Ancient Aliens s14e02 Episode Script
The Badlands Guardian
1 NARRATOR: A mysterious formation carved out of the Earth gone unnoticed for thousands of years.
HUGH NEWMAN: It's really, really striking when you first see it.
It looks so much like a human face.
NARRATOR: Is it an ancient megalithic structure made to be seen from the sky? TRAVIS TAYLOR: The Badlands Guardian looks artificial.
It doesn't look like a trick of nature.
NARRATOR: And could it be not only a link to mankind's extraterrestrial ancestors MARCIA MOORE: So you have to ask yourself, who were they emulating? NARRATOR: but one that holds the key to their return? GEORGE HAAS: We learned their codes and their secret symbolism, and what we're seeing probably holds a key to our legacy.
NARRATOR: There is a doorway in the universe.
Beyond it is the promise of truth.
It demands we question everything we have ever been taught.
The evidence is all around us.
The future is right before our eyes.
We are not alone.
We have never been alone.
NARRATOR: Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan.
53-year-old grandmother Lynn Hickox is scanning GPS driving directions to a local museum on satellite view when something catches her eye: a geographical feature that bears a striking resemblance to a human face.
It looks so much like a man-made structure that she posts the image on a message board.
Almost overnight, the image goes viral and becomes known far and wide as the "Badlands Guardian.
" It is quite striking.
It is clearly a face.
The brow, the nose, the lips, the chin are well formed.
The headdress a little less so, but clearly could be seen as feathers.
The Badlands Guardian appears to be a huge geoglyph near Alberta, Canada.
And to see it from Google Earth or from satellite imagery, you would think it was created by people many, many years ago.
"Geo" means Earth, and glyphs are symbols, so "geoglyph" means symbols on the Earth.
They can be geometric designs, they can be animals, they can be faces.
Some of them are carved into the ground, like we find in Nazca.
And in some places they're built up, mounds built up on the Earth.
The Badlands Guardian is a bust, or a head and shoulders presentation, of a male indigenous person.
It is so striking, because that is the indigenous people of the area.
It doesn't look like a Scotsman wearing a kilt.
It doesn't look like an African warrior.
It looks like an indigenous, uh, native to the area.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the likeness of a human face naturally formed in the Earth? Many who have examined the Badlands Guardian suggest that, based on the amount of detail it displays, this is highly unlikely.
When the mainstream scientific community looks at the Badlands Guardian, their first explanation is that it was created by weathering, uh, rain and water runoff.
But there's just so much detail that we're seeing in this formation that it goes way beyond anything nature could make.
It not only has basic facial features, it has secondary facial features, such as the eyelid.
The only thing missing from the Badlands Guardian is an ear feature.
Now, the interesting thing about that is, the local government in Canada, they had found a gas deposit there, right where the ear should be.
There might have been an ear there at one time, but now, because they put an access road there and they built this gas feature, that was all erased.
Archaeologists are often mistaken about ancient sites.
And what is actually a pyramid that's now, say, covered in soil and has a forest on it can be mistaken for just a natural hill.
This has happened in in South America, in China, Archaeologists are continually finding that things they think are natural are actually artificial.
NARRATOR: Some of the geoglyphs found around the world were formed simply by removing the top layer of soil to expose the lighter colored dirt underneath.
But if the Badlands Guardian is also a geoglyph, creating it would have been an enormous undertaking.
The massive concave formation is almost half a mile long and it is over 1,100 feet wide.
For comparison, the Mount Rushmore National Monument in South Dakota, which was completed in 1941, is approximately 80 feet tall and 200 feet wide.
And while it is only a fraction of the size of the Badlands Guardian, constructing it required an enormous amount of work, even with modern technology.
The carving officially started in 1927, and it was considered complete in 1941.
My grandfather was on the mountain approximately from 1933 to 1941.
He was chief carver on Mount Rushmore.
It took about 400 workers.
It took 14 years.
And when I think about the amount of time and effort that it took for people in the '30s to create Mount Rushmore, I can't even begin to imagine what the person or persons had to do, working on something the size of the Badlands Guardian.
I-I can't even wrap my head around it.
How was it possible that the people that carved this thousands of years ago were able to see what they were doing or know what they were doing? They must have had assistance by extraterrestrial beings.
GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: The Badlands Guardian can only be fully appreciated from the sky.
So you have to wonder why.
Well, then the answer is: people on the ground wanted to signal someone up in the sky.
NARRATOR: For ancient astronaut theorists, the Badlands Guardian could offer some of the most compelling new evidence that extraterrestrial intervention occurred on Earth in the distant past that is, if it really is an artificial structure.
Boston, Massachusetts.
February 2019.
Aerospace engineer and satellite imaging expert Mark Carlotto has spent countless hours examining the Badlands Guardian to see if he can determine for certain whether it is something other than a natural formation.
CARLOTTO: The image of the Badlands Guardian is very striking as this Native American figure, and there are some properties that are unusual.
So I did some analysis, uh, using some imaging software and the height map of the feature.
We'll start with an overview of the Badlands Guardian image here.
We see the figure in the middle of the image here, and notice the surrounding landform's very similar in morphology.
So, now what we'll do is we'll zoom up on the figure.
You can see it a little bit more clearly, the, um, this iconic face, so what can we do to bring out, you know, some information? Well, we ran a program that extracts the height, or elevation, uh, from the figure.
And the way it's depicted here is is: dark is low and bright is high.
So now, after we've taken the image and texture-mapped it onto the elevation surface, we can view it in 3D.
And, um, now I'm moving around it and viewing it like we might see it in a drone.
And as you can see, when you're looking straight down on the Badlands Guardian, it's, uh, this uncanny resemblance to a Native American.
But as we look off angle, and as we look at it from ground level, simulated ground level, you see the illusion disappears.
So clearly this feature, if it was created, was meant to be viewed from above.
NARRATOR: One important factor for Mark is how information looks when the lighting changes.
If the Badlands Guardian still appears as a face under different conditions, it could strengthen the argument that it's an artificial structure.
And as you can see, what we've simulated here in these views are noontime views, so the Sun is at noon, in the summer the spring or fall and the winter.
Notice in the winter the shadows are longer.
The Sun is lower in the sky.
And in all three, you definitely get this impression of a face.
It implies it's very interesting, and if it's not, uh, artificially created, nature is having a great joke on us.
TAYLOR: To me, the Badlands Guardian looks artificial.
It doesn't look like a trick of nature and that I'm suffering from apophenia.
All humans do have apophenia, meaning they see patterns where patterns are not.
That's why we see Mickey Mouse in the clouds and so on.
But this looks too specifically like some type of native person with a headdress on.
Looking at this picture, you can see the natural patterns of erosion.
So it's clear to me from this picture that this is an artificial structure.
NARRATOR: Did a grandmother in Saskatchewan accidentally discover physical evidence of extraterrestrial intervention on Earth? But if so, how long has it been there? Who built it? And what does it mean? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining other geoglyphs that have been discovered all over the world, and the strange figures they depict.
NARRATOR: In 1820, the prominent German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss began to explore the possibility that there are other intelligent beings in our solar system.
He hypothesized that alien life-forms might be able to view the surface of our planet through the use of superior technology, and proposed that we could attempt to communicate with them by creating large-scale shapes and figures in the Earth what are known today as geoglyphs.
CARLOTTO: Gauss' idea was simple, that tracks of forests be planted in the shape of right triangles so that at great distances, patterns of triangles would be visible from space.
He tried to come up with an idea of how we could signal our existence here down on Earth, and not just signal, but to tell 'em that we were intelligent.
So what he devised was to create this huge geoglyph in Siberia showing the Pythagorean triangle.
This is something that you can only work out if you have mathematical knowledge.
So he wanted to convey this knowledge to these intelligences outside of our own planet.
NARRATOR: More than a century after Gauss proposed creating figures in the Earth to communicate with extraterrestrials, pilots flying over southern Peru in the 1930s discovered hundreds of giant geoglyphs etched into the desert soil: the Nazca Lines.
As there is no record of when or why the Nazca Lines were formed or even who made them scholars can only guess as to what purpose they served.
But is it possible that these geoglyphs were created by ancient people who were doing exactly what Carl Gauss proposed: attempting to communicate with beings looking down on Earth from above? This is a huge area where these straight lines stretch for many, many miles.
And then effigies such as spiders and birds and other animals also carved into the landscape.
NARRATOR: It wasn't until the invention of the airplane that we were able to observe the Nazca Lines from the vantage point they were designed for.
With the ability to see the Earth from new heights, more and more geoglyphs were discovered.
And now, with satellite imagery, it has been revealed that our ancestors created similar formations all over the world.
SAUNDERS: They've been finding geoglyphs in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, North America, South America, Australia, all over the world they're finding geoglyphs.
NEWMAN: We have earthen geoglyphs such as Serpent Mound in Ohio.
In England, at Glastonbury, we have the Glastonbury Zodiac, constellations carved into the landscape.
We also have the Blythe Intaglios in the western part of America.
So all the geoglyphs all over the world do suggest that the ancients were using the Earth as, like, a canvas, but why would they do this? Were they sending messages up into the sky for other beings to see? POPE: It might be a test of some sort, uh, a code, a puzzle.
Something that we would only recognize when we had developed powered flight and satellites.
Does it lead to a next step? HENRY: These massive geoglyphs, they're not art for art's sake.
They did it for a very specific purpose, for a purpose of communicating with and interacting with extraterrestrial beings.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that an extraterrestrial civilization is monitoring us much like Carl Gauss predicted? One part of Gauss's hypothesis that now seems very plausible is the idea that extraterrestrials may have the technology to view details on the Earth's surface from great distances.
Could it be they are waiting for the day when we humans demonstrate the ability to do the same? That day may be closer than we think, as scientists are learning how to view the surfaces of faraway planets through a process called gravitational lensing.
A regular lens happens 'cause you have a change in index of refraction, which changes the speed of light.
A gravitational lens literally is curving space itself, and light now travels that curved path.
What it allows us to do in exploring space is it will allow us to observe or look at things we wouldn't otherwise be able to see.
(beeping quietly) NARRATOR: In 2019, the Hubble Space Telescope used a naturally occurring gravitational lens, a bend in space-time, in order to capture the light of a large galaxy cluster in the Leo constellation that was previously too far away and dim to see.
While Hubble utilized a gravitational lens that already existed in space, it is possible that one day we may be able to create our own.
If there was an extraterrestrial civilization that had that technology and was far enough along to make a gravitational lens that magnified, that might allow them to view things, for instance, on Earth, that you couldn't with just a standard lens.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that extraterrestrials created markers on Earth that they were capable of seeing from the far reaches of space? And did our ancestors then construct their own geoglyphs in the hopes that the alien visitors would return? Perhaps a piece of the puzzle can be revealed by examining geoglyphs of strange humanoid-type beings.
HENRY; At Nazca, we see what appears to be a humanoid figure wearing a space suit.
At the Blythe Intaglio, we see a very strange, tall, spindly human being.
Then you have the Atacama Giant who has these lines coming out on the top of his head.
The Badlands Guardian is unique among all the geoglyphs we've found around the world.
It's the only one that has a face.
DAVID CHILDRESS: Most of the humanoid geoglyphs are of a full figure who is looking directly at the sky.
But the Badlands Guardian is different.
He's in profile; it's just his head.
TSOUKALOS: It's a Native American face and Native Americans lived in that area.
And Native American history is filled with stories of sky people descending from above.
It's maybe a signal, "Hey", this is us down here.
Come and say hello.
" NARRATOR: Is it possible that the geoglyphs of humanoid figures, and also the Badlands Guardian, illustrate actual extraterrestrial visitors? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining a nearby site that boasts the greatest concentration of rock art on the North American Great Plains, dating back at least 9,000 years.
NARRATOR: Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, Canada.
Here, less than a hundred miles away from the Badlands Guardian, is an incredible record of local Native American traditions.
Thousands of ancient petroglyphs, images carved into stone, depict every aspect of life for the people who lived here centuries ago.
There are ancient calendars, depictions of animals, humans, entire battle scenes, and the Blackfoot gods, who they also refer to as "sky beings.
" In various Native American traditions, we have different spiritual beings located on these sort of different planes of existence.
And there's a wonderful range of stories in many, many Native American groups that talk about some of the adventures and interactions with these sky people with the humans on Earth.
NARRATOR: For the Blackfoot, the most prominent of these sky beings is the one they credit with their creation, Napi.
TSOUKALOS: The creator god of the Blackfoot is called Napi, and in this petroglyph he can be seen, what appears to be inside of a disc.
And he's very strange-looking 'cause he's got four fingers, he's got sort of an elongated skull.
(indistinct chanting) HENRY: The Blackfoot tell a really interesting creation myth about Napi.
They tell how he came to Earth and created various animals and-and other creatures.
And then one day he decided to form a living human being out of clay.
And then he goes and leaves the Blackfoot alone but he promises that he's going to return.
(horse snorting) NARRATOR: The Blackfoot regard Napi not as mythological, but as a real being who descended from the heavens.
So the Star People in Native American traditions are beings who came from the cosmos and taught the arts of civilization, agriculture, medicine, healing, and they brought maps of the cosmos to Earth.
Throughout especially the western part of America, we find petroglyph or rock art that portrays what appear to be star beings.
People can look at this art and say, "That's a depiction of an extraterrestrial.
" And this is one way that the First Nations people recorded their interactions with the Star People.
NARRATOR: Could this petroglyph of Napi be a depiction of a being that the ancient Blackfoot encountered coming down from the sky? And might this provide further evidence that the local indigenous populations were visited by extraterrestrials? Ancient Astronaut theorists say, yes, and believe the Badlands Guardian may reveal how the ancients communicated with these otherworldly visitors.
HAAS: Now, the headdress that he wears is called a medicine hat, uh, which it's not a chief's regalia that you would see with all the feathers going down that a chief would wear.
What a medicine hat entails is it incorporates the tail feathers of an eagle.
And these are normally worn by, uh, the medicine man.
YOUNG: The medicine man this is a wisdom figure, a combination of professor, doctor and priest all in one person.
The hat is what we tend to call a headdress.
The shamanic, ceremonial leader uses that to make contact with invisible dimensions, often thought of as upper worlds, in which contact is made with spirits, gods, energy that is beyond our understanding.
The fact that he's wearing a medicine hat that acts as a antenna tells us that this is a figure who was in communication with otherworldly beings, maybe even the Star People.
NARRATOR: If extraterrestrials communicated with the ancient Blackfoot Indians, is it possible that they imparted the knowledge and technology to construct the Badlands Guardian? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that not only did extraterrestrials visit people living in the Alberta Badlands in the distant past, but that they continue to visit the region to this very day.
Certain areas of the world are hotbeds of UFO activity.
And, in fact, Alberta, Canada, is one of these hotbeds.
There's constantly UFO sightings in the day and night, and there's quite a few photos and films that can be seen.
In 2009 alone, there were over 150 reported sightings of UFOs in Alberta.
One of the most famous UFO sightings in that area happened in 1967 when a person named Warren Smith and two of his friends were out walking in this area, and in broad daylight, they then saw a silvery, disc-shaped UFO hovering around the trees.
The witnesses took their photos, and then, finally, the UFO vanished.
HENRY: Warren Smith's photos of this craft as it was lifting into the sky were analyzed by the Photo Interpretation Center.
The experts there determined that the photos were real and that it matched the description of what he said he saw, suggesting that this was a genuine experience and that these were, in fact, genuine photos of a craft.
The area where Warren Smith took the photos isn't far from where the Badlands Guardian is located.
Does this suggest that aliens have a continuing interest in this area? CHILDRESS: With all of this UFO activity in Alberta, and it's in the vicinity of the Badlands Guardian, you have to wonder if this area isn't some portal or inter-dimensional spot where UFOs are coming and going.
And you have to wonder if it's something to do with the Badlands Guardian.
NARRATOR: Does the Badlands Guardian represent a medicine man who communicated with the Star People? Or could it be depicting a star being, one who taught the indigenous people of the region a means of communicating with extraterrestrials? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer can be found only by forensically examining the Badlands Guardian and taking a closer look at the shape of the figure's head.
NARRATOR: Los Angeles, California.
February 2019.
Ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos is meeting up with forensic 3-D artist Marcia Moore.
-Marcia.
Pleasure to meet you.
-Nice to meet you.
-How are you? Okay.
-Come on in.
Wow, look at this space.
NARRATOR: Since learning about the Badlands Guardian, Marcia has been working to reconstruct it digitally to see what it would look like as a three-dimensional head and perhaps provide further clues as to who or what it was modeled after.
-Pull up a chair.
-Great.
-And we'll discuss this guardian.
-Uh-huh.
So, you've taken this, and clearly you've seen the face and decided to recreate the face.
-Absolutely.
-Okay.
And what did you come up with? Well, the first step for me is to just take a look at the terrain.
I think, honestly, the whole aerial view when you look at it, there's a whole storyboard of information going on here.
But we're focusing on this face because this is very prominent.
So, you can tell we've got a neck area that's rather extended.
Some feathers, and then, also, this elongation that's forming around this headdress.
TSOUKALOS: Mm-hmm.
-All right, go on.
-From there, I created a 3-D sculpture.
I'm starting with just a normal-sized head.
So, I will overlay the aerial view, and I'm going to create layers.
And I'm actually just following the terrain.
I'm creating this long neck, and I'm creating this elongated head.
And here we have it.
This is the sculpture.
Everything in 3-D is mirrored on the other side, -so as we turn this around -Right.
And this is what he would like if that thing on the ground -were a person.
-Absolutely.
TSOUKALOS: Yeah, that's pretty awesome.
MOORE: You know, after the buildup of the 3-D sculpture, I made a digital piece of artwork that will flesh this entity out.
Mm-hmm.
TSOUKALOS: That looks great.
You know, I think it's really cool that you've kind of pointed out the elongation of the skull.
This whole phenomenon of elongated skulls exists worldwide.
Not only do we have these shapes in this geographic area, but also, for example, in South America, in Peru, but also in Europe, in the Hittite region, present-day Turkey, all with these long skulls.
NARRATOR: Around the world, ancient skulls have been found that are thin, long and misshapen.
In addition to the skulls, there are many ancient depictions of historical figures with extra large, elongated heads.
HENRY: What's controversial about the elongated skulls is that their cranial capacity is greater than a normal human.
So these may not be cases of cranial deformation.
These could be examples of a whole subspecies of humanity.
TSOUKALOS: Worldwide, we have these people in depictions wearing these long headdresses, and sometimes you even see pictures, especially in ancient Egypt, where you see the same figures without the headdress, and guess what? They have elongated skulls.
So, you have to ask yourself, why is there a, uh a figure coming out of the terrain that has, to me, seems like an elongated shaped head.
TSOUKALOS: The idea is that Earth was visited by extraterrestrials a long time ago.
And one of my opinions is that the elongated skull people were the actual visitors, and the skeletons that are found today are some of the few remnants of the people that were here a long time ago, clearly people that looked like us except for that they had an elongated skull.
So, that, to me, is fascinating.
Marcia, thank you so much for sharing your work with me.
You've given me a lot to think about, so thank you.
-Thank you.
-Appreciate it.
All right, take care.
Bye-bye.
NARRATOR: Does the three-dimensional reconstruction of the Badlands Guardian point to the possibility that it was not only built to be seen by visitors from the sky, but that it may even be a representation of an extraterrestrial? Could this be the face of the being the Blackfoot people identify as their creator god, Napi? Perhaps the answers can be found by examining yet another geoglyph that resembles a human face on Mars.
NARRATOR: July 19, 1976.
A NASA spacecraft named Viking 1 enters into orbit above Mars.
Just six days later, it takes a photograph of the Red Planet that is so extraordinary it immediately seizes the public imagination.
In the summer of 1976, NASA announced that they had found a face on Mars.
Now, NASA was the original group of scientists to label the face on Mars a head it was actually in their file and they said that they had found this formation on Mars that looked like a face.
However, just a few days later, they had a second press conference, and they said that they had taken a second image, days later, and it they found that it was just a trick of light and shadow and there was nothing there.
NARRATOR: Could it be that the image of a giant face on the Martian surface is actually an artificial structure, a physical record that someone, or something, has been there? Perhaps a clue can be found by comparing the Face on Mars with the Badlands Guardian.
CARLOTTO: So, the face is about a mile wide and about a mile and two-thirds long.
The Face on Mars is larger than the Badlands Guardian, but the Badlands Guardian is large enough that you can still see it in satellite imagery.
NARRATOR: To determine if the face was created by natural means, imaging expert Mark Carlotto conducted a scientific analysis of the Martian structure.
All right, so, in this overview, we see the Face on Mars in the middle.
One of the tests that was done on the Face of Mars was to assess whether it was an artificial or a natural object.
We applied a technique called fractal, uh, analysis to model the background terrain locally.
We have a filter that basically computes a little fractal model as it moves over the image.
And we see, if we go back and forth here to the original image and now the output of the fractal model, fractal filter, the face has a very high response.
And this was a very, uh, unexpected result, uh, at the time.
And the fractal technique found that it doesn't just look like a face but it actually is, statistically, in terms of the structure, different from the surrounding landforms.
One criticism of this formation is that, in more recent images, the impression of a face is much less evident.
The structure appears much more highly eroded.
But if it is an ancient feature, you would expect erosion would have taken its toll over the course of time.
If we flip it back and forth, there's a very high degree of correspondence between the left and the right side, making it a highly bisymmetrical object.
Bisymmetry would imply an artificial, uh, construction, 'cause nature would have to conspire quite a bit to create something that's not only face-like but bisymmetrical and possessing all the detail that the Face on Mars possesses.
The other interesting thing about the Face on Mars is that NASA has taken, over the last 25, 30 years, over 40 images of the Face on Mars, a formation that they say they have no interest in.
NARRATOR: If the Face on Mars is, in fact, a fabricated structure, who built it? Does it have a connection to the giant face recently discovered in Canada and perhaps other structures around the globe that were made to be seen from the sky? Curiously, many who have examined the Face on Mars have observed that the area surrounding it seems to point to a connection to one specific place on Earth, Egypt.
HENRY: Something extraordinary happened when we started taking pictures of the surface of Mars.
We saw what appeared to be pyramids on the surface of Mars.
It's mind-blowing, because these match the pyramids of ancient Egypt.
Is there a connection between Mars and Egypt? Well, indeed, there is.
The city of Cairo was originally called al-Qahirah, which meant "City of Mars" or "the Victorious.
" The Egyptians referred to the Sphinx as Ra-Horakhty, which means "Place of the Horizon," which is the very same name that they gave to Mars.
So there seems to be a-a deep-embedded memory in ancient Egypt of a correspondence or a connection between Egyptian civilization and one that might have been on Mars.
POPE: If we are dealing with something extraterrestrial in origin, then the-the Egyptian connection is very telling, because many, many speculations about the extraterrestrial links with ancient Egypt.
NARRATOR: But if there is a connection between the Cydonia region of Mars and ancient Egypt, what is the significance? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest further clues can be found by taking a closer look at the Badlands Guardian and the famous ruler it's thought to depict.
CHILDRESS: The Badlands Guardian is very similar to the statues of Akhenaten, the renegade Egyptian pharaoh.
He and Nefertiti and their children all had elongated heads, as we see all around the world and is often associated with extraterrestrials.
When you put an image of the Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten, beside the image of the Badlands Guardian, they're virtually identical.
When you do the "A" to "B" comparison, they both have this long neck, this very elongated face.
And Akhenaten, of course, is the great mystic pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
Ancient astronaut theorists believe that he might have extraterrestrial connections.
Akhenaten claimed that he was in contact with a celestial disk he referred to as the Aten.
In fact, he taught the Egyptians to no longer worship the whole pantheon of over 360 deities and to only worship the Aten.
And given the fact that his mummy has disappeared only adds to the mystery.
Is this, in fact, a human being we're looking at or could this possibly be a representation of some other type of a being, maybe an extraterrestrial, even? NARRATOR: If the Badlands Guardian is a representation not of a Native American but of an extraterrestrial known in Egypt as Akhenaten, could it bring us closer to solving a puzzle whose pieces are scattered all over the world and even on other planets? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that a much more recent discovery on Mars provides yet another piece that may finally complete the puzzle.
NARRATOR: Waterford, Virginia.
Cydonia Institute researcher George Haas is combing through satellite images of Mars when he spies a discernible shape.
It appears to be the image of another face.
Unlike the original so-called Face on Mars discovered in 1976, this face appears in profile, similar to that of the Badlands Guardian.
HAAS: So, in this area called Utopia, in a huge impact crater, is the profile face that has a beard, a mustache, and he's wearing a helmet that has an avian headdress.
When the bearded profile on Mars is compared to the Badlands Guardian, we see the same type of profile.
Both incorporate avian iconography.
One has a headdress of feathers.
The other one is wearing a headdress that incorporates an entire bird.
I think the culture that produced these formations on Mars had a direct relationship to the human race.
NARRATOR: Is an ancient story being told through geoglyphs that exist both on Earth and on our closest neighboring planet? And, if so, what happened to those responsible for writing it? CHILDRESS: Perhaps civilization on Mars was destroyed.
Or, perhaps, civilization began on Mars and then moved to Earth.
Earth was, in a sense, seeded by a Martian civilization, and that is why we have similar structures on Mars and on planet Earth.
COLLINS: So, with the discovery of the Face on Mars, is it possible that it's acting as a clue, it's telling us that, somewhere here, is evidence of a lost civilization that existed on the Red Planet perhaps millions of years ago? That's a very tantalizing possibility, and it's one that I know that every scientist going to Mars wants to answer.
HAAS: Maybe these geoglyphs were all part of some global memorial that was built by some unknown extraterrestrial culture that, uh, has to do with, uh, human origins and is telling the story of where we came from and possibly where we may be going.
HENRY: You have to ask, is there something in common between the people that were making these geoglyphs, and the answer is, is that they all have similar stories in these earthly civilizations.
They're in contact with star beings, celestial beings that came to Earth and are assisting humanity.
They lived with us, they interacted with us.
Then they left.
NARRATOR: But is it possible that not all of the communications we're receiving from these otherworldly beings are in the form of geoglyphs? Could crop circles, for instance, be more recent examples of a type of extraterrestrial dialogue? CARLOTTO: If you bring crop circles into the mix, there are some very sophisticated crop circles that also indicate, uh, knowledge of fractal geometry.
There could be a message.
They might be communicating with us, and we might, perhaps, want to communicate with them.
CHILDRESS: It's possible that many of these geoglyphs, much like crop circles that appear every summer, might give us clues to our past and to our destiny.
TSOUKALOS: The fact of the matter is that we have geoglyphs worldwide.
And with the improvement of our technology, who knows what else we'll discover in the next five to ten years? We are entering a new era of discovery, and I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings.
NARRATOR: As we send more spacecrafts to Mars, will we continue to uncover evidence of an alien civilization that could have lived there centuries ago? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and believe that the human race is getting very close to the day when it will unlock what they believe to be an alien code and find a means of direct communication, a living link between mankind's past and its extraterrestrial future.
HUGH NEWMAN: It's really, really striking when you first see it.
It looks so much like a human face.
NARRATOR: Is it an ancient megalithic structure made to be seen from the sky? TRAVIS TAYLOR: The Badlands Guardian looks artificial.
It doesn't look like a trick of nature.
NARRATOR: And could it be not only a link to mankind's extraterrestrial ancestors MARCIA MOORE: So you have to ask yourself, who were they emulating? NARRATOR: but one that holds the key to their return? GEORGE HAAS: We learned their codes and their secret symbolism, and what we're seeing probably holds a key to our legacy.
NARRATOR: There is a doorway in the universe.
Beyond it is the promise of truth.
It demands we question everything we have ever been taught.
The evidence is all around us.
The future is right before our eyes.
We are not alone.
We have never been alone.
NARRATOR: Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan.
53-year-old grandmother Lynn Hickox is scanning GPS driving directions to a local museum on satellite view when something catches her eye: a geographical feature that bears a striking resemblance to a human face.
It looks so much like a man-made structure that she posts the image on a message board.
Almost overnight, the image goes viral and becomes known far and wide as the "Badlands Guardian.
" It is quite striking.
It is clearly a face.
The brow, the nose, the lips, the chin are well formed.
The headdress a little less so, but clearly could be seen as feathers.
The Badlands Guardian appears to be a huge geoglyph near Alberta, Canada.
And to see it from Google Earth or from satellite imagery, you would think it was created by people many, many years ago.
"Geo" means Earth, and glyphs are symbols, so "geoglyph" means symbols on the Earth.
They can be geometric designs, they can be animals, they can be faces.
Some of them are carved into the ground, like we find in Nazca.
And in some places they're built up, mounds built up on the Earth.
The Badlands Guardian is a bust, or a head and shoulders presentation, of a male indigenous person.
It is so striking, because that is the indigenous people of the area.
It doesn't look like a Scotsman wearing a kilt.
It doesn't look like an African warrior.
It looks like an indigenous, uh, native to the area.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the likeness of a human face naturally formed in the Earth? Many who have examined the Badlands Guardian suggest that, based on the amount of detail it displays, this is highly unlikely.
When the mainstream scientific community looks at the Badlands Guardian, their first explanation is that it was created by weathering, uh, rain and water runoff.
But there's just so much detail that we're seeing in this formation that it goes way beyond anything nature could make.
It not only has basic facial features, it has secondary facial features, such as the eyelid.
The only thing missing from the Badlands Guardian is an ear feature.
Now, the interesting thing about that is, the local government in Canada, they had found a gas deposit there, right where the ear should be.
There might have been an ear there at one time, but now, because they put an access road there and they built this gas feature, that was all erased.
Archaeologists are often mistaken about ancient sites.
And what is actually a pyramid that's now, say, covered in soil and has a forest on it can be mistaken for just a natural hill.
This has happened in in South America, in China, Archaeologists are continually finding that things they think are natural are actually artificial.
NARRATOR: Some of the geoglyphs found around the world were formed simply by removing the top layer of soil to expose the lighter colored dirt underneath.
But if the Badlands Guardian is also a geoglyph, creating it would have been an enormous undertaking.
The massive concave formation is almost half a mile long and it is over 1,100 feet wide.
For comparison, the Mount Rushmore National Monument in South Dakota, which was completed in 1941, is approximately 80 feet tall and 200 feet wide.
And while it is only a fraction of the size of the Badlands Guardian, constructing it required an enormous amount of work, even with modern technology.
The carving officially started in 1927, and it was considered complete in 1941.
My grandfather was on the mountain approximately from 1933 to 1941.
He was chief carver on Mount Rushmore.
It took about 400 workers.
It took 14 years.
And when I think about the amount of time and effort that it took for people in the '30s to create Mount Rushmore, I can't even begin to imagine what the person or persons had to do, working on something the size of the Badlands Guardian.
I-I can't even wrap my head around it.
How was it possible that the people that carved this thousands of years ago were able to see what they were doing or know what they were doing? They must have had assistance by extraterrestrial beings.
GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: The Badlands Guardian can only be fully appreciated from the sky.
So you have to wonder why.
Well, then the answer is: people on the ground wanted to signal someone up in the sky.
NARRATOR: For ancient astronaut theorists, the Badlands Guardian could offer some of the most compelling new evidence that extraterrestrial intervention occurred on Earth in the distant past that is, if it really is an artificial structure.
Boston, Massachusetts.
February 2019.
Aerospace engineer and satellite imaging expert Mark Carlotto has spent countless hours examining the Badlands Guardian to see if he can determine for certain whether it is something other than a natural formation.
CARLOTTO: The image of the Badlands Guardian is very striking as this Native American figure, and there are some properties that are unusual.
So I did some analysis, uh, using some imaging software and the height map of the feature.
We'll start with an overview of the Badlands Guardian image here.
We see the figure in the middle of the image here, and notice the surrounding landform's very similar in morphology.
So, now what we'll do is we'll zoom up on the figure.
You can see it a little bit more clearly, the, um, this iconic face, so what can we do to bring out, you know, some information? Well, we ran a program that extracts the height, or elevation, uh, from the figure.
And the way it's depicted here is is: dark is low and bright is high.
So now, after we've taken the image and texture-mapped it onto the elevation surface, we can view it in 3D.
And, um, now I'm moving around it and viewing it like we might see it in a drone.
And as you can see, when you're looking straight down on the Badlands Guardian, it's, uh, this uncanny resemblance to a Native American.
But as we look off angle, and as we look at it from ground level, simulated ground level, you see the illusion disappears.
So clearly this feature, if it was created, was meant to be viewed from above.
NARRATOR: One important factor for Mark is how information looks when the lighting changes.
If the Badlands Guardian still appears as a face under different conditions, it could strengthen the argument that it's an artificial structure.
And as you can see, what we've simulated here in these views are noontime views, so the Sun is at noon, in the summer the spring or fall and the winter.
Notice in the winter the shadows are longer.
The Sun is lower in the sky.
And in all three, you definitely get this impression of a face.
It implies it's very interesting, and if it's not, uh, artificially created, nature is having a great joke on us.
TAYLOR: To me, the Badlands Guardian looks artificial.
It doesn't look like a trick of nature and that I'm suffering from apophenia.
All humans do have apophenia, meaning they see patterns where patterns are not.
That's why we see Mickey Mouse in the clouds and so on.
But this looks too specifically like some type of native person with a headdress on.
Looking at this picture, you can see the natural patterns of erosion.
So it's clear to me from this picture that this is an artificial structure.
NARRATOR: Did a grandmother in Saskatchewan accidentally discover physical evidence of extraterrestrial intervention on Earth? But if so, how long has it been there? Who built it? And what does it mean? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining other geoglyphs that have been discovered all over the world, and the strange figures they depict.
NARRATOR: In 1820, the prominent German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss began to explore the possibility that there are other intelligent beings in our solar system.
He hypothesized that alien life-forms might be able to view the surface of our planet through the use of superior technology, and proposed that we could attempt to communicate with them by creating large-scale shapes and figures in the Earth what are known today as geoglyphs.
CARLOTTO: Gauss' idea was simple, that tracks of forests be planted in the shape of right triangles so that at great distances, patterns of triangles would be visible from space.
He tried to come up with an idea of how we could signal our existence here down on Earth, and not just signal, but to tell 'em that we were intelligent.
So what he devised was to create this huge geoglyph in Siberia showing the Pythagorean triangle.
This is something that you can only work out if you have mathematical knowledge.
So he wanted to convey this knowledge to these intelligences outside of our own planet.
NARRATOR: More than a century after Gauss proposed creating figures in the Earth to communicate with extraterrestrials, pilots flying over southern Peru in the 1930s discovered hundreds of giant geoglyphs etched into the desert soil: the Nazca Lines.
As there is no record of when or why the Nazca Lines were formed or even who made them scholars can only guess as to what purpose they served.
But is it possible that these geoglyphs were created by ancient people who were doing exactly what Carl Gauss proposed: attempting to communicate with beings looking down on Earth from above? This is a huge area where these straight lines stretch for many, many miles.
And then effigies such as spiders and birds and other animals also carved into the landscape.
NARRATOR: It wasn't until the invention of the airplane that we were able to observe the Nazca Lines from the vantage point they were designed for.
With the ability to see the Earth from new heights, more and more geoglyphs were discovered.
And now, with satellite imagery, it has been revealed that our ancestors created similar formations all over the world.
SAUNDERS: They've been finding geoglyphs in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, North America, South America, Australia, all over the world they're finding geoglyphs.
NEWMAN: We have earthen geoglyphs such as Serpent Mound in Ohio.
In England, at Glastonbury, we have the Glastonbury Zodiac, constellations carved into the landscape.
We also have the Blythe Intaglios in the western part of America.
So all the geoglyphs all over the world do suggest that the ancients were using the Earth as, like, a canvas, but why would they do this? Were they sending messages up into the sky for other beings to see? POPE: It might be a test of some sort, uh, a code, a puzzle.
Something that we would only recognize when we had developed powered flight and satellites.
Does it lead to a next step? HENRY: These massive geoglyphs, they're not art for art's sake.
They did it for a very specific purpose, for a purpose of communicating with and interacting with extraterrestrial beings.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that an extraterrestrial civilization is monitoring us much like Carl Gauss predicted? One part of Gauss's hypothesis that now seems very plausible is the idea that extraterrestrials may have the technology to view details on the Earth's surface from great distances.
Could it be they are waiting for the day when we humans demonstrate the ability to do the same? That day may be closer than we think, as scientists are learning how to view the surfaces of faraway planets through a process called gravitational lensing.
A regular lens happens 'cause you have a change in index of refraction, which changes the speed of light.
A gravitational lens literally is curving space itself, and light now travels that curved path.
What it allows us to do in exploring space is it will allow us to observe or look at things we wouldn't otherwise be able to see.
(beeping quietly) NARRATOR: In 2019, the Hubble Space Telescope used a naturally occurring gravitational lens, a bend in space-time, in order to capture the light of a large galaxy cluster in the Leo constellation that was previously too far away and dim to see.
While Hubble utilized a gravitational lens that already existed in space, it is possible that one day we may be able to create our own.
If there was an extraterrestrial civilization that had that technology and was far enough along to make a gravitational lens that magnified, that might allow them to view things, for instance, on Earth, that you couldn't with just a standard lens.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that extraterrestrials created markers on Earth that they were capable of seeing from the far reaches of space? And did our ancestors then construct their own geoglyphs in the hopes that the alien visitors would return? Perhaps a piece of the puzzle can be revealed by examining geoglyphs of strange humanoid-type beings.
HENRY; At Nazca, we see what appears to be a humanoid figure wearing a space suit.
At the Blythe Intaglio, we see a very strange, tall, spindly human being.
Then you have the Atacama Giant who has these lines coming out on the top of his head.
The Badlands Guardian is unique among all the geoglyphs we've found around the world.
It's the only one that has a face.
DAVID CHILDRESS: Most of the humanoid geoglyphs are of a full figure who is looking directly at the sky.
But the Badlands Guardian is different.
He's in profile; it's just his head.
TSOUKALOS: It's a Native American face and Native Americans lived in that area.
And Native American history is filled with stories of sky people descending from above.
It's maybe a signal, "Hey", this is us down here.
Come and say hello.
" NARRATOR: Is it possible that the geoglyphs of humanoid figures, and also the Badlands Guardian, illustrate actual extraterrestrial visitors? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining a nearby site that boasts the greatest concentration of rock art on the North American Great Plains, dating back at least 9,000 years.
NARRATOR: Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, Canada.
Here, less than a hundred miles away from the Badlands Guardian, is an incredible record of local Native American traditions.
Thousands of ancient petroglyphs, images carved into stone, depict every aspect of life for the people who lived here centuries ago.
There are ancient calendars, depictions of animals, humans, entire battle scenes, and the Blackfoot gods, who they also refer to as "sky beings.
" In various Native American traditions, we have different spiritual beings located on these sort of different planes of existence.
And there's a wonderful range of stories in many, many Native American groups that talk about some of the adventures and interactions with these sky people with the humans on Earth.
NARRATOR: For the Blackfoot, the most prominent of these sky beings is the one they credit with their creation, Napi.
TSOUKALOS: The creator god of the Blackfoot is called Napi, and in this petroglyph he can be seen, what appears to be inside of a disc.
And he's very strange-looking 'cause he's got four fingers, he's got sort of an elongated skull.
(indistinct chanting) HENRY: The Blackfoot tell a really interesting creation myth about Napi.
They tell how he came to Earth and created various animals and-and other creatures.
And then one day he decided to form a living human being out of clay.
And then he goes and leaves the Blackfoot alone but he promises that he's going to return.
(horse snorting) NARRATOR: The Blackfoot regard Napi not as mythological, but as a real being who descended from the heavens.
So the Star People in Native American traditions are beings who came from the cosmos and taught the arts of civilization, agriculture, medicine, healing, and they brought maps of the cosmos to Earth.
Throughout especially the western part of America, we find petroglyph or rock art that portrays what appear to be star beings.
People can look at this art and say, "That's a depiction of an extraterrestrial.
" And this is one way that the First Nations people recorded their interactions with the Star People.
NARRATOR: Could this petroglyph of Napi be a depiction of a being that the ancient Blackfoot encountered coming down from the sky? And might this provide further evidence that the local indigenous populations were visited by extraterrestrials? Ancient Astronaut theorists say, yes, and believe the Badlands Guardian may reveal how the ancients communicated with these otherworldly visitors.
HAAS: Now, the headdress that he wears is called a medicine hat, uh, which it's not a chief's regalia that you would see with all the feathers going down that a chief would wear.
What a medicine hat entails is it incorporates the tail feathers of an eagle.
And these are normally worn by, uh, the medicine man.
YOUNG: The medicine man this is a wisdom figure, a combination of professor, doctor and priest all in one person.
The hat is what we tend to call a headdress.
The shamanic, ceremonial leader uses that to make contact with invisible dimensions, often thought of as upper worlds, in which contact is made with spirits, gods, energy that is beyond our understanding.
The fact that he's wearing a medicine hat that acts as a antenna tells us that this is a figure who was in communication with otherworldly beings, maybe even the Star People.
NARRATOR: If extraterrestrials communicated with the ancient Blackfoot Indians, is it possible that they imparted the knowledge and technology to construct the Badlands Guardian? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that not only did extraterrestrials visit people living in the Alberta Badlands in the distant past, but that they continue to visit the region to this very day.
Certain areas of the world are hotbeds of UFO activity.
And, in fact, Alberta, Canada, is one of these hotbeds.
There's constantly UFO sightings in the day and night, and there's quite a few photos and films that can be seen.
In 2009 alone, there were over 150 reported sightings of UFOs in Alberta.
One of the most famous UFO sightings in that area happened in 1967 when a person named Warren Smith and two of his friends were out walking in this area, and in broad daylight, they then saw a silvery, disc-shaped UFO hovering around the trees.
The witnesses took their photos, and then, finally, the UFO vanished.
HENRY: Warren Smith's photos of this craft as it was lifting into the sky were analyzed by the Photo Interpretation Center.
The experts there determined that the photos were real and that it matched the description of what he said he saw, suggesting that this was a genuine experience and that these were, in fact, genuine photos of a craft.
The area where Warren Smith took the photos isn't far from where the Badlands Guardian is located.
Does this suggest that aliens have a continuing interest in this area? CHILDRESS: With all of this UFO activity in Alberta, and it's in the vicinity of the Badlands Guardian, you have to wonder if this area isn't some portal or inter-dimensional spot where UFOs are coming and going.
And you have to wonder if it's something to do with the Badlands Guardian.
NARRATOR: Does the Badlands Guardian represent a medicine man who communicated with the Star People? Or could it be depicting a star being, one who taught the indigenous people of the region a means of communicating with extraterrestrials? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer can be found only by forensically examining the Badlands Guardian and taking a closer look at the shape of the figure's head.
NARRATOR: Los Angeles, California.
February 2019.
Ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos is meeting up with forensic 3-D artist Marcia Moore.
-Marcia.
Pleasure to meet you.
-Nice to meet you.
-How are you? Okay.
-Come on in.
Wow, look at this space.
NARRATOR: Since learning about the Badlands Guardian, Marcia has been working to reconstruct it digitally to see what it would look like as a three-dimensional head and perhaps provide further clues as to who or what it was modeled after.
-Pull up a chair.
-Great.
-And we'll discuss this guardian.
-Uh-huh.
So, you've taken this, and clearly you've seen the face and decided to recreate the face.
-Absolutely.
-Okay.
And what did you come up with? Well, the first step for me is to just take a look at the terrain.
I think, honestly, the whole aerial view when you look at it, there's a whole storyboard of information going on here.
But we're focusing on this face because this is very prominent.
So, you can tell we've got a neck area that's rather extended.
Some feathers, and then, also, this elongation that's forming around this headdress.
TSOUKALOS: Mm-hmm.
-All right, go on.
-From there, I created a 3-D sculpture.
I'm starting with just a normal-sized head.
So, I will overlay the aerial view, and I'm going to create layers.
And I'm actually just following the terrain.
I'm creating this long neck, and I'm creating this elongated head.
And here we have it.
This is the sculpture.
Everything in 3-D is mirrored on the other side, -so as we turn this around -Right.
And this is what he would like if that thing on the ground -were a person.
-Absolutely.
TSOUKALOS: Yeah, that's pretty awesome.
MOORE: You know, after the buildup of the 3-D sculpture, I made a digital piece of artwork that will flesh this entity out.
Mm-hmm.
TSOUKALOS: That looks great.
You know, I think it's really cool that you've kind of pointed out the elongation of the skull.
This whole phenomenon of elongated skulls exists worldwide.
Not only do we have these shapes in this geographic area, but also, for example, in South America, in Peru, but also in Europe, in the Hittite region, present-day Turkey, all with these long skulls.
NARRATOR: Around the world, ancient skulls have been found that are thin, long and misshapen.
In addition to the skulls, there are many ancient depictions of historical figures with extra large, elongated heads.
HENRY: What's controversial about the elongated skulls is that their cranial capacity is greater than a normal human.
So these may not be cases of cranial deformation.
These could be examples of a whole subspecies of humanity.
TSOUKALOS: Worldwide, we have these people in depictions wearing these long headdresses, and sometimes you even see pictures, especially in ancient Egypt, where you see the same figures without the headdress, and guess what? They have elongated skulls.
So, you have to ask yourself, why is there a, uh a figure coming out of the terrain that has, to me, seems like an elongated shaped head.
TSOUKALOS: The idea is that Earth was visited by extraterrestrials a long time ago.
And one of my opinions is that the elongated skull people were the actual visitors, and the skeletons that are found today are some of the few remnants of the people that were here a long time ago, clearly people that looked like us except for that they had an elongated skull.
So, that, to me, is fascinating.
Marcia, thank you so much for sharing your work with me.
You've given me a lot to think about, so thank you.
-Thank you.
-Appreciate it.
All right, take care.
Bye-bye.
NARRATOR: Does the three-dimensional reconstruction of the Badlands Guardian point to the possibility that it was not only built to be seen by visitors from the sky, but that it may even be a representation of an extraterrestrial? Could this be the face of the being the Blackfoot people identify as their creator god, Napi? Perhaps the answers can be found by examining yet another geoglyph that resembles a human face on Mars.
NARRATOR: July 19, 1976.
A NASA spacecraft named Viking 1 enters into orbit above Mars.
Just six days later, it takes a photograph of the Red Planet that is so extraordinary it immediately seizes the public imagination.
In the summer of 1976, NASA announced that they had found a face on Mars.
Now, NASA was the original group of scientists to label the face on Mars a head it was actually in their file and they said that they had found this formation on Mars that looked like a face.
However, just a few days later, they had a second press conference, and they said that they had taken a second image, days later, and it they found that it was just a trick of light and shadow and there was nothing there.
NARRATOR: Could it be that the image of a giant face on the Martian surface is actually an artificial structure, a physical record that someone, or something, has been there? Perhaps a clue can be found by comparing the Face on Mars with the Badlands Guardian.
CARLOTTO: So, the face is about a mile wide and about a mile and two-thirds long.
The Face on Mars is larger than the Badlands Guardian, but the Badlands Guardian is large enough that you can still see it in satellite imagery.
NARRATOR: To determine if the face was created by natural means, imaging expert Mark Carlotto conducted a scientific analysis of the Martian structure.
All right, so, in this overview, we see the Face on Mars in the middle.
One of the tests that was done on the Face of Mars was to assess whether it was an artificial or a natural object.
We applied a technique called fractal, uh, analysis to model the background terrain locally.
We have a filter that basically computes a little fractal model as it moves over the image.
And we see, if we go back and forth here to the original image and now the output of the fractal model, fractal filter, the face has a very high response.
And this was a very, uh, unexpected result, uh, at the time.
And the fractal technique found that it doesn't just look like a face but it actually is, statistically, in terms of the structure, different from the surrounding landforms.
One criticism of this formation is that, in more recent images, the impression of a face is much less evident.
The structure appears much more highly eroded.
But if it is an ancient feature, you would expect erosion would have taken its toll over the course of time.
If we flip it back and forth, there's a very high degree of correspondence between the left and the right side, making it a highly bisymmetrical object.
Bisymmetry would imply an artificial, uh, construction, 'cause nature would have to conspire quite a bit to create something that's not only face-like but bisymmetrical and possessing all the detail that the Face on Mars possesses.
The other interesting thing about the Face on Mars is that NASA has taken, over the last 25, 30 years, over 40 images of the Face on Mars, a formation that they say they have no interest in.
NARRATOR: If the Face on Mars is, in fact, a fabricated structure, who built it? Does it have a connection to the giant face recently discovered in Canada and perhaps other structures around the globe that were made to be seen from the sky? Curiously, many who have examined the Face on Mars have observed that the area surrounding it seems to point to a connection to one specific place on Earth, Egypt.
HENRY: Something extraordinary happened when we started taking pictures of the surface of Mars.
We saw what appeared to be pyramids on the surface of Mars.
It's mind-blowing, because these match the pyramids of ancient Egypt.
Is there a connection between Mars and Egypt? Well, indeed, there is.
The city of Cairo was originally called al-Qahirah, which meant "City of Mars" or "the Victorious.
" The Egyptians referred to the Sphinx as Ra-Horakhty, which means "Place of the Horizon," which is the very same name that they gave to Mars.
So there seems to be a-a deep-embedded memory in ancient Egypt of a correspondence or a connection between Egyptian civilization and one that might have been on Mars.
POPE: If we are dealing with something extraterrestrial in origin, then the-the Egyptian connection is very telling, because many, many speculations about the extraterrestrial links with ancient Egypt.
NARRATOR: But if there is a connection between the Cydonia region of Mars and ancient Egypt, what is the significance? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest further clues can be found by taking a closer look at the Badlands Guardian and the famous ruler it's thought to depict.
CHILDRESS: The Badlands Guardian is very similar to the statues of Akhenaten, the renegade Egyptian pharaoh.
He and Nefertiti and their children all had elongated heads, as we see all around the world and is often associated with extraterrestrials.
When you put an image of the Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten, beside the image of the Badlands Guardian, they're virtually identical.
When you do the "A" to "B" comparison, they both have this long neck, this very elongated face.
And Akhenaten, of course, is the great mystic pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
Ancient astronaut theorists believe that he might have extraterrestrial connections.
Akhenaten claimed that he was in contact with a celestial disk he referred to as the Aten.
In fact, he taught the Egyptians to no longer worship the whole pantheon of over 360 deities and to only worship the Aten.
And given the fact that his mummy has disappeared only adds to the mystery.
Is this, in fact, a human being we're looking at or could this possibly be a representation of some other type of a being, maybe an extraterrestrial, even? NARRATOR: If the Badlands Guardian is a representation not of a Native American but of an extraterrestrial known in Egypt as Akhenaten, could it bring us closer to solving a puzzle whose pieces are scattered all over the world and even on other planets? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that a much more recent discovery on Mars provides yet another piece that may finally complete the puzzle.
NARRATOR: Waterford, Virginia.
Cydonia Institute researcher George Haas is combing through satellite images of Mars when he spies a discernible shape.
It appears to be the image of another face.
Unlike the original so-called Face on Mars discovered in 1976, this face appears in profile, similar to that of the Badlands Guardian.
HAAS: So, in this area called Utopia, in a huge impact crater, is the profile face that has a beard, a mustache, and he's wearing a helmet that has an avian headdress.
When the bearded profile on Mars is compared to the Badlands Guardian, we see the same type of profile.
Both incorporate avian iconography.
One has a headdress of feathers.
The other one is wearing a headdress that incorporates an entire bird.
I think the culture that produced these formations on Mars had a direct relationship to the human race.
NARRATOR: Is an ancient story being told through geoglyphs that exist both on Earth and on our closest neighboring planet? And, if so, what happened to those responsible for writing it? CHILDRESS: Perhaps civilization on Mars was destroyed.
Or, perhaps, civilization began on Mars and then moved to Earth.
Earth was, in a sense, seeded by a Martian civilization, and that is why we have similar structures on Mars and on planet Earth.
COLLINS: So, with the discovery of the Face on Mars, is it possible that it's acting as a clue, it's telling us that, somewhere here, is evidence of a lost civilization that existed on the Red Planet perhaps millions of years ago? That's a very tantalizing possibility, and it's one that I know that every scientist going to Mars wants to answer.
HAAS: Maybe these geoglyphs were all part of some global memorial that was built by some unknown extraterrestrial culture that, uh, has to do with, uh, human origins and is telling the story of where we came from and possibly where we may be going.
HENRY: You have to ask, is there something in common between the people that were making these geoglyphs, and the answer is, is that they all have similar stories in these earthly civilizations.
They're in contact with star beings, celestial beings that came to Earth and are assisting humanity.
They lived with us, they interacted with us.
Then they left.
NARRATOR: But is it possible that not all of the communications we're receiving from these otherworldly beings are in the form of geoglyphs? Could crop circles, for instance, be more recent examples of a type of extraterrestrial dialogue? CARLOTTO: If you bring crop circles into the mix, there are some very sophisticated crop circles that also indicate, uh, knowledge of fractal geometry.
There could be a message.
They might be communicating with us, and we might, perhaps, want to communicate with them.
CHILDRESS: It's possible that many of these geoglyphs, much like crop circles that appear every summer, might give us clues to our past and to our destiny.
TSOUKALOS: The fact of the matter is that we have geoglyphs worldwide.
And with the improvement of our technology, who knows what else we'll discover in the next five to ten years? We are entering a new era of discovery, and I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings.
NARRATOR: As we send more spacecrafts to Mars, will we continue to uncover evidence of an alien civilization that could have lived there centuries ago? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and believe that the human race is getting very close to the day when it will unlock what they believe to be an alien code and find a means of direct communication, a living link between mankind's past and its extraterrestrial future.