Alien tech - Shofars, turtles and death rays

June 14, 2022 by Fredrik

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Is the story of powerful tones from a ramshorn evidence of ancient LDAR technology?

Do stories from the Guatemalan jungles about flying turtles prove aliens did visit the classical mayan?

Did Alexander the Great meet his greatest defeat against an extraterrestrial airattack?

Our host Fredrik continues the mission to discover what is genuine, fake, and somewhere in between on the TV-show Ancient Aliens. In this episode we will break down episode six from season two (Ancient Aliens S02E06) called “Alien Tech”. It originally aired in December 2010.

This will be an episode full of information and research. I’ve found a lot of interesting things among turtles, aliens and laser guns. This will be quite the ride so stay tuned.

I’ve also wanted to plug my appearance on friend of the show Erik McLarens “Religion Wars”. You should definitely check that out, a link will be in the description to this show. Otherwise you will find it everywhere you usually find your podcasts.

You can read the full transcript of the episode by either pressing the different topics or scroll down below the sources. 

Sources, resources and further reading suggestions

‘I beat pirates with a hose and sonic cannon’. (2007). news.bbc.co.uk. [online] 17 May. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6664677.stm#graphic

audiologist.org. (n.d.). Crowd Control with Long Range Acoustic Devices Can Cause Permanent Hearing Loss. [online] Available at: https://audiologist.org/item/crowd-control-with-long-range-acoustic-devices-can-cause-permanent-hearing-loss

Staab W. (2016). An Upper Limit to Sound? [online] Available at: https://hearinghealthmatters.org/waynesworld/2016/an-upper-limit-to-sound/

biblegateway.com. Joshua 6 NIV - - Bible Gateway. [online] Available at: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua%206&version=NIV .

French, Elizabeth Bayard (2002). Mycenae: Agamemnon's Capital. Stroud: Tempus

Neer, R.T. (2019). Art & archaeology of the Greek world : a new history, c. 2500-c. 150 BCE. London: Thames And Hudson.

Pline L'ancien, Rackham, H., Henry, W. and Eichholz, D.E. (2012). Pliny natural history. London: Folio Society.

ZME Science. (2015). Troll A - The tallest moved structure in the world. [online] Available at: https://www.zmescience.com/other/offbeat-other/tallest-structure/

Goldbaum, H. (2010). Stonehenge. [online] Available at: https://voicesfromthedawn.com/stonehenge/. 

Thompson, A. (1999). History of the Kings of Britain translated by. [online] Available at: https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/geoffrey_thompson.pdf .

Wight, C. (n.d.). Image of an item from the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. [online] www.bl.uk. Available at: https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=11717

Nash, D. J., Ciborowski, T., Ullyott, J. S., Pearson, M. P., Darvill, T., Greaney, S., Maniatis, G., & Whitaker, K. A. (2020). Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge. Science advances, 6(31), eabc0133. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abc0133

Dunning, B. (2015). The Flying Saucer Menace. [online] Available at: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4486

Aramean Queen(?) and servant funerary stele 8th century BCE (Berlin VA 2995) Pergamon Museum, Berlin

Zender, M. (2005) Teasing the Turtle from its Shell: AHK and MAHK in Maya

Writing. The PARI Journal 6(3):1-14 Avalible at: https://www.mesoweb.com/pari/publications/journal/603/Turtle_e.pdf

Deliyannis, Y. (2009). Did Alexander the Great really see UFOs? Chronicon Mirabilium. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/14398636/Did_Alexander_the_Great_really_see_UFOs_

biblegateway.com. (n.d.). Daniel 3:8-25 ESV - - Bible Gateway. [online] Available at: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel%203:8-25&version=ESV

MIT (2006). 2.009 Product Engineering Processes: Archimedes. [online] Available at: http://web.mit.edu/2.009_gallery/www/2005_other/archimedes/10_ArchimedesResult.html

Lundell, C. (1934). RUINS OF POLOL AND OTHER ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PETEN, GUATEMALA. [online] Available at: https://www.mesoweb.com/publications/CAA/CAA08.pdf

Museum of the Ancient Greek Technology. [online] Available at: https://kotsanas.com/gb/index.php

Music

“Now we ride” by Alexander Nakarada (serpentsoundstudios.com) 

Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License 

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

“Folie hatt” by Trallskruv

Hi, hello and välkommen to digging up ancient aliens. This is the podcast where we examine the TV-show Ancient Aliens. Do their claims hold water to an archeologist or are there better explanations out there? 

I am your host Fredrik and this is episode 17 and we are going to discuss episode six of season two (Ancient Aliens S02E06). It’s named Alien Tech and was aired on December 2, 2010. We are up for quite the adventure this time around. This episode is quite scattered, we will discuss pirates, turtles, Alexander the great and Merlin. We will dig down on these and a few more new claims. I’ve managed to uncover some interesting real background to quite a lot of these claims so sit down, relax and let’s enjoy some Alien technology. But first a few things.

Remember that you can find sources, resources and reading suggestions on our website, diggingupancientaliens.com. There you also find contact info if you notice any mistakes or have any suggestions. And if  you like the podcast I would really appreciate it if you left one of those fancy five star reviews that I’ve heard so much about. 

I’ve also wanted to plug my appearance on friend of the show Erik McLarens “Religion Wars”. You should definitely check that out, a link will be in the description to this show . Otherwise you will find it everywhere you usually find your podcasts.

Enough of me jammering let’s see what mysteries these locations might hold.

From the show's intro we get the feeling the show will mostly be about weaponry but we will get a lot more than that. But to be honest I thought that this episode would be different and focus more on building techniques. I still remember those giant buzzsaws from episode one. 

LDAR

But after the intro we open up on pirates! [Pirate noises] We’re taken outside Somalia back on November 5th 2005, at 5:50 in the morning the ship Seabourn Spirit (today named Star Breeze) was attacked. The pirates attacked the ship both with RPG rockets and machine gun fire. Seabourn Spirit was not captured and the show thanked LRAD for this. 

LRAD stands for Longe-range acoustic device and is a technology that can be used for many things. An acoustic hailing device, basically a long range megaphone. It can be used as a “sonic weapon” in quotations, we will talk about that some more in a bit. But also as an emergency broadcaster and to scare birds and other wildlife away from airport runways.

But in the show we focus on the sonic weapon part. In this mode we send a sonic wave toward a target, this beam is quite focused and can reach up to 160 decibels. But if you’re some 40 degrees to its side the volume will be 40 decibels lower and if you stand right behind the volume is 60 decibels lower. So safer but not safe without hearing protections. 

But yes, the Seabourn spirit did fend off the attack thanks to Michael Groves and Som Bahadur Gurung who with the LDAR and high pressure hoses fended off the pirates.

The use of LDAR has today increased and with it also the criticism of it. Due to the high output it can create permanent hearing loss and damage in people in its way. But also to people in its vicinity, as I noted a moment ago just because you’re not in its path it does not mean it’s safe. So valid criticism has come up against the use of LDAR as crowd control.

Battle of Jericho 

But from here we make a hope and a skip over to the middle east and the city of Jericho. Or Tell es-Sultan as it’s known today has been a site where people have lived for centuries. The Naftian culture did stay at the site back in 10 000 BCE, so there’s a lot of history here. The walls were erected at the earliest during the Pre-pottery neolithic phase A and even this early the walls seems to have been up toward 3,6 meter (12 feet) high and 1,8 meter (6 feet) wide. There’s a lot of interesting things we could spend our time talking about but you might have guessed that we’re here due to the battle of Jericho. 

The show then goes on to retell the story about the battle of Jericho almost as it’s presented in Joshua 6:1-22. We will in good Ancient Alien spirit hear this story a few times, Wilcock for one just repeat it with similar words but just agreeing with the narrator. They are though only focused on the ark and the ramshorn. But we then take a quick turn to a strange claim because the narrator says

“according to scientists the walls fell due to an earthquake”. So far I’ve not been able to tell where this claim even comes from, could be just someone they asked “what could have caused the walls to fall over”. 

Sure the town did burn and was raised in the 1500 BCE and was abandoned until 900 BCE, but it was not an earthquake that caused this. More likely an army, but the walls seem to not have been pulled down flat here either. I assume it’s a little thing to make their claims sound more likely.

But we then have Jonathan Young come in and tell the story yet again to fill us up on some time retelling the story. And let’s have a quick recap if you dear listener don’t remember it either. 

Then the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the army will go up, everyone straight in.”

So Joshua then goes and tells this to his people and follows the instructions as given. So when the day come on the seventh day it went:

When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

Note here that god told Johua to shout and blow the horns, one of them was not enough. 

But after Jonathan Young's third retelling of the story David Childress came in asking

“So, what kind of technology were they using? It sounds utterly fantastic to us that they could have had some kind of advanced alien technology. It’s clearly what they’re describing.” 

To me it sounds as people following god's commands and due to follow them as told god tears down the walls instead of punishing the Isrealites. The book of Joshua isn’t really to be taken as historical fact, historians and even religious scholars agree there’s little of historical value here. The main idea with the book is to teach the importance of following the law in the book of Deuteronomy and the ten commandments. If you read the full book you’ll notice the emphasis of obedience to god and the law. It came to be associated with Israeli nationalism later on of course but that was not the initial idea.

But we get to meet a new face in the Ancient Alien world. Professor Tudor Parfitt (Jewish Studies, Univ. of London) who is making some strange claims for his speciality. But for having released a book called The Lost Ark of the Covenant two years earlier in which he claims to have found the ark of the covenant maybe explains a little bit more. I’m also going to defend him a little here, in the book he does speak of the ark almost as a metaforic weapon. On page 42 for example he wrote 

“This was strange, I thought, as I gazed out at night. The Ark at some level was the secret weapon of the ancient Israelites. It meted out death, yet it breathed life into everything. These properties seemed to carry a powerful mystical message.”

Parfitt claims that the Ark was/is stored at the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe. Me and many others are skeptical and so far I’ve not found that he has made a good scientific claim for it. But as with other things we will see and now when we have digressed a little let’s continue with these walls.

The show here mostly talks about the connection between LDAR, a sound being made and the walls falling down. Calling it extremely good evidence and 

 “What’s interesting about the battle of Jericho is that this particular use of the Shofar clearly seems to be the same thing that we’re seeing with particle beam technology, death ray technology, thunderbolt technology. It very clearly seems that once again we have an extraterrestrial technology that the ancient people had at the ready that they could use when needed for military campaigns.” 

When it’s only used once in the bible and not again. Also I see a couple of issues firstly is that it does not really make sense that a sound would knock down walls. Sure, if you try hard enough you can break a glass that’s close enough to a speaker with a 100 decibel output. But you need to be quite close and loud. But since we don’t have buildings collapsing during concerts or nightclubs with exploding drink glasses you can guess that it takes quite a lot to achieve this. 

Then we’re also limited by living on earth where our pesky atmosphere prevents us from cranking the volume up to 11. So the theoretical maximum decibel is 192, can something be louder? Well sure, but then  it stops being a sound and starts being a shockwave. Without extreme ear protection you would also have lost your hearing even standing behind the device. 

But if the destruction would have happened it would have to be done with a blast or shockwave, but again we are talking about rather large forces that do not match with the description in the source. In the bible we learned that only the wall fell and the Isrealites killed the city by hand down to the last donkey.

We then meet professor Taylor Wang who is also a new face for the series and Michel Dennin who both give a sciency sounding explanation. But it more or less boils down to if you have found the right frequency and have an apparatus you can feed unlimited power it would be possible to destroy the walls. But again we’re left with a few what ifs and cherry picking. If the force is strong enough to bring down the walls it would destroy more of the town. 

But we’re going to leave Jericho and shofars to talk about something different. Would it be possible to move things with the help of sound? Could the ancient cultures have had access to levitation machines that used sound and could these help explain the mammoth stone structures that have “baffled” modern scientists for centuries (but not really)? 

Sound Construction

Cyclopean walls

With this transition we’re taken to the north eastern Peloponnese and the ancient city of Mycenae. Here the show starts to talk about the fortifications and the walls of this beautiful site. Mycenae should not be confused with the site with the same name on Crete and has been occupied since at least neolithic times. 

The show will focus mainly on the wall but due to the long occupation period of the site we can expect that there’s been quite some remodeling done on the site. The thing the show will focus on most is the “Cyclopean walls”. It is true that the site contains a style of architecture that’s known as Cyclopean, the name comes from Pliny the Elder's book Natural History where Pliny claims the name comes from Aristoteles. 

Example of cyclopean architecture with the lion gate in center
Example of Cyclopean architecture, the Lion Gate pictured in center. Picture by George E. Koronaios

The walls with this type of design were built in the Late Helladic III period around 1300 BCE. The design is most likely inspired from the Hittites, we have to remember that the world was not as isolated as the show wants us to believe. Or want us to believe when it fits them. But the mediterranean has for a long time had a tradition of trade and sailing, in connection to one of the palaces that have the Cyclopean architecture we’ve found a scarab from Queen Tie who was the wife of Amenhotep III.

But according to Pliny the name comes from the fact that the stone is too big for one man to lift. Therefore it might, according to Pliny who wrote this in 74 CE, been Cyclops who built this. The show of course latches on to this narrative and we will talk about it some more in just a moment. 

But what really makes this type of architecture stand out is that it’s rough and simple. The stones are not really dressed properly and gaps are filled in with smaller stones. Many of the stones in the walls are big, but not so big that a few people would be able to lift or move it. The walls here on Mycenae are made out of sandstone, this type of stone is quite easy to shape compared to other stones. So you don’t need advanced tools to “quarry” them. 

But let’s see what the alienists have to say here. So Coppens came in saying that the name is evidence that people back then knew that it’s impossible for people to have built it. But with the same logic there must have been real trolls in Scandinavia who moved boulders around. 

Philipp Coppens continues this claiming that the site is beyond the capabilities of the people who lived at the site. I’m not sure when he thought this was built but I think we’ve become quite accustomed to the show downplaying the capabilities of humans.

Treasury of Atreus

They bring up the Treasury of Atreus or Tomb of Agamemnon as it was known in the past and the lintel above the entrance. There’s a lot of things that’s impressive about this tomb but I would not count the 250 ton lintel being the greatest of them. So this tholos or beehive tomb was built during the Bronze age somewhere around 1250 BCE. So close to the building of cyclopean walls at least and again. We have moved bigger things already back then. But we continue with this quote:

“It is perfect. Just unbelievable. Now, we would have difficulties today moving that stuff around. Now, I’m not saying that we today cannot do it. I’m not saying that, but if we’re struggling with our modern technology, is it really logical to suggest that our ancestors did this with pivots, and with little ropes, and with wooden rollers?” - Giorgio A. Tsoukalos

I’m sure that Tsoukalos would have issues moving a large stone alone but this is plainly a strawman. The heaviest object moved to date is Gullfaks C with an impressive weight of 1.5 million, yes million tons. If you think this was a one time fluke we moved a smaller platform called Troll A that weighs only 1.3 million tons. The Troll A was moved at 1 knot an hour, so really slow, by eight tow boats 200 km to position. But we’ve moved a lot of things, maybe not fast but a lot easier and longer than previous cultures.

And I think it’s good to bring up Wally Wallington that we talked about in the last episode with David Andersson. Wallington is the guy who built his own Stonehenge in his backyard, by himself only using gravity and fulcrums. 

But let’s move on, we have Michel Bara who agrees with this notion that moving heavy things are almost impossible. Our narrator then tries to move us toward their preferred explanation with the following quote: 

“the key might be found not by studying the laws of physics, but by exploring the interdisciplinary science of acoustics and the principle of acoustic levitation.”

Acoustic levitation

So the theory seems to be that they used some sort of acoustic levitation. 

Thomas Valone, who has a degree in engineering and physics, says that it’s possible that the ancient people had access to levitation devices. But for full transparency I think it’s good to mention that Valone is very active in the free energy movement.

We then move to Taylor Wang again who I can’t pin down in this episode. He has a good background and is an actual astronaut (they don’t really bring this up in the episode). Wang was the first person of Chinese origin in space. I think we can put him in the same group as prof. Sara Seager, people who want to find alien life and were not aware of who they dealt with.

Dr. Wang shows us an acoustic positioning device that can position a small 10g ball within the box with sound waves. Even with editing the background noise is quite loud and you can clearly see Dr. Wang has earplugs so this is not a quiet thing they show us here. From the looks of it we haven’t got much further, from the look of it the machines might have gone quieter operating above the 20 000 hertz. People can’t hear it but it's not very practical outdoors depending on the area. Something that’s really clear is that the technology still doesn 't do more than drops of water and ping pong balls. It’s cool but we’re far from using this on a larger scale. The next step seems to be still to be able to use steel balls in the tests.

Merlin building Stonehenge

But armed with this knowledge that sound levitation might be real we go to Stonehenge. Why you might ask? Well since it’s a myth that Merlin built the Stonehenge it must be true. So let’s see what they have to say. 

So our dear Georgio comes on the screen and tells us the story about how Merlin armed with a rod or magic wand moved these stones some 200 miles to today's site. Ending this quite short story with that ancient myth is a bridge to understand what happened in our past.

Michel Bara fills in that there's a number of these stories out there and all of them must come from a true source. He doesn't give any examples but hints that there’s a lot of them.

So let’s have a little look at this. Georgio is right that there’s a myth that Merlin built the Stonehenge. He does not precise which one he bases his retelling on so I choose to use the oldest and most spread version of this story. Note that there’s more, but they are younger and some do involve Merlin making deals with the devil and things like that.

But the today oldest and what has been the foundation for all the other retellings of the story can be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s book The History of the Kings of Britain. This manuscript was written in 1136, but the copy I used was translated by Aaron Thompson and published by Cambridge in 1999. 

Merlin building the Stonehenge from medival manuscript
Merlin building the Stonehenge from the manuscript "Roman de Brut, a verse epitome"

The story takes place before the famed King Arthur but his uncle King Ambrosium Aurelianus had tried to have a peace meeting with the Saxons. But even though no weapons were allowed those treacherous saxons hid some knives on them and then during the meeting started to attack. Aurelianus' men fought back and won the day. The king wanted a fitting monument went to Merlin for advice who replied

“To honour the burying-place of these men with an everlasting monument, send for the Giant’s Dance, which is in Killaraus, a mountain in Ireland. For there is a structure of stones there, which none of this age could raise, without a profound knowledge of the mechanical arts. They are stones of a vast magnitude and wonderful quality; and if they can be placed here, as they are there, round this spot of ground, they will stand forever.”

When he is met with laughter Merlin explains that the stones are from Africa and have special power. So Tsoukalos could have gone a bit further than the 200 miles if he wanted. But the Britons go to Ireland, fight some Irish knights and then it’s time to move the stones. Merlin asks the army to try first and they try with ropes and force and can’t get them down. After laughing a little bit Merlin:

“then began his own contrivances. When he had placed in order the engines that were necessary, he took down the stones with an incredible facility, and gave directions for carrying them to the ships”

The stones then go back to England and

“Merlin obeyed the King’s orders and put the stones up in a circle round the sepulchre, in exactly the same way as they had been arranged on Mount Killaraus in Ireland, thus proving that his artistry was worth more than any brute strength.”

So the story isn’t really about magic, sure it’s in there but not really in regards to how Merlin moved the stones. There’s no mention of magic, just ingenuitive. With creativity and brain he accomplished something that brute force could not. We even have depictions of Merlin building Stonehenge in a 14th century manuscript, if you look at the show notes you can see this picture. To be honest Geoffrey of Monmouthwas probably closer to the truth about Stonehenge than the Ancient Aliens crowd. Proving yet again that maybe we haven’t become smarter, but maybe we do have become dumber. 

Alright but how did they then move these stones? Michel Bara says that the stories he mentioned before involve people chanting so there’s probably some sort of sound levitation. Because according to George Noory it would be almost impossible to do it by hand.

They’ve done experiments by putting hands around blocks. You can’t get enough hands in there. You can’t get 200,000 hands to lift a block. And once you roll it with all these people, how do you move it?

The sad reality here is that the blocks are closer to 32 km (20 miles) away. Analysis of the stone composition seems to indicate they originate from the area. 20 miles is still quite the walk but a lot easier. Do we know exactly how they moved the stones? No, not exactly but we’ve brought up the Nias people that had a tradition of moving large blocks of stone as part of one of their rituals. We even have videos of this tradition and it is hard and requires a lot of people. But I have never understood the Ancient Alien position that the people could not have done this because it took time and required people. As if they found the ledgers and the ancient britts were runned as a predatory corporation with steep deadlines.

If there was something they did have was time, especially Stonehenge. It was not a burial for a king or something that would have an end date.

But we’re going to round off this section of the show with a quote from Taylor Wang that I feel is a bit mined. As if he is humoring the producer, let me know what you think. Is he part of the alienist or not?

“Well, everything’s possible. We have no way to rule in or rule out aliens, because human technology is very primitive at this stage. And you look at earth that has only  survived four billion years, but there are planets billions and billions of years ahead of us. Their technology and their knowledge, it can be so far ahead of us, we can’t even imagine.” - Taylor wang

Ancient Antigravity

Flying Saucers in ancient art 

But we leave the island of Britain for this time and move on with a new topic. The narrator says that UFO:s are a modern invention according to the scholars. What scholars? Again that does not matter to the show. But they are right and they are wrong here. Unidentified flying objects have technically been reported since ever, if it’s flying and can’t be identified you have a UFO. The leap of connecting these things to aliens is rather modern. Many connect this to the reports from the pilot Kennet h Arnold who reportedly claim to have seen nine saucer-like aircrafts flying past his plane. This was in 1947, a good while after Orson Wells' dramatic reading of War of the worlds. But it’s after this point the shape of the craft became saucerlike. We talked a little about this back in episode 9 with Blake Smith. 

Now we’re going to play the association game here while David Childress speaks about how UFO’s have been depicted in ancient art. This is a common trope among the Ancient Alien people since art can be free and does not necessarily depict things exactly how they look. We don’t think that Salvador Dali painted in an environment so hot that clocks melted like ice. Or if we look at Scandinavian petroglyphs that people went around with giant erections while plowing fields or fighting. Alright, we’re not going to kinkshame on this podcast but I think you catch the drift.

But we see a bunch of zoomed in petroglyphs, unfortunately I could not trace down all of them before the release but the hunt will continue. At the same time it does not matter, we see more from Tassil n'Ajjer and The Lascaux cave paintings, basically if it contains something round or strange they put it in the slide show.

We’re moving on talking about what they call summerian disks and claims that people are flying in them. But on the screen we see an Aramean queen with a servant on a funerary stela. The stela is dated to the 8th century BCE, today it can be found at Pergamon Museum in Berlin. But on this stele we see two people sitting and above them we see a winged disk with what looks like a flower. This winged disk is usually associated with the sun and more exactly royalty and features often within the mesopotanian civilizations. 

But from mesopotamia we travel to Egypt where the show at 19:53 claims that there’s another disk with wings. They seem to just ignore the huge scarab (or dung beetle) that’s connected to the ball and well is the origin of the wings. As you might be familiar with, in the ancient Egyptian pantheon Ra was pictured to roll the sun across the sky. Similar to the beatle, therefore there’s always been a special connection between the beetle and the dungball in Egyptian art. 

But let’s leave the middle east for some time, the show is about to take us on a new adventure and a new artifact we have not seen on this show before.

Flying turtles of Guatemala

But let’s talk about what I assume the show feels is one of the greatest pieces of evidence for flying saucers in ancient times. We are transported to Guatemala the narrator gives us a very brief background for Guatemala in general and then we start to talk about the object. This turns out to be a turtle. Or rather if we look closer we see that it seems to be a man who is emerging from the mouth of the turtle. At this point Georgio tells us:

“And when I asked the local archaeologist there, “what is this?” They said, without the flinching of an eye, “well, this is, according to legend, the giant flying turtles “which flew around in Guatemala.” The entire body is aerodynamically fashioned. The extremities are pressed in an aerodynamic fashion against the body of this turtle. And if you look closely, it’s as if there’s some modern day fighter pilot glasses or goggles. This right here is from the same culture, from the same region where they created the turtle in Clay. So, they knew exactly what a turtle looked  like. It looks like a snapping turtle. And what we have here is everything but a turtle. It’s something else. In their frame of reference, they were able to use the turtle as the best example of what they might have seen that the gods used to fly around in.”

So is this the smoking gun? The evidence for alien visitation as Georgio seems to claim? Well with Ancient Aliens is never as simple as you might expect and we are now fairly used to them having an artistic approach towards the truth. But remember what Georgio said because we will get back to this in just a moment.

The place they talk about is called Topoxte and is located on a total of five islands in the Laguna Yaxha close to the more known site of Yaxha. As the crow flies there’s only 27 km to the even more famous site of Tikal. Little is really known about Topoxte and so far there’s not been that much research done on this site. So of course the Ancient Alien people use this to their advantage. Most of the construction of the site is located on three of the islands and it was founded toward the end of the middle Pre classic period. 

So this turtle that Tsoukalos presented earlier, it looks rather strange and to be honest it looks new. It’s definitely not ceramics but looks like wood in a very good condition for being excavated. If we turn to the article Tsoukalos wrote called “The giant flying turtles of Guatemala” published in the anthology, holy odin this is a long title, “The Disinformation Guide to Ancient Aliens, Lost Civilizations, Astonishing Archaeology, and Hidden History”. We will get a bit of a different story. The book was published in 200 5, so this is before he went on camera. But in the article he was asked to see the mechanic in a nearby town who had copies of some artifacts. So the mechanic shows him this turtle and tells Georgio about these flying turtles. Not an archeologist mind you, it also turns out that it’s the mechanic who carved this replica. The original is supposed to be at an unnamed university at Guatemala City. 

To be precise he wrote “What does this represent?” I asked the mechanic. Without raising an eyebrow, he said: “This is a representation of the giant flying turtles in which the gods flew around, a long time ago.” “What?” I asked. Without the slightest hesitation, he repeated what he had just said.”

He goes on in the article to present that: “Of course the critics now will say that the turtle is only meant to be looked at symbolically. The artisan used the turtle's shape to illustrate an important warrior's strength, who is invincible in combat because he is as strong as a turtle's indestructible shell. O r something like that.”

But is this true? Until we see at least a picture of the original I’m not even sure if it exists in this shape or form. I find it off putting that the accounts of Georgios own experience differs in Georgios retelling of it. 

But turtles are not uncommon in the Mayan tradition and they symbolize a number of different thin gs. We have for example depictions on how the maize deity comes out the back of a turtle. We also have depictions of Pauahtun (God N) who is emergens or wears a turtle shell. But the motif of people that emerges from the mouth is a common idea in maya art and religion. The motif of coming from a mouth symbolizes traveling across different spaces. This is maybe best seen on the murals at Yaxchilan. What exactly this turtle symbolizes is unfortunately hard to tell, it’s not an all too common match but as you heard there’s several viable explanations that would not include UFO:s. If we knew where the original was and more about its history and exactly where and in what context it was found we would be able to give a better explanation in time. 

From Guatemala we travel across the globe to the border towards India where a quite famous character will experience something otherworldly. 

Alexander the Great's UFO battle

“Halfway around the world, in 329 BC, the Greek ruler Alexander the Great planned the invasion of India.”

So the date 329 BCE is a little weird but not impossible that Alexander was planning the next part of the campaign then. But the campaign lasted between 327-325 BCE. 

But from here we go from a little weird to a lot more weird because David Childress is telling us that Alexander the Great's armies were attacked and dive bombed even before they got into India.

“As Alexander’s army was getting ready to cross the Indus and invade India, suddenly in the sky appeared these flying discs. And they began dive-bombing at the war elephants that were part of Alexander’s army. And what these flying discs did was cause stampedes within Alexander’s own war elephants, who then ran amok throughout his army, tearing up the camps and everything. And after that, Alexander’s generals met with him, and they said, “no, we’re not going into India. This is it. “We’re gonna turn back.” And that was the end of that war campaign.” - David Childress

So let’s try to figure this one out since this differs quite a lot from what’s written in the ancient sources I’ve encountered about this campaign such as Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans and Megasthenes Indika. 

The claims seem to build on two accounts, the first is from Frank Edwards who in 1959 wrote in his book “Stranger than fiction”.

He tells of two strange craft that divide repeatedly at his army until the war elephants, the men, and the horses all panicked and refused to cross the river where the incident occurred.What did the things look like? His historian describes them as great shining silvery shields, spitting fire around the rims... things that came from the skies and returned to the skies.

Unfortunately Frank Edwards doesn't give any reference or source on this claim. But building on this Alberto Fenoglio wrote in the magazine Clypeus published 1966 that there’s accounts of shields flying over the Maccedonian camps. But here we are not given any references either or what ancient sources that’s used.  

But looking into these it seems as Fenoglio is basing his writing on partly Edwards and the writer Quintus Curtius. The latter wrote about the Siege of Tyre in 332 BCE how the Tyrians used heated bronze shields filled with sand and excrement to sling it over the attackers. 

But Frank Edwards claims the trace is a bit more unclear, but it could be possible some inspiration was drawn from Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem (Letter from Alexander to Aristoteles). The issue the re is that it’s a known hoax, probably written sometime in the 4th or 5th century. But in there the author talks about a ball of fire flying over Alexander's army who take it as a bad omen.

But how about the silvery shields? Well it might have been a confusion for Edwards, during the campaign in India his troops changed name from Hypaspists to Argyraspides or the Silver shields. But unfortunately it seems as if the ancient sources are not describing UFO:s in connection to Alexander the Great's campaigns in general.

But why did Alexander's troops revolt? Well, it was close to the river of Hyphasis and they had been out on campaign for a really long time. The prospect to maybe face larger armies to the west and not seeing an end for the campaign probably didn’t help. Alexander's general Coenus is supposed to have said when hearing his commanders refusal to return “longed to again see their parents, their wives and children, their homeland”. We don’t need any aliens or UFOs to explain the armies longing to get home. I think this might be one of the most human feelings.

From Alexander we travel into our modern time where Stephen M. Greer and Childress are trying to explain how UFO:s fly and move around. Childress have apparently figured this out saying:

 It’s artificial gravity. So, when you’re inside of a gravitational field that you’re creating yourself around your craft, the gravity of the earth doesn’t have a force on you.

Artificial gravity / The Neueraera

We are a long way from creating artificial gravity, but there are small scale trials. I’m not convinced that Childress explains gravity properly here. Gravity affects everything and earth gravity affects more than us. The moon for example, our gravity is responsible for the shape of our moon. The sun's gravity reaches and interferes with our planet. So that a UFO would create its own field that’s unaffected by gravity around it sounds a bit much sci-fi novel. If we have any listener out there who knows more than me (don’t think it’s that impossible), please reach out and we can provide a better explanation. 

We then meet Paul Moller who presents his vehicle Neuera. The Nueara seems to be taken straight out of an episode of Jetson. To be honest I would not mind having one of those to fly around in. But if you hoped to be able to buy one it seems we’re out of luck. Paul Mollers company seems to have had issues creating a craft that passed free flight tests. Today it seems to have gone dormant if not even bankrupt with a website that’s not been updated since 2017.

BRUTE FORCE APPROACH

But from the quick and nimble antigravity UFO we move to Kennedy space station and we see the Endeavor take off. It’s a massive amount of smoke and fire and we have Tsoukalos saying it’s a truly magnificent sight and I can’t say that I don’t agree with this. But this period of agreement comes to a swift end when both Noory and Tsoukalos start to talk about people being on the moon in ancient times and that the gods always appear with a lot of fire and smoke. 

So it seems as if we are going to talk about ancient rockets, on the screen we can see an artist's rendition of the lid from Pascal's tomb. If you would like to know more about the lid I’d recommend that you listen to episode eleven where we talk a little more in depth about this. 

What they say here basically boils down to ancient people not having the vocabulary to describe rockets or UFOs. Therefore they call the UFO and aliens gods and chariots. They claim that in all religions fire and smoke is always in connection to gods coming to earth. Steven Greer says:

“When you’re dealing with this subject and you look at the ancient literature, you have to look at it through the lens of how is it being experienced by a civilization with no foundation for understanding the science, the technology.”

Meaning basically that if you decide it’s an UFO before you read the ancient text they are a lot easier to find. We continue to bring up examples they have found of fire and smoke such as dragons in China. Tsoukalos repeated the Hung Di or the story of the Yellow emperor yet again. Still with the whole flare that HungDi came to earth in a dragon that he then stepped out from and then disappeared by entering back into a dragon. We have talked quite a bit about this in the past. 

But from the Chinese dragons we go back to Greece. Michel Bara talks about how the gods in Greek mythology were traveling in chariots of fire. The only god who comes to mind is the chariot of Helios that’s described as fiery, the rest of the gods seem to use ordinary chariots but with immortal horses. 

But from Greece we have Tsoukalos saying the following:

“In the Old Testament, we can read about a glowing furnace that descended from the sky. And sometimes this glowing furnace is described as a chariot of fire or as the glory of the Lord.”

The only mention of a furnace i n the bible is in relation to book of Daniel chapter 3 verse 8 to 25 that tell the story of when king Nebukanessar condemned three jews to death by burning in a hot furnace. But god protects the condemned persons and they can walk around in the furnace unhurt. This is another of those times where Georgio would need to provide the source for his claim for us to look further into it.

But we’re going to stay in the middle east but the show will present depictions of the sun god Shamash that can be found in the North-west palace of Nimrod. 

During this we have our beloved Von Däniken talking about the Gilgamesh epic and that in there Gilgamesh travels up to the god Anu. During the flight it’s supposed that Gilgamesh describes earth from above. A nice tale but yet again we’re left without any references, going through the twelve tablets that make up the story I find a few mentions about Anu but not as described here. So on tablet one Anu hears the prayers of the inhabitants of the City of Uruk to save them from the horrible Gilgamesh, so Anu sends Enkidu. Then we don’t really hear more from Anu until tablet six where Anu's daughter Ishtar comes to see her father because Gilgamesh refused her advances. So she wants daddy Anu to send down the Bull of heaven. 

We see Anu again in tablet 7, telling Enkidu that he or Gilgamesh need to die for killing the previously mentioned bull. After this we don’t really see Anu again. So as with the furnace, without any reference from Von Däniken we can throw this story out too. 

But being in Mesopotamia we can’t leave Sitchin out of this so the show goes on talking about shem. You might be familiar with shem since it’s one of Noah's sons but this is not the context here. So in the show Jason Martell claims that the ancient sumerians had a word called shem that was some sort of space capsule shaped as a pine cone. The priests, according to Martell, were entering this capsule to travel up and down to the gods. 

But as you might suspect things are maybe not as they see. So the word shem is not sumerian, it is hebrew. But it has the same meaning as an akkadian word shumu that means “name” or “renown”. So the whole part here does not make sense, it seems as if Martell even got the pinecone wrong from Sitchin's “the 12 planet”. In there he attribe the word “MU” to a pinecone shaped object that rises straight up. No reference to a sumerian lexicon as you might suspect by now. But if you would pick up a lexicon made by the ancient mesopotamians you would realize that the word MU refers to the word “SHAMU” that would be translated to “heaven” or “part of heaven”. 

Again something we can move down to the garbage pile. But let’s just take a quick jump over to Greece where we now will discuss the Aeolipile. This is a sort of steam engine shaped as a wheel invented by the mathematician Hero according to the show.

We get to meet John Robert Tindall founder of Tindall Vision Laboratories. He demonstrates a replica, so instead of pistons it has two exhausts that make the wheel spin as the water steam is pushed out of it. At one point the contraption almost explodes in Tindalls face. 

What is so fascinating about this? Well, according to Childress we don’t know where Hero got the idea for this design and since it’s not using pistons and are saucer shaped it must be out of this world. Did we mention that the contraption is named after the wind god Aeolus? if you have been paying attention we know that if it’s a god involved we should read this as alien.

But yes the contraption is named after the wind god Aeolus. But it’s not really invented by Hero, it was noted down by Hero. Before him was Vitruvius, a roman architect and engineer. But both of these two draw this from Ctesibius (Tesibius), a Greek inventor who was working in the Ptolomeic Alexandria. Hero was the one who described it in such detail that we can reconstruct it. But the greek did have a lot of inventions involving engineering and steam among other things. If you’re interested in these types of things you should if you happen to be in Athens one day go to the Museum of Ancient Greek Technology.

Archimedes’ Death Ray

May 2010 - Firing from a warship at a distance of nearly two miles, a ray of intense laser energy burns through targets traveling at speeds of more than 300 miles per hour. The test seems to have been on a 50 000-watt with fiber optic lasers. I can’t find that much info on it but it took place and today we seem to have more powerful lasers that would be able to intercept incoming drones.

Steven Greer thinks ancient people had access to death ray and with that we’re moved back in time. More precisely to the year 214 BCE and the Siege of Syracuse, yes we are going to talk about Archimedes death ray. You who might have paid some attention might think now that the siege of Syracuse was between 213-212. But that’s Ancient Aliens for you and good catch!

So the death ray of Archimedes is usually depicted as a single mirror, but most modern scholars seem to agree that it was more likely several of them if this contraption existed. If you want to find it you will have better luck using the term Archimedes heat ray instead of death. But it’s been debated since the renaissance if this really existed or is part of fantasy. We don’t have first hand sources of it and no great details on what they used. 

There’s been many attempts to recreate the device in modern times.The most famous might be the TV-series mythbusters who tried this in episode 7 of season 4 in 2006. They deemed the myth being busted after having little success. The same year MIT attempted the same experiment using mirrors with success, the team argued that with a polished bronze shield the array would only need to be 1.5 times larger than what they used. So is it plausible at least that this was used? Seems as if it might have happened during the right conditions. But more research and discussion or even better hard evidence would be needed to put this question to rest.

But from here we go into talking about the inspiration of such a device since the people during this time would not be capable of this. Childress even says ”technology that would’ve seemed like magic to our primitive ancestors”. But as we have discussed many times now, this type of thinking is quite insulting toward our ancestors. Remember that this event took place 212 BCE. 

Georgio goes on talking about the Indian Dorje, seemingly unaware of dorje being the Tibetan word for Varja. Sure they have similar meaning but using another language word to talk about the Indian version of it does not bode well for credibility. The Vajra is a ritual weapon among the hindu gods and  has the properties of a diamond (indestructible) and a lightning bolt. But we use these semi mythical and mystical weapons to move over to Scotland where we will find the evidence for these being real.

Vittrified Forts

So across the Scottish countryside we have forts that seem to be vitrified. Almost like glass or glazed pottery according to the show. David Wilcock explain that

“Here you have these stone buildings in which an analysis of the outside comes to the conclusion that they were heated to over a thousand degrees Celsius in temperature. Conventional fire could not have reached this heat. You needed a sustained burn at a thousand degrees Celsius for a long period of time.”  

So first of all, do these vitrified forts exist? The answer here is yes, there’s about 60 of them known to date. Are they as the show describes? Well, here they have maybe had a bit of artistic license. So the stone for the most part looks like normal rock but embedded in tar or asphalt, sometimes you can see dripps in the blacker vitrification. But if you don’t know what you're looking at I think that most people would not notice that it’s something different here and write it off as normal stone.

So we know they at least exist, not as glass or glazed ceramics but still they exist. But how about the temperature? Wilcock has a point that you need more than thousand degrees often, to be precise the process usually requires 1100 degrees celsius. Sound as a lot, but remember that this was in the Scottish iron age, maybe very late bronze age. So to melt bronze you need 900 degrees celsius, to melt iron you need something close to 1500 celsius. So we can state with confidence that they had the capability to vitrify stone if they wanted to.

There were experiments back in 1934 and repeated in 1937 that you with common logs could vitrify the stone quite easily. They did note that they were not sure why you would want to do this but that it is possible. We still are not sure why they did this. It’s not done everywhere and where it’s done it is not done all over the wall. Sometimes it’s inside, sometimes outside. Some patches here and some patches there. The explanation is probably more mundane than both we and the proponents of ancient aliens think. ‘

They use this to talk about the celtic god Lugh and how he had a spear that shot fire and what not. This part is similar to the other god sections we have covered so far and since they don’t offer anything new or really that interesting here I’ll just gloss it over. But the myths described are not evidence of celtic death rays that were used on the forts.

But we end the episode on the following quote from Georgio

“All these descriptions of sophisticated weaponry sounds almost like science fiction. But is it, really? Because we have those weapons today! And I think it is merely a reinvention of history; That all the stuff that we have today has been around before, and that our past is not science fiction, but science fact.”

And seems to be so proud over that line. But we did not just watch science fact, no we did watch very poor science fiction.

Remember to leave a positive review anywhere you can such as itunes, spotify or to your friend at the trench. I would also recommend you to visit diggingupancientaliens.com to find some more info about me and the podcast. You can also find me on most social media sites and if you have comments, corrections, suggestions or just want to write an email in all caps you can find my contact info at the website.

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The intro music was created by Alexander Nakarada and from this episode we also have a fantastic outro. A band called Trallskruv will sing us out with their song “tin foil hat”. Links to both these artists will be found in the show notes.

Until next time, keep shoveling that science!