Time Lords of the 28th Century, Part I
The weird and wild story of the "WingMakers," a time-traveling civilization from the future…
In the late 1990s, a curious story began to make the rounds on the early Internet.
I suppose that’s not too unusual; you just about had your pick of strange stories and conspiracy theories back in the heady days of the ’90s—after all, this was the decade of Ruby Ridge, Waco, The X-Files, and Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM.
But you can forget John Titor, the Area 51 caller, and “Mel’s Hole”—the following story has them all beat, hands down.
For one thing, there’s the obligatory New Mexico connection, which causes it to fall within the remit of this Substack. And that’s just for starters. Because, when all is said and done, the strange story of the “WingMakers” covers nearly all the paranormal, ufological, and conspiratorial ground there is—everything’s there folks: the Greys, warring alien species, galactic federations, secret organizations, shadow governments, time-travelers from the future, ancient prophecies, spiritual enlightenment, biosynthetic androids come to infiltrate and conquer the earth…and, from time to time, even a little red meat for the “ancient aliens” crowd.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the story of the WingMakers is a wild one, and there’s a lot of ground to cover; so, without further ado, let’s dive in.
If we’re to believe the anonymous source of this story,1 it all begins in 1972, “in a remote section of northern New Mexico,” when a group of hikers stumble upon a curious artifact and strange pictographs or petroglyphs in a nameless and unvisited canyon.
The discovery is duly reported, and an archaeologist is dispatched to the site from the University of New Mexico to follow up; this archaeologist, however, finds no other evidence of permanent human settlement, and concludes that the canyon was only occasionally visited by a nomadic tribe, probably of Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloan extraction.
Interest in the canyon would most likely have ended right there—with maybe a further investigation or two in after-decades by the Office of Archaeological Studies—if it weren’t for one unusual matter: one of the recovered artifacts, dubbed the “compass,” elicited a great deal of interest from certain well-connected individuals in high places.
In simple terms, the compass appeared to be an advanced form of technology that was clearly anachronistic; moreover, the semiology and ideography of the petroglyphs was largely unlike any others in the region. This was enough to pique some high muckety-muck’s curiosity, and we are told that the canyon site—which was promptly christened “Ancient Arrow” after the new project’s codename—was placed under the supervision of the National Security Agency, of all things.
Apparently, when not eavesdropping on Americans, the NSA dabbles in archaeology. Actually, the agency’s interest in the site derived from the belief that it might represent the presence of a prehistoric, extraterrestrial civilization of unknown origin on the ancient earth.
The secretive NSA, we are given to believe, is very interested in such things, and has investigated similar discoveries in the past.
In any case, in the year after the fortuitous discovery of the Ancient Arrow site, the NSA thoroughly reconnoitered the area, discovering some additional petroglyphs in that maddeningly baroque and unidentifiable style, but nothing more—no more strange technology, no crashed saucers…nothing.
It was a setback, no question about it.
For the next two decades, the project languished, and nothing more was gleaned from the Ancient Arrow canyon. Then, in 1994, a rockslide opened up what was evidently the entrance to a small cave; upon further investigation, this turned out to be but the antechamber to a vast network of tunnels and chambers—twenty-three in total—that snaked its way deep into the living rock of the canyon wall.
What the NSA investigators found in this cave system was simply astounding: each chamber was adorned with an elaborate wall painting and accompanying hieroglyphs and pictographs, as well as what were assumed to be artifacts of advanced alien technology. It was exactly what the NSA had been waiting for.
The next move by the agency was to transfer the Ancient Arrow site into the jurisdiction of the secretive Advanced Contact Intelligence Organization (ACIO), which we are told is a “secret or unacknowledged department of the NSA,” the “lowest profile organization within the entire intelligence community” whose agenda is “to research, assimilate, and replicate any technologies or discoveries of extraterrestrial origin.” In other words, it’s the very blackest of black-budget agencies.
Now, I should add here that all of this fascinating intelligence comes to us by way of an interview conducted in late 1997 by an anonymous journalist who signs herself “Anne,” who was randomly selected to receive this story by a pseudonymous defector from the ACIO known only as “Dr. Anderson.”
For those counting, that means the story is twice anonymously sourced. And for those wondering how much faith can be placed in such a tale—well, all I can suggest is to keep reading.
Because this is where things get interesting.
The ACIO has apparently had great success in preserving, deciphering, and reverse-engineering alien technology over the years, and so the organization assigned the Ancient Arrow anomaly to its topmost working group—something called the “Labyrinth Group,” which is (or was) headed by an individual known only as “Fifteen.”
Fifteen was some sort of super-genius, a man with a plan, who also orchestrated a kind of coup in which he became not only the head of this Labyrinth Group, but also the Executive Director of the ACIO itself. Fifteen was also a kind of time-travel nut, who was obsessed with developing something he called “Blank Slate Technology” (BST), which apparently boils down to being able to intervene at certain inflection points in time to effectively rewrite history. In other words, Fifteen wanted total power over both the past and the future.
To that end, Fifteen cut a number of technology transfer deals with alien groups to help develop BST. These groups include the Greys—which are quite sinister and have been abducting and experimenting on animals and humans for decades (I knew it!)—as well as something called “The Corteum,” which is presumably an extraterrestrial organization or society that consists of aliens who are three meters high, with elongated heads and bodies and almost translucent skin.
Evidently, all of these alien groups regard Fifteen as the “CEO of the earth,” authorized to speak on the planet’s behalf, and that slippery individual does little to discourage this belief.
Anyhow, the ACIO and the Labyrinth Group learned enough from the limited data on the Ancient Arrow site to know that whatever species or civilization had left this strange “time capsule” was undoubtedly conversant in Blank Slate Technology, and therefore was of an almost inconceivably high technological order. In the twenty-third chamber, the ACIO team discovered the key to the mystery—an “optical disc” that presumably held all the answers.
Problem was, even their most sophisticated computers (juiced with alien technology unavailable to the rest of us, of course) were unable to unlock the secrets of the mysterious disc. So, for a couple of years, the whole project went into cold storage.
And this is where our informant, Dr. Anderson, enters the picture. A former member in good standing of the ACIO, Dr. Anderson informs us that he is an accomplished linguist and semiotician with a command of over forty languages, living and extinct. It was his insight that the disc could only be unlocked through a linguistic, rather than a technological, solution.
In the summer of 1996, Dr. Anderson realized that there was a connection between the extinct language of Sumer and the hieroglyphs and pictographs of the Ancient Arrow caves; this provided the key, and the rest was easy. The optical disc divulged over 8,000 pages of philosophical, artistic, literary, scientific, musical, and religious data; more importantly, it provided a name: the WingMakers, which is what the beings who created this technology called themselves.
And it turned out that they weren’t aliens at all—they represented a kind of secret society or maybe subculture of humanity from the future…750 years in the future, to be exact. They thought (or will think?) of themselves as “Culture Bearers,” whose mission is to enlighten the benighted humanities of the past—and there is some evidence to suggest that they time-traveled to even remoter periods of history, to sow the seeds of the first human civilizations.
The Ancient Arrow site is one of seven such time capsules,2 and the first discovered, that the WingMakers left in various parts of the earth. Their agenda, it seems, is that these time capsules will be discovered according to an elaborate plan, and the ideas and technology flowing from these discoveries are meant to influence the future evolution of mankind and aid in the establishment of a global civilization—presumably the very civilization of which the WingMakers themselves are a part.
It gets even better…much better. I’m talking alien invasions, ancient prophecies, galactic federations, secret societies, Martians, God, and Bill Clinton.
But that, my friends, will have to await the next installment…
Most of the following information is derived from the original archived “WingMakers” site; for those who prefer their reading material in printed form, the introductory note and first interview with “Dr. Anderson” is reproduced in The Time Travel Handbook: A Manual of Practical Teleportation & Time Travel, ed. David Hatcher Childress (Kempton, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999), pp. 153-194.
The artifacts at this site were all securely dated to the 8th Century AD, which probably suggests that the WingMakers chose to travel an even two millennia into their past to plant the first of their time capsules. There are also suggestions that the WingMakers interacted with the ancient Chacoan civilization that held sway in this part of the American Southwest at the time…and even that they may be connected in some way with the mysterious disappearance of that culture.