In the 21st century, a powerful
technology is transforming
our understanding of the ancient world.
Artificial intelligence is
one of the most fascinating technologies
in human history. We're getting knowledge
that we didn't have.
Artificial intelligence is finding
entire civilizations that were completely unknown.
They identified
60,000 ancient Mayan ruins
that had been lost for centuries.
And it is extracting incredible new information
from the world's earliest writings.
It's very possible that
AI will help unlock
new understandings about the gods.
As AI reveals new details about our past,
will it uncover proof that Earth was visited
by extraterrestrials?
Through AI, we're able
to analyze clues and ultimately find out
who we are and where we came from.
At Dartmouth College, some of the brightest minds
in the emerging field of computer science
hold the first ever workshop
on a new concept called artificial intelligence.
Their goal is to figure out how to create machines
that can think and learn like humans.
The computer scientists at Dartmouth were way ahead
of their time, especially when it comes to
computers replicating human-like thinking.
And if you fast forward just 40 years later,
you see the IBM Deep Blue system
defeating Garry Kasparov, a world chess champion.
After that, you have AI mimicking human behavior,
driving cars, and pretty much in every aspect of our daily lives.
Artificial intelligence is the ability
to use electronics
to begin to simulate the workings of the brain itself.
Some people look at movies like The Terminator and say,
"Oh, my god, we're talking about doomsday.
Other people say we're talking about a golden age
where machines increase our power and our ability
to create prosperity and peace.
AI certainly can be
an incredible tool. However,
at the same time, we need to be very, very careful,
because I cannot tell you how many examples
there are out there right now
where it's been proven AI has made mistakes.
While there is much debate over the benefits
and dangers of artificial intelligence,
the technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace,
and is quickly becoming a powerful tool
for historians and archaeologists.
The potential of AI
to help us in archaeology and in anthropology is limitless.
One way how AI can be used, for example, is
a lot of the ancient sites today
are quite literally in ruins,
but AI can help us with reassembling them on a screen.
AI can take
a lot of seemingly random data points,
but it can join the dots
in a way that human researchers can't.
It can look at images of archaeological sites
and essentially say, "Well, what are we missing?"
And it may find something which is part
of the original construction.
AI can model unimaginable
number of scenarios in an instant.
AI is having a dramatic impact
in the rediscovery of lost civilizations.
An AI can be used to accelerate our reconstruction
of ancient technologies.
This is tremendously exciting.
As artificial intelligence
uncovers long-hidden secrets in the archaeological record,
ancient astronaut theorists are confident
it will also provide new evidence
of extraterrestrial intervention on Earth.
And they believe one of the best ways
in which this technology is being applied
is in the translation of ancient cuneiform texts.
The oldest were written more than 5,000 years ago
by the Sumerians, who are
the world's first known civilization.
One of the great things that the Sumerians did
was precisely writing with a stylus in clay,
and then firing the clay so it becomes a brick.
And over the centuries
that brick becomes, essentially, stone.
And so, archeologists found literally thousands of these.
Attempts to decipher Sumerian cuneiform
began in 1849,
and it took nearly 90 years to fully crack it.
When they did, researchers discovered
detailed business ledgers,
official government correspondence
and medical texts.
But it is the stories found in the cuneiform tablets
of powerful beings called the Anunnaki
that is of particular interest to ancient astronaut theorists.
The Anunnaki are the founder gods
of the Sumerian civilization.
And they were masters
of the arts and sciences bringing civilizing qualities
to this part of the world.
According to the Sumerian texts, the Anunnaki
would come in rockets to Earth.
And they helped create Sumerian culture.
These texts are describing
what would only seem to be extraterrestrials.
To date, only ten percent
of the over half a million cuneiform tablets found
have been translated,
leading ancient astronaut theorists to speculate
that more information about the Anunnaki
is yet to be discovered.
There are only about
100 people who can
translate cuneiform anywhere in the world.
So, who knows
what these untranslated tablets might contain?
Now, thanks to artificial intelligence,
translation of these texts is being greatly accelerated.
At Ariel University, Professor of Assyriology
and Digital Humanities Dr. Shai Gordin
has created a new AI-powered translation software
to study Sumerian cuneiform.
With the advent
of the recording of cuneiform artifacts digitally,
that brought about a revolution
in our accessibility to these artifacts.
An AI can be trained to identify
the shapes of certain signs or certain letters.
And with
the accumulation of these digitization of tablets,
it became relatively easy to do.
The AI program has not only learned
how to read and translate cuneiform,
it can also reassemble texts from broken tablets.
Now that everything is digitized,
artificial intelligence completed lines
of ancient literature that hasn't been read
for thousands of years.
Which is, uh, incredible.
Using AI to read and translate cuneiform texts
is still in its infancy,
but already, it has discovered 20 new lines
in The Epic of Gilgamesh,
which is the oldest story ever written.
Researchers at the University of Chicago
are also using artificial intelligence
to interpret the college's collection of cuneiform tablets.
The AI program known as DeepScribe is being trained
to decode yet-to-be translated texts
embedded in thousands of ancient government records.
The technology will also have the capability
of finding missing details in tablets
that have already been deciphered.
AI is able to look at intricate markings
on the tablets and determine
lost words or lost phrases
that are embedded within these tablets that were
previously invisible to humans.
The idea that we now have
an AI model-- in fact, several--
that can now translate cuneiform
is gonna make full translations
of these texts an awful lot easier.
And who knows what these tablets might contain?
They could contain creation myths,
cosmological ideas, perhaps even a memory
of the ancient sites like Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe.
It's very possible that AI will help unlock
a whole new lexicon of knowledge,
possibly new data sets,
new understandings about the gods
that are just waiting to be discovered.
There are literally thousands of tablets
that we still have not translated,
and there's probably a wealth of information
that we can tap into utilizing this type of medium.
As artificial intelligence
becomes an essential tool for investigating the ancient world,
could it reveal new details
that fundamentally change
our understanding of human history?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,
and suggest further evidence can be found
by examining how AI is helping
to uncover civilizations that had been lost
for centuries.
Dotting the jungles of Central America
stand the ruins of the Maya,
considered by many to be one of the greatest civilizations
in the history of the Americas.
These skilled craftsmen
created sophisticated cities and temples,
including Tikal,
Palenque,
Chichen Itza,
Uxmal,
and Copán.
The Maya really stand out among
ancient civilizations, in terms of their
achievements. They created
the only writing system we know in all of the Americas.
And they became masters of mathematics and astronomy.
Archeologists have determined
that the most well-known Mayan ruins
were created between 250 and 900 AD.
Scholars have long considered this era,
known as the Classic Period,
to be the height of Maya civilization.
For decades,
there was a understanding or thinking
that the Classic Period was really
where they started building cities.
And that, before that, they had
more humble, village style living.
But very recently, we have
AI finding earlier than we knew structures,
and it's given us a better understanding
of the Maya world.
For over two decades, archaeologists have been
performing surveys of the vast Mirador Basin,
examining more than 1.6 million acres
of dense jungle using lidar technology.
Lidar
is the use of lasers
in order to penetrate through the jungle
to see what is lurking beneath all of that.
And that has opened up a whole new gateway.
Instead of going into the jungle,
you can now do it with airplanes
and use laser technology to peer beneath the jungle
to see what happened hundreds of years ago.
The lidar scans have produced thousands of images
and more data than archeologists
could ever hope to sift through on their own.
So, to process the material,
many have turned to artificial intelligence.
AI models can take large data sets of lidar,
and through pattern recognition and seeking
straight lines and circles,
it's revealed undetected structures
that were previously invisible to humans.
With the use of artificial intelligence
analyzing lidar images,
archaeologists have identified
60,000 ancient Mayan ruins
hidden beneath a jungle canopy
that had been lost for centuries.
I've been a mapper in the Maya area
for decades now, and lidar,
combined with the processing speed of AI,
has changed things.
I've mapped about 4,000 buildings,
but what I've done for a whole lifetime
was quadrupled by AI and lidar in a single year,
and that was just in one area.
Not only were archeologists amazed
by the number of settlements the AI program identified,
they were astonished by their apparent age.
It's thought that the newly discovered Mayan structures
were created in the tenth century BC--
predating other Mayan structures
by more than 1,000 years.
A huge population
must have once existed there, and this was never known
before this technology was used to uncover this information.
Archeologists realized that this area
was at one time densely populated,
and they built huge pyramid cities.
There were hundreds of thousands,
if not even millions of people living there.
For ancient astronaut theorists,
these 3,000-year-old ruins
are particularly intriguing because the Maya
wrote about an earlier age
that predated the Classic Maya structures
archaeologists were familiar with.
The Maya themselves say that
the founders of the Mayan civilization
were, in fact, star beings
that had come down in the distant past
that had given the Maya
the knowledge and wisdom
to create the foundations
of their civilization.
Could it be that
what artificial intelligence has uncovered
in Guatemala's Mirador Basin
are ruins from a time when the Maya
were visited by otherworldly beings?
Curiously, many of these ruins are even more sophisticated
than later Mayan structures,
including roads that were on par
with those built by the Romans.
The lidar surveys
have revealed literally hundreds
of what are being referred to by the archeologists
as superhighways linking together
the different Mayan cities.
And these are raised causeways
that come up several feet beyond
the actual level of the jungle themself.
Similar elevated causeways
were built by the Maya throughout the Classical era,
some of which were as wide as a four-lane highway.
Archeologists believe that while these roads
were used for transportation,
they served a more profound purpose.
You don't need an elevated highway or causeway
to simply walk from A to B.
Why would the Maya build these highways,
especially in the absence of any beasts of burden
or evidence of the use of wheels for carts
or anything of that nature?
And the answer to that question is that
the thing at the end of the causeway
would often house the rulers or very high nobles
and/or buildings that warranted procession.
These are ritual causeways that would be used
in a pilgrimage sense.
For ancient astronaut theorists,
it's highly intriguing that the Maya
built vast roadways for ritual purposes
because their mythology prominently features a road
that leads to the stars.
There are stories of the Maya that say that
the road of the stars descended from the sky
and 13 gods descended from the heavens to earth
and walked with our ancestors.
If the Mayan roads have an otherworldly connection,
as ancient astronaut theorists suggest,
is it possible that further evidence
is hidden in the jungle, just waiting to be discovered?
For ancient astronaut theory, AI is an incredible
tool, because we've been saying all along,
there's got to be more evidence out there.
And it seems that AI
is confirming much of what
ancient astronaut theory is suggesting.
Might the use of AI in Guatemala
reveal that ancient stories of humans
living alongside gods are not fantasy
but instead are accounts of real history?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,
and they suggest further clues can be found in Turkey
at one of the oldest archeological sites
ever discovered.
Spread across the arid Nazca Plateau
are the famous geoglyphs known as the Nazca Lines.
They are a collection of more than 400 giant patterns
carved into the earth.
Some of them are simple lines,
as the name implies. Some of them are much more complex.
They're animal forms, human forms.
They were originally discovered
by a few archaeologists in the 1920s.
But it was really in the 1930s, when commercial flights started,
that people noticed just how many lines there were.
They're of great interest to ancient astronaut theory
because they can only be seen from the sky.
The Nazca lines are thought of as beacons to the gods.
It's a signaling systems that humans are using
to communicate with the gods.
While archeologists believe these geoglyphs
were created between 200 to 700 AD,
the dating is uncertain, and no written records
exist to explain when or why the Nazca Lines were made.
But in 2024, new clues emerged
when a team of Japanese archeologists
announced the discovery of more than 300
previously unknown Nazca lines.
A Japanese researcher
named Masato Sakai used
lidar imagery in combination with AI
to really accelerate the process of discovery.
In just a year's time, he found 303 figures,
which almost doubled what we had found
in the first century before that.
With the help
of AI, these new lines and figurines
were discovered that, before, essentially,
were invisible to the naked eye.
Some of the glyphs
are quite intricate and very surprising, including
a 72-foot-long orca
that is portrayed in profile
holding some kind of a weapon in its hand.
The Japanese research team
believes the newly discovered geoglyphs
were created around 200 BC,
which would push back the dating
for when the first Nazca Lines were made
by at least 400 years.
Who knows what more is waiting to be discovered
as AI is increasingly brought to bear.
Maybe there's knowledge encoded
in some of these new patterns and lines
that was not apparent from
our looking at what we previously knew.
While researchers have just begun examining
the newly-discovered geoglyphs in hopes of finding clues
as to the purpose of the Nazca Lines,
at another iconic site,
AI may have already discovered a coded message.
Here stands one of the most important
archaeological sites in the world: Göbekli Tepe.
When excavations began in 1995,
archaeologists were amazed to unearth
dozens of giant stone monoliths,
some weighing as much as 20 tons
and many displaying intricate stone carvings.
Intrigued by the sophistication of the carvings,
archeologists had sediment layers of the site
radiocarbon dated, and the results were astonishing.
They indicated that Göbekli Tepe was created
around 9,500 BC,
predating the earliest known civilizations
by more than 5,000 years.
As the different enclosures gradually were revealed,
some extraordinary pillars were uncovered.
And the most enigmatic of these was Pillar 43,
otherwise known as the Vulture Stone.
Because one of its central features
is this open-winged vulture.
Beneath that is a scorpion.
And it's quite clear
that it's cosmological in nature.
Remarkably, a recent study of the site
has pushed its origins even deeper into antiquity.
In 2024, Dr. Martin Sweatman,
a professor at the University of Edinburgh,
led an unprecedented investigation of Pillar 43.
Martin Sweatman and his colleagues
used statistical analysis, AI-type technology
to see if there were any constellations
encoded within this particular pillar.
And they eventually found several matches
that kind of made sense.
They also then tried to put a date stamp on it--
of when these particular constellations,
along with this circle, which would be the sun--
when that would have happened.
They discovered
that the positioning of those symbols--
of the vulture, the scorpion and
the bird-headed figure--
matched three constellations.
It matched Scorpius, Sagittarius and Ophiuchus
at a specific time--
10,500 BC, approximately.
More than a thousand years
older than previously thought.
For ancient astronaut theorists,
the possibility that Göbekli Tepe
could date to 10,500 BC is tremendously exciting,
because it lines up with an era
described in Egyptian mythology as Zep Tepi.
Ancient Egyptian texts
have documented there was a time called Zep Tepi,
which was about 10,500 BC.
And that was a time when the so-called gods--
lowercase G-- walked amongst human beings.
We're told that these star beings
brought knowledge with them--
astronomy, agriculture, civilization--
and then they leave.
AI potentially has the ability to reveal
a connection among whoever created Pillar 43
at Göbekli Tepe in ancient Egypt.
Could artificial intelligence finally provide
evidence to support what ancient astronaut theorists
have been saying all along--
that ruins around the globe hold proof
of extraterrestrial contact thousands of years ago?
Perhaps even more compelling clues came to light
when AI analyzed some of the most important
documents ever discovered:
the Dead Sea Scrolls.
At the University of Groningen,
Professor Mladen Popovic has developed an AI program
for a highly specialized purpose.
As an expert in ancient Judaism,
he wants to incorporate artificial intelligence
in his study of the Dead Sea Scrolls
and the technology is already beginning to extract
incredible new information from what many consider
the world's most important ancient religious documents.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are so famous
because they are the most
ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible,
of the Old Testament.
And many manuscripts,
we had no idea that they existed.
They were found in the caves in Qumran,
which is near the Dead Sea. That's where
the Dead Sea Scrolls get their name.
From 1946 to 1956, they find
between, like, eight, 900 of these scrolls.
Some of them are books that didn't
make it into the Bible, like the Book of Enoch.
More than 11 copies of the Book of Enoch
were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And the text inspired Dr. Popovic
to name his new program after the biblical patriarch.
Enoch is such a fascinating figure
in the Old Testament and the Book of Enoch.
There was this archangel, Uriel,
and he showed Enoch how the cosmos works.
This Enoch figure is a sort of an ancient Jewish science hero,
and I thought it was very fitting to call it Enoch.
The Book of Enoch is a text often cited
as evidence for the ancient astronaut theory,
because it contains incredible tales of flying chariots,
a race of giants,
and even otherworldly beings coming to Earth.
The Book of Enoch tells of
the arrival of the Watchers, how they descend
down Mount Hermon, how they create this hybrid
hybrid offspring, the Nephilim,
and how the watcher angels then begin to teach humanity
the use of astrology, weapons, metallurgy.
In ancient astronaut theory, we understand that
Enoch is describing something that actually happened.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered,
the texts looked like
they came from the time of Christ, suggesting
that they were written down at that time.
However, the more the scholars looked into them,
the more they realized that they were more ancient.
It's a fascinating question--
who wrote these manuscripts,
these scrolls, and who put them in the caves?
And the traditional interpretation is that
it was this ancient group called the Essenes.
But their name does not appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls itself.
It might have been the Essenes,
but we're not sure about that.
Traditional scholarship says,
"Oh, you know, these texts, these are kind of fantasy.
"These are later interpolations or embellishments
on what the original writer meant."
But now AI might actually reveal
that those texts are much older than previously thought,
and what they're describing are not things
that they later made up,
but eyewitness accounts.
We were lucky to receive samples
of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
physical samples, that we could radiocarbon date
and that you can then use to train an algorithm
to associate a certain way of writing
with a certain time period.
And once the algorithm is trained to recognize that,
you can feed it images of other manuscripts
that have no date and it can compare them.
We learned that many of these manuscripts
are older than we previously thought,
from the second century BC or even from the third century BC.
We now have evidence that the Dead Sea Scrolls
is from the time of an actual Biblical author,
which is truly mind-blowing, because it brings us
to the time of these ancient Biblical writers themselves.
For the ancient astronaut theory,
this is significant, because many of those items
like the flying chariots
were thought to have been added later
when in fact, it happened during the time
when these things were written down,
which would lend to the idea that our ancestors
actually witnessed something
and commemorated this when it was happening.
Could it be that the Dead Sea Scrolls
contain the original writings of Enoch
and his first-hand accounts of extraterrestrial contact?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and they suggest
artificial intelligence isn't only finding new evidence
of alien intervention in the distant past
but also revealing that these otherworldly visitors...
...never left.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection airplane
is patrolling above a U.S. airbase when its thermal camera
captures a large metallic object flying at high speed.
A mystery object is seen circling the airport,
and then it moves off across the ocean.
And at one point it descends into the ocean,
and then a few moments later emerges.
We don't have that kind of technology.
Aerospace engineer Dr. Travis Taylor,
a member of the U.S. government's UAP task force,
was asked to analyze the remarkable footage.
As part of his investigation
into the strange object,
Dr. Taylor turned to AI software.
When I was on the UAP
UAP Task Force, we analyzed all sorts of different,
UAP videos
like the one in Puerto Rico,
and the AI analysis is really fascinating.
The AI does say that the object
is going about 72 to 74 miles per hour.
When it goes into the water, there is no splash.
And it even debunks one of the debunking videos
out there that says "Well, it was just a artifact
of the sensors why you didn't see the wake."
So, AI is being very useful.
As far as ufologists are concerned,
the AI revolution is happening at the perfect time
because more sensational UAP events
are being caught on video than ever before...
...and human observers
simply aren't equipped to analyze them
in the same way that artificial intelligence can.
We have all of this footage
from the past decades UFO or UAP sightings.
Some of it's shaky, some of it's blurry.
The AI can look at that and straighten up those images,
can clean them up for us so we can
see exactly what we're looking at.
But more than that, it can look at whatever's
portrayed in that video, frame by frame,
and say, "Oh, well, here's the size of it,
"here's what it's made of, here's its velocity
and here's where it was going."
AI gets better with the more things it sees.
So, we need to grab every UFO video,
every UAP video, every odd video out there
that we could get our hands on
and start training up a UAP base
of data for the AI systems.
And it'll help us start getting to the bottom
of what really is going on with this phenomenon.
Dr. Travis Taylor is among many scientists
who are using this tool to study
unidentified anomalous phenomena,
and he believes that our own technological evolution
will rely heavily on artificial intelligence.
AI is a fantastic technology.
It will give you a leg up on any topic known to man,
and maybe some topics that we haven't discovered yet.
I use it every day,
and I use it to solve complex general relativity
and quantum physics problems.
I have used it to solve problems and discover new concepts
and ideas that we haven't thought of yet.
I've used it for Defense Department concepts.
Used it for space science things.
And I have used it in the ancient astronaut theory
avenue as well. Because there are telltale signs
that we miss, as humans.
But the AI is very meticulous and finds them. I took
an AI system and analyzed Teotihuacan
and wanted to determine
why these buildings are in the arrangements they are.
And it turns out that the ratios of the building sizes
and the distances between the buildings
match the golden ratio exactly.
So, somebody knew and understood the golden ratio
when Teotihuacan was built.
And why, I haven't figured out yet.
But AI has already discovered something about Teotihuacan
that we didn't know before. And I think that's something
that that we can apply
to sites around the world,
to concepts around the world.
So, we're going to start seeing answers
and start getting knowledge
that we have lost or didn't have.
Scientists are also theorizing
that our search for extraterrestrial intelligence
out in the cosmos may involve AI envoys.
And some researchers,
like theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku,
suggest that if the UAPs seen in our skies
are of extraterrestrial origin,
they could very well be a type of AI technology themselves.
We have been brainwashed.
Brainwashed by Hollywood into thinking
that when the aliens land on the White House lawn
that they look sort of like us.
Realize that, in reality,
that is the most inefficient way
to explore the universe.
There are so many worlds to visit,
but to visit each one
with a humanoid being
is a waste of time, it's a waste of effort.
It's much better to use artificial intelligence
to explore the universe.
Artificial intelligence can cut through the painstaking work
of astronauts visiting one planet at a time
and give us a readout
of a thousand worlds all at once.
Could artificial intelligence
lead to profound new revelations
about not only the unexplained phenomena in our skies
but also the mysteries of our distant past?
According to ancient astronaut theorists,
AI may already have uncovered
an incredible secret of the ancient world
buried deep beneath the Pyramids of Egypt.
Engineer and geospatial analyst Dr. Filippo Biondi
has spent months working with a team of Italian researchers
to investigate what lies beneath the iconic structures
that stand on the Giza Plateau.
A technology called synthetic aperture radar
has allowed them to peer deep underground,
and what they claim to have found is extraordinary.
Under the Giza Plateau, they found
huge underground chambers and shafts
and structures under the Sphinx,
under the other pyramids, and everything else.
So what they discovered is quite remarkable.
What was detected with synthetic aperture radar
was astonishing.
And when artificial intelligence was employed
to analyze the SAR scans,
the resulting models were even more incredible.
Using AI, they've recreated
what it would have looked like. It looks like
these eight tubes going down with what looked like
cylindrical kind of cavities going deep under the ground.
The evidence is now emerging that there's
something much more profound going on there.
If the mysterious chambers under the Giza Plateau
do in fact exist,
it would upend our understanding of human history.
And as far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned,
it is only a matter of time
before artificial intelligence
provides incontrovertible evidence
of ET intervention on Earth.
If I myself had access to an AI model,
that could essentially tell me anything,
what I would do is I'd feed into it
all knowledge of ancient cosmologies
from around the world,
and allow it to tell us where exactly
this knowledge came from and just when it was created.
And my own heart tells me that it's gonna go back
at least to 40 to 50,000 years ago
and to have come from an enlightened human population
that existed at this time,
who we can truly refer to as the lost civilization.
In ancient astronaut theory, the idea is that these
extraterrestrials are leaving clues around the world.
Clues of buildings and of texts,
other things that, you know, are difficult to figure out.
And AI is helping us find those things.
And AI is helping us, you know,
ultimately find out who we are and where we came from.
Could it be that the rise of artificial intelligence
will not only have profound implications
for the future of humanity
but also provide incredible revelations about our past?
Will AI uncover evidence for the ancient astronaut theory
hidden in undeciphered texts,
encoded in megalithic structures
and buried with long-lost civilizations?
Perhaps, as this powerful technology continues to advance,
it will reveal that the history of humankind
has been written by extraterrestrials.
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