Lost Gold Mines of Peru (S1) | Ancient Aliens

Video: "Lost Gold Mines of Peru (S1) | Ancient Aliens" (History Channel)

Full auto-transcript: Peru has long been known as the land of gold. In ancient [music] times, Incan rulers adorned themselves with it. And when the Spanish [music] explorers arrived in the 16th century, they sent shiploads of their plunder back home to Spain. [music] >> Gold was largely a valuable commodity [music] because of of being rare and easy to make jewelry, coinage, and you're looking [music] at like the ancient Incas, those people are using gold as a status symbol. Many cultures thought it came directly from the gods. People thought gold was so pure, so wonderful, it must heal. And they would actually occasionally ingest pure gold. Certainly, um we're discovering more and more as we get better at archaeology and as we can look into these things, applications that people have used. For instance, there was some evidence that ancient people had very primitive batteries. And this would be [music] a place in which gold would be very useful because of its electrical properties and its conductivity. >> It should not be surprising then to find archaeological evidence of ancient gold mines. But some sites have recently been discovered that date back some 50,000 [music] years. >> All throughout areas in Peru, you see remnants of what could have been ancient mining operations. It's there. They go down some cases thousands of feet deep. >> Gold turns out to be surprisingly easy to mine for even though it's relatively rare. There's a lot of common techniques ancient people used and [music] some of them were used, you know, well into recent times. A lot of it, you know, involves [music] using water often to change the properties of the rock around it, a lot of heating and freezing [music] and the gold will come loose. >> In addition [music] to gold, other ancient sites in Peru provide evidence that they were once mined for quartz, hematite, and red ochre. >> They're used for different things. Quartz is incredibly common. It's basically silicon dioxide. It's kind of like glass. It's a great mineral. It's hard, but it can be formed [music] into pretty sculptures. You can make quartz statues. You could probably even use it for money before you discovered minerals and gold. Hematite and ochre are much more valuable because of their iron oxides. And particularly ochre is important as a pigment. So, as soon as you're going to start having painting, cave drawings even, or any sort of artwork, you need to make colors. And making color can be a challenge. And ochre is a great source of that. >> Also located in Peru are the world-famous [music] Nazca Lines. While the origins of these ancient geoglyphs remain a mystery, the area in which the lines are located suggests that a major excavation took place there, perhaps hundreds of centuries ago. >> At Nazca, entire mountain tops have been removed. I mean, this all requires machining. And I'm not talking, you know, a little wheelbarrow and and and [music] a and a a pick. I'm talking sophisticated machinery because we today would also need sophisticated machinery in order [music] to achieve such feats. >> Could the vast flat plain located in the Nazca Desert >> [music] >> be evidence of a gigantic mining operation, one that took place hundreds of thousands of years ago? >> Whoever comes here in a spaceship, Nazca would be like a beacon [music] as in come here because the moment you come to Nazca, you're sort of confronted with a Cliff Notes to Planet Earth where you have all sorts of raw materials that exist in that one particular spot in very, very abundant quantities. >> I think the Nazca Lines aren't evidence of search for gold, but they're evidence of some communication with possibly ETs [music] or gods from above. >> But despite the controversy, one thing is certain. The plain and the lines that scar the surrounding countryside are not natural formations. But while scientists [music] and ancient astronaut theorists remain divided about who or what [music] created the Nazca Lines, they are in agreement about one thing. The so-called Band of Holes, located in the Pisco Valley, is a [music] complete mystery. >> In the mountains of Peru, >> [music] >> we have what's commonly referred to as the Band of Holes. And it is this band of holes that were carved or dug into the mountainside. >> It's a bunch of little shallow holes dug into the ground. And it's had all kinds of explanations. Some people say it was just pot hunters, you know, looting, looking for burials. Some people think it looks like some kind of machine was running over the territory. Some people think it was some kind of systematic mining operation. >> They need raw material, be gold, [music] be it silver, be it uranium, whatever they need something. And they send something down like a shuttle. [music] It can be a robot. No, extraterrestrial is on board. And this robot just crashes over the surface and collects and measures raw material and disappears again. >> The holes run about 3 ft apart and measure [music] 6 to 7 ft in depth and number in the thousands. >> Often we see regular structures like that and we assume either a person or intelligent life had to make it, but there's lots of examples in nature where the natural processes lead to large-scale what we call pattern formation. You see it on a small scale in animals. You look at leopards and zebras. Leopards have spots, zebras have stripes. Surprisingly on geological scales, some of the same processes that give you spots on a leopard could give you indentations [music] in the ground and raised areas that would look like holes. It would take a long [music] time over geological scales, but we've had a long time and that might be what they're left over from. >> Mainstream archaeologists [music] suggest the holes were used to store grain, but ancient astronaut [music] theorists reject that notion. >> It's a mystery because who in their right mind would go ahead and dig all these holes? For what? >> The other intriguing aspect about the band of holes is that you can only see it from the air. When you stand down there, all you see is a couple of holes dug into the ground [music] and it doesn't really mean much, but if you're up in the air, there is this long band with these individual holes that you can see and you can conceivably create some type of message that can only be seen from the air. >> Mhm.