by Ray Morris

Time, what is it and how does it work? We live in a world of dimensions, up and down, side to side and distance. We can locate anything we can see by saying how far up, how far to the side and how far away it is from some base point, perhaps ourself. These are the three dimensions we all know well but there is a forth dimension we call time. That base point from which we measure our three dimensions is itself moving with time and as far as we can tell it can only move in one direction, forward. This would be our time flow rate. We can see into the past by looking at the stars, light from the stars has taken in some cases hundreds or millions of years to reach us so that we see them as they were then.

When you read the text in a book time progresses forward as your eyes move to the next word. At each word you know what you have already read but you don’t know what you are yet to read.

If at some point you move your eyes back to an earlier part of the text the words that you have read are still there, they havn’t changed. You have gone back in time and if you reread up to your original point you retrace your journey through time.

If you look to some part ahead in the text you can start reading but you don’t know the words you have missed. You have jumped into the future because you have not spent the time required to read the intervening text.

You can flick your eyes from line to line or page to page and time travel through the book. It would be easy to go from one line to the one above or below, more difficult to go from page to page. However to go from a word on one page to the word behind it on the other side of the page would be the shortest distance.

So in a book you could time travel forward and backward. You can go forward because in this case the future has already been written but in reality would you expect this to be the case? The writing of the book will never be finished. If a future already exists how could we affect it in the present? If you were using a word processor you could jump backwrd and forward through your text at will but you can only read text that you have already typed in. However if you go back in your text and make an alteration using a search and replace command then this could represent a new action in the past altering the future!  Difficult questions to answer but once the future has been arrived at then the past must certainly be fixed. Like in the book it must be possible to travel back over that which has already happened. Certainly if we travelled away from the earth at a speed fast enough to overtake the light reflected from the earth in the past then we would observe things as they used to be but probably only as a view of the atmosphere.

If we in the present were able to travel into the past then we would see people travelling into their future as we are now. For us the past is laid down but for them the future would not be. Likewise if in our future a viable form of time travel exists then people from the future would be using it to visit their past and our present and past. In fact they would be able to visit all of history. There would be some laws natural or otherwise that would prevent communication between future and past but in a few million years of time travel there must be some lapses.

So how would time travellers get around? If they used some sort of craft then they might have been observed and reported down the centuries. UFOs would fit the bill here, are they some kind of time tourists perhaps? They would have to be careful not to interact with anything they see. As the base point for our three dimensional world travels forward in our time one of these travellers may pass us with his time base point moving at a different rate. During this time we may observe something which could apparently be moving at an impossible speed and disappear without trace. However during the time they are visible they would actually have a physical presence and may be picked up by radar stations. Distortions in the time may cause the appearances of different colours. That different types of UFOs are reported it may be that further into the future the time travelling craft evolve and so many different designs will exist.

The first time travellers would have, in their terms, primative craft equivalent to the Write brothers flyer, later travellers will have more sophisticated designs. However as they are all travelling in time then they will be observed at different times and not in consecuitive order of their design. This would allow the observation of different kinds of UFOs.

As UFO sightings occur in waves or flaps at certain times and places it may be that time travel is sometimes easier at these times or that there are windows from the future like crossing through a page in a book which only happen at certain times or under certain conditions. Although we consider that light travels in a straight line, time may not. It may follow a convoluted path which sometimes may come close enough to itself such that only a small amount of energy is required to cross itself so that large jumps in time could be made.

To observe the past the traveller would have to match his time flow speed to that of the present he wished to observe but if he matched it exactly he may get stuck and require such a large amount of energy to get going that he may have to stay in that time. He may therefore have to slow down to a time flow rate very close but not exactly the same as our time flow rate. This would mean that there would be a limited time for observation of any time point before the traveller drifted too far away. This observation time may only be a few seconds and itself preclude any contact. If the traveller had disembarked his craft for closer observation he may be seen briefly and then be seen to fade as his time flow drifted away.

If time travel is possible then people from the future are observing us now and all the past from whenever. There must then be some evidence to be found which will show that this is the case.

What would we look for? Would there be any artifacts left behind, unusual events in history, advances in technology, unusual observations, ghost stories etc?

If we look at technology, it is true that every country can produce someone who invented a certain thing always round about the same time across the world, e.g. the telephone, television, computers etc. Did inventions or discoveries happen in different places at similar times because the technology was "ripe" or were they engineered from the future.

Of course in any travel business there are the organised package tours and if UFO craft are organised travel trips for tourists from the future then there would be conditions and controls imposed on these to ensure that contact and intervention with the past would not occur. However there is always the independant traveller and at some time perhaps before regulation people are able to time travel by themselves and either leave their craft or not use one.