Ancient Aliens s08e04 Episode Script
Faces of the Gods
Giants.
They found up to 40 or 50 people inside this cave.
One was allegedly seven feet, seven inches tall.
Grey-skinned creatures.
Essentially humanoid but, with disproportionately large heads and huge black almond-shaped eyes.
And beings, with god-like powers.
This was a person who was a little more than human.
Throughout history, there have been stories of strange beings and fantastic creatures.
But could they be more than just myth? In my opinion, these people were misinterpreted flesh-and-blood space travelers.
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 we find proof by examining the faces of the gods? Cahuachi, Peru.
this ancient settlement served as the religious and cultural capitol of the Nazca people.
But sometime around 500 AD, the Nazca mysteriously disappeared, leaving Cahuachi to fall into disarray.
anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka came to Cahuachi to study the ancient Nazca civilization.
During a dig, he unearthed some of the most surprising and shocking artifacts he had ever seen.
They were skulls with enormous, elongated craniums.
Where did they come from? How did they get there? And were they human? In Peru, we find these weird, elongated skulls.
And they're bizarre-looking.
I mean, and and these people look like aliens.
One may say, "Okay, aliens," but another aspect that we have to consider is that skull and cranial deformation, forming elongated heads, is a practice that's known throughout much of the ancient world.
In 1870, the process of skull deformation was well chronicled by a German botanist and explorer named Georg Schweinfurth.
While exploring the African Congo, he came in contact with a tribe called the Mangbetu.
They routinely performed a ritual of cranial binding that allowed them to physically alter the shape of human skulls.
They took infants' skulls and compressed them and bound them, and they forced the cranium out and elongate it.
And in many cases they doubled the size.
And a big question is why was this being done? It may have been a way to distinguish the elite, perhaps, from the everyday people.
May have been a social stratification type of issue.
Something that also appeals to me is that may have been a way to express, physically, and maybe try to achieve, physically, greater levels of consciousness, or higher levels of mental ability.
In my opinion, they did this in order to mimic the gods.
And those gods were physical beings, because if they were just a figment of our ancestors' imagination, I don't think that's a compelling enough reason to expose your children to such a ritual to achieve that type of look.
And in my opinion, these these people were misinterpreted flesh-and-blood space travelers.
Some people have suggested aliens had elongated skulls and, apparently, ancient peoples are mimicking those skulls.
The old saying is that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
" Although there have been many images that attempt to depict what aliens might actually look like, one in particular has come to dominate the public perception.
It, too, features an elongated cranium, and is associated with an extraterrestrial race that many refer to as the Greys.
In terms of entities, one very common description are the so-called Greys.
Three-and-a-half, four feet tall.
Essentially humanoid but, uh, very spindly with disproportionately large heads and huge black almond-shaped eyes.
But would someone in a primitive society really want to replicate this look and deform their skull? Some archeologists have a different perspective.
They point to artistic self-expression as an explanation of these customs.
There are all kinds of people that that either worship the body, or use the body as art, be it a tattoo or piercing of some sort, uh, or tribes that that, uh, put things in their ears or on their lips to try, to to try to grow parts of their body.
Some societies we know practiced binding parts of the body, feet or heads, and and try to make certain shapes, and this was done for whatever reason.
We know today that this isn't usually the most healthy thing to do, but it doesn't mean people don't do it.
The people are always trying to change their body to make it look a certain way.
Whatever the explanation may be for these rituals, they are not just found in Peru and the African Congo.
Skull deformation is a global phenomenon.
What's really strange is that this is found all over the world.
And this is something that archaeologists cannot easily explain.
Because for people on remote islands, for people in South America, or Malta, or in Africa, to suddenly, independently, do this cranial deformation like this, seems incredible.
I mean, this is something that had to be learned; something that was taught to them.
We seem to have basic similarities, as if there was one civilization or at least one type of culture that that was influencing people around the world.
I find it more and more difficult to believe what I was taught as an undergraduate, that all these different cultures just coincidentally came up with the same concepts, independently of each other.
Could it be that the elongated skulls found throughout the world are really the result of ancient humans trying to emulate the appearance of otherworldly visitors? Or could they really be the skulls of extraterrestrials? Ancient astronaut theorists believe further clues can be found by examining other strange bones and relics relics that may provide proof of giants.
Lovelock, Nevada.
In the early 1800s, local legends passed down by the Paiute Indians told of a race of giants who were exterminated by their tribe.
It is said this was done by trapping the giants in a cave, shooting arrows at them and then starting a large fire at the mouth of the cave.
Evidence of the slaughter lay undisturbed until the early 20th century.
Lovelock Cave was first discovered by local ranchers who were looking for bat guano to use in their fields.
In need of fertilizer for their crops, the ranchers removed nearly ten feet of guano-enriched soil from the surface of the cave.
And then they began finding human remains.
They found up to 40 or 50 people inside this cave.
One was allegedly seven feet, seven inches tall.
They all had long, red hair and were literal giants.
If these skeletons were the remains of the legendary red-haired giants, were they visitors from distant continents? Throughout the 19th century, many giant skeletons were allegedly discovered in the Midwest, also in parts of California and around Death Valley.
And the skeletons here, found at Lovelock, are one of the few that were really excavated by an accredited university.
Archaeologists from the Nevada Historical Society and the University of California believe the cave was occupied from approximately 1500 BC until a few hundred years before white men appeared in the Nevada Territory.
a local museum has preserved several skulls that some believe are recovered remains of the giants.
Inside this cabinet, here, are three skulls from the Lovelock caves.
When you first see these skulls, they seem to be pretty much normal-looking skulls.
However, it's when we really start to compare the jawbones with this modern dental impression of a normal adult male, that we see that these jawbones are unusually large.
And these are, really, the skulls of giant people who were perhaps seven, even eight feet tall.
One of the odd things with these skulls is that they're not actually put on display here at the museum, and they're kept hidden in this cabinet.
Now, we don't know if that's really, uh, just out of, um, respect for the Native Americans or whether there's really something unusual about these giant skulls that they don't want them to display.
Are the Nevada bones evidence of a race of giants that existed all through early human history? If so, could the giants be the descendents of extraterrestrials? According to the Hebrew Testament, one such giant appeared in the Valley of Elah Each morning for 40 days, a Philistine giant over nine feet tall challenged the Israelites to a fight.
His name was Goliath.
David and Goliath is one of those episodes in the Bible where you wonder what is going on.
Is it just a metaphor or are we dealing with a fundamental interpretation? And in that sense, Goliath has to be a giant creature.
The question, then, is he cannot be human.
What is he? David's stunning triumph over Goliath was considered a mere fable until archaeologists turned up evidence that suggests this confrontation really did happen.
On the outskirts of Tell es-Saf, Israel, scientists discovered a moat that may have once protected the Philistine fortress.
Nearby, they found shards of pottery inscribed with the name "Goliath.
" Tests indicate the pottery is from the same time period as described in the Bible.
Ancient astronaut theorists claim this is unmistakable evidence of extraterrestrial giants in biblical times.
Are we dealing with metaphors or are we dealing with hard evidence? Are these physical creatures, which somehow roamed the earth? And I think, on volume, we have to accept that some of these were real.
The question then is, how did these genetic freaks come about? One of the main tenets of ancient astronaut theory suggests that a long time ago extraterrestrials changed our genetic makeup through a targeted mutation of our genes, essentially in the lab.
So they took a couple of human beings, altered their DNA, then reinserted those people back into the population, so, through procreation, those people would pass on those new genetic alterations to the entire population.
Ancient astronaut theorists suggest the evidence points to one conclusion: that aliens changed the genetics of early human DNA.
For an alien being to work with DNA is so easy that just creating a new type is not at all that difficult.
Even today, we have the capability to create new types of animals.
The question is, were we created as such, as well? Did giants really walk the earth thousands of years ago? And if so, could they have been from another world? Or perhaps the result of alien experimentation with human DNA? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the stories of yet another type of otherworldly being winged creatures that descended from the sky as angels.
Rome, Italy.
Stored in the treasury of St.
Peter's Basilica in the Vatican is the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus.
Constructed in 359 AD, the sarcophagus features what some believe to be the earliest known depiction of winged angels in all of Christianity.
In the centuries that followed, angels were almost always depicted as having wings.
But why? Especially since the actual biblical texts rarely describe angels as having bird-like appendages.
The vast majority of the stories in the Old Testament, angels aren't described as having wings at all.
And some of them, they look human.
When the angel comes to visit Abraham, this angel does not have wings.
He looks like a man.
Abraham bows to him, which is interesting.
How did Abraham know, if he looks like a a human being, what was it that gave Abraham the clue to run over and bow down to him? And so there's a supernatural quality, there's a superhuman quality that they acknowledge, that this was a person who was a little more than human.
The concept of the angel, as such, comes directly out of the Greco-Roman tradition.
Stories of Hermes and Iris kind of coming down and giving messages, envisioning them as beings, like human beings, kind of looking like human beings and being benevolent.
There are plenty of other beings which have these beautiful wings, these kind of forms and shapes.
But all of these beings, however they're conceived of, are a way of telling us that we have a hard time understanding what it is that separates us from them, from the gods.
They have to be these kind of weird beings who have wings.
Angels show up in various cultures as, probably, misidentified technology.
If they saw someone, a human being or a humanoid, flying in the skies, they could only give it a natural review, giving it wings.
I don't think they actually had wings.
It was ancient man's way of saying they had the power of flight.
The angels that have wings that we're used to seeing depicted in pictures of the Bible and what have you basically, the wings say these beings can fly.
So, we believe in angels, and the Native Americans talk about the Star People, the Egyptians talk about the gods coming to and from the earth.
So I believe this is the basis, this is the template for the civilizations of the Earth's religious practices.
I believe that.
For centuries, religious tradition has perpetuated the notion of bird-like wings to explain an angel's mode of travel.
But is such a concept even scientifically plausible? In 2009, a study at University College, London compared classic depictions of winged angels with actual bird physiology.
You have to be able to flap down and flap up, and you really need a separate muscle to do each of these.
On the way down, you're generating the lift.
And you actually have to rotate the wing slightly and get a different angle as you come up, and then, they actually generate their thrust.
Otherwise, if you just went up and down in the same straight pattern, you'd be making lift one way, but when you went back the other way, you'd just push yourself back down.
So, when you look at the classic pictures of angels, the wings are centered on their back.
Very close together.
Whereas, the birds with the wings on the side can have longer muscles with the great strength that go into moving them up and down.
With the wings on the back, they're gonna look like they're gonna flap more like this than up and down.
Researchers also concluded that angels, given their humanoid interpretation, would be simply too heavy for flight.
We're not designed aerodynamically, and we're quite heavy.
I mean, we're solid bone, solid muscle.
So, those two features you have to overcome.
But if angels could not have possessed actual wings, how would they have managed to travel to and from the heavens? Angels were never described to fly around like Superman, but they sort of had a vertical ascent into the sky, or when they descended, it was a vertical descent.
How was that possible? In 1953, Bell Aerosystems developed the rocket belt, the precursor to today's workable jet pack.
Designed to lift individuals vertically into the air and glide them across the skies, today's jet packs can reach altitudes of over 8,000 feet and travel at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour.
If you look at a modern jet pack, humans are ascending and descending in a vertical position.
Now, imagine if that picture was shown to our ancestors.
How would they react? Obviously, they will say, "Wow, this creature must be divine.
This creature must be some type of a god, because they've got the capability of flight.
They're like birds.
Not even the sky is the limit to them.
" Did our ancestors try to explain an ancient alien technology by suggesting that extraterrestrial visitors were heavenly visitors with bird-like wings? If the answer is "yes," the implications are both profound and potentially disturbing.
For if angels are actual visitors from other worlds, then what is their mission? Are they simply watching us? Or is there, perhaps, a more sinister purpose? Oaxaca, Mexico.
Situated on a low mountain range, rising above the central plain, lie the ancient ruins of Monte Alban.
Here, around 100 BC, researchers believe the Zapotec Indians worshiped a bloodthirsty Mayan god with the body of a man and the head of a bat.
They called him Camazotz.
The iconography is rather striking the image of a half-man, half-bat a man with the head of a bat, and a wing-like cloak spread out with crosses of bones in the lining.
The Zapotec people, in the Oaxaca area of Mexico, believe that winged creatures, bat-like creatures, come in the night.
They will attack, and they will drink blood and disappear without ever being noticed.
This is simply a sort of anthropomorphic bat which was worshipped by the sacrifice of libations of blood.
So, what they did was, they cut themselves and poured it into a bowl and offered it to the god.
Blood was a very important substance to the Mayans.
That is what gave humans life.
Blood and breath was what the essence of life was.
That's where this "cajul," this divine essence resided in blood and in breath.
When you would die, you entered into the underworld.
It was called xibalba.
Then, if you defeated the lords of death, you would then ascend into the heavens and become one of the revered ancestors.
The blood is the thing that reconnects the world that we live in with the world of the dead.
Some of the earliest archaeological evidence shows that blood rituals were present as far back as we can search.
Legends and myths of supernatural beings with traits similar to vampires are a part of nearly every ancient culture.
In Hindu folklore, for example, the vetala was known as an evil spirit that took demonic possession of corpses.
The Indian goddess Kali was also intimately linked with blood sacrifices.
Kali becomes the destroyer, and she is portrayed as a hag-like woman with a whole number of arms each carrying a sword.
She is the goddess of death and destruction.
Her eyes are red, and she drips blood from her mouth.
She's known to take infants from their crib and drink their blood.
In North America, early Cherokees believed in a bloodthirsty creature that slaughtered humans, drank their blood and ate their livers.
Known as the Utlunta, this demon was said to possess eternal life while feeding on the living.
The notion of the thing from the spirit world traveling through the various Indian nations was a great fear among, uh, not only the Cherokee but also the Sioux and Arapaho.
But who or what are these mysterious creatures? And where did they come from? Might they be, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, extraterrestrial beings abandoned here on Earth? In the ancient Jewish Talmud, the Genesis story set in the Garden of Eden includes Adam and Eve, but also a woman called Lilith.
In Jewish folklore, Lilith was the first wife of Adam.
She was created from the same earth as Adam, not from his rib, as Eve was.
But she proved to be very disobedient and, uh, uncontrollable and had to be banished.
According to the Talmud, when Lilith refused to obey Adam, God sent three angels to convince her to submit to his authority.
But when Lilith refused for the final time, God condemned her to live on earth for eternity.
In a sense, Lilith was, uh, the first vampire to wander the earth.
She shared all of the characteristics of female vampires.
Lilith had the head and breasts of a woman, the body of a snake and the wings of a bird.
She's a terrifying creature.
In Jewish tradition, Lilith has been a kind of night demon against whom incantations and prayers have to be offered because she will come and snatch away an infant sleeping in its crib, or at least snatch away its soul and cause it to die.
But why are tales of bloodsucking creatures so prevalent throughout the ancient world? Might blood and the unique chemistry of it serve as a kind of cosmic fuel? One that connects the living to the dead? The human to the inhuman? The earthly to the otherworldly? Blood is the life-force of humans.
And it was very important to extraterrestrials, too.
You know, something's very special about our blood.
So we have to think that if these blood sacrifices aren't some distortion of what was originally just extraterrestrials showing us how important our blood was.
Angels.
Demons.
The Greys.
Are they all various interpretations of one type of extraterrestrial species a species that has been visiting our planet for thousands of years? Or are they descriptions of several different alien visitors? Ancient astronaut theorists believe further clues can be found by examining the ancient Greek stories of fish people.
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 worshipped throughout Greece almost as much as his younger brother Zeus.
Poseidon was the god of the sea.
He was also the god of earthquakes and, strangely, horses.
When Poseidon was in a good mood, he created new lands out of the sea.
He gave, uh, calm waters for good voyages.
When he was in a bad mood, he destroyed ships and brought storms.
Poseidon does rule over the kingdom of the sea.
It is envisioned as a kind of a 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 on to a really big trident.
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.
A potion is prepared that makes him heave up all the other, uh, siblings of Zeus, and these become the gods of Olympus.
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.
Any being which is swallowed up into a living creature will not be able to survive for three days.
It will die from suffocation and will begin to decay.
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.
A mutiny took place.
Some of the extraterrestrials, they had sex with wonderful earthly, uh, females, women.
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 a beautiful human girl, and he made her pregnant.
Poseidon is married, all right? He's got a child.
He's got some grandchildren, right? There's the whole caste of sea nymphs, as well.
All of them presumably, like, live in this place.
Poseidon has the power of the deep; the 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.
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.
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 smithcraft.
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 who are 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.
In Greek legend, the Telchines were also metallurgists.
They were said to have created Poseidon's magical trident and to have cast 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.
There were people called Telchines.
We do actually have evidence of these beings.
They were actual ancient Greeks who had specific tasks and trades like, uh, metallurgy, like smithing and so on.
And so you could see how it is that a being like Telchines, that these things could, in fact, not just be these mythological beings but, like, actual people.
So the way that we look at the ancient Greeks and Romans would have been the way that they would have looked at the stories that are being told about The Iliad.
We've got the stories of the Telchine, and they were able to survive underwater for unlimited amounts 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, 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.
Could the ancient Greek myths really be based on actual events? And if so, were the Telchines early humans in possession of alien technology? Or could they themselves have been otherworldly beings? Perhaps the answer can be found by exploring the Middle Eastern stories of shapeshifters known as the jinn.
Temple Mount.
Old City, Jerusalem.
It was here that many biblical stories reportedly occurred, including the Binding of Isaac, from Genesis 22.
In this story, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.
Abraham sets out to obey God's command.
But after binding his son and preparing for the sacrifice, he is stopped at the last minute by an angel.
Conventional interpretations of the story usually conclude that God only wanted to test Abraham's faith.
But ancient astronaut theorists suggest the tale has another interpretation.
In my opinion, god "God" would never ask such a question.
So is it possible that it was a fallen angel-slash-alien extraterrestrial who posed as God? God never demands human sacrifice.
Human sacrifice is totally anathema to Christianity and it's totally anathema to God as a creator.
The French philosopher Sartre very famously wrote: if an angel were to tell me I needed to sacrifice my son I'd ask for some I.
D.
Maybe somebody else impersonating a god.
And do we then have somebody stepping in to actually prevent this from happening? Are we, in fact, maybe confronted with two warring civilizations trying to control what is happening in the stories of the Bible? Just like there are good people and bad people here on earth, there is good and bad extraterrestrials out there.
Good and evil permeates the entire universe.
Yin and yang.
There's a balance.
Deep inside the Middle Eastern country of Oman, a mysterious cavern lies hidden far beneath the surface.
Called Majlis al Jinn, or "meeting place of the Jinn," it stretches more than 14 acres underground and is one of the world's ten largest caves.
Many Omanis still believe this cavern and others like it are actually inhabited by supernatural creatures of Islamic folklore called jinn or genies.
Mystical creatures that are usually invisible to man.
One interesting aspect of the jinns is an element of free will.
They're like angels, but we think of angels in the west as under the direct command of the divine powers.
But the jinn can make some decisions for themselves and some of them are a little contrary or curious in their way of being.
According to Islamic theology, genies often reveal themselves to humans with messages, which can be either benevolent or deceptive.
But is it possible that genies actually exist? If so, where did they come from? When we talk about genie genie in a bottle, it's very interesting, because you rub the bottle and then the genie comes out of it and it fulfills your wishes.
Well, let's look at this from a modern day perspective.
If you have a little container and you push a button and a hologram comes out, then could that be a genie in a bottle? And according to the ancient astronaut theory, that is exactly what happened where where extraterrestrials used holograms in order to relay messages.
That is, essentially, a genie in a bottle.
Like angels, jinn are said to be able to appear and disappear at will, and are sometimes only heard as disembodied voices.
But while some ancient astronaut theorists believe this behavior resembles that of extraterrestrials, others claim that angels, jinn and other supernatural creatures have origins right here on Earth.
They call these beings "ultraterrestrial.
" Ultraterrestrials are possible beings that travel and visit us from other dimensions.
We know that we all vibrate in the three-dimensional space at a certain frequency.
It's very possible that other beings vibrate at a higher frequency and are able to pass more easily into other dimensions.
The ultraterrestrial theory would also explain the folkloric creatures, the angelic creatures any sort of experience of a strange, supernatural, or alien being that's occurred throughout history.
Angels and demons.
Giants and genies.
Did they actually exist? And, if so, could they have come here from somewhere out of this world? But why? Were they sent here to shape mankind's past or its future? Did they mean to do us harm or good? Perhaps even more importantly: could they still be here, living among us, undetected?
They found up to 40 or 50 people inside this cave.
One was allegedly seven feet, seven inches tall.
Grey-skinned creatures.
Essentially humanoid but, with disproportionately large heads and huge black almond-shaped eyes.
And beings, with god-like powers.
This was a person who was a little more than human.
Throughout history, there have been stories of strange beings and fantastic creatures.
But could they be more than just myth? In my opinion, these people were misinterpreted flesh-and-blood space travelers.
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 we find proof by examining the faces of the gods? Cahuachi, Peru.
this ancient settlement served as the religious and cultural capitol of the Nazca people.
But sometime around 500 AD, the Nazca mysteriously disappeared, leaving Cahuachi to fall into disarray.
anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka came to Cahuachi to study the ancient Nazca civilization.
During a dig, he unearthed some of the most surprising and shocking artifacts he had ever seen.
They were skulls with enormous, elongated craniums.
Where did they come from? How did they get there? And were they human? In Peru, we find these weird, elongated skulls.
And they're bizarre-looking.
I mean, and and these people look like aliens.
One may say, "Okay, aliens," but another aspect that we have to consider is that skull and cranial deformation, forming elongated heads, is a practice that's known throughout much of the ancient world.
In 1870, the process of skull deformation was well chronicled by a German botanist and explorer named Georg Schweinfurth.
While exploring the African Congo, he came in contact with a tribe called the Mangbetu.
They routinely performed a ritual of cranial binding that allowed them to physically alter the shape of human skulls.
They took infants' skulls and compressed them and bound them, and they forced the cranium out and elongate it.
And in many cases they doubled the size.
And a big question is why was this being done? It may have been a way to distinguish the elite, perhaps, from the everyday people.
May have been a social stratification type of issue.
Something that also appeals to me is that may have been a way to express, physically, and maybe try to achieve, physically, greater levels of consciousness, or higher levels of mental ability.
In my opinion, they did this in order to mimic the gods.
And those gods were physical beings, because if they were just a figment of our ancestors' imagination, I don't think that's a compelling enough reason to expose your children to such a ritual to achieve that type of look.
And in my opinion, these these people were misinterpreted flesh-and-blood space travelers.
Some people have suggested aliens had elongated skulls and, apparently, ancient peoples are mimicking those skulls.
The old saying is that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
" Although there have been many images that attempt to depict what aliens might actually look like, one in particular has come to dominate the public perception.
It, too, features an elongated cranium, and is associated with an extraterrestrial race that many refer to as the Greys.
In terms of entities, one very common description are the so-called Greys.
Three-and-a-half, four feet tall.
Essentially humanoid but, uh, very spindly with disproportionately large heads and huge black almond-shaped eyes.
But would someone in a primitive society really want to replicate this look and deform their skull? Some archeologists have a different perspective.
They point to artistic self-expression as an explanation of these customs.
There are all kinds of people that that either worship the body, or use the body as art, be it a tattoo or piercing of some sort, uh, or tribes that that, uh, put things in their ears or on their lips to try, to to try to grow parts of their body.
Some societies we know practiced binding parts of the body, feet or heads, and and try to make certain shapes, and this was done for whatever reason.
We know today that this isn't usually the most healthy thing to do, but it doesn't mean people don't do it.
The people are always trying to change their body to make it look a certain way.
Whatever the explanation may be for these rituals, they are not just found in Peru and the African Congo.
Skull deformation is a global phenomenon.
What's really strange is that this is found all over the world.
And this is something that archaeologists cannot easily explain.
Because for people on remote islands, for people in South America, or Malta, or in Africa, to suddenly, independently, do this cranial deformation like this, seems incredible.
I mean, this is something that had to be learned; something that was taught to them.
We seem to have basic similarities, as if there was one civilization or at least one type of culture that that was influencing people around the world.
I find it more and more difficult to believe what I was taught as an undergraduate, that all these different cultures just coincidentally came up with the same concepts, independently of each other.
Could it be that the elongated skulls found throughout the world are really the result of ancient humans trying to emulate the appearance of otherworldly visitors? Or could they really be the skulls of extraterrestrials? Ancient astronaut theorists believe further clues can be found by examining other strange bones and relics relics that may provide proof of giants.
Lovelock, Nevada.
In the early 1800s, local legends passed down by the Paiute Indians told of a race of giants who were exterminated by their tribe.
It is said this was done by trapping the giants in a cave, shooting arrows at them and then starting a large fire at the mouth of the cave.
Evidence of the slaughter lay undisturbed until the early 20th century.
Lovelock Cave was first discovered by local ranchers who were looking for bat guano to use in their fields.
In need of fertilizer for their crops, the ranchers removed nearly ten feet of guano-enriched soil from the surface of the cave.
And then they began finding human remains.
They found up to 40 or 50 people inside this cave.
One was allegedly seven feet, seven inches tall.
They all had long, red hair and were literal giants.
If these skeletons were the remains of the legendary red-haired giants, were they visitors from distant continents? Throughout the 19th century, many giant skeletons were allegedly discovered in the Midwest, also in parts of California and around Death Valley.
And the skeletons here, found at Lovelock, are one of the few that were really excavated by an accredited university.
Archaeologists from the Nevada Historical Society and the University of California believe the cave was occupied from approximately 1500 BC until a few hundred years before white men appeared in the Nevada Territory.
a local museum has preserved several skulls that some believe are recovered remains of the giants.
Inside this cabinet, here, are three skulls from the Lovelock caves.
When you first see these skulls, they seem to be pretty much normal-looking skulls.
However, it's when we really start to compare the jawbones with this modern dental impression of a normal adult male, that we see that these jawbones are unusually large.
And these are, really, the skulls of giant people who were perhaps seven, even eight feet tall.
One of the odd things with these skulls is that they're not actually put on display here at the museum, and they're kept hidden in this cabinet.
Now, we don't know if that's really, uh, just out of, um, respect for the Native Americans or whether there's really something unusual about these giant skulls that they don't want them to display.
Are the Nevada bones evidence of a race of giants that existed all through early human history? If so, could the giants be the descendents of extraterrestrials? According to the Hebrew Testament, one such giant appeared in the Valley of Elah Each morning for 40 days, a Philistine giant over nine feet tall challenged the Israelites to a fight.
His name was Goliath.
David and Goliath is one of those episodes in the Bible where you wonder what is going on.
Is it just a metaphor or are we dealing with a fundamental interpretation? And in that sense, Goliath has to be a giant creature.
The question, then, is he cannot be human.
What is he? David's stunning triumph over Goliath was considered a mere fable until archaeologists turned up evidence that suggests this confrontation really did happen.
On the outskirts of Tell es-Saf, Israel, scientists discovered a moat that may have once protected the Philistine fortress.
Nearby, they found shards of pottery inscribed with the name "Goliath.
" Tests indicate the pottery is from the same time period as described in the Bible.
Ancient astronaut theorists claim this is unmistakable evidence of extraterrestrial giants in biblical times.
Are we dealing with metaphors or are we dealing with hard evidence? Are these physical creatures, which somehow roamed the earth? And I think, on volume, we have to accept that some of these were real.
The question then is, how did these genetic freaks come about? One of the main tenets of ancient astronaut theory suggests that a long time ago extraterrestrials changed our genetic makeup through a targeted mutation of our genes, essentially in the lab.
So they took a couple of human beings, altered their DNA, then reinserted those people back into the population, so, through procreation, those people would pass on those new genetic alterations to the entire population.
Ancient astronaut theorists suggest the evidence points to one conclusion: that aliens changed the genetics of early human DNA.
For an alien being to work with DNA is so easy that just creating a new type is not at all that difficult.
Even today, we have the capability to create new types of animals.
The question is, were we created as such, as well? Did giants really walk the earth thousands of years ago? And if so, could they have been from another world? Or perhaps the result of alien experimentation with human DNA? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the stories of yet another type of otherworldly being winged creatures that descended from the sky as angels.
Rome, Italy.
Stored in the treasury of St.
Peter's Basilica in the Vatican is the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus.
Constructed in 359 AD, the sarcophagus features what some believe to be the earliest known depiction of winged angels in all of Christianity.
In the centuries that followed, angels were almost always depicted as having wings.
But why? Especially since the actual biblical texts rarely describe angels as having bird-like appendages.
The vast majority of the stories in the Old Testament, angels aren't described as having wings at all.
And some of them, they look human.
When the angel comes to visit Abraham, this angel does not have wings.
He looks like a man.
Abraham bows to him, which is interesting.
How did Abraham know, if he looks like a a human being, what was it that gave Abraham the clue to run over and bow down to him? And so there's a supernatural quality, there's a superhuman quality that they acknowledge, that this was a person who was a little more than human.
The concept of the angel, as such, comes directly out of the Greco-Roman tradition.
Stories of Hermes and Iris kind of coming down and giving messages, envisioning them as beings, like human beings, kind of looking like human beings and being benevolent.
There are plenty of other beings which have these beautiful wings, these kind of forms and shapes.
But all of these beings, however they're conceived of, are a way of telling us that we have a hard time understanding what it is that separates us from them, from the gods.
They have to be these kind of weird beings who have wings.
Angels show up in various cultures as, probably, misidentified technology.
If they saw someone, a human being or a humanoid, flying in the skies, they could only give it a natural review, giving it wings.
I don't think they actually had wings.
It was ancient man's way of saying they had the power of flight.
The angels that have wings that we're used to seeing depicted in pictures of the Bible and what have you basically, the wings say these beings can fly.
So, we believe in angels, and the Native Americans talk about the Star People, the Egyptians talk about the gods coming to and from the earth.
So I believe this is the basis, this is the template for the civilizations of the Earth's religious practices.
I believe that.
For centuries, religious tradition has perpetuated the notion of bird-like wings to explain an angel's mode of travel.
But is such a concept even scientifically plausible? In 2009, a study at University College, London compared classic depictions of winged angels with actual bird physiology.
You have to be able to flap down and flap up, and you really need a separate muscle to do each of these.
On the way down, you're generating the lift.
And you actually have to rotate the wing slightly and get a different angle as you come up, and then, they actually generate their thrust.
Otherwise, if you just went up and down in the same straight pattern, you'd be making lift one way, but when you went back the other way, you'd just push yourself back down.
So, when you look at the classic pictures of angels, the wings are centered on their back.
Very close together.
Whereas, the birds with the wings on the side can have longer muscles with the great strength that go into moving them up and down.
With the wings on the back, they're gonna look like they're gonna flap more like this than up and down.
Researchers also concluded that angels, given their humanoid interpretation, would be simply too heavy for flight.
We're not designed aerodynamically, and we're quite heavy.
I mean, we're solid bone, solid muscle.
So, those two features you have to overcome.
But if angels could not have possessed actual wings, how would they have managed to travel to and from the heavens? Angels were never described to fly around like Superman, but they sort of had a vertical ascent into the sky, or when they descended, it was a vertical descent.
How was that possible? In 1953, Bell Aerosystems developed the rocket belt, the precursor to today's workable jet pack.
Designed to lift individuals vertically into the air and glide them across the skies, today's jet packs can reach altitudes of over 8,000 feet and travel at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour.
If you look at a modern jet pack, humans are ascending and descending in a vertical position.
Now, imagine if that picture was shown to our ancestors.
How would they react? Obviously, they will say, "Wow, this creature must be divine.
This creature must be some type of a god, because they've got the capability of flight.
They're like birds.
Not even the sky is the limit to them.
" Did our ancestors try to explain an ancient alien technology by suggesting that extraterrestrial visitors were heavenly visitors with bird-like wings? If the answer is "yes," the implications are both profound and potentially disturbing.
For if angels are actual visitors from other worlds, then what is their mission? Are they simply watching us? Or is there, perhaps, a more sinister purpose? Oaxaca, Mexico.
Situated on a low mountain range, rising above the central plain, lie the ancient ruins of Monte Alban.
Here, around 100 BC, researchers believe the Zapotec Indians worshiped a bloodthirsty Mayan god with the body of a man and the head of a bat.
They called him Camazotz.
The iconography is rather striking the image of a half-man, half-bat a man with the head of a bat, and a wing-like cloak spread out with crosses of bones in the lining.
The Zapotec people, in the Oaxaca area of Mexico, believe that winged creatures, bat-like creatures, come in the night.
They will attack, and they will drink blood and disappear without ever being noticed.
This is simply a sort of anthropomorphic bat which was worshipped by the sacrifice of libations of blood.
So, what they did was, they cut themselves and poured it into a bowl and offered it to the god.
Blood was a very important substance to the Mayans.
That is what gave humans life.
Blood and breath was what the essence of life was.
That's where this "cajul," this divine essence resided in blood and in breath.
When you would die, you entered into the underworld.
It was called xibalba.
Then, if you defeated the lords of death, you would then ascend into the heavens and become one of the revered ancestors.
The blood is the thing that reconnects the world that we live in with the world of the dead.
Some of the earliest archaeological evidence shows that blood rituals were present as far back as we can search.
Legends and myths of supernatural beings with traits similar to vampires are a part of nearly every ancient culture.
In Hindu folklore, for example, the vetala was known as an evil spirit that took demonic possession of corpses.
The Indian goddess Kali was also intimately linked with blood sacrifices.
Kali becomes the destroyer, and she is portrayed as a hag-like woman with a whole number of arms each carrying a sword.
She is the goddess of death and destruction.
Her eyes are red, and she drips blood from her mouth.
She's known to take infants from their crib and drink their blood.
In North America, early Cherokees believed in a bloodthirsty creature that slaughtered humans, drank their blood and ate their livers.
Known as the Utlunta, this demon was said to possess eternal life while feeding on the living.
The notion of the thing from the spirit world traveling through the various Indian nations was a great fear among, uh, not only the Cherokee but also the Sioux and Arapaho.
But who or what are these mysterious creatures? And where did they come from? Might they be, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, extraterrestrial beings abandoned here on Earth? In the ancient Jewish Talmud, the Genesis story set in the Garden of Eden includes Adam and Eve, but also a woman called Lilith.
In Jewish folklore, Lilith was the first wife of Adam.
She was created from the same earth as Adam, not from his rib, as Eve was.
But she proved to be very disobedient and, uh, uncontrollable and had to be banished.
According to the Talmud, when Lilith refused to obey Adam, God sent three angels to convince her to submit to his authority.
But when Lilith refused for the final time, God condemned her to live on earth for eternity.
In a sense, Lilith was, uh, the first vampire to wander the earth.
She shared all of the characteristics of female vampires.
Lilith had the head and breasts of a woman, the body of a snake and the wings of a bird.
She's a terrifying creature.
In Jewish tradition, Lilith has been a kind of night demon against whom incantations and prayers have to be offered because she will come and snatch away an infant sleeping in its crib, or at least snatch away its soul and cause it to die.
But why are tales of bloodsucking creatures so prevalent throughout the ancient world? Might blood and the unique chemistry of it serve as a kind of cosmic fuel? One that connects the living to the dead? The human to the inhuman? The earthly to the otherworldly? Blood is the life-force of humans.
And it was very important to extraterrestrials, too.
You know, something's very special about our blood.
So we have to think that if these blood sacrifices aren't some distortion of what was originally just extraterrestrials showing us how important our blood was.
Angels.
Demons.
The Greys.
Are they all various interpretations of one type of extraterrestrial species a species that has been visiting our planet for thousands of years? Or are they descriptions of several different alien visitors? Ancient astronaut theorists believe further clues can be found by examining the ancient Greek stories of fish people.
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 worshipped throughout Greece almost as much as his younger brother Zeus.
Poseidon was the god of the sea.
He was also the god of earthquakes and, strangely, horses.
When Poseidon was in a good mood, he created new lands out of the sea.
He gave, uh, calm waters for good voyages.
When he was in a bad mood, he destroyed ships and brought storms.
Poseidon does rule over the kingdom of the sea.
It is envisioned as a kind of a 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 on to a really big trident.
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.
A potion is prepared that makes him heave up all the other, uh, siblings of Zeus, and these become the gods of Olympus.
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.
Any being which is swallowed up into a living creature will not be able to survive for three days.
It will die from suffocation and will begin to decay.
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.
A mutiny took place.
Some of the extraterrestrials, they had sex with wonderful earthly, uh, females, women.
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 a beautiful human girl, and he made her pregnant.
Poseidon is married, all right? He's got a child.
He's got some grandchildren, right? There's the whole caste of sea nymphs, as well.
All of them presumably, like, live in this place.
Poseidon has the power of the deep; the 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.
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.
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 smithcraft.
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 who are 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.
In Greek legend, the Telchines were also metallurgists.
They were said to have created Poseidon's magical trident and to have cast 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.
There were people called Telchines.
We do actually have evidence of these beings.
They were actual ancient Greeks who had specific tasks and trades like, uh, metallurgy, like smithing and so on.
And so you could see how it is that a being like Telchines, that these things could, in fact, not just be these mythological beings but, like, actual people.
So the way that we look at the ancient Greeks and Romans would have been the way that they would have looked at the stories that are being told about The Iliad.
We've got the stories of the Telchine, and they were able to survive underwater for unlimited amounts 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, 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.
Could the ancient Greek myths really be based on actual events? And if so, were the Telchines early humans in possession of alien technology? Or could they themselves have been otherworldly beings? Perhaps the answer can be found by exploring the Middle Eastern stories of shapeshifters known as the jinn.
Temple Mount.
Old City, Jerusalem.
It was here that many biblical stories reportedly occurred, including the Binding of Isaac, from Genesis 22.
In this story, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.
Abraham sets out to obey God's command.
But after binding his son and preparing for the sacrifice, he is stopped at the last minute by an angel.
Conventional interpretations of the story usually conclude that God only wanted to test Abraham's faith.
But ancient astronaut theorists suggest the tale has another interpretation.
In my opinion, god "God" would never ask such a question.
So is it possible that it was a fallen angel-slash-alien extraterrestrial who posed as God? God never demands human sacrifice.
Human sacrifice is totally anathema to Christianity and it's totally anathema to God as a creator.
The French philosopher Sartre very famously wrote: if an angel were to tell me I needed to sacrifice my son I'd ask for some I.
D.
Maybe somebody else impersonating a god.
And do we then have somebody stepping in to actually prevent this from happening? Are we, in fact, maybe confronted with two warring civilizations trying to control what is happening in the stories of the Bible? Just like there are good people and bad people here on earth, there is good and bad extraterrestrials out there.
Good and evil permeates the entire universe.
Yin and yang.
There's a balance.
Deep inside the Middle Eastern country of Oman, a mysterious cavern lies hidden far beneath the surface.
Called Majlis al Jinn, or "meeting place of the Jinn," it stretches more than 14 acres underground and is one of the world's ten largest caves.
Many Omanis still believe this cavern and others like it are actually inhabited by supernatural creatures of Islamic folklore called jinn or genies.
Mystical creatures that are usually invisible to man.
One interesting aspect of the jinns is an element of free will.
They're like angels, but we think of angels in the west as under the direct command of the divine powers.
But the jinn can make some decisions for themselves and some of them are a little contrary or curious in their way of being.
According to Islamic theology, genies often reveal themselves to humans with messages, which can be either benevolent or deceptive.
But is it possible that genies actually exist? If so, where did they come from? When we talk about genie genie in a bottle, it's very interesting, because you rub the bottle and then the genie comes out of it and it fulfills your wishes.
Well, let's look at this from a modern day perspective.
If you have a little container and you push a button and a hologram comes out, then could that be a genie in a bottle? And according to the ancient astronaut theory, that is exactly what happened where where extraterrestrials used holograms in order to relay messages.
That is, essentially, a genie in a bottle.
Like angels, jinn are said to be able to appear and disappear at will, and are sometimes only heard as disembodied voices.
But while some ancient astronaut theorists believe this behavior resembles that of extraterrestrials, others claim that angels, jinn and other supernatural creatures have origins right here on Earth.
They call these beings "ultraterrestrial.
" Ultraterrestrials are possible beings that travel and visit us from other dimensions.
We know that we all vibrate in the three-dimensional space at a certain frequency.
It's very possible that other beings vibrate at a higher frequency and are able to pass more easily into other dimensions.
The ultraterrestrial theory would also explain the folkloric creatures, the angelic creatures any sort of experience of a strange, supernatural, or alien being that's occurred throughout history.
Angels and demons.
Giants and genies.
Did they actually exist? And, if so, could they have come here from somewhere out of this world? But why? Were they sent here to shape mankind's past or its future? Did they mean to do us harm or good? Perhaps even more importantly: could they still be here, living among us, undetected?