Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon

Description

Could “UFOs” and “Aliens” simply be us, but from the future? This provocative new book cautiously examines the premise that extraterrestrials may instead be our distant human descendants, using the anthropological tool of time travel to visit and study us in their own hominin evolutionary past. Dr. Michael P. Masters, a professor of biological anthropology specializing in human evolutionary anatomy, archaeology, and biomedicine, explores how the persistence of long-term biological and cultural trends in human evolution may ultimately result in us becoming the ones piloting these disc-shaped craft, which are likely the very devices that allow our future progeny to venture backward across the landscape of time. Moreover, these extratempestrials are ubiquitously described as bipedal, large-brained, hairless, human-like beings, who communicate with us in our own languages, and who possess technology advanced beyond, but clearly built upon, our own. These accounts, coupled with a thorough understanding of the past and modern human condition, point to the continuation of established biological and cultural trends here on Earth, long into the distant human future. 1.1. Conception......Page 15 1.2. Ontogeny......Page 17 1.3. Science, Rhetoric, the Unknown, and the Unknowable......Page 19 1.4. Temporal Bounds of Understanding......Page 21 1.5. Looking Forward Toward Us Looking Back......Page 23 1.6. Cladistics, Classification, and Catalyzing Contention......Page 24 1.7. Future Research into the Future Past......Page 27 2.1. Fear and Loathing on the IFO Trail......Page 39 2.2. Institutionalized IFO Inquiries......Page 42 2.3. International Institutionalized IFO Inquiries......Page 48 2.4. How Extratempestrials Differ from Sasquatch, Apparitions, and Other Fabled Phenomena......Page 50 3.1. The Question of Extratempestrial Encounters in Human Prehistory......Page 73 3.2. Cynicism of Eccentric Antiquity......Page 81 3.3. The Question of Extratempestrial Encounters in Human History......Page 83 3.4. Recent Indications of Anachronous Encounters......Page 87 3.5. Cross-Temporal Contact in Contemporary Times......Page 99 4.1. The Search for Extraterrestrial Life......Page 121 4.2. The Drake Equation and Probability of Humanoid Life on Earth-like Exoplanets......Page 124 4.3. Interplanetary Evolutionary Convergence and the Double Coincidence of Time......Page 132 5.1. Space, Time, and Interstellar Travel......Page 149 5.2. General Relativity, Warped Spacetime, Hyperspace, and Wormholes......Page 155 5.3. The Complexity of Interstellar Communication......Page 160 5.4. The Relative Ease of Intertemporal Exchange......Page 166 5.5. Anthropological Spacetime......Page 169 6.1. Limits of Our Current Understanding of Time and Time Travel......Page 194 6.2. The Concept of Time in Human History and Prehistory......Page 198 6.3. The Arrow of Entropy and the Arrow of Time......Page 209 6.4. Block Time and the Opacity of Free Will......Page 214 6.5. Block time, Backward Time Travel, and Self-Consistency......Page 218 6.6. Physical Pursuit of the Past......Page 225 7.1. Light Cones, World Lines, Warped Spacetime, and Closed Timelike Curves......Page 252 7.2. Form Follows Function......Page 260 7.3. Roundtrip Time Travel......Page 263 7.4. Attend to Your Configuration......Page 265 7.5. Electromagnetism......Page 268 7.6. It Is Knowledge; It Is Four Dimensions......Page 274 8.1. A Cautionary Tale of Teleology and Time......Page 296 8.2. Bipedalism, Craniofacial Evolution, and Cerebral and Cognitive Convergence......Page 298 8.3. Heterochrony and Paedomorphosis in Hominin Evolution......Page 305 8.4. Diet, Lithic Tools, Fire, Language, and Love......Page 311 8.5. Traces of the Past Trend toward the Future......Page 316 9.1. Probing the Future via Our Communal Pasts......Page 332 9.2. Abduction Reports as a Latent Look at the Future of Hominin Evolution......Page 334 9.3. Constructing the Other......Page 340 9.4. Human Variation—Past, Present, and Future......Page 342 9.5. Extratempestrial Phenotypic Variation—Geography, Ancestry, and Time......Page 344 10.1. Structural/Functional Tradeoffs in Hominin Evolution......Page 364 10.2. Sustained Trends in Hominin Neoteny......Page 380 10.3. Self-Domestication and Craniofacial Feminization......Page 387 10.4. Becoming Our Extratempestrial Descendants......Page 392 11.1. Biological and Cultural Anthropology through Deep Time......Page 425 11.2. Intertemporal Fecundity......Page 429 11.3. On the Banks of the Deep End of the Hominin Gene Pool......Page 431 11.4. Interfacing Time-Races—Physiology, Culture, and Communication......Page 441 11.5. Telepathy as a Future Form of Human Communication?......Page 444 12.1. Compounding Cyclic Cultural and Technological Change......Page 479 12.2. Intertemporal Integration......Page 480 12.3. Fermi’s Paradox and Hawking’s Time-Tourist Dilemma......Page 487 12.4. Temporal Gemination......Page 490 12.5. Temponauts, Time-Tourists, and Extratempestrials......Page 493 12.6. Eventual, Intentional, Intertemporal Interaction......Page 496 Index......Page 511 Image Credits......Page 530 Acknowledgements......Page 543