Ancient Aliens s06e06 Episode Script
Alien Operations
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Very well planned, and it happened well before the advent of modern medicine.
Strange beings with miraculous powers.
Even though the gods forbade it, he was actually able to raise the dead.
And a cover-up destroying centuries of scientific knowledge.
People are afraid of it.
The religious side is especially afraid.
Are recent breakthroughs in medicine really the result of years of research? Or does the knowledge of healing really come from an otherworldly source? It would seem to be that this is medical knowledge that's coming from some advanced civilization of extraterrestrials.
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, do stories of advanced medical procedures in the distant past provide further proof of mankind's extraterrestrial origins? Houston, Texas.
Doctors use robotic technology to perform complex heart surgery through incisions no larger than a keyhole.
Chicago, Illinois.
An amputee climbs 103 floors using a thought-controlled bionic leg.
At the University of Iowa, researchers develop technology that fabricates custom body parts using 3-D printers.
In the last 100 years, scientific advances have dramatically improved mankind's ability to heal itself.
More, in fact, than at any time in the last five centuries.
Throughout history, medicine is about correcting physical problems, restoring a patient to health, relieving suffering.
We've seen tremendous advances over the last three decades.
But there was a remarkable degree of sophistication and a surprisingly high success rate achieved by prehistoric surgeons.
Many of the procedures of modern medicine are derivatives of the ancient operations.
Evidence of advanced medical procedures practiced in the ancient world has been found everywhere from carvings on the walls of temples to skeletal remains all over the world.
But just who were the practitioners of this extraordinary science? And where did their knowledge of the human body come from? Most cultures around the world thought that if something was physically wrong with you, it probably also related to something perhaps spiritually wrong with you.
And so we also find that physicians, or healers, very often were not just healing the body, in our mundane sense, but also healing the soul.
And therefore they had to be somewhat of a religious figure as well.
To be a doctor in the ancient world means you have some kind of special relationship with a god who has gifted you with the power to heal.
A doctor was simultaneously a kind of tradesman and had kind of learned a skill, but also a sort of cultic figure as well who had an association with a god and would therefore use magical cures to deal with problems.
Our ancestors said that medicine came from the gods.
Our ancestors have said that the gods really gave manuals as to how to be living healthy, how to restore health to the human individual.
They realized something about our physical bodies which we are only beginning to understand once again.
Could it be that ancient healers were guided by alien beings? And if so, are recent advances in modern medicine actually a rediscovery of methods practiced thousands of years ago? Saqqara, Egypt.
Here, across from this towering step pyramid, lies the Physician's Tomb also known as the Tomb of Ankhmahor.
According to archaeologists, it was built more than 4,000 years ago for one of the most important officials of the ancient Egyptian civilization.
I'm taking you inside the Physician's Tomb, where you get a glimpse of how they performed complex medical and surgical operations in ancient times.
Now, what's amazing about this tomb is that the physician, Ankhmahor, lived 4,300 years ago and he performed very complex surgical and medical operations.
We can see here a circumcision And here we see a scene of reflexology.
We can see them muscling and flexing the muscles.
Also, here, an amazing operation, a surgical operation on the hands.
It is even suggested that they may have had brain surgery removing tumors.
But where did they get the knowledge from? Well, they say that they got it from Thoth the god of wisdom and science, who brought to them all the knowledge from the gods.
Known for his abilities in science, magic and medicine, Thoth was worshipped for centuries as the god of wisdom and healing.
According to ancient myth, this divine physician healed the eye of the Egyptian god Horus after his uncle Set gouged it out in an epic battle for power.
As a result, the Eye of Horus became an important symbol of restoration and good health.
But was Thoth only a mythical deity, as mainstream scholars believe? Or might he have been something or someone who actually existed? Ancient Egyptian medicine was anything but primitive.
There are clear examples of energetic medicine that are beyond our technological capabilities.
It seems as if these technologies were brought in and were given to them as a complete package, rather than something that developed out of a society that, before then, had been extremely primitive.
And the Egyptians themselves said that Thoth was responsible for this.
But who or what was Thoth? Might he have been not a divine being but an alien visitor, one possessing advanced scientific knowledge? In the Egyptian pantheon of gods, Thoth is the one with the head of an ibis but the body of a human being.
He was the Egyptian father of medicine, meaning he descended from the sky, and he gave them that knowledge.
Might Thoth have been not a divine being, as the Egyptians believed, but an alien visitor who possessed advanced scientific knowledge, one from whom the Egyptians learned their ability to heal? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the story of one of the most advanced surgeons in the history of India.
Varanasi, India.
Located on the banks of the Ganges, Varanasi is one of the oldest cities on Earth, a city that, according to legend, was founded by the gods.
Long known as a center of knowledge and learning, Varanasi was once home to an ancient physician by the name of Sushruta, who many historians credit with developing the art of surgery.
In ancient India, the early physician was a guy named Sushruta, and he was a surgeon and physician who would do skin grafts, cataract removals, even early plastic surgery on people.
So once again, we have someone whose medical knowledge seems so advanced for his time.
Sushruta is also considered to be the first practitioner of Ayurveda, one of the oldest known systems of medicine in the world.
According to Hindu legend, Sushruta is said to have received this knowledge from a god known as Dhanvantari.
Dhanvantari was a high level god, as we would know them, who provided all the information on this complete healing modality based on an understanding of the physical and subtle aspects of the body.
And it was passed through to Indian culture in ancient times and has been preserved and expanded since then.
Though he is most often depicted as having four arms and holding medicinal herbs, the god Dhanvantari was also a shape-shifter.
According to legend, during his journeys to Earth, he could take on other forms including that of a bird.
Is it possible that both Dhanvantari and the half man, half bird Egyptian god of healing, Thoth, were connected in some way? And if so, how? Whether it's Dhanvantari or Thoth, we learn of these extraterrestrial divinities very often being portrayed as bird-like beings who delivered the knowledge of ancient medicine to Earth.
This tells us that our original knowledge of medicine, human anatomy and how to heal the body came from extraterrestrial sources.
Sushruta was very clear in stating that he learned this knowledge from the gods.
Who were the gods? Extraterrestrials.
Every culture will tell you that the first surgeon, that medicine, that healing was a gift of the gods.
And that is extraordinarily interesting because it really shows that the benefit of mankind was accomplished through the intervention and the knowledge of the deities.
How is it possible that ancient cultures separated by thousands of miles shared similar stories about a bird-like creature? Could it be true, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that this extraordinary being was actually a highly skilled extraterrestrial from another world? And might he have traveled across the globe in an effort to teach early humans the art of healing? Perhaps more clues can be found in a collection of mysterious skulls discovered in the ruins of yet another ancient civilization.
Northern Turkey.
While digging at an archaeological site in the Samsun Province, archaeologists unearth hundreds of skeletal remains and ancient skulls dating back more than 4,000 years.
Strangely, 14 of the skulls have large holes, providing what some scholars believe is proof that ancient man carried out a remarkably sophisticated type of brain surgery called cranial trepanation.
Trepanation is making an opening into the skull.
We do it on a routine basis in today's neurosurgery to get exposure of the brain, to remove a tumor or remove a blood clot.
But it was done in ancient times probably to repair traumatic brain injuries from accidents and war injuries.
Ancient cultures did this all over the world in Peru, in Europe, in Asia and Africa.
They were literally cutting holes in people's heads, successfully opening up their skulls, removing skull material and then covering it up again, and the patients were surviving this and living long lives.
Even with the delicate and highly sophisticated tools in use today, neurosurgery is a complicated and risky procedure, one involving the body's most complex organ, the human brain.
Today's neurosurgery provides us with some remarkable new digital tools.
We have what is the equivalent now of a GPS system that allows us to navigate around the intracranial space.
We also are able to use preoperative imaging now to create an individual map of the brain and the brain function.
Those maps are critical to do modern neurosurgery.
But how could an ancient civilization have learned such highly advanced methods for operating on a human brain hundreds of years before such procedures were even attempted in other parts of the world? Perhaps the answers can be found by looking at a collection of human skulls discovered a century ago near the Peruvian Andes.
Here, at the San Diego Museum of Man, is an extensive display of pre-Columbian antiquities, including one of the largest collections of skulls in the world.
Dr.
Tori Randall, a chief paleoanthropologist, has spent years studying the ancient practice of trepanation.
These skulls are about They're Incan skulls, and they're special because they have trepanations, and you can see from the hole right here in the head they've had skull surgery performed on them.
It seems likely that a lot of these trepanations were happening based on warfare or healing some type of traumatic injury.
They seem to have performed the actual trepanations in parts of the skull where there wasn't a lot of cranial musculature, which would've made it more difficult.
One thing that they used were tumis, which are usually made out of bronze or copper.
And they're this little curvilinear knife.
This is definitely a very well planned out practice, very successful, and it happened well before the advent of modern medicine.
And the fact that so many individuals survived meant that they were very good at it.
It's remarkable that we see evidence of healing and recovery and survival in so many of the archaeological specimens, the skulls that show signs of bone healing.
They must have had a good sense of meticulous technique.
But it had to be a rough ordeal for the individual patient.
According to Dr.
Randall's findings, the Inca surgeons were also skilled at avoiding parts of the brain that would have damaged important nerves and affected motor skills.
What this means is that our ancient ancestors had extraordinary information about the brain.
It means that they had detailed knowledge about human anatomy way beyond what we normally attribute to them.
It involves an extraordinary amount of scientific information.
All over the world, we see skulls with curious small holes drilled in, and in these ancient cultures, the practice of trepanation was often said to have been given to them by the gods.
So it's possible that extraterrestrial technology had the ability to see into the brain.
Could the ancient Incan knowledge of brain surgery have really come from an extraterrestrial source? And if so, might ancient alien visitors have passed on any other medical knowledge? Ancient astronaut theorists believe further evidence can be found just a few hundred miles from where the trepanned Incan skulls were found.
famous Nazca Lines, lies the small city of Ica, Peru.
In 1966, a local physician named Javier Cabrera acquired several andesite stones unearthed in the desert here, stones etched with mysterious depictions of ancient, pre-Columbian people.
The Ica stones really give a different perspective on what the locals believed history was all about.
And the Ica stones, what they really spell out, or indicate at least, is that history is not the way we know it.
Each of these people interacting with what seems to be prehistoric animals, people looking through telescopes.
Some of the Ica stones seem to be strange maps of the world before ours.
And one of the things that the Ica stones depicts is ancient surgeries.
Also carved on dozens of these stones are images of brain surgeries, cesarean sections and even tracheotomies.
But one stone is among the most mysterious.
It is thought to depict two surgeons with a heart between them as they appear to be reconnecting the blood vessels.
Could this really be evidence that ancient man was capable of transplanting a human heart? The Ica stones are one of the very few examples of our ancients actually performing surgery.
It seems impossible that ancient people were doing anything like this, and therefore, it would seem to be that this is knowledge and medical knowledge that's coming from some advanced civilization of extraterrestrials.
Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that extraterrestrial beings taught mankind advanced medical procedures like cranial trepanation and heart transplants in the distant past? And if so, might these alien beings have shared other, perhaps even more profound, secrets and techniques of healing? Some researchers believe further evidence can be found in the legends and mythologies of the ancient Irish people and a god they knew as Dian Cecht.
Chicago, Illinois.
Scientists pioneer a stunning biomechanical advancement, a thought-controlled robotic arm.
Outfitted with electrodes that connect to the nerves of the wearer, the prosthetic works just like an actual arm and hand, receiving signals from the brain and giving the user a functioning new limb.
But as scientifically sophisticated as this is, ancient astronaut theorists point to a remarkably similar account in an ancient story from the British Isles.
Irish myth has a story about a divine physician called Dian Cecht.
He has herbs to heal every affliction of the human body and soul, and the people, whether they're wounded in battle or they're afflicted in childbirth or miscarriage or headaches or whatever the malady is, they will go to Dian Cecht for healing.
Dian Cecht is known as the Physician of the Gods, or he was the celebrated physician of the Tuatha Dé Danann, which are sort of a semi-divine early group of people in Irish lore.
According to Celtic tradition, the Tuatha Dé Danann were a race of supernatural beings that came to Ireland riding on dark clouds.
Dian Cecht was one of these otherworldly beings and a physician who sometimes used his knowledge to treat humans.
In the most famous account of his medical feats, the Irish god heals a king named Nuada who becomes injured in battle.
During that heated battle, Nuada lost his arm.
Because of this, he could no longer be king.
Kings were supposed to be physically pure according to the ideas of this time.
So he had to surrender his kingship for a while, and during this time period, Dian Cecht was the one who actually fashioned him an arm out of silver.
So he became known as Nuada of the Silver Hand or Nuada of the Silver Arm.
The story of Dian Cecht giving King Nuada an arm that was made out of silver really sounds like a modern science fiction story.
It almost sounds like prosthetics.
Is the story of Dian Cecht a myth as mainstream historians believe? Or might King Nuada's silver arm have actually been an advanced bionic machine just like the ones being developed today? If so, is it possible that the Celtic god Dian Cecht was, in fact, an extraterrestrial being? According to his legend, Dian Cecht replaced King Nuada's arm with a silver arm that was fully functional.
Is it possible that what we have here is an account of some type of prosthetics that existed already, way back in the past? It would seem that these legends are talking about what are really pretty high-tech medical devices and knowledge the kind of medical knowledge that we have today and has taken hundreds of years of expensive research to find.
So it would seem that they had these devices in ancient times, too.
But where would they have gotten them? It would seem to have been from extraterrestrials.
If the stories of Dian Cecht are true, might similar myths from other cultures also be based on historical fact? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and point to the stories of an ancient Greek god who wielded the incredible power of bringing the dead back to life.
Epidaurus, Greece.
In a small valley, 30 miles southwest of Athens, lie the celebrated healing center of the ancient world, the Asclepion, or Temple of Asclepius.
Asclepius was the child of the god Apollo, one of the principle divinities associated with magic and healing.
Now, Asclepius, because he is the child of Apollo, would necessarily develop this skill as well.
He becomes almost entirely associated with healing.
Asclepius is the Greek name for the divine physician.
Classical Greece did have healing temples in which people could go and have their daytime healing experiences or what they would call "healings during sleeping and dreaming," in which it was believed they would have an audience with Asclepius and receive some kind of diagnosis and prescription that they could apply in the daytime.
It's a very famous and a very interesting practice called incubation, which is people would go sleep in a temple of Asclepius, and Asclepius would visit them in a dream and tell them what the remedy was to whatever sickness or ailment they were suffering.
According to Greek mythology, Asclepius carried a serpent-entwined staff, the inspiration for the medical symbol still in use today.
But perhaps the most mysterious legend associated with the Greek god of medicine was his reported ability to provide the ultimate cure the power to restore life.
His healing arts are so powerful that he can wake people from the dead, which is the line that can never be crossed, of course.
He got into a bit of trouble.
He was using his power that he'd gotten from his father, Apollo, to raise the dead, which obviously poses a problem.
Zeus didn't like it because people that he had killed, Asclepius was raising from the dead.
What this story is telling us is that the story of Asclepius is the story of some extraordinarily powerful technology, knowledge or application of whatever it was, whereby physical death is not the end of it.
Asclepius is on record of raising people from the dead.
This is not anything within the purview of conventional medical technology.
We're talking about no pulse, no respiration, and perhaps even brain dead, as well.
Asclepius may have been operating off of an extraterrestrial derived body of knowledge, and possibly technology, that made it possible for him to achieve these seemingly supernatural feats, in which a dead body is brought back to life.
If Asclepius was a flesh and blood extraterrestrial being, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, then might he have had some sort of advanced scientific technology that allowed him to raise the dead? If so, what happened to this incredible knowledge? Why has the secret of life and death been lost to mankind? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the story of one of the bloodiest eras in recorded history.
France, in the year, 1233 A.
D.
Pope Gregory IX establishes the Inquisition, a group of institutions within the Roman Catholic Church charged with investigating and prosecuting heresy.
During the next 500 years, the Inquisition spreads throughout Western Europe.
Those suspected of sorcery or witchcraft are interrogated, tortured and executed, most by being burned at the stake.
And included as targets of this brutal and bloody purge are scientists, healers and other practitioners of the so-called black arts.
There was a time in the Church when any type of progress was considered to be the work of the devil, and so things were done in the name of God in order to suppress new knowledge.
Science was always something that was held back by the Church, out of fear of changing the status quo.
Historically, the Catholic Church has always been threatened by knowledge especially about healing and medicine.
One example is the invention of eyeglasses.
The Catholic Church went ballistic with the invention of eyeglasses because with it came an idea, the idea that the human body is improvable.
During the Inquisitions, the Catholic Church took a full steam charge on squashing out a lot of these pagan ideas that were medical science, to them at the time revolutionary, but did not jive well with the Church.
One reason the Church launched the Inquisition was to eliminate the average person's connection with this ancient indigenous knowledge that put power in the hands of the individual and took the power out of the hands of the Church.
Long before Christianity, you had healings, absolutely supernatural healings.
So people are afraid of it.
The religious side especially afraid.
Was the Catholic Church's attack on scientific knowledge a deliberate attempt to erase any connection between mankind and its relationship to otherworldly visitors? Visitors whose very existence would undermine the Church's strongly held teaching that life on Earth was the only life that existed in the universe? Did the Inquisition succeed in destroying centuries of advanced scientific and medical knowledge knowledge we are only now starting to retrieve? Perhaps another clue can be found by studying a medical procedure that actually survived the Inquisition, one that has been practiced for thousands of years.
The Italian Alps.
September 19, 1991.
Here, high on a snow laden mountainside near the Austrian border, two hikers discover the mummified corpse of a man.
Frozen in place for an estimated nicknamed Otzi, is carefully examined and so well preserved that scientists are able to determine his age, how he died and even the contents of his final meal.
But perhaps the most incredible discovery of all were the markings found along Otzi's legs and back 50 geometric designs that correspond to those found in the science of acupuncture.
Acupuncture is a long and well tested modality that moves energy through a kind of subway system in the body.
They're known as meridians with about a thousand treatment points.
All the treatment points have names and many of them have references to stars and very interesting things that don't seem to correlate with the body.
A medical therapy that targets an energy field that practitioners believe flows through the human body, acupuncture was originally believed to have been developed in China approximately 3,000 years ago.
The tattoos found on the skin of this Bronze Age mummy suggest that acupuncture was not only practiced in Europe, but practiced centuries earlier than most archaeologists and historians had believed possible.
But how? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the ancient Chinese medical book called the Huangdi Neijing, the oldest text known to give a detailed description of acupuncture.
The first medical book is wrote 2,500 years ago, is called Huangdi Nei Ching, The Yellow Emperors Classic Medicine.
In this book is a whole system.
It talk about all the channels, meridians, and the treatment methodology and the strategies.
According to Chinese mythology, one of the first practitioners of acupuncture was a physician named Bian Que, often depicted as a human-headed bird.
Bian Que is a legendary example of a healer who used supernatural means in order to accomplish his treatments.
Bian Que apparently could consume some herb, and once he ingested this substance, whatever it was, he could apparently see through walls, and see directly into the human body much like a CAT scan or an MRI.
And he was accredited with doing a double heart transplant on an emperor and another person where he switched their hearts.
So you have to wonder now, where did they even get this idea? Bian Que is another of those extraordinary beings who's described as half human and half bird.
This puts him in the league with such figures as Thoth and other divine beings who are also half human and half bird and who delivered to humanity amazing knowledge, especially about medicine and human transformation.
Could it be mere coincidence that the half human, half bird Chinese healer known as Bian Que closely resembles both the ancient Egyptian deity, Thoth, and the Indian god, Dhanvantari? Or is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists claim, that these ancient so-called gods were actually extraterrestrial beings? Beings in possession of highly advanced medical knowledge? I think acupuncture is one of these sciences which came from the gods and was given to our ancestors.
And so even though we might think that acupuncture is specifically linked to a specific culture right now, I think in the past, this was actually information which existed throughout mankind.
Medicine always came from a quote-unquote, "divine origin," meaning that some type of a deity descended from the sky and gave this knowledge of healing people to those particular cultures.
And now, why would all cultures all around the world speak of the exact same thing, that this knowledge was imparted to them by people descending from the sky? Are ancient astronaut theorists correct? Did extraterrestrial beings really give early man highly advanced medical knowledge about how to heal the human body knowledge that, with the exception of acupuncture, has been lost through the centuries? Perhaps proof can be found not in the carvings on the wall of a tomb or in the words of an ancient document, but the most unlikely of places, the cells of the human body.
In 2003, U.
S.
Government researchers announced they had completed one of the most monumental and scientifically significant projects in human history.
After 13 years of work, they had identified and mapped the over 20,000 genes in the human genome, giving scientists new insight into the genetic makeup of the human species.
What we don't know about humans in terms of evolution or genetics is sort of based on what we don't know about genetics nowadays.
For example, we do not know the genetic basis of the thought process.
We don't know memory.
We cannot create any ideas of how changes occurred to evolve the human brain to the functional being that it is right now.
Could this incredible map eventually solve the great mystery of human evolution? Might it help explain why humans, unlike any other living species, can think reasonand have the power of speech? Or why they can create art music and spend time contemplating the reason for their own existence? It's not until about 40,000 years ago that you get a very radical change in human behavior.
Our hunting strategies get better.
Our tools and our weapons get better.
It's as though some untapped faculty of the human brain and of the human imagination switched on.
Is it possible that the reason humans suddenly evolved from primitive beasts to sentient humans is due to otherworldly intervention? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is a profound yes.
One of the basic tenants of the ancient astronaut theory suggests that a long time ago, our DNA was artificially changed by extraterrestrials.
And we can see that this is exactly what happened, because all of a sudden, we made a giant intellectual leap, and all of a sudden, we became homo sapiens sapiens.
This was the time when the very first extraterrestrial genetic engineering took place.
And in some ways, this was, like, phase one in the creation of modern human beings as we know them.
Did extraterrestrials deliberately alter homo sapien DNA? And if so, did they also give humans the knowledge of how to maintain their bodies and heal themselves knowledge that we are only now rediscovering? There is a very widespread prevalence worldwide of a divine providence to medicine, that the gods wanted to help us to have happier, longer, more fulfilling lives, and that they brought out their best technology and their best wisdom teachings to us in order to make that healing possible.
Is there any surgeon out there who just woke up one day and said, "I'm going to perform a surgery"? Of course not.
Every single surgeon had to receive sophisticated and lengthy instruction, training.
We know that our ancestors told us that the knowledge for medicine was given to them by none other than what they referred to as the gods.
This is knowledge and information which exceeds the human capabilities.
And this is, once again, within part of a larger framework, the framework of divine healers, who allow this capability to be used for surgery, to be used for diagnosis, to be used for healing purposes.
They sit between us and the gods, and they were somehow able to apply the divine information, when it came to medicine, to very noble purposes here on Planet Earth.
Did ancient aliens really alter our DNA in an effort to make us better, smarter and perhaps more like themselves? And if so, did they also give early man medical knowledge knowledge that was lost over the centuries and that modern science is only now beginning to rediscover? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer is yes, and suggest that incredible new discoveries and rediscoveries lie ahead discoveries that may reveal the secrets of life and death, the key to immortality, and the answer to the question of who, and what, we really are.
Very well planned, and it happened well before the advent of modern medicine.
Strange beings with miraculous powers.
Even though the gods forbade it, he was actually able to raise the dead.
And a cover-up destroying centuries of scientific knowledge.
People are afraid of it.
The religious side is especially afraid.
Are recent breakthroughs in medicine really the result of years of research? Or does the knowledge of healing really come from an otherworldly source? It would seem to be that this is medical knowledge that's coming from some advanced civilization of extraterrestrials.
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, do stories of advanced medical procedures in the distant past provide further proof of mankind's extraterrestrial origins? Houston, Texas.
Doctors use robotic technology to perform complex heart surgery through incisions no larger than a keyhole.
Chicago, Illinois.
An amputee climbs 103 floors using a thought-controlled bionic leg.
At the University of Iowa, researchers develop technology that fabricates custom body parts using 3-D printers.
In the last 100 years, scientific advances have dramatically improved mankind's ability to heal itself.
More, in fact, than at any time in the last five centuries.
Throughout history, medicine is about correcting physical problems, restoring a patient to health, relieving suffering.
We've seen tremendous advances over the last three decades.
But there was a remarkable degree of sophistication and a surprisingly high success rate achieved by prehistoric surgeons.
Many of the procedures of modern medicine are derivatives of the ancient operations.
Evidence of advanced medical procedures practiced in the ancient world has been found everywhere from carvings on the walls of temples to skeletal remains all over the world.
But just who were the practitioners of this extraordinary science? And where did their knowledge of the human body come from? Most cultures around the world thought that if something was physically wrong with you, it probably also related to something perhaps spiritually wrong with you.
And so we also find that physicians, or healers, very often were not just healing the body, in our mundane sense, but also healing the soul.
And therefore they had to be somewhat of a religious figure as well.
To be a doctor in the ancient world means you have some kind of special relationship with a god who has gifted you with the power to heal.
A doctor was simultaneously a kind of tradesman and had kind of learned a skill, but also a sort of cultic figure as well who had an association with a god and would therefore use magical cures to deal with problems.
Our ancestors said that medicine came from the gods.
Our ancestors have said that the gods really gave manuals as to how to be living healthy, how to restore health to the human individual.
They realized something about our physical bodies which we are only beginning to understand once again.
Could it be that ancient healers were guided by alien beings? And if so, are recent advances in modern medicine actually a rediscovery of methods practiced thousands of years ago? Saqqara, Egypt.
Here, across from this towering step pyramid, lies the Physician's Tomb also known as the Tomb of Ankhmahor.
According to archaeologists, it was built more than 4,000 years ago for one of the most important officials of the ancient Egyptian civilization.
I'm taking you inside the Physician's Tomb, where you get a glimpse of how they performed complex medical and surgical operations in ancient times.
Now, what's amazing about this tomb is that the physician, Ankhmahor, lived 4,300 years ago and he performed very complex surgical and medical operations.
We can see here a circumcision And here we see a scene of reflexology.
We can see them muscling and flexing the muscles.
Also, here, an amazing operation, a surgical operation on the hands.
It is even suggested that they may have had brain surgery removing tumors.
But where did they get the knowledge from? Well, they say that they got it from Thoth the god of wisdom and science, who brought to them all the knowledge from the gods.
Known for his abilities in science, magic and medicine, Thoth was worshipped for centuries as the god of wisdom and healing.
According to ancient myth, this divine physician healed the eye of the Egyptian god Horus after his uncle Set gouged it out in an epic battle for power.
As a result, the Eye of Horus became an important symbol of restoration and good health.
But was Thoth only a mythical deity, as mainstream scholars believe? Or might he have been something or someone who actually existed? Ancient Egyptian medicine was anything but primitive.
There are clear examples of energetic medicine that are beyond our technological capabilities.
It seems as if these technologies were brought in and were given to them as a complete package, rather than something that developed out of a society that, before then, had been extremely primitive.
And the Egyptians themselves said that Thoth was responsible for this.
But who or what was Thoth? Might he have been not a divine being but an alien visitor, one possessing advanced scientific knowledge? In the Egyptian pantheon of gods, Thoth is the one with the head of an ibis but the body of a human being.
He was the Egyptian father of medicine, meaning he descended from the sky, and he gave them that knowledge.
Might Thoth have been not a divine being, as the Egyptians believed, but an alien visitor who possessed advanced scientific knowledge, one from whom the Egyptians learned their ability to heal? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the story of one of the most advanced surgeons in the history of India.
Varanasi, India.
Located on the banks of the Ganges, Varanasi is one of the oldest cities on Earth, a city that, according to legend, was founded by the gods.
Long known as a center of knowledge and learning, Varanasi was once home to an ancient physician by the name of Sushruta, who many historians credit with developing the art of surgery.
In ancient India, the early physician was a guy named Sushruta, and he was a surgeon and physician who would do skin grafts, cataract removals, even early plastic surgery on people.
So once again, we have someone whose medical knowledge seems so advanced for his time.
Sushruta is also considered to be the first practitioner of Ayurveda, one of the oldest known systems of medicine in the world.
According to Hindu legend, Sushruta is said to have received this knowledge from a god known as Dhanvantari.
Dhanvantari was a high level god, as we would know them, who provided all the information on this complete healing modality based on an understanding of the physical and subtle aspects of the body.
And it was passed through to Indian culture in ancient times and has been preserved and expanded since then.
Though he is most often depicted as having four arms and holding medicinal herbs, the god Dhanvantari was also a shape-shifter.
According to legend, during his journeys to Earth, he could take on other forms including that of a bird.
Is it possible that both Dhanvantari and the half man, half bird Egyptian god of healing, Thoth, were connected in some way? And if so, how? Whether it's Dhanvantari or Thoth, we learn of these extraterrestrial divinities very often being portrayed as bird-like beings who delivered the knowledge of ancient medicine to Earth.
This tells us that our original knowledge of medicine, human anatomy and how to heal the body came from extraterrestrial sources.
Sushruta was very clear in stating that he learned this knowledge from the gods.
Who were the gods? Extraterrestrials.
Every culture will tell you that the first surgeon, that medicine, that healing was a gift of the gods.
And that is extraordinarily interesting because it really shows that the benefit of mankind was accomplished through the intervention and the knowledge of the deities.
How is it possible that ancient cultures separated by thousands of miles shared similar stories about a bird-like creature? Could it be true, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that this extraordinary being was actually a highly skilled extraterrestrial from another world? And might he have traveled across the globe in an effort to teach early humans the art of healing? Perhaps more clues can be found in a collection of mysterious skulls discovered in the ruins of yet another ancient civilization.
Northern Turkey.
While digging at an archaeological site in the Samsun Province, archaeologists unearth hundreds of skeletal remains and ancient skulls dating back more than 4,000 years.
Strangely, 14 of the skulls have large holes, providing what some scholars believe is proof that ancient man carried out a remarkably sophisticated type of brain surgery called cranial trepanation.
Trepanation is making an opening into the skull.
We do it on a routine basis in today's neurosurgery to get exposure of the brain, to remove a tumor or remove a blood clot.
But it was done in ancient times probably to repair traumatic brain injuries from accidents and war injuries.
Ancient cultures did this all over the world in Peru, in Europe, in Asia and Africa.
They were literally cutting holes in people's heads, successfully opening up their skulls, removing skull material and then covering it up again, and the patients were surviving this and living long lives.
Even with the delicate and highly sophisticated tools in use today, neurosurgery is a complicated and risky procedure, one involving the body's most complex organ, the human brain.
Today's neurosurgery provides us with some remarkable new digital tools.
We have what is the equivalent now of a GPS system that allows us to navigate around the intracranial space.
We also are able to use preoperative imaging now to create an individual map of the brain and the brain function.
Those maps are critical to do modern neurosurgery.
But how could an ancient civilization have learned such highly advanced methods for operating on a human brain hundreds of years before such procedures were even attempted in other parts of the world? Perhaps the answers can be found by looking at a collection of human skulls discovered a century ago near the Peruvian Andes.
Here, at the San Diego Museum of Man, is an extensive display of pre-Columbian antiquities, including one of the largest collections of skulls in the world.
Dr.
Tori Randall, a chief paleoanthropologist, has spent years studying the ancient practice of trepanation.
These skulls are about They're Incan skulls, and they're special because they have trepanations, and you can see from the hole right here in the head they've had skull surgery performed on them.
It seems likely that a lot of these trepanations were happening based on warfare or healing some type of traumatic injury.
They seem to have performed the actual trepanations in parts of the skull where there wasn't a lot of cranial musculature, which would've made it more difficult.
One thing that they used were tumis, which are usually made out of bronze or copper.
And they're this little curvilinear knife.
This is definitely a very well planned out practice, very successful, and it happened well before the advent of modern medicine.
And the fact that so many individuals survived meant that they were very good at it.
It's remarkable that we see evidence of healing and recovery and survival in so many of the archaeological specimens, the skulls that show signs of bone healing.
They must have had a good sense of meticulous technique.
But it had to be a rough ordeal for the individual patient.
According to Dr.
Randall's findings, the Inca surgeons were also skilled at avoiding parts of the brain that would have damaged important nerves and affected motor skills.
What this means is that our ancient ancestors had extraordinary information about the brain.
It means that they had detailed knowledge about human anatomy way beyond what we normally attribute to them.
It involves an extraordinary amount of scientific information.
All over the world, we see skulls with curious small holes drilled in, and in these ancient cultures, the practice of trepanation was often said to have been given to them by the gods.
So it's possible that extraterrestrial technology had the ability to see into the brain.
Could the ancient Incan knowledge of brain surgery have really come from an extraterrestrial source? And if so, might ancient alien visitors have passed on any other medical knowledge? Ancient astronaut theorists believe further evidence can be found just a few hundred miles from where the trepanned Incan skulls were found.
famous Nazca Lines, lies the small city of Ica, Peru.
In 1966, a local physician named Javier Cabrera acquired several andesite stones unearthed in the desert here, stones etched with mysterious depictions of ancient, pre-Columbian people.
The Ica stones really give a different perspective on what the locals believed history was all about.
And the Ica stones, what they really spell out, or indicate at least, is that history is not the way we know it.
Each of these people interacting with what seems to be prehistoric animals, people looking through telescopes.
Some of the Ica stones seem to be strange maps of the world before ours.
And one of the things that the Ica stones depicts is ancient surgeries.
Also carved on dozens of these stones are images of brain surgeries, cesarean sections and even tracheotomies.
But one stone is among the most mysterious.
It is thought to depict two surgeons with a heart between them as they appear to be reconnecting the blood vessels.
Could this really be evidence that ancient man was capable of transplanting a human heart? The Ica stones are one of the very few examples of our ancients actually performing surgery.
It seems impossible that ancient people were doing anything like this, and therefore, it would seem to be that this is knowledge and medical knowledge that's coming from some advanced civilization of extraterrestrials.
Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that extraterrestrial beings taught mankind advanced medical procedures like cranial trepanation and heart transplants in the distant past? And if so, might these alien beings have shared other, perhaps even more profound, secrets and techniques of healing? Some researchers believe further evidence can be found in the legends and mythologies of the ancient Irish people and a god they knew as Dian Cecht.
Chicago, Illinois.
Scientists pioneer a stunning biomechanical advancement, a thought-controlled robotic arm.
Outfitted with electrodes that connect to the nerves of the wearer, the prosthetic works just like an actual arm and hand, receiving signals from the brain and giving the user a functioning new limb.
But as scientifically sophisticated as this is, ancient astronaut theorists point to a remarkably similar account in an ancient story from the British Isles.
Irish myth has a story about a divine physician called Dian Cecht.
He has herbs to heal every affliction of the human body and soul, and the people, whether they're wounded in battle or they're afflicted in childbirth or miscarriage or headaches or whatever the malady is, they will go to Dian Cecht for healing.
Dian Cecht is known as the Physician of the Gods, or he was the celebrated physician of the Tuatha Dé Danann, which are sort of a semi-divine early group of people in Irish lore.
According to Celtic tradition, the Tuatha Dé Danann were a race of supernatural beings that came to Ireland riding on dark clouds.
Dian Cecht was one of these otherworldly beings and a physician who sometimes used his knowledge to treat humans.
In the most famous account of his medical feats, the Irish god heals a king named Nuada who becomes injured in battle.
During that heated battle, Nuada lost his arm.
Because of this, he could no longer be king.
Kings were supposed to be physically pure according to the ideas of this time.
So he had to surrender his kingship for a while, and during this time period, Dian Cecht was the one who actually fashioned him an arm out of silver.
So he became known as Nuada of the Silver Hand or Nuada of the Silver Arm.
The story of Dian Cecht giving King Nuada an arm that was made out of silver really sounds like a modern science fiction story.
It almost sounds like prosthetics.
Is the story of Dian Cecht a myth as mainstream historians believe? Or might King Nuada's silver arm have actually been an advanced bionic machine just like the ones being developed today? If so, is it possible that the Celtic god Dian Cecht was, in fact, an extraterrestrial being? According to his legend, Dian Cecht replaced King Nuada's arm with a silver arm that was fully functional.
Is it possible that what we have here is an account of some type of prosthetics that existed already, way back in the past? It would seem that these legends are talking about what are really pretty high-tech medical devices and knowledge the kind of medical knowledge that we have today and has taken hundreds of years of expensive research to find.
So it would seem that they had these devices in ancient times, too.
But where would they have gotten them? It would seem to have been from extraterrestrials.
If the stories of Dian Cecht are true, might similar myths from other cultures also be based on historical fact? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and point to the stories of an ancient Greek god who wielded the incredible power of bringing the dead back to life.
Epidaurus, Greece.
In a small valley, 30 miles southwest of Athens, lie the celebrated healing center of the ancient world, the Asclepion, or Temple of Asclepius.
Asclepius was the child of the god Apollo, one of the principle divinities associated with magic and healing.
Now, Asclepius, because he is the child of Apollo, would necessarily develop this skill as well.
He becomes almost entirely associated with healing.
Asclepius is the Greek name for the divine physician.
Classical Greece did have healing temples in which people could go and have their daytime healing experiences or what they would call "healings during sleeping and dreaming," in which it was believed they would have an audience with Asclepius and receive some kind of diagnosis and prescription that they could apply in the daytime.
It's a very famous and a very interesting practice called incubation, which is people would go sleep in a temple of Asclepius, and Asclepius would visit them in a dream and tell them what the remedy was to whatever sickness or ailment they were suffering.
According to Greek mythology, Asclepius carried a serpent-entwined staff, the inspiration for the medical symbol still in use today.
But perhaps the most mysterious legend associated with the Greek god of medicine was his reported ability to provide the ultimate cure the power to restore life.
His healing arts are so powerful that he can wake people from the dead, which is the line that can never be crossed, of course.
He got into a bit of trouble.
He was using his power that he'd gotten from his father, Apollo, to raise the dead, which obviously poses a problem.
Zeus didn't like it because people that he had killed, Asclepius was raising from the dead.
What this story is telling us is that the story of Asclepius is the story of some extraordinarily powerful technology, knowledge or application of whatever it was, whereby physical death is not the end of it.
Asclepius is on record of raising people from the dead.
This is not anything within the purview of conventional medical technology.
We're talking about no pulse, no respiration, and perhaps even brain dead, as well.
Asclepius may have been operating off of an extraterrestrial derived body of knowledge, and possibly technology, that made it possible for him to achieve these seemingly supernatural feats, in which a dead body is brought back to life.
If Asclepius was a flesh and blood extraterrestrial being, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, then might he have had some sort of advanced scientific technology that allowed him to raise the dead? If so, what happened to this incredible knowledge? Why has the secret of life and death been lost to mankind? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the story of one of the bloodiest eras in recorded history.
France, in the year, 1233 A.
D.
Pope Gregory IX establishes the Inquisition, a group of institutions within the Roman Catholic Church charged with investigating and prosecuting heresy.
During the next 500 years, the Inquisition spreads throughout Western Europe.
Those suspected of sorcery or witchcraft are interrogated, tortured and executed, most by being burned at the stake.
And included as targets of this brutal and bloody purge are scientists, healers and other practitioners of the so-called black arts.
There was a time in the Church when any type of progress was considered to be the work of the devil, and so things were done in the name of God in order to suppress new knowledge.
Science was always something that was held back by the Church, out of fear of changing the status quo.
Historically, the Catholic Church has always been threatened by knowledge especially about healing and medicine.
One example is the invention of eyeglasses.
The Catholic Church went ballistic with the invention of eyeglasses because with it came an idea, the idea that the human body is improvable.
During the Inquisitions, the Catholic Church took a full steam charge on squashing out a lot of these pagan ideas that were medical science, to them at the time revolutionary, but did not jive well with the Church.
One reason the Church launched the Inquisition was to eliminate the average person's connection with this ancient indigenous knowledge that put power in the hands of the individual and took the power out of the hands of the Church.
Long before Christianity, you had healings, absolutely supernatural healings.
So people are afraid of it.
The religious side especially afraid.
Was the Catholic Church's attack on scientific knowledge a deliberate attempt to erase any connection between mankind and its relationship to otherworldly visitors? Visitors whose very existence would undermine the Church's strongly held teaching that life on Earth was the only life that existed in the universe? Did the Inquisition succeed in destroying centuries of advanced scientific and medical knowledge knowledge we are only now starting to retrieve? Perhaps another clue can be found by studying a medical procedure that actually survived the Inquisition, one that has been practiced for thousands of years.
The Italian Alps.
September 19, 1991.
Here, high on a snow laden mountainside near the Austrian border, two hikers discover the mummified corpse of a man.
Frozen in place for an estimated nicknamed Otzi, is carefully examined and so well preserved that scientists are able to determine his age, how he died and even the contents of his final meal.
But perhaps the most incredible discovery of all were the markings found along Otzi's legs and back 50 geometric designs that correspond to those found in the science of acupuncture.
Acupuncture is a long and well tested modality that moves energy through a kind of subway system in the body.
They're known as meridians with about a thousand treatment points.
All the treatment points have names and many of them have references to stars and very interesting things that don't seem to correlate with the body.
A medical therapy that targets an energy field that practitioners believe flows through the human body, acupuncture was originally believed to have been developed in China approximately 3,000 years ago.
The tattoos found on the skin of this Bronze Age mummy suggest that acupuncture was not only practiced in Europe, but practiced centuries earlier than most archaeologists and historians had believed possible.
But how? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the ancient Chinese medical book called the Huangdi Neijing, the oldest text known to give a detailed description of acupuncture.
The first medical book is wrote 2,500 years ago, is called Huangdi Nei Ching, The Yellow Emperors Classic Medicine.
In this book is a whole system.
It talk about all the channels, meridians, and the treatment methodology and the strategies.
According to Chinese mythology, one of the first practitioners of acupuncture was a physician named Bian Que, often depicted as a human-headed bird.
Bian Que is a legendary example of a healer who used supernatural means in order to accomplish his treatments.
Bian Que apparently could consume some herb, and once he ingested this substance, whatever it was, he could apparently see through walls, and see directly into the human body much like a CAT scan or an MRI.
And he was accredited with doing a double heart transplant on an emperor and another person where he switched their hearts.
So you have to wonder now, where did they even get this idea? Bian Que is another of those extraordinary beings who's described as half human and half bird.
This puts him in the league with such figures as Thoth and other divine beings who are also half human and half bird and who delivered to humanity amazing knowledge, especially about medicine and human transformation.
Could it be mere coincidence that the half human, half bird Chinese healer known as Bian Que closely resembles both the ancient Egyptian deity, Thoth, and the Indian god, Dhanvantari? Or is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists claim, that these ancient so-called gods were actually extraterrestrial beings? Beings in possession of highly advanced medical knowledge? I think acupuncture is one of these sciences which came from the gods and was given to our ancestors.
And so even though we might think that acupuncture is specifically linked to a specific culture right now, I think in the past, this was actually information which existed throughout mankind.
Medicine always came from a quote-unquote, "divine origin," meaning that some type of a deity descended from the sky and gave this knowledge of healing people to those particular cultures.
And now, why would all cultures all around the world speak of the exact same thing, that this knowledge was imparted to them by people descending from the sky? Are ancient astronaut theorists correct? Did extraterrestrial beings really give early man highly advanced medical knowledge about how to heal the human body knowledge that, with the exception of acupuncture, has been lost through the centuries? Perhaps proof can be found not in the carvings on the wall of a tomb or in the words of an ancient document, but the most unlikely of places, the cells of the human body.
In 2003, U.
S.
Government researchers announced they had completed one of the most monumental and scientifically significant projects in human history.
After 13 years of work, they had identified and mapped the over 20,000 genes in the human genome, giving scientists new insight into the genetic makeup of the human species.
What we don't know about humans in terms of evolution or genetics is sort of based on what we don't know about genetics nowadays.
For example, we do not know the genetic basis of the thought process.
We don't know memory.
We cannot create any ideas of how changes occurred to evolve the human brain to the functional being that it is right now.
Could this incredible map eventually solve the great mystery of human evolution? Might it help explain why humans, unlike any other living species, can think reasonand have the power of speech? Or why they can create art music and spend time contemplating the reason for their own existence? It's not until about 40,000 years ago that you get a very radical change in human behavior.
Our hunting strategies get better.
Our tools and our weapons get better.
It's as though some untapped faculty of the human brain and of the human imagination switched on.
Is it possible that the reason humans suddenly evolved from primitive beasts to sentient humans is due to otherworldly intervention? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is a profound yes.
One of the basic tenants of the ancient astronaut theory suggests that a long time ago, our DNA was artificially changed by extraterrestrials.
And we can see that this is exactly what happened, because all of a sudden, we made a giant intellectual leap, and all of a sudden, we became homo sapiens sapiens.
This was the time when the very first extraterrestrial genetic engineering took place.
And in some ways, this was, like, phase one in the creation of modern human beings as we know them.
Did extraterrestrials deliberately alter homo sapien DNA? And if so, did they also give humans the knowledge of how to maintain their bodies and heal themselves knowledge that we are only now rediscovering? There is a very widespread prevalence worldwide of a divine providence to medicine, that the gods wanted to help us to have happier, longer, more fulfilling lives, and that they brought out their best technology and their best wisdom teachings to us in order to make that healing possible.
Is there any surgeon out there who just woke up one day and said, "I'm going to perform a surgery"? Of course not.
Every single surgeon had to receive sophisticated and lengthy instruction, training.
We know that our ancestors told us that the knowledge for medicine was given to them by none other than what they referred to as the gods.
This is knowledge and information which exceeds the human capabilities.
And this is, once again, within part of a larger framework, the framework of divine healers, who allow this capability to be used for surgery, to be used for diagnosis, to be used for healing purposes.
They sit between us and the gods, and they were somehow able to apply the divine information, when it came to medicine, to very noble purposes here on Planet Earth.
Did ancient aliens really alter our DNA in an effort to make us better, smarter and perhaps more like themselves? And if so, did they also give early man medical knowledge knowledge that was lost over the centuries and that modern science is only now beginning to rediscover? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer is yes, and suggest that incredible new discoveries and rediscoveries lie ahead discoveries that may reveal the secrets of life and death, the key to immortality, and the answer to the question of who, and what, we really are.