Ancient Aliens

Cultural artifacts...

obliterated.

It is absolutely barbaric!

They're destroying our cultural heritage.

Irreplaceable texts reduced to smoldering ash.

It's as if the roots of human civilization itself

are being hidden from us.

And sacred lands

looted under the cover of darkness.

Armed men spent three days digging

and left with something in tow.

What exactly it was, nobody knows.

Throughout history, mankind's most ancient

and sacred sites have been

plagued by conflict and warfare.

But could this constant turmoil

really be part of an otherworldly agenda?

Could an extraterrestrial intelligence

be deliberately thwarting

any effort for itself to be discovered

from the ancient records?

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 the most compelling evidence

lie hidden in forbidden zones?

Northern Iraq.

20 miles south of Mosul lies

the ancient Assyrian capital city of Nimrud.

Built over 3,000 years ago

in the 13th century B.C.,

the site is an archaeological treasure trove.

Among the antiquities found here

are monumental statues

of winged lions with human-heads,

and massive relief carvings

depicting the ancient gods of Mesopotamia.

But on March 6, 2015,

militants from the Islamic State

stormed the ancient site,

violently destroying

everything in their path.

After obliterating irreplaceable relics,

they wired the entire site with explosives

and leveled it completely...

forever wiping it from the face of the Earth.

This group seems to be more destructive

than just about anything people can recall in history.

It's almost as if we're being orphaned from our past.

We are having our parentage,

our ancestors, cut off from us;

The record of them.

It is absolutely barbaric what is going on currently

in the Middle East

with some factions going deliberately

to ancient sites

and just eradicating

our cultural heritage.

This volatile region

is widely considered

to have been the cradle of civilization.

And its archaeological destruction

could mean the loss of information about mankind's

historical past.

Iraq, Syria... What we call the Middle East,

uh, or the Near East, uh,

is called the cradle of civilization for a reason.

Anthropologically,

this appears to be the place

where the first humans arose.

This is where people came from.

And all of the earliest civilizations,

cities, governments,

come from this region.

In the 21st Century,

the violence and destruction

have reached an unprecedented level,

but the Middle East has been embroiled

in conflict for thousands of years.

The Islamic state today is doing what the Taliban did before,

which is doing what Byzantine Christians and Jews

before them have all done.

They don't want any graven images.

So because of their religious beliefs,

they are basically destroying

our own cultural heritage for religious purposes.

And like human lives,

many of these you can't get back.

Since 1990,

the Middle East has seen the destruction

of cultural heritage on an unprecedented scale.

A scale not seen since the Christian vandalism

that began during the Roman Empire.

Over 700,000 archaeological,

cultural and religious artifacts

have been stolen or destroyed.

And over 200 significant historical sites

have been completely left in ruins.

The Middle East seems to be

in an almost permanent state of instability.

Is this deliberate?

Is someone keeping it that way?

Maybe to prevent us from discovering something?

Is there something

that would fundamentally change our understanding

of who we are and where we come from?

It is absolutely horrifying

to see the erasing of our history.

And what's worse all of these ancient sites

are one giant piece of the puzzle

that we might have been visited

in the past by extraterrestrials.

For thousands of years,

northern Africa,

the Middle East and India

have been in an almost constant state of unrest.

But also in Southeast Asia,

the regions of Kashmir and Tibet

are considered among the most disputed territories

in the world.

And halfway across the globe,

the northern triangle of Central America...

Which includes Guatemala,

El Salvador and Honduras...

Has been declared the deadliest region

on Earth

outside of active war zones.

Could there be a reason that these specific areas

experience so much chaos?

It might be that on such places,

the extraterrestrials descended some thousands of years ago,

on such places, they have, uh, hidden something.

There could be

something special about the sites.

These are areas that are so important

to the things that have happened on this planet.

And, I still think that the knowledge,

and the success of where we go as people

on planet Earth

is directly related to those areas.

Is it possible that there is

an otherworldly connection

between certain areas of global conflict

and places of significant archaeological importance?

Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest

there could very well be so-called

forbidden zones on planet Earth...

Areas that extraterrestrial entities

want to keep humans from exploring?

But if so, why?

Perhaps further clues can be found

by examining a conflict

in another volatile region,

where some of mankind's greatest treasures are being looted

from beneath the desert sands.

Cairo, Egypt.

2011.

In what has come to be known as the Arab Spring,

riots break out throughout Egypt.

Protesters demand the resignation

of President Hosni Mubarak.

With the media and law enforcement

focused on the demonstrations,

looters gain greater freedom

to pillage Egypt's ancient sites

and artifacts.

For many people,

getting rid of Mubarak was just a license

to profit from the new situation.

They would loot archaeological sites.

They were suddenly free of the dictator

and a lot of them went crazy.

During the Arab Spring, insiders told me

that trucks loaded with deep digging equipment

accompanied by armored vehicles and armed men,

spent three days digging in the sands outside Cairo

and left with something in tow.

What exactly it was, nobody knows.

Guards were powerless to do anything to stop it.

This created a huge amount of havoc,

just because of the lack of security

and the intentions of certain people

to steal Egyptian antiquities.

You can tell from the satellite imagery

the increase in different holes in the ground,

you know, looters' pits that they've dug.

This is the site of Dahshur.

This picture was taken in 2010.

But when you look at this one over here,

I think this was taken in 2013,

the difference between the two is pretty amazing.

Look at all these pits that were dug by looters.

When it comes to Egypt,

everyone's familiar with the pyramids,

but really that's only a tiny part

of what survives of that ancient