A crazy theory? Yes. But troubling enough to capture the interest of a few researchers and fuel a genuine school of thought on unidentified aerial phenomena.
One of the leading contemporary proponents of this idea is Michael P. Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University. In his book *Identified Flying Objects*, published in 2019, he develops what he calls the ‘extratempestrial’ model: certain supposed occupants of UFOs do not come from space, but from another era in human history.
The idea is based, first and foremost, on an amusing observation: in ufological folklore, aliens are often surprisingly human.
They have two arms, two legs, a head, two eyes, and a body symmetry comparable to our own. The famous ‘little greys’ are generally depicted with an enormous skull, large eyes, virtually no body hair and a relatively frail physique.
Yet Masters puts forward a possibility: what if this appearance were not that of an alien species, but that of a distant evolutionary descendant of Homo sapiens?
In a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years, human beings could, of course, have changed. Our environment, our diet, medicine, genetics or even potential artificial selection could profoundly transform our anatomy. Imagining our descendants with a physique different from our own is therefore not absurd in itself.
The giant leap lies in then attributing to them the ability to travel back in time.
And that is where the story becomes truly fascinating.
Contrary to popular belief, time travel is not entirely alien to physics. Einstein’s theory of relativity already implies that time does not pass in exactly the same way for everyone. Travelling into the future via relativistic effects is not merely a science-fiction concept: the phenomenon of time dilation is an established consequence of relativity.
Travelling back in time, on the other hand, presents a far more daunting problem.
Certain mathematical solutions to the equations of general relativity do, however, allow for the existence of what physicists call ‘closed timelike curves’: in theory, a trajectory through space-time could take an object back to its own past. Scenarios involving wormholes, in particular, have also been studied. This in no way implies that we know how to build a time machine: there is a colossal gulf between a mathematical possibility and a feasible technology.
But let us carry out this thought experiment.
Let’s imagine humanity 100,000 years from now.
Our civilisation has survived. It has mastered technologies whose workings we are just as incapable of imagining as a person from the Middle Ages would have been unable to understand a smartphone.
It has finally discovered how to travel not only through space, but through space-time.
Which destination would it choose?
Probably the dinosaurs.
The earliest civilisations.
Major historical catastrophes.
And above all, its own ancestors.
Us.
UFOs would then become something quite different: not interstellar spacecraft, but a sort of archaeological time machine. Their occupants would be historians, anthropologists or tourists from the future, having come to visit the 21st century.
This even offers a compelling explanation for one of the great oddities of ufology: why would an extraordinarily advanced civilisation spend so much time observing us without actually making contact?
If it came from the future, the answer would be simple: because it would already know our history.
And it might well have every reason not to alter it.
This immediately brings us back to the old paradox of time travel. If a traveller returns to their past and alters a key event, can they prevent the circumstances that made their own journey possible? Any civilisation that truly mastered this sort of technology might therefore have developed extremely strict rules of non-intervention.
This would make certain behaviours attributed to UFOs – observing, appearing briefly, then leaving – a sort of historical tourism under strict surveillance.
But there is, of course, a huge problem: we have no evidence that this is true.
We do not even have scientific evidence today establishing that unidentified aerial phenomena have an extraterrestrial origin. NASA points out that there is currently no credible data to demonstrate that UAPs are extraterrestrial technologies and, above all, emphasises the lack of sufficiently precise data to explain certain cases.
All the more reason, then, why there is no basis for concluding that they come from the future.
The ‘future humans’ theory therefore remains exactly what it claims to be: a speculative hypothesis.
But it possesses a particular intellectual appeal.
For decades, we have gazed at the stars and asked ourselves: ‘Who is coming to visit us?’
Perhaps we should be asking a different question.
When are they coming?
And behind this mind-boggling idea may lie an even more unsettling question.
When we have been drawing bald, large-skulled, humanoid aliens for seventy years, do we really believe we are depicting creatures from elsewhere?
Or are we simply, without realising it, imagining what we ourselves will look like in several thousand years’ time?
