Name: Ancient Aliens: Extraterrestrial Influence in Ancient Construction (Special)
Duration: 3 min 25 s
Channel: HISTORY
Description: [narrator] Leningrad, USSR, 1961. Scientist and mathematician Dr. Matest Agrest sends shockwaves through the world of academia with an article in which he poses a new...

[narrator] Leningrad, USSR, 1961. Scientist and mathematician Dr Matest Agrest sends shockwaves through the world of academia with an article in which he poses a new theory called paleocontact, a precursor to what is known today as the ancient astronaut theory, suggesting that certain biblical texts could be interpreted as evidence of alien visitation. And, according to Agrest, one place where such visitations occurred was Baalbek.

Dr Matest Agrest went into the ancient record, the Book of Enoch, and other Hebrew texts and noticed that there were beings coming from the sky or the stars that came to Earth, and he came up with a theory that they were extraterrestrial beings who came to Earth to assist humanity in developing advanced technology to build stone constructions such as what we see at Baalbek in Lebanon. [narrator] Agrest wrote about the Watchers, a group of fallen angels who, according to the biblical account, descended to Earth at Mount Hermon, very near the site of Baalbek. Agrest suggested that the Watchers were, in fact, visitors from another planet who built the megalithic platform at Baalbek as a launch pad.

He thought it was a giant stone platform that spaceships could land on and take off from. And this makes a lot of sense because it's so incredibly solid, with these huge stone blocks in it, that even huge vehicles, such as rockets, could land and take off from this huge platform. [narrator] Two decades after the publication of Agrest's controversial article, author and researcher Zecharia Sitchin came to the same conclusion about Baalbek based on a 5,000-year-old Sumerian text.

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of a hero of superhuman strength who embarks on an impossible quest. In the course of his journeys, Gilgamesh arrives at a site where he encounters otherworldly gods, a site that sounds suspiciously like Baalbek. In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of the great and important legends, um, of human history, we have the hero arriving in a place known as the Landing Place, a space which allows the ascent and the descent of beings from the heavens to the Earth.

[man 1] Zecharia Sitchin in the 1970s proposed, based on his reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh, that Gilgamesh himself had seen some sort of a spacecraft take off from a landing site and pinpointed that site as Baalbek. [narrator] Is it possible that Baalbek was a landing pad for alien visitors, and that it remained so for thousands of years? Could that be why so many ancient peoples, such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, all chose to build and rebuild some of their greatest temples on this spot?