The time-traveler hypothesis, also known as chrononaut UFO, future humans, extratempestrial model, and Terminator theory, is the proposal that unidentified flying objects are humans traveling from the future using advanced technology. Some notable people have given recent public exposure to the hypothesis, such as retired NASA aerospace engineer Larry Lemke, Wisconsin congressman Mike Gallagher, and American filmmaker Steven Spielberg.
The time-traveler hypothesis is considered extremely implausible by mainstream scholars, and it has historically only been endorsed by a minority of the UFO researchers who argue on behalf of non-prosaic explanations for the purported phenomena.
Antecedents
Origins of time travel speculation
The notion of time travel from the future to the past is thought to have been introduced for the first time in literature by French botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard in his popular 1861 book Paris avant les hommes ("Paris Before Men"), featuring a man sent back to prehistoric Earth where he interacts with an ape-like ancestor. A few years later, in 1887, Camille Flammarion published Lumen, a novel featuring an alien soul traveling through different worlds and historical periods.
Although traveling back in time is almost universally considered physically impossible, theoretical research has explored whether it might be possible. It has also been speculated by scientists such as J. Richard Gott, Ronald Mallet, and others that humans may someday be able to time travel to the past.
Speculation of future human evolution
Many authors and researchers have speculated about the future evolution of humankind. In 1888, English author H. G. Wells published his famous science-fiction novella The Time Machine featuring a future evolution of humans, which is generally regarded as one of the first modern instances of both time travel and speculative evolution. Other writers on speculative evolution include Edgar Rice Burroughs, British philosopher and science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon with his 1930 "future history" novel Last and First Men, American author Kurt Vonnegut in Galápagos, British writer Stephen Baxter in Evolution, Turkish artist and author Cevdet Mehmet Kösemen in All Tomorrows, among others. Climate change, the technological singularity, space travel, and genetic enhancement have also been identified as potential factors capable of altering the evolution of humans in the future, leading to different transhuman and posthuman scenarios.
UFOs and initial explanations
Human beings have reported unknown objects in the skies since antiquity. In the 1890s, a wave of mystery airship sightings was reported throughout the US, followed decades later by foo fighters during World War II and ghost rockets in the Nordic countries shortly thereafter.
The modern UFO era began in the summer of 1947, days after the United States announced plans to re-industrialize Germany over strenuous Soviet objection, sparking the Cold War. Amid fears of a Soviet response, civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold reported witnessing a formation of supersonic aircraft. Wartime prohibition of live "man on the street" broadcasts having ended, Arnold's sighting was covered nationwide on radio and in print media. In the days and weeks following the Arnold sighting, a nationwide craze swept the United States as over 800 similar sightings were published in the English-speaking press. Contemporary sources hypothesized that the sightings resulted from novel US or Soviet technology, misidentification of mundane objects, or behavioral effects like mass hysteria; while more speculative sources suggested that the sightings were a sign of the end of the world, were angelic or demonic, or were vehicles carrying people from other planets or other "dimensions".
Formation and spread Implausibility of humanoid aliens
Contactee and alien abduction folklore often describe encounters with human or humanoid figures and abductors. In his 1964 article The Nonprevalence of Humanoids George Gaylord Simpson claimed that it is extremely unlikely that there exists any form of extraterrestrial intelligence in the Solar System or elsewhere and that, even if they did exist, it was even more unlikely that they would be humanoids. His article was cited and analysed, alongside evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky’s similar view on the implausibility of the evolution of humanoid extraterrestrial life forms, in the famous 2014 collection of essays Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication edited by astrobiologist Douglas Vakoch and published by NASA in 2014. In the late 1980s, evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould put forth his famous thought experiment that if evolution was rewound and played back again it would likely take a very different course and humans would never evolve, which, in addition to his declared view against human-oriented evolutionary teleonomy, helped shape the established view that if intelligent extraterrestrials did exist, they would likely not resemble humans. In their book Evolving the Alien, biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart assumed a similar position about the iconic representation of the Grey alien from reports of UFO abduction and close encounters, stating that extraterrestrials from an alien world could not have evolved along so similar a vector as humans.
Modern popularization
It is unclear exactly when the hypothesis in its complete form was first proposed. Early versions surfaced between speculative UFO literature of the 1970s and the nascent internet culture of the 1990s, at times associated with the idioms "chrononaut UFOs", "time traveling humans", or simply "future humans". Examples include contributions by Jacques Vallée in his book The Invisible College, Radford University anthropology professor and former Forbes contributor David S. Anderson, Jenny Randles' 2001 book Time Storms, James Herbert Brennan's 1997 book Time Travel: A New Perspective, which also draws parallels between the time travelers and elements of the pseudoarchaeological notion of ancient astronauts and ooparts, as well as many others. In their 1998 book The Day After Roswell, U.S. Army officer Philip J. Corso and American novelist William J. Birnes reported that German physicist and engineer Hermann Oberth believed the craft recovered at Roswell could have been a time machine.
On 27 April 2012, History aired the "Time Travelers" episode from season four of the series Ancient Aliens, produced by Prometheus Entertainment and available on Netflix since 2022. In the same year, the "Time Benders" episode from season 18 of the same series aired on History, exploring other aspects of the concept and featuring more speakers, including American professor of biological anthropology Michael P. Masters from the Montana Technological University in Butte, Montana, and British journalist and Ministry of Defence civil servant Nick Pope. Pope linked the Rendlesham Forest incident in the UK and the Cabo Valdés Case in Chile with the time-traveler hypothesis, a connection he also explored in his 2014 book (written with John Burroughs, USAF, Ret., and Jim Penniston, USAF, Ret.) Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World's Best-Documented UFO Incident, published by St. Martin's Press. The two episodes feature, among others, ufologists Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, Sean David Morton, authors Erich von Däniken, David Hatcher Childress, Philip Coppens, and theoretical physicist Ronald L. Mallett, discussing the time-traveler hypothesis in the contexts of pseudoarchaeology and pseudohistory.
In 2013, the Huffington Post published an article describing the time-traveler hypothesis and often referencing the Ancient Aliens episode. In the article, the author also reports an online conspiracy theory about how U.S. Navy Commander George W. Hoover allegedly revealed to his son, George Hoover Jr. and later to ufologist William J. Birnes, that the Roswell incident may have involved human beings from the future rather than aliens and that he believed those "beings" were not extraterrestrial, but rather "extratemporal" in nature. The article goes on to link Hoover's story to other alleged UFO sightings and UFO abduction accounts with similar statements and reports about aliens actually being "humans of the future who have found the technology to overcome the limitations of light speed and time travel paradoxes that keep present-day humans from breaching the boundaries of time" and that their "often-humanoid appearance may suggest a link between the way we look today, and what we might look like thousands of years from now."
In his 2019 book Identified Flying Objects and subsequent 2022 volume The Extratempestrial Model, Michael P. Masters explored various aspects of the time-traveler hypothesis, including fringe ancient astronauts theories alongside speculative evolution scenarios such as brain growth, craniofacial evolution, bipedalism, paedomorphism, and more. Masters was featured on various prominent shows to discuss his contributions to the hypothesis including, amongst others, Reality Check with Ross Coulthart on News Nation, The Cryptid Factor co-hosted by New Zealand journalist David Farrier, comedian Rhys Darby, producers Dan Schreiber and Leon Kirkbeck,, Sean Patrick Hazlett's Through the Glass Darkly, and The Joe Rogan Experience.
In the same year, TNW also published an article about Masters' extratempestrial model. In June 2022, British ESA astronaut Tim Peake mentioned the time-traveler hypothesis in an interview on Good Morning Britain. In a 2023 interview with Stephen Colbert from The Late Show, American filmmaker Steven Spielberg also mentions the theory.
A number of motives for the alleged time travelers are put forth in the different media where the hypothesis is discussed, such as historical or paleoanthropological interest to study our own past, as well as tourism.
Terminology and connection to other theories
Although in his books and publications Masters uses the neologism "extratempestrial" to describe his model and the alleged beings piloting the UFOs, the overall idea has been dubbed the "time-traveler hypothesis" by executive director of nonprofit Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), Jan Harzan.
The time-traveler hypothesis and the interdimensional hypothesis overlap to a certain extent. Figures in the ufology community, such as former MUFON director for the state of Pennsylvania John Ventre in an interview with KDKA News Radio, as well as American parapsychologist and engineer Harold E. Puthoff, refer to the two interchangeably. Masters has stated that he considers his extratempestrial model a subcategory of the interdimensional hypothesis. Indeed, from a more scientific standpoint – albeit controversially – within the framework of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, temporal paradoxes could be avoided if the time traveler were to move from one dimension, or parallel universe, or timeline, to another.
In a similar manner to how the extraterrestrial hypothesis represents a potential solution to Fermi's paradox, the time-traveler hypothesis provides an alternative explanation for the absence of future time travelers. In an interview with Nova on PBS, astrophysicist and skeptic Carl Sagan said that there is a possibility that time travelers from the future are already here and we simply do not have the means or the knowledge to recognize them as such, or have other names for them, such as "UFOs or ghosts or hobgoblins or fairies" and that he did not think "that the fact that we're not obviously being visited by time travelers shows that time travel is impossible."
Forward time travel