Michael Masters
| Michael Masters |
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Michael P. Masters is a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University who argues that entities reported in UFO and alien abduction encounters are humans from the far future traveling back in time to study their evolutionary and cultural past — a framework he calls the extra-temporal hypothesis (or extratempes model). His interest in the topic began in childhood with Whitley Strieber's 1987 book Communion, which led him to study biological anthropology specifically to investigate whether reported alien beings could represent a future evolutionary form of Homo sapiens.
Academic background
Masters holds a doctorate and has published peer-reviewed research in cranio-facial evolutionary anatomy, studying how the human skull and brain have changed across the hominin lineage over millions of years. He has also co-authored a paper on crypto-terrestrials with academic colleagues and has participated in private briefings with members of the congressional UAP task force.
The extra-temporal hypothesis
Masters' core argument draws on established trends in human evolution: over the past several million years, the hominin lineage has shown consistent increases in relative brain size, reduction and retraction of the face, and enlargement of the eye orbit (driven by a pleiotropic genetic relationship between the brain and eye). Projecting these trends forward, he argues, the morphology of the archetypal gray alien — large globular cranium, reduced facial skeleton, enlarged eyes — is exactly what human descendants would be expected to look like tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years from now.
He further notes that across the most documented experiencer survey data — the Freaks study of over 5,000 multilingual international participants — the most commonly reported entity type is simply human in appearance, followed by short grays, tall grays, and hybrids, with all forms sharing bipedalism and the tetrapod body plan. Masters coined the term "temporal ancestry" to describe variation among entity types as snapshots of human evolution from different points in deep future time, analogous to geographic ancestry producing morphological variation among living human populations today.
The model proposes that smaller gray entities seen alongside human-appearing beings in some accounts (such as in Travis Walton's reported encounter) may be manufactured biological constructs — organic drones created by future humans — rather than independent species.
The extra-temporal model also encompasses the observation that many reported contact experiences involve the collection of reproductive material — gametes — from abductees. Masters frames this not as an alien practice but as evidence that future humans with fertility problems caused by genetic engineering or CRISPR modifications may return to the past to source "wild type" genetic material unavailable in their own time. He connects this directly to the Rendlesham Forest incident in which Jim Penniston decoded a binary message reportedly transmitted to him by the craft he touched, which stated: "We are you from the future. We're having problems with reproduction and we need this genetic material to help ourselves."
Books
Masters has written at least four books on the extra-temporal model and related topics. His first book, Identified Flying Objects (2019), introduced the model in a dense scientific format; he began writing it in 2012 and published it in 2019. His second book focuses on the model itself with a case-study approach drawing on fourteen close-encounter accounts spanning ninety years and five continents, using an abductive methodology — inference to the best explanation across multiple cases rather than advocacy for a single conclusion. His third book, Revelation, is a fictional exploration of alleged time travel and inter-temporal conflict that Masters wrote to make the model's concepts accessible to readers who do not engage with academic texts: "I wrote it because my friends weren't reading my science books because they're dense and scientific." His fourth book is a children's book published in early 2026.
Shortly after Identified Flying Objects appeared, Hal Puthoff — without Masters' prior knowledge — recommended Masters to the head of MUFON for the organization's 50th anniversary event, and also contacted Masters directly to convey his theoretical interpretation of how craft can perform extreme maneuvers without crushing their occupants. Masters disclosed this connection publicly for the first time in the 2025 Joe Rogan interview: "I owe a lot of the fact that anybody even knows who I am to Hal Puthoff."
Masters co-authored a peer-reviewed paper in 2024 on "scientific openness to the crypto-terrestrial idea" with two colleagues from Harvard — a publication that went viral internationally when clickbait headlines characterized it as "Harvard researchers say dinosaurs are aliens and they live among you." Masters explained the paper's actual scope as advocacy only for scientific openness, listing four categories of how a crypto-terrestrial civilization might exist, with the fourth (involving a breakaway advanced reptilian lineage) being the element that attracted viral attention.
Personal encounter
Masters disclosed in a 2024 interview that in October 2022, at the International UFO Congress in Phoenix, Arizona, he had what he describes as a contact experience mediated through two other conference participants — a woman named Heidi and a man named Eric — in which an apparent non-human consciousness communicated information to him telepathically and implanted three items of information he reports he cannot consciously access. He interprets the experience as consistent with the extra-temporal model's prediction that future humans would interact with researchers in the present to guide the disclosure process.
Julian Dorey interview — UFOs, God, and the greatest alleged time travel mystery (2024)
Masters appeared on the Julian Dorey podcast (episode #260), titled "Evolution Scientist: UFOs, God & the Greatest Time Travel Mystery," in an extended conversation examining the extra-temporal hypothesis in depth. Masters discussed how the trajectory of human cranio-facial evolution supports the model, reviewed the survey data on entity types reported in close-encounter literature, and addressed the theological and philosophical implications of the possibility that God and the entities reporting on galactic monitoring missions might be related concepts. He also recounted his 2022 personal contact experience at the International UFO Congress and its implications for disclosure. In the same interview, Masters addressed how the extra-temporal model interacts with Christian theology: entities identified as future humans "are still God's creation here on this planet — just future God creations coming back to hang out with past God creations," making the model potentially more compatible with mainstream religious worldviews than conventional extraterrestrial hypotheses.
Joe Rogan Experience — #2428 (2025)
Masters appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience (#2428, December 2025), in a wide-ranging conversation about his research, academic background, and personal experiences. He described his background as being in "biological anthropology" with research focused on "evolutionary anatomy" — and framed the saucer-shaped craft in close-encounter accounts as probable time machines in their own right, not merely vehicles but temporal displacement devices whose shape is functionally related to their mechanism.
Masters also disclosed in this interview that he was teaching a course at Montana Technological University — "UFOs, History and Science" — in which he treats the reality of the phenomenon as a starting assumption rather than an open question: "We're not going to waste time on that. We're gonna jump in. These are real. Here's what we're doing. This is what we know. This is what we don't know." He also disclosed that his belief in the phenomenon's reality draws partly on a childhood account from his biological father — overheard as a child and re-investigated in college — as well as his own UFO sighting in 2021 or 2022.