NARRATOR: Baalbek, Lebanon.
[music playing]
Here, in the fertile Bekaa Valley,
stands what many consider to be the greatest ruin of Roman
antiquity, the colossal Temple of Jupiter.
But the imposing remains that tower over the site today
are only the latest in a long line of structures
erected on this spot.
Archaeologists say the area has been continually inhabited
for at least 10,000 years, and no one
knows who built the first place of worship here.
But according to legend, both Egyptian and Assyrian
conquerors erected sanctuaries on the site,
followed by the Canaanites and Phoenicians,
who built a great temple here to their god Baal around 2500 BC.
Baalbek is one of those places where you have different people
over millennia building their shrines, their temples,
to their particular, you know, gods or goddesses.
You've got this temple that's built by the Phoenicians
for one of their deities, Baal.
Then Alexander the Great conquers this area,
and, surprise, surprise, builds a temple to the Greek gods.
NARRATOR: In the first century BC, roughly 300 years
after Alexander the Great, the Romans
conquer Lebanon and decide to erect a temple here
to their chief god, Jupiter.
The main Roman temple once boasted 54 columns, each
a staggering 65 feet in height.
But while visitors to the ruins may first notice the towering
Roman columns, the most impressive feature at Baalbek
is its massive foundation.
To this day, Baalbek, Lebanon, has remained
one of the most enduring mysteries on planet Earth
because the masonry that we find there is unparalleled compared
to the rest of the world.
In fact, there are three stone blocks,
called the trilithons, each weighing
approximately 800 metric tons, which is 1.6 million pounds.
ANDREW COLLINS: Each of these blocks
is approximately 62 feet in length
by about 14 feet in depth and 12 feet in breadth.
And they're not even on the ground.
So whoever placed them there in ancient times
would have had to raise them up to a height of about 20 feet.
WILLIAM HENRY: Each of the stones
were quarried 2 miles away and put perfectly
into place with such precision that you can't even
put a credit card or a needle in between those massive blocks.
NARRATOR: How ancient people carved and moved
such massive stones is a question that baffles
archaeologists to this day.
And equally as mysterious is who placed them there.
The giant blocks in the foundation
are clearly of a different building style than the temples
that sit above.
And in my opinion, that platform is not just ancient,
it is prehistoric.
NARRATOR: But if the platform at Baalbek
was constructed thousands of years before the Romans
arrived in the Bekaa Valley, why did
they choose this as the site to build
their most magnificent temple?
One pioneering Russian scholar has proposed that humans may
have been drawn to this location because it
was the site of one of Earth's earliest
extraterrestrial events.
Leningrad, USSR, 1961.
Scientist and mathematician Dr. Matest Agrest sends shockwaves
through the world of academia with an article in which he
poses a new theory called Paleo Contact, a precursor to what
is known today as the ancient astronaut theory,
suggesting that certain biblical texts
could be interpreted as evidence of alien visitation.
And according to Agrest, one place where such visitations
occurred was Baalbek.
Dr. Matest Agrest went into the ancient record, the Book
of Enoch and other Hebrew texts, and noticed that there
were beings coming from the sky or the stars that
came to Earth.
And he came up with a theory that they
were extraterrestrial beings who came to Earth to assist
humanity in developing advanced technology, to build
stone constructions, such as what we see at Baalbek
in Lebanon.
NARRATOR: Agrest wrote about the Watchers, a group
of fallen angels who, according to the biblical account,
descended to Earth at Mount Hermon,
very near the site of Baalbek.
Agrest suggested that the Watchers were, in fact,
visitors from another planet who built the megalithic platform
at Baalbek as a launch pad.
He thought it was a giant stone
platform that spaceships could land on and take off from.
And this makes a lot of sense because it's so incredibly
solid, with these huge stone blocks in it,
that even huge vehicles, such as rockets,
could land and take off from this huge platform.