Division of Historic Services
NARRATOR: Northern Iraq, along the east bank of the Tigris River. Opposite the city of Mosul lie the ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh, a place originally inhabited by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. Here, in 1842, British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard unearthed the ruins of the great library of Ashurbanipal, a royal archive containing …
NARRATOR: Portsmouth, England, December 21, 1872. The HMS Challenger sets out on a three-year scientific expedition to survey the Earth’s oceans and search for new marine life. At the time of its departure, the mainstream scientific viewpoint is that life cannot exist more than 1,800 feet beneath the surface of the ocean. But in March …
NARRATOR: Central Coast, New South Wales, Australia. Deep in the Brisbane Water National Park is a mysterious site known as the Gosford glyphs. The site consists of two massive eight foot high walls engraved with over 300 ancient carvings. Carvings that experts say do not resemble indigenous artwork, but Egyptian hieroglyphs. After deciphering the texts, …
ED BARNHART: For years, we thought of Machu Picchu as some sort of sacred pilgrimage city. But the more we look at it, and the more we understand the way Inca society functioned, we now see it as one of the many exterior palaces from Cuzco for an Inca king. Every Inca king, starting with …
[music playing] NARRATOR: Throughout the world, there are ancient traditions that identify the center of the head as being synonymous with the center of the earth, the center of the universe, and the very center of creation itself. This center is often depicted as egg-shaped and is identified in some cultures as the third eye. …
WILLIAM HENRY: The Sanskrit texts of the Hindu and Buddhist tradition talk about incredible flying craft called Vimana. They’re sort of a cross between a modern stealth fighter and a flying saucer. They describe several different types, including types that can travel from place to place, craft that can travel across the country, craft that …
NARRATOR: The Indus Valley, Pakistan, 1922. The Indian Archaeological Survey discovers the remnants of what is the largest ancient city of the Indus Valley civilizations, Mohenjo-daro. The artifacts and architecture cataloged at the site indicate a metropolis prospered here nearly 4,600 years ago. But the skeletal remains found among the ruins tell a puzzling story. …
NARRATOR: The sun temple at Abu Gorab, Memphis, Egypt. In 1898, an excavation team with the Berlin Museum discovered the base of a massive obelisk, estimated to have once stood at over 160 feet tall. According to the ancient Egyptian building texts from Edfu, Abu Gorab was known as the Place of the Gods. Egyptologists …
NARRATOR: June 13, 2014. Scientists researching the Earth’s mantle announce that they have found what have they believe to be a vast body of water three times the volume of all of our oceans combined contained within a mineral layer 400 miles inside the Earth. The discovery shakes the foundation of what scientists and scholars …
NARRATOR: Colorado Springs, July 1899. While testing a magnifying transmitter built to track storms, Nikola Tesla claims he received some sort of transmission from an unknown source. MARC SEIFER: One night he was tracking thunderstorms 600 miles away, but all of a sudden he heard these beeps. And it was three beats in sequence. And …