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NARRATOR: In 2017, NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems division asserted that identifying and extracting mineral resources in space-- such as iron, tungsten and titanium-- would be essential for future space exploration and colonization. The Moon and the near-Earth objects that are not too far from Earth, they're loaded with minerals and-and raw materials. You can look at the Moon and where the, uh, Sea of Tranquility and the other seas, they have a different coloration, because there's titanium oxide covering the surface.
We know there's uranium there because we've detected radon gas. So there's all sorts of materials. DIAMANDIS: One of the companies I'm proud of having cofounded, uh, is a company called Planetary Resources, who's got a vision of going to near-Earth asteroids to mine those asteroids for fuel, and ultimately, precious metals-- platinum-group metals, or construction metals. NARRATOR: But as NASA makes plans to mine essential space minerals, is it possible that other advanced civilizations came to Earth-- centuries ago-- for the same reason? As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, the answer is yes, and they believe the evidence can be found in the Sumerian stories of the Anunnaki, written more than 5,000 years ago.
MARTELL: When we analyze the story of the Anunnaki's creation of humanity, some very interesting nuances come out that might lead into understanding what humans might face in their own eventual colonization of another planet. NARRATOR: When famed ancient astronaut theorist Zecharia Sitchin studied the Sumerian tablets in the 1970s, he not only reached the conclusion that the Anunnaki came to Earth to escape a dying planet, but also noted that, while here, they used humans to mine for gold. MARTELL: When we look at the creation stories of biblical tales, we understand that God created the Earth in seven days.
It turns out that this consolidated version of seven days can be translated to a much earlier story in Sumerian form, called the "Atra-Hasis," where there is actually seven tablets of creation, telling how the Anunnaki came to Earth and genetically engineered us in their image, and in their likeness, to mine the gold for them here on Earth. NARRATOR: Is it possible that when the ancient Sumerians wrote about giant beings coming down from the sky and digging for gold, they were, in fact, documenting a visitation by extraterrestrials who were mining for resources-- just as NASA is planning to do in the not-too-distant future?
June, 2018. Scientist and aerospace engineer Dr. Travis Taylor is at Johnson Space Center's Building 9, the astronaut training facility. He is meeting with robotics engineer Lucien Junkin, who is eager to show him the latest in extraterrestrial transportation. I see this is a-a rover. Tell me a little bit about it. Yeah, this is basically an off-roading RV for Moon and Mars. And what-what is it that makes this so much better than, say, the lunar rover?
It can go out and explore. So the concept is if you have a habitat, you're gonna take two of these rovers and they'll go out for a week to two weeks and explore, come back, refuel and then we'll be back out exploring. Can-can we look inside or maybe go for a ride? Absolutely. Let's go for a ride. -Oh, that'll be awesome. -Okay. Just put your foot there, jump on up. All right. Pilot's on, power's on. -Go to low gear. -Low gear. Push forward on the stick. NARRATOR: The Planetary Analog Test Site, also known as The Rock Yard, is a multi-acre simulation of lunar and Martian terrain.
It is here that the Space Exploration Vehicle endures rigorous testing to determine its readiness for eventual off-Earth deployment. -Let's go through that crater first. -Okay. -Just go up and over? -Yeah. TAYLOR: Can it handle that kind of a.? -Yeah, if you put your foot right up there. -All right. .that'll brace you in your seat. So, like, on a tank, -you would typically feel it tip over. -Yeah. JUNKIN: So, active suspension, each one of the wheel modules, it senses it.
Right. I see that. How about that? It's all right to ride across these? Yeah, drive over-- across anything. TAYLOR: Wow, this is amazing. When it sees a big rock like that, it just goes right over it? JUNKIN: Yeah, it just goes right over it. -Let me show you something. -All right. So you're gonna pick out a rock and we're gonna explore the rock -in this. -Okay. -Yeah, let's look at that rock right over there. -Okay, that one. -So, look at this rock right here. -Uh-huh. We can bow down to it. And now, another cool feature: you twist this way.
TAYLOR: Oh, that crabs. Yeah, yeah. I got you, I got you. JUNKIN: That crabs. See how we can just rotate -all the way around? -That-that's amazing. JUNKIN: You're doing perfect. And then we're gonna shoot straight up that hill right there. -All right. Straight? -It'll take you-- yeah. TAYLOR: All right. JUNKIN: So it is a rock-climbing fool. -You could climb up a wall in this thing. -Yeah. We want the vehicle to go places where they're like, "This is my life support system."
-Right. Yeah, right. -"I'm not going there." -But the vehicle would go. -Will do it, -if they had to. -Will do it, if they have to. NARRATOR: If ancient astronaut theorists are correct, and extraterrestrials came to our planet thousands of years ago in search of gold and other precious minerals, wouldn't there be evidence? Some telltale sign that the Earth was once the site of a vast, global mining operation? CHILDRESS: There was a place in Peru called Cajamarquilla, and at this spot there are thousands of shallow pits
that are going up the ridge of a mountain, and they're in-line. They're quite uniform. They are only say, two, three feet deep, these pits. And they are baffling. What these pits might actually be is the result of some kind of mining probe that was going up this mountain, digging these holes, and then sampling for valuable minerals. The Trans Astronautic Corporation announces a partnership with NASA to develop a new venture in space-- asteroid mining.
We incorporated TransAstra in 2015 when we saw that SpaceX and Elon Musk and Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos and other entrepreneurs were developing low-cost, really effective ways to get in orbit. Once we have rockets that can get into orbit inexpensively, then it makes sense to start building real industries in space. And one of the first industries is asteroid mining. Precious metals that we really value on the Earth-- things like gold and platinum-- they're called precious metals 'cause they're not around much.
Question is: where are they? And the answer is asteroids. NARRATOR: Metals like gold, copper, and zinc have been mined on Earth for thousands of years and are vital to civilization. But their supply is finite, in part because they are not native to this planet. When the Earth was originally being formed, it was molten, and a lot of the precious metals were drawn towards the center of the Earth. And through this molten process, all the heavy elements went down to the core of the Earth where we can't get access to them. Then the Earth started to cool and form a cool crust, which was made of lighter materials.
NARRATOR: It is widely accepted that without access to metals, both technology and civilization would not have been possible. But luckily for mankind, some 3.8 billion years ago, it is estimated that trillions of asteroids crashed into the Earth and deposited a layer of heavy metals into the planet's now-hardened crust. These elements weren't actually from Earth originally. All of these elements came to Earth via comets and asteroids that impacted our planet long ago and early in its history.
SERCEL: So all the precious metals that we mine on the Earth actually came from the asteroids. NARRATOR: The bombardment of asteroids seeded Earth's crust with enough metals to make possible the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and today's technological civilization. But many metals, including rare earth elements needed for high technology, are in increasingly short supply. Because of this, many experts believe the asteroid belt may once again come to the rescue. SUMMERS: You get a typical asteroid, a few hundred meters in diameter, it will have more of those rare earth elements than have been mined on Earth in all of human history.
NARRATOR: Of the more than 6,000 asteroids in NASA's database, it is estimated that even just the ten easiest to reach and mine would yield an astonishing $1.5 trillion dollars in resources. SUMMERS: The asteroid belt could provide for the needs of our civilization for many centuries. Maybe thousands of years into their future. SERCEL: The natural thing to do is to build spacecraft, go out to the asteroids, mine them, make goods out of the asteroids. And we presume that other intelligences, if there are other intelligence, would think the same way we would.
And so anything that seems to make sense to us could make sense to others. NARRATOR: If other intelligent life-forms exist on nearby exoplanets, might they too be aware of the vast resources that exist in the asteroid belt and also on planet Earth? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest that Earth is rich in another commodity that would be of great value to any advanced civilization looking to mine for precious metals. liquid water. If aliens wanted to mine the asteroid belt, they'd need a base, somewhere to regroup and refuel. As it happens, there's one pretty close, and it's called planet Earth.
BIRNES: Why aliens come here might well be because we're mostly water on planet Earth. They stop here because they could break down water into hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. So, if you have a craft that somehow uses hydrogen power, you have all the hydrogen you'll ever need. It well could be that this is a way station for extraterrestrials. Ottawa, Ontario, 1982. At the National Museum of Canada, paleontologist and curator of vertebrate fossils Dale Russell publishes a thought experiment. Based on the trend toward larger brain sizes and the upright posture of dinosaurs, he proposes a theory about what one species of dinosaur would have evolved into if it had survived the mass extinction 65 million years ago.
What he did is take the dinosaur known as troodon. They noticed the morphological changes in the skeletal structure of the dinosaur. And based on over time where it was going, they extrapolated it out further. And strangely enough or wonderfully enough, they actually came up with a model that resembled a humanoid reptilian being, which actually matched that of the reports that we were hearing now as well as reports from ancient history. So for me, this was one of the most compelling pieces of information, where science actually says it is possible. The dinosaurs hadn't died out. This would have become what he called the dinosauroid, an upright standing, semi-humanoid, semi-reptilian entity, what we might call a reptoid.
He thought it might stand four to five feet high, weigh about 90 pounds, and have a fairly advanced brain. Now, did this entity ever come into existence? What if some of the dinosaurs didn't become extinct? What if they managed to survive a global extinction or presumed extinction 65 million years ago, and over time some of them developed through natural selection and they grew smaller, they became more intelligent, they became more adept and adaptive, and took on a humanoid form? We necessarily shouldn't think that the reptilians are extraterrestrials.
Perhaps in some strange way they're our forefathers, albeit from millions and millions of years in the past. NARRATOR: If the reptilians do exist, could they be the descendants of dinosaurs that walked the earth millions of years ago? Our concept or dinosaurs is changing all the time, of course. And nowadays we're making so many new discoveries every year that we're reinterpreting them in many ways. Certainly if you look 20, 30 years back, there were so many things that have been found, and so many other things we know now. in particular, I think it's been very important that nowadays it's completely very well accepted,
the idea that dinosaurs are not extinct, that dinosaurs essentially evolved into birds and that they're alive today. And now that we know that not all the dinosaurs died out, and as a matter of fact, some survived to become birds, warm blooded birds, mind you, from a dinosaur which is considered reptile and cold blooded, we're recognizing that even if these are birds now, we did recognize them now as being part of the dinosaur family. What could these other pockets that have survived the devastation 65 million years ago, could they have evolved parallel to mankind in hidden cavern systems? And could they be actually the beings that we think are extraterrestrial but are
actually our terrestrial neighbors? Paleontologists generally argue that the dinosaurs died out totally 65 million years ago. I think it's certainly within the realm of feasibility that some found an ecological niche to survive in, and may even exist today. And I point out that while we hear UFO abductees talking about little greys and tall humanoids, a minority of them do report encounters with what we would call reptoids. So it's possible that on some planet, if not earth, somewhere else they evolved from dinosaurs. To find another place in the universe that was so rich with resources and so capable of supporting life
was probably a very exciting discovery for extratrerrestrial visitors to earth in our prehistory. In their eyes, this could have been the place they could colonize or perhaps act as a working environment for experiments they were doing with new species they were trying to engineer. Maybe they manipulated dinosaur DNA to favor certain mutations. By playing with certain mutations in the genes of dinosaurs, highly advanced extraterrestrials, through genetic modification, may have been able to alter the course of dinosaur evolution to favor the rise of mammals.
NOORY: In ancient India, they performed incredible kinds of medicine and surgical procedures on people. Things like operating on the skull. What's fascinating about this is. is this kind of advanced medical knowledge goes way back, way back. And they were able to use those techniques to heal people. NARRATOR: Vedic scholars suggest that not only were the ancient Hindus able to perform brain surgery, but other advanced procedures as well. And much of this medical knowledge was set to record in a Sanskrit text dating back to 800 BC,
known as the Sushruta Samhita. In 2017 at a local library in Mahabalipuram, India, Giorgio Tsoukalos meets with fellow ancient astronaut theorist Praveen Mohan to take a closer look at the text. Now this is a, uh, vast medical text that contains information about more than 11,000 illnesses. Uh, it talks about 700 medicinal plants, 64 preparations from mineral resources, 57 preparations from animal resources, and it's considered the foundation of Ayurveda, the traditional Indian medicine. Oh, so this is the basis -for Ayurvedic medicine right here. -Yes, yes.
I was able to find a passage. I thought you might find it, -you know, interesting. -Mm-hmm. Right here. Now you can see where it says that surgical operations are of eight types. They are incising, excising, scraping, puncturing, probing, extracting, secreting fluids, and even suturing. -So imagine, we had suturing 2,600 years ago. -Mm-hmm. And this book was written more than a hundred years before Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine. That is amazing. And how was this information obtained? Like, what's the story behind this?
Well, the title Sushruta Samhita means that the author Sushruta is not really the author. He did not write this book. He got this information from a character called Dhanvantari, who was an otherworldly being. NARRATOR: Dhanvantari is believed to be the physician to the gods and the father of Ayurvedic medicine. SHIMKHADA: Dhanvantari himself has a divine origin associated with the churning of the milky ocean. The churning of the milk of sea refers to, perhaps, uh, the Milky Way. Dhanvantari came out of that and then he was the god of medicine. And he, then, gave this knowledge of medicine to human beings.
TSOUKALOS: Dhanvantari was said to have originated from the Milky Way. And so, all of a sudden, you have a connection with this deity arriving from the Milky Way. Well, what more do you want? The knowledge contained in this document, known as the Sushruta Samhita, was brought here by an extraterrestrial visitor. NARRATOR: Ayurvedic medicine is considered one of the world's oldest and most detailed healing sciences. Is it possible that it was really handed down to mankind by alien sources?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest that other texts clearly reveal this extraterrestrial connection. Mumbai University. Kalina, India. January 2015. The Indian Science Congress presents talks on various technical disciplines to an audience of some of India's top engineers. Included in the list of presentations is a lecture on "Ancient Indian Aviation Technology" given by retired pilot and flight instructor Captain Anand J. Bodas. In his lecture, Captain Anand Bodas told young engineers
that they should recreate what is given in ancient Vedic texts, because in the field of aviation, there are much more advanced devices mentioned than what we have today. NOORY: This was a very controversial talk because you had one camp that thought that the ancient civilizations of India possessed incredible flying technology, yet you then had that other camp that said this is crazy, it's nonsense. But something was going on many, many, many, many thousands of years ago, and they presented evidence and documented facts that they had flying machines that were capable of doing incredible things.
