If looks could kill...you would be dead. Turned to stone with just one glance. This is the myth of Medusa. A monstrous female feared by all men. On the battlefield and beyond. But she will be challenged by a surprising enemy. Behind the story lurks a stunning reality. Is Greece's most famous monster inspired by a human corpse? And is her story based on actual science as seen on our night sky? Discover the hidden meaning behind one of the greatest stories ever told. The hunt for the head of Medusa. This was once a garden, now it is a graveyard littered with dead bodies.
Each face frozen in a moment of terror. The fatal moment when it gazed upon... Medusa. Her gaze penetrates right into your inner being and petrifies you from the inside out. The myth of Medusa has captivated us for almost 3,000 years. Today her image still commands instant recognition around the world. The Medusa that we often see depicted on vases features a woman with boar's tusks, snakes curling around her head instead of hair,
sometimes she is bearded, very often she's grimacing, facing us directly with her tongue lolling out of her mouth, her eyes staring straight at you.
In ancient Greece, myths made sense of a confusing world. Their stories recorded history, explained nature, and dictated how people should live. The Medusa myth was no exception. They teach lessons to the society and help them organise things. And I think the Medusa story gives us a window into certain kinds of values in ancient Greek society. It surely gives a sense of a rich portrait of men's experience insofar as they may well have felt, at some point in their lives, completely under the spell of some bewitching type of woman.
Medusa can crush a man with a single, penetrating look. It is a power that makes her nearly invincible. The Medusa myth awakens a number of fears in people, especially men. This image of the all-powerful woman whose gaze can't be averted, whose gaze can see right through you, to expose everything inside of you, that can freeze you in your tracks, and somehow devour you and consume you, I think men in particular are very afraid of this sort of strong woman. To the ancient Greeks, Medusa's deadly image was one of the most terrifying in all of mythology. But she was not always a monster. According to the myth, Medusa was once a ravishing woman.
Every man in Greece wanted to possess her. She's described as a beautiful woman with long flowing locks of hair, every suitor wants to marry her, she causes envy among everyone. But Medusa can't get married. She is a priestess of Athena, the goddess of war, and bound by an eternal vow of chastity. Athena is the patron goddess of the great city of ancient Athens. She's also a virgin goddess, sex is not a part of her world, she's actually beyond the reach of any male desire. Servants in her temple would have been expected to be virginal so they could devote their energies not to domestic issues and child rearing but to the goddess' service.
Medusa, the hideous image of evil starts out as a symbol of purity. This is the story, but could it be based on reality? Athena's temple is no myth. It still stands today high atop the Acropolis in Athens. The Parthenon. In Greek it means "place of the virgin". When it was completed in 430 BC it towered over the city of Athens. Any Greek city should have a great temple. It would be like any city in America having some kind of great sports stadium. So Athens being the most prominent city in ancient Greece, wanted to have also a temple that befitted its magnificence, and so they created the Parthenon. At the centre of the temple stood a colossal statue of Athena. Nearly 40 feet high, carved out of ivory and gold. It was one of the most impressive sights in the ancient world. In the myth, this is where Medusa's tragic fate unfolds.
Medusa's beauty is off-limits, locked away in the service to Athena. But one suitor will not let her vow of chastity stand in his way - Poseidon, god of the sea. Poseidon is this sort of very prominent, masculine power. He is the god of the sea and the god of storms and the god of earthquakes. Earthquakes don't creep up on you, they hit you very hard. If he was angered, even just a little bit, he could explode violently and really do harm to you. In a fit of raw lust
Poseidon makes his move. And ravages the virgin priestess. He raped her inside of Athena's Temple, a sacrilegious act. He stole from her her virginity. Certainly this would be a crime in any time of the world. Medusa is devastated. Her innocence has been stolen. Her life changed forever. She was a rape victim and so she was no longer eligible for ordinary marriage according to the mores of Greek times.
And she's no longer a virgin either so she wasn't able to be devoted to service to a goddess. For certain religious rites you had to purify yourself from intercourse so actually having intercourse in the Temple is desecrating that space. Hence Athena's anger. Athena is furious. But not with Poseidon. As a powerful male god, this is expected of him. In the eyes of Athena, it is Medusa who deserves to be punished. The victim is about to become the accused. Athena's one of the guys. She has this role that places her in the kind of male camp. She's going to side with the men. In a way, it reflects a society where they considered women more as property value. They recognised at some point that rape is necessarily harmful to the woman, but it doesn't seem in most of these myths that there's any sympathy at all.
And frequently, the female figure who is raped is the one who's punished. Athena will impose a devastating sentence on her shattered priestess. She will transform Medusa from a beauty... into a beast. Her new look will bear a terrifying resemblance to a frequent and real sight in ancient Greece. Human corpses. Medusa, mythology's heinous snake-haired beast can turn her enemies to stone with a single glance. Once, she was Greece's greatest beauty. Desired by both men and gods. But after Poseidon raped her Medusa's world changed forever. The Medusa story is a tragedy because she wasn't even the perpetrator of the deed, it was Poseidon who raped her in Athena's Temple, but she's then turned into a hideous monster.
In the myth, the goddess Athena curses Medusa without warning. She begins an agonizing transformation. Clawing desperately at her face. Her skin cracks and withers. And her long, silken hair becomes a writhing mass of poisonous snakes. Medusa's horrific transformation is almost complete. But there's one more twist. She's now gonna have to undergo the most powerful and gut-wrenching of all the aspects of her curse. She'll have to be now a person whose very sight turns the looker into stone. It's now gonna isolate her from all of human society. Medusa is now no longer have any interactions with anyone else. So what Athena has effectively done is consign this poor girl to a kind of solitary confinement for the rest of her life.
For the tragic crime of being raped, Medusa has lost her status, her beauty and her ability to look at anyone without killing them. Now, the final blow, she is banished to a remote and desolate island... for life. Medusa is now gonna live out this curse for eternity. And for all eternity, things don't really change. All that matters is that stone garden grows by one every time someone tries to come close to her. In the myth, Medusa has become a type of monster called a Gorgon. A name that comes from the ancient Greek word for terrible. The gorgon is this horrible monster. It's got scaly skin, huge staring eyes that can turn you to stone by looking at you. The earliest traditions that we have of gorgons mention Medusa.
Medusa becomes first a human being who's then transformed into one of these nasty beasts. In Greek myth, gorgons represent the physical embodiment of death. In fact, death is what inspired them. The broad, wide-open eyes, the marks on the face, the bloated face itself, the pulled-back skin showing the teeth and the tongue protruding was inspired by the sight of a dead body. In the days after dying, the skin of a human corpse begins to shrink around the various parts of the body. The face becomes grotesquely bloated. The eyes expand out of their sockets. And the tongue swells pushing itself out of the mouth. Gradually, the corpse morphs from man to monster. On photographs of dead bodies, you can see all these changes that are characteristic of the gorgon taking place.
This is one of the things that people today aren't so familiar with, we get separated from death very early. We have specialists to take care of dead bodies. But the truth is that in ancient times you wouldn't be insulated from this.
People would see this sort of thing. Death was everywhere in the ancient world. In fact, many other historical monsters are modelled on corpses. In the middle of the Aztec calendar you find exactly the same features, you've got exactly the same oversized eyes, you've got the broad nose, you've got the rictus grin, you've got the protruding tongue. You find it in Bes, in Egypt. In India, you find many of the same features on Rahu, the demon responsible
for the eclipse. In southeast Asia, Rangda, the demon that kidnaps children also has huge pop-eyes and a very, very long tongue scrolling out of her mouth. The prominence of this gorgon symbol in many different spots in the ancient world gives us a real sense of just how widespread these myths were.
In the story, Medusa is now a gorgon, the mythical face of death. But her physical transformation is only the beginning of her punishment. Her hideous looks will make her an outcast. But her petrifying power will make her a target. Because the warrior who beheads Medusa will possess the ultimate battlefield advantage. Her severed head will still turn men to stone. Men from all over the Mediterranean set out to slay Medusa and claim that power for themselves. One of them has more than glory at stake. His name is Perseus. And his hunt for Medusa's head is one of mythology's greatest adventures. The story of Perseus begins in Argos, a real region of southern Greece. In antiquity a lot of myths were situated in specific locations.
Now, this was important for the people who lived in those places. They could actually claim connection to one of these divine heroes. In the myth, Argos is ruled by a tyrant named Acrisius. The king has a problem. He has no male heir. The Greek world tried to retain property in families. And the way you retain it families is you leave it to the first born son or the eldest male heir. Acrisius' only child is a daughter, Dana๋. She has no children of her own.
So the King consults a prophetess to ask if she will ever bear him a grandson. Acrisius is told in prophecy that if his daughter ever had a child, that child would rise up and kill him. He finds out that the son of his daughter is in fact going to kill him, and he sort of freaks out and decides that he needs to prevent her from ever having a child to begin with.
This fear of generational shift, this fear of losing your power to the next generation, was real. If you had a kid and you had something worth taking, at some point you needed to keep an eye on the kid. Overcome by terror, the King hatches a plan to save his own skin. Acrisius had his daughter Dana๋ walled up inside of a tower where no on could see her. It was a pretty miserable existence. Dana๋ is trapped with no fresh air and barely any food. It is the King's way of killing her without getting blood on his hands. The King kept waiting for news that his daughter had died, and was very surprised that he never received news that she had died of starvation or thirst.
After a while, they begin to see lights on and hear noise and sound coming from the tower. So Acrisius went to see what his daughter was up to. The King enters his daughter's chamber and discovers to his horror that Dana๋ is not only still alive, she's a mother to a son, Perseus. Acrisius is stunned that someone accessed the secure tower and impregnated his daughter. But the baby's father isn't a mortal man. He is king of the Greek gods. Mythology's most prolific womaniser. Zeus. Zeus, who seduced so many women in so many myths, sees Dana๋ through the grating and falls in love with her. He comes down to her in about the only shape that could come through the bars, which is a shower of gold. He took the form of a cascade of gold and poured himself into the room and then was able to make love to her that way.
Zeus' shower of gold may have been inspired by a real natural phenomenon, one named after Perseus. Probably the most impressive and visible meteorite shower in the sky is the Persean meteorite shower. Certainly, it looks like a shower of gold coming down if you've ever stopped and watched it in August. You can see the individual streaks with the yellowish colour to them. In mythologies around the world women can be impregnated by various natural forces. It's not just the shower of gold that we have in the legend of Perseus, we have women and animals sometimes being impregnated by the wind. Or in various mythologies women become pregnant by the sun. Perseus is born both divine and mortal. A type of hero known as a demi-god. So this demi-god idea means that this person has some features that are very godly, some divine powers, but at the same time he is mortal, he can die.
I suspect that the Greeks invented this idea of the demi-gods because they wanted to reach the gods as much as possible. To create images of themselves that are closer and closer to the gods. To fulfil his destiny as a demi-god Perseus must first survive his grandfather's wrath. King Acrisius fears the boy will fulfil the prophecy he dreads and grow up to kill him. His first impulse is to murder both mother and child. But he fears Zeus' revenge. So he devises a plan to let nature do the killing for him. Acrisius decided to put both the mother and the child into a boat-like construction and throw them into the sea.
Dana๋ and Perseus have been left for dead with no food, no direction and no protection from the dangers of the sea. Meanwhile, on a dismal island beyond the waves, Medusa is adding statues to her garden of death. Warriors turned to stone trying to capture her head. She possesses a power every conqueror desires. Even real conquerors like Alexander the Great. Medusa's power to turn men to stone may have spawned the famous phrase "looks that kill". But the ancient Greeks believed her power could be used for good as well as evil. In their language, the name "medusa" actually had a positive connotation, it meant "guardian".
Her image was often used to ward off danger. She even appeared on the armour of some of the world's most feared warriors. Evidence of this can be found in one of the time capsules of the ancient world, Pompei. When they were excavating the city in the 1830s, archaeologists found a very large mosaic which depicts a battle between Alexander the Great and the Persian King Darius. And on Alexander's breast plate is an image of Medusa. The battlefield wasn't the only place where Medusa's powers were sought. She was also used to scare children. The idea was that you would put the symbol on the outside of your stove and this would prevent children from opening up the oven door.
Now, the Medusa was something that Greek parents used to use in order to scare the kids in order to eat their food. "Eat your food or I'll ask the Medusa to get you. " So it was something very horrendous, very horrible, mesmerizing, frightening. In the myth, Medusa has a price on her head. Warriors from across the Greek world travel to her remote island seeking to steal it and use its petrifying power as a weapon against their enemies. So far, all who have tried made the same fatal mistake. They looked at her, first. The ancient sources are relatively silent on what Medusa must have thought and she is just sitting there living out her life amid a huge panoply of stone corpses. You can imagine that it would have been a very strange situation. You've got little stalagmites of people all over the place, and there she is, all alone.
But never had the satisfaction of actually being engaged with anybody. So you can imagine Medusa living out her life, kind of waiting for the next person to waft into her purview and get turned into stone. But one hero is determined to break her spell. As Medusa languishes among her statues Perseus is coming of age across the sea. When he was a baby, he and his mother Dana๋ were cast out to sea by his grandfather, King Acrisius. Mother and son were expected to die. But Perseus' divine father, Zeus, protected them. They washed up on an island called Serifos and settled there. He grows up into a nice and strapping young lad, as it were, very strong, and also very strong-willed and very protective of his mother.
Perseus has a very good reason to feel protective. The ruler of Serifos has plans for his mother. The king of Serifos was not enthusiastic about having Perseus around, partly because he had his eye on Dana๋ who was still a young woman and beautiful and he wanted to marry her. The king hatches a plan to take Perseus out of the picture. He demands an expensive gift from all of his subjects and vows to banish any who don't comply. He knows that Perseus is poor and won't be able to deliver. Perseus, being a young man without a father and without a family, if you didn't have a father in ancient Greece, it meant that you were very much a kind of social outcast, didn't have any gifts to bring to the king. Perseus is cornered. If he is exiled, his mother will be forced into an unwanted marriage and be separated from him forever. He makes an impulsive decision...with deadly ramifications.
Perseus says, well, I may not be able to buy a great gift because I am poor, but I'm gonna do something that no one else has been able to do, I will bring you the head of Medusa. It's a suicide mission. No one has ever returned from Medusa's island alive. But for Perseus there is no turning back. It's a matter of honour. He can't get out of it. He has to bring the head of the Gorgon. If Perseus succeeds, he will return home a hero with the stature to challenge the King and protect his mother. But if he fails, he'll be turned to stone. In Greek mythology, the names Perseus and Medusa are forever linked. The consummate hero and the ultimate monster. It is a story that began here, among these ruins.
This is ancient Mycenae. According to legend, this once great civilisation was founded by Perseus himself. Mycenae was the greatest of the ancient city-states back in the Bronze Age. And it ruled sway over a large swath of ancient Greece. For millennia, it was thought that Mycenae, just like Perseus and Medusa, was a myth. The only surviving reference to it was in Homer's epic story, The Illiad. But in the late 19th century, a lost civilisation was rediscovered. Using Homer's epic poems as a guide, archaeologists in the 19th century were able to locate these great ancient citadels. And what an amazing adventure it must have been to find out that not only was Homer talking about something that existed but now they themselves were in contact with it as well.
Mycenae lies near Argos, the city where Perseus was born in the myth. Its ruins are a window into the people who invented the story of Perseus and Medusa. Ancient Greeks who used mythology to explain life's mysteries. The city structures were so massive later generations of Greeks believed they were built by gods. They would look at the ruins of those palaces and see monumental masonry. This was a kind of feat that they couldn't imagine themselves doing, it seemed like something that only heroes could do. It was from these ruins that the story of Perseus sprang. The hero remembered for building the city and taking on Medusa. It is the ultimate challenge. Perseus confronts it with the bravado of a boy who is eager to prove himself a man.
But he is woefully unprepared for the task at hand. Perseus has no weapons, no experience, and no idea how to kill his target. Another piece that makes Medusa so terrifying is that they wouldn't have had a real sense of exactly what she looked like. Anyone who had seen her before Perseus would not have lived to tell the tale. So all he knew about was that there was this monster that was so hideous that if you ever caught eyes on her you would be frozen and turned to stone. He stalked off and began his adventure, and it wasn't long before he realised that he had no idea where he was going.
But, as heroes often do, and especially heroes whose fathers are gods, he soon gets supernatural aid. Lost in the wilderness, Perseus does what many ancient Greeks would have done under the same circumstances. He prays... and the gods hear him. His father Zeus sends down a divine messenger, Hermes, who gives Perseus the jumpstart he needs, a pair of winged sandals. One of the things that Perseus has to do is travel long distances very fast. And being an era without airplanes here comes Hermes to offer a solution - those sandals with wings that he himself, as a messenger of the gods uses. So he gives them to Perseus, he wears them and he can fly through continents at the speed of... Well, faster than a jet.
Now that Perseus has a set of wings, what he really needs is a set of weapons. Perseus has everything going for him, I mean, he has divine blood, he's got great powers, he's been brought up to just on the cusp of manhood, he's ready to take on these nasty beasts. But he needs more, he's got to have technology. Hermes offers Perseus an inside tip. He advises him to locate the Stygian Nymphs, beautiful women who possess the magical weapons he needs to kill Medusa. The Nymphs are these female divinities who are associated with natural elements, and they inhabit them, so they are in springs, in mountains, they're in trees. They're typically the objects of deep and powerful sexual desire and from this we get the idea of a "nymphomaniac".
The whereabouts of these nymphs are a mystery. Only three hideous women know how to find them. The Graeae sisters. They had been old, withered hags since the day they were born, and they don't like visitors. Perseus must get them to talk so he can save his mother and survive his face-off with Medusa. It's a battle we can still see in today's night skies... if we look closely. Medusa, a deadly gorgon, has turned countless warriors into stone. But someone is still stalking her, Perseus, and he wants her head. His success will require more than boyish bravado.
Perseus will need a powerful set of weapons so slay Medusa. To get them he must find the Stygian Nymphs. But only three wretched old women know where they live, the Graeae sisters. They are very strange. None of them have eyes except this one that they pass between each other whenever one wants to have a look at something, so they need to share it. Their eye is very precious to them. The island of the Graeae sisters is a dark realm where even the Moon does not shine. Perseus uses his trustee winged sandals to get there. Perseus is not just a hot-headed brawny but he's also pretty clever. When he gets to the island he realises he should do some reconnaissance and find out what their weaknesses might be before he proceeds.
When he realises they only have the one eye and they're blind while they don't have it, he steals the eye from them as they're passing it around. The sisters fly into a blind panic. They're in a very abject position. It's like a beggar having his last farthing stolen from him. They're falling all over each other trying to get that eye back from him. Perseus has the upper hand. He demands the location of the nymphs. The Graeae sisters reveal that they live on the river Styx, the waterway that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead. Perseus has what he came for. He tosses the eye onto the sand and takes to the skies. This is the myth, but how does it connect to reality? This story, like many others in Greek mythology, may literally have fallen from the sky.
Since the dawn of civilisation, mankind has looked at the heavens to explain the past, present and future. An awful lot of storytelling revolves around the things that you saw in the sky, the constellations that you see. Certainly we know that an awful lot of myths were tied to the constellations. We have, in the 5th century, Greeks naming the constellations by the names of mythical beings. And at that time, people not only saw the mythical creatures up in the sky as symbols, as mere representations, but they actually believed that the constellations were divine. One especially curious pattern exists in the heavens.
A hero holding a curved sword and the head of a gorgon. This is the constellation known as Perseus. A celestial blueprint for the myth. But there may be more to this cluster of stars. It may also reveal how the story of the Graeae sisters originated. The constellations themselves did things that inspired portions of the myth. The second brightest star in the constellation of Perseus is Algol, which is a very peculiar star. In the Perseus constellation,
Algol forms a point on Medusa's head. It is known as an eclipsing binary star. It appears as a single point of light in the sky, but is actually two stars that orbit around one another. As they go they eclipse each other's light making Algol appear to dim and then get bright again. It is a three-day cycle that may have inspired the story of the three Graeae sisters.
Algol is very bright for a while and then it goes out further rapidly every third day. This represents the stealing of the eye of the Graeae by Perseus. As it tries to pass to the third Graeae, Perseus is in there among them and he steals the eye. And when he takes it, you can see it go out. Well, if you're a good storyteller, and if you kept track of this, you know when the star is going to disappear, so you can start telling your story when the star is still bright. And when you get to the part of the story where Perseus has stolen the eye you can point up at the sky and say, "Look, it's gone. " Algol's impact on the myth may not end with the Graeae sisters.
Some experts believed it also inspired the climax of the story. Medusa's gruesome demise. The myth continues. Perseus is in a collision course with Medusa. The odds are stacked against him. To take on the monster he needs the right battle gear. He finds it along the River Styx. The gateway to Hades where he encounters the Stygian Nymphs. They present Perseus with three weapons essential to his survival. The sword of Zeus. The shield of Athena. And the helmet of Hades, god of the dead. It reminds us irresistibly of James Bond getting all the fabulous devices from Q. Not only because he gets all these things to carry out his mission but because they have magical properties to them.
Now Perseus is ready to fulfil his destiny. And not a moment too soon. Back home in the island of Serifos a royal wedding is in the works, and Perseus' mother is the unwilling bride. Will her son slay Medusa and bring back her head before it's too late? And how can he succeed where so many others before him have failed? The secret lies in his shield. Perseus' dangerous quest for the head of Medusa has taken him on a journey over thousands of miles. Now his moment of truth has arrived. He stands at the threshold of Medusa's deadly lair. The gods helped him get here but the rest is up to him.
All that's around Medusa is rocks, very hard things, anything that would have been living would have been turned to stone, so it must have been a very bleak and desolate place. Perseus is frightened as he takes the first steps toward his fate. But they are not steps forward. The young hero is slowly creeping backwards. Perseus is very smart, and he realises that trying to attack Medusa head-on would be his own undoing. He'd be turned to stone. So what he does instead is gets his shield turn it round and actually approach her from behind. And he walks up to her backwards looking at her in a shield so that he's safe.
You can imagine the tension building as he gets closer and closer. As far as he knows, the shield will protect him. But he must not have really known for sure. Perseus cautiously makes his way through the lair. Eyes locked on his shield. The slightest misstep will prove fatal. At last, Perseus locks onto his target. Closes his eyes. And swings his sword. With one clean stroke the head of Medusa rolls to the floor. Her years of torment and isolation are finally over. There would have been great fascination for Medusa among ancient audiences and whether they were rooting for her or against her, there would have been a great sympathy for this poor person.
I mean, think about what she'd been through, and all that she'd lost, and the horrible life she was fated to live. And her end point is to have a hero chop her head off. It is a tragic end for a tragic figure. But Medusa's story doesn't end here. One of the remarkable things about Medusa's head is even after she is dead, even after she has been removed and stuffed in a bag, it still has the power to transform anyone who looks on her to stone. Medusa's unstoppable and terrifying, but those forces can also be harnessed, and Perseus' story talks about that. When the head is inside the bag then it becomes a weapon that can be used for good as well as evil. Perseus is now the owner of the most dangerous weapon on Earth. He can turn anyone to stone. And he has a few targets in mind. His mother, Dana๋, has been left with no one to protect her from the lecherous King of Serifos.
She's about to be made a queen against her will. For Perseus it is a race against time. As the hero flies home it becomes clear just how powerful Medusa's head still is. As Perseus is flying with his winged sandals back across to get to Greece, drops from her blood drop into the sand, and from this spring up hundreds and hundreds of poisonous snakes. Some nasty monsters in antiquity are so mean and awful that their blood actually produces other monsters. Medusa is one of those that have such powerful blood. The dripping blood from her head as Perseus was flying away was thought, in later tellings of the story, to have given rise to all these snakes that ancient Romans knew to exist in North Africa. In the myth, the royal wedding day has arrived.
The father of the bride has come from Argos. Perseus' own grandfather, King Acrisius. He has long feared the prophecy that his grandson would kill him. Perseus arrives just as the wedding ceremony is getting under way. When Perseus returns to Serifos and sees that his mother is about to marry the King, he becomes very angry. So he lifts up the head of Medusa and says, "King, I have brought you your gift!" One glance turns the King to stone.
His face frozen in an eternal scream. But he's not the only king who gets caught looking. Acrisius is also petrified. Dana๋ has been saved by her son. And Perseus has earned his place as one of mythology's bravest heroes. His death-defying journey has transformed him from a boy into a man.
Perseus is particularly relatable among the ancient heroes. He is cast out at different points along the way and only because of the extra love of his mother is he able to make his way through some very difficult times. He makes his mark in the world and he grows into his own. He becomes a real, true powerful hero. Someone that the Greeks can look up to. After he saves his mother Perseus presents Medusa's head as a tribute to Athena, the goddess who created the monster.
In the end, it is Medusa's original punisher who inherits her power. There's a poetic quality to the ending of this story as Medusa's head becomes the icon on the breastplate of Athena. After all, this poor young girl started off this great misadventure by running a afoul of that goddess. Athena has the first and the last laugh. Medusa's story has come full circle. Her myth ends where it began: In ancient Greece's greatest temple, the Parthenon. Above it, she and the man who took her life are forever linked in the night sky.
Ancient Aliens - "The Visitors"
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For centuries mankind believed that life only existed here on Earth, but today many scientists agree that we are not alone.
MICHAEL CREMO: Practically every human civilization that has ever existed tells us we are not alone in the cosmos.
GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: A long, long time ago, extraterrestrials came here, and through a targeted mutation of our genes, we became human.
DAVID CHILDRESS: We have, in theory, a worldwide civilization that has extraterrestrials interacting with it, and human beings, as we are today, who are possibly the genetic breeding of these aliens.
NICK POPE: If we’re being visited, they've probably always been here.
Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings. But what if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? And if so, why did they come here? And just what was their mission?
On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission reached its destination... and two men-- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin-- actually walked on the moon.
MAN: They've got the flag up now, and you can see the Stars and Stripes on the lunar surface.
MAN 2: Beautiful, just beautiful.
It was the first time in history that beings left their home and traveled through space to an alien planet. Or was it? Were we really the first creatures in the universe capable of traveling to another world? Given the vastness of the universe and the billions of years that it took to create our galaxy, is it so hard to imagine that such a thing might have happened before, perhaps thousands of times and over the course of millions of years?
BILL BIRNES: The ancient alien astronaut theory presupposes that thousands and thousands of years ago-- even before recorded history-- Earth was visited by astronauts from another world.
But if alien beings did, in fact, travel to Earth, why? Did they come to explore, to plunder, to study, to hunt, or to breed? When Armstrong and Aldrin explored their incredible surroundings, they found the moon a barren landscape. It seemed to offer little more than a lifeless oasis of rocks and dust. But in 1986, further testing determined that the lunar landscape actually contains a high amount of helium-3, an extremely powerful
nonpolluting, nonradioactive fuel source. Experts estimate that a single space shuttle filled with this material could satisfy all the energy needs in the United States for an entire year. Think of it. Armadas of spaceships mining the moon and other planets for natural resources. Could this help explain why Earth might have served as a destination for travelers from other worlds?
BIRNES: We'd go out there with robot mining crews and eventually human mining crews, mine those planets, extract the ore. Ships would come; they'd take the ore and bring them back. Well, if we would do it, why wouldn't extraterrestrials?
But if alien excavators did come to Earth-- perhaps thousands of years ago-- wouldn't there be evidence? Here, in what is now known as Iraq, lies what is commonly regarded by historians and archaeologists as the "cradle of civilization." Between 3500 and 1900 BC, the fertile area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was the home of the Sumerian people.
TSOUKALOS: The Sumerians were one of the first cultures that built actual cities with streets and a street grid, almost like New York City, where you have, you know, a square street grid. They invented cobblestones. They had a sewage system. They were taught in agriculture.
The Sumerians also invented the first known writing system by using cuneiform script on clay tablets. In the 19th century, archeologists exploring the ancient ruins of Nineveh discovered 22,000 of these clay tablets. When they were later translated, the texts described many stories similar to those found in the Judeo-Christian Bible. Virtually every story that's in Genesis-- the flood story, Adam and Eve story-- they all have precedence
with the ancient Sumerians.
In 1976, author Zecharia Sitchin published his own translations of the Sumerian texts in a series of books called The Earth Chronicles. According to Sitchin, the clay tablets describe an alien race known as the Anunnaki who came to Earth to mine gold.
TSOUKALOS: Zecharia Sitchin has essentially suggested that the reason why we were visited in the remote past is because the ancient astronauts' home planet needed gold for their atmosphere and that their gold content in the atmosphere was depleting, so they came to Earth in order to mine gold and bring it back to their home planet.
But why gold? What are the unique properties of this precious metal that might make it important and worth traveling through the galaxy for? I think, for extraterrestrials, gold would be an important resource just like it is for us. If it's at all like our society, one of the major things it's going to be built on is electricity, and gold really is one of the top conductors, and its malleability and its ability to make it into wires, use it in really small forms as nanoparticles is going to make it an incredible technological resource for any sort of life-forms that reach that level of dealing with electricity and technology as we do. One of the exciting directions is possibly as an energy source through properties called thermoelectric effects, where it can take heat and turn it directly into electricity. This would be obviously a very nice clean energy source.
With its capacity to create energy and conduct heat, some scientists believe gold may also be an invaluable asset in the construction of spaceships.
DENNIN: Gold actually reflects infrared light. Infrared is basically light that's not quite red, and so you don't see it, but we interact with it as heat. The radiation will interact with your molecules and make them vibrate faster and you'll feel that as heat, so it makes a great heat shield, partly because it's so malleable. You can make it very thin; it's easy to work with; and it has great properties for reflecting and heat protection. The only metal that really lasts is gold. Gold is indestructible. All gold from ancient times still exists today.
GEORGE NOORY: If you look at Zecharia Sitchin's theories-- that E.T.s came down from another planet in our solar system, which is on a 3,600-year elliptical orbit, that they were running out of minerals, and gold specifically, that they somehow needed to line their atmosphere with. These extraterrestrials, they just first measure our planet. And they have the instrument to find out: where on this planet do we find raw material?
NOORY: Through their incredible equipment, they find a planet that has this. It's got gold. So they decide "We're going to go there and we're going to mine." So they send some expeditions to planet Earth. All of a sudden they get here and the factions begin to say, "Well, there's a lot of gold here, "but we're not digging it out. What are we going to do? We need workers."
HORN: The story that came down to the Sumerians is that the Anunnaki were mining gold on the earth, and the run-of-the-mill workers complained, said, "This is really hard work and we're tired. We don't want to do this anymore." And so they had a big council and they decided to create a primitive worker called an Adamu. So they look at what is on this planet, and that is Homo erectus, and they say, "Well, they're not very intelligent
"and they're not going to listen to us, so we're going to genetically alter them."
HORN: The Anunnaki created humans as a slave species.
According to Zecharia Sitchin, the Adamu were the first modern humans. They were created by the Anunnaki 450,000 years ago when they genetically mixed their DNA with that of prehistoric man.
VON DANIKEN: They took one cell of one of these ancestors of us. They changed the cell by an artificial mutation. They changed the DNA code, what our genetics are doing every day. It's carved in their stone. This is not something made up. This is part of the Sumerian history.
HORN: They believed that the gods came down and created them, and they were their slave species. They knew that, and they didn't have any philosophical beliefs about the purpose of man or anything.
NOORY: If you believe Sitchin's theory that mankind was created by E.T.s for slave labor, all of a sudden it makes sense. And then when you look at the biblical terms of what may have happened-- Adam and Eve? Sure, they may have been two individuals back a long time ago, the beginning of time. But perhaps Adam and Eve were the first of the genetically created human beings.
Closer comparisons between the Hebrew Bible and the Sumerian texts reveal many similarities, not only in their stories, but also in their language. "Adam" is Hebrew for "man." "Adamu" is what the Sumerians refer to as "first man," the Anunnaki slaves. But do the Sumerian tablets actually describe an alien race, a race that conducted mining operations on a global scale? Thousands of miles away, on the African continent, ruins of ancient gold mines have recently been discovered. The largest concentration can be found in South Africa, where some excavations, according to scientists, date back some 150,000 years. They're in areas that have an abundance of gold right now, so it's very possible that they could have mined it. Now, the big question is, how do we know they weren't human beings that simply did that? Why the E.T. theory?
In many languages in Africa, the native word for "star" means "bringer of knowledge or enlightenment." Some African cultures believe that extraterrestrial beings have been visiting the earth for tens of thousands of years. Zulu legends speak of a time when "visitors from the stars" came to excavate gold and other natural resources. These mines were worked by "artificially produced flesh-and-blood slaves created by the First People."
CHILDRESS: Some ancient mines in Southern Africa are thought to be a hundred thousand years old or older. If humans weren't doing that mining a hundred thousand years ago, and making metals, then we would have to assume it would be extraterrestrials doing it.
Alien slave mines? Genetically engineered humans? To believers of ancient astronaut theory, these notions are not far-fetched fantasies or fairy tales, but facts, and they point to additional evidence of alien mining a halfworld away... on the American continent. Peru has long been known as "the land of gold." In ancient times, Incan rulers adorned themselves with it. And when the Spanish explorers arrived in the 16th century, they sent shiploads of their plunder back home to Spain. Gold was largely a valuable commodity because of being rare and easy to make jewelry, coinage. And if you’re looking at, like, the ancient Incas, those people are using gold as a status symbol. Many cultures thought it came directly from the gods. People thought gold was so pure, so wonderful, it must heal, and they would actually occasionally ingest pure gold. Certainly, we're discovering more and more, as we get better at archeology and as we can look into these things, applications that people have used. For instance, there is some evidence that ancient people had very primitive batteries, and this would be a place in which gold would be very useful because of its electrical properties and its conductivity.
It should not be surprising, then, to find archaeological evidence of ancient gold mines. But some sites have recently been discovered that date back some 50,000 years. All throughout areas in Peru, you see remnants of what could have been ancient mining operations. It's there. They go down, some cases, thousands of feet deep.
DENNIN: Gold turns out to be surprisingly easy to mine for, even though it's relatively rare. There's a lot of common techniques ancient people used, and some of them were used, you know, well into recent times. A lot of it, you know, involves using water, often, to change the properties of the rock around it. A lot of heating and freezing, and the gold will come loose.
In addition to gold, other ancient sites in Peru provide evidence that they were once mined for quartz, hematite, and red ochre.
DENNIN: They're used for different things. Quartz is incredibly common. It's basically silicone dioxide. It's kind of like glass. It's a great mineral; it's hard; but it can be formed into pretty sculptures; you could make quartz statues; you could probably even use it for money before you discovered minerals and gold. Hematite and ochre are much more valuable because of their iron oxide. And particularly ochre is important as a pigment, so as soon as you're gonna start having painting, cave drawings even, or any sort of art work, you need to make colors. And making color can be a challenge, and ochre is a great source of that.
Also located in Peru are the world-famous Nazca Lines. While the origins of these ancient geoglyphs remain a mystery, the area in which the lines are located suggests that a major excavation took place there, perhaps hundreds of centuries ago.
TSOUKALOS: At Nazca, entire mountaintops have been removed. I mean, this all requires machining. And I'm not talking, you know, a little wheelbarrow and-and a pick. I'm talking sophisticated machinery, because we today would also need sophisticated machinery in order to achieve such feats.
Could the vast flat plain located in the Nazca Desert be evidence of a gigantic mining operation, one that took place hundreds of thousands of years ago?
TSOUKALOS: Whoever comes here in a spaceship, Nazca would be like a beacon, as in: "Come here." Because the moment you come to Nazca, you're sort of confronted with a Cliffs Notes to planet Earth, where you have all sorts of raw materials that exist in that one particular spot in very, very abundant quantities.
NOORY: I think the Nazca Lines aren't evidence of search for gold, but they're evidence of some communication with possibly E.T.s, or gods, from above.
But despite the controversy, one thing is certain: the plain, and the lines that scar the surrounding countryside, are not natural formations. But while scientists and ancient astronaut theorists remain divided about who, or what, created the Nazca Lines, they are in agreement about one thing: the so-called Band of Holes, located in the Pisco Valley is a complete mystery. In the mountains of Peru, we have what's commonly referred to as the Band of Holes, and it is this Band of Holes that were carved or dug into the mountainside.
ROBERT M. SCHOCH: It's a bunch of little, shallow holes, dug into the ground, and it's had all kinds of explanations. Some people say it was just pot hunters, you know, looting, looking for burials. Some people think it looks like some kind of machine was running over the territory. Some people think it was some kind of systematic mining operation.
VON DANIKEN: They need raw material, be it gold, be it silver, be it uranium, whatever; they need something. And they send something down like a shuttle. It can be a robot. No extraterrestrial is on board. And this robot just caresses over the surfaces and collects and measures raw material, and disappears again.
The holes run about three feet apart and measure six to seven feet in depth, and number in the thousands. DENNIN: Often we see regular structures like that and we assume either a person or an intelligent life had to make it, but there's lots of examples in nature where the natural processes lead to large-scale what we call "pattern formation." You see it on a small scale in animals. You look at leopards and zebras-- leopards have spots; zebras have stripes. Surprisingly, on geological scales, some of the same processes that give you spots on a leopard could give you indentations in the ground and raised areas that would look like holes. It would take a long time over geological scales, but we've had a long time, and that might be what they're left over from.
Mainstream archeologists suggest the holes were used to store grain, but ancient astronaut theorists reject that notion.
TSOUKALOS: It's a mystery because who in their right mind would go ahead and dig all these holes? For what? The other intriguing aspect about the Band of Holes is that you can only see it from the air. When you stand down there, all you see is a couple of holes dug into the ground, and it doesn't really mean much. But if you’re up in the air, there is this long band with these individual holes that you can see, and you can conceivably create some type of message that can only be seen from the air.
But if ancient aliens came to Earth searching for gold, why did they leave? More gold still exists here, as do many other valuable minerals. Could it be that ancient mining operations were just the means to another possibly greater end? Or perhaps the real alien mission on Earth was to hunt the greatest prey in the universe: Man. Alamosa, Colorado. September 7, 1967. When a three-year-old horse named Snippy went missing, her owners grew concerned and went out looking for her. Their search yielded a gruesome and mysterious discovery. Snippys body had been mutilated... ...almost surgically. An examination of the carcass showed that her skin and flesh had been neatly cut; her heart and brain had been removed, and a formaldehyde-like odor emitted from the remains. An autopsy also revealed that her spinal fluid had been removed. The events of Snippys death stunned the community and remain shrouded in mystery, even to this day. Since the mutilation, an estimated 50,000 similar events have been reported around the world, most of them involving cattle. But it was not until about the middle of the 1970s that cattle mutilations really entered into Ufology. Farmers would come out and find some prize livestock that was alive and healthy the day before and then it was just suddenly dead. And it looked like it had been cut up in a rather odd way. That certain parts of the body looked like they were cut out in ways that seemed to be almost surgical.
Television producer and UFO investigator Linda Howe has been tracking the mystery of animal mutilation for over 30 years.
HOWE: I began trying to get to the bottom of what was happening to all of these animals. There were horses, cows, other domestic animals found with the same pattern of bloodless excisions. The law enforcement called them animal mutilations. 266-some Polaroids, from so many cases, and the first thing I felt was anger. And then I felt nervous, and then I felt afraid. I sat across from sheriffs who told me, "Linda, we're not dealing with predators, disease, "and satanic cults. We're dealing with creatures from outer space." There are several explanations for why aliens would want to experiment on cows. One is that they're just looking for food. One that they're looking for some kind of information about vertebrate organisms. Another one is that they're looking for some kind of genetic material for some reason.
HOWE: The closest answer I've ever gotten was from a man who had had very upfront, and close and personal observations of nonhumans in his work for the government. He told me, he said, "The best answer I can give you, Linda, is: It's a genetic harvest." But once you have said, "a genetic harvest from Earth," there's even a bigger question. Why a genetic harvest from Earth? What is being made with this genetic harvest? To what end?
The answer to these questions might be found in our ancient past, in the bizarre, almost Frankenstein-like experiments that were practiced by early civilizations. We have ancient descriptions from Egypt where it says specifically that the gods created these chimeras-- mixed beings, or hybrids. We find paintings where you have a human body with a cut-off head and a red tube coming out of it, and next to it, you have just the head of some animal. And in the next picture-- 'cause they're like... they look like comic strips almost-- and in the next picture, you see the same human body with the animal head attached to the human neck.
Incredibly, examples of strange human-animal hybrid beings date back to a time even older than ancient Egypt.
TSOUKALOS: According to mainstream archaeology, ancient Sumeria is the earliest civilization of humankind. And the interesting part is the fact that their earliest writings are filled with references of these bizarre beings that descended from the sky called the Anunnaki. Anunnaki means "those who from the heavens came."
But is there any physical evidence of these human-animal hybrids? If so, wouldn't we have found skeletal remains? The answer may have been found in Saqqâra, Egypt, home to that country's oldest pyramid. In 1851, French scholar and Egyptologist Auguste Mariette explored a deep tomb dedicated to the sacred Apis bull. Inside were two sealed and intact sarcophagi. But when Mariette opened them, what they contained was shocking.
TSOUKALOS: They opened the sarcophagus and they didn't find a bull. Instead, they found this black mass of what’s called bitumen, a type of asphalt. And inside this stinking mass, they found the bone fragments of seven different types of animals crushed up. According to the accompanying texts, some type of monsters existed during the time of the Egyptians. And so who knows whether or not the priests instructed the people to destroy these beings, to rip them apart, to crush their bones, and put them inside this stinking mass, and put them underneath a lid, in the sarcophagus, weighing 80 tons. I mean, all... in all of Egypt we can find mummified remains of every single animal, but we find these sarcophagi that contain these crushed-up bones. Doesn't that mean the ancient Egyptians did not want for those creatures to ever return after their death?
Of course, mainstream scientists and archeologists believe ancient Greek and Egyptian stories of animal and human hybrids are just fanciful products of the imagination. But are they? There is this period in pre-dynastic Egypt, where these demigods ruled. We have not found human remains. We do not know who they were. But we do have scientific evidence that at least the ancient Egyptians believed firmly that they ruled. As to whether they are just human beings, like you or I; or whether they come from somewhere else; or whether they are a hybrid being, we have no idea.
What if ancient civilizations possessed the advanced scientific knowledge of our own modern day scientists? What if they, too, had unlocked the mysteries of DNA-- cloning and gene-splicing?
TSOUKALOS: Why is this so fascinating? Well, because if you look at this from a genetics aspect, we're in the process right now today of being able to recreate creatures like that. I mean, this is Frankenstein. This is science fiction stuff. Yet, in ancient Egypt, we have the exact same descriptions, the exact same depictions of some very bizarre, hybridization program which took place thousands of years ago.
BIRNES: They are mixing alien, animal and human DNA, not just for ten years or 20 years, but for thousands and thousands of years. And that's why there are so many alien abductions, and that's why each generation is cyclically more advanced than the next, until we get to the complete union of two cultures-- the ultimate hybrid.
HOWE: I think the answer clearly is, we're not alone in this universe and we have nonhuman intelligences interacting with this planet for reasons that are still unknown to most of us. It leaves you feeling a little nervous.
If alien beings came here, as some suggest, to perform strange mutation experiments on animals, could they have done the same on humans? And if so, why? Life on Earth comes in a tremendous diversity of shapes and sizes. It can be found from the depths of the deepest oceans to the peaks of the highest mountains. But the vast array of life-forms we see today is only a small portion of what has existed on this planet during its millions of years of history. In fact, scientists estimate that 97% of all the species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct.
CREMO: Most scientists today will tell us that there have been six major extinction events that have occurred during the history of life on Earth. The most recent of these extinction events was the one that occurred 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Paleontologists attribute these mass extinctions to natural causes such as meteor strikes... ...floods and dropping sea levels. But another theory suggests that these extinctions were not caused by nature, but by alien beings.
HORN: In the ancient Sumerian texts, they can control weather, they can cause droughts, and they did this to humans. They are capable of producing their own disasters.
But were now-extinct life-forms actually exterminated in order to make way for other, perhaps more docile or desirable species? Was the intent to clear the way for colonization? Or invasion? And if so, what sort of technology would be needed to effect such a widespread change?
BIRNES: Some theories say that we have that technology now, called scalar technology. We heat up through high, electrical impulses, a certain spot on the water, and that creates a hurricane. And by making a path with that beam, you can track the hurricane. Now if we can do that-- and this is hypothetical-- if we can do that, why can't an alien culture say, "Let's create an ice age on planet Earth?" It will kill off the dinosaurs, but pave the way for aliens to implant human beings on planet Earth.
Did alien beings come to Earth in order to stay? Might they, as some believe, have seeded it with their own genetic offspring? If so, where is the proof? Some ancient astronaut theorists point to myths that describe gods coming down from the heavens in order to mate with humans.
TSOUKALOS: Ancient texts talk about the fact that whoever visited the earth in the remote past, these gods, thought that Earth women were quite beautiful. So, in many occasions, we find stories where those visitors essentially mated with Earth women. It was misinterpreted, misunderstood as something divine that came here. They were flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials.
Native American folklore refers to those beings who came down from the heavens to breed with Earth women as Star People.
NANCY RED STAR: The Star People are extraterrestrial people. They are not from this... this earth. They visit. They are star ancestors.
BULLARD: There's a great deal of interaction between them. Like some of the American Indian star husband tales where some woman sleeping outside at night looks up at a star and thinks it's very beautiful and would like to go there, and winds up finding herself in the morning being pulled up into heaven and meeting with the supernatural being who was associated with that star, and becoming the bride of the star husband.
According to Native American mythology, the brides of these alien beings would become pregnant and give birth to star children. They would be raised by the native mother until the age of six, when they went to live
with their star father. Similar stories of intimate encounters between celestial beings and humans can be found in ancient Hebrew and Judeo-Christian testaments often referred to as the pseudepigraph, or what many refer to
as the Apocrypha.
ROBERT R. CARGILL: There are lots of instances in the pseudepigraph-- these are the books that didn't make it into the Bible-- where people are visited by beings that aren't from this earth.
TSOUKALOS: Before the Bible became the Bible of today, there were many additional books that used to be a part of the Bible. They were removed in what was called the Council of Nicaea because those books contained too much information, dangerous knowledge.
CARGILL: In Genesis 6, where it talks about these watchers that are kind of angels that came down from heaven and had sex with the women of the earth.
VON DANIKEN: These strangers had sex with beautiful young girls on our planet. How can angels have sex? This is impossible. In our point, in our view, angels were something spiritual, not something who has a body, and has a feeling of sex. But they had sex. Our prehistoric ancestors could not understand, and they believe that these extraterrestrials are some kind of gods.
JONATHAN YOUNG: The conception of the Christ. An angel comes to the holy mother, to the Virgin Mary, and tells her that she's going to be blessed by God with a child. And then, essentially, she finds herself pregnant.
REV. BARRY H. DOWNING: There is an angelic reality point in the New Testament. And whether it be at the birth of Jesus, or his resurrection, we've got the possibility of other powers from another world being involved from the beginning to the end.
BULLARD: The more literal version is the idea that Jesus is strictly alien, which, of course, in a sense, he is as, uh... You know, even if you take him as the son of God, then obviously, he is not of this earth.
NOORY: I tend to believe that Jesus was a very spiritual human being who understood a lot of things that we're beginning to learn today. But it's also very possible that he might have been an extraterrestrial who came down to teach us things. That divine intelligence is very real in some form or fashion.
Tales of gods mating with humans are prevalent in everything from Greek and Roman mythology to Native American legends. In China, at the end of the fifth century BC, the country was divided into seven states, each ruled by powerful warlords who battled for territory and power. It was during this turbulent era when the legendary story of Huangdi first appeared.
YOUNG: A great god took the form of a dragon, came down to a hilltop where a young maiden was out gathering fruit. And as this great dragon came near, the sky darkened. It was like a storm. She was terrified, and she passed out. When she came awake again, uh, the sun had come out again, and the dragon was gone, and she was pregnant.
Much like the story of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, the story of Huangdi told of an earthling woman who would give birth to him-- the legendary first emperor of China who ushered in a time of great change. Gods deliberately bred with humans so that they could produce... they could get a race that they could trust and control a little bit better.
CHILDRESS: In my mind, legends and-and myths are based on something real-- while they have been mythified and distorted and exaggerated, in many cases-- but there is, in my mind, some core of truth here.
Another prevalent theme in ancient texts, myths, and religions is that of a cataclysm of some kind. Usually, these come in the form of an intense flood, fire, or other devastating catastrophe. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, God punishes mankind for their decadence and sinful ways. He sends punishment in the form of a great flood... which destroys nearly all living things on the planet, except for Noah, his family, and the animals rescued aboard his ark. Similar stories can be found in numerous ancient texts. Many of the mythical tales of most civilizations include some kind of idea that there are gods that came to Earth at some point. One interpretation has been that these are literal descriptions of visitors from space. Not gods, but some creatures of... with advanced technology that came to Earth in times past, and either created mankind, brought culture to the earth, brought civilization, and then, for some reason, departed, usually under some kind of breach between mankind and the gods.
Take the case of the once-thriving Mesoamerican cultures of the Aztecs and the Mayans. By the year 1500 AD, they had all but vanished. But why? Was there a natural disaster of some kind? Or is there another, more otherworldly explanation? At some point, it all crashed in a cataclysmic disaster. And the world, as they knew it, came to an end. And tidal waves washed across continents. Areas of the planet went underwater. And the egalithic building that was going on then, too, also completely stopped. And it's what we see at certain areas. Like in Peru, where giant blocks of granite have been quarried and partially moved to where they were going. But then it all came to a sudden, complete halt.
For nearly 3,000 years, the Mayan civilization thrived in Central America. Among their many accomplishments, the ancient Maya invented a remarkably complex and accurate calendar. According to scholars, the calendar started on August 1 1, 31 14 BC. The first calendar cycle ends about 5,000 years later on December 21, 2012. But why? Did the Mayans know something about mankind's future--something we have forgotten or chosen to ignore?
CHILDRESS: There's a lot of excitement being generated now about the Mayan calendar ending in year 2012, and if there is such a cataclysm or some massive Earth change that's suddenly going to occur. And so the idea that ancient people, like the Mayans say, were somehow totally in tune with this and had knowledge of these kind of vast cosmic cycles, which apparently led to cataclysmic changes on the earth, that's the kind of advanced knowledge that we wouldn't expect them to have. And where would they get that kind of knowledge? You would think that would have to come from extraterrestrials.
if we accept the notion that alien beings left behind the Mayan calendar as some type of ancient advanced warning device, might they have left other astronomical instruments here on Earth? And if so, why was it so important for ancient civilizations to track the stars? The stars. Since the beginning of time, man has gazed in wonder at the night sky. Stars became the stuff of legends, home of the gods and sometimes, man's final resting place. It is no surprise then that ancient man built monuments dedicated to these celestial wonders. When we look at ancient monuments around the world--these Mesolithic structures--we find that many of them are aligned astronomically to the sun, to planets, to stars. Numerous examples can be listed. Stonehenge is essentially an ancient astronomical observatory. Yes, it may have been used for ritualistic purposes. It may have been used for religious purposes. But it's very clear that it was also used for astronomical purposes, for observations. We're not surprised, whether it's Stonehenge, pyramids, or perhaps the Nazca Lines, that ancient people understood events that were going to happen in the sky, and when they would repeat.
But why was ancient man so fixated on the sky? And why did they construct elaborate stone monuments and temples in order to track the movements of the stars? Was it simply to help farmers know when to plant their crops? Or might there have been another, perhaps more profound purpose? Could they, as some believe, have been constructed as a type of extraterrestrial GPS system? Nabta Playa, Egypt. 500 miles south of Cairo in Egypt's Nubian Desert sits one of the oldest astronomical sites ever discovered. In 1974, archaeologist Fred Wendorf almost passed it by before noticing its small stone artifacts and toppled rocks.
ROBERT BAUVAL: It's a very strange site. It's just strange stone formations, circles, uh, stone alignments. Bizarre trigger lines with strange rocks and others.
Later excavations put the date of the astronomical device at approximately 5000 BC, making it close to 1,000 years older than the remarkably similar formation at Stonehenge.
BAUVAL: When they brought an astronomer there, they realized that it was a ceremonial site, very intensely astronomical. The intriguing thing about this site is that it shows that they were tracking stars over thousands of years. And to track stars over that period, they must have have been aware of what we call "precession," which means they weren't simply astronomers, or ancient astronomers. They were very sophisticated astronomers.
Could the people who built Nabta Playa 7,000 years ago have possessed an advanced understanding of physics and astronomy? One that rivals or, perhaps, surpasses our own? And why were they tracking Orion and Sirius? In 1994, the mystery of Nabta Playa took on even greater significance when Robert Bauval announced a surprising discovery along Egypt's Giza Plateau. The Great Pyramid contained four long interior shafts. Bauval determined that they were each precisely aligned with specific stars in the sky.
BAUVAL: The southern ones aligned to the belt of Orion and to Sirius, and the northern ones aligned to the polar stars. Again, this is very intriguing. In terms of construction engineering, that's-that's bull's-eye. As an engineer, I know that it's one thing building a pyramid. But it's another thing building a pyramid with that kind of precision.
Bauval also proved that the three pyramids of Giza were laid out in the precise order and position of the three stars of the Orion's Belt constellation. But what exactly is the significance of the shaft alignment and the layout of the pyramids themselves?
BAUVAL: I mean, we're deciphering a message. The question is whether it is religious or whether it is a stellar message. The fact is that what we have on the ground is an image of a constellation that we know now is the birthplace of stars. Literally, stars are being born there. And the Egyptians themselves believed that their gods had descended from the stars.
NOORY: That could be either a knowledge of ancient astronomy, or it could also be a road map to where these E.T.s may have come from.
But why were the ancients so fixated on the Orion and Sirius constellations? Some believe the answer can be found on the other side of the world in North America. Cholula, Mexico is home to the largest pyramid in the world. More than 3,000 years old, it is estimated that it took approximately 1,400 years to complete.
TSOUKALOS: Even though the Cholula Pyramid doesn't look like much because of the overgrown vegetation, it is in fact the world's largest monument ever constructed by human hands. In fact, the volume of the Cholula Pyramid-- the whole pyramid complex-- is 4.45 million cubic meters. The Great Pyramid in Egypt only has 2.5 million cubic meters in volume. So, the Great Pyramid at Giza is way taller than the Cholula Pyramid, but volume-wise, the Cholula Pyramid is, by far, the largest man-made structure ever created on planet Earth.
Originally built by the Olmecs in the third century BC, the pyramid was later added on to and used by the Toltecs and the Aztecs as a place of religious ritual and human sacrifice. But along with its history of bloodshed, an examination of the pyramid reveals that the ancient cultures of the region had a remarkable understanding of astronomy.
CREMO: It's interesting to consider what the Aztec people thought about its origins. They did not think it was built by humans, like us, which is our theory today. According to the ancient Aztec tradition, the Cholula Pyramid was built by a being they called a "giant." If you look at the Aztec cosmology, you'll see that these giant beings were identified with different celestial objects. The one in particular that is said to have built the Cholula Pyramid is identified with the planet Venus.
Both the Aztecs and the ancient Egyptians charted most of the planets in the solar system thousands of years before European astronomers. But why? And even more compelling is the fact that the two cultures were thousands of miles and half a world apart.
CHILDRESS: Mainstream archeologists are telling us that all these civilizations around the world-- in the Americas, on remote Pacific islands, in Asia and Africa and Europe-- that they're all disconnected with each other, and that there wasn't some contact with South America, and Egypt, or any of these ancient civilizations. But really, it has to be the other way around. All of these ancient civilizations were connected in some way.
But were these holy sites, as ancient astronaut proponents suggest, really connected to each other? And if so, why? Are they evidence of aliens coming to Earth?
MAN: Whoa, I'm getting a series of lights right there. I got it, I got it, I got it.
NOORY: These reports that we continue to get from people of E.T. visitations and craft, clearly points out to me that we're being visited. And we have been visited.
MAN: Oh, there it is-- over to the left.
NOORY: They may have physically left the planet, in terms of a civilization, but they-they're continuing to come back and monitor us for some reason.
-MAN: Dude, wow.
-MAN 2: They're back. -More appeared, bro. -Yeah.
If aliens are watching us today, what are they waiting for? Or, as some claim, have they already left messages for us in plain view? 90 miles west of London, in the county of Wiltshire, the English countryside remains pretty much as it has for thousands of years. Small farms, stone walls, and rolling green hills provide inhabitants with an environment of peace and stability. This historic region is also home to a large number of ancient sacred sites, many built thousands of years ago. It's an ancient, sacred landscape where most of them occur. There are monuments that you know about: Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill. This is one small area that seems to be a manipulated landscape that was done thousands of years ago where sacred rituals have taken place.
But in 1978, Wiltshire's tranquil landscape became the focus of a controversy that persists to this day. REPORTER: Today alongside the tracks of farm machinery, a new set of circles were found. No human tracks lead to the markings.
There, carved in fields of wheat, barley, and rye were elaborate geometric patterns. Even more curious was the fact that much like the famed Nazca Lines of Peru, the designs were only visible from the air.
TAYLOR: When you see it for the first time, you go, "What in the world is that doing there?" I mean, it's obviously not natural.
BULLARD: There have been cases that have been traced back for hundreds of years-- so-called mowing devil, where apparently some sort of a devil supposedly mowed a field in a single night. But they became recognized as a phenomenon only when these circles started appearing in English wheat fields. They were very simple things at first. And, well... but they kept occurring year after year, and each year they seemed to get a little more elaborate. One of the early theories was that there was some kind of whirlwind that was making them. But as they became more elaborate, they also became associated with paranormal activity, particularly UFOs. Some people said they saw a light in the field at night. And some people that... began to read that as a UFO presence.
ROBERT MOORE: This circle in a Wiltshire field is just one of 200 such markings to have been discovered in the last six weeks. To farmers and scientists, how they're formed or by whom remains a big mystery.
Not surprisingly, the region became the focus of intense interest from UFO enthusiasts and skeptics, each offering explanations as to who or what was responsible for this strange phenomenon. But if in fact, alien beings from another planet were responsible for the crop circles, why were they making them in England? Were they trying to contact us or were there clues embedded in the designs? And was the proximity to Stonehenge and other ancient sites of any particular significance? So you have the idea of these earth energies, and these ancient structures, and then the crop circles are appearing around them. And many of the crop circles appear to be some kind of signals and ancient writing. The crop circles are calling us back to a time before science and spirit got separated, when we were whole; we had a sense of wholeness. And here, they're landing near sacred sites
that are from an ancient time when we did experience those things. When I saw the first photographs, I was... haunted, actually. Are these extraterrestrials doing this? Are we dealing with somebody who knows how to bend space and time? Our entire relationship with the universe and quantum physics--in all of its complexities--has been pushed hard by crop formations alone.
CHILDRESS: Certainly it is one theory that extraterrestrials are trying to communicate in a big way through popular media. Crop circles do get in the newspapers all over the world. Perhaps that's what they want. These are being carefully designed. They're not accidental-- both, in terms of the shape, and where they land. These aren't accidents. There's a mind behind this that's making these decisions. Where is that mind? What kind of body is it in?
Scientists struggled to find an explanation for the phenomenon, until in 1991, two self-proclaimed British pranksters, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, came forward and proclaimed that they were the ones responsible. They showed how they could make crop circles in a single night using some very simple tools. And at the time, people said, "Well, that must be the explanation for it."
Nevertheless, some researchers remain skeptical that a single pair of elderly men could have created literally hundreds of designs in the dead of night with little more than a few boards and some rope.
TAYLOR: You know, it was very effective. You still will run into people-- "Crop circles-- oh, forget about them. "Those two old guys made a... come on, don't be so naive! "They-they were done by those two old guys years ago. What are you paying attention to them anymore?" Very effective piece of disinformation.
During the years that followed Bower and Chorley's confession, crop circles continued to appear in the English countryside and at various locations around the world. Some were inarguably the work of artists or jokesters. But after studying soil samples and grain dispersion patterns in the disturbed farmland, researchers concluded that it would be impossible for all of these designs to be man-made. Well, in what we would consider
to be a mysterious crop circle, where we can't identify it being made by people, the lay is absolutely beautiful, the lay of the crop. It's like a million carpet layers came down, and put these stalks of grain down, right parallel to one another. It's just a gorgeous thing to behold. When the hoaxers make them, they tend to be sloppy and messy because they're not... they haven't got that same force. They're doing handmade manipulation, which doesn't lay them down quite as beautifully.
In 1991, noted biophysicist Dr. William Levengood put forth a startling new theory. After spending ten years studying crop circle sites and samples, he concluded that they were created by a complex energy system, which he called a spinning plasma vortex that comes down from somewhere high up in the atmosphere.
HOWE: Biophysicist Levengood has now analyzed 350-some samples from crop formations in his career. Now, if Levengood were sitting here with me, he would say, "All I can do is, I can take you from the ground, "I can take you from the crops, up. "But I can't tell you what sets in motion "that spinning plasma vortex in the first place. It's still a huge mystery." The anomalous things that happen inside crop circles are in fact one of the indications that you're in a so-called genuine circle because indeed the weirdest things happen. Batteries fail-- brand-new batteries. People go in with cameras. Cell phones don't work. There have been people who have started reading all kinds of messages into these crop circles. Uh, that they have some kind of digital significance that you can read. There's a kind of numerology, and there'll be a kind of message. People are really reading something into it.
TAYLOR: In terms of who or what is delivering them-- we have no way to know that. We only have science fiction that tells us what's coming to visit us. So, we have to just speculate about where this might be coming from. We have to wait for whatever the source is to introduce itself to us. Are we dealing with time travelers? Are we dealing with spiritual forces from some dimension we don't understand? Are we dealing with advanced intelligences that are not even in this galaxy, that are from someplace else? And is this a form of communication? The conversations keep getting more and more complicated. Crop circles are contact. We are being contacted. Just because we don't have the bodies to shake hands with, we have the evidence that the bodies have left us. I'm absolutely convinced that crop circles are evidence of intelligent life. There is intelligence bombarding us, winking at us, waving.
Are these mysterious crop circles messages or warnings? Or might they have another, perhaps more profound, purpose? Could they be futuristic clues guiding us to our ultimate destiny or ancient symbols paving the way for our ultimate destruction? Belize, Central America. In 1924, British adventurer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges traveled here with his daughter Anna to explore the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Lubaantun. One afternoon Anna climbed to the top of a crumbling pyramid, hoping to see the ocean. It was high noon and she was at the top, and the way the sun came in, the way the rocks had moved in that there was just a small opening and the light from the sun went through and it hit the top of the skull, and she ran down and she's all excited. She said "There's someone in there with a flashlight."
Anna's father and others in their party were too large to fit inside the small opening of the pyramid, so they tied a rope around Anna and lowered her into the hole. When she came back up, Anna held the top of a strange crystal skull. A second search uncovered a matching jaw. The two-piece skull weighed 1 1 pounds, seven ounces and appeared to be carved from a single piece of rock crystal.
COPPENS: It's the only crystal skull which is almost perfectly humanoid. It's the only crystal skull which has a detachable jaw, and when I say "almost perfectly humanoid," the one thing which is missing is the sutures on the cranium. It has a perfect cranium. So it almost suggests that, even though it's a human crystal skull, those who were carving it somehow felt that this creature was not born. It somehow came into this world perfectly.
The skull's appearance created an immediate sensation among the local tribesmen.
HOMANN: When the natives saw it, it was like their god had returned. They all started crying and kissing the earth and everything. They were just so excited, and Mitchell-Hedges seeing this, he presented it to the high priest and they put it in an altar, and for 24 hours a day they burned flames around the-the crystal skull.
The Mayan elders believed that, in ancient times, 13 crystal skulls were buried in secret places around the world. Currently it is claimed that seven have been found. Four are in private collections and one each in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. All have been the focus of intense examination, speculation, and even worship.
SHERRY WHITFIELD: A lot of natives and a lot of people working with crystal skulls say that the high quartz content skulls and especially the quartz skulls themselves is the highest frequency or energy or vibration possible on the physical plane, and so a lot of native people kind of worshipped or took care of these objects because they knew that they had or felt that they had the highest energy possible on the earth plane.
But what are the exact origins of these mysterious crystal skulls? Since their discovery, scientific tests have determined that the two owned by the British Museum and the Quai Branly were not authentic pre-Columbian artifacts. Could it be that the Mitchell- Hedges skull was also a fake? In the 1960s, it underwent extensive testing by art curator Frank Dorland and the Hewlett-Packard Company.
HOMANN: They used the most advanced stuff that they had. They could not find any marks on it except for around the jaw and, I think, a little bit around the eyes-- the only place they saw tool marks using their techniques. At the time, Hewlett-Packard found that the temperature always stays about the same temperature, no matter if it's in hot or cold. It was carved against the lines of the crystal. If anybody tried to do that, it would break into a thousand pieces. It's made out of a high level of electronic crystal, and they're not really sure exactly where it came from. If you listen to the academics, crystal skulls are all modern fabrications, meaning somebody has gone on there with a wheel and has carved them as such, and this is where the big divide is between established academics and alternative researchers like myself, who feel that the academics are not using all the available evidence to draw their conclusions, and, in short, we believe that the academics are wrong in their conclusions.
Are these skulls really ancient artifacts? And if not, who or what carved them? Crystal skulls, according to certain stories, yes, they are alien artifacts. Even some people think they're made on another planet. (indistinct whispering) I think there are links between crystal skulls and extraterrestrials, not necessarily that they were carved and created by extraterrestrials. I've been told they were created by humans, but they were created specifically to hold records from alien civilizations.
Could there actually be some type of coded information stored inside these skulls? And if there is, how could it be retrieved?
WHITFIELD: There is a legend that there were 13 skulls and that when the 13 skulls come together, then something significant will change in the world.
TSOUKALOS: Legends suggest that there are 12 additional worlds out there, planets which are inhabited by intelligent species. Now, we belong to those worlds or to those planets, and our planet Earth is called "planet of the children." They also suggest that these 13 crystal skulls that allegedly exist on planet Earth were each brought here from one of those 12 planets... and the 13th skull is the one that apparently contains all of the information of all those 12 different worlds.
CHILDRESS: Within each crystal skull, information is stored, and in fact IBM has shown that, too, that quartz crystal can store millions of gigabytes of information, and, in fact, any quartz crystal or a crystal skull could hold much more information than any computer we have now. So when these crystal skulls would be brought together, they begin to interface with each other... ...and ultimately a greater knowledge and information is condensed and brought to us, and that's the legend of the crystal skulls.
But as ancient astronaut theorists maintain, why would visiting aliens have given the crystal skull to the Maya? To what purpose?
COPPENS: The skull is a very important motif for the Mayans. When you look around the Mayan monuments, you see skulls carved pretty much everywhere. They use it for some of the notations for calendars.
And it is the Mayan calendar that many people refer to when discussing the possibility of a new Armageddon. Are the skulls somehow linked to this? The current keeper of the Mitchell-Hedges skull believes they are. We've got 2012 just a few years away. All these different things are happening, the wars, et cetera, and I think the skulls are coming forward to do what they were... they were made to do.
But are these skulls the trigger that will begin the dawn of a new era? Or will they simply be used as a tool by some form of extraterrestrial intelligence to guide mankind to its next stage of evolution? If so, is this intelligence waiting and watching for the right moment? And from where exactly could it be watching us? If extraterrestrial beings do exist in the universe, where are they? That was the question posed by Enrico Fermi, one of the leading scientists of the 20th century.
PAUL DAVIES: Shortly after the Second World War, the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who was taking part in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, was talking at Los Alamos with some friends about the reports of flying saucers, and Fermi suddenly said, in relation to extraterrestrial intelligent beings, "Where are they?" And he was simply making the point that if there was a civilization somewhere in the galaxy that had arisen, say, 100 million years ago, then they had plenty of time to spread across the galaxy. Fermi said, "Gee, if there’s all of these civilizations "out there and all of these planets out there, where is everybody?"
The Fermi paradox, as it became known, was an attempt to explain the lack of evidence of aliens despite the mathematical probability of their existence.
CARGILL: Up unto this point, to modern time, no credible scholar, no credible scientist looks at any of the evidence that ancient alien enthusiasts put forth and say, "Yes, this is evidence of ancient aliens." No credible scholar does that. Moreover, the whole SETI project-- the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence-- it's been going on now for nearly 50 years. The fact that we have found no radio telescope evidence of extraterrestrials plays very much into the Fermi paradox in that it further indicates: if they’re out there, why aren't we hearing from them? And we don't seem to be hearing from them.
But in the 1960s, MIT astrophysicist John Ball rebutted Fermi's hypothesis with a controversial one of his own: the zoo hypothesis. The zoo hypothesis says that we are in a zoo, or a wilderness area, that they have essentially left alone and are going to leave alone to allow us to develop in our own way and at our own rate.
CROWE: Extraterrestrials have detected us on Earth, but have chosen not to come here, not to invade, but rather to observe us as we observe animals in the zoo. They've thought, "We'll do a study of those earthlings and see what sort of people they are." Now, why would they do this? Well, if on the one hand we have nothing they want, that's surely true. And on the other hand, we aren't able to interfere with whatever they're doing. That's also surely true. They're out there doing their own thing, and they're not paying any attention to us. And we're not clever enough to eavesdrop on whatever they're doing. That's the predicament we're in. We have something that is looking down and monitoring us. We are on the Petri dish and we can't get out far enough to see what's behind those eyes behind that microscope.
If aliens are watching us right now, where are they? Some believe they are sitting out in space in what are called "Lagrange points," named after mathematician and astronomer Joseph Lagrange, who discovered them in 1772. There are five of these points between the sun, the earth and our moon.
SEAGER: Lagrange points are points between two bodies where the forces balance equally. Think of, like, a seesaw when you have one really heavy person and one really light person. There's a kind of balance point in there,
and that's what a Lagrange point is.
DAVIES: Lagrange points is where we send some of our own satellites. And that's a point in space where you can just sort of sit there inert for millions of years if you had to without having to worry about in course corrections. If you go anywhere else in the solar system, uh, then in order to keep pace with Earth as it orbits the sun, you've got to continually change your position.
SEAGER: So people have talked about Lagrange points as a place where a spacecraft might hide out because you don't have to do a lot to stay in that spot. It's sort of equally balanced and you just get carried along.
TSOUKALOS: If an extraterrestrial race would have ever visited our solar system, they would have placed a probe in those specific points in order to observe us, to record us, what have you. So, I mean, this is not something that the ancient astronaut theory has proposed. This is, you know, university professors, astrophysicists who have proposed this.
Some argue that another reason alien beings have yet to reveal themselves is because they don't yet consider us worthy. This forms the basis of John Ball's jungle hypothesis.
BALL: The jungle hypothesis just means that if you have animals, such as ants, that live in the jungle, no matter how many of them you have, their chances of ever having seen a human being are very slim. Not because we're hiding or anything, but we just don't have a reason to go into the jungle and step on anthills. So, the idea is that we are probably related to advanced extraterrestrial intelligence similar to an anthill might be related to humans. And the fact that we've never seen any extraterrestrial intelligence is just we don't have anything they want.
HOWE: We could actually shake hands with something that might have been coming and going on this planet for literally thousands, perhaps millions, of years, and has kept a distance during the last age of man for reasons unknown, and maybe is waiting for us all to finally grow up.
CROWE: One thing that can be said with a great deal of confidence is that, if the contact is initiated by them, they are going to be not only superior to us, but greatly superior to us. They won't be just beginners like we are. They will be far more advanced than we are.
Both the jungle and zoo hypotheses propose that alien beings are watching us, but are, for the time being, keeping their distance. But what if they’re not? What if the alien mission was to integrate with our society in a way that avoids detection? If so, might they be walking among us right now? According to the ancient astronaut theory, aliens may have come to Earth for many reasons: to excavate, to breed, to conquer, or simply to explore.
MATTHEW F. DOWD: Certainly, we want to go out and find out about things we don't know about. We see the moon. We want to go up to the moon and find out more things about it; we see Mars, we want to go there. We want to go to Jupiter. We send out our probes. So, if aliens are something like us, then perhaps they have that same kind of motivation. They just want to go learn.
TSOUKALOS: Just like we exhibit curiosity, there are other species out there that have the same trait. It would be very egotistical to think that we're the only explorers in this galaxy. I mean, that would be a very sad statement to suggest we're the only ones with a brain and want to go out there and explore.
But while our own journeys into space have been brief and largely exploratory, could other beings, traveling millions of miles to Earth, have stayed? And, if so, might they still be among us?
CHILDRESS: Many ancient astronaut theorists think this all happened in the past and the extraterrestrials came here, did this and did that, and then they took off back to their own planet. But there's a lot of evidence to show that extraterrestrials who might have come here in the past, they've never left. They have bases somewhere on the planet underneath the oceans, inside mountains. In South America, there is very strong beliefs that many UFOs come out of lakes and underwater. And that Lake Titicaca and other lakes in Peru and Bolivia and other areas of South America have some kind of underground, underwater alien base associated with them. If aliens were coming to our planet, there seems little doubt that they would stop at the moon on their way here. The moon itself is kind of the eye in the sky. NASA says that the moon is apparently hollow. During the Apollo missions, the command module crashed into the moon... (bell clangs) ...and the moon rang like a bell for hours. There are craters on the moon which they cannot find a bottom to, and it's thought, by some researchers, that these bottomless craters are entrances inside our moon. The whole enigma of the moon gets weirder and weirder the more you know it. Was the moon actually brought here from another solar system and put into orbit around our planet? Biologists say that life on this planet could never have occurred without our moon. And the reason for that is that the moon creates the tidal effect. And without the effect of tides and this rhythmic motion on the oceans, life would never have begun on this planet. In my mind, the evidence is there that the moon is a gigantic spaceship... in orbit around our planet. It's occupied by some extraterrestrial race. In many ways, it's much like the George Lucas Death Star concept in Star Wars where they're building this artificial moon that's capable, with technology, of actually destroying a planet.
But if alien beings are using the moon as some sort of satellite for Earth observation, why? What would be the purpose? And where is the proof?
RED STAR: They would like to see us evolve. You know, they are great masters, great... um, avatars. They are very high. And so are we. And we need to live up to our potential. We really need to live up to our potential for all people.
HOWE: And today, we are living still, as if we are alone in the universe while hundreds and thousands of people are seeing unusual craft in the skies as they did 5,000 years ago. And so, in a way, the idea that the ancient aliens
would finally be coming around full circle all the way into the 21st century... us trying to push open a truth that governments have suppressed in the 20th century, is really very ironic.
There are many diverse and conflicting theories concerning the idea that alien astronauts have been visiting the earth for centuries. But perhaps the proof lies in the most obvious place of all: right within ourselves.
VON DANIKEN: Somewhere in our genes it is coded that extra terrestrials were here thousands of years ago. And it takes a certain time before this message is open to us, maybe in the brain.
NOORY: I don't believe extraterrestrials, E.T.s, ancient astronauts are the missing link. I think what they very well could be, they may be the beginning of the link-- the link that helped genetically alter human beings, the link that jump-started our civilization the way we are today. It's very possible they came down here and saw some creature, and they said, "You know what? "We're going to jump-start this. "It may take another ten million years for this thing to become smart and intelligent." So they created us. And we're smart and intelligent now, aren't we?
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