S7: Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon

My special guest is Dr. Michael P. Masters, who's here to discuss how it's possible that extraterrestrials could very well be humans who have come back in time for a purpose. Get his book Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon on Amazon.
  
 Could “UFOs” and “Aliens” simply be us, but from the future? 
 This provocative new book cautiously examines the premise that extraterrestrials may instead be our distant human descendants, using the anthropological tool of time travel to visit and study us in their own hominin evolutionary past. Dr. Michael P. Masters, a professor of biological anthropology specializing in human evolutionary anatomy, archaeology, and biomedicine, explores how the persistence of long-term biological and cultural trends in human evolution may ultimately result in us becoming the ones piloting these disc-shaped craft, which are likely the very devices that allow our future progeny to venture backward across the landscape of time. 
 Moreover, these extraterrestrials are ubiquitously described as bipedal, large-brained, hairless, human-like beings who communicate languages, and, with us in our possession, technology advanced beyond but built upon our own. These accounts, coupled with a thorough understanding of the past and modern human condition, point to the continuation of established biological and cultural trends here on Earth long into the distant human future.
  
 Other investigations of UFOs
 Despite the failure of the ETH to make headway with the expert committees, a few scientists and engineers, most notably J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who had been involved with projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, concluded that a small fraction of the most-reliable UFO reports gave definite indications for the presence of extraterrestrial visitors. Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), which continues investigating the phenomenon. Another major U.S. study of UFO sightings was the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a secret project from 2007 to 2012. When the existence of the AATIP was made public in December 2017, the most newsworthy aspect of it was a report that the U.S. government possessed unidentifiable alloys and compounds purportedly attained from UFOs. Still, many scientists remained skeptical about this claim.
 Aside from the American efforts, the only other official and relatively complete records of UFO sightings were kept in Canada, where they were transferred in 1968 from the Canadian Department of National Defense to the Canadian National Research Council. The Canadian records comprised about 750 sightings. Less complete records have been maintained in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Greece. In the United States, CUFOS and the Mutual UFO Network in Bellvue, Colorado, continue to log sightings reported by the public.
 In the Soviet Union, sightings of UFOs were often prompted by tests of secret military rockets. To obscure the true nature of the tests, the government sometimes encouraged the public’s belief that these rockets might be extraterrestrial craft but eventually decided that the descriptions might give away too much information. UFO sightings in China have been similarly provoked by