Ancient Aliens

He was an artist

whose paintings have become priceless masterpieces.

Leonardo produced some of the world's

most recognizable paintings...

The Mona Lisa, the Last Supper,

the Lady with an Ermine.

He was a genius

whose inventions were centuries ahead of their time.

He drew construction plans

for tanks, for helicopters,

all sorts of wild things that came into reality

during our lifetime, right now.

But there are those who believe

that Leonardo da Vinci was inspired

by an extraterrestrial intelligence,

that his paintings are embedded with secret knowledge

and contain codes which, when deciphered,

will provide the keys to unlocking the universe.

I think da Vinci is trying to tell us

that there's a higher intelligence

that operates in our world.

And so, ladies and gentlemen,

we move to the Leonardo da Vinci, the Salvator Mundi,

the masterpiece by Leonardo of Christ the Savior,

previously in the collections of three kings of England.

New York City.

November 15, 2017.

$370 million. Back to Francoise's clients...

at $370 million dollars, ladies and gentlemen.

400.

$400 million!

At a Christie's auction at Rockefeller Center,

Leonardo da Vinci's newly authenticated painting

Salvator Mundi

sells for a record-breaking $400 million.

- Sold. - The buyer is a Saudi prince,

representing the new Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi.

But why was a member of the Saudi royal family...

Or anyone... so willing to pay such an incredible price

for a work of art?

Leonardo da Vinci has captured the fascination

of so many people.

I really believe he was way ahead of his time.

But if Leonardo were alive today and realized

how much his paintings would go for, he'd go crazy.

It's a lot of money for a painting.

You ask yourself if there's another possibility.

There are those who believe that the Salvator Mundi

is much more than a priceless piece of Renaissance art.

They believe, when considered in context

with other examples of da Vinci's paintings,

that it contains a piece of a giant puzzle,

one that, when put together,

could reveal the secrets of the universe.

April 15, 1452.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci,

the illegitimate child

of a nobleman and his maid, is born in Vinci, Italy.

If you were not entitled to take your father's name,

your last name just became the town you came from.

This probably aided his development.

The fact that he didn't belong

also meant that he wasn't caught up

in the official version of reality.

He was free enough to have his own ideas.

When he was a teenager,

Leonardo settled in nearby Florence.

At that time, the city was a cultural mecca,

the beating heart of a classical revival

known as the Renaissance.

The Renaissance is a resurgence

of new ideas and approaches and interests

in not only antiquity

but in the reinterpretation of the human condition.

It reinvents, really, the culture of the time.

Leonardo received an informal education

in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter

Andrea del Verrocchio,

but was also largely self-taught.

Despite this... Or perhaps because of it...

He excelled at a staggering range of disciplines.

Da Vinci was way ahead of his time

during the period in which he lived.

He drew construction plans for tanks...

for helicopters, all sorts of wild things

that came into reality

during our lifetime, right now.

In March 2018,

author and ancient astronaut theorist William Henry

traveled to Florence to learn more

about the Renaissance master.

He was also eager to find out, firsthand,

if there was any truth to the theory

that da Vinci hid secret messages in his paintings.

At the Piazzale Michelangelo, overlooking the city,

Henry met with Dr. Michael Kwakkelstein,

who has made it his life's work to discover

everything there is to know about Leonardo da Vinci.

I'm so excited to be here in Florence, home of Leonardo.

Yeah, you look around, you start to see

that these are what you see in Leonardo's paintings.

Absolutely. He took his inspiration

just from those hills, those trees.

500 years ago, Florence was, of course, a much smaller city.

- Right. - So just crossing the Arno

over there, you see the Ponte Vecchio,

Yes. -Leonardo would find himself amidst nature

to study the fall of water or the movement of water,

- to study birds. - Leonardo created

just a prodigious volume of...

an explosion, really, of creativity.

What do we have left of his legacy?

Do we have a lot? A little?

Well, we have a dozen paintings.

Some of these paintings are unfinished.

Some of these paintings are in a bad state.

Uh, but we have his notebooks,

his manuscripts... It's like a map

- of his mind, all these writings. - Wow.

You've personally been able to explore those notebooks

- and spent your life... - I'm still working on it.

It's a life work.

But while Leonardo's genius

was highly regarded in his lifetime,

he was also highly scrutinized by the Roman Catholic Church,

which remained a powerful political force

throughout Italy and much of the world.

During the Renaissance, there was a rediscovery

of ancient classical documents that were stored in monasteries

after the dissolution of the Roman Empire.

Because of these new discoveries,

new ideas were circulating,

ideas from great minds like Plato,

Aristotle and Galen from the ancient world.

But these great ideas

often did not combine well with Christianity,

and Leonardo is someone who represents a point of conflict.

It is this ancient knowledge

that has led many scholars and ancient astronaut theorists

to suggest that da Vinci, while Christian,

was also open to a wide range of spiritual philosophies.

Philosophies which, if revealed,

would have placed him in opposition

to the strict teachings of the Catholic Church,

and would have caused him to be publicly shunned as a heretic.

It's almost certain

that Leonardo had access to secret knowledge.

Leonardo was actually not, as a lot of people think today,

some kind of atheist.

Leonardo was a heretic.

He passionately believed

in something that was outside of the mainstream religion,

and therefore very dangerous.

Florence, Italy. 2002.

Using infrared diagnostic techniques,

Dr. Maurizio Seracini uncovers the underdrawing,

or preliminary sketch,

done by Leonardo da Vinci for his unfinished painting

Adoration of the Magi.

Commissioned in 1481,

the work depicts the biblical story

of the three wise men visiting the infant Jesus in Bethlehem.

But by viewing the painting with this new technology,

it becomes apparent that Leonardo's original sketch

actually included many more details

than those that could be seen with just the naked eye.

The first time I aimed the camera,

the infrared camera, to the, uh, to the Adoration,

uh... I felt very privileged.

Because for the first time in 500 years,

I managed to see probably the best creativity effort

of Leonardo on a work of art.

And science can help you to go back,

like if you were in a time machine,

and I saw dozens of figures...

Fighting horses, uh... nature, architecture.

And now my eyes alone could not see them,

because they were covered

by a brownish monochrome layer of paint...

that later I understood

was not applied by Leonardo.

In the background of the top left,

you could see a couple of people

sitting in despair on stairs of a temple in ruins.

Well, aiming the camera at the scene,

then suddenly a completely different view came out.

The detail that was painted over

was a scene of a pagan temple

that was rising up through the ruins of a Christian church.

And this was considered problematic

during the Renaissance period with Christianity

as the one and only true religion.

Upon close examination of da Vinci's original sketch,

instead of a temple in ruins,

the artist seemed to be depicting a scenario

in which an Egyptian temple is being rebuilt.

Most notable is the fact that one of the temple columns

is capped by a lotus flower, which in ancient Egypt

represented the so-called, "Flower of Life."

The Flower of Life is the information