Ancient Aliens S4E4 - English Transcript

NARRATOR: Volcanic eruptions... It will cover the sun for years. NARRATOR: Devastating earthquakes and tsunamis... And it's possible the extraterrestrials themselves are influencing some of these events. NARRATOR: And asteroids smashing the Earth, causing massive extinctions. What you're seeing is that this is done on purpose. NARRATOR: Have the world's worst global disasters been the result of nature's fury? Or have they been triggered by more supernatural forces? I don't think we can rule out the idea that this is the work of highly advanced, technological aliens seeking to obliterate the human race. NARRATOR: Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings. What if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? And could there be an extraterrestrial connection to some of the world's mega-disasters? NARRATOR: Japan. Friday, March 11,2011. 43 miles off the northeast coast, a massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake produces an explosive upheaval of the seafloor. 200 miles away, in Tokyo, buildings shake violently. Within half an hour of the earthquake, a powerful 30-foot tsunami strikes the northern coast of Japan... ...and sweeps across the landscape, reaching six miles inland, destroying everything in its path. (panicked shouts) Local officials estimate that over 19,000 lives were lost in the rapidly rising tide. MICHAEL DENNIN: Tsunamis are basically the name for a giant sea wave that's fairly coherent, has a lot of energy and will travel over a large distance. And it's really a matter of scale more than anything else. It's huge enough to cause huge amounts of damage when it hits the shore. These have to be generated by a large pulse of energy being put into the ocean. And the most common source of that is a massive earthquake under the ocean floor. FRANK BILLINGSLEY: They're used to earthquakes in this part of the world, but the fact that they had such little time, they just couldn't get away from it. So you can be a very sophisticated, first-world, developed country, you can be a superpower, and still have these kind of mega-disasters come your way. NARRATOR: According to Japan's Kyodo News Agency, in the days following the devastation, thousands of UFO's were sighted over Japan. If confirmed, what might this mean? DAVID CHILDRESS: It's interesting to note that when the tsunami occurred, there was suddenly an increase of UFO sightings in that area of Japan. So you have to think, well, are the extraterrestrials particularly interested in what happens to us in certain catastrophes and life-changing events that are occurring on this planet? And it's possible the extraterrestrials themselves are influencing some of these events. NARRATOR: But is it really possible, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, that otherworldly forces could provoke such deadly disasters? Crete. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, it is the largest of the Greek Islands. Here, in 365 AD, this once- quiet province of the Byzantine Empire was destroyed by a devastating underwater earthquake and subsequent tsunami. According to Roman historians, the tsunami also hit Alexandria, Egypt, and other cities along the Mediterranean coast, causing great destruction. MARK A. WILSON: The Crete earthquake of 365 was one of the great natural disasters of the Mediterranean world. So this was an earthquake that was probably an eight on the Richter scale. So it was very large. It produced a tsunami, and it raised the isle of Crete by nine meters. So it was an extraordinary event. NARRATOR: The ancient Greeks attributed earthquakes to the god of the sea, Poseidon. According to Greek myths, Poseidon was known as the "Earth Shaker" because of his power to provoke earthquakes, sea storms and tidal waves. WILSON: Ancient peoples would have ascribed natural disasters to the gods... as a really logical answer, because at first these events are deadly, so their lives depend upon trying to appease or please gods who control those things. PHILLIP COPPENS: Crete was said to be the home of the gods. There are caves today in Crete which we can visit which are identified as being the place where Zeus was raised from a baby to an infant. And so when you find that something is happening in Crete in early Christian times, you really have to ask whether this is somehow going to change the future of mankind. CHILDRESS: This may be the wrath of Poseidon, because what was happening at that time was the early Christians were struggling against a resurgence of paganism... ...and that tsunami came... to destroy, finally, all the pagan religion in the area. And so, modern Christianity became dominant. NARRATOR: But was the god Poseidon merely a figure of myth and legend? Or might this supernatural being have had a more otherworldly origin, as ancient astronaut theorists believe. CHILDRESS: Poseidon was always depicted as holding this weapon or instrument, his trident. And this trident could cause earthquakes and tsunamis. He could control the oceans with his trident. You have to wonder if this trident wasn't some high-tech, extraterrestrial device. MICHAEL CREMO: The weapons used by these Greek gods can be compared in some ways to modern weaponry. It's interesting that the United States Navy developed nuclear missiles for its submarines with the names "Poseidon" and "Trident." CHILDRESS: Perhaps this was Poseidon carrying out some sort of wrath on ancient Crete for finally rejecting him as a god. NARRATOR: Is it really possible that mega-disasters caused by earthquakes and tsunamis could be triggered by alien technology, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? And if so, might such catastrophic events have been provoked to change the course of human history? Perhaps further evidence can be found in modern military technology designed to use the weather as a weapon of mass destruction. NARRATOR: Haiti, January 12, 2010. (rumbling, debris clattering) At 4:53 p.m., a fierce 7.0 magnitude earthquake slams into the Haitian capital of Port Au Prince, causing massive destruction. It is the country's most severe earthquake in over 200 years. BILLINGSLEY: An earthquake that doesn't affect anyone is a natural hazard. When that natural hazard makes landfall, and affects a population, that is when it becomes a natural disaster. When it's a huge system that affects a lot of people with death and destruction, then we term it a mega-disaster. NARRATOR: According to local news reports, missionaries in Haiti videotaped a strange ball of light floating in the sky, less than 24 hours before the earthquake. WILLIAM BRAMLEY: UFOs have been reported throughout history, connected to earthquakes. Scientists used to disregard the idea of earthquake lights up until the 1960s, when they were actually photographed in Japan. Finally, they had to take notice that, yeah, there are strange aerial phenomena that go along with earthquakes. NARRATOR: Often referred to as earthquake weather, scientists have linked this strange phenomena to the geophysical activity that precedes an earthquake. DENNIN: Earthquakes are basically when the plates on the surface of the Earth move relative to each other in a sudden fashion. This sudden motion releases a lot of energy. BRAMLEY: If they were simply tectonic plates that gave off light, for example... a discharge into the air... they would burn out pretty quickly. But we are talking about bright lights that hover and linger. NARRATOR: Could the sudden discharge of immense energy really have produced strange lights in the skies above earthquake zones? Or might the lights and the apparent natural disasters have had a more technological origin? In 1996, the United States Air Force commissioned a secret study called the "2025 Report." In it, the military examined the feasibility of combat capabilities and tactics in the year 2025. NICK REDFERN: One of the areas that was seen as ripe for research, exploitation, and development, was the modification of the weather as a tool of warfare. People might think the idea that we can weaponize the weather is something just straight out of science fiction. The idea that we could pulverize whole nations just by modifying and exploiting the weather, and this is a verifiable report that is now in the public domain. So we do know that government and military bodies are significantly researching weaponizing the weather. MIKE BARA: Well, one of the big advantages of using weather as a weapon is that it's really difficult to prove who attacked you. The other thing is that weather itself can cause a heck of a lot more damage than weapons can. You could have, for instance, a powerful thunderstorm that could go all the way across the U.S. and cause basically nuclear- level destruction all the way across a huge swath. WILSON: There have been many attempts to control the weather during warfare, and one of the most famous attempts was in Vietnam. In which there was a real effort to seed the clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and create torrential rains. By flooding the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong supply lines, it would reduce their utility and choke off supplies to guerillas in the south. So, certainly we've had success in seeding clouds. NARRATOR: If the weather can be manipulated by the military to produce powerful storms, and even catastrophes, is this only a recent innovation, or is there evidence of the weaponized use of weather in the ancient past? Tales of a great flood destroying the world can be found in the earliest myths of many ancient cultures across the globe. Both the Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran describe an epic flood in the tale of Noah's Ark. JONATHAN YOUNG: God was unhappy with the people for their sinful ways, and as a kind of punishment and also an act of purification, sent the Great Deluge. Most living things would die in this except for a few birds and fish, but he told Noah very specifically how to build a craft that could survive the storm. WILSON: Noah is to collect pairs of the air-breathing animals on Earth, and he packs these animals and his family into the ark, and then it rains for 40 days and 40 nights and floods the entire Earth. And all air-breathing animals and people are killed. NARRATOR: In Ancient Mesopotamia, a similar story of a catastrophic flood was chiseled into clay tablets dating to 2,000 BC. Known as the "Epic of Gilgamesh," this early Sumerian poem describes angry gods that send a great flood to destroy mankind while allowing only a chosen few to survive. BRAMELY: The gods had created humanity to perform whatever labor they were supposed to do, but what happened was, according to the old Mesopotamian stories, human beings just started causing too much trouble. They became noisy. They became rebellious. And it was just time to wipe them out. And that's actually what's reported in those old creation stories. NARRATOR: But did such stories of great floods engulfing the world merely spring from man's imagination, or were they real? If so, might such devastation have had an otherworldly origin, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? REDFERN: If the human race in the early 21st century is now weaponizing the weather, why shouldn't aliens from some faraway world have already developed it? If ancient aliens were able to weaponize the weather, then I don't think we can rule out the idea that possibly some of these great ancient floods may not have been the work of gods, but could have been the work of highly-advanced technological aliens actually seeking to potentially obliterate the human race. GRAHAM HANCOCK: There are more than a thousand different flood myths from cultures all around the world, and the tendency has been for archeologists to say that that's simply because people's fantasies work in the same way. But I honestly think there's a Much simpler explanation for why the flood myth is so universal. I think it's a memory of what happened at the end of the Ice Age. What's much more mysterious is that coupled with these memories of global devastation, there are also memories of almost godlike beings with incredible powers and abilities who were caught up in that cataclysm. BRAMLEY: The deluge stories are really very interesting. What they all say is that the angels, the gods, whatever we want to call them today... they basically just got tired of humanity, where there's a wanton intention to wipe out, or thin out, the human race. GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: Right there we have a perfect example that maybe the extraterrestrials were unhappy with *** sapiens, and it is possible that they then created some type of a catastrophe, some flood to eliminate mankind. But it's also possible that benevolent extraterrestrials warned us about an impending catastrophe so that not everyone would be destroyed. NARRATOR: Could the mythic floods of the ancient past really have been the result of extraterrestrial influence? Or is it possible, as some ancient astronaut theorists contend, that aliens may have actually helped mankind survive nature's fury? Perhaps further evidence can be found near one of Earth's most dangerous places... active volcanoes. NARRATOR: The Republic of Indonesia, Southeast Asia. This archipelago, encompassing over 17,000 islands, is home to 129 active volcanoes. Here, in April 1815, the Mount Tambora volcano exploded in a cataclysm of fire, smoke and ash. The amount of material discharged into the atmosphere... estimated to have been 120 cubic tons... makes the event the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. With a death toll of nearly 71,000 people, it was the world's deadliest eruption. ROSALY LOPEZ: It had quite an effect worldwide. The year of 1816 was known as the year without a summer. And the reason is because very large volcanic eruptions inject a lot of ash and aerosols in the atmosphere, and they can actually lower the global average temperature. WILSON: A volcano on its own is not the disaster, but when it erupts and affects large groups of people, it certainly is. And volcanic eruptions have killed millions of people over time. NARRATOR: According to local religious traditions, volcanoes are considered sacred. And the Mount Tambora eruption is thought to have been the work of the gods. But why? Researchers believe answers can be found near the most volatile volcano in Indonesia today... Mount Merapi... a site believed by Java mysticism to be the center of the world. (rumbling) Strangely, this revered volcano is located just 29 miles from a mysterious ancient Buddhist temple called Borobudur. COPPENS: Whenever we are confronted with certain temple sites, some of them are obviously more interesting than others. But in this case, we have a very interesting location, because it is said that this mountain is the center of the universe. And you will always find that this is linked somehow in mythology with the ascent or the descent of a very important god, sometimes a creator deity or somebody else. NARRATOR: Built during the eighth and ninth centuries, the Borobudur temple was designed in the form of a stepped pyramid, and features a large round dome on top, encircled by 72 statues of Buddha, each seated in a bell-shaped enclosure called a stupa. Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, that the temple and stupas were built to honor otherworldly beings and their spacecraft that arrived at Mount Merapi in the ancient past? TSOUKALOS: There is no question that Borobudur was a place of pilgrimage that was built only because something significant happened in the remote past, in that specific area. The volcano was so huge for them, so incomprehensible, that they, over time, built stupas, all directed to the sky. Because each stupa, on that complex, represents a chariot of the gods, with which to actually reach outer space. COPPENS: This is a very specific shape for a temple. It's almost as if it is a flat-topped pyramid with something sticking on top there, as if something has landed. And then the question is, why did they construct it so specifically? Was it something which was visually remembering as to what had happened there, or what was still happening on a regular interval? CHILDRESS: All over the world, volcanoes often have some god associated with them who's controlling the volcano, causing earthquakes, causing devastating eruptions. And in fact, in Indonesia, the people there believe that there is an entire city of gods inside Mount Merapi. TSOUKALOS: When I read stories about ancient volcano gods descending or ascending from and into volcanoes, then I think to myself, are we really talking about something here that's a figment of our ancestors' imagination? Or is there some truth behind these stories? And the answer is yes. It was not some type of spiritual event, but it was where extraterrestrials descended from the sky in nuts-and-bolts spaceships. NARRATOR: But What is it about volcanoes that seem to attract celestial visitors? And might they have had the power to trigger volcanic eruptions? (explosion rumbling) The Hawaiian Islands. Here, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, lies Mount Kilauea. Spewing lava almost continuously since 1983, it is the most active volcano in the world. According to ancient Hawaiian legends, the volcano is home to Pele, the goddess of lightning and fire. YOUNG: She lives in the enormous volcano on the Big Island in her crater, and I've been up there. It's a big crater, and you can imagine a powerful goddess could live there. She has come from a place of the clouds, a place in the sky. And that's mysterious. We don't know where that is. NARRATOR: Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, that the origin of the Pele legend can be traced to contact with extraterrestrial beings? CHILDRESS: Just like the American military has hollowed out Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs, to create a secret and virtually impenetrable military base inside of a mountain, we have, in a sense, similar stories of ancient gods or extraterrestrials doing this to volcanoes, using them as bases. And if there was some danger of people discovering it, or people were building their homes or cities too close, these aliens could have their volcano erupt. TSOUKALOS: Is there something extraterrestrial behind those stories of volcano gods? Absolutely yes, because all around the world, our ancestors worshipped nature. There was a god of thunder... ...there was a god of rain, and even a god of a volcano. However, there was a fine line between worshiping nature and worshiping something else. And that something else was extraterrestrials. They were space travelers that came here from another planetary system. NARRATOR: Might some of the planet's most active volcanoes really have been home to extraterrestrial forces, as some ancient astronaut theorists contend? Researchers believe further clues can be found in one of the driest and deadliest places on Earth. NARRATOR: The Sahara Desert. Stretching across Northern Africa and covering nearly three-and-a-half-million square miles, it is one of the hottest and most formidable places on Earth. With an average rainfall of only half an inch per year, humans have fought a relentless battle to adapt to the harsh environment or die. CHILDRESS: Historians have often looked at the Sahara Desert and wondered what it is that created this particularly inhospitable desolate area of the planet. NARRATOR: But in the Algerian Sahara, in the region of Tassili n'Ajjer, numerous cave paintings, some estimated to date back as far as 8,000 BC, depict a time when the land was lush and teeming with life. But if so, what happened? CHILDRESS: The scenes that you see at Tassili n'Ajjer are totally bizarre. They're showing a Sahara that was once fertile with giraffes and antelope and other animals we find only in Central Africa really. And combined with them are these bizarre pictures of what even the archeologists have called the Martians and the spacemen. They have strange helmets on and suits. They look exactly like extraterrestrials. TSOUKALOS: The petroglyphs that we find there are incredible. They look like modern-day astronauts with suits, with helmets, with visors, and according to the legends of the Tassili region, the natives were visited at a time when a climate change was about to happen. So is it possible that the reason why we have these depictions of these ancient aliens is because they assisted the native population at the time of climate change to move into a new area of habitation? NARRATOR: Did alien beings visit this region thousands of years ago? And if so, might they have warned the local population of an enormous climate change... one that would trigger a vast migration? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer is yes. (drum playing) (singing) And for evidence, they point to the ancient oral traditions of a Western African tribal people Known as the Dogon. CHILDRESS: According to the Dogon themselves, they were guided by their alien fish gods, the Nommo, to this area near the Niger River where there's a lot more water. So they had to transit across the inhospitable Sahara to find their homeland... ...and their own explanation is that alien gods led them to this fertile area where they could establish their civilization. JASON MARTELL: The Nommos describe coming down in some type of flying craft. The Dogon Tribe gave some very interesting details, which sound like a UFO... a large spinning disc that made a lot of sound and wind as it descended to Earth and the Nommos appear. So, this is a very interesting story, which was replicated by many different cultures of seeing beings descending from the heavens to Earth. Were they gods, or were they extraterrestrials? (drums playing, chanting) NARRATOR: Even today, the Dogon believe they are the children of the Nommo, fish-like gods who came here from the Sirius star system. NOORY: The Dogon Tribe look up at the star system of Sirius, and they are convinced that they were visited here, and they were told about a star system, a binary system that we didn't know about for years later. I mean, how did these people know this? COPPENS: The Dogon have always been focused upon in the sense that they have this story, this information about their ancestors who somehow had this contact with this non-human intelligence. Now the question is, how did they attain this? It really might come from the Sahara Desert, from specifically culture pockets like Tassili n'Ajjer, and that the Dogon are descendants from these people. NARRATOR: Could the Tassili n'Ajjer cave paintings and the legends of the Dogon tribe really be proof of alien contact in the distant past, as ancient astronaut theorists believe? Perhaps additional evidence can be found half a hemisphere away at an archeological site near The city of Chifeng in China. Here, scholars have found 5,000-year-old stone carvings and other artifacts believed to have been engraved by a Neolithic people known as the Hongshan. CHILDRESS: The Hongshan people in China are known to have strange carvings, jade statuettes, showing long headed people looking very much like extraterrestrials. NARRATOR: But the most curious among the Hongshan's ancient carvings is this one... an image of what many scholars and archaeologists believe to be the depiction of a massive comet or meteor, similar to the one that did, in fact, strike this region around 3,000 BC. SEAN-DAVID MORTON: The evidence that we have that there was a massive catastrophe at that time, approximately between 3113 and about 3116 BC, is so fascinating. A whole team at Harvard and Princeton took a look, scientifically, at the Peruvian ice shelves there in the Andes Mountains, and they dug down, and they said there was a massive, planet-wide glaciation of the Earth, a gigantic catastrophe that froze wooly mammoths with tropical vegetation in their mouths, froze the entire planet at that time. NARRATOR: But how is it possible that these ancient people could have known of a catastrophic meteor strike that wouldn't occur for another 200 years? CHILDRESS: It seems like they were possibly warned by their extraterrestrial gods of this coming catastrophe and were able to leave and relocate somewhere else. TSOUKALOS: If we argue that this carving was done before the event took place, then somebody must have given them this knowledge, and in the ancient astronaut opinion, that knowledge was given to the Hongshan culture by extraterrestrials. COPPENS: The question whether this is by coincidence or somehow by some intelligence who's pulling the string of these meteorites and comets, our ancestors were absolutely convinced that there was an intelligence behind it. You might have certain comets which are programmed to bring life. You might also have certain comets which are programmed to bring destruction. NARRATOR: Might the Hongshan people, like the ancient ancestors of the Dogon tribe, really have received warnings of impending catastrophes from extraterrestrial beings, as many ancient astronaut theorists believe? If so, why? Did ancient visitors really want to save the lives of Earth's human inhabitants? Or were they trying to achieve something more, something that might forever change the course of human history? NARRATOR: November 8, 2011. A massive asteroid, a quarter mile in diameter, narrowly misses the Earth while passing by inside the orbit of the moon. It is known as a Near-Earth Object. MORRISON: It's a kind of wake-up call. It tells us that indeed these objects are real. They come very close, and someday, they may come so close that they would hit. There are probably a million near-Earth asteroids that are large enough that they could do significant destruction, by which I mean, if they hit a city, they would destroy it. They could kill millions of people. NOORY: An asteroid strike of significance, something big, could be devastating for the planet. It will cover the sun for years, and we'll go into an ice age, and we'll all starve to death. NARRATOR: According to mainstream science, one such object, an asteroid six miles in diameter, smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago, triggering a global catastrophe that forever changed the history of our planet. WILSON: The Chicxulub Crater is in Yucatan, Mexico, and it's the largest impact crater on Earth. And this crater is 180 kilometers in diameter. It's absolutely gianormous, and it represents an event that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago, and that's coincident with a mass extinction. And that's the mass extinction that took out many animals and plants... ...most particularly, the dinosaurs. MORRISON: Many scientists are still studying the details of the impact that produced the dinosaur extinction. They discovered the actual crater, the smoking gun, the remnant of that impact. From the size of the crater, we can infer how much energy. It was 100 million megatons of TNT equivalent. We don't have any other example that's that clean, but there must have been impacts like that throughout the history of the Earth. NARRATOR: Was such a devastating collision the result of chance, an intergalactic accident? Or might it have been a planned event, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? And if so, why? CHILDRESS: The reason that some kind of alien force would want to create the extinction of dinosaurs and other large animals would be to make the Earth safer for people. The idea of tidal waves and earthquakes, catastrophes causing mass extinctions, the Earth becomes a better place to live. We're able to have our civilization in a much more protected manner without having to worry about giant animals crashing into our house all the time. TSOUKALOS: One can ask the question, why would extraterrestrials do this? Well, the answer is very simple. We are their product. We are their offspring. WILLIAM HENRY: They treat us as creator beings, and we are their offspring, and they're able to make decisions about humanity based on their needs. So, perhaps their needs were satisfied, and they decided they didn't want humankind around anymore, so it's just as easy to wipe them out as it is to continue to perpetuate their existence. REDFERN: If aliens are visiting us, you know, and they're not necessarily hostile, but the very fact that there have been UFO sightings during earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, tornadoes... Is this a concern? VON DANIKEN: If you look at us humans from the religious side, or if you look at the humans from the scientific side, we look at us as the greatest. Something so gigantic and wonderful like humans does not exist somewhere in the universe out there. I could imagine that the extraterrestrials, one day, they have enough of our arrogance and ignorance, and they say we tried to teach now since centuries, but you still believe you are the greatest thing out there in the universe. So we have enough, and we punish you again. CHILDRESS: You have to wonder if extraterrestrials, with their super technology, haven't been involved in some of these catastrophes, actually creating them to change history. COPPENS: We know that our ancestors survived some of the greatest disasters. And on each occasion, there is always an intelligence out there who's willing to tell us and help us in making sure that we survive, and the question is, if something is going to happen in the future, are we going to be relying once again on the nonhuman intelligence to help us? NARRATOR: Devastating earthquakes and deadly floods, catastrophic eruptions and planet-crushing collisions... Are Earth's mega-disasters simply the consequence of natural events? Or is mankind simply a pawn in the great cosmic experiment, one engineered by otherworldly forces? Might alien forces be manipulating human history, in an effort to test us, to make us stronger? Or are they paving the way for Earth's future, a future where humans would no longer exist? Captioning sponsored by A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org