Dear Editor,

I’ve seen a few things in my life that I can’t explain because I don’t understand them. That doesn’t impact my day-to-day life very much. I still have to keep on keeping on, until my body or mind wears out and falls apart like the wonderful one-hoss shay of bygone folklore. I’ve never seen a UFO, space alien, or a Sasquatch, but I have no reason to doubt the veracity of those who say they have. I do have a theory as to what those phenomena actually are. UFO aliens are us in the future. Whaa? In the future, humans develop time travel, and some adventurers attempt to alter their time by going to their past (our present) and meddling in our affairs, to reshape their timeline. It doesn’t really work out very well. The highly superstitious humans of our time are reluctant to accept advice from scrawny little time-nerds, and don’t appreciate the catch-and-release abductions. 

Now, Sasquatches are similar, but rather than being further-evolved humans, they are evolved apes. They also are hitchhikers on the liquid timeline. That’s how they can show up unannounced, throw some rocks, tear up a few trees, and then disappear without leaving a body to be found and studied. It should be noted that evolution is not a progression from crude to perfect, it’s an adaptation to the environment of the moment. Genetic diversity yields young creatures, some of which will be suitable to the environment as it is, and those will survive and reproduce. Being alive is fraught with peril. It’s ever-changing, and not easily predictable. It’s tricky enough to observe signs of life in the past, and trace the path that we followed to get here. The future will be different, in ways we can’t know. We’ll make a bunch of wild guesses, and the fickle finger of fate will subtract the wrong answers. 

What do we want? Time travel. When do we want it? It doesn’t matter. That’s time travel for you. 

Robert Wills, Shawville and Thorne