In Digging up Ancient Aliens, our host Fredrik uses his background in archaeology to discover what is genuine, fake, and somewhere in between on the TV show Ancient Aliens.

This week we dive into the fascinating world of ancient rituals and their possible connections to extraterrestrial visitors.

First, we'll explore the history and archeology of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica and consider whether these practices were influenced by extraterrestrials or not.

Next, we'll venture to Britain to investigate the mysterious Stone of Destiny and ask whether the tradition of monarchy and regalia may have been an invention of extraterrestrials.

We'll also take a look at the Bep Kororoti, a ceremony and god some believe are evidence of astronauts visiting our planet.

Finally, we'll look at the intriguing possibility that ancient Egyptian and Viking funerary ships were designed to resemble spaceships.

This episode is based on episode five from season three (S03E05), Aliens and Mysterious Rituals.

As usual, you find all sources, resources, and further reading suggestions on the episodes' webpage.

In this episode:

Mayan blood sacrifices 3:10

El Castillo 15:30

White Gods 19:00

Beltane Festival 24:04

Bep Kororoti 25:16

Is the monarchy alien? 30:36

Olmec rituals 35:40

Electroscope and the power of prayer 35:53

Egyptian and Scandinavian funerary ships 42:47

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You find all of 2am Brainz stuff right here on this link.

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Music

“Folie hatt” by Trallskruv 

Lily of the woods by Sandra Marteleur

Humankind has for millennia sought comfort and guidance in rituals.

Could some of these traditions have been brought to us by extraterrestrial visitors?

Join me on a journey through time and space where we will find out the truth about these

claims.

And as it turns out, it's rarely aliens.

Hi, hello, and welcome to Digging Up Ancient Aliens.

This is the podcast where we examine the TV show, Ancient Aliens. Do the claims hold water

to an archaeologist, or are there better explanations out there?

I'm your host, Fredrik, and this is episode 28.

And since it's almost Christmas, it might be nice to look into different rituals and how

they might be evidence of alien visitation.

We will start in Mesoamerica and investigate human sacrifices.

Then go to the UK and the Stone of Destiny.

Are the tradition of a monarchy and its regalia really an invention by aliens?

We also learn about the Bepp Cororoti and how Egyptian and Viking ships try to emulate

spaceships.

Stay tuned.

But before we get too far into the episode, I want to highlight something listener Stella

sent in.

In our previous episode, I said that the Orion's belt would be foreign and unimportant in Mayan

society.

Well, it turns out that I was wrong.

The name was of course not used but in some creation myth the belt was actually important.

This is due to the Mayan hearth they had in their houses.

It was made out of three stones so it was believed that the gods home would also have

three stones.

We will get more into the creation story in this episode and see more versions of this

creation myth.

And the episode show notes have been updated to reflect that and a huge thank you to Stella.

And remember that you find sources, resources and reading suggestions on our website, diggingupancientaliens.com.

There you will also find contact info if you notice any mistakes or have any suggestions.

If you like the podcast I would appreciate if you left one of those 5 star reviews that

I heard so much about.

Now that we've finished our preparations, let's dig in to the episode!

Hey, this is Dinah from the 2AM Brains podcast.

Have you ever wondered if science has created a spider goat?

Or if Bigfoot is telepathic?

Join us every week on 2AM Brains to find out the answers to these questions and so much

more.

We start again with a trip to the Mayans, maybe to show the Mayan idea of cyclical time

maybe?

The show will focus on two things in this part, human sacrifice and El Castillo or Kukul

kan at Chichen Itza in Yucatan.

The reasons I believe are more due to these two things being more known and drawing in

the viewers in a sense that way.

And most of us react with some sort of horror fascination when we hear the word human sacrifice

and the show does really make use of this.

But really there's no great reason for the show to bring up this phenomenon.

The connection to aliens is quite vague and feels more like an afterthought.

William Bramley describes the sacrifices as

Now it's a gruesome act and they are describing here and one I'm sure you are quite familiar

with.

We look into the Mayan religion here and this human sacrifice a little bit as you might

suspect the show claims that the gods worshipped among the Mayans were not in fact gods, they

were of course aliens coming to earth giving Mayan the idea of civilization.

Now let's look into a bit of the religion and it's spiritual belief and then compare

that to what we learned from what the show claims.

First we should acknowledge that the Mayan religion and spirituality were severely traumatized

by the Spanish conquest.

What we know today is basically a reconstruction of bits and pieces that managed to survive

the destruction and attempts at annihilation by the European and Catholic Church.

Moving on we see a couple of things that might seem strange to us.

For once all living things have something called K' an invisible sacred quality.

The gods could have either animalistic or humanoid looks but at the same time they would

have the actual form that you could see such as sun, moon, Venus or even rain.

But they could also take an auditory form such as thunder.

So we have this idea of the invisible companion.

They were not only for us mere mortals, they also were spirit companions to the gods.

So yeah, even gods had one assigned to them.

So for example we can look at God G or K'nih'a'aw.

Why did I call this God G?

Well as we briefly discussed in the last episode the Mayan hieroglyph were decoded relatively

late so when scholars tried to examine the early codices they had, well the scholars

had a little problem.

They could not read the text but from the context they could see that gods were represented

in the document.

So Paul Kjellas set up a system where each representation got a letter between A to P

which has since stuck in the literature.

So K'nih'a'aw is a god well rooted in the classical era and is the sun god.

And K'nih'a'aw could be represented as a man, a jaguar or a deer but at the same time he

would be the literal sun while also having this spiritual companion like everybody else.

So there's a bit of duality going on here, he was both a man and the sun at the same

time.

Now looking at Mayan society you will learn that they found comfort in order and they

found this especially in the sky through astronomy.

And the stars move in a way that you can expect where they will be at a given time if you

just look long enough.

And the Mayan called the stars and planets sky wanderers due to their movements.

Note that these bodies were astronomical concept and literal embodiments of the gods.

But to the Mayan people the sky wanderers would not come to earth, that would not really

make sense.

These beings had a life each day they were born, they lived throughout the night or day

and then died as their heavenly body set each morning or night.

So we see this cyclical idea here and we will see it come again and again when we look into

the Mayan traditional spirit and well faith basically.

And we see that the kings or Adyas worked as a sort of high priest in the society.

Now they were not god-kings but they were the highest ranking person in the religion

of the state.

Let's look into the creation story that we only brushed upon in earlier episodes.

I must warn you though that it's not just one creation story in the Mayan religion,

there are several.

They all contain similar elements though.

The common characteristic is that humans were not born into the first world.

Remember that Mayan calendar starts at the beginning of the 13th Bak'tun.

In most stories we have three worlds before the final one.

The people in the northern Yucatan believed that the first world was inhabited by dwarves,

but all these first attempts had flaws and the gods start over just as they will do with

our world at one point or another.

Most of the destruction are by floods, there are other versions too, but most common are

floods.

But in contrast to the bible, there were no survivors or both.

And since there are so many versions I have decided to use the most common telling that

we find in Popol Vuh.

So in the aftermath of the last destruction, the earth is left in a quite ill defined mess.

A figure called Wukulbe Kwakiks, a giant bird, is going around and claiming to be lord of

both the sun and the moon.

But the hero twins kills Wakab with a blowgun and with the birth-death the sun and the moon

can rule their rightful domains.

But where did the hero twins come from?

Well to answer this we have to talk about the demise of the mice god Hunapau and his

brother Wukub Hunapau.

These two were terrific ballplayers who unfortunately lost a ballgame in Xibalba the underworld

to the gods of death.

The name of my deathcore metalband by the way is not, but it should be at least.

The brother was buried under the Xibalba ball court while Hunapau's severed head was

hanged in a calabash tree.

The Hunapau somehow spits in the hand of the daughter to the death god.

That way he manages to impregnate her.

This causes her to flee to the surface where her mother protects her and she births the

hero twins.

Now they were taken care by the grandmother and someday after they kill this monster Wukub

Kwakiks they find their father's ballgame equipment stored in the attic.

The twins are outstanding players and get invited to Xibalba to play the gods of death.

But it turns out that the gods of death don't like to lose and they are very sore losers

so they will try to kill the twins through different trials throughout the nights.

Luckily the animals are on the hero twins side and warn them about this.

In the end the death gods would not let them go.

To escape the hero twins sacrifice themselves.

The gods of death burned and milled their bones and spread the ashes in a river.

But from the river the twins was reborn and returned back to Xibalba, this time for vengeance.

Instead of playing a ballgame with the gods that obviously they cheated in, they showed

neat new tricks that they had learned.

One of the twins beheaded the other and then resurrected its dead sibling.

And the gods of death found this trick so amusing and fantastic that they demanded the

hero twins would perform the trick on them.

They did of course oblige and beheaded the gods but they did not resurrect them.

Instead the twins was transformed into the sun and Venus, forever fated to relive their

birth, escape and death for eternity.

And this is just one version as I mentioned earlier.

Other out there in some the hero twins are not turned into celestial bodies, instead

the mice god rises through a spring in the ball court.

Another the god Chaak resurrected the maize god by breaking into Xibalba as some sort

of Orefiues and the maize god becomes the tree of life starting the new creation.

Now we have mentioned ancestral worship in the past and the dead was a big part of Mayan

society and something I find refreshing is that there is actually no idea of how everyone

goes to this place of abundance called Flower Mountain.

And the Spanish react strongly that even people who committed suicide, died in childbirth,

war or whatever went there.

But there are two layers of the afterlife, the normal and being a god.

The Mayan kings were not gods on earth like the Egyptian pharaoh, but upon their death

they would become gods.

That's why blood sacrifice is essential.

The king isn't just talking to his ancestors, he is talking with the gods through his ancestors.

And we even have examples of queens doing the bloodletting since they might have a particular

ancestor within their bloodline.

So looking at all that we learned in the past episode and today we realize that you have

to really shoehorn aliens into the Mayan mythology.

Looking at their belief there's not much room for aliens, but what we see instead is the

idea of sacrifice and repetition.

Nothing was bound to happen again, time was not a line, it was a cycle.

What happened in the past shall occur in the future.

And the most important sacrifice was the king's blood.

His bloodletting rituals ensured the cycle would continue.

But if you wanted to sacrifice someone, the Mayans prefer a king to kill.

They would often be had as a representation of the Mayan god as we saw earlier.

And ordinary people would be sacrificed too.

Their blood was some sort of snack food for the gods, but more important it was a celebration

of the son's rebirth and life.

Some early accounts from the Spaniards claim that the Aztecs or other Maya speaking culture

introduced human sacrifice to Mayans.

But looking at Mayan art it seems to be a later construction from the Yucatan Mayan,

if of course these accounts are even true.

Now the show's thesis is that they performed this sacrifice to get their alien gods to

come back but well something else is needed to fit in with the Mayans.

The human sacrifice was to make sure the gods gave them favors.

We see an increase of the sacrifices towards the end of the Mayan civilization before Spain

started to force their culture upon them.

Now we have spent roughly 10 minutes or so trying to explain briefly Mayan religion and

the show spent maybe 2 minutes on this.

So this is good to highlight.

It's easy to make up things without evidence but it takes quite a lot of time trying to

explain why it's wrong and this is not a comprehensive guide to Mayan religion or practice but I

hope you my dear listener are inspired now to go and learn more about this.

The show notes will provide some excellent resources if you want to learn more about

this topic and I'm sure we will return to it for deep dives later on.

But let's move on and look where the sacrifices took place.

El Castillo or as it was called by the Mayans, Kukulkan.

As the name indicates it was a temple dedicated to the deity of Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl as

the feathered serpent was also known in Mexico.

And the show's main focus here is a particular shadow that appear on this pyramid on the

equinoxes.

I'll let von Däniken explain this to us.

This is a model of the pyramid of Chichen Itza in Mexico and every year on March 21st

when the sun goes up directly on the stairway here is created triangles of light and shadow

coming down the stairs which represents God Kukulkan has descended to the humans.

At the end you see the face of God Kukulkan on September 21st it's the opposite.

This time when the sun rises up in the morning God Kukulkan goes up the stairs and ends in

a bright light up on the little temple which means God Kukulkan visited the earthlings

teach them and after a certain period he disappeared again into the sky with the promise to return

one day.

So the idea presented is that since the shadow descends and ascends this must indicate that

aliens visited us.

We are back to claim if something goes up or down it must be a civilization explaining

a encounter of the third kind.

But does this really happen as presented?

Well the shadow exists but it only goes one way really and we're still determined if this

was really intended or just a happy coincidence.

What was more important to the Mayans is that the stairs adds up to the solar year.

We also see 52 Alco, probably referring back to the hub calendar that we talked about a

bit in the last episode that consists of 52 years.

We also have cenotes going out in all four weather direction and a cenote is a pit or

sinkhole that may occur after collapse of limestone revealing the underground beneath

and if you picture a large well you're quite close enough to what a cenote looks like.

Its importance for water supplies is a given basically.

They were also vital for sacrificial reasons, especially for the Itzamayan in the Yucatan

peninsula.

People were sacrifices into the cenotes to the rain god Shack.

Of course not all cenotes was used for sacrifice for obvious reason, but two of the four we

have in Shitsun Itza have evidence of the practice.

Unfortunately we know little about the pre-Hispanic version of Kukulkan, but the Itza idea of

the feather serpent spread through the Mayan culture and was in the end picked up by the

Aztec.

What's interesting about this is it's a dualistic god, it has feathers and flies and still also

serpentines like a snake on its belly down on earth.

Now I think it's crucial to at least bring up here that Quetzalcoatl is by some of these

alternative history proponents believed to be evidence of white people in the Americas

pre-Columbus.

In a previous episode we covered the short-lived colony of Vikings in northern Canada, but

this claim is different.

We have encountered the idea of white people or gods in America in an earlier episode,

so let's look a bit deeper about the claim about Quetzalcoatl or Kukulkan.

They don't bring up this in the episode, but well I thought that this might be a good place

to discuss this.

Now the idea is not new, not at all.

The white god theory comes in many forms and from a few different places.

We have to us now famous authors like David Childress who bring up this idea in his books

Lost Cities of North and Central America and The Lost Cities of Atlantis.

We see this claim in Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods more than once, but also the Mormons

brought this idea in their scriptures that white Israelites came to America.

But let's wind back and see if we can find the earliest mention of the origin of this

claim.

And if we do this we will end up with Geronimo the Mendieta, a Franciscan missionary and

chronicle who lived between 1525 and 1604.

In his work Historia Ecclesiastica, Indiana, volume 2, chapter 10 we learned about the

history of Quetzalcoatl.

The Mendieta probably based his writing on the now lost writings of Andres de Almas,

another priest operating a bit earlier than the Mendieta.

But in this chapter we learn that Quetzalcoatl was described as the following.

He was a white man, tall in body, broad forehead, large eye, long black hair, and large round

beard.

This is the earliest description of Quetzalcoatl as a white person, and this description does

not exist in any pre-Hispanic source.

If you my listener have an earlier source, please send it in, but I have looked, I have

not found any, it's not only me who's trying to find an earlier source, and we would all

be happy to be proven wrong.

To be a bit different from people who shall not be named, the writing of the Mendieta

inspires similar depiction of Veracaja in Peru as with his claims they tend to spread

and be reworked and just like a long game of telephone.

So the idea is around and it's festering, but it's not until the American congressman

Ignatius Donnelly, we see a connection between white gods and Atlantis.

Now Donnelly is of course a politician, Shakespeare denier and Atlantis believer.

Building on these ideas of again Blavatsky and Steiner he argued that the Atlanteans

were a population of white people who went around and taught people how to be a civilization.

If you read his book Atlantis, the Antediluvian world, you will quickly learn how his idea

of an advanced Neolithic society is eerily similar to Hancock's idea about a lost civilization.

Now in his book Donnelly, based on the book of Desiree Charnay, claimed that the Toltecs

were white.

On page 349 it's stated that Quetzalcoatl is white and both the Toltecs and Quetzalcoatl

originate from Atlantis.

I've also heard these strange claims that since people of Mesoamerica can't grow beards

it must have been Europeans they talked about.

Again taking de Menditas history and adding just an extra layer of races on top of it.

Not that neither Childress Hancock nor other alternative history promoter really deal with

the racist origin of their claims, I just hope that you won't go and look this up and

just be frightened on how obscenely racist the descriptions really are.

That's why I don't really quote it here because I don't really want to.

But again I gave you what page to go if you want to look it up it's freely available online

and yeah you will find it in the show notes.

Now I think we will return to White God's theory because they play quite a role in this

universe.

We didn't really get into the Mormon angle as we learned back in episode 22.

The LDS has a weird weird history.

But for now we will leave this part of the world and after the break we will look into

some rituals that the alien proponents claim to be evidence of visitation.

Let's return to the proof for ancient astronauts.

The show will now bring up two ceremonies that as evidence are pretty weak.

The first are festivities of Beltane, a Celtic celebration celebrated in the spring by lightning

fires.

This festival comes down to us through Gaelic dictionaries such as Sanna's Cormac.

The earliest reference to this is during 900 BCE.

The alien proponents claim that the celebration was attempted to recreate the lights from

UFOs that the Celts has seen.

It's also claimed that it was believed that portals opened up during this time.

Now the Celts, Scandinavians and people in the Baltic area in general indeed celebrated

the start of spring with lightning fires.

But it was not to recreate UFO lights but to scare away spirits.

Even the fires in the homestead were extinguished and relit.

The entry of spring was a celebration of life and rebirth in a sense.

And the UFO angle seems quite silly here or well maybe even more than usual.

Now the second celebration originates in Brazil.

The show starts to talk about a tribe called Kayapo and the ceremony performed within this

tribe.

We see a figure dressed in an oversized costume that seems to be woven.

And this figure is supposed to be called Bep Cororoti.

The show claims that this person is trying to resemble an astronaut and the tribe is

celebrating an extraterrestrial visitation.

The show does something in this segment that if you have followed along and watched this

episode you might have noticed we have Giorgio on screen telling us something that originally

Von Daniken has claimed.

And this particular case is from Daniken's 1973 book Gold of the Gods.

Now the Kayapo tribes refer to themselves as Mebengokre, meaning the men from the waterhole.

The name Kayapo originated during the 1800s and was coined by other groups in the area.

And this name translates to roughly those who looks like monkey.

This is probably not referring to the physical look but that the people used masks in a particular

ritual.

The Mebengokre lives in central Brazil in an area large as Austria and is mainly covered

with rainforest.

Now they have unfortunately struggled for a long time to be able to try to keep their

land since well other settlements are closing in.

Several NGOs trying to help the tribe to acquire the rights to the land and if you wish to

help you can visit the Kayapo project.

So the Mebengokre are a real tribe.

So far so good I guess even if we have, I have some opinions on using their name.

Even if I have some opinions on using a name that people don't really prefer.

But how is it with Bepp Kororoti that the show keeps talking about?

Well here it gets murky.

Vonda can claim in Gold of the Gullstat Yao Amerigo Perret visited the tribe in 1952

and learn the story about this spaceman.

We get the story about how the Mebengokre meets this strange man in a suit who they

can't hurt with their weapons and the figure find it quite amusing and then demonstrates

a powerful stick-like weapon that pulverized both stones and trees and Vondane makes quite

a deal about that this story was before Yuri Gargarin's trip to space in 1961.

So how would they even know how a space suit looked like?

Well since Vondane can did not give a reference it was quite tricky to find Perret's own account

of this.

It's not presented in the text or in the small reference list in the back Vondane can's book.

I did not have any luck in the books written by Perret's available and was close to giving

up when I had some stroke of luck.

Now Yao Amerigo Perret tells this story in an article for the weekly Brazilian magazine

O Cruzeiro in the issue published on the 29th of March 1972.

In the article Beb Corrote o Gurrimo do Espacho, Beb Corrote Space Warrior Perret talks about

this conversation taking place in 1962.

Now Beb Corrote is known from the anthropological records.

For example Claude Levi-Strauss discussed this figure in his book The Raw and the Cook

in 1969.

In it we learn that Beb Corrote was a powerful shaman who after getting a tapir was left

with only two paws by his greedy greedy friends.

Now he decided to take revenge so he shaved his head and climbed up a hill and started

to control lightning with his wand.

An interesting tidbit that explains this suit is that the Bebengocre are skilled beekeepers.

They have colonized and used different species of bee and some even stingerless.

Now Beb Corrote among the Bebengocre is usually associated with rain and thunder, but due

to his mortal beginning he is particularly fond of honey.

Ethnobiologist Daryl Poussey talks about how the Bebengocre leaves honey in wild nests

they open and this is so the bees will return later and create more honey.

But traditional people of the tribe had done this so Beb Corrote will get his share.

So the suit is to keep bees and not to get stung.

Jason Colavito landed on the same conclusion in his exploration of the subject.

And so we see some similarities between Jau Amerigo, Peretz Telling and other anthropological

collections.

But I'm not sure why Peretz Telling differs so much from the other anthropological work.

He might have accidentally influenced the group or the myth has evolved.

But I can't find any instance of this story after or before Peretz.

Now it does not mean it's not true, but it means that we should keep it with some skepticism.

The next part is giving me quite some David Icke vibes.

We will not discuss the shape-shifting Jewish reptilians here today, that would be silly.

Now the show proposes that the kings are traditions either instituted by aliens or kings trying

to emulate aliens.

This is a bit unclear, to be honest.

But we start with the Stone of Scone or as the show put it the Stone of Destiny.

This name is not wrong, but make it sound fancier than it is.

This stone is a stone on which the king or queen sits during the coronation ceremony.

Or nowadays it's beneath a bench on which the monarch sits.

For some reason the show claims that the stone is from outer space, but since it's made out

of old red sandstone, far and close to the Scottish village Scone.

Now this village, other than being named after a tasty bread, was the coronation place for

the Scottish royalty once upon a time.

And we descend into a section of lewth threads that they're trying to tie together, but the

main argument is that the kings are viewed as god.

And in some cultures that is true.

That's one reason for example Alexander the Great conquered Egypt.

It was one place he could be a literal god on earth.

But while religion and monarchy had close ties, most cultures have a different approach

to how the king is viewed.

In the Mayan world the king was a high priest as we've seen, and while in Rome some emperors

was deified upon their death.

And if you look at Catholic Europe the kings were ordained or chosen by god, but didn't

speak for god, nor was a representative of god.

The idea that a king, emperor, chieftain, a jahr, any other name for the role.

Well what they did varies widely between societies.

Luckily they have hidden some clues within the coronation.

Again we have a Eurocentric approach, but okay let's see what it is.

It's part of the regalia of the monarch, the scepter.

You know how the rod looks like an ankh, the Egyptian symbol?

Yeah, neither did I.

But this is the claim they make with a little fact from Jason Martel.

The ankh is always a symbol used in pharaonic times as a scepter.

But an interesting play on the word ankh shows that it also stems from the word Anunnaki,

which meant those who from heaven came to earth.

What Jason does here is to smash two worlds together without really understanding them.

The ankh is an Egyptian symbol representing three sounds that form this world.

In no form or even the sound it's related to Anunnaki.

That's just a pareidolia of four words basically.

If you translate it, ankh would mean key of life.

Even the translation of the Anunnaki that Martel gives is wrong and we have covered

it so many times now.

It's something that Zachariah Sitchin invented and now for those in the back, Anunnaki would

be translated to something like of princely seed.

While the ankh has its place in Egyptian depictions of the pharaoh, it was never used as a scepter.

In fact the Egyptian pharaoh already had a scepter, which we have drawings dating back

to even pre-dynastic times.

Add to this the stars we have found from the first dynasty.

Not one, but several, both in Abydos and Zachariah.

And the finest scepter is of the pharaoh Kashmikavih found by Pietro in 1901 and I recommend you

to go and look it up.

The Ankh scepter connection might not be the evidence that would blow this thing open,

but maybe we should start using our heads.

So if the stick doesn't work, you got to use your head.

Jason Martel returns with another Anunnaki claim that they have glow around them.

And from the light we're supposed to think about halos and the Anunnaki angel connection

is again repeated here.

We start to think about what you could put on your head might represent an alien helmet

I guess.

We don't really get into this claim too hard for it's just... it's silly.

Come on!

People always have needed to differentiate themselves from others.

This becomes even more visible when we look at monarchs.

The best way to stand out is to have visible headgear.

Usually these segments have some anchor to make them sound plausible, but I'm not sure

what happened with this one.

It's just a collection of silly claims.

But I don't know about you, but I think we could use a break here.

When we return we will investigate how much energy prayer generates and an Egyptian boat

mystery.

So this last section has some more fun things to bring us.

This segment is going to be a little bit all over the place.

We start first with the Olmecs, the mother culture of Mesoamerica.

They're most known for their giant stone heads.

That's where I found about 17 of.

Or about exactly 17 of.

These are large affair with full lips and sporting something that looks like a helmet.

This has resulted in some quite interesting alternative theories of the Olmec origin.

Even back in 1850 when the first stone was uncovered in Veracruz, the ideas of Africans

sailing over to Mesoamerica and starting the Olmec culture started to appear.

And this culminated in the 1980 with the story The Olmec Football Player by Kathleen Smith

in which an Afro-American football player traveled back in time.

I might not be so sure about that, these ideas tend to appear every so often, basically.

But what with the show claims about this colossal head?

Well, not much.

They used their heads to talk about something else and let Fieberg take the wheel.

The mother culture of Central America was the Olmecs.

In old images made by the Olmecs we can see helmeted beams dressed in overalls ascending.

They have wings and they have microphones almost in front of their mouths.

Are these the heads of rulers or priests?

Or were they maybe aliens that they wanted to portray?

Now it's unclear what images Fieberg refers to here, but I don't really recognize them.

I have not found this example going online searching.

A more common motif that's really well known in the Olmec tradition would be shamans transforming

into jaguars.

This transformation is sometimes depicted even in small children.

So maybe the shamanism was a trait you were born with.

I'm not sure about that.

But we see concepts that will be important in Mayan cultures such as twins and dwarves.

And Fieberg is correct in the statement that the Olmec can be viewed as the mother culture

of Mesoamerica but his correctness basically starts and ends there.

From the giant heads we get into the concept of shamans and here we go into a segment dominated

by Nancy Redstar, Clifford Mahoty and Standing Elk.

People you have met before if you have been following the show.

I'm not going to get into what they say here because well with evolve and expand I mean

Christianity has more than 45,000 domination.

That's only the ones big enough that we actually start to count them.

So I'm not going to tend to know more about Native American religion and just have the

approach to leave it as it is in this one.

They bring up ideas that I think reflect their belief.

Because we will get into something more interesting.

It's time for what you might have been waiting for since the last break.

How much energy does a prayer produce?

So to get to this question we need to follow the Olmec shaman through the Native American

religions through the Horseshoe Valley.

And it's quite a trip and we are finally led to believe that Dr Bogoslav Lipinski has proven

that prayer is for one real and has an energy output.

Now Dr Lipinski got his degree in biochemistry at the Universitet Varsovsky and seems to

do decent work in cancer research.

So his field is not at all related to his claim that seems to have been only published

in an article back in 2009 for a website called Mediorgia USA and the report was named Scientific

Study.

In it Lipinski claims to have measured prayer output with an electroscope in a city called

Mediogorgia in today's Bosnia-Herzegovina.

This experiment took place in 1985 with a rechargeable electroscope model BT-400 Biotech-Electronics

from Canada.

Ancient aliens and Lipinski refer to the country as Yugoslavia for reasons probably only known

to them.

This show was made well after the war down there and Yugoslavia had not existed for some

time in 2010.

But you might ask yourself what is an electroscope?

I wonder that too, and the short answer is that well it's a crude voltmeter.

The electroscope was invented in the 1600s by William Gilbert and to be honest it's mostly

stayed the same since.

I don't know if this is the tool Lipinski refers to but since I don't have anything

else to go on we have to assume that he you know refers to the proper device.

I could not find any old article about an electroscope with model BT-400 or the Biotech-Electronics

company in Canada.

If you can send it in to me and we can update it later.

Lipinski claimed that he managed to measure a high electric charge and radiation when

people prayed within a room.

But from what I can tell neither Lipinski nor anyone else has been able to replicate

this and the method makes little sense as the charge must be quite close to the electroscope

for it to register an output.

The electroscope can detect ionizing radiation or an electronic charge on a body but of course

within limits here.

It's a very common you know physics project for high schoolers and luckily you can build

your own electroscope in your home and start trying to replicate this study.

In all seriousness reading the study you will start to note that it suffers the same issue

that many ghost hunters face.

They don't know how to use the tube and interpret the data in a way that favors their preconceived

notion.

You know just like running around with an EMF meter in a building and then going wow

look at this electricity and not you know figure it might be the wires in the wall or

that's just me being you know mean crude skeptic.

But the study is really bad but as I said you can replicate this.

You can try the same you can collect all your friends in a prayer put the electroscope in

the room does it go off?

Well then he's right if it does not, well he probably is wrong.

Now let's move on to the stars and we're brought all the way back to Egypt for this last section

of the show where we will explore the meaning of vessels and the journey to the stars.

We open up on a thrilling discovery in 1952 of Khufu's funerary boat and it's 45 meters

or 150 feet I got you Americans.

Large vessel made out of cedars from Lebanon.

The ship is strange for reasons other than aliens it has no place for a mast and the

oars are really too small to be functional for the for the boat of these sites.

The leading theory today is that it was a funeral vessel made to bring the dead pharaoh

from the east to the land of the dead in the west and it was indeed not your daily sailing

type of vessel.

Philip Coppens explained this boat like this.

In the case of Khufu we find that there is a literal boat said to be a boat of a million

years even though this might appear to be a normal ship it is actually something far

more and it almost represents the spaceship because they didn't just speak about years

they spoke millions of years and this is precisely what space travel is all about.

Somehow the dead body was able to go on this voyage.

Now the idea of traveling to the land of the dead through a boat comes from Ra's daily

expedition across the sky and predestined return to the underworld.

Thus the Egyptian believed that you travel traveled west and then down.

Now not up to heaven this is something the alien crowd invented by themselves so if you're

rich you could have a large boat for example if you're middle class you might have a smaller

you know more modest model and if your means were very tight the coffin would actually

suffice you, but you need to put the right spells in there otherwise just fine.

This means that you can stop someone from going to the Duat for example you could you know

not bring them a boat then they would be stuck so you could punish the dead in that sense.

Now we also have a short appearance here by Robert Bauval who claims the word for God

in ancient Egypt is Niter Netero and that it translates to a being that came from the

cosmos.

Where we got this idea is highly unclear.

The glyph representing this word looks like a flag on a pole or maybe an axe and it's

meaning is a bit murky, but the most accepted translation is strength or power.

This can of course change it's still being pondered on but Bauval's translation does

not fit in any sense or way and he offers no explanation on how he got to it.

I mean it looks like a flag or an axe how does he get a cosmos from it?

No idea.

But we continue this idea of a boat meaning spaceship to my dismay by going north to my

home to my stone ships.

Oh for the love of Thor yes there will no claim that the stone ships shipsetting in

Sweden or skeppsetning is evidence of extraterrestrial visitation.

You will hear that these stone formation are grey while this is true to some extent it's

not the whole truth of course.

The show also claims that these are from the Viking area and some are but not all.

The stone ships sometimes have burial within them or are located within a grey field but

most commonly they were close to the old coastline.

The theory is while being part of the funerary rites was also points of navigation.

Remember that in Scandinavia you don't have sea rice we have land rice instead.

The old stone ships dates to the oldest stone ships dates back to Scandinavian Bronze Age

and the tradition of portraying ships stems from that too.

So in Scandinavian petroglyphs, one of the most common depiction is ships which seems

to have been crucial for the people of the time either due to trade or other reasons

but they like to depict boats.

We also find different types of ship burials.

They were rarely cremation type burials and are pretty famous due to their rich grave

goods.

The most famous example might be the Osbergar ship from Norway.

This ship is more or less intact and was buried with what we assume was a royal individual

with quite impressive grave goods.

At first only half of the vessel was covered by a tumulus leaving one side open and there

is this idea that the open part was used as a stage that the Viking burial was part of

a larger concept and a longer ritual especially for this king.

Now ship burials were not only for men we have examples of women being buried this way

too.

Take for example grave 36 in Birka Stockholm where from the skeletal remains it seems that

there has been a woman also with rich grave goods.

This should not be confused with the woman's warrior grave that upset some strange people

recently.

Now are these graves and boats evidence of aliens?

Well I doubt it.

The evolution and connection to the culture of Scandinavia would not make sense if they

tried to emulate alien spaceships.

So why did they try to emulate accurate ships in Egypt and Sweden when they didn't have

to sail them?

I mean wouldn't they try to build it like the vessels that you saw in the skies like

the spaceships?

You know maybe shape it like a saucer?

I don't know, neither does the show and it's where we end.

So it seems as if this episode was a bust again unfortunately.

It was not really the strongest episode that they've put together so far but maybe I better

luck next time when we will examine aliens and ancient engineers.

If you're waiting for me to tackle Graham Hancock's latest series Ancient Apocalypse

don't worry there's something in the pipeline but so many excellent archaeologists, historians

and others has done such an amazing job with this show already that I want to do something

a bit more special to make it a bit extra interesting for all of you.

Now till then remember to leave a positive review anywhere you can such as iTunes, Spotify

or to your friend in the trench and I recommend visiting diggingupancientalians.com to find

more info about me and the podcast and we have t-shirts don't forget that.

And you can also find me on most social media sites and if you have comments, corrections

and suggestions or just want to write an email in all caps you can find my contact info on

the website.

There you also find all the sources and resources used to create this podcast and you also find

further reading suggestions if you want to learn more about the subjects we bring up.

Sandra Mertelor created the intro music and our outro music is by the band called Trollskruv

who sings their song Tinfoil Head.

Links to both of these artists will be found in the show notes.

Until next time, keep showing that science!