Ancient Aliens s12e16 Episode Script

Gobekli Tepe is the smoking gun of a lost civilization because it confirms that, at the time of the last ice age, there was high culture existing in the world.
Gobekli Tepe's an incredibly sophisticated site.
There's a very important message they were purposefully sending to us.
We're actually seeing architecture in the Cygnus star system, just like what they paid homage to at Gobekli Tepe.
Only five percent of Gobekli Tepe has been unearthed so far.
So, what other surprises will we find there? We need to know about our origins.
We need to know our destiny.
And all of it lies under the surface of Gobekli Tepe.
Sanliurfa, Turkey.
October 1994.
While plowing his field, shepherd Savak Yildiz spots a strangely shaped stone protruding from the ground.
After brushing away the dirt, he realizes that it may be part of a much larger object.
Shortly after contacting the local museum with his find, he is visited by Klaus Schmidt from the German Archaeological Institute.
It wasn't until German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt visited the site and began digging, they realized what was really at this site.
What he discovered was mind-blowing.
After discovering the first T-shaped pillar buried at the site, he soon found more of these massive structures.
During the intensive dig, Schmidt and his team begin to unearth dozens of additional giant stone monoliths covered in intricate carvings, some weighing as much as 20 tons.
The site of Gobekli Tepe is a series of circular enclosures.
But then, in the center of each enclosure, you have two particularly big T-shaped pillars of limestone sort of facing each other.
Now, many of these pillars have remarkable carvings on them, wonderful carvings and bas-reliefs of animals, birds, insects, all kinds of things.
So, to fashion those and carve them and set them up in these structures was just absolutely amazing.
Archaeologists estimate that it would have taken a team of 50 men an entire week to move just one of the monolithic pillars from the limestone quarry to the top of the hill where they stand today and over 300 hours to carve the bas-reliefs.
At this rate, each of the five stone circles unearthed so far would have required a full year to be completed.
But why such a monumental site was built in the first place remains a mystery.
It's very difficult to know what the purpose of something like Gobekli Tepe could be.
And certainly Klaus Schmidt had not reached any conclusions, except that it's clearly not a settlement.
It's not a village.
There is absolutely no domestic refuse.
Schmidt always hoped that it was funerary and that there would be burials underneath the walls or underneath some of the pillars or so on.
But so far, they have not yet found any human remains at the site.
There are no domestic plants in the site.
There are only wild animal bones.
Inevitably, in archaeology, if we don't know what something is for, we think a ritual.
But, really, it's pure speculation.
Intrigued by evidence that the structure might go back to a Neolithic period, Klaus Schmidt has the sediment layers of the site radiocarbon-dated.
The results indicated that the stone structures could be as much as 12,000 years old, more than 5,000 years older than mankind's first known civilization in Mesopotamia.
More than that, it would place the construction of Gobekli Tepe to a time when mainstream scholars suggest humans were roaming the Earth as hunter-gatherers.
Well, the site of Gobekli Tepe really did send shockwaves through the whole world of early prehistory, because we'd never before known or imagined even that simple hunter-gatherers could produce such spectacular monumental structures.
Now, in archaeology, really since it began, we've always assumed that hunter-gatherers were capable of producing wonderful works of art Rock art, cave art, and things like that.
But we never imagined that they could come together in sufficient numbers, uh, to make, uh, monumental constructions like Gobekli Tepe.
But if the currently accepted timeline for mankind's advancement is correct, is it possible that primitive hunter-gatherers could have built such sophisticated megalithic structures? Ancient astronaut theorists say no, and instead suggest that Gobekli Tepe was built by the survivors of a lost society, one that was almost entirely wiped out by a worldwide cataclysm.
And to support their claim, they point to recent evidence of a catastrophic event which many mainstream scientists believe occurred at the very end of the last ice age, which is believed to have lasted from roughly 108,000 BC until nearly 10,000 BC.
Gobekli Tepe could be the smoking gun of a lost civilization, because it confirms that, at the time of the last ice age, there was high culture existing in the world.
This is something that had been speculated for many years, but there had not been the absolute evidence.
Now we could have it.
These engineering skills, this ordering of society is something that must have existed before the end of the last ice age.
And arguably even earlier.
According to ancient astronaut theorists, proof of a lost civilization exists some 300 miles away from Gobekli Tepe, in the form of a vast underground city known as Derinkuyu.
It extends some 13 stories underground and had the capacity to support 20,000 people.
Although the site has yet to be scientifically dated, some researchers have suggested that it may have served as a prehistoric refuge.
Derinkuyu is a multileveled city that has existed, uh, since time immemorial.
It was certainly used, uh, during Christian times.
But there's also evidence that there's prehistoric activity going on at these places.
Archaeologists found evidence of Stone Age tools going back to the Paleolithic era.
This is at the time of the last ice age.
And so it's possible that our ancestors escaped the cataclysm and the ice age deep down inside them.
But if Derinkuyu really did serve as refuge from a catastrophic event, how might it offer a connection to Gobekli Tepe? Perhaps further clues can be found by exploring more recently discovered caves and the stories suggesting that they were built upon the orders of otherworldly beings.
Central Anatolia, Turkey.
300 miles from the ancient site of Gobekli Tepe.
December 28, 2014.
A local crew excavating for an urban renovation project stumbles across a strange series of carved rooms and tunnels deep underground.
Upon further exploration, they find the subterranean network spans several miles and extends hundreds of feet below the surface of the Earth, much like the nearby caves of Derinkuyu.
What they discovered was that these caves extended for a distance of 370 feet down into the rock.
Archaeologists estimate that more than five million square feet of rock, the volume of over 370 Olympic-size swimming pools, was removed to carve out this subterranean city.
Yet there is no evidence of the extracted material in the area.
This mysterious cave system is still under excavation and closed to the public.
But in June 2017, author and researcher Andrew Collins was granted access to the site.
The sheer size of some of these rooms is absolutely amazing.
I mean, this one that we're in now is 120 feet in length.
And yet it's just one of hundreds of similar rooms that we find inside this great hill.
These tunnels that you see seem to go on and on.
And yet what's incredible is that not only were they full of people, but there was also livestock down here.
And we are told that as many as 20,000 people, perhaps even as much as 60,000, could've lived here at any one time.
Not only is there evidence that these caves once housed thousands of people, but archaeologists have found air vents and water wells that would have made it possible to live underground for years at a time.
These were cut deeply into the rock, sometimes for hundreds of yards in depth.
And at the base of them were wells that provided water to these underground populations.
When it was discovered, historians recovered artifacts that suggest the cave system was used by the early Christians to escape persecution.
So they dated the site to be approximately 1,500 years old.
But based on new evidence, the caves might be much older.
A few years ago, I interviewed an archaeologist by the name of Omer Demir.
And he found within it Paleolithic tools, tools that went back at least 10,000 to 12,000 years, and arguably even earlier still.
If these caves can be dated to at least 12,000 years ago Around the same time archaeologists believe the nearby site of Gobekli Tepe was constructed Just who built them? And what drove the builders underground? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest clues can be found not embedded in stone, but in the pages of ancient Persian religious texts.
Zoroastrianism is one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions, founded by the prophet Zoroaster in ancient Iran approximately 3,500 years ago.
The central figure of the religion was a powerful god named Ahura Mazda, who is often depicted seated inside a winged disk.
According to the story, recorded in a text known as the Vendidad, he sent a powerful warning to a young priest named Yima about a coming cataclysm.
Ahura Mazda told the great early king Yima that there would be a terrible disaster.
A giant serpent would descend from the heavens to the Earth.
Well, that sounds like a comet or a large meteorite falling to Earth.
Then a winter would come such as has never been known.
Prior to the event, Yima is given very specific instructions to build an underground shelter in order to survive the coming "giant freeze.
" Ahura Mazda instructs Yima to build a Vara.
This is a huge structure, two miles long, two miles wide, an underground hall of sorts where things can be protected from the terrible winter.
Yima was to hide a remnant of the people, and an extensive seed bank, also a pair of each of the animal species.
Once Yima is finished building the Vara, he takes 2,000 people in, a representation of mankind.
They are there for 150 years, but when the winter is over and they come out, it is a barren world.
They will have to rebuild civilization from scratch.
The Vara is supposed to be a huge enclosure that not only houses a large number of people, but also animals and seeds.
It's a storehouse just like Noah's Ark.
So you've got this same story, and it would seem that this is a very real thing that ancient people knew about and wrote about.
Could it be that the story of Noah's Ark and the Vara of Zoastrianism are one in the same? And the reference to an ark was later misunderstood to be a large ship? But if these accounts are in fact true, how is it that mankind had enough advance warning to build such sophisticated places of refuge? The ancient texts are very clear that the gods, they always warned people that this catastrophe would happen so that they would save a select group of that population.
So how was that possible? Either they had access to sophisticated technologies with which to predict the weather, or what's the other option? And if you combine that with the fact that Ahura Mazda was known to have descended from the sky in a vehicle with fixed wings It looks like some type of flying device That would suggest that he was in fact an extraterrestrial.
According to ancient astronaut theorists, the Vara described in the ancient Zoroastrian texts is strikingly similar to the recently discovered subterranean town in Central Anatolia.
The underground caves in Turkey sound exactly like the Vara that was made by Yima in Zoroastrian mythology.
Is it possible that this cave system supplies the evidence that tells us that the Zoroastrian mythology is in fact a real, true story? If these caves provide evidence that the account recorded in the ancient Zoroastrian texts is factual, did the inhabitants of the Vara emerge to find a barren wasteland where they were to rebuild civilization? Might they be responsible for the construction of Gobekli Tepe, located only 300 miles away? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest that this very connection could help explain some of the mysterious figures immortalized in the stone carvings.
Gobekli Tepe, 2017.
To date, 69 massive stone pillars have been unearthed at the ancient site, after more than two decades of excavation.
More than one-third of the statues contain elaborate carvings of animals, including various mammals, reptiles, insects and birds.
But also included are depictions of species not indigenous to the area, like geese, armadillos and wild boar.
There are such an incredible range of animals and birds and insects depicted at Gobekli Tepe, the like of which we have never seen at that period or anywhere else in the world.
And to have a whole bunch of them together is interesting.
You can speculate till the cows come home as to what it might represent.
We have not the faintest idea.
In the story of Noah's Ark, we're told that after the deluge, Noah's Ark lands at Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, not far from Gobekli Tepe, and we see some very strange animals portrayed on the pillars at Gobekli Tepe, almost as if it's a record of Noah's Ark itself.
Perhaps Gobekli Tepe is the place where Noah and his descendants disembarked and recreated civilization after the flood.
If there really is a connection between Gobekli Tepe and the biblical story of a Great Flood, could the carvings found at the site be an inventory of the animals that were rescued? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, but also suggest other carvings depict a species not of this Earth.
At the center of each of the five megalithic ring structures that occupy the archaeological site, stand two oversized monolithic pillars.
Weighing up to 20 tons and reaching heights of over two stories, they visually stand apart from the T-shaped stonework that surrounds them.
These pillars are anthropomorphic; they are humanlike in appearance.
They have low relief arms that come round to the front and end in these long, spindly fingers.
They wear garments.
They have belts with strange symbols.
There are no faces on these stones.
The heads are represented by T-shaped terminations that look almost like hammerheads, basically.
They could be gods, they could be ancestors, or they could be very specific people who are being venerated.
We really have no idea.
The archaeologist Schmidt himself referred to them as the "celestial ones," or the "celestial ancestors.
" And we have to ask if these are depictions of the extraterrestrial gods at Gobekli Tepe.
As mysterious as these statues are, strikingly similar depictions can be found in other parts of the globe.
An interesting feature about some of these T-shaped pillars is the fact that these arms culminate in the front around the navel area.
And what I find so cool is that this type of motif can be found elsewhere around the world.
For example, in Easter Island, with those giant statues, the Moai.
There, too, the arms go around the belly, and they culminate in front of the navel.
And then, at Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, for example, there is a statue that has the exact same hand position in front of the navel.
At the city of Tiahuanaco, in its central complex called the Kalasasaya, is a massive monolithic statue.
The statue is said by the Inca to be a giant.
In the previous creation before men, giants roamed the Earth.
And they inhabited the city of Tiahuanaco.
And this is actually very similar to the mythology of Easter Island and the stories we hear about the Moai.
We get very similar type of carved pillars as Gobekli Tepe in other parts of the world.
There is a very strong similarity in style which tells us that there is almost certainly some kind of relationship, that Gobekli Tepe is not in isolation, it's part of some kind of global culture, the remnants of a lost civilization that once existed in the prehistoric world.
Could the figures found at Gobekli Tepe and in other parts of the globe be a record carved in stone of an ancient alien race that existed prior to a catastrophic event? If so, might the sites where these extraterrestrials are immortalized be the places where human survivors emerged after the event known as the Great Flood? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest that more recent discoveries at the site provide additional proof of this otherworldly connection.
Sanliurfa, Turkey.
June 2017.
Author and researcher Andrew Collins travels to the Sanliurfa Archaeology and Mosaic Museum, just ten miles from Gobekli Tepe, to meet with curator Taha Ozyavuz.
Taha, I presume.
Nice to meet you.
He is there to get an up-close look at one of the most mysterious stone structures unearthed at the ancient site.
I think this is what we've come to see here.
Right.
And the fact that we have three different figures here, each of different sizes, what do you think that represents? Why do you think that it was damaged or destroyed in this way in antiquity? So somebody came along and deliberately destroyed it.
If the stone column found at Gobekli Tepe represents a genetic lineage, just why were two of the figures deliberately defaced? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that perhaps it was an attempt to obscure the truth about humankind's otherworldly origins.
What's curious about this totem pole is that there is essentially a larger being, perhaps an extraterrestrial, that has its hands around this other being that isn't exactly human but has human-like characteristics.
It could be a primitive human.
This figure appears to be giving birth, and the baby that is emerging from this mother's womb is clearly a human baby with a human face.
This suggests possibly that a breeding experiment took place leading to the development of modern humans as we now know them.
The interesting thing about this is that totem poles are like a repository for information.
It's an encyclopedia; it's like a time capsule.
And so if we have a genealogical record in this pillar at Gobekli Tepe, and we follow the ultimate extension of it, and we realize that what they're possibly telling us is that their ancestors were non-human.
So you have to wonder if the whole idea was to preserve information from our extraterrestrial past so that future generations would ultimately decode the information that's there, information possibly about our extraterrestrial creators.
Many ancient cultures have stories of the gods interacting with early humans and even breeding with them.
According to The Book of Enoch, an ancient text that was stricken from the Bible's Old Testament in the 4th century AD, there was a large-statured group of heavenly beings that descended to Earth in the remote past.
There were those called the "watchers.
" They were to watch humanity, not get involved.
But they violated that principle.
They came down to Earth.
And they introduced science and technology.
And they mingled with, breeded with, married human females and sired children.
Their children, they were known as the "fallen ones," the Nephilim.
They clearly would have been recognized today as human beings.
The only difference was that they might have been considered physically of greater stature.
Some claim that they were ten, 15 feet high.
And this was considered a corruption, according to divine law.
And it is taught that it is because of this corruption that God intervened to remove them from the Earth, and that's what brought the flood.
In the Bible, you read that some of the fallen angels came down on this planet.
These angels had, simply, sex with humans, definitely, because the outcome of it were giants.
So what kind of angels are these? Spiritual beings? No, it was the extraterrestrials.
Did the builders of Gobekli Tepe attempt to preserve important information about what happened here on Earth over 12,000 years ago? And does this include a record of the creation of mankind by extraterrestrial beings? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest an even greater mystery can be found by examining the remaining structures at the site that point us to the stars.
Gobekli Tepe, 2003.
While using geomagnetic surveys, archaeologists discover that the five stone circles unearthed at the site only scratch the surface of what lies buried below.
Not only do the enclosures appear to have been built in different layers, one on top of the other, but there is evidence of 16 more identical stone rings buried at deeper levels in the mound.
One of the most interesting things about Gobekli Tepe is the fact that not only did they construct one of the most amazing temples on the Earth at a time when it shouldn't have been possible to do it, they then buried each enclosure after probably just a few hundred years of use.
20 different enclosures were built.
And each one, seemingly at the end of its useful life, was completely covered over with rubble and soil before the next enclosure was built.
They spent as much time and energy covering it over in the end as they did building it to begin with.
In 2014, author Andrew Collins published his groundbreaking book Gobekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods.
In it, he proposes that the reason for the multiple reconstructions of the enclosures was to precisely track a specific celestial location.
The first thing that we looked at was Enclosure D, which is the oldest and the most impressive of all the structures, to see where exactly these twin pillars may have been facing 11,500 years ago.
One star came up, and this was Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation of Cygnus.
So we then looked at the twin pillars in the other enclosures at Gobekli Tepe.
We find that, although they're all aligned roughly either north-northwest or south-southeast, that there are slight differences.
And what they appear to be doing is following the same star as it moves very gradually along the local horizon.
The stone circles are lined according to stars that they were looking at.
But because of precession The slow change in the stars over time in the sky They had to realign them periodically.
Precession occurs due to the fact that the Earth's axis rotates much like a spinning top, changing the point of observation over time for various celestial bodies from any fixed point on the planet.
With the stone circles at Gobekli Tepe, they weren't just building them and covering them over for ritualistic purposes, but actually they were doing this for what we might call scientific purposes.
Legends of gods descending from the stars in the Cygnus constellation can be found in traditions across the globe.
In the Mandaean teachings of ancient Persia, the throne room of the great god Abathur-Muzania was said to be the Cygnus constellation.
In the Egyptian tradition, the goddess of the night sky, Nuit, was said to have come directly from Cygnus.
And in the Mayan tradition, it was said that the sun god, Kinich Ahau, descended from there.
So, from traditions as different as the Persian, the Egyptian and the Mayan, we have major deities coming from the Cygnus constellation.
If I were to be a visitor from another planet and I wanted to leave behind a calling card indicating where I came from, then I would build structures with the precise alignment of a constellation of my home star system.
So, perhaps the teachers who were at Gobekli Tepe came from Cygnus.
Is it possible that the builders of Gobekli Tepe were pointing to the place where their extraterrestrial teachers came from by aligning the site to that specific location in the night sky? In 2015, NASA officials announced a curious phenomenon picked up by the Kepler space telescope.
It was reported that a mysterious dimming and flickering was coming from a star in the Cygnus constellation.
And some scientists claim this might be caused by an alien megastructure passing in front of it.
NASA announced that they were tracking what they called an "alien megastructure" around the star of Cygnus.
And the speculation was that, as they were viewing Cygnus from time to time, the star would dim by 22%.
And what they were surmising was that some giant structure around the star was occasionally blocking our view of the star itself.
This is the most dramatic evidence of a potential extraterrestrial civilization that we have ever seen, because it's actually an object orbiting a star that absolutely should not be there, according to NASA.
We're actually seeing architecture in the Cygnus star system.
It could be what they paid homage to at Gobekli Tepe, telling us, "Look over here, guys.
'X' marks the spot.
" According to NASA astronomers, what they are observing is nearly 1,400 light years away.
This means that, given the time it takes for light from Cygnus to reach Earth, whatever object is causing the mysterious dimming was orbiting the star at least 1,400 years ago, and perhaps much earlier.
Could this be further evidence that Gobekli Tepe was indeed built to point to the home planet of mankind's extraterrestrial ancestors? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining recent events unfolding in the region and efforts to protect the secrets that still lie buried at the site.
Kobani, Syria.
June, 2015.
The militant extremist group known as the Islamic State, or ISIS, violently takes control of the city.
During their bloody rampage through the region, they systematically destroy historical relics and detonate bombs at various archaeological sites.
A mere 60 miles away, across the border of Turkey, archaeologists working at the site of Gobekli Tepe stand terrified as they watch the smoke rise from the battlefield.
In an effort to protect the 12,000-year-old stone structures from the threat of attack, the Turkish government stops all excavations and closes the site to the public.
They crate the stone monoliths and relocate the most valuable artifacts to a museum nearby.
Over the next 20 years, the government will spend $15 million to secure Gobekli Tepe by enclosing the area, covering the site with a steel-enforced roof, and installing an extensive security system.
Considering at least 80% of Gobekli Tepe remains hidden beneath the earth, archaeologists still have much to learn about the site.
But as it becomes dangerously close to suffering the same fate as other sites in the region, could its most profound secrets be lost forever? Is it possible that the Gobekli Tepe builders were actually sending us a message? Yes, the stones seem to suggest that this was the case.
Perhaps they were giving us some kind of warning, or it could be that they are trying to tell us the information that they knew about celestial beings, and perhaps even extraterrestrials, from the Cygnus constellation.
Gobekli Tepe goes back to a earlier cycle of civilization that existed at the end of the last ice age.
They experienced catastrophic changes.
So, I am of the opinion that there's a very important message that maybe they were purposefully sending to us, at least they were trying to preserve for posterity, for future generations.
And we need to figure out exactly what that message is.
Gobekli Tepe points us back to our origins, and points directly to the stars as the source of where we came from.
Once we accept this, we will be able to answer the questions of where we came from and ultimately where we're going as a species.
Does proof of mankind's extraterrestrial past lie buried beneath the earth at Gobekli Tepe? Proof that an advanced civilization existed on this planet more than 10,000 years ago? Perhaps the answers will be found not by examining ancient stone pillars covered with strange carvings but on a star, one that shines on us from many light-years away.