Mummification Across The World - Ancient Aliens

Mount Yudono, Japan. In the 1,200-year-old Dainichibo Temple, at the base of this holy mountain, sitting on an altar within a glass case, he's the mummy of the revered Buddhist monk, Daijuku Bosatsu Shinyoka Shonin. Shonin is what is known in Japan as Sokushinbutsu, or a living Buddha. He died in 1783 at the age of 96, but shockingly, this is not when the mummification process was started. It began six years before his death. This ritual of self-mummification was commonly practiced by monks in the Shingon sect of Buddhism in northern Japan between the 11th and 19th centuries. They would willingly embark on a process of self-mortification which was tantamount to suicide. The first phase would last about 1,000 days, and they would begin the self-mummification process by embarking on a very rigorous, low-calorie diet. In the second phase of the process, the practitioner would be imbibing the Urushi tea. Now, the Urushi tea is highly toxic. However, it was believed to lacquer, basically, the tissues and organs from the inside out in order to favor the mummification process. And because of its toxicity, the flesh so poisonous that even maggots would not consume it. When they were nearly dead, they would go into a small chamber just big enough to sit in the lotus position. It would be sealed up except for a reed that allowed a little air in, and inside, the monk had a bell. One day, the bell would not ring. The followers would withdraw the reed and seal up the chamber. After 1,000 days, they would open it to see what had happened. If the bodies had mummified, they were considered living Buddhas, and they were redressed in sacerdotal robes and displayed in special temple halls called Sokubutsudo. If they had not mummified, an exorcism was performed, and they were simply buried. Although hundreds of monks tried to attain Sokubutsudo, only 24 are known to have succeeded. But why would these devout followers of Buddha have endured such pain in order to mummify their own bodies? One of the central beliefs of Buddhism is reincarnation. But according to the Shingon sect, those who successfully complete the self-mummification process become higher beings. The idea was they didn't think they were dying. They perceived this as a state of suspended animation. It wasn't death for them. It wasn't life. It was somewhere in between. They needed the body preserved to enter this other dimension of reality and to continue life, although it's not life as we would interpret it. You do not have to be reborn because then you become a living Buddha. You have already attained your nirvana so that your body remains kind of immortal in a sense. They were trying to emulate these high-ranking or highly achieving, spiritually speaking, beings such as Buddhas or Bodhisattvas. But what did it mean to a Shingon monk to become a living Buddha and transition to a higher realm? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the life of the original Buddha himself. The historical Buddha was known as Siddhartha Gautama, and he was born around the mid-6th century BCE. He founded the Buddhist tradition in which he expounds on the path to enlightenment. It's very important that the historical Buddha was understood as a human. That gives every human practitioner access to the same level of ability and enlightenment. However, he also took on some magical powers that in some ways brought him much closer to a divine being or semi-divine being than to a normal mortal human. He was known to teleport across the Ganges River, appearing from one side of the river to the other in the blink of an eye. When you look at the life of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, he would appear to be somebody that we would maybe call a star child, part human, part extraterrestrial. Low Earth orbit, September 2007. An experiment aboard a Russian Photon M3 spaceship is trying to determine how resurrection works in the natural world. It contains dozens of microscopic animals called tardigrades. The tardigrades are a class of organisms that we refer to as extremophiles, meaning they can withstand extreme stresses that would kill most organisms. On Earth, tardigrades are almost impossible to kill. They can survive temperatures far above boiling and far below freezing by shedding almost all water in their cells. The tardigrade is a really interesting creature, and it's actually evolved to have this amazing ability to go into these deep states of what you might call hibernation. They're able to survive in really harsh conditions, but there's still metabolism going on, just very, very slowed down. On this mission, scientists want to see if they can survive long blasts of solar radiation, so they're placed outside the capsule for 12 days. They become inert, but are they actually dead? And they are brought back to Earth hydrated. We think they also have a really good, very efficient DNA repair mechanism because they essentially come back to life, often rather rapidly. Scientists do refer to that as a resurrection. There's a curious parallel to the tardigrade in the ancient world, a dead creature that was preserved by removing all liquids while it awaited resurrection. Egyptian mummies. In preparation for the afterlife, the ancients removed all blood, water, and organs from a body they planned to mummify. In order to preserve a body, you cannot leave organs in the body that are going to rot the body, and the Egyptians learned that very quickly, and they knew which organs had to be removed and that the blood had to be drained from the body to preserve the body for potential resurrection. If the body was properly prepared, the Egyptians believed its soul would start its long and arduous journey into the afterlife. There were a lot of rules. There was a lot of very specific navigation that needed to take place in order to get your soul from death into this afterlife. Sometimes these rules were so difficult that they would be written down, and oftentimes we find them written on the insides of the tops of coffins. At Saqqara is where we find the pyramid texts, some of the oldest religious texts in the world. They're devoted to the concept of how to not only preserve the human body, but to prepare the soul for journeying into the stars. The ancient Egyptians made it clear that they were in contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. In particular, one god, Ptah, came from Sirius. Now, Ptah is also the god, the ancient Egyptians said, who crafted or fashioned the human body. He is also the god of technology. So when you put all this together, it sure sounds like Ptah taught the ancient Egyptians how to resurrect the body and travel the cosmos. Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that the Egyptians' complex beliefs about resurrection came from the extraterrestrial beings Is it very possible that when we look at the Egyptians performing their very intricate mummification process, this is something that they might have witnessed? Maybe they didn't fully understand the process of what made it possible, but they would do their best to mimic it, and that's exactly what we see with mummification. Arica, Chile, 1983. Workers digging a trench in this coastal city just seven miles from the Peruvian border make a remarkable discovery. They unearth a cemetery containing 96 mummies from the prehistoric Chinchorro culture. Scientists determined that some of the remains date back over 7,000 years, making these the oldest known mummies in the world. The Chinchorro were fishermen who lived along the ocean in Chile and Peru, and in fact, 4,000 years before the ancient Egyptians started doing it, the Chinchorro were mummifying their dead in South America. The Chinchorros would open up the cavity of the body, they would take out all the organs, they would put sand and grass and other things inside the body, they would carefully cover it with mud, and then they'd make mud masks over their face. It was a very elaborate system embalming these things. The Chinchorro method of mummification is strikingly similar to the process used by the Egyptians thousands of years later. Why was this strange burial ritual continued, not just in Egypt, but in civilizations across the ancient world? El Castillo de Huerme, Peru, January 2013. Researchers announce that they've discovered an archaeological rarity, an untouched 1,300-year-old royal tomb from the Wari Empire. A predecessor to the Inca, the Wari civilization thrived in central Peru between 600 and 1100 A.D., before mysteriously disappearing. Inside the tomb was a treasure trove of gold, textiles, artifacts, and 63 mummified women, including three Wari queens. From the three roiled women, one of them had earrings that had images of winged beings. These winged anthropomorphic birds that we see in religious art happen from the very earliest art we know of in South America. And that's something also that you see at Tiwanaku, where winged beings are running towards Viracocha in the center of the famous Door of the Sun. So why are these winged beings, then, on jewelry with the Wari people? And we find that with Egyptians, too. The Egyptian god Thoth is depicted in Egyptian iconography as a half-bird, half-man deity, and it was Thoth who gave the knowledge of mummification to Isis. What's interesting is that there are other cultures around the world that also have half-bird, half-human beings that aren't treated as gods. This suggests that there was some global culture of extraterrestrial visitors here who were teaching this mummification as a technology. Tübingen, Germany, 2013. Scientists at the University of Tübingen report a landmark event. They have sequenced and decoded DNA that was extracted from five Egyptian mummy heads. Somehow, the way the ancient Egyptians embalmed the bodies of their dead allowed DNA to survive for thousands of years. One of the things that happens in mummification is that they rapidly extract all the water, and it's thought that water actually is one of the major contributors to the degradation of the DNA. So that rapid extraction of water was believed to protect the mummy from DNA degradation. Researchers have not yet found a complete set of genetic blueprints to the ancient Egyptian body. But this material shows them that if they do find enough DNA, they can, in theory, bring these people back to life to physically resurrect them. If we have the physical remain of a corpse, it might be possible to resurrect this corpse, literally, to regenerate the DNA. Now, the process would be extremely difficult, but the technology is on its way, and that would be amazing. I mean, they would literally have achieved their objective, is to be resurrected again. Is it possible that scientists are finally starting to unravel the secrets to resurrection? And if so, can humanity eventually master this power so we can bring bodies and souls back into the physical world whenever we choose? Some ancient astronaut theorists suggest that many religions describe the moment when humans reach this stage of evolution. It's variously called the Rapture, the Day of Judgment, End of Days, or the Apocalypse. According to the legends, all humanity is to evolve into a higher form. The proper word would be transformation, where in which we will have achieved the purpose for which we have come to Earth in the first place. But that in and of itself is not the end of the road. Then we evolve beyond that. This is referred to as the Great Resurrection. One thing is crystal clear. In all of the ancient texts, those gods promise to return, not just in the Bible, but in many of the ancient sacred texts. Could the End of Days that most religions foresee actually be the time when humanity discovers the secret to resurrection, allowing everyone to move between physical and spiritual planes of existence? And if so, will this realm be the place where we finally meet the extraterrestrials that ancient astronaut theorists say visited Earth thousands of years ago? The idea of resurrection or rebirth into a new realm of existence, a new kingdom of heaven, was central to our interaction with the celestials or extraterrestrial beings. You could almost make the argument that that's why they came here, was to teach us how to resurrect ourselves, our bodies, to transform our bodies into a celestial form, a light body form. We find a direct through line connecting extraterrestrials, angels, and the near-death experience. There is a compelling suggestion that at the end of days, the veil between realities will be parted, and we will gain the capability of moving directly between the world of the living and the world of the afterlife. And I don't think that is anything that we should look upon with dread, but with joy, because it means we're not alone, and, you know, they're there with us. Cusco, Peru. This sacred city was once the capital of the Inca Empire and, by the 13th century, was the center of one of the largest and most sophisticated pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas. The Inca were renowned for their proficiency in architecture and widely regarded as the most important of their many temple complexes was the one known as Coricancha. Historical accounts describe it as a magnificent palace of gold that housed the most holy objects of worship for the Inca, the mummies of their dead kings. That's where the king did his most important rituals and where the mummies of the previous Sapa Incas, or kings, were kept. And those mummies were communicated with on a regular basis. Even today, descendants of the Inca recreate the centuries-old practice of using the mummies in sacred ceremonies. Four times a year, they were brought out, and the living descendants would then consult with them about the affairs of state as well as what they should do in the future. It was believed that these mummies could communicate with deities or otherworldly beings in this twilight realm or in this state between life and death. They even had people specially trained to take care of the royal mummies, and some of the duties that these caretakers had were interpreting what the mummy wished to say, arranging meetings with the living and the dead, and strangely, even taking the mummy outside so he could urinate. But why would the Inca, the most advanced civilization in South America at the time, treat corpses as though they were living, thinking beings? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the Incan creation story. The Incan creation myth describes how the world was created by the Ayer brothers, and the word Ayer actually means mummy. So written right into the myth from the very beginning is the idea that mummification is of central importance to whomever and whatever these gods are. Is it possible that those mythical gods were actually extraterrestrial flesh-and-blood beings of some kind? But if the Ayer brothers really were extraterrestrials, why would the Inca have used the same term for these alien visitors as they did for their mummified dead? Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that the Inca may have witnessed these otherworldly space travelers emerging from a state of suspended animation. What if they were trying to mimic whatever it is they saw? And so if someone with no technological knowledge witnesses someone who is in suspended animation, and then they come alive, they have just witnessed the resurrection of someone, someone coming back from the dead, when in reality, that was never the case. Is it possible that the Inca witnessed alien visitors coming out of hibernation and that this is why they mummified their dead? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and claim that this might also explain mummification in other cultures, most notably the Egyptians. It's possible that the extraterrestrials who visited Egypt would have needed to have some sort of hyperbaric isolation chambers to get from their home world to here. Now, if that is true, then it's also possible that the mummification ritual actually originated from this long-term hyperbaric storage that they were doing with their bodies inside sarcophagus-like chambers. One idea certainly is that human beings and these societies were seeing extraterrestrials who were wrapped in certain body suits, and then they would come back alive. They were put in a special suspended animation that was similar to mummification, and perhaps this is why the Egyptians were doing mummification. The Italian Alps, September 19, 1991. Here, high on a snow-laden mountainside near the Austrian border, two hikers discover the mummified corpse of a man. Frozen in place for an estimated 5,000 years, the body, later nicknamed Uzi, is carefully examined and so well preserved that scientists are able to determine his age, how he died, and even the contents of his final meal. But perhaps the most incredible discovery of all were the markings found along Uzi's legs and back, 50 geometric designs that correspond to those found in the science of acupuncture. Acupuncture is a long and well-tested modality that moves energy through a kind of subway system in the body. They're known as meridians with about 1,000 treatment points. All the treatment points have names, and many of them have references to stars and very interesting things that don't seem to correlate with the body. A medical therapy that targets an energy field that practitioners believe flows through the human body, acupuncture was originally believed to have been developed in China approximately 3,000 years ago. The tattoos found on the skin of this Bronze Age mummy suggest that acupuncture was not only practiced in Europe, but practiced centuries earlier than most archaeologists and historians had believed possible. But how? Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the ancient Chinese medical book called the Wangdi Neijing, the oldest text known to give a detailed description of acupuncture. First, the medical book is wrote 2,500 years ago. It's called Wangdi Neijing, Yellow Emperor's Classic Medicine. In this book, this whole system is talk about all the channels, meridians, and the treatment methodology and strategies. According to Chinese mythology, one of the first practitioners of acupuncture was a physician named Bian Che, often depicted as a human-headed bird. Bian Che is a legendary example of a healer who used supernatural means in order to accomplish his treatments. Bian Che apparently could consume some herb, and once he ingested this substance, whatever it was, he could apparently see through walls and see directly into the human body, much like a CAT scan or an MRI. And he was accredited with doing a double heart transplant on an emperor and another person where he switched their hearts. So you have to wonder now, where did they even get this idea? Bian Che is another of those extraordinary beings who's described as half human and half bird. This puts him in the league with such figures as Thoth and other divine beings who are also half human and half bird and who delivered to humanity amazing knowledge, especially about medicine and human transformation. Could it be mere coincidence that the half human, half bird Chinese healer known as Bian Che closely resembles both the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth and the Indian god, Dhanvantri? Or is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists claim, that these ancient so-called gods were actually extraterrestrial beings, beings in possession of highly advanced medical knowledge? I think acupuncture is one of these sciences which came from the gods and was given to our ancestors. And so even though we might think that acupuncture is specifically linked to a specific culture right now, I think in the past this was actually information which existed throughout mankind. Medicine always came from a quote-unquote divine origin, meaning that some type of a deity descended from the sky and gave this knowledge of healing people to those particular cultures. And now why would all cultures all around the world speak of the exact same thing, that this knowledge was imparted to them by people descending from the sky? Thebes, Egypt. Along the west bank of the Nile River lies the Valley of the Kings. Here, in 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the 3,000-year-old tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun. When Howard Carter opened the burial chamber of Tutankhamun, it was the first time anybody had seen the burial chamber of a pharaoh. Untouched since the pharaoh's death in 1333 B.C., the tomb was full of the boy king's earthly possessions. It's very much the idea of having what you would have had in your house in this world with you to be there in the next world. And part of this whole idea of the tomb was a magical machine to bring you into the next world. To help Tutankhamun on his journey into the afterlife, the walls and ceiling of his burial chamber were decorated with illustrations from the Egyptian sacred Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead was a collection of spells relating to the transition between death and rebirth. The basic idea was to provide the dead person with what they needed magically to get through because there were various trials and tribulations to be faced before you were reborn into the next world. They had to encounter various demons. Everything from giant cockroaches to horrendous beings with knives instead of heads. All sorts of nightmarish visions you had to get through. And one of the things the Book of the Dead does is to explain how you deal with these various demons. Inside Tutankhamun's tomb, the archaeologists also discovered a sarcophagus with the young king's embalmed body, well preserved, with vital organs removed and sealed in jars. Like many ancient Egyptians, King Tut was mummified based on the belief that upon entering the underworld, his body would regain its powers of movement and speech. There seems to have been a kind of belief that the stellar or astral aspect of the dead king maintained a contact with the tomb and that the soul would return back to the physical body. The ancient Egyptians believed the tomb was the vessel in which the deceased's body, attended by its visiting soul, journeyed to the world beyond the grave. We today see the idea of being placed in a coffin and put underground as something like simply the disposal of the dead or the burial of the dead. For them, it was far more than this. It was like going back to the primordial womb of a sky-dog goddess whose name was Nuit, and she was represented by the Milky Way, and by doing that, you would eventually go back to being a star. It was believed that the soul itself could become a star. The practice of preserving a dead body or embalming did not begin with the Egyptians. Embalmed human remains have been found in Chile and Peru, dating to 5,000 B.C. But what compelled ancient man to preserve their bodies after their deaths? Did they really believe they would return to Earth, body, and soul? If so, what had they seen in life that would suggest that such a thing were even possible? Throughout history, mankind has consistently believed that when they died, they would go to the stars, and the Egyptians believed that too. You have to ask yourself, where did our ancestors get these ideas that on our death, we're being transported to the stars or to another world? Wouldn't this have come from extraterrestrials? The techniques that were used were given to the ancient Egyptians by the gods, the guardians of the sky. Who were these guardians of the sky? Well, according to ancient astronaut theorists, they were flesh and blood extraterrestrials. Tests on Tutankhamen's remains confirm that he was the son of Akhenaten. The controversial Egyptian pharaoh often depicted with a large, misshapen skull. Like their father, the skulls of both King Tutankhamen and his sister, Meritaten, also appear to have deformed shapes. Archaeologists have found that in Egypt, like Tutankhamen or his sister, who is this statue here, Meritaten, had these strange, elongated heads. You have to wonder, were they trying to imitate extraterrestrials who looked like this? Or perhaps they, in fact, were extraterrestrials, and this is how they naturally looked. On the other side of the world, in the ancient city of Paracas, Peru, archaeologists uncovered hundreds of mummified remains dating to 300 B.C. Many contained elongated skulls. What makes Paracas unique is that the elongated skulls are found in great numbers here, dating at least 3,000 years old, if not older. The only other place in the world that we find these are in Egypt during the reign of Akhenaten. It would seem as if this type of skull demarked these people as different to the local community, probably because they believed that they were descendants from original individuals that had heads that were elongated and that were serpent- or viper-like in appearance. Ancient civilizations all around this planet have always depicted some of their ancients as being strange-looking figures, long heads, big noses, creatures that could be human, but they sure didn't look human. If, as some researchers suggest, the practice of elongating skulls was done to mimic the head shape of highly intelligent beings ancient man came in contact with, then could the belief in preserving the body for the journey to the afterlife also have been based on some contact with superior beings? I'm suggesting that mummification is based on our ancestors who watched extraterrestrials getting ready for a flight through deep space. One possibility is to be frozen or to be put into animated sleep where you're inside this quote-unquote sarcophagus, this coffin, and so our ancestors might have watched this type of preparation and they misunderstood this for the gods dying. And so our ancestors mummified themselves in order to be ready for the return of the gods with the hopes that the gods would reanimate them from the dead in the future. Juarez, Mexico, 2008. Just 8 miles southwest of El Paso, Texas, in this notoriously violent border town, Dr. Alejandro Hernandez-Cardenas develops a groundbreaking new technique in forensic science. By using a secret chemical formula, he is able to rehydrate the flesh of unrecognizable homicide victims, including bodies that were mummified after years of being dried out in the hot desert climate. Out of sort of compassion or concern for the huge number of unidentified bodies in Juarez, he figured out a solution that you can place a mummified corpse in. The corpse becomes recognizable in terms of identifying scars or tattoos. The naturally mummified corpses are put in a tank that Dr. Cardenas refers to as the Jacuzzi, which holds 60 gallons of his secret formula. Over the course of a few days, the shriveled remains are rehydrated to look almost lifelike. But as astounding as his formula is, it's not the first time science has attempted to in some way restore a mummified body. In 1968, Robert Conley, a researcher from the University of Liverpool, attempted to virtually regenerate the blood of a completely mummified body. Only this mummy was 3,300 years old. It was the mummy of Egypt's most famous pharaoh, King Tutankhamen. Conley's method was to combine antigens taken from a skin sample of King Tut with his own blood cells. Conley is actually type O, which means you don't have any antigens on your blood cells. He was actually able to put the antigens from King Tut on his sort of clean slate of a blood cell, so then recreating whatever blood type the mummy had. Mix those red blood cells with different blood types, and if it's not the correct blood type, what you get is sort of clumping of the blood cells because there's an immune response against them. But if it's the correct blood type, then you don't see any sort of immunological response. And so in that way, they were able to figure out which blood type King Tut possessed. Since Conley's experiment, scientists have gone even further and discovered what they believe is King Tut's true DNA. Could the next step be an actual resurrection? Was the preservation of the body not just a ritualistic attempt to imitate alien visitors, but an actual form of suspended animation? But if so, how could they have foreseen such incredible scientific advancements thousands of years ago? It is possible that the ancient astronauts taught the Egyptians that mummification was a way of preserving their genetic information in the DNA. One of the startling discoveries in the study of mummies in Egypt and elsewhere is that quite a bit of DNA is actually preserved for thousands of years in the mummification process. This makes it possible to clone ancient mummies and, in a sense, bring them back to life. It is possible that at some point in the future, if your body had been successfully mummified, that these ancient extraterrestrials were well aware that a clone of who you were before could then be reborn many years later. And is it possible that with the magnificence of the DNA and with all the information that it contains, that you might also come back with the memories of what you lived and who you were and what you knew the last time? And that may be the purpose which will actually be used in the future, not yet present, but with a technology that we are very rapidly acquiring. When the extraterrestrials taught the art of mummification, did they have it in the back of their mind that maybe 5,000 years into the future, medical science would advance to the level where we would be able to extract the DNA from those mummies? And maybe this is part of the purpose of the mummification, is to create this time capsule.