Jesse Michels interviews author Eric Wargo about precognition, time loops, and how future events may influence the present through information traveling backward in time. Wargo argues that the human mind is fundamentally different from AI, operating partly as a quantum system that can access future information, and that many phenomena dismissed as superstition—prophecies, precognitive dreams, synchronicities—reflect a real physical process rooted in retrocausation and the block universe model of time.
Prophecies as Self-Fulfilling Time Loops
Wargo’s core idea is that any precognitive information from the future cannot change history because the universe is self-consistent—this is supported by physics work on wormholes and closed timelike curves from the 1980s, which show that paradoxes do not occur.
Prophecies are therefore always self-fulfilling: the act of receiving and reacting to a future message is already part of the causal chain that leads to the predicted outcome.
This reframes precognition not as seeing a fixed fate that can be avoided, but as participating in a loop where the information itself shapes behavior that brings about the outcome.
Classic Examples of Time Loops
Carl Jung’s scarab beetle: A rationalist patient dreamed of receiving a golden scarab; as she recounted the dream, an actual scarab beetle appeared at Jung’s window, which he handed to her. The dream changed her attention and behavior, making the encounter possible—she could not have known the beetle would appear, but the dream deflected her toward that moment.
Oedipus myth: The prophecy that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother caused him to flee his city, which directly led him to unknowingly fulfill the prophecy. Wargo sees this as the archetype of how denial and evasion of prophecy ensure its fulfillment.
Freud’s own life: Freud had a famous dream in 1895 that he analyzed at length in The Interpretation of Dreams; nearly three decades later, key elements of the dream came true when he developed oral cancer linked to his smoking. He never acknowledged the dream as a precognitive warning, embodying the Oedipus pattern of denial leading to fulfillment.
Freud’s Unconscious as a Model for Precognition
Wargo argues that Freud’s model of the unconscious—the iceberg with a submerged base—is a ready-made framework for understanding precognition, but with a crucial reorientation: the “submerged” part is not repressed past material but future consciousness influencing us now.
Precognition manifests in the same ways Freud studied: dreams (the primary channel), slips of the tongue, synchronicities, neurotic symptoms, and creative inspiration.
The brain processes future information indirectly and symbolically, which is why it is so often misinterpreted or dismissed.
Quantum Mechanics and the Brain
Wargo proposes the brain is a hybrid classical-quantum system: the classical level handles sensory input and body control like a conventional computer, while quantum processes inside neurons—particularly in microtubules—may enable precognitive signaling.
Microtubules, once thought to be mere structural scaffolding, have been shown to exhibit superconductivity and super-radiance, suggesting quantum coherence. They also control synaptic connection size and memory formation, making them a plausible physical mechanism for precognition as a form of memory from the future.
Quantum biology is an emerging field: examples include enzyme creation via quantum tunneling, bird navigation using the CR4 protein’s quantum spin, and other biological systems exploiting quantum effects despite warm, wet, noisy conditions.
The caudate nucleus and dorsal striatum (part of the brain’s reward system) show increased activity during “brilliant” moves in games like go—moves that only make sense in light of a future outcome—and may be linked to precognitive processing.
Artists and Precognitive Creation
Wargo documents extensive evidence that artists routinely produce work that anticipates future events in their lives, often personal upheavals rather than public news.
Michael Rolando Richards: A Black sculptor in 1990s New York obsessed with flight and martyrdom, he created multiple works depicting himself impaled by airplanes and riding burning meteors. He was awarded a studio in the Twin Towers for summer 2001 and was the only artist who stayed the night of September 10, dying in the attacks the next morning.
Morgan Robertson: Wrote the novel Futility (1898) about a massive ocean liner called the Titan hitting an iceberg on an April night in the North Atlantic with insufficient lifeboats—14 years before the Titanic disaster, which matched the fictional account in striking detail.
Wargo argues this is not cherry-picked coincidence but a pervasive pattern: when you study artists’ lives, precognitive themes appear constantly.
Remote Viewing and the Stargate Program
The CIA and DIA ran a psychic spy program called Stargate from 1972 to 1995, involving remote viewers like Joseph McMoneagle (awarded the Legion of Merit for over 200 intelligence contributions) and analyzed by statistician Jessica Utts and skeptic Ray Hyman, both of whom concluded the evidence for psychic functioning was statistically overwhelming.
Wargo’s contrarian hypothesis: much of what is called remote viewing is actually precognition—the viewer is accessing future knowledge of the target (e.g., future confirmation of what they drew) rather than perceiving distant locations in real time.
He argues the field has been hampered by using the wrong conceptual frameworks: first telepathy (telegraph metaphor), then clairvoyance/remote viewing (television metaphor), when the real mechanism may be temporal rather than spatial.
Ed May’s “decision augmentation” theory suggests that even psychokinesis (mind affecting random number generators) may be explained by experimenters’ precognition drawing them to run trials at moments when random outcomes align with their intentions.
Free Will, Alternative Timelines, and the Block Universe
Wargo rejects the many-worlds interpretation and alternative timelines as unscientific cop-outs; he is a committed block-universe advocate who sees the future as already fixed, like the past.
The reason precognitive information appears ambiguous or symbolic is precisely because time loops must be fulfilled: we receive future information indirectly and misunderstand it, and those misunderstandings drive the actions that bring about the predicted outcome.
Dreams about catastrophes (e.g., car accidents) are often “what-if” scenarios or near-miss thoughts that reflex back in time—the dreamer is alerted and narrowly avoids the accident, rather than switching timelines.
Precognitive signals are naturally selected for survival: the brain focuses on near-misses and worst-case scenarios because those are the thoughts that, sent backward, help the organism survive.
Consciousness, Perception, and the Reducing Valve
Wargo is skeptical of making consciousness the central explanation for psychic phenomena and UFOs, calling it a distraction from understanding mechanisms.
He is sympathetic to Donald Hoffman’s idea that perception is fitness-selected rather than truth-tracking, but thinks Hoffman overstates the case by claiming we perceive nothing of reality.
The “reducing valve” model (Aldous Huxley, William James) holds that ordinary consciousness is a narrowed-down version of a broader awareness, and that mystical or precognitive experiences represent temporary openings of this valve—useful but not sustainable for survival.
UFOs and Time Travel
Wargo agrees with biologist Mike Masters that the strongest hypothesis for the core UFO phenomenon is time-traveling humans or technology from the future, not extraterrestrial visitors.
He sees no intrinsic connection between UFOs and precognition (precognition is a universal feature of life), but the time-loops model is highly relevant to understanding time travel.
Quantum computer servers left running for decades or centuries could serve as “tesseracts”—four-dimensional information processors enabling communication across time, 3D printing of future technology in the present, and eventually physical time travel.
He speculates that UFO sightings near nuclear sites may reflect future factions intervening at points of maximum leverage to steer humanity away from catastrophic timelines.
Gravity Manipulation and Physical Time Travel
Beyond quantum information transfer, physical time travel may involve gravity manipulation, as suggested by general relativity (mass and energy curve spacetime).
Wargo references the rumored Nazi “Bell” device—a high-voltage apparatus allegedly designed to create different inertial reference frames and slow time—and inventor Thomas Townsend Brown’s work on gravity manipulation as a pathway to time travel.
He speculates that DNA itself might function as a quantum server, with organisms essentially being “3D-printed drones” based on information from their evolutionary future.
Cosmological Implications and Retrocausation
Wargo is drawn to John Wheeler’s “U diagram”—the universe as a self-observing loop—and argues that adding genuine retrocausation (as in Yakir Aharonov’s two-state vector formalism or the Kramer transactional interpretation) completes the picture.
If time travel becomes possible at any point in the future, it has always been inherently possible, meaning time travelers could have been present at the beginning of the universe—potentially explaining “alien” mythology, the Antikythera mechanism, and precociously advanced ancient artifacts as interventions by future factions.
Retrocausal effects of massive time-traveling technology or wormholes might even account for dark matter and dark energy, which could be gravitational effects from the future influencing present-day galactic dynamics.
Philip K. Dick as a Precognitive Artist
Wargo considers Philip K. Dick the only artist he has studied who fully understood and accepted that creative work is influenced by the future.
Dick had numerous documented precognitive dreams, including one in 1974 featuring small alien creatures, a fork-scored food item, and a reference to “Betty Hill” (whom he misremembered as “Betty Fields”)—all of which corresponded to scenes in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind three years later, a connection Dick never made.
Dick also precognized themes from Jacques Vallée’s The Invisible College in his novel VALIS, despite neither having read the other’s work at the time of writing.
Personal Synchronicities
Michels shares a personal example: a friend spontaneously told him to go to France, referencing the movie Before Sunset (whose main character is named Jesse) and predicting he would date a European woman. Michels booked a trip on a whim, spent the summer in Paris dating a woman named Selène—the same name as Julie Delpy’s character in the film—a connection he only noticed afterward.
Wargo notes that “synchronicity” (Jung’s term) is the go-to label people use for these experiences because they lack a conceptual framework for precognition.
