NARRATOR: Strange signals from outer space.
SETH SHOSTAK: That's the kind of thing we're looking for.
NARRATOR: The building blocks of life traveling on a meteorite.
You're looking at a speck of water in a meteorite.
This is extraordinary.
NARRATOR: An otherworldly presence found in our atmosphere.
MILTON WAINWRIGHT: So, this is a titanium sphere with life inside
and life on the outside.
Now, what on earth is it?
Absolutely amazing. It's blowing my head off.
NARRATOR: For more than a decade,
Ancient Aliens has followed investigators
across the globe as they've gone directly
to the sites where signs of alien life have been found.
Now we take a look back
at some of the most incredible evidence we've seen.
Evidence that, according to ancient astronaut theorists,
provides undeniable proof
that we are not alone in the universe.
♪ ♪
On Ancient Aliens, we have traveled the globe
investigating everything
from tiny microbes
to massive megaliths, all in the quest to find proof
of extraterrestrial life.
And one of the most incredible places
we've ever visited is a field study site
for an organization called SETI,
or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
In 2016, I got the rare opportunity
to tour the grounds and learn about how they listen
for signs of intelligent life in the universe.
NARRATOR: Shasta County, Northern California, March 2016.
Ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos
travels to the Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek
to meet with the director for SETI research Seth Shostak.
This is truly amazing.
What can you tell me about this place?
Well, this place is, uh, an observatory,
but it's a radio observatory, so these things around us,
these 42 antennas, they pick up radio waves.
And we're trying to pick up
very special sort of radio waves,
namely, some that would tell us somebody's out there.
By having lots of these dishes here,
we can look at more of the sky at once.
We can look at multiple star systems at once.
Why radio waves?
What's so significant about radio waves?
SHOSTAK: Radio waves go at the speed of light,
and they also, by the way, go through all the gas and dust
that's between the stars.
So, you know, if you want to communicate
from one part of the galaxy to another,
radio waves are a great way to do it.
So the way this works is actually kind of simple.
I mean, the cosmic radio static, it comes in from the sky
and it bounces off that big reflector there--
that first one, okay?
That's-that's a mirror for radio waves.
And that redirects into this secondary reflector,
on the end, on the nose there.
And then they're directed to the receiver, and that's inside.
That information goes through a fiber optic
over to the control room.
So, this is where the, uh, data
coming through the fiber optics kind of ends up
after it's been processed in a display like this.
And what are we looking at right here?
So, we're looking, in this case,
at three star systems at once, okay?
So that speeds up the search.
It also allows us to determine
whether we're really seeing E.T. or just interference.
The data from one of these star systems
is being displayed over on this part of the screen here.
This is called a waterfall plot.
That. Can you see, can you see that line
-of brighter dots there? -This right here, yes. Mm-hmm.
SHOSTAK: Yeah, that's a slightly more static
at that frequency, slowly going down the dot.
That's the kind of thing we're looking for.
So then, if this here were an actual E.T. signal,
how would it differentiate itself?
Uh, would it be a bit thicker, a bit more pronounced,
a bit longer, or... What are you looking for?
It could be all of those things. So, what you do is,
when you find a signal like this, you make a test.
You'll just move the antennas a little bit
and see if the signal goes away.
And then, point it back at the star and see if it comes back.
You say, "Well, that's looking promising."
You do that again, go off, go on, go off, go on.
If you do that five or ten times,
you start to get excited.
I hope that that day will come very soon.
NARRATOR: Although the SETI Institute
formally came into existence in 1984,
the practice of listening for extraterrestrial life
has been underway since the 1960s.
Astronomers based at various universities
throughout the U.S.
have pointed their radio telescopes into the cosmos
in hopes of capturing signals of intelligent life.
And sometimes, they receive a transmission
they can't explain.
Delaware, Ohio,
August 15, 1977.
At Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope,
astronomer Jerry R. Ehman conducts research for SETI.
While reviewing recorded data,
he detects a highly unusual signal
originating from the constellation Sagittarius.
DAVID CHILDRESS: They were looking
for a 72-second signal
that would be coming from extraterrestrials.
And as Dr. Jerry Ehman monitored the output
of the-the pages that were coming from space,
he suddenly found a signal that matched
exactly what they were looking for.
And so, he circled the page of data
that had that 72-second window on it
and wrote "Wow!" next to it.
And this became known as the Wow! signal.
And it essentially was the kind of extraterrestrial SETI signal
that they were all looking for,
and had suddenly, briefly, found it.
NARRATOR: While there are various theories
as to what may have caused the now-famous Wow! signal,
from terrestrial radio broadcasts to comet trails,
SETI has not ruled out the possibility
that it may represent modern man's first radio contact
with extraterrestrials.
SHOSTAK: The Wow! signal continues to intrigue people.
So we are going to use the Allen Telescope Array
to reobserve the Wow! signal,
look in the same spot on the sky,
look over a wider range of frequencies.
And-and if there's something up there
and it's still broadcasting, of course we would find it.
NARRATOR: Might the discovery of the Wow! signal
bring us one step closer
to discovering that we are not alone in the universe?
Perhaps further clues can be found by examining life-forms
on Earth that are capable of surviving
inside a comet.
The possibility of finding evidence of alien life
by receiving a message from space is a thrilling prospect.
But many scientists are looking for clues right here on Earth.
And in 2019, I got the incredible opportunity
to meet with a scientist who believes
he may have found extraterrestrial life
in one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet.
NARRATOR: Whistler, Canada.
April 17th, 2019.
Ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos
and retired NASA scientist Dr. Richard Hoover
are about to board a helicopter bound for a massive ice cave
-in the Canadian wilderness. -All right, you ready for this?
-Yes, absolutely. -All right.
NARRATOR: Dr. Hoover spent most of his career studying fossils
for signs of extraterrestrial microscopic life
and is a leading proponent of panspermia,
the idea that life on Earth originally rained down
from comets in outer space.
He has invited Giorgio to accompany him
while he investigates the Whistler ice cave...
I always love this.
NARRATOR: ...where he is confident that they will find
the glacial ice teeming with microbial
and perhaps even more sophisticated life-forms.
Life-forms that may be thousands of years old.
HOOVER: Oh, this is just
-absolutely magnificent. -It really is.
NARRATOR: If alien microbes are reaching Earth,
Dr. Hoover suggests that they could survive
within such an environment for long periods of time.
Today, he'll examine the glacier for the perfect samples
to analyze in his laboratory.
So, Richard, how excited are you to be here
to conduct this experiment?
(chuckles): Well, I'm tremendously excited.
-This is, this is absolutely a-a marvelous opportunity -Yeah.
to do more studies of life in ice.
NARRATOR: After a 20-minute helicopter ride,
the team arrives at the Whistler ice cave
in the Pemberton glacier.
TSOUKALOS: Wow, this is incredible.
HOOVER: Yeah, amazing.
Look at that.
There must be a thousand shades of blue in this ice cave.
Just absolutely fantastic.
And here we see all of these magnificent shades of blue
and up there, you see big streaks of black.
Glaciers like to eat rocks and as they eat rocks,
the rocks gather inside,
and when the sun shines through the ice and hits the rocks,
it can cause it to melt and form nice little pools of water.
And then when bacteria and algae grow in there
and respire and produce
their-their photosynthetic products,
they make their own atmosphere.
So, around every tiny rock in this glacier,
there is a tiny planetary system with its own biology,
its own atmosphere, its own soil, in effect.
And its own oceans.
NARRATOR: The ice here is tens of thousands of years old.
But Dr. Hoover believes it is teeming with life.
Wow, I mean, this is, uh, spectacular.
So you just described, basically, our environment
-on a microscopic level. -Exactly.
HOOVER: There is an enormous amount of biology
above us and throughout this wonderful glacier.
What we're about to do is take a core sample
of this beautiful blue ice.
TSOUKALOS: So, what are you looking for, specifically,
-right now? -What I want to do first
is chop away an outer layer and get into the inner ice.
We'll be looking inside of the ice
for the ice microorganisms.
Now we know there can't possibly be any contamination
because this ice has been in the glacier
and now is only freshly exposed.
And now we take the core.
Now we're into the ice.
I'll pull the ice core out.
-So, okay... -Mm-hmm. And that's enough, right?
-That's enough. Yeah, that's first sample. -Okay, great.
-Yeah, c-cap that. -Okay.
All the microorganisms that grow in ice
typically grow very, very slowly.
So, in fact, there are some microorganisms
that only reproduce once every half a century
-or once a century. -Mm-hmm.
So, th-the microbes that are found in here,
are they in suspended anim-animation
or are they moving around?
Probably both.
So essentially, what you're saying
is that this entire cave is filled with life.
Yes. But not just that.
This entire ice cap is filled with life.
There is this enormous amount of microorganisms
that live and thrive and love to live
in these low temperatures of the, of the ice cave
that we have here and ice caves and icy, uh, glaciers
all over the planet Earth.
And probably all over icy regions
within our entire solar system and mainly--
maybe widely distributed throughout the entire universe.
Are we essentially inside the interior of a, of a comet?
-Is this what it looks like? -Well, yes.
HOOVER: Microorganisms can live in ice,
and ice is the dominant component of comets.
Organisms can remain alive and protected
by the icy material of the comet until it arrives
into another solar system
and blows off chunks of material
that can find a planet that it can consider a wonderful home.
And so, this basically ties into the whole idea of panspermia.
Water is a wonderful radiation shield,
and when you have a comet that is a few miles in diameter,
on the inside of that cometary crust,
there is all of this magnificent ice
that has been frozen and then reworked
with material going in and out.
So, comets are not just a magnificent place
for panspermia, I am convinced that comets
are absolutely a wonderful place for the origin of life.
NARRATOR: As Giorgio and Dr. Hoover
take their samples to a lab to be analyzed,
what kind of life-forms might they find
within the Pemberton glacier?
Could it support the theory that life on comets
is more common than we ever thought possible?
First sample that we got.
NARRATOR: Now back in the lab, they are hoping
to observe microorganisms that remained dormant
within the glacial ice and are just now returning to life
for the first time in thousands of years.
-TSOUKALOS: Do you see anything? -Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes.
HOOVER: We've got bacteria.
This is fantastic.
I mean, look at this one-- it's spinning right here.
-Yeah. -This one just moves straight across the screen.
HOOVER: And this one is tumbling. And notice there's a cell
that has just undergone cell division.
Here's another one that's just undergone cell division.
TSOUKALOS: Okay.
The quest for extraterrestrial life,
to me, has been a lifelong one, as it has been with you.
So I've traveled around the world climbing pyramids,
I've looked at statues,
I've been to hundreds of museums,
I've read countless ancient texts,
and here we are looking at something
that shows extraterrestrial life
that may have come here millions of years ago.
The fascinating thing is,
that a far more extraordinary hypothesis
than the existence of extraterrestrial life
is the hypothesis that life exists on the planet Earth
and nowhere else in the universe.
If that were to turn out to be what really is the case,
then we would be completely unique
and we would be different from everywhere else in the universe,
and that would be an amazing discovery.
Much more amazing than finding out that bacteria
or ice worms are crawling around on the surface of Europa today.
This is incredibly fascinating.
You know, and it's also refreshing to hear
an actual NASA scientist telling me these things.
NARRATOR: If, as Dr. Hoover's research indicates,
icy comets are ideal incubators for extraterrestrial life,
and if microorganisms
are incredibly common in the universe,
is the Earth being regularly bombarded
by tiny alien life-forms?
Perhaps further clues can be found
by examining recent scientific evidence
that supports the once-fringe theory
that life on Earth was seeded from outer space.
On Ancient Aliens, we have found abundant evidence
that alien life has made its way to Earth.
But what if these life-forms
were deliberately sent out into the universe
and possibly even directed right at our planet?
In 2018, Andrew Collins met with researchers who believe
that they have found proof
that Earth is being regularly bombarded
by microbial life-forms.
NARRATOR: Author and researcher Andrew Collins
travels to Sheffield to witness a remarkable demonstration.
-Hi, guys, uh... Chris. -Andrew, how are you?
-About the same. Hi, Milton. -Pleasure. -NARRATOR: He is meeting
with microbiologist Milton Wainwright
and engineer Chris Rose,
two members of the research team who are convinced
that life on Earth may have originated in space
through a process known as panspermia.
I understand you've made some incredible discoveries.
Please tell me all about it.
WAINWRIGHT: In the early 2000s, my colleague
Chandra Wickramasinghe,
um, we were launching balloons from India.
And these were, uh, sampling the air at 41 kilometers.
And th-they showed that organisms
are continually arriving all the time.
Panspermia is an extremely simple idea.
Basically, it's the idea that life came from space.
Instead of being formed on this planet, it came from space.
My findings relate to panspermia simply,
and th-they show that organisms are coming in
at this very moment from space.
Tell me how you actually collect these samples.
This is our-our balloon that's gonna give us the buoyancy
from the-the hydrogen gas here.
Now, our capture mechanism is right here.
Let me show you this. This exposes little, uh,
metal stubs to the environment.
A-And you're look-- you're looking to see
if you can get microbes coming from the upper atmosphere
-and not from the Earth itself? -WAINWRIGHT: That's right.
All the critics say they're coming from Earth
because we're surrounded by life.
But we have lots of evidence that this material
is not coming from Earth, it's incoming from space.
I mean, this sounds incredible.
I mean, have you ever lost any of these?
-No, and we're not about to start today. -(laughter)
-So, fingers crossed, guys. -Brilliant.
NARRATOR: The team moves the balloon into launch position,
from which it will ascend more than 37 kilometers,
or 23 miles, into the air.
ROSE: Okay, guys. Ready?
-Andrew, won't you count down, please? -COLLINS: Okay.
Five, four, three,
two, one.
-Let it go. -ROSE: Oh, there it goes...
NARRATOR: Once the balloon reaches its target altitude
within the Earth's stratosphere,
the capture mechanism will hopefully collect samples
of non-Earth-based microbial life.
After the sampling is complete,
the balloon bursts, and the capture mechanism
descends back to Earth under the safety of a parachute.
The team uses GPS tracking to locate
where the mechanism lands.
Once retrieved, the sample is quickly secured
in a sealed container so that it does not become contaminated
with microbes from Earth.
Moments later, Andrew joins Milton and Chris
at a nearby laboratory.
Here they will extract the microbes
inside a sterilized clean room and then analyze them
to make sure no Earth microbes
have contaminated the sample.
COLLINS: A clean room.
How can you ensure the sterilization?
What are the protocols behind this process?
It's really all about sterilizing the air inside.
To make sure the air inside contains no microorganisms.
So all the air is filtered.
(indistinct chatter)
NARRATOR: Milton and Chris remove the carbon tabs
from the capture mechanism
and place them into vacuum-sealed containers.
This will further prevent contamination
while they view the samples with a scanning electron microscope.
COLLINS: Wow. What on earth is that?
I can tell that this is biological.
If you analyze this, I'm pretty certain
this will show as carbon, oxygen and a little bit of nitrogen.
Now, that's the signature for life.
COLLINS: We're saying that this piece of biological life
-could potentially be extraterrestrial in origin? -Right.
WAINWRIGHT: There's nothing from Earth around it.
It's pristine, so it's incoming.
Now, if we do a bit of, um, modeling studies,
we come to the conclusion that nothing bigger
than six microns can go out.
And this is 200.
So it's a very large particle, and it's coming in.
What we actually could be looking at here
is a genuine alien life-form.
What you're looking at there is an organism
or a clump of organisms that is incoming from space to Earth.
Nothing bigger than six microns can go
from the surface of the Earth to these altitudes
that we sample at.
And yet we are finding particles all the way up to 200.
They can't be coming up from Earth.
Absolutely amazing. It's blown my head off.
NARRATOR: Biological organisms,
not from Earth but from somewhere in space?
Could we be looking at actual evidence
of a living organism from a world other than our own?
COLLINS: We've actually found
evidence of what could be
extraterrestrial biological entities.
To see those images was extraordinary,
and it's convinced me that the Earth
is surrounded by life
that almost certainly came from outer space.
This is one we took earlier, as they say.
This is the most amazing image I've ever seen in my life.
It's got biological material here,
and this material we know contains carbon,
oxygen and nitrogen, so this is biological.
When we analyzed the ball, we found it contained titanium
and a small amount of vanadium.
So, this is a titanium sphere
with life inside and life on the outside.
Now, what on earth is it?
One possibility is that this is directed panspermia.
Some civilization has put biological material
inside and just on the outside of this thing
and they've spewed it out.
And this suggests that some alien civilization
is seeding planets.
This smoking gun of, uh, panspermia,
or even directed panspermia
could give us the best evidence yet
that aliens in some form seeded life on this Earth,
which is an incredible thought.
NARRATOR: Is it possible
that extraterrestrial life-forms
are being deliberately sent to planet Earth?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes
and suggest that archaeologists may have actually found
physical remains of the beings who are sending them.
On Ancient Aliens, we have traveled
around the world looking for definitive evidence
to prove that we are not alone in the universe.
And what could be more definitive
than a human-like skull
that appears to be something other than human?
In 2017, I got to examine an elongated skull up close,
and what I discovered was absolutely mind-blowing.
NARRATOR: New York City,
February 2017.
At New York University, Giorgio Tsoukalos meets
with art collector Jared Collins,
who is in possession of a 2,000-year-old elongated skull.
Oh, wow.
That is fantastic.
NARRATOR: The skull is incredibly well-preserved,
and Jared is having it tested at the university
to find out if it might possibly contain abnormalities
that indicate it is something other than human.
He agreed to meet Giorgio outside of the anthropology lab
for a first look at the skull.
So how did this come to be in your possession?
Well, it's not actually mine. It is on loan to me.
Me and one of my colleagues contacted a museum
and we asked them, "Do you have an elongated skull
in your collection?"
And they said they have just one, this one.
TSOUKALOS: And have they told you anything about it?
-Actually, strangely... -TSOUKALOS: Like the providence?
...this has been in storage for decades.
They have never tested it,
they had very little information on it.
They know it's absolutely Paracas.
So, this skull was found in the Paracas region
-of Peru. -That's right.
But no real modern testing has ever been done on this.
Oh, this is amazing.
So, let's go, right?
Okay.
NYU Professor of Anthropology Dr. Todd Disotell
agreed to conduct a forensic evaluation
of the elongated skull.
I've seen casts, I've never seen one in person.
-Okay. -Wow.
DISOTELL: That is freaky.
I mean, I just can't come up with another term.
I love that your first reaction is that it's freaky,
-'cause I agree with you. -Yeah, well, I mean,
-look at it. That's... -It's-it's quite bizarre.
DISOTELL: Let me just, uh, move it over
-to the sterile bench surface. -Mm-hmm.
Wow.
So, what's very fascinating--
-besides the shape... -(laughter)
The sagittal suture looks like it has completely fused.
I'm holding it, I'm looking at it,
and it's just been completely obliterated.
NARRATOR: The sagittal suture
is the seam where the two parietal bones of the skull
come together.
Although the markings may be faint due to fusing over time,
all human skulls are expected
to have some evidence of this feature.
So it is curious that this skull does not.
Nor do the skulls of a number of other mysterious specimens
that have been collected and examined by various experts.
One of the great enigmas of planet Earth
is that all over the world,
we find skeletons
with people having these elongated skulls.
NARRATOR: For centuries, various Native cultures
have engaged in the ritual practice
of artificially elongating their skulls
by tightly wrapping the heads of their children through infancy.
However, these skulls still feature evidence
of the cranial sutures.
Okay, let's move onto extracting
some tooth and bone powder to get DNA out of that.
Okay, excellent.
In order to obtain
the needed genetic material from the artifact,
Dr. Disotell will need to remove a tooth
and drill into it to extract the samples.
The analysis of the material will determine the sex,
ancestral lineage of both the father and the mother,
and any DNA anomalies when compared
with the current human genetic database.
Looks pretty good.
We will pack this up and send it off,
and in four to six weeks they should have the result.
TSOUKALOS: Four to six weeks, okay.
-Thank you very much, really appreciate your input on this. -Okay.
-Take care, gentlemen. -Thanks a lot. -You got it.
NARRATOR: Los Angeles, California,
April 2017.
All right, Todd, you got the results?
Yeah, and they're very, very interesting.
NARRATOR: Two months after their initial examination,
Giorgio is online with Dr. Disotell
to receive the results of the DNA test
they performed on the elongated skull.
They did get a good, clean DNA profile
from the maternally inherited DNA.
So, this particular specimen is actually not found
in the New World, not found amongst Native Americans,
and it's typically found amongst Europeans and Middle Easterners.
In fact,
the 100% match was to a Scottish individual.
This makes no sense whatsoever.
Really? In a South American skull?
This is all very strange.
That could mean that people from Europe
got to South America
1,500 years earlier than we currently understand that.
That's amazing.
Unfortunately, the condition of the sample
did not yield any Y chromosome.
But that's not surprising.
There is between a couple hundred
to a couple thousand times as much
maternal DNA in every cell of the body.
So what does that mean, what have we not
found out because of that?
Well, so, one, that would allow us to definitively
determine the sex,
and knowing who the father was
would be very, very informative.
Unfortunately, we're missing that.
Right.
Do you think that a case can be made at all--
and again, this is complete speculation--
that perhaps it is not necessarily human?
Is that a possibility?
Well, it's possible.
But still, we actually don't know what this is.
Since we didn't get any definitive result,
obviously, a scientist always wants to try to do that.
Uh, this is extraordinary.
Yeah, it still leaves open the possibility
of something interesting.
The results confirmed the fact that there is a mystery there.
First of all, we couldn't figure out
who the father is of that thing.
Number two, it has European DNA.
Two things that make no sense.
And it had a missing sagittal suture.
So I do think that that is an extraterrestrial skull.
NARRATOR: Could the elongated skull analyzed by Dr. Disotell
provide evidence that a human-like species
walked planet Earth that wasn't entirely human?
Perhaps further clues can be found
by examining recent scientific evidence
that supports the theory that life can exist
where we least expect it.
Many of the scientists we've spoken to on Ancient Aliens
believe that the best place to search for evidence
of alien life is on meteorites that have crashed to Earth.
A few years ago, I met with a planetary scientist in England
who showed me incredible evidence that these space rocks
could be delivering microbial extraterrestrial life-forms
right here to our planet.
NARRATOR: Milton Keynes, England,
March 2019.
Ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos
travels to The Open University
to meet with planetary scientist Dr. Queenie Chan.
Dr. Chan?
-Giorgio. -Hello.
-Great pleasure to meet you. -Welcome here.
Nice to meet you, too. Welcome.
Thank you so much for bringing me here.
NARRATOR: Dr. Chan recently analyzed
two meteorites recovered in 1998
and discovered something incredibly unexpected,
a salt crystal containing liquid water.
Giorgio is eager to find out what the implications
of this discovery could be,
and if it might provide further evidence
that life on Earth was seeded by extraterrestrials.
CHAN: Within a stony meteorite,
we've got something called the chondritic meteorite.
They are interesting because they have
organic materials in it.
The meteorite that I found extremely interesting,
uh, special-- two meteorites, actually--
Zag and Monahan's meteorite.
They are both ordinary chondrites,
but they are not ordinary. (chuckles)
They both fell to Earth in 1998.
And what's more interesting is, both of these meteorite
have salt crystal, that stunning blue coloration to them.
More interesting is, within these salt crystals,
we found water,
liquid water inclusion within them.
I'm trying to wrap my mind around this.
So, you're telling me that you found meteorites
that actually contain liquid water in them.
Should we have a look at it in the clean lab?
Yes, please, that would be amazing.
Absolutely.
NARRATOR: Before they can examine
the meteorite sample, Giorgio and Dr. Chan change
into protective gear that will keep the laboratory sterile.
TSOUKALOS: Oh, nice.
-And so, this is it. -This is it.
-Should we have a look under the microscope? -Yes, please, yes.
CHAN: Trying to move that in focus now.
There it is.
I'm going to enlarge it on my screen.
This is it. You're looking at a speck of water in a meteorite.
This is the first time that we've found
amino acids with water.
This is extraordinary.
NARRATOR: Amino acids?
These organic compounds are the building blocks of life,
so finding them within liquid water on a meteorite
is extraordinary.
Could alien proteins like these have started life on Earth?
One of the exciting things about the discovery of the blue
salt crystals in the asteroids that crashed to Earth
is really the amino acids.
Amino acids are the building block of protein,
and so it really shows that Earth isn't the only place
where the right chemistry exists for which you can get life.
In another laboratory,
Dr. Chan shows Giorgio the machine that analyzed
the meteorite samples on a nanometer scale.
The results are then displayed on a computer screen,
showing a comparison between amino acids
found on Earth and those that arrived here from space.
This is very interesting, because, uh, first of all,
we see a bunch of amino acids
that are common in-in terrestrial life.
And over here, we've got other extraterrestrial
-amino acid inside. -Really?
This is a revolutionary discovery.
I immediately go to the idea of panspermia,
that life has been brought throughout the entire galaxy
by means with which we can't even fathom how it was done.
The building blocks of protein
that we know to be necessary for life,
these very building blocks,
the same amino acids that we found on Earth,
is ubiquitous in the, in the universe.
It's everywhere. It's found on-on asteroid.
It's found on-on comets, too.
So, in your estimation, what is the likelihood
of life having begun elsewhere?
We've got so many different galaxies
and there are so many Earth-like planets
and, uh, we-we could have water elsewhere.
We know that amino acids,
building blocks of life, are ubiquitous,
um, so I think it's-it's totally possible.
NARRATOR: Could these incredible findings be proof that the seeds of life
traveled to Earth from other planets in our galaxy?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes
and believe that further evidence can be found
in the recent NASA discovery
that there might be life on Mars.
The search for evidence of extraterrestrial life
has taken Ancient Aliens from deep in the jungle
all the way up to a remote mountain cave.
But perhaps one of the most compelling places to look
is not on our planet at all.
In recent years, new research has suggested
that Mars may actually support life.
And in 2018, aerospace engineer Dr. Travis Taylor
traveled to NASA to learn about an exciting new discovery
and to see a piece of the Red Planet right here on Earth.
NARRATOR: Scientist and aerospace engineer Dr. Travis Taylor
travels to Johnson Space Center and meets
with NASA exploration mission scientist Dr. Elizabeth Rampe.
Dr. Rampe analyzes data obtained by the Mars Curiosity rover,
which, six years into its mission,
is sending back some of its most extraordinary findings yet.
So, there was very late-breaking news recently
from the Curiosity rover.
And some interesting information came out
of the Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, instrument.
-Okay. -So, SAM can measure gases
in the atmosphere, and it can also measure gases
that are evolved from samples.
So basically, we drill a rock,
deliver that powder to the instrument,
and then that instrument heats up the sample
and measures the gases that are coming off.
Whatever out gas is, it can tell you what this--
-what that is, right? Okay. -Exactly.
So, a big piece of information from the atmosphere
is that we've been tracking methane
over the last few Martian years,
and what we see is that there is a cycle to it,
where it spikes late summer, early autumn,
and then dips again.
-Wow. Yeah. -Yeah, so the big question
-is, why is that happening? -Right, that-- it-it, so--
that's-- could possibly be due to an organic material, right?
-Or a biological source. -Exactly.
-So, that's... -Meaning life.
-Right, I know, so: huge. -Right-right. Wow.
I-It's not the only hypothesis out there...
-Sure. -...but you know,
there is the possibility that there is
extant life on Mars that is creating this methane.
Wow.
The fact that NASA has now released information
that they've measured a cycle of methane
that goes up in the summer and down in the winter,
it sounds very similar to how biological processes
create methane here on Earth.
That could be evidence
that there's life, right now, on Mars.
NARRATOR: Life on Mars?
According to NASA, such a profound notion
is a distinct possibility.
And other discoveries made by the space agency could
reveal something even more incredible,
that life on Earth actually originated on Mars.
So what is this? Tell me what this is.
Okay, so this is a Martian meteorite.
So this is a rock that came from Mars.
-TAYLOR: How long ago? -The rock itself is about
180 million years old.
-Wow. -So that's when it crystallized on Mars.
And to give you some context,
180 million years ago,
-dinosaurs were roaming the Earth. -Right.
TAYLOR: Well, we know that this rock came from Mars.
So if there was organic material on Mars
three and a half billion years ago,
something could have caused that organic material
to go from there to here, right?
Right, and what's interesting about, you know,
"three and a half billion years ago"
is, that's when life was taking hold on Earth.
-Right. -So-- And-and Mars was once very Earth-like,
with, uh, rivers and lakes.
So why not Mars?
We've got all the building blocks for life on Mars,
-so why couldn't it happen there? -So it's very possible
that we're descendants of Martians.
-I-I... I'm not gonna rule that out. -(chuckles)
When you look at all of the evidence that's out there,
from microbes in the stratosphere
to strange signals coming from space
and even ancient bones that defy explanation,
you have to ask, have we already discovered alien life?
The answer is a resounding yes.
And I have no doubt that far more incredible proof
is yet to come.
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