Ancient Aliens s02e03 Episode Script

Ancient monuments deep under water A once-thriving metropolis now half a mile under the sea Lost cities submerged for thousands of years All over the world, there are sunken cities.
There's more than 200 known sunken cities in the Mediterranean alone.
What we're looking at are the remains of cities at a time when mainstream archeology tells us there were no cities, uh, anywhere in the world.
Are underwater monuments examples of mankind's earliest civilizations? Or is there evidence of skills far beyond that of primitive man? And if so, where did it come from? The native legends are very clear that something or someone landed, and then, knowledge, all of a sudden, spread.
There is many, many legends with lights coming from under the water.
You start to get the idea that there's some kind of ancient alien underwater base Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings.
What if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? If so, what evidence lies deep underwater? Covering more than oceans are a vast and largely unexplored mystery.
For most of recorded history, man could only guess at what lay beneath the ocean's surface.
But new technologies are reaching new depths.
Researchers around the world are finding the unexpected underwater complexes and sophisticated monuments that defy the conventional historical record.
There are remains of urban civilizations on parts of the Earth that were exposed on land 10,000 and more years ago.
Possible.
Scientific theory suggests that during Earth's last Ice Age, ocean levels were once much lower than they are today.
You have to envisage a world in which there are two mile-deep ice caps sitting on top of northern Europe and North America, in which are accumulated enormous quantities of water.
And we know that this water began to melt about 21,000 years ago, and finished melting about As a result, rich coastal lands were slowly submerged by rising sea levels.
Ten million square miles of land was flooded all around the world.
That's roughly the size of Europe and China added together were just rubbed from the record.
They just disappear from the story.
And in my opinion, archeology is not doing enough work to investigate those lost and submerged lands.
While much of the ocean's floor remains unexplored, for thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have been drawn to one of the greatest mysteries of the sea, the legend of the lost city of Atlantis.
It's been said that more books have been written about Atlantis than any other subject.
But most of what we know comes from the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote two books about Atlantis, the Timaeus and the Critias.
Written in 360 BC, Plato described Atlantis as a highly advanced city, ringed by concentric walls, which flourished 9,000 years before his own time.
There are descriptions of huge palaces for kings.
It's stated that Atlantis had huge naval forces, which it used to conquer other parts of the world.
It was an urban civilization.
According to the ancient Greek texts, Atlantis was connected with extraterrestrials from the beginning.
It was founded by the Greek god Poseidon.
Poseidon can be regarded as an extraterrestrial in the sense of not being of this Earth.
Poseidon, one of the extraterrestrial, found a pretty, wonderful, young woman-girl on Earth.
And he took this woman-girl, made her pregnant.
And to protect his new family, he founded Atlantis.
According to the legend, after a failed attempt to invade Athens, disaster struck the island.
According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed in a day and a night a cataclysmic destruction that sank the entire island and its capital city.
Some researchers believe that the Atlantians somehow destroyed themselves.
According to Plato, Atlantis was located in front of the Pillars of Hercules, a location beyond what some scholars attribute to modern Gibraltar.
And to the ancients, as they left the Mediterranean Sea to go into the larger Atlantic Ocean, this was where they went beyond the Pillars of Hercules between Spain and Morocco.
Across the Atlantic lies the island chain of the Bahamas, just southeast of Florida.
Here in 1968, archaeologist J.
Manson Valentine believed he found part of Atlantis when he discovered an unusual rock formation off the coast of North Bimini Island.
It's only in about 12 to 18 feet of water, so you can, uh, view it easily.
At first, scientists thought this was just beach rock, but then several other scientists exploring the Bimini Road noticed that the beach rock was on top of other beach rock, with balancing stones wedged in between.
And nature doesn't do that; man does.
And they realized this is a harbor, a breakwater for a harbor.
From the shallow edges of Bimini all the way to the Gulf Stream in 300 feet of water, we have found many fascinating complexities that look like remnants of ancient cities or structures roads, pathways, structures covered in coral.
Could the Bimini ruins be remnants of Atlantis? And if so, could these roads lead to other sites buried under sand and water? In the year 2000, while mapping the seafloor off the western coast of Cuba, a research expedition led by Russian-Canadian oceanographer Paulina Zelitsky spotted symmetrical stone structures deep below the water.
Remarkably, they were over a half mile down.
Divers cannot do this kind of, uh, investigation, so we have to use remote operating vehicle.
And this vehicle is equipped with video cameras and manipulators.
And it controlled, uh, from the deck of the ship.
The expedition was also armed with side-scan sonar equipment used to create images of large areas of the sea floor and underwater objects.
I was in control room on board of the ship, and we were receiving that image coming from side-scan.
And this is just one of the many other images that we were obtaining of, the 80, uh, structures made of large stones placed one on top of another.
Well, what do they end up with? It is an image that shows these rectangular 90-degree angles, over and over and over, on very large structures that seemed to have wide avenues.
The exploration found huge stone blocks in pyramid shapes, others more circular.
Most were gigantic, reaching 16 feet in height and weighing several tons.
30 geometric structures emerged, appearing to be the remains of streets, buildings, tunnels and pyramids, all at a depth of 2,200 feet below the surface of the water.
We might well have here the evidence of a prehistoric culture that would probably go back tens of thousands of years, and that's very exciting indeed.
Using dating techniques based on the presence of nearby volcanic ash, geologists estimated the underwater city sank over 6,000 years ago.
Could this be, a half mile down, some part of the sunken Atlantis from 9,000, 10,000 yrs ago that Plato talked about? Well, the Atlantis myth is integrally related with the area of the Caribbean and the Bahamas, in particular Cuba.
Plato talks about an island empire.
He's probably talking about dozens of different islands of different sizes, not just in the western Atlantic, but probably stretching out right into the central Atlantic area.
Both the Cuban and the Bahaman ruins lie on the western edge of the Bermuda Triangle, an area of ocean covering over 500,000 square miles, known for magnetic anomalies, extraterrestrial sightings and unexplained disappearances of aircraft and ships.
Could there be a connection between Atlantis and the area known as the Devil's Triangle? On the edge of the Bermuda Triangle, there are underwater ruins of the ancient city of Atlantis, the prehistoric city of Atlantis.
So, yes, there is a theory that Atlantis lies, not near Greece, but in the Bermuda Triangle.
If Plato's texts are true, then other Greek myths may provide a hint of the true fate of Atlantis.
One myth tells of the Titan goddess named Asteria, who fell from the sky and became an island.
In ancient Greece, we have a number of myths which describe islands bronze, gleaming islands that fell from the sky and landed in water.
I don't think that Atlantis, therefore, was an actual stationary, physical island.
Atlantis, according to Plato, disappeared in one night with a lot of fire and a lot of smoke.
See, I don't think that Atlantis sank.
I think Atlantis lifted off.
Was Atlantis a safe haven for ancient aliens before the end of Earth's last Ice Age? And if so, could there be other alien cities submerged deep underwater? Yonaguni, Japan.
This small island is at the westernmost tip of the Japanese archipelago.
Scholars believe the first inhabitants migrated here from Southeast Asia during prehistoric times.
In 1987, in nearby waters, dive tour orator Kihachiro Aratake made a shocking discovery.
A massive complex of stone formations lay hidden a mere 60 feet beneath the ocean surface.
Experts call it one of the greatest discoveries in the history of underwater archeology.
What's intriguing about the complex at Yonaguni is that there are a whole range of monuments, pretty much side by side, and this, to my eye, looks unmistakably to be the work of human beings, not the random action of the ocean on differential layers of stone.
There are several reasons why I think this is not a natural formation.
Some tools and engraved stones are found at the site.
Because of these things, there is no doubt that this is made artificially.
Submerged beneath largest of the underwater formations resemble a massive, five-layered stepped pyramid, the size of two football fields.
You see unambiguous carvings that clearly are geometric in nature, tons of right angles.
We see channels that you can walk through with stairwells at the end that are perfectly rectangular in shape.
There are places where you find megaliths piled on top of one another to create a tunnel through which you can swim.
There is a set of megaliths positioned side by side against the side of the cliff.
There's a gigantic human face carved underwater.
There is a stone that inscribes a big face, about seven meters in height.
Our first impression was that it looked a lot like the Moai on Easter Island.
Then we began to realize that it strongly resembled the sphinx which guarded the pyramids, and we wondered, "Is that the function the face is serving "here?" It's the whole combination of all these structures together which convinced me that we're looking at a at a ceremonial complex.
The mystery surrounding the Yonaguni underwater structure is, when did it go underwater? The geological evidence is that it was submerged during the meltdown of the last Ice Age.
All around the world, whether it is France, India or Japan, there are man-made structures that lie underwater.
Two ways how our ancestors could have done this.
Either they had scuba gear I don't think so or this stuff was built when the ocean levels were lower, and that was over 14,000 years ago, and 14,000 years ago, according to mainstream archeology, we were just dwelling in caves, hunter-gatherers.
Could the Yonaguni structures have been built by such primitive people? And what evidence exists of the people who inhabited this island? Human fossils were found, so I'm sure there were people living on the island, but I'm not sure if they had the technology to create structures, or anything like this.
It's not so much the question of could the stone have been chipped away and removed.
It's a question of the vision, of the scale of the complex, of thinking in those kind of terms.
And we know of no other, uh, Stone Age culture that thought in those kind of terms, of creating a gigantic, seemingly ceremonial complex.
If, according to scholars, the ancient Japanese people could not have built this monument, who did? And how did it get here? The speculation is that extraterrestrials created the Yonaguni monument.
The engineering is just beyond the capacity of Stone Age civilizations.
Ancient astronaut theorists also believe the key to the Yonaguni mystery is found in its global positioning.
Strangely, the complex lies within an area of the Pacific long suspected of extraterrestrial activity.
It's called the Dragon's Triangle.
Just south of Japan, you have a mysterious area called the Dragon's Triangle, which is very similar to the Bermuda Triangle, because you have planes that have disappeared from the air, ships that have disappeared from the ocean.
In fact, Japan had declared this a disaster area.
Don't sail through it.
Don't fly through it.
Stay the heck away, because if you go in there, terrible things can happen to you.
In ancient Japan, and even into the relatively modern era, there are stories about the Dragon Sea, in which objects rise out of the water and sail through the air.
In ancient Japan, these were winged monsters breathing fire.
In more modern times, these took on the appearance of actual machines.
When you compare those descriptions of these devices with the description that Columbus gave of a craft nearing the Bermuda Triangle actually rising out of the water, a light that followed the ship, you realize there's a similarity in both of these locations to things, objects, that are in the water and rise out of the water and fly through the air.
But why are the two submerged structures found within the perimeter of these strange regions of the planet where so much unusual activity occurs? Is it coincidence that the Earth's 25th parallel north cuts through both the Bermuda Triangle and the Dragon's Triangle? They lie on a plane along the same line, and both of them have the same magnetic phenomena, in which compass bearings are lost and instruments go down.
People wonder if there's a real, strange UFO connection.
If UFO's and flying saucers do exist, then we should suspect that they could originally come from an ancient super civilization.
It makes you wonder if flying saucers, UFO's, whatever you want to call them, actually use the area of the Triangle as their major base, and perhaps are even coming back to the remnants of a civilization that they were familiar with.
What if the sunken monuments at Yonaguni and near Cuba had alien origins? Might they have been used as alien bases? And if we believe extraterrestrials functioned on land, could they have also functioned underwater? Could there be more evidence lying in the vast Pacific? As an island nation, it should come as no mystery that much of Japan's rich history is tied to the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
But although many of Japan's legends are largely unknown to the West, some are drawing the attention of ancient astronaut theorists.
One such legend dates back to to a beach north of Tokyo.
Allegedly, a craft that was quite large in size washed up on the shore in Japan.
A strange round ship drifted ashore in this area.
The woman did not speak any language they could identify.
There were written inscriptions inside her craft that they could not identify, and she's clutching this box that she didn't want anybody to touch.
Known as the legend of the Utsuro Bune, or "hollow ship," the details of the story have puzzled historians for centuries.
Where, for example, did the mysterious hollow ship come from? Could it have come from the area of the submerged Yonaguni monument? Who was the strange woman? And what were the contents of the box she guarded so carefully? Was it a human head? Or was it, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe, a type of brain or other form of extraterrestrial intelligence? If so, could it have been intended as a gift to the early Japanese by an ancient space traveler? There's five different drawings that have survived from completely different regions of Japan.
They're almost identical to modern UFO reports.
As evidence to support their claims, ancient astronaut theorists point to early Japanese carvings and statuary, each suggesting a variety of extraterrestrial encounters.
This is a Dogu figure, and it comes from Japan.
And even to the untrained eye, you look at this, and it's as if this being is wearing some type of a suit with a helmet, some goggles, on the back there are all these weird buckles and circles, you know, straps.
Very similar to a modern-day space suit.
In my opinion, this is a likeness of a possible extraterrestrial that visited Earth thousands of years ago.
Archaeologists have catalogued the existence of more than 15,000 Dogu figures made during the Jomon period of prehistoric Japan, dating from approximately 14,000 to 300 years B.
C.
But could, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, these strange Dogu figures really be a primitive interpretation of a pressurized space suit or diving apparel? The story behind those Dogu figures is very clear, and anyone can go and read translations of the ancient texts that the Dogu, a long time ago, descended from the sky and taught the first Japanese people in various disciplines.
And the whole Japanese culture, including the kimono, the tea ceremony, the use of wasabi and ginger for eating sushi, the way that they build their architecture, their written language, everything they say came from these visitors, from these gods, from the universe.
The pictures shows beings who look like astronauts.
They are dressed like an astronaut.
They have the helmet as an astronaut.
They have some strange tools in their hands, tools which we do not understand.
Now, there is a link.
The Japanese call it "Dogus.
" In North America, we have still the Hopi tribe, in Arizona, and the Hopi Indians are still making today kachina dolls.
Kachina dolls look similar to the Japanese Dogu figures.
Further back, in the Sahara Desert, Africa, we found cave paintings.
When you see the picture, you see definitely an astronaut suit.
No doubt.
Absolutely.
Now, you compare these cave paintings with the kachina dolls of the Hopi, and with the Dogu of Japan.
You have one line.
Do the mysterious Dogu figures provide tangible evidence of extraterrestrial encounters in Japan's ancient past? And does the legend of the Utsuro Bune suggest that the Earth's oceans may be hiding even more proof of alien contact? Perhaps the answer can be found deep in the waters off the coast of India.
In 2001, researchers from India's Oceanic Institute detected anomalies on the bottom of the Gulf of Khambhat, seven miles from shore.
They had been commissioned by the Indian government to do a survey of pollution in the Gulf of Khambhat up in the northwest of India.
And they were not expecting to find anything except a mess down there.
But suddenly, their side-scan sonar started returning images of regular structures.
The images revealed an enormous network of stone buildings, now shrouded in mud and sand, and covering a distance of five square miles.
What we're looking at in the Gulf of Khambhat are the remains of cities.
There's actually two of them.
And it turns out that they are positioned on the side of ancient river channels.
They look lime cities that have been submerged for a very long time, at a time when mainstream archeology tells us there were no cities anywhere in the world.
Powerful crosscurrents made it nearly impossible to dive the 170 feet to the bottom.
Still, scientists retrieved dozens of artifacts, including wood and pottery shards.
Some of the dates on some of the human artifacts that were brought up extended as far back as 32,000 years.
But the oceanographers concluded that the area had been covered by water about 9,000 years ago.
So this city had apparently existed from 32,000 to about Mainstream scholars today claim that ancient Indian civilization only goes back 4,000 or 5,000 years.
Yet, Hindu scholars themselves say that Hindu civilization is going back, uh, many tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.
Might the ruins below the Gulf of Khambhat prove the Hindu scholars right? Another recent discovery may support their claims.
the modern city of Dwaraka.
Archaeologists digging deep under the city found signs of a settlement once inundated by the sea.
Inspired by this clue, they began searching for more ruins in waters just off the coast.
In only 70 feet of water, divers discovered sandstone walls, cobblestone streets and evidence of a prosperous seaport.
Scholars declared these ruins to be the remains of the ancient and legendary city of Dwaraka.
Ancient Hindu texts explain that the legendary city of Dwaraka was said to be the dwelling place of Lord Krishna, a deity worshipped across many traditions of Hinduism.
Imagine what it would mean for the Christian world to all of a sudden discover the actual Holy Grail, the actual Ark of the Covenant.
That would be akin, for the Indian population, to discover an actual Dwaraka.
This was a very powerful city, which was ruled by Lord Krishna.
And Krishna is still revered until today.
He's one of the highest gods that we have in Hindu culture.
Hindu texts explain that a king named Salwa attacked Lord Krishna in the mythical Dwaraka.
Ancient astronaut theorists believe the descriptions of the battle suggest the use of alien technology and even spacecraft.
According to the ancient Sanskrit texts, with this spacecraft, Salwa attacked the city, raining down energy weapons that resemble lightning.
He destroyed large parts of the city in this way When this happened, the king of the city, the god Krishna, responded by firing weapons at this spacecraft.
The weapons are described as arrows, but they're not ordinary arrows.
It's said that they roared like thunder when they were launched, and resembled bolts of lightning or rays of the sun.
In response, it is said that the spacecraft began to appear in different places simultaneously.
It appeared to be moving in ways that resemble modern descriptions of UFOs.
So what I find interesting about this account is, there's a spacecraft made of metal that is firing down weapons on a city on Earth.
The legend says that Krishna eventually departed Earth, and the ocean consumed his city of Dwaraka.
For many people, the description of fabulous ancient cities in the Sanskrit writings of India were simply mythology, but with the discovery of the remains of a sunken city off the coast of India in the location of Dwaraka, all that has changed.
People are beginning to look at these ancient writings in a new light, and see them not simply as mythology, but as actual historical records.
Did India's ancestors witness a war between extraterrestrial entities? If the mythical city cited in the Hindu texts turned out to be real, could there also be evidence of Krishna and his supernatural powers? Ancient alien theorists believe a link between the submerged ruins and extraterrestrials can be found in another set of texts known as India's Sangam literature.
Sangams were assemblies of sages.
It says that the first two Sangams took place on a sunken landmass called Kumari Kandam.
This area was once above water thousands of years ago, according to the accounts, but it's now underwater.
It's also interesting that these assemblies of sages included extraterrestrial beings, as well.
And this fits in with evidence discovered in the Gulf of Cambay, and off the coast of the present city of Dwaraka.
Are the interpretations of India's ancient texts proof of alien contact in Earth's past? And are the descriptions of gods actually descriptions of extraterrestrials? Perhaps another discovery one beneath a mysterious lake will yield even more evidence of alien visitors in the remote past.
The Andes Mountains, Peru.
Here, at an elevation of 12,500 feet, lie the dark waters of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable body of water in the world.
In August of 2000, an Italian team of divers and archaeologists launched an underwater investigation of the legendary lake.
There, submerged under 100 feet of water, the team uncovered traces of a paved road, a stone terrace, and a wall nearly a half mile long.
For centuries, local legends have spoken of a lost underwater city called Wanaku.
Could these ruins provide proof that such a city did, in fact, exist? Then, another shocking discovery.
Lying on the lake bed was a large, sculptured stone head.
Could this ancient relic offer a clue to the origins of this incredible archaeological find? Comparisons were quickly made to similar stonework found at the nearby ancient city of Tiahuana, just 12 miles south of Lake Titicaca a city long thought by ancient astronaut theorists to have extraterrestrial origins.
When the early conquistadors talked to the local Aymara Indians they were told that-that giants at the beginning of creation had created Tiahuanaco.
The Spanish, too, were amazed by the gigantic blocks of stone.
They felt that the devil had built this building.
If you look at some of the rock cut on megalithic structures at the site of Tiahuanaco, I personally believe very strongly that we are looking at an older episode of construction and the traces of a forgotten episode in the human story.
But if the ruins found at the bottom of Lake Titicaca are from the legendary lost city of Wanaku, what happened to it? Did it fall prey to a major earthquake or other natural disaster? Or was the city, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe, deliberately flooded? The more you know about Lake Titicaca, the stranger it gets.
Archeologists have problems in really explaining why there are sunken ruins there, because they're saying that the ruins aren't that old.
They're only 1,500 years old.
And that would mean that Lake Titicaca has gone through a number of major changes in that period.
And it's possible that somehow the lake itself and the shorelines were manipulated so that certain areas of Lake Titicaca were flooded in a sort of artificial way.
There is a type of seahorse that lives in Lake Titicaca.
And seahorses are coming from saltwater and oceans, yet these seahorses are living at nearly 13,000 feet in the Andes.
But just how could an ancient people have artificially created South America's largest lake? A lake that is 118 miles long and 50 miles wide? When you ask the local population, "How did all of this come into being?" the Aymara Indians will tell you that all of this has existed since before the beginning of time.
In the Aymara legends, the lake is like the the place of genesis, the place where it starts all the civilizations in our continent.
We have these very, very, very old roots.
I mean, we're not talking only about this civilization, this humanity.
We are talking about our seeds, the roots of the stars.
Some people believe that the extraterrestrial built, but what I believe is that the space brothers help us, direct us, teach us, because they had the experience in many ways.
The legend says that once the space brothers came to this planet and they used to live with us, and they was very important in our lives and they used to be very powerful people.
But is it possible that the lost city of Wanaku was really built, or inhabited, by the ancient ancestors of the indigenous Aymara people? And if so, could it have been deliberately flooded to avoid detection from the outside world? Cristina Sovrosa The elders, they used to talk about the underwater city.
They talk about the lights like stars connecting with the lake.
The stars, when they come down to the lake, there is changes in the temperatures.
There is many legends with lights coming from the underground of the lake.
It seems they come, they go and they return in different moments.
You start to get the idea that there is some kind of ancient alien underwater base.
And it's possible that some of these sunken ruins are, uh, somehow part of that base.
Could the ancient city of Wanaku really have been built by alien visitors? And if so, why? What was their purpose? Could the discovr of this and other sunken cities pride the evidence that mankind has been seeking for centuries evidence that proves that we are not alone? These mysterious underwater structures really don't have any context or any background; they just seem to come from nowhere.
They seem to stand out as being out of place in time, so there's some question marks, some mystery surrounding them that might shed new light on human history.
Atlantis, Lake Titicaca, Dwaraka.
All those ancient mystery places always have had a connection to the gods.
The gods who, in the ancient astronaut opinion, were flesh and blood extraterrestrials.
And in the end, the ancient astronaut theory will be proven right.