The Man Who Builds Autonomous Fighter Jets Says UFOs Probably Come From the Past — and He’s Thought About the Physics

Palmer Luckey founded Oculus, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion, then built Anduril Industries — one of the most significant autonomous weapons companies in the world. He is not a fringe researcher. He is someone with classified adjacency who builds technology for the U.S. military. His current working theory on UAPs is that they come from the deep past.

The interview was supposed to be about Anduril’s autonomous fighter jets, optical camouflage systems, and what war would look like on the Moon. It was posted by the Sourcery podcast in recent days and is circulating today across fringe channels after being picked up by The Daily Grail. Most of it is hard defense technology. Then host Molly O’Shea asked a question from left field: do Palmer Luckey think UAPs use optical camouflage?

He leaned into it for four minutes.

“My current working theory is they come from the past,” Luckey said. “Coming from the future is too hard. The physics just doesn’t seem to work.”

The Argument He’s Making

Luckey’s position is not simply that UAPs are time machines. It is more specific and more physically grounded than that. He is combining two ideas: the Silurian Hypothesis — the proposition that in billions of years of deep time, another technological civilization could have existed on Earth so long ago that no physical evidence of it remains — and the relatively well-understood physics of gravitational time dilation.

“There’s a very, very long tail of time,” Luckey said, “and also there are ways to travel forward through time very quickly. If I create a very strong gravity distortion, I can have subjective time inside of that bubble passing very, very slowly relative to the time racing by outside of it. And so it’s very believable that something from the distant past could come to our present.”

The physics he is describing is real. Gravitational time dilation is documented and measured. GPS satellites have to account for it. The question is whether it could be weaponized or engineered at scale — and that is where the argument moves from physics textbook into speculation.

What He Thinks They Are Doing

Luckey does not commit to a single explanation for what UAPs are or why they appear. He mentions underwater bases in the Santa Catalina Channel — a reference to the documented history of USO sightings in those waters and an out-of-print book on the subject he has apparently read. He suggests they could have been stored for a very long time. He raises the possibility that Earth hosted advanced civilizations a billion years ago that left no trace we have yet found.

What he is confident about: they were not manufactured recently by any known human civilization. “I think they’ve either been around for a very long time, stored for a very long time, created a very long time ago, or traveled from the distant past into our present.”

The Part Worth Sitting With

Near the end of the UAP segment, O’Shea asked Luckey how UAP revelations made him feel about America’s technological superiority. His answer was direct. “I think that the UAP stuff and our technological development live in completely parallel development tracks right now. If and when we figure out what’s going on with UAPs, UFOs, that whole universe — everything’s going to change and this won’t be relevant.” He pointed at one of Anduril’s autonomous fighters. “But until that happens, you have to treat them as completely independent parallel tracks.”

That is not the answer of someone dismissing UAPs as misidentified drones. That is the answer of someone who has considered the possibility seriously, found it credible, and made peace with its implications while continuing to build the best conventional weapons he can in the meantime.

“I’m not saying I know what is up,” he said. “I’m saying that it’s my current idea.”

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