Ancient Aliens s07e06 Episode Script
The Shamans
They can control nature Clouds come swirling in, lightning is coming down.
they can access other dimensions This energy enables them to travel into the realm of the spirit beings.
and connect with otherworldly beings.
Those creatures actually existed in physical form.
Throughout history, spiritual leaders known as shamans have healed, protected, and advised their people.
But are they simply putting on elaborate ceremonies? Or is there something more to their rituals? In a sense, in these shamanistic states, you're tapping into extraterrestrial powers.
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, might the evidence lie with mystical healers known as the shamans? Northern China, 1211 A.
D.
Five years after uniting the nomadic tribes of Mongolia, Genghis Khan launches a brutal invasion against Chinese Jin forces.
Despite being severely outnumbered, the Mongol army decimates their enemy in what is believed to be one of the bloodiest battles in Genghis Khan's more than 20 years of conquest.
By the time of his death in 1227, his empire covering most of Asia, Russia, and parts of Europe had become the largest in the world.
Genghis Khan was a great warrior.
He amassed one of the most awesome armies in the history of the planet, and he would go up the mountains to commune with the sky gods to gain power for his battles.
According to historical accounts, the Great Khan was also described as relying on powerful magic to create severe weather on demand, like hail storms, hurricanes and tornadoes to confound and defeat his enemies.
They march into battle.
And the next thing you know, clouds come swirling in, lightning is coming down, rain is falling down, ice is falling down, chunks of hail, snow.
The soldiers are not equipped for this sudden burst of cold.
They're shivering, they're freezing, they're slipping and falling on the ice.
And then they get totally wiped out by the invading Mongolian army.
What was remarkable about Genghis Khan is that we tend to think about him today as being this despotic, mad, cruel ruler.
He was a priest king, something known as a shaman.
In Mongolian culture, certain members of the tribe were thought to have the ability to communicate directly with the gods, accessing seemingly supernatural powers and information.
These holy prophets were commonly known as shamans.
Is it possible that Genghis Khan, one of the greatest conquerors in human history, used his connection with the divine to build the massive Mongol empire? And if so, just what does it mean to be a shaman? For thousands of years, in cultures throughout the world, shamans have been described as intermediaries who provide a link between humans and otherworldly beings.
Known in some cultures as medicine men or witch doctors, they are believed to have the power to travel to other realms in order to bring back healing, wisdom, and guidance to their people.
The word "shaman" originated with the indigenous people of Siberia and means simply "to know.
" Shamans think of the universe as being constructed in different layers, one on top of each other, each one containing a separate world.
One of the skills of the shaman is to be able to travel herself or himself between these different worlds in spirit form.
Shamans are people who enter those realms and negotiate with the intelligent beings that inhabit those realms.
But are shamans simply experiencing hallucinations daydreams manifested in their minds? Or is it possible that their visions are real? Dismissed by some today as madmen or charlatans, in the ancient world, shamans like Genghis Khan often held positions of great influence.
And ancient astronaut theorists claim the stories of these shamans reveal a connection to otherworldly beings.
Copán, Western Honduras.
In the ruins of this archaeological site, once a major Mayan city that thrived from 400 to 800 A.
D.
, stands a statue of one of its most powerful ancient kings, Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil, commonly known as 18 Rabbit.
Around 2,000 years ago, the Mayan empire was at its height.
And they had a king by the name of 18 Rabbit.
The rabbit, to the ancient Mayans, represented the Moon.
So, basically, 18 Rabbit was considered to be an incarnation of the Moon god.
And he is said to have had all sorts of miraculous powers.
By the end of his erected seven stone pillars, each depicting him interacting with the divine.
The stela of Copán shows King 18 Rabbit standing in the center of the universe.
But on the side of him is a portal to another world.
So it would seem to be telling us that he had access to the other world as well as being the commander and chief of this world.
Today, we separate politics and religion.
In the past, especially for the Maya, that was not the case.
To be the king was to also be supernatural; to have shamanic ability.
You were not just a king, you were a shaman king.
And 18 Rabbit, like every other king in the dynasty of Copán and in the cities around them, was a shaman.
According to Maya tradition, shaman kings like otherworldly beings through a process known as bloodletting.
The Mayan king would put a spine through his hand.
Blood would be collected by the shaman into a piece of paper.
And it would then be put into a fire and it would smoke.
And by watching this smoke rise, the shaman could see what actions they were supposed to take according to the will of the gods revealed in the smoke that was made by the blood of the king or the ruler.
The right to rulership for a Maya king, the thing that the people followed him for was his ability to contact the other world.
Through shamanic ceremonies, he was able to ask for the favor of the gods for the people.
powerful shaman king.
And you have to ask is it possible that these gods could be extraterrestrials? And perhaps it was the guidance of these extraterrestrial beings that made him such a powerful leader.
All around the world we can hear stories of how shamans state that they were in communications with beings from other worlds.
Is it possible that what we see in the experiences of ancient shamans is extraterrestrial human contact? And this contact wasn't seen as something dangerous or strange but rather as a means for moving humanity forward due to new and important knowledge received.
Were kings like 18 Rabbit really communicating with divine, perhaps even extraterrestrial, beings? Was it this otherworldly guidance that made them so powerful? But, if so, where did these ancient shaman learn how to access these incredible abilities? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answers can be found by examining the transformative and sometimes dangerous process of becoming a shaman.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
January 27, 2014.
A Peruvian-born shaman leads a group of participants in an ancient Andean practice.
Known as a despacho ceremony, this ritual dates back thousands of years.
In Peru, despachos or (speaks foreign language), which are offerings, have existed since the first pre-Columbian peoples settled the Andes and coastal areas.
Despacho consists of a ritual honoring with reverence our ancestral star relatives in the cosmos that have been guiding the evolution of humankind on planet Earth.
Every time I perform a Pachacuti ritual, portals are opened, conduits between the Earth and the sky are revealed.
It is believed that through ceremonies such as the despacho, shamans are in fact able to access these so-called nonlocal realms of being in the universe.
That helps to unify those of Earth with those from the sky.
If shamans really are able to access these so-called nonlocal realms, how are they doing it? And who or what has chosen them to be the ones to communicate with beings from beyond our world? I came into this shamanic tradition as a result of deep curiosity as a child.
I learned from my two primary mentors in folk healing known as curanderismo the following: the spirit world is here with us.
Let us celebrate through that portal to the stars.
I was introduced to a universe in which seen as well as unseen relatives and allies and spirit helpers abound.
And forming relationships with these spirit helpers was the foundation of my apprenticeship.
But who are the spirit helpers? Are they actual beings who exist in a realm most of us are unable to experience? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer may be found in the story of a famous Native American shaman.
Bighorn Mountain range, Wyoming.
Nearly 10,000 feet up, on a desolate peak that is only accessible during the brief summer months, lies a structure known as the Bighorn Medicine Wheel.
This massive stone circle measures over 75 feet in diameter and contains 28 spokes representing the lunar cycle.
By studying the astronomical alignments of the stones, researchers were able to date the construction of the site to approximately 1200 A.
D.
Although it is held sacred by over 60 different Native American tribes, just who built the medicine wheel remains a mystery.
So, the Bighorn Medicine Wheel is-is significant to a lot of tribes because it has this connection to a lot of different traditions in terms of star knowledge and star power and ceremony.
According to the oral tradition of the Crow tribe, the 19th century leader Red Plume made a journey to the medicine wheel as a young man that shaped his destiny as a powerful shaman and chief.
The medicine wheel connect to particular constellations that are kind of like vortexes between certain star energy and certain Earth energy, and the medicine wheel seems to be creating some place that marks the particular spot at a particular time where those star energies and Earth energies and human energy come together.
During what the Crow tribe call his "vision" "quest," Red Plume claimed to have encountered a mysterious race of beings he called "little people.
" He was visited, he said, by these little men who then took him inside the Earth into some kind of a vortex wormhole.
There, they taught him secrets of medicine.
There are lots of stories about little people in Native tradition across the Americas.
The little people come from another planet, and they kind of play around with human beings.
But they're also protectors of them, teaching them even through that playfulness.
Is it possible that this medicine man was actually meeting with extraterrestrials who then taught him some medical secrets and then allowed him to return back to his people? These stories didn't originate in our ancestors' imagination.
There is a core of truth to all those stories.
And so, those beings, are they, in reality, of extraterrestrial origin, something physical, flesh and blood? Absolutely.
Those beings are the progenitors of knowledge.
Could the stories of the Bighorn Medicine Wheel be describing extraterrestrial contact? Is this where shamans, like Red Plume, acquired wisdom from otherworldly beings? In cultures throughout the world, there are stories of shamanic initiation at the hands of so-called spirits.
Oftentimes, the process is described as dangerous.
In fact, many healers are said to be taken against their will for this instruction.
When shamans narrate their life stories, they usually do not say, "Well, I chose to be a shaman.
" The healer does not choose her or his profession.
They are chosen by the spirits.
The shaman is usually called and there's some sort of wound that the shaman sustains.
It can be any bizarre malady: being struck by lightning, epileptic fits, a bad accident, anything that wounds the person and enables them to go inward.
It's quite a hardship, you know.
It's not something that anybody who really knows about it would readily undertake.
Once the spirits have got you, you either die or remain permanently sick or become a shaman.
There aren't a lot of ways out.
You often go mad for a bit, or fall sick for a bit, as the spirits take possession of you.
And then you go through a a visionary process in which, for example, quite often you feel your entire body being taken apart and then put back together again.
And when you're back together again, you're starting to acquire the abilities to travel through time and space.
Why would so many of these traditional healers share this belief that they had been chosen and physically changed by spirits? Some ancient astronaut theorists believe more clues can be found by examining the similarities between these shamanic experiences and the stories of modern day UFO abductions.
People who believe they've been abducted by aliens will speak of implants being put in their bodies.
Put there by the aliens.
Exactly the same experiences are reported in much more traditional cultures, shamanistic cultures.
The construal there is that this is being done by the spirits.
And the similarity between the two experiences are very, very, very strong and very, very powerful.
Perhaps what's happening is that you're really in contact with some kind of extraterrestrials.
And in a sense, in these shamanistic states, you're tapping into what we would almost call extraterrestrial powers.
Is it possible that shamans receive their mysterious powers through alien abductions? And might this explain why shamans all over the world claim to have a connection to other realms? Perhaps the answers can be found in the strange and powerful visions experienced by shamans in the Amazon.
The Amazon Jungle, Peru.
Stretching from the Andes mountains to the eastern shores of Brazil, this rain forest is home to more than 80,000 species of plants many of which shamans and religious healers have consumed for thousands of years as a way to access realms they say are inhabited by otherworldly beings.
In the Amazon, one of the shaman's jobs aside from going to the other world and speaking with the spirits is to find the plants right here on Earth that can heal the people of his tribe.
And in the Amazonian belief systems, each plant in the jungle has its own spirit.
And one of the shaman's gifts is that he can communicate with these plant spirits.
Originating in the central Andes of South America, ayahuasca, meaning "the vine of the souls," is a psychedelic brew consisting of two different types of plants cooked with water.
And this is drunk by the shaman in order to enter the spirit world to gain information about diseases, to foresee the future, um, to carry out a healing for somebody.
We know some of the history of ayahuasca because archaeologists have found artifacts from the rain forest which date back three and a half thousand or 4,000 years.
But those are only the surviving artifacts that they found.
Potentially, this could go back to the beginning of time.
Ayahuasca contains dimethyltryptamine or DMT one of the most powerful hallucinogens known to man.
But strangely, this chemical compound only works when consumed under precise conditions.
Ingest DMT, it's inactivated in the intestine by, uh, by certain enzymes.
So in order to get the DMT to be activated and to be able to be absorbed, they had to combine it with other plants.
Ayahuasca contains a mixture of two plants.
There's actually quite subtle and sophisticated knowledge of plants goes into the preparation, 'cause these two things separately will not work.
You have to mix them together and let's not forget that there's 150,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon.
It's really quite an amazing achievement of ancient chemistry to bring these two plants together to produce a highly psychoactive visionary brew.
But how did ancient people living in the jungles of Peru over 3,000 years ago, with tens of thousands of plants to choose from, figure out that combining these two particular plants would produce these powerful visions? According to the mythology of the Achuar people of the Amazon, their ancestors didn't discover this on their own, but were guided by extraterrestrial beings.
The shamans communicated with their spirits, and were told to go into the jungle and turn two corners, as the myth goes, and then they would find this plant, and they brought that back to the village, prepared it in the appropriate way.
The oral tradition says that ayahuasca is a linkage to the upper world.
And it is entirely possible that they were given this gift by their own gods, which may be extraterrestrials.
If the Achuar story of how their ancestors discovered ayahuasca is true, could they have been guided not by spirits, but by extraterrestrial beings, beings who communicated with them on another plane of reality? Between 1990 and 1995, scientists at the University of New Mexico administered DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca, to 60 volunteers and discovered shocking results.
Medical researchers actually administered DMT to patients in a controlled medical setting and they had exactly the same experiences as those reported in the jungles of South America and elsewhere who are experiencing ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca users typically experience hallucinations in the visual form, and a lot of them say that they see other beings.
And a lot of them say that they get messages sent to them from these beings.
In several cases, those intelligent entities said to them roughly the following: "We're so pleased you've discovered this technology.
Now we can communicate with you more often.
" Perhaps what we're dealing with here is intelligent inhabitants of other dimensions.
Why would so many people report such similar experiences while using ayahuasca? Is it possible DMT provides access to another realm? Some shamans believe that plants like ayahuasca have an extraterrestrial origin, that they drifted here as space spores perhaps and then came to Earth on comets, started growing here.
And perhaps they even had an agenda.
Perhaps they are communication from extraterrestrials.
Is it possible extraterrestrials gave the ancients the recipe for this powerful concoction as a way to communicate healing powers with shamans? And if so, might the very core of mankind's knowledge about medicine have come from an otherworldly source? Hua Shan Mountain, China.
This 7,000-foot-high peak in the Shaanxi province is believed to have been the place where Shennong, a benevolent emperor that ruled the area more than According to accounts from the Han dynasty, Shennong not only introduced agriculture to mankind, but also developed a profound knowledge of Chinese herbs.
Shennong pledged that he would venture out into the world and test every plant on the planet in order to determine its benefits for humans and also to catalog, uh, the more toxic or dangerous effects of ingesting these plants.
Sometimes he would ingest, of course, poisonous plants and he would suffer poisonings up to 70 times, uh, per day.
More than 2,000 years later, Shennong's findings were compiled in The Divine Farmer's Herb-Root Classic, a medical journal that became one of the foundations of Chinese medicine.
But just how could this mysterious being have tested so many herbs, some even containing deadly poisons? Shennong was a quite unusual person.
It's said that he had a transparent stomach.
And he himself, after ingesting these poisons, would look into his own stomach and see how these poisons were interacting with himself.
And then he would take the antidotes for it.
So you have to wonder if he's not some kind of extraterrestrial.
Shennong could, in fact, have been an astral or star being who came to Earth to teach the secrets of healing.
This idea would explain his strange appearance and also his ability to withstand ingesting poisonous plants without ever being harmed.
Might Shennong have been an alien visitor? One who traveled to Earth in order to educate mankind about medicine and the healing nature of plants? And is this proof that ingesting DMT, a practice that dates back thousands of years, actually connects shamans with extraterrestrial beings? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and claim further evidence lies with the supernatural healing rituals of the San Bushmen.
The Kalahari Desert, South Africa.
Here, the native San Bushmen hold elaborate fireside rituals, lasting for hours into the night.
During these ceremonies, their shamans perform what's known as a trance dance, through which they reach an altered state of being and access other dimensions.
The trance dance is thought to activate an energy in their body called "n/um.
" And this energy opens a portal of sorts that enables them to travel into the spirit world.
And when the Bushmen activate this energy, they're able to put their hands in the fire without being burned.
They can see vast distances and it's as if in every way, shape and form, they're transformed into super powerful beings.
By accessing the power of n/um energy, it is believed that a shaman can extract illness, see the insides of the sick and travel out of their own body to the land of the gods.
This n/um, it goes up the body and then often it goes out of the crown of the head and that's usually when the out-of-body experience occurs and they travel to the spirit world.
I've seen a Bushman put a coal in his mouth and he wasn't burned.
They'll put their heads in the fire, and although their hair might singe and even catch fire, their face won't be burned, so something is happening with this n/um energy.
They call it boiling energy.
It's almost like there's a vibrational change in their whole body and probably in their DNA in some way.
Could this so-called n/um energy really be inherent in shamans accessed only while in a sort of dream state? And is it possible that the genetic makeup of these medicine men is what allows them to access other dimensions? The San Bush-people have a tradition that they are the first tribe ever created.
They're the oldest people in the world.
DNA tests have shown that they probably are.
That all other cultures and all other peoples that spread throughout the world came, originally, from where the San people are now.
When we look at the San Bushmen and we see the clear genetic evidence that they are the primordial seed of human civilization and life on Earth it is possible that their DNA is especially well equipped to have this potential to access these non-ordinary states of consciousness which may, in fact, be a key to physically journeying into them giving these people the ability to do things that most of us seemingly cannot.
Is it possible that the San Bushmen have special knowledge of how to alter their genetic makeup in order to access other realms? A knowledge that is shared by shamans around the world? And might this knowledge or power have been given to them by alien beings? Ancient astronaut theorists believe an undeniable connection between shamans and extraterrestrials can be found in cave paintings that date back thousands of years.
The Lascaux Caves, Southwestern France.
Discovered in 1940 near the village of Montignac, this cave complex is covered in Paleolithic paintings dating back more than 17,000 years.
Anthropologists believe ancient shamans used these subterranean chambers to perform sacred rituals, and curiously, among the many Ice Age animals that are depicted on the walls, there is a strange creature that has the body of a man and the head of a bird.
The technical term for such a creature is a therianthrope, and that's from the Greek "therian," which means wild beast and "anthropos," which means man.
Clearly these are not things that one encounters in everyday life.
The imagery of cave art is best explained as the experiences that shamans undergo in a deep state of trance.
When they return from the trance state they then depict, on the cave walls, the visions that they have seen in this deeply altered state of consciousness.
The birdman found in Lascaux is reminiscent of one of the Egyptians' most Thoth.
It is also consistent with the depiction of the Sumerian sky gods, the Anunnaki.
But is it mere coincidence that these shamans are encountering the same types of beings while in a trance that the world's earliest civilizations depicted as their gods? In all of these different indigenous cultures around the world there are remarkable similarities of what types of beings people claim to be meeting when they go out of body.
This suggests that in the dream plane and in the shamanic state, there is in fact a real place that we are going, and real beings that we are encountering when we get there.
This is where the ancient astronaut theory suggests that they were the same teachers the teachers that went to all the ancient cultures and brought them the basics for what we've accomplished today.
There was a big, noticeable change in human behavior around 40,000 years ago, exactly at the time that our ancestors begin to manifest the first amazing, uh, cave art.
And what is clear is that it's not a coincidence, that at the moment that the cave art begins, we also witness in the archeological record a radical change in human behavior.
Could the Lascaux cave paintings be proof that Shamans really do communicate with extraterrestrial beings, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? And if shamans like those of the San Bushmen undergo a physiological change in order to make this connection, what might that change be? Perhaps the answer can be found inside the human brain.
Tepoztlán, Mexico.
October 2011.
Here, just 50 miles from Mexico City shamans from all over North and South America gather to commemorate the region's long tradition of shamanic healing.
Throughout the three-day celebration, these modern-day medicine men engage in sacred dances, rhythmic chanting, and drumming all methods that shamans use to connect with other realms.
But why? Do these practices really effect a change within the shamans that allows them to communicate with beings that are otherwise beyond our perception? In many shamanic traditions, shamans have special tools that allow them to access the spirit world.
Among the most important of these tools are the shaman's drum, and/or the shaman's rattle.
These are rhythm instruments that beat out a particular rhythm, that allow the shaman to enter into trance, and to journey to the world of spirits.
We see this rapid, very steady rhythm on the drum as being a central tool in shamans being able to open up the doors of the mind, giving voice to the unseen realms of the cosmos.
Is it merely coincidence that shamans all over the world share the belief that by repeating certain rhythmic movements and sounds they can communicate with other realms? Or might this ancient practice produce a real physiological change in the shamans themselves? There's a neurological explanation for this.
One of the ways that we can alter our consciousness is through rhythmic movement.
So throughout the world you see many traditions in which people communicate with the gods by spinning, by dancing, by doing something rhythmic.
At the University of California in San Francisco, neuroscientist Dr.
Adam Gazzaley is performing experiments using actually track how drumming effects the human brain.
Participants wear virtual reality goggles, and experience both visual and auditory rhythms.
We feel that if we have a participant learn how to entrain with different rhythms through game mechanics, we can strengthen the rhythms of the brain and lead to better performance, better cognition, better memory, better attention.
And so we're recording, in real time, what's going on in her brain.
You can have a rhythm going on that you're listening to, and your brain has its own natural rhythms.
The entrainment would be that they become locked in time such that they follow each other.
We're sort of at, like, the gateway of this frontier now.
Could rhythm and repetition hold the key to discovering untapped potential within the human brain? Might shamans have been aware of this connection for thousands of years? And is the practice of entering a trance state still used to access this power in other spiritual ceremonies across the world? Pentecostal faith healers incorporate music that mirrors the rhythm of the heart.
Hypnosis is often achieved through the use of a pendulum.
Priests performing exorcisms repeat phrases over and over.
Even the Catholic Rosary involves repeating a sequence of prayers counted out on a string of beads to communicate with Almighty God.
It seems possible that the shamans must have understood something about the brain that we're only rediscovering today and how the drum in particular can effect the brain.
It's the brain who works different with the shamans than with normal people.
I always suggested look at our brain like a gigantic hole with big machines in there.
Some of the machines are running, and others are dead.
Now with the shamans, some of the machines are running which, in other brains, they are not working.
That makes a difference between the brain of a shaman and the normal, average people.
Have shamans discovered the means to communicating with extraterrestrials within the human brain? And does this suggest that similar powers might exist within all of humanity powers that we have yet to fully realize? As we settle into the be connected with what we used to know, what we can know again, and how unlimited we are as human beings, is something that we're all seeking.
And it is through the power of shamanism, it is with the help of these intermediaries, that we can begin to experience this again.
The shamans were always bringing advanced knowledge and leading humanity forward.
They represented healing, and they represented expansion of our consciousness.
If these shamans are really in contact with some kind of extraterrestrial gods, then we can see how these E.
T.
's have been purposely guiding us throughout our history.
In many ways they created us.
And even today, they are still manipulating and guiding us into the future.
Did shamans really communicate with otherworldly beings in the distant past? Is it possible that through these spiritual mediators, extraterrestrials were able to influence mankind? And might such celestial command continue even today? Perhaps one day we will realize that the key to contact with our alien ancestors does not lie in technology that propels us to the stars but in rediscovering abilities that already exist deep within ourselves.
they can access other dimensions This energy enables them to travel into the realm of the spirit beings.
and connect with otherworldly beings.
Those creatures actually existed in physical form.
Throughout history, spiritual leaders known as shamans have healed, protected, and advised their people.
But are they simply putting on elaborate ceremonies? Or is there something more to their rituals? In a sense, in these shamanistic states, you're tapping into extraterrestrial powers.
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, might the evidence lie with mystical healers known as the shamans? Northern China, 1211 A.
D.
Five years after uniting the nomadic tribes of Mongolia, Genghis Khan launches a brutal invasion against Chinese Jin forces.
Despite being severely outnumbered, the Mongol army decimates their enemy in what is believed to be one of the bloodiest battles in Genghis Khan's more than 20 years of conquest.
By the time of his death in 1227, his empire covering most of Asia, Russia, and parts of Europe had become the largest in the world.
Genghis Khan was a great warrior.
He amassed one of the most awesome armies in the history of the planet, and he would go up the mountains to commune with the sky gods to gain power for his battles.
According to historical accounts, the Great Khan was also described as relying on powerful magic to create severe weather on demand, like hail storms, hurricanes and tornadoes to confound and defeat his enemies.
They march into battle.
And the next thing you know, clouds come swirling in, lightning is coming down, rain is falling down, ice is falling down, chunks of hail, snow.
The soldiers are not equipped for this sudden burst of cold.
They're shivering, they're freezing, they're slipping and falling on the ice.
And then they get totally wiped out by the invading Mongolian army.
What was remarkable about Genghis Khan is that we tend to think about him today as being this despotic, mad, cruel ruler.
He was a priest king, something known as a shaman.
In Mongolian culture, certain members of the tribe were thought to have the ability to communicate directly with the gods, accessing seemingly supernatural powers and information.
These holy prophets were commonly known as shamans.
Is it possible that Genghis Khan, one of the greatest conquerors in human history, used his connection with the divine to build the massive Mongol empire? And if so, just what does it mean to be a shaman? For thousands of years, in cultures throughout the world, shamans have been described as intermediaries who provide a link between humans and otherworldly beings.
Known in some cultures as medicine men or witch doctors, they are believed to have the power to travel to other realms in order to bring back healing, wisdom, and guidance to their people.
The word "shaman" originated with the indigenous people of Siberia and means simply "to know.
" Shamans think of the universe as being constructed in different layers, one on top of each other, each one containing a separate world.
One of the skills of the shaman is to be able to travel herself or himself between these different worlds in spirit form.
Shamans are people who enter those realms and negotiate with the intelligent beings that inhabit those realms.
But are shamans simply experiencing hallucinations daydreams manifested in their minds? Or is it possible that their visions are real? Dismissed by some today as madmen or charlatans, in the ancient world, shamans like Genghis Khan often held positions of great influence.
And ancient astronaut theorists claim the stories of these shamans reveal a connection to otherworldly beings.
Copán, Western Honduras.
In the ruins of this archaeological site, once a major Mayan city that thrived from 400 to 800 A.
D.
, stands a statue of one of its most powerful ancient kings, Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil, commonly known as 18 Rabbit.
Around 2,000 years ago, the Mayan empire was at its height.
And they had a king by the name of 18 Rabbit.
The rabbit, to the ancient Mayans, represented the Moon.
So, basically, 18 Rabbit was considered to be an incarnation of the Moon god.
And he is said to have had all sorts of miraculous powers.
By the end of his erected seven stone pillars, each depicting him interacting with the divine.
The stela of Copán shows King 18 Rabbit standing in the center of the universe.
But on the side of him is a portal to another world.
So it would seem to be telling us that he had access to the other world as well as being the commander and chief of this world.
Today, we separate politics and religion.
In the past, especially for the Maya, that was not the case.
To be the king was to also be supernatural; to have shamanic ability.
You were not just a king, you were a shaman king.
And 18 Rabbit, like every other king in the dynasty of Copán and in the cities around them, was a shaman.
According to Maya tradition, shaman kings like otherworldly beings through a process known as bloodletting.
The Mayan king would put a spine through his hand.
Blood would be collected by the shaman into a piece of paper.
And it would then be put into a fire and it would smoke.
And by watching this smoke rise, the shaman could see what actions they were supposed to take according to the will of the gods revealed in the smoke that was made by the blood of the king or the ruler.
The right to rulership for a Maya king, the thing that the people followed him for was his ability to contact the other world.
Through shamanic ceremonies, he was able to ask for the favor of the gods for the people.
powerful shaman king.
And you have to ask is it possible that these gods could be extraterrestrials? And perhaps it was the guidance of these extraterrestrial beings that made him such a powerful leader.
All around the world we can hear stories of how shamans state that they were in communications with beings from other worlds.
Is it possible that what we see in the experiences of ancient shamans is extraterrestrial human contact? And this contact wasn't seen as something dangerous or strange but rather as a means for moving humanity forward due to new and important knowledge received.
Were kings like 18 Rabbit really communicating with divine, perhaps even extraterrestrial, beings? Was it this otherworldly guidance that made them so powerful? But, if so, where did these ancient shaman learn how to access these incredible abilities? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answers can be found by examining the transformative and sometimes dangerous process of becoming a shaman.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
January 27, 2014.
A Peruvian-born shaman leads a group of participants in an ancient Andean practice.
Known as a despacho ceremony, this ritual dates back thousands of years.
In Peru, despachos or (speaks foreign language), which are offerings, have existed since the first pre-Columbian peoples settled the Andes and coastal areas.
Despacho consists of a ritual honoring with reverence our ancestral star relatives in the cosmos that have been guiding the evolution of humankind on planet Earth.
Every time I perform a Pachacuti ritual, portals are opened, conduits between the Earth and the sky are revealed.
It is believed that through ceremonies such as the despacho, shamans are in fact able to access these so-called nonlocal realms of being in the universe.
That helps to unify those of Earth with those from the sky.
If shamans really are able to access these so-called nonlocal realms, how are they doing it? And who or what has chosen them to be the ones to communicate with beings from beyond our world? I came into this shamanic tradition as a result of deep curiosity as a child.
I learned from my two primary mentors in folk healing known as curanderismo the following: the spirit world is here with us.
Let us celebrate through that portal to the stars.
I was introduced to a universe in which seen as well as unseen relatives and allies and spirit helpers abound.
And forming relationships with these spirit helpers was the foundation of my apprenticeship.
But who are the spirit helpers? Are they actual beings who exist in a realm most of us are unable to experience? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer may be found in the story of a famous Native American shaman.
Bighorn Mountain range, Wyoming.
Nearly 10,000 feet up, on a desolate peak that is only accessible during the brief summer months, lies a structure known as the Bighorn Medicine Wheel.
This massive stone circle measures over 75 feet in diameter and contains 28 spokes representing the lunar cycle.
By studying the astronomical alignments of the stones, researchers were able to date the construction of the site to approximately 1200 A.
D.
Although it is held sacred by over 60 different Native American tribes, just who built the medicine wheel remains a mystery.
So, the Bighorn Medicine Wheel is-is significant to a lot of tribes because it has this connection to a lot of different traditions in terms of star knowledge and star power and ceremony.
According to the oral tradition of the Crow tribe, the 19th century leader Red Plume made a journey to the medicine wheel as a young man that shaped his destiny as a powerful shaman and chief.
The medicine wheel connect to particular constellations that are kind of like vortexes between certain star energy and certain Earth energy, and the medicine wheel seems to be creating some place that marks the particular spot at a particular time where those star energies and Earth energies and human energy come together.
During what the Crow tribe call his "vision" "quest," Red Plume claimed to have encountered a mysterious race of beings he called "little people.
" He was visited, he said, by these little men who then took him inside the Earth into some kind of a vortex wormhole.
There, they taught him secrets of medicine.
There are lots of stories about little people in Native tradition across the Americas.
The little people come from another planet, and they kind of play around with human beings.
But they're also protectors of them, teaching them even through that playfulness.
Is it possible that this medicine man was actually meeting with extraterrestrials who then taught him some medical secrets and then allowed him to return back to his people? These stories didn't originate in our ancestors' imagination.
There is a core of truth to all those stories.
And so, those beings, are they, in reality, of extraterrestrial origin, something physical, flesh and blood? Absolutely.
Those beings are the progenitors of knowledge.
Could the stories of the Bighorn Medicine Wheel be describing extraterrestrial contact? Is this where shamans, like Red Plume, acquired wisdom from otherworldly beings? In cultures throughout the world, there are stories of shamanic initiation at the hands of so-called spirits.
Oftentimes, the process is described as dangerous.
In fact, many healers are said to be taken against their will for this instruction.
When shamans narrate their life stories, they usually do not say, "Well, I chose to be a shaman.
" The healer does not choose her or his profession.
They are chosen by the spirits.
The shaman is usually called and there's some sort of wound that the shaman sustains.
It can be any bizarre malady: being struck by lightning, epileptic fits, a bad accident, anything that wounds the person and enables them to go inward.
It's quite a hardship, you know.
It's not something that anybody who really knows about it would readily undertake.
Once the spirits have got you, you either die or remain permanently sick or become a shaman.
There aren't a lot of ways out.
You often go mad for a bit, or fall sick for a bit, as the spirits take possession of you.
And then you go through a a visionary process in which, for example, quite often you feel your entire body being taken apart and then put back together again.
And when you're back together again, you're starting to acquire the abilities to travel through time and space.
Why would so many of these traditional healers share this belief that they had been chosen and physically changed by spirits? Some ancient astronaut theorists believe more clues can be found by examining the similarities between these shamanic experiences and the stories of modern day UFO abductions.
People who believe they've been abducted by aliens will speak of implants being put in their bodies.
Put there by the aliens.
Exactly the same experiences are reported in much more traditional cultures, shamanistic cultures.
The construal there is that this is being done by the spirits.
And the similarity between the two experiences are very, very, very strong and very, very powerful.
Perhaps what's happening is that you're really in contact with some kind of extraterrestrials.
And in a sense, in these shamanistic states, you're tapping into what we would almost call extraterrestrial powers.
Is it possible that shamans receive their mysterious powers through alien abductions? And might this explain why shamans all over the world claim to have a connection to other realms? Perhaps the answers can be found in the strange and powerful visions experienced by shamans in the Amazon.
The Amazon Jungle, Peru.
Stretching from the Andes mountains to the eastern shores of Brazil, this rain forest is home to more than 80,000 species of plants many of which shamans and religious healers have consumed for thousands of years as a way to access realms they say are inhabited by otherworldly beings.
In the Amazon, one of the shaman's jobs aside from going to the other world and speaking with the spirits is to find the plants right here on Earth that can heal the people of his tribe.
And in the Amazonian belief systems, each plant in the jungle has its own spirit.
And one of the shaman's gifts is that he can communicate with these plant spirits.
Originating in the central Andes of South America, ayahuasca, meaning "the vine of the souls," is a psychedelic brew consisting of two different types of plants cooked with water.
And this is drunk by the shaman in order to enter the spirit world to gain information about diseases, to foresee the future, um, to carry out a healing for somebody.
We know some of the history of ayahuasca because archaeologists have found artifacts from the rain forest which date back three and a half thousand or 4,000 years.
But those are only the surviving artifacts that they found.
Potentially, this could go back to the beginning of time.
Ayahuasca contains dimethyltryptamine or DMT one of the most powerful hallucinogens known to man.
But strangely, this chemical compound only works when consumed under precise conditions.
Ingest DMT, it's inactivated in the intestine by, uh, by certain enzymes.
So in order to get the DMT to be activated and to be able to be absorbed, they had to combine it with other plants.
Ayahuasca contains a mixture of two plants.
There's actually quite subtle and sophisticated knowledge of plants goes into the preparation, 'cause these two things separately will not work.
You have to mix them together and let's not forget that there's 150,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon.
It's really quite an amazing achievement of ancient chemistry to bring these two plants together to produce a highly psychoactive visionary brew.
But how did ancient people living in the jungles of Peru over 3,000 years ago, with tens of thousands of plants to choose from, figure out that combining these two particular plants would produce these powerful visions? According to the mythology of the Achuar people of the Amazon, their ancestors didn't discover this on their own, but were guided by extraterrestrial beings.
The shamans communicated with their spirits, and were told to go into the jungle and turn two corners, as the myth goes, and then they would find this plant, and they brought that back to the village, prepared it in the appropriate way.
The oral tradition says that ayahuasca is a linkage to the upper world.
And it is entirely possible that they were given this gift by their own gods, which may be extraterrestrials.
If the Achuar story of how their ancestors discovered ayahuasca is true, could they have been guided not by spirits, but by extraterrestrial beings, beings who communicated with them on another plane of reality? Between 1990 and 1995, scientists at the University of New Mexico administered DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca, to 60 volunteers and discovered shocking results.
Medical researchers actually administered DMT to patients in a controlled medical setting and they had exactly the same experiences as those reported in the jungles of South America and elsewhere who are experiencing ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca users typically experience hallucinations in the visual form, and a lot of them say that they see other beings.
And a lot of them say that they get messages sent to them from these beings.
In several cases, those intelligent entities said to them roughly the following: "We're so pleased you've discovered this technology.
Now we can communicate with you more often.
" Perhaps what we're dealing with here is intelligent inhabitants of other dimensions.
Why would so many people report such similar experiences while using ayahuasca? Is it possible DMT provides access to another realm? Some shamans believe that plants like ayahuasca have an extraterrestrial origin, that they drifted here as space spores perhaps and then came to Earth on comets, started growing here.
And perhaps they even had an agenda.
Perhaps they are communication from extraterrestrials.
Is it possible extraterrestrials gave the ancients the recipe for this powerful concoction as a way to communicate healing powers with shamans? And if so, might the very core of mankind's knowledge about medicine have come from an otherworldly source? Hua Shan Mountain, China.
This 7,000-foot-high peak in the Shaanxi province is believed to have been the place where Shennong, a benevolent emperor that ruled the area more than According to accounts from the Han dynasty, Shennong not only introduced agriculture to mankind, but also developed a profound knowledge of Chinese herbs.
Shennong pledged that he would venture out into the world and test every plant on the planet in order to determine its benefits for humans and also to catalog, uh, the more toxic or dangerous effects of ingesting these plants.
Sometimes he would ingest, of course, poisonous plants and he would suffer poisonings up to 70 times, uh, per day.
More than 2,000 years later, Shennong's findings were compiled in The Divine Farmer's Herb-Root Classic, a medical journal that became one of the foundations of Chinese medicine.
But just how could this mysterious being have tested so many herbs, some even containing deadly poisons? Shennong was a quite unusual person.
It's said that he had a transparent stomach.
And he himself, after ingesting these poisons, would look into his own stomach and see how these poisons were interacting with himself.
And then he would take the antidotes for it.
So you have to wonder if he's not some kind of extraterrestrial.
Shennong could, in fact, have been an astral or star being who came to Earth to teach the secrets of healing.
This idea would explain his strange appearance and also his ability to withstand ingesting poisonous plants without ever being harmed.
Might Shennong have been an alien visitor? One who traveled to Earth in order to educate mankind about medicine and the healing nature of plants? And is this proof that ingesting DMT, a practice that dates back thousands of years, actually connects shamans with extraterrestrial beings? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and claim further evidence lies with the supernatural healing rituals of the San Bushmen.
The Kalahari Desert, South Africa.
Here, the native San Bushmen hold elaborate fireside rituals, lasting for hours into the night.
During these ceremonies, their shamans perform what's known as a trance dance, through which they reach an altered state of being and access other dimensions.
The trance dance is thought to activate an energy in their body called "n/um.
" And this energy opens a portal of sorts that enables them to travel into the spirit world.
And when the Bushmen activate this energy, they're able to put their hands in the fire without being burned.
They can see vast distances and it's as if in every way, shape and form, they're transformed into super powerful beings.
By accessing the power of n/um energy, it is believed that a shaman can extract illness, see the insides of the sick and travel out of their own body to the land of the gods.
This n/um, it goes up the body and then often it goes out of the crown of the head and that's usually when the out-of-body experience occurs and they travel to the spirit world.
I've seen a Bushman put a coal in his mouth and he wasn't burned.
They'll put their heads in the fire, and although their hair might singe and even catch fire, their face won't be burned, so something is happening with this n/um energy.
They call it boiling energy.
It's almost like there's a vibrational change in their whole body and probably in their DNA in some way.
Could this so-called n/um energy really be inherent in shamans accessed only while in a sort of dream state? And is it possible that the genetic makeup of these medicine men is what allows them to access other dimensions? The San Bush-people have a tradition that they are the first tribe ever created.
They're the oldest people in the world.
DNA tests have shown that they probably are.
That all other cultures and all other peoples that spread throughout the world came, originally, from where the San people are now.
When we look at the San Bushmen and we see the clear genetic evidence that they are the primordial seed of human civilization and life on Earth it is possible that their DNA is especially well equipped to have this potential to access these non-ordinary states of consciousness which may, in fact, be a key to physically journeying into them giving these people the ability to do things that most of us seemingly cannot.
Is it possible that the San Bushmen have special knowledge of how to alter their genetic makeup in order to access other realms? A knowledge that is shared by shamans around the world? And might this knowledge or power have been given to them by alien beings? Ancient astronaut theorists believe an undeniable connection between shamans and extraterrestrials can be found in cave paintings that date back thousands of years.
The Lascaux Caves, Southwestern France.
Discovered in 1940 near the village of Montignac, this cave complex is covered in Paleolithic paintings dating back more than 17,000 years.
Anthropologists believe ancient shamans used these subterranean chambers to perform sacred rituals, and curiously, among the many Ice Age animals that are depicted on the walls, there is a strange creature that has the body of a man and the head of a bird.
The technical term for such a creature is a therianthrope, and that's from the Greek "therian," which means wild beast and "anthropos," which means man.
Clearly these are not things that one encounters in everyday life.
The imagery of cave art is best explained as the experiences that shamans undergo in a deep state of trance.
When they return from the trance state they then depict, on the cave walls, the visions that they have seen in this deeply altered state of consciousness.
The birdman found in Lascaux is reminiscent of one of the Egyptians' most Thoth.
It is also consistent with the depiction of the Sumerian sky gods, the Anunnaki.
But is it mere coincidence that these shamans are encountering the same types of beings while in a trance that the world's earliest civilizations depicted as their gods? In all of these different indigenous cultures around the world there are remarkable similarities of what types of beings people claim to be meeting when they go out of body.
This suggests that in the dream plane and in the shamanic state, there is in fact a real place that we are going, and real beings that we are encountering when we get there.
This is where the ancient astronaut theory suggests that they were the same teachers the teachers that went to all the ancient cultures and brought them the basics for what we've accomplished today.
There was a big, noticeable change in human behavior around 40,000 years ago, exactly at the time that our ancestors begin to manifest the first amazing, uh, cave art.
And what is clear is that it's not a coincidence, that at the moment that the cave art begins, we also witness in the archeological record a radical change in human behavior.
Could the Lascaux cave paintings be proof that Shamans really do communicate with extraterrestrial beings, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? And if shamans like those of the San Bushmen undergo a physiological change in order to make this connection, what might that change be? Perhaps the answer can be found inside the human brain.
Tepoztlán, Mexico.
October 2011.
Here, just 50 miles from Mexico City shamans from all over North and South America gather to commemorate the region's long tradition of shamanic healing.
Throughout the three-day celebration, these modern-day medicine men engage in sacred dances, rhythmic chanting, and drumming all methods that shamans use to connect with other realms.
But why? Do these practices really effect a change within the shamans that allows them to communicate with beings that are otherwise beyond our perception? In many shamanic traditions, shamans have special tools that allow them to access the spirit world.
Among the most important of these tools are the shaman's drum, and/or the shaman's rattle.
These are rhythm instruments that beat out a particular rhythm, that allow the shaman to enter into trance, and to journey to the world of spirits.
We see this rapid, very steady rhythm on the drum as being a central tool in shamans being able to open up the doors of the mind, giving voice to the unseen realms of the cosmos.
Is it merely coincidence that shamans all over the world share the belief that by repeating certain rhythmic movements and sounds they can communicate with other realms? Or might this ancient practice produce a real physiological change in the shamans themselves? There's a neurological explanation for this.
One of the ways that we can alter our consciousness is through rhythmic movement.
So throughout the world you see many traditions in which people communicate with the gods by spinning, by dancing, by doing something rhythmic.
At the University of California in San Francisco, neuroscientist Dr.
Adam Gazzaley is performing experiments using actually track how drumming effects the human brain.
Participants wear virtual reality goggles, and experience both visual and auditory rhythms.
We feel that if we have a participant learn how to entrain with different rhythms through game mechanics, we can strengthen the rhythms of the brain and lead to better performance, better cognition, better memory, better attention.
And so we're recording, in real time, what's going on in her brain.
You can have a rhythm going on that you're listening to, and your brain has its own natural rhythms.
The entrainment would be that they become locked in time such that they follow each other.
We're sort of at, like, the gateway of this frontier now.
Could rhythm and repetition hold the key to discovering untapped potential within the human brain? Might shamans have been aware of this connection for thousands of years? And is the practice of entering a trance state still used to access this power in other spiritual ceremonies across the world? Pentecostal faith healers incorporate music that mirrors the rhythm of the heart.
Hypnosis is often achieved through the use of a pendulum.
Priests performing exorcisms repeat phrases over and over.
Even the Catholic Rosary involves repeating a sequence of prayers counted out on a string of beads to communicate with Almighty God.
It seems possible that the shamans must have understood something about the brain that we're only rediscovering today and how the drum in particular can effect the brain.
It's the brain who works different with the shamans than with normal people.
I always suggested look at our brain like a gigantic hole with big machines in there.
Some of the machines are running, and others are dead.
Now with the shamans, some of the machines are running which, in other brains, they are not working.
That makes a difference between the brain of a shaman and the normal, average people.
Have shamans discovered the means to communicating with extraterrestrials within the human brain? And does this suggest that similar powers might exist within all of humanity powers that we have yet to fully realize? As we settle into the be connected with what we used to know, what we can know again, and how unlimited we are as human beings, is something that we're all seeking.
And it is through the power of shamanism, it is with the help of these intermediaries, that we can begin to experience this again.
The shamans were always bringing advanced knowledge and leading humanity forward.
They represented healing, and they represented expansion of our consciousness.
If these shamans are really in contact with some kind of extraterrestrial gods, then we can see how these E.
T.
's have been purposely guiding us throughout our history.
In many ways they created us.
And even today, they are still manipulating and guiding us into the future.
Did shamans really communicate with otherworldly beings in the distant past? Is it possible that through these spiritual mediators, extraterrestrials were able to influence mankind? And might such celestial command continue even today? Perhaps one day we will realize that the key to contact with our alien ancestors does not lie in technology that propels us to the stars but in rediscovering abilities that already exist deep within ourselves.