So far as my admittedly feeble mind is capable of comprehending, according to Einstein, our universe is a spacetime continuum composed of three spatial dimensions and a single temporal dimension. With respect to the spatial dimensions the three axes – which out of convenience we could call north-south, east-west, and up-down – are similar in that they’re symmetrical and bidirectional, which is to say we can move backward and forward along them.
Unlike the case with the spatial axes, the temporal axis is asymmetrical and unidirectional. And we move along it whether we like to or not. As becomes ever-clearer as you get older, we can’t stand still in the temporal dimension – to the contrary, we’re always moving away from the past and towards the future in the vessel of the omnipresent now, though at varying speeds relative to the observer. The faster one accelerates (think the Twin Paradox) or the stronger the gravitational field (think the time dilation experienced after visiting the ocean world in the 2014 movie, Interstellar), the slower time flows for them relative to those accelerating slower or in weaker gravitational fields.
In paranormal experiences and the field of parapsychology, though, things aren’t so straightforward.
Far distances in space can allegedly be perceived subjectively through extrasensory perception (ESP), in this case, clairvoyance, and can be instantaneously traveled to via the “disembodied” subtle body through the out-of-body experience (OBE). Time is also no object, as through variants of clairvoyance we can also perceive the future (through precognition) as well as the past (through what is known as retrocognition or postcongition).
While not recognized by traditional parapsychology so far as I’m aware, many have reported somewhat related paranormal experiences, though rather than variants of clairvoyance, they would appear to be variants of psychokinesis (PK). One such experience is reported cases of teleportation, which essentially constitute the physical analogue of clairvoyance. Rather than merely perceiving a distant point in space or visiting that location in subtle form, they appear to bend the space between a distant location and their physical bodies and spontaneously appear there in zero time. The physical analogues to precognition and retrocognition also occur (though they are most often an analogue of retrocognition), and they are collectively referred to as time-slips. Whereas in teleportation an individual seems to disappear from one location and reappear in another instantly, bending space while not affecting time, during time-slips people always seem to remain in the same physical location despite suddenly finding themselves in a different point in time. As I have explored recently, an experience related to the time-slip may be the time-freeze, which also seems to be bound to a specific geographical location for a limited “time” only.
As it turns out, the UFO phenomenon is replete with such spatiotemporal anomalies as well. While some may suggest that the many cases in which individuals while encountering UFOs suddenly find that far more time has passed than they can account for or find themselves in an entirely different location may represent such anomalies, I still find that in most such cases the wealth of evidence suggests that they were abducted and subjected to telepathically-induced posthypnotic amnesia (accounting for the phenomenon of “missing time”) and in some cases are simply returned to a place distant to the area where they were originally taken (accounting for the experience of suddenly finding themselves in a different locale). Not all such UFO encounters offer such a relatively (and I stress the word relatively) prosaic explanation, however. Indeed, some cases strongly suggest these non-human intelligences have gained mastery over not only space but time.
That they have gained mastery over space has been clear to me for some time, and for a swath of reasons, not least of which is the fact that I still hold to my working hypotheses that the most rational explanation for these craft and their occupants are that they represent an extraterrestrial intelligence and without the ability to manipulate space the journey from here to there would be extremely difficult. Not impossible, perhaps, but extremely difficult. Even if they came from a planet surrounding Proxima Centauri – which, at 4.2 light years away, is currently the closest star to our sun – it would take them over four years to get here if they were traveling at the speed of light. And if our current scientific understanding is accurate, they couldn’t. For starters, as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes larger and larger, requiring more and more energy. To get here, they would have to be able to control gravity so that the craft would not be moving at all; instead, they would be in a bubble, warping the space around the craft, and bending the space between the craft and its destination.
In other words, the technological equivalent of teleporting.
Also, consider the seemingly impossible maneuvers they’ve been witnessed to pull within our own planet’s atmosphere. Taking off without accelerating. Descending from space to the surface of the ocean, making sharp, right-angle turns, all instantaneously and without decelerating – and all without their craft utterly disintegrating or, assuming there are occupants, without those occupants slamming against the walls and becoming fucking mush. And breaking the sound barrier all without making so much as a peep, much less a sonic boom. All this would make perfect sense if they’ve somehow mastered the ability to manipulate or generate gravity and control space around the craft.
Given I’ve accepted this for some time, perhaps it shouldn’t have taken me so long to suppose they could similarly manipulate time – in my adult life, at any rate. When I was a kid and visiting my maternal grandmother, I wrote the government a letter asking them to disclose the truth about UFOs, and within the letter explicitly asked if they could travel through time. As a kid I was also obsessed with the notion of time travel, even before seeing Back to the Future, and carried my “blueprints” for a time machine or “T.M.” around with me at school in a red binder, working on it in my free time. When I began receiving flashbacks early in my high school career, however, my interest in the paranormal and the UFO subject in particular soared, and while my interest in time travel remained, the UFO interest became a subject of obsession, overshadowing my interest in time travel, which also became dissociated from the subject.
After all, given the way I was re-experiencing memories from my past, particularly during that period, the time-machine seemed to have been hiding between my ears the entire time.
This linkage between temporal anomalies and UFOs also tied in with one of the thorns in my side regarding my favorite television show at that time. I’ve always had a sort of love-hate relationship with The X-Files, with one of those reasons being that while I felt the show served the subject of the paranormal in general and UFOs in particular well in the sense that it popularized them, it also helped associate them with errors and misconceptions. One of the misunderstandings I noted early on in the series was the whole notion of missing time, which from my research I understood to be a period of amnesia some UFO witnesses experienced during their encounters which were sometimes later found to be periods during which they were abducted. The X-Files seemed to provide confusion, I thought, in their pilot episode, where Mulder and Scully experienced a time loss of nine minutes, which seemed to be expressed as jumping forward in time rather than an episode of amnesia.
Three decades later, I found evidence to suggest this may not have been the silly misunderstanding on Chris Carter’s part that I assumed it was at the time. To the contrary, he might have actually downplayed the kind of temporal anomalies associated with some UFO sightings.
For example, in The Extratempestrial Model, a 2022 book by Dr. Michael P. Masters, he cites a 1977 UFO encounter case from Pampa Lluscuma, Chile, involving one Corporal Armando Valdes. On April 25, at about 4 in the morning, his soldiers saw two silent, bright, violet lights descend from the sky. When Valdes approached one of the objects, he vanished before the eyes of the other men for fifteen minutes, and upon reappearing, uttered the words, “You don’t know who we are or where we come from, but we will be back soon,” before collapsing. Despite having been clean-shaven before, he now had about a week’s growth of beard, and his watch read April 30, collectively suggesting that what the men had experienced as only a quarter of an hour he had experienced as five days.
There is another example that has mysteriously fallen into my lap, dropped by the hands of synchronicity.
Interestingly, within a day of beginning to write this, one of my favorite YouTube channels, Beyond Creepy, posted an episode entitled “20 Years: Strange Encounter on Yaya Beach,” which provides a more extreme example of the kind of temporal anomaly that Valdes experienced. The story involves a group of six teenage boys who had an incredibly strange experience during a weekend camping trip to Playa Yaya Beach in Peru in 1981. When their campfire had gone out, half the group had gone to bed, and the other three had remained awake, but eventually, the cold became too much. Having noticed a light about a fifth of a mile down the beach and assuming it was a campfire, they drew straws to see which one of them would walk down to ask for some matches. In the end, t’was chance that selected the 18-year-old Caesar, who grabbed his flashlight and began what was estimated to be a twenty to thirty-minute journey there and back.
As Caesar began approaching the light, its color changed into a vibrant lilac color, and he now recognized that it was no campfire he was closing in on, but rather a glowing sphere. When a door resembling a camera lens appeared at the center, he entered it, shortly after which he noticed his flashlight was no longer with him. There were several apparent human beings inside, all of whom turned to stare at him and engage with him telepathically. He recalls them warning him that if humans failed to protect the planet from pollution, we would self-destruct, after which he exited the globe and returned to his friends, bearing matches – which he never mentioned being given – but no flashlight – which, you’ll recall, seemed to have mysteriously vanished from his hands.
To make matters more perplexing, his friends had been able to see him in the distance the entire time, and they had apparently observed him speaking to individuals around what they presumed to be a campfire before heading back.
Most perplexing at all, however, was that upon his return, they didn’t believe he was Caesar. Despite insisting he was Caesar, wearing the same clothes, and bearing features that resembled Caesar, he looked to be roughly 40 years of age. Once Caesar managed to convince his friends – the others had by this time awakened – that he was who he said he was, they decided to march back down to the campfire to demand to know what the bloody hell they had done to him. As they approached the light, however, it changed from orange to a brilliant violet, rose off the ground, and shot away at an insane speed, prompting them all to jointly yell out, “It’s a flying saucer!” Once arriving at the site, they found a circular indentation in the sand and spotted the lost flashlight nearby.
Caesar, who was now somehow about 40, predictably had issues initially getting his family to accept who he was and in the process of adapting to life of being a middle aged guy in every conceivable way.
Now, can I confirm either story? No, but they at least illustrate that temporal anomalies have been reported in conjunction with UFO encounters. This has been confirmed by Lou Elizondo, former director of AATIP, in a 2021 interview by GQ magazine, which Masters also quoted in his aforementioned book, to be an aspect of military encounters with UFOs as well:
“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 warping of spacetime. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience spacetime relative to the vehicle and the environment.”
Valdes only got close to the object, after all, and Caesar got inside it, so as far as these two cases go, Elizondo’s comment here seems to make some sense.
If the field generated by the craft can generate or manipulate gravity, it can manipulate space as well as time. Its ability to manipulate space, as I said before, is clear regarding its maneuvers. As for its capacity to manipulate time, this was exemplified in the case provided by Masters, Mr. X’s most recent episode of Beyond Creepy, and confirmed by Elizondo to be a common element in military accounts as well. It seems to me that all these cases, perhaps even the account of Cesear as provided by Mr. X, might have been unintentional side effects of individuals getting too close to the field generated by the craft.
In that light, it would also seem reasonable to assume that the entities could use their technology to deliberately focus this field in an intentional, directed way as well – perhaps at least helping to explain the phenomenon of the time-freeze, as I explore in Aliens Abductions & the Selective Time-Freeze.
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