Ancient Aliens s16e04 Episode Script

1 Enormous humanoid figures descending from the stars.
We have in our ancient midrashic teachings that when the adamic race descended to earth, they were beings approximately 100 feet tall.
Massive structures built with stones weighing thousands of pounds.
Cyclopean architecture is associated with the cyclopes, the one-eyed giants.
It really indicates something that's almost impossible to make.
Some of these blocks, I've heard, are up to 30 tons each? Yes.
I mean, this is incredible.
Mysterious tombs said to contain gigantic skeletons.
I personally went there, measured the tombs myself.
Even in the smaller tombs, you could fit a nine-to 12-foot giant.
Could the ancient legends of giants in the mediterranean really be true? The giants were a fact.
They did exist.
You have the stories of giants, you have structures that are incredible, and you have to wonder, what are their origins? 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.
The mediterranean.
This majestic inland sea, spanning nearly one million square miles, has been dubbed the "incubator of western civilization.
" its temperate climate and fertile soil enabled the rise of some of the greatest civilizations on earth, including the mesopotamians, egyptians, persians, phoenicians, greeks and romans.
Throughout the mediterranean, there were great civilizations.
Their art, their philosophy, their scientific findings, the accumulative knowledge is this strong connection to the ancient roots of western civilization.
It's really earth-shattering how sophisticated the ancient mediterranean cultures were in their understanding of astronomy and astrology and mathematics, going all the way back to the babylonians.
Each civilization developed innovations that shaped the modern world.
Mesopotamian astronomers devised the 12-month calendar.
Phoenician sailors pioneered celestial navigation.
Greek philosophers established the principles of democratic government and trial by jury.
Each culture had the written word, the arts, and, curiously, stories of giants.
There are legends of giants that appear throughout the mediterranean.
The roman historian dio cassius wrote that giants roamed the land before mount vesuvius erupted.
We call them mythology, but they were seen as truth at the time.
There are these stories of humans interacting with these giants, and they're often in conflict with them in the greek tales of the gigantomachy.
There is a story of the gigantomachy, a great battle between the olympians and the race of giants.
Giants play a major role in the earliest greek stories.
In the gigantomachy, these strange, enormous figures, who are neither gods nor humans, are battling for control of the heavens.
The giants were actually descendants of the titans.
Um, oftentimes, people confuse the two.
But the giants were said to have been born from gaia and uranus, and this is where the name derives.
Hercules was pivotal in the gods overcoming the giants in the gigantomachia.
Hercules' victory over the giants was called the pompeii, and the ancient city of pompeii is said to have been named for it.
Stories of giants can be found in the traditions of ancient cultures throughout the world.
Native tribes of the american southwest told of a race of red-haired giants curiously similar to the accounts of the celtic people of europe, who described red-haired giants called the tuatha dé danann.
In india, early sanskrit texts portray buddha as a nine-foot-tall, blue-skinned giant.
And on easter island, local traditions have it that the enormous stone moai statues were erected by giants.
But as far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, the incredible volume of stories found in the mediterranean, and the details contained within them, may indicate that this part of the world was an arrival point for actual giant beings that came to earth from another planet.
We have a great concentration of these stories in the mediterranean area.
You have them in greece, in Italy and in ancient sumeria.
So the idea that at some point giants roamed the land, you have to wonder, who were these giants? What are their origins? If actual giants once lived alongside humans, as some ancient texts suggest, did they leave behind any physical evidence of their presence on earth? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest the answer might be found by examining another race of giants from the greek tradition.
In the 7th century bc, the poet hesiod wrote about the cyclopes, a group of giants responsible for building incredible structures out of stone.
Now, the cyclopes were one-eyed giants.
They are builders.
They are craftsmen.
They can make things.
They make armor.
They make weapons.
They're able to build walls and gates, and these are very important divine figures.
In the mediterranean, there are structures thought to have been built by giants.
One of those is the lion's gate in mycenae.
This is said to have been built by the cyclopes.
And the reason for this is, one, because of the architecture of it It's called "cyclopean masonry," which are usually large stones placed upon each other.
Could real-life giants have built structures in the mediterranean that have survived the ravages of time and still stand to this day? As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.
And not just one or two But thousands.
In the middle of the mediterranean sea, just south of sicily, lie the islands of malta.
With three inhabited islands covering an area of roughly 120 square miles, it is one of the smallest countries in the world.
But this tiny nation boasts no less than seven enormous megalithic structures, containing some of the most massive freestanding stones in the world.
Malta is an incredible place, because there we have some of the biggest megalithic sites in all of europe.
The temples on malta and gozo are more than a thousand years older than the pyramids of egypt.
They are the earliest monumental architecture in the world.
Looks very much as if that architecture developed right here in malta.
Mainstream historians believe the first inhabitants of malta traveled from sicily in 5200 bc.
Today, the stone structures erected on the maltese islands are considered by archeologists to be among the greatest creations of ancient builders found anywhere on earth.
One of the oldest megalithic sites in europe is a place called ggantija on the maltese island of gozo, and this was actually the oldest free-standing temple in the world before gobekli tepe was discovered.
At the time that the ggantija temples were built, about 3500 bc, there was no one else in the world doing anything like this.
Some of the walls of ggantija temple are more than 20 feet high Still standing, have never fallen.
There's very little in the world that could survive for 5,000 years the way ggantija has.
While a structure lasting 5,000 years is astonishing, many believe these megalithic buildings could be far older.
But mainstream historians are unable to explain how the ancient builders were able to precisely arrange the massive stones Each weighing over 20 tons Before metal tools, or even the wheel, had been invented.
Modern cranes cannot lift that today.
It would appear that the builders at malta had some special technology that is probably beyond our own capabilities.
"ggantija" is translated from the maltese into "place of the giants," or "place made by giants.
" it's always been called that.
It was said to have been built by a giant goddess, sunsuna, who built it while nursing an infant.
In malta, the archaeologists agree with the local legends that the giants built the ancient structures of malta.
And who were those giants? These are not gods.
These are false gods.
They're extraterrestrials, if you will.
Was the mediterranean home to a race of colossal beings thousands of years ago? And if so, were they born of this earth, or did they come from somewhere else? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining another mysterious megalithic structure on malta, one that has a very specific cosmic connection.
Qrendi, malta located on the rugged south coast of the main island, this historic village is home to a mysterious megalithic temple called mnajdra.
This complex consists of stone structures that are laid out in the pattern of a trefoil, three interconnected circular chambers.
There are actually three temples at the complex of mnajdra.
The south temple seems to be aligned specifically to function as a solar calendar.
The temple is aligned so that the sunrise on the equinox, the two times each year when daylight and darkness are exactly equal, the sun rises exactly in the central corridor and lights up the whole temple all the way to the back.
On other times of the year, there are other stones that reflect the solstice daybreak.
Mainstream archaeologists estimate that the oldest temple at mnajdra was built sometime around 3600 bc, by the same builders who constructed the ggantija temple.
According to local folklore, these ancient builders were giants.
The idea of giants comes from the fact that it's so big.
There's no way that regular human people could stack all these stones up and create such mammoth buildings.
It had to be giants.
In 1992, university of malta professor paul micallef published a book that claimed mnajdra is thousands of years older than historians believe, and pinpoints the construction to 10,200 bc.
He came to this conclusion because based on the tilt of the earth at that point in time, on the morning of the summer solstice, a beam of light would have come through the main entrance of the mnajdra temple and been cast directly on the center of an altar stone.
The only way this could be achieved is if mnajdra was built specifically with the end effect in mind.
Over huge periods of time, the rising of the sun on the summer solstice moves to different parts of the sky.
And this is called the precession of the equinox, it's the earth's wobble over a nearly 26,000-year period.
If paul micallef's analysis is correct, it would predate the earth's earliest known civilizations by some 6,000 years.
So, how were sophisticated megalithic structures with precise astronomical alignments, built on an isolated island thousands of years before the emergence of civilization? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest the knowledge to do this was given to the people of malta by giants, who were not of this earth.
We automatically assume that extraterrestrials might be what we describe today as the grey aliens.
But more than likely we're gonna have be confronted with the fact that these species are far different than we've previously understood.
Astrophysicists are typically saying that the larger the planet, the greater the gravitational field.
And in theory, if some aliens are actual giants, uh, even twice the size of us, as an example, perhaps they're coming from planets that are actually smaller than the earth and has a smaller gravity and therefore, they grow larger than we are.
Could the megalithic temples on malta have been built by a lost civilization that thrived 12,000 years ago, possibly with the aid of giant beings who descended from the sky? Misrah ghar il-kbir.
Located on the southwest coast of malta, this region is home to some of the most baffling formations found anywhere on the planet, a complex network of grooves carved into the rock known simply as cart ruts.
The cart ruts on malta are about, uh, four feet wide.
They're-they're uniformly spaced.
Some of them run hundreds of yards.
Some of them run miles.
These parallel incisions in the bedrock have been identified as cart ruts because that's what they look like.
What they really were, what their purpose was we don't know.
There's nothing written.
There's no way, really, to tell.
But there are a lot of them.
In some places, they are so crisscrossed and complex that the area has been called clapham junction, after the train station in london.
Author gordon weston has been studying this strange anomaly for more than a decade and, in 2010, wrote a book called Unraveling an enigma, in which he examines the various theories about how they might have been formed.
So, gordon, tell me what you think.
Well, got a what, you got half a lifetime? Absolutely.
Yes.
Basically, you couldn't drive a cart down here.
The cart would be wrecked.
Early researchers looked at vehicles that would scrape away the rock, because that's what it looks like's happened.
There was three devices.
The first one was a sledge.
Probably the oldest form of human transport.
But they found that the sledge immediately got stuck.
So two other devices have been looked at.
Uh, one was the travois.
They're used by the plains indians to transport their teepees from camp to camp.
The problem is the poles would be wider than these ruts when they touch the ground.
The next device is called the slide car.
It's a load platform with two runners on it.
It's a fanciful and ridiculous idea.
Practical experiments and that It just doesn't work.
Science is useless for this problem.
There is no methodology which can be applied scientifically to these ruts.
So, in st.
George's bay, in a city called birzebbuga, there are a couple of ruts that go straight into the mediterranean sea.
- They are famous.
- You're-you're right.
It is interesting to see the ruts go into the sea.
They also are said to have come up on the other side of the bay.
But it's now built over.
So, how do you explain it? It might be that we're looking at a technology we don't understand.
The ruts go off into the sea.
Underwater, people have dived down and found them, miles away.
So, apparently, either the sea level rose or the land subsided or maybe both.
During the last ice age, the sea level was 300 feet lower.
So, it could have been that, 10,000, 15,000 years ago, the islands were inhabited by people who used these so-called cart ruts to transport, uh, stones across the island.
According to geologists, the last ice age ended around 10,000 bc.
Might the existence of these cart ruts corroborate the findings of professor paul micallef, who claimed the mnajdra temple was constructed more than 12,000 years ago? Perhaps even more baffling to researchers is the fact that these mysterious grooves are not confined to the maltese islands.
These cart ruts are found also in tunisia and in sicily.
So, they seem to relate to a people who are occupying all of those areas.
Might the so-called cart ruts be a remnant of a vast transportation network that existed throughout the mediterranean some 12,000 years ago? Could they be physical evidence to support the stories of giants? Perhaps further clues can be found on another mediterranean island, one that contains ancient stone structures known as the tombs of the giants.
Sardinia, Italy located 116 miles west of the italian peninsula, this picturesque island in the mediterranean boasts rugged mountains, arid grasslands, and white sand beaches.
It is also home to many mysterious ancient stone structures similar to those found on malta just 400 miles away.
Sardinia is probably best known for its abundance of structures called nuraghe.
And these are conical towers, usually truncated at the top, so that there's a flat base.
There are approximately 7,000 nuraghe that scholars have uncovered on sardinia, though that number could be as high as 20,000 or more.
These nuraghe are made out of huge basalt boulders.
They're stacked up into towers and walls and beehive chambers.
Archaeologists do not know how they were all built.
They assume that huge ramps were built to-to move all of this material, which, uh, seems unlikely, frankly, when you're there and you see it.
According to mainstream archaeologists, these structures were built by the nuraghe, a civilization that is believed to have inhabited the island nearly 4,000 years ago, emerging in 1800 bc and mysteriously disappearing around 200 ad.
Among the thousands of ancient structures found on sardinia, perhaps the most baffling to researchers are megalithic tombs said to have been built for giants.
There are nearly 800 so-called tombs of the giants found in sardinia.
And the reason why they're called giant is because they're remarkably long tombs, usually with stone slabs in them, and they appear extraordinarily large.
There is a lot of controversy concerning what these tombs were built for.
More specifically, for whom were they built? I personally went there, measured the tombs myself.
In the larger tomb, you could fit a nine-to 12-foot giant.
A nine-to 12-foot giant? Could the strange tombs in sardinia have once contained the corpses of actual giants? But if sardinia was home to a race of colossal beings, who were they? Cagliari, sardinia.
The national archaeological museum debuts its newest exhibit, a number of enormous stone statues known collectively as the giants of mont'e prama.
So, the giants of mont'e prama are very tall stone giants that were found on the, uh, western coast of sardinia back in 1974.
Uh, since then, there's been numerous excavations, and over 40 of these stone giants, over eight feet tall, have now been reconstructed from pieces that were found there.
The giants of mont'e prama are very strange-looking stone statues.
And what makes them so bizarre is their faces.
For all intents and purposes, the face looks like a replica of c-3po, the robot.
And the fact that archaeologists suggest that these are the replicas of the local population And they even call them the giants of mont'e prama You have to wonder, what did our ancestors try to carve? If these statues depict giants that once lived on the island as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, what might their strange appearance reveal about them? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining another of sardinia's ancient mysteries: The more than 300 stone monuments scattered across the island known as menhirs.
A menhir is a megalithic, uh, monument comprising of a single stone inserted in the ground, and it goes straight up vertically.
They're usually quite large and have a religious significance.
We find them all over the world, but the ones in sardinia are very interesting because they often have carvings on them of this upside-down kind of abstract human form on them as though someone is diving from the sky to the earth.
And there's been no explanation as to exactly what these represent.
Some people have suggested that they represent people descending from the sky and imparting knowledge.
What's incredible is that bird people or birdmen cults exist worldwide.
In fact, the further back you go in time, you see carvings and statues of beings that have wings.
Even earlier than angels, you have depictions of people up in the sky, fixed wings, like a modern-day airplane.
So, you have to wonder if our ancestors saw winged machines up in the sky.
If the giant statues found on the island of sardinia depict extraterrestrials as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, then is it possible that the menhirs are meant to reveal how these visitors arrived? For ancient astronaut theorists, the idea of giants descending from the heavens is reminiscent of the stories of another ancient mediterranean people: The sumerians.
This civilization, which existed at the same time archaeologists believe the menhirs on sardinia were carved, also wrote of enormous beings who came from the sky: The anunnaki.
The anunnaki are the so-called creator gods of ancient sumeria and babylon.
Our ancestors thought they were these divine, magical beings described as descending from the sky.
There's all types of wall reliefs and artifacts and inscriptions which depict the anunnaki standing amongst the other sumerian human beings.
They're always depicted as larger beings, uh, of great stature.
This is intriguing because on the island of sardinia is a huge, great, truncated pyramid with a long ramp running up towards it.
It's made of local stone, and it would seem to look extremely like a ziggurat from ancient sumeria.
So, were the anunnaki in any way linked with the gigantes legends on the island itself? Is it possible that a race of colossal beings known to the sumerians as the annunaki visited the island of sardinia in the distant past? And if so, might sardinia hold evidence that giants not only existed throughout the mediterranean but have extraterrestrial origins? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest further evidence can be found by examining ancient walls that still stand in what was once the very heart of the roman empire.
Ferentino, Italy.
June 2019.
Ancient astronaut theorist giorgio tsoukalos is in the heart of the italian peninsula, about 50 miles southeast of rome.
This area of Italy, known as latium, was considered the epicenter of the roman civilization.
Located 300 miles east of sardinia and 600 miles north of malta, ferentino is also connected to stories of giants.
Giorgio is eager to investigate the ancient city's massive megalithic walls, considered to be some of the finest constructions in Italy.
For expert insight, he has called upon local historian danila bracaglia.
- Danila? - Giorgio.
- Welcome to Italy and to ciociaria.
- Thank you.
This is, uh, beautiful.
- What can you tell me about this area? - Well, ferentino, where we are today, is actually known for these constructions of, uh, the megalithic walls, founded, according to the tradition, by god saturn.
Okay.
This is fascinating to me because this is one of the reasons why I'm here.
What can you tell me about the mythologies of saturn in this area here? So, the five cities of saturn are all a few kilometers one from another, and they all start with the letter "a.
" alatri, arpino, anagni, atina and ferentino.
The original name was atino.
The tradition says, you know, the towns were founded by saturn and the titans.
In greek mythology, the titans were humanlike gods of enormous stature who were eventually overthrown by their children, the olympians.
Saturn is the roman name for the titan cronus, the father of zeus and one of the primary gods of ancient rome, after whom both the planet saturn and the day Saturday are named.
The ancient romans wrote that saturn once reigned as an earthly king alongside janus during a golden age when the gods walked among humans.
Could it be that saturn and the titans are not merely the product of mythology but actually existed on earth and were responsible for helping to construct the megalithic structures found throughout the mediterranean? So, danila, where are we right now? So, this is one of the entrance gates to the town.
And here it's actually a perfect point where you can understand the stratification of the time.
You see the huge blocks from the pre-roman time, then smaller, uh, blocks in Built in the roman time and finally the middle age on top.
So, basically, you can see the The megalithic structure, then the roman, - and then medieval age.
- Exactly.
- Okay.
- And it's like reading a history book.
So, it's, uh, because here it's evident that people lived here for thousands of years and And they had different technique of construction.
Some of them, like the megalithic, uh, constructions, are lost, uh, so we don't know exactly, uh, when they were built.
Do you know if all these five cities of saturn - have the cyclopean walls? - Yes.
They have, uh, these walls, megalithics or huge stones, and some of them are better preserved than others.
I mean, this is incredible.
And this region is not the only place that has these walls.
For example, we have them also in greece.
But what's even more fascinating is that we have similar walls on the other side of the world in sacsayhuamán, peru.
So, from completely opposite sides of the planet, we have similar, if not identical, construction styles.
According to the ancient astronaut theory, saturn was one of the founding gods of civilization on earth, so the idea that this may have had something to do with an extraterrestrial visit, to me, is-is fascinating.
If the mediterranean really was home to giants, where did they go? Some ancient astronaut theorists believe traces of these giants can still be found on earth today hidden within our own dna.
Porto torres, sardinia.
October, 1953.
Excavators performing an archaeological dig in what was the roman empire's first colony on the island reportedly make an astonishing find.
In a place called porto torres, in 1953, it was reported that two over eight-foot-tall skeletons were discovered in the area with grave goods and bronze furnishings and other such things actually within the tomb itself, suggesting that indeed giants did exist in sardinia.
Full skeletons of giants have been unearthed in the soils of sardinia, especially among the nuragic ruins.
I interviewed two individuals who worked on the excavation of the nuragic ruins in the town of sardara, underneath the church of santa anastasia.
Both of these individuals dug up, at different periods of time, multiple skeletons of giants from nine to 12 feet tall.
Multiple giant skeletons, nine to 12 feet tall? Curiously, this is the same length of many of the so-called giants' tombs found all over sardinia.
But if such massive bones have indeed been discovered, what happened to them? Some researchers believe these findings have been deliberately covered up.
We hear these stories, but we don't have any evidence.
It's all been taken away.
For example, another account from the 1950s There was a gentleman who actually witnessed bones being dug up on his farm when he was a child.
And people in large black cars arrived, official-looking people, and took the bones away in the middle of the night.
When it comes to the alleged discovery of giant skeletons, does the fact that the bones have gone missing suggest a cover-up or a hoax? While skeptics say that many of these stories come from dubious sources, there is at least one discovery that was documented by one of the oldest universities in the world.
In 1892, it was reported that scientists at the university of montpellier in France studied bones that had been excavated on France's mediterranean coast, and found that they belonged to a human who stood over 11 feet tall.
So there have been numerous reports of giant bones, teeth, skulls.
The lack of physical evidence is quite frustrating, but I'm sure it will come out.
But if reports of giant skeletons are true, were these enormous beings human or something else? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest the answer may be hidden within our own dna.
Copenhagen, denmark.
A team of geneticists studying an ancient hominin called homo antecessor make a groundbreaking discovery.
This species was a close relative of the last common ancestor to humans and two other hominins: Neanderthals and denisovans.
It is just the latest in a series of incredible discoveries that have revealed humans not only shared the earth with at least eight other humanlike species, but even mated and produced offspring with them.
For quite a long period of time, many of us, myself included, thought that humans and other hominins, particularly neanderthals, didn't interbreed.
After 2010, when technology allowed us to sequence the entire genomes of several neanderthals and other species and modern humans, we began to see traces of a little bit of neanderthal mixture.
We see traces of neanderthal ancestry in europe, and we see it in asia, as well as in the americas amongst native americans.
Mysteriously, scientists have found one hominid is represented in human dna that has not yet been identified.
But ancient astronaut theorists believe clues as to what other ancestors might exist within the human genome can be found in the bible's book of genesis.
In the book of genesis, it says that the sons of god came into the daughters of men.
They created a hybrid offspring who are called "the nephilim," or "the fallen ones.
" they're referred to as "the giants" or "the mighty ones," and some believed they were between eight and 15 feet tall.
This is handed down not only in the bible.
This is also handed down in sumerian languages, that some of the gods had sex with humans, and the offsprings were giants.
Mythology is full of giants, and we have to look at these old myths with modern languages, change the word of "angel" into "extraterrestrial.
" in the beginning of time, extraterrestrials had sex with humans, and the product of this sexual contact were giants.
Is it possible that as geneticists continue to decode the human genome, they will find that among our various hominid ancestors is a missing link to enormous beings from another world? Ancient dna is perhaps, for me, the most important area of study in all of my work, because there is the potential chance here that we can find direct evidence of the ancestors of modern humans.
I suspect we'll find lineages of a race of giants.
Could it be that just like some humans have traces of neanderthal dna, there could still be similar traces of alien-human giants that scientists have yet to discover? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer is a profound yes, and suggest further insights could be revealed in early judaic texts, which give a curious description of the world's first man, otherwise known as "adam.
" The book of genesis, chapter six.
Placed just after the story of creation and the generations of adam and eve, this section of the hebrew bible contains a curious passage.
There is a very interesting teaching in older kabbalistic traditions that dates back to temple times.
Legend states that adam originally was, by our definition, a giant, that the original adamic race was not of the same physical stature as we human beings are today.
Some claim that the original adamic race were giants.
Is this a legend of symbolism, or is there something actual to it? Was the biblical adam a giant? Could it be that all of humanity is descended from a race that was of a much greater stature? And that there was a time on earth when giants were prevalent, and humans were the anomaly? When we look at the modern evolutionary cycle for human beings, it's still put on the shoulders of darwinistic views.
So anything that steps outside of those viewpoints is usually greatly challenged.
Mainstream science has had a very hard time wrapping their head around the idea that there could have been a lost race, part extraterrestrial, part human.
In mythology, the giants were a fact.
They did exist.
What we are missing are the bones of giants.
From time to time, anthropologists found some big bones, but then, other anthropologists contradicted it.
But definitely giants did exist in the past, and they were the result of a mixture between extraterrestrials and humans.
Do incredible megalithic structures, curious religious traditions repeated in culture after culture, and reports of enormous human remains represent the remnants of a lost civilization of giants? And if so, could these enormous beings have actually had a hand in the creation of humankind? Perhaps one day soon conclusive evidence of the link between humans and giants will finally come to light, and we will discover that within the mythological tales of our ancestors lies the true history of the human race.
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