The Secrets Inside Michael P. Masters' Head

Michael P. Masters was standing in his kitchen at his home in Montana, enjoying a nightcap.  

It was just after midnight in early 2022, and as Michael sipped his glass of bourbon, he felt a sudden urge to go outside. Specifically, he describes it as “that little voice” that compelled him to leave his kitchen and head into his backyard. 

Michael ascended his sloped backyard towards his “Sundowner spot” — a small platform he assembled on a whim one day while moving logs which sits roughly 150 feet up the canyon wall that juts up against his property. As he approached the Sundowner spot, he stopped, turned around, then observed “five lights in the sky perfectly spaced”. The lights weren’t moving, and while he couldn’t gauge their exact distance, he felt they were too close and too bright to be stars. They had a “whitish yellowish” color to them. 

Michael continued to observe the lights, then after around one minute, he states, “one by one, from right to left, they took off at incredible speed.” The objects left a trail of light behind them and shot towards the southeast. His immediate reaction was that he had just witnessed Starlink satellites for the first time. He excitedly returned inside and shook his wife awake, then told her what he had seen and that she “wouldn’t believe how crazy” Starlink is.  

It wasn’t until six months later, while at a pediatric dental appointment for his daughter, that Michael had a realization. He pulled out his phone and frantically Googled pictures of Starlink, then was immediately forced to face reality. The five lights he saw that night in early 2022 were not Starlink — they were of a different, unknown origin. He has since seen the string of lights that account for a Starlink satellite release several times, further confirming this conviction. Of the initial misclassification of the event, Michael states, “I don’t know if it was an aspect of my brain that wouldn’t let me say, ‘Wait, this is not normal, let’s put it in a normal box’.” 

Although strange in and of itself, Michael’s “five lights” UFO sighting marked the beginning of a series of increasingly anomalous and reality-shaking events that would unfold in his life throughout the rest of 2022.

Not long after his UFO sighting, he began experiencing what he describes as "precognition downloads". One particularly striking incident occurred about a week before Michael was slated to attend Archives of the Impossible, a conference held at Rice University that explores UFOs, UAP and paranormal phenomena.

Michael's wife had taken their kids to the bus stop, which was a 40 minute drive from their home. Suddenly, Michael looked at his phone and thought, "It's weird my wife hasn't called me to pull her out of the ditch yet." The thought struck him as odd, then a moment later, his wife called. She had missed the first bus stop, and had followed the bus to the next stop to drop the children off. On her way home, she drove into a large ditch that had been concealed by drifted snow.

It took them 45 minutes to pull her car out of the ditch. Everything from the precognitive thought to the event itself played out very matter of fact, although Michael confesses that he, "still couldn't even really process that I'd already thought that before I knew that had even happened." To add even more synchronicities into the mix, the following week at the Archives conference, Michael sat on a panel with Eric Wargo, author of three books and an expert on precognition and precognitive dreams.

Around that same time, Michael had an experience that would peel back another layer of the proverbial onion that was his reality. He was in his garage one evening, preparing ski equipment for an upcoming family ski trip. As he states, "When you have kids and you go skiing, it's an absolute nightmare, and nobody else knows enough about it to make sure everything is there."

After completing his meticulous equipment check, Michael stepped outside his garage, looked up and took notice of the security light in his neighbor's yard. Then, as he states, "All of a sudden, I am hearing words like it's talking to me, or something is talking to me, through this light." Michael acknowledges having an active internal dialogue, but insists this experience was distinctly different. He found himself responding to the queries, initiating what he describes as a “conversation with some sort of entity through this light.” The light itself was ordinary — “just a big pole with a light on it” that remains in his neighbor’s yard to this day. The content of the exchange primarily addressed anxieties he was experiencing related to his travel schedule at the time, and having to leave his family to attend conferences and film shoots. He remained fully present in his physical body throughout the interaction. Michael's friend and filmmaker Darren King would later refer to it as "your godlight over there" upon a visit to his home. In reflecting on this, Michael states, "If we're going to call it that, sure, but I wasn't talking to God. I don't know what it was."

Michael's "godlight" conversation would turn out to be the rising action that led to a climactic, belief-shattering event later that year.

The event occurred in October 2022 while Michael was attending the International UFO Congress, one of the largest and longest-running UFO-related conferences in the world, in Mesa, Arizona. Following his presentation at the conference, a woman who he was mildly acquainted with named Heidi led him to a VIP room intended for speakers and special guests of the event. Michael was initially told they would be fetching beers from a reserved stash to bring down to other friends attending the conference afterparty. Once in the VIP room, Heidi explained to Michael that they needed to wait there for her friend Eric, who wished to speak with him.

Michael had no idea who Eric was, and expressed a desire to leave the VIP room and head back to the party, since their beer procurement mission had been accomplished. Heidi continued to insist that they wait for Eric. Michael soon grew impatient, but eventually relented to Heidi's persistence. They migrated to the outdoor balcony of the VIP room, and Michael settled into a chair. After roughly 20 minutes, Eric finally appeared, then proceeded to immediately invade Michael’s private space. He pulled up a chair in front of him, positioned his knee directly against his crotch and leaned in uncomfortably close to his face. Before Michael could react with the anger brewing inside of him — he is admittedly more of a fight than flight guy — Eric made a startling statement. “We know you’ve been thinking about quitting,” he said. Eric somehow knew he had been contemplating quitting his work in the UAP field, something Michael had only thought about in his head privately a week earlier while mulling about his kitchen and had never shared with anyone.

When Michael replied wondering "how the hell" Eric could know that, he responded, "Once you know who we are, you’ll know how we know that." Given this seemingly impossible development, Michael soon came to believe he was not speaking with Eric directly, but rather with an entity through him. The entity then acknowledged Michael’s discomfort with the unusual proximity but explained they “needed to be this close for this to work.” This somehow fully dissolved Michael's anxiety, and he was now at ease and engaged in the interaction. He thought, "Alright whatever, this stranger's got his knee in my dick."

The conversation started verbal, then quickly shifted to a nonverbal, fully telepathic exchange. Michael began to query the entity with more questions, which were welcomed. Specifically, he asked if the entity was comprised of “future humans”. It should be noted here that Michael had been deeply researching a theory he calls “The Extratempestrial Model” for several years leading up to this event, and published a book in 2022 of the same name. The theory explores a possible connection between UFOs and backwards time traveling future humans. Through his book, Michael examines famous UFO contact and abduction cases from across the world over the past 80 years, and ties in his expertise in hominin evolution as a PhD and professor of biological anthropology, to make a case that many of these encounters may involve our future human descendants traveling back in time aboard UFOs, which serve as their time machines, to study their own past and collect biological materials.

The entity did not directly answer Michael’s future human question, but instead cryptically responded, “So you know how we know that,” presumably referring to how they knew about Michael’s private thoughts. When he expressed concern about his family’s wellbeing amid his travel schedule and increasingly strange experiences, they directly referenced Michael's prior "godlight" conversation – confirming to Michael that his conversation with the light was not just a figment of his imagination, and these encounters were somehow intimately connected.

At one point, three concerned women came out to the balcony to check on Michael. The women presumably felt something was wrong when they saw Michael and Eric staring intensely at each other without speaking, with Heidi standing silently behind Michael with her hand on his shoulder. Eric, or the entity speaking through him, promptly instructed the women to turn back and close the door behind them, which they uncannily complied to without comment.

The encounter took an even more surreal turn when the entity asked permission to "put three things" into Michael's brain for "some future times". They explained that his eyes would appear to go black, and he would receive information that he wouldn't be able to access or remember afterward. Michael consented to this. During this information transfer, Michael experienced visual sensations of streaming colors – predominantly blue, purple and red – flowing into his brain. Heidi, still beside him, would occasionally ask, "Did you get that?" and Michael would respond with subtle nods and single word replies to confirm the transmission was received.

The interaction ended sometime after this information transmission was complete. Michael left the balcony feeling disoriented and physically impaired. His head felt unusually heavy, and he was barely able to lift it. In this altered state, he stumbled through the now-crowded VIP room. One woman, possibly among those who had checked on him earlier, asked if he was okay, but he could barely respond.

Michael later learned from the conference organizers, Alejandra and Karen, that they had encountered him in the hallway after the incident. In his dazed condition, he reportedly told them, "I think someone was just in my brain." He then returned to his hotel room, collapsed onto his bed fully clothed with his shoes still on, and slept for over 12 hours. Upon waking, Michael broke down crying uncontrollably – a response he attributes either to a physiological reaction to whatever happened to his brain, or to some emotional understanding of the information he had received but could no longer consciously access.

Despite the potentially traumatic nature of the experience, Michael asserts that he has no regrets about consenting to the "transmission". When asked if he would accept it again knowing what he knows now, he responds with an unequivocal "absolutely," explaining that they "did a fantastic job."

In the months following the incident, Michael attempted to piece together more details by contacting Heidi and Eric. His conversation with Heidi revealed something startling — she had no recollection of the event whatsoever. She couldn't remember taking Michael to the VIP room or introducing him to Eric, suggesting she may have been in what Michael describes as a state of "deep trance mediumship," completely unaware of her actions while serving as a vessel for another consciousness. Eric Mitchell, however, does remember the encounter. Unlike Heidi, who appeared to be in a complete trance state, Eric seems to have maintained some level of awareness during the interaction.

About 1 year after the incident, Eric Mitchell and Heidi Gadd started their own podcast, Experiencer 1111, in which they explore anomalous phenomena and "talk about their own High Strangeness, along with Scientists, PhD's & other Experiencers from around the world." In Episode 8 of their show, Heidi and Eric bring on Michael P. Masters, and the three of them discuss their balcony experience, each offering their own perspective of what happened, why it happened, and the meaning they ascribe to it. Eric describes feeling an immediate and intense connection to Michael where "the rest of the room disappeared." Michael recalls being frustrated at being kept there, and experiencing "ontological shock" in the months following the experience. Heidi reiterates her lapses in memory of the events, and chuckles as Michael fills in the gaps.

This extraordinary series of events leaves us with far more questions than answers. What were the secrets placed inside Michael's head, and will he ever be able to access them? Who — or what — was the entity communicating through Eric that night on the balcony? And how do these experiences relate to Michael's own Extratempestrial Model — could these entities indeed somehow have a connection to our future human descendants?

I certainly don't have the answers to any of these questions, but they intrigue and inspire me. Admittedly, the only data I gathered for this story was through the open source information these experiencers have provided by their own accounts. Nevertheless, I believe Michael's story. He was shaken by these strange occurrences, reluctant to share them, and was only able to do so publicly more than a year after the balcony incident. He is a professor of anthropology at Montana Tech and serves as the chair of his department. He has a strong standing in the world of academia, and a family that he cares deeply about. The UAP topic is still very much a taboo and ridiculed one. He stands to lose much more than gain by sharing his anomalous experiences with us.