"NARRATOR:" "An enormous flying creature born of a raging inferno... a vicious three-headed dog guarding the gates of hell and mysterious sea serpents terrorizing mankind." "But are such monsters just mythical creatures:, a fantasy?" "Or did they actually exist in the ancient past?" "GEORGE NOORY:" "There was some kind of experimentation going on." "Let's take this animal and give him two heads." "Let's take this dragon and give him wings." "GIORGIO TSOUKALOS:" "These creatures are direct products of extraterrestrial genetic experimentations in our past." "NARRATOR:" "Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings." "What if it were true?" "Did ancient aliens really shape our history?" "And if so, might the beasts and monsters of ancient legend really have been the product of an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence?" "NARRATOR:" "Surf side Beach," "Montauk, New York." "On July 13, 2008, a 26-year-old woman and three of her friends discovered the carcass of a strange looking creature that had washed onto the shore." "RUEHL:" "It actually looked like a hybrid creature that had the claws of a raccoon and possibly the beak of a bird and the body, perhaps, of a dog." "A very unusual creature." "A photograph was taken and circulated." "It started popping up all over the Internet." "It went viral." "TSOUKALOS:" "The people couldn't identify the animal because it didn't look like anything." "It looked like a mixture of different animals." "REDFERN:" "And because it looked so strange, you know, it provoked a lot of theories." "Is it just an unknown animal?" "Could it be some sort of hybrid- type creature?" "Something, you know, that had been genetically tinkered with in a lab?" "NARRATOR:" "Some believe the mysterious creature is a hybrid beast, perhaps created at a nearby government testing facility, the Plum Island Animal" "Disease Center." "Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman labels the creature "The Montauk" "Monster."" "COLEMAN:" "This is a replica of the Montauk Monster." "One of the things that we noticed about this creature was the strange features around its mouth." "It looked like a beak." "It actually looked like we didn't know what was going on here." "Was it a griffon, was it a creature, was it a giant turtle?" "But indeed, that was decaying flesh that had come away from the skull." "Other features were the strange looking feet, and the body, indeed... because the picture had no scale in it... we thought looked enormous." "But on the body, these white objects here really define the size of flies on the creature, which then determined a scale." "This creature was very small." "RUEHL:" "Unfortunately, someone grabbed the carcass and supposedly took it to his front yard, and it ultimately vanished." "So the only evidence we have of this creature is the photo." "NARRATOR:" "But while some researchers theorized that the so-called Montauk Monster was the product of modern science, ancient astronaut theorists believe the animal could be part of a long line of genetically- modified creatures that have appeared throughout human history." "TSOUKALOS:" "If the Montauk" "Monster is in fact a reality, then that could mean that if we're able today to create some very bizarre creatures behind closed doors in labs all around the world, it is possible that our ancestors, especially the" "extraterrestrial ancestors, had the same capability." "Because in ancient texts, we have numerous references to monsters, bizarre beings that have been described in great detail." "NARRATOR:" "Ancient Greek artifacts depict terrifying beasts such as the gorgon... the Hydra... and the ferocious Cerberus." "And in Homer's epic poem the Iliad, the Greek author describes a battle in which the hero, Bellerophon, slays a monster called the Chimera." "JASON MARTELL:" "The Chimera was a dreaded beast that wreaked havoc and terrorized the people of Asia Minor." "Homer described the Chimera as an immortal beast with a lionlike head, a snake tail and a third goat head inhe middle that snorted bright fire." "GLENN:" "The notion of chimeras and hybrids is one that has been part of the human psyche for millennia." "I mean, when you think about things such as the Minotaur," "Pegasus, Anubis, this is something that either we have imagined or had been created at one time." "RICHARD RADER:" "These beings, these monsters, serve more of, kind of an ethical purpose in mythology than they are catalogs of something literal because storytelling and fiction are just a part of what we are as human beings." "NARRATOR:" "But did mythic monsters merely spring from the imagination of our ancestors?" "Or might they have actually existed?" "Ancient alien theorists believe in their existence and that evidence can be found in the relics of the past." "TSOUKALOS:" "To suggest that all of these creatures were nothing else but fantasy, in my opinion, doesn't really hold water because our ancestors weren't stupid." "They depicted what they saw." "We find these mixed hybrid beings all throughout Egypt as sphinxes, as griffons, as bizarre creatures that, according to the the ancient" "Egyptian texts, they did exist." "They were not a fantasy of our ancestors' imagination." "ERICH VON DANIKEN:" "Just imagine there is a mother spaceship traveling in the universe for centuries and centuries." "Then they find a solar system with a planet with the possibility of life like the earth." "And they observe on the Nile a crocodile, a living creature which obviously is resistant to the heat." "They observe a lion with his power, his muscles." "And now they start to think, "We could use a mixture of this creature on another planet."" "And now, by genetical design, they start to create mixed creatures." "Some of these mid creatures did exist in the past." "JONATHAN YOUNG:" "The griffon was a mythological creature that had the body of a lion with the head and wings of an eagle." "Now, the lion is the king of beasts, the eagle is the king of birds, so the griffon was the king of all creatures." "PHILIP COPPENS:" "The creature is somehow two creatures put together in a way that defies normal sense, defies normal explanation." "So the question then is:" "how does that happen?" "NARRATOR:" "By the mid-19th century, scientists began to look at fossil records around the planet to study how organisms changed over time." "Naturalist Charles Darwin theorized that all life-forms share a common origin and have evolved over the centuries through a process called natural selection." "Might the hybrid monsters of ancient religion and myth really have been the result of evolution?" "STANFORD:" "Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is a mechanism by which life-forms can change from one into another." "It relies on the principle that organisms that have certain traits, permutations may be advantageous in the struggle for existence and the struggle for reproduction." "And those traits are the ones that will be perpetuated over time, over many, many generations." "IMBROGNO:" "Certain different species can breed if they are genetically close, like the... like the donkey and the horse." "Like the wolf and the dog." "However, cats and dogs will not mate because, first of all, they don't have the biochemical signatures to mate with each other, and plus their genes are so different that the chromosomes just won't line up" "properly to reproduce." "It's impossible." "NARRATOR:" "But if Darwin's theories on evolution and natural selection cannot explain the origins of ancient beasts and monsters, then where might they have come from?" "Perhaps the answer cannot be found on Earth, but in a place much father away." "NARRATOR:" "Southern Pakistan." "In the middle of the Indus River" "Valley lie the ruins of Mohenjo-daro." "This ancient city, whose name means "mound of the dead," was one of the largest urban settlements in the world in 2600 B.C." "RUEHL:" "The ancient city of" "Mohenjo-daro had what appeared to be streets that were laid out parallel and perpendicular to each other, like a modern city." "The homes actually had their own toilets and they had a very sophisticated sewer system." "So it looks like a very advanced city." "NARRATOR:" "Ancient astronaut theorists have long thought this site was also the epicenter of a nuclear explosion that occurred more than 4,000 years ago." "RUEHL:" "Skeletons were found in dead positions as though there's an instantaneous death, and some of those skeletons, as measured by Soviet scientists, had 50 times the normal radioactivity." "They found pottery that had been fused, then walls were heated to such an extent they became vitrified or glasslike, suggesting some sort of ancient nuclear weapon involved." "NARRATOR:" "According to the" "Mahabharata, the ancient holy text of the Hindus, white-hot smoke rose in infinite brilliance and reduced the city to ashes." "Horses were burned by the thousands and corpses were vaporized by intense heat." "TSOUKALOS:" "And afterwards, a big silence came over the entire land and people start to have boils on their skin." "Their hair start to fall out and their nails." "There's only one thing that causes this, and that is radiation poisoning." "It's radiation fallout." "COPPENS:" "So the question then becomes when events happen in a place where there is extreme radiation, what impact does that have on human life or on other life present there?" "Could this explain, for example, why creatures were born with more than one arm or more than one leg, which then somehow became deified?" "Because even to this day, we know that in civilizations where anomalous human beings are born, somehow the touch of God is seen to be part of this creation." "NARRATOR:" "According to the ancient Hindu texts, after the carnage at Mohenjo-daro, a fearsome flying monster appeared in the sky." "It was called "Garuda."" "YOUNG:" "In the Mahabharata, the Garuda is a massive birdlike creature:, it's a red face, red wings, talon." "It's so huge it would block out the sun." "There are stories that it would let a certain god, Vishnu, ride on him on occasion." "TSOUKALOS:" "And each and every time he would show up, descending from the sky, he would create hurricane winds." "And upon his descent, the Earth would shake, dust would fly up in the air and everyone in the vicinity would be absolutely terrified." "Now here we have a carving of Garuda, and if we look at the top, yes, they look like feathers, but at the same time they could be interpreted as big gigantic flames." "CHILDRESS:" "According to Hindu mythology, Garuda's born out of this cosmic event, this war and destruction that happens at the end of every age." "COPPENS:" "Could this have been somehow connected to exposures or to radiation being borne within a zone of high radiation?" "We cannot know the answer, but we do know that within India and within Pakistan there are known zones of higher radiation than there are normal." "The logic dictates that somehow, genetic abominations will have been born within those places." "NARRATOR: if Mohenjo-daro was in fact the site of an ancient nuclear attack, could it be possible that Garuda was a mutant beast created as a by-product of intense radioactivity?" "STANFORD:" "We tend to have a science fiction view of what mutation is." "We think of mutations being caused by radiation and they cause outlandish features and gigantic-sized insects and so forth, but in fact, mutations happen all the time." "BUSBY:" "There's no recorded evidence of any radiation causing a mutation which changes some species into a different species." "Most of the radiation mutations are lethal." "NARRATOR:" "But if, as modern scientists believe, Garuda was not likely the result of genetic mutation, then what could explain its existence?" "TSOUKALOS:" "The Mahabharata states that Garuda was born from this raging inferno." "And what's really intriguing is the fact that in some text passages, we can read that the exterior of Garuda did not consist of feathers, but of metal." "Now what kind of a bird is that?" "No bird is made of metal, unless it's a type of machine." "VON DANIKEN:" "Garuda was a flying vehicle, and Garuda was able to travel to the Moon and around the Earth with very, very high speed." "Garuda even was able to shock mankind with lightning, which fell from heaven." "TSOUKALOS:" "Garuda was considered to be a snake killer." "In fact, Garuda needed to eat snakes in order to survive." "Now compare an airplane at the airport today hooked up to a fuel line." "Isn't that airplane eating a snake?" "If you see modern fighter jets take off in the middle of the night, and there's smoke and fire coming out of the exhaust, it looks like a dragon." "It looks like some type of a mythical creature, especially if you don't know what you're witnessing is nuts-and-bolts technology." "So of course you're gonna liken it to a living creature." "Those ancient aliens knew that our ancestors would worship them as gods because they knew that our ancestors didn't know it was technology." "They thought it was magic, spirituality, divine intervention, which it never was." "NARRATOR:" "To the east of" "India, near the village of" "Wucheng in the Sichuan province of China, similar tales of flying beasts have also been found in ancient texts." "In the fourth century, historian" "Chang Qu reported the discovery of what were then called" ""dragon bones."" "RUEHL:" "A question occurs as to whether dragons might actually have been actual dinosaurs that had wings." "I should point out that the wings would have been lost to the fossil record." "We're just recently talking about dinosaurs having feathers and having evolved into birds." "Well, it's possible that some dinosaurs actually did have wings and could be described as dragons." "NARRATOR:" "But while most mainstream scientists believe the remains found were most likely dinosaur fossils, like those of the flying pterosaur, ancient astronaut theorists have another, more provocative explanation." "COPPENS:" "Now a creature which somehow was able to spit fire obviously is not anyplace in the animal kingdom of today." "So what we have here is either an invention which did indeed spit fire, in which case we're not confronting a creature here, but somehow a creation." "Something which was either engineered by mankind or which was engineered by extraterrestrials." "NARRATOR:" "Machines that fly through the air and spit fire causing mass destruction, thousands of casualties and radioactive fallout." "Could the Garuda, and other so-called flying dragons, really have been ancient versions of today's high-tech bomber planes?" "Or perhaps something else?" "Something even more out of this world?" "NARRATOR:" "In March 2010, a panel of 41 international experts concluded that the impact of an asteroid that smashed into Earth at Mexico's" "Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago probably triggered the global climate change that resulted in the mass extinction of the Earth's dinosaurs." "But is there also evidence that some dinosaur species survived?" "And if so, might they also have evolved?" "CHILDRESS:" "Paleontologists tell us that, "Oh, these things have been extinct for 65 million years," yet they still crop up." "And they appear to be prehistoric animals, dinosaurs literally, that have survived right down to today." "Much like the coelacanth and alligators and sharks and turtles also have survived from those same prehistoric times." "I believe that ancient prehistoric monsters are still living in remote areas of the world, either in oceans and lakes or jungle areas today." "NARRATOR:" "In the highlands of" "Scotland, the legend of the Loch" "Ness monster has long been part of Celtic and Norse folklore." "Recorded accounts of sightings can be traced to the year 565, to the Irish monk St. Columba:, a powerful leader who founded monasteries in both Ireland and Scotland." "In his journals, Columba wrote of an encounter with people bearing a man near the shores of the now-fabled Loch Ness." "MARTELL:" "They explained to" "Father Columba that the man who had died had been swimming in the lake and was attacked by the water beast." "Upon hearing this, Father" "Columba sent his own follower into the lake." "When the beast came after this man, Father Columba made the sign of a cross and commanded the beast not to harm the man." "The beast fled and was never seen harming another man again." "REDFERN:" "A lot of people don't realize how big" "Loch Ness is." "It's 23 miles long, a mile wide and at its deepest point, it's about 800 feet." "And the water's very, very dark and dense." "And so it is the prime location where conceivably, if they didn't need to surface that often, they would sort of bypass detection." "COPPENS:" "When we're confronted with the Loch Ness monster, or any kind of anomalous creature, the question really is: where does it come from?" "Is it a remnant of the dinosaur age or is it something which is out of this world?" "We know that, for example, St." "Columba definitely felt that lake was sacred and that there was something present there which had a religious connotation, which is why he went to that place to begin with." "REDFERN:" "The intriguing thing is that there actually have been a significant number of UFO sightings over the" "Loch itself." "Of strange, brightly lit objects hovering over the water late at night, which clearly aren't helicopters or aircraft or meteorites or anything like that at all." "So in other words, Loch Ness is a weird and spooky place." "NARRATOR:" "Could the so-called sea monsters of Loch Ness possibly be descendants of ancient dinosaurs?" "Or might it be of another, perhaps, extraterrestrial origin?" "And if so, what might this say about other mythical sea beasts, like the seven-headed Sumerian sea monster the leviathan?" "YOUNG:" "The leviathan is sometimes described as a serpent or a crocodile or a dragon, but it lurks." "It is the gatekeeper to a portal to hell." "And this gateway to hell is apparently deep in the ocean, and the leviathan is there forever, lurking." "NARRATOR:" "In Greek myths, the" "Hydra was described as an ancient sea serpent with many heads." "It was said to be a descendant of the Earth goddess Gaia." "YOUNG:" "Hercules was sent to kill the Hydra, but it was terribly difficult." "He would slice off the head, and two heads would form" "And he had to ask help from his nephew." "And his nephew had a brilliant idea: bring a torch." "Fire might keep the heads from forming." "So Hercules would bash off one of the heads, and his nephew would, essentially, cauterize the neck so another one wouldn't form." "And in this way, the Hydra was finally defeated." "COPPENS:" "In the case of a" "Hydra, we have something which has several heads which is once again a category of a creature which you would expect not so see." "So we're either confronted here with something which was genetically engineered or which genetically went wrong, but clearly it was of such importance that it was adhered to in mythology where it attained a status over the years, over the centuries, up" "until this moment in time." "NARRATOR:" "According to" "Scandinavian legend, the kraken are legendary sea monsters of gargantuan size and are said to have roamed the seas off the coasts of Norway and Iceland." "This fearsome beast was infamous for its attacks on sailing ships." "YOUNG:" "The danger was not only being attacked by the kraken, they would come up to the surface, and were enormous:, the size of small islands." "So you could have a collision with a kraken that wasn't even out to attack you." "Another great danger was that if it submerged suddenly, it formed such a great whirlpool that it could pull a ship under." "NARRATOR:" "Could such legendary sea monsters have actually existed?" "Might they have escaped extinction in the safety of cold deep waters?" "According to ancient astronaut theorists, there is evidence of the origin of giant sea creatures in the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible." "YOUNG:" "A very early account of an encounter with some kind of monstrous sea creature is found in the Bible:" "the story of Jonah." "Here Jonah was not fulfilling his destiny, and his punishment was to be thrown off a boat into the ocean." "CHILDRESS:" "Jonah is swallowed by this giant fish sent by God." "He spends three days and three nights inside of this giant fish, and then is spewed out." "RUEHL: if Jonah, a human being, had been swallowed, he first of all would have been ripped up by the creature's teeth, then been crushed as it was swallowed, and perhaps stomach acids would have" "destroyed his skin and internal organs." "So I propose there's no way he could have survived being swallowed by whatever this entity was, if it was a fish or whale." "TSOUKALOS:" "So the question I have: is this truly a description of Jonah being swallowed up by a biological animal?" "Because in some references, we can read that the ribs of that whale were made out of gleaming bronze." "Now, that, to me, is a description of some type of technological device that was made of metal." "Jonah was, in fact, not swallowed by a whale, but by a" "USO: an unidentified submersible object." "COPPENS:" "Jonah disappeared into an object which was clearly of a manmade or extraterrestrial origin, and which was of such a specific interest that he not only related the story, but that thousands of years after it occurred, we're still talking" "about it today." "REDFERN:" "I think we need to look at stories like this at a deeper level." "Not to rule them out just as mythology, but to determine if the people reporting these things actually did have real experiences, but they were just trying to incorporate it into the way they understood the world at that time." "NARRATOR:" "Could alien beings really have lurked beneath the seas in submersible machines?" "If so, why were they there?" "Might they have come to share advanced technology with humans?" "Or did they come for another, perhaps more sinister reason?" "NARRATOR:" "Volgograd, State" "Medical University, Russia, 1954." "Soviet scientist and organ transplant pioneer Vladimir" "Demikhov surgically produces a fully functioning two-headed dog." "GLENN:" "What he did was he took the upper torso of a dog and grafted it onto the neck of another dog." "And surprisingly, this creature lived for a few weeks." "Demikhov brought it to medical shows as evidence that he could do this, that these sort of hybrids, that these sort of things could be done." "NARRATOR:" "Although, highly controversial, the transplant pioneer's audacious experiments paved the way for the first human heart transplant in 1967." "But while the image of" "Demikhov's dog is disturbing, ancient astronaut theorists believe our early ancestors also left behind evidence of equally bizarre creatures." "TSOUKALOS:" "The great thing about the ancient alien theory is the fact that we can compare modern achievements with stories from our ancient past." "And so if today we're able to create a two-headed dog with six legs, is it possible that a similar creature existed thousands of years ago?" "And I say yes." "NARRATOR:" "In the Greek epic poems of Homer's Odyssey and the" "Iliad, a vicious three-headed dog named Cerberus guards the gates of Hades." "According to the myths, Cerberus was descended from the Greek gods Typhon and Echidna." "But might the so-called gods that created the strange beast really have been early Earth visitors misinterpreted as gods, as ancient alien theorists believe?" "RADER:" "The humans and gods were kind of still living among one another." "All of this interbreeding, this fertility, like, produces, um, all of these monsters." "And you do not want to meet these monsters." "These are not the kind of things you want to encounter." "And if one guard dog is ferocious and terrifying, you can imagine three of them, but all on one body." "COPPENS: if Cerberus is a factual creature, then really what we're talking about here is somebody with the knowledge and the technology to create a multiheaded animal." "And so we are dealing with extraterrestrial technology." "NARRATOR:" "Is it possible that" "Cerberus and other hybrids, like the griffon, the Egyptian ammit or the Greek Chimera, were in fact created through advanced alien transplant procedures we have yet to discover?" "COPPENS:" "Any civilization which has contacted us in the past or which is contacting us today, roughly needs to be at our level of technological advancement." "It's probably going to be a bit beyond that." "And that also means that it's not just the science of space travel, but all sciences which are going to be somewhat more advanced." "So we know that the extraterrestrial who comes to" "Earth from a distant place will have this medical knowledge." "NOORY:" "There was some kind of experimentation going on." "Novelty, a zoo." "Let's see what we can do." "We'll play with these creatures." "Let's take this animal and give him two heads." "Let's take this dragon and give him wings." "Let's let him breathe fire." "Let's have some fun." "Maybe that's what they did." "NARRATOR:" "Depictions of monsters that are half beast, half human can be found dating as far back as 5000 B.C." "The centaur, the Minotaur and" "Medusa are all hybrid creatures described as being created by gods." "Researchers point to the origin stories of these creatures as further evidence of alien contact." "YOUNG:" "In Greek mythology, the centaur was half human, half horse." "The torso of the human would be joined to a horse at the shoulders, and this would leave them in perpetual tension between the raw animal instinct of the horse and the more civilized morality of human consciousness." "COPPENS:" "And interestingly enough, when we start looking towards mythology, we actually find specifically in the case of the minotaur, th is said to have be been done specifically by the gods." "NARRATOR:" "In India, the epic text the Mahabharata details the ancient account of the naga, a half human, half snake deity." "MARTELL:" "The naga was a serpent god in both Hindu and" "Buddhist mythology." "It was known to have human and serpentlike traits." "It was also known to be persecutors of all creatures, very poisonous and with great strength." "RUEHL:" "A question arises as to why ETs might create these various hybrids." "Well, of course, first of all," "I point out scientific curiosity." "Once you develop a technology, you want to see where you can take it." "We humans would do that." "I think any intelligent beings would." "But they might have created these various hybrid creatures to actually intimidate the existing human populace so that they would give them no trouble." "Or perhaps to create these creatures so they would be thought of as gods and be worshipped." "Even though they're advanced aliens, they might crave attention from humans." "IMBROGNO:" "Perhaps they wanted some type of slave labor that would not just be a dumb animal by adding human intelligence to, let's say, a bull, they could create a creature that would be able to move quite a bit of weight" "and work without exhaustion, but still have the intelligence to follow rules." "NARRATOR:" "In 1970, scientists from Case Western Reserve" "University School of Medicine, lead by Dr. Robert Jay White, performed a highly controversial operation: transplanting the head of one monkey onto the body of another." "HAROLD F. YOUNG:" "He was an excellent surgeon, superior technician, and had come to" "Cleveland from the Mayo ic where I think he'd learned really excellent neurosurgical care in the operating room." "WHITE:" "When in this room, there's a large amount of items from my dad's original laboratory." "This is a halo:, a brain transplant halo device." "It would clamp the brain in here as such." "And then they could actually put the patient in and complete the transplant with the body here." "This would hold the brain, the monkey's brain, and then the transplant could occur here, with the spinal connection and the connection to the neck right here." "GLENN:" "They transferred the head." "It was essentially a brain transplant by taking the whole head." "He was able to restore consciousness to the head of the monkey who had been transplanted." "And kept it alive for approximately three days." "WHITE:" "The monkey was able to open his eyes, he was able to hear, see and smell." "And as a result, they could show that this procedure could be done, it could work." "RUEHL:" "Even at our stage on" "Earth, we have the ability to transplant one head onto another creature." "Now that certainly argues for the possibility that various entities like the minotaur... the hydra and even the griffon could be created by advanced transplantology." "NARRATOR: if extraterrestrials visited" "Earth in ancient times, might the tales and depictions of weird hybrid monsters actually provide evidence of alien contact?" "Or do they provide clues to our own future?" "A future that may be closer than we think." "NARRATOR:" "In 2003, Chinese scientist Hui Zhen Sheng, at the" "Shanghai Second Medical" "University, successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs." "The embryos were the first human-animal hybrids created through genetic engineering." "ARMSTRONG:" "She took rabbit egg cells and removed all of the nuclear material from them, all of the instruction set that tells them to develop into a rabbit embryo." "She replaced it with a similar instruction set, but from a human cell." "So essentially, the embryo was human with small elements of rabbit." "GLENN:" "Why would researchers want to combine rabbit DNA and human DNA?" "The first reason is for medical research purposes, perhaps for organ transplantation." "The second reason is to create an enhanced human." "That is, give the human some sort of quality they might not have unless spliced with a rabbit gene." "Although it's hard for me to imagine... what that would be." "(chuckles)" "NARRATOR:" "A year later, in 2004, researchers at Minnesota's" "Mayo Clinic created pigs with human blood flowing through their bodies." "REDFERN:" "One of the animals that's actually quite close to us, surprisingly enough, in terms of genetics, uh, is the pig." "And one of the ideas that's been put forward is the idea of literally having almost, like, pig factories to grow hearts for people who need heart transplants, and literally, you know, you'd have a pig's" "heart inserted into your body." "And, you know, with certain drugs to prevent the organs being rejected, you could live a full and viable life." "COPPENS:" "At this moment in time, medical technology is able to create weird situations... genetic things which shouldn't really happen and which do not happen unless you start to make genetic modification." "This is evidence of manipulation of the genetically available material." "We are creating hybrid monsters as we speak." "TSOUKALOS: if modern science today would be able to create a hybrid being, a mixed being, then that would in essence corroborate the ancient alien theory, because we're merely saying that what today is being discovered is a rediscovery of" "what already took place thousands of years ago... meaning genetic experimentation." "NARRATOR:" "But is there any actual evidence of DNA splicing in the ancient past?" "In 1849, in what is now Iraq," "British archaeologist Austen" "Henry Layard uncovered numerous" "Sumerian clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script dating to" "4000 B.C." "Based on interpretations of the tablets, ancient astronaut theorists believe an advanced race of intelligent beings arrived on Earth 450,000 years ago, during the age of" "Neanderthals... and through genetic engineering, they created Homo sapiens... what is commonly referred to as modern-day human beings." "NOORY:" "The Sumerians talk about a civilization that came here from above, on another planet called Nabiru, and they called these creatures the" "Annunaki... high-level people who came here to mine for gold." "And in order to do it, they needed to genetically alter the species that happened to be on the planet at the time." "They created man according to the Sumerian texts." "ARMSTRONG: it is not impossible that we exist as the result of gene manipulation experiments." "There are so many stars and galaxies out there in space that it's impossible for a scientist such as myself to say that there are not alien species out there who could have visited the Earth at some point in the distant" "past." "So it is entirely possible that someone or something could have come along and manipulated those organisms." "TSOUKALOS:" "So this inherently means that if extraterrestrials tampered with our own DNA, they could have also tampered with animal DNA." "They could have used all sorts of DNA from every single animal on planet Earth." "GLENN:" "The creation of a chimeric monster is certainly something that will probably be possible within the next 20 to" "30 years." "We have the technology now to create these kinds of chimeras, something that might be perceived as a monster, but what we don't have right now is the technology to bring such a creature to term." "But that's only a matter of time." "NARRATOR: if the mythical monsters of the ancient past really did exist, what were they?" "Messengers from alien gods?" "Products of genetic experimentation?" "Biomechanical weapons?" "And if they did exist, where is the physical evidence?" "Still buried miles beneath our feet?" "Or are they, in fact, still out there, somewhere, waiting to return?" "Captioning sponsored by" "AE TELEVISION NETWORKS" "Captioned by" "Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org"