Original subtitles

>> NARRATOR: Mega‐machines cutting through solid rock...

the transportation of multi‐ton stone blocks...

modern aircraft carrying millions of people each day

around the world... and space shuttles sending

humans to the stars.

>> (over radio): And liftoff of Endeavor...

>> NARRATOR: But are these examples of modern technology,

or is there evidence that these incredible achievements existed

on earth thousands of years ago?

>> You begin to have to ask yourself, are we missing part of

the story?

>> NARRATOR: Could ancient man have possessed knowledge far

beyond that of our own century? And if so, where did it come

from?

>> I think that people in ancient times were visited by

beings coming not from this earth, and they gave us

scientific technologies.

>> It becomes all the more apparent that the possible

answer of "Have aliens visited in the past?" could be a

potential yes.

>> 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 if so, what if there were

clues left behind, sometimes hiding in plain sight?

What if we could find the evidence?

♪ ♪

Captioning sponsored by A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS

(wind whistling)

>> NARRATOR: Saqqara, Egypt. Located roughly 20 miles south

of Cairo, it is home to the world‐famous step pyramid of

King Djoser. Dating back more than 4,000

years, it is the oldest of Egypt's 97 pyramids.

Saqqara is also famous for being one of Egypt's oldest burial

grounds, earning it the nickname "City of the Dead."

It was here, in 1891, that French archeologists unearthed

an ancient tomb containing the burial remains of Pa‐di‐Imen, an

official from the third century BC. Among the various items

discovered was a small wooden model of what appeared to be a

bird, lying beside a papyrus bearing the inscription:

"I want to fly." The artifact was later sent to

the Cairo Museum, where authorities placed it alongside

several other bird figurines. The model sat largely

unnoticed, until 1969, when Egyptologist Dr. Kahlil Messiha

was examining the bird collection and noticed that

there was something very different about the Saqqara bird.

>> DR. UWE APEL: It's interesting because on one hand,

clearly, it should look like a bird because it has eyes and has

a typical nose of a bird. On the other hand, the wings are

clearly not bird wings.

>> DR. ALGUND EENBOOM: To the middle of the rim, you see this

wing a bit thicker. In this region, the lift‐up is

the highest. The whole thing becomes thinner

to the, um, end of the wings.

And those wings, uh, model down. And this is a very modern

aerodynamic design.

>> APEL: Then the other point is, birds have no rudders.

Because a bird does not need a rudder because of its

aerodynamic architecture. And so, there is the idea they

are not representing birds, but flying machines, or aircraft.

>> NARRATOR: Could the ancient Egyptians have possessed the

power of flight? In 2006, aviation and

aerodynamics expert Simon Sanderson built a scale model of

the Saqqara bird five times larger than the original to test

that possibility.

>> SIMON SANDERSON: We're running at a constant speed,

slowly increasing the angle of attack, and then measuring the

forces which it's producing. That way, we can learn about its

flight characteristics. At ten degrees, we're producing

four times weight and lift. So, it actually would be flying

now. That's good.

>> EENBOOM: Test shows the Saqqara bird is a highly

developed glider. And this is the design we used

today.

>> NARRATOR: During the Sanderson test, it was

discovered that the only thing preventing the Saqqara bird from

achieving flight was the lack of a rear stabilizing rudder, or

elevator, needed to maintain balance.

Is it possible that the Saqqara bird ever possessed this

critical component?

>> APEL: What is missing is something like an elevator,

but if you look at this feature here, then we may interpret that

something like an elevator was connected here, but was lost

during history.

>> NARRATOR: Computer models seem to confirm that the Saqqara

bird is certainly airworthy. But there is another problem to

consider: launching a glider. Modern methods require the use

of a towplane that pulls the glider into the air, then

releases it when a proper altitude is reached.

So, how might the ancient Egyptians have launched the

Saqqara bird?

>> EENBOOM: The scientifics of Egyptology told us that such

a bird could be powered off by catapults to fly.

And, uh, we had high acceptance by Egyptian scientists.

>> NARRATOR: The idea of using a catapult does have a

contemporary parallel. Many of today's glider

enthusiasts employ a bungee cord system to launch their

sail craft into the air. But if the Saqqara bird is

capable of flight, where would ancient Egyptians have acquired

such technology?

>> EENBOOM: I think that people in ancient times were visited by

beings coming not from this earth, and they gave us

culture and scientific technologies to improve

our life on earth coming from the primitive to a higher

developed culture.

>> ABEL: If ancient cultures would be able to produce any

really flyable machine, they would be far more advanced than

we believe today.

It changes our viewpoint of ancient societies.

>> PHILIP COPPENS: It's a fact that our ancestors were more

intelligent and had more technological superiority

capabilities than our history books give them credit for.

>> GRAHAM HANCOCK: You begin to have to ask yourself, "Are we

missing part of the story?" And honestly, I think we are.

I think there has been a forgotten episode in human

history. And, uh, we're a species with

amnesia. We don't really remember who or

what we are.

>> ROBERT BAUVAL: I haven't been convinced that there is evidence

that support an ancient visitation, but there is

no reason why not, and I think to shut oneself to that

possibility is a mistake, mainly because there is so many

anomalies that we can't explain.

>> NARRATOR: 7,000 miles from Egypt, the dense jungles and

rugged mountains of Colombia contain a vast number of

archaeological signs. Many treasure hunters believed

the legendary City of Gold, El Dorado, lies hidden here

somewhere under a thick canopy of trees.

While the mythical metropolis has never been found, early in

the 20th century, tomb‐robbers searching along the Magdalena

River stumbled upon a gravesite dating back 1,500 years to a

pre‐Colombian civilization known as the Tolima.

Among the funerary objects found there were hundreds of small

two‐ to three‐inch gold figurines.

>> GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: Many of those looked like insects and

fish. However, out of those hundreds

that they found, they also found about a dozen that are

eerily reminiscent of modern‐day fighter jets.

They have a triangular shape.

They have an upright tailfin, stabilizers...

and a fuselage. And they have nothing in common

with anything similar in nature.

>> NARRATOR: Could these gold objects really be proof that

earth has been visited by ancient aliens?

>> APEL: One of the objects shows a typical swept wings like

with a modern aircraft. And you compare it to something

like a space shuttle. You see that the basic wing

shape is very similar to wing shapes for high‐speed

aerodynamic bodies like a space shuttle is.

>> COPPENS: There is not a single insect in the world which

has got its wings at the bottom. Now, when you exclude the

possibility that it's an insect, one of the things which remain

is the fact that this is actually, yes, what it looks

like: a plane.

>> NARRATOR: In 1997, German aviation experts including

Algund Eenboom and Peter Belting, set out to prove the

speculation by building a scale‐model replica of the gold

flyer, fully equipped with landing gear and a working

engine.

>> EENBOOM: It was rather simple because we don't need to put

much parts to this shape because this shape is perfect.

Everything was already done by the native people 2,000 years

ago.

>> TSOUKALOS: They did not add an inch or remove an inch.

They just essentially blew the little thing into a larger size.

I mean, this is sensational that pre‐Colombian culture knew about

aerodynamics.

>> NARRATOR: Once completed, the remote controlled flyer took off

down a makeshift runway and flew.

>> COPPENS: When you see this thing taking off, you really

feel that this is the real deal.

>> EENBOOM: It was a very successful test and showed us

how perfect ancient people were working out aerodynamic design.

What it show you that there must be something happened.

We are not quite sure how it did, but that it did.

>> COPPENS: This is applied science. This isn't just thinking

somewhere. This is people going out there

and making sure and proving, what I still see, anybody can

see this, that this is real. This is genuine.

This little thing, which sits in a museum, could fly.

>> TSOUKALOS: So we have two examples from opposite sides of

the planet, and both examples are aerodynamically sound and

they fly. So, to suggest that all of this

is coincidence... I mean, after a while, even

coincidence no longer makes sense.

>> BILL BIRNES: Could the ancients have seen actual

entities, like ancient gods, ancient astronauts actually

flying around in what amounted to modern aircraft?

>> NARRATOR: The answer to these questions may be found in

ancient documents that describe flight patterns, aircraft specs,

and even aerial battles in remarkable detail.

>> NARRATOR: Over the past 50 years, NASA has sent astronauts

into space inside large rockets. This method has been described

by some as simply "putting a man on a large firecracker and

lighting the fuse."

Man's ability to travel farther into space would require more

advanced propulsion systems. Several are being researched by

NASA.

>> ROBERT FRISBEE: There are a wide variety of advanced

propulsion technologies that are being actively developed and

studied by NASA and other researchers.

A really exotic version of that is to use a launch‐assist

catapult, use technology derived from the magnetic

levitation trains to build a maglev sled.

It carries your rocket, gets it up to about Mach 1, and then

launches the rocket from it.

>> NARRATOR: While these futuristic propulsion systems

seem like something out of science fiction, ancient alien

theorists believe past civilizations possess these same

advanced technologies. They point to a number of

cultural myths that describe sky people coming to Earth in

fire‐breathing dragons, or metallic‐looking machines as

proof of extraterrestrial visitation.

>> DAVID CHILDRESS: In my mind, legends and myths are based on

something real. And while they've been

"mythified" and exaggerated in many cases, in my mind, some

core of truth here in that people really were flying in

airships in ancient times just like we do today.

>> NARRATOR: But might these ancient airships have reached

Earth using the same type of propulsion systems we use today?

The answer may be found deep in the Indian subcontinent.

India‐‐ over 1.1 billion people crowd its modern cities and

rural townships, speaking hundreds of languages, and

practicing a number of different religions.

India is considered one of the oldest civilizations with

settlements dating back over 11,000 years.

It is also home to several of the oldest records of ancient

technologies. Ancient Sanskrit text dating

back as far as 6000 BC, describing varying but vivid

detail flying machines called "vimanas."

>> EENBOOM: Vimanas are airplanes, and they are powered

by some jet engines. This seems to be true because

all the description of the flight behavior: "elephants ran

away in panic." Grass was thrown out because

there was a lot of pressure from behind those vimanas.

So that we can say this is a description of the spaceship.

>> NARRATOR: Although mainstream historians believe the vimana

texts are myths, many of the documents contain passages that

seem to describe modern machinery and technology.

>> CHILDRESS: The Vymaanika‐Shaastra goes into

metals that are used in these craft. It talks about electricity

and power sources. It talks about the pilots and

the clothing they have to wear. It talks about the food that

they eat. It talks even about the weapons

that are kept on these airships.

>> EENBOOM: The flight menus of the vimanas are quite similar to

the flight menus you find in the modern passenger flight

business. Or when you go to the military

jet engines, of course, they have also flight menus because

it's necessary for a pilot to get knowledge about his plane he

wanted to fly with.

>> MICHAEL CREMO: We also learned that these vimanas could

be controlled mentally. And this is a technology that

modern militaries are beginning to develop.

>> DR. STEVEN GREER: Even today, with as advanced as we think we

are, almost every manifestation of an actual extraterrestrial

civilization today would look almost like magic to us where

it has to do with technological electromagnetic systems that

interface with coherent thought and organized thought.

And this gets into people go, "Now, you're losing me here."

But I tell people, I say, "Yeah, well, you gotta push your

boundaries a little bit if you're talking about a true

interstellar civilization."

>> NARRATOR: The Vymaanika‐Shaastra, or Science

of Aeronautics, indicates vimanas used a propulsion system

based on a combination of gyroscopes, electricity, and

mercury. Is this possible?

>> CHILDRESS: Mercury is an unusual element.

Mercury is metal. It's also a liquid, and, uh,

is a conductor of electricity. You know, there's unusual things

you can do with mercury. You can put it into a closed

gyroscopic device with mercury spinning around, and then you

get electrified. Studies have been done on this

by NASA and by other scientists, and they find that you have

levitation effects, antigravity kind of effects, and a spinning

bright light is part of it, too.

>> NARRATOR: The Vymaanika‐Shaastra suggests

vimanas were powered by several gyroscopes placed inside a

sealed liquid mercury vortex.

>> FRISBEE: Here's an example of a little kid's gyroscope.

You spin it with a heavy wheel around a central axis.

Well, a gyroscope seems to do a lot of strange things, even defy

gravity. And it does this because it uses

what's called rotational, or angular, momentum.

And it wants to keep a particular orientation on its

spin axis, the center rod. If you push on that rod, it will

want to "righten" itself up to its original orientation.

It wants to keep that same angular momentum.

Gyroscopes are used all over the place: in airplanes, in

spacecraft, in submarines. This allows them to determine

their position based on where they started.

They can also use it for finding their velocity or even just the

orientation of the vehicle in space.

One of the texts talks about mercury rotating and driving

some sort of a powerful wind, or a windmill effect.

That might be some sort of what we call a "flywheel energy

storage" where you have a spinning disc, and then you

extract energy from it slowly. That would be the mercury.

And then that could be used to drive some sort of a propeller

or what we'd call a ducted fan sort of system like you have in

a hovercraft. Mercury would be quite good for

that because it's a high density, so you'd have a small

package for your power plant, and that's always good when

you're building an aircraft.

>> NARRATOR: Flywheel energy storage systems, however, tend

to lose power quickly. To navigate across space, its

size would have to be enormous.

>> FRISBEE: They're fine for use by power companies for

load‐leveling. You put energy in when you

don't need it. You get energy out when you need

it. But they're setting on the ground.

To have something light enough to actually fly, it's not at all

clear that this will be a practical device.

Now, maybe the people are trying to describe something that kind

of looked like this to them. It might not have actually been

mercury. It might have been some other

liquid metal.

>> EENBOOM: The mercury vortex engine is perhaps a failure in

the translation because the vortex is not a material quite

suitable to a jet engine.

>> GREER: The issue of how are these civilizations traveling

faster than the speed of light is a fundamental question.

It's a scientific application of things that have been studied

for thousands of years and they're within the Vadas, the

ancient Vedic teachings or other ancient teachings‐‐

and it is there.

>> NARRATOR: But if vimanas existed, could this prove there

was a worldwide transportation network thousands of years

before Columbus? The answer might be found on a

mountaintop outside Mexico City.

>> NARRATOR: In the 21st century, modern transportation

and communication methods have connected the world like never

before. Products or ideas, no matter

where in the world they may have originated, can spread to even

the most remote countries. A hip‐hop hit in Brooklyn might

make it big in Tokyo before it's even heard in Manhattan.

This cultural interconnection has transformed the globe, but

is it new? Mainstream archaeologists

believe ancient civilizations such as those found in the

remote Pacific Islands, Asia, and South America developed

independently from each other. But ancient astronaut theorists

contend that similarities in building styles and beliefs

found in these cultures suggest that a worldwide trade route may

have connected them to each other.

>> CHILDRESS: But just like we have airports today around the

world, in ancient times with the vimanas, there would have been

hangars for the craft, airports for them to land.

And those airports would have been situated in strategic

places around the world. And that's exactly what we see

in remote places.

>> NARRATOR: Could the complex set of lines covering Peru's

Nazca plain or the mysterious plateau above Mexico's Oaxaca

valley be evidence of runways for worldwide air transportation

system.

>> CHILDRESS: One of the unusual archaeological sites in Mexico

is a place called Monte Albán. That is also a mountain where

the top of the mountain was completely cut off and leveled

to make a very flat tabletop mountain.

And there's a megalithic city there, too, that's extremely

old.

This was probably some kind of

vimana airport.

>> EENBOOM: The vimanas could be kind of missing link between the

single cultures in the world because they had just a very

short time to flow from one part of the world to the other.

>> NARRATOR: Legends of air travel are also found in ancient

Africa and the Middle East. According to The Kebra Nagast,

a holy book of the Ethiopians written sometime between the

fifth and second century BC, the queen of Sheba was once

given a gift of a flying carpet by King Solomon of Israel.

>> TSOUKALOS: The Kebra Nagast is one of the most important

texts you've never heard of. The Kebra Nagast means

The Book of Kings and it is the most sacred book of the

Ethiopians. In it, King Solomon is

described‐‐ he had access to some type of a flying machine.

And in that part of the world the term "flying carpet" was

always used very liberally. My question is, did they really

mean actual flying carpets or was it another term with which

to describe some type of a flying machine?

>> CHILDRESS: This was the original Chariots of the Gods

that Erich von Daniken talked about‐‐ the flying magic carpets

of the Arabian Nights stories. There are traditions in the

Middle East of King Solomon having this airship and flying

to different places in the Middle East, certain mountains

which are known as the Mountains of Solomon.

These may have been certain airports or landing areas for

these vimanas. Nicholas Rourke, famous

Russian‐American explorer who traveled all through central

Asia and Tibet in the 1920s, he too claimed that Tibetans had

traditions of King Solomon flying to Tibet in this aircraft.

>> NARRATOR: The Kebra Nagast also describes how King Solomon

used his flying airship to make maps of the world.

>> NARRATOR: But could these have any relation to other

ancient maps some believe may have been made by

extraterrestrials?

>> HANCOCK: Some of these maps show the world not as it looks

today, but as it looked during the last ice age.

And this is really hard to explain.

Everybody's heard of the Piri Reis map, but they've perhaps

not heard of the Orontius Finnaeus map or‐or the Mercator

maps that show Antarctica in great detail hundreds of years

before Antarctica was even discovered.

>> NARRATOR: One of the most referenced stories of ancient

aircraft is found in a surprising place: the Bible.

In the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet describes a flying

chariot containing wheels within wheels and powered by

angels. Although Bible historians suggest Ezekiel was speaking

symbolically about the terrifying enemies facing

Israel, could this be another example of an alien visitation

and proof that prehistoric aircraft existed?

>> YOUNG: In the story of Ezekiel's throne chariot, this

flying vehicle that doesn't seem to have any means of

propulsion, if we thought of the word "angel" as representing

something like celestial energy, it sounds much more like a

spacecraft then because some of the angels are going back and

forth. Well, that sounds like flames.

That sounds like propulsion. Some of them are wheel‐like.

Well, those sound like flying saucers.

>> TSOUKALOS: Our ancestors weren't idiots.

Ezekiel saw something that was so frightening to him that he

fell to his knees. Then, out of the glory of God,

came this being in these bright clothes that looked like

metal, and told Ezekiel, "All right, man, we brought you here.

We want you to measure this monument, this building."

And Ezekiel asks, "Well, why should I do this?"

And the being says, "That's why we brought you here."

And then you have 40 pages, in the second part of the Book of

Ezekiel, with measurement after measurement after

measurement of this gigantic building, in which, by the way,

the glory of the Lord landed.

>> NARRATOR: In the early 1970s, NASA scientist Joseph

Blumrich set out to disprove the theory that what Ezekiel

witnessed was a spaceship.

>> TSOUKALOS: Joseph Blumrich is your proverbial rocket

scientist. He worked on the moon project

for NASA and, from the mind of a rocket engineer, started to

look at what was written in the first part of the Book of

Ezekiel. And after many months of research, Joseph Blumrich

came to the conclusion that what Ezekiel described in his

eyewitness report, it was indeed a type of spacecraft.

>> NARRATOR: Joseph Blumrich would go on to write The

Spaceships of Ezekiel. Several years later, a German

structural engineer named Hans Herbert Beier sketched out a

blueprint of the second section of the Book of Ezekiel, where

Ezekiel is told to construct an open‐topped building to house

the flying chariot.

>> TSOUKALOS: Ezekiel's spaceship fit exactly into the

temple that Hans Herbert Beier recreated.

So what we have here is a proof by indication.

Here we have a NASA engineer and a structural engineer‐‐ they

didn't know of each other's work‐‐ and both pieces fit

together like a puzzle. In any court of law, that's

evidence that would hold up.

>> HANCOCK: I think that scientists feel uncomfortable

with the notion of the lost civilization precisely because

the evidence for it is so ambiguous.

It's not so in your face that it's immediately obvious.

Uh, and, you know, the result is that science has not welcomed

this idea. It'll take much more evidence

before it's widely accepted.

>> TSOUKALOS: The god that I believe in doesn't need a

vehicle in which to move around from point A to point B.

Whatever was described in the Old Testament wasn't God, it

was a misunderstood flesh‐and‐ blood extraterrestrial whom

our ancestor misinterpreted as being divine and supernatural.

And why? Because of misunderstood technology.

And that is the underlying thread that applies to all of

the ancient astronaut theory.

>> NARRATOR: But while ancient texts provide tantalizing clues

to our past, physical evidence paints an even clearer picture.

But will modern science finally prove the ancient astronaut

theory?

>> FRISBEE: Did the ancient civilizations of Earth have

access to advanced technology? Well, it seems like they had

something going on.

>> NARRATOR: In today's largest construction sites and

quarries, huge mega‐machines are used to dig, cut, and lift

stone. These man‐made creatures dwarf

their creators and perform the work of thousands of men using

modern hydraulic technologies. Without such equipment,

builders could never construct modern skyscrapers.

Yet, thousands of years ago, ancient civilizations were

accomplishing the same work while constructing their

monuments and temples using massive stones.

These enormous blocks‐‐ many weighing in excess of 100

tons‐‐ would be a challenge even for today's engineers.

Yet thousands of years ago, people cut them out of solid

rock, transported them for miles and then lifted them

precisely into place. But how? Did they cut these massive

stone blocks with hammers, chisels, and copper wire,

as mainstream archeologists suggest?

Could they have lifted and transported them without a

pulley system or the wheel? Or did ancient civilizations

possess advanced technologies that have since been lost to

science?

>> BAUVAL: At Giza, you just don't have the pyramids.

Linked to the pyramids are what Egyptologists call valley

temples. It doesn't take a rocket engineer that when you go

there, there's something not quite right here.

Whereas the pyramids are built with blocks of two to three

tons, these temples, which are minute compared to the

pyramids, are built with blocks of 100 tons and some of them

200 tons. Let me tell you what a 100‐ton

block is. If you take a 100 family cars

and you squeeze them together you get one of these blocks.

First of all, let alone how they move these blocks is why

would they want to use 100‐ton blocks?

It simply doesn't make sense.

>> CHILDRESS: There's no reason for them to want to

build out of granite blocks the size of a semi truck.

It's like, "Okay, let's do something, but let's do it as

difficult as we could possibly do it."

>> TSOUKALOS: The reason why I am convinced that sophisticated

technology was utilized in these ancient rocks is because,

if we go to a stone quarry today and look at the scope of

machinery required to accomplish similar things,

those machines are huge.

>> NARRATOR: Subscribers to ancient alien theory do not

believe extraterrestrials built these amazing monuments, but

instead provided some type of technological know‐how or tools

to our ancestors. Engineering expert Chris Dunn

has spent several decades researching the construction

tools used by the ancient Egyptians.

>> DUNN: We're normally taught by Egyptologists, that the

ancient Egyptians had simple tools.

They went to work every day using stone balls, copper

chisels or copper tube and sand to grind holes in diorite and

granite, extremely hard rock. And what I have actually

gathered over the years is information that seems to

actually argue against that notion that they had simple

tools.

>> NARRATOR: In Egypt, Dunn was able to examine ancient

sites firsthand. What he found has proved to be

both revolutionary and controversial.

>> DUNN: If you look at the Giza Plateau and all the stones that

they actually placed in the Great Pyramid and the Khafre

Pyramid and Menkaura's Pyramid, two and a half million blocks of

stone in the Great Pyramid alone. They had to have had some

efficient means of cutting them to size and putting them into

place. They had to have had somebody on

site who is saying, "Okay, I need a block this size," and

then getting a block to them that size stat, like immediately.

>> NARRATOR: While searching several miles north of Giza, at

Abu Rawash, Dunn stumbled upon a clue when he spotted a granite

block containing a deep cut.

>> DUNN: When I first saw it, I just didn't know what to make of

it. And it was only after puzzling

over it for days, and sometimes waking up at 3:00 in the

morning scratching my head and thinking, well, how did they

make this cut? And finally, to realize that the

only way that they could have actually cut that thing was with

a saw that was 35 feet in diameter.

>> NARRATOR: The idea that ancient Egyptians used giant

saws provoked much resistance from mainstream archeologists.

Dunn however, was convinced.

>> DUNN: As an ex‐machinist I look for tool marks.

I look for them everywhere I go. And I could be accused of, well,

you know, if you're going to look for something, you're

probably going to find it because you're looking at it

through a certain filter. Accepted, I agree.

But the question is, why is it there? Clearly, to me, that is a

machine mark. But there were no machines back

then. So what do I do? I just go looking for more

machine marks. And they're all over the place.

You find them on statues. You find them particularly in

the Luxor Museum. There's seems to be an

impression on the side of Amon's buttock where it meets the

bench, where there is an undercut.

It was the slip of a tool. And therefore, it must have been

a tool that was quite efficient.

>> NARRATOR: Dunn also believes that the large depressions in

the ground at Giza are not boat pits as is claimed by mainstream

archeologists, but were actually used to hold the 35‐foot saws.

>> DUNN: I speculate that they were actually saw pits.

The saws were mounted in these pits, and that they ran the

blocks through the saw before they put them in the Great

Pyramid.

>> NARRATOR: Another mystery involves how mega‐stones were

lifted up and placed into a precise position.

>> COPPENS: What you find in modern construction is that to

build big buildings, you need to build big instruments which help

build these big buildings. And that is something which

archeology has never addressed.

>> NARRATOR: The three largest man‐made stones in the world are

found at the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek in Lebanon.

Each weighs an estimated 1,000 tons‐‐ or two million pounds.

A nearby quarry contains an even bigger stone, known as the Stone

of the Pregnant Woman. This giant rectangular block

weighs an incredible 1,200 tons. To move it today would take the

strength of 21 heavy‐lift cranes.

>> PETER PALUTIKOF: Being in the construction industry, if a

certain project is being constructed somewhere,

particularly in mountainous areas, how would we carry this

machinery, these cranes, and all that?

They are so heavy that it's virtually impossible to take

them to the site.

>> ROGER HOPKINS: This stone came off a project in Palm

Springs, where they had one of the largest excavators they

could rent. They had trouble loading it into

the truck. It's well in excess of five

tons‐‐ 10,000 pounds‐‐ small in megalithic terms, but

basically what we can handle with modern machinery.

>> BAUVAL: We're supposed to accept that the people who built

the pyramids did not have the wheel, did not have the pulley,

did not have iron. In fact, they had nothing but

brutal manpower and pieces of strings.

The complex does not fit the evidence.

>> HOPKINS: I've done pulling operations in upper Egypt.

Thousands of people involved in the various stages of the

project, moving very fragile pieces of stone that weigh

hundreds, if not thousands, of tons. Yes, you can use ropes, but

you're going to have to use other mechanical advantages.

>> NARRATOR: But if ancient civilizations did not possess

modern mechanical equipment, how did they move and lift mega‐ton

stones? Some believe they were given a

technical advantage from extraterrestrial visitors.

>> CHILDRESS: You've got to ask yourself, why would they try and

do something that seems so incredibly difficult?

The answer to why they would do that has to be that it somehow

wasn't so difficult for them. It was easy.

>> TSOUKALOS: There exists one very concise description of how

these massive stones were transported from the quarry to

the building site. The master builders had the

capability of putting some type of a white substance‐‐

paper‐like substance onto the stones and they rode on it, and

then they basically gave the stone block a push and it moved

by six feet as if by magic. Now did that thing really move

by magic? No, some technology was used.

>> CHILDRESS: That is part of the solution.

In order to really move massive amounts of stone like that, they

would have had to have been levitated‐‐ somehow made

weightless‐‐ and then just moved through the air by some kind of

device, perhaps even a handheld kind of device, like some beam

weapon.

>> NARRATOR: Ancient man's method of moving large blocks

is only one mystery. Another surrounds the techniques

of their stonemasons. How did prehistoric

civilizations cut such intricately designed patterns in

solid granite?

>> NARRATOR: Palm Springs, California.

Master stonemason and sculptor Roger Hopkins uses a variety of

advanced tools to cut and shape hard stones.

Powered implements such as diamond‐tipped wires and

polishers enable him to fashion works of art out of huge granite

blocks obtained from nearby quarries.

Yet even with these high‐tech tools, Hopkins cannot replicate

what ancient civilizations accomplished thousands of years

ago. Could these advanced engineering

methods be the smoking gun that proves humans had help from

alien beings?

>> HOPKINS: The precision on some of the work that I've seen

is just incredible. It's possible to do by hand, but

it would take an incredible amount of time.

Plus, you have to have years of experience to be able to pull it

off.

>> TSOUKALOS: In my opinion, the most tangible pieces of evidence

that we have regarding possible extraterrestrial technology is

when we look at the ancient stone‐cutting techniques.

Because in some instances, we ourselves today could not

replicate what our ancestors allegedly accomplished with

stonemasonry.

>> NARRATOR: Puma Punku is a large temple complex located on

a high plateau in Bolivia.

Mainstream archeologists date the site from approximately

200 BC. The people who lived here had

neither a written language nor the wheel, yet somehow they

built one of the world's most complex structures.

Ancient alien theorists view Puma Punku as clear proof of

extraterrestrial influence.

>> TSOUKALOS: The ruins we find at Puma Punku are simply

extraordinary. Puma Punku defies logic.

>> COPPENS: The interest of Puma Punku is not so much that the

individual stones sorted together perfectly, but the fact

that the stones, as such, are of such tremendous design that it

requires concepts of mathematics which are far beyond anything we

are actually using right now. Yet somehow in the past,

somebody has made that for a specific purpose, and in a way

which even computer programs today would kind of go, how is

this possible?

>> TSOUKALOS: In the highlands of Bolivia, Puma Punku‐‐ some of

these blocks are over 40 to 50 tons each.

What can you tell us about this?

>> HOPKINS: Boy, they had their stone‐cutting abilities pretty

well fine‐tuned for 5,000 years old. I mean, it's almost

unbelievable. But the cutting planes that they

have on here are very impressive. And some of the inside cuts‐‐

see, like in here, all these interior cuts‐‐ very hard to do.

I mean, it would be difficult for us with our equipment to get

that kind of precision.

>> TSOUKALOS: Let's talk a little bit about inside boxes.

>> HOPKINS: Ew, I was afraid you were going to pull something

like this on me. That is a hell of a piece of

work. I mean, if we were to do something like that today, we'd

use‐‐ what they have, these computer‐driven CNC machines

which have diamond tips. And you have a template that,

you know, the computer follows. Even then, it may not come out

as perfect.

>> TSOUKALOS: Because even though you can tell that

obviously this piece broke off...

>> HOPKINS: Mm‐hmm.

>> TSOUKALOS: Nowhere in here can you see any imperfection.

It's like... And by the way, when you're there, if you go

with your finger over these edges, and you put a little

pressure on your fingertip, you can cut yourself.

This is how sharp the edges are.

>> NARRATOR: But where could the ancient peoples have developed

such technology? Is it really possible that

extraterrestrial visitors provided different construction

methods and tools?

>> MICHAEL DUNN: When I saw these blocks, I didn't really

think that they were cut. The first thing really that I

thought of was this appears very similar to Frank Lloyd Wright's

textile block system of construction, which he used in

his California houses in the early 1920s.

Now what he did was‐‐ he took concrete, poured it into molds.

>> TSOUKALOS: There actually are ancient Incan legends that

suggest that they had the capability of softening the

stone. At Sacsayhuaman, for example,

we find these gigantic stone blocks, gigantic stone walls,

where it looks as if those stones were molten, put into

place, and then the stone hardened again.

>> NARRATOR: Several hundred miles north of Puma Punku,

Machu Picchu sits high atop the Peruvian Andes.

Built by the Incas in the 15th century, this stone citadel was

suddenly abandoned about 100 years later.

Like Puma Punku, Machu Picchu also has signs of advanced

engineering and possibly, molded stones.

>> DUNN: I can't help but think that whoever was behind

this thought the process through from beginning to end.

They didn't quarry the rock, and then decide, "How the heck are

we gonna transport this?" They knew from beginning to end

what needed to be done with whatever techniques and

technology they were going to use, so that this was no

big deal. In industry today, there's a

kind of an adage: "Keep it simple, stupid."

>> NARRATOR: Based on his experience, Mike Dunn believes

the simplest way to build the great walls of Machu Picchu

would have been to transport small rocks to the site, then

melt them, and use molds to fashion exact size and shape

needed.

>> DUNN: That would solve a lot of difficulties of constructing

this wall. First, you have your shapes, all

the same size, each shape. So you're guaranteed that they

would fit together as opposed to being cut by different artisans.

>> HOPKINS: Melting the rocks, and then pouring them into place

would take and incredible amount of heat just to spool off pieces

of stone. I have a stone torch which I use

for sometimes shaping granite. And, I mean, it generates a

temperature of in excess of 3,000 degrees.

3,000 degrees... that's a lot.

>> DUNN: When we look back at the ancients, and we see a

technology that they couldn't possibly know, there's only

two possibilities then: either God did it‐‐ which we really

don't think happened‐‐ or some high‐tech civilization from

another planet came and showed them how to do it, then took

their materials and tools and went back home.

>> TSOUKALOS: The idea behind that is that none of these

ancient monuments were constructed or manufactured by

extraterrestrials. It was us humans who built it

with extraterrestrial technology.

>> HOPKINS: It's entirely possible that there were

visitations, that they pointed out ways to do things, and that

they wanted to leave some kind of a record.

I mean, if you're gonna leave a permanent record, the only way

you can do that is in stone.

>> NARRATOR: But if advanced beings from another planet

really did bring their technology to Earth, might the

ancient astronauts have left one of their tools behind?

>> NARRATOR: The methods used to build huge megalithic

structures such as Puma Punku and the pyramids of Egypt remain

a mystery. But what about the tools used to

build them? Where are they? And might they provide a clue as

to how these enormous stone structures were created?

>> HOPKINS: A lot of the real ancient mysterious work was done

at a time when there was no steel, and the copper they had

was, yeah, they could harden it by cold‐hammering it, but still,

it wouldn't make a dent in rocks like basalt and granite.

So they would have had to use, you know, much more laborious

techniques or they had some sort of advanced technology which

escapes me, and I've been in the business 40 years.

>> DUNN: The tools and machines must have been equal to the task

of actually building the pyramids, crafting those statues

to such a high order of precision...

crafting those boxes to a modern‐day precision that you

find in our inspection lab. And the big question: Where are

the tools?

>> NARRATOR: In the late 19th century, British archaeologist

Sir Flinders Petrie scoured Egypt, looking not for the

biggest items, but the smallest.

>> CHALLIS: Petrie was absolutely fascinated by the

technical achievements of the Egyptians, particularly the

early Egyptians. He constantly was looking for

how they made things, how they developed things, how they

continued to sort of basically perfect their tools.

>> DUNN: We're normally taught that the ancient Egyptians had

simple tools, and what Petrie brought out is information that

seems to actually argue against that notion.

>> CHALLIS: This is an example of a drill hole.

You can see the very fine lines on it. You can see the technology

that's made to use it. You can see how it's a

perfect hole almost all the way through, but it tapers at

one end. This is a fragment of a diorite bowl.

It's one of the hardest substances, and you can see on

this, on this fragment that there's a, a lathe mark, which

is really interesting that they managed to make such a mark in

such a hard material.

>> NARRATOR: Among all the tools discovered by Petrie, however,

one stood out from all the rest. While working inside the Great

Pyramid, Petrie stumbled across

a tubular drill made of granite.

>> CHALLIS: Tubular drills amongst the ancient Egyptians

were actually fairly common. I mean, Petrie found quite a few

of them. The interesting thing about the

one that he found in Giza is that it's such hard stone that

was so carefully carved, precisely grooved.

As you can see, it's got very, very fine markings on it,

basically lines, literally a couple of millimeters apart.

You can see it goes all the way round very, very accurately,

hardly any waves at all. He was absolutely amazed by this.

He kept returning to it throughout his life.

His theory was that the Egyptians must have had access

to diamonds or some kind of jewel that would have cut it.

The interesting thing about Petrie's theory about how these

drill lines are made was that he never discovered any diamonds

in ancient Egypt. So where were they?

Where did they go? We don't know.

>> NARRATOR: If the ancient Egyptians didn't possess

diamonds, how were the precision grooves cut onto the

granite drill? Did Petrie accidentally discover

a tool made by extraterrestrials? Machinist expert Chris Dunn

attempted to answer this question by creating his own

granite drill using the known tools and techniques of the

ancient Egyptians.

>> DUNN: In order to test the Egyptologist theory about how

the ancient Egyptians drilled into granite, I took a tube and

I fixed a crank on it, and actually used sand and silicon

carbide, and after many hours of turning and drilling into this

piece of granite, finally got deep enough that I could

actually pop a core out. And the reason for that was to

actually look at the surface, not just of the whole, but of

the core.

>> NARRATOR: The next step was to use a high‐tech industrial

microscope to compare his drill core to a latex copy of the one

at the Petrie Museum.

>> DUNN: We have under the microscope the core that we

drilled with the copper tube and sand.

And as you can see, the surface of the core, the striations are

not very clear. There's nothing really

distinctive in terms of the feed of the tool marks using

sand and, and copper. Now bringing the latex that they

took of the core in the Petrie Museum, and we see something

totally different. The striations are very clear

and they're quite deep. The devil is actually in the

details, and the details of this particular artifact are what I

consider to be a smoking gun in terms of what level of

technology we give the ancient Egyptians credit for.

>> NARRATOR: Intrigued by his discovery, Chris Dunn performed

other experiments using his precision instruments.

>> DUNN: As you can see, this is a... an inspection surface

plate, uh, probably ground to within 2/10,000 of an inch.

That is one‐tenth the thickness of a human hair.

Now, I was really amazed when I went inside the serapeum and put

these gauges up against the surface, and found them to be

within what I consider to be the tolerance of these particular

gauges. If you would put a piece of

paper under one edge of that blade‐‐ just a piece of paper‐‐

you begin to see that there was... would be light leaking

through. And so, the precision on the

inside of the granite boxes in the serapeum are, I would say,

within 2/1,000 of an inch, which is incredible because

those tolerances can't just appear by accident.

It was very shocking. It was astounding to me to go to

Egypt and, uh, go into a facility that was supposedly

3,000 years old and find the same kind of precision.

I was amazed.

>> HOPKINS: I've seen evidence of the carvings on granite done

in Egypt, and they did... they did it with little shards of,

uh... of quartz. I believe they would have just

scratched away the stone with that.

That... that's one possibility, but I mean, that's... that...

that's a heck of a lot of work to do that.

I mean, we're talking, somebody would devote years to doing

something like that.

>> TSOUKALOS: But here is my point. Here we have a real‐life

stonecutter‐‐ you.

>> HOPKINS: Yeah.

>> TSOUKALOS: You see this, and there's, like, smoke coming out

of your head.

>> HOPKINS: Let's put it this way‐‐ I had a client come in and

ask me to do that, I wouldn't do it for any amount of money

because I'm not going to waste my life trying to replicate that.

>> NARRATOR: But precision‐cut stone monuments are not the only

enduring Middle Eastern mysteries.

Engineering experts have also examined the Bible story of the

Israelites' exodus from Egypt. Just how did they survive for 40

years in the desert? Could they have possessed

intricate machines with extraordinary abilities, used

not for building, but for man's own survival?

>> NARRATOR: In the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Exodus

describes how the Jewish people suffered as slaves living in

Egypt. Then sometime in the 14th

century BC, the ruling pharaoh feared their growing numbers

and ordered the killing of all first‐born Jews living in Egypt.

In an effort to save her son, one mother put her child in a

small basket and set him adrift on the Nile River.

That child was found by the pharaoh's family, who named him

Moses and raised him as their own.

As an adult, Moses discovered his true identity and demanded

that the pharaoh free the Jews. When the pharaoh rejected him,

Moses helped the Jews escape from Egypt.

(thunder cracks)

Historians believe that Moses and his people crossed the Red

Sea and made their way into the Sinai Desert.

According to the ancient text, God grew angry at the Jews for

idol‐worshipping and forced them to wander the desert aimlessly

for 40 years before allowing them to enter Israel.

During this time, the Bible says the Israelites survived by

eating a single food source: manna. But what is manna?

A naturally abundant food provided by God or, as some

believe, an advanced food‐dispensing machine?

>> PARFITT: In the Bible, it explains how the Israelites

got from Egypt, where they'd been slaves, to the Promised

Land. They had to cross the Sinai Desert.

And inevitably, given that there was a lot of Israelites and very

little growing, as it was a desert, they ran short on

supplies. God stepped in at this point and

sent manna from heaven. This took the form of some kind

of seeds that rained down upon the desert.

And then they were collected the next day.

And they provided food for the Israelites, except Friday, when

there was a double portion, because on Saturday, being

the Sabbath, it didn't fall.

>> NARRATOR: While the Hebrew Bible fails to give a clear

description of manna, another ancient Jewish text provides

an alternative clue. The Zohar is a collection

of spiritual commentaries and interpretations of the Torah,

and is central to the mystical Kabbalah belief written in the

13th century. The Zohar describes what is

called the Ancient of Days as providing the manna,

but what was this Ancient of Days?

A man, a god or something else?

>> TSOUKALOS: The text speaks of different‐sized brains,

different‐sized faces that were connected with different tubes

and different light sources. Theologians have suggested that

this is a description of God. However, when looked at from a

modern perspective, what is described in the Zohar isn't

necessarily a god figure, but rather a type of machine.

>> NARRATOR: Intrigued by this information, two electrical

engineers, George Sassoon and Rodney Dale, used the anatomical

descriptions of the Ancient of Days to design what they called

a manna machine.

>> DALE: This really is‐is the key diagram of the manna

machine, as we built it up from the text.

For instance, one here is the mouth, but it's actually

the air intake, which carries what is described as the breath

of life. The air goes up this tube here,

which is described as the‐the brain of the Ancient

One, but is actually a dew still. So that although we're talking

about the great sea and the hairs of the beard and so on,

at the same time, we were able to work out their relative

positions and build out the specification of the machine,

and find that we had something that was biochemically viable.

(speaking German)

>> TRANSLATOR: The machine sucked in moist morning air and

condensed in the upper part of the machine that looked like

a Plexiglas dome. From there, it was led down to

an algae culture. The algae culture was treated

with energy, such as a strong laser light, in order to speed

the growth.

>> DALE: Of course, it needed energy for cultivating the algae.

And this was produced, we postulate, in a small nuclear

reactor, which would produce both heat and light as required.

(Fiebag speaking German)

>> TRANSLATOR: The manna machine is a very dangerous device.

We suspect that the reactor that powered the machine was

transported in the Ark of the Covenant.

>> TSOUKALOS: We have multiple references in the Bible that

whoever came close to the Ark of the Covenant and didn't know how

to operate it was smitten to death.

(thunder cracks)

And sometimes people, after they encountered the Ark, started to

lose their nails and started to lose their hair.

So we have evidence of some type of radiation poisoning which

was in direct correlation with the Ark of the Covenant.

And so, the Ark of the Covenant housed an extraterrestrial

device which was given to the Israelites during their 40‐year

wandering through the desert.

>> NARRATOR: The manna machine is believed to have supplied a

highly nutritious form of green algae, or chlorella, as its food

source. It's yet another theory supported by modern science.

>> DALE: We found that work in the field of space travel had

already been done, where the green algae‐‐ chlorella‐‐ was

bred in tanks and fed to people living in a closed environment

and kept them alive.

>> NARRATOR: Research studies done by NASA in the 1960s and

1970s established that human life could be sustained for

extended periods of time by consuming chlorella algae and

nothing else. If it's possible for astronauts

to survive on algae, could the Israelites have done the same?

(Fiebag speaking German)

>> TRANSLATOR: The manna machine was a sensitive device.

It had to be cleaned. Once a week was cleaning day,

where the machine wouldn't produce food and the tribe would

not move. So the Sabbath, the Saturday,

could derive from that necessity.

>> DALE: One theory that one could put forward of course is

that the machine, although they knew how to maintain it and make

it produce the manna, that it did after a time pack up, not

work anymore. And that was why they came out

of the desert.

>> NARRATOR: But if the Israelites' survival depended

upon the manna machine, where did they get it?

Some believe they had stolen it from the Egyptians prior to

their exodus. Others suspect extraterrestrials

gave it to them as a humanitarian gesture, to prevent

their starvation in the desert. Either way, the answer, like the

Ark of the Covenant, seems lost to history.

Today, scientists have successfully pioneered a process

that produces a substance high in protein by means of solar

energy, water vapor, and chlorella algae.

Could this be a duplication of alien technology from thousands

of years ago?

>> TSOUKALOS: They actually built a machine, a machine based

on algae culture producing some type of super food.

And we can find a similar type of technology described in the

Zohar. Is history repeating itself?

>> DALE: One of the big questions is: Where did the

machine come from? And I suppose there are two

answers to that. Either it was built on Earth,

which is a theory I can't really subscribe to.

The other question of course is that it might have come from

outer space somewhere. Now, that's quite a big leap of

imagination, but of course the interesting part is that it

actually produces food as is used by spacecraft.

>> NARRATOR: If the ancient world contained manna machines,

giant mega‐saws, and sophisticated aircraft, what was

the energy source for all of this technology?

The answer may be hiding in plain sight.

>> NARRATOR: Of all the ancient structures located around the

world, perhaps none is more mysterious or as enduring as

the Great Pyramid at Giza.

At a height of 471 feet, the Great Pyramid stood as the

tallest structure in the world until the completion of the

Eiffel Tower in 1889. But while other pyramids and

temples contain walls filled with hieroglyphics describing

their purpose, the Great Pyramid lacks even a single

marking. What was its function? Why was it built?

And what secrets remain hidden inside?

>> BAUVAL: Nobody has been able to explain the interior design

of this pyramid. It simply doesn't make sense,

according to our logic. You have narrow tunnels that

you have to crouch. You emerge in grand galleries

that are nine meters high. You have chambers that made of

granite, where granite doesn't come from in the area.

You have to ship the granite by barges 600 miles away.

>> TSOUKALOS: It's an anonymous site. Not a single inscription.

Not a single hieroglyph. Not a single anything.

It's just there.

>> DUNN: Some people speculated that it was a temple and an

initiation chamber, where people would go to the king's

chamber and become enlightened. There are anecdotal reports

about people who have been inside the pyramid and have

come out absolutely shaken and‐‐ because it was haunted.

>> COPPENS: Egyptologists believe that the pyramids were

built to bury the dead pharaoh. The problem with the accepted

view is the fact that not a single dead pharaoh's body has

been found inside a pyramid, even when the pyramid was

completely sealed, i.e. not a single grave robber could have

entered it.

>> BAUVAL: The Egyptologists say it's to conceal the body.

Well, why advertise it? I mean, there's nothing more

visible than a pyramid for miles. And to this day, you would have

thought, in this modern age, with all the knowledge we have,

we should be able to explain this pyramid.

We cannot explain this pyramid.

>> NARRATOR: Engineering expert Christopher Dunn has

been on a personal quest to unlock the secrets of the Great

Pyramid since the late 1970s. According to him, there are

specific clues in the design and construction of this

mega‐monument that can help answer exactly why it was built.

>> DUNN: When you look at the Great Pyramid, and look at the

culture that built it, they're brilliant, brilliant

engineers. In fact, a lot of engineers say

we couldn't build the Great Pyramid today.

And it was built, supposedly, 4,500 years ago.

And it was built to the precision of a machine.

When I started to do the research and I examined the

Great Pyramid with the eye of functionality, um, it was built

like a machine. Perhaps it functioned like a

machine.

>> NARRATOR: The interior design of the Great Pyramid

features four inclined air shafts emanating from the

king's chamber and the lower queen's chamber.

Like the Great Pyramid itself, their presence and purpose

cannot be easily explained.

>> BAUVAL: The difficulty of building those shafts is

incredible. It's a bit like building a

chimney at an incline across a house. I mean, as a construction

engineer, it's a nightmare.

>> NARRATOR: In 2002, a team of engineers and Egyptologists

sent a small robot into one of the airshafts connected to the

queen's chamber. After 65 meters, a stone door

blocked its path. A hole was then drilled through

it. On the other side was a small room with yet another door

leading further up the shaft.

>> BAUVAL: Since the discovery of the door, we've had every

university, archeologist, anthropologist, every engineer

you can think of‐‐ nobody has been able to explain the purpose

of the shafts.

>> NARRATOR: But were these shafts ever open?

And if they were, what might they have been used for?

>> CHRIS DUNN: The early explorers that went into the

queen's chamber found that the walls were covered with a layer

of salt. That kind of gelled with a

theory that I had developed. You had a dilute hydrochloric

acid solution coming down one shaft and hydrated zinc coming

down the other shaft and when they combined in the queen's

chamber, they created hydrogen.

>> NARRATOR: Hydrogen. It is one of the most powerful

energy sources in the universe. In the mid‐19th century,

it was hydrogen gas that helped lift some of mankind's first

airships, called zeppelins, into the sky.

Today, it is used as a fuel to launch rockets into space.

And if, thousands of years ago, the Great Pyramid was actually

producing hydrogen, that would make it one of the earliest

power plants known to man.

>> CHRIS DUNN: The Giza power plant theory is essentially the

drawing of energy from the Earth through the Great

Pyramid, and converting that energy into microwave energy.

So the chemicals actually come in through the shafts into the

queen's chamber, and then they combine and mix and

hydrogen boils off. The hydrogen is then lighter

than air and it will flow into all the upper chambers.

The energy from the earth is then vibrating the whole pyramid.

The vibrations are picked up in the Grand Gallery.

So I proposed the Grand Gallery was a resonator hall and there

are 27 pair of slots that actually go up the length of

the gallery and then the resonators were mounted in

there vertically.

>> CHILDRESS: Christopher Dunn is theorizing that with

resonating galleries, the pyramid shot a microwave out of

one of the shafts, and once you started up this power plant, it

would have gone on for years, decades, even hundreds of years

without stopping and creating the microwave.

And that was a usable energy that could be captured.

>> DUNN: Now we can speculate where it goes from there.

It could be collected in the immediate vicinity or it could

keep traveling off into space. We don't know.

That's the mystery.

>> NARRATOR: But if the Great Pyramid was actually a power

plant producing energy, was it doing it alone, or was it part

of a larger network? And are there any clues that

could tell us what all of that energy was being used for?

>> NARRATOR: Perhaps the 20th century's most influential

inventor was a Serbian‐American named Nikola Tesla.

His patents on alternating electrical currents and

distribution helped establish the commercial electricity

industry. He also made contributions to

robotics, radar, and computer

science. But while Tesla can be credited

for many scientific advances, one idea that fell short was

his attempt to create a wireless electrical grid.

>> CHILDRESS: Tesla's project was to have these towers around

the United States and around the world.

And they would broadcast electricity like a television

station.

>> FRISBEE: Instead of having to string power lines all over

the place, you just transmit the energy through the air

or through the ground. There were a number of

demonstrations of this device for wireless power transmission

during Tesla's lifetime. So, we know the device worked.

It appears that he was using the conductivity of the ground

or the air to carry the electric current.

Basically in the air, if you put enough voltage on it,

you'll get an arc across it. I mean, you see that all the

time in a fluorescent lightbulb. In the ground you have water,

minerals, salts that can also carry the ions along, and

therefore carry the electric current.

>> NARRATOR: But while Tesla's power towers proved popular in

theory, the project ended in financial failure.

But could Tesla's idea of wireless electricity have been

a rediscovery of an ancient technology?

>> CHILDRESS: I believe that what Tesla was doing was trying

to recreate what was an ancient power system that was used

around the world, and the way they did this was the use of

obelisks.

Obelisks as monolithic, granite towers, which are one solid

piece of crystal, and the obelisks themselves were cut

to special sizes and tuned like a tuning fork.

>> NARRATOR: Could these ancient broadcast towers really have

sent electricity up into the atmosphere?

And if so, how was the electricity generated?

>> CHILDRESS: Each of these obelisks would have required

some kind of generating power station similar to what we have

today. Electricity is created by rotating magnetic fields.

So rotating magnetic fields generate AC power.

The very first power station was built by Nikola Tesla at

Niagara Falls. You've got to have some sort of

power that's spinning the rotating fields, and in this

case would be water. So every obelisk would have had

to have had a power station similar to like the one at

Niagara Falls. It's generating power, but the

obelisk itself is putting the power into the atmosphere,

making it useable. And this is similar to

Christopher Dunn's theory of the Giza power plant because he

believes that the Great Pyramid was actually sending a

microwave beam to a satellite that was in orbit around the

planet. That satellite then could have

been taking microwave power and then it could transmit it

again, in theory, to some other location on the earth,

such as, say a remote island like Easter Island or something

like that.

>> FRISBEE: From some of the descriptions of ancient flying

machines, it's possible that some form of power beaming

might have been used. And in fact, for a lot of the

schemes that you see, it actually would make a lot of

sense because you could put the power beaming station on a

mother ship in orbit. You're just beaming energy to

the vehicle, where it's absorbed and turned into

propulsion thrust. It actually makes a lot of

sense because you're taking the energy system, the power

system, off of the vehicle and locating it remotely.

>> NARRATOR: Electricity... power tools...

mega‐machinery... and the ability to explore the

heavens... Have these technologies been

available for just the past few centuries?

Or are they of ancient origin, only recently rediscovered?

Were our ancestors capable of these incredible achievements?

Or might they have come from another source, one much more

out of this world?

>> CHILDRESS: Civilizations were much more advanced that we

give them credit, and literally, as advanced as we

are today.

>> BAUVAL: In my view, we need to take this seriously

simply because of the scale of the work.

We're looking at monuments that took, perhaps, a century to

build. Even today, we have difficulty

in considering such a project.

>> CHRIS DUNN: It just boggles the mind.

And really, to look at those artifacts and to go back in

time and say, how did they do it? We are kind of cracking the lid

open a little bit and looking inside to try and see just what

happened in our history.

>> COPPENS: It's a question which is a scientific question.

And you constantly have to ask it.

And the possible answer of have aliens visited in the past

could be a potential yes.

>> TSOUKALOS: It's a very specific reason why all of this

stuff was built in stone: for posterity. So it would last.

So that a future generation would have to stumble across

these monuments. We are that society who can

look at these ancient monuments and finally recognize that all

of this stuff was built as a message for us to see that our

past is way different than what we're being taught in school.

Captioning sponsored by A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS

Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH

access.wgbh.org