Original subtitles

>> NARRATOR: Reports of UFO sightings come from all corners

of the globe.

>> I was taken onboard a 200‐foot‐diameter spacecraft

in the Mojave Desert and given...

>> I saw two great big, real bright lights hanging up

in the air.

>> NARRATOR: Most believe these alien encounters are a

modern phenomenon, but the fact is they have been reported for

thousands of years.

>> MICHAEL CREMO: Practically every human civilization have

been in touch with extraterrestrial beings.

>> GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: In India, Israel.

>> DAVID CHILDRESS: The Mayans and the Aztecs.

>> LINDA HOWE: The idea that there was one or more non‐human

groups inspiring us is the truth.

>> NARRATOR: Millions of people around the world believe we

have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings.

But what if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help

to shape our history? And if so, where did they

come from? And just who were the visitors?

(wind whistling)

>> NARRATOR: Roswell, New Mexico.

This sleepy town in America's Southwest was once best known

for its large military air base. But that changed in 1947

when a local rancher reported that a spaceship crashed on his

property. Several weeks later, the U. S.

Army issued a press release confirming the existence of an

alien craft. The next day, the military

changed its story and announced that what they had found was a

weather balloon. These conflicting reports sent

shock waves around the world, and the name "Roswell" became a

pop culture code word that forever links extraterrestrial

visitation with enduring mystery.

>> NICK POPE: Speculation about why the Roswell crash would be

covered up is difficult to pin down.

Some people talk about this in terms of information that would

be shattering to our worldview.

>> STEVEN GREER: Almost everyone's heard about the

so‐called Roswell event, and one of the real

implications of disclosure is that some of our most cherished

myths about the origins of the human race and our history

and archaeology would fall apart.

>> GEORGE NOORY: Something happened at Roswell, New Mexico

a long time ago. People want the truth.

I think there's something in the human being itself that is

striving, that is hungry for this knowledge in order to

answer questions about our own existence.

>> NARRATOR: Today, public opinion polls indicate more than

half the world's population believes aliens have either come

here in the past or are coming here now.

But what is it exactly that makes so many people believe?

>> JONATHAN YOUNG: I do think looking upward makes sense.

The universe is large. There are things out there

we do not understand. There is probably intelligent

life somewhere.

>> ROBERT BAUVAL: People tend to forget that we're on a planet

that's four and a half billion years old.

The presence of our civilization in that vast scale of time...

I mean, if I click my finger, it wouldn't even be fast enough to

say this is the time of our civilization.

And to think that we're the only ones in this vast period of

time, to me, is absurd.

>> SARA SEAGER: Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has over 100 billion

stars. And in our universe, we think

there are more than 100 billion galaxies.

So if every star had a planet with intelligent life, how many

alien civilizations would we have?

>> ERICH VON DANIKEN: If you take us as the crown of

creation, or the top of evolution, we look at our self

as the greatest, the biggest. We say, how incredible, uh,

unique we are in the whole universe.

We forgot to learn modesty.

>> JENNIFER HELDMANN: Each step that we take makes us a little

bit less special. We used to think that we were

the center of the universe, as humans, and then we realized,

"Oh, all right, well, that's not true." And...

But we're at the center of the galaxy, and, like, well, all

right, so we're like two thirds of the way out in a spiral arm.

And then, well, at least our sun, you know, with this... No.

The sun is actually in the middle, and the earth goes

around it. So earth isn't even the center

of that system, and... So, the more that we learn, we

sort of, you know... It's a very humbling science.

(rumbling)

>> NARRATOR: When man first landed on the moon, our

perspective on the universe changed forever.

>> Houston, uh, the Eagle has landed.

>> BUZZ ALDRIN: We aliens who happened to...

go down the ladder on July 20,

1969‐‐ we aliens... were certainly part of a

magnificent race.

I just don't think people have a grasp for what energy it takes

to go from one star to another.

>> NARRATOR: This historic event raised the question: if humans

can successfully navigate in space and explore other worlds,

why couldn't beings from other parts of the universe have done

the same? And might they have already come

to Earth hundreds, or perhaps, thousands of years ago?

>> VON DANIKEN: I think human past is more fantastic than we

all believe. I have come to the idea that

maybe extraterrestrials were on this planet.

>> NARRATOR: Cahuachi, Peru.

2,000 years ago, this ancient settlement served as the

religious and cultural capital of the Nazca people.

But sometime around 500 AD, the Nazca mysteriously disappeared,

leaving Cahuachi to fall into disarray.

1,400 years later, in 1910, anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka

came to Cahuachi to study the ancient Nazca civilization.

During a dig, he unearthed some of the most surprising and

shocking artifacts he had ever seen.

They were skulls with enormous,

elongated craniums. Where did they come from?

How did they get there? And were they human?

>> CHILDRESS: In Peru, we find these weird, elongated skulls.

And they're bizarre‐looking. I mean, and‐and these people

look like aliens.

>> ROBERT SCHOCH: One may say, okay, aliens.

But another aspect that we have to consider is that skull and

cranial deformation, forming elongated heads is a practice

that's known throughout much of the ancient world.

>> NARRATOR: In 1870, the process of skull deformation was

well chronicled by a German botanist and explorer named

Georg Schweinfurth. While exploring the African

Congo, he came in contact with a tribe called the Mangbetu.

They routinely performed a ritual of cranial binding that

allowed them to physically alter the shape of human skulls.

>> CHILDRESS: They took infants' skulls and compressed them and

bound them. And they forced the cranium out

and elongate it. And in many cases, they doubled

the size.

>> SCHOCH: And a big question is why was this being done?

It may have been a way to distinguish the elite, perhaps,

from the everyday people. May have been a social

stratification type of issue. Something that also appeals to

me is, that may have been a way to express physically and maybe

try to achieve physically greater levels of consciousness

or higher levels of mental ability.

>> TSOUKALOS: In my opinion, they did this in order to mimic

the gods. And those gods were physical

beings because if they were just a figment of our ancestors'

imagination, I don't think that's a compelling enough

reason to expose your children to such a ritual to achieve that

type of look. And in my opinion, these people

were misinterpreted flesh‐and‐blood space travelers.

>> SCHOCH: Some people have suggested aliens had elongated

skulls, and apparently, ancient peoples are mimicking those

skulls. The old saying is that imitation

is the sincerest form of flattery.

>> NARRATOR: Although there have been many images that attempt to

depict what aliens might actually look like, one in

particular has come to dominate the public perception.

It, too, features an elongated cranium, and is associated with

an extraterrestrial race that many refer to as the grays.

>> POPE: In terms of entities, one very common description are

the so‐called grays‐‐ three and a half, four feet tall,

essentially humanoid, but, uh, very spindly with

disproportionately large heads and huge black almond‐shaped

eyes.

>> NARRATOR: But would someone in a primitive society really

want to replicate this look and deform their skull?

Some archeologists have a different perspective.

They point to artistic self‐ expression as an explanation of

these customs.

>> ROBERT R. CARGILL: There are all kinds of people that either

worship the body or use the body as art, be it a tattoo or a

piercing of some sort, or tribes that, that put things in their

ears or on their lips to try to, to try to grow parts of their

body. Some societies, we know, practiced binding parts of the

body, feet, or heads and try to make certain shapes, and this

was done for whatever reason. We know today that this isn't

usually the most healthy thing to do, but it doesn't mean

people don't do it. People are always trying to

change their body to make it look a certain way.

>> NARRATOR: Whatever the explanation may be for these

rituals, they are not just found in Peru and the African Congo.

Skull deformation is a global phenomenon.

>> CHILDRESS: What's really strange is that this is found

all over the world, and this is something that archaeologists

cannot easily explain because, for people on remote islands,

for people in South America or Malta or in Africa to suddenly,

independently do this cranial deformation like this seems

incredible. I mean, this is something that

had to be learned, something that was taught to them.

>> SCHOCH: We seem to have basic similarities, as if there was

one civilization or at least one type of culture that was

influencing people around the world. I find it more and more

difficult to believe what I was taught as an undergraduate‐‐

that all these different cultures just coincidentally

came up with the same concepts

independently of each other.

>> NARRATOR: Is it possible that individual societies around the

world were influenced by similar events?

And were they imitating real beings who visited from other

planets? Some of the most compelling

images of an elongated cranium can be traced to ancient Egypt

and the depictions of one of its most controversial pharaohs.

Could it be that he too was mimicking the look of

extraterrestrials? Or is there an even more

outrageous explanation? Could he have been one of them?

>> NARRATOR: Egypt. Long before the ancient

Egyptians built the pyramids or even settled along the Nile

River, they spoke of an era called Tep Zepi, or the

beginning of time. According to legends, Tep Zepi

was when "sky‐gods" descended from the stars to Earth on

flying "boats," and then turned mud and water into a new kingdom.

>> BAUVAL: The word "god," according to the ancient

Egyptian, is "netyro." It means a being that came from

the cosmos. They are very adamant about the

fact that their gods had descended from the stars.

They tell us that the god Osiris, who ruled with his

consort and sister‐‐ the goddess Isis‐‐ they were star gods, and

in fact they identify them very clearly.

Osiris was identified the constellation of Orion.

Isis was identified as the god to the star Sirius, the

brightest star in the sky. There's an interesting point

about this‐‐ is that within the constellation of Orion is the

so‐called nursery of stars. The stars in our galaxy

literally were born in that zone, and it's really peculiar

that the ancient Egyptians insist that the birth of star

gods are in this constellation. They truly believed‐‐ they were

very adamant about this‐‐ that their origins is in the sky.

>> SCHOCH: Something that we see around the world with ancient

civilizations is that they had incredible knowledge of the

stars, of the planets, of the heavenly motions.

The average person in the ancient world had way more

knowledge of what's going on in the skies than a lot of

well‐educated people today.

>> NARRATOR: As ancient Egypt grew into a great civilization,

its citizens believed their pharaohs were sons of Osiris and

thus, living gods. Artwork and wall carvings

depicted them as perfect humans, and while the people worshipped

many different gods, the pharaoh stood above them all.

This basic Egyptian religious belief remained in force for

nearly a thousand years until one pharaoh changed everything.

Who was this heretic? His name was Akhenaten, and in

every surviving depiction, he is shown with an elongated skull.

Who was he? According to Egyptian mythology,

he too was descended from the gods who arrived on Earth at the

time of Tep Zepi. But why do so many still believe

he actually came from the stars?

In 1352 BC, Akhenaten ascended to the throne as the tenth

pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. Almost immediately, he

instituted a series of radical religious changes, including a

ban on references to multiple gods.

>> BAUVAL: It's a rather strange thing that he would want to do

that in one sweep, but he ordered all the, the iconography

of previous gods to be removed. He only allowed one emblem,

which was a sun emblem, literally a sun disk with

curious arms or rays pointing down.

>> TSOUKALOS: Why did he do this? Because according to his

writings and his poems that were written about him later on, he

was visited by one of those beings that descended from the

sky, who told Akhenaten, "This is the way. I am your god."

>> NARRATOR: This sun god was known as Aten.

Akhenaten claimed to be a direct descendent of Aten.

>> BAUVAL: Akhenaten, like any other pharaoh, regarded himself

to be divine. He was a god. Not only himself believed

himself to be a god, but the whole nation saw him as a god.

Now, the definition of a god is that he was a descendant from

these celestial beings.

>> NARRATOR: During his fourth year as pharaoh, Akhenaten

ordered the construction of a new capital city.

He called it Amarna and dedicated it to the sun.

Akhenaten would spend the next ten years here, during which

time he instituted changes in both art and culture, including

how he himself would be publicly depicted.

>> CARGILL: In Egyptian iconography, Egyptian pharaohs

are depicted as these triangular‐shaped beings‐‐

these broad, strong shoulders and these very skinny waists.

Now, we look at leaders today and we know that most leaders

don't have broad shoulders and skinny waists, but it was

important to depict the Egyptian kings as having broad shoulders

and skinny waists‐‐ very, you know‐‐ the epitome of what a

king ought to look like.

>> BAUVAL: That's exactly the opposite with Akhenaten.

He shows himself perhaps as he really is... a rather strange

look. He has a very mystical look.

>> SCHOCH: If we take Akhenaten's statues, for

instance, literally, he was a very strange‐looking character.

Sort of combined, some people would say, feminine aspects with

masculine aspects, may have had an elongated skull.

>> CARGILL: The change in royal iconography of Akhenaten showed

him as he probably really was, with a misshapen head, with a

potbelly, with a sunken chest, as opposed to the idealized

iconography of traditional Egyptian artists that showed

this big, strong pharaoh.

>> NARRATOR: Akhenaten's wife Queen Nefertiti and their

children were also depicted as having elongated skulls.

So why were Akhenaten's and Nefertiti's heads deformed?

Did they suffer from a genetic abnormality or did they

deliberately alter their shape? Some believe there could be yet

another explanation behind their strange, otherworldly

appearance.

>> CHILDRESS: They look like they're different than other

human beings.

>> TSOUKALOS: Is it possible that Akhenaten might have been

an extraterrestrial hybrid?

>> CARGILL: Ancient alien enthusiasts look at Pharaoh

Akhenaten of Egypt and say, "Ah, look at that long head.

That looks like an alien gray. That looks like some kind of

something that's nonhuman, some hybrid between something else

and something human. Must be evidence of alien

interference, alien reproduction with humans.

Something like that."

>> BETTY ANN BROWN: I've been to Egypt, and one of the most

stunning things about seeing the archeological remains of

ancient Egypt is that one unique pharaoh, Akhenaten.

>> TSOUKALOS: I mean, he's got a very narrow, pointy face, high

cheekbones, and a very elongated cranium.

>> CHILDRESS: The idea that they were either... looking like

extraterrestrials, or perhaps had extraterrestrial DNA in

them is a credible idea.

>> NARRATOR: Akhenaten ruled for 17 years.

After his reign, Amarna was abandoned, and temples to the

sun were destroyed. Images of Akhenaten were

deliberately defaced. Ancient Egypt swiftly returned

to its old ways, worshipping many gods.

Was this a rejection of Akhenaten's radical religious

belief system, or a cover‐up of his alien identity?

>> BAUVAL: There's been a lot of theories about why.

Um, if... I mean, the most extreme is that he somehow had

some sort of extraterrestrial connection.

If one accepts that conclusion, then it would explain why he was

literally put off the reign and, some say, put to death.

>> NARRATOR: Some Egyptologists believe Akhenaten was forced to

abdicate and flee from Egypt with a group of his loyal

followers. In 1907, the actual body of

Akhenaten was discovered in Egypt's Valley of the Kings by

a British archeologist named Edward Ayrton.

After unearthing Akhenaten's mummified remains, he was able

to confirm that, indeed, the ancient pharaoh's skull was

misshapen and elongated.

>> CARGILL: Some scholars argue that he suffered from some kind

of physical abnormality; he suffered from a disorder that

caused his face to appear to be long, or his head actually was

longer. I think with Akhenaten we're

dealing with a physical deformation that wasn't

corrected by the royal artists. They just depicted him as he

was: potbelly, sunken chest, long head.

>> NARRATOR: Akhenaten was succeeded by his son,

Tutankhamen, who became the most renowned pharaoh of all

time. When his tomb was discovered in

1922 by Howard Carter, Tutankhamen was also found to

have an elongated skull. Could he have inherited alien

genes from his father?

Today, much of Akhenaten's life still remains a mystery.

Did he really change Egypt's entire belief system because,

as some suggest, he was a celestial being?

If that's true, might there be evidence of similar entities

coming to Earth? Perhaps more clues can be found

thousands of miles away on the other side of the African

continent.

(men singing)

>> NARRATOR: Mali, in northwest Africa.

Deep in a remote valley live the Dogon people, who are the

descendants of a nomadic tribe that settled here around 1000 AD.

Just like Akhenaten's followers, the Dogon had been

forced to leave Egypt because of religious persecution.

>> SCHOCH: The Dogon claim a very long and ancient tradition,

and in my opinion maintain some of the ancient Egyptian

traditions and myths that have been carried on right into the

present age. Parts of ancient Egypt may not

have died. They were carried on, to this

day, among the Dogon.

>> NARRATOR: But what exactly are their beliefs?

Dogon mythology holds that the sky‐god Amma created the first

living creature known as Nommo. The legend also says that

shortly after his creation, Nommo multiplied into several

parts, one of which rebelled against Amma.

Amma responded by destroying him and scattering his ashes

throughout the world.

>> PETER FIEBAG (translated): According to the Dogons' myths,

a god gave them this knowledge. He descended from the sky in an

arc, surfing on fire, landing in a storm.

>> TSOUKALOS: Still today, the Dogon celebrates a festival in

the honor of Nommo and that visitation that occurred in the

remote past. How do we know this? For this festival, they have

wooden masks that date back to a very long time ago, when

this festival began.

>> FIEBAG (translated): Dogon masks tell the mystic stories

of their ancestors. This is a sculpture of the

creator. They call him Amma. He is embracing the universe.

This is how they pass on information from generation to

generation, by stories carved in masks.

>> NARRATOR: But could Nommo have been a real person?

Some see eerie similarities between the Dogons' legend and

the story of the mysterious Pharaoh Akhenaten.

Akhenaten believed he was directly descended from the sun

god Aten. Nommo was said to have been

created by the sky deity, Amma. Is it a coincidence that both

cultures, although thousands of miles apart, shared mythical

tales of beings coming from the skies?

And both Nommo and Akhenaten were depicted with elongated

heads. Is it possible that these legends were based on real

events?

(Fiebag speaking foreign

language)

>> FIEBAG (translated): The Dogons dwell in the central

plateau region of Bandiagara. Their knowledge is centuries

old, and their priests have been sharing it with chosen

individuals only. In the 1920s, French

anthropologist Grialue and ethnologist Dieterle visited

the tribe and were invited to share their secrets.

>> NARRATOR: But one secret stood out: the Dogon claimed

that their god Amma came from a specific star in the Sirius

constellation, the same place where the ancient Egyptians

believed their god Osiris was born. This star, which modern

astronomers refer to as Sirius B, the Dogon called Po Tolo.

But what baffles experts is that the star is so far from

Earth, it's impossible to see with the naked eye.

>> BAUVAL: I was very intrigued by this, by the way.

I mean, the Dogons should not have known about the existence

of this star. Sirius is the second nearest

star from our solar system. It's eight light‐years away.

In fact, it's not even visible with standard telescopes.

It was first seen, literally seen, and photographed in the

1970s.

>> TSOUKALOS: Modern science has corroborated that Sirius B

does indeed exist. Problem is, the Dogon knew about

this before modern science corroborated it.

I mean, that's spooky.

>> NARRATOR: Measurements taken with the Hubble telescope in

2003 have confirmed that Sirius B is what's known as a white

dwarf‐‐ or a partially burnt‐out star with extremely

dense mass. Although it is smaller in size

than Earth, it's estimated to weigh eight times as much as our

sun. But how did the Dogon acquire

this ancient knowledge of astronomy that seems to be

centuries more advanced than that of modern science?

>> SEAGER: The mystery is, how did this story get passed on

down generations... if the story came from a time before

astronomers knew there was a companion star to Sirius which

can't be seen with the human eye?

>> FIEBAG (translated): This is the Dogon symbol for Sirius.

When you move it around, you can see an orbit around the

center marked by Sirius A. Sirius B circles around it, so

it is a circular system. This sign is practically an

astronomic model that the Dogons could not have invented

because only Sirius A is visible, and Sirius B and C

are invisible. However, their description of

the orbit is correct. One assumption is that this god,

Nommo, who brought them this knowledge, could have been an

extraterrestrial intelligence.

>> NARRATOR: Since the early 20th century, the tribe has

been routinely studied and researched by anthropologists.

This has led many modern historians to claim that the

Dogon must have learned about astronomy from Westerners.

>> CARGILL: The Dogon's mythology is so fluid that when

science confirms something that they might have believed in

antiquity, it might have just been sheer coincidence, or it

could have been a conflation. That is, they heard...

Because it's an oral culture, and because the mythology is so

fluid, they heard something that someone said about this

star in relation to another star, and they just grafted that

in to their mythology. They grafted that into their

religion. And then when some reporter,

some subsequent reporter comes along and says, "What do you

believe?," they say, "Well, we've thought this for millions

of years."

>> TSOUKALOS: When critics suggest that this knowledge was

given to them by modern ethnologists, that's simply

incorrect because we know that the story goes back hundreds of

years earlier than any modern ethnologist ever went there.

>> FIEBAG (translated): If it were ever proven that all this

information is exactly correct, including the parts that are

still being studied by astronomers, this would mean

that the earth had visitors from outer space in prehistoric

times.

>> BAUVAL: Either they inherited that knowledge, and the question

is, from where? From a previous civilization, or

from some sort of extraterrestrial civilization?

Or it's a coincidence. In my view, it is not a

coincidence.

>> NARRATOR: If the Dogon people really possessed this advanced

astronomical knowledge, were their legends based on real

events? The ancient Egyptians and Dogon

were far from alone in their belief in gods or mystical

beings that came from the sky. Is there an explanation for

similar myths shared by ancient cultures all around the world?

And what does that reveal as to who these visitors may be?

Perhaps the answer can be found, not in northern Africa, but here

in the rocks and canyons of the American Southwest.

>> NARRATOR: 30 miles south of Gallup, New Mexico lies the

pueblo of Zuni. Sheltered from the desolate

high plains, this adobe city is home to the Zuni Indians, one

of the oldest indigenous tribes in North America.

They have inhabited this land for almost 2,000 years, and have

protected their secrets even longer.

>> CHRIS O'BRIEN: The Zuni are a very interesting culture in that

they're one of the few cultures that really have not opened up,

uh, to the rest of the world about their star knowledge

traditions. Most of this type of information

is very closely held by the natives.

And, um, I really find it very intriguing that this is the

time period in history where now we're starting to learn more and

more about their star knowledge.

>> NARRATOR: Much of the Zuni people's history is etched in

the rocks in the New Mexico desert.

Tribal Elder Clifford Mahooty

and archeologist Dan Simplicio have studied the Zuni's secret

history firsthand. They've collected stories

passed down through generations that are rooted in the belief

that the tribe's creators and protectors are supernatural

beings from the sky.

>> DAN SIMPLICIO: This one's kind of interesting here.

I would imagine it was created in last century, but from this

design, you can see the star figure.

Celestial images oftentimes are depicted in a lot of our

cultural petroglyphs. And this is one of 'em where it

depicts the star. It could be the supernova of

the crab nebula.

>> CLIFFORD MAHOOTY: Our Zuni mythology in the prayer system,

in the ritualistic protocols, talk about these people that

came over here, and told us how to actually live our lives

as beings, sky people. If you listen to a lot of

religious chants and songs and prayers, that's all they talk

about. They're talking about space.

They're talking about out there in the universe where they came

from. So they depict it on a rock wall

here. But the actual meaning of it is

somewhere more profound and more complex than that.

>> NARRATOR: These drawings are thought to have been created

around 1200 BC, yet they appear to depict modern space travelers

and their vehicles.

>> SIMPLICIO: If you move back a little bit, you can see

another figure here. It has a dome. It has eyes.

Uh, there's something coming down...

>> MAHOOTY: And a nose.

>> SIMPLICIO: Like a nose. There's a nose, but it kind of

flares out...

>> MAHOOTY: I think it was something to do with the

ancient ones, when they saw something.

They took as much description of it to put in on there.

Of course it's not going to be exactly what they saw, but

that's as best as they can do for something that they saw.

>> CHILDRESS: With all petroglyphs and things like

that, I mean, they're up to interpretation.

Sometimes they are just doodlings of people.

But other times, they may well be actual descriptions and

depictions of some kind of god from outer space, some ancient

astronaut. And when you go around, say like

the Zuni pueblo, I mean, that's what they'll tell you those

petroglyphs are. Even the Zunis themselves call

them the spacemen.

>> SIMPLICIO: This one seems to have two legs coming out like

that. It has a, you know, broad diamond shape body.

Um, there probably was a better head that chipped off here.

Well, that's very different‐looking than humans

are.

>> MAHOOTY: Now usually they're called UFOs.

But in the Zuni way, we've always been taught that they're

the keepers of the upper world, which means space.

You know, they're sky people. Beings that are of the

extraterrestrial origin, and this is still within our

mythology and our religious practices today.

>> NARRATOR: Like most Indian tribes, the Zunis call these

sky people kachinas. According to the Zunis'

creation story, the kachina gods came down from the heavens

to lead the Zunis to earth through a special portal.

>> MAHOOTY: The sipapu‐‐ that's the entrance to the fourth

world, or the underworld. And that's a representation of

where the kachinas come and go. And so, according to the

mythologies, the Zunis were brought forth into the world of

light‐‐ which is where we are at today‐‐ by what I would

interpret as extraterrestrial beings from the universe.

(singing in native language)

>> NARRATOR: Every year, the Zunis participate in a ceremony

known as the Shalako festival. Dressed in traditional costumes

to represent the kachinas, the Indians celebrate the arrival

of the gods on earth.

(singing continues)

>> CHILDRESS: This is a‐a figurine of kachina gods.

And these guys are some gods from the sky who came down.

Uh, they wear weird helmets.

>> TSOUKALOS: This one has a helmet as a head, and if you

look at the whole body of it, it's as if it wears some type

of a... of a suit. This one here also has the

helmet and the visor.

>> CHILDRESS: For the Pueblo Indians, like the Zunis, these

are their‐their sky‐gods that every year, they have special

ceremonies. People put on these special

costumes and masks to reenact the coming of the gods.

They really look like ancient astronauts.

>> BILL BIRNES: If you look at the poetry and the legends and

the stories from American Indian tribes in the Southwest, they

have the legend of the star people.

The star people came to Earth and seeded planet Earth, and

they came on flying ships. If you speak to the elders, they

will tell you that a lot of us believe in the existence of

extraterrestrials.

>> THOMAS MILLS: The Zunis don't have a written language.

The storyteller comes and he tells the young children how it

all happened. All their songs, that they do in

their ceremonies, tell the story over and over, and that's how

they pass down traditions, customs, beliefs.

They tell it in the Indian way. They use things they understand

to explain things that they don't understand.

>> SIMPLICIO: I remember my grandparents talking about a

craft that flew and had actually crash‐landed on one of the mesas

east of here. There's no interpretation of

what an aircraft is, so the closest thing that they could

interpret as anything capable of flight is a bird, or our masked

kachina dancers.

>> MAHOOTY: We are very, very superstitious people.

It's always been in the history of Zuni that they have always

been here even right here where we're sitting right now, but

you just don't see them. They're in a different frequency.

And those are very, very sacred, and those are very, very secret.

They're out there somewhere.

>> NARRATOR: For those who believe that ancient astronauts

came to earth thousands of years ago, the prehistoric artwork

provides more clues in what they claim is a growing body of

evidence: from wall carvings and statues in ancient Egypt

to tribal traditions and exotic masks in West Africa

to petroglyphs in the American Southwest.

All thousands of years old, they seem to recount similar

stories of visitors from the skies. Could the legends of alien

beings visiting earth thousands of years ago have inspired more

traditional beliefs?

>> NARRATOR: Celestial beings coming down to Earth.

Gods descending from the sky. Can these events only be found

in the ancient legends of the Zuni?

Do similar accounts exist in other cultures and other

religions across the world? And if so, what is the

explanation?

>> TSOUKALOS: We have to remind ourselves that our ancestors

were highly intelligent. However, their technological

frame of reference was different than our technological frame of

reference, so they didn't have the vocabulary with which to

describe or with which to name certain things that they saw.

So what did they do? They used words that they were

familiar with in their time, and so they tried to describe

whatever they witnessed to the best of their abilities with

their vocabulary.

>> NARRATOR: Ancient China also shared some of the same beliefs

that can be found in Egyptian, Native American, and Dogon

legends‐‐ that deities arrived from the stars.

According to Chinese mythology dating back to 3000 BC, when the

god named Huang Di was born, there was "a radiance from the

great star Chi." Huang Di would later emerge

from the belly of a fire‐ breathing dragon to become

China's first emperor.

>> YOUNG: The origins of the Han Chinese people start with a

story of a great god looking down with empathy.

Here were people in poverty, in a beautiful, rich country, the

landscape profound, but the people were suffering.

He took pity and decided to come down.

>> TSOUKALOS: Huang Di arrived on planet Earth in a flying

dragon. He had the power of flight.

Huang Di could be anywhere within minutes, and he usually

accomplished this by hopping on his dragon and flying somewhere.

>> YOUNG: Now this divine energy becomes human and is a great

leader‐‐ the Yellow Emperor who rules and unites the people‐‐

and there is a period of great prosperity until his work is

done.

>> NARRATOR: Huang Di brought order to the chaos, creating

China's first empire. He is seen as a cultural hero,

and is credited with the invention of the compass,

acupuncture, and the standardization of Chinese

writing. One of his greatest legacies is

the Great Wall of China.

>> YOUNG: When the land is prosperous, he decides it's time

to go, and the great yellow dragon comes back and he gets

back into the belly of the dragon and flies off forever.

>> TSOUKALOS: Now, were these dragons truly dragons in a

biological nature? Or were they misinterpreted

types of machines? Because, as we all know, dragons

are always correlated with spewing fire and a lot of smoke.

Whenever we see a modern rocket take off, there is all this

smoke, and sometimes the smoke is yellow and sometimes it's red.

So it's very bizarre how we have these correlations between the

ancient times and modern times today.

>> YOUNG: Mythology is the effort to grasp what we can't

grasp, to understand what is beyond us.

In the Eastern teachings, the dragons very often carry people,

sometimes on their back or sometimes inside their bellies,

so if we think of them as, as a poet's effort to explain a

vehicle that was strange to them, well, those sound like

flying saucers. So it might just be a problem

with translation because, after all, it's just a word.

It's trying to describe something that's very difficult

to grasp.

>> NARRATOR: 4,000 miles west of China, another tale of celestial

beings influencing civilization can be found, this time in what

is now modern‐day Iraq. The Babylonian legend of Enuma

Elish dates back to the seventh century BC.

The text was first discovered in 1849 by British archeologist Sir

Austen Henry Layard while searching the ruins of the

Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.

The story tells of how the first humans were created by an

extraterrestrial race known as the Anunnaki.

>> TSOUKALOS: In the ancient texts of Sumeria, we have

descriptions of these beings descending from the sky called

the Anunnaki. The term "Anunnaki" means "those

who from the heavens came." It says, word for word, that

these beings descended in flying vehicles from the sky, and we

can find not only descriptions of the Anunnaki, but also

depictions and we can see them in statues, in carvings, so it's

all very interesting to see that those beings looked like

modern‐day space travelers with weird suits.

Some of them wore wristwatches. They had boots on and helmets

and, above all, wings, and they were always described or

depicted in floating above some

"regular people." So the question is: who were the

Anunnaki? And according to the ancient

astronaut hypothesis, they were space travelers who visited

Earth in the remote past.

>> NARRATOR: Similar themes can be found in the legends of Greek

and Roman gods, which also describe events that some

interpret as extraterrestrial contact.

Both cultures believed in powerful gods who lived in the

heavens and often came down to Earth to interact with humans.

(thunder cracks)

>> CHILDRESS: A well‐known example is Zeus and the Greek

gods, and they've come down from the sky and Mount Olympus, where

they live in some mountain, and they're bringing, really,

civilization and sciences to mankind, but they have many

human attributes, too, where, yeah, they, uh, they're

attracted to human women, uh, they want to have sex and

children with as many of 'em as they can, and then they go back

into the sky.

>> THOMAS BULLARD: These ideas of gods mating with humans are

very commonplace, like Zeus in Greek mythology was always

coming down, mating with mortals, and producing demigods

like Hercules or Helen of Troy, who were exceptionally

beautiful, exceptionally powerful, unusually gifted in

every way. So, in other words, you were

creating a better race in, in this sense.

>> TSOUKALOS: In the ancient astronaut opinion, the whole

pantheon of gods that we have in ancient Greece consists of

nothing else but flesh‐and‐blood extraterrestrials who were

misinterpreted as being these divine creatures by our

ancestors.

>> CREMO: There is a lot of evidence showing that we're not

alone in the cosmos and that our human civilizations on Earth

have been interacting for long periods of time with

extraterrestrial intelligences.

>> NARRATOR: Belief in celestial beings interacting with humans

is a cornerstone in several major religions.

In fact, according to the Bible's Book of Genesis, God

created the first humans Adam and Eve.

The Bible also contains other passages that describe strange

interactions between "otherworldly" beings and humans.

>> CARGILL: People believe messengers of some sort come

down from the heavens. You know, they came down and

they had sex with humans, and this is where we produced

giants, people like Goliath, so in a technical sense, they are

alien. They're gods or they're angels;

there's some kind of superhuman thing.

>> NARRATOR: Interpreting these Bible stories has also led to a

certain amount of debate and controversy.

While most see a single god directing and influencing

mankind's destiny, others argue that it is really a number of

gods that are responsible.

>> TSOUKALOS: In the Old Testament, it says very clearly,

"And then God created man in our own image."

Now, grammatically speaking, that sentence doesn't make

sense, because you have "God" and then you have "our image."

Well, theologians suggest that, by "our," what they meant is the

Trinity, the Holy Trinity, so basically, if you were to change

the word "god" to "gods," then all of a sudden, the sentence

makes sense‐‐ "and then the gods created man in our own image."

>> CARGILL: So you have this reference‐‐ "let us create man

in our image." In several religious texts,

specifically the Hebrew Bible, which Christians also accept,

and in the Koran, which Muslims revere as holy, you have the

reference to God in the plural, and it is incredibly interesting.

>> NARRATOR: But do all these religious scriptures that tell

similar stories really point to the possibility that aliens have

visited Earth throughout ancient history?

>> BIRNES: The fact is, the story of creation in our own

Bible is the story of creation in cultures around the world.

The story of the flood, the evolution of the human species,

the development of language‐‐ all of this points to‐‐ in fact,

the Bible says so‐‐ life on Earth came from contact with an

extraterrestrial life form. That's in the Bible.

That's in ancient cultures around the world.

So I believe the theory of ancient astronauts is true, and

I believe there's solid evidence there, and I believe

the harder you try to refute that evidence, the more you wind

up against a brick wall. That ancient astronauts visited

us, visited Earth thousands upon thousands of years ago, and

seeded the very civilization we have today.

>> NARRATOR: If the believers in the ancient astronaut theory are

correct, then just who were these visitors?

And might cutting‐edge astrophysics and biology help us

to uncover their identity?

>> NARRATOR: On March 18, 1965, Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov

stepped outside the Voskhod 2 and became the first human to

walk in space.

He spent 12 minutes and eight seconds outside his ship before

returning. Leonov's survival depended upon

a protective suit that could keep him alive where there was

neither atmospheric pressure nor oxygen.

If we need spacesuits, would aliens traveling to Earth

require the same protection? Is that what we're looking at in

these ancient carvings and drawings?

>> TSOUKALOS: When critics ask, "Well, why would ancient

astronauts have to wear astronaut suits like... that

we're familiar with today?," the answer is very simple.

Can we go through space without wearing a type of suit?

Of course not. We would die.

'Cause who says that whoever visited us in the remote past,

that they could breathe in the atmosphere of planet Earth?

So, it's not farfetched to

suggest that they did, in fact, wear some type of suit.

>> NARRATOR: Why might these images resemble modern

astronauts? If they are aliens, is it

possible they are similar to humans?

And could they have come from a planet just like Earth?

At the turn of the 20th century, a group of British and German

scientists considered this possibility.

They embraced a theory put forth by early Greek philosophers,

that all life in the universe began in one specific place.

This theory is called panspermia.

>> SEAGER: Panspermia is the theory that life formed in one

place, and then got spread around to other places.

In outer space in the medium between stars, we see molecules

that are the building blocks of life.

So it's easy to get the building blocks of life to another

planet. For example, if life formed on

Mars, it could have come here to Earth, contaminated Earth,

and then started life here.

>> NARRATOR: Roughly 3.6 billion years ago, Mars was warm and

wet, much like the conditions on Earth today.

Biologists believe that because Mars cooled more quickly than

other planets, life may have developed there first.

(whirring)

>> PAUL DAVIES: Mars is a better candidate for life during the

early part of the solar system. Mars rocks are coming here all

the time, and these have been knocked off Mars by asteroid and

comet impacts. And we know that they could

convey any Martian microorganisms to Earth.

>> NARRATOR: In August 1996, a team of scientists made a

stunning announcement. A Martian meteorite found in

Antarctica contained evidence of fossilized life.

The four‐pound rock, designated ALH 84001, showed the presence

of carbonate globules excreted by microbes when they were alive

on Mars 3.6 billion years ago. Earth was no longer alone.

Life had existed elsewhere in the universe.

>> DAVIES: So this cross‐ contamination between Mars and

Earth, which 20 years ago was regarded as a rather wild

conjecture, is now pretty much accepted by the astrobiology

community.

>> NARRATOR: Astrobiologists studying the origin and

evolution of life in the universe embraced the

possibility that life on Earth

began in outer space.

Did modern‐day scientists finally prove what ancient

cultures have believed for centuries?

>> BAUVAL: The common myth or idea that the origins of

humankind is from the stars is widespread.

Ancient cultures have... The ancient Egyptians, the

Mayans, the Aztecs, the Indians and so forth...

Uh, is intriguing, and it's probably true.

And I mean it from an astrophysical point of view.

We do come from the stars. It's a fact that life on earth

has been seeded by the coming of a comet containing the life

matter.

>> SCHOCH: I personally suspect there is life out there.

In fact, I believe that we have evidence... if nothing else,

microbial evidence, for life extraterrestrially.

>> NARRATOR: But if life did land on Earth from outer space,

was it by accident, or might it have been sent here on purpose?

One mainstream scientist thought so.

British geneticist Francis Crick is best known for his

collaboration with James Watson. Together, they unraveled the

structure of human DNA in 1953.

Less than ten years later, they were awarded the Nobel Prize

for their groundbreaking work in genetics.

In the 1960s, Crick became a proponent of panspermia theory

and took it to a whole new level with an idea he called

directed panspermia.

>> GRAHAM HANCOCK: Francis Crick hypothesized that somewhere,

perhaps on the other side of the galaxy, there had been a

civilization of advanced intelligent beings.

And they had found that their planet was going to be destroyed.

Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in their vicinity, and

their planet would be sterilized of life.

And he asked himself, "What would an intelligent

civilization do in that situation?"

Um, well, first of all, they'd try to figure out if they could

get out of there, if they could actually preserve their lives

and the lives of their descendants.

Perhaps crowd into spaceships and fly across interstellar

space until they found a suitable planet to colonize.

>> NARRATOR: But could it actually be true?

Could we really be the descendants of an alien race

that traveled here from another world?

>> POPE: The ultimate implication of some

exobiological theories is actually that we ourselves are

extraterrestrials, that life on earth arose

because organic material was brought here from elsewhere.

>> BIRNES: What if we're the ones, the descendants of those

who came from another planet? We weren't created.

We were brought here, seeded planet Earth as a colony from

some other planet. So we're colonists of another

race. And that's why the aliens look

like us.

>> SCHOCH: In my opinion, it's not unscientific to consider the

possibility of ancient astronauts, alien intervention.

We live in a huge universe. Now, bacteria versus humanoids‐‐

one may say, that's a big difference, but in some ways,

it's not a big difference. Where you have life, you have

the ability for that life to develop into what we consider

civilization or intelligent beings.

>> NARRATOR: Is it just a coincidence that modern science

and ancient alien theory have come to the same conclusion:

that life on Earth came from the stars?

And if it's possible that billions of years ago, an

extraterrestrial race spread out across space, how would

they survive in their new home? Could they really be our

missing link?

>> NARRATOR For thousands of years, mankind has tried to

depict alien beings who they believe came from the skies.

Many of those creatures seem to share characteristics with

humans. They often have two arms, two

legs, fingers and a head... just like we do.

Biologists refer to this basic body shape as bilateral symmetry.

>> MICHAEL DENNIN: Bilateral symmetry is, very simply, you

divide something down the middle into two parts, and

lateral means up and down, and the two sides are an exact

reflection of each other. If you fold the thing in half,

all the parts line up.

>> RUSSELL TUTTLE: Being bilaterally symmetric allows

you to be streamlined... and to develop a head end, so

you become cephalized. And that certainly happened in

vertebrates. Virtually, the mouth at the end

of something and then you get progressive development, and

that seems to have led to many, many advances.

(creatures chirping, chittering)

>> DENNIN: So, when you look at it closely, you can see a lot of

advantages coming in. Having the two arms and two

legs to work together really gives you great mobility and

balance and speed.

Having eyes on two sides

separated gives really improved vision in various ways.

Animals that are predominantly prey use their two eyes

independently and get a huge field of view.

Animals that are predominantly hunters have them more in the

front and get really good depth perception, which you need if

you're gonna land on the animal you're hunting.

(lion growling)

>> NARRATOR: If it is true that aliens resemble humans in their

physical characteristics, might there also be genetic

similarities? Could we even be related?

In 2003, the U. S. Government announced that the Human Genome

Project had identified all of the nearly 25,000 genes in the

human body. For the first time, scientists

had a road map to the genetic make‐up of humans.

>> NARRATOR: In 2006, genetic researchers at the University

of California at Santa Cruz discovered an area of the

genome they called HAR1 that appears to be unique to

humans. Scientists believe the HAR1

gene plays a critical role in the advanced development of the

human brain, and is a key element that sets us apart from

other animals. But where did it come from?

Did humans develop this distinct gene naturally through

evolution? Or did it land here from

another planet? Francis Crick, the British

scientist who helped discover the structure of DNA, believed

that human genes could not have evolved by chance.

>> HANCOCK: Crick didn't feel in that period of roughly

600 million years, from the formation of the planet down to

the time when the planet could first support life, there was

enough time for DNA to evolve by accident.

It's an enormously complicated molecule.

Crick gave this analogy: You would be more likely to

assemble a fully functioning and flying jumbo jet by passing

a hurricane through a junkyard than you would be to assemble

the DNA molecule by chance in any kind of primeval soup in

five or six hundred million years. It's just not possible.

>> NARRATOR: But if this molecule could not have evolved

accidentally, how was it created? Was it, as some believe, put

there on purpose?

>> TSOUKALOS: The question should not be do the

extraterrestrials look like us or what do the

extraterrestrials look like, but do we look like the

extraterrestrials? Because according to the ancient

astronaut theory, a long, long time ago, extraterrestrials

came here, and through a targeted mutation of our genes,

we‐‐ quote, unquote‐‐ "became human."

(Fiebag speaking foreign

language)

>> FIEBAG (translated): Possibly there is information in our DNA

about whether human evolution was manipulated or not.

The DNA is almost deciphered, yet we only understand five

percent of the information it carries.

>> TSOUKALOS: Geneticists have determined that it only

takes about five percent to clone a human being, and that

95% of that genetic material that we have in our bodies is

nothing more than what they refer to as "genetic junk."

>> DENNIN: Why is everything there?

And there's probably parts of the DNA that don't have an

obvious current function. Maybe they're left over from

something that was used in the past, kind of like our appendix

is left over.

>> NARRATOR: Could this "genetic junk" hold the key to the

evolution of humans? Some people suggest that

decoding our DNA entirely will unlock startling information

about our origins. But could it even prove that

aliens played a role in our development thousands of years

ago?

>> HANCOCK: If you hypothetically wanted to record

an eternal message that could be decoded by a creature that

had eventually evolved enough intelligence to decode it, the

place to put that message would not be on some monument or in

some text, which might be swept away, but actually on the DNA of

the creature itself.

(baby cooing)

It's recently been established that DNA is a recording medium

of almost limitless power. It would be technically

possible to record the entire knowledge of a civilization on

the DNA in our bodies. All you'd need is a way to

access that information.

>> VON DANIKEN: I think we have something, the whole

humanity, in our genes. Somewhere in our genes it is

coded that extraterrestrials were here thousands of years ago.

>> NARRATOR: But the questions persist: If aliens visited

Earth tens of thousands of years ago...

how did they get here? When we look to the past for

the answers, are we looking in the wrong place?

Should we actually look forward... to our future?

>> NARRATOR Scientists agree that the best chances of finding

alien life will be on planets similar to ours, and

descriptions of extraterrestrials seem to

resemble humans in many ways. Some ancient astronaut

theorists draw a surprising conclusion from these facts,

suggesting that aliens might actually be human.

>> POPE: It is odd that many of the descriptions of aliens

are effectively humanoid, and this raises an interesting

possibility. One idea that's been put

forward is that, uh, these are not extraterrestrials at all,

but they're time travelers from the future.

>> NOORY: They could be us from a thousand, 2,000, 10,000

years from now. Let's assume for a moment that

10,000 years from now on this planet, if we all survive, that

time travel was created. They've invented it.

Just like the time machine of H.G. Wells' day, they can go

back, or they can go forward. So let's assume 10,000 years

from now we decide to come back to see us.

Maybe they have changed physically.

They look like the alien grays or whoever they may be.

>> BIRNES: It could well be that ancient astronauts might

not be creatures from other planets at all, but time

travelers from 2720 in a time machine.

>> NARRATOR: Time travel is an essential concept for science

fiction, but would it be possible for flesh‐and‐blood

humans to find a way to transport themselves through

time with current technology? Would this enable us to cover

the vast distances of space?

>> PAUL DAVIES: If I could travel close to the speed of

light, I could reach the year 3000, say, in a couple of years.

Have to get very close to the speed of light for that, but

it's doable, and we know that this isn't a theory, this is...

this is real physics‐‐ we could demonstrate these time‐warping

effects. So you can reach the future

quicker by traveling close to the speed of light.

(whooshing)

>> NARRATOR: The concept of time travel was first proposed

by Albert Einstein in 1905 when he published his Theory of

Special Relativity.

>> DENNIN: Ancient astronaut theory says that astronauts

visited us a long time ago from somewhere else.

The technology involved in doing that, we would assume

would be similar to what we understand now.

I mean, we know special relativity is a law of physics.

It holds anywhere in the universe.

Ancient astronauts that would come all the way here can

travel these large distances and not age that much, relative

to their home planet. Because if you're going close

enough to the speed of light, you will have slowed down time

enough that when you get back, hundreds, thousands, or even

millions of years could have passed.

>> NARRATOR: One limitation to this method of travel is that

because a spacecraft has mass, it theoretically cannot reach

the exact speed of light. The resulting reduction in

velocity would then dramatically increase the amount of time

needed to cross the vast universe.

>> NOORY: Well, there's definitely many theories about

how extraterrestrials got here, how their propulsion system got

them to planet Earth. They're surely not coming here

the way we go out into space. They'd never get here.

They are finding different ways. They have either developed a new

form of propulsion, or they're able to travel through‐‐ what

I've always believed‐‐ wormholes throughout the universe.

That would instantaneously put them here.

>> NARRATOR: The idea of wormholes was first proposed in

1935 by Albert Einstein and his longtime collaborator Nathan

Rosen. They began to explore the possibility that space and time

could literally be bent to create a time travel shortcut.

>> DENNIN: Wormholes have not been detected.

They are a postulated structure in space that involve actually

taking‐‐ if you want to think of a sheet of paper‐‐ bending it in

half and connecting the two pieces that you get together.

A wormhole is thought to do something like that.

Space gets warped, and it connects between two different

parts of space. You know, there's predictions

about what they would look like; there's theories about them, but

we haven't detected one yet. You're not actually ever

traveling faster than the speed of light; you're just cutting

corners.

>> CHILDRESS: You don't actually have to go light speed and

travel for light‐years to someplace.

You literally go there through a wormhole and through

hyperspace, and bang, you're there.

>> DAVIES: If you can have a wormhole in space, then it can

be turned, in principle, into a time machine.

And so travel back in time as well as forward in time would

then be possible. The problem is: where do you get

your wormhole? Uh, it's not inconceivable that

wormholes were made in the Big Bang, coughed out along with

everything else, and there might be one out there in the universe

we could harvest or adapt to form a time machine.

>> DENNIN: If you end up discovering that you could make

wormholes, then that increases the range that you can explore

in space and that increases the likelihood of having two

civilizations at the same time with the right technology to

communicate with each other.

>> NARRATOR: While theoretically possible, traveling through

wormholes or at the speed of light is currently both

economically and technically impossible for us here on Earth.

Using modern propulsion methods, it would take 70,000 years to

reach the nearest star.

>> DAVIES: Our fastest rockets are totally puny.

It's really pathetic. So we're talking about .01% of

the speed of light if you're lucky.

Any object that we can fire out into the solar system is going

to take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star.

>> NARRATOR: Believe it or not, at 4.6 billion years old, our

solar system is one of the youngest in the universe.

But if civilizations exist in other galaxies, is it possible

that they are more advanced than those on Earth?

And if so, could they be ahead of us in their ability to travel

through space and time?

>> CHILDRESS: For extraterrestrials to come here,

through the vast reaches of space to our planet, they

clearly have to have technology that's way in advance of what we

have today. To go from solar system to solar

system, rather than going warp speed, like in Star Trek, you

really are going to travel, as they do in Star Wars, where

you're jumping through hyperspace.

Going from a solar system to solar system is no time at all.

>> TSOUKALOS: Just because we can't travel from star to star

does not mean another more advanced society can't do it

either. I think that's the height of

human arrogance to say, "Just because we can't do it, another

more advanced civilization can't do it either," so, you know, we

have to stop looking at us that we are the pinnacle of creation

'cause we're not.

>> NARRATOR: Celestial beings. Visitors from the skies.

Deities descending from the heavens to interact with man.

Could these worldwide stories be the foundation for the

prevailing belief that something greater than

ourselves, from beyond our world, created the universe as

we know it?

>> NARRATOR: Almost all of the great world faiths are based on

stories of celestial beings who visit Earth.

Many millions of people accept these legends as part of their

core beliefs.

And from the earliest cave drawings... to images at

Roswell, we see artists' interpretations of

extraterrestrials or gods coming to our planet.

>> YOUNG: In many traditions, there is something coming from

above. There is a stairway to heaven or

there's a whirlwind or an angel descends.

Sometimes the encounter is quite dangerous.

As would be appropriate to something awesome and larger and

more powerful than we are. Usually it is memorable.

>> CHILDRESS: Many of the myths are much more specific and they

really talk about gods physically coming to Earth‐‐

landing, doing miracles, and

showing the people how to live.

>> NARRATOR: If visitors did come from the stars, is it

possible that they actually changed the way ancient people

thought? Did they provide an intellectual

spark to prehistoric civilizations?

Could that be the reason why so many different cultures could

build such large and lasting monuments?

>> NOORY: It's almost as if primitive man woke up one

morning and went, "Hey, I've got this knowledge and I know how to

make tools and I'm gonna go and build all these things."

Nah, I don't think it happened that way.

I think others came down to this planet and started teaching

other people, uh, that were beginning to evolve.

But the one thing I truly do not believe is that modern cavemen

at the time basically created all this knowledge out of thin

air.

>> TSOUKALOS: All around the world, we have concise

descriptions in ancient texts which say word for word that

some beings came from the sky.

So it's as if this intellectual Big Bang or this Big Bang of

knowledge occurred in various periods of time, and those

various periods of time most concisely always correlate with

some type of description of gods

descending from the sky.

>> HANCOCK: I do think of that as a very significant

before‐and‐after moment in the human story, and it is not a

moment that is linked to physical evolution.

We've already got the hardware. It's as though something

happened to our software around about that time, and I think

it's a very intriguing moment in the human story.

>> NARRATOR: For supporters of ancient alien theory, the

verdict is already in. They believe that aliens visited

many of Earth's earliest cultures thousands of years ago.

But is it possible? Are extraterrestrials

responsible for the sacred creation myths of the first

human civilizations? Might they have tampered with

our DNA? Are humans themselves aliens

from another planet in the heavens or even from another

time? While man continues to search

for these answers, the questions remain.

If they came here, what was their mission?

We call Earth home, but with perfect conditions for life,

could it be a beacon, calling out to other intelligent

civilizations that may exist in the universe?

>> CARGILL: I think there is life, simple life, bacterial

life, microbial life on other planets.

I think we're going to find that. And who knows?

Maybe one day we'll find some other planet that's capable of

sustaining life, that has evolved people over a long

period of time, that are also looking up at the stars

wondering: is there anybody else out there, are we the only ones?

>> HELDMANN: What bigger question could we ask about

ourselves and our place in the universe? You know, is there life

elsewhere in the universe, or are we it?

I mean, I think it's one of the most fascinating questions, and

we're fortunate enough to live in a time when we can address

this question scientifically and really try and get at some

answers.

>> NOORY: You can then come up with a conclusion that

something, one, very strange is happening on this planet, and

two, if it's coming from outside of this system, then we're being

visited by something that has some intelligence behind it.

>> TSOUKALOS: In the end the truth wins, and we've seen this

in history, where scientific theories or ideas that have been

deemed impossible turned out to be true, and so it is my firm

conviction that the same will count for the ancient alien

theory.