Biological anthropologist · Identified Flying Objects, 2019
Michael P. Masters
Michael P. Masters approaches the UFO question from an unusual disciplinary direction: biological anthropology. Rather than beginning with the assumption that reported visitors originate on another planet, he asks whether some of the beings described in encounter narratives could be descendants of humanity itself. His proposal, the extratempestrial hypothesis, suggests that an advanced future human civilisation might possess a means of travelling into its own past. If so, some unidentified craft and their occupants might come not from distant space but from another point in Earth's history. This is a speculative interpretation, not an established scientific explanation of UAP reports.
Masters is a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University. His academic interests include human evolutionary anatomy, variation, archaeology and biomedicine. That background matters because he frames his argument around changes in human bodies and cultures over evolutionary time. Popular descriptions of purported UFO occupants often feature large heads, relatively small faces, slight bodies and enlarged eyes. Masters asks whether these descriptions could be interpreted as exaggerated extensions of some existing human anatomical trends. The resemblance is suggestive within his model, but it is not evidence that such beings exist, nor does evolutionary biology predict a single inevitable future human appearance.
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Michael P.
Consequently, the existence of UFO reports cannot be used to infer that backward time travel has been achieved.