"We're so excited to be able to see this." "So this is it." " It's-it's very heavy." " It's heavy." " Wow." "Could physical evidence of alien visitation have been hiding in plain sight?" "This is a very strange piece." "It is a strange piece for us as well." "Did part of an alien craft fall from space?" "We acknowledge these uncertainties about its dating" " and its composition." " So we have a real mystery here." "Or are we looking at alien technology made right here on Earth?" "This defies everything we know." "Definitely." "Tuyên Quang Province, Northern Vietnam." "January 2, 2016." "During the early morning hours, three strange metal spheres are seen falling from the sky." "Witnesses report that one of the spheres seemed to be flying in a mysterious pattern before crashing to Earth and making a loud "thunder-like" sound." "Witnesses saw these spherical-shaped metallic balls, which were recovered by the Vietnamese military." "We have photographs of them, but we don't have whatever the objects were." "Now, of course, the big question is:" "could they be connected to the UFO phenomenon?" "Numerous similar spheres were seen in Spain in 2015 and in Africa in 2011." "The skeptic would argue that this is just simply space debris and nothing else." "But what's particularly intriguing is that, in March 1974, a very strange sphere was found at Fort George Island in Florida." "It was found by the Betz family." "On March 26, 1974, on a remote piece of land in Ft." "George Island, Florida, owned by Gerri and Antoine Betz, a wildfire broke out in the middle of the night, burning acres of brush." "The cause of the fire is unknown." "But the next day, as the family was investigating the damage, they came upon a strange object:" "a metal sphere." "Gerri Betz and her son Terry went out there, and Terry sees this metallic-looking ball in the ground there." "And he picks it up and shows it to his mother, and they take it back to the house." "And a couple of weeks went by, and Terry had the ball on a table next to his bed." "And he took his guitar out." "He started strumming it." "And the ball started vibrating." "I was about ten or 11, and one night they pulled it out." "We got I think it was a mayonnaise lid out, and we were holding it in different places on the, on the sphere." "And it would be magnetized and stick in some areas and not in others." "I can't remember which household member said, "Well, watch this."" "And they walked past it, it was sitting on the carpeted floor, and it followed them and moved as they did." "They took a few steps and turned, and it rolled right behind them and to a stop." "I had never seen anything like it before." "The Betz sphere began to make headlines in April of 1974." "One of the first to break the story was a young reporter named Ron Kivett, who conducted an exclusive interview with Gerri Betz just after she had made her amazing discovery." "In February of 2017, investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, just 20 miles from the site where the Betz family made their incredible discovery." " Hi, Ron." " Hi, Linda." " Nice to meet you." " It's good to meet you." " Come on in." " Yes." "Thank you." "She arranged to meet with Ron Kivett to get a firsthand account of his experience with this bizarre object." "You've actually held this silver sphere." "I have actually held the ball, right." "Talk about what happened." "I'm so curious." "You get to their house." "How was the Betz sphere introduced?" " How did they show you?" " Um..." "The ball was on a coffee table, a glass-topped coffee table in a foyer much like this, a little bit larger, but it was windows all the way around, almost like an atrium." "And, uh, I said, you know, "Can I pick it up?"" "Gerri said, "Oh, sure."" "So I-I picked it up, and it was heavier than I anticipated it to be." "About 20 pounds, right?" "That's what they say, yeah, about 20 pounds." "The ball had a much rougher texture to it than I anticipated." "And if you moved it, you could hear a very faint tinkling inside it." "It wasn't a hum or a buzz, it was that tink, tink, tink." "Terry had the ball in his room, and he began to notice that even when the ball wasn't moving, he could hear this tinkling sound." "Well, it would suggest it was conscious, or was downloading, uploading information from something that it was involved with." "Well, the consciousness of it." "I decided I wanted to take the ball outside and get some pictures with natural light." "The ball was back on the table." "So we all get up to leave to go find a spot to shoot it in, and the ball rolled all the way to the edge and stopped." "And it was just like, "Don't forget me."" "That's when the hair stood up on my arms." "After observing the strange behavior of the sphere for several weeks, the Betz family decided to submit it to the military for examination." "It got interest from the Navy." "It got interest from the United States government." "And during the testing of it, they found it was made of a stainless steel metallic alloy, specifically the ferrous alloy number 431." "And then when it was analyzed with X-ray spectography, the interior of the sphere was hollow and had smaller spherical objects, which were analyzed to have an atomic weight of 140." "Now, the largest atomic weight that we see in nature is uranium, which is a 92." "So these smaller, super heavy balls that were inside, with an atomic weight of 140, caused certain scientists to speculate that if anyone actually tried to drill inside the sphere, that it could be the equivalent of a thermonuclear weapon," "that those elements could go into criticality and create a massive explosion." "So the point is, this sphere has very peculiar properties that suggest that it is in fact some sort of artificially intelligent technology." "Do you think that it is a viable hypothesis that at least the Navy, from the work that they did," " knew this is not terrestrial?" " Oh, absolutely." "And it was after the Navy examination..." "Right." "That everything seemed to basically come to a halt." "Correct." "I never got a real clarification on what happened, you know." "But now the ball has disappeared." "Is it possible the Navy discovered evidence that the Betz sphere is of extraterrestrial origin, and secretly confiscated it for further examination?" "Gerri and her family are not interested in talking about the sphere anymore." "They just don't want to discuss what happened with it." "Maybe nobody will ever see it again." "That's a possibility, you know?" "I don't know." "To date, no one has been able to locate the sphere or explain what it was." "But perhaps further clues may be found by returning to the very site where the mysterious Betz sphere was first discovered." "Talking with the Betz Family, you thought you're dealing with really honest people who are very puzzled about what this sphere is." "When I first talked to them, I was convinced that all of them were telling me the truth." "Fort George Island, Florida." "February 3, 2017." "Investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe is traveling with reporter Ron Kivett to the site where a mysterious metal sphere that displayed the uncanny ability to move on its own was first discovered in 1974 by the Betz family, following a wildfire on their property." "This would have been an area where the fire would have been." "We're getting closer." "Now, this is the kind of woods they would have found it in." "All of this here, you can see where the-the palmettos." " Yeah." " It's thick." "It's hard to go through." "In fact, it's almost amazing." "Without the fire..." "Without the fire, they probably..." "They would never have found it." "Gosh." "So, the mys..." "There's the mystery" " of what caused the fire..." " Right." "How long it had been there, and..." "Was it intended to be found?" "Wow." "Skeptics of the Betz sphere story claim it was part of a sculpture that fell from an artist's truck." "So this is what it would have all looked like before the fire." "But Ron Kivett says this is impossible, since the sphere was discovered in the middle of a densely forested area" "20 miles from any stretch of main highway." "You know, now that I'm here where the Betz family found that sphere, it's just so clear that any of the stories about an artist over on the road having something falling off a truck and rolling" "through all of this thick palmetto..." "It's impossible." "Impossible." "And the whole idea that they would never have found it if there had not been a fire..." "No." "The fire was integral to finding the ball." "What do you think, talking with Terry and Gerri?" "I know they found it." "I know how they..." "how they found it." "They knew right away, you know, after that-that first incident or so, that they had something special." "If it was a hoax, somebody put it there." "If it was not a hoax, somebody put it there." " It's..." " Or something." "Or something." "If this mysterious sphere was of extraterrestrial origin, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, might it have been intentionally placed on the Betz's property and even have started the fire that resulted in its discovery?" "Throughout history, similar spheres have appeared in artwork that dates back hundreds of years and are often depicted as coming from the heavens." "In Christian art, you'll see these incredible examples of angels holding bowling ball-size spheres in their hands." "In other examples," "Jesus himself holds a metallic sphere." "God is portrayed holding a sphere." "So when you go back to the Betz family and compare it with what we know about these spheres and Christian mythology, you have to ask, are-are we dealing with something of ancient origin or possibly of extraterrestrial origin?" "Where is that sphere today?" "My wager?" "One of our government agencies has this Betz sphere, and our government has probably learned a great deal about a sphere that has self-activating software and maybe has been sending and receiving the whole time." "The concept of a self-activating metal sphere with the ability to communicate is not as farfetched as it may sound." "In fact, science is on the verge of discovering a similar technology today." "Beijing, China." "March 2015." "Here at Tsinghua University, scientists announce the creation of a self-fueled robot in the form of a small liquid metal sphere that is capable of shape-shifting." "When energy is applied from the outside, externally, the metal would change shape." "But they also noticed that it could also produce its own power supply for about an hour, and because of this action, it would move, too." "And, of course, most people are considering using it in the field of robotics." "Just imagine where that can go." "We're seeing the first steps that we are making towards having these types of exotic alloys that could, in the future, give us the ability to emulate the type of extraterrestrial technology that we already see in out-of-place artifacts." "In addition to creating shape-shifting robots, this new technology may be used by doctors to make repairs inside the body without performing surgery." "It could also lead to fully flexible electronics, as well as major advances in artificial intelligence." "Some ancient astronaut theorists propose that it was a similar technology that powered the Betz sphere." "This is a possible explanation for what could be going on with the super heavy balls inside the Betz sphere." "They may be using some sort of similar technology in order to roll themselves around inside, which then allows the ball to be able to roll around, much like a self-propelled bowling ball." "So with these new discoveries, we now have a plausible explanation for how the Betz sphere was able to roll around." "As modern scientists develop new alloys, we have to wonder if these artifacts, like the Betz sphere, they are perhaps there for us to examine and retro-engineer and use and create for ourselves and our own space industry." "Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that objects like the Betz sphere have been purposely left behind by extraterrestrials for thousands of years in order to help in the development of mankind's technological evolution." "As further proof, they point to mysterious metal ingots recently recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily that are unlike any other metal known to exist on Earth." "Sicily. 2015." "Archaeologist Sebastiano Tusa excavates a shipwreck less than a mile off the coast, which has remained undisturbed for more than 2,600 years." "His team dredges up an ancient payload of 39 metal ingots." "Interestingly, spectrographic analysis of the recovered alloy reveals the compound is unlike anything ever found in the ancient or modern world." "The interesting part about this is the composition of the ingots that they found." "The metal is 80% copper and 20% zinc." "There was other things found in it, but that's the majority of the composition." "Now, zinc only occurs in nature as sphalerite." "It's a zinc sulfur complex." "In order to create zinc, which didn't come around till about a thousand years ago, you have to actually process the zinc out of this sulfide." "They didn't have that technology back then." "What was someone doing blending together copper, zinc, lead, nickel, iron?" "This is a complex alloy." "This is nothing easy to do." "It suggests the possibility that it could have special electrical or energetic properties that we don't even know about." "People would not be expected to be making such a complex alloy back then." "How is it possible that such an advanced alloy was manufactured over 2,600 years ago, centuries before man had the technology to manipulate elements like zinc into metals?" "And what was its purpose?" "Based on the composition of this alloy, scientists believe what they have found is orichalcum, a metal associated with the legendary continent of Atlantis." "According to Plato's fourth century dialogues, the Timaeus and Critias," "Atlantis possessed a power and technology greater than any other civilization on Earth." "It was founded and ruled over by the Greek god Poseidon, whose temple was covered in a precious metal called orichalcum, which translates to "mountain copper."" "The composition of the alloy is not specified by Plato, but based on its electrical properties, color and luster, scientists suggest that if it really did exist, it most likely consisted of copper mixed primarily with zinc," "just like the metal found in the shipwreck." "It was said that the temple of Poseidon on Atlantis flashed with the red light of orichalcum." "The copper tint of this metal caught the attention of the seekers that came to this sacred place." "This is not just an attractive color." "This has spiritual implications." "There was something about this metal that was said to resonate with the divine." "Perhaps it was its origin, that it had come from heaven, it fell out of the sky." "According to Plato's story, the Greek god Cadmus, son of Poseidon, came down from Mount Olympus and gave orichalcum to the people of Atlantis." "An important figure in early Greek mythology was Cadmus, a divine character, the first hero, fifth in the lineage from Zeus of the Greek gods." "It was Cadmus that brought the making of bronze." "He knew how to make alloys, special metals, which, in the early days of civilization, was the beginning of technology." "So Cadmus is the one who shows us the divine nature of metalwork and gives this as a gift to the generations." "Why are we so quick to dismiss the underlying stories in those myths?" "Those stories talk about extraterrestrials coming and visiting our culture." "They talk about gods that walked among us and interacted with humans but with a severely advanced technology beyond anything that we have today." "Ancient astronaut theory says that the legends of these Greek gods are not just mythological, but they're actually rooted in actual events." "Is it possible that the Greek gods were extraterrestrial beings our ancestors witnessed descending from the sky, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest?" "And does the discovery of orichalcum provide physical evidence that the legendary continent of Atlantis truly existed?" "These artifacts could allow you to conclude that the continent of Atlantis was real, that it sank, and that it possessed high technology before it met its tragic fate." "According to ancient astronaut theorists, discoveries like the metal ingots found off the coast of Sicily provide evidence that extraterrestrials have been fostering mankind's technological evolution for thousands of years." "And they suggest that even more compelling evidence can be found by examining a mysterious artifact discovered in the tomb of King Tut." "Cairo, Egypt." "At the Egyptian Museum, an entire floor is dedicated to the incredible treasures found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen." "Among them is a metal dagger that has baffled both scientists and archaeologists because it appears to be made of iron, but dates back to at least 1322 B.C., more than a century before Egypt's Iron Age." "On May 20, 2016, a new layer was added to the mystery." "Researchers from the Journal of Meteorics and Planetary Science announced that they had finally determined the composition of King Tut's dagger." "After detailed analysis, it was confirmed that the blade is indeed iron, forged from metal that originated not on Earth but in the stars." "Meteorites are very difficult, uh, to fashion into objects." "Anybody, even today, who's ever worked with a meteorite will tell you that because of the high nickel content, they're very, very brittle and very difficult to work with." "Considering the difficulties of working with meteoric metal..." "Even with today's technology..." "How did metallurgists 3,300 years ago perform such tasks?" "This dagger is completely out of place in the fact that..." "Unlike simple objects, like beads, that can be simply hammered out and rolled..." "This has been perfected to a point where it has no hammer marks on it, it's completely smooth, it has a nice edge all the way around on it." "It almost looks as if it had been cast." "But in order to achieve that, you would have to reach temperatures of 3,000 degrees in order to melt that meteorite, and then, of course, add the necessary fluxes to get the impurities out and then cast the blade," "which brings up even more questions for the researchers." "If they were smelting iron, it would change our whole outlook on Egyptian history." "What could explain the presence of this mysterious metal dagger in King Tut's tomb when no other similar artifacts have been found in Egypt dating back to this period?" "Might Egyptian metallurgists have had help working with this difficult compound?" "Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest stories found throughout the ancient world reveal that extraterrestrials taught our ancestors the secrets of metallurgy in order to help move society forward." "True metallurgy, in the sense of putting different metals together as alloys, dates back to maybe 3800 B.C., when bronze was first discovered as an alloy of tin and copper." "Maybe the second most important development after the harnessing of fire." "As we think of modern times and our emphasis on technology, here is the sacred roots to all of that." "Stories emerged out of all the religious systems about the gods as metalworkers." "Hephaestus, in the Greek imagination, made weapons and the armor for the gods." "In the Celtic imagination, it was the great goddess Brigid who made beautiful and wonderful and powerful things into metal and then into fabricated form." "In Japanese lore, Canayago came to Earth to teach the people metalworking." "There seems to be a-a ubiquitous understanding from ancient cultures that metallurgy is from the heavens." "Could there be some tie that, in the past, certain abilities were originally brought to man, possibly by extraterrestrials, and things we would create had a certain energy or myth about them that still is alive today?" "According to ancient astronaut theorists, the most compelling of these stories originates in the same place as King Tut's mysterious dagger:" "Egypt, where they worshipped a sacred object called the Benben stone." "Ancient Egyptian texts describe the Benben stone as a meteoric iron object that belongs to the heavens." "The original Benben stone mysteriously disappeared, but many ancient depictions of it remain." "The Benben stone has a very strange origin." "It is thought that the Benben stone descended from the sky like a firebird." "If you look at the Benben stone, sometimes it is described or depicted with people coming out of this stone." "Now, to me, this looks very similar to a lunar module." "If you have the idea that this firebird is descending from the sky with fire and smoke, well, if you look at a rocket descending, these are firebirds." "So our ancestors perhaps witnessed some type of a craft descending from the sky, out of which these extraterrestrials came, which set in motion our technological evolution." "According to Egyptian texts, their gods were extraterrestrial beings that came to Earth and taught our ancestors the secrets of metalwork." "If true, might this be why we find isolated examples of advanced and sacred metallurgy occurring long before mankind was known to have grasped such technology?" "Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest that hidden away in the storage area of a small museum in Eastern Europe is even more astounding evidence:" "the remnants of what might be an extraterrestrial spacecraft." "Transylvania, Romania." "1970." "Workers digging a trench along the banks of the Mures River unearth two giant bones, and, with them, a mysterious metal object buried 35 feet beneath the surface." "The discovery brings the project to a halt, as the crew takes their findings to a nearby museum." "This strange object, known today as the Wedge of Aiud, continues to baffle archaeologists because it is an aluminum alloy that appears to have been made thousands of years before humans were able to smelt or fabricate metal." "It was ten meters in depth, uh, associated with some bones, which they later identified as woolly mammoth bones." "If they were contemporary, all of them, then they were in use sometime in the period when Neanderthals roamed the earth, so they were extinct 40,000 years ago, so they must be older than that." "The wedge was analyzed three times, to my knowledge." "The main, uh, metal in its composition is aluminum." "Humans didn't really start working with aluminum until well into the 1800s." "So when you look at this wedge and you analyze it, it really has most of the modern properties we would associate with aluminum." "This incredible metal artifact was discovered at a time when Romania was behind the Iron Curtain of the former Soviet Union." "For decades, government officials refused to reveal where the Wedge of Aiud was being held... even after the fall of the USSR." "But its location has recently come to light, and in January of 2017, ancient astronaut theory pioneer Erich von Daniken and his protégé Giorgio Tsoukalos sought out the wedge to see it for themselves." "On January 18, 2017, at the National History Museum of Transylvania, ancient astronaut theorists Giorgio Tsoukalos and Erich von Daniken were offered a rare opportunity to get a firsthand look at the Wedge of Aiud." "Museum curator Ana Gruia has taken it out of a storage locker where it has been deliberately hidden from the public since the early 1970s." "This is exciting." "Okay, I'm just going to put my gloves on." "This is great." "So this is it." " Oh, wow." " Okay." " This is the wedge." " This is strange." "It's-it's very heavy." " Giorgio, take it." " This is crazy." " It's heavy." " Wow." "This was found at a depth of ten meters, which is about 30 feet, in the ground." " Yes." " Yes, and here, this is the... where they took the sample out..." " Yeah." "And here to make the analysis." "And here you see two pieces that are broken off, sort of, so maybe it was attached or something." "But very strange." "So what does the museum have to say about this?" "This is a very strange piece." "It is." "It is a strange piece for us, as well." "As historians, we do not consider it a historical object that we're used to." "We don't know what it was used for, and we acknowledge these uncertainties about its dating, and its composition, as well." "So, for what can you use this?" "It looks like a hammer or a shovel, but," "Giorgio, what is the word of..." "in English...?" "Oh, an excavator tooth." "Well, it looks like this." "It could have been something like it." "Yeah." "But these excavator tooths are never made out of aluminum." "No, it's too weak." "Aluminum is too soft." "Yeah." "They are made out of steel, especially hard steel, so it... it could not be that." "So we have a real mystery here." "But you see this patina over this whole object?" "And this creates another problem." "Yes, because you cannot fake a patina." "It's impossible to artificially create a patina." "The patina is a thin coating of various metal compounds that forms on the surface of the metal during exposure to atmospheric elements." "The older the object, the thicker the patina layer will be." "It takes hundreds, if not thousands of years for a thick layer of patina, as this apparently is, for it to develop." "Yes, we agree there are two basic problems." "One, that aluminum was not invented at the age when we presume this was in use." "And second, it's the patina, as you noted." "Which speaks for the date for the..." " Yes." " For the age of it." "So we still have a mystery here." "Thank you very much for, uh, showing us this object, because I know that there was a time, uh, when nobody knew where it was..." "Somewhere in a box in the back." "Which means present-day archeology has a problem." "And they're doing magnificent work." "But when something like this comes along, you know, we should investigate this and not put it in a box in the back." "It did depend on mentalities" " in official position." " Yes." "It isn't currently exhibited, uh, because we have to admit, as historians, that we do not know more details about it." "For us, it's just baffling at this point." "But taking the-the logic further, uh, this conflicting information could have just two solutions so far." "One, that it is really not so old, and the context is irrelevant, and the patina was somehow produced in special circumstances." "So it's a new object, strangely preserved, let's say." "And the second option is, of course, that it's not of terrestrial origin." "In all of your adventures, how does this compare to some of the other things that are inexplicable?" "I am helpless." "I have no idea." "That says it all right there." "Very bizarre." "Bizarre." "I've known about this thing since the early 1990s, and I have to tell you that looking at it in person was a dream come true." "And it's a very strange thing." "I mean, how do you explain this?" "It certainly looks as if it was part of a larger object." "Was it a component of a device?" "Was it a component of something larger?" "If the Wedge of Aiud really is over 40,000 years old, then who made it, and what was it used for?" "Some ancient astronaut theorists believe they may have the answer." "An aeronautical engineer who saw the Aiud Wedge looked at that and said," ""That's a piece of a landing gear for a vertical take-off and landing aircraft."" "Ancient astronaut theorists have also looked at this wedge and surmised that it's possible that it's part of a crashed extraterrestrial craft." "Could the Wedge of Aiud really be a remnant of an extraterrestrial craft, perhaps similar to the one some say the Egyptians represented with the Benben stone?" "Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest evidence recently recovered from a meteorite in Russia may be another gift from our alien ancestors, one that propels us towards the next great technological leap." "Siberia, Russia. 1979." "A meteorite crashes into the Koryak Mountains." "Nearly four decades later, in December 2016, researchers studying pieces of the meteorite at the University of Florence, Caltech and Princeton announce that it has brought with it an incredible, rare metal formation called a "quasicrystal."" "This quasicrystal features 60 points of rotational symmetry, made up of aluminum, copper and iron." "It is an exotic pattern that has never before been found in nature, and could lead to the next major technological leap." "This thing should not exist, and yet there it is on this meteorite." "Now, quasicrystal alloys violate the known laws of physics completely, but what we have heard from whistleblowers is that the surfaces of extraterrestrial vehicles, such as the one that crashed in Roswell, are made of quasicrystal alloys." "And certain quasicrystal alloys, when electrified, generate antigravity." "Extraterrestrial intelligences may have been wanting us to find the quasicrystals, and it shows that there could be a whole new world of technology waiting for us to unlock." "And what we're looking at is a very likely possibility that these out-of-place artifacts are just some of the table scraps from an extraterrestrial civilization that had way more advanced stuff than that." "Are extraterrestrials giving mankind the tools needed to reach the next level in our technological evolution?" "And if so, where are they leading us?" "The stories of these very powerful ancient alloys suggest that these are pathways back to our origins." "That these are ways that we can connect with our original extraterrestrial visitors, and also point a way forward for us, because as we begin to understand these technologies, perhaps one day we'll even be able to duplicate them." "As modern scientists develop new alloys, we have to wonder if these ancient artifacts of strange alloys aren't extraterrestrial artifacts that are perhaps there for us to examine and retro-engineer, and use and create for ourselves and our own space industry." "There is no question that we are getting closer and closer to whatever technology the extraterrestrials possessed." "Are the unexplained metal artifacts found all over the world proof that we have been visited by otherworldly beings?" "And did extraterrestrials teach our ancestors secrets of metallurgy that we are just now beginning to develop and reproduce?" "Perhaps by examining these strange metal objects, we will begin to not only understand our past, but also be better prepared to face... our ultimate destiny." "CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS"