UFO Time Travelers

One popular theory that attempts to explain UFO phenomena holds the aliens are actually us--a version of us that exists thousands of years in the future, when time travel is not only possible, it has become essential if the human race is to survive.

In this scenario, human beings have evolved into beings of almost pure mentality. Our bodies have become mere vestiges of bodies--thin, pale, and asexual. Our heads have become larger to accommodate our enormous brains.

Far in the distant future, the earth is a much darker place with a thinner atmosphere, which has caused the human race to evolve huge dark eyes, which we use to communicate thought, eliminating the need for speech.

Whether or not this theory is true, the story is appealing and maintains a emotional resonance regarding our situation today. We are in a place historically where rationality and science are valued over emotion and associative thinking to an extreme degree.

In fact, so great is the split between reason and imagination today that saying that something is imaginary is the same (for most people) as saying it is not true.

Even though every technological solution discovered today seems to spawn forty serious new problems, we still look to science and human reason help us avert disaster.

Contemporary scientific innovation has taken on a runaway quality, not unlike Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Every attempt to clean up the last mess creates a bigger one.

It isn't that science and reason are bad, it's just that, when combined with our seriously flawed human culture, values, and politics, science lately has this creepy way as expressing itself as Monsanto or Los Alamos.

The ascendance of science is the elephant in today's living room; the Emperor's new clothes.

People should be laughing at this Emperor (or at least handing his a robe), but instead, out of fear of looking stupid, we ridicule the child who points out his nakedness.

Time has always played a key role in UFO close encounter experiences and abductions.

• People who encounter UFOs, whether they recall an abduction or not, often 'lose' chunks of time; sometimes large chunks of time.

• In a typical experience, a UFO is seem from a car on a deserted road. The next thing the driver knows, he or she is driving and is miles from the site where the UFO was seen. Although the distance from the sighting and where the driver finds himself may be, for example, fifteen minutes or so, the driver has 'lost' hours of time and does not even recall the previous fifteen minutes.

• UFOs often have a quality of 'blinking in and out' or moving in a jerky fashion, in a way that resembles how a cartoon might look when you slow it down to the point that you are aware of individual images. In other words, a time gap separates the movement from point A to point B. In between points, the UFO is not visible. Not all sighting are like this, but many are.

• The Men in Black, made so famous by UFO researchers Gray Barker and John A. Keel, often show up in dated clothing, driving dated cars, and speaking in a stilted, outmoded way, as if they are having trouble gauging what year it is and how that years affects the dress and behavior of human beings.

• UFOs reflect the era in which they are seen. During the Crusades and Middle Ages, they often appeared as huge crosses or arrows in the sky. During the 19th century they appeared as huge 'airships' or dirigibles. Today they look like aircraft made with cutting edge technology we do not yet possess but can just barely imagine.

All of these characteristics play with an element of time, and all of them indicate an unknown phenomenon (or phenomena) that displays intelligent control.

Rationalists and debunkers often make the point that the nearest inhabitable planets are so far away that no form of life could travel from there to here because the span of time would just be too great.

Actually, that isn't quite accurate.

It's true that an alien race which had about the same level of technology that humans have would have scant chance of reaching Earth using that technology. Buy why would we suppose they would have that level of technology and nothing else?

The truth is that even human physicists can imagine travel across enormous distances in an incredibly short time using concepts from quantum physics including space time and wormholes.

Stephen Hawking once opposed the concept of time travel, claiming he had empirical evidence against it, such as the fact that, "…if time travel existed, then we would have been visited by visitors from the future." With recent discoveries in the field of quantum physics, Hawking now concedes that time travel is possible but impractical because of the enormous energy it would require.

Michio Kaku explains how time travel would work and some of the problems with it at this link: http://mkaku.org/home/?page_id=252. Interestingly, in other essays he also discusses time travel into the past as being both more complicated and more possible than time travel into the future.

The same principles that make time travel theoretically possible also make travel across enormous distances theoretically possible. We can't do it, but in theory at least, someone could.

Personally I doubt it, for the following reasons:

• The appearance of a time traveler would be accompanied by a characteristics of high strangeness that would cause most scientists and rational thinkers to ridicule witnesses.

• If the time traveler directly contacted authorities and discussed his agenda, again, it is more likely that he would be deemed mentally ill than a person from the far future.

• If the far future is exceptionally different than today's society, and if human characteristics and Earth's environment are changed as well, a time traveler might not be able to survive in the current conditions we inhabit.

• If, unable to survive in present Earth conditions, the time traveler made contact with contemporary Earthings by means of time manipulations, mental projections, and manipulation of dreams, again, this experience, if shared, would be labeled psychological and therefore 'not real'.

So far, despite military officers, politicians, and pilots from all over the world coming forward with multiple credible sightings, including some that were witnessed by thousands of people, UFOs get no serious scientific uptake and continue to provoke hailstorms of ridicule.

That's depressing, but I think that, if UFOs are piloted by human time travelers from the far future, they have almost certainly factored that into their operations and plans.

What do I think?

I don't know.

I have lots of ideas though. I think the topic deserves more respect, But what I would never do is pretend to have the one and only true answer.

My best guess is that this lesson--this openness to an attitude of "I don't know" and a respect for mystery is one of the main changes that UFO occupants are trying to germinate in our culture.

When it comes to the topic of UFOs, most people tend to go to one of two extremes: They either become true believers or skeptical debunkers. Both groups can be unpleasant.

But the space in between those two extremes is the most fertile and the most absent from our current models of knowledge. In fact, that is so ingrained in our epistemology (model of knowledge) as forbidden that its exclusion has been made into its own philosophical law: The Law of the Excluded Middle.

The fact that all this makes sense to me in some kind of alien way is one of the many reasons I am so fascinated by UFOs.

And why I'll keep writing about them and annoying both groups to the best of my ability.