NARRATOR: In the jungles of Central America,
the Maya people thrived for more than 2,000 years.
The Mayans were very, very sophisticated.
They built huge pyramid cities.
They created the only writing system in all of the Americas.
NARRATOR: The Maya possessed knowledge that defies explanation.
How did they understand the long, vast orbits
of the Earth through the Milky Way galaxy?
NARRATOR: And new evidence has revealed
a civilization more extraordinary
and more ancient than we ever imagined.
We have discovered a lost chapter of human history.
NARRATOR: But could the Maya's greatest secret
involve contact with visitors from beyond Earth?
WILLIAM HENRY: The early Maya themselves said we were taught by
extraterrestrial beings.
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.
♪ ♪
Throughout Central America stand the ruins of the Maya,
considered by many to be the greatest civilization
in the history of the Americas.
While archaeologists and historians have been
studying this ancient culture for over four centuries,
there are still many questions left to answer
since much of the Maya's history is still hidden
within the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala.
The roots of the Maya are very obscure,
but traditional Maya scholarship says
that historically you have
the more primitive pre-Classical Maya
and then you've got the Classical Maya,
who are more advanced.
NARRATOR: For centuries,
scholars considered the height of the Maya civilization
to be during the Classic era,
between roughly 250 and 900 AD.
Before this was the pre-Classic era,
that began around 2000 BC
and was believed to be made up of nomadic people
who lived in simple dwellings.
There was a thinking that the Classic period
was really where they started building cities.
But then in the '60s and '70s,
as we got deeper into the jungle,
we realized there were older cities
that were as big, and in some cases, bigger
than the Classic ones.
NARRATOR: Today, archaeologists believe
that the Maya built cities throughout Central America
and thrived as a civilization for more than 2,000 years.
They were responsible for some of the most impressive
architecture in the entire North American continent,
and this is just one of their many accomplishments.
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 through that writing system, they were able to conduct
very scientific investigations,
and they became masters of mathematics and astronomy.
The Maya were arguably the ancient world's
best astronomers, even excelling the Greeks.
Many of the Maya sites
all through the Yucatán, Guatemala, Belize,
and throughout Mexico are kind of astronomically aligned.
Now, they even have observatories
as parts of the site,
the most famous being, really, at Palenque
and at Chichén Itzá, for instance,
where they have literally places
where they would observe the stars.
NARRATOR: Why the Maya were so preoccupied
with tracking the stars remains a mystery.
But scholars agree that they possessed
a remarkably advanced understanding of astronomy,
which is perhaps most evident
within their highly sophisticated
and complex calendar system.
Librarian Ernst Förstemann uses his extensive knowledge
of mathematics to decipher the dots and symbols
of a 12th-century Maya text known as the Dresden Codex.
In doing so,
he unlocks the secrets of the Maya calendar.
The Maya have what's widely understood
as the most sophisticated ancient calendar ever made.
It involves so many different cycles.
It's so sophisticated, in fact,
that early scholars thought that the Maya were,
as they called, esoteric time worshipers.
The Maya are very interested in the cycles of life.
So a lot of their calendars were created
to track those cycles and look for harmonies between cycles
to better harmonize themselves with the natural world.
ANDREW COLLINS: The long count calendar of the Maya
lasted for 5,125 years.
It was backdated to have begun in 3114 BC,
which meant that it actually ended
on December 21, 2012.
And many of us will remember how it was believed
that there was gonna be a time of great transformation,
possibly the end of the world.
NARRATOR: In 2012,
over a thousand years
after the fall of the Maya civilization,
their calendar became known to people all around the world.
Many believed that the final date on the calendar
was intended to mark an apocalyptic event.
BARNHART: The idea that the Maya predicted the end of the world was really
just a Western misunderstanding of how their calendar works
and what they were using their calendar for.
Westerners see time as a line,
it goes back into the past and forward into the future,
and we're the point in the middle.
The Maya saw time as a cycle that kept going
like the hands of a clock.
When it hit 12, it didn't just explode,
it just went back around for another loop.
So Maya calendar systems were set up
to be never-ending cycles.
NARRATOR: While the Maya were exceptional at tracking time
and observing the heavens,
archaeologists were astounded
when they discovered that this ancient culture
was tracking what is known in astronomy as precession.
Precession is the wobbling of the Earth on its axis
which changes the location of constellations in the night sky.
It's actually a huge cycle that lasts 26,000 years.
And the Maya, without a shadow of a doubt,
were calculating precession.
They were able to say,
back in the distant past,
this planet would've been in that constellation.
NARRATOR: Scholars remain mystified
as to how the Maya came to have such an advanced understanding
of astronomy, mathematics and timekeeping,
and answers have been difficult to come by,
since a large portion of the Maya's writing and artifacts
have been lost or destroyed over the centuries.
There was a big cultural shift between about 900 and 1200 AD,
and one of the prevailing theories
about the end of Maya civilization was that
basically they taxed their resources,
that they created an unstable landscape
that then lent itself to landslides, to fires,
to floods,
and that can lead to societal collapse.
NARRATOR: In the 16 century, Spanish conquistadors arrived
in the Maya cities of the Yucatán Peninsula.
They found the sites sparsely populated or even abandoned,
with many structures already in ruins.
And while Spanish colonizers were the first Europeans
to record their accounts of the Maya culture,
they were also responsible for destroying
much of the Maya's own history.
When the Spanish showed up,
they wanted to convert them to Christianity.
Step one in that process
is dividing them from their traditional wisdoms.
And those were written in the books.
So, the Spanish on purpose burned
every document they could find.
They destroyed as much as they could.
Today we have four surviving books that
at least scholarship has been able to study and know about.
There are probably more, almost certainly,
hiding in the mountains in Guatemala.
And the Maya, for good reason, hide them.
NARRATOR: Have the secrets of the Maya
and how they built such an advanced civilization
more than a thousand years ago been lost forever?
Ancient astronaut theorists suggest
there are still answers to be found
in the Maya texts that have survived,
and their accounts of powerful beings
who came down from the sky.
NARRATOR: The Getty Museum opens an exhibition
displaying the oldest book ever discovered in the Americas,
called the Maya Codex of Mexico.
Like other Maya codices, the roughly 900-year-old text
consists of illustrations and hieroglyphs
written on tree bark pages
that were bound together like a book.
DAVID CHILDRESS: The Mayans had hundreds, thousands of codexes that were
describing the Mayan history and the gods
and everything that they wanted to write down.
And four Mayan codices
are known to exist and to have survived.
NARRATOR: In addition to these manuscripts,
archaeologists have found Maya hieroglyphs
carved on temples that date to as early as
the third century BC.
But since the great majority of the Maya codices
have been lost or destroyed,
scholars have only recently begun to decipher
the ancient writing system.
It's been a long process to
translate Maya hieroglyphs,
and we're not done.
Experts estimate we've got
maybe 80% of it translated,
and there are still glyphs that elude us.
DAVID CHEETHAM: About 70 years ago, Maya archaeologists
started to unravel the Maya hieroglyphic world,
and by the '70s, the '80s,
more and more of the language
was understood in terms of
its interface with the glyphs.
NARRATOR: As scholars slowly learned how to read Maya hieroglyphs,
they discovered the codices contain
richly illustrated astronomical charts,
divination tables
and instructions for religious ceremonies.
But the most important story found in the codices
is a historical record known as the Popol Vuh.
Their creation story is called Popol Vuh.
And its opening chapters outlined that the gods,
which they call the makers and modelers,
set up the world.
But the story really centers around
two boys, a pair of twins
they call the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque.
And they battle with the lords of death,
and they make the world safe
for creation, us, to occur.
NARRATOR: According to the story, after the Hero Twins
have prepared the Earth for humanity,
they are followed by a larger pantheon of gods.
TSOUKALOS: Their beginning of creation, and they have a date for it,
is the 11th of August,
3114 BC.
The Popol Vuh says that on that day,
the road of the stars descended from the sky,
and the gods, 13 of them,
descended from the heavens down to Earth
and imparted knowledge
to the local population.
NARRATOR: While researchers have documented more than
250 Maya gods,
this original pantheon of 13 beings
taught the ancient Maya agriculture, mathematics
and astronomy.
The most prominent of all the Maya gods
described in the Popol Vuh
is the flying serpent Kukulkan.
Lofty thinking and knowledge
was a gift from Kukulkan,
who gave them sophistication,
the art of speech, also mathematics.
Kukulkan was the second deity
in the Maya pantheon.
And the name means both "wind" and "giver."
You find Kukulkan connected with
a lot of the happenings in the sky,
whether it's, you know, thunder, lightning,
storms, rain.
And his appearance was as a serpent,
which is a very common
symbol for wisdom.
NARRATOR: What ancient astronaut theorists find particularly intriguing
about Kukulkan is that this god
is not always depicted as a flying serpent,
but is sometimes shown as a humanoid face
emerging from the serpent's mouth.
HENRY: In Mayan iconography,
Kukulkan is shown as a serpentine being
with a humanoid head that flies through the sky.
And it makes you wonder what is going on here?
It's very possible that
it's some sort of a craft that is interpreted
as a feathered serpent
and a god being emerges from that craft
and is a culture bearer.
TSOUKALOS: Kukulkan looks like a snake shooting across the sky.
If you look at a modern-day plane,
that looks like a flying snake if you don't have
the vocabulary with which to describe
the fuselage and the wings, for example.
So, of course, we have stories of flying snakes
because those were the best terms
with which to describe what they witnessed.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the gods
described in the Maya writings were otherworldly visitors
witnessed by their earliest ancestors,
as ancient astronaut theorists suggest?
The first known Maya codices
containing the Popol Vuh
date to the 16th century AD.
But archaeologists have clearly identified figures
from the Popol Vuh featured on Maya temples
that are hundreds of years older,
and ancient astronaut theorists suggest
they provide further evidence of an extraterrestrial influence.
Like the carvings found at
the ruins of Quiriguá in Guatemala.
TSOUKALOS: What's interesting is that
often repeated motif
of what seems to be people in helmets.
In Quiriguá, Guatemala,
there is this helmeted person
sitting in what seems very reminiscent of
something technological in nature,
what looks to be some type of a spacecraft.
NARRATOR: Perhaps the most extraordinary Maya depiction
of a being that descended from the heavens
can be found on a pyramid
in the ancient city of Chichén Itzá.
ERICH VON DÄNIKEN: The Maya said the guardians of the sky descended.
And they showed it in their temples.
For example, the temple of Chichén Itzá,
every year on March 21st,
you can see the descending of god Kukulkan,
the feathered serpent coming down.
The sun goes up,
and because of the astronomical orientation,
because of the steps,
you see a triangle shadow going down the step,
the step exactly in the center of the pyramid.
CHILDRESS: These discoveries support
the Mayan legends of how the god Itzamná
came down and, and gave knowledge of writing and books,
while the feathered serpent Kukulkan came
and he gave them knowledge of astronomy and agriculture.
It would seem that the core Mayan knowledge
came from these gods
who were probably extraterrestrials.
NARRATOR: Could it be that stories of the Popol Vuh
aren't fictional mythology,
but are, in fact, recorded history of
ancient Maya interaction
with beings who descended from the sky?
Perhaps further clues can be found by
examining a Maya city in Honduras
that was literally built
to reflect the cosmos.
NARRATOR: This ancient site,
located deep in the jungle,
served as one of the most important city centers
of the Maya civilization.
At the peak of its power in the seventh century AD,
the kingdom of Copán had a population of at least
20,000 people and covered an area
of over 100 square miles.
Copán is a Classic Maya city
that sits at the far eastern edge of the Maya world.
Most of the Maya world is built out of limestone,
and a lot of those limestone monuments
have now melted.
But Copán's sculpture, because it's in volcanic tuff,
is beautiful.
It's deep relief and still very visible.
DAVID SEDAT: The city of Copán is probably one of the longest known
and most investigated Maya city today.
These fantastic carved stones of Copán
evoke the imagination and the mystery of this place.
It was called the Athens of the Maya world.
NARRATOR: Among the most remarkable carvings discovered at Copán
are the 15 stone statues known as "stelae"
that connect the city's ancient rulers with the gods.
CHEETHAM: The most fantastic part of Copán is
the carved monuments which are carved in the round.
They're not what we call plano-convex
like a slab with a, you know,
a low-relief carving.
These are carved in a sort of Michelangelo way
in the round, and they're absolutely fantastic.
NARRATOR: The most well-known of Copán's stelae
were built during the 36-year reign
of the ruler Waxaklajuun Ub'aah K'awiil,
better known by the nickname "18 Rabbit."
SEDAT: On one of the stelae of Copán,
18 Rabbit portrayed himself
as the foremost patron god of Copán,
the all-encompassing god K'intay Ahau.
And on the stelae,
he basically gives a dissertation on the cosmos.
TSOUKALOS: For all intents and purposes,
18 Rabbit is depicted like modern-day astronauts.
You see tubes, you see weird boxes,
you see weird canisters and tanks.
You see boots.
It's stuff that looks more technological in origin.
And what's fascinating is that in Tikal, in Guatemala,
one of the stelae shows this being
with a tube that comes straight down in the front
and then it goes to the left
and it culminates in some sort of a tank.
It all looks very technological in origin.
CHILDRESS: It would seem that these gods
of the ancient Maya
were real physical beings,
and interacting with the Mayans, giving them knowledge,
and were really instrumental in creating
this advanced culture in Central America.
NARRATOR: Do the incredible ruins of Copán serve to commemorate
the Maya's interactions with extraterrestrials?
As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned,
the answer is a resounding yes.
And they suggest further evidence can be found
by examining the artwork at another famous Maya site
400 miles to the northwest.
Under a pyramid called the Temple of Inscriptions
at the ruins of Palenque,
archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier
discovers a mysterious underground stairway
obstructed with large stones.
Over the next three years,
Ruz and his team carefully clear the stairwell
consisting of 71 steps.
When the door at the base of the stairwell is finally opened,
they encounter room after room of skeletons and artifacts.
And in the final room, they find the tomb
of King K'inich Janaab' Pakal.
One of the best-known and famous Maya ahau
or "royal lord,"
was Pakal, who ruled in the seventh century AD.
And he ruled for 68 years at this site,
thus making him the longest-lived ruler
in the Americas that we know of.
NARRATOR: While Pakal became
a famous leader during his lifetime,
today he remains one of the most well-known Maya kings
because of the magnificence of his tomb and sarcophagus.
The tomb of Pakal is one of the most amazing pieces
of Maya art that we've ever found.
On the top of the lid is a very elaborate carving
that we believe is a depiction of Pakal
falling into the underworld upon his death.
NARRATOR: Although many historians and archaeologists
interpret the carving on Pakal's lid
as the king's descent into the underworld,
ancient astronaut theorists suggest
it depicts a very different type of journey.
The sarcophagus of Lord Pakal forever will remain
one of the smoking guns of the ancient astronaut theory.
He is in a reclining position.
He has a breathing apparatus attached to his nose.
His hands are manipulating some buttons.
And his feet are on pedals.
It looks as if Pakal is lifting off into space
inside some type of a rocket vehicle.
NARRATOR: As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned,
the idea that King Pakal's sarcophagus lid
depicts a journey to space is supported by Maya writing
that surrounds the iconic carving.
TSOUKALOS: Those Maya glyphs say
that this is King Pakal's journey to Xibalba.
"Xibalba" means "underworld."
Well, archaeologists, about 15 years ago,
revisited the term "Xibalba" and concluded
that, actually, "Xibalba" can also be translated
as "Milky Way."
And all of a sudden, this depiction makes sense
because what we have here is a representation
of King Pakal on his journey to the Milky Way.
NARRATOR: Could it be that the carving
on King Pakal's sarcophagus
depicts the cockpit of a spacecraft?
Do the artifacts of Palenque and Copán
support the notion that the Maya did not just write stories
about gods who came down from the sky
but had real encounters with otherworldly visitors?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,
and suggest further evidence can be found
at the oldest Maya site ever discovered.
A site that, until the 20th century,
had remained hidden in the jungles of Guatemala
for more than 1,000 years.
NARRATOR: The Mirador Basin,
northern Guatemala, 1978.
A team of American archaeologists
launches a project to excavate a mysterious ancient site
that has been discovered deep in the jungle.
Called El Mirador, it features two gigantic pyramids
now known as El Tigre and La Danta.
BARNHART: The Mirador Basin is very deep in the jungle.
You can fly a plane over it,
but you don't really see anything.
Everything is covered in trees.
So, we assumed,
if humans were ever in there,
they weren't building anything of substance.
But as we got in on the ground and we could see
from the bottom of the trees instead of on the top,
we realized that a lot of the things
we mistaked for mountains were actually gigantic pyramids.
NARRATOR: Artwork carved on the pyramids
at El Mirador identified them as belonging to the Maya.
La Danta, the bigger of the two, is larger in volume
than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
CHEETHAM: La Danta, it's not just a pyramid,
it's a pyramid with pyramids on top of it.
I mean, this is a massive structure
that's rivaling or even bigger
than any other known Maya temple complex.
NARRATOR: Researchers for the Mirador Archaeological Project,
which ran from 1978 to 1983,
were astonished to find
such massive Maya structures
in this remote jungle area.
And it begged the question,
could this be one of the oldest Maya sites ever discovered,
built at a time when the environment was more hospitable?
The answer would be provided by archaeologist Richard Hansen,
who was in charge of the Tigre Complex
in the western sector of the site.
TSOUKALOS: In March of 1979,
Richard Hansen was excavating a room within a structure
called the Jaguar Paw Temple.
At the time, these structures were understood
to be from what they call the Classic Maya period,
which dates from about 250 AD to 900 AD.
And that's because archaeologists didn't think
the Maya were capable of building
large structures like this before that time.
But Hansen came upon ceramic artifacts
that he immediately recognized as Chicanel,
which means that these are artifacts from around 200 BC.
And, of course, he was shocked.
Richard Hansen himself said that he suddenly realized
the whole evolutionary model for the Maya was wrong.
And in that moment, he was the only person
in the world who knew it.
NARRATOR: Since Hansen's discovery,
other scientific data has revealed
that El Mirador dates to at least 600 BC,
and could be even older.
This is long before the Classic Maya era,
which is the period when most archaeologists had believed
the Maya started building monumental structures.
The debate on how to subdivide Maya history
has actually gone on for as long as we've been studying the Maya.
But for decades,
there was an understanding
that, before the Classic period,
they had more humble,
village-style living.
CHEETHAM: It's in the last 50 years or so,
including information from places like El Mirador,
that we have, as archaeologists, come to both understand
and appreciate the fact that a great civilization
actually predates the Classic period.
NARRATOR: For ancient astronaut theorists,
the discoveries at El Mirador support the idea
that the Maya stories of sky gods are, in fact,
historical accounts of extraterrestrial visitation.
HENRY: The Maya said that they were in contact
with the gods and that they were given this knowledge
directly by these extraterrestrial beings.
And what we have discovered is the pyramids
that were constructed, likely, to honor
these otherworldly beings.
NARRATOR: In 2003, 24 years
after his first incredible discovery at El Mirador,
Dr. Richard Hansen got the opportunity
to conduct a survey of a much larger area of the basin
using a sophisticated remote sensing method called lidar.
Lidar is a laser-imaging detection and ranging device.
It uses light in the same way a radar uses radio
for detection and ranging.
JUAN CARLOS FERNANDEZ-DIAZ: A compact system can be flown
on a small airplane.
In four to five hours,
we can map 200 square kilometers
at really high resolution,
something that will take years or decades
for a ground crew to do using traditional techniques.
NARRATOR: Dr. Hansen spent nearly two decades
performing his lidar survey and what he uncovered was
that the pyramids of El Tigre and La Danta provide
only a small glimpse
of what is hidden in the Mirador jungle.
NARRATOR: 19 years into the vast lidar study
of the Mirador Basin, Dr. Richard Hansen
and his archaeological team announce their findings.
Incredibly, lidar surveys covering
1.6 million acres of the jungle
have revealed nearly 1,000 ancient Maya settlements
including houses, palaces
and colossal pyramids.
And they are believed to date back
at least 3,000 years--
long before the height of the Maya civilization.
CHEETHAM: These are some of the largest buildings
that were ever made by the Maya.
Some of these buildings include
things like ball courts,
temple structures, palace structures,
residential compounds, plaza groups.
It boggles the mind.
TAYLOR: What's amazing is we've found what seems to be
an entire civilization
that's rival of the Egyptian civilization
that the Mayans had built
a long time ago
we never knew were there.
There are pyramids there
that rival the pyramids in Egypt.
NARRATOR: The results of the lidar study established the pre-Classic Maya
as being just as advanced
as other great early civilizations
like the Egyptians
and the Greeks.
And archaeologists were astounded
by how much the Maya built.
The data revealed that hidden within the jungles
of the Mirador Basin
are more than 110,000 ancient structures.
Archaeologists realize
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.
FERNANDEZ-DIAZ: It's really awesome when we can go
and find a city that's unknown to modern science.
I mean, that's incredible.
And for me, some of the,
like, really cool things,
it's actually being able
to see features that remind us that the Maya were
just like you and I.
And being able to see stuff like a market.
I mean, we think about pyramids
and, like, temples and stuff like that,
but finding some structures
that archaeologists interpret to be a market
where people came from different places
to exchange goods and services, that's amazing.
NARRATOR: Dr. Hansen's lidar survey
produced one incredible revelation after another.
But for archaeologists, the most astonishing of all
was an elaborate network of causeways
or elevated roads.
HENRY: El Mirador had these elevated causeways--
superhighways is the way
the archaeologists described them--
and they were actually also covered with white plaster
so that they would reflect the light of the moon
so that then they could travel during the-the nighttime hours.
These ancient Maya causeways are considered
more sophisticated than those of other civilizations
of the time, like the Greeks and Romans
due to the fact that they were elevated over many miles.
FERNANDEZ-DIAZ: The longest causeway that we know
is over a hundred kilometers long.
The largest portion of the causeway connects
the site of Mirador to other sites.
Some of these causeways were the size
of a four-lane highway.
They are probably between two and five meters in elevation
with relationship to the lowlands.
So it was a massive undertaking.
Name another city in 1000 BC
that had elevated roadways
that are as wide as a four-lane highway.
There is none.
NARRATOR: The discoveries that continue to be made in the Mirador Basin
are completely upending our understanding of the Maya,
and present new questions
as to how this sophisticated culture
emerged seemingly out of nowhere more than 3,000 years ago.
What we have discovered right there
is a lost chapter
of human history.
Because they now determined
that even a thousand years before the Classical Maya period
they had an entire network of roads
with buildings, with structures.
I mean, my mind is blown
because this is a complete rewriting of Maya history.
HENRY: We have a whole new scenario here.
The evolutionary theory of how the Maya came along
is wrong.
It's completely upset by this discovery.
NARRATOR: How is it that the early Maya developed
sophisticated cities and structures
at a time when it is thought
the entire North American continent was
populated by primitive nomadic people?
Could it be that the Maya creation story is, in fact,
a historical account of extraterrestrial visitation?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest
further evidence can be found
by examining the Maya's connection
with the Pleiades star cluster.
NARRATOR: Located over 400 light-years from Earth,
near the constellation of Taurus,
is a star cluster known as the Pleiades.
It is commonly recognized as seven bright stars
referred to as the Seven Sisters.
But there are, in fact, around 3,000 stars
in the Pleiades star cluster.
This area of the night sky held great significance
for the Maya civilization.
COLLINS: The Maya themselves associate
the celestial beings that had contact
with their own ancestors with the Pleiades constellation.
In more recent years,
this has come through the work
and the teachings
of a writer and researcher
by the name of José Argüelles,
who during the 1970s
spent a long time in the Maya lands,
having his own experiences
talking to the Maya themselves,
and coming to the conclusion
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.
NARRATOR: Could it be that the Maya identify
the Pleiades as the home of the gods
because this was told to their ancestors
by extraterrestrial visitors?
As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned,
that question was answered by the recent
lidar studies at El Mirador.
Because what they revealed is that, incredibly,
the ancient structures of El Mirador
appear to have been intentionally positioned
to mirror the seven brightest stars of the Pleiades.
Some archaeologists have suggested that El Mirador is
aligned with the Pleiades
and that the pyramids and other structures there
are actually recreating the Pleiades star system
on the grounds in the El Mirador basin.
TSOUKALOS: In my opinion, those structures are
calling cards of our visitors long ago.
NARRATOR: Does the layout of El Mirador provide the ultimate proof
that Maya society was the product
of extraterrestrial intervention?
While ancient astronaut theorists find
this possibility intriguing,
they believe even more profound discoveries
are yet to be made.
BARNHART: The things that we've actually been able to excavate,
it's just a fraction,
a sub-percent of what's actually
out there to see.
I can say with confidence that we have dug
less than one percent of the Maya world.
Even in cities we know well, like Palenque for example,
I made a map of Palenque.
I mapped almost 1,500 buildings.
We've excavated 33.
And that's a well-known city.
We have barely begun to scratch
the surface of what's still remaining
of ancient Maya society.
CHEETHAM: As a tourist or an archaeologist going
into the Maya lowland,
it's quite remarkable to see
pyramids sticking out of the canopy of the jungle.
And you're tempted to think,
"Well, wow, there must be thousands of sites
that are remaining to be discovered."
HENRY: When we look at what is happening in Maya country now,
it's a resurgence of a civilization long lost,
but that is truly among the most magnificent
in all human history.
The modern Maya have to be
incredibly proud of this.
This is their lineage.
This is their ancestors
that built these magnificent cities
that are now being unveiled and uncovered.
I think what we're gonna be finding here is
some incredible new discoveries among the Maya.
And it's ultimately gonna point to the Pleiades
and extraterrestrials as the ones that were
the teachers of this civilization.
NARRATOR: Could the lost cities of the Mirador Basin--
that archaeologists are only now beginning to explore--
hold incredible new evidence about,
not only the Maya
but the origins of human civilization?
Are the jungles of Central America hiding
the ultimate proof of ancient alien visitation?
Perhaps as we continue to unravel
the mysteries of the Maya,
we will learn that their stories of sky gods are,
in fact, historical accounts
of our extraterrestrial past.
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