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The Indus Valley, Southern Pakistan. In 1922, an officer with an Indian archeological survey group discovered the ruins of an ancient city known as Mohenjo-daro. According to mainstream archeologists, the city, whose name means mound of the dead, had flourished between 2600 and 1900 BC. However, scientists in Pakistan have suggested Mohenjo-daro is much older. Mainstream archeologists believe the city was abandoned as a result of climatic changes, or possibly a decrease in trade. But when the ruins of Mohenjo-daro
were discovered in the 1920s, 44 skeletons were found lying face down in the street, many holding hands. Their faces and body positioning suggested they suffered a sudden, violent death. PHILIP COPPENS: You have a culture of people who literally were lying dead in the street archeologists have found human remains and something big has happened to these people. NARRATOR: What in fact did happen to the people of Mohenjo-daro? Why is there evidence that wild animals avoided scavenging the remains? And why even after thousands of years had their bones not decayed?
GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: In certain areas of that site, you find increased levels of radiation. And radiation exists all over the place. When all of a sudden you have higher levels of radiation in certain areas of the world, the question arises-- why? [ominous music] NARRATOR: Is it possible that Mohenjo-daro was one of the cities mentioned in the Bhagavad-Gita, a city that suffered the equivalent of a sudden atomic attack? In his 1979 book, Atomic Destruction in 2000 BC, British researcher David Davenport claimed to have found a 50-yard wide epicenter at Mohenjo-daro, where everything appeared to have been fused through a transformative process known as vitrification.
GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: Vitrification is a process in which regular type stone gets molten into a magma state, and then it hardens again. But once the stone is hardened again, it feels like glass. At Mohenjo-daro, we find evidence of vitrification, which could have only been achieved if the material was exposed to extreme heat by some type of a blast. DAVID CHILDRESS: When British and Indian and Pakistani archeologists began doing excavations in the Sindh Desert on the borders of India and Pakistan in the late 1940s and early 1950s, what they found in these cities, Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Kot Diji, was archeological evidence to show there were apparently atomic weapons, only it happened in ancient times.
There's other evidence in parts of Africa and the Middle East where it would seem to be like some sort of atomic explosion had taken place, there and had turned the desert sand into glass. And that's exactly what happened at Alamogordo in New Mexico when they detonated the first atom bomb in the desert. NARRATOR: Could the strange ruins found in the Indus Valley really contain evidence of an ancient atomic explosion? If so, where did these powerful weapons come from? Who was using them, and why? GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: In the ancient Indian texts themselves it says, and I quote, at one point, three giant cities were orbiting the Earth. And those giant cities were often described as being made of gleaming metal and iron.
And at one point, those three cities went to war with each other. And it described how the gods threw weapons at each other, destroying those cities, they all went up in flames, and fire came raining down onto Earth. So when you read those passages, the question I ask is, what is it that our ancestors try to describe here? And I think that it was some type of a technology that was witnessed, yet our ancestors while being highly intelligent, didn't understand the nuts and bolts aspects behind that technology. And so they created something divine out of it, something supernatural, yet it never was divine, it never was supernatural.
NARRATOR: Mahabalipuram, India. While at a local library with fellow ancient astronaut theorist Praveen Mohan, Giorgio Tsoukalos gets a firsthand look at early copies of some of India's most important ancient texts. And now let me show you the other book. This is the Bhagavad Gita. NARRATOR: Among the most influential is the Bhagavad Gita, part of the 13,000-page epic called the Mahabharata, which contains 19 individual books. Historians think this text was written around 500 BC, so this book is 2,500 years old. -Okay. -But according to "mythology," this was supposed to be written at least 10,000 years ago.
(chuckling): Okay. It's a very popular book, and some people even say atomic science is hidden in this book. Not just regular people, but modern physicists. So the argument can be made that the knowledge of, -for example, the atom is contained in a book -Mm-hmm. -Yes. -.that is at least 2,500 years old? And some stories say -that it was given by an otherworldly being. -Yes. -Okay. -Even Robert Oppenheimer, who is the father of atomic bomb, -uh, was fascinated by this book. -Mm-hmm. -Really? Wow. -Yes.
TSOUKALOS: Okay, that's interesting. NARRATOR: Jornada del Muerto Desert, New Mexico. July 16, 1945. In the middle of the barren Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, scientists detonate the first man-made nuclear weapon. The destruction was comparable to no other weapon known to man. The father of the atomic bomb was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, a secret government program created to develop such a weapon.
Oppenheimer, when he saw the successful nuclear test and realized what a terrible weapon he was unleashing, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita's "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." NARRATOR: Oppenheimer's interest in ancient Sanskrit literature began while he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and was introduced to the texts by renowned scholar Arthur W. Ryder. Under Ryder's tutelage, Oppenheimer extensively studied the Vedic scriptures and became proficient in Sanskrit. According to his biographers, he kept a hardcover of the Bhagavad Gita on his bookshelf and was known to give copies away to his friends as gifts.
BRANDENBURG: One of the ideas that's deep within the Vedic scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita, is the idea of duty. He felt it was his duty to do this, even though it would be a terrible thing, he realized, to develop this new nuclear weapon. So he believed he was part of a cosmic cycle and we had to do this to advance. Perhaps he knew that by developing the atomic bomb, we were actually reconnecting with technologies that we had been exposed to many thousands of years before. NARRATOR: One of the key ideas found within the Indian texts is the concept of the cyclical nature of existence, that once we complete a cosmic cycle, it just begins once more.
Oppenheimer himself came to see that he was, in a sense, fulfilling some ancient destiny and that this weapon could ultimately be used to stop a major war, which is exactly what happened. It totally broke the momentum of World War II. In that sense, he was seeing that he was, in some way, fulfilling a destiny that came to him from a seemingly supernatural source, i.e. extraterrestrial gods who influenced ancient India. NARRATOR: If Oppenheimer's work on the atomic bomb was inspired by the ancient Indian texts, could this mean that similar weapons actually existed on Earth thousands of years ago?
Thar Desert. Rajasthan, India. 1992. Engineers conducting soil sampling at a site where a housing development was to be built discover a heavy layer of radioactive ash under the soil. Further examination reveals the contamination stretches across a three-square-mile area of the desert. MOHAN: After cordoning off the area, scientists unearthed a city with completely demolished buildings. HENRY: Scientists have discovered a radioactive ash that they believe dates to 8,000 to 12,000 years ago that shows evidence of a nuclear blast in ancient times.
This is very interesting because the Sanskrit texts describe exactly this type of occurrence in this era in ancient times. NARRATOR: In the Ramayana, one of the major ancient Sanskrit epics, a mighty weapon of the god Brahma called the Brahmastra is described as a weapon of immense power intended to rain down destruction from above. Brahma provided this weapon to the hero Rama as a last resort after all conventional means of warfare failed in his battle against the demon king.
SHIMKHADA: The Brahmastra is the deadliest weapon there is in the history of humankind. It is like a nuclear device, uh, that can be detonated, and then it will have a very devastating effect. Once it was fired, its effect fell on a lot of animals, and then they dropped dead. And also, people started losing their nails, their hair, and they could not breathe. LAYNE LITTLE: Rama fires the Brahmastra weapon upon Dhrumatulya. It is commonly accepted that this is in Rajasthan, in Pakistan.
It's the 19th-largest desert in the world. [ominous music] Alamogordo, New Mexico, white sands proving ground, July 16, 1945. Early in the morning, a number of US military officers and scientists gathered to watch a powerful new weapon being tested. Some believe the device will be a complete failure, others think it might destroy the entire state of New Mexico. As a precaution, viewing stations are placed from 10 to 20 miles away from the test site. At precisely five 5:29:45 seconds,
the first atomic bomb is detonated. 3, 2, 1, fire. [explosion] The blast emits a fireball over 600 feet wide, and produces an explosion equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. The mushroom cloud reaches over 7 miles in height and the reverberations can be felt nearly 100 miles away. The world had a new weapon, one so terrifying it left even its creator, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, shocked and shaken. J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent.
NARRATOR: For the first time in its history, the Earth had been assaulted by a man-made weapon of incredible power. But what if it had all happened before? What if an explosion of even greater force and destructiveness had long ago shaped the Earth's history? Some people have suggested on the basis of a number of lines of evidence that there may have been atomic warfare, atomic bombs, atomic explosions in the very distant past. [explosion] NARRATOR: Atomic warfare among ancient civilizations may sound like something out of a science fiction novel. But descriptions of similar deadly occurrences
can be found in the very same text Dr. Oppenheimer quoted after the New Mexico atomic test. J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: I remember the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. [ominous music] NARRATOR: Part of an ancient Hindu scripture known as the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad-Gita was written sometime between the 5th and 2nd century BC.
This massive 100,000-verse text contains stories about the ancient empire of Rama, which it is said existed over 12,000 years ago, a roughly 5,000 years before the earliest recorded civilization in Mesopotamia. GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: If you read the ancient Indian epics, they read like modern day science fiction. Yet, they're thousands of years old with references not only of flying chariots and of these gods that had these incredible technological capabilities, but incredible weapons that they used in those epic battles. NANCY RED STAR: They had what was called a Brahma weapon. There were many people that were singed and burned and melted by the Brahma weapon.
NARRATOR: Ancient astronaut theorists believe the Brahma weapon was an early nuclear device because the descriptions of its deadly after-effects are eerily similar to the effects of exposure to intense radiation. It is a theory largely discounted by conventional science. There is no evidence that a nuclear bomb was described in the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad-Gita. It describes a battle. In battles, there are explosions, big explosions. [explosion] It's one thing about suggesting that, you know, battles have explosions but that's not really what we're looking at.
You got to look at the whole picture. One reference that we have for example speaks of these explosions that were brighter than a thousand suns. And when these blasts occurred, the suns were twirling in the air, trees went up in flames, and there was just this mass destruction. [explosion] After those blasts, people who survive started to lose their hair, and nails started to fall out. I mean, right there, we have a concise reference to radiation poisoning, nuclear fallout. And those texts are thousands of years old.
NARRATOR: Southern Pakistan-- in the middle of the Indus River Valley lie the ruins of Mohenjo-daro. This ancient city, whose name means Mound of the Dead, was one of the largest urban settlements in the world in 2,600 BC. The ancient city of Mohenjo-daro had what appeared to be streets that were laid out parallel and perpendicular to each other like a modern city. The homes actually had their own toilets. And they had a very sophisticated sewer system. So it looks like a very advanced city.
NARRATOR: Ancient astronaut theorists have long thought this site was also the epicenter of a nuclear explosion that occurred more than 4,000 years ago. Skeletons were found in dead positions as though there was an instantaneous death. And some of those skeletons, as measured by Soviet scientists, had 50 times the normal radioactivity. [dramatic music] They found pottery that had been fused. Then walls were heated to such an extent they became vitrified or glass-like, suggesting some sort of ancient nuclear weapon involved.
NARRATOR: According to the Mahabharata, the ancient holy text of the Hindus, white hot smoke rose in infinite brilliance and reduced the city to ashes. Horses were burned by the thousands, and corpses were vaporized by intense heat. And afterwards, a big silence came over the entire land, and people start to have boils on their skin. Their hair start to fall out and their nails. There's only one thing that causes this, and that is radiation poisoning. It's radiation fallout.
[suspenseful music] So the question then becomes, when events happen in a place where there is extreme radiation, what impact does that have on human life or on other life present there? Could it explain, for example, why creatures were born with more than one arm or more than one leg, which then somehow became deified? Because even to this day we know that in civilizations where anomalous human beings are born, somehow the touch of God is seen to be part of this creation. NARRATOR: According to the ancient Hindu texts, after the carnage at Mohenjo-daro, a fearsome flying monster appeared in the sky.
It was called Garuda. [dramatic music] In the Mahabharata, the Garuda is a massive bird-like creature, has a red face, red wings, talon. It's so huge, it would block out the sun. There are stories that it would let a certain god Vishnu ride on him on occasion. Each and every time he would show up descending from the sky, he would create hurricane winds. And upon his descent, the earth would shake, dust would fly up in the air, and everyone in the vicinity would be absolutely terrified.
Now, here we have a carving of Garuda. And if we look at the top, yes, they look like feathers, but at the same time they could be interpreted as big, gigantic flames. According to Hindu mythology, Garuda is born out of this cosmic event, this war and destruction that happens at the end of every age. Could this have been somehow connected to exposure to radiation, being born within a zone of high radiation? We cannot know the answer, but we do know that within India, within Pakistan, there are known zones of high radiation than there are normal.
The logic dictates that somehow genetic abominations will have been born within those places. NARRATOR: If Mohenjo-daro was, in fact, the site of an ancient nuclear attack, could it be possible that Garuda was a mutant beast created as a byproduct of intense radioactivity? We tend to have a science fiction view of what mutation is. We think of mutation as being caused by radiation, and they cause outlandish features, and gigantic-sized insects, and so forth. But in fact, mutations happen all the time. There's no recorded evidence of any radiation causing a mutation, which changes some species into a different species.
Most of the radiation mutations are lethal. NARRATOR: But if, as modern scientists believe, Garuda was not likely the result of genetic mutation, then what could explain its existence? The Mahabharata states that Garuda was born from this raging inferno. And what's really intriguing is the fact that in some text passages, we can read that the exterior of Garuda did not consist of feathers, but of metal. Now what kind of a bird is that? No bird is made of metal, unless it's a type of machine. Garuda was a flying vehicle. And Garuda was able to travel to the Moon and around the Earth with very, very high speed.
Garuda even was able to shock mankind with lightning, which fell from heaven. [dramatic music] Garuda was considered to be a snake killer. In fact, Garuda needed to eat snakes in order to survive. Now, compare an airplane at the airport today hooked up to a fuel line. Isn't that airplane eating a snake? If you see modern fighter jets take off in the middle of the night, there is smoke and fire coming out of the exhaust. It looks like a dragon.
It looks like some type of a mythical creature, especially if you don't know what you're witnessing is nuts and bolts technology. So of course you're going to liken it to a living creature. Those ancient aliens knew that our ancestors would worship them as gods because they knew that our ancestors, they didn't know it was technology. They thought it was magic, spirituality, divine intervention, which it never was.
