I can't say how these bits are connected, but I noted that Morgan introduced the spiritual variable in his discussion. He seems to be tying time travel to spiritual knowledge.
The Orb experience anecdotes indicate that they appear in response to something within us and they awaken something within us, and they bring a new kind of spirituality or a new level of awareness with them.
So here's how I'd say these bits are connected:
I believe (because of prior spiritual beliefs, basically; starting with my Mum's near-death experiences in the 1960s, but continuing on through the 1850s-1950s Spiritualist movement and everything that came after including the attempts of dedicated 1970s psi researchers to batter their heads against the brass doors of Heaven) that the universe exists in layers (like an onion, or an ogre). The space/time/matter layer is in some ways the "lowest" layer of a stack: matter and energy are not nearly as causal as we think they are. (I think Liebniz was getting at something like this when he helped birth modern physics in the 1700s; his "pre-existing harmony" is an approach to a physics where causality isn't something that energy over time does to matter, but rather merely a correlation.) The higher layers are mostly invisible to us, and environments there are also more obviously intelligent/sentient than this world. Thoughts are real and publically observable things (yikes!), we have multiple bodies also in layers (physical, "qi", "desire", "spirit", etc... each spiritual/metaphysical tradition has a slightly different take, but the general idea seems to recur multiple times). There are entire civilizations which exist in these higher layers from us. They communicate with us via a form of deep telepathy that sends information packets that often don't directly take the form of words, but can "unpack" in our consciousness into words.
Sometimes the "messengers" from these civilisations manifest very dramatically and visually as orbs of light, which may or may not be subjective or group hallucinations. They might also manifest visually or audibly as other things, but they much more often communicate very quietly and subtly without "manifesting" at all. I feel like most human creative activity is in fact a co-operation between a receptive human mind and one or more of these messengers; in other words, that the Greek idea of the "muse" is not a metaphor but a real thing. I think there is a spectrum between imagination, creativity, and "mediumship", and not really a clear division between different modes of receptivity. ("Contact modalities", in 2024 "Experiencer" jargon.)
There are also not just "good" or "enlightened" civilisations; while the higher levels are, I believe, strongly good (but often almost abstract and intangible to us), there are pockets of subcultures "lower" and "closer" to us which are confused, angry, hurt, or malicious. So "communication" with this wider universe can be very fraught and even dangerous, and the more so the more "tangible" forms it takes. This would imply that the 20th century psychic research and ESP focus on strictly scientific and physically measurable communication is actually quite dangerous, which might be why clear results in that area have been very slim. Similarly, deliberate intent to cause harm will attract civilisations interested in that, and so military psi in particular must be a very dangerous and inadvisable realm to play with. George Lucas was onto something with the "Light Side" and "Dark Side"; he didn't make up those concepts entirely from scratch.
If you want to use the currently fashionable pop-science ideas of "multiverse" or "simulation theory", then those might help grasp the edges of what the universe actually is, but these ideas are really only a shadow of the actual original Gnostic/idealism idea. The universe is not *actually* a physics sim running on a giant computer, but it *is* an "illusion", "maya", or "virtual reality". It's just that the "platform" it's "running on" is something that's sentient. There are entire bodies of theological/philosophical thought on how and why sentience could end up masquerading to itself as nonsentience (as opposed to the current academic belief that sentience is an illusion somehow caused by nonsentient physical systems), but it's an ancient idea that appears to be reinforced by data of the psychic/"channelled" nature over the last couple hundred years.
Since the 1940s, it became fashionable to not believe in "discarnate human spirits" anymore and instead to believe in "aliens", but I'm pretty sure it's the same beings that were communicating via table-tipping and Ouija boards in the 1850s, public fashion just changed so they adopted a slightly different "PR image". The methods by which "aliens" and "spirits" communicate with the human mind, the way in which they manifest, the messages they bring, the philosophy they teach.. these all overlap to such a strong degree that it seems to take a wilful desire for obfuscation to separate them into two different categories.
Where time travel comes into this - and this features in both Near Death Experiences and "channelled" communications - there is widespread agreement among these anomalous "communicators" that Time And Space Just Work Differently in the layers "above" us. Even Einsteinian relativity doesn't seem to capture what's happening in these hyperspaces "above" us. Since the higher layers are more sentient than the lower layers, time "up there" really seems to be directly linked to thought in a way that we can't really comprehend in our modernistic philosophy, but would be perfectly understandable to any monk from the Middle Ages.
Now Morgan seems to buy into a version of this idea. I think anyone who has come through the various psi / remote-viewing schools in the US defense industry scene from the 1970s on would have some form of this universe-picture; it's just part of the psychic landscape. Morgan might *also* believe in physical time travel machines, but I don't think it's required to believe that such technology exists to believe that the human race is in contact with multiple "hyperspatial civilizations" which transcend time, and has been in such contact for thousands of years. Such contact does not in itself imply the imminent end of the world (although our technological boom might).
So this is why I parse Morgan through a somewhat critical filter. I see him make coy references to time travel and psi and also to Townsend Brown and also to technology, and I think: yes, these are dots, but do they join up? Yes, time travel is pretty much a necessary part of the psi experience. And the Townsend Brown story seems to include psi elements - if nothing else, the people who became attracted to Townsend Brown's scientific ideas seem to almost always have some investment in a psi worldview. Psi is so everpresent everywhere in the human condition, however, that I don't know if we can draw any conclusions about *physically existing time travel technology* from time travel appearing in the psi experience.
It is a fixture of the UFO mythos that there exist physically-existing nuts-and-bolts saucers that have some kind of psi interface to them, and that humans just after WW2 captured some of those saucers with our cap-guns and bottle tops (yay us!), and these now exist in some secret hangar somewhere, have possibly been reverse engineered by the US military and/or a private consortium, and that they can travel in time as well as space because (insert General Relativity here, which is completely irrelevant to the psi world-picture). And it's precisely *because* this is such a prevalent belief in the UFO mythos - such a warping gravity field of belief - that I worry when Morgan seemed to be trying to nudge his story in that direction without actually saying it. I wanted to see him clearly construct and lay out an argument and justify each step, because he was obviously very capable of doing this. And yet he didn't. I didn't like that. It felt... not quite deceptive, but on the edge of deceptive without quite stepping over.
Nate
about this and starts to recall why he walked away in 2009....)