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[ominous music] The United States Capitol, 1992. Congress authorizes funding for the Spaceguard Program, a global network of telescopes designed to scan the skies for Earth-threatening asteroids. As of 2011, NASA has identified approximately 10,000 near-Earth objects that could potentially hit our planet. Of all the natural hazards that we know of-- earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, typhoons-- the impact hazard, the possibility of us being hit by a comet or asteroid, is the only one we can eliminate. You could never stop an earthquake or a volcano. But if we had a decade, two decades warning of an object that might hit the Earth, we do have the technology-- at least, in principle-- to send a spacecraft out,
and give it a nudge, and just slightly change its orbit so it misses. If we can control the trajectories of asteroids to direct them away from Earth, then it's certainly possible that highly-advanced extraterrestrials could have had the technology to direct an asteroid towards Earth. FRANKLIN RUEHL: Did advanced ETs direct an asteroid to that spot? It's within the realm of feasibility that advanced ETs indeed directed an asteroid to the Yucatan Peninsula. LUIS M. CHIAPPE: The question is, was the impact enough to trigger the extinction? And that's what's controversial.
Some people believe that was enough. Some people believe that it wasn't. NARRATOR: For decades, mainstream scientists believed that the asteroid that may have been responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs was a fragment of a giant asteroid called Baptistina. But on September 19, 2011, NASA concluded that the deadly asteroid may have had a different origin. DAVID MORRISON: Some people think that they can guess what the origin was of the object that hit us 65 million years ago.
Others disagree. We simply don't have enough data. NARRATOR: But if the asteroid did not break off of Baptistina, where did it come from? And is it possible, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe, that the object may not have been an asteroid, but an extraterrestrial weapon? Perhaps the extinction was triggered by advanced ETs. Specifically, they might have used something to destroy the dinosaurs. NARRATOR: In 1980, physicist Luis Alvarez discovered a thin global layer of sediment nearly 65 million years old that contains high levels of iridium, an element not commonly found on Earth.
Those materials probably came from an asteroid. They could have come from a comet. But they definitely came from somewhere in the solar system, far beyond the Earth and moon. NARRATOR: Some researchers believe iridium is deposited on Earth by celestial masses, like meteors, comets, and asteroids. But the rare element can also be introduced into the atmosphere as a byproduct of something else-- fallout from a nuclear weapon. Could the Earth's iridium layer really be physical proof that advanced nuclear weapons had at one time devastated our planet? And might they have been deliberately deployed in an effort to wipe out the dinosaurs?
[boom] Some researchers point to evidence found within the recovered bones of these extinct creatures. Most people don't realize that most of the T-Rex skeletons that are on display at various museums around the world, they're painted with a very specific paint. Now, the reason they had to paint them is because when they discovered the bones, they discovered that they were very radioactive.
NARRATOR: But if dinosaurs really fell victim to a nuclear attack, might there be some sort of tangible evidence? Ancient astronaut theorists believe the evidence does, in fact, exist in the pages of the ancient Hindu texts. We can look into the ancient Indian texts, like the Mahabharata, and there are clear stories that describe lizards of various sizes, some even the size of buildings, that were all mass-exterminated, and it was because of the angry gods. Now, we can look at this and say it's mythology. Or was there some type of mass-extinction level event caused by ancient aliens?
MICHAEL CREMO: If we look at the records left in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, we see descriptions of weapons resembling modern atomic weapons. We also see descriptions of advanced technology, such as spacecraft. In the Mahabharata and other sacred Indian texts, we can read that weapons of mass destruction were used that were brighter than a thousand suns when they were deployed. And afterwards, silence fell over the affected land. If nuclear weapons were deployed, the only logical conclusion is that their origin was, in fact, extraterrestrial.
Is it possible that what we have here was, in fact, not an extinction, but an extermination event? NARRATOR: Porto Torres, Sardinia. October, 1953. Excavators performing an archaeological dig in what was the Roman Empire's first colony on the island reportedly make an astonishing find. In a place called Porto Torres, in 1953, it was reported that two over eight-foot-tall skeletons were discovered in the area with grave goods and bronze furnishings and other such things actually within the tomb itself, suggesting that indeed giants did exist in Sardinia.
TIMOTHY ALBERINO: Full skeletons of giants have been unearthed in the soils of Sardinia, especially among the Nuragic ruins. I interviewed two individuals who worked on the excavation of the Nuragic ruins in the town of Sardara, underneath the Church of Santa Anastasia. Both of these individuals dug up, at different periods of time, multiple skeletons of giants from nine to 12 feet tall. NARRATOR: Multiple giant skeletons, nine to 12 feet tall?
Curiously, this is the same length of many of the so-called giants' tombs found all over Sardinia. But if such massive bones have indeed been discovered, what happened to them? Some researchers believe these findings have been deliberately covered up. NEWMAN: We hear these stories, but we don't have any evidence. It's all been taken away. For example, another account from the 1950s-- there was a gentleman who actually witnessed bones being dug up on his farm when he was a child. And people in large black cars arrived, official-looking people,
and took the bones away in the middle of the night. NARRATOR: When it comes to the alleged discovery of giant skeletons, does the fact that the bones have gone missing suggest a cover-up or a hoax? While skeptics say that many of these stories come from dubious sources, there is at least one discovery that was documented by one of the oldest universities in the world. In 1892, it was reported that scientists at the University of Montpellier in France studied bones that had been excavated on France's Mediterranean coast, and found that they belonged to a human who stood over 11 feet tall.
NEWMAN: So there have been numerous reports of giant bones, teeth, skulls. The lack of physical evidence is quite frustrating, but I'm sure it will come out. NARRATOR: But if reports of giant skeletons are true, were these enormous beings human or something else? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest the answer may be hidden within our own DNA. Copenhagen, Denmark. 2020. A team of geneticists studying an ancient hominin called Homo antecessor make a groundbreaking discovery.
This species was a close relative of the last common ancestor to humans and two other hominins: Neanderthals and Denisovans. It is just the latest in a series of incredible discoveries that have revealed humans not only shared the Earth with at least eight other humanlike species, but even mated and produced offspring with them. For quite a long period of time, many of us, myself included, thought that humans and other hominins, particularly Neanderthals, didn't interbreed. After 2010, when technology allowed us to sequence the entire genomes of several Neanderthals
and other species and modern humans, we began to see traces of a little bit of Neanderthal mixture. We see traces of Neanderthal ancestry in Europe, and we see it in Asia, as well as in the Americas amongst Native Americans. NARRATOR: Mysteriously, scientists have found one hominid is represented in human DNA that has not yet been identified. But ancient astronaut theorists believe clues as to what other ancestors might exist within the human genome can be found in the Bible's Book of Genesis. HENRY: In the Book of Genesis, it says that the sons of God came into the daughters of men.
They created a hybrid offspring who are called "the Nephilim," or "the fallen ones." They're referred to as "the giants" or "the mighty ones," and some believed they were between eight and 15 feet tall. VON DANIKEN: This is handed down not only in the Bible. This is also handed down in Sumerian languages, that some of the gods had sex with humans, and the offsprings were giants. Mythology is full of giants, and we have to look at these old myths with modern languages, change the word of "angel" into "extraterrestrial." In the beginning of time, extraterrestrials had sex with humans, and the product of this sexual contact were giants.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that as geneticists continue to decode the human genome, they will find that among our various hominid ancestors is a missing link to enormous beings from another world? FENTON: Ancient DNA is perhaps, for me, the most important area of study in all of my work, because there is the potential chance here that we can find direct evidence of the ancestors of modern humans. I suspect we'll find lineages of a race of giants. Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, July 2010. Here in the ruins of a medieval church on Saint Ivan Island, six small human bone fragments are discovered inside a marble sarcophagus.
Through radiocarbon dating and DNA testing of one knuckle bone, scientists conclude that the bones are from the first century AD. But what is even more incredible is the belief by many that the bones are actually those of Saint John the Baptist. KATHLEEN MCGOWAN: In Christianity, John the Baptist is specifically important because he is known as the forerunner, the precursor, the one who comes before the Messiah. And in the stories of John the Baptist, he becomes extremely important for Christians because he announces that a greater Messiah is coming after him, and the legends around John's bones were always legends of extreme power.
John was a prophet. NARRATOR: Now on tour in churches throughout Bulgaria, tens of thousands of the faithful come to visit, pray, and even worship these tiny bone fragments. But why? What is it about ancient bones, even those thought to have belonged to a saint, that compel people to come and visit them? Could it be they possess some mystical or other worldly power? The idea of saints' bones and relics having power is something it goes back to the very early days of Christianity. And certainly, in the latter part of the dark ages in the Middle Ages,
they became very big business. If you had saints' relics in your church or in your cathedral, you could bring in a lot of pilgrims who would also bring in a lot of donations. There was a strong belief by the nobility and the royalty that the bones of these saints actually did contain some kind of power. ERICH VON DANIKEN: Humans always want to worship their celebrities, their kings. Whatever was linked with mysteries, humans worship it. So in antiquity, it entered already into altars. When a high priest died, part of his body, part of his bones
were sometimes separated, brought to different countries, and everyone worshipped the bone in an altar that still happened in Christianity. NARRATOR: Kushinagar, India, 483 BC. Siddhartha Gautama, the great spiritual teacher upon whom Buddhism is founded, dies. According to legend, after Buddha was cremated, several small pieces of his body remained intact and were retrieved from the ashes.
JUDY CHUNGWA HO: After his cremation, the ashes were fought over by a lot of his disciples, and finally, they resolved to the problem by dividing them into eight different parts. When the Buddha's ashes were divided, and there is a claim that there was a tooth found there, it was considered as very valuable. Right away when the tooth was given to a king, the relic, the tooth relic itself became associated with the power of kingship, and it is believed that the king who possesses the tooth would be able to rule properly, and there would be peace and prosperity in his kingdom.
NARRATOR: Could such a tiny but tangible relic from the mouth of the dead Buddha really have such power? Is a physical link to a holy and venerated leader really a means of connecting to the afterlife, and even more profoundly, some divine life force? The worship of relics actually is as old as the Buddha's religion itself and in many other religions, too. The Buddha himself approves of the worship of relics because he believes that his followers need something very concrete to remind them of his presence and his teachings. The relics are supposed to be actually the essence of the saints, so in a way, the relic are the saints themselves. So they have the powers of the saints.
ANDREW COLLINS: The importance here is why is it that objects like this can gain such an incredible spiritual value. And quite clearly, it's to do with the psychology of the importance of individuals like the Buddha, who are seen to be personifications of God or the gods themselves and that just to own this or to have some part of it imbues you with the same powers of the gods themselves. DAVID CHILDRESS: So you have to wonder just why these relics are so important. We give them power, these bones and these teeth. But what they are, at least in a scientific manner, is a piece of DNA from the Buddha himself.
ERICH VON DANIKEN: I think they knew that in the far future, the gods, the extraterrestrials would return again. And some of these gods may have to say to one of his darlings on the planet Earth, if we find your body, your cells are still existing, then we are able to reconstruct your body. Oxfordshire, England, 1819. In a quarry just outside the village of Stonesfield, paleontologist William Buckland discovers several fossilized bones of an enormous, unknown animal, including portions of a lower jaw with teeth still in place.
Those similar bones had been found in the past. Dr. Buckland was the first European to officially record the discovery of a dinosaur or, as he called it, a Megalosaurus. Since then, dinosaurs have been discovered on every continent in the world. There are all kinds of dinosaurs that have been found. You have bladed dinosaurs like the Stegosaurus. You have horned dinosaurs. You have meat-eating dinosaurs. You have all sorts of dinosaurs.
They live in very different environments-- deserts, subtropical forests, by the seashore. There are over a thousand species of dinosaur that we know and, no doubt, thousands more that we don't know. They ranged in size from chicken size to the largest land animals ever. LUIS M. CHIAPPE: The largest land animal that we see today is the elephant, but the elephant would be a midget in comparison to one of these Titanosaurs. You're talking about an animal that weighed 25 times the weight of an adult, male elephant. This animals reach lengths of about 120 feet and weights of a hundred tons.
The plant-eaters would have been dangerous simply because of their size. Walking in between a herd of Titanosaurs that weighed a hundred tons, you know, would have been deadly, probably, let alone being face to face with a T-Rex. The dinosaur really speaks to us. Every child has this fascination with dinosaurs. And we know that they're able to fly. We know that they are able to frighten you. They are to some extent supernatural creatures. DAVID CHILDRESS: One of the things with planet Earth was that in ancient times, everything was bigger. And all the animals were bigger, and plants were bigger.
Everything was gigantic. LUIS M. CHIAPPE: The world of the dinosaurs was completely different from our world. During the age of the dinosaurs, many other animals lived. You have giant reptiles swimming in the ocean, flying reptiles flying over the heads of dinosaurs. You also have insects, mammals, amphibians, and other creatures, but dinosaurs were the king of the land. [roaring] We imagine in science fiction what it would be like to travel to an exotic, exciting, strange, alien world, where these giant creatures roaming around the planet, and it happened here on Earth in our prehistory.
NARRATOR: While scientists have been studying dinosaur fossils for nearly 200 years, their theories about what these giant creatures were and how they lived often change with each new discovery. Recently, paleontologists have determined that Tyrannosaurus Rex was most likely covered not with scales, but with feathers. MARK A. WILSON: We found feathers of dinosaurs. They're actually preserved in amber. And so dinosaurs, we now believe that many, if not most of them had a feathery covering of some kind.
We know they have very complex behaviors. The eggs that we find show that many dinosaurs made nests on the ground that they protected from predators, and they brought food to the developing young. LUIS M. CHIAPPE: In the past, we envision dinosaurs as lethargic, gigantic reptiles that were slow and sluggish. That notion has changed completely. We interpret them now as being much more active. Many of them were feathered, and, presumably, they were warm-blooded. We know that they grew very fast.
Essentially, dinosaurs were very atypical reptile, if you want. We still have a lot to learn about the dinosaurs. It used to be easy to define a dinosaur, but defining a dinosaur has become more complex. NARRATOR: But while paleontologists continue to discover information on the lives of dinosaurs, ancient astronaut theorists believe there may be an otherworldly connection to their demise. JASON MARTELL: When looking at dinosaurs, there are some key questions that really need to be answered. We don't know their level of intelligence.
We don't really know what happened to them. More importantly, where do they come from? GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: Scientists truly believe that dinosaurs ruled this planet for 165 million years. In comparison, modern Homo sapiens-- humans-- have only been around for about 200,000 years. So dinosaurs are by far the dominant species in the history of this Earth. [roaring] But in the early 1800s, if you told someone the Earth used to be teeming with giant beasts, some of which weighed over a hundred tons, that person would say to you, you're crazy. And yet, today, the dinosaurs are scientific fact.
[roaring] Dinosaurs could very well have been an early experiment by extraterrestrials with life on Earth. This planet has been capable of supporting life for millions, if not billions of years. NARRATOR: The accepted belief within the scientific community is that dinosaurs dominated the planet until a catastrophic event wiped them out 65 million years ago. [dramatic music]
There was a mass extinction that essentially exterminated maybe 50% of what was alive. Among the 50% are the last dinosaurs that lived during the age of the dinosaurs-- things like the Triceratops, T-Rex. PHILIP COPPENS: We are speculating. And we have seen science trying to come up with answers. And so how the dinosaur disappeared is something which is still an open question to which science has no answer so far. It is possible that extraterrestrials may have wanted to trade out the dinosaurs for a more intelligent species in their likeness, and Earth was the perfect place to do it.
