Ancient Aliens

A visionary scientist.

He provided the greatest leap

in human history.

A single-minded obsession.

We wanted to go to space

because he wanted to go to space.

And a mysterious past.

You have to wonder where this knowledge came from.

He developed the means to put a man on the moon,

but was Wernher Von Braun's passion fueled

by his own ambition?

Or might he have been influenced by otherworldly beings?

Wernher Von Braun was in touch with some sort

of extraterrestrial force

that is steering us even further out into space.

Since the dawn of civilization,

mankind has credited its origins to gods

and other visitors from the stars.

What if it were true?

Did extraterrestrial beings

really help to shape our history?

And if so,

might aliens have influenced Wernher Von Braun?

Huntsville, Alabama.

July 24, 1969.

A crowd of thousands gathers in Courthouse Square

to cheer on the triumphant return of Dr. Wernher Von Braun,

just hours after Apollo 11's Columbia Command Module

splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

The United States had achieved

what many believed was impossible:

Putting a man on the moon.

The picture ran in newspapers around America

the following day,

celebrating the genius rocket engineer who was behind it all.

Von Braun is a titan.

You know, he's one of the major figures of the last century.

And he was way ahead of his time.

Von Braun adamantly believed

that humanity's future was in space.

He's the greatest voice we've had

in the history of the space program.

Considered by NASA

to be the "Father of Rocket Science,"

Von Braun is credited with either inventing

or helping to develop many

of the most sophisticated aerial technologies that exist today,

like the supersonic anti-aircraft missile,

the ballistic missile,

the first American satellite,

and the first U.S. space vehicles,

including the enormous Saturn V rocket

that enabled man to reach the moon.

Without exaggeration, the Apollo program has been called

"the greatest achievement that mankind has ever accomplished."

Without Wernher Von Braun, we would have not reached the moon.

To date, the Saturn V is the most powerful rocket

that we've ever built.

Von Braun's incredible engineering feats were matched

only by his all-consuming crusade to send man into space.

In the 1950s, when space travel seemed a fantasy,

Wernher Von Braun teamed up with Walt Disney

to convince a skeptical public

that putting man on the moon was not only possible,

but that it would happen in their lifetimes.

In these films,

watched by an estimated 42 million people,

Von Braun boldly predicted

not only how we would send men into space,

but also the use of protective suits,

lunar landing vehicles, orbiting space stations,

and even manned trips to Mars.

If we were to start today

on an organized and well-supported space program,

I believe a practical passenger rocket

could be built and tested within ten years.

But who exactly was this engineering genius

with such extraordinary visions for the future?

Why did he believe so strongly

that man could and should travel into space?

And what did he expect to find when we got there?

Wernher Von Braun was born March 23, 1912,

in a small town in Eastern Prussia.

The second of three sons,

Wernher grew up a child of wealth and privilege.

But while he was born into an accomplished family,

Wernher's keen intellect and unusual passions stood out.

His father once said,

"I don't know where his talent comes from,"

and stated on more than one occasion

that he considered his son a mystery.

Wernher Von Braun was multitalented.

Both sides of his brain were working.

He could think about technical things

and imagine rocketry and space travel,

but he was an accomplished musician.

And these traits manifested very early.

I think his parents knew by the time he was four or five

that he was very special.

His mother gave him a telescope when he was young,

and he looked at the moon and said, "I want to go there."

I want to build the machine that will go to the moon."

And of course he did half a century later.

Wernher Von Braun grew up in a time

when German science fiction authors focused

on science utopian novels

that often featured an idealized German engineer

who solves the world's problems through science and technology.

Movies such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis

and Woman in the Moon also stirred the public's imagination

and no doubt had a powerful influence on Von Braun.

For a young man growing up in the 1920s and '30s,

space travel was considered too fantastic and far-fetched

to ever be possible.

And although the Wright brothers had achieved

the first powered flight in 1903,

the horse and buggy was still

a widely used mode of transportation.

The achievement of putting a man on the moon

is something that was at the time really almost impossible

and almost unthinkable.

Wernher Von Braun was obsessed with going to the moon

and going to Mars from the time he was a little boy.

And that was his destiny.

In his teens,

Von Braun wrote papers on orbital flight,

and by the incredibly young age of 20,

he was named the head of Germany's rocket program

by army artillery officer Captain Walter Dornberger.

Dornberger would later write in his 1952 book,

V-2, the Firing into Space,

that he was deeply impressed by the young Von Braun's energy,

shrewdness and astonishing theoretical knowledge.

When he worked towards one of his goals,

he would apply himself

and master a subject in very short order.

He'd been trained as an engineer,

and doing a PhD in physics is not trivial.

And he got his PhD at an age

when most German students were still undergraduates.

But how is it that Wernher Von Braun...

Whose contemporaries included such scientific geniuses

as Nikola Tesla,

Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein...

Was so far ahead of everyone when it came to rocketry?

And what was behind his obsession

to travel to the stars?

Some ancient astronaut theorists believe

that the boy genius may have been guided

by otherworldly forces.

Maybe he drew his inspiration from science fiction.

Maybe it came from his... his own imagination and vision

of what the future should be.

Or maybe it was inspired by something extraterrestrial.

Some sort of extraterrestrial contact

might have happened with Wernher Von Braun.

Something or someone might have reached him and saw

where we needed to go as a civilization,

and gave him the tools and the insights

that he needed to be able

to build our way out into space.

Some have suggested that people

like Albert Einstein, Tesla, that they've had

this extraterrestrial intervention;

That they have had access

to this abundance of knowledge.

And the question has arisen...

Did Wernher Von Braun? Was he also one of them?

Because the vision he had, the ideas

were incredible for their time.

Might extraterrestrials

have chosen Wernher Von Braun

to propel mankind to the moon and beyond,

as some ancient astronaut theorists propose?

Perhaps further clues can be found

by examining Von Braun's connection

to a mysterious Nazi institution

known as the Ahnenerbe.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler

rose to power and began consolidating.

Germany's military, political

and economic institutions under the control

of his Nazi Party apparatus.

For years, Wernher Von Braun avoided

becoming a member of the Nazi Party,

but on November 12, 1937,

he was commanded to join and did so.

To hear him tell it, he was, uh, had no choice.

That he... it was either do that

or, um, face the same fate

as everyone else who disobeyed the Nazis...

Certain death.

Von Braun didn't think the Nazi movement was the way to go,

but it was a means to an end to develop his rockets.

In 1944,

with the help of additional funding

from the German government,

Von Braun launched the 45-foot,

27,000-pound A-4,

later rechristened the V-2,