NARRATOR: Extraordinary accounts of missing time.
BRUCE GERNON: Once the aircraft penetrated the tunnel,
time started changing instantly.
It only took three minutes and 20 seconds
to fly a hundred miles.
NARRATOR: Otherworldly events that seem to alter reality.
JOHN BURROUGHS: It seemed like everything was going in slow motion,
like everything was slowing down.
NARRATOR: Sightings of strange craft
changing location instantaneously.
GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: These vehicles are able
to pop in and pop out
of either time or another dimension.
NARRATOR: Could extraterrestrials
have mastered the ability to travel through time?
Is Earth being visited not only by entities from other planets
but also from the future, or even the distant past?
Perhaps an alien civilization in outer space,
thousands of years more advanced than us,
may be able to time travel.
NARRATOR: There is a doorway
in the universe.
Beyond it is the promise of truth.
It demands we question everything
we have ever been taught.
The evidence is all around us.
The future is right before our eyes.
We are not alone.
We have never been alone.
NARRATOR: Mount Pion, Turkey.
Here, where the ancient Greek city of Ephesus once stood,
lie the ruins of a religious site
known as the grotto of the Seven Sleepers.
The grotto is thought to be the location
where, many centuries ago,
a group of seven men experienced a shift in time.
In the Christian and Islamic story
of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,
we learn the amazing story of seven warriors
who professed Christianity in 250 AD,
when it was just beginning to emerge as a new religion.
The Roman emperor offered these warriors an opportunity
to recant and to disavow their Christianity.
Instead, they decide to sell all their possessions
and go into a cave, and in response,
the-the emperor decides
to seal this cave with the Sleepers inside of it.
Several hundred years go by,
and a shepherd chances upon this cave.
(bleating)
And he breaks down the wall, and the seven people
inside of the cave have been sleeping for hundreds of years,
and it's now 300 years later.
And they're still alive, these Seven Sleepers.
These Sleepers then go into Ephesus...
...and nothing looks the same.
Something they noticed is that there are
Christian crosses everywhere,
because by now, Christianity has taken over.
AMIR HUSSAIN: With the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus you think,
"Okay, is it that there's some miracle here,"
or have they been in a place where the time line,
you know, has-has shifted, and so,
what seems 300 years to them
has been a much shorter amount of time.
NARRATOR: While many scholars regard this story as fictional,
millions of Christians and Muslims believe
a true miracle took place, and that these seven warriors
were transported into the future.
In fact, hundreds of graves have been found at the grotto
dating back to the fifth century,
along with inscriptions indicating
that people were buried there because it was considered
a location of great power.
Today, it remains a popular pilgrimage site,
serving as a testament to humankind's preoccupation
with one of the most significant and least understood forces
in the universe: time.
What is time? That's a great question.
It's a fundamental question.
We all normally live
along the straight line of time,
from the past, present, to the future.
But the question is, is there a way around that,
a way to travel through time?
JONATHAN YOUNG: Time is important to us.
The passage of time is an item of grief
that we all know is universal.
We have a kind of longing to defeat time.
HENRY: Why has time travel stuck around for so long
in human consciousness?
I think this idea that you can go into the ancient past
or travel into the future is the ultimate trip.
NARRATOR: The notion of breaking free from the seemingly inescapable bonds
of time has existed in the human imagination for centuries.
But modern concepts of time travel are largely credited
to science fiction author H.G. Wells,
who, in his 1895 book The Time Machine, speculated
as to how time travel might be scientifically possible.
MICHIO KAKU: H.G. Wells began to say to himself,
"If we can move in space, why can't we move in time?
And that's the beginning of his novel The Time Machine.
H.G. Wells said it takes three coordinates
to locate an object in space.
Time, therefore, is the fourth dimension.
We need four coordinates to identify
any event in our universe.
ANDREW COLLINS: H.G. Wells talked about
the idea that space and time were somehow linked together.
And the protagonist of the book was able to go, at will,
any time into the future or any time into the past,
to actually experience and see what was going on.
NARRATOR: Could humankind one day be able to travel back in time
or even into the future?
Incredibly, just a decade after the publication
of The Time Machine,
Albert Einstein proposed a similar vision of time travel.
HUGH NEWMAN: H.G. Wells, in 1895,
mentioned the idea of time and space being connected.
Now, this is interesting, because Albert Einstein
came up with the theory of relativity,
where he also proposed that time and space are connected.
Time used to be thought of in Newtonian classical physics
as something absolute.
It didn't change, it was the same
for everybody everywhere.
Einstein came along in 1905,
published a paper on special relativity,
and demonstrated that time's actually relative.
Now, in Einstein's theory,
space and time are linked to each other.
That's why it's called spacetime.
Whatever you do to space also happens to time.
A rotating black hole can cause a twisting of space.
Time is linked to space.
So if I'm twisting space, I can twist time.
Mathematically, this has been shown.
I can travel from the future back into the past.
We haven't been able to do it yet experimentally,
but it's a real part of Einstein's
general theory of relativity.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that spacetime
can be manipulated to travel into the past?
And if so, how close is modern science
to achieving such an incredible feat?
The University of Connecticut, 2021.
Theoretical physicist and professor Dr. Ronald Mallett
works closely with a team of researchers on a project
to realize his lifelong dream:
the creation of a time machine.
By using a mechanism called a ring laser,
Dr. Mallett believes that he can manipulate the fabric of space
and time to create a door that can open to the past.
MALLETT: What I did was I solved
Einstein's gravitational field equations,
and I was able to show that a circulating beam
of laser light will cause a twisting of space.
There is a device, it's called a ring laser.
All it is is a device that causes light
to move around in a loop.
You can get it to do that in a number of different ways.
Bouncing it off mirrors, for example.
And I was able to show that a circulating beam
of laser light will cause a twisting of space.
What I was able to show further is that if this twisting
of space was strong enough,
it could lead to time being twisted into a loop.
And these loops in time could allow for the possibility
of time travel in the past.
This is all anchored in Einstein's
general theory of relativity.
NARRATOR: While Dr. Mallett's time machine
may be theoretically sound,
one major hurdle stands in his way:
harnessing massive amounts of energy.
MICHAEL DENNIN: The real constraint
with a time machine at the moment
is the energy involved, because you have to bend
the dimension that's time.
KAKU: The energy at which you can create
a gateway through space and time is called the Planck energy.
The Planck energy is a quadrillion times
more powerful than our most powerful machine,
the Large Hadron Collider.
We're talking about the energy of a star.
Perhaps an alien civilization in outer space,
thousands of years more advanced than us,
may be able to access the Planck energy.
That cannot be ruled out.
NARRATOR: If extraterrestrial civilizations
have the technology to traverse the vast distances of space,
as ancient astronaut theorists suggest,
might they have also mastered the ability
to travel through time?
Perhaps further clues can be found
by examining incredible stories of time travel
found in some of the earliest texts ever written.
NARRATOR: After a record-breaking 340 days
abord the International Space Station,
astronaut Scott Kelly returns to the NASA Johnson Space Center.
The mission was designed to help researchers
understand the effects of long-term spaceflight
on the human body.
Scott's identical twin brother and former astronaut Mark Kelly
remained on Earth to serve as the control subject.
While Scott was in space,
his immune system was more active,
his vision deteriorated
and he lost more bone mass compared to Mark.
But perhaps the most significant difference
was that for Scott, time had slowed down.
When they measured the aging acceleration of Scott Kelly
and Mark Kelly, the twins, it turns out
that Scott was 0.5 milliseconds younger than Mark.
And so, what's going on here?
TRAVIS TAYLOR: So, that actually fits with time dilation.
It's a phenomenon that we have observed to be real,
that the closer you go to the speed of light,
the more time slows down for you.
KAKU: According to Einstein's theory
of special relativity,
the faster you move, the slower time gets.
So, if you have a telescope and could look inside
a rocket ship speeding near the speed of light,
everyone inside that rocket would be frozen,
moving at a different rate in time.
Given that the space station orbits around the planet Earth
at about 17,500 miles per hour,
you can actually calculate how slow time must be
on the space station.
And so, we can actually measure this effect in the laboratory.
MALLETT: Imagine, in the future, when we have rockets that can go
close to the speed of light.
They could find that days, maybe years had passed
for the people on board the rocket.
But when they come back, they would find out
that decades had passed here on the Earth.
They could come back and find
that they are younger than their children.
Time travel to the future is real.
We've seen the baby steps of it. But it has happened.
NARRATOR: If space travel has revealed to humankind
the possibilities that exist for manipulating time,
is it possible that somewhere
in the vast expanse of the universe,
other intelligent beings have advanced to the point
where they are able to move through time as easily as space?
Ancient astronaut theorists believe evidence can be found
in ancient texts that our ancestors
may have already witnessed
or even experienced the bending of time.
YOUNG: There's this wonderful book of stories,
an epic in Hindu culture, the Mahabharata,
written in the third century before the Common Era,
but this was writing down oral traditions
that were much, much older than that.
And one of the tales is when King Raivata
goes up into the heavens and meets God,
the great creator god Brahma himself.
TSOUKALOS: King Raivata was actually taken into the heavens in a chariot
to visit this gigantic palace that was in the celestial realm.
And when King Raivata came back, much to his surprise,
he did not recognize a single person
that was in his neighborhood.
In fact, it turns out that he had returned
hundreds of years later.
Now, how is such a thing even possible?
CHILDRESS: Here we have
what is perhaps the first story
of time dilation,
where someone has gone up into space,
in, say, a spaceship, and all this time has passed.
Which is exactly what Einstein had talked about in 1905.
Only, this is a story from thousands of years ago.
NARRATOR: Could King Raivata's experience be a historical account
of a time dilation event
that occurred thousands of years ago?
For ancient astronaut theorists,
this possibility is made stronger
when considering the fact that similar stories
were told in other parts of the world--
like in Egypt, where ancient hieroglyphs
describe a celestial craft called the solar barge of Ra.
TSOUKALOS: There are many references in ancient Egypt
about Ra's solar barge, which was this vehicle
that they described that they saw cross the sky.
This solar barge is also known as the Ship of a Million Years.
NARRATOR: According to an ancient document known as the Turin King List,
which contains a record of all Egyptian rulers
up until 1300 BC,
the earliest pharaohs lived for hundreds
or even thousands of years.
These were the pharaohs who were said to have journeyed
to the stars on the solar barge of Ra.
HUSSAIN: You look at some of these records
from the Egyptians and you think,
well, okay, if there is this phenomenon
of time dilation, if these pharaohs really are travelling
on craft at very high speeds, then when they come back,
they're still young, the Earth has aged tremendously,
and so, is that part of it?
Is that how you have pharaohs that lived hundreds of years?
You see this effect that we now call time dilation
in various ancient cultures.
TSOUKALOS: There is an artifact at the Ashmolean Museum
in Oxford, England that is called
the WB44 Kings List of ancient Sumeria.
It lists the exact reigning periods
of all the kings of ancient Sumeria.
The total is 266,000 years,
and there are crazy reigning periods
that are recorded very specifically,
and I think they knew perfectly well how to record time.
HUSSAIN: You have these figures in the Bible
that live for hundreds of-of years.
The oldest figure in the Bible is Methuselah,
the grandfather of Noah,
and he dies, the Bible tells us, the age of 969.
NARRATOR: According to the Hebrew Bible,
Methuselah's father Enoch
left the Earth in a fiery chariot,
and was 365 years old
when God chose for him to remain in the heavenly realm.
All other pre-flood Patriarchs
are recorded as living for more than 700 years.
CHILDRESS: Certainly one way that they would be able to have
these incredibly extended lives would be
that they are traveling through space
and coming back and therefore,
400, 900 years can go by,
and-and t-that's essentially their age on Earth.
TSOUKALOS: These concepts
should not be described by our ancestors
because it should have exceeded their knowledge at the time,
but the fact that multiple stories exist
where someone wakes up or gets returned
hundreds of years after certain events...
that's strange.
NARRATOR: Could these stories be historical accounts
of ancient people experiencing time dilation
after traveling aboard alien spacecraft?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,
and suggest other accounts, both ancient and modern,
may reveal that extraterrestrials
have the ability to manipulate time
in even more extraordinary ways.
NARRATOR: Royal Air Force Wing Commander Sir Robert Victor Goddard
is dispatched to inspect an old, disused airfield
near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Sir Robert Victor Goddard was flying over an airfield
to survey and see if the airfield could be used
in the future,
and while he's flying over it, he noticed there's cracks
in the airfield and there's grass growing up
and cows are eating the grass and so on.
He's flying home and he gets kind of lost,
or turned around a bit in a storm,
so he decides to fly back to where he was to get a bearing.
On the return journey, he encountered very strange, uh,
yellow and brown clouds.
Almost like he entered into some kind of otherworldly portal.
And he came out of there
and found himself in bright sunlight.
And going over the same airfield,
everything was renovated.
And there were aircraft out there on the tarmac.
But they were painted yellow.
And there were people tending these aircraft dressed in blue.
NARRATOR: When Goddard landed
and told his colleagues what he saw,
they insisted it was not possible,
since RAF planes were painted silver at that time
and mechanics' uniforms were tan-colored.
However, just a few years later,
the RAF changed the color of both their training planes
and mechanics uniforms, which Goddard witnessed
when he flew over Drem airfield again in 1939.
He's making another flight and realizes,
"There are the planes, at Drem.
"They are painting them yellow.
The people have on blue uniforms."
It is exactly what he remembered seeing
when he came out from beyond this yellow cloud
four years before in 1935.
COLLINS: Some people have suggested
that Victor Goddard's experience
could be extraterrestrial in nature, and that, just maybe,
he was thrust through time
by a yellow and brown cloud that he encountered.
There are many examples of these weird clouds
being encountered in different parts of the world.
NARRATOR: Ancient astronaut theorists propose
that an alien civilization advanced enough
to achieve interstellar travel may also possess the technology
to create portals through time.
And they suggest further evidence that such gateways
have been established here on Earth can be found
by examining the extraordinary events
that have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle.
At 3:00 in the afternoon,
pilot Bruce Gernon departs from Andros Island
bound for Palm Beach, Florida, just north of Miami.
It's a route that he's flown
many times before without incident,
but this flight will be unlike any other.
Since I've been flying for 47 years now, uh...
I've had a lot of flights in that area.
But this experience I'll never forget.
It all started a hundred miles east of Miami
when I found myself surrounded by this strange storm.
Time started changing instantly.
And I believe I actually got to see the fabric of time itself
as I watched the tunnel rotate.
When I reached the other end, the tunnel collapsed.
And I reached the shoreline of Miami Beach.
It only took three minutes and 20 seconds
to fly a hundred miles.
I should have been able to fly only ten miles, approximately.
Not 100 miles.
HENRY: I think that what he must have experienced
is perhaps some kind of a time shift,
or he entered into an anomalous vortex
that perhaps was some kind of a time portal.
We don't know, but it's a very curious example of time travel.
NARRATOR: Could it be
that the route Bruce Gernon traveled
led him into a portal through time?
As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned,
this incredible possibility is even more intriguing
because of the area where it happened, the Bermuda Triangle.
The Bermuda Triangle is really located off of, uh, Florida.
The northern point of it is the island of Bermuda.
It then goes down to, essentially, southern Florida,
and then out into The Bahamas.
And this is an area that has historically
had strange phenomenon.
NARRATOR: While Gernon was fortunate enough
to have survived his harrowing experience,
many ships and aircraft traveling through this region
have disappeared without a trace.
In one extraordinary case
that occurred on December 5, 1945,
five Navy Avenger torpedo bombers,
known as Flight 19, all went missing at the same time.
All five of their compasses were not working correctly,
and they had two navigational instruments
that they could use, and they were not
-working properly, either. -(alarm buzzing)
NARRATOR: The planes disappeared from radar,
and their last communication
consisted of nothing but eerie static.
(radio static)
The Navy immediately sent a team to search
for the missing bombers, but they never recovered any debris.
Is it possible that the Bermuda Triangle
is subject to portals or vortexes
that create these mysteries?
What we do know is that it is a place
of intensive electromagnetic activity,
and this is something that we can tell
from the fact that so many aircraft and ships
experience problems with their instrumentation.
NARRATOR: Might the Bermuda Triangle be an electromagnetic hot spot
where portals capable of manipulating time
open and close?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,
and they believe that these portals may help explain
some of the strange, otherworldly activity
reported in the area.
Many UFO sightings
and m-more modern UAP, uh, videos
have been released show unusual flight dynamics and capabilities
of these... whatever they are.
Well, it may be they're creating portals,
in our universe and in our time and our space,
that they can move in and out of, uh, at will.
There's no reason to, uh, say they can't
until we know what they are.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that visitors
from other worlds are utilizing portals
in the Bermuda Triangle
to travel through time and space?
And if so, do such portals already exist naturally,
or are they being created
with some type of extraterrestrial technology?
Perhaps the answer can be found
by examining the account of a UFO witness who claims
to have received a message from the future.
NARRATOR: In Suffolk County, England, there is a remote forest
in the village of Rendlesham
that has become famous for being the site
of one of the most extraordinary UFO encounters ever reported.
And some of those who experienced it
believe this incident also involved time travel.
The event occurred on December 26, 1980.
Airman John Burroughs was performing
a routine security check at a U.S. Air Force base
when he received orders
to investigate a possible downed aircraft.
BURROUGHS: My supervisor called me on the radio and asked
to meet up with him so we could check the east gate.
We're driving down the road leading to the east gate
to check on it when all of a sudden he saw
some strange lights in the forest.
So I decided we'll call it in
and let them know something strange was going on.
They decided to send one of the security units down.
So it was Sergeant Penniston.
He got down there and he saw the same strange lights
that we were seeing.
JAMES PENNISTON: So I could see all these multiple
color lights and things like that.
And the air felt different.
I don't know how to really explain that.
But it did feel like there was electricity
on our skin and hair and stuff.
But that progressively got worse
the closer we got to the tree line.
And it got more intense.
BURROUGHS: There seemed to be, like, an electricity-charged atmosphere,
and then, also, there were points where there--
it seemed like everything was going in slow motion.
NARRATOR: As the servicemen approached the strange lights,
Sergeant Penniston reportedly saw a large craft
just beyond the tree line.
PENNISTON: The craft was triangular in shape,
measuring about six to seven feet high,
black in color.
I had come around to the far side of the craft,
and that's when I noticed that there was,
you know, inscription on the side.
You know, it is about three feet long,
maybe six inches high, um,
and, uh, so I'm expecting to find, I don't know,
some kind of prototype stuff, uh, USAF.
I'm-I'm looking for something very familiar.
Instead of something familiar,
I see these pictorial-type glyphs.
And got running my hand over the side of the craft.
I don't know how to explain this.
It's like someone was holding a picture up, okay?
I could see it in my mind's eye.
Zeros and ones.
So I recorded those. One after another.
HESELTINE: When Penniston touched
the craft, he then said
that he felt a strange download of information,
uh, to his mind.
And he felt compelled the next day to write down
a series of zeros and ones,
which we now regard as binary code.
POPE: Years later,
a computer programmer took this information,
ran it through a translation program
and a message emerged.
The message read: "Exploration of humanity
"continuous for planetary advance,
"eyes of your eyes,
origin year 8100."
When one sees "origin year 8100,"
one is forced to speculate, might we be looking
not just at extraterrestrials,
but time travelers from the future?
NARRATOR: After the incident, the U.S. military
conducted a brief investigation,
but allegedly tried to keep the eyewitnesses
away from the press.
But for Airman Burroughs and Officer Penniston,
the event wasn't easy to leave behind.
Both men had lasting physical effects from the encounter
and even reported strange dreams.
After the incident, I started having throat and eye problems.
At one point, my gums turned white.
I also had vision problems,
and when I went and saw the doctor,
one of his first questions was,
had I been ever exposed to radiation?
I've definitely had dreams about it,
and I still have feelings about what happened
and what could happen in the future.
I got out of the service in 1993.
Then I was out about maybe three months,
and then, I started getting these dreams and nightmares.
During the dreams,
I could see that these were time travelers,
40 to 50,000 years in the future.
I see that their purpose to come back
was to correct things, was to fix things.
Something horrible has happened.
Something they have to correct.
But it requires time travel.
It requires going back into the past.
I never had a feeling of it being extraterrestrial.
It's always been that they were simply us in the future.
NARRATOR: Could it be that the craft reportedly witnessed
by James Penniston and John Burroughs
came not from a distant star
but from a distant point in time?
Perhaps further clues can be found by examining trends
in evolution and what humans may look like in the future.
MICHAEL MASTERS: If we look at past trends
in our biological form,
we see that we're likely to look very similar
to what's most commonly described
in these instances of close encounters.
NARRATOR: Butte, Montana, 2019.
Professor of biological anthropology
at Montana Technological University,
Dr. Michael Masters publishes Identified Flying Objects.
This groundbreaking book explores the profound notion
that the UFO phenomenon may involve
our distant human descendants
traveling backward across the landscape of time.
MASTERS: One of the big questions about
backward time travel is why aren't we inundated
by time tourists if backward time travel exists?
And the answer may simply be, we do.
We do see them, in the form of UFOs,
in the form of these "alien beings"
that are most likely traveling backwards
from the human future, using more advanced technology
and with a more advanced physical form
than what we have now.
NARRATOR: Dr. Masters points out
that current accounts of humanoid aliens,
the Greys in particular, bear a striking resemblance
to what many biologists predict humans may look like
in the distant future.
MASTERS: If we look at past trends in our biological form
and in our technology,
we see the same dominant trends in our morphology.
Our neurocrania have become enlarged, becoming more rounded.
Our midfacial and lower facial anatomy has retracted.
If these are to continue into the future,
we're likely to look very similar
to what's most commonly described
in these instances of close encounters,
where the being have big heads, small faces, big eyes.
NEWMAN: Many of the types of aliens, if you like,
or strange beings that are in these crafts,
they're often taller, they've got larger heads,
larger eyes, and that could be a sign of evolution
of our species going thousands
or possibly hundreds of thousands of years
into the future.
NARRATOR: Could the so-called Grey aliens
that many people believe they have encountered
actually be human time travelers?
According to some researchers, further evidence
that Earth is being visited by future humans can be found
by examining accounts of unidentified flying objects.
MASTERS: If we look at the craft, too,
they seem to have a form that indicates the function
of backward time travel.
It's very consistent with research
since Einstein's paper in 1915, demonstrating how the rotation
of a massive or highly energetic disc or cylinder
could create backward time travel capabilities.
ERICH VON DANIKEN: Sometimes I ask myself
if UFOs are not time travelers.
It's our own, uh, people of the future
who study some history and they send some vehicles
to measure, to observe, to photograph us.
But they don't make direct contact.
So I would exclude nothing, not even time travel.
NARRATOR: But if future humans have traveled back in time,
are they simply observing events of the past?
Or could they have a more profound agenda?
One of the other ideas relating to this is the idea
that our selves from the future
are actually trying to help us in some way.
There's some kind of interaction going on.
They could be giving us information
about advances in technology.
They could be giving us information about other planets.
They could be giving us scientific data
that we need to survive
that they know about in the future,
but y-- we're yet to get to that point.
COLLINS: Could they be coming back
to help evolve us in some way,
to help us learn new technologies and innovations?
Perhaps to steer us towards their own future.
Maybe these technologies involve everything
from quantum computers to nuclear fusion
to AI and even nanotechnology.
All of these are at the cutting edge of science,
and we are actually looking for answers
to how to better perfect these technologies.
MASTERS: If UFOs are craft
from our future, if the beings seen in association with them
are our distant descendants,
and they crashed into Roswell, New Mexico in 1947,
it's possible that we've been reverse-engineering
this technology.
And not just for the purposes of flying through space
at tremendous speeds
or having antigravity propulsion systems,
but also, potentially, to figure out how to travel through time.
We may be eventually reaching the point
where that technology is ours, coming back through time again,
where there's this constant loop through the past and the future.
NARRATOR: If time travel is possible,
could it be that Earth is being visited
by both extraterrestrials and humans from our own future?
Perhaps further clues can be found
by examining the possibility
that the true nature of time is much different than we think.
NARRATOR: Housed at the National Institute
of Standards and Technology
are two atomic clocks that together serve
as the United States' primary time and frequency standard.
Around the world, similar clocks with incredible precision
set the time by which all of humankind operates.
It is a relentless march of seconds, minutes, hours
and days determining when we wake up,
go to work, eat, sleep, celebrate
-and ultimately, die. -(monitor beeps)
But what if how we perceive time
is nothing more than a human construct?
An attempt to quantify and control a universal force
that modern science hasn't even begun to understand?
We live in the fantasy of linear time,
because we have to remember
that all the notions of time are imposed on reality.
Reality flows in its own way.
We imagine that our clocks measure it.
We claim to be able to mark it off
in hours and days and things,
but that's all just imposed on it.
NARRATOR: Physicists point out
that going by modern science's linear concept of time,
even the idea of the here and now is merely an illusion,
since light and sound do not travel instantaneously.
When you look at a mirror, you're not really looking
at yourself as you are, you're looking at yourself
as you were about a billionth of a second ago.
When you look at the Moon, you're not really looking
at the Moon as it is now.
You're looking at the Moon as it was about a second ago.
So when you look at the Pleiades,
you're looking at the Pleiades as they were 400 years ago.
NARRATOR: Some of the stars viewable in the night sky
burnt out long ago,
which, according to a linear model of time,
means they no longer exist.
They are no longer reachable.
But what if this model of time is wrong?
TAYLOR: Another take on time travel is that
when the Big Bang occurred, all of space and time
and everything is in it was created.
So all of time is in the universe already.
For some reason, we can only experience the now.
NARRATOR: Could it be that our understanding of time
is limited by how we experience it?
And might a more technologically-advanced
extraterrestrial species or even future humans
have discovered how to manipulate time and space
to travel both to the past and to the future?
COLLINS: The idea that we may simply be dealing with
space people from other star systems
may not be the full answer.
We could be dealing with time travelers.
Could these intelligences have been aiding us?
Perhaps guiding us?
Perhaps controlling the evolution of humanity?
VON DANIKEN: I rather am a believer in time travel.
I say nothing will be impossible for us in the future.
Even if you think it's completely crazy,
it will happen.
Whatever humans are able to think,
to calculate, even to fantasize,
will one day become reality.
NARRATOR: Is Earth being visited by highly-advanced civilizations
that have overcome the limitations of time and space?
And if so, could they even be our own human descendants
traveling back from the future?
Perhaps our notions of time, space
and our place in the universe
are about to be radically altered.
Only time will tell.
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