What would the motivation of time traveling evolved-humans from the future be? Dr. Michael P. Masters, professor of biological anthropology at Montana Tech in Butte, Montana proposes that alien sightings and visitation may not be extraterrestrial, but instead extratempestrial.
Masters provocative new book Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon, carefully and studiously examines the idea that extraterrestrials may actually be our distant human descendants, using the anthropological tool of time travel to visit present day humans in order to study us for their own hominin evolutionary past, is that all they are doing, studying? What else could their intentions be?
Radio Wasteland: Of course you don’t have an answer for this question, but anytime we’re talking about extraterrestrial, temperrestrial, non-us, non-current tests, the idea of motive comes along. Do you think that their motive is purely anthropological or I mean what is the motive?
Michael P. Masters: Yeah, you’re right. And I appreciate you prefacing that question with that because I can’t know. I haven’t met them. I haven’t asked them.
Radio Wasteland: No. Of course. Of course, yeah.
Michael P. Masters: And it sucks because a lot of people have and I haven’t so I’m a little jealous and spiteful towards those people. A few guys want to come down and abduct me like I could… But no, you’re right why would they do this? And we talked about earlier in the show how a good part of it at least from my perspective would be that it’s scientific, that they’re trying to get information about our evolutionary past. But I don’t think it’s just that, I think there’s also a time tourism component to it. I think it’s also just an interest in what’s happened in the past and especially throughout different periods. Like it’s easy to think, again once we have time-travel technology and it could potentially exist as early as 500 or 5,000 years in the future, why would they be interested in us?
But there’s a lot that can happen in that period. There’s a lot that can happen between now and then whether that the records are lost, the information’s lost and they just want to come back and see what we were doing. But outside of that, I think there’s a tourism component too, who wouldn’t pay a lot of money right now? If we had this technology now who wouldn’t pay to go see the pyramids being built or Machu Picchu or the first cave paintings or any of those monumental or even benign moments in the past just to watch people from whatever period you were interested in, the Nazis in Germany or anything. We’re clearly obsessed with history, but what if you could see it? What if you could actually see it? And I think we would pay a lot of money to do that so the economic incentive might help drive time travel technology in the private sector in the same way it is now with Elon Musk and SpaceX, with Amazon, all the money they’re putting in.
In the same way, we’re doing that with space right now, once we get close to being able to do that with time, why wouldn’t we? It might be the same thing where we’re trying to, Virgin Atlantic trying to take people up in the space, to see the earth from high above or we just make our own rockets and then crash and die in the process.
Radio Wasteland: Yeah, we, you’re right. We do often get stuck in what media throws at us. This world of every, basically a world that’s not full of rich people wanting to do time travel for money. We imagine that money is gone someday. We adhere to all these utopian futures that one doesn’t tend to fall in. But sure. Why not? I mean. Even if you take money out of it, all you really have to think is are these creatures still going to have curiosity?
Michael P. Masters: Yeah. That’s a good point.
Radio Wasteland: Which is probably, right?
Michael P. Masters: Yeah.
Radio Wasteland: And if they do then they’re going to come back.
Michael P. Masters: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s not just about how much money can I make from this. We’re still going to be interested in that. And as I talk about in the book, the most visited sites for tourism, which kind of combines the two things, it’s both money and interest are Machu Picchu and Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza. That’s where people go, that’s where they visit to try to find out about the ancient past. So if you could just go there, if you could do it. Yeah, you’re right. Even outside of the money that’s made on this side, there’s still the demand side. It’s not just about supply but demand too.
Radio Wasteland: That’s a really good point.
Radio Wasteland: Well, that makes me think from a ufology perspective, where the UFO is usually, can we identify that sort of motive in terms of the UFO sightings we know about them? The only thing I can think of is that UFOs seem to be really interested in nuclear power plants. So maybe that’s going to be the craze in the future.
Michael P. Masters: Well I mean and that makes sense too in the context of them being a product of us or not. And if we were to destroy ourselves, they don’t exist. It comes back to that grandfather paradox thing. So, obviously they have a stake in existing. The thing they care about most is probably existing in the future and who knows? Maybe they shut down a nuclear base. Not far from me. I gave a talk up in Livingston. No, well I did Livingston, but Lewistown Montana right outside the Malmstrom Air Force Base and they shut down that base. Why did they do that? Why would they care as extraterrestrial beings? It seems like they would care because they’re invested in their past and our future as things that need us to continue being for them to exist. So yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I think that’s definitely a factor in it.
Radio Wasteland: And in the presented narrative, if there is a gap in time where history is lost, of course, they would be investigating the things that might create a gap in that time. Yeah.
Michael P. Masters: Absolutely. And what else would it be other than a nuclear Holocaust, some sort of major disease outbreak, like anything, would definitely disrupt it. But, honestly, a lot of people that have read this book have come up to me and said, “I used to be afraid of an extraterrestrial invasion, but if you’re right, all that fear is gone because why would they-”
Radio Wasteland: Why would that happen?
Michael P. Masters: “Why would they kill their ancestors? They need us to be them.” And it gave them comfort. They got comfort from that. And you’re right. Yeah. If we’re all on the same timeline, if we’re all existing as part of this same collective phylogenetic past, then they would help us, not hurt us. Think about, do a thought experiment, think about being, let’s go back even farther than homo erectus. Go back to Australopithecus afarensis in East Africa 3.5 million years ago. Homeboy comes down and this UFO looks like us but with less hair and bigger heads, smaller faces, starts doing weird things. How are you going to interpret that? How do you put that into the context of what you do on a day to day basis? Just trying to not get eaten by leopards.
Radio Wasteland: Oh yeah. Definitely God or magic.
Michael P. Masters: Yeah, that’s your day. That’s magic, that’s God, that’s a thing. And that would be that way all the way up until basically right now, like even a hundred years ago. And you know the cave paintings that we see, all of the megalithic structures, not all of them obviously, but certain things. So I definitely don’t discount that there are things that exist in the archeological record that could have been the product of future humans interjecting themselves in the past. And then them just saying, “This is the best way I can record this. This was amazing to us. We need to write this down in the only way we have.”
We have only had writing for like 5,000 years. What else did they have three and a half million years ago? 2 million years ago. So they put, like the early man in the Nazca culture, they just put a big-headed thing on a mountain. That’s the best they can do. Now we have cell phones, we can take pictures and we still don’t believe it even when we do that stuff. It’s all fake. Those guys are making it up. It’s all fake. But I don’t think we should draw this distinction between mainstream archeologists and what the actual evidence is. Because I think that’s dangerous. It’s a slippery slope. Science is science. Belief is belief. Those should be kept separate. And we have principles in science. We have methods in science and we can understand things. If you want to believe things that are just rooted in how they interpret things, that’s fine. We’ve been doing that for literally the entire history of humanity, but I don’t think we should conflate one. I don’t think we should confuse the two, and I think we should draw a distinction there.