Ancient Aliens

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For centuries, Native Americans have kept alive

some of the oldest traditions on Earth.

Through oral history and sacred sites,

the story is told to Indigenous people for thousands of years.

Their incredible history is carved into the landscape.

This is sensational. Look at that guy right there.

They represent those gods that came to Earth.

And their sacred rituals display a reverence for the land

and for the ancestors from the stars.

They're the keepers of the upper world, which means space.

We don't use the word "gods."

We use the word "creator."

Do the stories of America's Indigenous people

reveal a long history of contact with otherworldly visitors?

All Native American tribes have oral histories

that people came from the stars to visit them.

I know they're out there.

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.

Collinsville, Illinois.

15 miles east of St. Louis.

Towering over the flat local terrain is Monks Mound,

the remains of a massive earthen pyramid.

Built more than 1,000 years ago, it was the centerpiece

of the ancient Native American city of Cahokia.

Monks Mound is the largest building

of the ancient North America north of Mexico.

It was called that

because Trappist French monks lived nearby it.

It stands 100 feet tall today.

It was probably taller in its heyday.

It comprises of about 22 million cubic feet of dirt,

which was millions and millions

of buckets of dirt brought one at a time.

Its circumference on the bottom is larger

than the Temple of the Sun just north of Mexico City.

Monks Mound and other ancient ruins across the Americas

offer clues about how Native people once lived

in vast, thriving communities.

Yet very little is known about the inhabitants of Cahokia

and many Native cultures

since most of their history and traditions

were passed down orally rather than through written records.

The Native Americans traditionally use

a oral tradition.

Everything is spoken.

The oral traditions actually go back thousands of years.

It's just the way it was.

And we've maintained that tradition even to this day.

It is unknown what the Native Americans

who inhabited Cahokia called themselves.

Anthropologists refer to them as the Mississippians,

a name used to describe a wide variety of Native peoples

that lived east of the Mississippi in North America.

And although much about Cahokia remains a mystery,

what is known is that it thrived

centuries before Europeans ever stepped foot in the Americas,

as did countless other cities.

Around 1050,

the city swells to a population of 15,000,

and including the satellite communities around it,

almost 30,000.

There were a number of these cities

all around the eastern part of what's now the United States.

The general picture of Native America before European contact

is that it's some sort of just nomadic life,

that they were living in small bands and camps.

The truth is that there were thousands of people

living in the same place,

very much the way the Europeans were.

Across North America,

vast differences existed between the Native peoples

in terms of language, customs and cultural practices.

Yet many tribes shared the tradition

of worshipping a powerful being known as the Bird Man.

When excavations were performed at Cahokia in the 20th century,

this motif was found to be abundant.

The most remarkable example

was connected to the burial of a man believed to have been

an early Cahokian ruler.

His body had been placed on an elevated platform

covered by a bed of more than 20,000 marine shell disc beads

arranged in the shape of a falcon,

with the bird's head appearing beneath

and beside the man's head

and its wings and tail beneath his arms and legs.

The Bird Man of Cahokia is a burial

that was found under a mound in the center of the city.

And it's called the Bird Man

because there's this arrangement of shells

that appear to be in the shape of a bird.

And it makes sense because we know that the Mississippians

had a supernatural being who may or may not be a god.

But he's a very powerful creature

that lives up in the sky.

We see depictions on also stone tablets.

Native people believed in the power deity called the Bird Man.

There are a number of depictions in the remains

of these cultures of this powerful creature

who could fly and could move among the different realms

and was essentially the ruling, uh, god of this reality.

Various descriptions of the Bird Man

can be found from one tradition to the next,

and some also feature a similar celestial being

called the thunderbird.

The thunderbird, uh, in Zuni

is described as a being that came from the sky

that could create lightning.

It could create a lot of noise.

And it was represented

as a being with wings made out of knives.

Now, the thunderbird could have been a vehicle.

But way back then, the Indians had no other reference.

- So they just said... - it is a bird.

One could argue that this is a representation

of misunderstood technology

that could illustrate some type of a flying craft.

Because if you don't have the terminology for a plane,

well, of course you're gonna call it a bird.

I mean, pilots even today call their planes birds.

The Mound Builders, I believe, were those Indian tribes

that had contact with the extraterrestrials,

the teachers.

The star ancestors taught the American Indians

about where they came from,

their different star system, constellations,

and how they're supposed to carry out their rituals,

by referring to their star system,

whether it be Pleiades,

whether it be the Milky Way,

whether it be the Big Dipper.

We don't use the word "gods."

We use the word "creator."

He who has no name and has all the names.

He's the eye that oversees everybody.

The creation story, if you understand it correctly,

we are all from the cosmos.

Our ancestors were extraterrestrial.

The story is told to Indigenous people

for thousands of years

through oral history

and through the petroglyphs and pictographs

and the sacred sites that continue to be part

of our Native cultural traditions.

In talking about star people,

all Native American tribes have these, uh, traditional

oral histories that people came from the stars to visit them.

And it's universal, all across the United States,

that these gods, as we call them today,

came to Earth and visited to provide knowledge.

The Cherokee talked about, uh, the star seeds

and the people coming from the sky.

The Zunis and the Hopis talk about the star people coming,

and the Mississippi mound people had the Bird Man culture.

So, here we have these cultures,

and their legends and lores are about

star ancestors coming down,

giving them information, showing them science and medicine.

Native American people have been very clear

when they speak of celestial beings that imparted knowledge.

And if you compare that to the ancient astronaut theory,

that's exactly what it talks about,

that the knowledge was imparted by beings who visited us.

Could the stories of the Bird Men and star people

provide an oral history of alien visitation

among early Native American tribes?

Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,

and propose that, while the Indigenous communities

kept no written records,

a historical account of exactly what they encountered

can be found carved into the landscape

at an ancient petroglyph site in Arizona.

In the American Southwest

is a region known as the Four Corners,

where the boundaries of Arizona, New Mexico,

Colorado and Utah meet.

Most of this region belongs

to semiautonomous Native American nations,

including the Navajo,

Hopi, Zuni,

Ute and dozens of other Native American peoples.

They are all thought to be descendants

of people frequently called the Ancestral Pueblo, or Anasazi.

The Anasazi, or the old ones,

as we like to refer to them,

were here in the Four Corners region,

uh, for thousands of years.

And they suddenly, around 1070 AD, just up and disappear.

Their cities are abandoned,

their structures, everything.

Pottery is left.

They don't know what happened to them.