One of my favorite movies of the past few decades has to be Arrival, a 2016 film starring Amy Adams, who plays a linguistics expert tasked with translating and facilitating communications with an extraterrestrial race that has arrived on Earth. Without giving away too many spoilers, I’ll just reveal that the language of these entities gives Adams’ character — named Louise Banks — the ability to perceive time in a non-linear way.
This allows Louise to have premonitions and causes her to contemplate the implications of free will and its effect on life choices. Making decisions while knowing the future becomes the subject of her internal conflict towards the end of the movie.
In real life, humans perceive time linearly; that is, we have separate notions of the past, present, and future. Our brains most likely process events in this way due to evolution as this temporal mode of thinking gave us the best chance of both reproduction and survival.
But the language used by the extraterrestrial race depicted in this movie did not have terms for the past, present, or future. These different facets of time were perceived to be happening either all at once or in a circular fashion, the latter being suggested by the ring-shaped symbols in their written word.
A few years after the movie came out, I found myself deep down the rabbit hole of researching the more complicated aspects of the UFO phenomenon. I had a few sightings myself in my teens and twenties, including one memorable encounter when the craft seemed to just disappear into thin air. I had seen numerous references to potential temporal features of this technology, but it wasn’t until I heard a specific analogy that I truly understood the implications.
Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon’s UFO program, was asked to follow up on a comment he made in a previous interview. He had proposed the concept of “mankinds,” insinuating that an organism may exist in the vicinity of our planet with a similar level of consciousness to our own. His explanation of their more developed understanding of time reminded me of Arrival immediately.
I quote him at length, as his comments are integral to this conversation.
It’s not a point in time. It’s a process. It’s an event that’s occurring. So a way to look at it from that perspective is to think of a cigarette or cigar. Parts of this cigar that have already burnt, or parts of this cigarette that have already burnt — the ash — is the past. That part of the cigarette or cigar that has not yet burned is the future. And that cherry — that moment of ignition, that spark of where the future is now getting consumed and becoming part of the past — that is the present.
As human beings, we live at that moment. All of our hopes, our fears, our memories — love, hate, good, bad — all that is an expression of an experience that occurs at an infinitesimally small moment of space-time…
That is how we experience the present.
But what if there were things that had the ability to experience…where the present was a much bigger cherry, if you will? A much bigger transition, where more elements of the future and the past are experienced in the present, and [they] can do that also physically, right? So it’s not just an idea.
What if there were a species out there that experienced the universe with an extra level of dimension? So you and I are having this conversation right now with your audience, and we’re having this conversation right here, right now. But if I were to have the ability to have this conversation right here, but five minutes ago or five minutes from now, we would never meet. We’d be like two ships passing in the night.
Is it possible that maybe some of these things — these UAP — have [this] ability? We experience them when they are right here, right now, and every other time we don’t because we’re simply not intersecting with that extra-dimensional space of time.
You know, when you look at that cigarette or cigar burning, you’ll notice that it never burns evenly. When you look at it up close, and you can kind of remove the glare and the flare from the burn, we realize that there are portions of the future — of the portions of the cigar that haven’t burned yet — behind portions of the cigar that already has burned.
It’s not an even burn, almost. There’s an overlap, right? And quantum theory is beginning to show some of the models for that.
This cigarette analogy made perfect sense to me. If a species had a wider perception of time than humans do, their burning “cherry” of the present would be bigger than ours. However, it is hard to imagine this from our current paradigm in a practical sense because we are obviously unable to actually experience it.
When it comes to human technology, our advancement of it is based on our current narrow understanding of the present. We can only develop and manufacture new scientific applications within this specific moment in time as we comprehend it. This may cause one to wonder what the technological capabilities might be of a species that had a deeper grasp on the temporal reality of the universe.
Could the manifestation of that technology explain the unimaginable physics on display in our skies, under our oceans, and in space?
Possible evidence of this scenario may be demonstrated by the characteristics of the tic-tac UAP, an anomalous vehicle described by numerous service members during the now-legendary Nimitz incident in 2004.
After the craft took off at an unfathomable speed past the horizon after pilot Dave Fravor engaged it, the aviators were directed to rendezvous at a “CAP point” with specific computer-generated coordinates.
To their surprise, the radar showed the tic-tac had arrived instantly at exactly that location.
Fravor moved in to get a closer look. As he closed onto the craft it accelerated so fast it disappeared.
LCDR Slaight from the backseat of the plane above said it accelerated “like a bullet,” and was gone. All four aviators looked back down at the water and the breakwater was gone. They were alone over the clear blue sea.
Flabbergasted, the Fravor led the jets back to their combat air patrol (CAP) point and accomplished their training mission. On the way home the controller said, “you’re not gonna believe me, sir, but that thing is back at your CAP.”
“What?” Fravor thought. “How did it know where our CAP was?”
Some have speculated that the tic-tac may have somehow intercepted the signal transmission to determine exactly where they would be headed, and others have even suggested some sort of telepathic communication with the pilots or crew of the carrier strike group.
But what if, due to a wider perception of time, the intelligence behind the craft already knew exactly where they would arrive within our human understanding of the future?
In other words, what if the amount of time between the determination of the CAP point location and the pilots arriving there were all part of the present as this intelligence understood it?
Tom DeLonge, who founded To The Stars Academy and is advised by many former highly-ranked members of the military and intelligence communities, has hinted at something along these lines in several interviews.
In one comment specifically, he refers to UFOs as a “time displacement craft.”
What interests me is that I think [Skinwalker ranch] gives us a potential pathway to discuss some alternate candidates for where they’re from, what they’re doing, or how it all works.
I think most people like to think of UFOs as coming from another planet. You know, “We found an exoplanet and it’s coming [from] there, and how do they travel? Well, they could do it in 30 years if they go fast.”
Well, the data doesn’t seem to suggest that, really. It’s more [like] what’s happening at Skinwalker, where it seems like it’s more about frequencies and [it’s] dimensional, or they materialize.
It’s almost like they’re a displacement craft, that displaces our time like a submarine would in the ocean, That was a lot of what Dr. Hal Puthoff worked on in AATIP, which was understanding the attributes of the propulsion and the science that they’re using.
I think once you think about UFOs using that kind of technology, then it’s kind of like, “Well if they do that, if they use that, that means there are things that are adjacent to us that we don’t see.”
We don’t understand [them] but [they] are right here, and every once in a while they can kind of cross over.
DeLonge’s comments here echo what Elizondo has said previously about the burning cherry and, potentially, the characteristics displayed by the tic-tac craft back in 2004.
However, this strange temporal behavior is not only applicable to these craft, but also to the observers who experience these encounters themselves.
There are countless examples of time anomalies in the UFO literature over the decades. Reports of “missing time” are common and consistent among experiencers and abductees, with these accounts going as far back as the infamous Betty and Barney Hill case in 1961.
However, there are more recent reports by service members involving the manipulation of time perception as described by Elizondo, once more in a separate interview.
One might imagine that you get a report from a pilot who says, “Lue, it’s really weird. I was flying and I got close to this thing and I came back home and it was like I got a sunburn. I was red for four days.” Well, that’s a sign of radiation. That’s not a sunburn; it’s a radiation burn.
Then [a pilot] might say, if [they] had got a little closer, “Lue, I’m at the hospital. I’ve got symptoms that are indicative of microwave damage, meaning internal injuries, and even in my brain there’s some morphology there.”
And then you might get somebody who gets really close and says, “You know, Lue, it’s really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes’ worth of fuel. How is that possible?”
Well, there’s a reason for that, we believe, and it probably has to do with the warping of space-time. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience space-time relative to the vehicle and the environment.
It certainly sounds like these pilots are experiencing some sort of time dilation when they come in close proximity to these craft. Interestingly, Elizondo references this potential warping of space-time in the same breath as other health effects endured by members of our military, such as microwave and other radiation injuries.
The head of the most recent iteration of the new Pentagon UFO program, now known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), recently gave a presentation on their goals and the areas of study they plan to investigate in the future titled, The Defense Department’s UAP Mission & Civil Aviation.
One of the briefing slides in particular caught my attention, as it mentioned the effects of these UAPs on the observer. This slide reveals that one area of focus will be “any physiological, psychological, or other effects apparently corresponding to the UAP observation.”
Considering Elizondo mentioned time dilation within the context of health effects, could that be what AARO is implying with the use of the word “other” in this briefing slide?
And if so, what are the long-term biological effects?
A form of time dilation, through our own perception, can also happen naturally. For instance, during a traumatic or life-threatening situation, time may seem to slow down. Even throughout a normal day, time can seem to crawl if one is bored or fly by if the individual is partaking in an enjoyable activity.
But what is the mechanism responsible for this effect?
Stanford professor of pathology Dr. Garry Nolan has spoken at length about a specific area of the brain that showed a pattern of abnormalities in service members who had come into contact with UFOs.
Interestingly, this “hyper-connectivity” between the caudate nucleus and the putamen — integral parts of the basal ganglia, known as “the brain within the brain” — was actually present in these individuals before they had their experience.
This has led to speculation that certain people with these anomalous connections in the basal ganglia may actually be more prone to having interactions with UAP.
We started to notice that there were similarities in what we thought was the damage across multiple individuals. As we looked more closely, though, we realized, well, that can’t be damaged, because that’s right in the middle of the basal ganglia [a group of nuclei responsible for motor control and other core brain functions].
If those structures were severely damaged, these people would be dead. That was when we realized that these people were not damaged, but had an over-connection of neurons between the head of the caudate and the putamen [The caudate nucleus plays a critical role in various higher neurological functions; the putamen influences motor planning, learning, and execution]. If you looked at 100 average people, you wouldn’t see this kind of density. But these individuals had it. An open question is: did coming in contact with whatever it was cause it or not?
For a couple of these individuals we had MRIs from prior years. They had it before they had these incidents. It was pretty obvious, then, that this was something that people were born with. It’s a goal sub-goal setting planning device, it’s called the brain within the brain. It’s an extraordinary thing.
This area of the brain is involved (partly) in what we call intuition. For instance, Japanese chess players were measured as they made what would be construed as a brilliant decision that is not obvious for anybody to have made that kind of leap of intuition, this area of the brain lights up. We had found people who had this in spades. These are all so called high-functioning people. They’re pilots who are making split second decisions, intelligence officers in the field, etc.
So these individuals — who appear to be predisposed to interacting with these craft — all had above-average connectivity in the area of the brain strongly associated with intuition. When you think about it, intuition is essentially anticipating what is going to happen and then acting upon it; a sort of instinctual precognition.
Interestingly, studies have shown that the basal ganglia is also responsible for — you guessed it — time perception.
The present findings provide compelling evidence for the involvement of the basal ganglia in formulating representations of time. Activation in the right putamen and caudate were uniquely associated with encoding time intervals….Contrary to one proposal, these and other studies show that the basal ganglia are involved in timing a wide range of intervals, from hundreds of milliseconds (300 ms) to tens of seconds (20 s). Collectively, these results implicate striatal dopaminergic neurotransmission in hypothetical internal timekeeping mechanisms.
The idea that hyper-connectivity in the area of the brain responsible for encoding time appears to be related to one’s ability to interact with this technology — potentially built by a species with a wider definition of the present — begs a few simple, yet intriguing questions.
Do these individuals have the ability, however limited, to meet these craft on their own timeline?
Is this why some people are able to interact with them, while others see nothing?
Is intuition, and potentially precognition, a result of an individual accessing the dimension of time that UFOs inhabit?
The correlations here between the areas of the brain responsible for time perception, along with the comments from Elizondo on the potential time-related aspects of these craft, suggest that there is a temporal characteristic to these encounters that is not well understood.
It may seem quite challenging to pull all of this together and make sense of it in a cohesive way. Anything that sits outside our current paradigm of reality is bound to do that.
But there is one final metaphor that I believe wraps this all up in a simple, if bleak, thought experiment.
John Keel, who I consider to be a sort of Hunter S. Thompson of ufology, posits that humans are like microbes floating in a drop of water on a slide, being studied by a boy who is analogous to the UFO phenomenon.
As the boy sticks tiny needles in the water to interact with this vastly inferior organism, the microbe sees it as an incomprehensible enigma that continues to be a mystery throughout the generations of its species’ existence.
Visualize a teenaged boy with a microscope. He is studying a tiny microbe with a total life-span of sixty seconds. He takes a fine needle and pokes it into the liquid environment of the microbe—a drop of water on a slide that seems limitless to the minute creature. Suppose that the microbe has some sort of visual or sensory apparatus.
The point of the needle would suddenly appear enigmatically before it, a totally foreign object beyond the microbe’s experience and frame of reference. The bewildered microbe swims around the object, studies it, then sits down and writes a microbe report on the unexplained object that he saw. When the boy withdraws the needle, the “object” suddenly disappears in front of the microbe because it is no longer part of his environment or his time cycle.
Five minutes later, by the boy’s clock, he reinserts the needle into that same drop of water. Now many generations of microbes have passed. A new microbe glimpses this wonder and hurries to the microbe library and uncovers the old report. Strange foreign objects made out of an unknown material and behaving in a most peculiar way had been seen in ancient times, the microbe learns. To the boy, the two events spanned a mere five minutes. To the microbes, many generations had passed. By our time cycle, the two events were almost simultaneous.
Switch things around a bit. Now we are the microbes. Could it be possible that all UFO events are interrelated, and although they are widely separated according to our time cycle, they might really be almost simultaneous events to the ufonauts?
If these entities sit outside time — or at the very least, possess a technology that allows them to experience it in a much more evolved way — what does that mean for humanity and our interactions with them?
Perhaps if we are better able to understand the intentions of or establish communication with the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon, humanity will be able to step outside its linear notion of time and enjoy the benefits of what comes with it.
Or perhaps we are the microbes floating aimlessly in our temporally confined reality; a droplet of water in a petri dish, with an incomprehensible, imperceptible entity poking at us from outside our timeline.
Either way, it is my belief that we should do everything in our power to find out.
