Ancient Aliens s04e09 Episode Script
The Time Travelers
NARRATOR: Ancient star rituals summoning higher powers COPPENS: What the discipline of the Kalachakra is telling us is that we can control time.
NARRATOR: Legends of otherworldly beings traveling through time It's not outside the realm of possibility that these aliens, they are, in fact, time travelers.
NARRATOR: and scientific theory revealing the secrets of the universe.
If someone can travel faster than the speed of light, then theoretically, someone could travel in time.
NARRATOR: Are alien beings really from out of this world, or might they be evidence of man's future technological achievements? You have to wonder if they weren't time-traveling extraterrestrials, or even humans coming from our own future.
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? And if so, might new evidence reveal the existence of time travelers? NARRATOR: Bern, Switzerland.
September 26, 1905.
Albert Einstein publishes his special theory of relativity.
According to his astonishing scientific breakthrough, space and time are one.
RONALD MALLETT: In the old theory of Newton, space was a rigid container and time was an absolute flow.
In Einstein's theory, this was revolutionized.
Space now became a flexible medium, and time now could be altered.
MICHAEL DENNIN: Einstein realized that if you move faster, the ticks on your clock actually change.
Prior to Einstein, no one understood that or would even have expected that, because it only happens when you get very, very close to the speed of light.
SARA SEAGER: There is a way within the laws of physics to travel long distances and still be alive, and that actually is related to special relativity and the idea that if you can travel very, very close to the speed of light, time will slow down for you.
And in this sense, if you could travel very near the speed of light, only a day or two would pass, instead of the whole four years.
NARRATOR: January 30, 1933.
flees to the United States.
Fearing Hitler's rise to power, he warns the U.
S.
and the world of terrible dangers posed to humanity, especially if Nazis were to acquire advanced technology.
(loud rumbling) But by revealing to the world his breakthrough theories, might Einstein have accidentally helped the Nazis build a time machine? Southwest Poland.
The Owl Mountains.
Here, concealed under rolling hills, were seven underground complexes built for a top secret Nazi program called Die Glocke.
Some researchers believe it was in these covert facilities, between 1943 and 1945, that Third Reich scientists carried out clandestine experiments in an effort to win World War II.
JIM MARRS: They were developing lots of exotic things.
They were in charge of the V1, the V2 rocket programs.
But then, I think, the culmination of their experimentation was with Die Glocke, or The Bell, and they called it that because it was bell-shaped.
> MICHAEL BARA: And what this appeared to be was some sort of device that had very, very powerful, rapidly rotating energetic magnetic fields.
And there are thoughts that this basically was a time machine.
That the idea was that you would be able to move back and forth in time, change history, change certain events, and create a new time line and a new reality.
NARRATOR: The existence of the mysterious bell-shaped device, measuring nine feet wide and 12 feet tall, was first exposed by the high-ranking Nazi general Jakob Sporrenberg while being interrogated by Polish authorities after the war.
But when the Allies eventually captured the German research center, neither the Nazi Bell nor its project commander, Hans Kammler, could be found.
BARA: Hans Kammler was in charge of all the super-secret Nazi technology.
And this guy just disappears after the war.
In fact, there are four official versions of his death.
(laughs): So nobody really knows how he died, when he died, if he died, where he went, or what happened.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the German military was experimenting with time travel technology? And if so, might the Nazi Bell have actually traveled to the future? (whooshing) December 9, 1965.
(rumbling) Thousands witness a brilliant fireball flash across the sky before crashing in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
(explosion) MARRS: The military was immediately on the scene, grabbed everything up, and then said nothing happened.
The thing that intrigues me about the Kecksburg crash is the description of the object.
Unlike most of the flying saucers, this one was bulbous.
It has been described like an acorn, or, what I could see, is kind of something that resembled the Nazi Bell.
NARRATOR: Might the object that crashed at Kecksburg have been the long-lost Nazi Bell that disappeared 20 years earlier? And is it possible that German scientists had discovered a way to transport humans from one time and place to another, as some researchers believe? If so, did they use Einstein's theories to create their own time machine? Or might their inspiration have been, perhaps more divine? Tibet.
May, 1938.
While on an expedition through the northeast region of the Himalayan Mountains, Nazi officials searching for the origins of the Aryan, or master, race, instead discover the Buddhist teachings known as the Kalachakra.
DOC BARHAM: In the Buddhist tradition, there's the notion of Samsara, or the wheel of time.
In the Kalachakra initiation, the teaching is to understand time, particularly biological time calendar time and astrological time, and how those things actually influence you.
(men chanting) PHILIP COPPENS: And so what the discipline of Kalachakra is telling us is that whereas we seem to see time as linear, this is not the case, that time is somehow cyclical, and that we can somehow master this and control time.
DAVID CHILDRESS: Throughout the Buddhist world, the Buddhists build, uh, what they call stupas.
They look very much like the Nazi Bell.
COPPENS: The stupas, it is said that we can use this shape to somehow connect with the gods.
Now, when we put the practice of Kalachakra on this, what we are talking about is somehow a practice of transcending time.
BARHAM: The Kalachakra teaching gives individuals actual practices and techniques to be able to step outside of time, and to be able to move in time.
So it's entirely possible that the Nazis were looking for secrets on how to travel in time.
NARRATOR: Is it really possible that the Nazis unlocked the secrets of time travel during their expedition in Tibet? And if so, might the early teachings of the Kalachakra be evidence that ancient Tibetan Buddhist monks had knowledge of time travel thousands of years ago, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? Perhaps the answer can be found in the legends and rituals of an ancient civilization in New Mexico.
(bird screeches) NARRATOR: Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.
In a remote desert region 150 miles northwest of Albuquerque lie the mysterious ruins of an ancient Pueblo people.
Called the Anasazi, they thrived from 900 to 1100 AD.
GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: This is the Plaza of Pueblo Bonito.
This is a representation of our place in the universe.
You've got the worlds above, the worlds below, and this right here is our plane of our world.
This is the exact place where time and space began for the ancestral Pueblans, who inhabited this place hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
NARRATOR: Scholars believe the Anasazi, or ancient ones, built their civilization with advanced knowledge of engineering, mathematics and astronomy.
SEAN MORTON: Somehow, some way, they built a city that is perfectly circular, that goes out in perfectly straight lines, that the structures of the city themselves actually predict the moon and cycles of the sun.
All in the geometry.
All in the stone, if you will.
MARSHALL KLARFIELD: These are very elaborate constructions which required engineering skills beyond what the local folks had.
And it had to be done by an advanced civilization.
NANCY RED STAR: The Anasazi built Chaco Canyon.
And they built it as part of a promise of a way of living; that they were to uphold the wishes of the Creator.
And so Chaco Canyon is the delivery of the teachings.
The teachings came from the star people.
NARRATOR: But how did these ancient people engineer such elaborate structures without modern machinery? And just who were the star people who brought knowledge to the Anasazi? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answers can be found by looking at the ancient rituals and myths of Chaco Canyon.
According to local legends, the Anasazi believed in a multidimensional existence and practiced sacred rituals called crystal stargazing; ceremonies believed by some to enable time travel.
RED STAR: If you go up into the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi, there are elaborate star maps up in those caves.
And that's where the crystal stargazing ceremonies took place where they had the ability to traverse space and time.
COPPENS: What we're seeing within this area are people who basically say that they somehow emerged out of a different dimension onto this place.
And they say that this for them is a place of emergence.
They say that they interacted with mysterious creatures.
NARRATOR: Did the Anasazi really believe in interdimensional time travel, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? If so, might they have left behind tangible evidence of otherworldly contact? TSOUKALOS: I'm standing in front of the petroglyphs at Una Vida.
And they're very amazing as you can tell, with animal life, but there's also some very weird creature standing there, humanoid figures, and one guy is holding what to me looks like a representation of a spiral galaxy.
Native Americans were very aware of our place in the universe, that we were part of a giant spiral galaxy.
RED STAR: The spiral symbol, the one that you see on the walls, is a connection between the Anasazi and the extraterrestrials.
They had contact.
And they either came with them or they either left with them, we just don't know.
But it's a bridge that existed between the Anasazi and the star people.
TSOUKALOS: Four very interesting humanoid petroglyphs have been found, one of which hovers above the other three humanoids with antennae sprouting out of its head.
Some would suggest that this is a depiction of the ancient Ant People that emerged to essentially jump start human civilization.
NARRATOR: According to the legends of the Hopi, a Native American tribe believed to be the descendants of the Anasazi, the Ant People saved them from the first destruction of the universe.
WILLIAM HENRY: The Ant People are described as very special cosmic visitors, maybe even star beings, extraterrestrials, who rescued them from this cataclysm by taking them underground.
What's interesting about this is that in ancient Sumeria, they tell of beings called the Annunaki, who also came from the stars.
The Hopi word, "anu" means "ant.
" And the word "naki" means "friend.
" Is it possible that the Annunaki are the ant friends or Ant People that the Hopi were describing? NARRATOR: Did the Annunaki of ancient Sumeria also appear here in Chaco Canyon thousands of years ago as many ancient astronaut theorists believe? Perhaps the answer can be found in the local legend of the Wingmakers.
A group of hikers exploring a system of hidden caverns in Chaco Canyon discovered wall paintings and even cuneiform writing similar to those found on Sumerian artifacts.
After careful analysis, ancient astronaut theorists suggest that the caverns were originally inhabited by beings visiting from the future called the Wingmakers.
CHILDRESS: And the Wingmakers were-- they claimed-- humans, and in a sense extraterrestrials from 300 years in the future.
And they were using Chaco Canyon as their base for this time zone, where they were coming from the future into our present time.
RED STAR: My belief is that, yes, the Wingmakers were the culture bearers bringing us a look at what our future was, which was mathematics, it was science, it was art, it was cultivation.
NARRATOR: Might there be truth to the story of the time- traveling Wingmakers at Chaco Canyon? And if so, is it possible the Wingmakers were actually alien visitors? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest the evidence still lies in Chaco Canyon.
TSOUKALOS: This is a kiva.
A kiva was known to be the most sacred of places where ceremonies took place with the ancestral Pueblans when they talked about the cosmos, and the universe and our place in the universe.
NARRATOR: Mainstream archeologists believe the kivas were once covered with timber to make a roof.
But strangely, some Hopi legends refer to this circular structure as a "cloud house.
" TSOUKALOS: What if these cloud houses were nothing else but biodomes or biospheres made of nuts and bolts? It is interesting that biospheres today look as if people are living sort of sunk into the ground with a giant dome over it, and here we have something very similar.
So the question is, why would anybody do this, and according to the ancient myths, they were witness to an incredible event that had something to do with ancient aliens and to them, it was a divine encounter.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that alien beings inhabited biospheres in Chaco Canyon, like those our own scientists envision for future use on other planets? And might they have traveled here not in spacecraft, but through an interdimensional space-time portal? But if so, where did they come from? Perhaps answers can be found halfway around the world in the ancient Indian text of the Mahabharata.
The Mahabharata.
In this sacred Indian text, written in the eighth century BC, King Revaita is described as traveling to the heavens to meet with the creator god Brahma, only to return to Earth hundreds of years in the future.
Some researchers believe this Hindu tale may be one of the oldest records of successful time travel in the ancient past.
CHILDRESS: There's the story of a king called Revaita, and he is taken into space to see the gods.
And when he returns to the Earth, he finds that many ages have gone by.
And it's been hundreds of years.
And this is a kind of thing that would happen to space travelers and in time travel, as well.
You think you're gone for only a few days, but when you return to Earth, you find out that you've been gone for hundreds of years.
NARRATOR: Like the legend of Chaco Canyon, similar tales of time travel can be found all around the ancient world.
In Japan, the legend of Urashima Taro details a fisherman's visit to the protector god of the sea-- Ryujin-- in an underwater palace for what seemed like only three days.
CHILDRESS: When he returns to his fishing village, he finds that it's been 300 years that he's been gone.
And his house is in ruins, everybody he knows is long dead, no one remembers him or his family.
NARRATOR: And in the Hebrew Bible, descriptions of the prophet Jeremiah in Jerusalem are eerily similar to both of these accounts of time travel.
VON DANIKEN: In the Bible, the prophet Jeremiah was sitting together with a few of his friends, and there was a young boy.
His name was Abemolik.
And Jeremiah said to Abemolik, "Go out of Jerusalem, there is a hill and collect some figs for us.
" The boy went out and collected the fresh figs.
All of a sudden, Abemolik hears some noise and wind in the air, and he become unconscious, he had a blackout.
After a time he wakes up again, and he saw it was nearly the evening.
So when he runs back to the society and the city was full of strange soldiers.
And he says, "What's going on here? Where is Jeremiah and all the others?" And an old man said, "That was 62 years ago.
" It's a time travel story written in the Bible.
NARRATOR: Southern Egypt.
Agilkia Island.
Here, just six miles upstream from Aswan in the Nile River Valley, lies the Temple of Isis.
Built in the fourth century BC, the temple was a center of worship for the Egyptian goddess of fertility and nature until the sixth century AD.
COPPENS: Isis became the most important deity which ancient Egypt ever had.
She was married to her brother, Osiris, and together they really became the popular husband and wife to which everybody wanted to be like.
She is seen as a symbol of life, whereas Osiris is seen as the deity who rules over the death.
And so whether you are alive or whether you're dead, you can always identify with Isis and Osiris.
NARRATOR: According to ancient Egyptian religious belief, the goddess Isis was known as the Divine Mother, and believed to be the soul of the brightest star in the sky Sirius.
BARA: So to the ancient Egyptians, Osiris was Orion, that constellation actually was a literal living embodiment of the great god Osiris.
Sirius was the representation of his wife, sister and consort, Isis.
Together, those two essentially ruled the skies and the life of the Egyptian people themselves.
CHILDRESS: Many ancient cultures, including the Egyptians, Chinese, the Greeks, the Japanese, all had beliefs, legends that our gods who created us have come from Sirius.
And this star is known to be extremely important star to almost all ancient cultures.
HENRY: This knowledge originally emerged in ancient Egypt and in Africa with the Dogon tribe, who taught that beings of light came from Sirius and created humankind.
COPPENS: It is clear that so many cultures possessed information about Sirius, and they single out Sirius apart from everything else, and it's got nothing to with its brightness.
It has to do with the fact that somehow Sirius is responsible for sending us emissaries who educate us.
NARRATOR: Could the Sirius star system really be the point of origin for the gods of ancient man? Or was it, in fact, the place of origin for extraterrestrial time travelers, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? According to astronomers, Sirius is approximately 8.
5 light-years away from Earth, an incredibly vast distance.
SETH SHOSTAK: A light-year is about six trillion miles, so it's quite a ways to Sirius.
Our best rockets go about seven miles a second.
That's pretty fast, but even at that speed, to get to Sirius would take about 200,000 years.
SEAGER: So far, the farthest humans have traveled is the moon, at about 250,000 miles away.
Our next step will be Mars some day, but even that is a huge, huge stretch for humans.
Six-month trip to Mars, and just being able to survive there without oxygen and the things we usually have around us is a huge challenge.
The distances are too vast, and our technology is just nowhere near at level of being able to do that.
We got to the moon, and that's as far as we got.
That's not to say that another civilization couldn't have done that.
It's just, on Earth, we just don't have the technology to do that.
NARRATOR: What if interstellar distances were too great even for advanced extraterrestrial beings? Or might their level of technical sophistication be beyond our wildest dreams? COPPENS: Simply because it is impossible to us doesn't mean it's impossible for everybody, and definitely when it comes to beings out there who are able to transcend this boundary of time, it is clear that they are not subject to time in the way we are subject to it.
NARRATOR: Do some of the ancient myths and legends provide proof of successful intergalactic time travel, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? If so, might time travel have allowed passage for alien beings, as well as humans, to and from our world? Perhaps the answers can be found in a laboratory deep underground in Geneva, Switzerland.
Storrs, Connecticut.
January, 2012.
In a lab at the University of Connecticut, theoretical physicist Ronald Mallett demonstrates his large-scale model of a time machine.
Using a device called a ring laser that produces a circulating beam of light, the professor hopes to prove that the twisting light actually bends space, forming a loop in time.
MALLET: Now, what's happening here is that these lasers, even though you can't see it, they're actually creating a circulating pattern of light.
And that circulating pattern of light is actually twisting the empty space in here.
The twisting of space will eventually lead to a twisting of time.
In Einstein's theory, the two are connected.
And that twisting of time will be where time travel's occurring, because if you think of time as being a straight line, then if we twist space, then what will happen eventually is that that space will twist time into a loop.
So the breakthrough of my work was to use light to manipulate time.
And that should allow for the possibility of going back in time using light.
NARRATOR: Although this is only a prototype, Mallett believes he may be able to create a working time machine in as little as ten years.
He believes the energy of the light beams will produce a gravitational field strong enough to drag a spinning neutron through time.
MALLETT: Let's say I'll call the spin up a one, and I'll call spin down a zero.
So imagine I send a stream of neutrons with spin up, spin up, spin down, spin up.
What do you call that? That's binary code.
So by using the spin of neutrons, I can send a binary code, which could be translated into a message.
NARRATOR: But could this technology ultimately be able to send larger objects through time, like a person, or a spacecraft? HENRY: Einstein's theory of relativity allowed for something called the Einstein-Rosen bridge, which is what we today call a wormhole.
It opened up the possibility that we can travel from point A on Earth to point B somewhere else in the universe as if there were nothing in between.
NARRATOR: If the possibility exists to travel instantly from one end of the universe to another through wormholes, might there be evidence that such technology was used in the ancient past? HENRY: The ancient Egyptians knew about star gate and wormhole travel.
The evidence there I discovered is at the Temple of Hathor at Dandera.
When you enter into this temple, you look up on this ceiling, which is called the astronomical ceiling, and you see the gods as ascended light beings traveling on their ships of eternity.
And it suggests to me that the ancients didn't use the term "wormhole" for these time travel portals, but were clearly talking about the same thing.
NARRATOR: Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, that advanced celestial beings traveled in time through wormholes on their way to Earth? Or might they have possessed an even more advanced time travel technology, perhaps based on the complex science of quantum physics? Geneva, Switzerland.
tunnel more than 16 miles in circumference, lies the world's greatest particle accelerator: the Large Hadron Collider.
Completed in 2008 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, the massive international project may allow scientists to solve outstanding scientific mysteries concerning the creation of the universe.
DENNIN: The Large Hadron Collider is a machine we use in science to study how particles smaller than an atom behave.
The Large Hadron Collider is based on the principle of accelerating protons, which are one of the key elements of the nucleus of an atom, and you want to accelerate them up to very, very high speeds basically in a circular motion and collide two beams that are moving in opposite directions.
When you make this collision of the particles, you get a large number of product particles out.
Just like when you collide any two objects, they smash and break into pieces, the protons break into pieces.
And it allows us to study the fundamental particles that make up all of matter.
NARRATOR: On December 13, the Large Hadron Collider announced their findings of possible evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, or what some refer to as the God particle.
MALLETT: A number of physicists have discovered that there is a link between the four forces of nature that we believe exist.
And you might say the glue that holds these together, we believe, is this Higgs particle.
It gives particles their mass, and it also is the thing that helps to bind the forces.
So discovering this God particle is a way of understanding the possible unification of the forces of nature.
NARRATOR: Some scientists believe the discovery of the so-called God particle may lead to the creation of the Higgs singlet a particle believed to possess the ability to jump into another dimension, move forward or backward in time, and appear in the future or past.
In other words, it would make time travel possible.
SEAGER: We live in a three-dimensional world, and sometimes people consider time a fourth dimension.
But some theories in physics, string theory, predict that there are many, many more dimensions-- ten or 11 dimensions altogether.
Only, these dimensions are not accessible to us.
We don't see them.
Now, these dimensions are tiny, subatomic, smaller than particles inside of an atom.
And if you could somehow travel along these other dimensions, it would take you somewhere else entirely.
NARRATOR: Could other dimensions really exist that we are not yet able to perceive? If so, might advanced beings from a distant galaxy have already mastered and utilized the God particle to visit Earth, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? TSOUKALOS: If you place a picture side by side of the Hadron Collider and the Aztec calendar, there's an eerie similarity between the two.
The Aztec calendar was known to be a gateway to the universe.
And the Hadron Collider is similar to that, because we are trying to unlock the secrets of the universe with this machine.
And I find it fascinating that we have a carving from a long time ago, and when compared to the modern-day Hadron Collider, there is an eerie similarity.
Is it coincidence? I think not.
NARRATOR: Did ancient man really make contact with early time travelers? And are humans on the verge of discovering that same incredible ability? Perhaps further evidence can be found, evidence that ancient aliens may not have come from distant galaxies but from our own future.
NARRATOR: Ever since the infamous UFO incident of 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, there have been thousands of reports of extraterrestrial sightings, and even firsthand accounts of alien abductions.
Described as humanoid with large heads and small bodies, researchers believe these beings might, in fact, be an alien species that some call the Greys.
BARA: These aliens look not too dissimilar from us.
They have heads, they have hands, they have two arms, two legs, two eyes, a nose, a rudimentary mouth.
They certainly in their descriptions appear to be pretty close to us.
Or what they kind of look like is very, very early science fiction concepts of how the human race would eventually evolve over the eons.
BARHAM: If you look at the extraterrestrials that are described-- the Greys-- that are related to the Roswell incident, you will see that their forms, in many ways, resemble what we might project or predict that we could look like in the future, if we became a space-faring race.
CHILDRESS: The Roswell crash in New Mexico, in fact, happened coincidentally close to the birthday of the Egyptian goddess Isis.
So you have to wonder, too, if these so-called alien bodies that were allegedly found at the Roswell crash with thin bodies and big heads, if they weren't some kind of time-traveling extraterrestrials.
NARRATOR: Is it possible the beings believed to have been recovered at Roswell traveled here from the star Sirius, just like the Egyptian goddess Isis, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? And might they be coming here using advanced expertise in space-time technology? EDGAR MITCHELL: I would think that it's quite possible that the alien visitors had then proved to be the way we think they are, that they're using certain forms of teleportation perhaps, or certainly they have propulsion devices that can approach the speed of light.
LINDA HOWE: What we do know is that the physics of our planet, quantum physics and string theory, have moved the ball so much further than it was in the last century to saying there are no mathematical restrictions on time travel to the future or to the past.
And that once you know that the physics community is saying there are no restrictions, it's just us finding out how do we do this.
CHILDRESS: Time travel is basically the same as teleportation.
We could go from place to place on Earth in a matter of milliseconds.
This would revolutionize all kinds of travel, at the same time, our connections between us and any other civilization.
And including civilizations on other planets, as well.
NARRATOR: But just who really are these otherworldly creatures called the Greys? Is it possible they came to Earth not from outer space, but from the future or the past? Or might they actually be human time travelers? COPPENS: There are various theories as to what the Greys are.
There are stories that they are beings which have been around since time immemorial and are still around.
But there are also encounters which people have had, and in giving these encounters, it has been said that really the Greys are us from the future.
And that they really have traveled back in time because somehow we have genetically created this situation whereby the Greys are no longer able to procreate and that they have to therefore come back to our times to sort of remedy the situation.
BARA: People back in the '60s and '70s kind of speculated what would human beings look like in 1,000 years or 2,000 years? And the idea was that we would expand our intellectual knowledge so our brains would get bigger, and we'd have machinery that would basically do all the physical tasks for us that we do with our hands now.
We really would become almost physically inert beings.
And if you look at those early concepts of the future of the human race, they kind of look like the standard traditional Grey alien, the Roswell alien.
VON DANIKEN: I rather am a believer in time travel.
I say nothing will be impossible for us in the future.
Even if you think it's completely crazy, it will happen.
Whatever humans are able to think, to calculate, even to fantasize will one day become reality.
Sometimes I ask myself if these UFOs are not time travelers.
It's our own people of the future.
NARRATOR: Considering the scientific advancements from the last century alone, might it be possible future humans have discovered the ability to travel in time, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? Are they, in fact, the so-called visitors that have been recorded throughout the centuries? Or are they otherworldly aliens who have mastered travel through both time and space? Perhaps the answers can be found not in the here and now, but in another place and time.
NARRATOR: Legends of otherworldly beings traveling through time It's not outside the realm of possibility that these aliens, they are, in fact, time travelers.
NARRATOR: and scientific theory revealing the secrets of the universe.
If someone can travel faster than the speed of light, then theoretically, someone could travel in time.
NARRATOR: Are alien beings really from out of this world, or might they be evidence of man's future technological achievements? You have to wonder if they weren't time-traveling extraterrestrials, or even humans coming from our own future.
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? And if so, might new evidence reveal the existence of time travelers? NARRATOR: Bern, Switzerland.
September 26, 1905.
Albert Einstein publishes his special theory of relativity.
According to his astonishing scientific breakthrough, space and time are one.
RONALD MALLETT: In the old theory of Newton, space was a rigid container and time was an absolute flow.
In Einstein's theory, this was revolutionized.
Space now became a flexible medium, and time now could be altered.
MICHAEL DENNIN: Einstein realized that if you move faster, the ticks on your clock actually change.
Prior to Einstein, no one understood that or would even have expected that, because it only happens when you get very, very close to the speed of light.
SARA SEAGER: There is a way within the laws of physics to travel long distances and still be alive, and that actually is related to special relativity and the idea that if you can travel very, very close to the speed of light, time will slow down for you.
And in this sense, if you could travel very near the speed of light, only a day or two would pass, instead of the whole four years.
NARRATOR: January 30, 1933.
flees to the United States.
Fearing Hitler's rise to power, he warns the U.
S.
and the world of terrible dangers posed to humanity, especially if Nazis were to acquire advanced technology.
(loud rumbling) But by revealing to the world his breakthrough theories, might Einstein have accidentally helped the Nazis build a time machine? Southwest Poland.
The Owl Mountains.
Here, concealed under rolling hills, were seven underground complexes built for a top secret Nazi program called Die Glocke.
Some researchers believe it was in these covert facilities, between 1943 and 1945, that Third Reich scientists carried out clandestine experiments in an effort to win World War II.
JIM MARRS: They were developing lots of exotic things.
They were in charge of the V1, the V2 rocket programs.
But then, I think, the culmination of their experimentation was with Die Glocke, or The Bell, and they called it that because it was bell-shaped.
> MICHAEL BARA: And what this appeared to be was some sort of device that had very, very powerful, rapidly rotating energetic magnetic fields.
And there are thoughts that this basically was a time machine.
That the idea was that you would be able to move back and forth in time, change history, change certain events, and create a new time line and a new reality.
NARRATOR: The existence of the mysterious bell-shaped device, measuring nine feet wide and 12 feet tall, was first exposed by the high-ranking Nazi general Jakob Sporrenberg while being interrogated by Polish authorities after the war.
But when the Allies eventually captured the German research center, neither the Nazi Bell nor its project commander, Hans Kammler, could be found.
BARA: Hans Kammler was in charge of all the super-secret Nazi technology.
And this guy just disappears after the war.
In fact, there are four official versions of his death.
(laughs): So nobody really knows how he died, when he died, if he died, where he went, or what happened.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the German military was experimenting with time travel technology? And if so, might the Nazi Bell have actually traveled to the future? (whooshing) December 9, 1965.
(rumbling) Thousands witness a brilliant fireball flash across the sky before crashing in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
(explosion) MARRS: The military was immediately on the scene, grabbed everything up, and then said nothing happened.
The thing that intrigues me about the Kecksburg crash is the description of the object.
Unlike most of the flying saucers, this one was bulbous.
It has been described like an acorn, or, what I could see, is kind of something that resembled the Nazi Bell.
NARRATOR: Might the object that crashed at Kecksburg have been the long-lost Nazi Bell that disappeared 20 years earlier? And is it possible that German scientists had discovered a way to transport humans from one time and place to another, as some researchers believe? If so, did they use Einstein's theories to create their own time machine? Or might their inspiration have been, perhaps more divine? Tibet.
May, 1938.
While on an expedition through the northeast region of the Himalayan Mountains, Nazi officials searching for the origins of the Aryan, or master, race, instead discover the Buddhist teachings known as the Kalachakra.
DOC BARHAM: In the Buddhist tradition, there's the notion of Samsara, or the wheel of time.
In the Kalachakra initiation, the teaching is to understand time, particularly biological time calendar time and astrological time, and how those things actually influence you.
(men chanting) PHILIP COPPENS: And so what the discipline of Kalachakra is telling us is that whereas we seem to see time as linear, this is not the case, that time is somehow cyclical, and that we can somehow master this and control time.
DAVID CHILDRESS: Throughout the Buddhist world, the Buddhists build, uh, what they call stupas.
They look very much like the Nazi Bell.
COPPENS: The stupas, it is said that we can use this shape to somehow connect with the gods.
Now, when we put the practice of Kalachakra on this, what we are talking about is somehow a practice of transcending time.
BARHAM: The Kalachakra teaching gives individuals actual practices and techniques to be able to step outside of time, and to be able to move in time.
So it's entirely possible that the Nazis were looking for secrets on how to travel in time.
NARRATOR: Is it really possible that the Nazis unlocked the secrets of time travel during their expedition in Tibet? And if so, might the early teachings of the Kalachakra be evidence that ancient Tibetan Buddhist monks had knowledge of time travel thousands of years ago, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? Perhaps the answer can be found in the legends and rituals of an ancient civilization in New Mexico.
(bird screeches) NARRATOR: Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.
In a remote desert region 150 miles northwest of Albuquerque lie the mysterious ruins of an ancient Pueblo people.
Called the Anasazi, they thrived from 900 to 1100 AD.
GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: This is the Plaza of Pueblo Bonito.
This is a representation of our place in the universe.
You've got the worlds above, the worlds below, and this right here is our plane of our world.
This is the exact place where time and space began for the ancestral Pueblans, who inhabited this place hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
NARRATOR: Scholars believe the Anasazi, or ancient ones, built their civilization with advanced knowledge of engineering, mathematics and astronomy.
SEAN MORTON: Somehow, some way, they built a city that is perfectly circular, that goes out in perfectly straight lines, that the structures of the city themselves actually predict the moon and cycles of the sun.
All in the geometry.
All in the stone, if you will.
MARSHALL KLARFIELD: These are very elaborate constructions which required engineering skills beyond what the local folks had.
And it had to be done by an advanced civilization.
NANCY RED STAR: The Anasazi built Chaco Canyon.
And they built it as part of a promise of a way of living; that they were to uphold the wishes of the Creator.
And so Chaco Canyon is the delivery of the teachings.
The teachings came from the star people.
NARRATOR: But how did these ancient people engineer such elaborate structures without modern machinery? And just who were the star people who brought knowledge to the Anasazi? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answers can be found by looking at the ancient rituals and myths of Chaco Canyon.
According to local legends, the Anasazi believed in a multidimensional existence and practiced sacred rituals called crystal stargazing; ceremonies believed by some to enable time travel.
RED STAR: If you go up into the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi, there are elaborate star maps up in those caves.
And that's where the crystal stargazing ceremonies took place where they had the ability to traverse space and time.
COPPENS: What we're seeing within this area are people who basically say that they somehow emerged out of a different dimension onto this place.
And they say that this for them is a place of emergence.
They say that they interacted with mysterious creatures.
NARRATOR: Did the Anasazi really believe in interdimensional time travel, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? If so, might they have left behind tangible evidence of otherworldly contact? TSOUKALOS: I'm standing in front of the petroglyphs at Una Vida.
And they're very amazing as you can tell, with animal life, but there's also some very weird creature standing there, humanoid figures, and one guy is holding what to me looks like a representation of a spiral galaxy.
Native Americans were very aware of our place in the universe, that we were part of a giant spiral galaxy.
RED STAR: The spiral symbol, the one that you see on the walls, is a connection between the Anasazi and the extraterrestrials.
They had contact.
And they either came with them or they either left with them, we just don't know.
But it's a bridge that existed between the Anasazi and the star people.
TSOUKALOS: Four very interesting humanoid petroglyphs have been found, one of which hovers above the other three humanoids with antennae sprouting out of its head.
Some would suggest that this is a depiction of the ancient Ant People that emerged to essentially jump start human civilization.
NARRATOR: According to the legends of the Hopi, a Native American tribe believed to be the descendants of the Anasazi, the Ant People saved them from the first destruction of the universe.
WILLIAM HENRY: The Ant People are described as very special cosmic visitors, maybe even star beings, extraterrestrials, who rescued them from this cataclysm by taking them underground.
What's interesting about this is that in ancient Sumeria, they tell of beings called the Annunaki, who also came from the stars.
The Hopi word, "anu" means "ant.
" And the word "naki" means "friend.
" Is it possible that the Annunaki are the ant friends or Ant People that the Hopi were describing? NARRATOR: Did the Annunaki of ancient Sumeria also appear here in Chaco Canyon thousands of years ago as many ancient astronaut theorists believe? Perhaps the answer can be found in the local legend of the Wingmakers.
A group of hikers exploring a system of hidden caverns in Chaco Canyon discovered wall paintings and even cuneiform writing similar to those found on Sumerian artifacts.
After careful analysis, ancient astronaut theorists suggest that the caverns were originally inhabited by beings visiting from the future called the Wingmakers.
CHILDRESS: And the Wingmakers were-- they claimed-- humans, and in a sense extraterrestrials from 300 years in the future.
And they were using Chaco Canyon as their base for this time zone, where they were coming from the future into our present time.
RED STAR: My belief is that, yes, the Wingmakers were the culture bearers bringing us a look at what our future was, which was mathematics, it was science, it was art, it was cultivation.
NARRATOR: Might there be truth to the story of the time- traveling Wingmakers at Chaco Canyon? And if so, is it possible the Wingmakers were actually alien visitors? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest the evidence still lies in Chaco Canyon.
TSOUKALOS: This is a kiva.
A kiva was known to be the most sacred of places where ceremonies took place with the ancestral Pueblans when they talked about the cosmos, and the universe and our place in the universe.
NARRATOR: Mainstream archeologists believe the kivas were once covered with timber to make a roof.
But strangely, some Hopi legends refer to this circular structure as a "cloud house.
" TSOUKALOS: What if these cloud houses were nothing else but biodomes or biospheres made of nuts and bolts? It is interesting that biospheres today look as if people are living sort of sunk into the ground with a giant dome over it, and here we have something very similar.
So the question is, why would anybody do this, and according to the ancient myths, they were witness to an incredible event that had something to do with ancient aliens and to them, it was a divine encounter.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that alien beings inhabited biospheres in Chaco Canyon, like those our own scientists envision for future use on other planets? And might they have traveled here not in spacecraft, but through an interdimensional space-time portal? But if so, where did they come from? Perhaps answers can be found halfway around the world in the ancient Indian text of the Mahabharata.
The Mahabharata.
In this sacred Indian text, written in the eighth century BC, King Revaita is described as traveling to the heavens to meet with the creator god Brahma, only to return to Earth hundreds of years in the future.
Some researchers believe this Hindu tale may be one of the oldest records of successful time travel in the ancient past.
CHILDRESS: There's the story of a king called Revaita, and he is taken into space to see the gods.
And when he returns to the Earth, he finds that many ages have gone by.
And it's been hundreds of years.
And this is a kind of thing that would happen to space travelers and in time travel, as well.
You think you're gone for only a few days, but when you return to Earth, you find out that you've been gone for hundreds of years.
NARRATOR: Like the legend of Chaco Canyon, similar tales of time travel can be found all around the ancient world.
In Japan, the legend of Urashima Taro details a fisherman's visit to the protector god of the sea-- Ryujin-- in an underwater palace for what seemed like only three days.
CHILDRESS: When he returns to his fishing village, he finds that it's been 300 years that he's been gone.
And his house is in ruins, everybody he knows is long dead, no one remembers him or his family.
NARRATOR: And in the Hebrew Bible, descriptions of the prophet Jeremiah in Jerusalem are eerily similar to both of these accounts of time travel.
VON DANIKEN: In the Bible, the prophet Jeremiah was sitting together with a few of his friends, and there was a young boy.
His name was Abemolik.
And Jeremiah said to Abemolik, "Go out of Jerusalem, there is a hill and collect some figs for us.
" The boy went out and collected the fresh figs.
All of a sudden, Abemolik hears some noise and wind in the air, and he become unconscious, he had a blackout.
After a time he wakes up again, and he saw it was nearly the evening.
So when he runs back to the society and the city was full of strange soldiers.
And he says, "What's going on here? Where is Jeremiah and all the others?" And an old man said, "That was 62 years ago.
" It's a time travel story written in the Bible.
NARRATOR: Southern Egypt.
Agilkia Island.
Here, just six miles upstream from Aswan in the Nile River Valley, lies the Temple of Isis.
Built in the fourth century BC, the temple was a center of worship for the Egyptian goddess of fertility and nature until the sixth century AD.
COPPENS: Isis became the most important deity which ancient Egypt ever had.
She was married to her brother, Osiris, and together they really became the popular husband and wife to which everybody wanted to be like.
She is seen as a symbol of life, whereas Osiris is seen as the deity who rules over the death.
And so whether you are alive or whether you're dead, you can always identify with Isis and Osiris.
NARRATOR: According to ancient Egyptian religious belief, the goddess Isis was known as the Divine Mother, and believed to be the soul of the brightest star in the sky Sirius.
BARA: So to the ancient Egyptians, Osiris was Orion, that constellation actually was a literal living embodiment of the great god Osiris.
Sirius was the representation of his wife, sister and consort, Isis.
Together, those two essentially ruled the skies and the life of the Egyptian people themselves.
CHILDRESS: Many ancient cultures, including the Egyptians, Chinese, the Greeks, the Japanese, all had beliefs, legends that our gods who created us have come from Sirius.
And this star is known to be extremely important star to almost all ancient cultures.
HENRY: This knowledge originally emerged in ancient Egypt and in Africa with the Dogon tribe, who taught that beings of light came from Sirius and created humankind.
COPPENS: It is clear that so many cultures possessed information about Sirius, and they single out Sirius apart from everything else, and it's got nothing to with its brightness.
It has to do with the fact that somehow Sirius is responsible for sending us emissaries who educate us.
NARRATOR: Could the Sirius star system really be the point of origin for the gods of ancient man? Or was it, in fact, the place of origin for extraterrestrial time travelers, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? According to astronomers, Sirius is approximately 8.
5 light-years away from Earth, an incredibly vast distance.
SETH SHOSTAK: A light-year is about six trillion miles, so it's quite a ways to Sirius.
Our best rockets go about seven miles a second.
That's pretty fast, but even at that speed, to get to Sirius would take about 200,000 years.
SEAGER: So far, the farthest humans have traveled is the moon, at about 250,000 miles away.
Our next step will be Mars some day, but even that is a huge, huge stretch for humans.
Six-month trip to Mars, and just being able to survive there without oxygen and the things we usually have around us is a huge challenge.
The distances are too vast, and our technology is just nowhere near at level of being able to do that.
We got to the moon, and that's as far as we got.
That's not to say that another civilization couldn't have done that.
It's just, on Earth, we just don't have the technology to do that.
NARRATOR: What if interstellar distances were too great even for advanced extraterrestrial beings? Or might their level of technical sophistication be beyond our wildest dreams? COPPENS: Simply because it is impossible to us doesn't mean it's impossible for everybody, and definitely when it comes to beings out there who are able to transcend this boundary of time, it is clear that they are not subject to time in the way we are subject to it.
NARRATOR: Do some of the ancient myths and legends provide proof of successful intergalactic time travel, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? If so, might time travel have allowed passage for alien beings, as well as humans, to and from our world? Perhaps the answers can be found in a laboratory deep underground in Geneva, Switzerland.
Storrs, Connecticut.
January, 2012.
In a lab at the University of Connecticut, theoretical physicist Ronald Mallett demonstrates his large-scale model of a time machine.
Using a device called a ring laser that produces a circulating beam of light, the professor hopes to prove that the twisting light actually bends space, forming a loop in time.
MALLET: Now, what's happening here is that these lasers, even though you can't see it, they're actually creating a circulating pattern of light.
And that circulating pattern of light is actually twisting the empty space in here.
The twisting of space will eventually lead to a twisting of time.
In Einstein's theory, the two are connected.
And that twisting of time will be where time travel's occurring, because if you think of time as being a straight line, then if we twist space, then what will happen eventually is that that space will twist time into a loop.
So the breakthrough of my work was to use light to manipulate time.
And that should allow for the possibility of going back in time using light.
NARRATOR: Although this is only a prototype, Mallett believes he may be able to create a working time machine in as little as ten years.
He believes the energy of the light beams will produce a gravitational field strong enough to drag a spinning neutron through time.
MALLETT: Let's say I'll call the spin up a one, and I'll call spin down a zero.
So imagine I send a stream of neutrons with spin up, spin up, spin down, spin up.
What do you call that? That's binary code.
So by using the spin of neutrons, I can send a binary code, which could be translated into a message.
NARRATOR: But could this technology ultimately be able to send larger objects through time, like a person, or a spacecraft? HENRY: Einstein's theory of relativity allowed for something called the Einstein-Rosen bridge, which is what we today call a wormhole.
It opened up the possibility that we can travel from point A on Earth to point B somewhere else in the universe as if there were nothing in between.
NARRATOR: If the possibility exists to travel instantly from one end of the universe to another through wormholes, might there be evidence that such technology was used in the ancient past? HENRY: The ancient Egyptians knew about star gate and wormhole travel.
The evidence there I discovered is at the Temple of Hathor at Dandera.
When you enter into this temple, you look up on this ceiling, which is called the astronomical ceiling, and you see the gods as ascended light beings traveling on their ships of eternity.
And it suggests to me that the ancients didn't use the term "wormhole" for these time travel portals, but were clearly talking about the same thing.
NARRATOR: Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, that advanced celestial beings traveled in time through wormholes on their way to Earth? Or might they have possessed an even more advanced time travel technology, perhaps based on the complex science of quantum physics? Geneva, Switzerland.
tunnel more than 16 miles in circumference, lies the world's greatest particle accelerator: the Large Hadron Collider.
Completed in 2008 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, the massive international project may allow scientists to solve outstanding scientific mysteries concerning the creation of the universe.
DENNIN: The Large Hadron Collider is a machine we use in science to study how particles smaller than an atom behave.
The Large Hadron Collider is based on the principle of accelerating protons, which are one of the key elements of the nucleus of an atom, and you want to accelerate them up to very, very high speeds basically in a circular motion and collide two beams that are moving in opposite directions.
When you make this collision of the particles, you get a large number of product particles out.
Just like when you collide any two objects, they smash and break into pieces, the protons break into pieces.
And it allows us to study the fundamental particles that make up all of matter.
NARRATOR: On December 13, the Large Hadron Collider announced their findings of possible evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, or what some refer to as the God particle.
MALLETT: A number of physicists have discovered that there is a link between the four forces of nature that we believe exist.
And you might say the glue that holds these together, we believe, is this Higgs particle.
It gives particles their mass, and it also is the thing that helps to bind the forces.
So discovering this God particle is a way of understanding the possible unification of the forces of nature.
NARRATOR: Some scientists believe the discovery of the so-called God particle may lead to the creation of the Higgs singlet a particle believed to possess the ability to jump into another dimension, move forward or backward in time, and appear in the future or past.
In other words, it would make time travel possible.
SEAGER: We live in a three-dimensional world, and sometimes people consider time a fourth dimension.
But some theories in physics, string theory, predict that there are many, many more dimensions-- ten or 11 dimensions altogether.
Only, these dimensions are not accessible to us.
We don't see them.
Now, these dimensions are tiny, subatomic, smaller than particles inside of an atom.
And if you could somehow travel along these other dimensions, it would take you somewhere else entirely.
NARRATOR: Could other dimensions really exist that we are not yet able to perceive? If so, might advanced beings from a distant galaxy have already mastered and utilized the God particle to visit Earth, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? TSOUKALOS: If you place a picture side by side of the Hadron Collider and the Aztec calendar, there's an eerie similarity between the two.
The Aztec calendar was known to be a gateway to the universe.
And the Hadron Collider is similar to that, because we are trying to unlock the secrets of the universe with this machine.
And I find it fascinating that we have a carving from a long time ago, and when compared to the modern-day Hadron Collider, there is an eerie similarity.
Is it coincidence? I think not.
NARRATOR: Did ancient man really make contact with early time travelers? And are humans on the verge of discovering that same incredible ability? Perhaps further evidence can be found, evidence that ancient aliens may not have come from distant galaxies but from our own future.
NARRATOR: Ever since the infamous UFO incident of 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, there have been thousands of reports of extraterrestrial sightings, and even firsthand accounts of alien abductions.
Described as humanoid with large heads and small bodies, researchers believe these beings might, in fact, be an alien species that some call the Greys.
BARA: These aliens look not too dissimilar from us.
They have heads, they have hands, they have two arms, two legs, two eyes, a nose, a rudimentary mouth.
They certainly in their descriptions appear to be pretty close to us.
Or what they kind of look like is very, very early science fiction concepts of how the human race would eventually evolve over the eons.
BARHAM: If you look at the extraterrestrials that are described-- the Greys-- that are related to the Roswell incident, you will see that their forms, in many ways, resemble what we might project or predict that we could look like in the future, if we became a space-faring race.
CHILDRESS: The Roswell crash in New Mexico, in fact, happened coincidentally close to the birthday of the Egyptian goddess Isis.
So you have to wonder, too, if these so-called alien bodies that were allegedly found at the Roswell crash with thin bodies and big heads, if they weren't some kind of time-traveling extraterrestrials.
NARRATOR: Is it possible the beings believed to have been recovered at Roswell traveled here from the star Sirius, just like the Egyptian goddess Isis, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? And might they be coming here using advanced expertise in space-time technology? EDGAR MITCHELL: I would think that it's quite possible that the alien visitors had then proved to be the way we think they are, that they're using certain forms of teleportation perhaps, or certainly they have propulsion devices that can approach the speed of light.
LINDA HOWE: What we do know is that the physics of our planet, quantum physics and string theory, have moved the ball so much further than it was in the last century to saying there are no mathematical restrictions on time travel to the future or to the past.
And that once you know that the physics community is saying there are no restrictions, it's just us finding out how do we do this.
CHILDRESS: Time travel is basically the same as teleportation.
We could go from place to place on Earth in a matter of milliseconds.
This would revolutionize all kinds of travel, at the same time, our connections between us and any other civilization.
And including civilizations on other planets, as well.
NARRATOR: But just who really are these otherworldly creatures called the Greys? Is it possible they came to Earth not from outer space, but from the future or the past? Or might they actually be human time travelers? COPPENS: There are various theories as to what the Greys are.
There are stories that they are beings which have been around since time immemorial and are still around.
But there are also encounters which people have had, and in giving these encounters, it has been said that really the Greys are us from the future.
And that they really have traveled back in time because somehow we have genetically created this situation whereby the Greys are no longer able to procreate and that they have to therefore come back to our times to sort of remedy the situation.
BARA: People back in the '60s and '70s kind of speculated what would human beings look like in 1,000 years or 2,000 years? And the idea was that we would expand our intellectual knowledge so our brains would get bigger, and we'd have machinery that would basically do all the physical tasks for us that we do with our hands now.
We really would become almost physically inert beings.
And if you look at those early concepts of the future of the human race, they kind of look like the standard traditional Grey alien, the Roswell alien.
VON DANIKEN: I rather am a believer in time travel.
I say nothing will be impossible for us in the future.
Even if you think it's completely crazy, it will happen.
Whatever humans are able to think, to calculate, even to fantasize will one day become reality.
Sometimes I ask myself if these UFOs are not time travelers.
It's our own people of the future.
NARRATOR: Considering the scientific advancements from the last century alone, might it be possible future humans have discovered the ability to travel in time, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? Are they, in fact, the so-called visitors that have been recorded throughout the centuries? Or are they otherworldly aliens who have mastered travel through both time and space? Perhaps the answers can be found not in the here and now, but in another place and time.