Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Ancient carvings,

depicting dinosaurs with humans.

VON DANIKEN: Sometimes the humans are even writing on the back

of the dinosaurs.

NARRATOR: The fossilized tracks of the dinosaurs and men

discovered side by side...

DR. WILLIE E. DYE: We've

found human footprints, dinosaurs and all types of

fossils that scientists tell us that should not be in the same level,

we find them coexisting.

NARRATOR: And high levels of radiation found in the bones

of a tyrannosaurus rex.

MICHAEL BARA: The reason they had to paint them with lead

paint is because they discovered were very, very intensely radioactive.

NARRATOR: Did the dinosaurs fall victim to a cosmic collision?

Or were they deliberately killed off?

GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: Is it possible that what we have here

was in fact not an extinction, but an extermination event?

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 if so, will science reveal the connection between aliens

and dinosaurs?

sync and corrections by bellows

NARRATOR: Oxfordshire, England, 1819.

In a quarry just outside the village of Stonesfield,

paleontologist William Buckland discovers several fossilized

bones of an enormous unknown animal, including portions of a

lower jaw with teeth still in place.

Though similar bones had been found in the past,

Dr. Buckland was the first European to officially record

the discovery of a "dinosaur,"

or as he called it, a megalosaurus.

Since then, dinosaurs have been discovered on every continent

in the world.

LUIS CHIAPPE: There are all kinds of dinosaurs that have been found.

You have plated dinosaurs like the stegosaurus,

you have horn dinosaurs, you have meat-eating dinosaurs, you

have all sorts of dinosaurs.

They live in very different environments, deserts,

that we know, and no doubt thousands more that we don't know.

They ranged in size from chicken-size to the largest land animals ever.

CHIAPPE: The largest land animal that we see today is the elephant.

But the elephant would be a midget in comparison to one

of these titanosaurs.

You're talking an animal that weighed maybe 25 times the

weight of an adult male elephant.

These animals reached lengths of about a 120 feet and weights

of a hundred tons.

The plant-eaters would have been dangerous simply because of their size.

Walking in between a herd of titanosaurs that weighed at a

hundred tons, you know, would have been deadly, probably,

let alone being face-to-face with a T rex.

PHILIP COPPENS: The dinosaur really speaks to us.

Every child has his fascination with dinosaurs, and we know that

they were able to fly.

We know that they are able to frighten you.

They are, to some extent, supernatural creatures.

DAVID CHILDRESS: One of the things with planet Earth was

that in ancient times, everything was bigger and all

the animals were bigger and plants were bigger.

Everything was gigantic.

CHIAPPE: The world of the dinosaurs was completely different from our world.

During the age of the dinosaurs, many other animals lived.

You have giant reptiles swimming in the ocean, flying reptiles

flying over the heads of dinosaurs.

You also have insects, mammals, amphibians and other creatures.

But dinosaurs were the king of the land.

TSOUKALOS: We imagine in science fiction what it would be

like to travel to an exotic, exciting, strange alien world

where these giant creatures roaming around the planet,

and it happened here on Earth in our pre-history.

NARRATOR: While scientists have been studying dinosaur

fossils for nearly 200 years, their theories about what these

giant creatures were and how they lived often change with

each new discovery.

Recently, paleontologists have determined that tyrannosaurus

rex was most likely covered not with scales, but with feathers.

WILSON: We found feathers of dinosaurs that are actually

preserved in amber, and so dinosaurs, we now believe that

many, if not most of them, had a feathery covering of some kind.

We know they had very complex behaviors.

They ate eggs that we find show that many dinosaurs made nests

on the ground that they protected from predators,

and they brought food to the developing young.

CHIAPPE: In the past, we envisioned dinosaurs as

lethargic, gigantic reptiles that were slow and sluggish.

That notion has changed completely.

We interpret them now as being much more active.

Many of them were feathered and presumably they were warm-blooded.

We know that they grew very fast.

Essentially dinosaurs were very atypical reptile, if you want.

We still have a lot to learn about the dinosaurs.

WILSON: It used to be easy to define a dinosaur.

But defining a dinosaur has become more complex.

NARRATOR: But while paleontologists continue to

discover information on the lives of dinosaurs, ancient

astronaut theorists believe there may be an otherworldly

connection to their demise.

JASON MARTELL: When looking at dinosaurs,

there's some key questions that really need to be answered.

We don't know their level of intelligence, we don't

really know what happened to them.

More importantly, where do they come from?

TSOUKALOS: Scientists truly believe that dinosaurs ruled this planet for

165 million years.

In comparison, modern homo sapiens-- humans-- have only

been around for about 200,000 years.

So dinosaurs are by far the dominant species in the history of this Earth.

(roaring)

But in the early 1800's, if you told someone the Earth used to

be teaming with giant beasts, some of which weighed over a

hundred tons, that person would say to you, "You're crazy."

And yet, today, the dinosaurs are scientific fact.

Dinosaurs could very well have been an early experiment by

extraterrestrials with life on Earth.

This planet has been capable of supporting life for millions if

not billions of years.

NARRATOR: The accepted belief within the scientific community

is that dinosaurs dominated the planet until a catastrophic

event wiped them out 65 million years ago.

CHIAPPE: There was a mass extinction that essentially

exterminated maybe 50%

of what was alive.

Among the 50% are the last dinosaurs that lived during

the age of the dinosaurs.

Things like triceratops, T rex.

COPPENS: We are speculating, and we have seen science trying

to come up with answers, and so how the dinosaur disappeared is

something which is still an open question to which science has

no answer so far.

TSOUKALOS: It is possible that extraterrestrials may have

wanted to trade out the dinosaurs for a more

intelligent species in their likeness...

and Earth was the perfect place to do it.

NARRATOR: Were the dinosaurs killed off by a cosmic natural

event as mainstream scientists believe?

Or might the dinosaurs have been the target of extermination?

Perhaps the answer may be found by examining numerous ancient

carvings and other artworks -- in which dinosaurs and man

are shown to have coexisted.

NARRATOR: Planet Earth... 65 million years ago.

An eight-mile-wide asteroid hurtles towards the planet at

approximately 12 miles per second and strikes the region

now known as the Yucatan Peninsula... with a force of

100 million megatons of TNT.

According to mainstream science, this catastrophic event forever

changed the climate and the topography of Earth and ended

the reign of the dinosaurs.

DAVID MORRISON: The object that came in was eight or ten

miles in diameter.

That impact dug a deep hole, lofted material into the

atmosphere, black dust, which shrouded the planet in darkness

for months, maybe for a couple of years.

MARK A. WILSON: There would have been a time in which the

sunlight was simply shut out from the Earth's surface, and

photosynthetic organisms, like plants, would begin to die.

FRANKLIN RUEHL: The plant- eating dinosaurs would have

nothing to eat and would have died off.

The meat-eating dinosaurs would then have nothing to eat either,

and this might've lasted anywhere from five to ten years.

How quickly the extinction took place is a matter of debate.

NARRATOR: But is it possible that some species of dinosaur

actually survived this cataclysmic event?

And not only survived but thrived for several thousands,

or even millions, of years?

Perhaps clues can be recovered near a crater where scientists

believe the giant asteroid struck the Earth, right in the

heart of what is now the Yucatan Peninsula.

Today, less than 90 miles from the epicenter of the

asteroid impact, lies one of the largest and best-preserved

cities of the ancient Maya,

Chichen Itza.

CHILDRESS: You have to wonder if it's not some strange

coincidence that the same spot, the Yucatan, which experienced

this devastating asteroid strike, which caused extinction

of the dinosaurs, is also the main habitation area of the ancient Maya.

PHILIP COPPENS: Chichen Itza is said to have been the place where

the Mayans made contact with the gods.

And I find it an extraordinary coincidence of all the potential

places around the Gulf of Mexico, which they could've

chosen, they took a place where literally something fell from

the sky 65 million years ago.

And the Mayans believed that this contact with the gods, this

contact with the sky, happened there, up until the most recent of times.

And so, what we have here is either a coincidence or

something else going on.

And, really, this something else is only something, which

hardly anybody has touched upon, but I think it is

something which really needs to be explored in far more detail.

CHILDRESS: In the Mayan area and other areas of Mexico,

there are curious depictions of dinosaurs.

There's pterosaurs.

There's a famous dinosaur that appears on one of the paintings

at Bonampak.

So you have to wonder just how the Mayans knew about dinosaurs.

Supposedly, dinosaurs have been extinct for millions of years.

NARRATOR: But if, as mainstream scientists believe,

the dinosaurs had been extinct for millions of years

before the evolution of mankind on this planet,

then what would explain the wealth of Mayan art

depicting interactions between humans and what appear to be

dinosaurs-- found in the very area where they supposedly died off?

Ancient astronaut theorists believe that additional evidence

can be found in northern Cambodia, at one of the largest

temple complexes in the world,

Angkor Wat.

Here, among the intricate stone carvings that adorn the walls of

the sacred site, researchers have been fascinated by numerous

images of animals that supposedly roamed the region

where the temple was built.

But one, depicting what appears to be a dinosaur, has

archaeologists and scholars scratching their heads.

MARK A. WILSON: There's a temple called Ta Prohm, and it

has a series of medallions that are carved into its surface and

one medallion in particular has attracted attention because it

looks like a stegosaurus.

And so some have cited this as an example of a dinosaur that

lived into historical times.

GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: It's a stegosaurus not as a skeleton,

but it's a stegosaurus with its skin and muscles, as if somebody

saw it while it was alive.

So how is it possible that the artist was able to carve

something like this?

Did they receive the knowledge of something like this?

LUIS CHIAPPE: There is no doubt that ancient civilizations

must have encountered dinosaur remains.

Many of them lived in areas where dinosaurs are very

abundant and I'm sure they found them here and there.

I think that the fact that they have incorporated what appears

to be dinosaurs in their artistic depictions speaks of an

attempt to interpret them.

How exactly they interpret them, I don't believe is clear.

Even 200 years ago, we had a hard time figuring out how

the bones of dinosaurs fit together.

NARRATOR: What could explain the ancient builders of

Angkor Wat having such a sophisticated knowledge of dinosaur anatomy?

Could it be, as many ancient astronaut theorists believe,

that their knowledge came firsthand, as the result of actual interaction?

NARRATOR: The Tsodilo Hills, Northern Botswana, Africa.

Here, in 2001, archaeologists discover what many believe to be

the world's oldest-known religious artifact,

a 20-foot-long serpentine rock carving, made over 70,000 years ago, by

the ancient San People.

DAVID ICKE: Serpent worship is one of the oldest known

form of religious worship.

And it's absolutely everywhere that you look.

NARRATOR: But might the enormous scale of the serpent's head, measuring

six-and-a-half feet tall, suggest that the carving

represented not a python... but a dinosaur?

MICHAEL BARA: There's a lot of ancient artwork that clearly

shows a actual reptilian species being worshiped by humans.

Some sort of reptilian presence that was here on the Earth in

the ancient past.

TSOUKALOS: The question is, is it possible that our

ancestors saw something that they tried to imitate and the

answer is a resounding yes.

COPPENS: Whenever it comes to evidence of the possibility

that dinosaurs and mankind existed, each time science has

tried to explain it away.

But we know the archeological evidence really suggests that it

is not that straightforward.

It is definitely possible that our earliest ancestors met dinosaurs.

NARRATOR: Might ancient depictions of dinosaurs really

be proof that humans and dinosaurs did, at one time, coexist?

According to mainstream scientists, the notion is not

only incredible, but downright impossible.

Unless, of course, they are confronted with evidence

in the form of a fossilized footprint of a dinosaur, side by

side with that of a human being.

NARRATOR: Dinosaur Valley State Park.

Glen Rose, Texas.

Here, in 1930, Roland T.Bird, field explorer for the American Museum,

reported finding "clearly defined" human footprints alongside dinosaur

tracks in the same exposed layer of riverbed limestone.

MICHAEL CREMO: Some researchers found human footprints alongside the

footprints of dinosaurs.

There is other evidence, from other parts of the world, that

shows that human beings like us were present during the time of

the dinosaurs.

DYE: We've found human footprints, dinosaurs and all

types of fossils that scientists tell us that should not be in

the same level as man, but we find them coexisting.

COPPENS: Now, we have never thought about this because

science has told us that there are 65 million years between us and them.

But there is, again, archaeological and geological

evidence to suggest that this is not the case.

There are footprints which show ancestors of ours and dinosaurs

in the same stratum.

NARRATOR: Could these fossilized footprints really be

evidence that, at some point, humans actually coexisted with dinosaurs?

According to mainstream scientists, the fossil evidence

found at Dinosaur Valley is inconclusive at best.

RUEHL: There are three basic dinosaur eras-- the Triassic,

Jurassic and Cretaceous.

Actually, these were named not for the dinosaurs, but for the

various rock structures that were found at that time.

The Triassic dates back about 250 to 200 million years ago;

the Jurassic, 200 to 135 million years ago; and the final, the

Cretaceous, 135 to 65 million years ago.

COPPENS: It is simply impossible to say that every

single dinosaur of planet Earth completely disappeared, and the

likelihood is that at least some definitely survived for at least

several more million years.

NARRATOR: The most widely used scientific method to

determine the age of fossils is by a process known as carbon dating--

a technique that measures the rate of decay and radioactivity in

an organic object.

BEN FIRMSTON: Carbon-14, it's not a stable isotope, so it

decays over time, whereas the C-12, carbon-12, does not decay,

so by measuring the two against each other, we're able to get

very general age.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: In order to do carbon dating, you need organic material.

You need wood or bone-- something that lived.

A piece of stone can't be carbon-dated, and often,

archaeologists are reduced to finding something under that

piece of stone, which is organic, and dating that, and

then making the assumption, not necessarily correct, that the

carving of the stone dates to the period of the thing under it.

MICHAEL CREMO: For objects that are millions of years old,

there is no scientific method that will allow us to date the

object or bone itself.

They have to date the dinosaur bone according to the age of the

deposits in which it is found.

There are methods that will allow them to date these deposits.

COPPENS: Carbon dating results don't get published in

peer review journals.

We have so many things happening in the world of science whereby

it is clear that scientists are playing a game.

And so this notion that somehow dinosaurs completely disappeared

65 million years ago is now something which science as such

is really beginning to push holes in, as well.

CHRISTOPHER BUSBY: Carbon dating assumes that the

concentration of radiocarbon, carbon-14, is always a constant.

And I think this is an assumption which may not be...

may not be true, because carbon-14 is produced as a

result of certain cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere.

But if those cosmic ray interactions changed in the

past, which they may well have done, then the production of

carbon-14 that is present in the atmosphere at the time when it

was fixed in whatever it is that are being tested, will have not

been the same as it is now.

NARRATOR: But if the fossil evidence of dinosaurs cannot be

reliably dated, might some bones actually be from a time

thousands, or even millions, of years after paleontologists

believe they became extinct?

Ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer is yes, and

they point to additional evidence found in South America.

Ica, Peru.

Here, in 1961, workers in the Ocucaje Desert unearthed a

collection of carved andesite stones, many depicting what

appear to be human encounters with dinosaurs.

And since then, approximately 50,000 of these mysterious

stones have been found across the region.

VON DANIKEN: I have photographed some hundreds of

them in a collection in the city of Ica.

And there was an old professor, Dr. Cabrera.

The Indians brought him stones from all over the country of

Peru, and on these stones is these fantastic engravings.

NARRATOR: Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera began researching

what have become known as the Ica stones in 1966.

Ranging in size from small pebbles to large boulders,

Dr. Cabrera's museum preserves over 20,000 of the strange rock carvings.

VON DANIKEN: All dinosaurs died about 60 millions of years

ago, so normally, no human being should ever have seen a dinosaur.

But there are wonderful pictures, engravings on stone,

where you see humans and dinosaurs together.

Sometimes the humans are even riding on the back of the dinosaurs.

DYE: What we have here is an Ica burial stone, which is very

unique, and what it depicts is that man and dinosaurs lived

contemporaneously.

We see the various triceratops, brachiosaurus and T. rex--

those type of creatures.

So these Icas had to either see them or they knew a lot more

about the dinosaurs, because they drew them precisely.

NARRATOR: Although many ancient astronaut theorists

believe the stones date from the fifth century BC to the early

13th century AD, there are those in the scientific community

who remain skeptical about their origin.

But consider this-- just the enormous number of stones would

have required that an artist carve more than 1,000 of them

a year every year for 45 years.

But even if the Ica stones are proven to be real, more questions remain.

What happened to the dinosaurs?

Did they simply get hunted to extinction?

If so, by whom?

And why?

COPPENS: Imagine a period in time when there are very

few human beings about on this planet.

And maybe there are dinosaurs about.

These beings could easily kill our ancestors.

If our ancestors were in an environment where there were

dinosaurs, this would be the greatest threat to their survival.

NARRATOR: Might the dinosaurs have proven to be too big...

too territorial... or simply too deadly for mankind

to allow their survival?

Or was their demise part of a larger plan, not by humans,

but by otherworldly beings, as many ancient astronaut theorists speculate?

And they believe further evidence can be found in the

study of Earth-threatening asteroids.

NARRATOR: The United States Capitol, 1992.

Congress authorizes funding for the Spaceguard program, a global

network of telescopes designed to scan the skies for

Earth-threatening asteroids.

As of 2011, NASA has identified approximately 10,000 near-Earth

objects that could potentially hit our planet.

MORRISON: Of all the natural hazards that we know of--

earthquakes, volcano, hurricanes, typhoons--

the impact hazard, the possibility of us being hit by a comet or

asteroid, is the only one we can eliminate.

You could never stop an earthquake or a volcano.

But if we had a decade, two decades warning of an object

that might hit the Earth, we do have the technology, at least

in principle, to send a spacecraft out and give it a

nudge and just slightly change its orbit so it misses.

TSOUKALOS: If we can control the trajectories of asteroids

to direct them away from Earth, then it's certainly possible

that highly advanced extraterrestrials could have had

the technology to direct an asteroid towards Earth.

RUEHL: Did advanced E.T.'s direct an asteroid to that spot?

It's within the realm of feasibility that advanced E.T.'s

indeed directed an asteroid to the Yucatan Peninsula.

CHIAPPE: The question is,

Was the impact enough to trigger the extinction?

And that's what's controversial.

Some people believe that that was enough; some people

believe that it wasn't.

NARRATOR: For decades, mainstream scientists believed

that the asteroid that may have been responsible for wiping

out the dinosaurs was a fragment of a giant asteroid called Baptistina.

But on September 19, 2011, NASA concluded that the deadly

asteroid may have had a different origin.

MORRISON: Some people think that they can guess what the

origin was of the object that hit us 65 million years ago.

Others disagree.

We simply don't have enough data.

NARRATOR: But if the asteroid did not break off of Baptistina,

where did it come from?

And is it possible, as some ancient astronaut theorists

believe, that the object may not have been an asteroid, but an

extraterrestrial weapon?

RUEHL: Perhaps the extinction was triggered by advanced E.T.'s.

Specifically, they might have used something to destroy the dinosaurs.

NARRATOR: In 1980, physicist Luis Alvarez discovered a thin,

global layer of sediment nearly 65 million years old that

contains high levels of iridium, an element not naturally found on Earth.

MORRISON: Those materials probably came from an asteroid.

They could have come from a comet.

But they definitely came from somewhere in the solar system

far beyond the Earth and moon.

NARRATOR: Iridium is believed to be deposited on Earth by

celestial masses like meteors, comets and asteroids.

But the rare element can also be introduced into the atmosphere

as a byproduct of something else.

Fallout from a nuclear weapon.

But could the Earth's iridium layer be physical proof that

advanced nuclear weapons had at one time devastated our planet?

And might they have been deliberately deployed in an

effort to wipe out the dinosaurs?

BARA: Most people don't realize that most of the T.Rex

skeletons that are on display at various museums

around the world-- for instance the Field Museum in Chicago has

these dinosaur skeletons, these T. rex skeletons, and they're

painted with a very specific high-density lead paint.

Now, the reason they had to paint them with lead paint is

because when they discovered the bones of these T. rexes,

they discovered that they were very, very intensely radioactive.

NARRATOR: But if dinosaurs really fell victim to a nuclear

attack, might there be some sort of tangible evidence?

Ancient astronaut theorists believe the evidence does, in

fact, exist-- in the pages of the ancient Hindu texts.

MARTELL: We can look into the ancient Indian texts like the

Mahabharata, and there are clear stories that describe lizards of

various sizes-- some even the size of buildings-- at were

all mass-exterminated.

And it was because of the angry gods.

Now, we can look at this and say it's mythology, or was there

some type of mass extinction-level event caused by ancient aliens?

CREMO: If we look at the records left in the ancient

Sanskrit writings of India, we see descriptions of weapons

resembling modern atomic weapons.

We also see descriptions of advanced technology, such as spacecraft.

TSOUKALOS: In the Mahabharata and other sacred Indian texts,

we can read that weapons of mass destruction were used that were

brighter than a thousand suns when they were deployed.

And afterwards, silence fell over the affected land.

If nuclear weapons were deployed, the only logical

conclusion is that their origin was in fact extraterrestrial.

Is it possible that what we have here was in fact not an

extinction, but an extermination event?

NARRATOR: Might the dinosaurs really have been exterminated by

extraterrestrial beings, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe?

And if so, could it be that some of them have in fact

survived to this day?

There are those who believe the answer is yes and that the

evidence can be found in the creatures that exist right before our eyes.

NARRATOR: Solnhofen, Germany.

1861.

Archaeologists discover a strange fossil embedded in limestone.

Its features clearly identify it as a dinosaur, but with one

exception: it has wings.

They called it Archeopteryx, or "ancient wing."

CHIAPPE: Archaeopteryx-- it's like the-the Mona Lisa of the fossil world.

It's an animal that lived about 150 million years ago.

It had a long bony tail, big claws, teeth in its mouth.

It was a small animal.

It was certainly a flyer.

WILSON: We don't know anything about feathers before then.

But we certainly see in Archaeopteryx that has feathers

that are designed for flying.

RUEHL: Now, the feathers may have been for warmth, they may

have been for display to attract mates or perhaps to help them

move faster when either chasing prey or being pursued themselves.

The evidence appears to be very strong, because there are

actually over 100 anatomical characteristics that are similar

to birds and dinosaurs.

And one theory is that T. rex, for example, has relatives

today among chickens and ostriches.

CHIAPPE: Nowadays, it's very well accepted that dinosaurs are not extinct.

If you consider that we live with 10,000 species of living

birds, that means 10,000 species of living dinosaurs.

So many primitive birds that are very dinosaur-like, these are

all missing links, if you want.

NARRATOR: To date, Archaeopteryx is the only species of dinosaur

paleontologists believe capable of flight.

But if this is the only flying dinosaur ever discovered, how is

it, as ancient astronaut theorists argue, that all modern

birds could have stemmed from this one creature?

And how is it possible that birds and certain reptiles with

dinosaur genes were able to evolve?

VON DANIKEN: According to evolution, all dinosaurs died

out about 60 millions of years.

First, there are many speculations what the reason is.

It was said that it was an impact maybe created by a meteorite.

But if this would be true, why only the dinosaurs died?

It should be that all kind of animal were killed on Earth if

you have a meteorite impact.

So that's not the case.

So the question is: why only the dinosaurs died?

JONATHAN YOUNG: Some creatures that we are familiar

with have survived from very long ago, cockroaches,

crocodiles, sharks, lizards.

So the possibility exists that there are some that we have not

seen that may live at the very deep part of the ocean or in

unexplored lakes.

We don't know.

RUEHL: We have a number of reports of lake monsters around the world.

The most famous, of course, Loch Ness in Scotland.

Are these dinosaurs that actually survived the devastation from 65 million

years ago and found an ecological niche to survive in?

For skeptics who believe that the dinosaurs died out 65

million years ago, I point to the case of the coelacanth.

This is a so-called fossil fish that was discovered off the

coast of Madagascar back in 1938.

Now, it was believed extinct for millions of years.

It actually predated the dinosaurs.

This is a large fish about five to six feet in length and 100 pounds.

NARRATOR: Is it possible that the so-called evolutionary

offspring of dinosaurs are a result of extraterrestrial

intervention, as many ancient astronaut theorists believe?

And if so, how and why?

Some believe the answers can be found in the very bones of the

dinosaurs themselves.

In 1993, paleontologist Mary Schweitzer publishes a

groundbreaking study concerning the fractured leg bone of a

Tyrannosaurus rex, one presumed to be almost 70 million years old.

Here, Schweitzer discovered the remains of blood vessels and

what appeared to be whole cells.

Her discovery contradicted what most mainstream scientists had

long believed about the perishable nature of the soft

body tissue of dinosaurs.

CHIAPPE: I think that the possibility of finding proteins

or portions of DNA, say, in animals that lived hundreds of

millions of years ago is certainly exciting because it opens up a world of

paleogenetics, a world in which we can look at the genetic

structure of this ancient organism in a way that

we haven't been able to do thus far.

RUEHL: Now, the current thinking has been that

everything of a soft nature like that would've been ossified and

would not exist today.

Her research apparently shows that there could be DNA samples

inside dinosaur fossils that could be extracted and it could

be used to actually recreate one or more dinosaurs, to actually

give us a real Jurassic Park.

NARRATOR: If scientists are getting closer to extracting

viable DNA from dinosaur fossils, is it possible, as

ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that extraterrestrials

may have pioneered this technique thousands, or perhaps

millions of years ago?

And might they have manipulated that genetic material to make

dinosaurs into numerous smaller, and arguably more manageable, species?

TSOUKALOS: I think it is possible that the coelacanth

survived due to a direct guarantee by extraterrestrials.

That they might have saved the coelacanth DNA and reintroduced

the coelacanth into the world's

oceans millions of years after it was extinct.

And the same counts for crocodiles and turtles and all

of those animals that we know of today that have survived from

the age of the dinosaurs.

CHIAPPE: It's very difficult to say what would have happened

if the large dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era didn't become extinct.

But there's no doubt that the world as we know it today, in my

opinion, must have been forged by the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

VON DANIKEN: Maybe it was made on purpose by

extraterrestrials simply because if the dinosaurs would have

survived, they would have overtaken the planet Earth, and

that was not in their plan.

It was in their plan to create something like themselves, a

human-like being.

So the dinosaurs were not helpful in this game.

NARRATOR: Might the extinction of dinosaurs have actually been a planned

extermination by extraterrestrials?

And could some dinosaurs have actually survived the event and

even coexisted with man and still exist in another form?

Perhaps the answers lie buried in every region of our globe.

Because the more we learn about dinosaurs, the closer we may

come to discovering the truth about the extraterrestrial

nature of the strangest creatures that ever lived on

Planet Earth: ourselves.

sync and corrections by bellows