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Sourcery · 4 min · Dec 22, 2025

Luckey's UAP theory favors the distant past over the future

He argues that UAPs may be ancient or have traveled from the distant past, since far more time preceded humans than has elapsed since.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 4:28Anduril treats failed tests as part of product development3 min
  2. 14:18Visible-spectrum invisibility is easy but often not usefulPro pick 4 min
  3. 32:03Design weapons for factories the country already has3 min
  4. 2:00Anduril's product-first model rewards speed over billable work2 min
  5. 11:41Spacecraft would be too fragile to armor in combat3 min
  6. 17:53Luckey's UAP theory favors the distant past over the future4 min
  7. 22:06Seabed Sentry filters ocean detections into useful alerts3 min
“given that there's been a lot more time before now than now, just probabilistically speaking, I think it's likely these things have been around for a very long time”
Palmer Luckeyat 20:06 · Sourcery
20:06

Takeaways

  1. He considers travel backward from the future less plausible.
  2. He suggests advanced civilizations could have existed before humans.
  3. He thinks UAPs are unlikely to have been made recently.

About this segment

He argues that UAPs may be ancient or have traveled from the distant past, since far more time preceded humans than has elapsed since. He stresses this is a guess, not a claim of knowledge.

Palmer Luckey

Palmer Luckey is cofounder of Anduril.

Co-founded Anduril, which builds autonomous defense systems, and designed the Oculus Rift that revived VR.

  • Molly O'Shea, Host · Founder, Sourcery

    Ex-Upfront Ventures investor; has interviewed Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey.

From “Palmer Luckey on UFOs, Anduril, Invisibility Tech, & Moon Wars”, Dec 22, 2025. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 17:59

    there's a lot that we don't understand about these vehicles and what they are, where, or when they come from. But it is likely that whatever they are doing is a side effect or an artifact of what's going on. So like, like, like I've, I've talked about this with the people that like, well, you know, how come, how come, you know, how come like sometimes they're invisible in certain spectrums? And my point is, well, like, what if they are not interacting with reality itself in a way you would expect?

  2. 18:28

    Like some of these things that you see them and they don't have any radar signature either. I don't know if that means they're cloaking themselves actively or if it means that just they do not exist even in the way that we think about physical matter. I don't know if it's an active countermeasure so much as the nature of the thing itself. but of course there's so much that we don't know my current working theory is that they come from the past so interesting okay coming from the future is too hard the physics just don't seem to work out but if you think about it um think about it in a certain perspective like there's a question of where they come from like do they come from earth do they come from nearby do they come from really really far away wherever wherever wherever they come from you know spatially the

  3. 19:11

    question then is okay temporally what is more likely that they happen to have come from this particular instant in time or the hundreds of millions or billions of years that existed prior to our existence um you know that could be true if they were just like waiting around and then came over you know at some point it could be the case if they are regularly surveying and have just been around for a long time you could imagine a world where maybe the earth hosted advanced civilizations a billion years ago and we just don't even know about them and these are the remnants of that. I'm not betting on any of these. It's just that wherever they come from geographically, there's a very, very long tail of time. And also there's ways to travel forward through time very quickly. You know, if I create a very strong gravity distortion, I can have

  4. 19:53

    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. It's not really believable that something can come from the future back into our present. So, that's my bet, is basically, given that there's been a lot more time before now than now, just probabilistically speaking, I think it's likely these things have been around for a very long time, and either spent a long time coming to us, or to themselves, subjectively, not much time at all.

  5. 20:27

    Wow. That's it. Look, I'm not saying I know what's up. That's just my... Not saying I know, but I'm using some ideas. I'm not saying I know what's up. I'm saying that is my current guess. Okay. Based on what I know. Interesting. You said this was your most underrated product. So why? Oh, sorry. And lastly, the real bet here is I don't think any of these UAPs, I think it's unlikely they were manufactured or created within the last few years.

  6. 20:53

    That seems very unlikely. 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. That's impossible to say. This is the theory, of course, that there's these undersea alien bases, that these things are destroyed there. There's an out-of-print book called The UFOs and USOs of the Santa Catalina Channel, and it's all about how people have seen these things that have gone into and out of the ocean in extremely similar ways over the course of decades and so like it's it's believable but of course being stored on earth does not necessarily mean they came from here nor does it not but i i would bet that these things are not recently manufactured i suspect they've been around for either a long time or maybe a really really long time how does that make you feel about

  7. 21:47

    our technological superiority i think that uh i think 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 uh every everything's going to change and uh this this won't be relevant so we have to we have we have but until that happens you have to treat them