Ancient Aliens s11e05 Episode Script
The Visionaries
1 DAVID WILCOCK: There is a metaphysical connection to the most significant technological breakthroughs.
GIORGIO A.
TSOUKALOS: Ramanujan describes how he was asleep and he saw these numbers being written in front of him, and he had no idea what this was all about.
WILLIAM HENRY: The meeting of John von Neumann and Alan Turing changed history.
Maybe Steve Jobs was receiving information beyond the physical realm.
DAVID CHILDRESS: Is it possible that extraterrestrials are somehow guiding certain people to bring them to their higher levels of knowledge? HENRY: It appears that these beings are guiding humanity into a new age of super-advanced technology that will ultimately allow us to interface with the cosmos.
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, could there be a connection between aliens and our greatest visionaries? Ã Ã Ã Ã NARRATOR: Houston, Texas.
July 20, 1969.
At NASA Mission Control Center, the massive IBM System/360 Model 75 computer, which boasts processing power of 16.
6 million instructions per second and up to eight megabytes of main memory, is employed to accomplish the greatest feat in human history-- putting a man on the moon.
NEAL ARMSTRONG: Houston, uh, Tranquility Base here.
The Eagle has landed.
NARRATOR: People across the world marveled at this technological achievement.
But incredibly, only six decades later, a handheld device weighing less than half a pound dwarfs the total technology NASA possessed in 1969.
Today's smartphone contains a staggering one million times the computing power used to carry out the moon landing.
What we had when they went to the moon is like nothing compared to what an average teenager carries around now.
I mean, the kind of computing power, the ability to access information, the ability to reach people.
An astonishing technological achievement.
You can only imagine what's gonna happen in 30 years from now.
What we think is so advanced is gonna be so not advanced.
NARRATOR: How is it that mankind's technology has advanced so rapidly? According to ancient astronaut theorists, at specific points in history, extraterrestrials have influenced certain individuals to allow humanity to make major leaps forward, and they propose that this has continued up until modern times.
As evidence, they point to the visionary who jump-started the microcomputer revolution, Steve Jobs.
San Francisco, California.
January 9, 2007.
Apple's annual Macworld Conference and Expo.
Thank you for coming.
NARRATOR: At the center of a worldwide media frenzy, Apple cofounder and CEO, Steve Jobs, takes the stage to announce a revolutionary new product, the iPhone.
What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been and super easy to use.
(audience cheers, applauds) And we are calling it "iPhone.
" (audience cheers) KARA SWISHER: Steve Jobs was one of the greatest visionaries in Silicon Valley.
The idea of what he was doing is how you popularize computing.
A lot of people who were early in computing didn't think about people using them, and he managed to deliver into the hands of consumers a device that was usable, it was intuitive, it was easy to use, it was easy to understand, and-and that is not a small thing.
In the simplicity and the beauty of it, he made something that was, um, just perfect.
NARRATOR: Steve Jobs and his team of engineers at Apple harnessed technology that connected society digitally and put all the world's knowledge literally at mankind's fingertips.
But the seeds of this technological revolution were planted in 1973, when the 19-year-old college student dropped out of school.
Jobs was attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon, when he, along with one of Apple's first employees, Daniel Kottke, made a decision that would change not only the course of their lives, but ultimately the course of humanity.
DANIEL KOTTKE: I met Steve at Reed College the first month, but our friendship developed because a week or two later, I must have been walking around with a copy of Be Here Now, and I was eager to talk about it, and Steve was familiar with it.
That book quickly led to Autobiography of a Yogi, and then led to Ramakrishna and His Disciples.
NARRATOR: Like many of his generation, Jobs became caught up in the spiritual enlightenment movement that was sweeping through America in the 1970s.
And according to those who knew him best, he considered it not just a passing interest but a calling.
Steve got ahold of the book Cosmic Consciousness.
That's probably what pushed him over the edge.
It had chapters about great geniuses through history and how they were enlightened, and that was the whole thesis.
That's how we ended up in India.
NARRATOR: Fueled by his desire to find spiritual enlightenment, Steve Jobs traveled to India, with Daniel following a few months later.
Together they discovered a Hindu guru known as Haidakhan Baba.
LAYNE LITTLE: He was discovered at about the age of 18 doing yoga in a cave.
But there are legends going back that the same figure had appeared all the way back into the 1800s.
NARRATOR: Haidakhan Baba claimed that he had no mother or father.
But who was this character who had no known history before the age of 18 and was said to have manifested out of thin air? He professed that he was an immortal being known in Hinduism as Mahavatar Babaji.
Mahavatar means, uh, "the great avatar.
" "The great incarnated being.
" Mahavatar is eternal, and he can appear anytime, anywhere, taking forms of another human being.
So he was here to change the humanity, uh, in-in a better path, in-in a path of understanding, a path of greatness.
LITTLE: Steve Jobs did spend some time with him.
Haidakhan Baba actually gave him an initiation by giving him a spiritual name.
This is a traditional kind of initiation, so they were formally initiated by this guru.
Babaji had said that he was a celestial being who had come to Earth to help enlighten our planet and to advance us forward.
And we have to wonder, is it possible that Steven Jobs was being influenced telepathically by an extraterrestrial entity named Babaji? NARRATOR: Haidakhan Baba claimed that he had "come to guide humanity to a higher path" and referred to himself as the "messenger of the revolution.
" Shortly after returning to the United States, Steve Jobs embarked on a revolution himself, the development of the microcomputer, along with Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.
Steve was not in it for money.
He was in it for the mission of transforming the world.
The Apple II was the first mass-market personal computer.
Woz of course was the all-around genius who created the whole design and all the software.
But the thing that Steve gets huge credit for is having enough passion for what he saw the future bringing that he just did not give up.
And the iPhone of course is the computer now that is taking over all our lives.
Transformed everything, everything.
NARRATOR: Steve Jobs continued to practice meditation throughout the rest of his life, often finding refuge at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California's Los Padres National Forest.
It was here, while deep in meditation, that Jobs thought he received much of the inspiration that transformed the modern world.
DEEPAK SHIMKHADA: Meditation does help to connect with a higher source, a higher force, because then one becomes one with the divine, so they could, you know, in-in a sense, uh, download the knowledge, wisdom directly from them.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that Steve Jobs received guidance from an otherworldly source? And if so, could it be that he was just one of a number of key visionaries who were chosen by extraterrestrials to lead humanity into the future, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? Perhaps further answers can be found by examining an Indian mathematician who was decades ahead of his time.
NARRATOR: Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
December 2012.
After years of work, mathematician Ken Ono and two of his former students come up with a groundbreaking mathematical formula that will allow scientists to study black holes in an entirely new way.
Incredibly, they achieved this feat by studying a single paragraph written by an Indian mathematician over nine decades earlier-- Srinivasa Ramanujan.
WILCOCK: Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who is unlike any other genius in world history.
Ramanujan's work has now formed the basis for superstring theory and multidimensional physics.
Some of the most advanced math that all the high-end scientists are still using today is called "modular functions," which could lead to time travel, antigravity, limitless free energy, all of this futuristic technology.
He was able to take a little that he knew farther than most mathematicians would be able to take them.
He had the vision to see what was important.
There are just so many beautiful ideas that he had, some of which are just waiting to be developed.
NARRATOR: Ramanujan made breakthroughs in integral calculus, which can be used to determine the drag force buffeting a wing as it slides through the air or the gravitational effects of the Earth on a man-made satellite.
But perhaps what is most noteworthy is that Ramanujan insisted these baffling theorems were not simply the product of his own genius.
He claimed they were communicated to him by an otherworldly being.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in Erode, India, on December 22, 1887, and was considered a miracle child because he was the only one of his mother's four children to survive infancy.
Even as a young boy, he was obsessed with numbers.
From a very early age, just instinctively, he was thinking about numbers, he was calculating.
He was fascinated by numbers.
Numbers, he said, have personalities for him, that they had a kind of life for him.
There are a lot of stories about how he was so focused on mathematics that he would ignore a lot of his other subjects.
NARRATOR: Ramanujan grew up in the town of Kumbakonam, in a house within view of the impressive Sarangapani Temple.
The mathematical prodigy spent much of his childhood at the temple among thousands of carvings of Hindu gods.
According to Ramanujan's childhood friend, he would often go to the temple and work on mathematics.
The friend had a memory of coming into the temple and finding Ramanujan with all these inexplicable figures surrounding him.
NARRATOR: The figures that surrounded Ramanujan were in fact complex mathematical equations that he had written in chalk on the stone slabs of the temple floor.
He would often say that they were communicated to him in his dreams by the Hindu goddess Namagiri Thayar.
He always insisted, and he was very adamant about this, that the mathematical discoveries he made came to him in dreams and visions provided by the goddess Namagiri.
In these visions, he would see these fantastic, beautiful mathematical formulae un-scrolling before him.
NARRATOR: Numerous times throughout Ramanujan's youth, he would abruptly vanish for days at a time, then return home without explanation.
His neighbors considered him to be psychic.
And he suggested that numbers connect us to higher powers in the universe.
Could it be that Ramanujan really was receiving information from an otherworldly being? Ever since he was a little child, he was having these visions of the Hindu goddess Namagiri, and on his own, in poverty in India, he re-derives over a hundred years' worth of Western mathematics.
But then the goddess Namagiri is giving him all this other information that goes way beyond where Western mathematics had gone.
CHILDRESS: For someone like Ramanujan, who grows up in a devout Hindu family in southern India, everything that-that he experiences has to do with Hindu gods and goddesses.
But is it possible that it was really some kind of extraterrestrial who was helping him develop these mathematical theorems? WILCOCK: There is abundant evidence of extraterrestrial intervention that is involved in many of the most significant technological breakthroughs that we see in our world, and these could come through the form of dreams or actual contacts with some sort of intelligent beings.
NARRATOR: Could Srinivasa Ramanujan, who practiced meditation and studied Hinduism, much like Steve Jobs, have received guidance from otherworldly beings that have been directing the course of humanity for thousands of years? Is this why he was able to devise theorems so complex that the world's greatest mathematicians are still struggling to understand them 100 years later? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest further evidence can be found by examining the man who helped bring about the end of World War II, Alan Turing.
NARRATOR: London, England.
June 23, 1912.
In the residential district of Maida Vale, Alan Turing is born.
By the age of six, his teachers identify him as a genius.
By 16, he is studying the most advanced work of Albert Einstein.
And much like the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, he has a single-minded focus and thinks differently from his peers.
LEAVITT: Alan Turing was the other great mathematical genius of the 20th century, but of a completely different stripe than Srinivasa Ramanujan.
His vision was born out of an extraordinary literal-mindedness.
By taking things literally, he was able to go places that people who were less literal-minded would never be able to go.
NARRATOR: In fact, Alan Turing was so literal-minded that there has even been speculation he had Asperger's syndrome.
But some ancient astronaut theorists propose his unique intellect may reveal an otherworldly influence, one that intervened during mankind's deadliest conflict.
Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England.
March 18, 1940.
Six months into the Second World War, British military intelligence sets up a top-secret base in Bletchley Park, 50 miles northwest of London.
Known as "Station X," it is home to a handpicked team of mathematicians led by Alan Turing that work tirelessly to crack the infamous Nazi encoding device called the Enigma machine.
LEAVITT: The Enigma machine was an encryption machine that worked very simply, at least for the person operating it.
You would have a message to convey, and you would type the first letter.
Its gears would turn.
And then a light would illuminate with another letter.
And that letter you would write down.
The machine was putting the letter through a huge range of substitutions.
NARRATOR: In 1940, Turing accomplished what nearly every expert at the time had deemed impossible.
He solved the Enigma code.
PAUL CERUZZI: At Bletchley Park, Turing conceived of a way of reverse engineering an Enigma to run it backwards.
It wasn't easy, but they built this very complicated machine called the bombe.
If you could separate out the hardware from the sequences of operations-- what we now call software-- you could create a machine that could decode messages, but it could also do other things, including mathematics, and I think that he realized that this machine could be made into something that was quite, uh, a bit more capable.
NARRATOR: In the process of creating this machine, Turing also developed a technology far more significant than anyone at the time could have imagined: the world's first computer.
CHILDRESS: It's particularly interesting how some of these visionaries think differently, so you have to wonder if these people are tapping into some kind of universal mind, and even that somehow telepathically extraterrestrials are giving them information so that they can see these universal truths.
NARRATOR: Curiously, in one of his papers, Turing wrote that telekinesis and extrasensory perception should be taken seriously and questioned the existence of free will.
Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that he wrote this because he himself was somehow in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining a meeting Turing had before the war with another mathematical genius, John von Neumann.
John von Neumann was a Hungarian mathematician who emigrated to the United States and took a position at Princeton University.
He had an incredible talent for mathematics and physics in all kinds of fields.
NARRATOR: Like Turing, von Neumann contributed to ending World War II through the development of technology.
He came up with a way to use machine calculation to determine how to compress plutonium for the atomic bomb.
This technology was essential to the success of the project, and it might never have been realized had von Neumann not crossed paths with Alan Turing.
CERUZZI: We know that Alan Turing, uh, met John von Neumann at Princeton.
Von Neumann was familiar with Turing's theoretical papers.
What we don't know is the substance of their conversations.
A lot of that was very highly classified.
Very, very little information ever leaked out.
It has been argued by some historians of computing that John von Neumann absorbed the fundamental idea of the universal machine from Alan Turing.
NARRATOR: According to historians, Turing and von Neumann were largely responsible for inventing the first computers and accelerating the advancement of technology exponentially.
But is it possible the meeting of these two geniuses was more than mere chance? WILCOCK: It could very well be that extraterrestrial intelligence was involved in making sure that von Neumann and Turing met each other in 1935 and steered their development to ensure that the computer would be brought out on schedule at the right time, which is exactly what we see.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that extraterrestrials brought together Turing and von Neumann to accelerate the development of computer technology? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest that at the same time aliens were helping mankind to develop another important technology, a rocket that would reach the stars.
NARRATOR: Kaluga, Russia.
December, 1903.
Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky publishes the article "Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices.
" Most scientists of the time consider the topic of space exploration highly speculative and even far-fetched, considering the Wright Brothers had just achieved the first powered flight that same month.
But many of the major points contained in Tsiolkovsky's article, such as the proposal that the speed required for orbit around the Earth is five miles per second and that this could be achieved by means of a multistage rocket, would be proven to be incredibly accurate.
ANDREW JENKS: He's a fascinating character and the father of Soviet rocketry, who actually designed the rockets that put the first man into space, that put the first dog into space, that launched Sputnik, the first satellite, into space in 1957.
NARRATOR: Tsiolkovsky's main source of inspiration was his friend and mentor, Nikolai Fyodorov, a Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher.
Fyodorov was one of the founders of "cosmism," which was a precursor to ancient astronaut theory.
JENKS: The cosmists began with Nikolai Fyodorov in the 1870s and 1880s, and they believed that human civilization actually had origins, uh, in outer space and that it was our destiny as human beings to move back into space, and we would go back to our origins from whence we came.
NARRATOR: Like Fyodorov, Tsiolkovsky came to be a cosmist himself.
And he not only inspired Soviet rocket scientists but also the genius responsible for putting the first man on the moon, Wernher von Braun.
Germany.
May 1945.
After six years of the deadliest warfare the world has ever seen, the Nazis surrender to the Allied Powers.
Germany's top rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, predicted the defeat months earlier and by deceiving his superiors has managed to move his team of scientists south into Austria to surrender to the American forces.
Acquiring von Braun was considered a major coup by the United States.
His work in rocketry was so important that the Soviets scoured his former headquarters at Peenemunde Army Research Center in search of any information he may have left behind.
What they discovered were the writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and found that almost every page was embellished by von Braun's comments and notes.
WHITEHEAD: Wernher von Braun was heavily influenced by Tsiolkovsky.
Tsiolkovsky himself had this concept of human beings being birthed in the stars.
And if you really think about it, could it be that these scientists coming out of Russia had some kind of advanced knowledge? Could they have been communicating with some form of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence that was influencing the space race and influencing this push to get humanity to go back to the stars? NARRATOR: As a young boy, Wernher von Braun was fascinated with the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.
G.
Wells and was convinced that he could make their visions of space travel a reality, even going so far as to tell his mother that he would build a machine that would take man to the moon.
(indistinct radio chatter) But when von Braun actually achieved this in 1969, it was such an extraordinary technological leap that some people believed, like Tsiolkovsky, he too was guided by extraterrestrial beings.
WILCOCK: Wernher von Braun was utterly captivated by the idea that we belong in the stars.
It's as if the Earth is a seed, and if that seed never germinates, then it could just die.
We need to go out into space.
And that vision of a new tomorrow is what fueled him to want to succeed even further.
That leads me to suggest the possibility that some sort of extraterrestrial contact might have happened with Wernher von Braun.
Something or someone might have reached him and saw where we needed to go as a civilization and gave him the tools and the insights that he needed to be able to build our way out into space.
NARRATOR: Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Wernher von Braun were aided by extraterrestrial beings? And if so, why? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the predictions not of science but of science fiction.
MAN: How far out can you get? That's the big question in television today, and CBS has the big answer.
Its fabulous new series, Lost in Space.
NARRATOR: In 1965, the CBS network announced the debut of what would become television's first prime-time science fiction series.
MAN: Wouldn't Dad like to use this gadget to beat that thruway traffic? NARRATOR: Set in the far-future of 1997, Lost in Space told the story of a family of space colonists who become marooned on an alien world.
It underscored America's growing acceptance that mankind's future was not here on Earth but out in the vast reaches of the galaxy.
This trend continued when the following year NBC premiered Star Trek, the epic saga of a futuristic starship whose crew is charged with exploring the galaxy, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and going where no man-- or woman-- had ever gone before.
Interestingly, both programs would appear in America's living rooms years before mankind would even step foot on the moon.
It is amazing that today we are living in times where only 40, 50 years ago, people were fantasizing about the future.
And here we are experiencing that said future.
Not all of it, but many things.
Where do we stand 50 years from now? I think science fiction is a part of disclosure.
Over time, science fiction has become science fact.
MAN: Ignition sequence start.
NARRATOR: Of course, science fiction's role in pre-envisioning what would ultimately become the world's "science fact" was nothing new.
Space stations, intelligent robots, extraordinary communication devices, Even Star Wars-type space weapons were all pre-envisioned in the creative minds of authors like Jules Verne, H.
G.
Wells, Arthur C.
Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.
And their works later formed the basis for countless films and television series.
Great innovation has come from science fiction literature.
Arthur C.
Clarke imagined the satellite before the engineers.
They were reading science fiction when they came up with the idea to do that.
This has happened repeatedly where a creative artist will come up with a new idea just to tell a story, but it's coming from the unconscious.
I mean, look at Jules Verne.
Go back and read Jules Verne.
It's really interesting.
Like, a lot of the stuff we made, like, he just thought it up.
TSOUKALOS: And these ideas sprung out of a man's mind, and it has become reality.
And I think that they've turned to reality because of young kids reading these stories and eventually growing up and realizing, "Wait a second.
"We have all these technological capabilities.
"What if I can bring it to the next level with a new invention?" So science fiction can serve as a direct path to science that has been inspired by fantasy.
NARRATOR: But are many of today's scientific wonders merely the product of fertile minds and wild imaginations? Or do they have their origins elsewhere, possibly light-years away? REDFERN: There's an interesting theory, the idea that certain profound science fiction writers may not have just simply come up with the ideas for their stories on their own, albeit they may have thought they came up with the ideas on their own.
Perhaps there was an outside force presenting it to them.
Have science fiction authors and writers been inspired by extraterrestrials? NARRATOR: Could extraterrestrials have given humanity glimpses of its own future through science fiction? And if the creative minds of the past have been able to pre-envision the incredible technologies of the present day, then should we also regard the science fiction of today as a guide to where mankind is headed next? Where do we stand 50 years from now? And if we're talking about science fiction today, one recurring theme is what happens if we gain the ability to upload our consciousness to some type of a computer? Is it possible that our future may lie in a digital realm? I would not want my thoughts to be uploaded to a computer, because then we really become glass.
This planet will cease to exist within two seconds if we all know each other's thoughts.
So there's a fine line we have to walk between what can and will ensure our future and what can and will be our assured annihilation.
NARRATOR: According to many ancient astronaut theorists, the visions of a bleak future-- as depicted in today's science fiction-- could, if realized, prove as perilous as they once seemed profound.
But they also suggest that the messages that mankind's visionaries receive may not be dire predictions as much as they are warnings.
Warnings intended to help mankind avoid annihilation.
NARRATOR: Today the theorems of Srinivasa Ramanujan are being applied in branches of physics that may allow us to unlock the greatest mysteries of the cosmos.
The computer models established by Alan Turing and John von Neumann have advanced human technology by leaps and bounds.
The advances in rocketry made by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Wernher von Braun have allowed for greater exploration of space.
And Steve Jobs' contributions to the microcomputer revolution have put all of the world's collective knowledge at our fingertips.
But has the work of these visionaries and others really been directed by an extraterrestrial intelligence? And if so, to what end? We have been the experiment of, I believe, extraterrestrials.
I think they have nurtured us to see how we develop.
And they're probably saying, "Gosh, look at these humans, look how fast they can advance.
" And we're getting better and better and better with technology.
But Elon Musk from Tesla and physicist Stephen Hawking all warn us, "Be careful of artificial intelligence.
It could go too far.
" I agree with them.
We need to be careful.
CHILDRESS: Something too that comes out of a lot of the UFO literature of the '50s and '60s, that extraterrestrials were allegedly contacting certain people and warning them of the dangers of nuclear power and that what we were doing with our atomic weapons was very destructive and that we could destroy our own planet with this technology and that the extraterrestrials themselves were very concerned about this.
And so, in many ways, we must be very careful of how we use our own technology.
TSOUKALOS: There's a reason why we are where we are today.
We have made these advances in technology for one and one reason only to return to the stars, because that's where we came from.
And now the question is: are we going to fulfill our destiny or not? NARRATOR: Is it possible that humanity's greatest visionaries have been unknowingly carrying out some sort of extraterrestrial master plan? One intended to prepare mankind for the ultimate "close encounter"? And if so, does this mean that our future has been somehow predetermined? Or are we simply being given the tools with which to shape our own destiny? Perhaps the answer can be found in the pages of a science fiction book, in the palm of our hand within a simple cell phone, or in the latest robotic technology.
Perhaps it is carved on the stone walls of an as-yet-undiscovered tomb.
Or even as we sit, right before our eyes.
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS sub-rip romulus70
GIORGIO A.
TSOUKALOS: Ramanujan describes how he was asleep and he saw these numbers being written in front of him, and he had no idea what this was all about.
WILLIAM HENRY: The meeting of John von Neumann and Alan Turing changed history.
Maybe Steve Jobs was receiving information beyond the physical realm.
DAVID CHILDRESS: Is it possible that extraterrestrials are somehow guiding certain people to bring them to their higher levels of knowledge? HENRY: It appears that these beings are guiding humanity into a new age of super-advanced technology that will ultimately allow us to interface with the cosmos.
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, could there be a connection between aliens and our greatest visionaries? Ã Ã Ã Ã NARRATOR: Houston, Texas.
July 20, 1969.
At NASA Mission Control Center, the massive IBM System/360 Model 75 computer, which boasts processing power of 16.
6 million instructions per second and up to eight megabytes of main memory, is employed to accomplish the greatest feat in human history-- putting a man on the moon.
NEAL ARMSTRONG: Houston, uh, Tranquility Base here.
The Eagle has landed.
NARRATOR: People across the world marveled at this technological achievement.
But incredibly, only six decades later, a handheld device weighing less than half a pound dwarfs the total technology NASA possessed in 1969.
Today's smartphone contains a staggering one million times the computing power used to carry out the moon landing.
What we had when they went to the moon is like nothing compared to what an average teenager carries around now.
I mean, the kind of computing power, the ability to access information, the ability to reach people.
An astonishing technological achievement.
You can only imagine what's gonna happen in 30 years from now.
What we think is so advanced is gonna be so not advanced.
NARRATOR: How is it that mankind's technology has advanced so rapidly? According to ancient astronaut theorists, at specific points in history, extraterrestrials have influenced certain individuals to allow humanity to make major leaps forward, and they propose that this has continued up until modern times.
As evidence, they point to the visionary who jump-started the microcomputer revolution, Steve Jobs.
San Francisco, California.
January 9, 2007.
Apple's annual Macworld Conference and Expo.
Thank you for coming.
NARRATOR: At the center of a worldwide media frenzy, Apple cofounder and CEO, Steve Jobs, takes the stage to announce a revolutionary new product, the iPhone.
What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been and super easy to use.
(audience cheers, applauds) And we are calling it "iPhone.
" (audience cheers) KARA SWISHER: Steve Jobs was one of the greatest visionaries in Silicon Valley.
The idea of what he was doing is how you popularize computing.
A lot of people who were early in computing didn't think about people using them, and he managed to deliver into the hands of consumers a device that was usable, it was intuitive, it was easy to use, it was easy to understand, and-and that is not a small thing.
In the simplicity and the beauty of it, he made something that was, um, just perfect.
NARRATOR: Steve Jobs and his team of engineers at Apple harnessed technology that connected society digitally and put all the world's knowledge literally at mankind's fingertips.
But the seeds of this technological revolution were planted in 1973, when the 19-year-old college student dropped out of school.
Jobs was attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon, when he, along with one of Apple's first employees, Daniel Kottke, made a decision that would change not only the course of their lives, but ultimately the course of humanity.
DANIEL KOTTKE: I met Steve at Reed College the first month, but our friendship developed because a week or two later, I must have been walking around with a copy of Be Here Now, and I was eager to talk about it, and Steve was familiar with it.
That book quickly led to Autobiography of a Yogi, and then led to Ramakrishna and His Disciples.
NARRATOR: Like many of his generation, Jobs became caught up in the spiritual enlightenment movement that was sweeping through America in the 1970s.
And according to those who knew him best, he considered it not just a passing interest but a calling.
Steve got ahold of the book Cosmic Consciousness.
That's probably what pushed him over the edge.
It had chapters about great geniuses through history and how they were enlightened, and that was the whole thesis.
That's how we ended up in India.
NARRATOR: Fueled by his desire to find spiritual enlightenment, Steve Jobs traveled to India, with Daniel following a few months later.
Together they discovered a Hindu guru known as Haidakhan Baba.
LAYNE LITTLE: He was discovered at about the age of 18 doing yoga in a cave.
But there are legends going back that the same figure had appeared all the way back into the 1800s.
NARRATOR: Haidakhan Baba claimed that he had no mother or father.
But who was this character who had no known history before the age of 18 and was said to have manifested out of thin air? He professed that he was an immortal being known in Hinduism as Mahavatar Babaji.
Mahavatar means, uh, "the great avatar.
" "The great incarnated being.
" Mahavatar is eternal, and he can appear anytime, anywhere, taking forms of another human being.
So he was here to change the humanity, uh, in-in a better path, in-in a path of understanding, a path of greatness.
LITTLE: Steve Jobs did spend some time with him.
Haidakhan Baba actually gave him an initiation by giving him a spiritual name.
This is a traditional kind of initiation, so they were formally initiated by this guru.
Babaji had said that he was a celestial being who had come to Earth to help enlighten our planet and to advance us forward.
And we have to wonder, is it possible that Steven Jobs was being influenced telepathically by an extraterrestrial entity named Babaji? NARRATOR: Haidakhan Baba claimed that he had "come to guide humanity to a higher path" and referred to himself as the "messenger of the revolution.
" Shortly after returning to the United States, Steve Jobs embarked on a revolution himself, the development of the microcomputer, along with Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.
Steve was not in it for money.
He was in it for the mission of transforming the world.
The Apple II was the first mass-market personal computer.
Woz of course was the all-around genius who created the whole design and all the software.
But the thing that Steve gets huge credit for is having enough passion for what he saw the future bringing that he just did not give up.
And the iPhone of course is the computer now that is taking over all our lives.
Transformed everything, everything.
NARRATOR: Steve Jobs continued to practice meditation throughout the rest of his life, often finding refuge at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California's Los Padres National Forest.
It was here, while deep in meditation, that Jobs thought he received much of the inspiration that transformed the modern world.
DEEPAK SHIMKHADA: Meditation does help to connect with a higher source, a higher force, because then one becomes one with the divine, so they could, you know, in-in a sense, uh, download the knowledge, wisdom directly from them.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that Steve Jobs received guidance from an otherworldly source? And if so, could it be that he was just one of a number of key visionaries who were chosen by extraterrestrials to lead humanity into the future, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? Perhaps further answers can be found by examining an Indian mathematician who was decades ahead of his time.
NARRATOR: Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
December 2012.
After years of work, mathematician Ken Ono and two of his former students come up with a groundbreaking mathematical formula that will allow scientists to study black holes in an entirely new way.
Incredibly, they achieved this feat by studying a single paragraph written by an Indian mathematician over nine decades earlier-- Srinivasa Ramanujan.
WILCOCK: Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who is unlike any other genius in world history.
Ramanujan's work has now formed the basis for superstring theory and multidimensional physics.
Some of the most advanced math that all the high-end scientists are still using today is called "modular functions," which could lead to time travel, antigravity, limitless free energy, all of this futuristic technology.
He was able to take a little that he knew farther than most mathematicians would be able to take them.
He had the vision to see what was important.
There are just so many beautiful ideas that he had, some of which are just waiting to be developed.
NARRATOR: Ramanujan made breakthroughs in integral calculus, which can be used to determine the drag force buffeting a wing as it slides through the air or the gravitational effects of the Earth on a man-made satellite.
But perhaps what is most noteworthy is that Ramanujan insisted these baffling theorems were not simply the product of his own genius.
He claimed they were communicated to him by an otherworldly being.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in Erode, India, on December 22, 1887, and was considered a miracle child because he was the only one of his mother's four children to survive infancy.
Even as a young boy, he was obsessed with numbers.
From a very early age, just instinctively, he was thinking about numbers, he was calculating.
He was fascinated by numbers.
Numbers, he said, have personalities for him, that they had a kind of life for him.
There are a lot of stories about how he was so focused on mathematics that he would ignore a lot of his other subjects.
NARRATOR: Ramanujan grew up in the town of Kumbakonam, in a house within view of the impressive Sarangapani Temple.
The mathematical prodigy spent much of his childhood at the temple among thousands of carvings of Hindu gods.
According to Ramanujan's childhood friend, he would often go to the temple and work on mathematics.
The friend had a memory of coming into the temple and finding Ramanujan with all these inexplicable figures surrounding him.
NARRATOR: The figures that surrounded Ramanujan were in fact complex mathematical equations that he had written in chalk on the stone slabs of the temple floor.
He would often say that they were communicated to him in his dreams by the Hindu goddess Namagiri Thayar.
He always insisted, and he was very adamant about this, that the mathematical discoveries he made came to him in dreams and visions provided by the goddess Namagiri.
In these visions, he would see these fantastic, beautiful mathematical formulae un-scrolling before him.
NARRATOR: Numerous times throughout Ramanujan's youth, he would abruptly vanish for days at a time, then return home without explanation.
His neighbors considered him to be psychic.
And he suggested that numbers connect us to higher powers in the universe.
Could it be that Ramanujan really was receiving information from an otherworldly being? Ever since he was a little child, he was having these visions of the Hindu goddess Namagiri, and on his own, in poverty in India, he re-derives over a hundred years' worth of Western mathematics.
But then the goddess Namagiri is giving him all this other information that goes way beyond where Western mathematics had gone.
CHILDRESS: For someone like Ramanujan, who grows up in a devout Hindu family in southern India, everything that-that he experiences has to do with Hindu gods and goddesses.
But is it possible that it was really some kind of extraterrestrial who was helping him develop these mathematical theorems? WILCOCK: There is abundant evidence of extraterrestrial intervention that is involved in many of the most significant technological breakthroughs that we see in our world, and these could come through the form of dreams or actual contacts with some sort of intelligent beings.
NARRATOR: Could Srinivasa Ramanujan, who practiced meditation and studied Hinduism, much like Steve Jobs, have received guidance from otherworldly beings that have been directing the course of humanity for thousands of years? Is this why he was able to devise theorems so complex that the world's greatest mathematicians are still struggling to understand them 100 years later? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest further evidence can be found by examining the man who helped bring about the end of World War II, Alan Turing.
NARRATOR: London, England.
June 23, 1912.
In the residential district of Maida Vale, Alan Turing is born.
By the age of six, his teachers identify him as a genius.
By 16, he is studying the most advanced work of Albert Einstein.
And much like the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, he has a single-minded focus and thinks differently from his peers.
LEAVITT: Alan Turing was the other great mathematical genius of the 20th century, but of a completely different stripe than Srinivasa Ramanujan.
His vision was born out of an extraordinary literal-mindedness.
By taking things literally, he was able to go places that people who were less literal-minded would never be able to go.
NARRATOR: In fact, Alan Turing was so literal-minded that there has even been speculation he had Asperger's syndrome.
But some ancient astronaut theorists propose his unique intellect may reveal an otherworldly influence, one that intervened during mankind's deadliest conflict.
Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England.
March 18, 1940.
Six months into the Second World War, British military intelligence sets up a top-secret base in Bletchley Park, 50 miles northwest of London.
Known as "Station X," it is home to a handpicked team of mathematicians led by Alan Turing that work tirelessly to crack the infamous Nazi encoding device called the Enigma machine.
LEAVITT: The Enigma machine was an encryption machine that worked very simply, at least for the person operating it.
You would have a message to convey, and you would type the first letter.
Its gears would turn.
And then a light would illuminate with another letter.
And that letter you would write down.
The machine was putting the letter through a huge range of substitutions.
NARRATOR: In 1940, Turing accomplished what nearly every expert at the time had deemed impossible.
He solved the Enigma code.
PAUL CERUZZI: At Bletchley Park, Turing conceived of a way of reverse engineering an Enigma to run it backwards.
It wasn't easy, but they built this very complicated machine called the bombe.
If you could separate out the hardware from the sequences of operations-- what we now call software-- you could create a machine that could decode messages, but it could also do other things, including mathematics, and I think that he realized that this machine could be made into something that was quite, uh, a bit more capable.
NARRATOR: In the process of creating this machine, Turing also developed a technology far more significant than anyone at the time could have imagined: the world's first computer.
CHILDRESS: It's particularly interesting how some of these visionaries think differently, so you have to wonder if these people are tapping into some kind of universal mind, and even that somehow telepathically extraterrestrials are giving them information so that they can see these universal truths.
NARRATOR: Curiously, in one of his papers, Turing wrote that telekinesis and extrasensory perception should be taken seriously and questioned the existence of free will.
Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that he wrote this because he himself was somehow in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining a meeting Turing had before the war with another mathematical genius, John von Neumann.
John von Neumann was a Hungarian mathematician who emigrated to the United States and took a position at Princeton University.
He had an incredible talent for mathematics and physics in all kinds of fields.
NARRATOR: Like Turing, von Neumann contributed to ending World War II through the development of technology.
He came up with a way to use machine calculation to determine how to compress plutonium for the atomic bomb.
This technology was essential to the success of the project, and it might never have been realized had von Neumann not crossed paths with Alan Turing.
CERUZZI: We know that Alan Turing, uh, met John von Neumann at Princeton.
Von Neumann was familiar with Turing's theoretical papers.
What we don't know is the substance of their conversations.
A lot of that was very highly classified.
Very, very little information ever leaked out.
It has been argued by some historians of computing that John von Neumann absorbed the fundamental idea of the universal machine from Alan Turing.
NARRATOR: According to historians, Turing and von Neumann were largely responsible for inventing the first computers and accelerating the advancement of technology exponentially.
But is it possible the meeting of these two geniuses was more than mere chance? WILCOCK: It could very well be that extraterrestrial intelligence was involved in making sure that von Neumann and Turing met each other in 1935 and steered their development to ensure that the computer would be brought out on schedule at the right time, which is exactly what we see.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that extraterrestrials brought together Turing and von Neumann to accelerate the development of computer technology? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest that at the same time aliens were helping mankind to develop another important technology, a rocket that would reach the stars.
NARRATOR: Kaluga, Russia.
December, 1903.
Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky publishes the article "Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices.
" Most scientists of the time consider the topic of space exploration highly speculative and even far-fetched, considering the Wright Brothers had just achieved the first powered flight that same month.
But many of the major points contained in Tsiolkovsky's article, such as the proposal that the speed required for orbit around the Earth is five miles per second and that this could be achieved by means of a multistage rocket, would be proven to be incredibly accurate.
ANDREW JENKS: He's a fascinating character and the father of Soviet rocketry, who actually designed the rockets that put the first man into space, that put the first dog into space, that launched Sputnik, the first satellite, into space in 1957.
NARRATOR: Tsiolkovsky's main source of inspiration was his friend and mentor, Nikolai Fyodorov, a Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher.
Fyodorov was one of the founders of "cosmism," which was a precursor to ancient astronaut theory.
JENKS: The cosmists began with Nikolai Fyodorov in the 1870s and 1880s, and they believed that human civilization actually had origins, uh, in outer space and that it was our destiny as human beings to move back into space, and we would go back to our origins from whence we came.
NARRATOR: Like Fyodorov, Tsiolkovsky came to be a cosmist himself.
And he not only inspired Soviet rocket scientists but also the genius responsible for putting the first man on the moon, Wernher von Braun.
Germany.
May 1945.
After six years of the deadliest warfare the world has ever seen, the Nazis surrender to the Allied Powers.
Germany's top rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, predicted the defeat months earlier and by deceiving his superiors has managed to move his team of scientists south into Austria to surrender to the American forces.
Acquiring von Braun was considered a major coup by the United States.
His work in rocketry was so important that the Soviets scoured his former headquarters at Peenemunde Army Research Center in search of any information he may have left behind.
What they discovered were the writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and found that almost every page was embellished by von Braun's comments and notes.
WHITEHEAD: Wernher von Braun was heavily influenced by Tsiolkovsky.
Tsiolkovsky himself had this concept of human beings being birthed in the stars.
And if you really think about it, could it be that these scientists coming out of Russia had some kind of advanced knowledge? Could they have been communicating with some form of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence that was influencing the space race and influencing this push to get humanity to go back to the stars? NARRATOR: As a young boy, Wernher von Braun was fascinated with the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.
G.
Wells and was convinced that he could make their visions of space travel a reality, even going so far as to tell his mother that he would build a machine that would take man to the moon.
(indistinct radio chatter) But when von Braun actually achieved this in 1969, it was such an extraordinary technological leap that some people believed, like Tsiolkovsky, he too was guided by extraterrestrial beings.
WILCOCK: Wernher von Braun was utterly captivated by the idea that we belong in the stars.
It's as if the Earth is a seed, and if that seed never germinates, then it could just die.
We need to go out into space.
And that vision of a new tomorrow is what fueled him to want to succeed even further.
That leads me to suggest the possibility that some sort of extraterrestrial contact might have happened with Wernher von Braun.
Something or someone might have reached him and saw where we needed to go as a civilization and gave him the tools and the insights that he needed to be able to build our way out into space.
NARRATOR: Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Wernher von Braun were aided by extraterrestrial beings? And if so, why? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the predictions not of science but of science fiction.
MAN: How far out can you get? That's the big question in television today, and CBS has the big answer.
Its fabulous new series, Lost in Space.
NARRATOR: In 1965, the CBS network announced the debut of what would become television's first prime-time science fiction series.
MAN: Wouldn't Dad like to use this gadget to beat that thruway traffic? NARRATOR: Set in the far-future of 1997, Lost in Space told the story of a family of space colonists who become marooned on an alien world.
It underscored America's growing acceptance that mankind's future was not here on Earth but out in the vast reaches of the galaxy.
This trend continued when the following year NBC premiered Star Trek, the epic saga of a futuristic starship whose crew is charged with exploring the galaxy, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and going where no man-- or woman-- had ever gone before.
Interestingly, both programs would appear in America's living rooms years before mankind would even step foot on the moon.
It is amazing that today we are living in times where only 40, 50 years ago, people were fantasizing about the future.
And here we are experiencing that said future.
Not all of it, but many things.
Where do we stand 50 years from now? I think science fiction is a part of disclosure.
Over time, science fiction has become science fact.
MAN: Ignition sequence start.
NARRATOR: Of course, science fiction's role in pre-envisioning what would ultimately become the world's "science fact" was nothing new.
Space stations, intelligent robots, extraordinary communication devices, Even Star Wars-type space weapons were all pre-envisioned in the creative minds of authors like Jules Verne, H.
G.
Wells, Arthur C.
Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.
And their works later formed the basis for countless films and television series.
Great innovation has come from science fiction literature.
Arthur C.
Clarke imagined the satellite before the engineers.
They were reading science fiction when they came up with the idea to do that.
This has happened repeatedly where a creative artist will come up with a new idea just to tell a story, but it's coming from the unconscious.
I mean, look at Jules Verne.
Go back and read Jules Verne.
It's really interesting.
Like, a lot of the stuff we made, like, he just thought it up.
TSOUKALOS: And these ideas sprung out of a man's mind, and it has become reality.
And I think that they've turned to reality because of young kids reading these stories and eventually growing up and realizing, "Wait a second.
"We have all these technological capabilities.
"What if I can bring it to the next level with a new invention?" So science fiction can serve as a direct path to science that has been inspired by fantasy.
NARRATOR: But are many of today's scientific wonders merely the product of fertile minds and wild imaginations? Or do they have their origins elsewhere, possibly light-years away? REDFERN: There's an interesting theory, the idea that certain profound science fiction writers may not have just simply come up with the ideas for their stories on their own, albeit they may have thought they came up with the ideas on their own.
Perhaps there was an outside force presenting it to them.
Have science fiction authors and writers been inspired by extraterrestrials? NARRATOR: Could extraterrestrials have given humanity glimpses of its own future through science fiction? And if the creative minds of the past have been able to pre-envision the incredible technologies of the present day, then should we also regard the science fiction of today as a guide to where mankind is headed next? Where do we stand 50 years from now? And if we're talking about science fiction today, one recurring theme is what happens if we gain the ability to upload our consciousness to some type of a computer? Is it possible that our future may lie in a digital realm? I would not want my thoughts to be uploaded to a computer, because then we really become glass.
This planet will cease to exist within two seconds if we all know each other's thoughts.
So there's a fine line we have to walk between what can and will ensure our future and what can and will be our assured annihilation.
NARRATOR: According to many ancient astronaut theorists, the visions of a bleak future-- as depicted in today's science fiction-- could, if realized, prove as perilous as they once seemed profound.
But they also suggest that the messages that mankind's visionaries receive may not be dire predictions as much as they are warnings.
Warnings intended to help mankind avoid annihilation.
NARRATOR: Today the theorems of Srinivasa Ramanujan are being applied in branches of physics that may allow us to unlock the greatest mysteries of the cosmos.
The computer models established by Alan Turing and John von Neumann have advanced human technology by leaps and bounds.
The advances in rocketry made by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Wernher von Braun have allowed for greater exploration of space.
And Steve Jobs' contributions to the microcomputer revolution have put all of the world's collective knowledge at our fingertips.
But has the work of these visionaries and others really been directed by an extraterrestrial intelligence? And if so, to what end? We have been the experiment of, I believe, extraterrestrials.
I think they have nurtured us to see how we develop.
And they're probably saying, "Gosh, look at these humans, look how fast they can advance.
" And we're getting better and better and better with technology.
But Elon Musk from Tesla and physicist Stephen Hawking all warn us, "Be careful of artificial intelligence.
It could go too far.
" I agree with them.
We need to be careful.
CHILDRESS: Something too that comes out of a lot of the UFO literature of the '50s and '60s, that extraterrestrials were allegedly contacting certain people and warning them of the dangers of nuclear power and that what we were doing with our atomic weapons was very destructive and that we could destroy our own planet with this technology and that the extraterrestrials themselves were very concerned about this.
And so, in many ways, we must be very careful of how we use our own technology.
TSOUKALOS: There's a reason why we are where we are today.
We have made these advances in technology for one and one reason only to return to the stars, because that's where we came from.
And now the question is: are we going to fulfill our destiny or not? NARRATOR: Is it possible that humanity's greatest visionaries have been unknowingly carrying out some sort of extraterrestrial master plan? One intended to prepare mankind for the ultimate "close encounter"? And if so, does this mean that our future has been somehow predetermined? Or are we simply being given the tools with which to shape our own destiny? Perhaps the answer can be found in the pages of a science fiction book, in the palm of our hand within a simple cell phone, or in the latest robotic technology.
Perhaps it is carved on the stone walls of an as-yet-undiscovered tomb.
Or even as we sit, right before our eyes.
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