Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] An Interview with Michael Masters: The Extratempestrial Model & The Future Human Past

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Today, we’re circling back to an idea that we visited in one of the earliest episodes of the podcast—the extratempestrial model. Sometimes also referred to as the future human hypothesis, the extratempestrial model is the idea that the UFOs phenomenon might represent advanced humans and human descendents who are traveling here from another point in time. I’ll admit to struggling with this idea at first. Time travel has always seemed a little too clunky and a little too hokey to be taken seriously. But as so often happens on this trip down the rabbit hole, the more I learned and the more my perspective began to swell and shift to accommodate the strange new realities I was exploring, the more what once seemed like a kind of crazy idea to me suddenly started to make a heck of a lot of sense. And I found that many of my objections had more to do with the limitations of my knowledge than the limitations of the extratempestrial model. So I wanted to come back around to this idea, because there is a lot there to dig into, most of which didn’t make it into the initial episode. And there are some new and updated ideas that I think are really valuable in understanding the complexities of the phenomenon. And there’s no better way to take a deep dive into this topic than with one of the people who literally wrote the book on the extratempestrial model—Dr. Michael P. Masters. Micahel Masters is a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University. He specializes in human evolution, osteology, and anatomical sciences. Dr. Master’s work related to the phenomenon explores the potential evolutionary trajectories of humankind, linking anthropological theory to hypotheses about extraterrestrial life. He is the author of several books on the topic including Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon, The Extratempestrial Model, and his latest, a satirical science fiction novel called, Revelation: The Future Human Past.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowGET THE EPISODE BRIEFGET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookMUSICTheme: Cabinet of Curiosities by Shaun FrearsonTIMESTAMPS00:30 - Introduction07:20 - What Is The Extratempestrial Model?09:50 - The Extratempestrial Model & The Interdimensional Hypothesis11:29 - The Social & Biological Trends That Hint At The Extratempestrial Model16:32 - Technology & The “Other”20:48 - Technological Variability In Humans21:02 - The Communication Problem25:38 - How Technology Is Shaped By Biology28:52 - Exotic Bipedal Beings32:17 - Could Humanoid Beings Be The Result of Biomimicry?37:08 - Are UFOs Time Machines?43:50 - The Nimitz Incident47:18 - Rethinking The Impossible49:57 - The Block Universe59:02 - Revelation: The Future Human PastBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The other. Spector Vision Radio. A strange podcast network for strange times. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today, we're circling back to an idea that we visited in one of the earliest episodes of the podcast, the extra tempestrial model. Sometimes also referred to as the future human hypothesis, the extra tempestrial model is the idea that the UFO phenomenon might represent advanced

humans and human descendants who were traveling here from another point in time. Now, I'll admit to struggling with this idea at first. Time travel has always seemed a little too clunky and a little too hokey to be taken seriously. But as so often happens on this trip down the rabbit hole, the more I learned and the more my perspective began to swell and shift to accommodate the strange new realities I was exploring, the more what once seemed like kind of a crazy idea suddenly started to make a heck of a lot of sense. And I found that many of my objections had more to do with the limitations of my knowledge than the limitations of the extraterempestrial model itself. So I wouldn't to come back around to this idea, because there is a lot to dig into,

most of which didn't make it into the initial episode, and there are some new and updated ideas that I think are really valuable in understanding the complexities of the phenomenon. And there's no better way to take a deep dive into this topic than with one of the people who literally wrote the book on the extratemporal model. Dr. Michael P. Masters. Michael Masters is a professor of biological anthropology

at Montana Technological University. Dr. Master's work related to the phenomenon explores the potential evolutionary trajectories of humankind, linking anthropological theory to hypotheses about non-human intelligence. He is the author of several books on the topic, including identified flying objects, a multidisciplinary scientific approach to the UFO phenomenon, the extraterrestrial model, and his latest, a satirical science fiction novel called Revelation the Future Human Past. But before we begin, there are just a couple of things. things that I want to say about this episode. Too often, when we're talking about the UFO phenomenon,

we find that we're talking about what the craft are and how they might work, while studiously ignoring some of the biggest and most profound questions, which are, what is the nature of the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon? Who is actually inside the craft? And what do they want? And that makes sense in a lot of ways. With craft, the questions are more straightforward, as are the methodologies for answering them. For example, you can verify that a craft is real and determine things about its capabilities in measurable scientific terms

if you can capture it on multiple tracking systems simultaneously. Or, if you were able to get your hands on an actual craft, you could test those materials in a lab and determine what it was made out of and maybe even get clues as to how it was made. And with a topic that has been so heavily stigmatized, it's not hard to understand why people would want stick to the hard science, to the things that we would at least hypothetically have the ability

to prove in a lab. And there are many who argue that if we want euthology to be taken seriously, then the only way forward is to leave behind all the speculation and just focus on what we can know for sure. As the oft-mentioned Carl Sagan quote goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It makes sense then that people would want to focus on the best and most empirically provable data points in order to have the best shot at clearing that bar. And I get that. It's a valid perspective. The problem comes when we decide that that is the only kind of data that we're going to be willing to take seriously. This approach ultimately cripples us in terms of getting a sense of the full scope of what we're dealing with here. Because virtually all of the

biggest questions about the UFO phenomenon, including who these others are and what they're doing here and what they want, aren't questions that can be answered in a lab. As an anthropologist, Michael Masters is trained in exactly the sort of discipline that we need to ask some of these bigger questions. His tools are observational, not experimental. The data used to assess these kinds of questions are qualitative, not quantitative. We're not talking about facts and figures or elements on the periodic table. We're talking about experiences and patterns. We're talking about stories and anecdotes. We're talking about the eyewitness accounts of people who claim to have actually come in contact with these beings. And depending on where you are, on your own trip down

the rabbit hole, those kinds of conversations might make you a little bit squeamish or uncomfortable, and that's totally normal. But if you're feeling that way, I challenge you to question where that impulse comes from and not to let it hold you back from considering new viewpoints and perspectives. because ultimately, we need to recognize that being willing to entertain the reality of UFOs only up to the point that anyone actually interacts with the intelligence behind them isn't actually objective, no matter how much the denizens of consensus reality try to insist that it is. Before we begin, I'll also mention that throughout this interview, Mike and I reference the Edgar Mitchell Free Study. Free stands for Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial

and extraordinary experiences, and the study that we're referring to, involved the largest survey of experiencers that has been done to date with over 3,000 participants. From this data, they were able to pull valuable insights as to the types of experiences that people report, the impact that it has on their lives, and yes, details about what these beings actually look like and what they say to reported contactees. I'll link to that in the episode brief so that you can explore that on your own if you're interested. But I just wanted to clarify that when you hear me mention, say, mantid beings, I'm not arguing for the literal existence of giant intelligent insects. I'm

agnostic on that, as I am for most of this stuff. But the fact remains that a certain percentage of people who report contact with non-human entities report seeing something of that nature, and that's significant even if we don't know what it means. And so as we dive into this episode, I'll leave you with another, and I'd argue, much more helpful quote from Carl Sagan. We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. Here is my conversation with Dr. Michael Masters. So for anyone listening who might not be familiar from a high level, what is the extraterrestrial model and what advantages does it have

over the extraterrestrial hypothesis? Well, that's a great question. Thanks for having me on, by the way. It's nice to be here to chat with you about such things. The extrater tempestrial model is really just a time-traveling future humans' explanation for UFO phenomenon, which is an idea that's been around for decades, really. But I thought it needed a name. I have heard it called chrono-nots and UFO knots and a couple others. But I thought Extratemporal is a good way of sort of summing it up with one word, where the term extraterrestrial just means off-earth or outside of Earth. And this, they very well could be here on Earth, just in a future time,

so we don't see them at this very moment, but they may inherit the Earth and live here just as we do now. But in various times throughout our future, so yeah, by substituting temp, the Latin root for time, It just indicates that they're from outside our position in time rather than being outside of our position and space on this planet. But as I've said since the beginning, I don't see this as mutually exclusive with the extraterrestrial hypothesis or any others. In fact, I've come to believe recently that we may be talking about the exact same thing as with cryptotterrestrials, ultra-terrestrials, gin, genies, fairies, angels, gods, demons, all of it, I think really may be. just be some iteration of humans. And when we interject time, like I read Matt Tony's book recently, the crypto throstrils. I can't find it on my bookshelf, of course, but I'm reading it,

and it's the exact same thing I'm arguing. And we even have a similar writing style, which kind of freaked me out at first. But if you interject that element of time, that fourth dimension, we're saying the same thing, you know, so I think maybe if we step back and look at the phenomenon on with that perception of being able to move through the fourth dimension of time or possibly a higher dimension that allows them to sort of dip in and out of whatever time they wish throughout their own past, then it may help explain a lot of these different interpretations that are potentially all the same thing. That's really interesting.

And it sounds like even with the interdimensional hypothesis that, you know, people make that distinction between the extra tempestrial model and the interdimensional stuff, but that even might be permutations of the same thing as well. Is that how you're beginning to think about it? Well, the interdimensional is always, I've always considered that the same as this extratrestrial model. It's just a more general category. So people interject that. They say, oh, they're interdimensional. That doesn't answer the question. It doesn't say who they are. It just means they're coming through multiple dimensions of space and or time. So then you have to ask, well, what do you mean by that? You know, are you talking about still individuals from off our planet with a separate evolutionary

history on a different planet and different solar system who are using different dimensions to get here? Or are we talking about future humans using extra dimensions to visit their past or something completely outside of that? You do have to ask, though, if they originate in a different dimension or a space with higher dimensions or multiple dimensions of time, would they look like us still? Would they be so recognizable as humans? would their physics even work in our four dimensions, three of space, one of time? So I think there are some limitations to just interjecting that, and it still doesn't answer the question.

You need to say, well, what are they then, even if they are using extra dimensions? So yeah, I've always considered that the same thing. This extra tempestrum is the more specific version of that that indicates that their origins are still earthly, and within these three dimensions of space, just using extra dimensions of time or possibly some fifth dimension of space time that we don't understand. But currently there's no evidence to suggest there there are multiple universes or anything like that. Theoretically, there are extra dimensions beyond our four, but there's still not a broad consensus on that or whether or not we could ever find them and study them if they do exist. So what are the biological and social trends in the

evolution of humans that lead you to believe that the beings being reported by many contactees might actually be us from another point in time. I'm glad you added social to that too because, you know, we can't separate the two in human evolution. We're unique in that respect. And if you look at the history of humanity, we refer to it as biocultural evolution, biosocial, because the two are inseparable. Once we developed culture, once we started to use stone tools and fire and all kinds of

various iterations of stone and wood and ivory, really it had such a mass. massive impact on our physiology that we can't look at human evolution without that. Like we can study the biology of other organisms. We don't have to focus on culture because it wasn't fundamental to their evolutionary trajectory. But with humans, it was. Good example is when we first started using fire to cook food. It shrunk our gastrointestinal system. That in conjunction with using tools to process the food, especially fibrous meat products.

Fire kind of starts the digestive process or whole gastrointestinal system. system shrunk, it helped contribute, more energy to the brain, Leslie Iello's expensive tissue hypothesis. So really the two are intricately linked. But even before culture, some of the most dominant trends, the first iterations of culture, some debate about that, was between three and three point three million years ago is when we find the first evidence of stone tools. But prior to that, we still had three million years of evolving Sons culture, prior to culture, and the two most dominant trends, not just in that pre-culture period, but throughout the last six to eight million years of human evolution have been

an increase in brain size. It's roughly three times the size it was in our earliest dominant ancestors and modern chimpanzees around 400 cubic centimeters. And as the brain grew and moved out interiorly, more forward over our eye orbits, and also expanded medial laterally, especially in the parietal lobes, toward the top and back part of the skull. In conjunction with that, we had a face that retracted. It got smaller and retracted, again, partly because of tools, probably because of fire and stone tools,

where we relieved pressure for large teeth, mastigatory muscles, large chewing apparatus. The face could get out of the way of an expanding brain, and that's exactly what happens. So we have this trade-off between our brains and our faces. And so this is kind of the main way I approached it for my first book, Identified Flying Objects, where if those same trends continue, regardless of what sort of continued social pressures or political or economic or environmental

pressures occur, this same fundamental change in human evolution that's occurred for six to eight million years. If it continues, we're very likely to possess the same cranial facial architecture as these quintessential gray aliens. So that was kind of the starting point for that theory, I realized after publishing that book that there's a huge number of cases where it's people, just like us, it's modern humans. And I referenced the Dr. Edgar Mitchell-Free study relatively often because it's the only large survey-based study that gives us some results that are quite informative. It's a multi-language, multicultural survey study. And obviously there's issues with surveys that we could get into. But with something like this, it's arguably

arguably the best we can do right now until we can set up cameras in every abductee's bedroom and really study the physiological form of these beings during an abduction. But what they found is that the most commonly reported form is human, just like us, an actual anatomically modern homo sapiens sapien. And then after that was the short, gray, tall grays, and then hybrid, some iteration of those in combination. And as I often point out, all four of those are by definition. mission hominin. They are within our lineage. They're upright walking bipedal hominin. So I think

it's important to note that and also just how many really are us. They look like us talking about the social and cultural things. When abductees are given tours of the craft, they have kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, and control rooms and medical examination, all the same things you'd expect us to have in a craft like that as modern humans. So I think, yeah, I think there's a lot of things that indicate that they are us, and especially the ones that look and act just like us. That was a part of my second book was to walk that back. You know, I was just talking about the grays primarily in the first book, but to walk that back and cover a broad geographic area.

There's five continents over 90 plus years of contact the experiences. And what do people see? You know, yes, there are archetypal grays, but also people just like us who are seen exercising outside their ships and collecting grasshoppers and really Monday. and things like that. That is really interesting. In your second book, the Extra Tempestrial Model, you talk about what we can learn from early interactions

between old world and new world indigenous populations that came into contact with each other and how we might respond to encountering a more technologically advanced version of ourselves. And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little because even in this situation where people are seeing a being that they identify is looking just like us. And yet, as a result of technology, we kind of placed them in the role of the other.

Yeah, no, God's, angels. Those are the focus of this most recent book, too, that, you know, the interpretation of these beings, these humans, as I would argue, is going to be different. Even if it's the same ones, let's say it's the exact same ones as a little thought experiment. Who happened to ship from right now? You know, where are the aliens? We're the ones traveling back in time. You go about 10 minutes. You're going to look like everybody else.

20 years, 50 years, 100 years. But once you do start getting into the thousands, yeah, especially when you focus on the culture and technology of those times, it's going to be godlike. It's magical to them. And even ones that could walk around, you put on the clothes of those people. You know, we haven't evolved this capacity yet. At least most of us haven't. Some individuals have.

But the ability for telepathic communication, remote viewing, clairvoyance, future knowledge, seemingly a lot of these beings, even ones who aren't quite to the gray level have that capacity. And if we did that, if we had that now, and we can go back and interact with the minds of these individuals without talking, that's a very angelic, godlike thing to do. And then just our technology alone would give us status. There's that cliche example of the white Europeans coming across and taking over the Aztec, the Mayan, the Olmec, all of these different civilizations. I guess the Olmec became the Aztecs, but they were largely able to do that because of how they were perceived, and then this hierarchical structure of their civilizations where you take out the individual at the top

and plant yourself in that lead position, and now you control the population, save for some of those that aren't as accepting of your new position of power over them. But they could do that because of the technological differences. Fortunately, these don't seem to be doing that. They're not taking over past groups and enslaving us and making us, build things and toil in the fields, but they could if they want them. Regardless, we still see them as godlike. There's been a lot of even recent UFO cults, UFO religions. And yeah, you take it back even farther with continuing the ARB technology example that I sort of tangentially straight away from

there. Sorry about that. We're going to be perceived differently in each of these previous iterations of human existence. And you go back 20,000 years, 30,000 years, 40,000 years. Now it's unfathomable. what we're doing, who we are. And we're seeing coming down from the sky in each of these situations because the craft fly. So you can understand where the extraterrestrial hypothesis came from. You associate these craft with the stars, they're star people, as they're known in a lot of Native American societies. Even things like the wheel within the wheel, the burning embers and the Ezekiel story,

there's so many accounts like that. And if we step back and look at those, I talked about Baba Mwaner Waresa in my second, book, The Rain Goddess is this traditional tale on East Africa. And you see those all over the place because of people have been interacting these godlike beings. They're going to write that down. They're going to store that in oral tradition or if they have writing hieroglyphs, written history. But even through song in oral tradition, you can pass things down for thousands and thousands

of years. And I think if we look at bees and take them seriously and see these patterns across them, I think it'll reveal that the phenomenon has been with us for a very important. eons, just like so many have said before Jacques Valet and countless others. And yeah, what if it's the same thing, just observed and interpreted by different societies because they are in this stage of evolution that predates their ability to comprehend it. We're still there. Apparently, we still haven't quite cracked the code as a species yet, but I think we're close. And honestly, I think that has a lot to do with what we're seeing now with the current disclosure movement. At first, I didn't think it was

real. I woke up to this blinding light. I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is ours.

It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, fringe arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Save now at Whole Foods Market.

It's the summer splash event. with great everyday prices on 365 brand ground beef for the grill and ice cream for dessert. They have yellow sales signs on ready to cook beef or chicken kebabs too. Level up with savory marinate, spices and rubs, and complete your cookout with a crowd-pleasing cherry pie and their balsamic chicken salad. Available at the prepared foods counter. Get Summer Splash Savings Now at Whole Foods Market. It's really interesting.

And you think about even now on our planet, the kind of spread that we have technologically. Like there's undiscovered tribes in the rainforest and on islands that are living at kind of a Stone Age level while we're taking people to the moon. So, you know, you have to wonder. That's a great point. And we see how those interactions go. You know, there seems to be a pretty large spread even in what we know about.

Yeah. And I think that's, I'd never thought about that before, but that's a great analogy for likely what we're seeing going back through time where, you know, we have the snapshot in time now. we like to think of everyone across the world is flying in airplanes and driving fast cars, but that's not the case. We have quite a huge spread of cultural technological advancement. We don't make distinctions in anthropological circles anymore about first world, second world, third world, because it implies some sort of ranking system. But there's undoubtedly a vast amount of cultural variation. That's, in fact, one of the ways we know that our biology doesn't dictate

our culture is that biology changes very slowly, subject to the laws of natural salivation. election and culture changes almost instantly anymore. You know, somebody does a new TikTok dance and it's viral across the world in a day or two. It's true. In the extrater tempestrial model you write, are tides, atmosphere, low gravity, orbit, distance from the sun, chemical composition, abundance of carbon and DNA has the coding system for all life on Earth, are additional factors that make it highly unlikely extraterrestrial beings would look, walk, eat, drink, mate, sense, think, communicate, or be anything like us. And that really struck me,

and it made me wonder to what extent we'd even be able to recognize other intelligent forms of life, much less communicate with them. And maybe it's not just that the non-human intelligences that were in contact with or in some way genetically related to us, but maybe for us to even have a real shot at being aware of and interacting with any non-human intelligence. Like we'd almost have to have that kind of a profound biological link. Yeah, that's a good point. It was kind of the premise of that movie Arrival, which I finally watched not too long ago. People have been telling me to watch it for like two years. And that's the whole issue is how do we communicate? Are they violent? Are they going to kill us even though they could? And then they interjected a very strong time travel

component to that too, where they see all time at the same time, sort of a slaughterhouse vibe situation. And yeah, the whole thing was for Amy Adams, to figure that out, to crack the code, to break through those nuances of their form of communication. And they were fundamentally different than us. We're not talking about upright walking bipedal hominence like we are in this situation. And you would expect that, especially because the vast majority of Earth-like exoplanets outside of our solar system are massive. They're much, much larger than Earth. I did a little, analysis of this in 2016 and then just did it again with new exoplanet data from a number of sources upwards of almost 6,000 exoplanets and only about 4% were the same size or smaller than Earth,

which indicates that even that gravity factor alone, not to mention all of the other variables you just mentioned in asking this question, it's going to make for something very different than us. And the fact that bipedalism is so rare here, are the only a mammal that does it full time, of all of the mammals on this planet, indicates that it's probably not going to happen on planets that are heavier than ours, which are 96% of them. So, yeah, I think we definitely need to keep those things in mind. Again, I don't want to do a straw man fallacy thing here and say,

well, it's either this or the extraterrestrial hypothesis, because there's probably a lot of things that are going on. But if we do look at these two models in contrast to one another, yeah, we're not likely to have an upright, walking human civilization that looks like us, thinks like us, has sex like us, communicates like us. There's all of these things that go in to what we've evolved, not just biologically, but with regard to our culture and system of communication, could they even learn our language if they existed 2.5 million light years away? How would they find us? How would they get here? How would they communicate with us?

These craps can obviously go fast. I don't think that's a factor, but how How do they even identify our location, especially because the speed of light would take 2.5 million years to even get there. We're talking about potentially other galaxies at that point, but even within the roughly 100,000 light year span of our own galaxy, anywhere in that. But you're talking about huge limitations with being able to find us. And then, yeah, as you mentioned, communicate with us once they got here. I have to imagine that our technology is in some ways really shaped

by our shape and by the fact that we're bipedal and by the fact that we have some hands free and that you know, we have while we're facing eyes. So do you think technology would look fundamentally different if it was created, even if it could do analogous things by something that looked a lot different than we did, like had a different body schema? Yeah, you know, we have this expression of biology that form follows function and even beyond having similar things like bathrooms and kitchens and bedrooms and operating tables that are so commonly seeing these craft, just the fact that we're even talking about something that looks like something we would or could use.

You know, what if they had tentacles? What if they had eight limbs and no legs? Or they floated instead of walked? Where we wouldn't expect to see something that we can just walk in and walk around on, go make a grilled cheese sandwich in their kitchen and take a dump in their bathrooms. like we're talking about something that's going to be very different. And it's part of why I've said since the beginning that if they were described as floating tentacle bearing beans, I never would have even given this a second thought.

But because they're described so often as human in almost every instance, there's only 5% in that Dr. Edgar Mitchell study where they were described as something fundamentally non-human. So yeah, I think we definitely need to keep that in mind. No, there's a show the, I forget, Will Robinson, I think, was the main character in that. I don't know. It's kind of an old, I think it was an old book. A Lost in Space, is that one of the time? Yeah, I think that was it.

Yeah, which is really good. I think it's made for, like, kids, but it was really a good series. And they had this thing that was a machine. Space was like this really trippy star system, like one of those old screensavers from the 90s. But it was still upright walking, still had two limbs. it could morph its body into something different, but it flew the ship with four appendages, upper limbs and lower limbs. So we do try to push that sometimes, but you watch Star Trek or Star Wars or the Oraville

or any of these. They try to make something look so different from us, but it still looks like us, you know, and they'll go to this planet, which is allegedly many, many late years away, and they get there and it's humans that are identical to us that speak English with an American accent. It's like, come on. You know, try harder, at least push the boundaries of our knowledge of evolution a little bit, but it's hard to do that. You know, same thing with time travel.

It's hard to stick to the block universe model of time travel when making a script because it's hard to be self-consistent. Even though the universe seemingly is, it's a lot easier to interject change and interject different timelines because your storyline is easier to write like that. But I feel like we should do better with both. It should be making non-humans look like non-humans. and we're going to write time travel, make it a little more realistic in the context of the way we perceive time. Absolutely.

I think it's interesting, too, going back to what you were saying about the kinds of beings that people report seeing, that even some of the more kind of exotic non-human intelligences, like mantids, even though they look very distinctly not human, they're still kind of upright walking five-keedal, you know. Yeah. Did they have six limbs? If they had six limbs, they're an insect. If they had four, they're a tetrapod. Very important distinction.

I don't care how damn big their eyes were. If they have the body form, the bowel plan, as we call it, of a tetrapod, then they're an earthly tetrapod. If they have six limbs, they're probably an earthly insect. Probably from an alternate dimension, it could be a very distant post-human civilization where bugs took over and figured out time trouble. I don't necessarily believe that, but it has been mentioned before. Yeah, but it does at least, it does at least suggest an earth origin. Yeah. Clearly not right now because we don't see giant mantis walking down.

Fortunately, we do. Generally. And they tend to be kind of, they freak people out. And that's another interesting correlation, especially that comes out of this free study, because, you know, we can always talk about anecdotal things, but this was an actual well-thought-out survey study. And those are quite valid in social science. And we shouldn't ignore that fact.

You know, everybody is like, well, we need standards of evidence. So we need to do lab-based studies with controlling all variables. That's bullshit. That's unrealistic with regard to most things. And we're uniquely positioned as anthropologists to call bullshit on that because we can't do that to people. It's highly illegal. And we wouldn't in the first place because it's unethical. So as a result of that, we have other ways of gather.

data and we can make predictions and we can test those with the same types of statistical rigor and hypothesis testing that we can with anything else. The only limitation is we can't say there's cause and effect because there's too many co-factors. There's too many other variables. But survey data is a legitimate way of conducting studies like this. They're up to over 5,000 individuals at this point. But yeah, they found that people who interact with the more human-looking entities, you

Humans, human-looking humans, had a more positive experience because you can sort of see yourself in them. And arguably, if they are closer to us in time, in our future, they would see more of us in themselves. Whereas if you're talking about very distant humans from tens of thousands of years in the future, maybe longer that it might take to develop those big bug eyes where we confuse them through a praying mantis, then, yeah, they see us as some primitive little ant-turd from their very distant past. and why would they care about us? Why would they give us hugs and try to make us feel nice about what's happening? Yeah, that makes sense when you see how we treat animals and the beings that we feel don't have quite the same level of advancement that we have.

Yeah, looking at primate research is a great example. It's just recently that we started outlaw doing scientific research on the hominoids, which includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobo and common chimpanzees. Yeah, it's still only 26 countries who have outlawed that. Macacs get used for everything. Poor little bastards get all kinds of things shoved into them and shot up with AIDS and everything else. But yeah, we do it too.

Absolutely. Where do you draw the line? Yeah, exactly. Well, this question's a little more off the beaten path, but with your background, I'm really interested to ask you this. So the communication problem that's presented by non-human intelligence also makes me wonder if what we're seeing with these humanoid entities might be some kind of like bio mimicry intended to serve as an interface between us and an intelligence that's too unlike us for us to process it in any other way.

In interviews, Gary Nolan has posed a thought experiment of how would you communicate with an ant colony that's living in your backyard? And so maybe you would need something that looked enough like an ant for an aunt to communicate with it, but enough not like an ant so that it got the idea that it was something other. What do you make of that idea? And do you think it's possible that maybe more exotic forms of non-human intelligences that might be coming from somewhere else could be using some form of vile mimicry to communicate with this? Yeah, I listened to that. That was from his salt talk, I believe. By the way, they call him Harry Nolan in Russia, which I think is fun. I checked directing them on that, but they didn't stick.

Yeah, so I listened to that in the airport recently. I think not long after it came out. My first thought was, why not make them look exactly like us then? If they can, why make all these different versions and with some that have very shocking mantis-like characteristics? If they're focused on a specific group of people on a specific planet at a specific time, as extraterrestrials who have the ability to make something look kind of like us and communicate with us, why not make them look exactly like us if they're advanced creatures that have that technology? I think they would.

But the variation unto itself seems to indicate that it is different iterations of humans from different times. With that said, I do definitely agree that if you're going to send something back to a certain time, especially early on, there are inherent dangers associated with that. It's hard enough to fly things through space with our normal perception of the passage of the fourth dimension. but when you're dropping things in and out of four-dimensional space time, appearing and disappearing, there's undoubtedly four or more things you have to account for. And I think that does help explain why they crash. I think human fallibility helps explain why they crash.

But yeah, why not make AI in the form of yourself, which we do now? Let's go back to that analogy earlier where we were talking about us getting on these ships and going back and exploring all these different groups. If you had to go back and pick up a couple of 200-pound Neanderthals with spears and fighter flight responses, are you going to want to go out there and do that yourself? Or are you going to want to maybe employ some artificial intelligence, some big strong robots to go do that for you? And I think a modern example is the Pascagoula encounter with Calvin Parker and Hickson, where they were taken by robots at first.

They saw humans in the craft, but their initial abduction was arguably a robot, not even one that looked like a human, which I think is interesting. I think that implies that they're from a more approximate period in our future. But Whitley Strieber thinks he was initially taken by an AI that looked like these gray. So I think they make them in their own image. They don't really try to build them to specific time periods, which I think you would see if they cared about that more. Or if they were extraterrestrial and we're trying to come to a certain place at a certain time and make something that could be that intermediate. I don't think they need one because we're not ants.

We're people and they're people. So I don't think that's necessarily an aspect of the communication thing. I do think that it may be an aspect of what they're doing and how they're doing it. And I mean, we're already doing it. We're already making robots to look like us probably mostly for the sex industry, to be honest. There's been a lot of indications of that throughout the recent past. There is, what was that? That movie, God, it was a horrible movie.

I think it might have been called AI, actually, with that kid from The Sixth Sense and the sexy British guy. I forget his name. Jude Law, I think, was in it. But, yeah, it was, you know, they were all sex robots and there were all these places people could go. And then they'd have to worry about diseases and the ethics of sex trafficking and things like that. So, yeah, I don't think it's just going to be sex robots. robots, but they're utilitarian in a number of ways beyond that. And I think once we start traveling back in time, they're going to be even more so. Humans, we are predictable, if nothing else,

right? Yeah. And it usually serves on food and sucks, because we are animals, just like every other. Yes, absolutely. So we've talked a lot about the morphology of the beings that people encounter, but what clues do we have that the craft being reported might not be spacecraft, but actually time machines? Well, I think they can be both. They can go very fast. And like I've argued for a long time, if we are going to do interstellar travel, we would need those craft to be time machines, simply because of the effect of time dilation, how it compresses both time and space for those inside the crafts. So when they get back, the classic example is the twin paradox, where the individual stayed behind is much older because time passed faster back on their own planet than it did for

the twin that was in the ship. So if you wanted to return not just to your home planet, but your home time, you would need backward time travel technology to do that. So I think it's probably going to be an aspect of both. And I don't think we'll really attempt interstellar travel until we have that capability. But honestly, I've come to think that these machines are both inherently, not just because of that, but because of the way they appear and disappear, the way they seemingly shift colors, the color spectrum when they're powering up before

darting off or just disappearing in thin air, that's something you would expect of a time machine. And then, and I kind of broke down the history of how we understand time and how time travel might work in my first book since Einstein's 1915 publication on general relativity, which laid out the 10 theory equations that have been solved numerous times to demonstrate that time travel is possible. Backward time travel, specifically, future time travel is easy. But then obviously,

we're talking about 1915 to 2023, still without any knowledge of the advanced machinery that were arguably seen from that future. And we're likely to reverse engineering, and this is the thing that pisses me off the most, is people miss this obvious fact. We're talking about how these craft

are thousands of years beyond us. and we're reverse engineering. In linear time, we're going to be flying those things thousands of years in the future, probably a lot sooner than that. But we would be expected to have the technology. If we're reverse engineering, we'll eventually figure out how it works and then use it to travel back in time. And I feel like it's a very obvious thing that a lot of people just goes right by them. Like, yes, it's more advanced than us.

Yes, we have it. Yes, we're figuring out how to do it. Maybe that'll be up. us at some point using that same technology. And I talk about this in both of my books because I think it's an important point, but one that's really commonly overlooked and people's statements about this highly advanced technology that's so hard to understand. And certainly it was for our ancestors, but we're getting to the point where we can start

to understand it. We can figure outwards, even though all of these secrets are being kept from us because of the benefits of the military industrial complex and what they can get out of it in the context of war, another predictable thing, sex food war. which has always been the case. Anytime any civilization, any small group, had technology that was more advanced and better killing other people than they spread.

And that technology spread with them. And unfortunately, that's probably been the case with what's been going on with the UFO cover up over the last 90 years as well, especially because a lot of it was happening during wars, Cold War, World War II, post-World War II, and so on. But, yeah, I don't know. I think there's a lot of things,

even beyond that that indicate they are time machines. I list a number of them in my second book just like the fact that the trees were allegedly the trees around the Travis Walton abduction site grew at a much faster rate and they could test that with the tree rings around them relative to trees farther away from that. Linda Jones in Manchester, UK describes the grass growing instantly around her. Jim Penniston talks about a sphere of influence around the craft where time seemed to slow and then he had missing time. At missing time itself is, I think, a pretty good indication

that there is some sort of shift in the rate at which time flows, as we perceive it, in and around these crafts. So, yeah, we can only know so much in this very limited perspective we have in 2020. We think we're so advanced, but when we're talking about these highly evolved complex machines, we're not. I know maybe there eventually will look back on our understanding of time now. physicists don't even understand it. Astrophysicists, they can do numbers, they can crunch things, but it's all bullshit because they don't even know what the fundamental nature of time is, and arguably

space. Sean Carroll says that all the time, space might also be in an emergent phenomenon. Then they get all like bitchy with everybody, like we know everything. And I think it's kind of a Napoleon complex where they don't and they know it, but they got to double down and be like, well, actually, no, we've got it all figured out. Don't you worry about that. You can't do the math. So don't worry about that. And it's infuriating because if we all just said, look, we don't know. But let's try to figure it out together instead of just, I don't know, making all these little fights that you see in the UFO community, the paleoanthropology community. Any field where there's a lot of smart people that don't have it all figured out, it tends to just devolve into chaos and name calling and arguing.

And you see that across the board. I guess I'm a part of it by just saying that too, so I'll call myself out. Yeah, absolutely. It gets ridiculous at times. I struggled with this theory at first, but I know that one case that you go over in your second book and that was really one that brought me around and that most people will be familiar with is the Nimitz incident because you have that moment where the Tick-Tac beat them to the cap point, which was something that was created in real time through a computer that like no one should have had any kind of access to. whatsoever and yet somehow the Tick-Tac wasn't just near the cap point it was on that.

It was on it. Yeah. I feel like it's almost impossible to wrap your mind around that and what could be going on there without there being some sort of an understanding that they are interacting with time in a way that's different than. Yeah, future knowledge too. I mean, if we're talking about individuals that knew something about the future and that almost seems like one where they're trying to communicate something or they're trying to say, hey, look, we know where you're going. How do we know that? Yeah, I'll should be asking questions. It's like, there's a lot of things that they seemingly do to make us ask questions that some of us. There's the vast majority of the human population that ignores all of this. But yeah, if you pay attention, and like I said earlier, I wonder if that's

an aspect of the disclosure thing is that we're not just asking questions, what trying to figure it out. And once we get close enough, I don't see how that couldn't be a signal to them that it's time to talk to us. If we know who they are, they don't have to be covert anymore. They don't have to hide everything that they're doing anymore. And that to me seemed like one. Like, why do that? You know, if you're just flying around, why end up in that exact point that nobody knows about and you shouldn't know about unless you had future knowledge? So yeah, that's an interesting one, but also the G-forces. I also talk about that in that section of the book.

This was something that was conveyed to me by someone who allegedly worked in the intelligence community for his entire life. He was retired. I can never know if that's true. I can never fact-check those things. Maybe somebody could. I don't know. I didn't really care to either because I felt like they were just trying to tell me something

and didn't matter who they were. But it was something that I overlooked in my first book that with time travel capabilities and with the sphere of influence that they're making around this craft where they're manipulating the flow of time, suddenly we're talking about different reference frames, different ways in which time flows

in that sphere of influence in and around the craft versus those outside of it. And based on a number of different cases, I give examples of both in the extra tempestrial model, they're doing both. They're speeding it up and slowing it down. So if they have that ability to slow down time in and around them, what we see is a 10,000 G maneuver, maybe, you know, 0.5 or 1G to them. It may feel just like a plane taking a slow bank as it comes off the runway. So, you know, I do, I think it helps explain that too. And that's what this ex-intelligence individual told me. And whether or not they were who they claimed they were, They wrote to me after my first book came out, pointed out a very obvious thing that I overlooked, a point of ignorance. And I was like, oh, cool, that's interesting. Thanks. And they were like, no, I don't think you understood what I was saying and explained it again.

And I was like, oh, yeah, damn, that makes a lot of sense. And we moved on. And I've been talking about it since then. You know, it's not something I thought of. But once they mentioned it, and it's been the case with all of this research, and this is why I argue that we should all be talking to each other and not fighting because if we listen to each other, we all move farther down the field faster than if we just get on our high horses and think we have everything figured out. But he mentioned that.

There's been a couple other ones like the AI thing. We talked about earlier. I overlooked that. My first book, Disease Transmission was another one I overlooked. So it's important to put things out there that doesn't answer everything. It doesn't even come close. But the more we have a conversation and the more people with. specific sets of expertise start to contribute to that conversation. We as a whole grow in our

collective knowledge and move forward faster. And that was definitely one of those cases. And it's so interesting too how so many of these things that the craft do seem impossible. And then people tend to blow them off and say, well, it can't be real because that's not possible. And yet, like you just gave that example. I feel like you were talking about someone specific thing. I mean, that might be, maybe. It might be sub-tweeting. Maybe. But I mean, but with one little change like that, like with one little piece of context or one little idea, suddenly what is impossible makes so much sense.

And it's like, well, why would we run from something that seems impossible? Why wouldn't we stop and talk it through and try to find that thing that makes it. Yeah. That's one of my favorite things about Jeff Crapel at race universities. He addresses the impossible. It's most of the archives of the impossible. A number of his books are like, well, what the hell is the impossible? It's this stupid idea that we have where in posterity we look back on it like, oh, that was actually kind of easy.

And that was the first quote, J.L. and Heineck in my most recent book, Revelation, was we look back on the past. It's like, we forget that there'll be a 20th century science and the 30th century science. Then we look back with this arrogance of posterity. I don't remember the exact words he used, but it's absolutely true. And we're talking about time frames that are centuries where this phenomenon likely stretches tens of thousands of years into our future. So yeah, this tiny little blip on their radar probably looks ridiculous. Kind of embarrassing for humanity, I would guess.

Yeah, I would not be surprised if that's the case. With time travel, I know that a difficulty that a lot of people have with it is they have this kind of back to the future sort of paradigm around it where if you go into the past, you could potentially create a paradox where maybe you wouldn't be born. But you've argued in your work that the block universe model resolves that paradox. I think that's something a lot of people aren't familiar with. So could you explain what the block universe is and how that works? Yeah. And you're absolutely right. Marty McFly ruined all of our brains in the 80s and 90s. You know, great movies, but definitely didn't do anything for how we perceive what is likely

the way in which time works. And so, yeah, like a lot of people get hung up on paradoxes. And that only exists if there is actual change, if there can be change to the past. However, within the Block Universe model, there is no ability to change it because the past, present, and future all exist already as one massive, four-dimensional entity, a block of all moments in space, time that have, are, and will ever exist. So if you go back into the past, it's not changing anything. You go to the past as we perceive linear time, which our brains had to develop.

Neuroscience has shown that we perceive time linearly because we have to. Because if a tiger is running at us and we're perceiving time backwards, we run straight into it instead of away from it. And there's different speeds at which other animals perceive time, too, what I call biorelativity, because it's not just this same perception of time and the speed at which things change that we see. Donald Hoffman's written a lot about this, not just with the perception of time, the colors, textures, feels, everything. So we've evolved to have a linear perception of time. And unfortunately, that's really limited our ability to see beyond that. And you're right, this is the big hang up for people.

I think I've probably explained block time more than anything else in any conversation I've had because it's important to understand it's not just my idea either. It's the most conventionally held understanding of how the universe works. Earlier I mentioned that we still don't know what time is. It's not fundamental. It's an emergent phenomenon that comes from something that is fundamental that we don't yet understand. So we could potentially alter this knowledge to expand beyond the block universe. but currently this is what we have and it does make a lot of sense. And within this, it doesn't allow for paradoxes in the way that they're often perceived.

Because you go back into the past, you do whatever you're doing, you're not changing anything. You're just doing what you already did in that past period. You come back to the future, everybody's heads aren't made out of donuts. They're the exact same as they were because you had already done those things before that moment in time. It's already there. It just took you still going to do it. And nothing changes. It's still all a part of this massive landscape of time that we can't see

because we see this sort of linear flow to it, but the past, present and future are all there. They're all part of that massive block. And we feel the present, even though it doesn't exist, this is one of Einstein's big hangups, that there's no way to quantify now. And there's a reason it doesn't exist because presentism doesn't exist. It doesn't explain the universe that we live in.

but the block universe seemingly does. And if you look at this interaction with different time periods, these future humans are likely doing, they don't get home after these missions and see everything as being different. They get home and it's all the same. They just went and did all of the things that were already in those parts of space time. So it's only once you get into the many worlds interpretation and different branching timelines and multiverses,

that you do have the opportunity for paradox. You then have to start asking those questions about, Well, what about this timeline or that timeline? Are they jumping in between them? Can they get back to their own? Do they want to? Why don't we see future humans constantly coming back trying to change things because they screwed up the timeline by doing something they thought would be good and it's bad?

They expect all these time wars and things that we just don't see. So I do think the Block Universe model is not only accurate. I don't argue for this because I do think it helps explain the phenomenon. It's just what we agree on is the fabric of reality. at this point, but again, that can all change. Hmm, yeah. So if our descendants aren't necessarily coming back to change things, there's not like some epic time war going on,

then why are they coming back? What are the ideas about that that you think are most compelling? Well, I always get out in front of that question by acknowledging my biases, because as an anthropologist, that's what we want to do. In our classes all the time, we say, well, if only we had a time machine, we could know. These are our best theories based on the evidence, based on the fossil record, based on the toolkit of our ancestors, but we can't know until they tell us.

But based on the behaviors that are reported, there is seemingly a research component to it. These abductions, look at John Mack, look at Kathleen Martins. They've both listed like very specific descriptions of what contact these experience independently, and they're almost identical. And that indicates to me and should indicate to others that there are patterns there. There are things we can learn from those. And they seemingly are scientific. It seems to be research-based, at least in these time periods where people are being abducted about, maybe a whole different thing that they're doing even 200 years ago, or creating religions 2,000 years ago or whatever. But what it seems like in this time period is that it's research

pace and it's also a gammy collection endeavor on a massive scale. That they're collecting sperm from men, they're collecting eggs from women, and that is seemingly paramount. What that means, harder to say, but that is a pattern that we can identify, a very, very recurrent pattern. And a lot of people ask me, well, so what are they doing to us? Why do they want? all of these sex cells. And I don't think it's for us, I'm of the belief that it's for them. It's something about the future that they require past human DNA for. And it was interesting having written a whole section about that in my first book and then learning about Jim Peniston's encounter and he said something almost identical, which he was told by them. Really quickly,

I'm like a week before publication. Trying to add that. And again, it's not cherry picking. It's not selection bias, but that's an important thing. When I independently observed this across these different contact cases, and he was allegedly told by them, let's put those together. Maybe those fit together for a reason that that happened a week before I published this book. So I don't have to sell synchronicities to your audience probably. I'm sure they experienced them on a regular basis. But yeah, I do you think it's research based. I think it's studying us and our society and our culture. because you can do that much better with living humans than you can with fossils. And I think it's also them collecting our DNA for whatever reason.

I list a number of them in both books. So I won't go down that rabbit hole again. Yeah, it's interesting because even in our modern day, we're seeing a rise in fertility issues. We're seeing lower sperm counts in men. So it could be if that trend continues, suddenly fervisting that material doesn't seem so crazy. Yeah, and that's all I try to do in these books. Like, you can't predict the future. We can maybe observe things from the future.

And that's why it pisses me off. When people are like, well, this is speculation. It's not because we're observing things. Again, it's this disconnect. I see it so much teaching in an engineering school, one of the top engineering schools in the Pacific Northwest, where everybody is so locked in to quantitative research methods in a controlled lab,

where all factors are controlled for. That's one part of scientific research, but there's also a huge another part that you're ignoring and sort of trying to belittle in looking at this relationship or the way that science is conducted. So it kind of pisses me off because we're talking about observational research here and observing these things and these patterns across things. And if they are from the future, we should be able to glean that.

And it would indicate some things about our future by taking them seriously and studying them and looking for these patterns across them. Knowing that, one thing I really tried to avoid was predicting what's going to happen between now and them. I hear this all the time, well, we're going to live underground or we'll live in space. There's a ton of YouTube videos where they sort of take these ideas and go there because I don't. And I don't for a reason because we can't know. We can't know what happens between now and then to create this cranial facial form. So, as you mentioned, it's important to look at trends. Long-term trends, we can identify in the present and throughout the recent and very distant past,

and if those continue, we're likely to see this that are the others. So, yeah, we should absolutely focus on those fertility and pecundity trends in the context of this question, but at any point, anything could change. We can't say for sure. The only one I would really hang my hat on is the cranial facial change, the runaway brain. That one perseveres throughout potentially eight million years of human evolution, regardless of what we're doing and where. And, yeah, I don't see that one changing simply because we became aware of it. I think there's probably something deeper going on there.

But yeah, trends are important. Patterns are important. Should pay attention to them and stop elevating lab-based quantitative research over all others because it's a very narrow view of science. Yeah, absolutely. So to switch gears a little bit, you also have a new book out called Revelation, The Future Human Past, which is a satirical science fiction novel. The book is really interesting with lots of big ideas and food for thought. And it's also deeply irreverent and really funny.

I was reading it on an airplane this weekend and I think I completely annoyed the person sitting next to this. Or there's some LOL moment. Because I thought you were going to say erotic, which it also kind of is. It is a little erotic. I'll give you that. I'll give you that. But so are contact experiences. Mm-hmm.

Exactly. Can you talk a little bit more about the book and just what inspired you to write it? Yeah, I'd love to. It's actually the first time I've gotten a chance to talk about it. So it was inspired. I did a talk at the Eslin Institute in Big Sur, California in July. And one of the co-founders, Michael Murphy, came up to me after my talk. And he's like, man, we've had so many UFO people through here.

and I call bullshit on all of it. I've given up on UFOs. But, you know, listening to you talk about this future human idea, it makes a lot of sense, it checks a lot of boxes. But I'm curious, have there been any studies of sex and music specifically? Like, what can we learn about the potential future human or aliens, if they're extraterrestrial or whatever, about sex and music?

I was like, there's been some cases with some pretty hot stuff going down. but as far as a study of that, I don't know. I was like, I'll get back to you. So I went through just, I don't even know how many cases across all these different databases. You can find anecdotal accounts of like, yeah, and then this happened. And obviously the sperm extractions is ubiquitous, but that's not sex. That's not that interaction on some spiritual level. And yeah, I kind of got frustrated.

I couldn't find anything. So I thought it would be fun to write a book where, that was sort of a corner piece of it and how we see sex now and how they potentially see it as a really cognitive spiritual interaction, which we can feel too, but also what that might mean for research. If they're coming back to study that from the future, so I sort of split the script a little bit. And instead of us studying that about them, I was like, well, what if they were studying that about us? And then, yeah, like, just religion's a really interesting part of it that keeps getting mentioned. Like, well, one of the hardest things about disclosure is going to be for religious people.

I was like, well, I'll write a book to help religious people so they can, you know, kind of get ahead of that and get a foot in the door. So when things drop, they're like, oh, okay, it was future humans. And I'm being a little snarky and saying that. But so no, it was just this kind of combination of his questions and also satire is just fun. I think a lot of people read this and think, oh, Masters is some kind of bleeding heart liberal or something. But I'm actually pretty middle of the road when it comes to politics. I'm certainly a social progressive and I think we all should be. And I think that is the future of humanity.

I think we're moving in that direction and have been for a long time with increased empathy and acknowledgement of the other. in whichever way of conceptualized that, whether it be gender or race or ethnicity or whatever. But with satire, you can kind of go farther. And you can call bullshit on a lot of things that are just clearly hypocritical. And so I think the book was a combination of all of those, where it's pushing humanity forward, where we're seemingly going based on past trends again with regard to empathy and this way of being more accepting, which clearly we have been. Jim Crow laws were 60 years ago. Slavery was just like a hundred and some. So it wasn't that long ago that we're complete assholes to each other. And I think we're moving in directional where we'll be less and less assholes to each other. And we'll recognize that a lot of that was the product of religion.

You wrote the book in dialogue. I'm just curious about that choice and what led you to make that decision. Well, I don't really feel like it was a decision. I just started writing. And then I realized about halfway through that there was no narration. And narration has always kind of bugged me because I would like to imagine things myself. I don't want to be told who this individual is or what this scene looks like. I want to imagine it, you know? So that things are described.

I'm not describing in detail every small part of every scene at all. But you get a sense of where it's taking place. and when, and then you can create your own imagery around that. I got lucky because I didn't realize that books weren't written like that, but there is this show called Daisy Jones and the Six or something like that. It's Elvis Presley's granddaughter, and I saw her on Stephen Colbert's show, and she was talking about precognition and how she's had it her whole life, And she's an advocate for pre-cognition.

I've had it my whole life, too. And so I was really interested in this. And then I watched this clip they showed from this Daisy Jones in the sixth show. I'm probably bastardizing the name of it. And it was about precognition in the show, too. So that was a nice little thing to see. But then we're getting ready for this trip to go to Europe. And my wife picked up a copy of the book that I guess this show is based on, as they oftentimes are.

And we're in Europe and I got a little break in Paris for the first week. And then we headed south through the Dordone and onto the Mediterranean. And my editor sent the manuscript back like, dude, nobody's going to have any idea who is talking at any point in this book. You know, and my beta readers kind of indicated that too. And I was like, no, I know, I just don't know what to do. Turns out that entire book is written as dialogue in the exact same way. my wife, you know, I'm laying in bed. I'm like, my editor just said this. I don't know how to finish this book now. And she's like, actually that one we brought that we were carrying around that

nobody ever read the entire time we're in Europe was written that exact same way and opened it up. I said, holy shit. Oh, yeah, that's perfect. I just put their names in front of it like they did in this book. So there is precedent for it, I guess. I didn't learn that until after the fact. But yeah, it's being turned into an audio book right now by a couple of voice actors. And they're excited about that, You know, because they just get to act. The whole thing is just being those people in those moments and saying those words and putting their own twist on it. But I don't know.

It wasn't intentional. It just came out that way. Well, I really liked it. I thought it was really effective without giving a plot away. But the story starts in such a very grounded sort of place and then slowly kind of slips into this more surreal reality. And I thought that because you weren't getting all these like intricate descriptions of everything, it made.

it a little bit more dreamlike and a little bit more interesting. I just thought it was a cool. I think it was the right choice for this book. It's great. I'm glad to hear you say that because I didn't do it on purpose. And you never know how something's going to turn out when you kind of buck a trend like that and just right. Like I was aware that most books have narration. But yeah, I felt like it worked for this too.

And there's enough character switches and enough. I didn't go too crazy with characters because you do have to follow along with who's saying what. But I made the characters maybe a little richer, some more relatable, some that you can hate more, and then obvious with any arc of a character, those things change. But yeah, it's hard because there's so many things I want to say. Like you said, you can't because you don't want to give away the storyline and some of the twists and turns. But I do think that people who follow UFO phenomenon will enjoy a lot of the Easter eggs and some of the not just references but themes, like the whole cataclysm thing.

there was another, I guess to backtrack, that was another kind of main reason for writing it, is that whole idea about what if there are two different groups of future humans, like Frank Melbourne and Ross Cole Art have been talking about for a long time, and I've been asked about that too. I've been in contact with some of these people as well. What if that is the case? What does that look like in the context of our future? What might that mean for humanity? And I think that is an important question. And in writing a satirical science fiction book, you're putting things out there that might make sense.

That might be complete nonsense. But you have the freedom to do that. And that was a really fun part about writing this. Well, it's really awesome. I can't recommend it enough. And it's a super fun read. And I hope Hollywood comes knocking for you because it felt to me, I was like this, maybe because it was in that dialogue form. But I'm like, oh, my gosh, this would be it would be very adaptable.

I know you wouldn't have to do anything. The thing would be just cutting it down. You'd have to cut it down to where it could be a script. But I think that would be a super easy process. I'd love to see it becoming a movie. They've already got actors picked out. Well, we're speaking it into existence right now. Let's do it.

We're manifesting it. Absolutely. So just to get things wrapped up, what are you working on? What should people expect to see from you next? I have always come out with paperbacks, ebooks, and audio books at the same time. And it just wasn't possible with this one because it does require acting and voice characters, different characters for different voices. So the rest of my summer is probably going to be spent doing that, which I'm kind of excited

about because I've developed some audio production skills being in various bands over the last 20 years or so in recording music and recording my first two audiobooks too. It's just obviously different because there's more people involved now. For the people I'm working with, they're really excited about it too. And it's fun. Like you said, it's kind of fun and funny at times. So the ones involved have read it. We are reading it right now and are excited for that.

And then there's a Mufon Compret in late August. I'll be giving a talk at some various other projects, possibly a documentary that's been in the works for four years with five different. production companies because COVID and then unforeseen deaths and God only knows what else. But yeah, in the same way that last book might lend itself well to a feature film, the idea itself, I think, could reach more people as a documentary or some sort of mini-series. A lot of people have seen that too. It's just been a number of issues and getting that out.

But I'm working with somebody now who seems to be really passionate about it. And we seem to have a lot of mutual goals with regard to the creative aspects and the storytelling and the science. You know, the big problem was that I wanted to adhere to the science behind this. And as you're well aware and your listeners are, entertainment dominates everything. And people are so afraid to break into doing something different, even an idea that makes a lot of sense if it doesn't conform to what they know, sells already, then it's hard to really make that switch. But things are changing. They're changing fast. So I'm excited to see where that goes. They sure are changing fast. They sure are. Well, Mike,

it was so wonderful to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for making the time. I'm such a fan of your work and so excited about your new book. I'll be sure to include all the links for all of your books in the episode description so that people can check those out. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Thank you, Kelly. It was great talking to you. I really enjoy your show and go bucks. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multivocal discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats

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