Ancient Mysteries - Ancient Flying Machines: Legends That Still Defy Explanation

Episode Date: July 18, 2026

Did ancient civilizations witness technology far beyond their time?This documentary explores legends of celestial flying machines described in myths, sacred texts, and ancient traditions from around the world. We examine historical accounts, archaeological discoveries, and the theories that have fueled debate about whether these stories were symbolic—or inspired by something extraordinary.Some legends were written thousands of years ago.Their mysteries remain unsolved.💬 Could ancient accounts of flying machines have a real historical basis?🔔 Subscribe for more documentaries about ancient mysteries, lost civilizations, and unexplained history.

This episode is brought to you by FIFA World Cup, launch edition, on Netflix. It's a fast, fluid game where your phone is the controller and your TV is the stadium. You just launch it on your TV, scan the QR code with your phone, and boom, you're shooting and passing in seconds. Plus, it's included in your Netflix membership

with zero extra costs. Go to the Games tab and play FIFA World Cup launch edition now, only on Netflix. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Hi there, mystery hunters. Today we're hunting for flying machines in the ancient world. Not the Wright Brothers kind, but temples carved with cockpits, gods riding chrome chariots across the sky, and stone reliefs of what looks a whole lot like a pilot at the controls of a rocket. From India to Egypt to the jungles of Central America, our ancestors kept drawing the exact same thing, and it was not a horse. So here's the big question. Were they just inventing gods with a serious talent for aerospace design? Or did they actually look up, see something roaring overhead,

and sketch it with the crayons they had? Because let's be honest, if you saw a metal ship spitting fire back in 3000 BC, you wouldn't call it a weather event. You'd call it a god, and then build a very large temple about it. Today we go continent by continent through the carvings, the sacred texts, and what science actually says. Vimarnas, wheels within wheels, runways in the desert, and one stone King who might just be a pilot. But before we lift off, drop a comment and tell me what city you're watching from. Now, let's roll. Our first stop is India, and if you ask the ancient astronaut crowd, this is the mothership of the entire theory. Everywhere else on the planet, you get a strange carving here, a spooky legend there, a single stone that maybe kind of looks like a helicopter

if you squint and skip breakfast. India, on the other hand, hands you an entire library, shelves of it, and that is exactly why the whole modern idea of gods as astronauts practically grew up here. Rewind to 1971, a Swiss writer named Eric von Dhanikin, fresh off turning the ancient aliens concept into a runaway global bestseller, walks into a Sanskrit college in Calcutta, the city we now call Kolkata, because apparently even ancient cities eventually update their branding. He is not there for the food, which for the record was a tragic waste of a trip to Bengal. He is there to sit down with a real Sanskrit scholar, Professor Dilip Kanjilal, and goes spulunking through some of the oldest religious literature humanity has ever produced, the Vedic texts. Thousands of years of hymns,

epics and cosmic drama, all written in a language most people on Earth today could not read if their lives depended on it. And what von Denikin says he finds in there is going to feel weirdly familiar to anyone who has ever sat through a summer blockbuster. Gods, descending from the sky, in machines. Now, God's showing up is not a lot of exactly a breaking news alert for a religious text. That is basically the entire job description. What grabs von Denikan and the theorists who follow him is not that the gods arrive from above. It is how the texts describe the arrival, because these are not the vague, misty, a-divine radiance-filled-the-heavens kind of lines you might expect. They are specific,

almost annoyingly specific. The literature talks about flying craft called Vimannas, and it does not simply say the Vimana flu and everyone was very impressed. It describes how thing moved through the air, how it was steered, the noise it made, and what the person operating it actually had to do to keep it in the sky. It reads less like a prayer, and more like the world's oldest pilot briefing, complete with the ancient equivalent of, please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. This is the moment the whole theory catches fire, because up to this point, the mainstream reading of these passages was simple and frankly reasonable. The gods rode gorgeous celestial chariots across the heavens, the same way poets have always dressed up the divine

in the finest imagery available. It was metaphor, symbolism, ancient people describing the majesty of the gods with the biggest, shiniest thing they could imagine. Von Denikan looks at the same words and asks a much cheekier question. What if it is not metaphor at all? What if these detailed and mechanical descriptions are detailed and mechanical, for the most obvious reason imaginable, which is that somebody was describing a machine they had actually seen. That single reframe changes everything. Suddenly the chariots of the gods stop being poetry and start being, in the eyes of the theorists, eyewitness reports.

And once you flip that switch, India transforms from a land of beautiful mythology into what the ancient astronaut community basically treats as the crown jewel, the great treasure vault of ancient space travel. Naturally, once you have decided the Vimanas were real, the next question writes itself, and it is a question no episode of any documentary has ever been able to resist. If these were real machines, where are the blueprints? Which is exactly where things get spicier, because the theorists insist the blueprints exist. Behind the broad, sweeping

descriptions of gods and their flying craft, there is a second, far more concrete layer, and this is where the story stops being cosmic and starts sounding like a used car saga. The flying machine that gets the most attention has a name, the Pushbaka, and it stars in one of the most beloved epics ever written, the Ramayana, and the Pushbaka is not just any old vehicle. It is described as a self-moving aerial craft that could carry passengers, expand to fit however many people needed a lift, and travel wherever its owner commanded. In other words, the ancient dream ride, a flying machine that adjusts its own seating capacity on demand. Airlines today cannot even manage to give you legroom, and here is a several thousand-year-old story casually describing a craft that resizes itself

for the crowd. But the truly entertaining part of the Pushbucker is its ownership history, which reads like the paperwork on a car that has changed hands one too many times. Originally it belonged to Kuberra, the god of wealth, which honestly tracks, because of course the richest deity and the pantheon rolls around in the ultimate luxury flying machine. This is the ancient version of the billionaire with the private jet, except the jet flies itself and never lose your luggage. Then along comes Ravana, the demon king and the epic's grand villain, who does what villains do and simply takes the thing by force. So now the god of wealth has been carjacked out of his prized aircraft by a ten-headed demon, which is a sentence I never expected to write,

and yet here we are. And finally, after Ravanna is defeated, the Pushbaker ends up in the hands of the hero, Rama, who uses it to fly home. So over the course of the story, the flying machine goes from divine billionaire to demonic thief to triumphant hero, basically the most dramatic ownership chain in the history of transportation, and not a single trip to the equivalent of the DMV in sight. For the theorists, the point is not the drama, delightful as it is. The point is that this craft is treated in the text as a real, physical, mechanical object that people board, operate, argue over and steal rather than a floating symbol of divine glory. You do not, they argue, carjacker metaphor, and then comes the piece of the puzzle that ancient astronaut enthusiasts absolutely

love, because it is the closest thing they have to a smoking gun. The theorists point to a text called the Vimonika Shastra, which supposedly traces all the way back to an ancient sage named Baradwaja, and this is not a poetic epic full of heroes and demons. This is presented as a straight-up technical treatise, a manual. It describes the materials you would build of Vamana's body out of, The workings of its engines, how the craft generates power and lift, and even the gear the pilot is supposed to wear while flying it. There are passages about special metals that resist heat, about the diet a pilot should follow, about the equipment needed to survive at altitude. For believers, this is the mic-drop moment. This is not a fairy tale about gods anymore.

This is, they claim, an instruction booklet. Ancient aerospace engineering sitting in plain sight, thousands of years before anyone was supposed to know the first thing, thing about flight. It reads, To the Faithful, like an IKEA manual for a spaceship. Except instead of a billy bookcase and one left over screw, you get a fully functional aircraft and the promise of the heavens.

So the chapter leaves us with the question the theorists keep hammering, and it is a genuinely good one. Where on earth would ancient authors get engineering details this specific? How do you write a technical description of hull materials and propulsion and pilot equipment if you have never seen a machine

capable of flight? It is a fair thing to wonder, and it is exactly the kind of question that keeps a theory alive for decades. Here is the twist, though, and it is a twist the more dramatic documentaries tend to hurry past with impressive speed. When historians and engineers actually went looking for the ancient roots of that so-called technical manual, the trail did not lead back into the misty depths of antiquity. It led back to the early 20th century, the Vimonika Shastra, as we actually have it, appears to have been produced in the early 1900s, reportedly dictated by the early 20th century. a man who said he was channeling the ancient sage, and it was only formally published in the

1950s, which means the world's oldest aircraft manual may be roughly the same age as the actual airplane. That is a plot twist worthy of the epics themselves. The blueprint everyone treats as impossibly ancient shows up right around the same era. Humans were already busy inventing the real thing, and it gets better or worse, depending on which team you're cheering for. In the 1970s, a group of aeronautical engineers at the Indian Institute of Science decided to do the least glamorous and most devastating thing you can do to a legend. They read the manual carefully and asked whether the machines it describes could actually fly. Their verdict was not kind. The designs, they concluded, were not aerodynamically sound.

Several of the craft, if built exactly as described, would be more likely to sit stubbornly on the ground than saw majestically through the clouds. So the great technical proof of ancient flight turned out, on close inspection, to describe vehicles that a modern engineer would gently steer away from the runway. Unsurprisingly, this part rarely makes the highlight real. What nobody disputes is the sheer scale of it. This is not one weird passage that a translator misread after a long night. India's ancient literature returns to the theme of flight again and again, across different texts, different characters, and different centuries, which is precisely why it became the beating

heart of the whole ancient astronaut argument in the first place. When von Denikan walked into that college in 1971, he was not inventing a story so much as pulling a thread that Indian civilization had already woven into its greatest epics thousands of years before. Whether that thread leads to a hanger full of ancient spacecraft or simply to the boundless imagination of some of history's finest storytellers is the debate that has kept people arguing ever since, and the theorists are not remotely done. Because if the sky above ancient India was really full of machines, then those machines had to launch from somewhere, land somewhere, and answer to someone. The idea of divine flying craft is one thing when it stays parked politely in the pages

of an epic. It becomes something else entirely when people start pointing at the ground itself, at the very stone and architecture of the ancient world, and asking whether the evidence was hiding in the buildings all along. If the last stretch left the flying machines trapped inside the pages of the great epics, the theorists have a comeback ready for anyone demanding something more solid, and it is about as solid as evidence can get. Stone. Because von Denikan did not just read about Vimanas and call it a day, he looked up, and when he raised his eyes to the towering Hindu temples of India, he claims he saw the very same craft staring right back down at him, carved permanently into the architecture itself. The idea goes like this. Walk up to one of the classic temples of

southern India and your gaze gets yanked straight upward by the tower rising over the innermost shrine. Tear stacked on tier, tapering toward the heavens like a stone rocket that got cold feet on the launch pad. The theorists look at that soaring, layered, faintly otherworldly shape and ask the obvious troublemaker question, why does it look like that? Of all the possible ways to honour a god, why build a tower shaped like something frozen in mid-hover. Their answer is that the ancient architects were not doodling a pretty silhouette out of thin air. They were sculpting a portrait, a giant, permanent three-dimensional monument to something the builders swore they had personally watched glide across the sky.

And here is the twist that makes even the eye-rolling skeptics pause for a second, because it happens to be genuinely, verifiably true, and not something a producer invented over lunch. In the temple architecture of southern India, that very tower rising above the sand. Sanctum already has a name, and the name is Vimana, the exact same word the epics use for the flying craft. So the theorists are not even reaching for the connection. The connection is sitting right there in the vocabulary, waiting for someone to notice it. To an ancient astronaut believer, this is like discovering that the fanciest room in a house is literally called the spaceship room, and then being told it is all a big coincidence. Now, mainstream scholars have a perfectly

grounded explanation for the shared word, and it is not nearly as thrilling, which is is usually how these things go. In traditional thought, the temple is a symbolic vehicle in a spiritual sense, a structure meant to carry the divine presence and the worshipper's attention upward toward the heavens. The soaring tower represents a cosmic mountain, the dwelling of the gods, the axis-linking earth and sky. It is a metaphor rendered in granite, not a scale model of a landed aircraft. Under that reading, calling the tower of Imana is poetry. The same lofty symbolism we ran into before, just this time set in stone instead of verse. The tower points to heaven because heaven is the entire point,

but the theorists are not buying the tidy version, and they push their case with a certain cheeky logic. If ancient people wanted to represent the abode of the gods, they say, why choose this specific curved capsule-like hovering profile again and again across enormous distances and centuries when a simple pointed spire would have said heaven just fine? The repetition is what fascinates them. It is not one strange building by one eccentric architect who skipped a few classes.

It is a recurring shape, showing up temple after temple, as if generations of builders were all working from the same mental snapshot. And in the ancient astronaut worldview, when a lot of unconnected people keep drawing the same weird thing, the least fun explanation is that they were all making it up, and the most fun explanation is that they were all looking at the same object. Naturally, guess which one gets the documentary? Whatever you make of it, the effect of this argument, is enormous, because it takes the theory out of the library and drops it onto the landscape. Suddenly, the claim is not confined to dusty manuscripts that only a handful of Sanskrit scholars can read. It is bolted to enormous public buildings that millions of people walk past every

single year. The theorists have essentially turned entire temple complexes into what they treat as monuments, stone memorials commemorating a moment when the sky machines came down and somebody awe-struck, decided the only proper response was to speak. spend the next several decades chiseling the memory into rock so it would never be forgotten. Whether that memory was a spacecraft or a spiritual vision is the whole argument, but either way you have to admit it is a spectacular way to keep a diary. And this is where the story takes a sharp turn from the peaceful and the architectural into something a lot more violent,

because in the legends these craft did not spend all their time gently ferrying gods around and posing for temple towers. Sometimes, according to the tales, they came down swinging. Fast forward to the year 329 BC, and one of the most famous conquerors in all of human history is standing at the edge of India with a very big problem. Alexander the Great, the young Macedonian who had already stampeded across half the known world, collecting empires like a kid collecting trading cards, has reached the great rivers of the subcontinent and is preparing to push deeper into unfamiliar territory.

His army is battle-hardened, exhausted, and increasingly of the opinion that they have conquered quite enough of the planet, and would very much like to go home now. And then, if you believe a story that ancient astronaut fans absolutely adore, something appears in the sky above his troops that no amount of military training had prepared them for. According to the legend, strange flying disks, described as gleaming shields of shining silver-spitting fire, come screaming down out of the heavens toward Alexander's army, and they do not just hover ominously and vibe. They dive. They swoop directly at the war elephants, those massive, terrifying living tanks that were supposed to be the unstoppable centrepiece of an ancient battlefield. And here is the thing about war elephants.

They are enormous, they are powerful, and they are also, unfortunately, about as emotionally stable as a stack of dinner plates in an earthquake. The moment these blazing objects come shrieking down from above, the elephants completely lose it. Panic sweeps through the ranks. The animals bolt trumpeting and stampeding, and in their terror they turn on the very people who brought them, trampling right through Alexander's own camp, and turning his mighty invasion force into a chaotic mess of crushed tents and fleeing soldiers. Not exactly the glorious frontier of conquest you picture from the statues, more like a very expensive military parade meeting a very bad afternoon, and in this version of events, the flying discs are what finally break the spell. The tale claims

that after this bizarre aerial ambush, Alexander's commanders take one look at the smoking chaos and the terrified troops and gently suggest to their king that perhaps, just perhaps, this whole India expedition has run its course. And so the man who conquered from Greece to the doorstep of the subcontinent, who never lost a major battle,

supposedly turns his army around, spooked out of further advance by objects nobody could identify. For the theorists, this is the payoff, because it means the sky machines of the ancient world were not merely a divine uber service for gods and heroes. They had teeth, they could fight, and they could rattle the greatest general of the age. The neat part, at least for the ancient astronaut crowd,

is that this does not sit alone as a random one-off anecdote. It rhymes with the epics themselves, which we already met as the birthplace of the whole Vimana idea. Those texts do not just describe flying craft cruising serenely between cities. They describe aerial warfare, skyborne duels between gods and demons, and devastating weapons launched from the air that can lay waste to entire armies below.

So, when a legend surfaces about flaming disks terrorising Alexander's elephants, believers see it as one more entry in a long, consistent pattern, different continent-crossing storytellers, same recurring theme of machines that rule the sky and occasionally rain destruction from it. Of course, the historians would like a word, and their word is a bit of a buzzkill. For starters, the mainstream record has a far less cinematic explanation, for why Alexander turned back, and it involves no flying sources whatsoever. His weary troops, soaked by relentless monsoon rains, worn down by years of campaigning,

and staring at rumours of even larger armies waiting ahead, essentially staged a work stoppage. They refused to go further. It was, in the plainest terms, a mutiny driven by exhaustion and homesickness, the ancient equivalent of an entire company simultaneously deciding they are done answering emails. no shields of silver required. On top of that, the flaming disc story itself has an awkward paper trail. It does not appear in the solid contemporary accounts of Alexander's campaigns, and instead tends to surface in much later and far shakier retellings, the kind of source that historians handle with tongs. In other words, the tale of the sky ambush may be less an ancient eyewitness report and more a much

younger legend that grew fashionable long after the fact, and whether the discs were alien craft, poetic exaggeration, or a story invented centuries later by someone who wanted to make Alexander's retreat sound cooler than a soldier's strike, the legend does one very effective thing. It plants the notion that the ancient skies were not just decorated with the occasional divine chariot but were at times a genuine battlefield, which raises a question that has been quietly building this whole time. If these machines were real enough to fly, real enough to fight, and real enough to send a world conqueror packing, then they had to come from somewhere and land somewhere. A craft that takes off has to touch down, and that simple, stubborn piece of logic

is about to drag the entire investigation out of the temples and battlefields of Asia, and drop it into the middle of a South American desert, where something enormous is scratched into the earth, something you can only truly make sense of from high above. The place is the Nazca Desert of southern Peru, one of the driest, most sun-baked, least eventful stretches of ground on the entire planet, and that last part turns out to matter enormously, because scratched across this vast reddish plain is one of the strangest art projects humanity has ever attempted. Enormous lines that run dead straight for miles, sprawling geometric shapes, and gigantic figures of animals, a hummingbird, a monkey with a curled tail, a spider, a condor with a wingspan the size of a football field,

all etched into the surface at a scale so ridiculous that from ground level you would walk right across one and never even realise it. Stand in the middle of the monkey and you would just see, well, desert. The whole spectacle only snaps into focus when you get high above it and look straight down, and that single fact is the seed of the entire mystery because it raises a maddening question.

Why on earth would a people go to insane lengths to create colossal drawings that they themselves could never fully see from the ground? von Denikan had an answer, and it was characteristically bold. Forget the artwork angle entirely, he suggested. What if these are not pictures at all? Or at least not only pictures? What if the long, dead straight lines slashing across the plateau are actually runways?

Landing strips and ground markings laid out for flying machines? The ancient equivalent of the painted lines and guidance markers you see at any modern airport. In this reading, the NASCAR plane is not a mysterious open-air gallery. It is a terminal. An arrival's lounge for the gods, missing only the overpriced coffee and the flight that is inexplicably delayed. This idea does not float around on its own either. It clicks neatly into a bigger framework pushed by the ancient astronaut writer David Hatcher Childress, who argues that if Flyingcraft were buzzing around the ancient world, as the epics of India insist they were,

then simple logic demands infrastructure. Machines that fly need places to take off, refuel, park, and get repaired. You cannot have an Air Force with nowhere to land it, so Childress proposes that the ancients must have maintained a whole network of these facilities, strategic airfields and hangars, scattered at key points across the globe, and once you're already looking for ancient airports, a desert covered in mile-long straight lines practically raises its hand and volunteers. NASCAR stops being a puzzle, and becomes, in the theorist's eyes, the obvious candidate for a prehistoric spaceport, an ancient international airport that somehow forgot to install a control tower.

It is a genuinely seductive pitch, and you can see why it took off, so to speak. The problem is that the moment you invite actual archaeologists and a few stubborn facts into the room, the runway theory starts hitting turbulence. The most famous buzzkill came from a German mathematician named Maria Reichi, who spent decades of her life out on that plateau, sweeping the lines with a broom, measuring them, and fighting to protect them. She practically became the guardian of the place, and she had a beautifully deadpan objection to the whole landing strip idea, which is that the ground of the Nazca plane is soft, loose and sandy.

Her point was blunt and devastating. If spacecraft had tried to land there, they would not have taxied gracefully to a gate. They would have gotten stuck. As she memorably suggested the aliens would have needed a tow truck, not exactly the sleek arrival you would expect from a civilization that mastered interstellar travel. And the deeper you look, the more than money. mundane explanation holds up, which is somehow both reassuring and a little disappointing. The Nazca people, who thrived here between roughly 2,500 years ago, made the lines using a technique so simple it almost feels like cheating. The desert surface is covered in dark, reddish, iron-stained stones, and just beneath them lies pale, lighter ground. Sweep the dark stones aside in a path,

and you expose a bright line that stands out vividly against the surrounding plain. No lasers, no alien surveying equipment, just patient people, wooden stakes, lengths of cord, and a truly heroic tolerance for the sun. Researchers have shown that the giant figures can be reproduced using nothing more than these basic tools and careful planning, scaling up a small sketch onto an enormous canvas. Turns out you do not need a spaceship to draw a big monkey. You need rope, math, and a lot of free time. So what were they actually for? The honest answer is that scholars still debate it, which is part of why the mystery endures. The leading ideas involve ritual and religion. Many think the lines were sacred pathways, meant to be walked in ceremony and procession.

A popular theory connects them to water and fertility, an obsession that makes total sense for a culture clinging to survival in one of the driest deserts on earth, where finding water was less a hobby, and more the entire personality of the civilization. Others have argued for astronomical alignments, the lines pointing toward the rising and setting of the sun or stars. And the crucial detail the ancient astronaut angle tends to skip is that these figures did not need to be viewed from the sky by human eyes at all. They may have been made to be seen by the gods above, or experienced on foot rather than admired from a plane. The audience was never supposed to be us squinting down from a tour flight with a queasy stomach. But here is the thing that keeps the theory

stubbornly alive despite all of that, and it is worth saying plainly. The genuinely, the genuine The genuine wonder of NASCAR does not depend on aliens at all. A people with no writing system as we know it, no aircraft, and no way to float above their own work, managed to plan and execute perfectly proportioned, kilometre scale art that has survived for a couple of thousand years. That is legitimately astonishing. The theorists look at that achievement and reach for visitors from the stars. The archaeologists look at the same achievement and reach for something arguably more

impressive, which is the raw ingenuity of ordinary human beings with rope and determination. And once you accept that people were capable of creating something so vast that only the sky could take it all in, the ancient astronaut crowd has a natural follow-up. If a civilisation in the deserts of Peru left marks meant to be read from above, then maybe the sky machines were leaving fingerprints on other deserts too, thousands of miles away, along a very different and very famous river, which carries us to Egypt and to a temple wall that has launched a thousand internet arguments. In the ancient sacred complex of Abidos stands the Temple of Setti I, a genuinely magnificent monument packed with exquisite carvings,

and up on one of its beams sits a cluster of hieroglyphs that, at first glance, appears to show something that has no business existing in a structure over 3,000 years old. Enthusiasts look at these shapes and see, unmistakably to them, a helicopter, complete with rotor and tail. Right beside it, They claim to spot other craft, silhouettes that resemble an airplane and even something like a submarine or a futuristic boat. It is the kind of image that gets passed around with the caption that explains everything, and the confidence of someone who has never once been wrong, ancient Egyptians, apparently, doodling the results of a modern air show onto their temple ceiling. The explanation for the Abidus carvings, though, is one of the most satisfying reality checks in this entire field,

because it is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of layered stone. The inscription was originally carved with a set of hieroglyphs praising the Pharaoh Setti I. Later, under his successor, Remesses the second, the old text was filled in with plaster, and a new inscription was carved over the top. A totally normal ancient practice, the equivalent of editing a document instead of buying a fresh sheet of paper. Over the following millennia, that plaster crumbled and fell away, and what remains is a jumble of two overlapping sets of hieroglyphs bleeding into each other. The helicopter and its friends are what happens when two different messages get superimposed and then partially erased.

A 3,000-year-old case of two layers of text accidentally photobombing each other. It is less a secret record of ancient aviation, and more the world's oldest example of forgetting to turn off track changes. Egypt is not done handing ammunition to both sides, though, because there is also the matter of the fiery disks. The theorists point to old reports of strange circles of fire seen moving across the Egyptian sky. most famously, an account tied to the reign of the great Pharaoh Thutmose III, some three and a half thousand years ago. The source usually cited is a controversial document known as the Tully Papyrus, named after the man who supposedly transcribed it,

which describes glowing circles of fire appearing in the heavens, growing in number, and eventually vanishing, as the astonished scribes recorded the whole event. For believers, this is a jackpot, an apparent eyewitness account of unidentified flying objects, written down by ancient Egyptian officials who had absolutely no cultural reason to invent a fleet of hovering firewheels.

Naturally, the story comes with a heap of complications that rarely make it into the exciting version. The original papyrus, if it ever existed in the form claimed, has never been properly located or examined by the wider scholarly community. What circulates is a transcription and a translation, both of which serious Egyptologists treat with deep suspicion, pointing out problems with the reading of the text

and the shaky chain of custody. In plain terms, we are asked to trust a copy of a document nobody can produce, describing an event nobody else recorded in a translation experts openly question. It is the ancient history equivalent of my cousin totally saw it, but he cannot find the photo right now. Still, taken together, Egypt does exactly what the theorists want it to do in the grand argument. It stretches the map. What began as a story rooted in the flying craft of India and then lept to the deserts of the Americas, now plants a flag in the Valley of the Nile as well. The claim is no longer about one culture with an overactive imagination. It is about a pattern supposedly spanning the whole ancient world, the same fiery disks and impossible flying shapes

turning up in the art and records of civilizations that never traded a single postcard with one another. And once you're convinced that the ancient skies were crowded with machines from Peru to the pyramids, the natural next question is not just who was flying them, but whether anyone up there was actually looking down and, remarkably, writing down what they saw well enough to map the very shape of a world no one on the ground was supposed to know. So who exactly was supposedly up there, hovering over the planet with a bird's eye view and a steady hand for cartography? The theorists have a nominee, and it is a name you probably know from a very different context, one that usually involves wisdom, wealth, and a famously dramatic ruling about cutting a baby

and half. King Solomon. The legendary Israelite monarch, remembered for his riches and his cleverness, gets recast in this story as something no Sunday school ever mentioned, which is a frequent flyer. The source that gets pulled into this is the Cabra Nagast, the great national epic of Ethiopia, a book steeped in the tale of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In the version the theorist lean on, Solomon does not simply dazzle the visiting queen with treasure and riddles. He hands her a flying carpet, which, let us be honest, is a far better parting gift than anything you will find in a modern airport duty-free. And Solomon himself, the story goes, had access to some kind of aerial vessel of his own, a craft that let him travel enormous distances at speeds no ancient king riding a camel

could dream of. Suddenly the wisest man in the ancient world is also, apparently, sitting on the ancient equivalent of a private aircraft and using it. The theorists then start collecting supporting breadcrumbs from across the map, and some of them are surprisingly real. Scattered around the Middle East and Central Asia are places whose names invoke Solomon, mountains and high seats that local tradition ties to the Great King. In the ancient astronaut reading, these are not just spots he supposedly visited on foot, their landing sites, elevated platforms where his flying vessel could touch down, the ancient equivalent of a mountaintop helipad, and the reach of the legend is genuinely striking. The painter and explorer Nicholas Ruhrig, who spent years wandering the mountains of Central Asia,

soaking up local law, recorded traditions that place Solomon's flights as far away as Tibet, which is a long way from Jerusalem to travel if your only option is a donkey and a good attitude. But the detail that really lights up the theorist's eyes is the claim, drawn from the same body of legend, that Solomon used his aerial vantage point to do something extraordinary. He mapped the world from above. He looked down on the shape of continents and coastlines and recorded what he saw, producing charts of a planet that nobody at ground level could possibly have surveyed, and that single idea acts like a trapdoor,

because it drops the whole discussion straight into one of the most argued about puzzles in the history of exploration, the mystery of the maps that seem to know too much. Here the theorists roll out their star witnesses, a small collection of old charts that supposedly show things their makers had no business knowing. There is the map drawn in 1513 by the Ottoman Admiral Piri Rees, along with charts associated with the cartographers, Arontius Phineas and Gerardus Mercarta. The explosive claim attached to them is that these maps depict the coastline of Antarctica, and not the frozen, ice-buried Antarctica we know today, but the land as it might have looked before the ice sheets swallowed it, complete with rivers and bays that are now sealed under miles of glacier. The problem, of course, is glaring.

Antarctica was not even officially spotted by humans until 1820, three centuries after some of these maps were drawn, and nobody surveyed its true buried coastline until the modern era with sonar and radar. So how, the theorist demand, could a 16th century mapmaker sketch a continent that would not be discovered for hundreds of years and draw it as it looked in a prehistoric age?

Their answer ties the whole chapter together in a neat dramatic bow. These charts, they argue, were copied from far-old source maps, and those originals were made by someone surveying the globe from the sky, the same aerial map-making the Solomon Legend. Now playing on Netflix, The Hawk. From the mind of Will Ferrell. Oh, mama, I'm back. Comes a new original series.

Get ready, get ready. That's it. Did I stutter? When an iconic pro golfer. Lonnie. Lonnie. Hawkins! You were a big shot golfer.

I still am a big shot golfer. No one. Dad, I'm the hon. No. We'll stand in his way. That's how it's done. The Hawk. Now playing.

Only on Netflix. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if.

Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. And describes.