Ancient Aliens s03e15 Episode Script
Aliens, Gods and Heroes
NARRATOR: Superhuman strength Supernatural powers And the awesome ability to fly.
Throughout history, mankind has told incredible tales of gods and superheroes.
But do we yearn to possess these extraordinary powers for another, more profound, reason? WILLIAM HENRY: Implanted within our DNA is this desire to become god-like, to fly in the air, or swim through the ocean or especially to ascend into the stars.
ERICH VON DANIKEN: Humans were created according to the image of God.
So we are part of them.
If the so-called gods had incredible powers, we have them in us, too.
NARRATOR: Could ancient stories of god-like kings and heroes really have otherworldly origins? JASON MARTELL: Many of the sacred powers given to kings of the past we know today were more than likely technology that ancient man was given from the actual gods, which we know were probably extraterrestrials.
NARRATOR: 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? Does it help to explain our continuing fascination with stories of gods and heroes? Greece.
The Island of Crete.
On the Lassithi Plateau, over half a mile above sea level, lies the Dikteon Cave.
This sprawling complex of caverns stretches nearly one and a half square miles, and archeological finds have shown a human presence dating as far back as 6,000 years ago.
Historians believe the first inhabitants of the area actually lived inside the cave, and according to legend, its many chambers were once home to an otherworldly being, Zeus, the Greek god of thunder.
In Greek mythology, Zeus is the son of Cronus, the king of the first generation of gods known as the Titans.
RICHARD RADER: Zeus's father, Cronus, is not particularly excited about giving birth to a child because he's heard a prophecy that one of his children is going to over throne him So, just as soon as their children are born he just swallows them all down.
Now his mother Rhea, who's Cronus's wife, is distraught about this.
So what she does is substitute a rock that she's wrapped up in swaddling clothes.
Gives it to Cronus, which he swallows down.
And what she does is hides Zeus away in a cave.
So he grows up there.
NARRATOR: In Theogony, the describes the cave Zeus was hidden in as lying in these very mountains, and specifically near the city of Lyktos, the location of the Dikteon Cave.
But the similarities between this cave and the cave of Zeus described in Greek mythology go much further.
PHILIP COPPENS: The ancients say that when they are talking about mythology, it is about own recorded events of their past.
According to the Greek myths, the child Zeus was nourished on a mixture of honey and milk at the udder of the goat.
Now around 1900 AD, a chamber of the Dikteon Cave was identified by locals as the birthplace of Zeus, and when archeologists went in there, they discovered an alter with the remains of numerous religious offerings, amongst them honey and goat milk.
These remains date back 4,000 years, to the exact period in which the ancient Greek stories took place.
The question is, is this once again a coincidence that modern excavations find remains in this cave that match up with what's written in Greek mythology? NARRATOR: Also found in the Dikteon Cave were numerous artifacts dating back to what would have been the time of Zeus's childhood according to the Greek stories.
Among them was a fragmentary inscription bearing a hymn a hymn dedicated specifically to Zeus.
Could the Dikteon Cave really be the cave described in Theogony? And if actual locations from Greek mythology really do exist, could legendary characters and events also be based on historical fact? COPPENS: We think of mythology as something which has been invented.
But really, when we look at the ancient Greeks, they believe that the War of the Titans physically happened.
That this was a war, which was fought in heaven, by the deities.
NARRATOR: In Greek mythology, the War of the Titans is a celestial battle waged by Zeus and his siblings, known as the Olympians, against their father Cronus and the Titans.
The Olympians, who are the victors in this battle, were the gods worshiped by the ancient Greeks.
But according to ancient astronaut theorists, these human-like beings may have been something other than divine, and this mythical war may have been an actual historical event.
To support this claim, they point to the existence of similar myths and stories told by different cultures throughout the world.
COPPENS: When it comes to warring parties of gods, Greece is not a stand-alone issue.
We have the same thing in Ragmornak.
In Norwegian mythology, we have this idea that the gods fought amongst themselves as well.
We also have stories from Sumerian, Babylonian, Hittite accounts where it says that the wars were fought between gods.
MARTELL: We see the same story of Titans being over throned by a new set of gods.
In the sumerian epics, the Annunaki coming here as the original culture in ancient Iraq.
So these similarities tell of a warring race of beings that squabbled amongst themselves about the rights of various areas on the Earth.
NARRATOR: What can explain the similarities of these ancient war stories that emerged from all over the world? Could they all be describing the same historical events? And if there is an historical basis for the legends and stories, what does that suggest about the incredible powers and weaponry supposedly possessed by the gods? MARTELL: It's very possible that the Clash of the Titans known from the Greek times is actually speaking of a much earlier epoch of extraterrestrials having a type of battle.
HENRY: The ancient Greek gods had helmets that made them invisible.
They had breastplates that made them impervious to their enemies' weapons.
They had tridents that shot thunderbolts; they had winged sandals that gave them the power of flight.
These are all profound examples of an ancient alien technology that the Greek gods possessed.
NARRATOR: If mythical gods and monsters really did exist, were they, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, extraterrestrial beings? And could this help to explain the enormous and enduring popularity of gods, Titans and other so-called "superheroes" in today's popular culture? DAN DIDIO: There's so many different places where the characters of the superheroes come from but naturally so much of these come from mythology and from literature.
Because those are such strong bodies of work they're so familiar, and they become the architecture of all types of heroes.
JONATHAN YOUNG: The stories exists partly because we want to dream of such powers, We want to imagine what might be possible if we had unlimited dominance.
COPPENS: We watch endless amounts of television and movies which says that amongst us are a group of people who are more than just human super humans, and that somehow these people are born that way or that something happens to them which triggers this.
But basically the underlying subconscious message revealed is that we are capable of becoming gods.
Implanted within our DNA is this desire to become god-like, either to fly in the air or to swim through the ocean or run super fast or especially to ascend into the stars.
NARRATOR: Why are human beings so drawn to stories about beings with superior abilities and technologies.
Are they looking for something larger? and more powerful outside of themselves? or perhaps, within? In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus is often credited with creating human beings out of basic materials found on Earth.
YOUNG: Prometheus was playing with mud and made little figurines of it and Athenea was fascinated with this and breathed life into them.
RADER: The cynical read is to say what he wants is somebody who to worship him like people worship Zeus.
He created us in his image and he gave us all these skills culture and technology and medicines, and makes us what it means to be a human being.
Zeus realised he couldn't uncreate these beings but what he could do is limit them in their capabilities and restrict them their capacity and prevent them from becoming god-like.
DAVID CHILDRESS: It's as if the extraterrestrials wanted to keep us from having all the same technology that they had NARRATOR: In another version of the story, Prometheus is said to have stolen a spark of Zeus's lightning bolt in order to give humans the gift of fire.
COPPENS: When we are talking about a god who gives fire to man, we realise that this is not the god as in the supreme being the one, but clearly somebody else, an ancient alien GEORGE TSOUKALOS: We pursued throughout history to master the powers of the gods but the question is where did all those ideas originate, and the answer is very simple.
Due to extraterrestrial contact, in our remote past.
NARRATOR: Could humans really be the creation of alien beings with extraordinary powers? Do we have a subconscious desire to reconnect with the so-called gods of our past by becoming more like them through advancements in technology? Could this explain the origins of ancient tales of gods and heroes who were thought to possess extraordinary powers? Perhaps the answer can be found near the Greek valley of Phocis, and by examining the legend of The Oracle at Delphi.
Lydia, 716 B.
C.
Gyges, a shepherd in the service of King Candaules, becomes the unlikely successor to the throne of this ancient kingdom in modern day Turkey.
But the story of how this modest servant rose from a shepherd to a king is so fantastic that many scholars and historians have dismissed it as mere myth.
YOUNG: Gyges is out in the field and there's a terrible earthquake He sees a cave open, goes in the cave and sees a gold ring BADER: He just kind of walks in this chamber, which is like a tomb where he sees a dead body that has some jewelry on it so he grabs this ring off because he's a poor man He puts the ring on and discovers that it gives him the power to be invisible.
YOUNG: Here, he has the kind of power a god would have and does it use it well? Well, actually it's a little questionable how he uses it.
HENRY: He comes up with a plan.
The next time he goes to visit the king he brings that ring with him, turns himself invisible, seduces the queen, kills the king, takes over the palace.
COPPENS: What we have here is really a multi-layered legend We have not only the story of the fact that somebody in the past had the cloak of invisibility but actually that he did not invent this that it was a legacy from a race who had buried their dead and that alongside these deaths were artifacts, which were technological What kind of a magical amulet or technology are we talking about here? Was this the ring of the gods that's described by the ancient sumerians and is the ring of cosmic sovereignty NARRATOR: According to legend, a bloody civil war irrupted following the death of King Candaules It ended when Gyges obtained approval for overthrowing the throne from the oracle of Delphi.
A mysterious priestess whose eerily correct prophecies BIRNES: The oracle of Delphi, whether it's a prophet or a soothsayer had a direct relationship to the extraterrestrial being.
The extraterrestrial being communicated through the priest who then interpret that into a language that the listeners could understand.
NARRATOR: But was it really a god who endorsed Gyges reign, or was Apollo, the son of Zeus, an extraterrestrial, as astronaut theorists contend.
Was it perhaps the same extraterrestrial who let Gyges to find the ring that enabled him to see his power, in the first place.
And if so, could this be an example of aliens endowing a human with god-like powers, to carry out some earthly agenda? TSOUKALOS: When I read stories like Gyges of Lidia who has found this ring which gave him the capability of becoming invisible then there are two things that I think of: one, is it just fantasy or do we have another reference here that describes misunderstood technology.
Because today, researchers at Duke University are trying to develop an invisibility cloak.
NARRATOR: Duke University engineer professor David R Smith is the director for the center for meta-material and integrated plasmatics For the past decade, Smith and his team have been working to create meta-materials or artificial materials that are not found in nature.
Just like a piece of glass can control the way light bends Smith is set out to prove that certain man made materials can actually be constructed to render objects invisible.
DAVID SMITH: This is actually an example of a meta-material this is a bunch of pieces of circuit board all cut out and assembled together and on the circuit boards are little pieces of copper that are tied in circuits, and each circuit has a certain response to electromagnetic radiation and the combination of these patterns plus the shape gives us something that we can call an invisibility cloak The idea behind the cloak is that when renders something inside of it invisible, and it's self invisible as well NARRATOR: At present, the device only makes objects disappear at microwave frequencies But Dr.
Smith believes that soon this technology will also be able to make objects invisible to even the human eye.
SMITH: Just in the last year or two, there actually have been experiments showing certain of the cloaking idea is transitioning to the visible spectrum, red, green, blue.
Those experiments are actually being done now LOIS GRESH: We will have invisibility cloaks at some point that we could wear as humans.
I definitely think we're gonna get there because science and speculative science go hand in hand.
Science creates a base point, speculative science pushes it farther into the future, and that's how technology advances.
NARRATOR: An actual cloak of invisibility? Though still in development, researchers in Japan have designed an optical camouflage system that makes special reflective material seemingly disappear, including the person wearing it, thus bringing us closer to achieving a fully functional invisibility cloak like the one described in the story of Gyges.
Could this mean that other seemingly far-fetched devices of fantasy, like flying carpets and magic wands, are also based on science, and if so, might they have been used in the ancient past, perhaps in the hands of extraterrestrial visitors? TSOUKALOS: Just because we are working on these technologies today does not mean that we are the first.
Because we find multiple references in ancient texts that describe devices with which you were able to go invisible.
DiDIO: So much of our storytelling deals with the fact that what we deem to be magic can really be science at a different time.
NARRATOR: If legendary tales like the story of King Gyges could be proven to be real, what does it suggest about other fantastic stories of gods and titans? Hisarlik, Turkey Within this archaeological site lie the ruins of Troy, a place once thought by mainstream scientists to be no more than myth until Heinrich Schliemann unearthed its remains in 1871.
Here in the 12th century B.
C.
, the ancient Greek city was the center of the Trojan War, a Greek battle described in Homer's Iliad.
According to the epic poem, the goddess Athena gives King Diomedes the power of divine vision during the war so that he could see like the gods.
RADER: Athena comes down and she wants to help the Greeks, so she finds Diomedes and she says, "I'm gonna help you out here.
So what I'm gonna do is strip away this mist that's over your eyes.
You, as a human being, you don't really know what's going on.
You just see battle, but once I strip away this mist, you're gonna be able to see what's really going on, which is that, in addition to a battle going on, there are gods fighting.
YOUNG: King Diomedes sees that Ares-- the god of war-- is fighting alongside his enemy Hector, and he was not to use this sight to attack the gods, but that is exactly what he uses it for.
COPPENS: The side aspect of this is this: it's a question-- did the gods really have this? Were they superhuman like we want to become, or did they have technology which enabled them to do these kind of things? NARRATOR: Diomedes and the gods' power of super eyesight may seem like pure fantasy, but enhanced vision is also becoming a reality thanks to advancements in spectrometer technology.
Spectrometers are devices used to measure properties of light over a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum than is visible with the human eye, and today, just as we are developing cloaking devices, we are also developing technology to see through those devices.
SMITH: Technology is driven by society's needs.
more than anything else but myths have a way of inspiring us and they represent part of the imagination which we need to even envision the next generation of technologies DÄNIKEN: If I dream, I could go to another galaxy I will sooner or later go to another galaxy We are the offsprings of the gods and all these things are in our brains We think we are very powerful.
In practice we are not, but we have technology to develop the power because we are the sons of the gods.
NARRATOR: Might technology be our way of reconnecting with the gods, or did the so-called gods deliberately deny us their superpowers as a way of motivating our imaginations and technological achievements? Perhaps further evidence can be found in the heavens at a Mexican ceremony that commemorates real-life close encounters with alien visitors.
Veracruz, Mexico Five men in ceremonial dress ascend a 100-foot pole.
Once at the top, one of the men performs a sacred dance while playing a flute and drum atop a platform.
The other four men launch themselves off.
It is a ritual known as La Danza de los Voladores, or The Dance of the Flyers.
YOUNG: The ritual has the leader stand on top of the pole on the top of little platform, and the four flyers wrap up cable around that pole and then branch out fly around in a pyramid shape, in perfect synchronized order.
It's a stunning and daring thing to do.
They are representing the birds.
They are representing the four cardinal directions.
They are representing the elements.
Heavily symbolic and mythic, and it is a powerful ritual.
NARRATOR: The Totonac people who practice this ceremony today claim it is a dance that was invented 500 years ago as a plea to the gods to end a severe drought.
But could this ancient ritual have different, perhaps otherworldly origins? TSOUKALOS: What we have here with the Voladores is 100% living mythology something that describes and illustrates in front of our living eye the descent of the gods, from a time ago.
HENRY: The motive of the god descending from the skies is one of the most ancient stories.
If you go back to the Old Testament you have the stories of the sons of gods descending from the sky and they see the daughters of men and they create a race of giants.
In the Book of Genesis, Jacob sees a ladder ascending into the heavens with angels ascending and descending upon this ladder.
Jesus, in the Book of John, describes the heavens opening and beings descending upon the son of man.
NARRATOR: According to ancient astronaut theorists, the Voladores ritual is a reenactment of a close encounter with alien visitors in the distant past.
They believe extraterrestrials descended upon the flat mountaintops of the Palpa region in Peru around 500 A.
D.
, dropping from their aircraft and gliding down to Earth in spiraling circles.
TSOUKALOS: The Voladores ritual was very technological, as in, you know, these beings descending from the sky and the circle signifying arrival of the gods.
Where does that flying or descending gods motif originate? Our ancestors saw something because why would you hurl yourself from a 100-foot pole out of nothing, to imitate a bird? Birds are not that important.
Something very significant happened.
NARRATOR: Could an alien encounter really be the inspiration for the Voladores ritual? And could the Totanac people, who created the ceremony, really have been trying to mimic the ancient gods' power of flight? As further evidence that early humans may have encountered alien visitors equipped with the power of flight Ancient astronaut theorists point to various artifacts and statues depicting ancient gods.
One such example is the Mayan god, Ah-Muzen-Cab, also known as the flying "Bee God.
" Another is the most prominent god of early Mesoamerican culture-- the winged deity Quetzalcoatl.
LOGAN HAWKES: Mesoamericans believed in the winged serpent or the Quetzalcoatl, which came from the sky bringing wisdom, power of the wind, and also influenced everything that happened in the everyday life of the Mayans.
In fact, they looked to the sky for all their answers, from everything as simple as when to plant corn, to when to go to war.
Uh, they believed all answers in the universe came from the sky and trying to relate that to their daily lives.
HENRY: The ancient record are loaded with fantastic examples of the gods flying around.
These are the ancient aliens, and humans are being shown the ultimate capability of these gods.
VON DANIKEN: In my eyes, because we are the sons of the gods, we are the offsprings of the gods whatever humans can dream, whatever humans think was once reality in the past or will be reality in the future.
NARRATOR: July 21st, 2003 The English Channel.
Felix Baumgartner becomes the first person to cross this free fall using a specially made fiber wing.
But the Austrian daredevil is just one of many who have used wing-suits to simulate flying by means of a free fall.
ED PAWLOWSKI: A wing-suit is basically a jump suit that you put on under your rig and it's designed to actually make you fly.
when you exit the plane.
The material inflates underneath your arms, in between your legs, and creates basically an airfoil that you glide on through the air.
It's an amazing feeling because you're actually the pilot and the plane.
It is total freedom.
You feel as though you're flying.
Though you are falling, you're using the air to maneuver your body.
And the wing-suit helps you cover a lot of ground as you're descending.
Some people have been exceeding two-to-one glide ratio.
For example, three-to-one would mean for every foot you descend, you're traveling three feet forward.
TSOUKALOS: We got these flying guys that have these wings attached to their backs, and they hurl themselves out of planes, and some even have rocket engines attached to them.
And so they essentially themselves become airplanes.
Now imagine showing that to someone from a hundred years ago.
That person would be in complete awe of what they are witnessing, not understanding that there's technology involved with this.
VON DANIKEN: Just using our own body, we cannot fly.
We have no wings.
But, of course, we have the fantasy and we have the technology to develop wings that we can fly.
TSOUKALOS: The pursuit of flight has been one of the most sought after quests in all of mankind's history.
Why? Because with flight you could reach, conceivably, the realm of the gods.
NARRATOR: From the ancient Greek myth of lcarus, fashioning wings of feathers and wax, to modern daredevils, like Felix Baumgartner, human beings have been fascinated with, and often frustrated by, their desire to fly.
But have birds really served as mankind's inspiration? Or something else? Something extraterrestrial.
And if ancient visitors could fly, what other powers might they have possessed? And what abilities might early man have had and lost? Perhaps the answer can be found, not in the skies (thunder crashes) but deep beneath the sea.
Cape Sounion, Greece.
Perched on the headland, surrounded on three sides by the sea, lies the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon, built in 440 BC.
The second son of the Titan King Cronus, Poseidon was worshiped throughout Greece almost as much as his younger brother Zeus.
YOUNG: Poseidon was the god of the sea, he was also the god of earthquakes and, strangely, curses When Poseidon was in a good mood, he created new lands out of the sea.
He gave calm waters for good voyages.
When he was in a bad mood, he destroyed ships and brought storms.
(thunder crashes) RADER: Poseidon does rule over the kingdom of the sea.
It is envisioned as a kind of place where people live.
And when he comes out of that place yes, he rides the spectacular kind of like water chariot that is driven by dolphins and he holds a really big trident.
NARRATOR: In Greek mythology, Cronus eats all of his children except for Zeus, who eventually rescues his siblings, including Poseidon, from the belly of his father.
YOUNG: A potion is prepared that makes him heave up all the other siblings of Zeus, and these become the gods of Olympus.
NARRATOR: But ancient astronaut theorists believe this Greek myth is actually a metaphor for an extraterrestrial event.
They believe the notion of gods being vomited up from the belly of their father actually describes mutinous aliens being expelled from the mother ship.
COPPENS: Anything which is followed up into a living creature will not be able to survive for three days it will die from suffocation and will begin to decay So what we have here is not a creature, but something else.
It could've been an object, which was clearly of a man-made or extraterrestrial origin.
VON DANIKEN: A mutiny took place.
Some of the extraterrestrials, they had sex with a wonderful earthly female, woman They were not allowed to do this.
So, one of these extraterrestrials who were not allowed to go back with the mother spaceship had the name of Poseidon.
Poseidon fell in love with the beautiful human girl.
And he made her pregnant.
RADER: Poseidon is married, all right.
He's got a child.
He's got some grandchildren, right.
There's a whole caste of sea nymphs as well.
All of them presumably, like, live in this place.
YOUNG: Poseidon had the power of the deep, the unseen place.
If you look out at the sea, you see a surface, and you're aware there's a whole world below that, suggesting powers beyond that which meet the eye.
NARRATOR: Among the mythical creatures associated with Poseidon are the Telchines a race of advanced fish children.
These human like beings could live both in and out of water HENRY: They're masters of technology and seem to match up with the fish gods of ancient sumeria who worked for Enki the great god of alchemy, and technology and smith craft RADER: The Telchines are also kind of in the shadowy territory of god human monster things.
They're just these kind of figures who are not gods but they're like human beings There's one story about the Roman version of Zeus, Jupiter.
trying to destroy them.
Now, we don't know whether they are actually all destroyed but it's possibly because of their relationship to the magic.
NARRATOR: In Greek legend, the Telchines were also metallurgists They were said to have created Poseidon's magical trident and to have casted the first bronze statues of the gods of Olympus.
And according to some historians the Telchines may not have been creatures of myth but were beings who actually existed.
RADER: There were people called Telchines, we do actually have evidence of these beings they were actual ancient greeks who had specific tasks and traits like metallurgy, like smiting and so on.
And so you could see how it is that a being like Telchines that these things could in fact not these just these mythological beings but like actual people.
So the way we look at the ancient greeks and Rome, is the way they would have looked at the stories that are being told about the ***.
TSOUKALOS: We've got the stories of the Telchine and they were able to survive under water for unlimited amount of time Now, how is such a thing possible unless you have access to some type of technology An Israeli company is currently developing a human artificial gill system that allows humans to take oxygen from surrounding water without the need of oxygen tanks You can potentially can remain underwater for unlimited amounts of time.
All the technology that we are discovering today is in fact old news.
It's been around before.
NARRATOR: Could the ancient Greek myths really be based on actual events? Were the Telchines early humans enabled with god-like abilities? And were these powers really misunderstood alien technology? Perhaps the answers can be found, not in the past, but in the present.
As modern day advances in science and technology give us, perhaps, our greatest evidence that we are not alone.
The ability to fly to thrive underwater, and to travel through space and explore the universe.
At one time, these were all believed to be impossible notions.
Dismissed as mere science fiction or myth.
But mankind's continued advances in technology have made the word "impossible" almost obsolete.
In our modern world, steroids can help generate Herculean muscles, titanium joints can replace and even improve upon our own natural ones.
And even prosthetic gills are being developed, so human beings can breathe underwater without the use of air tanks.
Today, government contractors like Raytheon-Sarcos and Lockheed Martin continue to develop exoskeleton machines for the U.
S.
military.
When worn, they can allow soldiers to walk, run and lift hundreds of pounds with virtually no effort.
DIDIO: What makes exoskeletons so cool is that it's an every man thing Every body can pick one, put one on, anybody can be the hero.
You can take a person with any sort of physical weaknesses and make them greater than the person without them.
GRESH: Exoskeletons would be a prime example of something coming out of comic books into mainstream reality.
And in reality, exoskeletons are becoming very popular with the military.
A soldier can wear the Raytheon exoskeleton, for example, and lift 200 pounds NARRATOR: While these modern day super men may be limited in their mobility, the development of exoskeletons represents an incredible evolution in the relationship between men and machine.
But did such incredible technology exist before? Perhaps in mankind's ancient past.
TSOUKALOS: Now, it is possible that some type of exoskeleton technology was used in the remote past for example, on the Giza plateau? Imagine the operator of one of those exoskeleton machines, coming out of that machine, that person has super powers even though the person does not have any powers at all That person is only operating sophisticated technology.
One could argue, with all the advancements we are making today in science and all the other academic fields we are becoming more god-like We are not becoming gods, we are not turning into real super heroes we are only becoming god-like because of our technology.
GRESH: I think we have innate need to push our bodies and our minds to the utmost limits and strive for super intelligence, super strength and other superpowers.
The reason is that people have long been fascinated with what could be stronger than humanity itself, and if it's not human, then it must come from somewhere else, either a god or an extraterrestrial.
NARRATOR: But with all of these scientific achievements, is mankind perhaps making himself more and more vulnerable to what could be terrible consequences? YOUNG: There are many tales of ordinary mortals ascending to become rulers, to become gods and various positions of enormous power Often these characters then become corrupt and the stories stick around and are retold over a long period of time, long after their sources have withered away.
to teach us that power corrupts to be careful what you wish for and to be very cautious if ever holding great power because of its ability to harm.
DIDIO: Almost 50% of our stories are about technology run amuck, or the dark side of technology, because when you talk about superpowers, when you talk about all this transformation, everything comes at a price.
And you always have to weigh whether or not price is worthy, or necessary to make, for the greater good, and sometimes it's not.
Sometimes, the price you pay is just too great, when you lose your own self.
NARRATOR: Are all of mankind's scientific achievements really examples of emerging technology? or is the yearning for superpowers and heroic feats embedded in our collective DNA? Are humans finally catching up to the abilities of beings who have been here before? And were they gods? Or, as some believe, alien ancestors, living thousands of years ago, but possessing powers and abilities thousands of years more advanced? Perhaps only time and further advancements in technology will tell.
Or perhaps it will all be revealed when they return.
Throughout history, mankind has told incredible tales of gods and superheroes.
But do we yearn to possess these extraordinary powers for another, more profound, reason? WILLIAM HENRY: Implanted within our DNA is this desire to become god-like, to fly in the air, or swim through the ocean or especially to ascend into the stars.
ERICH VON DANIKEN: Humans were created according to the image of God.
So we are part of them.
If the so-called gods had incredible powers, we have them in us, too.
NARRATOR: Could ancient stories of god-like kings and heroes really have otherworldly origins? JASON MARTELL: Many of the sacred powers given to kings of the past we know today were more than likely technology that ancient man was given from the actual gods, which we know were probably extraterrestrials.
NARRATOR: 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? Does it help to explain our continuing fascination with stories of gods and heroes? Greece.
The Island of Crete.
On the Lassithi Plateau, over half a mile above sea level, lies the Dikteon Cave.
This sprawling complex of caverns stretches nearly one and a half square miles, and archeological finds have shown a human presence dating as far back as 6,000 years ago.
Historians believe the first inhabitants of the area actually lived inside the cave, and according to legend, its many chambers were once home to an otherworldly being, Zeus, the Greek god of thunder.
In Greek mythology, Zeus is the son of Cronus, the king of the first generation of gods known as the Titans.
RICHARD RADER: Zeus's father, Cronus, is not particularly excited about giving birth to a child because he's heard a prophecy that one of his children is going to over throne him So, just as soon as their children are born he just swallows them all down.
Now his mother Rhea, who's Cronus's wife, is distraught about this.
So what she does is substitute a rock that she's wrapped up in swaddling clothes.
Gives it to Cronus, which he swallows down.
And what she does is hides Zeus away in a cave.
So he grows up there.
NARRATOR: In Theogony, the describes the cave Zeus was hidden in as lying in these very mountains, and specifically near the city of Lyktos, the location of the Dikteon Cave.
But the similarities between this cave and the cave of Zeus described in Greek mythology go much further.
PHILIP COPPENS: The ancients say that when they are talking about mythology, it is about own recorded events of their past.
According to the Greek myths, the child Zeus was nourished on a mixture of honey and milk at the udder of the goat.
Now around 1900 AD, a chamber of the Dikteon Cave was identified by locals as the birthplace of Zeus, and when archeologists went in there, they discovered an alter with the remains of numerous religious offerings, amongst them honey and goat milk.
These remains date back 4,000 years, to the exact period in which the ancient Greek stories took place.
The question is, is this once again a coincidence that modern excavations find remains in this cave that match up with what's written in Greek mythology? NARRATOR: Also found in the Dikteon Cave were numerous artifacts dating back to what would have been the time of Zeus's childhood according to the Greek stories.
Among them was a fragmentary inscription bearing a hymn a hymn dedicated specifically to Zeus.
Could the Dikteon Cave really be the cave described in Theogony? And if actual locations from Greek mythology really do exist, could legendary characters and events also be based on historical fact? COPPENS: We think of mythology as something which has been invented.
But really, when we look at the ancient Greeks, they believe that the War of the Titans physically happened.
That this was a war, which was fought in heaven, by the deities.
NARRATOR: In Greek mythology, the War of the Titans is a celestial battle waged by Zeus and his siblings, known as the Olympians, against their father Cronus and the Titans.
The Olympians, who are the victors in this battle, were the gods worshiped by the ancient Greeks.
But according to ancient astronaut theorists, these human-like beings may have been something other than divine, and this mythical war may have been an actual historical event.
To support this claim, they point to the existence of similar myths and stories told by different cultures throughout the world.
COPPENS: When it comes to warring parties of gods, Greece is not a stand-alone issue.
We have the same thing in Ragmornak.
In Norwegian mythology, we have this idea that the gods fought amongst themselves as well.
We also have stories from Sumerian, Babylonian, Hittite accounts where it says that the wars were fought between gods.
MARTELL: We see the same story of Titans being over throned by a new set of gods.
In the sumerian epics, the Annunaki coming here as the original culture in ancient Iraq.
So these similarities tell of a warring race of beings that squabbled amongst themselves about the rights of various areas on the Earth.
NARRATOR: What can explain the similarities of these ancient war stories that emerged from all over the world? Could they all be describing the same historical events? And if there is an historical basis for the legends and stories, what does that suggest about the incredible powers and weaponry supposedly possessed by the gods? MARTELL: It's very possible that the Clash of the Titans known from the Greek times is actually speaking of a much earlier epoch of extraterrestrials having a type of battle.
HENRY: The ancient Greek gods had helmets that made them invisible.
They had breastplates that made them impervious to their enemies' weapons.
They had tridents that shot thunderbolts; they had winged sandals that gave them the power of flight.
These are all profound examples of an ancient alien technology that the Greek gods possessed.
NARRATOR: If mythical gods and monsters really did exist, were they, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, extraterrestrial beings? And could this help to explain the enormous and enduring popularity of gods, Titans and other so-called "superheroes" in today's popular culture? DAN DIDIO: There's so many different places where the characters of the superheroes come from but naturally so much of these come from mythology and from literature.
Because those are such strong bodies of work they're so familiar, and they become the architecture of all types of heroes.
JONATHAN YOUNG: The stories exists partly because we want to dream of such powers, We want to imagine what might be possible if we had unlimited dominance.
COPPENS: We watch endless amounts of television and movies which says that amongst us are a group of people who are more than just human super humans, and that somehow these people are born that way or that something happens to them which triggers this.
But basically the underlying subconscious message revealed is that we are capable of becoming gods.
Implanted within our DNA is this desire to become god-like, either to fly in the air or to swim through the ocean or run super fast or especially to ascend into the stars.
NARRATOR: Why are human beings so drawn to stories about beings with superior abilities and technologies.
Are they looking for something larger? and more powerful outside of themselves? or perhaps, within? In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus is often credited with creating human beings out of basic materials found on Earth.
YOUNG: Prometheus was playing with mud and made little figurines of it and Athenea was fascinated with this and breathed life into them.
RADER: The cynical read is to say what he wants is somebody who to worship him like people worship Zeus.
He created us in his image and he gave us all these skills culture and technology and medicines, and makes us what it means to be a human being.
Zeus realised he couldn't uncreate these beings but what he could do is limit them in their capabilities and restrict them their capacity and prevent them from becoming god-like.
DAVID CHILDRESS: It's as if the extraterrestrials wanted to keep us from having all the same technology that they had NARRATOR: In another version of the story, Prometheus is said to have stolen a spark of Zeus's lightning bolt in order to give humans the gift of fire.
COPPENS: When we are talking about a god who gives fire to man, we realise that this is not the god as in the supreme being the one, but clearly somebody else, an ancient alien GEORGE TSOUKALOS: We pursued throughout history to master the powers of the gods but the question is where did all those ideas originate, and the answer is very simple.
Due to extraterrestrial contact, in our remote past.
NARRATOR: Could humans really be the creation of alien beings with extraordinary powers? Do we have a subconscious desire to reconnect with the so-called gods of our past by becoming more like them through advancements in technology? Could this explain the origins of ancient tales of gods and heroes who were thought to possess extraordinary powers? Perhaps the answer can be found near the Greek valley of Phocis, and by examining the legend of The Oracle at Delphi.
Lydia, 716 B.
C.
Gyges, a shepherd in the service of King Candaules, becomes the unlikely successor to the throne of this ancient kingdom in modern day Turkey.
But the story of how this modest servant rose from a shepherd to a king is so fantastic that many scholars and historians have dismissed it as mere myth.
YOUNG: Gyges is out in the field and there's a terrible earthquake He sees a cave open, goes in the cave and sees a gold ring BADER: He just kind of walks in this chamber, which is like a tomb where he sees a dead body that has some jewelry on it so he grabs this ring off because he's a poor man He puts the ring on and discovers that it gives him the power to be invisible.
YOUNG: Here, he has the kind of power a god would have and does it use it well? Well, actually it's a little questionable how he uses it.
HENRY: He comes up with a plan.
The next time he goes to visit the king he brings that ring with him, turns himself invisible, seduces the queen, kills the king, takes over the palace.
COPPENS: What we have here is really a multi-layered legend We have not only the story of the fact that somebody in the past had the cloak of invisibility but actually that he did not invent this that it was a legacy from a race who had buried their dead and that alongside these deaths were artifacts, which were technological What kind of a magical amulet or technology are we talking about here? Was this the ring of the gods that's described by the ancient sumerians and is the ring of cosmic sovereignty NARRATOR: According to legend, a bloody civil war irrupted following the death of King Candaules It ended when Gyges obtained approval for overthrowing the throne from the oracle of Delphi.
A mysterious priestess whose eerily correct prophecies BIRNES: The oracle of Delphi, whether it's a prophet or a soothsayer had a direct relationship to the extraterrestrial being.
The extraterrestrial being communicated through the priest who then interpret that into a language that the listeners could understand.
NARRATOR: But was it really a god who endorsed Gyges reign, or was Apollo, the son of Zeus, an extraterrestrial, as astronaut theorists contend.
Was it perhaps the same extraterrestrial who let Gyges to find the ring that enabled him to see his power, in the first place.
And if so, could this be an example of aliens endowing a human with god-like powers, to carry out some earthly agenda? TSOUKALOS: When I read stories like Gyges of Lidia who has found this ring which gave him the capability of becoming invisible then there are two things that I think of: one, is it just fantasy or do we have another reference here that describes misunderstood technology.
Because today, researchers at Duke University are trying to develop an invisibility cloak.
NARRATOR: Duke University engineer professor David R Smith is the director for the center for meta-material and integrated plasmatics For the past decade, Smith and his team have been working to create meta-materials or artificial materials that are not found in nature.
Just like a piece of glass can control the way light bends Smith is set out to prove that certain man made materials can actually be constructed to render objects invisible.
DAVID SMITH: This is actually an example of a meta-material this is a bunch of pieces of circuit board all cut out and assembled together and on the circuit boards are little pieces of copper that are tied in circuits, and each circuit has a certain response to electromagnetic radiation and the combination of these patterns plus the shape gives us something that we can call an invisibility cloak The idea behind the cloak is that when renders something inside of it invisible, and it's self invisible as well NARRATOR: At present, the device only makes objects disappear at microwave frequencies But Dr.
Smith believes that soon this technology will also be able to make objects invisible to even the human eye.
SMITH: Just in the last year or two, there actually have been experiments showing certain of the cloaking idea is transitioning to the visible spectrum, red, green, blue.
Those experiments are actually being done now LOIS GRESH: We will have invisibility cloaks at some point that we could wear as humans.
I definitely think we're gonna get there because science and speculative science go hand in hand.
Science creates a base point, speculative science pushes it farther into the future, and that's how technology advances.
NARRATOR: An actual cloak of invisibility? Though still in development, researchers in Japan have designed an optical camouflage system that makes special reflective material seemingly disappear, including the person wearing it, thus bringing us closer to achieving a fully functional invisibility cloak like the one described in the story of Gyges.
Could this mean that other seemingly far-fetched devices of fantasy, like flying carpets and magic wands, are also based on science, and if so, might they have been used in the ancient past, perhaps in the hands of extraterrestrial visitors? TSOUKALOS: Just because we are working on these technologies today does not mean that we are the first.
Because we find multiple references in ancient texts that describe devices with which you were able to go invisible.
DiDIO: So much of our storytelling deals with the fact that what we deem to be magic can really be science at a different time.
NARRATOR: If legendary tales like the story of King Gyges could be proven to be real, what does it suggest about other fantastic stories of gods and titans? Hisarlik, Turkey Within this archaeological site lie the ruins of Troy, a place once thought by mainstream scientists to be no more than myth until Heinrich Schliemann unearthed its remains in 1871.
Here in the 12th century B.
C.
, the ancient Greek city was the center of the Trojan War, a Greek battle described in Homer's Iliad.
According to the epic poem, the goddess Athena gives King Diomedes the power of divine vision during the war so that he could see like the gods.
RADER: Athena comes down and she wants to help the Greeks, so she finds Diomedes and she says, "I'm gonna help you out here.
So what I'm gonna do is strip away this mist that's over your eyes.
You, as a human being, you don't really know what's going on.
You just see battle, but once I strip away this mist, you're gonna be able to see what's really going on, which is that, in addition to a battle going on, there are gods fighting.
YOUNG: King Diomedes sees that Ares-- the god of war-- is fighting alongside his enemy Hector, and he was not to use this sight to attack the gods, but that is exactly what he uses it for.
COPPENS: The side aspect of this is this: it's a question-- did the gods really have this? Were they superhuman like we want to become, or did they have technology which enabled them to do these kind of things? NARRATOR: Diomedes and the gods' power of super eyesight may seem like pure fantasy, but enhanced vision is also becoming a reality thanks to advancements in spectrometer technology.
Spectrometers are devices used to measure properties of light over a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum than is visible with the human eye, and today, just as we are developing cloaking devices, we are also developing technology to see through those devices.
SMITH: Technology is driven by society's needs.
more than anything else but myths have a way of inspiring us and they represent part of the imagination which we need to even envision the next generation of technologies DÄNIKEN: If I dream, I could go to another galaxy I will sooner or later go to another galaxy We are the offsprings of the gods and all these things are in our brains We think we are very powerful.
In practice we are not, but we have technology to develop the power because we are the sons of the gods.
NARRATOR: Might technology be our way of reconnecting with the gods, or did the so-called gods deliberately deny us their superpowers as a way of motivating our imaginations and technological achievements? Perhaps further evidence can be found in the heavens at a Mexican ceremony that commemorates real-life close encounters with alien visitors.
Veracruz, Mexico Five men in ceremonial dress ascend a 100-foot pole.
Once at the top, one of the men performs a sacred dance while playing a flute and drum atop a platform.
The other four men launch themselves off.
It is a ritual known as La Danza de los Voladores, or The Dance of the Flyers.
YOUNG: The ritual has the leader stand on top of the pole on the top of little platform, and the four flyers wrap up cable around that pole and then branch out fly around in a pyramid shape, in perfect synchronized order.
It's a stunning and daring thing to do.
They are representing the birds.
They are representing the four cardinal directions.
They are representing the elements.
Heavily symbolic and mythic, and it is a powerful ritual.
NARRATOR: The Totonac people who practice this ceremony today claim it is a dance that was invented 500 years ago as a plea to the gods to end a severe drought.
But could this ancient ritual have different, perhaps otherworldly origins? TSOUKALOS: What we have here with the Voladores is 100% living mythology something that describes and illustrates in front of our living eye the descent of the gods, from a time ago.
HENRY: The motive of the god descending from the skies is one of the most ancient stories.
If you go back to the Old Testament you have the stories of the sons of gods descending from the sky and they see the daughters of men and they create a race of giants.
In the Book of Genesis, Jacob sees a ladder ascending into the heavens with angels ascending and descending upon this ladder.
Jesus, in the Book of John, describes the heavens opening and beings descending upon the son of man.
NARRATOR: According to ancient astronaut theorists, the Voladores ritual is a reenactment of a close encounter with alien visitors in the distant past.
They believe extraterrestrials descended upon the flat mountaintops of the Palpa region in Peru around 500 A.
D.
, dropping from their aircraft and gliding down to Earth in spiraling circles.
TSOUKALOS: The Voladores ritual was very technological, as in, you know, these beings descending from the sky and the circle signifying arrival of the gods.
Where does that flying or descending gods motif originate? Our ancestors saw something because why would you hurl yourself from a 100-foot pole out of nothing, to imitate a bird? Birds are not that important.
Something very significant happened.
NARRATOR: Could an alien encounter really be the inspiration for the Voladores ritual? And could the Totanac people, who created the ceremony, really have been trying to mimic the ancient gods' power of flight? As further evidence that early humans may have encountered alien visitors equipped with the power of flight Ancient astronaut theorists point to various artifacts and statues depicting ancient gods.
One such example is the Mayan god, Ah-Muzen-Cab, also known as the flying "Bee God.
" Another is the most prominent god of early Mesoamerican culture-- the winged deity Quetzalcoatl.
LOGAN HAWKES: Mesoamericans believed in the winged serpent or the Quetzalcoatl, which came from the sky bringing wisdom, power of the wind, and also influenced everything that happened in the everyday life of the Mayans.
In fact, they looked to the sky for all their answers, from everything as simple as when to plant corn, to when to go to war.
Uh, they believed all answers in the universe came from the sky and trying to relate that to their daily lives.
HENRY: The ancient record are loaded with fantastic examples of the gods flying around.
These are the ancient aliens, and humans are being shown the ultimate capability of these gods.
VON DANIKEN: In my eyes, because we are the sons of the gods, we are the offsprings of the gods whatever humans can dream, whatever humans think was once reality in the past or will be reality in the future.
NARRATOR: July 21st, 2003 The English Channel.
Felix Baumgartner becomes the first person to cross this free fall using a specially made fiber wing.
But the Austrian daredevil is just one of many who have used wing-suits to simulate flying by means of a free fall.
ED PAWLOWSKI: A wing-suit is basically a jump suit that you put on under your rig and it's designed to actually make you fly.
when you exit the plane.
The material inflates underneath your arms, in between your legs, and creates basically an airfoil that you glide on through the air.
It's an amazing feeling because you're actually the pilot and the plane.
It is total freedom.
You feel as though you're flying.
Though you are falling, you're using the air to maneuver your body.
And the wing-suit helps you cover a lot of ground as you're descending.
Some people have been exceeding two-to-one glide ratio.
For example, three-to-one would mean for every foot you descend, you're traveling three feet forward.
TSOUKALOS: We got these flying guys that have these wings attached to their backs, and they hurl themselves out of planes, and some even have rocket engines attached to them.
And so they essentially themselves become airplanes.
Now imagine showing that to someone from a hundred years ago.
That person would be in complete awe of what they are witnessing, not understanding that there's technology involved with this.
VON DANIKEN: Just using our own body, we cannot fly.
We have no wings.
But, of course, we have the fantasy and we have the technology to develop wings that we can fly.
TSOUKALOS: The pursuit of flight has been one of the most sought after quests in all of mankind's history.
Why? Because with flight you could reach, conceivably, the realm of the gods.
NARRATOR: From the ancient Greek myth of lcarus, fashioning wings of feathers and wax, to modern daredevils, like Felix Baumgartner, human beings have been fascinated with, and often frustrated by, their desire to fly.
But have birds really served as mankind's inspiration? Or something else? Something extraterrestrial.
And if ancient visitors could fly, what other powers might they have possessed? And what abilities might early man have had and lost? Perhaps the answer can be found, not in the skies (thunder crashes) but deep beneath the sea.
Cape Sounion, Greece.
Perched on the headland, surrounded on three sides by the sea, lies the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon, built in 440 BC.
The second son of the Titan King Cronus, Poseidon was worshiped throughout Greece almost as much as his younger brother Zeus.
YOUNG: Poseidon was the god of the sea, he was also the god of earthquakes and, strangely, curses When Poseidon was in a good mood, he created new lands out of the sea.
He gave calm waters for good voyages.
When he was in a bad mood, he destroyed ships and brought storms.
(thunder crashes) RADER: Poseidon does rule over the kingdom of the sea.
It is envisioned as a kind of place where people live.
And when he comes out of that place yes, he rides the spectacular kind of like water chariot that is driven by dolphins and he holds a really big trident.
NARRATOR: In Greek mythology, Cronus eats all of his children except for Zeus, who eventually rescues his siblings, including Poseidon, from the belly of his father.
YOUNG: A potion is prepared that makes him heave up all the other siblings of Zeus, and these become the gods of Olympus.
NARRATOR: But ancient astronaut theorists believe this Greek myth is actually a metaphor for an extraterrestrial event.
They believe the notion of gods being vomited up from the belly of their father actually describes mutinous aliens being expelled from the mother ship.
COPPENS: Anything which is followed up into a living creature will not be able to survive for three days it will die from suffocation and will begin to decay So what we have here is not a creature, but something else.
It could've been an object, which was clearly of a man-made or extraterrestrial origin.
VON DANIKEN: A mutiny took place.
Some of the extraterrestrials, they had sex with a wonderful earthly female, woman They were not allowed to do this.
So, one of these extraterrestrials who were not allowed to go back with the mother spaceship had the name of Poseidon.
Poseidon fell in love with the beautiful human girl.
And he made her pregnant.
RADER: Poseidon is married, all right.
He's got a child.
He's got some grandchildren, right.
There's a whole caste of sea nymphs as well.
All of them presumably, like, live in this place.
YOUNG: Poseidon had the power of the deep, the unseen place.
If you look out at the sea, you see a surface, and you're aware there's a whole world below that, suggesting powers beyond that which meet the eye.
NARRATOR: Among the mythical creatures associated with Poseidon are the Telchines a race of advanced fish children.
These human like beings could live both in and out of water HENRY: They're masters of technology and seem to match up with the fish gods of ancient sumeria who worked for Enki the great god of alchemy, and technology and smith craft RADER: The Telchines are also kind of in the shadowy territory of god human monster things.
They're just these kind of figures who are not gods but they're like human beings There's one story about the Roman version of Zeus, Jupiter.
trying to destroy them.
Now, we don't know whether they are actually all destroyed but it's possibly because of their relationship to the magic.
NARRATOR: In Greek legend, the Telchines were also metallurgists They were said to have created Poseidon's magical trident and to have casted the first bronze statues of the gods of Olympus.
And according to some historians the Telchines may not have been creatures of myth but were beings who actually existed.
RADER: There were people called Telchines, we do actually have evidence of these beings they were actual ancient greeks who had specific tasks and traits like metallurgy, like smiting and so on.
And so you could see how it is that a being like Telchines that these things could in fact not these just these mythological beings but like actual people.
So the way we look at the ancient greeks and Rome, is the way they would have looked at the stories that are being told about the ***.
TSOUKALOS: We've got the stories of the Telchine and they were able to survive under water for unlimited amount of time Now, how is such a thing possible unless you have access to some type of technology An Israeli company is currently developing a human artificial gill system that allows humans to take oxygen from surrounding water without the need of oxygen tanks You can potentially can remain underwater for unlimited amounts of time.
All the technology that we are discovering today is in fact old news.
It's been around before.
NARRATOR: Could the ancient Greek myths really be based on actual events? Were the Telchines early humans enabled with god-like abilities? And were these powers really misunderstood alien technology? Perhaps the answers can be found, not in the past, but in the present.
As modern day advances in science and technology give us, perhaps, our greatest evidence that we are not alone.
The ability to fly to thrive underwater, and to travel through space and explore the universe.
At one time, these were all believed to be impossible notions.
Dismissed as mere science fiction or myth.
But mankind's continued advances in technology have made the word "impossible" almost obsolete.
In our modern world, steroids can help generate Herculean muscles, titanium joints can replace and even improve upon our own natural ones.
And even prosthetic gills are being developed, so human beings can breathe underwater without the use of air tanks.
Today, government contractors like Raytheon-Sarcos and Lockheed Martin continue to develop exoskeleton machines for the U.
S.
military.
When worn, they can allow soldiers to walk, run and lift hundreds of pounds with virtually no effort.
DIDIO: What makes exoskeletons so cool is that it's an every man thing Every body can pick one, put one on, anybody can be the hero.
You can take a person with any sort of physical weaknesses and make them greater than the person without them.
GRESH: Exoskeletons would be a prime example of something coming out of comic books into mainstream reality.
And in reality, exoskeletons are becoming very popular with the military.
A soldier can wear the Raytheon exoskeleton, for example, and lift 200 pounds NARRATOR: While these modern day super men may be limited in their mobility, the development of exoskeletons represents an incredible evolution in the relationship between men and machine.
But did such incredible technology exist before? Perhaps in mankind's ancient past.
TSOUKALOS: Now, it is possible that some type of exoskeleton technology was used in the remote past for example, on the Giza plateau? Imagine the operator of one of those exoskeleton machines, coming out of that machine, that person has super powers even though the person does not have any powers at all That person is only operating sophisticated technology.
One could argue, with all the advancements we are making today in science and all the other academic fields we are becoming more god-like We are not becoming gods, we are not turning into real super heroes we are only becoming god-like because of our technology.
GRESH: I think we have innate need to push our bodies and our minds to the utmost limits and strive for super intelligence, super strength and other superpowers.
The reason is that people have long been fascinated with what could be stronger than humanity itself, and if it's not human, then it must come from somewhere else, either a god or an extraterrestrial.
NARRATOR: But with all of these scientific achievements, is mankind perhaps making himself more and more vulnerable to what could be terrible consequences? YOUNG: There are many tales of ordinary mortals ascending to become rulers, to become gods and various positions of enormous power Often these characters then become corrupt and the stories stick around and are retold over a long period of time, long after their sources have withered away.
to teach us that power corrupts to be careful what you wish for and to be very cautious if ever holding great power because of its ability to harm.
DIDIO: Almost 50% of our stories are about technology run amuck, or the dark side of technology, because when you talk about superpowers, when you talk about all this transformation, everything comes at a price.
And you always have to weigh whether or not price is worthy, or necessary to make, for the greater good, and sometimes it's not.
Sometimes, the price you pay is just too great, when you lose your own self.
NARRATOR: Are all of mankind's scientific achievements really examples of emerging technology? or is the yearning for superpowers and heroic feats embedded in our collective DNA? Are humans finally catching up to the abilities of beings who have been here before? And were they gods? Or, as some believe, alien ancestors, living thousands of years ago, but possessing powers and abilities thousands of years more advanced? Perhaps only time and further advancements in technology will tell.
Or perhaps it will all be revealed when they return.