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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on

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Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast. Doctor Michael

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Speaker 1: Masters with US, Professor of Biological Anthropology at Montana Tech

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Speaker 1: in Butte, Montana. He received a PhD at anthropology from

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Speaker 1: Ohio State University in two thousand and nine. He specialized

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Speaker 1: in human evolutionary anatomy, archaeology, and biomedicine. He spent the

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Speaker 1: following decade developing a broad academic background that unites the

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Speaker 1: fields of anthropology, astronomy, astrobiology, and physics to examine the

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Speaker 1: premise that UFOs and aliens are simply our distant human

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Speaker 1: descendants returning from the future to study us in their

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Speaker 1: own hominin evolutionary past. His book Identified Flying Objects, a

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Speaker 1: multidisciblinary scientific approach to the UFO phenomenon. Michael, First of all,

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Speaker 1: great job on the book. Thank you sir, it's great

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Speaker 1: to be here. Thanks for having me on. For tell

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Speaker 1: me how an anthropologist got involved in this. Well, it

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Speaker 1: actually started at a really young age. I was only

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Speaker 1: I think I was eight years old, and I came

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Speaker 1: down the stairs. We had some guests over at our house.

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Speaker 1: My parents had some friends over and I overheard a

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Speaker 1: story of my dad talking about the ufoon encounter he

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Speaker 1: had before I was born. But he was relaying the

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Speaker 1: story of this sort of glowing orb that appeared over

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Speaker 1: the horizon and darted toward them and then kind of

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Speaker 1: sat there for a little bit and shot back across

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Speaker 1: and then shot straight up into the sky at this

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Speaker 1: tremendous speed, and it really piqued my interest in it.

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Speaker 1: And not long after that he bought the well known

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Speaker 1: book Communion by Whitley Strieber, and I remember very vividly,

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Speaker 1: not long after hearing this story, looking up on the

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Speaker 1: shelf and seeing that that alien head, that very humanoid

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Speaker 1: what a cover h spook, Yeah, right there on the cover,

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Speaker 1: and um, yeah, I just had the sort of flash

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Speaker 1: and saw this u kind of timeline between an early

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Speaker 1: hominan form obviously I didn't know that term at the time,

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Speaker 1: but sort of a chimpanzee form, a modern human and

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Speaker 1: then that alien form on the book cover, and um,

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Speaker 1: I don't know, just just kind of set me on

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Speaker 1: this lifelong journey to understand this relationship. There's a lot

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Speaker 1: of you know, obviously common characteristics. What I now know

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Speaker 1: it's an apomorphies or you know, share derived characteristics that

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Speaker 1: you can see in you know, countless reports of encounters

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Speaker 1: that people have, abduction reports, close encounters where I actually

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Speaker 1: see these beans, and um just started to kind of

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Speaker 1: put things together and study it in greater detail and

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Speaker 1: put it all into this book. Did you go into

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Speaker 1: the field of anthropology primarily to investigate the possibility that

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Speaker 1: we could be descendants from extraterrestrials? That's the entire reason. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: I started out as a physics major because you know,

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Speaker 1: obviously you can't understand time travel without understanding times in

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Speaker 1: the physics of time. And um, I don't know, about

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Speaker 1: about halfway through my undergraduate career, I just decided to

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Speaker 1: kind of look at the evolutionary anatomy, and you know,

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Speaker 1: I was really interested in anthropology just um saw a

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Speaker 1: lot of opportunities to travel, which has definitely proven to

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Speaker 1: be true over the years. And um, yeah, I know.

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Speaker 1: I actually had a bunch of friends reach out to

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Speaker 1: me from you know, one of the first weeks or

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Speaker 1: freshman year in the dorms saying, oh my god, I

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Speaker 1: remember you talking about this, and a group of people

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Speaker 1: just sitting around that's that's why I was there, and

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Speaker 1: um yeah, it's I wanted to wait until I really

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Speaker 1: was able to you know, not just to communicate this

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Speaker 1: to people that haven't interest in it, but to communicate

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Speaker 1: it with my scientific colleagues as well. Was your PhD

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Speaker 1: thesis on this or did you have to play it safe? Um? No,

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Speaker 1: My PhD thesis looked at long term evolutionary changes in

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Speaker 1: homin and cranio facial anatomy, so evolution of the brain

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Speaker 1: and two of the main tradeoffs. Two of the main

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Speaker 1: trends in homin and evolution are an increase in brain

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Speaker 1: size and a reduction in the face. Those two can't

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Speaker 1: exist together. You couldn't put, you know, a camper trailer

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Speaker 1: on top of a corvette and expected to still work.

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Speaker 1: So as our brains have gotten bigger, our faces have

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Speaker 1: gotten out of the way. And there's a lot of

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Speaker 1: cultural things that have gone into that. Agriculture being able

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Speaker 1: to process foods that relaxed selective pressure on our teeth

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Speaker 1: that allowed them to get smaller, as well as our

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Speaker 1: chewing muscles and our brains have clearly, you know, we

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Speaker 1: benefit from those getting bigger over time, too. So so no,

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Speaker 1: I mostly studied those things which are extremely relevant to

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Speaker 1: this overall investigation of you know, what would happen if

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Speaker 1: those same trends were projected forward and looking at that,

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Speaker 1: you know, it's there's a lot of a lot of

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Speaker 1: evidence to suggest that we would look very much like

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Speaker 1: what is so commonly reported in these abduction accounts. But

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Speaker 1: but no, my research is mostly I use MRIs. I

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Speaker 1: study vision specifically juvenile on set myopia, and stigmatism in

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Speaker 1: the context of evolutionary changes, in the context of that

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Speaker 1: increase in brain size, reduction in the face. What happens

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Speaker 1: to the eyes as they grow larger in association with

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Speaker 1: increased brain development? How are they affected? How how is

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Speaker 1: vision affected in a functional sense? So there's actually a

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Speaker 1: lot of overlap. You wouldn't necessarily think that, But I discuss,

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Speaker 1: you know, a lot of my current anthropological research in

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Speaker 1: the book because it's relevant to this question. Now, the

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Speaker 1: name of your book, of course, is Identified Flying Objects.

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Speaker 1: Tell me how you picked that title. Well, I'll admit

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Speaker 1: it sounds a little narcissistic to say, hey, I figured

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Speaker 1: this out look everybody, But no, that's not I discussed

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Speaker 1: that in the first chapter. Is that it's also about

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Speaker 1: just the stigma that surrounds this topic and how it's

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Speaker 1: been manufactured largely by scientists. I mean, it started with

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Speaker 1: with Jail and Heineck, um, you know, with Project Signed,

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Speaker 1: Project Grudge, especially trying to to to put down, you know,

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Speaker 1: interest in this and discussion about this. And then he

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Speaker 1: changed and he changed his mind. He did. It's it's

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Speaker 1: very paradoxical if you think about it, because his role

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Speaker 1: early on was to to discredit these people. But then

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Speaker 1: as he started to understand that these people were telling

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Speaker 1: the truth, he then sort of had to to study

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Speaker 1: them and understand it while at the same time also

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Speaker 1: trying to diminish what they can contribute. So yeah, no,

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Speaker 1: he had a he had a very interesting career. Um.

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Speaker 1: But but no, I mean, I definitely understand that there's

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Speaker 1: something going on um And and the more I investigated,

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Speaker 1: the same thing has been taking place, and more and

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Speaker 1: more people, as I speak about this openly, more people

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Speaker 1: come out and tell me their story. And it's just

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Speaker 1: been an amazing ride, it really is. And not all

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Speaker 1: these people are making these stories up. No, certainly some

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Speaker 1: of them are. UM. But but the consistency across reports,

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Speaker 1: the consistency and the description of these these upright walking

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Speaker 1: what we call bipedal humanoid forms with you know, the

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Speaker 1: big heads, the small faces, the big guys. Um, you know,

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Speaker 1: five fingers on each hand. Grays. Yeah. But but you know,

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Speaker 1: I think, honestly, we can we can look at what

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Speaker 1: I dubbed temporal ancestry in the book. We can look

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Speaker 1: at racial ancestry or geographic ancestry, or what used to

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Speaker 1: be known as as race and understand these differences among

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Speaker 1: humans in the context of where they evolved. You know,

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Speaker 1: we have darker skin in places with high ultra violet

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Speaker 1: radiation because it protected them from skin cancer. Um, you know,

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Speaker 1: lighter skin because of full of acid and because of

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Speaker 1: vitamin D absorption. So we can understand these differences today

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Speaker 1: in the context of people evolved in these geographic regions.

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Speaker 1: But that variation that's so commonly reported in these reports

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Speaker 1: of close encounters may just be an aspect of temporal

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Speaker 1: variation that the more different they look, even some of

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Speaker 1: the reptilian or the insect characteristics that are reported could

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Speaker 1: just be a very distant stage of human evolution in

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Speaker 1: the future. And if you think about us going back,

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Speaker 1: you know, ten thousand years into the past, we're going

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Speaker 1: to look very similar to those individuals that we would

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Speaker 1: be examining. You go back a million years or two

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Speaker 1: million years, or six million years, and we start to

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Speaker 1: look very different at each subsequent stage of visiting our

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Speaker 1: ancestral past. So honestly, you know a lot of people

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Speaker 1: will say, well, yes, this explains the Grays, but what

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Speaker 1: about these other ones? And honestly, I think, you know,

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Speaker 1: if we look at the long term history of human evolution,

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Speaker 1: potentially the long future of human evolution, it could potentially

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Speaker 1: explain those characteristics as well. You're concluding primarily that these

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Speaker 1: so called extraterrestrials maybe coming from the future, not some

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Speaker 1: other planetary system. Correct, Yeah, that's the primary, the primary thesis.

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Speaker 1: And like I said, you know, that's what drove me

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Speaker 1: to go to college for this and to get a

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Speaker 1: PhD in this and to continue studying it, and to

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Speaker 1: merge these fields of astrobiology, physics, and astronomy with anthropology

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Speaker 1: to get a deeper sense of this. But um, yeah,

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Speaker 1: if you if you look at even if you take

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Speaker 1: the reports out of it, you know a lot of

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Speaker 1: people haven't read the books, say well, this is all

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Speaker 1: based on the false assumption that these things exist, that

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Speaker 1: this is happening, and it's it's not at all, because

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Speaker 1: the book mostly focuses on long term evolutionary changes, not

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Speaker 1: just in our physical form, you know, not just in

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Speaker 1: the increased brain size and specifically increased what we call

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Speaker 1: neurocranial globularity, the development of a more bulbous head, a

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Speaker 1: more rounded, balloon shaped head in association with our smaller faces.

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Speaker 1: If you look at those trends that have persisted throughout

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Speaker 1: six million years of human evolution, irregardless of our geographic

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Speaker 1: location or the climate, or what sorts of ecological interactions

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Speaker 1: we had, or much later political social economic systems, those

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Speaker 1: trends continued. If you look at that projected forward, assuming

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Speaker 1: it will continue the same way it has in the

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Speaker 1: same way it's been accelerating over recent human evolution, we

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Speaker 1: would look very much like these things that are reported.

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Speaker 1: So it's I don't think we should ignore anything with

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Speaker 1: a phenomenon as complex as this. I think we need

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Speaker 1: to look at at all available evidence. But the book

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Speaker 1: doesn't hinge on that. It's just an important part of

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Speaker 1: bringing in circumstantial evidence that happens to corroborate what is

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Speaker 1: very hard evidence from this anthropological fee. Michael, why can't

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Speaker 1: you conclude that the the ets may have come from

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Speaker 1: other planetary systems throughout our galaxy or universe? Yeah, I mean,

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Speaker 1: you know, it's this is where the controversy comes in. Well,

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Speaker 1: I don't think it needs to be controversial. I mean,

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Speaker 1: that is the dominant model, you know, it's it's it's

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Speaker 1: the going hypothesis. It's what's been discussed. It's and it

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Speaker 1: makes sense too if you think about you know, what

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Speaker 1: everybody sees. It's it's these craft coming down from the sky.

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Speaker 1: And your first response is going to be, well, clearly

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Speaker 1: they came from these stars, you know, and you have

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Speaker 1: all of the prehistoric historic accounts and before people knew

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Speaker 1: what stars were, what the sky really was, you know,

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Speaker 1: it makes sense why we would think that. But but

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Speaker 1: if you really look at not just what's happened here

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Speaker 1: on our planet, you know, were the things I was

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Speaker 1: just describing with with our specific trajectory, but you also

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Speaker 1: have a number of other issues. We tind of talk

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Speaker 1: about space as being this this this neighborhood, you know,

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Speaker 1: this celestial neighborhood with these stars and they're just right

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Speaker 1: next door. But there's a vast amount of space separating

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Speaker 1: these solar systems, and especially separating galaxies. I mean, it's

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Speaker 1: it's immeasurable. We can measure it, obviously, but but to

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Speaker 1: really think about what a light year is the distance

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Speaker 1: that light travels in one year at three hundred thousand

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Speaker 1: kilometers per second, we're talking about huge distances. And even

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Speaker 1: beyond that, I mean, all of the planets that are

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Speaker 1: being discovered as part of the Kepler mission, they're almost

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Speaker 1: entirely actually, I'm pretty sure every single one is a

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Speaker 1: planet that's much larger than Earth. And if we if

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Speaker 1: we do take into consideration that these aliens or extra

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Speaker 1: tempest trials as I call them in the book, are

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Speaker 1: upright walking. They are bipedal, just like us. That characteristic

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Speaker 1: is not likely to evolve on any planet even slightly

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Speaker 1: larger or more dense than our own. It's extremely rare

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Speaker 1: that we do it. And I discussed, Look, do you

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Speaker 1: think we should be on all fours? We were for

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Speaker 1: a long time. All of our primate cousins are still

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Speaker 1: on all fours. Chimpanzees and gorillas walk on their knuckles.

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Speaker 1: That's about as close as they've gotten to standing upright,

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Speaker 1: but it's extremely rare on this planet. Most of that

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Speaker 1: has to do with gravity, and I talk about the

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Speaker 1: research of a fellow named Bruce Latimer, who used to

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Speaker 1: be the head of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History,

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Speaker 1: wrote this really interesting paper called The Perils of Being

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Speaker 1: Bipedal that look at how we're not even that great

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Speaker 1: at it. We suffer from knee problems, back problems, foot problems,

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Speaker 1: hernia's hemorrhoids, varicost veins, choking is a problem, sleep apnea, TMJ,

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Speaker 1: the vision problems that I was discussing earlier. All of

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Speaker 1: these things, in one way or another are tied to

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Speaker 1: us standing upright and the fact that it's so rare

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Speaker 1: here and that we still reap these benefits despite all

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Speaker 1: of the negatives that come with it. Indicate that on

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Speaker 1: a different planet, somewhere else that is larger than Earth,

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Speaker 1: it's going to be even less likely to happen there.

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Speaker 1: Speculate on how far in the future these beings might

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Speaker 1: be when they came back thousand years out, two hundred

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Speaker 1: years What do you think I mean? You know, originally

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Speaker 1: when I said in set in motion to research this,

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Speaker 1: that that was the main idea is that I would

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Speaker 1: create some timeline of you know that we could use

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Speaker 1: maybe even like everybody, which is the hardest thing to do.

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Speaker 1: It is, you know, and there's a lot of reasons

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Speaker 1: why it's it's difficult. I'll give you the cliff notes version,

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Speaker 1: but one is just the variation that exists within time periods,

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Speaker 1: and we struggle with this as modern anthropologists, even looking back.

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Speaker 1: The farther back you go, the less available evidence there is.

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Speaker 1: We've been very lucky with a couple of individual specimens.

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Speaker 1: Lucy is probably the best known. Another one can MWt

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Speaker 1: fifteen thousand, which is a homo Erectus skeleton, very complete,

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Speaker 1: but we don't know if that is representative of all

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Speaker 1: of the other individuals that lived at that time. There's

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Speaker 1: still the geographic variation that we see today, and back

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Speaker 1: at that time there were far more species alive that

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Speaker 1: would add species wide variation. We don't have that today.

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Speaker 1: We're all the same species. But then you have sex

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Speaker 1: variation differences between men and women age variation. That homo

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Speaker 1: Erectus individual I mentioned earlier happened to be eleven years old,

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Speaker 1: so we don't really even know what the adult form

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Speaker 1: looks like. So so to project that forward, to try

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Speaker 1: to say this is what will look like in ten

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Speaker 1: thousand years or twenty thousand years. It's riddled with hitches,

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Speaker 1: and the whole point of the book is to get

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Speaker 1: away from speculation, to avoid vaculating about what things will happen,

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Speaker 1: what will cause us to look a specific way, or

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Speaker 1: you know, when will look a specific way. So it

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Speaker 1: may be disappointing to some readers, but I actually try

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Speaker 1: not to really make any predictions. And again, like I

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Speaker 1: was saying earlier, what we see, you know, once we

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Speaker 1: have this technology in the future, in the same way

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Speaker 1: that we didn't stop using fire once we harnessed fire

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Speaker 1: as a cultural tool about one point eight million years ago,

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Speaker 1: once we have time travel technology, we aren't likely to

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Speaker 1: just stop using it. So so what we see now

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Speaker 1: and in the past may actually be individuals representing different

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Speaker 1: time periods in the future and giving us a snapshot

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Speaker 1: of those different points in time, sort of ambassadors from

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Speaker 1: from different points throughout our evolutionary future. So that also

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Speaker 1: complicates that, you know, it brings an addition to the

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Speaker 1: sex and the geographic and the age variation. It may

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Speaker 1: very well bring temporal variation into the question as well.

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Speaker 1: Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at

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