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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know.
A production of I Heart Radio.
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.
It's I too. Yeah. Jerry's at camp right now.
Can I do a quick C.O.A. 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.
We are certainly not going to get into it in the detail that will satisfy you.
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 C.O.A.
That was like a true bona fide C.O.A.
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.
And 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 of things.
Just stop there. And I'm saying I'm excluding true crime, obviously.
These are just oddities that have not been solved at this point.
Maybe you never will be solved, but probably could be at some point.
You never know. Well, now we're just eating into our cicada.
Okay. I'm sorry. So let's talk first, I guess, then yes, about cicada 33.01, 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 33.01.
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 compare very much to like the moth on the silence of the lamb's poster.
Yeah, totally. Especially the first image had a cicada.
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 defining us.
We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through.
Good luck. Cryptic. 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.
Stagnography is what it's called.
Hiving 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 people just kind of said about getting busy with it as some people say.
Yeah. And one of those kids, I assume you read the Rolling Stone article or no.
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 some of the first people that solved it.
I'm not going to go on record and say the first, but one guy would only go by tech TKK.
And another guy's name was Marcus Warner.
And they would eventually hook up online.
But initially this kid tech 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 alpha numeric text.
He knew that the Caesar ciphers, one of the oldest ciphers, one of the oldest kinds of encryption, which is a substitution cipher where like this, I don't know if the Caesar was literally a is 1, b is 2.
But you can apply it to different 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, a website in fact.
Yeah, that was the thing.
So one of the reasons why this Keta 3301 puzzles 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 went, were sent intentionally done 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 or theory in 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 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. I was 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 multiply all three of these numbers together and add a dot com at the end to find the next step.
Good luck. Goobye. Yeah.
Rolling stone profile, but another solver, I think he was profiled in a national poster telegraph article.
This theme 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 that took the answer, put a dot com on the end and it took him to a website.
They had a countdown clock and a picture of his cicada.
So he knew he was at the right spot.
He'd multiplied correctly and guessed correctly.
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. All of a sudden, it's had fined our symbol at the location near a studio.
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 code it again with the picture of that cicada.
And that led to another cicada image with another riddle and this one contained 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. And so there's that 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.
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've been posting Arthurian legends and Mayan codes on, they said we found the intelligent individuals we were looking for.
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 check.
Exactly. 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 timeframe, the a lot of time frame and actually was in communication with the people who were behind CK to 3301.
He still has no idea exactly what they were doing or what they wanted.
But based on the interview that they subjected it to and some of like the interactions he had with them, he guess 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 codebreakers 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 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 for some reason, one of the readings I had about him, it just made it sound like he lost interest maybe.
I don't know. That's interesting.
So to be clear, I believe what we just described was just that first puzzle.
And we don't have the time to get into the rest of the puzzles.
I don't think the first two were solved.
I don't think anyone ever solved the third before 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 I 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.
It was an elaborate scheme to recruit cyber security 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? 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 paste bin from a somebody who said that they were an ex-secative member, that they were a military officer from a non-English speaking country that had been recruited by a superior.
And that he said cicadas 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 positive it was Julian Assange.
There's all kinds of fun theories out there on who it might have been.
I think the one thing is pretty clear.
I feel really, really strongly that it probably wasn't just somebody having fun doing some cool scavenger hunt mystery puzzle thing on the internet.
It seemed like it was probably some kind of legit recruitment.
I agree. But I think my money's on hacker collective whether white hat or black hat I don't know, but a group of hackers.
Does that mean good guys are bad guys?
Yeah. I don't know how this terminology.
Well, I mean, it's pretty straightforward.
You know, you can guess you just did.
All right. Here you go. Did I pass a test?
You did. You made it onto the next riddle.
Why did you just text me?
It wouldn't duck. It'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.
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Alright so mystery number two and I'm shocked I've never heard of this one.
Is it 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.
For all intents and purposes is 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 recorded in Germany on the North Coast, the coast of Germany, Josh.
There's no such thing. I mean, some sort of landlock border I think.
I think so. Reference to old bearer by the way.
But yeah, this guy did what all of us did in the early eighties is we would sit around and listen to the radio and record songs from the radio onto our cassette deck.
So we could take them on the road with this and he was doing this.
Had a big mix tape of all these things from 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.
He called those unknown ones his unknown pleasure is a joy division reference.
Because most of this music was post punk, new wave.
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 eighties.
It's just true like all of that is true.
But it also 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 that you hear just enough that to me, the fact that you 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, probably so. The only thing I'll disagree with about the Rolling Stone is 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 okay 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 person 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 soloist, whoever, not a single person on the planet.
And you might be like, well, 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.
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 NDR Eintz Station in Germany, the music for young people program that he listened to.
He's like, because I recorded stuff for mother 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 found that modulation line in that song.
So it was like, at least we know it was definitely from NDR Eintz.
Right. They figured that out, they also figured out that it was at least from 1984 because the techniques, is it techniques or techniques?
I always said techniques, but who knows that may have been wrong.
Okay. The tape deck made by techniques or techniques, you know the brand, that he was using to record off the radio, wasn't made until 1984.
That's awesome. And you might think, well, okay, it could be 1985, 1986.
The other songs that are on this tape, which are known as cassette 4, were songs from XTC, the cure.
I could not, for life of me, find what songs they were.
But everybody seems to be satisfied that these XTC songs and cure songs and other songs that were played on that, 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 wear with all that we don't have.
I'm calling on somebody somewhere to find the, and make a playlist of cassette 4 and put it on your, whatever your favorite streamer is.
Yeah. I can't believe it's not out there actually.
I bet that's a bang in 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 obsessions are right word, but it was certainly something that drove her to some extent.
And as the internet kind of blossomed and grew, I think in starting in 2007, she started sharing it on the internet.
There's a couple of sites that she posted it on initially, one of Canadian sites, another German site that are kind of the crowdsource people to say what, 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 for 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 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.
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. Take it in. Take it out.
Just go 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 it's beware there because there's madness that way.
If you really start paying attention and trying to figure out what the lyrics are, 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 DJ's were like, you know, we would get like tapes thrown over the wall at us that we didn't even know what they were, but they were just music that people wanted to stick here and play.
Here's my theory. Okay.
Ockham's Razerman. 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. 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 block musician who managed to get their tape out.
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.
It's about how people smuggling in American action movies into Romania.
They think essentially led to the downfall of Nikolai Chuchescu in 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 in 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 you made it literally has never heard this whole mystery in a year.
Someone's like, 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 OK.
So everyone likes a mystery a little bit more.
So let's talk about a couple of more things that people have done for this investigation.
I mean, you said spectrography.
Spectography. Right? Am I saying that correctly?
I don't know. Spectrograph?
Yes. Spectrography? I think so.
It sounds right. Geez. So in addition to that, people, in addition to getting in touch with Paul Basquerville, 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 this 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?
That one's the most believable because 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, just let that be your own little secret.
And maybe that's a case.
Maybe this person knows this.
And they just think this is awesome.
And 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 I'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 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 turned it at like an 80s club on like the wave night for sure.
Yeah. There was plenty of worse music than this at the back then.
For sure. But there is also a lot of really good music too.
Like the wind. It's a rock so way.
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. Darshan Shun.
Stuff you should know. Hi, icons.
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We're back and you know, dude, this could be a whole other show for us.
Just three mysteries per week, 15 minutes a pop.
You like that? No, no, it's kind of fun.
I don't know if you did it.
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.
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 Titer.
I believe the tower'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 facts, machines and the radio no less.
Yeah. And this is another one that a lot of people have gotten really into.
Like I went on Reddit and was kind of looking at some stuff.
And it broke my brain such that it 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 Titer mystery seems like you could really just just go crazy essentially.
Well, the first one was either like in my six 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 Titer.
Okay. John Titer is a internet based, that no one's ever seen or spoken to him in real life, poster 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, presumably that brought America together again.
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 Titer willingly gave out as a time traveler on the internet starting in 1997 or eight and then in 2000 again.
Yeah. He said the US had been divided into five zones and that time travel had been invented, had been invented two years previous in 2034.
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 1997 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 CZM 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 core vet.
Yeah. Very back to the future.
That's the part that gets me very back to the future.
The thing about John Titer and the posts that he posted are that this stuff that this, it 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, like billions of rotations a second.
You would, 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.
Oh, sure. I'm just impressed that in 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 Titer gave out was, I can see how some people who believe that time travel is possible consider John Titer 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.
Ah, I'm not so sure about that part, but he would go on to talk, you know, again, you know, he was a US 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, you know, sent back in time by his, I guess the army or the US government, but he stopped off for a personal, personal reasons in 2000 basically
to get family pictures that were lost during the Civil War, Memento's 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 Minnesota in 1975 to get an IBM 5100, which was the first portable computer 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 Titer 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-Bolotin 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 into the future.
I mean, come on, dude. Think about how creative that is if the guy is just a hoaxer.
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 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, well, he didn't say this part, but the fact that he talks about the George W.
Bush election sowing discord and they're being an uprising in a civil war 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.
And he's like, I'm just a little bit of a paradox for him being there and meeting him 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 Tider said that it's just I'm just in awe, a god even you could say.
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 a fairly deep philosophical 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.
There's a lot of symbolism going on.
I encourage people to read it and follow because it's pretty cool.
It is. 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 who with ink stranded on the side of the road with car trouble, people just drive past them.
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 a gas that this how people treat one another in America in the early 2000s.
And 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.
And I'm going back to this time and place where, you know, community and family is absolutely everything.
A utopia, if you will, a bit.
He didn't he didn't talk it up like a utopia.
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.
And 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.
A pinpointing? No. Something deal with your computer and where it was posting from.
See you later. I can't remember.
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 tighter in it that all it had was a PO 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.
And the Habers do seem, they certainly have something to do with this because like you said, they run the John Titer Foundation and Larry Haber claims to be the legal representative of K-Titer, John Titer'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, again, named Joseph Mathini, 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 took up the mantle and carried it on from there a couple of 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 Titer 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 to 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%. Again, Larry Haber is saying that he represents K Titer and K Titer doesn't seem to exist.
Like there's a lot of people, again, people have not met these people.
Everything has been on the internet.
So 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.
I don't know. It's very interesting.
Yeah. The Haber definitely exists.
Larry and Mori, possibly John, but I saw he doesn't.
Right. I understand. Okay.
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 podcast duty, duty to them.
I'm with you on that. Since Chuck said duty to them, of course, that means he's just unlocked a listener mail.
I'm going to call this tomato fun fact from Brian Crebowl.
Or maybe it's Crebowl in Germany.
It would be Crebowl, but who knows?
Hey guys, in this also 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 led to the belief that tomatoes were poisonous and persisted throughout Europe for a little while.
One little bit of hubris for a group that thought they knew everything, there was to know, that they were a step above the indigenous communities.
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 to.
Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcast.iHeartRadio.com.
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