Certainly one of the most controversial theories on the true nature of the Men in Black is that, rather than space-faring entities, government agents, Tricksters, or Tulpas, they are actually time travelers from our own distant future!
Is our present day really playing host to clandestine time-surfers from a future that is as far ahead of us as it is incomprehensible? Or is such a scenario just too fantastic and absurd for words? Maybe not: John Keel came across numerous cases that focused upon the unknown visitors’ odd obsession with time. Indeed, he noted that their often-reported ultra-fast mode of conversation “could be caused by their failure to adjust to our time cycle when they enter our space-time continuum. They are talking at a faster rate because their time is different from ours” (Keel 1975).
And of course there is the curious fact that in countless reports on record, the Men in Black are seen driving old-style cars that seem to be incomprehensibly brand-new. And what of those Homburg and Fedora hats with which the Men in Black seem so enamored? They were certainly all the rage in the 1940s and 1950s, but they are most definitely less so now. Indeed, practically everything about the MIB seems strangely out of time. If the time-travel scenario does have some validity, then perhaps these anomalies are due to the Men in Black occasionally screwing up when trying to gauge the fashions and modes of transport of the many eras to which they are constantly traveling.
Beyond the Men in Black, some researchers and witnesses to UFO activity believe that the pilots of the elusive saucer-shaped craft themselves may not be extraterrestrials, but instead time travelers from our own distant future. Dr. Bruce Goldberg, who holds a BA degree in biology and chemistry, and who has penned more than 20 books, including Past Lives, Future Lives, is an adherent of this particular theory. He says that the entities piloting the UFOs “...originate from between 1,000 to 3,000 years in our future and from earth.... These time travelers have mastered the art of entering the fifth dimension and traveling back in time to our century.... The purpose... is to facilitate our spiritual growth. They are us in the future” (Goldberg 2010).
Jim Penniston, formerly of the U.S. Air Force, also believes UFOs are piloted by future humans. He was one of the key military players in a famous UFO encounter at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England—an atmospheric, densely treed area adjacent to the now-closed joint British Royal Air Force/U.S. Air Force military complex of Bentwaters-Woodbridge—on December 26 and 28, 1980. Essentially, what many UFO researchers believe took place deep in the dark woods throughout the course of several nights was the landing of a craft—or, perhaps, multiple crafts—from another world, from which small, humanoid entities reportedly emerged and engaged senior U.S. military personnel in face-to-face communication. The craft was allegedly tracked on radar, deposited elevated traces of radiation within the depths of the forest, avoided capture, and made good its escape—and in so doing created a controversy that rages to this day.
Penniston underwent hypnotic regression in 1994 as part of an attempt to recall deeply buried data relative to what occurred during one of Britain’s closest encounters. While under hypnosis, Penniston stated that our presumed aliens are, in reality, visitors from a far-flung future. That future, Penniston added, is very dark, and in deep trouble: polluted, deathly cold, and blighted by reproductive problems. The answer to their problems is to travel into the distant past—to our present day, in other words—to secure sperm, eggs, and chromosomes, all as part of an effort to ensure the continuation of the dwindling human race.
The skeptics ask, Where is the hard evidence to support such a scenario? And, on the matter of the revelations of Jim Penniston, the skeptic may suggest that data secured from someone placed into a radically altered state of mind may not be entirely reliable, even if the character of the person relating the story is unblemished. In other words, hypnosis may be just as likely to bring forth fantasies borne out of the murky depths of the subconscious and the imagination as it is to produce real data.
But what does any of this have to do with the Men in Black? A fascinating theory has been put forward that portrays the MIB as time travelers from a future that is millennia ahead of our present. It is the theory of Joshua P. Warren, one of the world’s premier investigative researchers and authors on all things supernatural and mysterious. Warren’s theory begins with one important question: “Why do they wear black?” While deeply pondering this important point, Warren developed a hypothesis that “combines the very complex with the very mundane,” and that provides us with a potential explanation as to who the MIB really may be.
Joshua P. Warren in his paranomal HQ.
“I have thought, for a long time, about what I call the para-temporal loop hypothesis. At first glance it may not seem all that original, as it deals with the complexities that derive from potential time travel. The hypothesis is based upon one particular testable element. And that is, if ever, in all of the infinite future, any advanced species discovers how to travel back in time, will they do it?” Warren notes that if time travel is truly impossible to achieve, then the hypothesis crumbles and it becomes something to simply muse upon instead. But, he stresses, if it is indeed feasible to travel into the past, and then back to the future again, then not only will someone, someday, attempt it, but they will very likely keep such a fantastic discovery cloaked in secrecy, too. “It’s just about the most powerful secret anyone could have: the ability to change the course of time,” he says.
Here is how Warren sees the mind-bending scenario playing out:
Let’s say, hypothetically, that one million years from now—long after humans are gone, perhaps—there is a humanoid creature that dominates this planet that has evolved from the oceans. We’ll call him Fish-Man. And Fish-Man is a great scientist and has discovered how to travel back in time. And so he does this. And let’s say he goes back to the year 1920. Of course, he has to do his best to disguise his appearance, or else everyone will know what he is. And while he’s back in 1920, he might be thinking how he could help, or even hurt, his own future existence. And in doing so, he wants to be careful that he doesn’t harm himself in the future. On the contrary, he might even try and enhance his future life by changing something in the past that will benefit him down the road; or even something that will harm his enemies.
Such an action would not be without its hazards, however, as Warren readily admits:
Now, of course, Fish-Man will never know for certain if it’s going to turn out right. If he screws up, then maybe he starts to vanish like the kid in Back to the Future. But if he does a good job, then he returns to his future and he finds that he has a better life. But, by traveling back in time, he has caused a para-temporal loop. It’s a separate timeline that he continues to exist on. So, continuing with this thought experiment, let’s say he gets back to his future, and things are better and brighter for him. And he doesn’t want to jeopardize that by stating what he has done. But, he wakes up one day and everything is back the way it was before he tweaked it by going into the past. And he can’t figure out what’s happened.
Unbeknownst to Fish-Man, about a billion years after he’s alive, Bear-Man becomes the next scientist who figures how to travel in time, long after the Fish-People are gone. Bear-Man is a humanoid who has evolved from the forests. He travels back to 1915, and makes a number of changes from which he will profit, but that will affect, or even completely cancel out, the time line carefully altered and nurtured by Fish-Man. And, at that complicated point, all hell inevitably breaks loose, as Warren details:
Fish-Man has to then go back to 1910 to correct Bear-Man’s adjustments, and so on, and so on. So, now, we have what seems like the plot of some bad sci-fi movie, where we have all these figures from different futures that are going back into the past and trying to tweak things to their own benefit. But, if you look at this in a broader scale, and consider that the future apparently has some infinity about it, then there may be thousands and thousands of these different types of beings that are each traveling back, tweaking the timelines in some way. And what makes it an even bigger mess is that they’re not necessarily aware of each other. They’re all just as confused about what’s happening as everybody else is.
As first-class evidence of such chaotic meddling with the time lines, Warren refers to the strange story of what has become known as The Thunderbird Photograph. As the tale goes, back in the 1960s, a photograph, said to date from the late 1800s, appeared in the pages of a newsstand magazine of the day—possibly True, Saga, or Argosy—displaying the deceased remains of a monstrous bird pinned to a pair of barn doors somewhere in rural North America (the exact location is, just like the picture itself, a matter of some debate). Numerous researchers, investigators, and authors of a whole range of anomalies claim that they personally saw the priceless picture when it was published. The big problem today, however, is that, despite the fact that the pages of the three magazines (and many others besides) have been carefully and dutifully scoured—even to the point of obsession—the picture cannot be found anywhere. It’s almost as if it never existed in the first place. And, in a curious way, maybe it didn’t. Or, if Joshua P. Warren’s theories are correct, maybe it did exist—but only for a short while.
How can we explain such a strange situation? A specific photograph cannot simply disappear from every publication that it ever appeared in—can it? Maybe, if we follow Warren’s lead, it can: “I get the impression,” he says, “that there might be a shifting timeline that we are passing through on a day-by-day basis. One day UFOs might be real, and the next they’re not. The next day Bigfoot is running around your backyard, and the next day he doesn’t exist. One day the Thunderbird photo is in a magazine, and then when the timeline is played with again, it’s no longer in the magazine. And it may be that, day by day, hour by hour, or even minute by minute, small changes to the timeline are being made by these entities, or beings, coming back and constantly playing around with the past and the future. So, things we remember in the past, like the Thunderbird photo, suddenly no longer exist in the present.”
And it’s with respect to this particular aspect of time travel, Warren opines, that the Men in Black may play some form of critical role: “If we accept it might be possible that something similar to what I’ve just described might be happening, or potentially happening, then somewhere along the line we can imagine that there might be policemen—time-cops, so to speak—who step in here and there, and who try to really get the scoop on all these para-temporal loops and control the entire situation.”
And that, Warren suggests, brings us to the presence and role of the Men in Black: “Going back to my original point: Why do the MIB dress like this? Why do we call them the Men in Black? Well, if a man puts on a black suit with a black hat and walks down the street in 1910, and you see that man, you would probably notice him. But, would you think there was anything too extraordinary, or too out-of-place about him? No, you probably would not. And if you saw a man walking down the street in 2010 wearing a black suit and a black hat, would you notice him? Probably, yes. But, would you think you think there was necessarily anything too extraordinary? No.”
What this all demonstrates, says Warren, is that the outfit of the black suit and the black hat is flexible enough to work within the social context of the culture of at least a century or more. And so, therefore, if you are someone who is in the time-travel business, and within the course of your workday you’re going to go to 1910 to take care of some business, and then a couple of hours later you’re going to be in 1985, and then a few hours after that you’ll be heading to 2003, you don’t want to be in a position of having to change your clothes three times. So what do you do? In Warren’s hypothesis, you dress in an outfit that is going to allow you access to the longest period of time within which that same outfit may not draw too much unwelcome attention. “And that’s why,” suggests Warren “in and around the whole 20th century, it just so happens that the black suit and the black hat will work for them.”
What if, however, your time-travel plans are destined to take you much farther into the past? Clearly, wearing a 20th-century suit just won’t cut it. Warren acknowledges this point when he says, “If you were to go back into the 1600s or 1700s, there would be a different wardrobe that would work within the broadest range. I don’t know what that wardrobe is, but I feel confident that if I sat down with a historian who was extremely knowledgeable of the fashions from those past periods, and who also understood the concept that I’m talking about, we could probably come up with a dress that the Men in Black may have worn at various points throughout history, in order to give them the widest range to work within at any given time.”
Perhaps those earlier Men in Black, those time travelers who chose to head even further into our past, may have been the prosperous and mysterious burghers in black to which Brad Steiger referred in a previous chapter.
Warren also weaves one of the most notorious fringe elements of the Men in Black puzzle into his paradigm-mangling ideas, too: that of Mothman. Could it really be the case that the shadowy, glowing-eyed beast that briefly haunted Point Pleasant’s long-abandoned TNT area in the mid-1960s was a real-life equivalent of Warren’s hypothetical Bear-Man or Fish-Man? And, if so, were Point Pleasant’s Men in Black dispatched from a faraway future to bring the activities of this winged nightmare to a halt? Warren thinks this may be exactly what occurred:
When it comes to the idea of Mothman, this brings up another good connection to what I was describing. If you have a situation in which the timelines are being constantly changed in an unauthorized way, by some of these para-temporal travelers, from far in the future, who are unleashing all this bizarre stuff that isn’t supposed to be there—and maybe a real Mothman, like the hypothetical Bear-Man and Fish-Man, is actually one of these para-temporal travelers— then obviously you’re going to have these Men in Black pop up there to try to get the timeline situation under control. And that’s why, when you take something like what happened at Point Pleasant in the 1960s, we have a variety, a whole spectrum of paranormal activity and strange creatures, and then the Men in Black suddenly appear.
So, it could be that the Men in Black follow all this stuff around; that’s their job. Not that they are causing these things to happen, but they’re alerted to it when there’s a dangerous timeline issue that needs to be corrected. They’re not necessarily the bad guys at all; they might be doing damage control, and maybe that includes warning and silencing witnesses to protect the time-travel secret. They might be weird, and they might look weird, but their overall mission may be just to keep order and protect the timelines.
How ironic it would be if the theories of Joshua P. Warren are indeed correct, and that instead of representing our absolute worst nightmare—as many that have encountered the MIB surely believe them to be—the Men in Black are actually heroes: the dutiful, persistent guardians of past, present, and future combined, forever fated to keeping their strange secrets from those who cross their paths as they surf the centuries, always on missions to terminate endless numbers of meddlesome, reckless time manipulators.