Before he allegedly left our worldline in 2001, the person claiming to be John Titor, the Internet time traveler from 2036, wanted to try an experiment.
He offered to take letters back with him to 1998, and send them to alternate versions of people in this timeline. It would be a quick stop on his return to 1975, whence he would jump back to his future 2036.
So, wanting to be a part of this “experiment,” certain message board posters agreed to send their letters to Pamela. She was, I guessyou could say, Titor’s confidant during his trip through our worldline. She would compile the letters – most of which were, I assume, emails – and pass them on to the time traveler.
This was it: A chance for everyone to send messages to their alternate selves, to let them know about important events in their futures, or just say “Hi!” One participant sent an encrypted message that only he could understand, while Pamela sent an old-fashioned written letter, as she didn’t have access to the Internet in 1998.
No one expected anything to happen. Some participated just for the fun of it, and those who believed Titor was, indeed, an actual time traveler, knew they likely wouldn’t notice any changes, anyway. The messages would be sent to an entirely different worldline.
John Titor even said as much. It just wasn’t part of the deal.
But when it comes to time travel, you never know what you’re going to get. Many of the participants who agreed to send messages experienced what have come to be known as “Alter-vús.”
What Is An Alter Vu?
An Alter vu, in the context of the John Titor story, is a strange phenomenon in which someone remembers his or her reality differently.
These days, some may refer to it as the Mandela Effect. But the Alter-vús of the John Titor saga seemed to involve a great many incredible things, far more than just memory. Buildings disappearing, or popping up where they hadn’t been before. Signs changing. Strange dreams. Disorientation on a temporal scale.
Like time being rewritten before their eyes, something wasn’t quite right.
Pamela, herself, claims to have dreamed about a time traveler visiting her in a car in April 1998. She’d recorded it in a dream journal, but it wasn’t until the arrival of John Titor in 2000, and his ultimate offer to send messages to the past, that she remembered it. Thus, she believes it may have been an “alter-vú.”
And one unfortunate participant claimed he was “losing his mind,” and was allegedly never heard from again. I don’t know anything about that.
If you’ve seen the movie Donnie Darko, the whole thing reminds me a lot of its ending, where you had different characters watching events listlessly, or staring off as if they could vaguely remember, or at least feel, what happened in the tangent universe. Frank touches his eye, the biggest giveaway.
I won’t muse on whether or not John Titor was an actual time traveler here, but the Alter-vu is an interesting little end to the tale.
