard in a dance club in the 80s. Which is true. Like, all of that is true. But it also...

It has like a strong guitar riff, like early Joy Division. It kind of has a little bit of that, but it's also more produced than that. And the vocals, the lyrics and the vocals are incomprehensible, except in little snippets. And you hear just enough that to me, the fact that you can't fully understand what the person is saying and it's so open to interpretation, I think that's what starts to suck people in the most. Yeah.

Yeah, probably so. The only thing I'll disagree with about the Rolling Stone is that it sounded like a hit. I don't think the song's very good. Oh, really? I find it. I wouldn't say good, but I find it definitely catchy. I mean, it's OK. And I have been walking around singing it. So it must be a little catchy. But compared to the music of that era, and this is just my dumb opinion, I think it sounds like what I think it is, which was a fairly amateurish Eastern block.

recording a song that sounded a little bit like the rest of the music of the era. So the thing is, I don't know if we've said entirely yet, no one on the planet seems to know what the song is

what the name of the song is or who the artist is who created this, what the band is or the solo artist, whoever. Not a single person on the planet. And you might be like, well, you know, maybe you just haven't looked deep enough. Wrong. People have looked...

into the depths of 1980s Germany using all sorts of different tools to analyze the song digitally. I mean, like people have really dug into this. And the other thing about it that makes it so impressive that it remains mysterious is that people have been searching for who made this song since before 2010. Yeah.

Let's talk about that story, shall we? Yeah, you mentioned using modern tools. One of the mysteries from Darius was he was like, I guess in his German accent, which I'm not going to try, said, I'm not even sure, for sure, that I taped it from this program on the Ende R 1st station in Germany, the music for young people program that he listened to. He's like, because I recorded stuff from other stations and other programs,

But they have since proven that, proven that basically using spectrogram analysis. They actually pinpointed it and said, no, there was a 10 kilohertz line that this station used as like a modulation scheme that isn't found on other stations. And they've been able to do that.

And they found that modulation line in that song. So it's like, at least we know it was definitely from Ende R. Einz. Right. So they figured that out. They also figured out that it was at least from 1984 because the Technics deck. Is it Technics or Techniques? I always said Techniques, but who knows? That may have been wrong. Okay. The tape deck made by Technics or Techniques. You know the brand.

that he was using to record off the radio wasn't made until 1984. And you might think, well, okay, it could be 1985, 86. The song, the other songs that are on this tape, which are known as Cassette 4, were songs from XTC, The Cure,

I could not for the life of me find what songs they were, but everybody seems to be satisfied that these Ecstasy songs and Cure songs and other songs that were recorded on that same tape came out in 1984 or right before 1984. So the guess is that this was taped off of the radio between 1983 and 1984. Yeah, and you know what? There's people that have time on their hands and...

technological wherewithal that we don't have. I'm calling on somebody somewhere to find

And make a playlist of cassette four and put it on whatever your favorite streamer is. Yeah, I can't believe it's not out there, actually. I bet that's a banging playlist. I'll bet it is, too. So back to the story, the initial story of where this all came from. Darius, he apparently was content with just putting a question mark next to the song or in the song's place on the track listing on the cassette.

But his sister was not satisfied with that. His sister, Lydia, who just goes by Lydia H. in this Rolling Stone interview, she always really wanted to know who made this song. I don't know if obsession is the right word, but it was certainly something that drove her to some extent. And as the Internet kind of blossomed and grew, I think starting in 2007, she started sharing it.

on the internet. There's a couple of sites that she posted it on initially, one a Canadian site, another a German site, that are kind of, they crowdsource people to say, what song is this?

And that was the start of baffling Internet users with this song. Yeah. And that's where I would have expected an answer if there was one. It's on YouTube. You can listen to it. People on YouTube and other places, too, have tried to decipher the lyrics as best they can. It seems pretty clear that it's probably a foreign or at least a non-American speaker foreign to us. But people are pretty sure it's in English.

No, it's definitely in English. Okay. I mean, I think it's clearly in English. Great. Are people debating that? No, I don't think so. You can't get all the words. You can get a lot of them. Like the Wind is the title that a lot of people have put on it because, you know, the very beginning of the song, it's like the wind. But is it? I don't even know if it's saying like the wind. Mm-hmm.

It almost sounds like something again, but I can't even tell that part. Yeah. So there's a bunch of names for the song, which the official generic name for it is TMS, the mysterious song or the most mysterious song on the Internet. But people call it Blind the Wind.

Locked away. Some people think that's what he's saying instead of like the wind. I can hear it actually, as a matter of fact. And I can't remember what the line is, but there's other lines in there that make it sound like he is talking about being locked up. Check it in. Check it out. Take it in. Take it out. Disco woman.

There's a lot of different names for this song based on what people think this guy is saying because no one can say what the lyrics are. No one knows. You can't do it. And beware there because there's madness that way. If you really start paying attention and trying to figure out what the lyrics are, friend, you are going to end up with a new hobby you may or may not want.

Yeah. They've gotten in touch with that original DJ who said, you know, I don't know what that song was. I certainly don't remember playing it. No recollection of it whatsoever. This was a time, obviously, when Germany was split in half, or maybe not technically half, by the Cold War. And, you know, the DJs were like, you know, we would get, like, the...

Tapes thrown over the wall at us that we didn't even know what they were, but they were just music that people wanted us to hear and play. Here's my theory. Okay. Occam's Razor, man. It's a song that someone made and they died and no one knew they made it. I guess that is probably the simplest solution, yes. It's just no one, no one knowing that that person made it. No one recognizing that person's voice. I mean, this is widespread. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's possible just the right person hasn't heard it yet. I don't know. But I kind of tend to agree with you. I think that's probably what happened. It was an obscure East German or Eastern Bloc musician who managed to get their tape out. Yeah.

And I mean, that's not unprecedented. Tapes went both ways through the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. There's a really great documentary called Chuck Norris versus Communism that came out in 2015. And it's about how people smuggling in American action movies into Romania, they think essentially led to the downfall of Nikolai Ceausescu and his regime because people kind of saw how life could be. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah. Did Chuck Norris win? Yeah, he won because there's no more communism in Romania as far as I know. Do you know what would be great? I mean, I'm 53 years old. I'm way into music and I've gone down some rabbit holes about music. I had never heard of this before this week. Like,

you know, maybe the person who made it literally has never heard this whole mystery. And in a year, someone's like, hey, that was me. I know. I think that a lot of people would be really sad when that happened. Yeah. Then just keep it to yourself, buddy, if that's the case. Everyone likes a mystery a little bit more. So let's talk about a couple of a couple more things that people have done for this investigation. I mean, you said spectrography, right? Yeah.

Am I saying that correctly? I don't know. Spectrograph? Yes. Spectrography?

I think so. It sounds right. Jeez. So in addition to that, people, and in addition to getting in touch with Paul Baskerville, the DJ who hosted that show in 1984, people have gotten in touch with the archivist at that radio station and gotten a full list of playlists for every single episode of that radio show. This song does not turn up on it.

Don't forget, though, they've proven that it was played on this radio station. So they started looking at playlists for other radio shows. They've gotten a substantial number of them. Still hasn't turned up on any playlist, anything that could be this song.

And then someone else essentially pinned the song in between 1983 and 1984 because they believe that the synthesizer that was used was a specific type of Yamaha, a DX7, that was not available until 1983. Isn't that nuts that people have done all this?

Uh, that one's the most believable cause that's just how keyboard nerds are, but sure. Yeah. I just think that's super cool that people have just tried all of this different stuff and it still is just not budging. It will not budge. Yeah. And again, if that guy's out there, um, just, you know, let that be your own little secret and maybe that's the case. Maybe this person knows this and they just think this is awesome. And, uh, you know, who knows? That's why it's a great mystery.

His friends and family are like, why are you always tittering to yourself? It's so weird. Why are you talking about the wind? So if you haven't heard the song, it's worth going to check out. Just look up the most mysterious song on the Internet and you will find it for sure. Although you can also look up like the wind and mysterious and all that stuff and it'll turn it up. Yeah. And to be clear, I don't think it's like a bad song. I just think it's not like as good.

It didn't become a big hit for a reason. Yeah, I think hit is a little overly generous, too. I'm with you. But you could still have heard it at like an 80s club on like Blue Wave Night for sure. Yeah, there was plenty of worse music than this back then. For sure. But there was also a lot of really good music, too. Like the wind.

Rocks away. Disco girl. Okay. Well, I think we reached the end of the most mysterious song on the Internet, our second of our three mysteries of the Internet. And we'll take a message break. We'll come back and we will reveal the third after this. Stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck. Woo!

Stuff you should know. This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back.

Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's Hip Hop Beat Station. ♪♪

We're back. And you know, dude, this could be a whole other show for us. Just three mysteries per week. Fifteen minutes of pop. You like that, huh? I don't know. It's kind of fun. Careful what you say. Do you have time on your hands like that? No, no, no. I quit my other show for a reason. You as well. We need to edit that part out, man. I don't want the wrong people to hear that and be like, hey, that's a great idea. All right. Take it away, my friend. Oh, okay.

Here we go. We're talking about what, in my opinion, is one of the top three great mysteries of the Internet.

Yeah, I think I agree. The mystery of John Titor. I believe that's how it's pronounced. I've only ever seen it written down. I've never heard anybody say it out loud. But I've heard that name for a long time because this is an ancient Internet mystery. And as a matter of fact, it turns out it seems to predate essentially the Internet or at the very least it was it finds its origin off the Internet through fax machines and the radio, no less.

Yeah, and this is another one that a lot of people have gotten really into. Like, when

went on Reddit and was kind of looking at some stuff and it broke my brain such that I was like, all right, we're going to do our best to give a little overview here. Yeah, I think something about the most mysterious song on the internet, it seems far more wholesome and less dark. For some reason, getting sucked into the John Titor mystery seems like you could really just go crazy, essentially. Well, the first one was either like,

MI6 or CIA. This one is possible time traveler in civil war. And the middle one was like a cool synth pop hit. Yeah. So let's just tell them a little bit about John Titor. Okay. Um, John Titor is a internet based that no one's ever seen or spoken to him in real life. Um,

who claimed to be a time traveler from the year 2036 in America, an America that had been racked, like you said, by civil war that had gone on for a while, but was ended by World War III, which presumably that brought America together again. Um,

And that it seems like the American economy has completely collapsed and everybody's much more family and local community centered. And he said that the average day in the life in 2036 outside Tampa, Florida, where he's from, is like a day on the farm.

And you might be like, wow, that's pretty descriptive. That is the tip of the iceberg of the information that John Titor willingly gave out as a time traveler on the Internet starting in 1997 or 8 and then in 2000 again. Yeah, he he said the U.S. had been divided into five zones and that time travel had been invented, had been invented two years previous in 2034. Yeah.

But let's back up to where this started, because it all started in, like you said, pre-Internet in a very kind of unlikely way, I think, by somebody sending a couple of faxes to a radio show, Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM.

And this was read on the air. And then a couple of years later, posted basically the same thing online on the Time Travel Institute site, which is a site that's been around since 97, dedicated to temporal sciences. And the user's name was Time Travel underscore zero. So like we said, time traveler from the future and started saying things like,

You know, there were six components to the time machine. There was an onboard or onboard cesium clocks, twin micro singularities, which are tiny, very tiny black holes that he traveled using a stationary mass temporal displacement unit powered by two topspin dual positive singularities producing a typical offset Tipler sinusoid.

And it was put in the back of a 66 Corvette. Yeah. Very back to the future. That's the part that gets me. Very back to the future. The thing about John Titor and the posts that he posted are that this stuff that is this what sounds like gibberish is actually not at all made up.

For example, a Tipler sinusoid refers to a theoretical type of time travel that was proposed in the 70s by a physicist named Frank Tipler. And he essentially figured out mathematically that if you could take two huge masses, many times denser than the sun, say two black holes, and pull them out, spaghettify them essentially, and then spin them really fast, right?

like billions of rotations a second, what you would do is essentially pull open space-time and open essentially a portal to somewhere in the future, possibly somewhere in the past, possibly galaxies away from where you started. And again, this is hypothetical, theoretical, but this is not something that the average person is walking around in their head, like that the Tipler sinusoid exists.

So I'm just impressed. And that's just another example where if you put all this stuff together and all of the how different and complimentary and very infrequently contradictory the information that John Titor gave out was. It's I see how some people who believe that time travel is possible consider John Titor an actual time traveler. Okay.

I don't, but I could see how people do. It's just so convincing. Like the stuff he says is so convincing and he seems to have no agenda whatsoever. That's the other thing. I'm not so sure about that part, but he would go on to talk, you know, again, you know, he was a U.S. soldier in Tampa living on a river in a tree house and said that he was there on an official mission. He was supposed to

He was sent back in time by his, I guess, the army or the U.S. government.

Uh, but he stopped off for a personal, um, personal reasons in 2000, basically to get, uh, family pictures that were lost during the civil war mementos to visit his family, that kind of thing. Right. But the official mission that he was sent back for supposedly by the federal government was to go back to, uh, Minnesota in 1975 to get an IBM 5100, which was the first portable computer, um,

And his grandfather supposedly worked on developing this thing. And so that's why he was sent back to get this computer so they could debug legacy computer programs that they, you know, they're obsolete and they couldn't work with anymore because they didn't have this old working computer. Right. And so that's cool. That's an obscure computer. Again, most people aren't walking around with awareness that the IBM 5100 ever existed. But even more than that.

John Titor said that the reason they wanted a 5100 is because it had a specific, unique component to it. It apparently could run other programs written for like those huge mainframes. And that that was the reason they needed it in the future. And that IBM had actually like kept this quiet. And it turns out that's true. I think the Rochester, Minnesota Post Bulletin got in touch with one of their local residents who worked on the IBM 5100 in the mid 70s.

who confirmed, like, that's absolutely true. There was this little quirk that was peculiar to the 5100, and IBM did not publicize this at all. So it's just so bizarre that this person knew that, and that that was the reason that they were sent back into the future. I mean, come on, dude. Like, think about how creative that is if the guy is just a hoaxster.

Yeah. So he goes on to and this is a very key thing is he went on to say, by the way,

The many worlds theory of physics is correct, which means that, you know, for every possible different outcome, the universe splits into different versions to accommodate those outcomes. He's like, that's all true. So the fact that I'm saying he didn't say this part, but the fact that he talks about the the George W. Bush election sowing discord and there being an uprising and a civil war in the in the 2000s.

The fact that none of that happened, he said, that's just because that I went back in time and changed the outcome. So basically anything I say, you can't prove wrong. That's one part of it. Yes. He was saying like because his very presence would change it and that he came from a different time stream himself. The other implication of that is that he can't possibly create a paradox.

Even going and visiting his family, and I read his three-year-old self in 2000, would not create a paradox because he comes from a different time stream, did not exist in this time stream until he hopped over to it. So there's no paradox for him being there and meeting himself as a younger kid, right? Again, really genius details that

So I feel like I'm coming off like I'm trying to convince listeners to believe that this is real. That's not the case. If you do believe it's real, great. I'm just so thoroughly impressed with the creativity behind every component and facet of what John Titor said that it's just – I'm just in awe, agog even you could say. Yeah.

So as this thing gained steam over the years, he finally eventually made a post in March 2001 that said this is the last post. I'm going back to 2036. Smell you later. And he wrote this big, long, kind of fairly deep philosophical article.

take on what he learned and what he saw and also the fact that he had already been talking about the fact that like, by the way, people in the future don't think you're too great and that you guys haven't been doing the right things and you kind of screwed everything up for the future. So he kind of writes this kind of nice long thing at the end

which was ended with farewell John. You know, there's a lot of symbolism going on. Like I encourage people to read it in full because it's pretty cool. It is. It is very cool. But he basically says like, here's why I'm leaving and why I won't be back or recommend anybody come back here either because you guys don't take care of one another. Like he talked about how

people stranded on the side of the road with car trouble, people just drive past him. Nobody stops. And he asked his family that he was visiting why people don't stop. And they were saying, it's too dangerous to stop and pick somebody up. You never know if they're going to kill you. And they need to learn the lesson about making sure you don't run out of gas in the first place. And he's just like aghast at this, at how people treat one another in America in the early 2000s.

And, um, in that farewell thing, he said, make sure you keep a gas can with you for when your car dies on the side of the road. Um, and I'm going back to this, this time and place where, you know, community and family is absolutely everything.

A utopia, if you will. A bit. But he didn't talk it up like a utopia. It sounded like it was probably you or I would consider it hard living. But to him, it was vastly superior to the kind of lifestyle that we live pre-Civil War here in the United States in 2024. Yeah. So this is one that a lot of people have tried to solve over the years. I feel like it's been solved personally. Yeah, totally.

Signs, you know, there were people that got on the web and started looking at metadata and like, what's it called when you can pinpoint where something came from? Oh, I can't think of it now. Pinpointing? No. Something to deal with your computer and where it was posting from. Geolocating? Yeah.

Yeah, but there's another word for it. I know this is people are just yelling at me, but long story short, both the metadata and this method of pinpointing that a website called Hoax Hunter conducted this investigation pointed to this area of Florida in both cases. So that really narrowed it down. And then I believe they also found.

a registration to like an LLC or a company with the word Titor in it, that all it had was a P.O. box from that same area of Florida. And so they basically think that it is there are three brothers, the Haber brothers. For my money, it's Larry or his younger brother, John, and not the older, I think, older brother, Maury Haber. Yeah. So Larry Haber exists. Maury Haber exists. I've seen that John Haber does not exist. Right.

But the Habers do seem they certainly have something to do with this, because like you said, they run the John Titor Foundation. And Larry Haber claims to be the legal representative of Kay Titor, John Titor's mother. She doesn't seem to exist either. And it's possible the whole thing was just a hoax carried out by these guys.

Totally possible. But what's interesting is I turned up another article that interviews in part a guy named Joseph Matheny, who's a multimedia artist, who said we were the ones who started this whole thing by sending those faxes to Art Bell. And we stopped after that. And apparently some coast to coast fans said.

took up the mantle and carried it on from there a couple years later. So two groups that weren't communicating or working with one another were inadvertently collaborating, or one was collaborating with the other later on, to create this whole hoax that was the John Titor mystery. Now, where did you see that the youngest brother didn't exist? Well, I know that Larry Haber, I believe it was Larry, who said, I don't have a brother, John.

And I think I saw somewhere else that John is not real, that there's not a John Haber. Interesting, because I saw stuff, quotes from John. But, like, I think it's one of those things where you can't trust anything you're reading at this point. Exactly. 100%. Because, again, Larry Haber is saying that he represents Kay Titor, and Kay Titor doesn't seem to exist. Like, there's a lot of people, again, people.

People have not met these people. Everything has been on the Internet. So it's there's no telling who is involved or who isn't involved, who's real, who's not real. It's fascinating in that regard. So there's multi layers to what makes this whole mystery just so great. Yeah. Well, I mean, they're on the Internet. Those two guys. I mean, at least the two guys are. Yeah.

And like one of them is a very well to do business person. And I don't know. It's very interesting. Yeah. The Habers definitely exists. Larry and Maury and possibly John. But I saw he doesn't. Right. I understand. OK. Well, no, I was wrapping it up for everybody else. I know, you know. Gotcha. I think that's it. Right, Chuck? I got nothing else. I mean, but a deep sense of unfulfilled, you know, podcast duty. Dutydom. Right. I'm with you on that.

Since Chuck said dutydom, of course that means he's just unlocked listener mail. I'm going to call this tomato fun fact from Brian Creeble. Or maybe it's Cribble.

In Germany, it would be Creeble, but who knows? Hey, guys. In the salsa episode, you mentioned that when Europeans first encountered tomatoes, they thought they were deadly because they remember the nightshade family. I forget where I learned this, but this idea was initially fueled because some of them were actually killed by eating tomatoes. However, it was not the tomatoes that killed them. They were eating them off lead plates, and the acid from the tomatoes dissolved some of the lead, which was then consumed along with the tomatoes, thus killing some. This is what...

Burn. Who was that from?

That was from Brian. Brian, that's awesome. Thank you very much. I've definitely never heard that one, so thanks for filling that out for us. And if you want to fill something out for us like Brian did, you can send it via email too. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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