GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: A UFO sighting over multiple cities.
MAN: I don't know what the hell it is.
GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: An extraterrestrial event
that changed the course of history,
and an alien abduction witnessed by no less than six people.
On "Ancient Aliens," we've investigated dozens
of extraordinary encounters.
From among the thousands that have been reported,
here is what I consider to be the most compelling stories.
Each one adds to the growing body of proof
that we have been visited by extraterrestrials
for thousands of years.
NARRATOR: The Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, Arizona.
November 5, 1975.
22-year-old forestry worker Travis Walton
is driving home after sundown, along with six
coworkers, when suddenly, a strange light
appears in the sky.
We'd just finished a long, hard day,
and it was starting to get dark.
So we loaded up our equipment.
We're headed home.
And I noticed there were some little glimmers of light
coming through the trees.
And the light seemed to be coming from higher than where
ground level would be.
It was only when we got to where this light was
crossing the road that we had an unobstructed view of the craft.
Now Dallas in the back yelled out, it's a flying saucer!
And I said, Mike, stop!
[car screeching]
It was a clearly visible, clearly defined
metallic object, a disk hovering there,
outlined against the sky.
I threw open the door, thinking I'd get a closer
look before it took off.
As I got closer to it, the sound that was making--
it was a sound you both heard and felt.
And the crew said they could feel
the vibration in the truck.
They said it seemed like something was about to happen.
And it was.
[chuckles] That's when this energy hit me.
The crew said that it was like I'd stepped on a landmine,
like an explosion so violent that they
thought it had killed me.
But when this beam of energy hit me,
I felt like a physical blow, but with a sort
of a tingling sort of an electric shock sort
of feeling at the same time.
I don't know whether I came too soon after I was taken aboard,
but I knew I was on some kind of an elevated gurney
or operating table.
I was looking straight into the face of this creature,
and I just flipped out.
NICK POPE: He saw these hideous entities that scared him--
maybe quite similar to the modern idea
of the so-called alien grays.
And he fought, and he panicked.
And then, these aliens seemed to go away,
and then their place was taken by much more humanlike aliens,
and he calmed down.
TRAVIS WALTON: In the case of these human-looking ones,
I started to have serious misgivings
that this was a rescue.
And that's when they put this mask over my face,
and I just blacked out real quickly.
NICK POPE: Now, the suspicion here was that actually,
these weren't different aliens.
These were the same aliens, but they
were capable of shapeshifting into something else,
specifically to calm him down.
NARRATOR: Crew searched everywhere
for the missing forest worker.
But it wasn't until five days later
that Walton reappeared in a nearby town.
I was lying face down, outside in the dark,
and there was a light above me.
And I saw the bottom of the craft
there, right before it shot up into the sky.
NARRATOR: When details of Travis Walton's close encounter
were revealed to authorities, they dismissed his account
as a possible hallucination.
But Travis has no doubt that what he and his coworkers
experienced was a genuine extraterrestrial encounter.
TRAVIS WALTON: What no one asked was,
what about the rest of the crew?
How do seven people have an identical hallucination?
And besides that, they were given
a lie detector test by state police, which they passed.
There's real-life things that occur out there
that need to be understood.
So take a look at the facts, and then judge.
I don't know the purpose that they had.
All I know is what happened to me.
This was unmistakable.
NARRATOR: Northeast Syria-- the Khabur River.
According to the Hebrew Bible, it
was here in the sixth century BC that divine beings descended
from heaven and made contact with a Hebrew
priest named Ezekiel.
PATRICK COOKE: Ezekiel was by the River Chebar,
and he said a great whirlwind came toward him.
He described it as a fire enfolding itself.
And out of the fire was the color
of amber, which is the Hebrew word, which
means polished spectrum metal, which
implies that it's metallic and that it's spinning.
And it lands in front of him, and suddenly, out
of this whirlwind come four creatures.
NARRATOR: In the Bible, the prophet Ezekiel
calls these spiritual beings "cherubims," and describes them
as having four faces, four wings, and skin that
shone like polished bronze.
REV. BARRY H. DOWNING: He says that he was taken up
into the sky and taken to different places
where he could see different things.
And then, he was told some of the future things
that were going to come.
This was a huge image of hope that came to Ezekiel
during his experience.
NARRATOR: But is this the story of a divine encounter,
or could Ezekiel's description of metallic wheels
descending from the sky in a whirlwind of fire
and strange beings with skin like polished bronze point
to a different type of otherworldly contact?
He's got the best description of a UFO
that's anywhere in the Bible.
Because he basically says that the thing looked like a wheel
within a wheel, kind of a classic flying
saucer description.
TRAVIS TAYLOR: Ezekiel describes that the outside of the wheel
doesn't spin.
The inside of the wheel spins.
So he's telling us that's the engines.
None of this necessarily has to be magic.
This could all be technology.
PHILIP COPPENS: He's basically the kind of a guy
who's been abducted, who has been told certain things,
and who's then returned to the place of origin.
It would be what we today would describe
as an abduction account.
NARRATOR: Could it be that the prophet Ezekiel's
account of a heavenly close encounter
might have been something else?
Perhaps one not involving heavenly beings,
but visitors of another interplanetary nature?
This concept was put forth to the public by the ancient
astronaut theory pioneer, Erich von Daniken, in his 1968 book,
"Chariots of the Gods?"
And after hearing Erich speak at a conference
in the early 1970s, NASA engineer Josef Blumrich
was determined to debunk his controversial interpretation.
I had a speech at NASA in Huntsville,
and I spoke about Ezekiel.
And the chief engineer of that time, Mr. Joe Blumrich,
came to me and said, Erich, that was very interesting,
but in the Bible, you will definitely
not find any technology.
But he still said, I will read, originally
in the Bible, Ezekiel.
NARRATOR: Blumrich set out to find
flaws in Von Daniken's theory.
But when he read the Book of Ezekiel,
he was shocked to find himself agreeing
with the controversial author.
So much so, in fact, that he wrote a book called,
"The Spaceships of Ezekiel," in which he provided a blueprint
for a practical landing module, based on the description
found in the biblical story.
Several years later, a German structural engineer
named Hans Herbert Beier also sketched out a blueprint
of the second section of the Book of Ezekiel,
where Ezekiel is told to construct
an open-topped building to house the flying chariot.
GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: Hans Herbert Beier sent the
blueprint to Erich von Daniken.
Within five minutes of looking at these blueprints,
Erich was on the phone with Joe Blumrich.
And he said, hey, Joe, can you bring a model
of your spaceship of Ezekiel?
And then, he called Hans Herbert Beier, and he said,
can you bring a model of your construction
of Ezekiel's temple?
Both models were created to the same ratio.
And guess what?
Ezekiel's spaceship fit into the temple construction
that Hans Herbert Beier recreated according
to the biblical measurements.
NARRATOR: As far as ancient astronaut theorists
are concerned, the biblical account of Ezekiel
provides conclusive evidence of an alien encounter.
But more importantly, it may also
reveal that for thousands of years, the destiny of humankind
has been directed by extraterrestrials.
[inaudible] Qumran, Palestine.
In 1946, a collection of ancient manuscripts,
known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, is discovered hidden in clay
jars deep inside a cave.
Among the manuscripts is the Book of Enoch,
a so-called lost biblical text.
In the Bible's Old Testament, Enoch
is the seventh of 10 patriarchs who
lived before the Great Flood, and the great-grandfather
of Noah.
But where the Hebrew Bible only mentions Enoch briefly,
the Book of Enoch, which consists
of more than 100 chapters, greatly expands on his story.
In it is a curious passage that details
Enoch's ascent to heaven.
ERICH VON DANIKEN: According to the Book of Enoch,
he says he was 12 years old.
The whole community of his village wanted to sleep.
But then, they hear the noise in the sky.
Two angels came down from the sky.
One of the two beings says to Enoch, don't be afraid, human.
Then, they went up to the so-called heaven.
WILLIAM HENRY: And in the Book of Enoch,
we learn Enoch himself is taken into the heavens
in a fiery chariot.
ERICH VON DANIKEN: Enoch goes up to the so-called sky.
And there, Enoch sees something over the Earth,
which he cannot describe.
He has no word like spaceship or something.
He says, it looked like houses of crystals.
GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: It is described that he sees
planet Earth underneath him.
He actually describes his arrival--
how he has to walk through these different rooms, where
he sees jewels, and he sees shiny surfaces
and blinking lights.
It is an eyewitness account.
It's I, Enoch, did this.
I, Enoch, saw that.
The Book of Enoch is one of the first abduction
accounts written down by a fellow human being.
NARRATOR: Does the Book of Enoch really describe
an actual abduction event?
One that took place thousands of years ago?
And if so, might this incredible close
encounter be documenting communication
with otherworldly beings?
ROBERT CARGILL: Enoch-- he was said
to be at the right hand of god.
In fact, Enoch was said to be god's
scribe in later tradition.
So god would decree things, and Enoch was the one who recorded
everything that went on.
So Enoch was the keeper of all knowledge of heaven.
WILLIAM HENRY: This is one of the reasons why the Book
of Enoch is so controversial.
Enoch was the first human to ascend to the throne of god,
where he is given powerful universal knowledge
by angelic beings or extraterrestrial beings.
NARRATOR: If Enoch was given information
from extraterrestrial beings to share with mankind,
as ancient astronaut theorists contend,
what truths about our otherworldly past
might be waiting to be revealed?
The extraterrestrials want that in the far future
of mankind, we start to see these things.
We start to translate these books,
and now, we start to ask questions.
We start to ask, for example, how can we explain that?
Have we maybe been visited by extraterrestrials?
And I think it's important to think in this way.
Because these extraterrestrials have promised to return
And one day, they will return.
NICK POPE: I was taught not to believe in coincidence.
I was taught to look for patterns.
When you have all these encounters, these sightings,
these descriptions we have from biblical times onwards,
it tells you there's something going on.
Doesn't necessarily tell you what it is, but it tells
you there's something there.