All language subtitles for Bodies of Aliens Buried in Texas Cemetery (S3, E1) _ Ancient Aliens _ Full Episode (1080p_24fps_H264-128kbit_AAC).anglais

NARRATOR: Cowboys with six shooters, covered

wagons crossing the plains, and Native Americans wearing

war paint and feathers.

These are the images most people associate with America's Old

West.

The WILD West as we know it tends

to come from Hollywood movies.

And that's a very cleaned up, sanitized version of what

the West was really like.

NARRATOR: But might there be more to the story,

much, much more?

LOGAN HAWKES: When we think of the Old West,

the last thing we think about would

be Billy the Kid chasing a flying saucer

across the desert.

From cowboys to lawyers to doctors to housewives

washing the clothes and taking care of the sheep,

people were seeing things in the sky they couldn't explain.

This is a replica of one of the bars that was

was in one of the light ships.

And they're guarded by the Star People.

MAN: Ancient aliens have been around for tens of thousands,

if not millions of years.

Why would they avoid the American Southwest?

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 help to shape our history?

And did the cowboys and natives of America's Wild West

actually come in contact with alien beings

from another, much more distant, frontier?

[theme music]

What kind of a man goes around blowing up other people's cows?

You've got to believe me.

There was white light, this bright light.

There was this big light and you fell in the river.

And when you come back, two of my best hands

has just disappeared.

There wasn't no light [inaudible]..

In the 2011 film "Cowboys and Aliens,"

a man awakens in the desert with no clue to his past

except for a mysterious metal device shackled to his wrist.

This may provide the key not only to his identity

but to his ability to protect the town of Absolution

from a deadly attack by alien spaceships.

Based on the graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg

and directed by visionary filmmaker Jon Favreau,

"Cowboys and Aliens" skillfully blends the conventions

of the classic Hollywood westerns

with the futuristic effects of an alien invasion film.

But although "Cowboys and Aliens"

is the product of its creator's imagination,

there are those who believe this story might have

a few roots in historical fact.

Aurora, Texas.

This rural southwestern town covers an area

of just over 3 square miles.

Headstones at the local cemetery mark the final resting places

of the area's hardworking ranchers and farmers.

But one body, allegedly buried here, has no marker at all.

The Aurora cemetery was founded

in 1861 right at the start of the War Between The States.

Texas State Historical Commission has a marker here.

This states the cemetery is well known because of the legend

of a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897.

And the pilot killed in the crash is buried here.

NARRATOR: 50 years before, the United States Army

announced that a flying disk had crashed at Roswell, New Mexico.

There was a report of a strange unidentified object that

crashed on the property of a local judge.

JEFF DANELEK: On an April morning in 1897,

an airship supposedly ran into a windmill

on the property of a gentleman named Judge Proctor.

The ship exploded in flame.

And it was burnt to a crisp, essentially.

JIM MARRS: There was an explosion.

In those days-- this is before television,

before jet aircraft--

any big noise got your attention.

Plus the ground shook so they knew something tremendous had

happened.

JEFF DANELEK: A local reporter arrived on the scene.

He reported that there was a large debris field

and also that there was the charred remains of what

appeared to be to him an alien from another planet.

The occupant, described as unworldly by witnesses,

was given a Christian burial and put in an unmarked grave.

JIM MARRS: In 1897, this was six years

before the Wright brothers actually made heavier

than air craft work.

So this is why I consider the Aurora spaceship crash

the smoking gun of the UFO controversy,

because this occurred six years before there was anything

manmade in the air.

NARRATOR: Witnesses claimed that debris from the crash

was recovered by local law enforcement

and never seen again.

Others claim that Judge Proctor buried it

at the bottom of a deep well.

For decades, the incident remained largely forgotten

until, in 1945, a man named Brawley Oates, who

had purchased Proctor's land, reportedly was cleaning out

the debris from the well when he later developed an extremely

severe case of arthritis, which he claimed to be the result

of the contaminated water.

JEFF DANELEK: He believed that the water from the well

contained some sort of element to it that gave him

a severe case of arthritis.

It was a bad enough case of arthritis

it eventually killed him.

So a lot of people today wonder if the well wasn't contaminated

with some sort of radioactive agents, which was the rationale

behind his arthritis.

PHILIP COPPPENS: We find that people who are using that well

actually get ill.

And so what happens at a moment in time

is that the descendants of these people

actually decides to cement the well.

NARRATOR: The incident at Roswell in 1947

also began stirring controversy about the Aurora incident,

this time concerning the strange body supposedly still resting

in an unmarked grave.

JOHN WHALEN: Researchers wanted to exhume the body

but the local cemetery association wouldn't let them.

MARSHALL TRIMBLE: My first question is why not.

What's it going to hurt?

As a historian, it makes me suspicious

when somebody is trying to hide something from you or tells you

you can't do something.

JIM MARRS: I first got onto the Aurora story back in 1973

and was there before the tombstone went missing

and actually probably one of a few people around

who still remember where the actual gravesite was.

Now the little grave is located right here.

It was a short little grave, that of a child

or very small person.

And the little headstone, the marker, was right about there.

A few years ago, scientists with ground penetrating radar

established that there really had been a short grave here.

Now back in 1973, Bill Case was the aviation writer

for the "Dallas Times Herald."

I was working for the "Star-Telegram."

We met up here.

He had a metal detector.

And we found three readings of metal in the grave.

A couple of months after the headstone went missing,

Bill invited me to meet him up here.

We went over the grave and there was no readings in the grave.

He showed me three little holes that

had been drilled in the grave.

Someone extracted the metal out of the grave.

NARRATOR: In recent decades, further investigation

of the crash site has turned up inconclusive evidence,

including unusually high traces of aluminum

at the bottom of the now sealed well

where Judge Proctor had supposedly

disposed of the wreckage.

Could the events that happened on a Texas farm

in the early hours of April 17, 1897 really

be evidence of an alien close encounter?

Could it have been the first such event

to occur in America's Western region or was it only one

of many?

Adams County, Ohio.

At the end of the 1700s President

George Washington awarded what was then the uncharted land

beyond the Appalachian Mountains to Revolutionary War veterans

in 600 acre parcels as payment for their service.

But when the settlers arrived, they

found much of the land covered with thousands of Indian burial

mounds.

And one of these was very different from the rest.

PHILIP COPPPENS: Imagine when you're pushing west

and all of a sudden you find this gigantic effigy mount

in the form of a serpent.

What you have is a gigantic structure which just sits there

in the middle of a fairly interesting landscape.

Serpent Mound was one of the amazing, mysterious mounds

found by the first settlers as they came over the Appalachian

Mountains.

There were thousands of mounds, but Serpent Mound

must have been special.

NARRATOR: Like the Nazca lines in Peru,

Serpent Mound is a giant prehistoric structure

that looks as though it is meant to be viewed only from the sky.

DAVID CHILDRESS: When you see the great Serpent Mound

in Ohio, it's massively huge.

And it can't really be appreciated when you're

standing there looking at it.

What we have here is meant to be seen from the sky.

THOMAS JOHNSON: It's mysterious in the fact

that it is on an elevated plateau

and concealed from the world, unless you're flying over it

in a plane.

And it's on a very uneven ground.

And really, to lay that out and make it right,

you'd almost have to be above looking down to get it right,

which is a mystery.

NARRATOR: This 1,330 foot long structure

widens across the land and depicts a coiled snake,

eating what appears to be an egg.

It is the largest effigy mound in the world.

And curiously, unlike most Native American mounds,

the great Serpent Mound was not constructed for burials.

ROSS HAMILTON: The Serpent Mound had no burials.

It's one of those mysterious mounds that offered us no clue

as to who the builders were.

But on the property, there were burial mounds

dated from about very early Adena period, nearly 3,000

years ago.

NARRATOR: Another curious aspect of Serpent Mound

is where the ancient Native Americans chose to build it,

on the outside swell of a five mile wide meteor crater.

ROSS HAMILTON: 300 billion years ago, a meteor

came into this area and struck the Earth going

about 50,000 miles an hour.

The Serpent Mound is built right on the very edge of the crater.

And there's magnetic anomalies and faults

go across the Serpent Mound in that the Native Americans could

douse them.

And they could feel the positive energy that's

coming out of the ground.

GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: If you bring a compass to the great Serpent

Mound, there's certain spots where the compass needle just

keeps going.

So obviously, we have some weird magnetic fields there and also

some gravitational anomalies.

THOMAS JOHNSON: The myth has it that the Native Americans when

they came here could sea birds similar to passenger pigeons

or homing pigeons circling by the millions,

because within the skull of the pigeon

is a little piece of hematite or magnetite.

And that's how they navigate.

And they couldn't figure out where north was.

Can you imagine millions of birds flying

in a circle 5 miles wide?

NARRATOR: In addition to creating magnetic anomalies,

the meteor also deposited a number of elements not

indigenous to the area, including one of the rarest

elements on Earth, iridium.

When we look at the location of the Serpent Mound,

we find not only that there is iron, that there is uranium,

but also iridium.

Iridium can withstand temperatures up

to 2,000 Celsius.

It is not corrosive.

And it's actually been used in unmanned spacecraft.

AJ SHAKA: A lot of iridium apparently comes

from outer space rather than being found on the Earth.

There is a use of iridium for thermal electric circuits.

These deep space probes include actually a radioactive source,

because it's the only thing that can provide enough power when

you're out beyond Jupiter and there's no sunlight

and there's no nothing.

We have iron, iridium and uranium, three substances which

definitely should not be considered to be of any use

to Native Americans.

The question then is to who are they of use.

NARRATOR: Ancient astronaut theorists

believe extraterrestrials may have come to this site to mine

iridium for their spacecraft and point

to numerous caves found in the crater swell

beneath the mound as evidence of this.

Right here, we can see one of those caves is pretty large.

And since this site is believed to be many, many millions

of years old, there is a chance that there are many,

many caves.

NARRATOR: But if alien visitors really did

come here to mine iridium and other elements, might this

explain why the Serpent Mound was built on a scale that made

its shape visible from the sky?

THOMAS JOHNSON: The Serpent Mound is a marker for space

according to the Shawnee Indians.

They're convinced that space travelers are using

Serpent Mound as a marker.

NARRATOR: According to Zuni elder Clifford Mahooty,

the Shawnee aren't the only Native Americans

who believe Serpent Mound has an extraterrestrial connection.

The Star ancestors taught the American Indians

about where they came from and how they're supposed

to carry out their rituals.

The mound builders, I believe, were those Indian tribes

that had contact with the extraterrestrials.

NANCY RED STAR: That's the essence of our culture.

And the mounds were a place where we would practice

and learn from those beings that come in from outside

of this world to visit.

NARRATOR: Ancient astronaut theorists also

point to the placement and shape of the great Serpent Mound

as proof of its extraterrestrial origins.

ROSS HAMILTON: The serpent itself was aligned

to a constellation that had its apex at the height of the night

sky 5,000 years ago.

The constellation Draconus was used

to align the Great Pyramid.

NARRATOR: In addition to lining up with the stars of Draconus,

the coils of Serpent Mound also align with the solar events

of the solstice and Equinox as well as the 18.6 year lunar

cycle.

Could these precise astronomical alignments

suggest that the Serpent Mound served a greater purpose

than just acting as a marker?

Some believe that, because of its magnetic anomalies,

this site may also have been used to harness energy.

These magnetic anomalies, these faults,

attract lightning.

ROSS HAMILTON: The Serpent Mound is

right on the edge of an outcropping of pure limestone

or dolomite, which is even better than the limestone

they built the Great Pyramid from.

And it's highly semi-conductive.

This is what I call the Serpent Mound stone.

It's an unusual feature.

It seems to be made of a different kind of dolomite

than what exists on the outcropping

of the general serpent.

This stone could have been placed

in the center of the oval.

Therefore, you wouldn't get a lot of random strikes

so much as you would a lot of strikes that would tend to come

to the stone.

NARRATOR: Could the Serpent Mound

have been a source of great energy?

Might it have held an advanced alien technology that

was somehow lost?

When I look at our history of building ancient monuments

like Stonehenge, the Sphinx, the pyramids, the Mayan temples,

what it tells me is no matter how technologically advanced

we are today, we've lost a knowledge

of something tremendous that came thousands and thousands

of years ago.

And it's a tragedy that not only have we forgotten how

to utilize it, but we've relegated it to the realm

of folklore and mythology.

ROSS HAMILTON: When the lightning lamps were

eliminated, Native cultures fell into darkness again

about 5,000 years ago.

But we know that if their prophecies hold true,

the Serpent Mound will be reactivated again one day.

And when that reactivation occurs,

that'll be the beginning of the restoral of the Earth.

NARRATOR: Was the great Serpent Mound really

a hub of ancient extraterrestrial visitation?

If so, perhaps there is also truth in legends of other, even

more bizarre alien encounters in the American West.

Palmyra, New York.

September 21, 1823.

In the upstairs bedroom of a log cabin just south

of this small rural village, 17-year-old Joseph Smith

had a vision of someone or something not of this world.

It was late at night.

It was dark.

And the room filled with a very, very bright light.

In this personage was floating in mid-air.

His feet were off the ground.

And he identified himself as Moroni.

After talking with Joseph Smith for a while,

the Moroni seemed to ascend into the air,

completely leaving the room again dark.

The next morning also, Moroni came back to Joseph Smith

to show him the hidden golden book, which is what we know

as the Book of Mormon today.

NARRATOR: According to the Book of Mormon,

Moroni identified himself to Joseph Smith

as a man who lived in America in the late 4th and early 5th

centuries.

But Moroni was not Moroni's home.

He claimed to have much more distant origins.

LOGAN HAWKES: Moroni claimed to be from the Pleiades star

cluster.

So a church today nine million members strong

believe that their church may have originated

not of this world but of another world.

NARRATOR: According to Joseph Smith,

not only did Moroni claim to be from another planet.

He also directed him to dig up the golden plates from the Hill

Cumorah, which scholars believe is

a reference to an ancient Native American mound much

like the Serpent Mound.

We have since found out that in burial mounds

and on the refugee mounds across the Native American region,

we have such plates.

These writing tablets have been found,

and not just in North America but also in South America.

This entity tells Joseph Smith to go on a physical search

for an object, which we know could have been

an archaeological finding.

NARRATOR: But if Moroni was a spiritual or metaphysical

being, why would he give Joseph Smith

physical objects with which to translate the plates?

According to ancient astronaut theorists,

Moroni may, in fact, have been a star being, an extraterrestrial

whose mission was to pass down to Smith and his followers

the advanced knowledge of the mound builders.

In Mormonism, actually, a lot of their theologies

is directly related to this idea of God, and various angels,

and various spiritual beings live on different planets.

According to Native American legends,

the star beings left Earth thousands of years

ago at about the same time ancient astronaut theorists

believe extraterrestrials left Egypt.

But if Joseph Smith's vision of Moroni was real,

might this have been not so much a spiritual encounter

as an extraterrestrial one?

If so, perhaps there were other such alien visitations,

ones which, in turn, fueled an increased interest in the stars

throughout the 1800s.

The 19th century people were very interested in astronomy.

There was some thought that there

might be life on other planets.

So oftentimes, lights in the sky were attributed to possibly

visitors from another world.

NARRATOR: Joseph Smith felt such a strong connection

to the Native Americans that he believed they could help guide

him to a new holy land, which he called the New Zion.

Although Smith died in 1844, the victim of mob violence,

his successor, Brigham Young, ultimately led the Mormons

further west to Utah.

In 1849 when the Mormons arrived in the area of Parowan Gap,

local Ute leader Chief Walkara told them

they had entered God's own house and showed

them proof in the form of petroglyphs dating back

thousands of years.

GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: All throughout Utah,

petroglyphs depict hunters with bows and arrows going

after buffalo, Very ordinary daily life occurrences.

But there are also some other depictions which are very odd.

And they look like spaceships.

They look like beings with halos.

They look like beings with antenna on their heads

or beings that wears some type of a suit.

For all intents and purposes, they

look like depictions of spacemen.

Great Falls, Montana.

October 19, 1865.

Six months after the assassination of President

Abraham Lincoln, a fur trapper reports

what might be the first documented UFO crash in the Old

West.

In 1865, "The Missouri Democrat"

reported that a trapper saw a light traveling

through the sky at night.

If flew over his camp, broke apart, and crashed

in the forest seven miles away.

The next day, he tracked it down,

found a large stone embedded inside the mountain.

It was hollow.

It was cracked open.

He claimed there were chambers inside of it.

And there were hieroglyphic markings on it.

And there was also some mysterious liquid

spilled around the area.

But the newspaper went so far as to suggest that these were

meteoric conveyances of aliens from Mercury or Uranus.

So the whole idea of UFO crashes was

explored in the 19th century almost 100 years

before Roswell.

NARRATOR: But what makes this story even more intriguing

to ancient astronaut theorists is the location of the sighting

along the upper Missouri River.

This is the home of the Blackfoot Indians,

a tribe whose ancient legends include strange tales of star

beings visiting the region from other worlds.

ANDREW COLLINS: The Blackfoot have very profound legends

and myths relating to beings which quite clearly are said

to have come down from some kind of sky world

to Earth and in their sky vehicles.

And the way that they are described,

these can be modern ideas of flying saucers or UFOs.

Could the object that the Montana fur trapper claim

to have found really have been one of the alien crafts

described in Blackfoot legends?

And might the markings have been the same as what Joseph Smith

found on the golden plates?

To some Native Americans, like Chief Standing Elk

of the Yankton Dakota tribe, star beings

are still very much amongst us.

And they are still making contact with humans.

A lot of our relatives that come from the stars,

they speak on a telepathic level.

And there were some that came to me

and showed me a bar with symbols on it.

They talked to me and I understood them very,

very well.

This is a replica of one of the bars that

was in one of the light ships.

And they represent universal laws.

And they're guarded by the star people.

These are universal laws.

NARRATOR: Did early Americans really encounter

what the natives called star beings as they crossed

the frontier?

And what other strange encounters

might they have experienced as they made their way further

west?

Tombstone, Arizona.

In 1881, this mining boomtown was the home of Wyatt Earp

and the site of the gunfight at the OK Corral.

Less than 10 years later, it would become the location

of one of the most bizarre UFO sightings in history.

According to a story in "The Tombstone Epitaph" in 1890,

two ranchers were out in the desert of Arizona

when they saw some sort of monstrous bird flying overhead

with a huge wingspan.

The body was described as being like an alligator.

And the wings were described as membranous.

MARSHALL TRIMBLE: There's another version

of the story told by the two old cowboys when they were very

old.

They never really-- they just shot

at the bird and it got away.

It was literally bulletproof.

There were a number of reports of big birds

that cowboys would shoot at or chase for great distances.

And they reported the bullets would bounce off

the leathery skin.

NARRATOR: But was the story of this giant bird simply a hoax

as many believe or was there some degree of truth to it?

In the Old West, we have stories of the tommyknockers,

these creatures that resided in mines.

The Ghost Rider, which was this cowboy that

was flying across the sky but also of ghost trains.

So were all of those stories just campfire stories

that were invented on the spot or were they

based in some type of truth?

NARRATOR: For many Americans living

in the early and mid 1800s, the vast western frontier

offered both opportunity and profound sociological change.

Freed of the constrictions of European tradition

and Judeo-Christian fundamentalism,

the early pioneers could now experiment

with political, social, and religious philosophies which

their eastern counterparts had frowned upon.

One such newly emerging philosophy

was called transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism was, perhaps, the leading philosophy

developed in America in the 19th century.

One of the founding figures in it was Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It was belief in extraterrestrial life

that led him to depart from Christianity.

And another author who was part of that

is the poet Walt Whitman.

His most famous book, 1855, is the "Leaves Of Grass."

And in the "Leaves Of Grass," there

are like 200 references to astronomy.

He believed strongly in extraterrestrials.

In a nutshell, transcendentalism

reminded young America that all things are not knowable,

and that some things are knowable but not

through the five senses.

So it opened up the easterners as they went west

to new ideas and new sights.

NARRATOR: Another strong influence

on the way 19th century Americans view the world was

the emergence of a new genre of literature, science fiction.

MAX MCCOY: I think the image that has come down

to us from lots of movies and TV shows that the cowboy is kind

of a rough, illiterate character.

Most cowboys were extremely literate.

Face it.

There wasn't a lot of entertainment

out on the plains.

NARRATOR: One of the first great American science

fiction writers was Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce, who

believed strongly in the possibility of life

beyond our world.

Ambrose Bierce was an author of some very strange

short stories.

"The Difficulty of Crossing a Field"

was about an Alabama farmer who one day was taking a walk

across the field when he just disappeared.

He was gone.

And years later, his wife would say that she could hear

his voice from time to time coming from the circle

but he wasn't there.

Ambrose Bierce was trying to show us that this man traveled

interdimensionally to another place.

And while he was still there, he wasn't there.

NARRATOR: It is thought by many scholars and historians

that Bierce, as well as other authors of early fantasy

fiction, had been influenced by Native Americans

and their folklore.

In addition to belief in star beings,

they believed in the existence of interdimensional gateways

or portals, which would enable visitors to travel between time

and space.

MICHAEL DENNIN: If you're thinking about like people

suddenly disappearing through a hole in spacetime

into another dimension, at the surface of it, when we think

about our modern theory of relativity

and that you can bend space and time,

it seems not so crazy, because we know mathematically

how to describe holes in spacetime that connect

different regions of space to others.

NARRATOR: The mystery of whether such portals really

exist may have been solved by Ambrose Bierce himself

When he ventured south of the border into the Mexican desert.

DAVID CHILDRESS: At the very early part of the 20th century,

Ambrose Bierce was in northern Mexico in this area

that's known for strange phenomenon called Quimé.

This area too is thought to be another one

of these interdimensional portal areas.

One theory is that Bierce may not have traveled into Mexico

alone.

Another very colorful figure by the name of FA Mitchell Hedges

may have traveled with him into Mexico.

Mitchell Hedges was a great British adventurer most noted

for his discovery of a Mayan crystal skull.

And the ancient city of Paquimé is just a few miles away from

the crystal cave.

The largest crystal deposits in the world are found here.

Mitchell Hedges believed that his skulls

were capable of psychically communicating with a person

and interdimensionally transferring that message

to an extraterrestrial being.

The theory is that Hedges, along with Bierce,

may have discovered or mastered the method of speaking

through the crystals or employing their power

and may have transported, as in his stories,

to an interdimensional space never to be heard from again.

While there, he said his last communication that we know of,

which was a letter.

And that letter ended with this ominous line.

"As for me, I leave tomorrow for an unknown destination."

NARRATOR: The man who wrote about so

many strange disappearances was never seen or heard from again.

Did Ambrose Bierce meet with foul play

or did he find an interdimensional portal

like the ones described in his stories?

Perhaps the answer can be found in a mysterious lake

in California, one thought by many

to be an actual gateway to another world.

Elizabeth Lake, Southern California.

This high desert body of water sits at the junction

of the tectonic plates that form the powerful San Andreas

Fault. The Mexicans who colonized California

in the 1700s called it Laguna Del Diablo, Lake of the Devil.

And it was said that the devil's own pet would

come into this world through a portal at the bottom

of the lake.

Local legend says that at the bottom

is actually an ancient city underworld.

They call it the Lake of the Devil.

And it's said that in the middle of the 18th century from up

until about 1880 onwards, something was happening there

which frightened locals.

JOHN WHALEN: Some of the rich landowners built ranches there.

These ranchers claim to have been harassed and tormented

by some sort of monstrous beast that would come out

of the water, and steal cattle, and menace the locals.

NARRATOR: The ranchers who claim to have witnessed this beast

called it the Thunderbird.

And their description of it was nearly identical to that

of the giant bird witnessed by cowboys in Tombstone in 1890.

Eventually, one of the landowners got it in his head

that he was going to hunt this creature down and sell it

to the circus.

So according to the story, this rancher

was able to actually fire a few shots at this creature, which

seemed to be bulletproof and metallic.

The bullets bounced off.

And after that encounter, the bird flew east never

to be seen again in California.

NARRATOR: Could this so-called thunderbird really

have been the same creature that cowboys shot at in Tombstone?

And why was it referred to by locals as the devil's pet?

STANDING ELK: They didn't have the vocabulary we have today.

So when things happened that they couldn't explain,

it was called the devil's tower.

It was called the devil's Lake.

It was called the devil's this or the devil's that.

Take it away from the legend and you might find that this

was a portal to another dimension which the locals knew

about and might have something to do with the fact

that this mysterious entity was present at that very

specific location.

NARRATOR: If a portal to another dimension or another part

of the universe does lie at the bottom of Elizabeth Lake,

might it also be possible that the thunderbird was not

really a creature at all but something even more incredible?

JONATHAN YOUNG: The thunderbird was enormous.

It made enormous noises.

So the thunder part of it could sound like a jet engine.

Its eyes were was able to literally pierce and emanate

fire.

We have this large, flying, winged creature

which gives off a thunderous sound and lights

fly from its eyes.

That to me suggests that we could be dealing

with some sort of craft.

Native Indians in North America,

they know, of course, the bird, but now something differently

arrived, an object which could fly which is bigger

than the eagle but at the same time makes tremendous noise.

So you have the creation of the thunderbird.

Even when the airplanes first started going out

up in the sky here in the southwest,

they referred them to as metal birds.

As a matter of fact, when the first fixed wing craft landed

in Zuni, the Indians over there actually went out there

and worshiped the airplane.

It makes me think of a concept called cultural tracking, which

is the idea that UFOs can mass themselves to appear as almost

anything.

If you go back to ancient China and they

talk about the flying dragons.

You go back to the ancient Egyptians.

They talk about flying boats.

You go to the Roman times and they're

talking about flying shields.

Perhaps that was just their interpretation

or perhaps that's what they actually saw.

NARRATOR: Did the cowboys in Tombstone, Arizona and ranchers

at Elizabeth Lake witness an alien vehicle,

one that may have been visiting North America for thousands

of years?

The truth of the matter is there's some very interesting

incredible stories that come from the 1800s about flying

objects and strange encounters and events.

The Old West was not only rugged, deadly, bloody,

but it was also mysterious.

It was a time when people often encountered things

that they didn't understand and had to make up

stories to account for it.

And you see this in nearly every society.

How many things do we know today

that were thought to be just impossible?

I always try to keep an open mind when I hear a story.

And I might not believe but I don't disbelieve either.

NARRATOR: Aliens invade a quiet Western town and terrified

residents scramble for their guns in a valiant attempt

to defend themselves.

A mere product of Hollywood's high concept imagination

or are films like "Cowboys and Aliens" actually inspired

by historical events, stories that challenge everything we

know or believe about ourselves?

As we continue to explore the vastness of the universe

and examine more and more of the mysteries of the Earth,

are we getting closer to unlocking

the secrets of our past and opening a doorway

to our future?