Ancient Aliens s18e03 Episode Script
Beneath the Sacred Temples
1
The Dome of the Rock.
The Temple of Jupiter.
Puma Punku.
They are sites sacred to millions of people, and they are all built atop the ruins of structures that are far more ancient.
Some of the most iconic temples sites around the world are built on the exact same location as former temples.
And the question is, why? What compelled early humans to build and rebuild in the same place, again and again? It seems they were not only doing it for practical purposes but also for religious and spiritual reasons.
Are there locations on Earth that hold special power? The local population say, "It was not us who built this.
It was the gods.
" And might we find that they were once occupied by extraterrestrials? There is no question in my mind that these are much older sites than we think, and that they were spots for extraterrestrial communication a long, long time ago.
There is a doorway in the universe.
Beyond it is the promise of truth.
It demands we question everything we have ever been taught.
The evidence is all around us.
The future is right before our eyes.
We are not alone.
We have never been alone.
Cuzco, Peru.
Nestled in a high river valley of the Andes Mountains, among peaks towering over 20,000 feet, this once great city served as the capital of the Inca Empire from the 13th to 16th centuries AD.
In 1533, Spanish conquistadors arrived in Cuzco and were astonished by the incredible stonework found at a site just north of the city called Sacsayhuamán.
Above the city of Cuzco we find the megalithic site and huge ceremonial Inca complex called Sacsayhuamán.
Its most prominent feature is a zigzag wall of three levels.
Some of the stones there weigh as much as 125 tons and were moved from the quarry at least three miles away.
Sacsayhuamán is one of the most beautiful ancient structures you will ever see in your life.
There are massive, gigantic megalithic blocks, and you find the most amazing of masonry style where you can't even fit a dollar bill in between the fittings of any of the blocks.
Sacsayhuamán served both as a fortress and a ceremonial center.
A circular structure that lies within the megalithic walls, called Muyuq Marka, was the base of a tower where the Inca worshipped the sun god Inti.
However, many experts suggest that while the Inca certainly utilized this megalithic structure, they were not the ones to build it.
Standard belief is that the Inca constructed Sacsayhuamán less than a thousand years ago.
But in some of the earliest Spanish chronicles it is said that the Spanish were completely astounded by seeing this site, and they asked the local Inca, "Did you build this?" And the Inca replied, "No.
This was here when we arrived 500 years ago.
" Many experts believe Sacsayhuamán predates the Inca by thousands of years, and that the Inca built on top of what came before.
The Inca were a Bronze Age civilization, and the stones at Sacsayhuamán are metamorphosed limestone, which is much harder than bronze and could not be cut or shaped using bronze tools.
Inca built on top 'cause you can tell a major difference between megalithic construction, where the stones fit perfectly together, and the Inca, which is stones piled on top of stones with mortar as filler.
But if Sacsayhuamán really does predate the Inca As the Inca themselves claimed How could an even earlier civilization have possessed far superior technology? The ancient Inca talk about celestial beings who descended from the sky a long time ago and imparted the first knowledge of anything toward people of Earth.
The ancient astronaut theory suggests it was human beings who built Sacsayhuamán but under the tutelage of the extraterrestrials.
Is it possible that the astonishing megalithic stonework at Sacsayhuamán was achieved with the help of alien technology, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? And if so, might the Inca have built on top of it And established it as a place of worship Because they were somehow aware of this? Sacsayhuamán is only one of many places where ancient civilizations have felt compelled to repeatedly build their most sacred sites.
In fact, there are locations all around the world where successive cultures have rebuilt over and over again.
This has been going on since the end of the last ice age with places like Gobekli Tepe in Southeast Turkey, where the oldest and most sophisticated monuments were built first on the bedrock.
And then, eventually, they would be covered over, and a new structure, new enclosure built on top of them.
Some of the most iconic temple sites around the world, from Baalbek in Lebanon to the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Egypt, are built on the exact same location as former temples that were reputed to be there.
And the question is, why? It is not uncommon for people to repurpose an old structure or rebuild on its foundation for practical purposes.
But what ancient astronaut theorists find intriguing is how the most sacred sites tend to remain sacred over thousands of years.
And of all the places in the world where this phenomenon is found, perhaps there is none more universally revered than the 35-acre platform in Jerusalem known as Temple Mount.
KATHLEEN McGOWAN: The Temple Mount is arguably the most important spiritual site in the world.
All three of the primary monotheistic religions have a connection to the events of history that occurred on top of the Temple Mount.
It's believed that, "Is this the stone from which the world originates?" It's a crucial element in the Jewish tradition.
When Isaac is offered up for sacrifice by Abraham, this happens on the exposed surface of Mount Moriah.
That's the Temple Mount.
For Muslims, this is where the Prophet Muhammad ascends up to heaven.
That stone is now covered over by the Dome of the Rock, this very important Islamic monument.
The Dome of the Rock has stood at Temple Mount for more than 1,300 years, but the very first temple to occupy this sacred space was the legendary Solomon's Temple, constructed upon order of the Israelite king in the tenth century BC.
According to the Hebrew Bible, King Solomon received a message from the heavens to build his temple on this spot.
Its primary purpose was to house the Ark of the Covenant, the golden box which carried the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and which was said to be God's earthly throne.
Solomon has a communication with the angel Michael, who comes and helps Solomon to build this.
And so, not only is this the presence of God on this spot, it's God who's helping in the building of this.
And so that's part of what makes that place so special.
So literally divine.
Solomon's Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC.
But 70 years later, Jewish exiles returning to Jerusalem built a new temple on the exact same location.
That's what we call the Second Temple.
And that temple survives until the year 70 AD, when it's destroyed by the Romans.
Then, in the seventh century, Muslims conquered Jerusalem.
They build the Dome of the Rock there.
And, so, there's been a long history of different people coming in, taking control, building, rebuilding, uh, places there.
McGOWAN: Solomon was instructed to build the temple on this incredibly important space.
So why is this space important? Is it an energetic space? Is it a portal? What we see over and over again with these profound religious sites all over the world is, we see this reverence for power places endures.
From the earliest human history to today, we're constantly building on top of these places.
If a higher power instructed King Solomon to build on Temple Mount, could there be something special about this particular location on Earth? And could the same be true for other places around the world where successive cultures built again and again? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining one of the most astonishing megalithic sites in the world, and stories about its connection to the stars.
Baalbek, Lebanon.
Here, in the fertile Bekaa Valley, stands what many consider to be the greatest ruin of Roman antiquity the colossal Temple of Jupiter.
But the imposing remains that tower over the site today are only the latest in a long line of structures erected on this spot.
Archaeologists say the area has been continually inhabited for at least 10,000 years, and no one knows who built the first place of worship here.
But according to legend, both Egyptian and Assyrian conquerors erected sanctuaries on the site, followed by the Canaanites and Phoenicians, who built a great temple here to their god Baal around 2500 BC.
Baalbek is one of those places where you have different people over millennia building their shrines, their temples, to their particular, you know, gods or goddesses.
You've got this temple that's built by the Phoenicians for one of their deities Baal.
Then Alexander the Great conquers this area and surprise, surprise Builds a temple to the Greek gods.
In the first century BC, roughly 300 years after Alexander the Great, the Romans conquer Lebanon and decide to erect a temple here to their chief god Jupiter.
The main Roman temple once boasted 54 columns, each a staggering 65 feet in height.
But while visitors to the ruins may first notice the towering Roman columns, the most impressive feature at Baalbek is its massive foundation.
To this day, Baalbek, Lebanon has remained one of the most enduring mysteries on planet Earth, because the masonry that we find there is unparalleled compared to the rest of the world.
In fact, there are three stone blocks called the trilithons, each weighing approximately 800 metric tons, which is 1.
6 million pounds.
Each of these blocks is approximately 62 feet in length by about 14 feet in depth and 12 feet in breadth.
And they're not even on the ground.
So whoever placed them there in ancient times would have had to have raised them up to a height of about 20 feet.
Each of the stones were quarried two miles away and put perfectly into place with such precision that you can't even put a credit card or a needle in between those massive blocks.
How ancient people carved and moved such massive stones is a question that baffles archaeologists to this day.
And equally as mysterious is who placed them there.
The giant blocks in the foundation are clearly of a different building style than the temples that sit above.
And in my opinion, that platform is not just ancient, it is prehistoric.
But if the platform at Baalbek was constructed thousands of years before the Romans arrived in the Bekaa Valley, why did they choose this as the site to build their most magnificent temple? One pioneering Russian scholar has proposed that humans may have been drawn to this location because it was the site of one of Earth's earliest extraterrestrial events.
Scientist and mathematician Dr.
Matest Agrest sends shockwaves through the world of academia with an article in which he poses a new theory called "paleocontact," a precursor to what is known today as the ancient astronaut theory, suggesting that certain biblical texts could be interpreted as evidence of alien visitation.
And according to Agrest, one place where such visitations occurred was Baalbek.
Dr.
Matest Agrest went into the ancient record, the Book of Enoch and other Hebrew texts, and noticed that there were beings coming from the sky or the stars that came to Earth, and he came up with a theory that they were extraterrestrial beings who came to Earth to assist humanity in developing advanced technology to build stone constructions such as what we see at Baalbek in Lebanon.
Agrest wrote about the watchers, a group of fallen angels who, according to the biblical account, descended to Earth at Mount Hermon, very near the site of Baalbek.
Agrest suggested that the watchers were, in fact, visitors from another planet, who built the megalithic platform at Baalbek as a launchpad.
He thought it was a giant stone platform that spaceships could land on and take off from.
And this makes a lot of sense, because it's so incredibly solid, with these huge stone blocks in it, that even huge vehicles, such as rockets, could land and take off from this huge platform.
Two decades after the publication of Agrest's controversial article, author and researcher Zecharia Sitchin came to the same conclusion about Baalbek based on a 5,000-year-old Sumerian text.
The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of a hero of superhuman strength who embarks on an impossible quest.
In the course of his journeys, Gilgamesh arrives at a site where he encounters otherworldly gods, a site that sounds suspiciously like Baalbek.
In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of the great and important legends, um, of human history, we have the hero arriving in a place known as the Landing Place.
A space which allows the ascent and the descent of beings from the heavens to the Earth.
Zecharia Sitchin in the 1970s proposed, based on his reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh, that Gilgamesh himself had seen some sort of a spacecraft take off from a landing site and pinpointed that site as Baalbek.
Is it possible that Baalbek was a landing pad for alien visitors? And that it remained so for thousands of years? Could that be why so many ancient peoples, such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, all chose to build and rebuild some of their greatest temples on this spot? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining new discoveries made at a mysterious ancient site on the other side of the world.
While searching for the southern capital of the Inca Empire, Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León comes upon something far stranger A vast, abandoned city near the shore of Lake Titicaca that the locals call Tiahuanaco.
The ruined city contains temples, huge megalithic structures, and vast ceremonial buildings.
Tiahuanaco was huge.
It spanned for miles and miles, and had a population of perhaps as many as 20,000 people.
Among Tiahuanaco's most impressive ruins is a carved monolith called the Gateway to the Sun and a terraced mound called Puma Punku, containing stone blocks cut with extraordinary precision.
According to archaeologists, the Tiahuanaco complex once served as the capital of a sprawling empire that rose and fell centuries before the Inca.
This is why we have the term called the pre-Inca.
But who were the pre-Inca? And this is where it gets interesting, because pre-Inca construction is more sophisticated than Inca construction.
While some mainstream historians say the site dates back only to the Bronze Age, others maintain it is far older.
Arthur Posnanski spent an exorbitant amount of time at Tiahuanaco, and he calculated an actual origin date of Tiahuanaco, which he based to be around 12,500 BC, which is an incredible time, because at that time, according to mainstream archaeology, we were munching on bananas.
So, it opens up the possibility that this site is vastly more ancient than we're led to believe.
And we're only just now beginning to discover the complete history of that site.
Some experts believe that the builders of Tiahuanaco were the ancestors of the local Aymara people who still live in the area today.
But many of the Aymara themselves disagree.
The local population, the ancient Aymara culture, say, "It was not us who built this.
It was the gods.
Los dioses.
" Recently, the mystery of who built Tiahuanaco only deepened with a staggering discovery not within the city but beneath it.
Researchers from UNESCO, working with local archaeologists at Tiahuanaco, announce findings that send shockwaves through the world of archaeology.
While analyzing satellite imagery and ground-penetrating radar of the Tiahuanaco site, they find dozens of previously unknown structures buried virtually everywhere they look.
What this aerial technology has found is 34 acres of terraced mounds, underground platforms, and elements of a pyramid complex.
Undated constructions reveal that temples may have taken the form of industrial-strength platforms, and this begs the question, why are the bases, these platforms, so industrial-strength? It's as though they were built to support extreme weight.
So, originally, there could have been one large mega-platform, similar to what we find at Baalbek.
This could have belonged to a much earlier civilization.
If Tiahuanaco is yet another sacred site where successive cultures built temples atop the ruins of far earlier structures, is it possible that there is a connection to extraterrestrial visitation? As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, Tiahuanaco's most mysterious ruins, at Puma Punku, provide the best evidence that the site was not only significant to the native people but also to otherworldly visitors.
Puma Punku is, to me, the most important place on Earth as far as an extraterrestrial visitation would be concerned.
The construction style at Puma Punku does not exist anywhere else on Earth.
These stones, some of them weighing a hundred tons, are made of andesite and other hard materials that today we would use a diamond-tip drill in order to shape or mold such stones.
How did they do it with hammers and chisels? Like the foundation stones beneath Baalbek and the megalithic blocks of Sacsayhuamán, the buried platforms beneath Puma Punku raise a provocative question: Why were the largest, heaviest and most sophisticated parts of these sites those that date back farthest in time? According to ancient astronaut theorists, more than 12,000 years ago, human civilizations existed on Earth that possessed incredible technology given to them by extraterrestrial beings.
The ancient Egyptians referred to a-a time called the "First Time," when the gods, extraterrestrial beings, walked among men.
Pre-10,000 BC.
We have authentic legends about these lost lands and lost worlds.
And that extraterrestrials were here at the same time.
We have these all over the world.
We have the stories of Atlantis and Lemuria.
Many cultures around the world have, also, these same legends and lores and myths of cataclysms.
The Scandinavians have this.
Also, we have the flood of Noah.
We have the Greeks also have tales of a flood.
What we now know from incredible amount of evidence coming from every part of the world, is around 10,800 BC, the Earth suffered a terrible, uh, catastrophe in the form of a comet impact known as the Younger Dryas event.
And this devastated every continent of the world with fires and floods.
So, now it looks like we're looking at a-a secret history of planet Earth, one where there's extraterrestrial intervention.
And there were civilizations and activities going on then, and they were destroyed in a cataclysmic flood.
From Baalbek in Lebanon to the Temple Mount to Puma Punku, some of these sites are thought to be the locations where pre-flood temples once existed.
So, after the cataclysm, people are regaining civilization, and they go back to the exact same location as previous temples and-and rebuild the temple there.
Could it be that the most ancient structures found at sacred sites all over the world belonged to civilizations that have been lost to history? Civilizations where extraterrestrials once lived among humans before falling victim to a cataclysmic event? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining a site in Peru where the Inca claimed to have had a direct line of communication with the gods.
Cuzco, Peru.
In the heart of the ancient Incan capital stands the Convent of Santo Domingo, a Spanish church constructed roughly 400 years ago.
But still visible beneath the church are the remnants of an older and far more impressive structure: the Incan temple of Coricancha.
Coricancha is probably the premier site for the ancient Incan civilization.
This was the crowning jewel of their empire.
Um, it, uh, reflected the Incan, uh, political power.
As well as the religious power.
It had gold plating all along its walls, inside and out.
So it glowed in the Sun.
And it was a very imposing structure.
It had a base that was a curved wall with a big garden at the bottom.
And inside, it had a number of temples.
After the Spanish conquistadors sacked Cuzco in November of 1533, they demolished the Coricancha and built a convent and church on its monumental foundation.
All that's left of the original structure is the impressive stonework of the base and some underground rooms.
But some experts believe the surviving stonework of the Coricancha is too monumental and sophisticated to have been achieved with the Bronze Age tools of the Inca, and was built instead by an earlier, unknown civilization.
So, with the Coricancha, we have good evidence that when the Inca arrived in this area, there was already an earlier megalithic temple there.
They were actually building on something that was already there, like, possibly an ancient platform, possibly an underground temple, because there's evidence of tunnels in this area.
For ancient astronaut theorists, this raises the same question posed by Baalbek and Tiahuanaco: why did ancient people repeatedly build temple after temple on the same sacred spot? And some believe that in the case of the Coricancha, Inca legends may provide a pivotal clue.
Because tradition states that a special spot within the Coricancha allowed communication directly with the heavens, but only when it was activated by the most sacred relic in the Inca world, a mysterious golden disc called the Inti Punchaco.
The most legendary relic of any Peruvian era was said to have been kept in the original Coricancha.
This was the Inti Punchaco.
This sun disc, this golden artifact, allowed whoever possessed it to commune directly with the gods.
According to the Inca, within the Coricancha, the Inti Punchaco disc allowed direct contact with their creator god Viracocha.
Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that the specific placement of it was important because it may have been receiving a signal from beyond Earth.
And they believe the exact spot where it was activated still exists in a chamber of the Coricancha that was spared destruction by the Spanish.
In the Coricancha is this special niche, and today they've covered it with a Plexiglas sheet, but it has blocks that are perfectly cut and articulated in unusual ways, little notches and things, plus drilled holes that go through it, which seem to be for electric cables or something.
So it would appear that some device was placed into this niche in the wall that was like a monitor of some kind.
And they've chosen this spot.
And all for reasons that we do not understand.
So, could it be that at the Coricancha, there was a sacred kind of part of the site there where they were connecting with the gods? Actually something in the land, like a-a magnetic hot spot or a vortex that the Inca and then later the Spanish became aware of.
Is it possible that ancient Peruvians possessed a device that allowed them to communicate with beings from beyond Earth? And that the location of the Coricancha was essential to activating this technology? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest that clues as to just how such a technology might have worked can be found by examining mysterious magnetic anomalies detected at one of the most remote ancient sites in the world.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, roughly 2,500 miles northeast of Australia, lie the ruins of a once great ancient city Nan Madol.
Consisting of hundreds of man-made islets off the eastern coast of Micronesia, it has been dubbed the "Eighth Wonder of the World.
" The site of Nan Madol on the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia is one of the strangest places on the planet.
It's an 11-square-mile complex composed of over 250 million tons of basalt logs floating on a submerged coral reef.
They are 18 feet long, four feet in diameter, and are stacked 40 feet up in the air.
Why did they do this? And how did they do this? Today, the site lies abandoned and shunned by the local Micronesians, who consider it haunted.
Nan Madol is one of these disappeared civilizations.
It's fascinatingly interesting.
This seemed to have been the center of power of a, uh, major civilization.
And yet it also seems that it might have been built on earlier civilizations that are lost in time.
Since stone is difficult to accurately date, no one knows for certain when it was constructed or how it was built.
When you ask the local population, "Where were these blocks quarried?" In unison, they will tell you, from across the island and that they were flown across the island.
According to legend, twin sorcerers of giant proportions came down from the sky and floated above the site and positioned the basalt columns as they desired, a legend that's very similar to the same story at Puma Punku.
But when I hear stories like that, I wonder, well, perhaps we have another example of what I refer to as misunderstood technology.
As with other sites like Puma Punku, Baalbek and the Coricancha, legend says that these structures were not the first to exist here, but instead were built above a much older city.
The mystery of Nan Madol is even more intriguing when we factor in the local legend that states that it was built on an earlier civilization called the Kanamwayso, which is submerged below water but still has those same basalt megaliths.
Objects that appear to be basalt columns have in fact been found beneath the ocean at Nan Madol, and those who have studied the columns both above and below the water have discovered a curious electromagnetic anomaly.
There's a strong magnetic field in every single one of the 250 million tons of basalt there.
You can take a compass and run it along these basalt blocks, and your compass will just spin as you move it along the blocks.
Also, it's thought that the site itself is a special power spot and an energy vortex, and that's why Nan Madol is built there.
And this legendary sunken city called Kanamwayso as well.
The local population also reports many, many sightings of orbs and lights that have been seen hovering around Nan Madol.
Is it because of the magnetic spectrum of Earth? And you have to wonder if, through magnetism, the stones were transported in the first place, 'cause they were transported through the air.
Some ancient astronaut theorists suggest that elevated electromagnetic energy present at Nan Madol was not only a powerful tool used to move the giant basalt columns, but that it may also have been the reason that extraterrestrials helped the locals to build here in the first place.
Could it be that there was a sacred kind of part of the site there, where they were connecting with the gods? You know, not just through visionary experiences, but actually something in the land, like a-a magnetic hot spot or a vortex? We hear the word "vortex" in science fiction, popular culture all the time.
And a vortex is just a mathematical thing that describes a swirling motion.
An electromagnetic field can be formed in a vortex.
You could create a vortex that would enable transporting information from somewhere else to here at the speed of light or faster than the speed of light.
And if there are places on the Earth where these types of vortexes may be stronger than others, you could see people going there to build structures that maybe altered the electromagnetic field of the local environment.
Was there even some kind of portal or vortex present in some of these sacred places? If that's the case, we have to question these principles of oracle sites, megalithic temples.
Were they built to harness this, to be these communication portals between these different places? There is no question in my mind that these are much older sites than we think, and that they were spots for extraterrestrial communication a long, long time ago.
Is it possible that certain locations around the world act as vortexes of electromagnetic energy? And that ancient people built their most sacred sites in these very spots in order to communicate with otherworldly beings? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that although this notion may sound far-fetched, scientists at NASA recently found evidence that such portals really do exist.
NASA makes a groundbreaking announcement, that there is indisputable evidence of magnetic portals connecting the Earth and the Sun.
These portals open every eight minutes and allow the transfer of high-energy particles between the two celestial bodies.
So, you have these two really powerful magnets, the Earth and the Sun, and their field lines are crossing each other.
But every now and then, for whatever reason, we have these flux transfer events where the field lines will actually connect to each other and they create a pathway for the magnetic field of the Sun to literally be connected to the magnetic field of the Earth.
And it's even been referred to in the scientific literature as magnetic portals.
We actually have a connection that could be a transit to or a pathway for information to travel from the Sun to the Earth or vice versa.
Ancient astronaut theorists have long been intrigued by the concept of electromagnetic portals, since in theory they could provide a means of communicating, or even traveling rapidly, across the vast distances of space.
The NASA discovery poses an intriguing question: could sites around the world, where successive cultures built their most sacred temples, be locations that facilitate the creation of magnetic portals? Could a civilization with a more advanced knowledge of physics than we have currently make use of this flux transfer, of these magnetic field lines connecting between their star and other planets? Could it create a means of traveling quickly from one point to the other between them? Or maybe even something else that we just haven't discovered yet.
Maybe these sites were kind of manipulating the energies of the cosmos and the Earth to open these portals up for this kind of purpose.
And what or who were they really communicating with? Was it really the gods? Was it the ancestors? Or was it otherworldly beings? Could Baalbek, Temple Mount, Puma Punku, the Coricancha, and other sites around the world where sacred structures have been built again and again have electromagnetic properties similar to Nan Madol? Properties that could be harnessed to create gateways to connect with otherworldly beings? McGOWAN: Over and over, around the world, from the beginning of time to now, we see that sacred sites and power points have been marked by humankind.
Temples have been built to communicate from Earth to heaven.
Quite clearly, these places are somewhere that we keep coming back to.
We call them portals, we call them vortexes.
They are gateways onto another world, and they are very, very important not just for human experience but for evolution itself.
Are humans drawn to certain locations on Earth by a magnetic force? Do we build our most sacred temples on the same sites again and again because these locations connect us to the cosmos? Perhaps, as we continue to unearth even more ancient ruins, we will come to better understand our connection to the universe and the truth about our extraterrestrial past.
The Temple of Jupiter.
Puma Punku.
They are sites sacred to millions of people, and they are all built atop the ruins of structures that are far more ancient.
Some of the most iconic temples sites around the world are built on the exact same location as former temples.
And the question is, why? What compelled early humans to build and rebuild in the same place, again and again? It seems they were not only doing it for practical purposes but also for religious and spiritual reasons.
Are there locations on Earth that hold special power? The local population say, "It was not us who built this.
It was the gods.
" And might we find that they were once occupied by extraterrestrials? There is no question in my mind that these are much older sites than we think, and that they were spots for extraterrestrial communication a long, long time ago.
There is a doorway in the universe.
Beyond it is the promise of truth.
It demands we question everything we have ever been taught.
The evidence is all around us.
The future is right before our eyes.
We are not alone.
We have never been alone.
Cuzco, Peru.
Nestled in a high river valley of the Andes Mountains, among peaks towering over 20,000 feet, this once great city served as the capital of the Inca Empire from the 13th to 16th centuries AD.
In 1533, Spanish conquistadors arrived in Cuzco and were astonished by the incredible stonework found at a site just north of the city called Sacsayhuamán.
Above the city of Cuzco we find the megalithic site and huge ceremonial Inca complex called Sacsayhuamán.
Its most prominent feature is a zigzag wall of three levels.
Some of the stones there weigh as much as 125 tons and were moved from the quarry at least three miles away.
Sacsayhuamán is one of the most beautiful ancient structures you will ever see in your life.
There are massive, gigantic megalithic blocks, and you find the most amazing of masonry style where you can't even fit a dollar bill in between the fittings of any of the blocks.
Sacsayhuamán served both as a fortress and a ceremonial center.
A circular structure that lies within the megalithic walls, called Muyuq Marka, was the base of a tower where the Inca worshipped the sun god Inti.
However, many experts suggest that while the Inca certainly utilized this megalithic structure, they were not the ones to build it.
Standard belief is that the Inca constructed Sacsayhuamán less than a thousand years ago.
But in some of the earliest Spanish chronicles it is said that the Spanish were completely astounded by seeing this site, and they asked the local Inca, "Did you build this?" And the Inca replied, "No.
This was here when we arrived 500 years ago.
" Many experts believe Sacsayhuamán predates the Inca by thousands of years, and that the Inca built on top of what came before.
The Inca were a Bronze Age civilization, and the stones at Sacsayhuamán are metamorphosed limestone, which is much harder than bronze and could not be cut or shaped using bronze tools.
Inca built on top 'cause you can tell a major difference between megalithic construction, where the stones fit perfectly together, and the Inca, which is stones piled on top of stones with mortar as filler.
But if Sacsayhuamán really does predate the Inca As the Inca themselves claimed How could an even earlier civilization have possessed far superior technology? The ancient Inca talk about celestial beings who descended from the sky a long time ago and imparted the first knowledge of anything toward people of Earth.
The ancient astronaut theory suggests it was human beings who built Sacsayhuamán but under the tutelage of the extraterrestrials.
Is it possible that the astonishing megalithic stonework at Sacsayhuamán was achieved with the help of alien technology, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest? And if so, might the Inca have built on top of it And established it as a place of worship Because they were somehow aware of this? Sacsayhuamán is only one of many places where ancient civilizations have felt compelled to repeatedly build their most sacred sites.
In fact, there are locations all around the world where successive cultures have rebuilt over and over again.
This has been going on since the end of the last ice age with places like Gobekli Tepe in Southeast Turkey, where the oldest and most sophisticated monuments were built first on the bedrock.
And then, eventually, they would be covered over, and a new structure, new enclosure built on top of them.
Some of the most iconic temple sites around the world, from Baalbek in Lebanon to the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Egypt, are built on the exact same location as former temples that were reputed to be there.
And the question is, why? It is not uncommon for people to repurpose an old structure or rebuild on its foundation for practical purposes.
But what ancient astronaut theorists find intriguing is how the most sacred sites tend to remain sacred over thousands of years.
And of all the places in the world where this phenomenon is found, perhaps there is none more universally revered than the 35-acre platform in Jerusalem known as Temple Mount.
KATHLEEN McGOWAN: The Temple Mount is arguably the most important spiritual site in the world.
All three of the primary monotheistic religions have a connection to the events of history that occurred on top of the Temple Mount.
It's believed that, "Is this the stone from which the world originates?" It's a crucial element in the Jewish tradition.
When Isaac is offered up for sacrifice by Abraham, this happens on the exposed surface of Mount Moriah.
That's the Temple Mount.
For Muslims, this is where the Prophet Muhammad ascends up to heaven.
That stone is now covered over by the Dome of the Rock, this very important Islamic monument.
The Dome of the Rock has stood at Temple Mount for more than 1,300 years, but the very first temple to occupy this sacred space was the legendary Solomon's Temple, constructed upon order of the Israelite king in the tenth century BC.
According to the Hebrew Bible, King Solomon received a message from the heavens to build his temple on this spot.
Its primary purpose was to house the Ark of the Covenant, the golden box which carried the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and which was said to be God's earthly throne.
Solomon has a communication with the angel Michael, who comes and helps Solomon to build this.
And so, not only is this the presence of God on this spot, it's God who's helping in the building of this.
And so that's part of what makes that place so special.
So literally divine.
Solomon's Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC.
But 70 years later, Jewish exiles returning to Jerusalem built a new temple on the exact same location.
That's what we call the Second Temple.
And that temple survives until the year 70 AD, when it's destroyed by the Romans.
Then, in the seventh century, Muslims conquered Jerusalem.
They build the Dome of the Rock there.
And, so, there's been a long history of different people coming in, taking control, building, rebuilding, uh, places there.
McGOWAN: Solomon was instructed to build the temple on this incredibly important space.
So why is this space important? Is it an energetic space? Is it a portal? What we see over and over again with these profound religious sites all over the world is, we see this reverence for power places endures.
From the earliest human history to today, we're constantly building on top of these places.
If a higher power instructed King Solomon to build on Temple Mount, could there be something special about this particular location on Earth? And could the same be true for other places around the world where successive cultures built again and again? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining one of the most astonishing megalithic sites in the world, and stories about its connection to the stars.
Baalbek, Lebanon.
Here, in the fertile Bekaa Valley, stands what many consider to be the greatest ruin of Roman antiquity the colossal Temple of Jupiter.
But the imposing remains that tower over the site today are only the latest in a long line of structures erected on this spot.
Archaeologists say the area has been continually inhabited for at least 10,000 years, and no one knows who built the first place of worship here.
But according to legend, both Egyptian and Assyrian conquerors erected sanctuaries on the site, followed by the Canaanites and Phoenicians, who built a great temple here to their god Baal around 2500 BC.
Baalbek is one of those places where you have different people over millennia building their shrines, their temples, to their particular, you know, gods or goddesses.
You've got this temple that's built by the Phoenicians for one of their deities Baal.
Then Alexander the Great conquers this area and surprise, surprise Builds a temple to the Greek gods.
In the first century BC, roughly 300 years after Alexander the Great, the Romans conquer Lebanon and decide to erect a temple here to their chief god Jupiter.
The main Roman temple once boasted 54 columns, each a staggering 65 feet in height.
But while visitors to the ruins may first notice the towering Roman columns, the most impressive feature at Baalbek is its massive foundation.
To this day, Baalbek, Lebanon has remained one of the most enduring mysteries on planet Earth, because the masonry that we find there is unparalleled compared to the rest of the world.
In fact, there are three stone blocks called the trilithons, each weighing approximately 800 metric tons, which is 1.
6 million pounds.
Each of these blocks is approximately 62 feet in length by about 14 feet in depth and 12 feet in breadth.
And they're not even on the ground.
So whoever placed them there in ancient times would have had to have raised them up to a height of about 20 feet.
Each of the stones were quarried two miles away and put perfectly into place with such precision that you can't even put a credit card or a needle in between those massive blocks.
How ancient people carved and moved such massive stones is a question that baffles archaeologists to this day.
And equally as mysterious is who placed them there.
The giant blocks in the foundation are clearly of a different building style than the temples that sit above.
And in my opinion, that platform is not just ancient, it is prehistoric.
But if the platform at Baalbek was constructed thousands of years before the Romans arrived in the Bekaa Valley, why did they choose this as the site to build their most magnificent temple? One pioneering Russian scholar has proposed that humans may have been drawn to this location because it was the site of one of Earth's earliest extraterrestrial events.
Scientist and mathematician Dr.
Matest Agrest sends shockwaves through the world of academia with an article in which he poses a new theory called "paleocontact," a precursor to what is known today as the ancient astronaut theory, suggesting that certain biblical texts could be interpreted as evidence of alien visitation.
And according to Agrest, one place where such visitations occurred was Baalbek.
Dr.
Matest Agrest went into the ancient record, the Book of Enoch and other Hebrew texts, and noticed that there were beings coming from the sky or the stars that came to Earth, and he came up with a theory that they were extraterrestrial beings who came to Earth to assist humanity in developing advanced technology to build stone constructions such as what we see at Baalbek in Lebanon.
Agrest wrote about the watchers, a group of fallen angels who, according to the biblical account, descended to Earth at Mount Hermon, very near the site of Baalbek.
Agrest suggested that the watchers were, in fact, visitors from another planet, who built the megalithic platform at Baalbek as a launchpad.
He thought it was a giant stone platform that spaceships could land on and take off from.
And this makes a lot of sense, because it's so incredibly solid, with these huge stone blocks in it, that even huge vehicles, such as rockets, could land and take off from this huge platform.
Two decades after the publication of Agrest's controversial article, author and researcher Zecharia Sitchin came to the same conclusion about Baalbek based on a 5,000-year-old Sumerian text.
The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of a hero of superhuman strength who embarks on an impossible quest.
In the course of his journeys, Gilgamesh arrives at a site where he encounters otherworldly gods, a site that sounds suspiciously like Baalbek.
In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of the great and important legends, um, of human history, we have the hero arriving in a place known as the Landing Place.
A space which allows the ascent and the descent of beings from the heavens to the Earth.
Zecharia Sitchin in the 1970s proposed, based on his reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh, that Gilgamesh himself had seen some sort of a spacecraft take off from a landing site and pinpointed that site as Baalbek.
Is it possible that Baalbek was a landing pad for alien visitors? And that it remained so for thousands of years? Could that be why so many ancient peoples, such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, all chose to build and rebuild some of their greatest temples on this spot? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining new discoveries made at a mysterious ancient site on the other side of the world.
While searching for the southern capital of the Inca Empire, Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León comes upon something far stranger A vast, abandoned city near the shore of Lake Titicaca that the locals call Tiahuanaco.
The ruined city contains temples, huge megalithic structures, and vast ceremonial buildings.
Tiahuanaco was huge.
It spanned for miles and miles, and had a population of perhaps as many as 20,000 people.
Among Tiahuanaco's most impressive ruins is a carved monolith called the Gateway to the Sun and a terraced mound called Puma Punku, containing stone blocks cut with extraordinary precision.
According to archaeologists, the Tiahuanaco complex once served as the capital of a sprawling empire that rose and fell centuries before the Inca.
This is why we have the term called the pre-Inca.
But who were the pre-Inca? And this is where it gets interesting, because pre-Inca construction is more sophisticated than Inca construction.
While some mainstream historians say the site dates back only to the Bronze Age, others maintain it is far older.
Arthur Posnanski spent an exorbitant amount of time at Tiahuanaco, and he calculated an actual origin date of Tiahuanaco, which he based to be around 12,500 BC, which is an incredible time, because at that time, according to mainstream archaeology, we were munching on bananas.
So, it opens up the possibility that this site is vastly more ancient than we're led to believe.
And we're only just now beginning to discover the complete history of that site.
Some experts believe that the builders of Tiahuanaco were the ancestors of the local Aymara people who still live in the area today.
But many of the Aymara themselves disagree.
The local population, the ancient Aymara culture, say, "It was not us who built this.
It was the gods.
Los dioses.
" Recently, the mystery of who built Tiahuanaco only deepened with a staggering discovery not within the city but beneath it.
Researchers from UNESCO, working with local archaeologists at Tiahuanaco, announce findings that send shockwaves through the world of archaeology.
While analyzing satellite imagery and ground-penetrating radar of the Tiahuanaco site, they find dozens of previously unknown structures buried virtually everywhere they look.
What this aerial technology has found is 34 acres of terraced mounds, underground platforms, and elements of a pyramid complex.
Undated constructions reveal that temples may have taken the form of industrial-strength platforms, and this begs the question, why are the bases, these platforms, so industrial-strength? It's as though they were built to support extreme weight.
So, originally, there could have been one large mega-platform, similar to what we find at Baalbek.
This could have belonged to a much earlier civilization.
If Tiahuanaco is yet another sacred site where successive cultures built temples atop the ruins of far earlier structures, is it possible that there is a connection to extraterrestrial visitation? As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, Tiahuanaco's most mysterious ruins, at Puma Punku, provide the best evidence that the site was not only significant to the native people but also to otherworldly visitors.
Puma Punku is, to me, the most important place on Earth as far as an extraterrestrial visitation would be concerned.
The construction style at Puma Punku does not exist anywhere else on Earth.
These stones, some of them weighing a hundred tons, are made of andesite and other hard materials that today we would use a diamond-tip drill in order to shape or mold such stones.
How did they do it with hammers and chisels? Like the foundation stones beneath Baalbek and the megalithic blocks of Sacsayhuamán, the buried platforms beneath Puma Punku raise a provocative question: Why were the largest, heaviest and most sophisticated parts of these sites those that date back farthest in time? According to ancient astronaut theorists, more than 12,000 years ago, human civilizations existed on Earth that possessed incredible technology given to them by extraterrestrial beings.
The ancient Egyptians referred to a-a time called the "First Time," when the gods, extraterrestrial beings, walked among men.
Pre-10,000 BC.
We have authentic legends about these lost lands and lost worlds.
And that extraterrestrials were here at the same time.
We have these all over the world.
We have the stories of Atlantis and Lemuria.
Many cultures around the world have, also, these same legends and lores and myths of cataclysms.
The Scandinavians have this.
Also, we have the flood of Noah.
We have the Greeks also have tales of a flood.
What we now know from incredible amount of evidence coming from every part of the world, is around 10,800 BC, the Earth suffered a terrible, uh, catastrophe in the form of a comet impact known as the Younger Dryas event.
And this devastated every continent of the world with fires and floods.
So, now it looks like we're looking at a-a secret history of planet Earth, one where there's extraterrestrial intervention.
And there were civilizations and activities going on then, and they were destroyed in a cataclysmic flood.
From Baalbek in Lebanon to the Temple Mount to Puma Punku, some of these sites are thought to be the locations where pre-flood temples once existed.
So, after the cataclysm, people are regaining civilization, and they go back to the exact same location as previous temples and-and rebuild the temple there.
Could it be that the most ancient structures found at sacred sites all over the world belonged to civilizations that have been lost to history? Civilizations where extraterrestrials once lived among humans before falling victim to a cataclysmic event? Perhaps further clues can be found by examining a site in Peru where the Inca claimed to have had a direct line of communication with the gods.
Cuzco, Peru.
In the heart of the ancient Incan capital stands the Convent of Santo Domingo, a Spanish church constructed roughly 400 years ago.
But still visible beneath the church are the remnants of an older and far more impressive structure: the Incan temple of Coricancha.
Coricancha is probably the premier site for the ancient Incan civilization.
This was the crowning jewel of their empire.
Um, it, uh, reflected the Incan, uh, political power.
As well as the religious power.
It had gold plating all along its walls, inside and out.
So it glowed in the Sun.
And it was a very imposing structure.
It had a base that was a curved wall with a big garden at the bottom.
And inside, it had a number of temples.
After the Spanish conquistadors sacked Cuzco in November of 1533, they demolished the Coricancha and built a convent and church on its monumental foundation.
All that's left of the original structure is the impressive stonework of the base and some underground rooms.
But some experts believe the surviving stonework of the Coricancha is too monumental and sophisticated to have been achieved with the Bronze Age tools of the Inca, and was built instead by an earlier, unknown civilization.
So, with the Coricancha, we have good evidence that when the Inca arrived in this area, there was already an earlier megalithic temple there.
They were actually building on something that was already there, like, possibly an ancient platform, possibly an underground temple, because there's evidence of tunnels in this area.
For ancient astronaut theorists, this raises the same question posed by Baalbek and Tiahuanaco: why did ancient people repeatedly build temple after temple on the same sacred spot? And some believe that in the case of the Coricancha, Inca legends may provide a pivotal clue.
Because tradition states that a special spot within the Coricancha allowed communication directly with the heavens, but only when it was activated by the most sacred relic in the Inca world, a mysterious golden disc called the Inti Punchaco.
The most legendary relic of any Peruvian era was said to have been kept in the original Coricancha.
This was the Inti Punchaco.
This sun disc, this golden artifact, allowed whoever possessed it to commune directly with the gods.
According to the Inca, within the Coricancha, the Inti Punchaco disc allowed direct contact with their creator god Viracocha.
Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that the specific placement of it was important because it may have been receiving a signal from beyond Earth.
And they believe the exact spot where it was activated still exists in a chamber of the Coricancha that was spared destruction by the Spanish.
In the Coricancha is this special niche, and today they've covered it with a Plexiglas sheet, but it has blocks that are perfectly cut and articulated in unusual ways, little notches and things, plus drilled holes that go through it, which seem to be for electric cables or something.
So it would appear that some device was placed into this niche in the wall that was like a monitor of some kind.
And they've chosen this spot.
And all for reasons that we do not understand.
So, could it be that at the Coricancha, there was a sacred kind of part of the site there where they were connecting with the gods? Actually something in the land, like a-a magnetic hot spot or a vortex that the Inca and then later the Spanish became aware of.
Is it possible that ancient Peruvians possessed a device that allowed them to communicate with beings from beyond Earth? And that the location of the Coricancha was essential to activating this technology? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest that clues as to just how such a technology might have worked can be found by examining mysterious magnetic anomalies detected at one of the most remote ancient sites in the world.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, roughly 2,500 miles northeast of Australia, lie the ruins of a once great ancient city Nan Madol.
Consisting of hundreds of man-made islets off the eastern coast of Micronesia, it has been dubbed the "Eighth Wonder of the World.
" The site of Nan Madol on the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia is one of the strangest places on the planet.
It's an 11-square-mile complex composed of over 250 million tons of basalt logs floating on a submerged coral reef.
They are 18 feet long, four feet in diameter, and are stacked 40 feet up in the air.
Why did they do this? And how did they do this? Today, the site lies abandoned and shunned by the local Micronesians, who consider it haunted.
Nan Madol is one of these disappeared civilizations.
It's fascinatingly interesting.
This seemed to have been the center of power of a, uh, major civilization.
And yet it also seems that it might have been built on earlier civilizations that are lost in time.
Since stone is difficult to accurately date, no one knows for certain when it was constructed or how it was built.
When you ask the local population, "Where were these blocks quarried?" In unison, they will tell you, from across the island and that they were flown across the island.
According to legend, twin sorcerers of giant proportions came down from the sky and floated above the site and positioned the basalt columns as they desired, a legend that's very similar to the same story at Puma Punku.
But when I hear stories like that, I wonder, well, perhaps we have another example of what I refer to as misunderstood technology.
As with other sites like Puma Punku, Baalbek and the Coricancha, legend says that these structures were not the first to exist here, but instead were built above a much older city.
The mystery of Nan Madol is even more intriguing when we factor in the local legend that states that it was built on an earlier civilization called the Kanamwayso, which is submerged below water but still has those same basalt megaliths.
Objects that appear to be basalt columns have in fact been found beneath the ocean at Nan Madol, and those who have studied the columns both above and below the water have discovered a curious electromagnetic anomaly.
There's a strong magnetic field in every single one of the 250 million tons of basalt there.
You can take a compass and run it along these basalt blocks, and your compass will just spin as you move it along the blocks.
Also, it's thought that the site itself is a special power spot and an energy vortex, and that's why Nan Madol is built there.
And this legendary sunken city called Kanamwayso as well.
The local population also reports many, many sightings of orbs and lights that have been seen hovering around Nan Madol.
Is it because of the magnetic spectrum of Earth? And you have to wonder if, through magnetism, the stones were transported in the first place, 'cause they were transported through the air.
Some ancient astronaut theorists suggest that elevated electromagnetic energy present at Nan Madol was not only a powerful tool used to move the giant basalt columns, but that it may also have been the reason that extraterrestrials helped the locals to build here in the first place.
Could it be that there was a sacred kind of part of the site there, where they were connecting with the gods? You know, not just through visionary experiences, but actually something in the land, like a-a magnetic hot spot or a vortex? We hear the word "vortex" in science fiction, popular culture all the time.
And a vortex is just a mathematical thing that describes a swirling motion.
An electromagnetic field can be formed in a vortex.
You could create a vortex that would enable transporting information from somewhere else to here at the speed of light or faster than the speed of light.
And if there are places on the Earth where these types of vortexes may be stronger than others, you could see people going there to build structures that maybe altered the electromagnetic field of the local environment.
Was there even some kind of portal or vortex present in some of these sacred places? If that's the case, we have to question these principles of oracle sites, megalithic temples.
Were they built to harness this, to be these communication portals between these different places? There is no question in my mind that these are much older sites than we think, and that they were spots for extraterrestrial communication a long, long time ago.
Is it possible that certain locations around the world act as vortexes of electromagnetic energy? And that ancient people built their most sacred sites in these very spots in order to communicate with otherworldly beings? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that although this notion may sound far-fetched, scientists at NASA recently found evidence that such portals really do exist.
NASA makes a groundbreaking announcement, that there is indisputable evidence of magnetic portals connecting the Earth and the Sun.
These portals open every eight minutes and allow the transfer of high-energy particles between the two celestial bodies.
So, you have these two really powerful magnets, the Earth and the Sun, and their field lines are crossing each other.
But every now and then, for whatever reason, we have these flux transfer events where the field lines will actually connect to each other and they create a pathway for the magnetic field of the Sun to literally be connected to the magnetic field of the Earth.
And it's even been referred to in the scientific literature as magnetic portals.
We actually have a connection that could be a transit to or a pathway for information to travel from the Sun to the Earth or vice versa.
Ancient astronaut theorists have long been intrigued by the concept of electromagnetic portals, since in theory they could provide a means of communicating, or even traveling rapidly, across the vast distances of space.
The NASA discovery poses an intriguing question: could sites around the world, where successive cultures built their most sacred temples, be locations that facilitate the creation of magnetic portals? Could a civilization with a more advanced knowledge of physics than we have currently make use of this flux transfer, of these magnetic field lines connecting between their star and other planets? Could it create a means of traveling quickly from one point to the other between them? Or maybe even something else that we just haven't discovered yet.
Maybe these sites were kind of manipulating the energies of the cosmos and the Earth to open these portals up for this kind of purpose.
And what or who were they really communicating with? Was it really the gods? Was it the ancestors? Or was it otherworldly beings? Could Baalbek, Temple Mount, Puma Punku, the Coricancha, and other sites around the world where sacred structures have been built again and again have electromagnetic properties similar to Nan Madol? Properties that could be harnessed to create gateways to connect with otherworldly beings? McGOWAN: Over and over, around the world, from the beginning of time to now, we see that sacred sites and power points have been marked by humankind.
Temples have been built to communicate from Earth to heaven.
Quite clearly, these places are somewhere that we keep coming back to.
We call them portals, we call them vortexes.
They are gateways onto another world, and they are very, very important not just for human experience but for evolution itself.
Are humans drawn to certain locations on Earth by a magnetic force? Do we build our most sacred temples on the same sites again and again because these locations connect us to the cosmos? Perhaps, as we continue to unearth even more ancient ruins, we will come to better understand our connection to the universe and the truth about our extraterrestrial past.