The search for alien life has been one of the last great frontiers. We push out into the dark reaches of space desperately seeking any sign that we are not a lone rock with the only life in the universe. There has been much discussion of what form they would take, what their intentions would be, and how we would communicate with these creatures. Yet, what if they are not creatures at all, but rather highly advanced, sophisticated robots?

There are several possible forms that robotic aliens could take. A much-discussed possibility is that they might be essentially drones sent by their extraterrestrial masters. This makes a lot of sense, as we ourselves use probes to explore the reaches of our solar system and beyond, places where it is not practical or possible to send manned missions. If aliens simply wanted to check us out or scout our planet, why go through all of the trouble, resources, and danger of traversing light years of space with a living crew when you can just basically send a drone instead? This idea has been toyed with in UFO circles and one idea is that they are already here, and that UFOs themselves could really be just drones sent from across the sea of stars. As to their intentions, they might be here to take samples or collect scientific data, study our kind, or perhaps even be used as a way to make contact with us. After this, perhaps the operators of the drones might decide to pay a visit themselves, and one can only hope it is for friendly reasons.

Another possibility is that these robots could be the aliens themselves, and this could play out in a few ways. In one scenario they could be AI intelligences that either coexist with or have usurped their biological creators. This could be due to what is often referred to as a technological singularity, which is basically a hypothetical point in time when technological growth reaches a point of no return, uncontrollable and exploding at a rate faster than we can keep up with, disrupting society as we know it in ways we may not even be fully able to predict. In the case of AI, this accelerating growth could spawn a superintelligence that would upgrade and improve itself at an astronomical rate, beyond that of its creators’ ability to monitor or control, quite likely gaining self awareness in the process. Such an intelligence could very well self-replicate and spawn others, a race of AIs eventually turning against their biological originators to destroy them and continue on, possibly for millions of years to the point that the original species of their planet is a faded memory relegated to fossils and history books. It makes sense, as it would be the next step up in evolution from the confines of biology, and robots would be perfect for the rigors of space and the vast distances involved with travelling to other worlds.

Looking at how fast technology is progressing here on Earth, there are many futurists and writers who believe that not only is such a singularity possible, but that it is inevitable. Some of the leading minds in AI and the future of the planet, such as Nick Bostrom, Vincent C. Müller, and Elon Musk, predict that this will happen for us within the next few decades, and great minds like Musk and the renowned Stephen Hawking have long told of how the rise of artificial intelligence will most likely lead to our downfall. If this hypothetical situation is an inexorable byproduct of technological advancement, it could even mean that robotic civilizations that have gotten to the stage of travel across the stars could significantly outnumber biological ones and be the dominant type of civilization in the universe. Even more frightening than this, perhaps technologically advanced biological races reach this singularity or destroy themselves before they ever have time to reach the stars to any appreciable degree, essentially leaving all space faring intelligent races to be robotic artificial intelligences. One Professor Susan Schneider from the University of Connecticut and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton thinks that this would be the norm, and that such robotic alien civilizations could feasibly be even billions of years old, and has said:

I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological. The most sophisticated civilizations will be post-biological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence. Other civilizations may be vastly older than us – earthlings are galactic babies. All lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence would be billions of years, specifically ranges from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.

Even if such AI intelligences did not violently overthrow their masters and cause a robotic apocalypse or seek to replace them like in a science fiction movie, it is possible that they could at least outlast them. Planetary cataclysms, changing climates or environments, drought, famine, and diseases would all mean nothing to them. Their makers could wither away and die or kill themselves in war to fade into history as their robotic creations went on to inherit the planet and become a spacefaring civilization of its own, again perhaps even forgetting over the eons that there were ever even biological creators at all. They could very well believe that they are the original life, and have lost all sense of ever having had other intelligences come before them. To them their original creators could be mere myths and legends.

Yet another possibility is that the robots are, in a sense, their own creators. The idea here is that the original species that designed these robots have merely downloaded their own consciousnesses into these new forms. It is not a new idea, thrown around in science fiction for quite some time now, and looking ever more possible as our technology makes leaps and bounds. It seems only a matter of time before someone on Earth attempts this, so it is not completely far-fetched to think that a super advanced race would have already perfected the process. They may have decided to take on a robotic form from a desire to be immortal, to escape harsh conditions on their planet, to move on to the next evolutionary step, or any number of other reasons we will probably never understand. They may even do it specifically for space travel, downloading into robotic bodies for these excursions to withstand the rigors of covering such vast distances and eliminating the need to operate life support systems, sort of like a super advanced spacesuit, while their physical bodies remain behind in stasis. In the end, the idea here is that these are just robots in physical form, with the minds of living entities inside them.

If aliens were actually AI robots, it poses a few potential problems if we ever met them. Our way of thinking and interacting with the world around us is heavily influenced by our biological processes, needs and our physiology, so how would a self-aware robot with none of these biological cues think? Would we even be able to comprehend what they are saying to us or what their thought processes are? This would also affect their intentions towards us, as what would a race of robots think of intelligent biological organisms and how would they react to us? If they were purely, coldly logical it might make sense for them to just wipe us out, unless they wanted to study us for some reason. This poses the question of why they would even want to come here in the first place, and with a purely robotic intelligence this might be hard to fathom. Whatever their motivations are, we could only hope that after millions or even billions of years of self-awareness they might have developed a sense of empathy and altruism, but this seems it would be far less likely with robots than it would for biological organisms, because again, altruism and empathy are often seen as traits that at the heart of it evolved at least in part from biological needs. Would a race unfettered from these have a need for such things? Who knows?

There is also the problem of communication with these robots. Besides the fact that their thought processes would be far different than ours, would we be able to communicate with them in any conventional sense? We already have a lot of possible hurdles to overcome with communicating with aliens, but with robots would it even be possible at all? They could be so far beyond the usual biological communication methods and have minds that work so amazingly fast and are so far beyond our own capabilities that we might not even comprehend them. Perhaps mathematics could provide some common ground, but if their minds were so advanced it still might be hard to find a way to relate to each other.

In the end, this is of course all speculation, but based on current trends in technology on our planet and our own increasing use of robotics, it seems more than plausible that other intelligent civilizations should do the same. What happens after hundreds, millions, or even billions of years of this inexorable progress? We can only guess, and wonder if, instead of alien creatures we might run into the robots they have made, or have even been replaced by.

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One of the most profound questions we face is that of if we are alone in the universe. In 1950, influential and notable physicist Enrico Fermi was working for Los Alamos National Laboratory, and suggested almost half jokingly that if there were space-faring civilizations were out there in the cosmos we should have probably heard from them by now. He famously asked “Where is everybody?” and we still don’t really have an answer to that. Fermi was puzzled by the fact that, if such civilizations existed, they hadn’t visited or found us yet. In his opinion, if they were out there, they would have exponentially broken their barriers and moved out into the galaxy, colonizing new worlds, and we would have surely known about them by now, and it is a good question. Where are they? There are a lot of proposed reasons for why we haven’t found anyone, which I have covered before, but recently there has been talk of yet another reason. Perhaps the answer to the question of where all of the aliens are is that they are all buried under miles of ice, far from our prying eyes and efforts to find them.

Perhaps one of the problems with finding life in the universe besides our own is that we are simply not looking in the right places. There has been much effort directed by scientists at looking for “Earth-like planets,” that is, planets that are much like our own and which we deem to be the most habitable and welcoming to us. These are the planets that sit just the right distance from their star, called the “Goldilocks Zone,” to have a habitable temperature, an atmosphere conducive to life, with plentiful oxygen and organic molecules, and most important of all liquid water. These are the basic ingredients we have proclaimed to be crucial for life as we know it, and it makes sense that we should deem planets similar to our own to be the best candidates for life and try to find them. After all, the only life we truly know of in the universe, that of our own world, developed in these conditions. But what if alien life is somewhere else, not on the surface, but beneath it?

While all of this effort is being made to find second Earths, and several have been indeed located, a far more common type of planet is thought to be frozen worlds and moons encased in rock and ice, but harboring vast liquid oceans below. In fact, it is widely believed that such watery worlds are perhaps 1,000 times more common than rocky, earth-type planets. To give an idea of just how common this type of world is, we need only look to our own solar system, which holds many examples. For instance, Jupiter’s moons Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa are all thought to have liquid oceans buried by miles of ice and rock, as are Saturn’s moons Titan, Dione, and Enceladus, Neptune’s moon Triton, and others, all with these oceans kept in their liquid state through geothermal activity and the affects of tides and gravitational forces. Not only do such worlds have liquid water in plentiful supply, but through geothermal activity they hold the chance of having habitable conditions and the necessary nutrients and ingredients for life even outside of the magic Goldilocks Zone. Indeed, even planets within our own star’s Goldilocks Zone aren’t really habitable, such as Mars and Venus, so maybe this is a key, and looking at these subsurface oceans potentially opens up the doors to further planets we can search for life on.

In addition, these types of habitats hold other advantages as well, because since they are located so far under, hazardous surface conditions wouldn’t necessarily affect them. One NASA physicist Alan Stern has said of this, “Impacts and solar flares, and nearby supernovae, and what orbit you’re in, and whether you have a magnetosphere, and whether there’s a poisonous atmosphere — none of those things matter.” Another group of scientists who think so are Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb, of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University, who have written a whole study on this called Subsurface Exolife. Lingham has said of the benefits of a subsurface existence in these alien oceans:

The conventional notion of planetary habitability is the habitable zone (HZ), namely the concept that the “planet” must be situated at the right distance from the star such that it may be capable of having liquid water on its surface. However, this definition assumes that life is: (a) surface-based, (b) on a planet orbiting a star, and (c) based on liquid water (as the solvent) and carbon compounds. In contrast, our work relaxes assumptions (a) and (b), although we still retain (c). One major advantage that icy worlds have is that the subsurface oceans are mostly sealed off from the surface. Hence, UV radiation and cosmic rays (energetic particles), which are typically detrimental to surface-based life in high doses, are unlikely to affect putative life in these subsurface oceans.

We have seen whole sophisticated ecosystems around hydrothermal vents on Earth in areas previously thought to be hostile for life, so it is a promising idea. Yet, there are still some drawbacks to the notion, as Lingham has said:

On the negative side, the absence of sunlight as a plentiful energy source could lead to a biosphere that has far less organisms (per unit volume) than Earth. In addition, most organisms in these biospheres are likely to be microbial, and the probability of complex life evolving may be low compared to Earth. Another issue is the potential availability of nutrients (e.g. phosphorus) necessary for life; we suggest that these nutrients might be available only in lower concentrations than Earth on these worlds.

Nevertheless, such icy worlds are coming to be seen as more and more promising as a potential candidate for alien life, and such biospheres are even thought to very plausibly be able to spawn highly intelligent life. Yet, if these vast oceans did produce intelligent life comparable to or beyond human intelligence, the main problem would be even knowing they are there at all. Some of these worlds have miles and miles of rock or ice between the surface and the water, meaning that communication with radio signals might not be an option. Stern has explained, “If they have technology, and let’s say they’re broadcasting, or they have city lights or whatever — we can’t see it in any part of the spectrum, except maybe very-low-frequency.” There would also be a lack of biosignatures on the surface to give a clue as to any life that might lie below, as the surface could be completely forbidding and barren. It seems that really the only way to know if they exist is if they contacted us or if we physically went and drilled down to them. Professor Loeb has said of these challenges:

It is very difficult to detect sub-surface life remotely (from a large distance) using telescopes. One could search for excess heat but that can result from natural sources, such as volcanos. The most reliable way to find sub-surface life is to land on such a planet or moon and drill through the surface ice sheet. This is the approach contemplated for a future NASA mission to Europa in the solar system.

Adding to this is that even if there are highly intelligent civilizations under the ice, living in such an environment would not be conducive to space travel, as they would have to bore through all of that surface, and water would be a very heavy and difficult medium to transport into orbit and over very long distances. It has even been suggested by scientists like Stern that they might not even be aware that there is space out there over their heads at all, with the universe perhaps all effectively ending for them with the impenetrable wall above them. There has also been speculation that intelligent life would need a mastery of fire to really develop machines and technology, which would be impossible in their watery realm. For instance, dolphins and octopuses have in recent years been speculated as being possibly of human-level intelligence, but their biome makes development of any sophisticated technology a challenge. Could that be happening here? There is no way to know.

What we do know is that these icy planets and moons do exist, along with ample water and quite probably the elements necessary for life. We also know that they are likely far more common than rocky, earth-like worlds. Is it at least possible that if there has evolved intelligent life outside of our own it had done so in one of these environments? If so, what does that mean for our efforts to search out and contact such life? Due to their extreme circumstances is it likely we will ever detect them or meet them? Whatever the case may be, it poses an interesting possibility for the Fermi Paradox, and at the very least truly expands the locales we should be looking at for life in the universe besides our own.

Every now and again people contact me about the controversial Alien Autopsy Film that surfaced in 1995. When it was first aired I suspected that the film showed the body of someone who had a rare, strange, medical condition. Various syndromes were put forward by people in the medical community. For a while, I even mused on the possibility of the footage showing a genuine alien. The controversy rumbled on for years. Twenty-five years later, just about everyone in the field of Ufology (including me) takes the view that the whole thing was nothing but a hoax – albeit a very well made hoax, it must be said. There are, however, a few people in Ufology who still cling to the theory that the footage is the real deal – whether of an alien or of a human. They really shouldn’t, though. With that all said, I thought today I would share with you an aspect of the controversy that doesn’t get the coverage it should. At one point in the film, one of those in the autopsy room removes a pair of eye-lenses from the creature. It’s then that we learn the aliens do not have black eyes, after all. Those black eyes are actually just dark lenses that can be peeled off. Their eyes are pretty much like ours, but slightly bigger. This brings us to a certain U.K. television show called UFO.

UFO was a popular sci-fi show that aired in the U.K. in  1970. It ran for 26 episodes. It was the brainchild of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who also created a bunch of other shows that entertained me when I was a little kid. They included Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Fireball XL5, and Stingray. As for the theme of the show, the people at UFO Series.com state the following: “The series is set in what would have been ten years in the future – the early 1980’s. It had been discovered that Aliens are coming to Earth and kidnapping people for unknown reasons. A secret military defense organization named SHADO (‘Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organization’) is set up and is just becoming operational in the first episode. SHADO’s main headquarters is secretly hidden beneath a London film studio, and many SHADO personnel double as film studio employees as a cover. SHADO also has a base on the moon (‘Moonbase’) and a fleet of submarines (‘Skydiver’). Incoming UFO’s are detected by an Earth orbiting satellite (‘Space Intruder Detector’, or ‘SID’).”

Gerry Anderson’s U.F.O Wiki note: “To protect their eyes the aliens wear opaque sclera contact lenses with small pinholes for vision. The show’s opening sequence begins by showing the image of one of these contact lenses being removed from an obviously real eye with a small suction cup, even though the lens is not shown in contact with the eye. The entire lens-removal sequence is shown in the pilot episode.” Of particular relevance is the fact that the SHADO team discovers that the aliens’ eyes are not what they appear to be when they perform an autopsy on the human-looking alien. In fact, in UFO the removal of one of the eye-lenses is the very first thing we see in the opening credits of the show!

As I said, the Alien Autopsy Film-UFO connection doesn’t surface too often. In my mind, though, it’s an integral part of the “AA” controversy that has lasted for twenty-five years. I’m sure those who still valiantly hang onto the claim that the film is genuine will find some way to squirm out of all this. And they will probably say that all of the above is just down to coincidence. But, with everything said, the most likely scenario is also the simplest one: certain aspects of UFO inspired the creators of the Alien Autopsy footage.

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Just a few days ago while doing radio, I was asked what I thought about the so-called “Grey” aliens of Ufology. And of the possibility of them being some kind of “biological robot.” I was also asked what I thought about how this tied in with a now dead man who caused a controversial storm in 1997. In the summer of that year, one of the most inflammatory UFO-themed books ever written was published. Its title: The Day After Roswell. Ghost-written by William Birnes, the editor of the now-defunct UFO Magazine and of History Channel’s also defunct UFO Hunters, the book tells the story of Philip Corso. Specifically, Lieutenant Colonel. Philip J. Corso. U.S. Army. Corso’s story was both amazing and groundbreaking. But, was it true? While some in the field of Ufology embraced the story, many certainly did not. I viewed the whole story as disinformation intended to confuse the truth of what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico back in the summer of 1947. Or, it was nothing more than an elaborate and ingenious tale designed to make money from the gullible and the “I want to believe” crowd.

According to Corso, he, in near single-handed fashion, spearheaded a secret program designed to seed alleged alien technology and wreckage – recovered from the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico by the U.S. Army Air Force’s 509^th Bomb Wing in July 1947 – into the private sector. As a result of this clandestine operation, so Corso maintained, the United States was soon able to understand, and even back-engineer, at least some of the extraterrestrial materials. Fiber-optics, transistors, night-vision equipment, and computer chips, were all, allegedly, a direct outgrowth of the extensive studies of the Roswell materials. But, it’s not so much the technology reportedly found at Roswell that we need to focus our attentions on today. Rather, it’s the bodies of the beings allegedly found strewn around the crash site.

Contrary to what the UFO community said or assumed, Corso never explicitly stated that the Roswell corpses were extraterrestrial. In fact, what he really said was quite the opposite. In Corso’s story the so-called “Grey aliens” are actually created, built, or grown to perform specific tasks. As for the creators of the Greys, it was they, Corso maintained, who were the real aliens. Corso also said that, as far as he was aware, no one has ever seen the real aliens. Only ever their black-eyed, large-headed worker-drones. William Birnes said that Corso described the Greys as “…an android or biological robot. He said it had no digestive system whatsoever and was connected electronically to the navigation controls of the spacecraft.”

As for Corso himself, he stated: “…perhaps we should consider the EBEs [Extraterrestrial Biological Entities] as described in the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather than lifeforms, specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or time.” He expanded on this, outlining the profoundly weird nature of the Greys: “While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.”

I can’t say I’m a fan of the writings and claims of Corso – at all. I find the majority of his story to be just too far out there. The biggest irony, however, is that for all the sensational claims made by the man, I actually do think that the Greys could very well be some kind of manufactured entities, rather than creatures born in a normal fashion.

Have you ever heard the account of an alien abductee and jokingly asked yourself: “I wonder what he was smoking?” According to a new study, at least some of them may have been smoking the hallucinogen DMT. The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University recently published the findings of a 2019 study of users of the hallucinogen DMT who had experienced at least one “breakthrough” experience and found that many of those experiences were very similar to account descriptions by non-drug-using alien abductees. Would you like to experience what it feels like without the probing, potential implants, possible burns, hybrid children and other experiences that can occur during an actual close encounter of the 4th kind? The days of actual human testing in the U.S. of DMT and other psychedelic drugs may be closer than ever.

“It has been speculated that due to the endogenous presence of DMT in the mammalian brain, including humans, DMT may play a role in a variety of non-ordinary states of consciousness such as dreaming, psychosis, spiritual experiences, encounters with non-human intelligence (e.g. alien and unidentified flying object (UFO) encounters), extrasensory perception, out-of-body experiences, and near-death experiences.”

Because so many of these accounts were anecdotal, researchers at the CPCR decided to scientifically question actual users. Over 20,000 people responded to their call for volunteers in late 2018. They selected 2,561 who had “an experience of encountering a seemingly autonomous being or entity after consuming DMT” and met their other selection criteria. The volunteers were asked to fill out an extensive survey and the results were compiled. The vast majority agreed on this:

“(The DMT-induced entity encounters were the) most meaningful, spiritual, and psychologically insightful lifetime experiences, with persisting positive changes in life satisfaction, purpose and meaning attributed to the experiences.”

There was a surprising amount of commonality in the responses. Almost all had a positive emotional response (love, kindness, joy, etc.) while less than 20% felt any fear. Over two-thirds said the entity gave them a message or a mission, and they referred to the entities using similar descriptions, such as “being,” “guide,” “spirit,” “alien” and “helper.” Three-quarters believed the entity existed at least partly in a different dimension or reality and continued to exist after their encounter. A majority believed the entity was conscious, intelligent and benevolent. (Statistics and actual percentages are available in the report.)

These experiences certainly sound similar to accounts by those claiming to have had alien encounters or have been abducted – at least those whose experiences were pleasant or non-threatening. A majority of those experiencing alien encounters or abduction agree that it changed their lives, and the DMT users expressed the same about their ‘encounter’ with an entity – including changing from being an atheist.

DMT has been consumed in some form in South America since pre-Columbian times and is found in at least 50 plants (including apparently innocuous sources such as leaves of citrus plants) and in some animals. It’s hallucinogenic properties were only confirmed in the mid-20th century and its research has been hampered by drug laws in the U.S. and other countries. While the researchers stated that their goal was to study it for its therapeutic and positive benefits, it’s obvious they were intrigued by the ‘alien encounter and abductee’ account similarities.

“However, regardless of whether or not DMT will be shown to have therapeutic efficacy, future double-blind human laboratory studies investigating dose-effects and correlated brain activity may provide a unique window into the psychological and biological nature of such anomalous subjective experiences of encounters with nonhuman entities that date back to the beginnings of recorded human history.”

How many alien encounters or abductions are the result of unknowingly or accidentally ingesting DMT or other mild hallucinogens? Will the world of UFOlogy accept the numbers? Will alleged abductees?

One of the debates that has hovered around the UFO phenomenon is just what UFOs are. For some they are experimental aircraft being tested by the government. For others they are alien spaceships from across space, here on their inscrutable missions. Other ideas are that they are interdimensional interlopers, shifting across the bridge between realities from some parallel dimension. Yet, these are not the only ideas out there, and one that is gaining more and more attention is that aliens might not be any of the above, but rather human beings from the future.

One of the ideas that has been floated about concerning the origins of UFOs and alien encounters is that these are not aliens from another planet or dimension at all, but are rather us. The idea here basically boils down to the notion that these entities are humans from the future, perhaps so far in the future that we have evolved past being superficially recognized as such. One of the main people in recent years behind this theory is Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University, who has been fascinated with UFOs ever since his father had an encounter with one when he was just a child. Over the course of his career as an anthropologist, he has sought real scientific enquiry into the UFO phenomenon, and culminating in his book on the matter Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon.

One area Masters has seen as particularly intriguing is the idea that “aliens” might actually be human beings from far in the future, and he uses his knowledge of human evolution to help support this claim. In many reports of aliens, we have what are called in UFOlogy “the Greys,” perhaps the most commonly encountered type of entity. These beings are usually described as thin, bipedal, and hairless, with enlarged craniums, small mouths and jaws, tiny noses, and very large eyes, all very humanoid considering that if they have travelled from another planet it seems unlikely that they would resemble us so closely. Instead, Masters and others who subscribe to his theory believe that this appearance is more in keeping with the trends and patterns of human evolution throughout our history on this planet. Indeed, looking at the expected path of human evolution into the future, it is predicted that we will develop hairlessness, larger heads for more brain space, smaller mouths, and many of the other features of these so-called aliens. As a matter of fact, if one were to look at these predicted trends and fast forward an image of a modern human to simulate these changes, one will come up at some point with a being that looks very much like the Greys that are seen on UFOs. It does seem to make sense. After all, it seems more likely that we would evolve to look like them than for a completely alien species from another world to evolve to look like us.

At the same time that we are evolving into this form, our technology would be making leaps and bounds as well, possibly leading to the ability to travel through time at some point, and with these fantastical machines and alien physical appearance, it would be only natural for humans to come to the conclusion that they are seeing extraterrestrials rather than time travelers. It all seems like something straight out of a science fiction story, but then again, so is the idea that aliens are visiting Earth from across light years and a sea of stars. In fact, according to Masters, the time traveler idea is actually the more rational explanation for UFOs, a simpler possibility than assuming spacefaring civilizations exist and are visiting us, and he has said of this to Space.com:

If we continue to evolve in the same way we have over the six to seven million years since we first started walking upright and our neurocranium – the upper part of our skull and brains – continued to increase in size and get more rounded. If the same dominant trend continues in the future we are likely to look very much like what is commonly described in UFO reports. The book ties together those known aspects of our evolutionary history with what is still an unproven, unverified aspect of UFOs and aliens. We know we’re here. We know humans exist. We know that we’ve had a long evolutionary history on this planet. And we know our technology is going to be more advanced in the future. I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us. I’m just trying to offer what is likely the most parsimonious explanation. I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us.

Well, what if we do for a moment assume that aliens are actually us from the future and UFOs their craft, then why would they be coming here to this time in the first place? The answer to that question could go any number of ways. Perhaps they are here just to study us or to investigate times in their history. Maybe they are here as tourists of a sort, just observing the past. Masters has said of his own thoughts on the matter:

The alleged abduction accounts are mostly scientific in nature. It’s probably future anthropologists, historians, linguists that are coming back to get information in a way that we currently can’t without access to that technology. Perhaps this is my bias as a paleoanthropologist, but I think they are studying their own past. There could also be a tourism component in which people pay to go back and experience monumental moments in human history. Undoubtedly in the future, there are those that will pay a lot of money to have the opportunity to go back and observe their favorite period in history. Some of the most popular tourist sites are the pyramids of Giza and Machu Picchu in Peru … old and prehistoric sites.

Masters even goes as far as to speculate that the fact they are time travelers rather than space faring aliens could explain why they mostly keep to themselves and have not announced their presence. After all, doing so would possibly cause disruptions in the time line and make things complicated. He has explained of this:

If they have come all this way through space, why not introduce themselves after such a long journey? With time it makes more sense, because of the complication which arrives from interjecting yourself into the past. This doesn’t change the past but you become part of the past. There’s nothing which forbids the interaction so it’s not as if we’d come into contact with our future selves and explode. It just complicates things.

There’re certainly still missing pieces of the puzzle. There are aspects of time that we don’t yet understand. Wanted is a theory of quantum gravity, and we can meld general relativity and quantum mechanics. I’m just trying to put forth the best model I can based on current scientific knowledge. Hopefully, over time, we can continue to build on this.

It could also explain why we have not made any radio contact with these aliens out there in the yawning chasm of space, because they are just us slipping around through time. It’s all a pretty wild theory, but in many ways is no more outlandish than any other idea on what aliens and UFOs might be. It certainly puts an interesting spin on things, to imagine that at least some of these entities might not be alien intelligences from beyond the stars or through the veil between dimensions, but us. Is there anything to this, or is it just grasping at straws? In the void of any concrete answers concerning the UFO phenomenon it seems at least a possibility worth pursuing, and perhaps in time we will know for sure.

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