Ah ... that's a long story! I've written about it here and elsewhere many times, but I'll sum it up. Between November 2000 and March 2001, a man who called himself, "John Titor" posted here at TTI (and elsewhere) claiming that he had come from an alternate version of the year 2036. You can Google that and read for days.His story was fascinating, but I believed him to be an anti-government, militia, doomsday-prepper type of person who was using fiction to promote his cause. At one point, he claimed he would be making a stop in the Spring of 1998 before returning to his own time. He offered to forward a message to our past selves. I took him up on that offer.
Spring 1998 was a very difficult, pivotal time for me and my family. Titor's offer became an enticing thought experiment. I wrote an email to my younger self that warned of what was coming in 1998 and how to avoid the problems I had lived through. Then, I went further, and gave myself vast amounts of future knowledge. This included three years of news, stock market charts and lottery drawing statistics. I also included all posts and data from Titor, with the idea of using the vast fortune I bestowed to accelerate the development of time travel.
As one layer of proof, I included a couple of photos of my son and nephew. They were young at the time, so three years of growth would be immediately revealing. I then compressed all the data into nested, password-protected zip files. In the plain text, I asked six questions that only I could answer correctly. The answers to the first three questions (when combined as a single phrase without spaces) opened the first layer. The answers to the second three questions opened the final layer and unzipped all the data. I intentionally left the details in the enclosed personal message vague, assuming anyone could read it - saying things like, "your wife" or "at home" instead of giving names and addresses. When completed, I emailed the 1.4MB file to Pamela Moore, who was coordinating the collection and forwarding of the messages to John Titor. Pamela joked with me that it must be nice to have broadband because she spent the night downloading my file over dial-up.
Titor stopped posting at the end of March 2001 and that was it, until around mid May. I began experiencing intense Déjà vu-like feelings, then noticing things were different. Suddenly, a Walgreens drug store was on a corner that had been empty land just a day before. My mind couldn't process this and I began to doubt myself. I didn't understand how I could have missed its construction but chalked it up to faulty memory. Then, I had an experience that caused me to shed all doubt. My family and I took a trip down to Vero Beach, Florida to spend the day shopping, dining and seeing a movie. On the way into town, coming from I-95, we saw several empty lots with "Coming Soon" signs for various stores. Adjacent to those lots was a recently built Linens-N-Things where my wife bought something. I stayed in the car with my son while she shopped. In the car, I had that strange Déjà vu-like feeling again. Unlike Déjà vu, where you feel like you have already seen or experienced something before, this felt like something was different and out of place (I call it an "altervu"). We spent the day at the Indian River Mall, leaving at night after the movie. Driving back to the highway, I saw a fully-stocked Rooms To Go furniture store on what had been one of those empty lots! I immediately exclaimed to my wife something like, "Where did that come from!?!" to which she casually replied, "That's always been there." I was flabbergasted! I asked her repeatedly about the empty lots from earlier in the day but she dismissed it (the way I had dismissed the Walgreens) as faulty memory. That's when I knew I had stepped into The Twilight Zone.
I contacted Pamela about my experiences and she told me others who had sent emails to Titor were having similarly bizarre experiences. Pamela and I had one altervu in common at that point. The Burger King logo had changed - overnight, from our perspective. Pamela even inquired about it and found out they had changed the logo a year or two earlier. I also found a Rooms To Go store in Melbourne, Florida that was sitting on a recently empty lot. I went in and talked to a sales manager. He told me the store had been there for ten or eleven years!
From that point until today, I occasionally experience altervus. My wife is my sounding board. I always check her memories against mine to know if I'm just being forgetful or if something has changed. Einstein has mentioned his life-long experiences. I know of three other people who were not connected to Titor in any way, yet experienced altervus. Their common denominator is Zeshua, a self-proclaimed time-communicator from 2025 - 2026 who has posted here on TTI and interacted more extensively with our small group by email and within a private forum.
Geoffrey, please understand that you will probably receive extensive ridicule while posting here. Many pretenders have come here to have a laugh at the expense of the so-called "stupid" people who believe time travel is possible. The reality is, most of the people who hang around here are very intelligent. We're also very skeptical. Despite my experiences, I have no empirical evidence. This is just my story. I can not say that John Titor or Zeshua or anyone else can be, or do what, they have claimed.
Unfortunately, I spend little time here because of the onslaught of pretenders and the negativity of the good people who have been "burned" so many times before. It gets old, fast. With this in mind, your mention of Dean Stockwell and Scott Bakula hasn't gone unnoticed. Your story revolves around you traveling within your own timeline and ending up in your younger self's body. This was a plotline in an episode of "Quantum Leap". Pretenders often drop a small clue in their initial posts to see if we pick up on it, then laugh at our expense if it goes unmentioned ... so I'm mentioning it. Feel free to bow out gracefully - no harm, no foul. Otherwise, please carry on with your story; it's very interesting.
Also, if you are a science fiction fan, I recommend you watch the 2004 - 2009 reboot of "Battlestar Galactica". Dean Stockwell plays a major part in the series.
Welcome to The Twilight Zone!
