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This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.

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The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily

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the only ones to the mysteries we will examine.

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On a desolate plain near the Peruvian Andes is evidence that thousands of years ago

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man may have known how to fly.

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Huge drawings are etched in the ground.

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They make sense only when viewed from a great height.

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Miles of what looked like modern runways score the desert.

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If they were, what manner of craft landed here?

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Who were the pilots?

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We are conditioned to think that flight is the province of modern man.

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Perhaps we are latecomers to the sky.

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The land we call Peru is both lush jungle and arid plateau.

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The desert plain called Naska is host to a strange menagerie, a nine-fingered monkey,

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a huge ungainly spider, giant birds and mammoth lizards.

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They are cut into the dry earth, visible only from the sky.

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Often as we pursue our studies of ancient civilizations, we're tantalized by discoveries

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that don't seem to fit our comfortable notions about the past.

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Some of these discoveries suggest that early man knew a great deal more about flight

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than we once thought possible.

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There are no written records to guide us as we go in search of man's dream of flight,

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but there are remarkable clues to be found in legend and in monuments of earth and stone.

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Clues that suggest our remote ancestors were not strangers to the sky,

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but they may even have had help in realizing their dream.

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The urge to fly seems to have been a primal one with man, to leave the heaviness of earth,

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to taste the wind and thrill to the rushing ground below.

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Every ancient culture known to us has legends of men who flew.

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For thousands of years it has been thought that the tragic tale of Daedalus and his son Icarus was but a myth.

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How it seemed could it have been otherwise that with only wings a man could fly?

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Daedalus and his son Icarus were said to live on Crete, center of ancient Mediterranean civilization.

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The ruler of Crete, King Minos, ordered them trapped in the famous Minoan maze.

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Their only escape was on the wings that the brilliant Daedalus contrived to build.

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Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, or his wings of wax would melt.

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Father and son soared high into the air, but Icarus was captured by the exhilaration of flight and recklessly reached for the sun.

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Icarus would pay dearly for his impetuous flight. His wings melted and he plunged headlong into the Aegean Sea.

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If the Icarus legend was the only story of flight in the ancient world, it could be dismissed, but there are others.

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Long after the Minoan Golden Age, the city of Florence dominated the culture of the Mediterranean world.

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It was in Florence that one of the great minds of Renaissance Europe pondered the dream of flight.

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Leonardo da Vinci was a classic Renaissance man. For years he was preoccupied with a flying machine of his own design.

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It had some of the features of a modern helicopter. One report has Leonardo testing his machine in 1505 by launching it from a hilltop above Florence.

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History does not record the results of that test.

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Before Leonardo was born, a structure called the Jantar Mantar was built in India.

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It was apparently an astronomical observatory. The complex arrangement of its architecture performed the functions of telescope and computer.

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With its help, the thinkers of India contemplated the stars.

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Ancient Indian chants contain one of the most detailed descriptions of a flying machine.

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The chants may have been flights of fancy, or they may have been the accounts of early journalists passing on something they had seen.

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In either case, the chants describe an airborne vehicle called Varana.

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A form of energy called sidli made it possible for the machine to fly to distant stars.

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It is a curious fact that in some ways the ancient Indian observatory resembles a rocket gantry.

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Throughout the ancient world, we see time and again an advanced knowledge of astronomy mingled with legends of flight.

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For the graves of Egypt are dominated by the presence of Osiris, the flying god who brought knowledge to the Nile Basin.

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What inspired the ancient obsession with flight?

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Why are the pyramids aligned in such a way as to be perfect landmarks for incoming aviators?

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The thick jungle of Central America was once home for a remarkable people called Maya.

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Archeologists believe they flourished in this region for 15 centuries.

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Then, quite suddenly, the Mayans vanished.

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They left behind pyramids and temples. Their capital cities must have been lavish.

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Yet no roads connect these widely separated islands of civilization in the jungle.

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Perhaps the Mayans were familiar with the principles of flight, for there is evidence that like other ancients, the Mayans were on intimate terms with the heavens.

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Certainly, their observatories made it possible for them to construct the calendar as accurate as any in use today.

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It makes us think that perhaps they too knew something of flight.

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It is 1911. Wilbur and Orville Wright are demonstrating their flying machine for the U.S. Army.

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Their solution to the problem of flight was to attach a wing shaped like a bird to a primitive engine that burned oil.

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It was a solution appropriate to the dawning industrial age, but was it the only solution?

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Long furrows were cut into the hard soil of the Nazca Plain 2,000 years ago.

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By whatever method the lines were created, they were meant to be seen from the sky, but by whom?

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The Nazca Plain on the western shoulder of the Andes in the country we call Peru.

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The huge designs found on the desert floor that can only make sense from the air have been duplicated in other parts of the world.

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The Mojave Desert near Barstow, California. Here, an ancient man stares upward.

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From the ground it is impossible to tell exactly what shape the figure has taken.

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How then do you know the shape of the figure?

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How do you know exactly what shape the figure has taken?

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How then did a primitive Indian tribe make the drawing?

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One possibility, one explanation for the method used, might have been the existence of ancient aviators.

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A unique experiment was mounted to prove the point.

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Could men working on the ground be directed by someone hovering overhead?

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The site selected for the experiment was the Mojave Desert.

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A hot air balloon was the choice for a flying platform.

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It is a simple device requiring only fabric and a means for heating air to make it work.

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In modern times, the first balloon flight took place in France. The year was 1783.

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The principles remain the same. The technology virtually unchanged.

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That's more!

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Then as now, there is a purity to balloon flight. An exhilaration undampened by the drone of engines for the blur of supersonic travel.

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Organs

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Two, three, two, one.

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Five, four.

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Directly over it.

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That's all.

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Walk over there. Walk towards it.

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Suddenly, from on high, it is possible to understand how a land drawing could have been directed from the air thousands of years ago.

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Music

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We got it. Don't worry.

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There is nothing in the barstow experiment that could not have been done by earlier inhabitants of the desert.

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Sound of the car.

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We'll get back over this way. Let's walk back.

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Did American Indians launch balloons? Or are there other explanations?

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Sound of the car.

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Sound of the car.

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Sound of the car.

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Dr. William Clulo, chief archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has spent many years studying the mythology of American Indians.

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One of the few important practitioners in a simple society like this is what we call the shaman.

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Many people would refer to it as the healer or the medicine man.

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But among the capacities of the shaman, we can number in many tribes the ability to take flights outside of his actual body.

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That is, he projects a part of his personality or his psyche outside of his body, goes beneath the earth, beneath the water, or into the heavens, in order to secure some formative of an intuitive statement about what is wrong in the society.

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And he performs healing and curing with the aid of the intuitions that he gets in these projected flights.

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Sound of the car.

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Perhaps the symbolism of myth refers to flights that really occurred.

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Indian shamans may have been intermediaries who traveled between a primitive culture on earth and a more highly advanced one in the sky.

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Time and again, in out-of-the-way places where primitive men made their home, there are faint suggestions left of the relationship between man and flight.

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When a plateau in Peru named for a dead bull, there are drawings more than 10,000 years old.

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One interpretation placed on them is that they depict the ancients welcoming visitors from the sky.

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They might be dismissed if it were not for other signs in Peru.

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Many engineered roads late a thousand years ago connected the mighty cities of the Inca Empire, but the Incas did not possess the wheel.

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Were these roads runways for another form of vehicle, an airborne vehicle?

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Is there a connection to flight in the circular ruin of Saxa-Waman?

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The calendar ring of the Incas suggests an advanced knowledge of space and time, the kind of knowledge that might have led to ancient flight.

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But far and away, the most convincing evidence is found elsewhere.

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A fantastic collection housed in the National Museum of Aeronautics in Lima, Peru suggests that this may be the case.

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It is not a collection of precious artifacts, but rather an assortment of stones.

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The stones were discovered in 1963 in the tiny village of Ica that lies only 40 miles from the Nazca Plain.

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Bizarre drawings on the stones depict the curious breed of mechanical bird.

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On another is represented what could be a modern space shuttle.

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The stones are designed in the same style as Nazca ceramics.

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The message on the stones is evidently controversial.

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Representatives of the Peruvian government have been reluctant to discuss them.

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Golden icons molded by primitive Indians in the highlands of Colombia reinforce the notion that somewhere in man's past, the dream of flight was realized.

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The relics look astonishingly like modern delta wing fighter planes.

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Off the coast of Peru lies the Bay of Pisco.

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Inscribed on a hill is a 60-foot marker.

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It points inland on a direct line to the mysterious Nazca Plain.

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The base camp for prehistoric aviation may have been the Nazca Plain.

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The patterns have been laid out with great precision.

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Why did the ancients construct the Nazca Lines?

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Nobody really knows.

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The markings were first discovered in the 1920s by the Nazis.

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The ancients construct the Nazca Lines.

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Nobody really knows.

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The markings were first discovered in the 1920s by a pilot flying over the plane.

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Since then, many have attempted to solve the mystery with no success.

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For the past 30 years, a German mathematician named Maria Reich has devoted her life to solving the riddle.

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After nearly half a lifetime of sleeping in an adobe hut and working under a blistering sun,

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Reich does not know what motivated the ancient Peruvians to execute this grand design.

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A 1968 study financed in part by National Geographic determined that some of the lines have astronomical alignments,

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but no more than could be expected by chance.

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And yet, the lines seem to be pointing.

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Do they point the way to other outposts where ancient aviators once touched ground?

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It is a persistent fancy we must allow ourselves to have,

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for there seems to be no other explanation on earth.

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Music

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It is hard to shake the notion that here, on the plains of Nazca, there once flew ancient aviators.

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Music

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Cape Kennedy, 1970.

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The forlorn remains of a launch pad no longer in use.

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Will future generations examine the ruins of our technological civilization and wonder at the purpose of such structures?

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Will they understand the inner workings of radio telescopes or control towers

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and see them as evidence that in the 20th century man was reaching out to the stars?

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Music

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There's evidence that man has lived on this planet at least three million years.

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Were the inhabitants of other worlds idle all that time?

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Or were they too, reaching for the stars?

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Perhaps realizing their dream long before we could even speak it.

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And could it be that what it has taken us so long to do was merely to copy something we saw in our remote past?

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The answer may await us in the stars. A reunion of pupil with teacher.

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It's not so wild a dream.

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Music

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Coming up next, Agent Joe Pistone infiltrates the mob.