Anyone with more than a passing interest in the UFO topic knows there is a particular theory that, rather than being piloted by extraterrestrials from another galaxy, they are instead actually humans from the future (a theory that Steven Spielberg himself has expressed interest in).
Well, now we have a counter theory: that UFOs are craft piloted by Earthlings from the deep past!*
The suggestion was put forward by techbro Palmer Luckey – who originally shot to fame as the creator of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, which made him a billionaire when Facebook bought it – in an interview with the Sourcery podcast about his current venture, the weapons manufacturer Anduril (video embedded below for convenience).
After a discussion surrounding how to make aircraft and drones invisible, and why optical camouflage is not only not needed but in fact unhelpful in most battlefield conditions, host Molly O’Shea prompted Luckey with a question from left field: “So you don’t think UAPs use optical camouflage?”
Rather than shy away from a topic that many people seeking PR might consider radioactive, Luckey leaned into it with a 4-minute answer. “There’s a lot that we don’t understand about these vehicles and what they are, where or when they come from,” Luckey replied, “but it is likely that whatever they are doing is a a side effect or an artifact of what’s going on.”
I’ve talked about this with people – they’re like, how come sometimes they’re invisible in certain spectrums, and my point is well what if they are not interacting with reality itself in a way you would expect? Like some of these things you see them and they don’t have any radar signature either. I don’t know if that means they’re cloaking themselves actively or if it means that just they do not exist even in the way that we think about physical matter. I don’t know if it’s an active countermeasure so much as the nature of the thing itself. But of course there’s so much that we don’t know.
But immediately after acknowledging that we don’t really know much about UAP, Luckey dropped his own conclusion: “My current working theory is that they come from the past.”
Coming from the future is too hard. The physics just don’t seem to work out. But if you think about it in a certain perspective, like there’s a question of where they come from. Do they come from Earth? Do they come from nearby? Do they come from really really far away?
Wherever they come from, you know, spatially. The question then is okay, temporally, what is more likely? That they happen to have come from this particular instant in time or the hundreds of millions or billions of years that existed prior to our existence? Um, you know, that could be true if they were just like waiting around and then came over, you know, at some point. It could be the case if they are regularly surveying and have just been around for a long time. You could imagine a world where maybe the Earth hosted advanced civilizations a billion years ago and we just don’t even know about them and these are the remnants of that.
Luckey’s answer combines the UFO topic with another fringe idea that is sometimes referred to as ‘The Silurian Hypothesis‘, which ponders whether – given the billions of years of deep time that have elapsed since Earth’s formation – it might be possible that another technological civilization might have existed on our planet before us, which occurred so long ago that no evidence of it has survived.
The Anduril co-founder continued with some technical details:
There’s a very, very long tail of time, and also there’s ways to travel forward through time very quickly. If I create a very strong gravity distortion, I can have subjective time inside of that bubble passing very, very slowly relative to the time racing by outside of it. And so, it’s very believable that something from the distant past could come to our present. It’s not really believable that something can come from the future back into our present. So that’s my bet: basically, given that there’s been a lot more time before now than now, just probabilistically speaking, I think it’s likely these things have been around for a very long time, and either spent a long time coming to us or to themselves subjectively not much time at all.
That’s not to say Luckey is a ‘true believer’. “I’m not betting on any of these,” he tells O’Shea. “I’m not saying I I know what’s up. I’m saying that is my current guess. Okay. Based on what I know.”
But even if not a true believer, it’s obviously a topic that interests Luckey, given his enthusiasm to talk about it. As O’Shea attempts to move the conversation on to showcasing another of Anduril’s products, Luckey instead interrupts to continue riffing on the topic of UFOs from the past:
I don’t think any of these UAPs…I think it’s unlikely they were manufactured or created within the last few years. That seems that seems very unlikely. I think they’ve either been around for a very long time, stored for a very long time, created a very long time ago, or traveled from the distant past into our present.
[There’s this] theory of course, like you know that there’s these undersea alien bases that these things are stored there. There there’s an out-of-print book called the UFOs and USOs of the Santa Catalina channel (ed. note: probably referring to Undersea UFO Base: An In-Depth Investigation of USOs in the Santa Catalina Channel) and it’s all about how people have seen these things that have gone into and out of the ocean in extremely similar ways over the course of decades. And so like, it’s believable. But of course being stored on Earth does not necessarily mean they came from here nor does it not. But I I would bet that these things are not recently manufactured. I suspect they’ve been around for either a long time or maybe a really, really long time.
After O’Shea in response asks the weapons company founder how the idea of UFOs makes him feel “about our technological superiority”, Luckey concludes his monologue by confessing that any UFO revelations could make his company obsolete. “I think that the UAP stuff and our technological development live in completely parallel development tracks right now. If and when we figure out what’s going on with UAPs, UFOs, that whole universe, uh every everything’s going to change and this won’t be relevant,” he confesses, pointing at one of Anduril’s autonomous fighters. “But until that happens, you have to treat them as completely independent parallel tracks.”
(* Technically, any constructed craft will have ‘come from the past’ – Luckey is talking about actual time travel.)
