Original subtitles

[Narrator] It is one of the most unexplored places on Earth.

The majority of the Amazon

is still completely untouched by archaeology.

[Narrator] But now, the long-held secrets

of the Amazon are finally coming to light.

[Andrew Collins] We have pyramid platforms,

plazas that show an incredibly advanced

culture that completely went missing.

So where exactly did all of this come from?

[Hugh Newman] All across the Amazon,

they talk about these sky beings

coming down to Earth

and sharing knowledge about civilization.

[Narrator] Could the dense jungle canopy of the Amazon

be hiding an alien presence?

[William Henry] Perhaps it's going to reveal

the greatest understanding of extraterrestrial contact

anywhere in the world.

♪ ♪

[Narrator] Stretching over two million square miles

across South America is Amazonia,

a region of dense jungle,

mighty rivers,

and mysterious phenomena.

More commonly referred to as simply the Amazon,

this vast rainforest covers nine nations

and is home to more than 30 million people.

The Amazon is huge.

It's actually an area larger than

the entire United States.

In terms of trees, there are

16,000 different varieties.

Insects, 2.5 million.

And the flora and fauna there

is more diverse than any other forest on the planet.

It's almost impossible to imagine

exactly how vast and incredible it is.

It's very dense. It's very dangerous.

It's got rushing waters filled with dangerous fish.

It's got violent waterfalls,

trees that are so tall

they're hard to climb to see what's next.

[Narrator] The extreme conditions in the Amazon

make much of it nearly impossible to access on foot.

As a result, less than 15%

of this mysterious landscape has been explored,

mapped, or extensively studied by modern scientists.

But despite its inaccessibility,

the Amazon is home to hundreds of Indigenous tribes,

many of which have never made contact with the outside world.

Just within the Amazon itself

are over 400 Indigenous tribes,

and we know of 300 distinct languages they speak.

These people may have been around for thousands of years,

so we have an incredible resource here.

We have a window into the ancient world.

[Narrator] Many of the native peoples of the Amazon

claim to have inhabited the areas

they live in for centuries.

Like the Asháninka,

one of Peru's largest Indigenous groups.

According to the Asháninka,

their ancestors were taught how to live

in harmony with the rainforest

by celestial visitors who came down from the sky.

The Asháninka say that part of the creation

involved star beings

that came down and taught humans

essential things like farming.

This particular group

does sustainable farming very, very well,

and they credit these star beings with teaching them that.

[Narrator] Similarly, the Ticuna of Brazil,

Colombia, and Peru

hold annual ceremonies to honor the "people of the sky,"

who gave their culture the knowledge

to build a civilization.

[Barnhart] The Ticuna people honor those spirits to this day

through ceremonies in which they have very elaborate

body paint that tells the story of those original people

who came down, and those people went back up into the sky.

Throughout the Amazon, we find incredible

Indigenous tales of sky gods, star beings,

that came into the area to deliver knowledge

and then ultimately left,

and perhaps with a promise to return.

I think one of the reasons why many of these cultures

have these annual festivals is in order

to remember these things as a commemoration

of a real event, a physical event

that happened hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.

[Narrator] As far as ancient astronaut theorists

are concerned,

Indigenous peoples throughout the Amazon

share similar traditions because their ancestors

encountered the same extraterrestrial visitors.

But is there any physical evidence

that this could be true?

For decades, archaeologists proposed

that only small, isolated settlements

had ever existed in the Amazon rainforest.

But in the 21st century, new technology

has proven this notion to be entirely wrong.

[Narrator reads on-screen text]

The National Institute for Cultural Heritage funds

an extensive survey of the ancient Upano Valley

using lidar to penetrate the jungle canopy

and create precise 3D mapping of the forest floor.

Nine years later, in 2024,

archaeologists published the astonishing results,

which reveal a staggering 115 square miles

of sophisticated settlements

that may have formed an entire lost civilization.

We have at least 6,000 different structures

that have been found in total.

We have major, major structures

comparable to the Giza Plateau in size.

[David Cheetham] There is estimated 30,000 people

in this setting maybe as early as 500 BC.

And you have agriculture and settlement and urbanism,

all in a symbiotic sort of relationship.

[David Childress] In the Upano Valley,

we also have over 120 square miles

of canals and grids and causeways.

And this is a flood-prone area of the Amazon.

And so, when they built all these earthworks,

they were designed, you know, to, uh, mitigate this flooding.

So, that's hydraulic engineering.

[Collins] It was suggested in the past

that nothing could've built up

from a cultural perspective in the Amazon area,

but now we know that lidar

is slowly revealing civilizations that

we didn't even know existed until the last 20 years,

and that's quite incredible.

[Narrator] Around the same time

that these astonishing discoveries

were being made in Ecuador's Upano Valley,

other lidar surveys began taking place

throughout the Amazon region,

and uncovered additional evidence of lost civilizations.

[Barnhart] In the Amazon part of Peru,

they have now found-- thanks to lidar--

over 415 discrete sites,

and these are big sites.

They're not just little campsites.

They have architecture and they have roads.

[Collins] The Llanos de Moxos is a region of the Bolivian Amazon

that has recently revealed, through lidar,

pyramid platforms,

plazas, earthworks,

agricultural areas that show that there was

a structured society that completely went missing.

They're speculating that there were eight to ten million people

living in that region, in the Amazonian basin.

They had a technological know-how that far exceeds

any expectations, and quite frankly, far exceeds

what we see of the Indigenous peoples now or recently.

[Henry] These discoveries are a complete obliteration

of our previous view of the Amazonian people.

So, we have to ask the question, where did these people

get this extraordinary knowledge from?

We know almost nothing about these people,

however, the myths and legends of the entire area

speak of these sky beings that the ancient Amazonians

told came down out of the heavens

and brought this knowledge to them.

[Narrator] Could the recent discovery

that vast cities existed

in the Amazon rainforest centuries ago

indicate that the stories of the Indigenous people are true?

Were their ancestors able to thrive in this harsh environment

not only by their own ingenuity but also because they received

assistance from otherworldly visitors?

Perhaps further clues can be found

by examining a mysterious ceremony

held in Brazil centered around a figure who,

according to local tradition, emerged from a flying craft

wearing a space suit.

[Narrator reads on-screen text]

Along the banks of the Xingu River

lives an Indigenous tribe that has occupied this region

for centuries

and had no contact with the outside world

until the 1950s.

Known as the Kayapo, they continue to maintain

their ancient traditions passed down through the generations.

The Kayapo people have some really interesting traditions

that relate to their cosmology.

The men can often be seen wearing a vibrant headdress

covered in feathers representing the universe.

And they wear long ropes in their hair, which symbolize

the ropes their ancestors used when they arrived from the sky.

[Narrator] Kayapo legend says that, long ago, their ancestors

lived far away in the place where the Sun rises,

until one day, they climbed down to Earth on ropes

through a hole in the sky.

After arriving in the Amazon, the ancient people witnessed

an otherworldly being descend from the heavens

who they called Bep-Kororoti.

[Henry] To this day, the Kayapo people will reenact

a ceremony where young boys will dress up

as Bep-Kororoti and reenact what the ancients were encountering

Bep-Kororoti was a knowledge bearer, a culture bearer,

who delivered laws, who delivered knowledge

about agriculture, about navigation, and then left

in a thunderous rise into the heavens.

[Barnhart] The myth about Bep-Kororoti

among these folks is that he came down

from the heavens to give humanity all sorts of gifts

of how to do agriculture and hunting and things.

He came down in a very strong, fancy-looking suit,

and he had a very warrior ethos.

Bep-Kororoti means "being who came from the stars."

Now, according to the Kayapo,

Bep-Kororoti descended from the sky in a fireball,

emerged in this bulky suit out of this vehicle,

and he spoke their language and said,

"Don't be afraid. I'm here to teach you."

He was their first teacher.

He looks very similar to, like, a type of a modern-day astronaut

with, you know, the pressurized suit.

The story of Bep-Kororoti is one of the smoking guns

of the ancient astronaut theory

because it could be interpreted as a direct contact story

with an extraterrestrial

whom our ancestors misinterpreted

as having divine powers

because they misunderstood, well, the technology.

[Narrator] Could the Kayapo story

of Bep-Kororoti reveal that the Brazilian rainforest

was a place of extraterrestrial contact in the distant past?

As with other parts of the Amazon,

recent lidar surveys have revealed lost ancient structures

along the same Xingu River where the Kayapo live.

[Schoch] What we're finding

is that the Amazon was not as it is today.

Especially thousands of years in the past.

The Indigenous people were incredibly sophisticated.

It's really tantalizing.

And what I would say now is, we're just really

hitting the tip of the proverbial iceberg

as far as what was going on there.

How sophisticated were they?

[Childress] We've discovered, through lidar,

roads, mounds, and pyramids.

And with all of this landscape engineering and modification,

you have to wonder,

where did they learn this sophistication?

Where did they get the knowledge to do this?

When you look at the Kayapo stories,

it would seem that it has to do with extraterrestrial activity.

[Narrator] As far as ancient astronaut theorists

are concerned, the lidar findings in Brazil

help to corroborate the Kayapo story

that says their ancestors

encountered an extraterrestrial visitor.

And they suggest further evidence of otherworldly contact

can be found in the stories of other

Indigenous Brazilian peoples.

1,200 miles west of the Kayapo settlements,

the 652-mile-long Vaupés River

winds through dense rainforest

along the border of Brazil and Colombia.

Along this river

are the many communities of the Tukano people.

[Newman] The Tukano are almost

entirely isolated from the outside world.

But their society is made up of 17 different groups

that speak 16 different languages.

But what is interesting is that the separate ethnic groups

are strongly interconnected through their shared mythology.

According to their legends, their ancestors witnessed

otherworldly beings descending from the sky

in canoes of light or radiant discs.

The canoes are interesting because they're described

as being serpent-like,

and they would travel through the kind of sacred rivers

seeding different cultures as it moved through.

[Barnhart] When we're talking to Amazonian tribes

and they're describing

their worldview to us,

the translation is kind of lost in translation.

So they'll talk about things that are made of light,

but it's not necessarily a light source.

It glows as if it's from another place.

So that's what the Tukano canoes are envisioned as.

They have a glow. They have a spectral light about them.

[Tsoukalos] Now, we all know that canoes do not fly,

so why do we have stories of flying canoes?

Once again, according to the ancient astronaut theory,

we have an ancient description of modern-day technology.

These descriptions of these ancient aerial vehicles

were-were not derived out of fantasy

but because our ancestors witnessed these flying machines.

[Narrator] Do the stories of the Tukano and the Kayapo

provide further evidence that extraterrestrials

made contact with ancient civilizations in the Amazon?

Could the recently discovered ruins hidden underneath

the dense jungle hold evidence

of interactions with otherworldly beings?

Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,

and they suggest that an alien presence in the Amazon

was not only experienced centuries ago,

it's continuing even today.

[Narrator reads on-screen text]

Local police stations and newsrooms

are flooded by a series of extraordinary reports

of mysterious flying objects.

The reports continue for several weeks,

and on November 17th, the newspaper O Liberal

published the account of a seven-year-old boy

who was attacked by an orb of light.

[Henry] The villagers reported these

glowing orbs of light that were shooting

what appeared to be laser beams at them.

They called them "chupa-chupas" because they were painful

when they hit the skin, and the people thought that

they were sucking their energy or their blood out of them.

[Narrator] The very next day, November 18th,

local newspaper O Estado do Pará

ran a story that the orbs had been terrorizing

neighborhoods across the region.

[Tsoukalos] Usually,

UFO incidents,

you know, happen to a single person

or to two people, and often people wonder,

"Well, you know, was the story made up?"

But if you have an event that was witnessed

and experienced by a group of people, and sometimes

by people not even in the same group,

well, then you really have to start listening.

And in the case of the 1977 account,

something really strange

affected a lot of people.

[Narrator] Then, on November 19th,

newspaper A Província do Pará

featured interviews with four women

who claimed they were attacked by the phenomena.

[Narrator] The reports continued for months,

and the event came to be considered

one of Brazil's most famous UFO incidents.

It got to the point where the villagers

wouldn't go out at night.

Fishermen wouldn't go out into the seas at night.

They were terrified by what they were experiencing.

[Narrator] As sightings increased, the mayor of Colares

asked the Brazilian Air Force

to help put an end to the violent encounters.

[Narrator] Known as Operation Prato--

or Operation Saucer in English--

the Brazilian Air Force

studied the phenomena for almost six months.

Then the investigation was abruptly canceled

by military higher-ups,

who claimed they were concerned about sparking a public panic.

This operation was rapidly shut down after the military

came in and took photos, after they took surveys.

And they completely locked down any reference to this story.

What actually did they find there?

Was it something so terrifying

that they couldn't reveal it to the people,

or was it direct evidence

of extraterrestrial contact?

[Narrator] In the years since Operation Saucer was shut down,

independent researchers have been searching for the evidence

collected by the Air Force.

[Narrator] Could the research and photographic evidence

collected by Operation Saucer

be in the possession of the United States?

While the source of the 1977 incident remains a mystery,

it is not the only account

of disturbing UFO activity in the region.

Hundreds of similar accounts can be found

throughout the 20th century,

many investigated by local authorities.

One such case occurred in April of 1980,

when a Peruvian Air Force lieutenant

encountered an unidentified aircraft

during a routine flight over a military base.

[Narrator] As far as ufologists are concerned,

the Amazon has proven to be a UFO hot spot.

But could these modern-day sightings be connected

to ancient stories of visitors who came down from the sky?

[Childress] It would seem that there's been UFO activity

in the Amazon for thousands of years.

The Amazon itself is such a vast area,

and it's mainly water and jungle,

but this would be a good place

to, you know, have, say, an extraterrestrial base.

[Narrator] As far as ancient astronaut theorists

are concerned, the incidents in Peru and Brazil

could reveal that an alien presence

has persisted in the Amazon for centuries.

And while it has been more than 40 years

since the Colares incident,

reports continue of unexplainable

and shocking alien activity.

[Narrator] Northern Brazil.

In July 2024, Brazilian documentary filmmaker

Rony Vernet traveled deep into the rainforest

to investigate a series of recent encounters

between local villagers and mysterious orbs of light.

[Henry] People reported that these orbs of light

would fly through walls that would enter into their homes,

and when they were shot with these laser beams,

they experienced dizziness, fatigue,

apparent radiation sickness, burns.

[Narrator] Vernet, a computer scientist by trade,

took a particular interest in these reports

because of his own encounters

with strange lights in the sky over Brazil.

[Narrator] Vernet documented his trip to the Yawanawá village

in a film titled Phenomena in the Amazon,

which featured numerous eyewitness accounts

of strange events in the sky.

-[speaking foreign language] -[translator] People had been

watching it for about three days.

I went out to see if I could see it, and I did.

It was standing there, and really low.

And then we started saying, "It is here. Here it goes."

And it moved over there and passed.

Then it went up a little more

and then it went in that direction.

And after about 20 minutes passed,

it lit up again, went out, and then is gone.

[Narrator] For Vernet, the most alarming stories he documented

were those in which witnesses

reported feeling paralyzed during an encounter.

[speaking foreign language]

[translator] I saw this orange ball like this,

at a height of about 30, 40 meters

illuminating a yard there.

Until then, we didn't have this understanding.

I was going to try to shoot it,

but I was paralyzed and I couldn't move.

And that orange light disappeared from my sight.

[Narrator] What could explain

these mysterious sightings in the Amazon?

To find out, Vernet enlisted the help of the locals

to set up several 4K cameras throughout the village.

One night, as he monitored the footage,

he noticed something extraordinary.

[Narrator] Just as intriguing as the orbs' erratic movement

is where they were observed coming from.

According to Vernet, the UFO seemed to emerge

from deep in the jungle.

[Narrator] When Vernet approached the local people

about what he saw,

they said that not only have they witnessed similar phenomena

for hundreds of years but they also believe

these lights are coming from a portal in the forest.

[Narrator] Could the Amazon rainforest

contain portals to other worlds?

According to ancient astronaut theorists,

it's a distinct possibility.

[Henry] The Amazon basin is a site of immense fascination.

These orbs of light that fly through the trees,

that dive into the rivers match up with other orbs

seen around the world, suggesting that perhaps

the Amazon is a place of contact.

It's a hideout for some of these beings

that we still have no awareness of.

[Narrator] Is an otherworldly presence

hidden within the dense rainforest of Brazil?

And perhaps even portals to other parts

of the cosmos or alternate dimensions?

Curiously, in the very same region

where Rony Vernet recorded strange orbs of light,

archaeologists have uncovered a much older mystery--

massive ancient earthworks that can only be seen

from the sky.

[Narrator] Acre, Brazil, the 1980s.

As logging companies begin to cut down trees

in the Amazon rainforest,

enormous areas of the forest floor

are exposed for the first time.

And at one clearing, a massive series of circles

and squares carved into the landscape is revealed.

Known as Jacó Sá, these earthworks, or geoglyphs,

are over 900 feet wide.

These are several hundred meters in diameter.

Which is an incredible, incredible task to undertake.

It would have been the task of the whole village

to carve and to dig and to separate

these earthworks, create mounds.

And these geoglyphs are possibly 2,000 years old.

So, quite, quite old.

[Cheetham] In this area, there's over 450 of these.

Sometimes they're squares, sometimes rectangles,

sometimes squares with circles in the middle,

and the actual function of these things remains, uh, unknown.

[Narrator] Archaeologists have determined that the earthworks

served no practical purpose, such as corralling animals.

And according to ancient astronaut theorists,

the mysterious geometric figures displayed

in some of these massive geoglyphs

appear to contain a coded message.

[Whitehill] These are perfect squares and perfect circles.

It speaks to a level of engineering excellence,

and it speaks to a level of intention.

That one is a square, and one is a circle inside of a square.

Is one an entrance, and one is an exit?

[Henry] The squaring of the circle is,

throughout cultures around the world, a symbol

of the unity of heaven and earth,

which is an incredibly abstract concept

for them to be modeling in this geoglyph.

[Narrator] The geoglyphs are located

in the same region of the Brazilian rainforest

where the Indigenous Yawanawá people have reported

mysterious orbs of light.

And a recent study proposes that these earthworks

were designed with an otherworldly purpose.

In 2017, researchers at the University of São Paulo

and the University of Helsinki suggested that the geoglyphs

of the Amazon served as doorways

through which ancient shamans

would communicate with other realms.

[Barnhart] In the Amazon, shamans are considered

intermediaries between the physical world of us humans

and the spirit world.

The spirit world is really what's pulling our strings,

but we don't see it.

It's an invisible world.

The shamans are the link between this world and that.

[Collins] There's no question

that shamanism is

one of the most ancient, enduring mechanisms

in the Amazon for communication with the other world.

This type of communication is something that's been going on

for a very, very long time, as much as 10,000 years

and arguably even earlier than that.

[Newman] The shaman would actually use geoglyphs

as a place to kind of go into meditation

to communicate with ancestors and spirits

and even otherworldly beings, according to their traditions.

[Barnhart] The modern Amazonians don't mess

with these geoglyphs.

They honor them. They protect them.

They don't farm on them. They don't build in them again.

They see them as part of the group of spirits

that the shamans are connecting to.

[Narrator] Could it be that the giant earthworks

discovered in the Amazon

were made to communicate with celestial beings?

Ancient astronaut theorists say yes

and suggest the geoglyphs were not only made

for shamanic rituals but also to directly signal visitors

looking down on the Earth from high above.

[Henry] When you think about the creation of these geoglyphs,

we're talking about people that are devoted to leaving a message

that can only be seen from the sky.

[Childress] We find geoglyphs all over the world.

In Kazakhstan, in the Atacama Desert,

the American Southwest.

The famous lines and figures on the Nazca plain in Peru.

And now we have this area of the Amazon

that's got geoglyphs in it.

So are they trying to contact

sky gods, extraterrestrials?

[Tsoukalos] Why were they built?

And in my opinion, it's to signal somebody, as in,

"Hey, we are down here, come and visit."

Or essentially, "Come back."

[Collins] It's beyond coincidence

that you have here these geoglyphs

exactly where all of these glowing orbs

were encountered by the Indigenous peoples to this day.

We obviously don't know, but what we can say is that

we are dealing with entities from somewhere else.

[Narrator] Could it be that there is a connection

between the ancient geoglyphs found in Acre, Brazil

and the orbs of light witnessed in the very same region today?

Might this be evidence of an extraterrestrial presence

that has persisted in the Amazon for thousands of years?

Ancient astronaut theorists say yes

and suggest that, with new exploration

taking place in the rainforest,

many long-held secrets may soon be revealed.

[Narrator] The Alto Mayo landscape, Peru.

This region of the Amazon rainforest

spans almost 3,000 square miles,

an area roughly the size of Delaware.

In 2022, a team of scientists from Conservation International

surveyed the area, and discovered

27 new species of animals, plants, and insects.

It's amazing just how many new species were discovered

over a area of 3,000 square miles

over just such a short period of 38 days.

And you just have to wonder how many more new species

are out there just waiting to be discovered.

[Skinner] We're finding such an amazing amount each day

and each year.

We know more now in probably

the last ten, 20 years than we have in the last 100.

[Narrator] The discovery of new species

is just one more indication

that the Amazon hides many secrets still to be uncovered.

And ancient astronaut theorists believe that,

as we continue to plumb the depths of the jungle,

we will one day find the ultimate proof

of an extraterrestrial presence on this planet.

[Henry] The Amazon is a perfect hiding place.

It's a treasure house of ancient civilizations and secrets

that have long been hidden by the canopy of the jungle.

[Childress] You know, when we think of the vastness

of the Amazon and the huge rivers

and forests that are there,

this is a pretty good place to hide.

I mean, even today, many parts of the Amazon

are just so incredibly remote,

and they're unexplored.

[Narrator] According to ancient astronaut theorists,

the notion of an alien presence in the Amazon

is not mere speculation but a reality that is

well-documented by the stories

and traditions of the Indigenous people.

[Newman] What's so interesting is that

discoveries have been found in the whole Amazon region

which were quite astonishing, in my opinion.

And it really does show a level of sociopolitical organization

really reaching a whole other level.

There's also traditions

throughout the Amazon of gods

or sky beings who would descend to Earth.

They would bring social order, provide ritual knowledge

and other such things to these societies.

So there's this interesting connection

between these myths and stories that come out of the Amazon

and what we're finding here under the jungle canopy.

[Tsoukalos] What's fascinating is, there are examples

from different tribes of the Amazon that talk about

a celestial visitor imparting knowledge

or building the first schools.

And they have these remembrance festivals one time each year

so people don't forget.

[Henry] When we put all the pieces together in the Amazon--

the geometric earthworks,

the sky beings that the ancient Amazonians told

came down out of the heavens,

when we look at what lidar has revealed

in terms of understanding of the complexity

of these ancient civilizations--

what we're finally realizing is that the Amazon basin

was a place of contact in the ancient world,

and perhaps it's going to reveal

the greatest understanding of extraterrestrial contact

anywhere in the world.

[Narrator] Is it possible the Amazon rainforest

hides evidence of otherworldly activity

that we are only just beginning to unearth?

Could the shared mythology of the Amazon peoples

that describe powerful beings descending from the sky be true?

And if so, does there continue

to be an alien presence in the region to this very day?

Perhaps as we continue to explore the dense jungle,

we will uncover not only ancient settlements

but the ultimate evidence

of our extraterrestrial origins.

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