Zombies raising from their graves...
bloodsucking vampires
damned for all eternity...
and humans trapped in a life-
and-death struggle
between Heaven and hell.
For thousands of years mankind
has told tales of encounters
with strange soulless creatures.
But are these mere myths or
are they beliefs rooted in
scientific fact?
They will attack,
they will drink blood
and disappear without
ever being noticed.
The blood is the thing
that reconnects the
world that we live in with
the world of the dead.
Avatars have the power
to take dead people,
bring them back to life.
What kind of powers would you
have to have to do that?
The powers of an extraterrestrial?
Millions of people around
the world believe we have
been visited in the past by
extraterrestrial beings.
What if it were true--
did ancient aliens really
help to shape our history?
And if so, are there
extraterrestrial origins in
earthly stories of the undead?
Thebes, Egypt
Along the west bank of the Nile
River lies the Valley of the Kings.
Here in 1922, archeologist
Howard Carter discovered
the 3,000-year-old tomb of
the pharaoh Tutankhamun.
When Howard Carter opened
the burial chamber Tutankhamun
it was the first time anyone had seen
the burial chamber of a pharaoh.
Untouched since the
pharaoh's death in 1333 BC,
the tomb was full of the boy
king's earthly possessions.
It's very much the idea
of having what you would
have had in your house in this
world with you to be
there in the next world.
And part of this whole idea of
the tomb as a magical machine to
bring you into the next world.
To help Tutankhamun on
his journey into the afterlife...
the walls and ceiling
of his burial chamber
were decorated with illustrations
from the Egyptian's
sacred Book of the Dead.
The Book of the Dead
was a collection of spells
relating to the transition
between death and rebirth.
The basic idea was to provide
the dead person with what they
needed, magically, to get through.
Because there were various
trials and tribulations to be
faced before you were
reborn into the next world.
They had to encounter various demons:
everything from giant cockroaches
to horrendous beings with
knives instead of heads.
All sorts of nightmarish visions
you had to get through.
And one of the things the Book
of the Dead does is to explain
how you deal with
these various demons.
Inside Tutankhamun's tomb,
the archaeologist also discovered
a sarcophagus with the young king's
embalmed body, well preserved
with vital organs removed
and sealed in jars.
Like many ancient Egyptians,
King Tut was mummified based on
the belief that upon entering
the underworld, his body would
regain its powers of
movement and speech.
There seems to have
been a kind of belief
that the stellar or astral
aspect of the dead king
maintain a contact with the tomb.
And that the soul would return
back to the physical body
The ancient egyptians believed
the tomb was the vessel
in which the deceased body
attended by its visiting soul
journeyed to the world
beyond the grave.
We, today, see the idea of
being placed in a coffin
and put under ground, it's something
like simply disposal of the dead
or the burial of the dead.
For them, it was far more than this.
It was like going back to the
primordial womb of a sky goddess
whose name was Nuit.
And she was represented
by the Milky Way.
And by doing that, you'd eventually,
you'll go back to being a star.
It was believed that the soul
itself could become a star.
The practice of preserving
a dead body, or
embalming, did not begin
with the Egyptians.
Embalmed human remains have been
found in Chile and Peru
dating to 5000 BC.
But what compelled ancient man
to preserve their bodies
after their deaths?
Did they really believe they would
return to Earth, body and soul?
If so, what had they seen in
life that would suggest that
such a thing were even possible?
Throughout history mankind has
consistently believed
that when they die,
they would go to the stars,
the egyptians believed that too.
You have to ask yourself,
where did our ancestors
get these ideas,
that on our death we're
being transported
to the stars or to another world.
Wouldn't this have come
from extraterrestrials?
The techniques that they used
were given to the ancient
egyptians by the gods
the guardians of the sky
who were these guardians of the sky?
Well, according to ancient
astronaut theorists, they were
flesh and blood
extraterrestrials.
Tests on Tutankhamun's remains confirm
that he was the son of Akhenaten;
the controversial Egyptian
pharaoh often depicted
with a large misshapen skull.
Like their father, the skulls
of both King Tutankhamun
and his sister Meritaten also
appear to have deformed shapes.
Archaeologists have
found that in Egypt, like
Tutankhamun or his sister, who's
this statue here, Meritaten, had
these strange elongated heads.
You have to wonder, were
they trying to imitate
extraterrestrials who looked
like this, or perhaps they, in
fact, were extraterrestrials, and
this is how they naturally looked.
On the other side of the
world, in the ancient
city of Paracas, Peru...
archaeologists uncovered
hundreds of mummified
remains dating to 300 BC.
Many contained elongated skulls.
What makes Paracas unique is
that the elongated skulls
are found in great numbers here dating
at least 3,000 years old if not older.
The only other place in the
world that we find these are in
Egypt during the reign of Akhenaten.
It would seem as if this
type of skull demarked
these people as different
to the local community.
Probably because they believed
they were descendents from
original individuals that had
heads that were elongated
and that were serpent or
viper-like in appearance.
Ancient civilizations
all around this planet
have always depicted some
of their ancients as being
stringed looking figures:
Long heads, big noses.
Creatures that could be human,
but they sure didn't look human.
If as some researchers suggest,
the practice of elongating skulls
was done to mimic the head shape
of highly intelligent beings
ancient man came in contact
with, then could the belief in
preserving the body for the
journey to the afterlife also
have been based on some
contact with superior beings?
I'm suggesting that
mummification is based on
our ancestors who watched
extraterrestrials getting ready
for a flight through deep space.
One possibility is to be frozen
or to be put into animated
sleep, where you're inside this quote
end quote sarcophagus, this coffin.
And so our ancestors might
have watched is type of
preparation, and then they
misunderstood this for the gods dying.
And so our ancestors mummified
themselves in order to be ready
for the return of the gods with
the hopes that the gods would
reanimate them from the
dead in the future.
Could ancient man really
have had contact with
visitors from other planets?
If so, could they have learned from
them the secrets of life and death?
Secrets about preserving their
earthly bodies, so that someday
they might walk again?
The Republic of the Congo,
Central Africa.
Stretching across this mystical
land is the world's second
largest rain forest.
Here, according to scholars, the word
"zombie" originated around 500 BC.
According to most archeologists
and language experts, ancient
Africans used the word "nzumbe"
to refer to one's primary spirit.
They believed that a person has
two souls-- one called the
"great angel" and the other
called the "little angel."
The little good angel represents
your identity, your ego self.
And upon death,
the little good angel
sits by the grave for a few
days and then rises before god.
The big good angel also sits by
the grave for nine days, and can
be stolen, and you can
be made into a zombie.
The spirits who rule over that
crossroads between life and
death are called the Ghede.
The Ghede spirit is not the
spirit of the graveyard
Nor it is the spirit of death
It's actually the spirit of
the gateway to the graveyard.
When you die, he opens up
the gateway at the cemetery
so that you pass
from life into death.
But also he can open up the
gate whether you passed back
from death into life
That's why he is the spirit
who's responsible for zombies
In most of the
traditions about zombies
zombies are called into being, or
called back from the grave unwillingly
and that's usually out of
control of the witch doctor.
The idea is that after the
soul has left the body
you can still raise this
person from the dead
Therefore the classical zombie is
actually a soulless animated corpse.
Most civilizations
have some variety
of an individual coming
back from the dead
It goes all the way back to the
first civilization in Mesopotamia.
We have them in ancient Egypt,
we have them in Mesoamerica, you
have them in Central and East Asia.
In 300 BC, ancient Chinese
legends began making
reference to horrific zombie- like
creatures called "jiang shi",
a name that, when translated,
literally means "stiff corpse".
Supposedly a "jiang shi" rests in
a coffin by day or hides in
dark places such a caves.
At night these creatures hunt
down family members in an effort
to devour their essence.
Its skin was decayed
and had long finger nails.
The thing was actually brain dead, but
it had an increased sense of smell
and a great sense of hearing.
In Norse mythology, a dragger
was a person who lived a sinful life
After dying, they would come back
from the dead and haunt the living.
Many burial practices
grew up to try to control
this possibility of the zombie
raising, the undead coming back.
Gravestones might originally
been to hold them
down, to keep them from
coming out of the ground.
Various kinds of spiking to hold
the body down or cutting the
body up so it couldn't reanimate.
Cutting the head off or burning
and distributing the ashes.
All out of a fear that this
creature or this being would
somehow return.
Today stories of the
reanimated dead are most
closely associated with the
Haitian practice of voodoo...
Were beginning in the 1500s,
voodoo priests performed
mysterious rituals in order to
create and control zombies.
The voodoo zombie
is essentially harmless
unless it is told to
commit acts of v*olence.
Most importantly, the voodoo
zombie is an individual.
It is controlled by a master.
It is controlled usually by some
form of supernatural powers.
There are a couple of different kinds.
There's the zombie as the
disembodied spirit, but there's
also that more traditional
concept of a body that has lost
its soul and is just
automatically enslaved and
working for a zombie master.
But where, or from
whom, does this strange power
over life and death come from?
According to ancient astronaut
theorists, there is evidence of
strange other-worldly entities
that communicate to humans
through intermediaries known as
priests, shamans, witch
doctors or demigods.
Many different religions
have different ways of
conceiving of specialists who
might be able to
intercede in the cosmos.
So, for instance, among the
Native Americans we find shamans
and shamanism who very often
are held as people who can
intercede between the spiritual
realm and the mundane
realm here on Earth.
It is quite possible that some of the
first doctors were the disciples,
the students of the extraterrestrials.
So they had their knowledge
which helped them to be higher
than the rest of mankind.
Perhaps the most famous
story of an intermediary
reanimating the dead appears in
the New Testament of the Holy Bible.
According to the Gospel of St.
John, it was here at Al
Eizariya, two miles from
Jerusalem, that Jesus of
Nazareth resurrected a man who
had been dead for four days.
Jesus was so moved, the
Bible says, he wept
As he looked at the tomb, and was moved
by the weeping of Mary and Martha
he decided to raise
Lazarus from the dead.
So he approaches the
entrance to the tomb
and literally calls out to Lazarus
to come forth from the dead.
In my opinion, there's no
scientific explanation for the
raising of Lazarus.
It seems that Lazarus' soul was
actually reunited with his body;
that he was just not a
walking dead or the undead,
but he became himself
raised from the dead.
So here are special
people who had the power
to take dead people and
bring them back to life
What kind of power would you have
to have to be able to do that?
The powers of an extraterrestrial?
Could there really
be an extraterrestrial
connection between living humans
and the world of the dead?
Is it possible that human souls
travel through space and time
much as space travelers might?
If so, would this shatter the
belief in the existence of Heaven?
Or would it be the very proof
mankind has been searching
for, for centuries?
Oaxaca, Mexico
Situated on a low mountain range
rising above the central plain
lie the ancient ruins of Monte Alban.
Here, around 100 BC, researchers
believe the Zapotec
Indians worshiped a
bloodthirsty Mayan god with the
body of a man and the head of a bat.
They called him Camozotz.
The iconography
is rather stricking,
the image of a half man half bat
A man with the head of a bat and
a wing like clogs spread out
with crosses and bones in a lining
The Zapotec people in the
Oaxaca area of Mexico believed
that winged creatures, bat- like
creatures come in the night
they will attack, they will drink blood
and disappear without ever being noticed.
This is simply a sort
of anthropomorphic bat,
which was worshiped by the
sacrifice of libations of blood
So what they did was they cut
themselves and poured it into a bowl
and offered it to the god.
Blood was a very important
substance to the Mayan.
That is what gave humans
life, blood and breath
was what the essence of life was.
That is where this k'uhul, this divine
essence resided in blood and in breath
When you would die, you entered into
the underworld, it was called Xibalba
Then if you defeated the lord
of the death, you would then
ascend into the heavens and become
one of the revered ancestors.
The blood is the thing that reconnects,
the world where we live in
with the world of the dead.
Some of the earliest
archaeological evidence shows
that blood rituals were present
as far back as we can search.
Legends and myths of
supernatural beings with
traits similar to vampires are a
part of nearly every ancient culture.
In Hindu folklore, for example,
the vetala was known as an evil
spirit that took demonic
possession of corpses.
The Indian goddess Kali was also
intimately linked with
blood sacrifices.
Kali becomes the destroyer,
and she is portrayed
as a hag-like woman with a
whole number of arms...
She is carrying a sword. She is the
goddess of death and destruction.
Her eyes are red and she
drips blood from her mouth.
She's known to take infants from
their crib and drink their blood.
In North America, early
Cherokees believed in a
bloodthirsty creature that
slaughtered humans, drank their
blood and ate their livers...
known as the U'tlun'ta.
This demon was said to possess
eternal life while
feeding on the living.
The notion of the thing
from the spirit world
traveling through the various
Indian nations was a great fear
among not only the Cherokee but
also the Sioux and Arapaho.
But who, or what, are
these mysterious creatures
and where did they come from?
Might they be, as ancient
astronaut theorists believe,
extraterrestrial beings
abandoned here on Earth?
In the ancient Jewish Talmud,
the Genesis story set in the
garden of Eden includes Adam and Eve,
but also a woman called Lilith.
In Jewish folklore, Lilith
was the first wife of Adam.
She was created from the same earth
as Adam, not from his rib as Eve was.
But she proved to be very
disobedient and uncontrollable
and had to be banished.
According to the Talmud,
when Lilith refused to
obey Adam, God sent three angels
to convince her to
submit to his authority.
But when Lilith refused for the
final time, God condemned her to
live on Earth for eternity.
In a sense, Lilith was the first
vampire to wander the Earth.
She shared all of the
characteristics of female vampires.
Lilith had the head and
breasts of a woman, the body
of a snake and the wings of a bird,
which is a terrifying creature.
In Jewish tradition, Lilith has
been a kind of a night demon
against whom intententions and
prayers have to be offered,
because she will come and snatch away
an infant sleeping in its crib
or at least snatch away its soul
and cause it to die.
But why are tales of
bloodsucking creatures so
prevalent throughout the ancient world?
And what is it about blood--
particularly human blood-- that
makes it such a vital ingredient
in vampire mythology?
Unlike the zombie, the
vampire are soulful corpse
They are corpse where the soul,
sort of refused to leave the body
Very often this is because this
person who died was just so bad
and so evil that they were able
to not go on to the other world
or to Heaven or even to
hell, as the case may be.
The vampire is not part of
this world and is not totally
part of the next world.
It is halted in its progression.
And that's why most vampire
legends and stories involve the
releasing of the soul of the
vampire so he can complete the
journey to the other side.
Might blood and the
unique chemistry of it,
serve as a kind of cosmic fuel?
One that connects the
living to the dead?
The human to the inhuman?
The earthly to the other-worldly?
The Mayan culture had
a fascinating ritual.
The high king would slice
himself in his male organ to
intentionally bleed, and have a
rather extensive bloodletting
which, of course, would
alter his brain chemistry.
This would lead to an altered
state and a vision which would
indicate the future
path for the nation.
Certainly on a death
state or an altered state
they had access to other worlds
so there was a universal belief
in contact with the stars
and the stars came down and
made us in the first place
and one day we would go back there
Blood is the life force of humans
and it was very important
to extraterrestrials too
there is something very
special about our blood
so we have to think that
if these blood sacrifices
aren't some distortions
of what was originally
just extraterrestrials showing us
important our blood was.
Might bloodletting both
the shedding and the
drinking of it, have been, as
some scholars suggest, a chance
to commune with the gods and a bid
to obtain godlike immortality?
Or did early humans simply
create myths and stories about
undead vampires and zombies as
a means of communicating their
ancestral connection to
extraterrestrial beings?
And if these beings actually
existed, might they not return?
Judgment day
The day of reckoning.
In Judeo-Christian and
Muslim traditions,
it is the day at the end of time,
when God will return
and descend upon Earth
to judge the living and the dead
according to the good and evil
of their earthly lives.
Consistent with the most
commonly held beliefs, God's
return will follow a sequence of
events including Armageddon and
the annihilation of all creatures,
the resurrection of the
dead and the reuniting
of all souls with their
physical bodies.
The day of reckoning
is when each men and women
is gonna be held accountable for
every word that they've said
for every action that they've done
Where god will judge the souls
of the living and the dead
for anything that have
done on this planet
The Jewish belief is that
except for pristine few
most souls will go into a
period of review, about a year
in which they go through their lives
and see the things they've done wrong
learn a thing or two, and then
go on to the world to come.
Now, the muslims or
Islam, everyone dies
and God raises them all back to life
and there is nothing but judgment
and the good Muslims will
be taken to paradise
and the bad ones will be
thrown into outer darkness.
Christians believe that Jesus
Christ is the Son of God,
and that he will return to
Earth on the day of reckoning
to pass judgment on all souls,
both living and dead.
It is also the reason why
Christians believe the human
body should be buried and
not cremated after death.
But could the tombs and graves
of the world really open one day
and the dead rise again?
According to
traditional Christian belief,
God creates a human being at
the moment of conception,
by infusing into the newly
formed embryo an immortal soul.
And that fusion of raw material
and soul is what makes
the human person.
That's why at the day of reckoning
there has to be the
resurrection of the dead,
so that humans are restored to their
original unity as body as soul combined.
This day of reckoning, we
will find the souls of the departed
will be reunited with their physical
body which will be raised from
the dead and reconstructed,
probably genetically, by God himself.
Ancient cultures throughout
time also believed
in the return of their gods
and a day of reckoning.
In ancient Mesoamerica, the
Aztecs believed in feathered
serpent gods that
created the universe,
who would return one day to
destroy evil and bring peace.
In Central
America, Quetzalcoatl
the feathered serpents
with this wisdom bringer
sometimes said to have come
down from the sky world
to spread this heavenly
knowledge and wisdom
and to bring salvation to the world.
Dating to 150 BC, the Dead
Sea Scrolls prophesize
that the Sons of Darkness will be
destroyed and the Sons of Light
will live in peace for all eternity.
And the concept of an omnipotent
god who will return on Judgment
Day also appears in one of the
so-called lost books of the Bible--
the Book of Enoch.
The Book of Enoch talks
about this great judgment
for the unrighteous.
That they will be judged with fire.
That the Son of man will come
with 10,000 fiery angels and
they will judge mankind.
After the final judgment, the
Bible says the new Heaven
is created, the new Earth is
created and the New Jerusalem
descends from Heaven
onto the new Earth.
The New Jerusalem is this
cubical city 1,500 miles long,
wide and high, made
of translucent gold.
Many people would theorize that
maybe it's some sort of
spaceship, some sort of UFO.
But could there be
an alien, or extraterrestrial,
origin to the biblical
stories of final judgment?
Might it be as astronaut
theorists contend,
the day when we are once again visited
by alien beings or
perhaps alien ancestors?
Some thousands of years ago
extraterrestrials were here.
They created first mankind
by an artificial mutation.
And now when they...
they return
have you done what we
were expecting for you
And the ones who understand
what happened in the past,
they will not be shocked, because they
knew and they expected all
the time what will happen.
In my mind, it's when
the extraterrestrials
genuinely return to our planet
and announce themselves
and at that point, the humans
who have achieved enlightenment
will join with their brothers,
the extraterrestrials.
Ancient astronauts braided us
and we'll all return to the stars.
Is it possible, as ancient
astronaut theorists propose,
that in the end we are destined
to encounter our alien origins,
and if so, is there really
truth to the notion
that our existence does
not end with death
And is there a world
between life and death?
One which leads to another,
perhaps, extraterrestrial plane?
April, 1983,
Carmel California.
Along a scenic coastal highway,
27-year-old Jessica Haynes was
sitting in the passenger seat of
a friend's car as they headed
north toward San Francisco.
So we got to in a drive
and the last thing I remember was
watch this.
Suddenly the driver lost
control and slammed into a tree.
Jessica's friend sustained only
minor injuries, but Jessica's
body was severely injured.
The next thing I remember
is that I was in an ambulance.
I could feel there was
something very wrong.
Nearly dead, Jessica
was rushed into surgery
where she had an
extraordinary experience.
In the evening, I felt
a presence enter the room.
It was a very loving presence.
There was a sense that I could
shift into a different dimension.
And in telepathy, the voice said,
"If you want to let
go, it will be okay."
I was aware that I would
be leaving my body.
And I said, "Yes."
I was instantly in another place.
I no longer had a body.
I was now a point of light.
After a while, as I'm
experiencing this and being
this, a light appeared.
And I pulled into the light like a
tractor beam and merged into it.
It was filled with thousands
and thousands and millions of
sparkling lights.
It was just beautiful.
And I thought, "I'm home, I'm home!"
There's a sense that Earth,
people, where I'd worked, things
that I'd done, became more
and more of an illusion.
And there are presences
on either side.
Very loving presences.
Not male, not female.
It was very much all energy.
And everything was simultaneous.
So looking at my life again,
I realized I want to get back.
Like thousands of other
near-death accounts,
Jessica's story featured elements
that were eerily consistent.
The bright white light, the
notion of a gateway or tunnel,
the presence of loved ones and a
feeling of peace and security.
It is uncanny that these people
all seem to talk about the same thing
This tunnel, this effect, this ability
to transfer from one point to the next
and they all seem to be
going down the same path
The more people know
about near-death experience
the more they realise a profound
evidence that underlies
that near-death experiences are real.
The Greek philosopher
Plato documented
the story of a soldier named Er,
who claimed that when slain in
battle, his soul went forth from
his body and journeyed with many gods
through a tunnel of light
to a mysterious place.
Er was shown by the gods that
good souls were sent up to Heaven
and were gloriously rewarded.
But the bad souls were sent
down to a realm where they were
first punished, then purified
and then finally resurrected.
What's interesting is that
not only he's seen
rewards and punishment
but seeing how it is that
souls are reincarnated.
This is what's really
radical about this.
It was totally new in the Greek world--
this conceiving of the
soul not only as immortal,
but reincarnated perpetually.
What's exciting is that
multiple lines of evidence are
pointing to the reality of a soul.
In other words, there does seem
to be that spiritual, unearthly,
non-physical part of us that
absolutely can transcend and
survive death and go on
and indeed live forever.
Might these often reported
near-death experiences
really be proof of an afterlife?
Proof that the is an eternal soul?
That virtue is ultimately rewarded
and evil eternally punished?
Or might these compelling
accounts provide evidence of
another, much more
extraterrestrial reality?
Based upon the communality
of this white light experience
it seems like what the
individual experiences
is simply moving from
one state to another
And as they do that, they will
move through something that
could be described
as like a wormhole.
A central tenet of the
Indian traditions of
Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism,
is expressed in an ancient
Tibetan text that advises the
living on how to prepare
for the after world.
The text suggests concentrating
one's mind on a wormhole through
which the soul can travel
to a cosmic universe.
If done successfully, the soul
is liberated from the
cycle of life and death.
If not, the soul is reincarnated
into the body of a newborn.
It's like we have an
instinctual knowledge
that with our death, our
passing from this existence
that we are going to this other world
At the point of death,
we could find ourselves
at the other end of the universe
When we die, most cultural
traditions talk about
traveling from this world to the
next or returning to
our original home.
We could look at it as the
possibility that all of these
places are simultaneously coexisting.
They would be different layers
of different dimensions
coexisting simultaneously
all together at once.
In the "Law of Biogenesis",
published in 1864,
the chemist and microbiologist
Louis Pasteur proclaimed that
life evolves from preexisting life,
not from inanimate material.
According to this landmark
theory, life is an unbroken
chain of living organisms that
go all the way back to the
origin of life in the universe.
If true, who, or what, is
the origin for human life?
All life on this planet
is interconnected, and
our own lives are connected back
to the primordial lives at the
very beginning of life on this planet.
Could the legends and myths
of life beyond death
that sprung from countless
civilizations over thousands of years
have been mere man-made fabrications,
or might the so-called
legends really be
truths that had been passed to our
ancestors by ancient astronauts?
Perhaps what awaits all humans
is not death, but a profound
knowledge, one that will reveal
the truth of our earthly and
other-worldly origins.
03x14 - Aliens and the Undead
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Explores the pseudoscientific hypothesis of ancient astronauts in a non-critical, documentary format.
Explores the pseudoscientific hypothesis of ancient astronauts in a non-critical, documentary format.