15x06 - The World Before Time

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NARRATOR: Ancient stories that describe civilizations long before our own.

FELICIA BEARDSLEY: Oral histories always talk about the "before the before.

" When gods and people walked the land.

NARRATOR: New discoveries that challenge conventional history.

MARK CARLOTTO: These Meso-American sites actually extends the time frame for archeology from 10,000 years to tens of thousands of years.

NARRATOR: And monumental structures that suggest that everything we think we know about our planet is wrong.

DAVID CHILDRESS: This pyramid city is so deep in the ocean, it must be 50,000 years old.

GEORGE NOORY: There's no question in my mind that preexisting civilizations on this planet had high technology.

They had help from the extraterrestrials.

NARRATOR: But if human civilizations existed on Earth tens of thousands of years ago, what happened to them? And could it be only a matter of time before their fate becomes our own? NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: April 2018.

A groundbreaking paper is published by NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt and astrophysicist Adam Frank that tackles an intriguing question.

Might advanced civilizations have existed on Earth in the remote past that have been completely lost to history? MICHAEL DENNIN: This paper asked a very interesting question, which is: Can we detect ancient civilizations that are tens of thousands of years old? And the intriguing answer is really no.

Because all evidence of these civilizations and remnants of them would've been destroyed in that time frame.

CHILDRESS: The evidence for them would be hard to find, they were saying.

Cataclysms and Earth changes in the past would have erased the evidence for these civilizations.

DENNIN: You know, we're only a couple hundred years into a technological civilization.

That's not a very long time frame in the fossil record.

So, if our civilization got wiped out, we would possibly disappear from that record in the future.

GIORGIO A.

TSOUKALOS: Once humankind is gone, all those skyscrapers, all the results of human civilization will be gone after a thousand years.

So, who knows what will be left after 100,000 years, or in some cases, hundreds of thousands of years.

NARRATOR: According to mainstream archaeology, the Earth's earliest civilization emerged in the area of modern-day Iraq around 3000 BC.

But the surviving histories of many ancient peoples tell of an earlier age, one where mortals and beings known as "gods" lived side by side.

Oral histories have been around generations upon generations upon generations.

And they always talk about the "before the before," when gods and people walked the land.

BETTANY HUGHES: Hesiod was a-a Greek author who wrote that there were Five Ages of Man: The Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Age of Heroes and the Age of Iron.

In the Golden Age, basically, people were living beautiful lives along with the gods.

And he thought this was real, he didn't think this was a myth.

BEARDSLEY: The Aztecs have other ages of man.

Other cultures have similar ways of breaking up time and going back into deep time.

It's their understanding of their origins.

When we look into the historical records of the Greeks and the Aztecs, they're often talking about ages.

Often, ages that span many thousands of years.

And it opens up the possibility that humanity, in fact, has gone through intermittent periods of dark and light for many, many thousands of years, for millennia.

And it's just part of our experience here on Earth.

NARRATOR: Stories of an age before modern humans can even be found in early Judaic texts, which describe a race of humans that existed on the Earth long before the biblical Adam.

ARIEL BAR TZADOK: The pre-Adamic civilizations are hinted to in the Bible.

There is a curious genealogy, which is portrayed in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 36, which states these are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, prior to there being a king in Israel.

There was intelligent, technologically advanced civilizations of a humanoid nature here on Earth prior to Adam.

According to Enochian literature, we have a record of it being technologically advanced, even to the point of having nuclear technology.

CARLOTTO: I think there's extensive knowledge from many cultures, many traditions that something existed before our modern human civilization developed.

There might have been, uh, other, uh, civilizations on Earth, um, that predated us that were not the only technological civilization on the planet, but just the latest one.

That there had been previous ones that existed that were destroyed and that had become forgotten over time.

NARRATOR: Could it be that these ancient stories are more than just fanciful tales, and that our planet has witnessed the rise and fall of more than one so-called "advanced civilization"? TSOUKALOS: We have stories of the Golden Era, when the so-called "gods" still mingled among men.

So, you have to wonder, what gods, and what time, and who were they? According to mainstream archeology, the gods were nothing but a figment of our ancestors' imagination.

And I wholeheartedly disagree with this, because our ancestors were very clear in distinguishing gods of nature, and gods who actually descended from the sky physically and taught mankind in various disciplines.

So, if there's a prehistoric civilization, what I'm saying is that that knowledge did come from the extraterrestrials.

NARRATOR: A central idea behind what is known as "ancient astronaut theory" is the notion that extraterrestrials came to Earth in the distant past and altered the course of humanity.

If the various stories of ancient civilizations are true, including those concerning gods living among mortals, could it mean that alien visitations may have happened more than once? Ancient astronaut theorists believe that not only is such a profound notion possible, but that evidence can be found by examining the stories of the Sumerian civilization that emerged 5,000 years ago and the beings they called the Anunnaki.

TSOUKALOS: The term "Anunnaki" means "those who from the heavens came.

" And our ancestors thought they were being visited by these divine magical beings.

CHILDRESS: In the ancient Sumerian texts, they were described as bringing knowledge and science.

They were often depicted as bird-type people.

NARRATOR: Curiously, a similar figure to the bird-headed Anunnaki exists in cave art discovered in Lascaux, France, which dates back to roughly 16,000 BC.

In the Lascaux cave, is a deep shaft with an incredible pictorial story on the wall.

It shows a huge bull-like creature, next to which is a birdman, a figure with a bird's beak.

HENRY: The Birdman of Lascaux was considered to be a-a shamanistic figure.

But we have to ask the question: Could this be something more? Could this be an otherworldly being, an extraterrestrial being, who interacted with this prehistoric culture in France? NARRATOR: In 2019, archaeologists in Indonesia announced that they had discovered rock art in a cave on the island of Sulawesi that they believe was created at least 44,000 years ago.

If true, it is the oldest pictorial record of storytelling ever found.

And curiously, among the images painted on the cave walls is a depiction of a humanlike figure with a bird's head.

The paintings depict a group of eight humanoid hunters approaching a group of animals.

And one of them appears to have a very large bird beak.

44,000 years ago, we have these birdmen in Indonesia.

18,000 years ago, they're in France.

So, what are the chances of these birdmen figures being just, uh, coincidently created in these different areas? We have to ask ourselves: Are these birdmen actually representatives of the Anunnaki who are extraterrestrials, who came all over the world in prehistory? NARRATOR: But if, as ancient astronaut theorists insist, the Earth played host to numerous advanced civilizations long before our own, what happened to them? And why is there no hard evidence to prove they existed? For many, the answer can be found hiding in plain sight, and the hard evidence exists in the form of objects made using the only substance that can stand the test of time, stone.

NARRATOR: Aerospace engineer and satellite imaging expert Dr.

Mark Carlotto has spent the past three years investigating some of the world's most impressive archaeological sites.

After closely examining each site's precise geographical orientation, he has come to the incredible conclusion that many ancient structures provide evidence of being far older than has been suggested by mainstream archaeology and were likely built tens of thousands of years ago.

CARLOTTO: If you look at many monuments, uh, today, um, they're often built with respect, uh, to the cardinal directions.

So, knowledge of the Earth, of astronomy, of the heavens was very important in alignments.

NARRATOR: Because most of the world's megalithic structures were built so that they would be in precise alignment with the Earth's cardinal directions of north, south, east and west, Dr.

Carlotto's investigation had a breakthrough after he noticed that Teotihuacán, the ancient complex north of Mexico City, didn't properly line up.

An extraordinary possibility then occurred to him: Perhaps the structure was built tens of thousands of years earlier, when the Earth's poles were not in their current locations.

It was an idea that was not as farfetched as it seems.

In the 1950s, Harvard-educated scientist Charles Hapgood proposed a theory known as crustal displacement, whereby, at certain moments in history, the Earth's crust suddenly and rapidly shifts positions and, in the process, changes the positions of the North and South Poles.

DENNIN: Plate tectonics have plates moving slowly as individual separate plates.

Um, Charles had a theory that, basically, instead of a slow, steady movement, he was really interested in sudden, quick movements of the crust as a whole.

CHILDRESS: What Hapgood was saying was that the thin crust of the Earth can slip forward on the mantle.

And, therefore, the North Pole and South Pole can shift somewhat, and this causes huge, cataclysmic changes.

CARLOTTO: Hapgood's analysis was based on climate data looking at patterns of climate change, uh, changes in glacial patterns, uh, ice ages and then correlating those patterns with what he believed was the cause, which was a shift of the poles.

Hapgood believed that, over the last 100,000 years or so, that there were three previous locations of the North Pole.

And when I looked at the imagery of these Mesoamerican sites and realized that these pyramids and temples were not aligned to north, I thought perhaps they were aligned to former North Poles that Hapgood had discovered.

Hapgood actually sent this theory to Albert Einstein, who endorsed it.

And when Einstein d*ed, he actually had Hapgood's book open on his desk.

NARRATOR: Dr.

Carlotto believes that some of the world's most impressive ancient structures not only confirm Hapgood's theory but radically alters our understanding of intelligent life on planet Earth.

CARLOTTO: So, my process for analyzing these images starts with a geographically registered image, where north is up.

So, for example, uh, here we have Teotihuacán.

And this is where my search, uh, began.

And let me just highlight the four sides so we can define a direction towards the north.

As you can see in this image, the pyramid is not orientated to the cardinal directions north, south, east and west.

NARRATOR: To test his theory, Dr.

Carlotto was curious to find out if other ancient structures shared Teotihuacán's same geographic anomaly.

What I ended up doing was developing an algorithm as the basis for analyzing their alignment.

So now, as we'll see when we zoom out, we'll find that Teotihuacán is aligned to other sites, uh, nearby.

And I'll show you that by zooming out here.

And this shows a number of other sites in the Valley of Mexico that are aligned in the same g-general direction.

All of these, uh, lines are meridians that lead to a point east of Hudson Bay.

NARRATOR: Incredibly, these sites align with a location that Hapgood proposed was once the North Pole.

CARLOTTO: Hapgood believed the Hudson Bay pole existed 12,000 to 18,000 years ago.

So these sites, by virtue of their alignment to this particular pole, could be that old.

NARRATOR: If Dr.

Carlotto's analysis is correct, it would date the construction of Teotihuacán to at least 10,000 BC, which is 10,000 years older than mainstream archaeologists propose.

And he contends that other ancient sites were built even earlier.

CARLOTTO: One of the most enigmatic sites on Earth is Baalbek, the Temple of Jupiter, in Lebanon.

As you can see, this site is orientated to a point in Northern Greenland that Hapgood believed was a former location of the North Pole.

NARRATOR: Based on Hapgood's theory, Baalbek's alignment to Northern Greenland would date it to a staggering 50,000 years ago.

CARLOTTO: Another site nearby, the Western Wall in the city of Jerusalem, is aligned in the direction of the Greenland pole.

And let's take a look at a third site, the Parthenon in Athens.

We believe that the original structures at these sites in other words, the original sites themselves were established as long ago as 50,000 years.

NARRATOR: According to Dr.

Carlotto, these are still not the oldest structures that exist on Earth.

Based on Hapgood's theory, the North Pole was located in the Bering Sea more than 100,000 years ago.

So, this is the Temple of the Six Monoliths at Ollantaytambo, and it's the Sun Temple.

Normally, sun temples are aligned to the cardinal directions.

They have an eastern side that faces the rising sun on the equinox.

Here, the Sun Temple is tilted approximately 45 degrees.

An alignment to the current pole doesn't make any sense.

But if we now change our reference and look at an earlier pole, this, uh, pole thought to have existed in the Bering Sea, then the orientation of the Sun Temple makes perfect sense.

So what's significant about this analysis is that it actually extends the time frame for archaeology from 10,000 years to tens of thousands of years to perhaps 100,000 years or more.

So it's my contention that the five ages of the Aztecs, the five ages of the Greeks and the previous and current locations of the pole are all correlated.

They all tell the same story.

CHILDRESS: The idea that cataclysmic pole shifts actually occurred, uh, is startling.

These structures can be much older than archaeologists admit.

And, ultimately, hundreds, thousands of years later, people found them again and-and started reusing them.

It's a fascinating thought.

NARRATOR: Are the remnants of long-lost civilizations still standing today? Civilizations that existed on Earth as much as 100,000 years ago, but misinterpreted by scholars as being much more recent? Perhaps the proof can be found by examining physical evidence of ancient writing dating back more than 10,000 years.

NARRATOR: Geologist Dr.

Robert Schoch and his colleague Dr.

Manu Seyfzadeh announce a discovery that has the potential to radically alter the currently accepted timeline of human history.

They believe they have found hieroglyphic writing at the 12,000-year-old archaeological site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

If true, it would predate the earliest known writing by thousands of years.

SCHOCH: At Gobekli Tepe, I'm convinced now that we have evidence of actual what we can only call writing, symbolic notation, writing on some of the pillars.

We're still trying to interpret them.

But if this analysis is correct, they had writing.

And according to standard conventional thinking up until now, writing and literacy did not exist anywhere on Earth until 6,000 or 7,000 years after Gobekli Tepe.

And what we see at Gobekli Tepe, I don't believe that's the beginning.

NARRATOR: Could the strange symbols found on the stone pillars at Gobekli Tepe represent a writing system that was developed by a long-lost civilization, one that thrived more than 12,000 years ago? As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, physical evidence of lost civilizations has been found that they believe to be much, much older.

Canadian explorer Paulina Zelitsky and her team are conducting an oceanic survey off the coast when they detect curious formations more than 2,000 feet underwater.

HUGH NEWMAN: They found when they were taking images, some kind of pyramidical structure and other structures.

There were circular areas.

There was what appeared to be some kind of city built down there.

It was about two square kilometers in size.

And so, this is something quite astonishing if this is, you know, a reality.

CHILDRESS: This pyramid city is so deep in the ocean that geologists and archaeologists are saying that it must be 50,000 years old for sea levels to-to be that low.

NARRATOR: 50,000 years old? Might the formations found off the coast of Cuba corroborate the findings of Dr.

Mark Carlotto, who suggests that the alignments of Baalbek, the Greek Parthenon and numerous other ancient structures date back some 50,000 years? We've got ruins all over the world that are underwater.

Ruins have been found underwater in Lake Titicaca.

The formation of Yonaguni off the southern Japanese island of Yonaguni.

We have underwater cities around India, such as Dwarka, which is the famous home of Krishna.

And Indian archaeologists for years thought it was just a mythical city until they started finding these underwater ruins off of Gujarat.

There's over 200 known sunken cities in the Mediterranean.

So, much of the evidence for early civilizations on planet Earth would be underwater today.

So, they were obviously built at a time when the ocean levels and the seas and the continents were quite different than they are today.

HUGHES: All of this evidence tells us that there were extraordinary civilizations and cultures that have been lost to the story of the world until now.

NARRATOR: Although many of the world's known underwater ruins still await excavation due to the difficulty of reaching them and retrieving artifacts, it is hoped that divers will someday be able to examine these structures and find symbols carved into them that match those found at Gobekli Tepe.

But as far as Dr.

Robert Schoch is concerned, the wait may already be over.

In 1991, he ignited a firestorm of controversy when he suggested the Great Sphinx of Giza was built long before the age of the pharaohs.

SCHOCH: At that time, all the Egyptologists agreed that the Sphinx had been carved in 2500 BC, that it was carved from scratch from the limestone bedrock.

I'm a geologist.

I went there.

I looked at the Sphinx.

Within the first couple of minutes, I knew there was something amiss.

What we did is we looked at subsurface weathering, mineralogical changes to figure out when the rock was carved.

I came to the conclusion that the Sphinx goes back not just a few thousand years but to the end of the last ice age, so to about 10,000 BC or so.

NARRATOR: Key to Dr.

Schoch's analysis was the type of erosion he observed in the base of the Sphinx.

SCHOCH: You look at the body of the Sphinx itself.

I, as a geologist, noticed immediately that the core body is eroded not by wind and sand as you expect for the Sahara Desert, but it is water precipitation.

NARRATOR: Water erosion? In the Sahara Desert? If this analysis is correct, what could have caused it? SCHOCH: There's a huge increase in global temperatures at 9700 BC.

This correlates with the melting of the glaciers, rising of sea levels.

But when you have all this water being put into the atmosphere, the atmosphere can only hold so much water.

It comes down as precipitation.

It comes down as torrential rains.

NARRATOR: But if, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, the great Egyptian megalithic structures were built more than 10,000 years ago, what happened to the advanced civilization that created them? Perhaps the answer is closer than we think and can be found embedded in the pages of the Holy Bible.

NARRATOR: Dr.

Irving Finkel, one of the world's foremost experts on cuneiform writing and a curator at the British Museum, publishes a book titled The Ark Before Noah.

In it, Finkel translates a Sumerian tablet that dates back 3,700 years and rewrites the biblical story of Noah and the Great Flood.

The book sparks a global sensation.

IRVING FINKEL: When this tablet came across the desk to me and I realized clearly how important it was, it was one of those heart-stopping moments.

Everybody in the world is interested in Noah's Flood and where it might've come from, so it's a really big thing.

In the Bible, God decided, because human race was so sinful and wicked, to destroy everything and at the last minute, relented enough to inform Noah that he has to build a boat really fast and put all the animals in it and shut the doors.

Then afterwards, life could continue when the waters went down.

But the tablet is at least a thousand years older than the story in the Bible.

So, of course, this means that the question of where the story came from has a whole different explanation.

JONATHAN YOUNG: There's a similar story in India.

King Manu was warned by a fish that there would be a great flood.

The king built a great boat and survived.

In an Aztec version, a sacred couple hide in a hollow tree with a little corn and somehow manage to survive the deluge.

Other versions come from Irish legend, Norse lore, also from China.

This is a terribly important motif.

We're used to history being something that's written down in books, but for most of the human experience, history was told in stories, shared around campfires.

It doesn't mean that it's all made up, and I think it's one of those moments where the myths are telling us about the truth of the past.

NARRATOR: Dutch archaeologist Cornelis Hijszeler is excavating a sandpit when he notices something strange: A thin layer of ash buried 50 feet deep in the soil.

NEWMAN: It's like a layer of black ash.

Now, this suggests there was a great conflagration that took place, and it dates to between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago.

NARRATOR: Over the next few years, the ash layer, dubbed Usselo horizon, is found all over the world.

CHILDRESS: The Usselo horizon is found, actually, in ten countries on four continents.

In Australia, in South Africa, in other parts of Europe and India.

And this deposit of ash around the world is evidence of a worldwide cataclysm.

NARRATOR: Could this layer of ash really be evidence of a devastating global event, like the one known as the Great Flood, for instance? Geologist Dr.

Robert Schoch believes the cataclysmic event and the resulting layer of ash was created by a devastating solar flare, a sudden flash of increased brightness on the Sun.

SCHOCH: Based on my analysis of the evidence, there was a major, major solar outburst.

This caused, in a flash, the glaciers to melt virtually instantaneously.

It caused evaporation of water.

We have physical evidence of this in the geological record.

NARRATOR: To many, the Usselo horizon is the strongest evidence yet discovered that supports stories of the Great Flood.

For ancient astronaut theorists, proof of a global flood could offer some of the most compelling evidence that extraterrestrial intervention occurred on Earth in the distant past.

In the Babylonian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, Utnapishtim, is told of a coming flood by the god Enki.

In Vedic texts, King Manu is alerted by Lord Vishnu, who appeared in the form of a fish.

And in the biblical tale, Noah is warned by God.

The common denominator in the flood myths around the world is that there was an otherworldly being, an extraterrestrial being who is providing knowledge to certain humans of what is to come.

This tells us that there was definitely an extraterrestrial connection.

NARRATOR: If advanced civilizations existed on Earth that were lost to history, could the story of the Flood explain what happened? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest that further evidence can be found within the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in a cave in Jerusalem in 1947.

COLLINS: Some Bedouin shepherds came across these jars, and inside these were ancient texts.

Very quickly, archaeologists and linguists started to realize that these contained Jewish religious literature that were of incredible importance, not just to the Jewish people but to the world as a whole.

NARRATOR: Among the texts is a story that describes the birth of Noah that doesn't appear in the Old Testament.

TSOUKALOS: Noah is described of having skin that is whiter than snow, of having hair that is whiter than the whitest of wool, and Noah's eyes were brighter than the Sun.

Now, when Noah was born, the father, Lamech, went to his father, Methuselah, and says, "This is not my son.

What happened here?" And Methuselah then says he may have come from a different place where man has met the angels.

Now, we need to first figure out what is the kernel of truth.

And in my opinion, it certainly was not a giant ship made out of wood.

And you combine that with Noah, who looks very otherworldly well, there's your answer.

NARRATOR: Could a worldwide flood explain the disappearance of an advanced civilization that preceded our own? And if so, were there survivors that kept the memory of this pre-Flood world alive through oral traditions? Ancient astronaut theorists believe that not only did an advanced civilization exist for many centuries before the Great Flood, but that remnants of its lost technology can be found all over the world.

NARRATOR: Researchers with the Israel Antiquities Authority studying the Dead Sea Scrolls make a major discovery.

Using state-of-the-art imaging technology, they uncover a passage of ancient text previously unseen by the naked eye.

These researchers have discovered a new passage in the Dead Sea Scrolls that indicates that Noah's Ark wasn't in the shape of a ship at all, but was in the shape of a pyramid.

NARRATOR: Curiously, this is not the first time that Noah's Ark has been depicted as a pyramid.

In the 15th century, Italian artist Lorenzo Ghiberti created his masterpiece a series of ten panels that depict scenes from the Old Testament.

HENRY: The Italian sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti was selected to create the doors going into the new Florence cathedral, the Il Doumo.

These doors are called the "Gates of Paradise.

" And something that is very extraordinary about them is that in one instance he shows Noah's Ark as a pyramid that resembles the Great Pyramid of Giza.

CHILDRESS: Was it possible that Lorenzo, while he was working for the Church learned about the true nature of Noah's Ark and then depicted it in his sculpture? NARRATOR: According to historians, the Pyramid of Djoser, constructed in 2600 BC, was the first pyramid ever built in Egypt, and the Great Pyramid was built 100 years later.

But the dating of the Great Pyramid, and the two smaller pyramids that stand next to it, is a point of major contention, with many researchers suggesting they were built much earlier.

The step pyramid of Djoser is considered the world's first pyramid.

It's a six-tiered pyramid built very near the Giza plateau.

CHILDRESS: Egyptologists often assume that the older pyramids are less well created and smaller, such as Djoser's pyramid, and that ultimately, their building got better and better, until they finally built the Great Pyramid as their, uh, final construction masterpiece.

But it may be completely reversed of that, and that the Great Pyramid, which is by far the best of all the pyramids, is actually the oldest of the pyramids.

ERICH VON DANIKEN: Two and a half thousand BC, according to archaeology, humans made the Great Pyramid.

Now, in old writings, especially in the Book of Enoch, and in the so-called Hitat, which is a book from Arabian writer, they say the Great Pyramid was constructed before the Great Flood.

HENRY: What if the Great Pyramid existed, perhaps even for millennia, before the Djoser Pyramid? Then the Egyptians come along, discover it, decide, "Hey, maybe we can make one of those, too," and that's when they build the Djoser Pyramid? CARLOTTO: Perhaps the the most similar common motif, or style, is the pyramidal, uh, shape that seems to exist throughout the world in Egypt, in Mesoamerica, in China giant earthen mounds in the shape of pyramids.

Why pyramids? NARRATOR: Is it possible that pyramids were built by cultures all around the world because they were trying to recreate much older structures that survived a great flood? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes.

And some researchers have even suggested that those pyramids that were built by pre-Flood civilizations represent a form of lost technology.

In his 1998 book, The Giza Power Plant, noted machinist and engineer Christopher Dunn proposed that the shape, positions of chambers and proximity to underground rivers indicate the Great Pyramids of Giza functioned as power plants.

CHILDRESS: I personally think that the pyramids were some kind of energy generators.

And here we have the strange idea that the ark itself wasn't a boat-type-shaped thing but was actually a pyramid.

So was it possible that whoever built the pyramids of Egypt was doing so to try to preserve their technology? NARRATOR: For ancient astronaut theorists, the possibility that the Great Pyramid served a technological purpose presents an intriguing question: If a lost civilization was able to build massive power plants, perhaps with the assistance of extraterrestrials, could they also have had the means to escape a world-ending cataclysm by leaving the Earth? NARRATOR: Geneticist Erich Jarvis and data management company DNAnexus announce plans to create a biological database of every vertebrate species on Earth.

The development of this new genetic DNA database is essentially a modern-day version of Noah's Ark where all of these animals, their DNA is selected and kept in these special databases.

And in the future, we could resurrect any of these animals if we had to, if there had been some mass extinction on the planet.

NARRATOR: But many researchers are hopeful that by the time a global cataclysm strikes, humanity will have developed the means to transport this modern-day ark into space and seek out a new home planet.

We don't have forever on this planet.

Let's say our resources are running out.

Let's say something else happens.

Or let's even say we know and we can calculate this that 252 years from now, we will be met by a giant collision with an asteroid.

Well, we better do something about that.

So we better start working on that today.

NARRATOR: In 2018, a company named Axiom Space revealed plans to put a hotel in Earth's orbit.

Meanwhile, NASA is preparing to send astronauts to Mars.

Considering humanity's current efforts to venture into space, if advanced civilizations existed in Earth's distant past, might they have done the same? Cultures all around the world talk about humans deciding on their own to leave the planet.

They call this "ascension.

" In many of the flood myths, the common theme is that it had been prophesied, and people knew it was coming.

Maybe their answer was to migrate into space.

CHILDRESS: There are a number of craters on the Moon that have what look like pyramids right in the middle of the crater.

Mars apparently has similar pyramid structures on it.

Maybe they were created by this super civilization of the past, just like, uh, we're going to do in the near future.

NARRATOR: Could it be that pyramids and other structures were built on the Moon and Mars not by beings who were coming to planet Earth, but by those who were fleeing it? Did Earth's refugees build these structures to sustain them while they sought out a new home? As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, this notion presents another, perhaps even more profound possibility.

CHILDRESS: With modern UFO activity, you have to ask yourself, are these UFOs from this ancient civilization that left before the cataclysm and now they've come back? NARRATOR: Is it possible that civilizations that inhabited the Earth tens of thousands of years ago did not die off, but survived on another world? And if so, might they be capable of returning to their home planet as alien visitors? Perhaps as we venture deeper into space, we will make contact, not with extraterrestrials, but with mankind's ancient ancestors.