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You think you're a gopher landing over?

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Roger, understand. Gopher landing 3000 feet.

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July 20th, 1969.

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Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to land on the moon.

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That's one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.

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Just like aliens visiting from another world.

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It had been the stuff of science fiction.

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Now, everything that could be imagined seemed possible.

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If mankind could travel the skies and go to other planets,

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why couldn't beings from other planets visit the Earth?

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Amidst a wave of modern UFO sightings, a new theory emerged

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that aliens visited Earth in antiquity and were regarded as gods.

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But if that were true, wouldn't there be proof?

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Perhaps there was.

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All we needed to do was open our eyes and our imaginations.

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The proof, perhaps, was all around us.

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In May of 2008, a startling proclamation was issued by the Vatican.

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For the first time in its 2000 year history, the Catholic Church acknowledged the possibility

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that intelligent life could exist on other planets

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and that a belief in extraterrestrials did not contradict a belief in God.

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Which means, of course, that we are now entering an age in which the universe is beginning to be conceived

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in different ways from where it was before.

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And if it is a reality for us, why could it not have been a reality for other beings in the universe

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who could have visited our Earth in perhaps guided, culturally mentioned times?

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But just what sparked this sudden turnaround in religious thought?

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Could the Church have been influenced by recent scientific discoveries?

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In 2002, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft detected enormous reservoirs of ice beneath the Martian surface.

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The presence of ice and the possibility of water suggested that life could be sustained

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or even generated on another planet.

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After decades of orbiting space shuttles and robotic rovers,

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the idea of sending man back into space to Mars and beyond ignited the imagination

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and brought back the notion that mankind and alien beings had crossed paths before.

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In 1968, just one year before Neil Armstrong's epic spaceflight,

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a book was published that forever changed the way many in the scientific, religious and creative communities

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would view their home planet.

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Written by Swiss author Eric von Daniken, chariots of the gods attempted to prove

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that alien explorers had visited the Earth thousands of years ago.

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When I was a young man, I was educated as a strict Catholic in a boarding school.

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And there we had to make translations of part of the Bible, Greek to Latin, Latin to German.

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For example, in the first book of Moses, before the Lord descends on the Holy Mountain,

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Moses was ordered to construct a gate around the mountain.

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Otherwise, the Israelites would be damaged.

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I was shocked. I said, this is impossible.

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My God, he would never use first a gate to protect himself or to protect the Israelites.

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What are they talking about?

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And now the world started.

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I started to read thousands of pages of the beginning of religions of every mythology.

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It's always the same story.

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Of course, with different names, with different heroes, somebody descends from the sky to the humans.

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Our forefathers could not understand it.

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They believed that these are some gods.

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I was shocked.

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I asked the question, were primitive human influenced by extraterrestrials?

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Not gods.

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And if it always, like I suggested, what is the proof?

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So you start trying to find at least indications.

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That's what I have done now for at least 45 years.

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You have pictorial evidence, you have artifacts in archaeology,

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and you have what's come out of the old literature.

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Hundreds of indications which you cannot deny anymore.

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What it means is that we need new explanations for human origins,

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that perhaps we're not alone in the universe,

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and that human-like beings came to this planet from some other planet elsewhere in the cosmos.

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I think that's a very good idea myself.

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And it really excited people.

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It was a new way of looking at the past, looking at ancient civilizations,

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and it put this very modern space-age spin to the whole thing.

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Chariots of the gods caused a sensation,

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fueled in no small part by the popular response to books like Frank Herbert's Dune,

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television shows like Star Trek,

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and feature films like 2001, A Space Odyssey.

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The time was ripe because everybody was talking of possible space travel,

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of possibility of extraterrestrials,

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so it was all wonderful coming together, but it was not planned.

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After a Swiss newspaper, printed excerpts of it on a weekly basis.

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More than 10,000 copies of the book were sold before ever hitting the market.

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So it was a running bestseller starting in Switzerland first,

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then going over to Germany, and then the rest of the world.

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They had to print and print and print and print.

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Absolutely incredible.

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In 1970, a feature-length documentary was released to theaters,

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followed by dozens of bestselling books,

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and growing legions of fans and supporters.

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Chariots of the gods was tremendously influential.

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It somehow spoke to people who want to believe.

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When I was a boy, Chariot of the gods was one of the books I first read.

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I mean, I ripped it apart. I digested. I couldn't get enough of it.

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I just fell in love with that book, because it really opened up all kinds of new questions.

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And Vandanakon was able to point out many anomalies in history

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that the mainstream archaeologists can't answer very well.

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He had what was a revolutionary new idea,

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that of gods from outer space coming to the planet,

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helping create civilization.

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When I first read Chariots of the gods,

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I couldn't put that book down, because it answered a whole bunch of questions that I had.

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And it was a great combination of archaeology and adventure.

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And it's just a wonderful way to see the world and pursue these ancient mysteries.

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And it truly was, I think, the catalyst for what people like I do today,

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and that is to talk about the mysteries and the unusual and the paranormal.

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He paved the way for a lot of us to talk about these strange stories.

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And that continues to grow, and it's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.

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People want answers to questions that they can't answer themselves.

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But in spite of the book's enormous popularity, or perhaps because of it,

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Vandanakon's theories were scorned by scientists and jeered at by theologians.

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Of course, it created a storm of controversy.

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I was completely attacked, especially by the scientific newspapers.

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They said, come on, he's just telling a story, he's a liar, or he's a fraud, or whatever.

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There is not a single piece of evidence that Vandanakon puts up with the world.

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There is no evidence that Vandanakon puts forward that cannot be attributed to human ingenuity, technology, and development.

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Don't try to reduce the scriptures to a science book,

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or don't try to reduce the scriptures to an explanation of our modern world today.

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I don't expect that the scientific community now embraces and kisses me and says,

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oh, wonderful, great you did.

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We have to live with critics.

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This is normal.

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The chariot of the God was full of speculation.

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I had 238 question marks.

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Nobody read the question mark.

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They always said, Mr. Vandanakon is saying,

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and I did not say, I asked the question, would that be a possibility?

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That in chariots of the God, they made clear differences between speculations and facts.

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But as controversial as many of Vandanakon's theories are, believers point to tangible evidence.

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How, for example, could a century's old map chart a land mass that has only recently been discovered?

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It would tend to indicate that the map was made at a time when Antarctica was ice free,

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which would be many millions of years ago.

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And how could a primitive civilization know how to harness electricity or even build a computer?

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This was tantamount to finding a jet airplane in the tomb of King Tut.

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And just who were these mysterious designs only visible from high altitudes intended for?

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The signs are made for somebody who flies.

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There's no way out this...

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Could Vandanakon's theory that ancient gods were really alien visitors contain any serious scientific merit?

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The answer involves a search around the world, and even right before our eyes.

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If alien beings from other planets had visited the Earth thousands of years ago,

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how would our ancient ancestors have tried to communicate with them?

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And wouldn't there be some physical evidence of the time they spent here?

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One answer may lie in the Nazca desert of Peru.

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There, atop an arid plateau that stretches for nearly 50 miles,

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countless geometric patterns and figures decorate the landscape.

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The

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You fly over this desert and you see some lines.

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The lines look like airstrips. They start abruptly, they end abruptly.

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The longest of it is 23 km, right away, not one curve.

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Just incredible. And ending in one of these so-called airstrips.

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In the mixture of large lines and small lines, you see gigantic figures in the ground.

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Figures of fishes, monkeys, spiders, apes.

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But of such over-dimensional size that you can see them only from the air.

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People built them, or somebody built them, hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

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Perhaps maybe even thousands of years ago.

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That could be signs of hello up there. Here we are. It's something.

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Various disputed explanations suggest that the lines could have been used for irrigation ditches,

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giant astronomical calendars, or pathways perhaps used for religious worship.

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Looking at NASCA from the air, it looks like an airport.

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And it really does, because you have all these bands, wide bands,

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that look like airstrips that are laid on top of each other.

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But you also have these gigantic long straight lines that go for miles and miles over valleys, over mountains.

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So once again, you've got this idea of like, okay, people are creating this.

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But what is the reason? Is it to show these gods in aerial vehicles, land here, kind of a thing?

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Because we just don't have a good idea of why people would do this.

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And it really does seem that they're trying to signal people who are in the air in space or flying around our planet.

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During World War II, American troops created air bases on remote Pacific islands.

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To natives who had never witnessed advanced technology, the sight of giant metal birds touching down,

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looked to them as if the gods themselves had turned the earth into a planetary pit stop.

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They would see these big planes land, and it was all technology that just was out of the sky.

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They didn't know how these things worked, but they could see them land.

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And what they liked about it was they were getting free stuff. They were getting cargo.

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Suddenly when the war was over, all these airstrips were abandoned and everyone left.

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And the islands scratched their heads and they all said to themselves,

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wow, wasn't it great when all these planes came out of the sky and gave us free cans of corned beef and stuff?

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We really liked that cargo.

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Entire religions sprung up from this, where priests actually said, yes, you know, that was our dead ancestors sending us cargo.

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So what they did then was they began going to do the old airstrips and they would build mock wooden airplanes

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to try and get those planes to come back from the sky and deliver the cans of corned beef to them again.

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And so you can see how then an analogy with modern cargo cults plays exactly into the ancient astronaut scenario

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where something like this could have easily happened in the past and entire religions built around ancient astronauts.

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But gigantic geoglyphs aren't the only mystery surrounding Nazca.

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I was flying over Nazca for days, hanging out the aircraft with the camera and shooting and shooting and shooting.

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I have more or less about 4,000 pictures about Nazca. This is really fascinating.

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You see, this is one of the pictures which prove that this mountain was made flat artificially

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because you compare it with the mountain around there.

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There the mountains cap comes up from both sides. Here it was flat. This is absolutely incredible.

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This is one of the most craziest pictures I made about Nazca.

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The crazy thing is the rubble, the remains of that summit or that mountaintop, gone.

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It's nowhere. It's not in the valley down below. It's nowhere in the region.

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What happened to it? Because all the mountains around it have their summits. It's there.

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And then you have other mountains that are as flat as a table with bands on top that look like runways.

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Another question. Why would visiting ETs be drawn to the bone-dry deserts of Peru?

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Let's just say hypothetically that a spaceship arrives here on planet Earth

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and you want to quickly find out what this planet consists of.

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Nazca would be the perfect place to go and visit for some sampling and for some experimentation

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because Nazca still today is one of the most abundant areas in the world regarding raw materials.

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There you find everything. You find gold. You find uranium. What have you?

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It's basically the cliff notes of planet Earth.

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You go to Nazca and you immediately know everything about what our planet consists of

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because all the raw materials converge there at high volumes.

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Why do we have to believe that this simply could not be an expression of an artistic impulse?

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Is it really that outlandish to believe that these natives in Peru might have wanted to create some large-scale work of art?

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And to say that such a large-scale work of art could not have been created merely for the possibility of having created it

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rather than if the Nazca lines are so inhumanly vast that they could only be admired by people who are capable of flight?

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Well, you know, you can say the same thing about the Great Wall of China.

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And yet the Great Wall of China has a purpose that is political, that is martial.

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Somebody might have walked the Nazca lines as a spiritual labyrinth in the shape of a spiritual totemic object

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and were in their own way supposed to get a kind of epiphany from that.

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The fact that we don't understand the purpose of a thing opens it to tremendous speculation.

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Nazca and the Nazca figures make no sign seen from the Earth.

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You have to fly over it.

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The signs are made for somebody who flies.

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There's no way out of this.

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I hope archaeologists who know all later will come to a similar conclusion.

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But if visitors from other planets were thought to be gods, wouldn't there be written accounts of them?

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Perhaps the answer can be found right in front of us.

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In one of the most shocking places of all.

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Ironically, Eric Von Daniken's firm belief that Earth has been visited in the past by beings from other planets

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is entirely consistent with his belief in God and the Bible.

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It is merely a question of interpretation.

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I want us to understand I was a very, very deep believer in God.

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By the way, I'm still a believer in God. I never lost my God.

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But for a young man, my God had to be almighty.

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My God would never need a vehicle in which to move around.

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A vehicle to go from point A to point B.

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In what Christians refer to as the Old Testament,

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there are in fact several accounts of God and his angels visiting the Earth.

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Sometimes these visitations are accompanied by tremendous noise and clouds of billowing smoke.

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In the Book of Ezekiel, for example, the prophet claims that he witnessed a visitation by heavenly beings

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coming down from the skies aboard a fantastic flying machine.

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As far as Von Daniken is concerned, it's a highly detailed description of an alien sighting.

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This is incredible. Ezekiel not only describes what he see, he also describes what he hears.

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He describes the whole thing as being the splendor of God.

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The prophet also details several four-faced winged creatures who appeared in the likeness of men

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and who traveled upon a gleaming wheeled device.

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Inside the splendors of God, there was something like a drone.

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And on this drone was a being sitting, looking like a human in glittering clothes.

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And beneath it, he saw some vehicles. He saw some wings.

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He describes the noise of the wings. He describes the noise of the wings with the tundering of a waterfall.

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Ezekiel saw his wheel within a wheel. This sounds more high-tech than supernatural.

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And we can't suppose that people 3,000 years ago would understand the difference between the supernatural and high-tech.

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But what if there is more to Ezekiel's heavenly visions than the imaginative insights of a religious man?

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What if there was a scientific foundation for them?

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Yes, I once had the opportunity of meeting and spending time and traveling with a gentleman by the name of Joseph Blumrisch.

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He was a senior chief engineer at NASA, a person involved in the Mariner expedition to Mars.

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He was also in charge of the landing gear for the Mariner spaceship.

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And he told me himself that the idea of the design used for the Mariner spaceship that landed on Mars came to him from the reading of the biblical text

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in which there is talk about wheels within wheels.

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So here you have another example of a person of curiosity who conceives of these ideas.

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Another biblical figure who continues to fascinate Vondanikon is the character of Enoch.

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Enoch is not part of the Bible. In the Bible, in the Old Testament, you find maybe just one phrase about Enoch, that's all.

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But among the apocryphic texts, there are volumes and volumes, if you know them.

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You find the book of Enoch. Enoch is the first person in antiquity who writes in the first person,

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I did, I hear, I was there.

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In one of the ancient texts, this great grandfather of Noah is said to have been taken away by God for 300 years.

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He was taken up to the sky. Up there he meets the highest, the so-called highest in religion they call it God.

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He meets the highest and the highest thess to his servants.

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You teach this young man in our language and then you teach him writing.

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So he writes books. Of course, he knows all these foreigners by name.

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He quotes them by name. He knows their profession.

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He knows which of these extraterrestrials was the astronomer.

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So Enoch is the only in first person, thousands of years ago, who gives some of the names of the extraterrestrials and gives some of their professions.

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How is this possible? We have an eyewitness and nobody speaks about it. So I really was confused.

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That would be the argument that the followers of Fontanikin would say.

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Why is it so absurd for aliens to come when it's completely acceptable for God to intervene in human history?

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The difference is Fontanikin's arguing that aliens came and gave technologies to people to advance those cultures.

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So basically they gave objects. They gave new ideas and new technologies and that those cultures advanced because of them.

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Whereas, at least in the Bible, it's not like God gave humankind a magic watch, you know, or a new missile that they could use to defeat their enemies.

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God gives instructions, at least the Bible records, that God gives instructions on how to live, but not how to build new devices that further or advance a specific culture.

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Can we like an Ezekiel's chariot to a UFO?

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The ancients use myth and metaphor and images to describe their experience of God.

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I think what we don't want to fall to is a type of fundamental literalism.

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The stories of the Old Testament emerge out of the people of that time, out of their own context, to make sense of their experience of God.

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We can gain insight by reading the Old Testament and reading about Ezekiel's chariot.

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But it's not to draw a strict analogy between his chariot and a UFO.

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When all of these stories were written down, writing was a fairly new invention.

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The very first thing they wrote down is something that actually happened to them.

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It was so important, so compelling, so significant to them that they had to put it in writing.

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Why can't modern society come to grips that these stories might be true after all?

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Von Daniken's research turned up evidence of other arguably extraterrestrial phenomena, and not only in the Bible.

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Almost every religion has similar stories about deities, with spectacular powers and abilities, who come to Earth and directly influence the lives of men.

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Suddenly one day I said to myself, no come on. This is similar to the stories in so many old religions.

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Are they talking about extraterrestrials?

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These so-called gods are here, they give orders, they force the humans to do certain things,

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and one day they disappear. But they always disappear with the promise to return in a far away future.

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If, as I believe, people in ancient civilizations were familiar with space travel,

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people in ancient civilizations were in communication with human-like beings from other planets,

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then I think we should expect to find evidence for this in their literatures, which we do find.

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Throughout the ancient Sanskrit epics of India, there are numerous descriptions of Vimanas, or mythical flying machines.

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One of these accounts even dates back over 5,000 years.

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In the Bhagavad Purana, which is an ancient Sanskrit history,

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there is a description of a spacecraft that was piloted by a king named Shalva.

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It's described that it was made of metal.

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It was described that it sometimes appeared to be in two places at once.

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It was described as having a motion similar to that of a butterfly.

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And these descriptions are consistent with what people who observe UFOs today report.

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In other Sanskrit texts, such as the Mahabharata, the Rig Veda, and the Ramayana,

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there can be found descriptions of Vimana measuring as wide as 100 feet,

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and often equipped with the capabilities of modern aircraft.

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One Vimana produced a Shaft of Light, which when focused on a target, consumed it with its power.

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It's like a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon movie from the 30s.

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They read like the wildest science fiction.

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People are flying around in airships called Vamanas, blasting each other and having aerial fights, destroying entire cities.

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And the crazy thing is that all of those stories are totally accepted in the Mahabharata.

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I don't think we can say that these descriptions are simply imagination,

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because even though they were written thousands of years ago,

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they match what many people today report in terms of observing the actions of UFOs.

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Were they just mythological tales that they're making up fantasy?

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Or these physical real events, and they're trying to describe them as they're just a mythological tale?

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Or these events, and they're trying to describe them as the best that they could?

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That seems to make more sense to me.

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I gotta tell you this, I would be out of a job in India,

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because there, if I were to talk about ancient aliens and ancient gods,

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they would say, OK, so what else is new?

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When backing up their claims of extraterrestrial visitation,

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ancient alien theorists draw upon two kinds of examples.

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There's the evidence you can read, such as that found in ancient texts,

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and then there's the evidence you can actually see.

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Among the earliest types of physical specimens, numerous cave and rock drawings,

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and stone sculptures found all over the globe.

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You know, pictures are worth a thousand words. Absolutely.

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And you see pictures depicted, for example, on a cave in Italy

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that show two astronauts with helmets on.

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What the heck could it be? What could it be?

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Each of these ancient illustrations or statues depict figures dressed in strange attire for the times,

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and sporting unusual headgear.

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But could they really be representations of alien astronauts,

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visitors from other worlds who touched down upon the Earth thousands of years ago?

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All over the world, we have statues and sculptures and paintings and depictions

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of these extraterrestrial beings.

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Even in the United States, at Sego Canyon, Utah,

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we have petroglyphs of very weird-looking creatures

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that have antennae on their heads, helmets,

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and have for you around the world.

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In Kimberly, Australia, for example, we have the exact same depictions

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of these helmeted beings with a halo around their heads.

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And the question I have is, what did our ancestors see

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that compelled them to put this on their cave walls?

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On yet another continent in Guatemala City,

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we have a sculpture that looks eerily reminiscent of a modern-day astronaut.

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That thing is wearing a helmet, there's some type of a mouthpiece,

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and on his chest are some type of controls or a breathing apparatus.

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How is this possible?

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1,500 years ago.

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And in Colombia, there were thousands of tomb artifacts

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that look like modern-day airplanes.

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It has fixed wings, it has a fuselage,

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and it has an upright tail fin, which is not intrinsic to nature,

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but it is intrinsic to modern-day aerodynamics.

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Did our ancestors see something similar flying in the air?

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Absolutely.

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Another compelling artifact that was found was at the Istanbul Museum,

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where you have this headless spaceman sitting inside some type of a space vehicle.

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You can see his hands, and you can see tubing that go to some sort of devices.

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He's wearing a suit, his legs are crammed in there.

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I mean, even to the untrained eye, this looks very aerodynamic,

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and it looks something that, you know, came from outer space.

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These people witnessed something, they were told something,

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and they tried to depict it the best way they could

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with the kind of technology they had at the time,

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and that was simple tools and simple artwork.

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Many of these ancient civilizations were widely separated in space and time.

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They weren't in communication with each other,

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but still they have the same kinds of accounts.

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I think it's because they all experienced these things,

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and they all have the idea that we're part of a cosmic hierarchy of beings.

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So I think we can't explain things away so easily.

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But for Eric Vondanikin and other proponents of his ancient astronaut theories,

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perhaps the most significant illustration can be found in Mexico.

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The Mayan archaeological site of Felenke had been abandoned for centuries

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before it was stumbled upon by Spanish explorers.

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We sort of get to the top of this, and suddenly here are the great pyramids of Felenke.

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Here, deep within a secret tomb, under one of the age-old temples,

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lies the seven-ton sarcophagus of Felenke's seventh-century ruler, Picale the Great.

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Lord Picale apparently died here at Felenke.

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He was apparently this mysterious Mayan leader.

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He was a giant, seven or eight feet tall, actually,

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and then they built this pyramid around his tomb.

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The Mayans literally worshipped him as some kind of a god.

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King Picale's sarcophagus is adorned with a carving

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that has become a famous example of classic Mayan art.

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Most believe the illustration shows Picale descending into the Mayan underworld,

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but ancient astronaut theorists interpret the carving a vastly different way.

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On this lap, an incredible inchisling.

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You see a man, and he is sitting in a sort of capsule.

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He has some sort of mask on his nose, and you see his upper hand, he's manipulating some controls.

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From the lower hand, he's turning something on.

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The heel of his left foot is on a kind of pedal,

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and outside of the capsule you see a linking flame.

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This is incredible. This is absolutely a proof for extraterrestrials.

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If we look at the similarities of what our astronauts look like

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when they are in a rocket ship or in the space shuttle and have gear attached to them,

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there are similarities being shown.

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So one just has to ask the question of, you know, is this just an artifact symbolically showing something,

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or are they trying to depict with their own limited understanding of the time what was taking place?

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Was Lord Picale just some Mayan king that everyone liked?

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Was he some important visitor from some far-off land?

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Or was he even possibly some extraterrestrial from another planet?

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Although most scientists and archaeologists discredit

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Von Daniken's interpretation of the Polenke carvings,

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visitors to the site are often treated to stories and offered souvenirs that support his claim.

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This is Eric Von Daniken's theory, the Charits of the Gods.

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You see, Picale's supposed to be driving the rocket, holding the controls, the pedals,

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the engine, and the fire of the rocket.

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This will be the cabin.

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And this is the oxygen.

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Mainstream archaeologists claim that it's really a depiction of Lord Picale

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and his journey to the underworld.

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He's going underground rather than out into space.

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Both are interesting theories and either could be right in my mind.

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In recent years, Picale's tomb has been closed to tourists and casual visitors.

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Although the sarcophagus is off limits, ancient astronaut theorists can still find a wealth of evidence

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in the carvings along the walls of Polenke.

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This is very similar to what's on the lid of Lord Picale of his tomb.

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The way he's got his left hand right here in an odd position and his wrist,

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also some kind of rocket exhaust or something is coming out of him.

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But Lord Picale may not have been the only alien who once walked the Polenke ruins.

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The Mayans had such an advanced calendar and mathematical system.

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Why were they so obsessed with the stars?

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One of the most advanced of any ancient cultures.

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And yet the Mayans just vanished around 500 AD.

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We don't know where they went.

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And one explanation is that the Mayans were some kind of extraterrestrials

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and they literally left our planet.

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But ancient cave drawings and stone carvings aren't the only types of illustrations

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that fascinate ancient alien theorists.

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In 1929, historians discovered a map which had been painted onto a piece of gazelle hide.

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They traced the document back to a 16th century Turkish admiral named Piriris.

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But in stark contrast to other maps dating back to that time,

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the map depicts land masses that were still, as yet, unexplored.

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It shows the coast of Antarctica as it exists under the current ice cover.

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Now that's really pretty amazing because it would tend to indicate that the map was made at a time

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when Antarctica was ice free, which would be many millions of years ago.

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The map also accurately charts the coasts of Europe and North Africa.

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But it's the illustration of northern Antarctica that truly astonishes ancient astronaut theorists

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because this region wouldn't even be discovered for another 300 years.

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We have to remember that Antarctica is covered by at least a mile thick ice.

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We didn't have ground penetrating radar until 1958,

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so for a map to exist in 1531 accurately showing the topography is pretty interesting.

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When cartographers superimposed the Piriris map over a modern map of the world,

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they were amazed to discover that the ancient chart was fantastically accurate in the most minute of details.

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But how could the creators of a centuries-old map have known of mountains or rivers that had yet to be discovered?

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In 1531, I really don't know of anyone who was flying above the surface of the Earth high enough

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to map topography and how would they see underneath the ice?

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Their maps were so accurate.

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I mean, we know that they didn't go to Antarctica and explore it,

441
00:40:49,000 --> 00:40:52,000
but yet they were able to draw these maps of it.

442
00:40:55,000 --> 00:40:59,000
But if ancient aliens possessed the technology to travel the universe,

443
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:06,000
would the only evidence of their journey be in the form of a few carvings or a mysterious map?

444
00:41:06,000 --> 00:41:10,000
Wouldn't there also be signs of a highly advanced technology?

445
00:41:10,000 --> 00:41:14,000
Signs that might be too large to overlook.

446
00:41:14,000 --> 00:41:19,000
You mean to tell me that people of that time period did this by hand?

447
00:41:19,000 --> 00:41:21,000
I don't think so.

448
00:41:27,000 --> 00:41:30,000
When it comes to searching for evidence of ancient aliens,

449
00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:36,000
Eric Von Daniken literally leaves no stones unturned.

450
00:41:36,000 --> 00:41:39,000
I have collected for more than 40 years information,

451
00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:44,000
and there are two sorts of evidences to support my hypothesis.

452
00:41:44,000 --> 00:41:47,000
The one source is literature.

453
00:41:47,000 --> 00:41:51,000
This might be archaeological or mythological literature,

454
00:41:51,000 --> 00:41:54,000
and the other sorts are practical objects.

455
00:41:54,000 --> 00:41:57,000
For example, the pyramids are linked to the gods.

456
00:41:57,000 --> 00:42:03,000
The gods who once descended from the sky to us earthlings.

457
00:42:04,000 --> 00:42:07,000
Without a little interplanetary help,

458
00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:10,000
how else could early Egyptians have learned to stack

459
00:42:10,000 --> 00:42:16,000
the nearly two and a half million limestone and granite blocks that create the Great Pyramid?

460
00:42:18,000 --> 00:42:23,000
How could prehistoric man move the immense boulders at Stonehenge?

461
00:42:24,000 --> 00:42:29,000
And how could ancient builders at Kusko fit stones so closely together

462
00:42:29,000 --> 00:42:33,000
that even a razor blade can't fit between them?

463
00:42:37,000 --> 00:42:43,000
As you travel around the world trying to piece together this puzzle of the ancient world,

464
00:42:43,000 --> 00:42:47,000
there's not that much to really get a good grasp on,

465
00:42:47,000 --> 00:42:53,000
but what there is is giant blocks of stone,

466
00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:58,000
huge articulated granite or basalt blocks in many cases.

467
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:01,000
Sometimes they weigh a thousand tons.

468
00:43:05,000 --> 00:43:08,000
These things are the size of railway cars,

469
00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:12,000
and you find them in Peru and Bolivia and Mexico and ancient Egypt.

470
00:43:12,000 --> 00:43:24,000
You have to ask yourself, why and how could ancient people have dragged these railway car-size blocks of stone,

471
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:28,000
stacked them up together into these giant buildings?

472
00:43:30,000 --> 00:43:36,000
Perhaps the most familiar and most mysterious megalithic structure in all the world

473
00:43:36,000 --> 00:43:39,000
is the Great Pyramid of Giza,

474
00:43:39,000 --> 00:43:43,000
the oldest and largest of Egypt's three Great Pyramids.

475
00:43:43,000 --> 00:43:49,000
This miracle of engineering is believed to have been constructed during a 20-year period,

476
00:43:49,000 --> 00:43:52,000
ending around 2560 BC.

477
00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:58,000
But to ancient alien theorists, those numbers just don't add up.

478
00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:06,000
The Great Pyramid was not built in only 22 years,

479
00:44:06,000 --> 00:44:16,000
because logistically speaking, you would have to cut, transport, and put into place one stone every nine seconds.

480
00:44:18,000 --> 00:44:23,000
And there are modern engineers who have come forward and said,

481
00:44:23,000 --> 00:44:26,000
we couldn't do this in 22 years either.

482
00:44:27,000 --> 00:44:31,000
There are all kinds of theories on how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.

483
00:44:31,000 --> 00:44:34,000
So many theories, you just sit back and shake your head.

484
00:44:34,000 --> 00:44:44,000
And that includes ET visitations, levitating the blocks with some kind of sound system, anti-gravity,

485
00:44:46,000 --> 00:44:53,000
thousands of workers pulling long ropes on a ramp that had to be almost two miles long to get it up to where it is.

486
00:44:54,000 --> 00:45:02,000
All I know is that they are so finely aligned and that the architecture is so precise

487
00:45:02,000 --> 00:45:10,000
that even modern people today with great technology would have a difficult time being that good.

488
00:45:13,000 --> 00:45:20,000
How, for example, in the inside of the pyramids and the tombs, could they build granite in marble areas

489
00:45:20,000 --> 00:45:23,000
that were just so perfect and so clean?

490
00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:30,000
You mean to tell me that people of that time period did this by hand?

491
00:45:31,000 --> 00:45:32,000
I don't think so.

492
00:45:34,000 --> 00:45:42,000
The enormous size and weight of the stones, multiplied by the sheer number of them, makes one thing certain.

493
00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:50,000
The construction of the Great Pyramid remains one of the greatest marvels and mysteries of architectural engineering.

494
00:45:52,000 --> 00:45:58,000
I don't want to discount human ingenuity because I do believe that we do have the ability to do these things over a longer period of time,

495
00:45:58,000 --> 00:46:04,000
but the knowledge to build some of these monuments, there had to have been some type of intervention or some type of knowledge

496
00:46:04,000 --> 00:46:08,000
given to ancient man to carry out those instructions. They couldn't have just come up with it on their own.

497
00:46:09,000 --> 00:46:17,000
In Egypt, there are all traditions saying the Great Pyramid was constructed by a pharaoh with the name of Saurid.

498
00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:25,000
And then they say Saurid is the same which the Hebrew community calls Inok.

499
00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:33,000
Inok is a prophet in the Old Testament. There are books of Inok called the Apocryphic Texts.

500
00:46:34,000 --> 00:46:37,000
You make a connection with Inok to these extraterrestrials.

501
00:46:37,000 --> 00:46:40,000
He clearly says he met these extraterrestrials.

502
00:46:41,000 --> 00:46:52,000
Now we have writings in the book of Inok and he gave the order to construct a building which cannot be destroyed by the thousands of years of the future.

503
00:46:53,000 --> 00:47:13,000
And the ancient Egyptian texts speak that the pyramids were built by human beings with the assistance of the guardians of the sky, meaning the gods.

504
00:47:14,000 --> 00:47:25,000
And so we have proposed that the pyramids were built by human hands, but with the assistance of extraterrestrial technology.

505
00:47:28,000 --> 00:47:37,000
As one of the seven wonders of the world, the Great Pyramid remains not only an archaeological mystery, but a geographical marvel.

506
00:47:38,000 --> 00:47:55,000
In 1877, author and theologian Joseph Seiss demonstrated that the Great Pyramid resides at the intersection of the longest line of latitude and the longest line of longitude, the exact center of all the landmass in the world.

507
00:47:56,000 --> 00:48:09,000
Also, each of its four sides aligns almost precisely with the four points of the compass, though such an instrument wasn't even designed until thousands of years later.

508
00:48:12,000 --> 00:48:22,000
But is it just mere coincidence that pyramid construction, very similar to that practiced in ancient Egypt, was also evolving halfway around the world?

509
00:48:23,000 --> 00:48:30,000
There are pyramids on remote Pacific islands, and in India, and in Mexico.

510
00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:46,000
So this is something that's all over the world. Archaeologists haven't really been able to explain why dissimilar cultures, separated by huge oceans, are building the same structures, and in many ways the same way.

511
00:48:47,000 --> 00:49:01,000
Here in central Mexico stands an ancient city that dates back more than 2,000 years. Its name, Teotihuacan, literally means city of the gods.

512
00:49:02,000 --> 00:49:06,000
And located at its center is the Pyramid of the Sun.

513
00:49:07,000 --> 00:49:14,000
Incredibly, this pyramid's perimeter is virtually the same as that of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

514
00:49:15,000 --> 00:49:22,000
A structural coincidence? Or could it be that both were inspired by the same designers?

515
00:49:23,000 --> 00:49:31,000
A couple theories for that. Okay, one, maybe they were all taught the same thing by an extraterrestrial race.

516
00:49:32,000 --> 00:49:39,000
Two, there were ancient travelers from within this planet who went from one area to another over the thousands of past years.

517
00:49:39,000 --> 00:49:49,000
And then there's some skeptics will say, hey, that's the greatest archaeological way to make it, so they just knew it. I don't think that's the case.

518
00:49:53,000 --> 00:49:59,000
At Teotihuacan, here you have a giant pyramid of the Sun and a giant pyramid of the Moon.

519
00:50:00,000 --> 00:50:08,000
According to the legends, these things were built by gods who were giants at the end of one of the destructions of the world.

520
00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:20,000
Civilizations such as the Aztecs and the Mayans and the Hopi Indians of Northern Arizona, they believe that the world has been destroyed four times in the past.

521
00:50:21,000 --> 00:50:24,000
One time by ice, once by fire, once by water.

522
00:50:28,000 --> 00:50:38,000
Each time, mankind rebuilds again. And Teotihuacan supposedly was built just at the beginning of one of these four worlds.

523
00:50:40,000 --> 00:50:47,000
You may ask the question, why build these huge, huge structures? For what purpose?

524
00:50:48,000 --> 00:50:55,000
Well, in Egypt, for example, either the pharaohs had incredible egos and they wanted to outdo themselves, right?

525
00:50:56,000 --> 00:51:06,000
So they built these huge museums for themselves. Or it's also possible that these ancients wanted to leave behind something for us.

526
00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:17,000
It is written in ancient Egyptian texts, the purpose, why the pyramid was built, was to store knowledge.

527
00:51:18,000 --> 00:51:29,000
Three hundred books which allegedly contained the knowledge of the universe, dictated by the guardians of the sky.

528
00:51:29,000 --> 00:51:39,000
Of course, the pyramids aren't the only ancient monuments that continue to baffle scientists and archaeologists.

529
00:51:40,000 --> 00:51:48,000
There are literally hundreds of them and they can be found in every corner of our world.

530
00:51:49,000 --> 00:52:01,000
In a remote area of the Pacific Ocean lies one of the most isolated yet inhabited locations in the world, Easter Island.

531
00:52:08,000 --> 00:52:14,000
Here, over 800 stone guardians called Moai stand watch over the island's coastline.

532
00:52:15,000 --> 00:52:23,000
But are they primitive native carvings or eerie portraits of alien visitors from thousands of years ago?

533
00:52:25,000 --> 00:52:33,000
Whatever they were for, they're made to last for thousands of years, they're built out of blocks of stone that weigh many, many tons.

534
00:52:34,000 --> 00:52:41,000
Not only are people building structures out of these huge, megalithic blocks of stone,

535
00:52:41,000 --> 00:52:44,000
but this was going on around the world.

536
00:52:44,000 --> 00:52:51,000
And yet, supposedly it's just primitive people doing this for no really good reason, it would seem.

537
00:52:51,000 --> 00:52:59,000
I think one of the things that comes into our considerations of what ancient cultures could have accomplished is whether they were able to write it down or not.

538
00:52:59,000 --> 00:53:05,000
We're very tied to if we have evidence that they wrote down how they did it, then we believe we know how they did it.

539
00:53:05,000 --> 00:53:11,000
So, Egypt, we have a lot more writings and drawings that show them building the pyramids, give us an idea of the technology.

540
00:53:11,000 --> 00:53:19,000
If you go somewhere like Easter Island, we don't have any real written evidence of what they did, and sometimes that leads us to question their innovativeness.

541
00:53:24,000 --> 00:53:34,000
3,000 miles away, in the Republic of Bolivia, stonework exists, which is amazingly similar to the statues of Easter Island.

542
00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:43,000
Tijuanaco is, in fact, so ancient that it defies modern dating techniques.

543
00:53:43,000 --> 00:53:51,000
It is estimated to be over 17,000 years old, perhaps the oldest city in the world.

544
00:53:53,000 --> 00:54:04,000
And somehow, the sculptures at Tijuanaco were constructed in the same style and with the same enigmatic expressions as their distant cousins on Easter Island.

545
00:54:06,000 --> 00:54:11,000
A lot of the stuff with Tijuanaco you can see in earlier civilizations.

546
00:54:11,000 --> 00:54:25,000
All the way back before, into the centuries BC in Peru, you see some of these same patterns, some of the same iconography, imagery, and you can see the ancestry of this.

547
00:54:26,000 --> 00:54:39,000
But while tourists flock to the ruins of Tijuanaco, perhaps the most mystifying of all ancient sites lies just a few hundred yards away.

548
00:54:39,000 --> 00:54:51,000
Of relatively little interest to most visitors, Puma Puncu is a field of stone ruins that both thrills and stimulates the imaginations of ancient alien theorists.

549
00:54:56,000 --> 00:55:13,000
In my opinion, the most significant piece of evidence that we have in this entire ancient, asynod puzzle is Puma Puncu in the Highland of Bolivia.

550
00:55:14,000 --> 00:55:29,000
While the pyramids at Giza are incredible feat of achievement, compared to Puma Puncu, the pyramids are child play.

551
00:55:29,000 --> 00:55:51,000
Logic does not exist at Puma Puncu because there we have megalithic structures which just lie about this entire site as if ripped apart by some sort of a great force.

552
00:55:52,000 --> 00:56:01,000
The blocks of Puma Puncu were so finely cut that they once perfectly interlocked, like the pieces of an elaborate puzzle.

553
00:56:01,000 --> 00:56:11,000
But with the nearest quarry over ten miles away, how did these colossal stones, some weighing hundreds of tons, even get here?

554
00:56:12,000 --> 00:56:20,000
We are talking about the place 4000 meter overseas level. That means there are no trees up there which you could use for rollers.

555
00:56:20,000 --> 00:56:24,000
Nothing grows except a few grasses and bushes.

556
00:56:24,000 --> 00:56:45,000
I have stood in front of many monuments, however Puma Puncu takes the crown because what we find there is so inexplicable, so inachievable that the question remains how was it done and for what purposes.

557
00:56:46,000 --> 00:57:14,000
Mainstream archaeologists say that Puma Puncu was built by the Aymara Indians and we would all have to agree that in order to build something like Puma Puncu, you need writing, you need planning and you need some sort of an idea where which piece goes and how it ultimately all fits together.

558
00:57:14,000 --> 00:57:27,000
But there is one thing that all the mainstream archaeologists agree upon that the Aymara didn't have any writing. So how was it possible that they built all of this without plans?

559
00:57:27,000 --> 00:57:52,000
What's really amazing and why the ancient astronaut theorists are so drawn to Puma Puncu and Tijuana Co is that the quality of the stonework and the immense size of these blocks is so incredible and perfect that there's actually evidence of machining and that they were using machine tools to cut these blocks.

560
00:57:52,000 --> 00:58:12,000
One of these platforms is 800 tons and they are so smoothly polished. You have some stone megalithic stones with grooves which are just a few millimetres inside which definitely cannot be made with stone age chisels.

561
00:58:13,000 --> 00:58:17,000
It doesn't work with stone age chisels. So there is another technology behind it.

562
00:58:18,000 --> 00:58:25,000
The lines cut into these rocks are exactly straight and precisely the same depth from one end to the other.

563
00:58:26,000 --> 00:58:45,000
It's as if only master builders were allowed to work there because everything is so precise, everything is so perfect. You wonder how any of this was even possible.

564
00:58:45,000 --> 00:59:00,000
One of the most intriguing things there is that the stones that were used there aren't sandstone, they're granite and diorite.

565
00:59:01,000 --> 00:59:15,000
The only stone that's harder than diorite is diamond. So the only way that this could have been achieved is if the tools were tipped with diamonds.

566
00:59:15,000 --> 00:59:27,000
American professors who were up there with their computer and modern measurements, they were really shocked. In their literature they say it is impossible to reconstruct Puma Puncu. It's absolutely impossible.

567
00:59:28,000 --> 00:59:37,000
But is it really difficult to believe that ancient peoples could have so precisely carved these stones or could build such an incredibly intricate structure from them?

568
00:59:40,000 --> 00:59:52,000
If it was ancient astronauts teaching them these building techniques, why don't we see just perfect almost skyscraper like vertical edifices? Everything was all pyramid like?

569
00:59:52,000 --> 01:00:15,000
Stone cutting techniques have been invented and reinvented and independently invented all over the world. If you think of yourself as a god king and you want to have a structure built that's going to last thousands of years, it's much better to build it out of perfectly fitting stones without mortar that degrades and decays and has to be maintained.

570
01:00:15,000 --> 01:00:21,000
So we see mortarless structures, megalithic structures all over the world.

571
01:00:26,000 --> 01:00:41,000
We have an anomaly here where on one hand these people are supposed to be very primitive. They're just one step out of the stone age. Yet what they're doing are things that we couldn't even do today apparently.

572
01:00:41,000 --> 01:00:53,000
Or would have extreme difficulty. And that is building with these giant blocks of stone, perfectly fitting them together with other blocks, interlocking them.

573
01:00:54,000 --> 01:01:04,000
The ancient people of our time on this planet truly saw strange things. They witnessed bizarre events.

574
01:01:06,000 --> 01:01:14,000
But those stories other than in depictions and some artwork and things like that, they're gone for some reason. They're just gone.

575
01:01:14,000 --> 01:01:34,000
But left behind are incredible things that we have that make you wonder how in the heck were these things built? Those are great mysteries and I think one of the things that keeps people just continuing to push for the answers are the fact that these things are so out there that they can't figure it out.

576
01:01:35,000 --> 01:01:54,000
But uncovering the mystery of just how these incredible structures were built would only solve one piece of the puzzle. Finding out why they were built and how they were used poses equally compelling questions. Questions that may not be answerable here on Earth.

577
01:01:55,000 --> 01:02:13,000
Did aliens really inspire our ancestors to build ancient temples and pyramids? And if they came here, did they leave behind any advanced knowledge of physics, astronomy or mathematics?

578
01:02:14,000 --> 01:02:28,000
If so, is there any evidence that remains to this day? One example might be this one, often described as the world's first mechanical computer. It dates back over 2,000 years.

579
01:02:29,000 --> 01:02:50,000
The Antikythera device was found in 1900 by sponge divers diving off a small island in the Aegean called Antikythera. There was a shipwreck there and in it was a coral encrusted box and it was made of metal alloys.

580
01:02:51,000 --> 01:03:10,000
And it then went to the Athens Museum where a good 50 years later they were able to x-ray this box and they were able to discern cod wheels that were interconnected and give us a very good depiction of what this thing was.

581
01:03:10,000 --> 01:03:15,000
And it is a computer. It's a really sophisticated machine.

582
01:03:20,000 --> 01:03:31,000
It's a very interesting piece of technology because it serves two purposes. One was that it was an astronomical device where you could by using it chart your position to the stars and navigate your way through the seas.

583
01:03:31,000 --> 01:03:43,000
It was also an astrological device so that someone could tell you, ah, if you were born on this date and your planet sign is this, then certain things are going to happen to you when the planets are in this alignment.

584
01:03:43,000 --> 01:03:53,000
So it was a very interesting piece of technology that literally had more complicated gears and inner workings than a modern day Swiss watch.

585
01:03:53,000 --> 01:04:01,000
And it's found to be dated, I think, like 200 BC. So it's really an anomaly as to who could have created that and what it was being used for.

586
01:04:02,000 --> 01:04:16,000
When archaeologists first started to examine this thing in the 1950s, they said that they never could conceive of the ancient Greeks having such complicated machinery.

587
01:04:16,000 --> 01:04:22,000
And in fact they said this was tantamount to finding a jet airplane in the tomb of King Tut.

588
01:04:32,000 --> 01:04:40,000
Even older than the Antikythera mechanism, are these carvings on a wall at the Dendera Temple complex in Egypt?

589
01:04:40,000 --> 01:04:48,000
To some, the strange designs look eerily similar to objects very much in use today.

590
01:04:49,000 --> 01:05:00,000
In Egypt, there is this underground crypt at Dendera that was always secret and only the high priests had access to that crypt.

591
01:05:00,000 --> 01:05:04,000
And it's very hot in there, very narrow, low ceiling.

592
01:05:04,000 --> 01:05:12,000
And on the walls, you have these reliefs of what looks like ancient light bulbs.

593
01:05:12,000 --> 01:05:21,000
Because we have to question one thing. How did the ancient Egyptians light the inside of their tombs?

594
01:05:24,000 --> 01:05:33,000
According to most mainstream archaeologists, torches were used by the ancient Egyptians to light the pitch black chambers of tombs and temples.

595
01:05:33,000 --> 01:05:39,000
Yet nowhere on the ceilings is there even the slightest evidence of soot or smoke residue.

596
01:05:40,000 --> 01:05:47,000
But if torches weren't used, how else could these ancient rooms and hallways have been illuminated?

597
01:05:52,000 --> 01:05:59,000
Another theory that was proposed is that the light was directed from outside by copper mirrors.

598
01:05:59,000 --> 01:06:02,000
And then there was light.

599
01:06:03,000 --> 01:06:05,000
Hey, that is a neat trick.

600
01:06:05,000 --> 01:06:18,000
And they've actually tried to recreate that theory, but unfortunately they failed because only after a few corners, the sunlight dissipated because the copper mirrors were too weak.

601
01:06:21,000 --> 01:06:32,000
Also, there isn't enough oxygen inside those tombs with which to support or feed a flame of a torch.

602
01:06:33,000 --> 01:06:44,000
I was once inside the king's chamber, inside the pyramid of Giza, and somebody turned off the lights and immediately we were in pitch darkness.

603
01:06:44,000 --> 01:06:51,000
And I said no problem, I'll just take out my lighter from my satchel and I turned on the lighter and it didn't work.

604
01:06:52,000 --> 01:06:55,000
So how were the insides of their temples lit?

605
01:06:55,000 --> 01:07:01,000
I mean, the only remaining solution is by some sort of an artificial light source.

606
01:07:02,000 --> 01:07:06,000
And that is, for example, a light bulb.

607
01:07:06,000 --> 01:07:14,000
So as an underground crypt at Dendera, we find reliefs of such light bulbs.

608
01:07:16,000 --> 01:07:21,000
Egyptologists' explanation of this, and they have to have some explanation.

609
01:07:21,000 --> 01:07:23,000
There's got to be one.

610
01:07:23,000 --> 01:07:24,000
It has to be pretty mundane.

611
01:07:24,000 --> 01:07:26,000
It can't be that it's an electrical device.

612
01:07:26,000 --> 01:07:31,000
Their explanation is that it is a lotus flower.

613
01:07:31,000 --> 01:07:39,000
And what appears to be a bulb around is the aroma of the lotus flower.

614
01:07:39,000 --> 01:07:43,000
And so it's just a very odd depiction of a flower.

615
01:07:43,000 --> 01:07:47,000
But another explanation, of course, would be they actually had electrical lights.

616
01:07:48,000 --> 01:07:55,000
But if the ancient Egyptians had used some kind of electric light to illuminate their passageways,

617
01:07:55,000 --> 01:08:00,000
why does the visual evidence exist only in the temple at Dendera?

618
01:08:00,000 --> 01:08:04,000
In Egypt you had different areas of specialty.

619
01:08:04,000 --> 01:08:14,000
And Dendera was the area where the knowledge of the light-giving source was kept.

620
01:08:14,000 --> 01:08:19,000
And this secret knowledge was kept by the high priests.

621
01:08:19,000 --> 01:08:24,000
And they're the only ones who were privy to this type of information.

622
01:08:24,000 --> 01:08:34,000
Because Dendera was the special place where this specific knowledge was guarded and kept.

623
01:08:35,000 --> 01:08:40,000
The scientific community is not saying, oh, there aren't extraterrestrials, or they never did it.

624
01:08:40,000 --> 01:08:43,000
They are judging whether or not this is a valid scientific theory.

625
01:08:43,000 --> 01:08:45,000
And what do I mean by that?

626
01:08:45,000 --> 01:08:51,000
For something to be a scientific theory, it really needs to be something you can test with an obvious experiment.

627
01:08:51,000 --> 01:08:58,000
But how could the ancient Egyptians have used anything resembling a modern-day light bulb without access to electricity?

628
01:08:58,000 --> 01:09:03,000
After all, electricity wouldn't be discovered for thousands of years.

629
01:09:03,000 --> 01:09:09,000
That is, of course, with the exception of what scientists call the Baghdad battery.

630
01:09:09,000 --> 01:09:12,000
The Baghdad battery was discovered in ancient Iraq.

631
01:09:12,000 --> 01:09:17,000
Scholars today say there's no way that ancient man was using electricity or light bulbs.

632
01:09:17,000 --> 01:09:22,000
So they look at this Baghdad battery and there's about a dozen of them that have been found in Iraq.

633
01:09:22,000 --> 01:09:26,000
And the only mainstream theory is that they were using it for electroplating jewelry.

634
01:09:27,000 --> 01:09:34,000
Two major proponents of ancient alien theory, Jason Martel and Georgiosucholos,

635
01:09:34,000 --> 01:09:38,000
demonstrate just how the Baghdad battery could generate electricity.

636
01:09:38,000 --> 01:09:41,000
Using a modern mock-up of the device.

637
01:09:41,000 --> 01:09:44,000
Well, basically this is made out of a clay pot.

638
01:09:44,000 --> 01:09:46,000
Clay just found naturally in that region in southern Iraq.

639
01:09:46,000 --> 01:09:54,000
And then they would use a small copper lining and something along the lines of an asphalt stopper wrapped around an iron rod.

640
01:09:54,000 --> 01:09:56,000
And these all applied together.

641
01:09:56,000 --> 01:10:02,000
And the combination of some weak acidic acid, vinegar, grape juice, orange juice, in this case wine,

642
01:10:02,000 --> 01:10:07,000
would be able to generate a charge by combining these elements with the iron rod and the copper.

643
01:10:07,000 --> 01:10:11,000
And the combination of that creates an abundance of electricity.

644
01:10:11,000 --> 01:10:16,000
So what we're going to do is basically just fill the clay pot with some orange juice here.

645
01:10:16,000 --> 01:10:18,000
I'll try not to spill it too much.

646
01:10:18,000 --> 01:10:21,000
And then we'll go ahead and put the copper rod back in there.

647
01:10:21,000 --> 01:10:22,000
Copper and iron rod.

648
01:10:22,000 --> 01:10:25,000
We'll give it a moment to kind of fill that copper area there.

649
01:10:25,000 --> 01:10:32,000
And then by turning on the voltmeter and applying this to each side, we should be able to generate a charge.

650
01:10:33,000 --> 01:10:34,000
And there it goes.

651
01:10:34,000 --> 01:10:35,000
Into the positive.

652
01:10:38,000 --> 01:10:45,000
And if we give it some time to get the electrolytes really buzzing in there, you'll see that this volt will actually continue to rise.

653
01:10:45,000 --> 01:10:52,000
But while some see the Baghdad battery as evidence that man was sparked on by extraterrestrial wisdom,

654
01:10:52,000 --> 01:10:56,000
others look at it and simply say, so what?

655
01:10:56,000 --> 01:11:00,000
You could take some ancient technology like the Baghdad battery,

656
01:11:01,000 --> 01:11:08,000
which probably was used for something like metal plating in which you just mix chemicals and it has certain chemical reactions to it

657
01:11:08,000 --> 01:11:10,000
that they're using for this reason.

658
01:11:10,000 --> 01:11:14,000
And we can take and put a voltmeter on it and go, oh look, we're able to get a reading out of it.

659
01:11:14,000 --> 01:11:16,000
Well, so what?

660
01:11:16,000 --> 01:11:18,000
That's just a chemical reaction.

661
01:11:18,000 --> 01:11:25,000
If they were using it, say this battery to operate other machines, where are the other machines?

662
01:11:25,000 --> 01:11:31,000
If they were sending the electricity down wires, where are all the wires that would have been all over the culture?

663
01:11:31,000 --> 01:11:40,000
In other words, it's not likely a one-off invention like that is going to survive without all the other inventions that would have been there at the same time.

664
01:11:40,000 --> 01:11:47,000
It is a battery. Everybody agrees with that, but nobody knows why they made it and how they made it.

665
01:11:47,000 --> 01:11:49,000
What mind would think of that?

666
01:11:49,000 --> 01:11:53,000
You know, electrical current that several thousand years ago?

667
01:11:53,000 --> 01:11:56,000
It's very strange, but it's clearly a battery.

668
01:11:56,000 --> 01:12:06,000
The whole idea that ancient civilizations actually had knowledge of electricity and used electricity is an accepted archaeological fact today.

669
01:12:06,000 --> 01:12:17,000
Just like in our own civilization where about 200 years ago Benjamin Franklin and other scientists began experimenting with simple electrical devices,

670
01:12:17,000 --> 01:12:25,000
we now have evidence that over 3,000 years ago people were also experimenting with electrical devices.

671
01:12:25,000 --> 01:12:33,000
Where might it have led them? What other electrical devices would they have been able to create?

672
01:12:33,000 --> 01:12:38,000
I believe they probably created all kinds of electrical devices.

673
01:12:38,000 --> 01:12:44,000
Tombs, temples, ancient light bulbs, even electricity.

674
01:12:44,000 --> 01:12:53,000
Here on Earth exists evidence of architectural and technological wonders centuries before we ever believed them possible.

675
01:12:53,000 --> 01:12:59,000
But if evidence of ancient astronauts exists here on Earth, what about elsewhere?

676
01:12:59,000 --> 01:13:05,000
Might we find what we are looking for by looking in the sky?

677
01:13:06,000 --> 01:13:22,000
Here at the ancient city of Tehuotihuacan in Mexico, evidence suggests that ancient cultures possessed an incredibly accurate knowledge of our neighboring planets.

678
01:13:22,000 --> 01:13:33,000
Some scholars have even interpreted the number and orientation of its pyramids to perfectly reflect a model of our own solar system.

679
01:13:34,000 --> 01:13:50,000
Along the Avenir de los Muertos, the Avenue of the Dead, the pyramids there align in perfect distance of each of the orbits of our planets in our solar system.

680
01:13:51,000 --> 01:14:01,000
Perhaps significant is the fact that the large pyramid of the Sun is positioned at the center of the other structures,

681
01:14:01,000 --> 01:14:10,000
reflecting the fact that the Sun is at the center of our solar system and that the planets revolve around it.

682
01:14:11,000 --> 01:14:17,000
It was a known fact back then already that the Sun was at the center of our solar system,

683
01:14:17,000 --> 01:14:24,000
which Western science didn't find out until much, much later.

684
01:14:26,000 --> 01:14:36,000
But just how could Tehuotihuacan's designers have known so early on that the planets in our solar system revolved around the Sun?

685
01:14:37,000 --> 01:14:44,000
Didn't that take many more centuries of scientific progress and investigation to figure out?

686
01:14:45,000 --> 01:14:57,000
Interestingly enough, debunkers will say, oh, this is just coincidence that these pyramids are aligned with the planets of our solar system.

687
01:14:57,000 --> 01:15:08,000
But if we go on the other side of the planet to Stonehenge, we have another ancient site, which is way older, by the way, than Tehuotihuacan,

688
01:15:08,000 --> 01:15:17,000
where if you look at Stonehenge from a bird's eye view, you see that these are all concentric circles.

689
01:15:18,000 --> 01:15:28,000
And each of these circles corresponds exactly with the orbit of all of our planets in our solar system,

690
01:15:28,000 --> 01:15:33,000
so we have two places on Earth where we have the same thing.

691
01:15:37,000 --> 01:15:45,000
In recent years, Stonehenge has also been interpreted by some archaeologists to be a kind of astronomical calendar,

692
01:15:46,000 --> 01:15:50,000
one which could be used to calculate events such as solar eclipses.

693
01:15:50,000 --> 01:16:01,000
But if that were true, whoever aligned these massive stones on the barren English landscape would have to have had precise astronomical knowledge of the path of the Sun.

694
01:16:02,000 --> 01:16:19,000
Built between the 7th and 9th centuries, the stone temples of Tikal tower more than 200 feet above the Guatemalan rainforest.

695
01:16:19,000 --> 01:16:30,000
Tikal is home to one of the largest excavation sites in the world, one where thousands of structures still remain buried beneath the jungle.

696
01:16:30,000 --> 01:16:38,000
According to most scientists, Tikal's pyramids played an essential part in helping the Mayans devise their calendar.

697
01:16:40,000 --> 01:16:44,000
By aligning the sightlines between the highest points of the structures,

698
01:16:44,000 --> 01:16:52,000
ancient astronomers could pinpoint the most important dates of the year, such as an upcoming equinox or solstice.

699
01:16:53,000 --> 01:17:07,000
But what also excites ancient astronaut theorists is how perfectly the layout of Tikal's pyramids correlate to the star map of the Pleiades Orion region of the sky.

700
01:17:07,000 --> 01:17:13,000
An overhead view of the structures almost exactly mirrors the alignment of the constellation.

701
01:17:14,000 --> 01:17:22,000
This same outline has been spotted in an area far from Tikal, much, much farther.

702
01:17:22,000 --> 01:17:32,000
Recently discovered on Mars is a cluster of landforms that offers a near-perfect replication of the pyramid pattern of Tikal.

703
01:17:32,000 --> 01:17:37,000
Three distinct locations, one unique pattern.

704
01:17:38,000 --> 01:17:41,000
Coincidence or design?

705
01:17:44,000 --> 01:17:59,000
At Tikal, the legends and the mythologies that we have all speak of a time when the gods intermingled and interconnected with our ancestors.

706
01:17:59,000 --> 01:18:12,000
So Tikal also was built as a message for future generations to see that a long, long time ago we were visited by extraterrestrials.

707
01:18:12,000 --> 01:18:18,000
Someone who had seen this had to have actually relayed the information to them because they couldn't have just guessed.

708
01:18:18,000 --> 01:18:25,000
So it really starts to raise the question of saying this ancient astronaut theory really needs to have more light shed on the topic.

709
01:18:30,000 --> 01:18:36,000
It's certainly possible that the ancient people not only measured all of these astronomy events,

710
01:18:36,000 --> 01:18:43,000
but were able to come up with a mathematical theory to put them together and then to predict new things.

711
01:18:43,000 --> 01:18:46,000
We shouldn't think that the ancient people were dummies.

712
01:18:47,000 --> 01:18:53,000
Early man, people in ancient times, didn't have dashboard-mounted GPS units.

713
01:18:54,000 --> 01:19:00,000
They had the path of the sun through the sky, the path of the moon through the sky.

714
01:19:00,000 --> 01:19:02,000
They could see the stars at night.

715
01:19:02,000 --> 01:19:06,000
These were permanent fixtures that they could navigate from.

716
01:19:06,000 --> 01:19:15,000
So it's not surprising at all that almost every culture recorded astronomical phenomenon.

717
01:19:15,000 --> 01:19:18,000
We never look up at the sky and enjoy the beauty of it.

718
01:19:18,000 --> 01:19:23,000
Ancient people, the skies would be so dark and the stars would be so bright.

719
01:19:23,000 --> 01:19:32,000
Not only that, but they relied on the sky for directions, for seasons in which to plant, and for a variety of things.

720
01:19:32,000 --> 01:19:40,000
Today, with our GPS units and navigation systems and computers, we don't need to look at the sky.

721
01:19:41,000 --> 01:19:49,000
I want to be very clear about one thing, that our ancestors were as smart as we are today.

722
01:19:49,000 --> 01:19:55,000
However, I don't believe that ancient astronauts visited the Earth in a remote past.

723
01:19:55,000 --> 01:20:03,000
I am convinced of it, because of all the countless indications and pieces of evidence that we can find

724
01:20:03,000 --> 01:20:09,000
from all around the world in different ancient cultures, in different mythologies and legends.

725
01:20:09,000 --> 01:20:19,000
I know it happened, because if you look at all the pieces, it's the only conclusion that you can draw.

726
01:20:21,000 --> 01:20:27,000
But just why were ancient people so focused on the sky and the stars in the first place?

727
01:20:28,000 --> 01:20:36,000
Were they waiting for something to happen? Or perhaps, for something, or someone to return?

728
01:20:44,000 --> 01:20:52,000
Four decades may have passed, but the ideas put forth by Eric von Daniken are still captivating his followers

729
01:20:52,000 --> 01:20:56,000
and frustrating his skeptics to this day.

730
01:20:56,000 --> 01:21:06,000
Like an Old Testament prophet or an ancient shaman, the author is still out there, spreading his firmly held message that we are not alone.

731
01:21:06,000 --> 01:21:12,000
The time of the stone has not crossed over thousands of kilometers, it has just drawn a line, partly across the mountains.

732
01:21:12,000 --> 01:21:20,000
And our stone-time friends have not laid thousands of stones in geometric shapes. Here the regime was led.

733
01:21:37,000 --> 01:21:43,000
The classic Battle Star Galactica series started with a narration that said,

734
01:21:43,000 --> 01:21:48,000
there are those who believe that life here began out there with tribes of humans far across the universe,

735
01:21:48,000 --> 01:21:51,000
that may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians and the Toltecs and the Mayans.

736
01:21:51,000 --> 01:21:55,000
You know, that's straight out of von Daniken as in that kind of belief, you know.

737
01:21:55,000 --> 01:22:02,000
It puts us in contact with an idea of a mythological intelligence, and that is one of the things that we as human beings crave desperately,

738
01:22:02,000 --> 01:22:07,000
is to know that we are not alone in the world and that somebody else out there is either looking after us

739
01:22:07,000 --> 01:22:10,000
or coming to fight for us and that will unite us against a common enemy.

740
01:22:15,000 --> 01:22:24,000
I was reading a lot of books from Eric von Daniken and I can imagine that's the true what he wrote in his books.

741
01:22:25,000 --> 01:22:32,000
And so I can imagine this, that we had help from aliens, but I don't know, I'm not sure.

742
01:22:34,000 --> 01:22:39,000
We only know so much in this world and what we do know is so limited and every day we're finding more.

743
01:22:39,000 --> 01:22:43,000
That requires us to ask more questions and bigger questions and think bigger.

744
01:22:44,000 --> 01:22:51,000
It's possible that something from another planet came, some other life form, intelligent life form came and did this.

745
01:22:52,000 --> 01:22:58,000
I mean, who knows? It could be because the origins of many things are lost in antiquity.

746
01:22:58,000 --> 01:23:03,000
All we have are remnants and shreds of evidence to suggest what might have happened.

747
01:23:04,000 --> 01:23:11,000
Someone told me that it was proven that aliens had a part in this. I wouldn't be that surprised. Why not?

748
01:23:12,000 --> 01:23:20,000
To be honest, ancient astronaut theory has never cropped up in a discussion with my colleagues.

749
01:23:20,000 --> 01:23:30,000
I don't care how many pints into it we've been, we have never discussed ancient astronaut theory in any credible way whatsoever.

750
01:23:31,000 --> 01:23:36,000
One of the good things about ancient astronaut theory is that it makes us think.

751
01:23:36,000 --> 01:23:41,000
It brings out the, what about this? What about that?

752
01:23:41,000 --> 01:23:43,000
We need explanations for all these things.

753
01:23:43,000 --> 01:23:58,000
And I think that one of the main reasons why mainstream archaeologists get a real knee-jerk reaction to the ancient astronaut theory is that it's very disturbing to them because they don't have all the answers.

754
01:23:58,000 --> 01:24:05,000
Now some of them may believe that life could exist in the universe, but their bottom line is, show me the proof.

755
01:24:05,000 --> 01:24:11,000
Show it to me for real. I want to see the spaceship. I want to see something concrete.

756
01:24:11,000 --> 01:24:16,000
Not just a few pictures that everybody can interpret as being this or that.

757
01:24:21,000 --> 01:24:25,000
Far-fetched, ridiculous, insane.

758
01:24:25,000 --> 01:24:33,000
Ancient aliens visiting Earth centuries ago, building monuments, influencing scripture.

759
01:24:34,000 --> 01:24:37,000
But what if it all turned out to be true?

760
01:24:38,000 --> 01:24:48,000
What would happen if just one piece of evidence turned up, one stone, one key, that proved that Fontanacan had been right all along?

761
01:24:49,000 --> 01:24:53,000
And if he is right, what does that suggest about our future?

762
01:24:54,000 --> 01:24:59,000
If alien visitors had come here before, would they come again?

763
01:25:04,000 --> 01:25:11,000
Even I think the idea of aliens and them visiting us is very exciting and interesting and it would be really cool if that happened.

764
01:25:11,000 --> 01:25:15,000
So it gets people excited about the question, maybe they start thinking about it.

765
01:25:15,000 --> 01:25:21,000
And like many things, they might ultimately come to thinking about the physics or the archaeology and get involved in the scientific process.

766
01:25:21,000 --> 01:25:25,000
So that can be a positive side effect of these theories and their popularization.

767
01:25:26,000 --> 01:25:36,000
If it turns out that the ancient astronaut theory is wrong, I will be the first one to say, okay, no problem.

768
01:25:36,000 --> 01:25:42,000
But so far, certain pieces of evidence have not been debunked.

769
01:25:42,000 --> 01:26:02,000
If the ancient alien astronaut theory is somehow proven to be true, this would be a huge boon to my work and to the search for other planets like Earth with life on them.

770
01:26:02,000 --> 01:26:08,000
Because if alien astronauts have visited Earth in the distant past, it means they're pretty nearby.

771
01:26:08,000 --> 01:26:13,000
And it means that we don't have to look very far to find planets like Earth with signs of life on them.

772
01:26:14,000 --> 01:26:21,000
But evidence has to be treated with a great deal of caution because it has different meanings.

773
01:26:22,000 --> 01:26:27,000
I'm not sure what the reaction of the population will be.

774
01:26:28,000 --> 01:26:38,000
It will strengthen the general concept that our history of religions in the world needs to be looked at again with more respect and also with more wonder.

775
01:26:38,000 --> 01:26:43,000
Meaning, what are we supposed to make of this now and what are we supposed to be doing with this now?

776
01:26:44,000 --> 01:26:56,000
If science detects life on Mars, if science detects a UFO, then we need to take what science is saying to us and begin to rethink about ourselves.

777
01:26:56,000 --> 01:27:03,000
In light of the possibility of new life, does that change our understanding of God?

778
01:27:03,000 --> 01:27:06,000
It should have anything broadened it.

779
01:27:06,000 --> 01:27:10,000
If we do find alien life, we should rejoice.

780
01:27:12,000 --> 01:27:19,000
And honestly, the way things are going on this planet right now, I would welcome a visitation every once in a while. A little help.

781
01:27:20,000 --> 01:27:29,000
There is no doubt that my hypothesis will be accepted by the mainstream. It's maybe a question of just five or ten years.

782
01:27:31,000 --> 01:27:38,000
Sooner or later we will have contact with someone out there and then the thinking, they will return.

783
01:27:38,000 --> 01:27:44,000
And if you don't listen to Eric von Denneken, you will have the shock of the gods.