Ancient Aliens s10e01 Episode Script
Aliens B.C.
NARRATOR: Enormous man-made caves.
PAUL BAHN: Nobody knows what on earth these things are.
NARRATOR: Unexplainable structures.
LOGAN HAWKES: You ask them, "How did you build these?" And they'll say, "We didn't build this.
" NARRATOR: And underwater discoveries that challenge everything we know about the past.
DAVID CHILDRESS: That's amazing.
I'm convinced.
Something's going on down there.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that an advanced civilization inhabited the earth thousands of years ago? And if so, were they human or something out of this world? GIORGIO A.
TSOUKALOS: Extraterrestrials colonized Planet Earth thousands of years ago.
The more we uncover, it will all point in one direction.
We are not the first.
NARRATOR: Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has credited its origins to gods and other visitors from the stars.
What if it were true? Did extraterrestrial beings really help to shape our history? And if so what might we learn from the study of aliens BC? NARRATOR: Traverse City, Michigan.
May 22, 2015.
At an undisclosed location in Traverse Bay on Lake Michigan, author and explorer David Childress has teamed up with sonar technician Brian Abbott and underwater photographer Chris Doyal to investigate a series of strange underwater rock alignments they first discovered in 2007.
So you don't bring very many people out here, do you? No, you're one of the first we've brought out to this site.
We try and keep it kind of quiet and secret.
Chris has been out here a few times.
Well, it's a pretty sensitive site, so we try to keep traffic to a minimum.
Well, how did you find this site, anyway? Uh, we were actually out looking for shipwrecks and we put our sonar down off the side and I started to see stones line up on my rose compass.
Okay, and then you deploy this sonar and take a picture, huh? Yeah, we, uh, we can get that done here real quick, we can deploy the sonar off the side and, uh, start getting some images and show you what we've got on the screen.
All right, great, let's do it.
Excellent.
When I first found these on the computer screen, I started to laugh, because it was like, this can't be true, and I jokingly said, "Hey, we have our own Stonehenge underwater," and everyone, "Ha, ha, ha," and I started looking at it farther and I'm going, "Wow.
We might have something here.
" Set the cable here, we'll be all set.
So we'll take a look at the computer screen.
Okay? All right.
So the sonar's spinning around.
So as you can see in this, uh, deployment location, we have, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six stones.
And what's really interesting about this is, these stones all measure the same distance across.
CHILDRESS: Yeah, this does look like an artificial alignment this stone circle and then this line of stones there.
Yeah, that was unique to me, because as an engineer, when I look at stuff that's square or rectangular or circle in nature, it-it kind of makes it jump out, because Mother Nature generally doesn't do things like that.
What I saw on the sonar looked a lot like stone circles and stone alignments that I've seen in England, or Carnac in France, and it makes me wonder what's going on here in Ancient North America.
So have you actually, uh, been down here in scuba equipment? No, I haven't, but Chris has.
Yeah, we went down and I actually took some still photographs of it and we noticed on one of the stones there's some really interesting carvings on the surface of it.
Some people have even said that it appears to resemble a mastodon.
Really? - Really.
Wow.
Can we go down there now and see it? - Yeah, absolutely.
NARRATOR: Taking an underwater camera down to the mastodon rock, Chris Doyal will send up a live feed to a monitor on the boat.
As he descends, he's gonna pick out the stone here.
CHILDRESS: Okay.
What's that? - ABBOTT: That's the stone.
CHILDRESS: Is-is this the stone that has the carvings on it? Yes, it is.
So he's moving slowly in on it.
So you can see the head, right through there.
There's a tusk.
So we have one leg coming down.
CHILDRESS: It does look like the stone has been carved, and ABBOTT: Yeah.
- Yeah, you can see the legs and a trunk on it.
Wow! That's amazing.
I'm - Yeah, it truly is.
Yeah, I-I'm convinced.
Uh, something's going on down there.
ABBOTT: Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, mastodons went extinct.
So we've got a carving on a rock formation at, you know, a depth of water that, uh, you know, probably shouldn't be here, but is here.
This rock is probably made out of granite, which is very, very hard, and if you look up close at these markings, you can see that these were made by percussion marks.
These weren't just scratched into the surface, that each line was individually pecked out.
That rock looks like it has a carving of a mastodon on it.
And that would mean that that carving was made before the extinction of these mastodons.
So you have to wonder what was going on here in North America at the time of the last ice age.
NARRATOR: The carved image of a mastodon? An animal that has been extinct for over 10,000 years? But what is it doing at the bottom of Lake Michigan? Could it really be part of an artificially created rock formation, like Stonehenge in England? If so, it would have to have been created before the end of the last ice age, when the lake bed was dry over 12,000 years ago and that would contradict the currently held belief that early humans were not capable of erecting monumental structures in North America, or anywhere else, at that time.
You never know when something's going to pop up that's going to totally change your whole view of a, of a period or even of human development.
One of the main trends that I've noticed in archaeology is that the dates for things tend to go back all the time; the earliest pottery in a place, the earliest arrival of people in a place.
They always turn out to be earlier than we traditionally thought.
ANDREW COLLINS: Today we know that there was a monument on the site of Stonehenge at least 10,000 years ago.
And this is not speculation.
The archaeologists are saying this today.
And the same thing seems to be going on in other parts of the world.
CHILDRESS: New dating techniques done by geologists on the Sphinx in Giza indicate that it was carved before 10,000 BC.
So more and more, as we make new discoveries in archaeology, it's pushing mankind and civilization back farther and farther.
TSOUKALOS: Earth has a much deeper prehistory than what we read about in textbooks today.
You can read that Puma Punku or Tiahuanaco, for example, was built between 500 and 800 AD.
Some archaeologists have suggested that Puma Punku and Tiahuanaco might date back as far as 12,000 years BC, so around 14,000 years ago.
NARRATOR: Could it be that a sophisticated culture existed on Earth thousands and even tens of thousands of years ago? But if so, who built it? What happened to it? And might there still be remnants of it, standing boldly, right before our eyes? According to ancient astronaut theorists, many of the answers can be found by looking no further than the Old Testament of the Bible.
NARRATOR: Throughout the world, there are incredible man-made structures that have been found to date back thousands of years earlier than archaeologists initially thought.
Is it possible that an advanced civilization really existed on Earth in mankind's prehistory? A close examination of the so-called "Old Testament" of the Judeo-Christian Bible suggests that although Adam and Eve are presumably the first humans created by God, their son Cain later went on to marry and join a thriving community.
REVEREND LIONEL FANTHORPE: There are a number of biblical stories which make us suspect that perhaps Homo sapiens were not the only species on Earth or even the first ones.
Although Adam and Eve are recorded in the Garden of Eden as the first human parents that when Cain went on his way after murdering his brother, Abel, he comes to another city with other beings living in it.
Now, who are they? What are they? NARRATOR: According to ancient astronaut theorists, several ancient texts can be found that describe beings that dwelled upon the earth before the time of Adam and Eve.
These are often referred to as the "pre-Adamites.
" There is a long and ancient history of what today are called pre-Adamites.
Now, who are they and what are they? This is a subject, of course, of many legends.
Those legends tell us tremendous amount of things.
People's lives extended for thousands of years.
They allegedly reached high levels of technology, even traveling to the stars, and yet somehow something went wrong in their civilization.
The pre-Adamic civilization fell, but some went to the stars, and they were told, ordered by God, to watch and to observe.
Well, let's assume for a moment that we had this incredible planet, and, all of a sudden, the extraterrestrials, other beings, came here, and they had their own facilities, their own monuments, their own communities for at least some time.
And then, somewhere along the line, they took off.
NARRATOR: Stories of a time when otherworldly beings occupied the planet can be found in nearly all world mythologies.
For the ancient Egyptians, the dawn of life on Earth is referred to as "Zep Tepi," "the first time," when the god Osiris served as an earthly ruler.
The ancient Greeks called this period the "Golden Age," when the Titans and the Olympians dwelled on Earth.
And the ancient Sumerian accounts detail a time before the creation of man when the gods were the sole occupants of the planet.
The basic suggestion is that extraterrestrials colonized Planet Earth thousands of years ago, and we're talking not 10,000 or 15,000 years ago, but hundreds of thousands of years ago.
NARRATOR: But if an advanced, possibly extraterrestrial, civilization really did exist here on Earth, why is there no record of it? No apparent archaeological or architectural evidence? BAHN: For most of the cultures studied by archaeology, we are bereft of probably the vast majority of what they produced.
This is particularly true the further back in time you go, simply because anything organic will-will not survive.
TSOUKALOS: The reason why most of the ancient monuments were built by using stone is because stone lasts forever.
That's it.
And the reason why we have these monuments today is because they were calling cards.
They were calling cards of a pre-civilization.
NARRATOR: Mechanical engineers, like Nikhil Kar, study the deterioration, corrosion and decomposition of various materials to determine the approximate rate of decay and structural failure.
By applying these principles to a cityscape, scientists are able to determine roughly how long it would take the hallmarks of a sophisticated civilization to disappear.
If civilization was abandoned, after 50 years, you would start to see, um, material degradation processes take over for a skyscraper, for example, would see parts of the external facade crumbling to the ground.
For steel material, you're gonna start to see little pits form in that steel structure.
After a thousand years, the soil may begin to absorb the material and erode the material itself.
Eventually, you're gonna get to a point where only stone materials, natural stones are gonna be around, such as Mount Rushmore.
NARRATOR: Quito, Ecuador.
Here in the grasslands of South America are the remnants of the Great Incan Road.
The sophisticated network of pathways and trails covers over 25,000 miles though Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile.
The Inca built this vast roadway without the use of the wheel, draft animals, metal tools or even a written language.
Yet modern engineers have noted that the roadway incorporates advanced engineering principles.
ED BARNHART: The Inca road system was really one of the most magnificent ancient architectural feats ever made.
One of the things that made the Inca roads so incredible is that they traversed the Andes, these incredibly tall, steep mountains.
They had to bore tunnels through mountains.
They cut narrow paths along sheer cliff faces.
BRIEN FOERSTER: One of the most intriguing things about the Inca road system is that there is a major artery that goes from the northwest to the southeast.
And along that, we find almost every major megalithic construction, including Tiahuanaco, Puma Punku, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo and Saksaywaman.
Many are starting to believe that these megalithic structures are thousands of years older than the Inca, and therefore parts of the Inca road system are, as well, thousands of years older than that civilization.
The Incas, so many of their great structures Cuzco and their royal highway you ask them, "Who built these? How did you build these?" And they'll say, "We didn't build this.
" Well, who did build it? CHILDRESS: The Incas had elaborate legends of coming through tunnel systems in the earth, appearing on an island in Lake Titicaca, and then coming to Cuzco and finding already a-a system of tunnels and-and ancient mines and structures.
It was home of the gods.
It's where they lived before they left.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the foundations of the Inca superhighway and the megalithic sites along it are remnants of an extraterrestrial civilization that once colonized Earth? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is a profound yes.
And to prove it, they point to a series of stone carvings said to depict mankind's ancient ancestors.
NARRATOR: Southeastern Turkey.
Buried beneath 20 feet of sand, archaeologists unearth the world's oldest temple complex Gobekli Tepe.
Radiocarbon dating suggests that the site dates back to at least the tenth century BC, a time before the end of the last ice age and 6,000 years before prehistoric man was said to have developed language.
BAHN: Gobekli Tepe is really one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.
There are very few finds in archaeology that really changed the whole way we look at the past.
And that is essentially what has happened, because our view of hunter-gatherers, uh, has changed enormously.
We now know they were capable of coming together in large numbers with under presumably some kind of authority to cooperate on massive projects such as Gobekli Tepe, which involved bringing huge pieces of stone from quite some distance away, carving it beautifully, setting these pillars upright, and doing this on a massive scale.
The very first temples in the world are at Gobekli Tepe.
And-and this in many ways changes everything, because here we have the smoking gun of a lost civilization.
It confirms to us absolutely that at the end of the last ice age, there was high culture existing in the world.
There's no doubt in my mind that there are question marks all around the ancient world.
And Gobekli Tepe offers such a giant question mark, because according to mainstream science, we were sitting in caves, munching on bananas.
And clearly that isn't the case.
NARRATOR: Although, to date, archaeologists have only excavated less than one acre of this 22-acre site, what they have found is astounding.
The remains of a complex of buildings, massive walls and T-shaped stone formations, some nine to ten feet tall and weighing up to 50 tons.
Many of the stone pillars are covered with relief carvings of animals, reptiles and insects.
Archaeologists have also found figures at the site that appear to represent humans with strangely stylized clothing.
BAHN: We have no idea what these humans represent.
We suspect that these are not just simple statues commemorating people.
T-They could be gods.
They could be spirits.
They could be ancestors, something of that kind.
NARRATOR: But perhaps most intriguing is a life-size statue found just six miles away that has been dated to the same period the Urfa Man.
DAVID WILCOCK: This looks like a person who has come from an advanced civilization, who's wearing something that has much more of a defined collar, possibly even some sort of advanced space suit.
What the heck is he doing there? His face looks strange, he's bald, his head, his eyes look weird.
There's something unusual about this guy, and that could be a clue that leads us into the mystery of an antediluvian, or pre-flood, civilization.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the strange humanoid figure found near Gobekli Tepe actually represents an extraterrestrial? A being from a lost civilization that existed on Earth sometime before the last ice age? If so, does it give credence to other ancient stories describing otherworldly civilizations that once existed here on Earth? There is this recessed courtyard in Tiahuanaco that has all these different faces.
These stones were found underneath the soil, meaning that at some point, some type of event happened that buried these particular stones.
Some have actually surmised that they represent some type of a pre-flood civilization, that what we have here is, in fact, a remnant that depicts that society.
All over the world, we have giant statues and-and carvings of people's faces and heads.
Some of them are giant colossal heads like the Olmec colossal heads.
Others are the Easter Island type statues, which are huge and depict people who have elongated heads.
They're cone heads, essentially.
They were giants of yore with godlike powers.
In my mind, we would call them extraterrestrials.
In all of these places, the locals are saying, "Yes, these are our ancestors.
These are the people who came before us.
" NARRATOR: Might our planet really have been inhabited by alien visitors tens of thousands of years ago? And might they have brought with them advanced knowledge, incredible architecture and technology that virtually vanished, without a trace save for a few stone carvings and monuments? But why? What catastrophic event might have happened on Earth that would have wiped out everything that wasn't made of stone? Perhaps further evidence can be found by examining a number of massive man-made caves recently discovered in China.
NARRATOR: Zhejiang Province, China.
June 1992.
A local villager pumping water out of a pond in Phoenix Hill uncovers a man-made cavern with stairs hallways and massive ten-story-tall pillars.
The grotto is one in a series of 24 separate caverns, each with similar proportions and intricately carved walls, floors and ceilings.
BAHN: Nobody really knows what on earth these things are.
There's no trace of them having been occupied or being used for storage.
Uh, certainly not for burials.
There's no trace of anything like that.
TSOUKALOS: There's a Swiss author by the name of Luc Burgin who was the first to take this story outside of China in his book China's Mysterious Cave Labyrinth.
And what he showed me convinced me that some kind of advanced technology was used here.
It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, where you enter this subterranean world that clearly has been hewn out of the bedrock with artificial means.
It's almost as if there was some sort of artificial mechanism that was grinding and drilling all of the stone out, and this suggests the possibility that they may have had some sort of technology.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists estimate that the material excavated from the site would amount to nearly one million cubic meters approximately the volume of 400 Olympic-sized pools.
Yet there is no evidence of where this material would have gone.
And Chinese officials have calculated that an endeavor of this magnitude would take a minimum of 1,000 men working day and night for at least five years.
There is no historical record, uh, of these caverns having been excavated.
So there's no document explaining what they were used for, who excavated them.
And this remains a very, very, uh, frustrating detail for historians.
COLLINS: We know that in China there are written records that go back at least 3,000 years.
They make absolutely no mention of these caves.
So we must look much further back in time for their origin.
But exactly how old are they? Are they 4,000 years, 5,000 years? Are they even 10,000 years? We just don't know at this time.
TSOUKALOS: Some have suggested that they're up to 15,000 years old.
In fact, Chinese scholars are the ones who have proposed that this cave system dates back to one of China's first emperors, Huang Di.
And Huang Di, as we all know, descended from the sky in nothing else but a fiery dragon.
WILCOCK: Somebody went to an extreme amount of trouble to build an underground civilization.
Why would they do that? Is it possible that something was happening on the surface of the Earth? When we go back to the Icelandic legends, we see this cataclysm that is described as a cataclysm of fire called the Ragnarok in which you have flames in the air and rocks and gravel raining down from the sky.
NARRATOR: In the Icelandic Ragnarok legend, the world is turned upside down.
A great fire is followed by a submersion of the world in water, resulting in the death of the Nordic gods and their offspring.
Only two humans are left to repopulate the earth.
It is a tale much like that of the Great Flood found in the Judeo-Christian Bible.
And similar stories of a great deluge one that marks the end of an old world and the start of a new one can be found in the histories of virtually every ancient civilization on our planet.
ROBERT SCHOCH: Virtually every culture, every ancient culture talks about floods and ancient floods.
Some people dismiss this as, you know, myth without explanation.
But what we find geologically is, in fact, we would expect flood legends.
NARRATOR: In 2007, a consortium of geologists publishes its collective findings indicating evidence of a major meteor event.
What they discover is a carbon-rich layer in the geological record at various sites across the globe dating back to around 10,900 BC.
A separate study conducted by scientists studying Arctic ice core samples finds evidence suggesting a rapid glacial melt at nearly the same time period.
SCHOCH: The Ice Age ends very, very dramatically, almost literally overnight.
You see this in the ice cores.
All of a sudden, there are dramatic changes, temperatures rising, torrential rains, flooding.
NARRATOR: Could the geological record suggest that the stories of a global cataclysm are true? If so, might the stories of a cleansing of the earth of otherworldly beings, leaving only humans to repopulate the planet, also be true? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest further evidence exists in the tales of a long lost continent.
NARRATOR: Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Here at the Minnesota Historical Society are housed boxes upon boxes of notes, letters and research material detailing evidence of an antediluvian, or pre-flood, civilization.
The collection is the culmination of an exhaustive search for proof of a prehistoric civilization, conducted by the 19th century U.
S.
senator.
Ignatius Donnelly.
COLLINS: Ignatius Donnelly was a very interesting person.
He was a U.
S.
congressman.
Um, he was a writer.
He was a-a cryptologist.
And in 1882 he came out with his most famous book _ What he did was to propose the existence of a mother civilization, a-a lost civilization that existed at the time of the last ice age.
CHILDRESS: Ignatius Donnelly was fascinated by the story of a lost civilization that was destroyed over 10,000 years ago.
He looked into all kinds of scientific anomalies at the time, including the extinction of mammoths and other animals.
Stories of a civilization within the Americas and in the Atlantic.
NARRATOR: In his writings, Donnelly concluded that not only did a lost civilization actually exist, but that it was destroyed due to a meteoric-type event that shifted the earth's axis in the distant past.
Donnelly believed that remnants of this civilization could be found in the Americas and the ultimate evidence would be located underwater in the Caribbean.
He was convinced that when Christopher Columbus sailed west from Spain in 1492, he knew this as well.
COLLINS: The explorer Christopher Columbus, before his epic journey to the New World, was very much aware of the stories of a lost civilization.
It was something that was discussed in the various European cults at this time.
Ancient mariners, the voyagers of the past, had maps which showed different areas of the earth, which they could not know anything possibly about because they hadn't been discovered at that time, and were probably accessible to people like Christopher Columbus, before his journey to the New World.
There were legends in the Middle Ages that there was a land and a continent across the Atlantic.
And early maps started showing before Columbus, even a large island in the Atlantic, which they called Antillia.
Columbus, on his first journey to the New World, as he neared the Caribbean, he started seeing weird lights in the sky.
So you have to wonder: were extraterrestrials purposely trying to help Columbus? Perhaps some of the knowledge that he had of maps, and that he was really going to find land across this ocean, had been assured to him.
NARRATOR: Could Columbus have been purposely guided to this area not only by ancient maps of unknown origin, but also by extraterrestrial beings? Although the secret maps and charts of Christopher Columbus have been lost, scholars attribute them as having been a key source in the creation of one of history's most enigmatic maps.
The Piri Reis map has been dated to 1513 AD, but what it illustrates suggests geological knowledge that was unknown until our modern age.
ERICH VON DANIKEN: A Turkish seaman, an admiral, painted the map.
His name was Piri Reis.
Now, if you see the map, you see the coastline of the southern part of France.
Then you see Spain.
Then you see what is today's Gibraltar.
Then you see a part of Africa.
On the other side, you see a coastline of South America, but what is important, on the bottom of the map of Piri Reis you see the coastline of Antarctica.
Now, this coastline is covered today with ice and snow.
So somebody must have mapped this before the Ice Age.
NARRATOR: The continent of Antarctica was discovered in 1820, over 300 years after Piri Reis drew his map.
And scientists have proposed that the Antarctic coastline has been obscured by ice for at least 6,000 years.
Could it be that the original source for the maps of Columbus and the Piri Reis map predates our recorded history? If so, has evidence been left behind on Earth to assure that we can piece together the truth about a lost civilization? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and claim further proof may be found underwater in the Bahamas.
NARRATOR: Andros Island, the Bahamas.
Members of the Association for Research and Enlightenment conduct aerial searches for underwater structures that might reveal evidence of a lost civilization.
Off of the coast of Andros, they discovered an incredible platform of rectangular and square stones that stretched for several hundred yards.
And all the indications are that it goes back to the end of the last ice age and is probably around NARRATOR: The search is part of a long-term project working in conjunction with the Cayce Foundation.
Their quest is to locate remnants of the lost continent of Atlantis, which healer and psychic Edgar Cayce said would be located in the area.
WILCOCK: Edgar Cayce is arguably America's greatest psychic.
He was born in 1877, died in 1945, and he has documented over 14,000 psychic readings.
What's interesting is that Cayce also got into things like reincarnation.
Some of Cayce's clients were told that they had lifetimes in the so-called mythical civilization of Atlantis.
In fact, Cayce's reading said that the people of Atlantis, as a whole, had mass reincarnated as the people of America and that America was, in a sense, a future-life carryover of Atlantis.
NARRATOR: Cayce revealed in his psychic readings that the truth about the nature of this lost civilization exists in a hidden hall of records at three locations across the globe: in Egypt near the Sphinx, underwater in the Bahamas, and in the Yucatán Peninsula.
Any three of these areas apparently would have all of the records that we would need to completely rebuild our history and understand how there may have been much more widespread extraterrestrial presence here on Earth.
NARRATOR: Could recent archaeological finds in the Bahamas confirm that Edgar Cayce was right about the existence of a lost extraterrestrial civilization? And if so, should we be concerned about his predictions for the future of humanity? Cayce was a cataclysmist, and in his readings, he was constantly talking about Earth changes and pole shifts that caused civilizations to be destroyed in ancient times.
And Cayce said that we were gonna have another pole shift around the time of the millennium.
Even a relatively small asteroid, coming in at the right angle not necessarily hitting Earth, but sort of grazing the earth could, theoretically, change the tilt axis of the earth significantly.
Now, if that occurred, land and ocean would redistribute on the earth.
WILLIAM HENRY: It seems as if history repeats itself.
And it may be that at this moment, we are exactly in the same situation that the citizens of Atlantis were in.
COLLINS: Perhaps we will find out exactly what had happened to this lost civilization and learn from their mistakes and not sink into oblivion ourselves.
TSOUKALOS: The more we uncover, it will all point in one direction.
We are not the first and we never have been.
An extraterrestrial pre-civilization existed before our recorded history, and this truth will be revealed within our lifetime.
NARRATOR: Could the stories of a time when gods and otherworldly beings inhabited the earth be more than just mythology? And might the discovery of unexplainable remnants from this lost civilization reveal the truth about our extraterrestrial origins, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? Perhaps we are on the verge of uncovering the final piece of the puzzle that will change our understanding of Earth's history forever.
But will we uncover it before it's too late?
PAUL BAHN: Nobody knows what on earth these things are.
NARRATOR: Unexplainable structures.
LOGAN HAWKES: You ask them, "How did you build these?" And they'll say, "We didn't build this.
" NARRATOR: And underwater discoveries that challenge everything we know about the past.
DAVID CHILDRESS: That's amazing.
I'm convinced.
Something's going on down there.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that an advanced civilization inhabited the earth thousands of years ago? And if so, were they human or something out of this world? GIORGIO A.
TSOUKALOS: Extraterrestrials colonized Planet Earth thousands of years ago.
The more we uncover, it will all point in one direction.
We are not the first.
NARRATOR: Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has credited its origins to gods and other visitors from the stars.
What if it were true? Did extraterrestrial beings really help to shape our history? And if so what might we learn from the study of aliens BC? NARRATOR: Traverse City, Michigan.
May 22, 2015.
At an undisclosed location in Traverse Bay on Lake Michigan, author and explorer David Childress has teamed up with sonar technician Brian Abbott and underwater photographer Chris Doyal to investigate a series of strange underwater rock alignments they first discovered in 2007.
So you don't bring very many people out here, do you? No, you're one of the first we've brought out to this site.
We try and keep it kind of quiet and secret.
Chris has been out here a few times.
Well, it's a pretty sensitive site, so we try to keep traffic to a minimum.
Well, how did you find this site, anyway? Uh, we were actually out looking for shipwrecks and we put our sonar down off the side and I started to see stones line up on my rose compass.
Okay, and then you deploy this sonar and take a picture, huh? Yeah, we, uh, we can get that done here real quick, we can deploy the sonar off the side and, uh, start getting some images and show you what we've got on the screen.
All right, great, let's do it.
Excellent.
When I first found these on the computer screen, I started to laugh, because it was like, this can't be true, and I jokingly said, "Hey, we have our own Stonehenge underwater," and everyone, "Ha, ha, ha," and I started looking at it farther and I'm going, "Wow.
We might have something here.
" Set the cable here, we'll be all set.
So we'll take a look at the computer screen.
Okay? All right.
So the sonar's spinning around.
So as you can see in this, uh, deployment location, we have, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six stones.
And what's really interesting about this is, these stones all measure the same distance across.
CHILDRESS: Yeah, this does look like an artificial alignment this stone circle and then this line of stones there.
Yeah, that was unique to me, because as an engineer, when I look at stuff that's square or rectangular or circle in nature, it-it kind of makes it jump out, because Mother Nature generally doesn't do things like that.
What I saw on the sonar looked a lot like stone circles and stone alignments that I've seen in England, or Carnac in France, and it makes me wonder what's going on here in Ancient North America.
So have you actually, uh, been down here in scuba equipment? No, I haven't, but Chris has.
Yeah, we went down and I actually took some still photographs of it and we noticed on one of the stones there's some really interesting carvings on the surface of it.
Some people have even said that it appears to resemble a mastodon.
Really? - Really.
Wow.
Can we go down there now and see it? - Yeah, absolutely.
NARRATOR: Taking an underwater camera down to the mastodon rock, Chris Doyal will send up a live feed to a monitor on the boat.
As he descends, he's gonna pick out the stone here.
CHILDRESS: Okay.
What's that? - ABBOTT: That's the stone.
CHILDRESS: Is-is this the stone that has the carvings on it? Yes, it is.
So he's moving slowly in on it.
So you can see the head, right through there.
There's a tusk.
So we have one leg coming down.
CHILDRESS: It does look like the stone has been carved, and ABBOTT: Yeah.
- Yeah, you can see the legs and a trunk on it.
Wow! That's amazing.
I'm - Yeah, it truly is.
Yeah, I-I'm convinced.
Uh, something's going on down there.
ABBOTT: Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, mastodons went extinct.
So we've got a carving on a rock formation at, you know, a depth of water that, uh, you know, probably shouldn't be here, but is here.
This rock is probably made out of granite, which is very, very hard, and if you look up close at these markings, you can see that these were made by percussion marks.
These weren't just scratched into the surface, that each line was individually pecked out.
That rock looks like it has a carving of a mastodon on it.
And that would mean that that carving was made before the extinction of these mastodons.
So you have to wonder what was going on here in North America at the time of the last ice age.
NARRATOR: The carved image of a mastodon? An animal that has been extinct for over 10,000 years? But what is it doing at the bottom of Lake Michigan? Could it really be part of an artificially created rock formation, like Stonehenge in England? If so, it would have to have been created before the end of the last ice age, when the lake bed was dry over 12,000 years ago and that would contradict the currently held belief that early humans were not capable of erecting monumental structures in North America, or anywhere else, at that time.
You never know when something's going to pop up that's going to totally change your whole view of a, of a period or even of human development.
One of the main trends that I've noticed in archaeology is that the dates for things tend to go back all the time; the earliest pottery in a place, the earliest arrival of people in a place.
They always turn out to be earlier than we traditionally thought.
ANDREW COLLINS: Today we know that there was a monument on the site of Stonehenge at least 10,000 years ago.
And this is not speculation.
The archaeologists are saying this today.
And the same thing seems to be going on in other parts of the world.
CHILDRESS: New dating techniques done by geologists on the Sphinx in Giza indicate that it was carved before 10,000 BC.
So more and more, as we make new discoveries in archaeology, it's pushing mankind and civilization back farther and farther.
TSOUKALOS: Earth has a much deeper prehistory than what we read about in textbooks today.
You can read that Puma Punku or Tiahuanaco, for example, was built between 500 and 800 AD.
Some archaeologists have suggested that Puma Punku and Tiahuanaco might date back as far as 12,000 years BC, so around 14,000 years ago.
NARRATOR: Could it be that a sophisticated culture existed on Earth thousands and even tens of thousands of years ago? But if so, who built it? What happened to it? And might there still be remnants of it, standing boldly, right before our eyes? According to ancient astronaut theorists, many of the answers can be found by looking no further than the Old Testament of the Bible.
NARRATOR: Throughout the world, there are incredible man-made structures that have been found to date back thousands of years earlier than archaeologists initially thought.
Is it possible that an advanced civilization really existed on Earth in mankind's prehistory? A close examination of the so-called "Old Testament" of the Judeo-Christian Bible suggests that although Adam and Eve are presumably the first humans created by God, their son Cain later went on to marry and join a thriving community.
REVEREND LIONEL FANTHORPE: There are a number of biblical stories which make us suspect that perhaps Homo sapiens were not the only species on Earth or even the first ones.
Although Adam and Eve are recorded in the Garden of Eden as the first human parents that when Cain went on his way after murdering his brother, Abel, he comes to another city with other beings living in it.
Now, who are they? What are they? NARRATOR: According to ancient astronaut theorists, several ancient texts can be found that describe beings that dwelled upon the earth before the time of Adam and Eve.
These are often referred to as the "pre-Adamites.
" There is a long and ancient history of what today are called pre-Adamites.
Now, who are they and what are they? This is a subject, of course, of many legends.
Those legends tell us tremendous amount of things.
People's lives extended for thousands of years.
They allegedly reached high levels of technology, even traveling to the stars, and yet somehow something went wrong in their civilization.
The pre-Adamic civilization fell, but some went to the stars, and they were told, ordered by God, to watch and to observe.
Well, let's assume for a moment that we had this incredible planet, and, all of a sudden, the extraterrestrials, other beings, came here, and they had their own facilities, their own monuments, their own communities for at least some time.
And then, somewhere along the line, they took off.
NARRATOR: Stories of a time when otherworldly beings occupied the planet can be found in nearly all world mythologies.
For the ancient Egyptians, the dawn of life on Earth is referred to as "Zep Tepi," "the first time," when the god Osiris served as an earthly ruler.
The ancient Greeks called this period the "Golden Age," when the Titans and the Olympians dwelled on Earth.
And the ancient Sumerian accounts detail a time before the creation of man when the gods were the sole occupants of the planet.
The basic suggestion is that extraterrestrials colonized Planet Earth thousands of years ago, and we're talking not 10,000 or 15,000 years ago, but hundreds of thousands of years ago.
NARRATOR: But if an advanced, possibly extraterrestrial, civilization really did exist here on Earth, why is there no record of it? No apparent archaeological or architectural evidence? BAHN: For most of the cultures studied by archaeology, we are bereft of probably the vast majority of what they produced.
This is particularly true the further back in time you go, simply because anything organic will-will not survive.
TSOUKALOS: The reason why most of the ancient monuments were built by using stone is because stone lasts forever.
That's it.
And the reason why we have these monuments today is because they were calling cards.
They were calling cards of a pre-civilization.
NARRATOR: Mechanical engineers, like Nikhil Kar, study the deterioration, corrosion and decomposition of various materials to determine the approximate rate of decay and structural failure.
By applying these principles to a cityscape, scientists are able to determine roughly how long it would take the hallmarks of a sophisticated civilization to disappear.
If civilization was abandoned, after 50 years, you would start to see, um, material degradation processes take over for a skyscraper, for example, would see parts of the external facade crumbling to the ground.
For steel material, you're gonna start to see little pits form in that steel structure.
After a thousand years, the soil may begin to absorb the material and erode the material itself.
Eventually, you're gonna get to a point where only stone materials, natural stones are gonna be around, such as Mount Rushmore.
NARRATOR: Quito, Ecuador.
Here in the grasslands of South America are the remnants of the Great Incan Road.
The sophisticated network of pathways and trails covers over 25,000 miles though Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile.
The Inca built this vast roadway without the use of the wheel, draft animals, metal tools or even a written language.
Yet modern engineers have noted that the roadway incorporates advanced engineering principles.
ED BARNHART: The Inca road system was really one of the most magnificent ancient architectural feats ever made.
One of the things that made the Inca roads so incredible is that they traversed the Andes, these incredibly tall, steep mountains.
They had to bore tunnels through mountains.
They cut narrow paths along sheer cliff faces.
BRIEN FOERSTER: One of the most intriguing things about the Inca road system is that there is a major artery that goes from the northwest to the southeast.
And along that, we find almost every major megalithic construction, including Tiahuanaco, Puma Punku, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo and Saksaywaman.
Many are starting to believe that these megalithic structures are thousands of years older than the Inca, and therefore parts of the Inca road system are, as well, thousands of years older than that civilization.
The Incas, so many of their great structures Cuzco and their royal highway you ask them, "Who built these? How did you build these?" And they'll say, "We didn't build this.
" Well, who did build it? CHILDRESS: The Incas had elaborate legends of coming through tunnel systems in the earth, appearing on an island in Lake Titicaca, and then coming to Cuzco and finding already a-a system of tunnels and-and ancient mines and structures.
It was home of the gods.
It's where they lived before they left.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the foundations of the Inca superhighway and the megalithic sites along it are remnants of an extraterrestrial civilization that once colonized Earth? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is a profound yes.
And to prove it, they point to a series of stone carvings said to depict mankind's ancient ancestors.
NARRATOR: Southeastern Turkey.
Buried beneath 20 feet of sand, archaeologists unearth the world's oldest temple complex Gobekli Tepe.
Radiocarbon dating suggests that the site dates back to at least the tenth century BC, a time before the end of the last ice age and 6,000 years before prehistoric man was said to have developed language.
BAHN: Gobekli Tepe is really one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.
There are very few finds in archaeology that really changed the whole way we look at the past.
And that is essentially what has happened, because our view of hunter-gatherers, uh, has changed enormously.
We now know they were capable of coming together in large numbers with under presumably some kind of authority to cooperate on massive projects such as Gobekli Tepe, which involved bringing huge pieces of stone from quite some distance away, carving it beautifully, setting these pillars upright, and doing this on a massive scale.
The very first temples in the world are at Gobekli Tepe.
And-and this in many ways changes everything, because here we have the smoking gun of a lost civilization.
It confirms to us absolutely that at the end of the last ice age, there was high culture existing in the world.
There's no doubt in my mind that there are question marks all around the ancient world.
And Gobekli Tepe offers such a giant question mark, because according to mainstream science, we were sitting in caves, munching on bananas.
And clearly that isn't the case.
NARRATOR: Although, to date, archaeologists have only excavated less than one acre of this 22-acre site, what they have found is astounding.
The remains of a complex of buildings, massive walls and T-shaped stone formations, some nine to ten feet tall and weighing up to 50 tons.
Many of the stone pillars are covered with relief carvings of animals, reptiles and insects.
Archaeologists have also found figures at the site that appear to represent humans with strangely stylized clothing.
BAHN: We have no idea what these humans represent.
We suspect that these are not just simple statues commemorating people.
T-They could be gods.
They could be spirits.
They could be ancestors, something of that kind.
NARRATOR: But perhaps most intriguing is a life-size statue found just six miles away that has been dated to the same period the Urfa Man.
DAVID WILCOCK: This looks like a person who has come from an advanced civilization, who's wearing something that has much more of a defined collar, possibly even some sort of advanced space suit.
What the heck is he doing there? His face looks strange, he's bald, his head, his eyes look weird.
There's something unusual about this guy, and that could be a clue that leads us into the mystery of an antediluvian, or pre-flood, civilization.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the strange humanoid figure found near Gobekli Tepe actually represents an extraterrestrial? A being from a lost civilization that existed on Earth sometime before the last ice age? If so, does it give credence to other ancient stories describing otherworldly civilizations that once existed here on Earth? There is this recessed courtyard in Tiahuanaco that has all these different faces.
These stones were found underneath the soil, meaning that at some point, some type of event happened that buried these particular stones.
Some have actually surmised that they represent some type of a pre-flood civilization, that what we have here is, in fact, a remnant that depicts that society.
All over the world, we have giant statues and-and carvings of people's faces and heads.
Some of them are giant colossal heads like the Olmec colossal heads.
Others are the Easter Island type statues, which are huge and depict people who have elongated heads.
They're cone heads, essentially.
They were giants of yore with godlike powers.
In my mind, we would call them extraterrestrials.
In all of these places, the locals are saying, "Yes, these are our ancestors.
These are the people who came before us.
" NARRATOR: Might our planet really have been inhabited by alien visitors tens of thousands of years ago? And might they have brought with them advanced knowledge, incredible architecture and technology that virtually vanished, without a trace save for a few stone carvings and monuments? But why? What catastrophic event might have happened on Earth that would have wiped out everything that wasn't made of stone? Perhaps further evidence can be found by examining a number of massive man-made caves recently discovered in China.
NARRATOR: Zhejiang Province, China.
June 1992.
A local villager pumping water out of a pond in Phoenix Hill uncovers a man-made cavern with stairs hallways and massive ten-story-tall pillars.
The grotto is one in a series of 24 separate caverns, each with similar proportions and intricately carved walls, floors and ceilings.
BAHN: Nobody really knows what on earth these things are.
There's no trace of them having been occupied or being used for storage.
Uh, certainly not for burials.
There's no trace of anything like that.
TSOUKALOS: There's a Swiss author by the name of Luc Burgin who was the first to take this story outside of China in his book China's Mysterious Cave Labyrinth.
And what he showed me convinced me that some kind of advanced technology was used here.
It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, where you enter this subterranean world that clearly has been hewn out of the bedrock with artificial means.
It's almost as if there was some sort of artificial mechanism that was grinding and drilling all of the stone out, and this suggests the possibility that they may have had some sort of technology.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists estimate that the material excavated from the site would amount to nearly one million cubic meters approximately the volume of 400 Olympic-sized pools.
Yet there is no evidence of where this material would have gone.
And Chinese officials have calculated that an endeavor of this magnitude would take a minimum of 1,000 men working day and night for at least five years.
There is no historical record, uh, of these caverns having been excavated.
So there's no document explaining what they were used for, who excavated them.
And this remains a very, very, uh, frustrating detail for historians.
COLLINS: We know that in China there are written records that go back at least 3,000 years.
They make absolutely no mention of these caves.
So we must look much further back in time for their origin.
But exactly how old are they? Are they 4,000 years, 5,000 years? Are they even 10,000 years? We just don't know at this time.
TSOUKALOS: Some have suggested that they're up to 15,000 years old.
In fact, Chinese scholars are the ones who have proposed that this cave system dates back to one of China's first emperors, Huang Di.
And Huang Di, as we all know, descended from the sky in nothing else but a fiery dragon.
WILCOCK: Somebody went to an extreme amount of trouble to build an underground civilization.
Why would they do that? Is it possible that something was happening on the surface of the Earth? When we go back to the Icelandic legends, we see this cataclysm that is described as a cataclysm of fire called the Ragnarok in which you have flames in the air and rocks and gravel raining down from the sky.
NARRATOR: In the Icelandic Ragnarok legend, the world is turned upside down.
A great fire is followed by a submersion of the world in water, resulting in the death of the Nordic gods and their offspring.
Only two humans are left to repopulate the earth.
It is a tale much like that of the Great Flood found in the Judeo-Christian Bible.
And similar stories of a great deluge one that marks the end of an old world and the start of a new one can be found in the histories of virtually every ancient civilization on our planet.
ROBERT SCHOCH: Virtually every culture, every ancient culture talks about floods and ancient floods.
Some people dismiss this as, you know, myth without explanation.
But what we find geologically is, in fact, we would expect flood legends.
NARRATOR: In 2007, a consortium of geologists publishes its collective findings indicating evidence of a major meteor event.
What they discover is a carbon-rich layer in the geological record at various sites across the globe dating back to around 10,900 BC.
A separate study conducted by scientists studying Arctic ice core samples finds evidence suggesting a rapid glacial melt at nearly the same time period.
SCHOCH: The Ice Age ends very, very dramatically, almost literally overnight.
You see this in the ice cores.
All of a sudden, there are dramatic changes, temperatures rising, torrential rains, flooding.
NARRATOR: Could the geological record suggest that the stories of a global cataclysm are true? If so, might the stories of a cleansing of the earth of otherworldly beings, leaving only humans to repopulate the planet, also be true? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest further evidence exists in the tales of a long lost continent.
NARRATOR: Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Here at the Minnesota Historical Society are housed boxes upon boxes of notes, letters and research material detailing evidence of an antediluvian, or pre-flood, civilization.
The collection is the culmination of an exhaustive search for proof of a prehistoric civilization, conducted by the 19th century U.
S.
senator.
Ignatius Donnelly.
COLLINS: Ignatius Donnelly was a very interesting person.
He was a U.
S.
congressman.
Um, he was a writer.
He was a-a cryptologist.
And in 1882 he came out with his most famous book _ What he did was to propose the existence of a mother civilization, a-a lost civilization that existed at the time of the last ice age.
CHILDRESS: Ignatius Donnelly was fascinated by the story of a lost civilization that was destroyed over 10,000 years ago.
He looked into all kinds of scientific anomalies at the time, including the extinction of mammoths and other animals.
Stories of a civilization within the Americas and in the Atlantic.
NARRATOR: In his writings, Donnelly concluded that not only did a lost civilization actually exist, but that it was destroyed due to a meteoric-type event that shifted the earth's axis in the distant past.
Donnelly believed that remnants of this civilization could be found in the Americas and the ultimate evidence would be located underwater in the Caribbean.
He was convinced that when Christopher Columbus sailed west from Spain in 1492, he knew this as well.
COLLINS: The explorer Christopher Columbus, before his epic journey to the New World, was very much aware of the stories of a lost civilization.
It was something that was discussed in the various European cults at this time.
Ancient mariners, the voyagers of the past, had maps which showed different areas of the earth, which they could not know anything possibly about because they hadn't been discovered at that time, and were probably accessible to people like Christopher Columbus, before his journey to the New World.
There were legends in the Middle Ages that there was a land and a continent across the Atlantic.
And early maps started showing before Columbus, even a large island in the Atlantic, which they called Antillia.
Columbus, on his first journey to the New World, as he neared the Caribbean, he started seeing weird lights in the sky.
So you have to wonder: were extraterrestrials purposely trying to help Columbus? Perhaps some of the knowledge that he had of maps, and that he was really going to find land across this ocean, had been assured to him.
NARRATOR: Could Columbus have been purposely guided to this area not only by ancient maps of unknown origin, but also by extraterrestrial beings? Although the secret maps and charts of Christopher Columbus have been lost, scholars attribute them as having been a key source in the creation of one of history's most enigmatic maps.
The Piri Reis map has been dated to 1513 AD, but what it illustrates suggests geological knowledge that was unknown until our modern age.
ERICH VON DANIKEN: A Turkish seaman, an admiral, painted the map.
His name was Piri Reis.
Now, if you see the map, you see the coastline of the southern part of France.
Then you see Spain.
Then you see what is today's Gibraltar.
Then you see a part of Africa.
On the other side, you see a coastline of South America, but what is important, on the bottom of the map of Piri Reis you see the coastline of Antarctica.
Now, this coastline is covered today with ice and snow.
So somebody must have mapped this before the Ice Age.
NARRATOR: The continent of Antarctica was discovered in 1820, over 300 years after Piri Reis drew his map.
And scientists have proposed that the Antarctic coastline has been obscured by ice for at least 6,000 years.
Could it be that the original source for the maps of Columbus and the Piri Reis map predates our recorded history? If so, has evidence been left behind on Earth to assure that we can piece together the truth about a lost civilization? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and claim further proof may be found underwater in the Bahamas.
NARRATOR: Andros Island, the Bahamas.
Members of the Association for Research and Enlightenment conduct aerial searches for underwater structures that might reveal evidence of a lost civilization.
Off of the coast of Andros, they discovered an incredible platform of rectangular and square stones that stretched for several hundred yards.
And all the indications are that it goes back to the end of the last ice age and is probably around NARRATOR: The search is part of a long-term project working in conjunction with the Cayce Foundation.
Their quest is to locate remnants of the lost continent of Atlantis, which healer and psychic Edgar Cayce said would be located in the area.
WILCOCK: Edgar Cayce is arguably America's greatest psychic.
He was born in 1877, died in 1945, and he has documented over 14,000 psychic readings.
What's interesting is that Cayce also got into things like reincarnation.
Some of Cayce's clients were told that they had lifetimes in the so-called mythical civilization of Atlantis.
In fact, Cayce's reading said that the people of Atlantis, as a whole, had mass reincarnated as the people of America and that America was, in a sense, a future-life carryover of Atlantis.
NARRATOR: Cayce revealed in his psychic readings that the truth about the nature of this lost civilization exists in a hidden hall of records at three locations across the globe: in Egypt near the Sphinx, underwater in the Bahamas, and in the Yucatán Peninsula.
Any three of these areas apparently would have all of the records that we would need to completely rebuild our history and understand how there may have been much more widespread extraterrestrial presence here on Earth.
NARRATOR: Could recent archaeological finds in the Bahamas confirm that Edgar Cayce was right about the existence of a lost extraterrestrial civilization? And if so, should we be concerned about his predictions for the future of humanity? Cayce was a cataclysmist, and in his readings, he was constantly talking about Earth changes and pole shifts that caused civilizations to be destroyed in ancient times.
And Cayce said that we were gonna have another pole shift around the time of the millennium.
Even a relatively small asteroid, coming in at the right angle not necessarily hitting Earth, but sort of grazing the earth could, theoretically, change the tilt axis of the earth significantly.
Now, if that occurred, land and ocean would redistribute on the earth.
WILLIAM HENRY: It seems as if history repeats itself.
And it may be that at this moment, we are exactly in the same situation that the citizens of Atlantis were in.
COLLINS: Perhaps we will find out exactly what had happened to this lost civilization and learn from their mistakes and not sink into oblivion ourselves.
TSOUKALOS: The more we uncover, it will all point in one direction.
We are not the first and we never have been.
An extraterrestrial pre-civilization existed before our recorded history, and this truth will be revealed within our lifetime.
NARRATOR: Could the stories of a time when gods and otherworldly beings inhabited the earth be more than just mythology? And might the discovery of unexplainable remnants from this lost civilization reveal the truth about our extraterrestrial origins, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? Perhaps we are on the verge of uncovering the final piece of the puzzle that will change our understanding of Earth's history forever.
But will we uncover it before it's too late?