John Titor was the name used for a purported time traveller from the year 2036 that posted on several time travel-related Internet bulletin boards during 2000/2001, making many ambiguous, but seemingly falsifiable, predictions about events in the near future and giving an account of his supposed native time period. Whether or not John Titor was a hoax seems to have been a topic of controversy on web-based paranormal discussion boards.
The postings claimed Titor to be a serving soldier who was assigned to a government time travel project. He was supposedly sent from 2036 back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer which he claimed was needed to "debug" various legacy computer programs in 2036. The postings also described various future events between 2000 and 2037, including World War III (predicted for 2015) followed by two decades of recovery.
Along with the prediction of World War III, another notable prediction is that of a Civil war in America, which was predicted to begin in 2004, around the time of the presidential election, and would escalate until 2008, which, according to Titor, "[is] a general date by which time everyone will realize the world they thought they were living in was over."
Another prediction was that 2004 would be the last year in which the Olympic Games would occur. This seems at odds with real-world events as the 2006 Winter Olympics began February 10, 2006. However there has been some argument as to whether the Winter Olympics was included in the prediction. Some have also speculated as to whether the predictions made by Titor were predicting only one course of the future, suggesting humans may have created an alternate future by going about things differently. This is an example of the many possible interpretations of Titor's seemingly specific predictions.
When asked about the mechanisms of the time traveling, he replied that he was no engineer. When asked to use the time machine to do something paradoxical (ie, kill his grandfather) he replied that that would only affect this universe, but not his. He appeared to imply that there were many worldlines, and his time machine could not control its outgoing destination exactly, but could return to a worldline exactly similar to his own home. (It would be a different "Worldline" but would be exactly the same in his perspective as when he left.)