[Narrator] It is one of the most unexplored places on Earth.
The majority of the Amazon
is still completely untouched by archaeology.
[Narrator] But now, the long-held secrets
of the Amazon are finally coming to light.
[Andrew Collins] We have pyramid platforms,
plazas that show an incredibly advanced
culture that completely went missing.
So where exactly did all of this come from?
[Hugh Newman] All across the Amazon,
they talk about these sky beings
coming down to Earth
and sharing knowledge about civilization.
[Narrator] Could the dense jungle canopy of the Amazon
be hiding an alien presence?
[William Henry] Perhaps it's going to reveal
the greatest understanding of extraterrestrial contact
anywhere in the world.
♪ ♪
[Narrator] Stretching over two million square miles
across South America is Amazonia,
a region of dense jungle,
mighty rivers,
and mysterious phenomena.
More commonly referred to as simply the Amazon,
this vast rainforest covers nine nations
and is home to more than 30 million people.
The Amazon is huge.
It's actually an area larger than
the entire United States.
In terms of trees, there are
16,000 different varieties.
Insects, 2.5 million.
And the flora and fauna there
is more diverse than any other forest on the planet.
It's almost impossible to imagine
exactly how vast and incredible it is.
It's very dense. It's very dangerous.
It's got rushing waters filled with dangerous fish.
It's got violent waterfalls,
trees that are so tall
they're hard to climb to see what's next.
[Narrator] The extreme conditions in the Amazon
make much of it nearly impossible to access on foot.
As a result, less than 15%
of this mysterious landscape has been explored,
mapped, or extensively studied by modern scientists.
But despite its inaccessibility,
the Amazon is home to hundreds of Indigenous tribes,
many of which have never made contact with the outside world.
Just within the Amazon itself
are over 400 Indigenous tribes,
and we know of 300 distinct languages they speak.
These people may have been around for thousands of years,
so we have an incredible resource here.
We have a window into the ancient world.
[Narrator] Many of the native peoples of the Amazon
claim to have inhabited the areas
they live in for centuries.
Like the Asháninka,
one of Peru's largest Indigenous groups.
According to the Asháninka,
their ancestors were taught how to live
in harmony with the rainforest
by celestial visitors who came down from the sky.
The Asháninka say that part of the creation
involved star beings
that came down and taught humans
essential things like farming.
This particular group
does sustainable farming very, very well,
and they credit these star beings with teaching them that.
[Narrator] Similarly, the Ticuna of Brazil,
Colombia, and Peru
hold annual ceremonies to honor the "people of the sky,"
who gave their culture the knowledge
to build a civilization.
[Barnhart] The Ticuna people honor those spirits to this day
through ceremonies in which they have very elaborate
body paint that tells the story of those original people
who came down, and those people went back up into the sky.
Throughout the Amazon, we find incredible
Indigenous tales of sky gods, star beings,
that came into the area to deliver knowledge
and then ultimately left,
and perhaps with a promise to return.
I think one of the reasons why many of these cultures
have these annual festivals is in order
to remember these things as a commemoration
of a real event, a physical event
that happened hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.
[Narrator] As far as ancient astronaut theorists
are concerned,
Indigenous peoples throughout the Amazon
share similar traditions because their ancestors
encountered the same extraterrestrial visitors.
But is there any physical evidence
that this could be true?
For decades, archaeologists proposed
that only small, isolated settlements
had ever existed in the Amazon rainforest.
But in the 21st century, new technology
has proven this notion to be entirely wrong.
[Narrator reads on-screen text]
The National Institute for Cultural Heritage funds
an extensive survey of the ancient Upano Valley
using lidar to penetrate the jungle canopy
and create precise 3D mapping of the forest floor.
Nine years later, in 2024,
archaeologists published the astonishing results,
which reveal a staggering 115 square miles
of sophisticated settlements
that may have formed an entire lost civilization.
We have at least 6,000 different structures
that have been found in total.
We have major, major structures
comparable to the Giza Plateau in size.
[David Cheetham] There is estimated 30,000 people
in this setting maybe as early as 500 BC.
And you have agriculture and settlement and urbanism,
all in a symbiotic sort of relationship.
[David Childress] In the Upano Valley,
we also have over 120 square miles
of canals and grids and causeways.
And this is a flood-prone area of the Amazon.
And so, when they built all these earthworks,
they were designed, you know, to, uh, mitigate this flooding.
So, that's hydraulic engineering.
[Collins] It was suggested in the past
that nothing could've built up
from a cultural perspective in the Amazon area,
but now we know that lidar
is slowly revealing civilizations that
we didn't even know existed until the last 20 years,
and that's quite incredible.
[Narrator] Around the same time
that these astonishing discoveries
were being made in Ecuador's Upano Valley,
other lidar surveys began taking place
throughout the Amazon region,
and uncovered additional evidence of lost civilizations.
[Barnhart] In the Amazon part of Peru,
they have now found-- thanks to lidar--
over 415 discrete sites,
and these are big sites.
They're not just little campsites.
They have architecture and they have roads.
[Collins] The Llanos de Moxos is a region of the Bolivian Amazon
that has recently revealed, through lidar,
pyramid platforms,
plazas, earthworks,
agricultural areas that show that there was
a structured society that completely went missing.
They're speculating that there were eight to ten million people
living in that region, in the Amazonian basin.
They had a technological know-how that far exceeds
any expectations, and quite frankly, far exceeds
what we see of the Indigenous peoples now or recently.
[Henry] These discoveries are a complete obliteration
of our previous view of the Amazonian people.
So, we have to ask the question, where did these people
get this extraordinary knowledge from?
We know almost nothing about these people,
however, the myths and legends of the entire area
speak of these sky beings that the ancient Amazonians
told came down out of the heavens
and brought this knowledge to them.
[Narrator] Could the recent discovery
that vast cities existed
in the Amazon rainforest centuries ago
indicate that the stories of the Indigenous people are true?
Were their ancestors able to thrive in this harsh environment
not only by their own ingenuity but also because they received
assistance from otherworldly visitors?
Perhaps further clues can be found
by examining a mysterious ceremony
held in Brazil centered around a figure who,
according to local tradition, emerged from a flying craft
wearing a space suit.
[Narrator reads on-screen text]
Along the banks of the Xingu River
lives an Indigenous tribe that has occupied this region
for centuries
and had no contact with the outside world
until the 1950s.
Known as the Kayapo, they continue to maintain
their ancient traditions passed down through the generations.
The Kayapo people have some really interesting traditions
that relate to their cosmology.
The men can often be seen wearing a vibrant headdress
covered in feathers representing the universe.
And they wear long ropes in their hair, which symbolize
the ropes their ancestors used when they arrived from the sky.
[Narrator] Kayapo legend says that, long ago, their ancestors
lived far away in the place where the Sun rises,
until one day, they climbed down to Earth on ropes
through a hole in the sky.
After arriving in the Amazon, the ancient people witnessed
an otherworldly being descend from the heavens
who they called Bep-Kororoti.
[Henry] To this day, the Kayapo people will reenact
a ceremony where young boys will dress up
as Bep-Kororoti and reenact what the ancients were encountering
Bep-Kororoti was a knowledge bearer, a culture bearer,
who delivered laws, who delivered knowledge
about agriculture, about navigation, and then left
in a thunderous rise into the heavens.
[Barnhart] The myth about Bep-Kororoti
among these folks is that he came down
from the heavens to give humanity all sorts of gifts
of how to do agriculture and hunting and things.
He came down in a very strong, fancy-looking suit,
and he had a very warrior ethos.
Bep-Kororoti means "being who came from the stars."
Now, according to the Kayapo,
Bep-Kororoti descended from the sky in a fireball,
emerged in this bulky suit out of this vehicle,
and he spoke their language and said,
"Don't be afraid. I'm here to teach you."
He was their first teacher.
He looks very similar to, like, a type of a modern-day astronaut
with, you know, the pressurized suit.
The story of Bep-Kororoti is one of the smoking guns
of the ancient astronaut theory
because it could be interpreted as a direct contact story
with an extraterrestrial
whom our ancestors misinterpreted
as having divine powers
because they misunderstood, well, the technology.
[Narrator] Could the Kayapo story
of Bep-Kororoti reveal that the Brazilian rainforest
was a place of extraterrestrial contact in the distant past?
As with other parts of the Amazon,
recent lidar surveys have revealed lost ancient structures
along the same Xingu River where the Kayapo live.
[Schoch] What we're finding
is that the Amazon was not as it is today.
Especially thousands of years in the past.
The Indigenous people were incredibly sophisticated.
It's really tantalizing.
And what I would say now is, we're just really
hitting the tip of the proverbial iceberg
as far as what was going on there.
How sophisticated were they?
[Childress] We've discovered, through lidar,
roads, mounds, and pyramids.
And with all of this landscape engineering and modification,
you have to wonder,
where did they learn this sophistication?
Where did they get the knowledge to do this?
When you look at the Kayapo stories,
it would seem that it has to do with extraterrestrial activity.
[Narrator] As far as ancient astronaut theorists
are concerned, the lidar findings in Brazil
help to corroborate the Kayapo story
that says their ancestors
encountered an extraterrestrial visitor.
And they suggest further evidence of otherworldly contact
can be found in the stories of other
Indigenous Brazilian peoples.
1,200 miles west of the Kayapo settlements,
the 652-mile-long Vaupés River
winds through dense rainforest
along the border of Brazil and Colombia.
Along this river
are the many communities of the Tukano people.
[Newman] The Tukano are almost
entirely isolated from the outside world.
But their society is made up of 17 different groups
that speak 16 different languages.
But what is interesting is that the separate ethnic groups
are strongly interconnected through their shared mythology.
According to their legends, their ancestors witnessed
otherworldly beings descending from the sky
in canoes of light or radiant discs.
The canoes are interesting because they're described
as being serpent-like,
and they would travel through the kind of sacred rivers
seeding different cultures as it moved through.
[Barnhart] When we're talking to Amazonian tribes
and they're describing
their worldview to us,
the translation is kind of lost in translation.
So they'll talk about things that are made of light,
but it's not necessarily a light source.
It glows as if it's from another place.
So that's what the Tukano canoes are envisioned as.
They have a glow. They have a spectral light about them.
[Tsoukalos] Now, we all know that canoes do not fly,
so why do we have stories of flying canoes?
Once again, according to the ancient astronaut theory,
we have an ancient description of modern-day technology.
These descriptions of these ancient aerial vehicles
were-were not derived out of fantasy
but because our ancestors witnessed these flying machines.
[Narrator] Do the stories of the Tukano and the Kayapo
provide further evidence that extraterrestrials
made contact with ancient civilizations in the Amazon?
Could the recently discovered ruins hidden underneath
the dense jungle hold evidence
of interactions with otherworldly beings?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,
and they suggest that an alien presence in the Amazon
was not only experienced centuries ago,
it's continuing even today.
[Narrator reads on-screen text]
Local police stations and newsrooms
are flooded by a series of extraordinary reports
of mysterious flying objects.
The reports continue for several weeks,
and on November 17th, the newspaper O Liberal
published the account of a seven-year-old boy
who was attacked by an orb of light.
[Henry] The villagers reported these
glowing orbs of light that were shooting
what appeared to be laser beams at them.
They called them "chupa-chupas" because they were painful
when they hit the skin, and the people thought that
they were sucking their energy or their blood out of them.
[Narrator] The very next day, November 18th,
local newspaper O Estado do Pará
ran a story that the orbs had been terrorizing
neighborhoods across the region.
[Tsoukalos] Usually,
UFO incidents,
you know, happen to a single person
or to two people, and often people wonder,
"Well, you know, was the story made up?"
But if you have an event that was witnessed
and experienced by a group of people, and sometimes
by people not even in the same group,
well, then you really have to start listening.
And in the case of the 1977 account,
something really strange
affected a lot of people.
[Narrator] Then, on November 19th,
newspaper A Província do Pará
featured interviews with four women
who claimed they were attacked by the phenomena.
[Narrator] The reports continued for months,
and the event came to be considered
one of Brazil's most famous UFO incidents.
It got to the point where the villagers
wouldn't go out at night.
Fishermen wouldn't go out into the seas at night.
They were terrified by what they were experiencing.
[Narrator] As sightings increased, the mayor of Colares
asked the Brazilian Air Force
to help put an end to the violent encounters.
[Narrator] Known as Operation Prato--
or Operation Saucer in English--
the Brazilian Air Force
studied the phenomena for almost six months.
Then the investigation was abruptly canceled
by military higher-ups,
who claimed they were concerned about sparking a public panic.
This operation was rapidly shut down after the military
came in and took photos, after they took surveys.
And they completely locked down any reference to this story.
What actually did they find there?
Was it something so terrifying
that they couldn't reveal it to the people,
or was it direct evidence
of extraterrestrial contact?
[Narrator] In the years since Operation Saucer was shut down,
independent researchers have been searching for the evidence
collected by the Air Force.
[Narrator] Could the research and photographic evidence
collected by Operation Saucer
be in the possession of the United States?
While the source of the 1977 incident remains a mystery,
it is not the only account
of disturbing UFO activity in the region.
Hundreds of similar accounts can be found
throughout the 20th century,
many investigated by local authorities.
One such case occurred in April of 1980,
when a Peruvian Air Force lieutenant
encountered an unidentified aircraft
during a routine flight over a military base.
[Narrator] As far as ufologists are concerned,
the Amazon has proven to be a UFO hot spot.
But could these modern-day sightings be connected
to ancient stories of visitors who came down from the sky?
[Childress] It would seem that there's been UFO activity
in the Amazon for thousands of years.
The Amazon itself is such a vast area,
and it's mainly water and jungle,
but this would be a good place
to, you know, have, say, an extraterrestrial base.
[Narrator] As far as ancient astronaut theorists
are concerned, the incidents in Peru and Brazil
could reveal that an alien presence
has persisted in the Amazon for centuries.
And while it has been more than 40 years
since the Colares incident,
reports continue of unexplainable
and shocking alien activity.
[Narrator] Northern Brazil.
In July 2024, Brazilian documentary filmmaker
Rony Vernet traveled deep into the rainforest
to investigate a series of recent encounters
between local villagers and mysterious orbs of light.
[Henry] People reported that these orbs of light
would fly through walls that would enter into their homes,
and when they were shot with these laser beams,
they experienced dizziness, fatigue,
apparent radiation sickness, burns.
[Narrator] Vernet, a computer scientist by trade,
took a particular interest in these reports
because of his own encounters
with strange lights in the sky over Brazil.
[Narrator] Vernet documented his trip to the Yawanawá village
in a film titled Phenomena in the Amazon,
which featured numerous eyewitness accounts
of strange events in the sky.
-[speaking foreign language] -[translator] People had been
watching it for about three days.
I went out to see if I could see it, and I did.
It was standing there, and really low.
And then we started saying, "It is here. Here it goes."
And it moved over there and passed.
Then it went up a little more
and then it went in that direction.
And after about 20 minutes passed,
it lit up again, went out, and then is gone.
[Narrator] For Vernet, the most alarming stories he documented
were those in which witnesses
reported feeling paralyzed during an encounter.
[speaking foreign language]
[translator] I saw this orange ball like this,
at a height of about 30, 40 meters
illuminating a yard there.
Until then, we didn't have this understanding.
I was going to try to shoot it,
but I was paralyzed and I couldn't move.
And that orange light disappeared from my sight.
[Narrator] What could explain
these mysterious sightings in the Amazon?
To find out, Vernet enlisted the help of the locals
to set up several 4K cameras throughout the village.
One night, as he monitored the footage,
he noticed something extraordinary.
[Narrator] Just as intriguing as the orbs' erratic movement
is where they were observed coming from.
According to Vernet, the UFO seemed to emerge
from deep in the jungle.
[Narrator] When Vernet approached the local people
about what he saw,
they said that not only have they witnessed similar phenomena
for hundreds of years but they also believe
these lights are coming from a portal in the forest.
[Narrator] Could the Amazon rainforest
contain portals to other worlds?
According to ancient astronaut theorists,
it's a distinct possibility.
[Henry] The Amazon basin is a site of immense fascination.
These orbs of light that fly through the trees,
that dive into the rivers match up with other orbs
seen around the world, suggesting that perhaps
the Amazon is a place of contact.
It's a hideout for some of these beings
that we still have no awareness of.
[Narrator] Is an otherworldly presence
hidden within the dense rainforest of Brazil?
And perhaps even portals to other parts
of the cosmos or alternate dimensions?
Curiously, in the very same region
where Rony Vernet recorded strange orbs of light,
archaeologists have uncovered a much older mystery--
massive ancient earthworks that can only be seen
from the sky.
[Narrator] Acre, Brazil, the 1980s.
As logging companies begin to cut down trees
in the Amazon rainforest,
enormous areas of the forest floor
are exposed for the first time.
And at one clearing, a massive series of circles
and squares carved into the landscape is revealed.
Known as Jacó Sá, these earthworks, or geoglyphs,
are over 900 feet wide.
These are several hundred meters in diameter.
Which is an incredible, incredible task to undertake.
It would have been the task of the whole village
to carve and to dig and to separate
these earthworks, create mounds.
And these geoglyphs are possibly 2,000 years old.
So, quite, quite old.
[Cheetham] In this area, there's over 450 of these.
Sometimes they're squares, sometimes rectangles,
sometimes squares with circles in the middle,
and the actual function of these things remains, uh, unknown.
[Narrator] Archaeologists have determined that the earthworks
served no practical purpose, such as corralling animals.
And according to ancient astronaut theorists,
the mysterious geometric figures displayed
in some of these massive geoglyphs
appear to contain a coded message.
[Whitehill] These are perfect squares and perfect circles.
It speaks to a level of engineering excellence,
and it speaks to a level of intention.
That one is a square, and one is a circle inside of a square.
Is one an entrance, and one is an exit?
[Henry] The squaring of the circle is,
throughout cultures around the world, a symbol
of the unity of heaven and earth,
which is an incredibly abstract concept
for them to be modeling in this geoglyph.
[Narrator] The geoglyphs are located
in the same region of the Brazilian rainforest
where the Indigenous Yawanawá people have reported
mysterious orbs of light.
And a recent study proposes that these earthworks
were designed with an otherworldly purpose.
In 2017, researchers at the University of São Paulo
and the University of Helsinki suggested that the geoglyphs
of the Amazon served as doorways
through which ancient shamans
would communicate with other realms.
[Barnhart] In the Amazon, shamans are considered
intermediaries between the physical world of us humans
and the spirit world.
The spirit world is really what's pulling our strings,
but we don't see it.
It's an invisible world.
The shamans are the link between this world and that.
[Collins] There's no question
that shamanism is
one of the most ancient, enduring mechanisms
in the Amazon for communication with the other world.
This type of communication is something that's been going on
for a very, very long time, as much as 10,000 years
and arguably even earlier than that.
[Newman] The shaman would actually use geoglyphs
as a place to kind of go into meditation
to communicate with ancestors and spirits
and even otherworldly beings, according to their traditions.
[Barnhart] The modern Amazonians don't mess
with these geoglyphs.
They honor them. They protect them.
They don't farm on them. They don't build in them again.
They see them as part of the group of spirits
that the shamans are connecting to.
[Narrator] Could it be that the giant earthworks
discovered in the Amazon
were made to communicate with celestial beings?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes
and suggest the geoglyphs were not only made
for shamanic rituals but also to directly signal visitors
looking down on the Earth from high above.
[Henry] When you think about the creation of these geoglyphs,
we're talking about people that are devoted to leaving a message
that can only be seen from the sky.
[Childress] We find geoglyphs all over the world.
In Kazakhstan, in the Atacama Desert,
the American Southwest.
The famous lines and figures on the Nazca plain in Peru.
And now we have this area of the Amazon
that's got geoglyphs in it.
So are they trying to contact
sky gods, extraterrestrials?
[Tsoukalos] Why were they built?
And in my opinion, it's to signal somebody, as in,
"Hey, we are down here, come and visit."
Or essentially, "Come back."
[Collins] It's beyond coincidence
that you have here these geoglyphs
exactly where all of these glowing orbs
were encountered by the Indigenous peoples to this day.
We obviously don't know, but what we can say is that
we are dealing with entities from somewhere else.
[Narrator] Could it be that there is a connection
between the ancient geoglyphs found in Acre, Brazil
and the orbs of light witnessed in the very same region today?
Might this be evidence of an extraterrestrial presence
that has persisted in the Amazon for thousands of years?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes
and suggest that, with new exploration
taking place in the rainforest,
many long-held secrets may soon be revealed.
[Narrator] The Alto Mayo landscape, Peru.
This region of the Amazon rainforest
spans almost 3,000 square miles,
an area roughly the size of Delaware.
In 2022, a team of scientists from Conservation International
surveyed the area, and discovered
27 new species of animals, plants, and insects.
It's amazing just how many new species were discovered
over a area of 3,000 square miles
over just such a short period of 38 days.
And you just have to wonder how many more new species
are out there just waiting to be discovered.
[Skinner] We're finding such an amazing amount each day
and each year.
We know more now in probably
the last ten, 20 years than we have in the last 100.
[Narrator] The discovery of new species
is just one more indication
that the Amazon hides many secrets still to be uncovered.
And ancient astronaut theorists believe that,
as we continue to plumb the depths of the jungle,
we will one day find the ultimate proof
of an extraterrestrial presence on this planet.
[Henry] The Amazon is a perfect hiding place.
It's a treasure house of ancient civilizations and secrets
that have long been hidden by the canopy of the jungle.
[Childress] You know, when we think of the vastness
of the Amazon and the huge rivers
and forests that are there,
this is a pretty good place to hide.
I mean, even today, many parts of the Amazon
are just so incredibly remote,
and they're unexplored.
[Narrator] According to ancient astronaut theorists,
the notion of an alien presence in the Amazon
is not mere speculation but a reality that is
well-documented by the stories
and traditions of the Indigenous people.
[Newman] What's so interesting is that
discoveries have been found in the whole Amazon region
which were quite astonishing, in my opinion.
And it really does show a level of sociopolitical organization
really reaching a whole other level.
There's also traditions
throughout the Amazon of gods
or sky beings who would descend to Earth.
They would bring social order, provide ritual knowledge
and other such things to these societies.
So there's this interesting connection
between these myths and stories that come out of the Amazon
and what we're finding here under the jungle canopy.
[Tsoukalos] What's fascinating is, there are examples
from different tribes of the Amazon that talk about
a celestial visitor imparting knowledge
or building the first schools.
And they have these remembrance festivals one time each year
so people don't forget.
[Henry] When we put all the pieces together in the Amazon--
the geometric earthworks,
the sky beings that the ancient Amazonians told
came down out of the heavens,
when we look at what lidar has revealed
in terms of understanding of the complexity
of these ancient civilizations--
what we're finally realizing is that the Amazon basin
was a place of contact in the ancient world,
and perhaps it's going to reveal
the greatest understanding of extraterrestrial contact
anywhere in the world.
[Narrator] Is it possible the Amazon rainforest
hides evidence of otherworldly activity
that we are only just beginning to unearth?
Could the shared mythology of the Amazon peoples
that describe powerful beings descending from the sky be true?
And if so, does there continue
to be an alien presence in the region to this very day?
Perhaps as we continue to explore the dense jungle,
we will uncover not only ancient settlements
but the ultimate evidence
of our extraterrestrial origins.
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