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Human corpses preserved for thousands of years.

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The ancient Egyptians were convinced that the dead could and would be awakened one day.

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Strange relics placed on the bodies of the dead.

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One of them had images of winged beings.

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And monks buried while still alive.

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These funerary rites would be all about humans becoming not just like the gods, but gods themselves.

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Mysterious burial rituals and elaborate mummification processes have been found on every continent on the planet.

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But why? Were the ancients simply trying to cheat death?

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Or could there be another, more otherworldly explanation?

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It is possible that mummies were being preserved so that they may be reunited with the gods that actually started their culture.

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Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings.

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What if it were true?

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Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history?

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And if so, might the ultimate proof be hidden in the secrets of the mummies?

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Vatican City, April 2, 2005.

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Pope John Paul II dies, bringing his historic 26-year papacy to a close.

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His corpse is chemically preserved and transported to St. Peter's Basilica for public viewing.

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In a funeral service watched by millions, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger speaks of the beloved Pawn of Soul being guided to the eternal glory of heaven.

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His body is then interred in a large underground tomb beneath the church.

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We can see that a great deal of care was taken to preserve Pope John Paul's body.

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The idea is that death, in fact, is just the beginning of this journey.

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Many modern funerals, those that take place in Europe and the Americas, many of the initial ideas actually have their roots in ancient Egypt.

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In ancient Egypt, bodies were mummified and put into a sarcophagi that resemble human beings, and this is still done today in many religious traditions, including the Roman Catholic Church.

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Mummification is any process used to prevent the decaying of the body that naturally occurs after death.

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The preserved body of Pope John Paul II is essentially a mummy, and in fact, modern-day mummies can be found all over the world.

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When Communist Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, Russian scientists preserved his body by removing the organs and replacing them with a secret system to simulate the movement of bodily fluids.

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The process has kept him looking astonishingly lifelike to this day and was also used to preserve the bodies of Joseph Stalin and Ho Chi Minh.

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North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Chinese Emperor Mao Zedong also remain preserved in remarkable condition.

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But it is not just world leaders who are being mummified.

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Anybody that is involved in a funeral home is, in effect, undergoing a type of mummification.

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But why do so many people go to such great lengths to preserve the body after death?

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Our ancestors believed in an afterlife and that the proper ceremonial rights at time of death allowed the departed to travel to the reward to the next life.

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It was often imagined to be in the heavens, the stars, and that this travel allowed the person to come into their full reward.

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We have all over the world people continue to preserve bodies and it's because there is this idea of living forever, that death is not the end, it's a beginning, it's a transitory state.

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For some reason everyone has this idea that we need the body to live forever.

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If people truly believe there was a spiritual essence that infused the body that left at the moment of death, they can't justify mummification.

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What can explain the fact that for thousands of years in cultures throughout the world, people have held a belief that the preservation of the body is necessary to transition into the afterlife?

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Ancient astronaut theorists believe clues can be found hidden beneath the desert sands of Upper Egypt.

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The Valley of the Kings, located on the western bank of the Nile River, lies one of the most expansive burial grounds in all of Egypt.

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The tombs were constructed between 1539 and 1075 BC for pharaohs and other nobility.

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To date, 63 tombs have been discovered in the Valley of the Kings.

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One of the best preserved is that of pharaoh Ramses VI, who ruled from approximately 1145 to 1137 BC.

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More than 4000 years ago, King Ramses would have started taking this to become his tomb, where he called it his house of eternity.

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For ancient Egyptians, a tomb wasn't just a place where they would end up dead.

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A tomb was a place where they would start their eternal life.

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The Egyptians believed that in death, the soul would split into several parts and begin the journey to the afterlife.

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But to make this transition, it was essential to reunite the soul with the physical body.

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And while the Egyptians were not the first to mummify their dead, no other ancient culture went to such great lengths to preserve the body and ensure entrance into the next life.

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Ancient Egyptians would put a body that needed to be mummified in a dry room.

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They would first take out the internal organs and they packed that body with natron salt to start the drying process.

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And then they would remove the brain.

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And then they would rinse the body with sweet-smelling oils and they'd cover the entire body in natron salt.

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And it would stay that way for about 35 to 70 days.

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Once the body was all dried out, they would wrap the entire body, putting amulets and other special jeweled objects in the linen, and then once it was completely wrapped, and be done.

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The Egyptians understood the most important factor in mummification, the removal of fluids, which ensures that bacteria cannot survive and the body will not decay.

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Although archaeologists have discovered much about how these mummies were prepared, the Egyptians left behind no texts or instructions on mummification.

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Just how the Egyptians came to create this complex practice remains a mystery.

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But they did leave behind extensive records regarding their thoughts on the afterlife.

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This right here is a very good depiction of the journey of the afterlife with King Ramesses.

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You see him here on a solar barge being protected by all the different gods behind him, goddess Isis and goddess Osiris.

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This right here is God Anubis, and God Anubis is the God of the mummification.

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The most important story in Egyptian mythology is the God Osiris, how his brother set coveted his brother's power and killed him.

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Then his wife Isis, in grief, got help from Anubis, who then helped Isis breathe life back into him.

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To survive into the next life with the help of Anubis, the inventor of embalming and mummification.

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The mummification process in Egypt has often been related to the star Sirius, which we call the dog-star.

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And the mummification rites were overseen by the Egyptian god Anubis, who was a jackal-headed god.

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And so you have to wonder if Anubis wasn't some real physical extraterrestrial god.

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The ancient Egyptian temple walls are covered with images of transformation.

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And what it reveals is that their core sacred science was about human transformation or ascension into celestial beings.

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So you wonder, is it possible it's because those who originally taught us the concept came from the stars?

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Could it be that the ancient Egyptians beliefs about the afterlife were influenced by extraterrestrial visitors?

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Was it from these visitors that they learned the process of mummification?

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And if so, what was their ultimate agenda?

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Perhaps the answers can be found in ancient mummies that predate the Egyptians by thousands of years.

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Arika Chile, 1983

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Workers digging a trench in this coastal city, just seven miles from the Peruvian border, make a remarkable discovery.

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They unearth a cemetery containing 96 mummies from the prehistoric Chinchoro culture.

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Scientists determined that some of the remains date back over 7,000 years, making these the oldest known mummies in the world.

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The Chinchoro were fishermen who lived along the ocean in Chile and Peru.

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And in fact, 4,000 years before the ancient Egyptians started doing it, the Chinchoro were mummifying their dead in South America.

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The Chinchurros would open up the cavity of the body, they would take out all the organs, they would put sand and grass and other things in it.

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Inside the body, they would carefully cover it with mud and then they'd make mud masks over their face.

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It's a very elaborate system, embalming these things.

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The Chinchoro method of mummification is strikingly similar to the process used by the Egyptians thousands of years later.

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But why was this strange burial ritual continued? Not just in Egypt, but in civilizations across the ancient world.

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El Castillo de Huerme, Peru, January 2013.

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Researchers announced that they'd discovered an archaeological rarity, an untouched, 1300-year-old royal tomb from the Huari Empire.

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A predecessor to the Inca, the Huari civilization thrived in central Peru between 600 and 1100 AD, before mysteriously disappearing.

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Inside the tomb was a treasure trove of gold, textiles, artifacts, and 63 mummified women, including three Huari queens.

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From the three roiled women, one of them had earrings that had images of winged beings.

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These winged anthropomorphic birds that we see in religious art, happen from the very earliest art we know of in South America.

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And that's something, also, that you see at Tewanaku, where winged beings are running towards Viracocha, in the center of the famous door of the sun.

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So why are these winged beings, then, on jewelry with the Huari people? And we find that with Egyptians, too.

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The Egyptian god, Thoth, is depicted in Egyptian iconography as a half-bird, half-man deity.

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And it was Thoth who gave the knowledge of mummification to Isis.

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What's interesting is that there are other cultures around the world that also have half-bird, half-human beings that aren't treated as gods.

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This suggests that there was some global culture of extraterrestrial visitors here who were teaching this mummification as a technology.

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Is it possible that the Huari images of winged gods really represent extraterrestrials who came down from the sky?

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Did they visit not just Peru, but ancient cultures across the world?

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And does the fact that these images are found on Huari mummies suggest that this was a science brought to planet Earth by other worldly beings?

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Uthkubamba Valley, Peru

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Perched on a mountain cliff in this isolated region of the Amazon stands six massive clay sarcophagi, known by locals as simply the ancient wise men.

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Researchers estimate these eight-foot clay coffins were constructed between 1100 and 1300 A.D.

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They were built to house the mummified remains of elite members of the Chacha Poya tribe, a pre-Columbian civilization of fierce warriors.

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So we don't know much about the Chacha Poyos people who they were.

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They seem to be very different from the other tribes in Peru and just exactly where they had come from and where they went is today a complete mystery.

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I don't know of any other culture in South America that created sarcophagus or coffins.

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These coffins were big and they were made in the form of humans, not unlike the sarcophaguses in Egypt.

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The Chacha Poya mummies were buried in a fetal position and this is interesting.

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The fetal position suggests the possibility that the mummification rite was going to lead to a new birth.

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It's like the idea that there's a new incubation and this may explain why we see mummification not just with the Chacha Poya,

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but we also see it in Egypt and this mummification technology on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean does suggest that these people are after some sort of goal that we don't yet understand in modern times.

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Could mummification have been an attempt by the ancients to not only preserve the body after death, but to enable the dead to be reborn,

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a technique used by extraterrestrials to achieve power over death?

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Perhaps further clues can be found by examining mummies made not from the bodies of the dead,

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but from the bodies of people buried alive.

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Mount Yudono, Japan.

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In the 1200-year-old Dainichi-bo temple at the base of this holy mountain,

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sitting on an altar within a glass case, he's the mummy of the revered Buddhist monk, Daijuku Bosatsu Shinokai Shonen.

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Shonen is what is known in Japan as Sokoshinbutsu, or a living Buddha.

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He died in 1783 at the age of 96, but shockingly, this is not when the mummification process was started.

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It began six years before his death.

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This ritual of self-mummification was commonly practiced by monks in the Shingon sect of Buddhism in northern Japan between the 11th and 19th centuries.

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They would willingly embark on a process of self-mortification which was tantamount to suicide.

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The first phase would last about a thousand days, and they would begin the self-mummification process by embarking on a very rigorous, low-calorie diet.

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In the second phase of the process, the practitioner would be imbibing the Urushi tea.

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Now, the Urushi tea is highly toxic.

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However, it was believed to lacker basically the tissues and organs from the inside out in order to favor the mummification process.

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And because of its toxicity, the flesh so poisonous that even maggots would not consume it.

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When they were nearly dead, they would go into a small chamber just big enough to sit in the lotus position.

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It would be sealed up except for a reed that allowed a little air in, and inside the monk had a bell.

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One day, the bell would not ring. The followers would withdraw the reed and seal up the chamber.

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After one thousand days, they would open it to see what had happened.

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If the bodies had mummified, they were considered living Buddhas,

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and they were redressed in sacerdotal robes and displayed in special temple halls called Sokobutsudo.

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If they had not mummified, an exorcism was performed and they were simply buried.

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All though hundreds of monks tried to attain Sokobutsudo, only twenty-four are known to have succeeded.

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But why would these devout followers of Buddha have endured such pain in order to mummify their own bodies?

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One of the central beliefs of Buddhism is reincarnation.

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But according to the Shingon sect, those who successfully complete the self-mummification process become higher beings.

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The idea was they didn't think they were dying.

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They perceived this as a state of suspended animation. It wasn't death for them, it wasn't life, it was somewhere in between.

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They needed the body preserved to enter this other dimension of reality and to continue life, although it's not life as we would interpret it.

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You do not have to reborn, because then you become a living Buddha.

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You have already attained your nirvana, so that your body remains kind of immortal in a sense.

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They were trying to emulate these high ranking or highly achieving spiritually speaking beings such as Buddhas or Bodhisattvas.

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But what did it mean to a Shingon monk to become a living Buddha and transition to a higher realm?

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Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the life of the original Buddha himself.

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The historical Buddha was known as Siddhartha Gautama.

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And he was born around the mid-sixth century BCE.

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He founded the Buddhist tradition in which he expounds on the path to enlightenment.

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It's very important that the historical Buddha was understood as a human that gives every human practitioner access to the same level of ability and enlightenment.

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However, he also took on some magical powers that in some ways brought him much closer to a divine being or semi-divine being than to a normal mortal human.

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He was known to teleport across the Ganges River, appearing from one side of the river to the other in the blink of an eye.

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When you look at the life of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, he would appear to be somebody that we would maybe call a star child, part human, part extraterrestrial.

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Is it possible that the first Buddha had extraterrestrial origins?

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Might the Shingon monks have believed that through the process of self-mummification, they too could be transformed into more advanced beings?

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Ancient astronaut theorists believe that further answers can be found by examining the story of an Egyptian pharaoh with extraterrestrial origins.

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Amarna, Egypt, 1891.

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Italian archaeologist Alessandro Barcente explores the tomb constructed for the pharaoh Akhenaten, but finds no evidence of his mummy.

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What's really interesting is that the Egyptologists were certain that they would find Akhenaten behind that tomb, and they didn't.

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Just what happened to this revolutionary leader after his death is as mysterious as the pharaoh himself.

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Was he never actually buried in his tomb, or could he have then removed?

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Akhenaten ruled from 1353 BC until his death 17 years later.

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His reign was dominated by controversy when he abandoned the pantheon of old Egyptian gods, and instead demanded that his subjects worship the sun god, Atten.

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The Atten was something that he saw in the sky between two mountains that inspired him to create the sacred city of Amarna.

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Now the typical view is the Atten must be the sun, but it is entirely possible that what Akhenaten was seeing was in fact an extraterrestrial flying craft.

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Did Akhenaten uproot the entire kingdom of Egypt because of an extraterrestrial encounter? Or could there be an even more profound explanation?

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If you compare images of Akhenaten to other depictions of pharaohs, you'll notice that Akhenaten looks very different.

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He had this very bizarre elongated skull, and he had this weird potbelly and weird arms.

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So was he really a human?

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Perhaps Akhenaten was not of this earth.

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While archaeologists have yet to uncover the remains of Akhenaten, ancient astronaut theorists believe that depictions of him having an elongated skull could be more than just artistic license, because there are other mummies that do in fact have unusual skulls.

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Some elongated skulls can be explained by the fact that numerous ancient cultures practiced head binding, a form of body modification where the heads of infants were tightly bound to force their skulls to become conical in shape.

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But several misshapen skulls appear to defy explanation.

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In Peru and Malta, elongated skulls have been discovered that are mysteriously missing a sagittal suture. The fibrous jagged joint found in all human skulls.

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When you compare some of these elongated skulls, some have sutures like we have as humans, and then there are other skulls that do not have the same sutures.

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So is it possible that some of them are of actual extraterrestrial origin?

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It would not surprise me in the least bit. In the least bit.

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Could the elongated skulls found on certain mummies actually be of extraterrestrial origin?

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Might they be proof that humans learn the process of mummification from alien visitors?

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For years, researcher Brian Forster has been studying elongated skulls found in Paracas, Peru, and recent DNA tests have yielded startling results.

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Initial results, though ambiguous, seem to indicate that partial segments of their DNA are not to be found in what is called GenBank, which is the record of human DNA that's been decoded so far.

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Astonishingly, the geneticist who's been studying them has said that their DNA, at least in some aspects, are not human.

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Might the DNA of the mummified Paracas skulls contain the truth about ancient man's contact with extraterrestrials?

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Could it be that the mummy of Ancanatan has never been found because it was deliberately hidden or destroyed to keep us from discovering its alien origins?

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Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that the most compelling evidence of a connection between mummification and extraterrestrials can be found with the Inca,

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who treated the dead as though they were still very much alive.

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Cusco, Peru.

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This sacred city was once the capital of the Inca Empire, and by the 13th century was the center of one of the largest and most sophisticated pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas.

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The Inca were renowned for their proficiency in architecture, and widely regarded as the most important of their many temple complexes was the one known as Coricanja.

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Historical accounts describe it as a magnificent palace of gold that housed the most holy objects of worship for the Inca, the mummies of their dead kings.

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That's where the king did his most important rituals and where the mummies of the previous Sapa Incas or kings were kept, and those mummies were communicated with on a regular basis.

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Even today, descendants of the Inca recreate the centuries-old practice of using the mummies in sacred ceremonies.

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Four times a year they were brought out, and the living descendants would then consult with them about the affairs of state as well as what they should do in the future.

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It was believed that these mummies could communicate with deities or otherworldly beings in this twilight realm, or in this state between life and death.

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They even had people specially trained to take care of the royal mummies, and some of the duties that these caretakers had were interpreting what the mummy wished to say,

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arranging meetings with the living and the dead, and strangely even taking the mummy outside so he could urinate.

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But why would the Inca, the most advanced civilization in South America at the time, treat corpses as though they were living, thinking beings?

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Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the Incan creation story.

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The Incan creation myth describes how the world was created by the ire brothers, and the word ire actually means mummy.

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So written right into the myth from the very beginning is the idea that mummification is of central importance to whomever and whatever these gods are.

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Is it possible that those mythical gods were actually extraterrestrial flesh and blood beings of some kind?

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But if the ire brothers really were extraterrestrials, why would the Inca have used the same term for these alien visitors as they did for their mummified dead?

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Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that the Inca may have witnessed these otherworldly space travelers emerging from a state of suspended animation.

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What if they were trying to mimic whatever it is they saw?

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And so if someone with no technological knowledge witnesses someone who is in suspended animation and then they come alive, they have just witnessed a resurrection of someone, someone coming back from the dead.

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When reality, that was never the case.

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Is it possible that the Inca witnessed alien visitors coming out of hibernation and that this is why they mummified their dead?

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Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and claim that this might also explain mummification in other cultures, most notably the Egyptians.

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It's possible that the extraterrestrials who visited Egypt would have needed to have some sort of hyperbaric isolation chambers to get from their homeworld to here.

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Now if that is true, then it's also possible that the mummification ritual actually originated from this long-term hyperbaric storage that they were doing with their bodies inside sarcophagus-like chambers.

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One idea certainly is that human beings and the societies were seeing extraterrestrials who were wrapped in certain body suits and then they would come back alive.

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They were put in a special suspended animation that was similar to mummification.

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And perhaps this is why the Egyptians were doing mummification.

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Could mummification really have been an attempt by ancient people to imitate extraterrestrial space travelers? Perhaps.

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But ancient astronaut theorists propose that there may be an even more profound explanation that early humans were not simply imitating alien visitors, but intended to join them in the future.

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Juarez, Mexico. 2008.

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Just eight miles southwest of El Paso, Texas, in this notoriously violent border town.

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Dr. Alejandro Hernandez-Cardenas develops a groundbreaking new technique in forensic science.

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By using a secret chemical formula, he is able to rehydrate the flesh of unrecognizable homicide victims, including bodies that were mummified after years of being dried out in the hot desert climate.

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Out of sort of compassion or concern for the huge number of unidentified bodies in Juarez, he figured out a solution that you can place mummified corpse in.

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The corpse becomes recognizable in terms of identifying scars or tattoos.

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The naturally mummified corpses are put in a tech that Dr. Cardenas refers to as the jacuzzi, which holds 60 gallons of his secret formula.

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Over the course of a few days, the shriveled remains are rehydrated to look almost lifelike.

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But as astounding as his formula is, it's not the first time science has attempted to in some way restore a mummified body.

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In 1968, Robert Connolly, a researcher from the University of Liverpool, attempted to virtually regenerate the blood of a completely mummified body.

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Only this mummy was 3,300 years old.

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It was the mummy of Egypt's most famous pharaoh, King Tutankhamen.

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Connolly's method was to combine antigens taken from a skin sample of King Tut with his own blood cells.

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Connolly is actually type O, which means you don't have any antigens on your blood cells.

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He was actually able to put the antigens from King Tut on his sort of clean slate of a blood cell.

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So then recreating whatever blood type the mummy had makes those red blood cells with different blood types.

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And if it's not the correct blood type, which you get is sort of clumping of the blood cells because there's an immune response against them.

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But if it's the correct blood type, then you don't see any sort of immunological response.

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And so in that way they were able to figure out which blood type King Tut possessed.

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Since Connolly's experiment, scientists have gone even further and discovered what they believe is King Tut's true DNA.

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Could the next step be an actual resurrection?

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Was the preservation of the body not just a ritualistic attempt to imitate alien visitors,

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but an actual form of suspended animation?

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But if so, how could they have foreseen such incredible scientific advancements thousands of years ago?

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It is possible that the ancient astronauts taught the Egyptians that mummification was a way of preserving their genetic information in the DNA.

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One of the startling discoveries in the study of mummies in Egypt and elsewhere is that quite a bit of DNA is actually preserved for thousands of years in the mummification process.

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This makes it possible to clone ancient mummies and in a sense bring them back to life.

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It is possible that at some point in the future, if your body had been successfully mummified, that these ancient extraterrestrials were well aware that a clone of who you were before could then be reborn many years later.

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And is it possible that with the magnificence of the DNA and with all the information that it contains, that you might also come back with the memories of what you lived and who you were and what you knew the last time?

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And that may be the purpose which will actually be used in the future, not yet present, but with a technology that we are very rapidly acquiring.

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When the extraterrestrials taught the art of mummification, did they have it in the back of their mind that maybe 5,000 years into the future medical science would advance to the level where we would be able to extract the DNA from those mummies?

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And maybe this is part of the purpose of the mummification is to create this time capsule.

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Could our ancestors really have been taught the process of mummification by extraterrestrial beings?

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Was it their intention that we would eventually develop the technology to retrieve the DNA of the ancient mummies and restore them to life?

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And if we do, might we discover that these human time capsules hold the secrets to our very origins?

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Perhaps one day we will truly be able to re-animate the dead.

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And from these ancient mummies, we will learn the truth about our alien ancestors.