by: Maddie Rowley

If you’re a thirty-something millennial, you’ve probably dipped a toe into the world of TikTok and maybe even now, like me, you’re kind of addicted. It’s so easy to scroll through endless 60-second videos that cater to any and all kinds of interests. There’s a little TikTok corner reserved for just about everything you can think of—true crime, interior design, refrigerator organization (yes, you read that correctly) and even time travel. 

As someone who’s into all things supernatural and paranormal, but isn’t really into scifi, I was a little bit surprised when I found myself diving DEEP into the rabbit hole of #timetravel TikTok. This corner of the app is full of mysterious people who claim to be from the year 2028 or 2029, or they’re an anonymous account that swears they’re from an unheard-of planet in the year 2582 who has come back to warn us about near-future disastrous events. 

I’m not sure whether some of the people behind these accounts are trying to be satirical or serious but either way, they say they’re out to prove to us TikTok watchers that they’re real time travelers by omnisciently revealing future world events. For example: @thatonetimetraveler, who has over 1.5 million followers shared a video compilation full of tropical stock photos with overlaid text that said:  “On October 7th, 2023, signs of life will be discovered on Venus and Neptune,” and “On May 5th, 2022 a super tsunami will hit America’s west coast.”

Some of these “time travelers” even tried to predict who would win the 2020 Presidential Election (one TikToker I saw guessed right, and the other guessed wrong). 

Time travel TikTok was actually just the tip of the iceberg for me. I knew that however silly these videos were to watch, they were all so clearly hoaxes. So that sent me down yet another rabbithole where I stumbled upon something even more interesting than random people on TikTok “predicting” future events.

Photographs and videos of time travel “proof” really sucked me in, and so did the story of the mysterious Y2K time traveler who went by the name “John Titor.” Titor said he was from the year 2036 and that he traveled back to the year 1975 to bring back a specific IBM computer system. He said he decided to stop in the year 2000 for “personal reasons.”

All of Titor’s correspondences (which came in the form of faxes to paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM) about time travel were compelling because they were full of scientific explanations about the machine he used to travel back to 1975, but also, like the TikTok time travelers, his foretelling of future events that turned out to be all wrong. 

Titor predicted, among other things, that a civil war would erupt in America in 2004, which would ultimately culminate in a WWIII in 2015. Oops!

A man named Joseph Matheny claims to be behind the early 2000s John Titor persona. Matheny said the project was merely a form of art. “This was pure art, in the sense that we could build a story, build a character that didn't have books, movies, and media attached.”

I came up for air after reading about John Titor and immediately moved to YouTube to watch compilations of zoomed-in photographs singling out possible time travelers. Black and white photos from another time, of a man in a golf hat and a trench coat with his hand up to his ear, giving the impression that he’s on a cell phone. The only issue? There were 100% definitely no cell phones whenever this photo was taken. 

I like to let my imagination get away with me and believe that time travel is real—that maybe there’s a group of time-travelers somewhere out there, blending in to the crowds, working furiously to prevent disasters from happening that they already knew about, but the rational side of me thinks that time travel probably isn’t a thing yet (unless, I guess you’re a ghost… which would be an entirely different story). 

What do you think? Does time travel exist? Do you think humans have been time traveling for decades or more?