NARRATOR: Baalbek, Lebanon. [music playing] Here, in the fertile Bekaa Valley, stands what many consider to be the greatest ruin of Roman antiquity, the colossal Temple of Jupiter. But the imposing remains that tower over the site today are only the latest in a long line of structures erected on this spot.
Archaeologists say the area has been continually inhabited for at least 10,000 years, and no one knows who built the first place of worship here. But according to legend, both Egyptian and Assyrian conquerors erected sanctuaries on the site, followed by the Canaanites and Phoenicians, who built a great temple here to their god Baal around 2500 BC. Baalbek is one of those places where you have different people over millennia building their shrines, their temples, to their particular, you know, gods or goddesses.
You've got this temple that's built by the Phoenicians for one of their deities, Baal. Then Alexander the Great conquers this area, and, surprise, surprise, builds a temple to the Greek gods. NARRATOR: In the first century BC, roughly 300 years after Alexander the Great, the Romans conquer Lebanon and decide to erect a temple here to their chief god, Jupiter.
The main Roman temple once boasted 54 columns, each a staggering 65 feet in height. But while visitors to the ruins may first notice the towering Roman columns, the most impressive feature at Baalbek is its massive foundation. To this day, Baalbek, Lebanon, has remained one of the most enduring mysteries on planet Earth because the masonry that we find there is unparalleled compared to the rest of the world.
In fact, there are three stone blocks, called the trilithons, each weighing approximately 800 metric tons, which is 1. 6 million pounds. ANDREW COLLINS: Each of these blocks is approximately 62 feet in length by about 14 feet in depth and 12 feet in breadth.
And they're not even on the ground. So whoever placed them there in ancient times would have had to raise them up to a height of about 20 feet. WILLIAM HENRY: Each of the stones were quarried 2 miles away and put perfectly into place with such precision that you can't even put a credit card or a needle in between those massive blocks.
NARRATOR: How ancient people carved and moved such massive stones is a question that baffles archaeologists to this day. And equally as mysterious is who placed them there. The giant blocks in the foundation are clearly of a different building style than the temples that sit above.
And in my opinion, that platform is not just ancient, it is prehistoric. NARRATOR: But if the platform at Baalbek was constructed thousands of years before the Romans arrived in the Bekaa Valley, why did they choose this as the site to build their most magnificent temple? One pioneering Russian scholar has proposed that humans may have been drawn to this location because it was the site of one of Earth's earliest extraterrestrial events.
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 Paleo Contact, 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.
