Michael P. Masters is a professor of Anthropology at Montana Tech University, who has attained recent popularity for daring to tread where many of his colleagues would refuse—into the UFO public arena.
Masters has indeed joined the small (but growing) cadre of academics who are not afraid to discuss the UFO mystery and take it seriously. He has written several books and papers related to the subject, and is known in the field for supporting the hypothesis that Ufonauts are not really extraterrestrials but visitors from a future timeline—what he calls the ‘extra-tempestrial model’.
He bases this reasoning not only on the anatomical features of these beings reported by witnesses (too similar to our own to be explained from a biological perspective, since ETs would come from a planet with a completely different evolutionary history) but also on the alleged interest the aliens display on human genetic material, if we take the accounts of abductees/experiencers literally.
Masters was a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast last month, where they discussed these and other ideas. Albeit I find Mike’s theory interesting, and the ‘time traveling’ hypothesis seems to be gaining popularity among the power circles involved in the so-called ‘Disclosure’ movement—even Steven Spielberg mentioned it to Stephen Colbert in one interview, which raises the possibility it could be part of the plot in his new highly awaited Disclosure Day movie— I can’t help to find several logical holes in it. Maybe I just don’t find visitors from the future to be weird enough to resolve my own questions about the UFO mystery… unless we’re approaching it less like the Terminator or Star Trek, and more like Interstellar or the Seth Speaks book series.
Nevertheless, I gave in and listened to Masters’s episode on the JRE (#2428, released on December 18th, 2025) and was very surprised by what he shared with Joe close to the end.
The following quote has been stitched together using Spotify’s automated transcript. At around 02:20:52 Mike says:
“So I had a really insane experience in 2022 that forced me to start thinking about what this is, what this physical reality is, because I was shown […] I call it a mini abduction.
I was taken up. I was at a UFO conference […] This was October 14th, 2022. [I was trying to get a beer at the bar but] I was out of money. [I woman who I knew, but loosely] comes up and says: “Hey, I have a key to the VIP room.” We had just come down from there where they hosted a meet-and-greet with the speakers (I was one of the speakers).
So we went there to get beers [and snacks to] stuff it in my pockets. We were going to bring some to our friends […] And then she’s like, “Well, you can’t go, my friend Eric wants to talk to you.” I was like, “Who’s Eric?” “Don’t worry, you’ll like him.”
So at some point we end up on the balcony and I’m just sitting, I give up. I’m like, “Fine, I guess I’m just waiting for this Eric guy, whoever the hell that is.”
So eventually ‘Eric’ comes in, pulls his chair up right into me—like his knee is in my dick (!) like straight up right here! [points to his crotch under the table] I start to get very much [into a] fight or flight thing. And I’m like, you know, like, “What the fuck’s this guy??” Total stranger, never seen him in my life, and his face is right here [points to his face].
He says, “I can sense that you’re angry about this, but I need to be this close for this to work…””
Masters continued to retell this uncanny anecdote, at some point equating it with a recent dream Joe had which the famous podcaster feels might have been some sort of ‘alien contact’ scenario—given how realistic it felt to him. In Mike’s case, he explained how ‘Eric’ seemed to be able to read his innermost thoughts, and was aware of how he was considering the possibility of quitting the UFO field altogether (out of a sense of frustration, emotional exhaustion, and a desire to spend more time with his family instead of filming TV shows and recording podcasts). This thought, Mike was adamant, crossed his mind one night while he was doing the dishes at his home kitchen, and he didn’t share it with anyone—not even with his wife.
Masters became convinced that, through ‘Eric’—whom he never took the time to describe physically, leaving the listener to assume it was just a regular-looking person— he was in communication not with a single individual, but with a group of entities; perhaps humans from the future, which would give validation to his line of research. When Eric said to him, “We know you’ve been thinking about quitting lately, and we’d really prefer you not do that yet,” Mike asked, “How could you possibly know that?” Eric (or ‘They’ as Mike began to address this stranger) answered back: “Once you know who we are, you’ll know how we know that.”
“And there was a number of things that transpired. We’re out on this balcony. I’m in shock. I’m like, “What the hell is going on here?? How does this complete stranger know my thoughts?” The conversation evolved. I was allowed to ask questions. They’re like, “We know you’re frustrated. We know you’re upset with this. We’d really like you to keep going. Is there anything you need? Is there anything we can help with?” I was like, “No, I’m quite happy in general. Just exhausted. Don’t want to do this anymore.” […]
I asked three different questions. And people started to come back to this room because the party was wrapping up downstairs and they-re starting to come back to the VIP room where all the free booze was. And we’re out on this balcony. These three women come out at one point and this man [‘Eric’] who now is like […] eyes right here (points to his own eyes). I can’t move anymore. Like I lost the ability to turn my head. I’m just like laser-focused. [‘Eric’] said [to the women] “Can you close the door behind you?” […] And these three women turned in perfect unison, walked back and closed the door. Nobody came out the rest of the time we were out there.
Eventually got to the point where they’re like, “We came here because we need to put three things in your brain for some future time”—or ‘times’, I forget which—They said, “Do we have your permission to do that?” And over the course of this interaction, I started to remember them [emphasis mine] and I started to feel like a little bitch about complaining, about being tired, travelling, hotels, flights, you know. And I was like, “Oh, that’s right! I know you, I know who you are!” Not that guy—I’d never seen him in my life—but I know You. And there’s a familiarity.
The encounter with ‘Eric’—or the entities channeled through him—continued, and once Masters consented to the implantation of something into his brain his vision went dark, even though his eyes remained open, and he felt a ‘fast stream of information’ just passing into his brain (a ‘download’ as it is often called in ufological/paranormal circles) which he described as ‘exhausting and overwhelming’ even though he didn’t experience any pain during or after.
Masters said to Joe that at one point the interaction with ‘Eric’ smoothly transitioned from verbal into completely ‘telepathic’, without him even noticing the difference:
“It was so seamless that I didn’t even really notice it happened. And eventually, like, “Wait, we’re not moving our mouths!” We’re just talking with our brains. But the woman who brought me up there in the first place was staying in my left [side] with her hand on my shoulder. She would occasionally go, “Did you get that? Did you see that? That was important, did you get that?” So she was watching it, too [the ‘download’] and saw it coming in as it was coming through this individual in front of me.
[…] I have no idea how long I was in that mesmerized state, but after they finished, that entire room had five times more people in it. There was like probably twenty people in this room all looking at us like, “What the fuck is happening with Masters out there?”
After the ‘download’ was finalized, Mike stood up and slowly walked out of the room past the onlookers, still so overwhelmed by the experience he could barely lift his head. He didn’t explain to Joe what happened to ‘Eric’ afterward, but the woman who had ‘lured him’ into the balcony put her hand on his shoulder and asked if he was OK. Masters did not respond and continued walking past her toward his room, which was located on the same hotel floor (the 4th) and without even taking his clothes off he collapsed on the bed and slept for thirteen hours—one wonders if he missed his flight back home, or whether the conference organizers showed any concern.
Once he woke up, Mike said, he started crying uncontrollably:
“I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t scared. I had a memory of what happened the night before, but it was kind of fuzzy. And then as it started to come back more and more and more, I started to be like, “Oh shit” like, “That was real!” You know, my first thought was like, “Oh, that wasn’t real.” And then I was allowed to remember all of it. Everything before they put me in that state is like crystal clear in my mind.
And I wrote it all down not long after that […] So there was actually like a written transcript of how everything happened.”
Writing books and giving public interviews about UFOs is risky enough for an academician. But admitting to an experience as strange as the one Masters shared with Joe Rogan and his massive audience? That would be something that even non-academic UFO researchers would be hesitant to share.
Which doesn’t mean these sort of encounters don’t happen often. In fact, I suspect they are more common than we might want to admit…
One other example I’ve encountered in my online studies was shared by the famous British researcher Colin Andrews, who specialized in the controversial crop circle phenomenon, on our friend Mike Clelland’s old iteration of his podcast Hidden Experience in 2013.
In that highly-recommended audio interview, Colin shared with Mike how he slowly began to accept he had had personal experiences with the UFO phenomenon, due to events that happened to him when he was just five years of age, which he shared in another interview with podcaster Mel Fabregas. These experiences were, in his opinion, the reason he ended up devoting his life to crop circle research in the first place.
Like many before him, Colin was faced with the hard choice of whether ‘coming out of the UFO closet’ as it were—and endangering his reputation in a field which frowns upon investigators claiming to have personal experiences of their own—or keeping the secret forever.
In the interview, Colin explains to Mike how in 2009, as he was taking a shower in his home in Connecticut, he received a distinct message in his head: “You must go public with this NOW.” Colin knew exactly what this cryptic command meant, and although he felt a lot of hesitation at first, he knew he had to do as he was ‘told’.
That year he was scheduled as one of the speakers at Steve Basset’s Paradigm Conference in Washington, D.C., and Colin made the decision to completely change the subject of his pre-planned presentation, to talk about his personal experiences instead.
At the hotel auditorium, right before he started, a man approached the stage and sat right at the front. Colin said to Mike this person was totally ordinary-looking, and yet he felt he could stare right past his eyes and directly into his head. The man simply told Colin, “You know you have to do this now.” Colin never asked him any questions or clarifications; he simply nodded and started his presentation, in which he publicly admitted his experiences.
These sort of confessions have made Mike Clelland suspect that almost all of the people who have chosen to research the UFO phenomenon in an active capacity, are probably doing so due to personal interactions with the phenomenon—even if they are not conscious about them.
Which is why I am compelled to believe Mike Masters’s anecdote, even if we don’t have any way to verify it—who knows what the other people who were in that balcony that day would say, or how they subjectively perceived and interpreted the event as it unfolded.
The idea that Ufonauts possess highly developed psychic abilities, like telepathy or clairvoyance, has been part of the UFO mythos for decades. Ingo Swann, the famous New York artist and psychic who was instrumental in the beginnings of the Stargate ‘psychic spy’ program in the United States, believed that UFO intelligences were actively trying to prevent Earth humans from developing PSI abilities. It is tantalizing to speculate that perhaps ‘They’ believe we are just not ready for that kind of power unleashed into our world—something Greg and I discussed with parapsychologist Dean Radin in an upcoming interview on our YouTube channel.
…And yet, if there is something I have learned in all my decades of studying the UFO mystery, is that the phenomenon is deceptive by nature. Which makes me wonder: Do experiences like Mike Masters, Colin Andrews, and countless others, serve to corroborate their belief system, or are they simply meant to lead them astray and encourage them to spread more disinformation?
