Every Town - UNDERGROUND Civilizations - We've Been Looking For Aliens In The Wrong Place

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Today we're talking about the idea that we are not, and have never been, alone on this planet, and that the proof isn't up in the sky where we've spent seventy years pointing our telescopes. It's underneath us. It's been underneath us the whole time. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/YeBIDZnWf34 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've always assumed we were the first. That before us, there was nothing but stone tools and firelight and small bands of people who hadn't figured out how to build anything yet. That history itself is a straight line, and we're the one standing at the front of it. Looking back at everyone who came before, we are the culmination of it all, and are at the peak of what humans have ever been.

But every so often, somebody digs into a hillside and finds something that shouldn't be there. A temple, older than farming itself. An entire city carved 280 feet straight down into solid rock, and symbols that show up on continents that supposedly never spoke to each other, never even knew the other existed. No matter how crazy the finding is, the official answer is always the same. A hundred gatherers did it.

But here's another answer, and it's a simple one. Well, what if we weren't the first? What if someone was here before us, built something, and instead of dying out, they went down. Down out of our story completely, and they kept going. And what if they're still here today? But we just haven't found them yet. Hey guys, it's Andrew and welcome to every town where today. We're doing something a little different.

No missing girl and no cold case file. Today, we're talking about the idea that we are not and have never been alone on this planet and that the proof isn't up in the sky where we've spent 70 years pointing our telescopes. No, it's underneath us. It's been underneath us the whole time. Here's a number to keep in mind for this because it's important and it's a big one. The fossil record puts anatomically modern humans, so people who look just like you, same skull, same brain size, same everything, going back at least 300,000 years. Some of the dating pushes that even further.

This is not cavemen grunting around a fire. It's us, fully modern. Now here's the part nobody really sits with. The oldest cities we point to as the birth of civilization, Sumer, Urk, the first writing, the first laws, the first wheel, well, those show up around 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. I do the math, and that's roughly 294,000 years of fully modern humans, same everything you're using to listen to this right now, before anybody anywhere decided to build a city. Now the standard answer is that it's not that we couldn't, it's that we didn't need to. Small bands of people were always just moving, always in survival mode. Agriculture, permanent settlements, all of that had to wait for something like reliable weather.

Even though there's been plenty of big chunks of solid weather that have spanned thousands of years, conventionally, they say it didn't really click into place until the end of the last ice age, somewhere around 11,700 years ago. That this is when the climate finally settled down enough to farm the same patch of ground year after year. That's the textbook answer, but it skips over a gap that's hard to ignore. Nearly 300,000 years of people exactly like us,

and in all that time, as far as we've found, there's nothing. There's no cities, no writing, no monument, just campfires and stone tools generation after generation for longer than almost anything else in human history combined. Maybe that's exactly what happened, or maybe something did happen in there, somewhere in those 294,000 years, and we just haven't found it yet. And the reality is that the further you go back, the harder it will be to ever find evidence of people at all.

The surface of the earth is constantly changing, and things get buried under rubble, debris, sand, and water. Many things erode and decay and disappear completely. I mean, if you put a car outside and left it to the element, within 100 years you might be left with some unidentified lump of an engine block, but everything else had to be gone. So, when you're talking thousands of years, well, it gets tricky. But one thing that doesn't erode so easy. easily is stone. Up into the 1990s, it was believed the oldest stone megalithic structure is dated back to around 3,600 BCE, the temples of Gantigia on the island of Gozo and Malta. So there was something like 5,600 years old, massive dressed limestone, ceremonial

architecture, genuinely one of the most impressive things humans had managed with stone tools and bare hands. They were older than the pyramids, older than Stonehenge, and for decades, that was the ceiling. As far back as anyone could prove, this was what organized humans were capable of building at that scale. Then, that ceiling didn't just move. It shattered, over in southeastern Turkey,

at a place called Gobeckley-Tepe. The name means Pop-Belly Hill in Turkish, which is about the least-threatening name you could give to the most unsubterterterter. unsettling archaeological site on the planet. And for decades, it was just a hill. Farmers walked over it. Plows kept catching on odd bits of limestone poking up through the soil, and nobody thought much of it.

Then in the 1990s, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt got a look at it, and his entire career changed direction on the spot. What Schmidt and his team eventually dug out of that hillside has been ready to geocarbon dated to somewhere around 9600 to 8200 BCE. That puts it at roughly 11 to 12,000 years old, more than twice as old, as the oldest stone megalithic structure ever found. That's older than the first cities in Mesopotamia, which is the region we were taught in school gave birth to civilization itself.

We have monumental architecture so early in the history of mankind. So we didn't expect it to have it so early. So we are nearly 7,000 years before the pyramids, which are the first monumental building everyone knows. And beyond its age, here's why this is such a significant find. Quebecli-Tepé was built before agriculture existed, before pottery, before the wheel, at a time when every textbook says human beings were nomadic hunter-gatherers,

moving around and chasing food from place to place with nothing resembling permanent architecture. That's the world Gobeckley-Tepe was supposedly built in, except what's sitting in that hillside is not the work of a scattered band of hunters. It's a series of massive stone enclosures, ringed with T-shaped limestone pillars, some of them over 17 feet tall and weighing many tons apiece. Schmidt himself argued that raising these things would have taken hundreds of organized workers,

people who had to be fed, housed, and coordinated toward a single purpose over a long stretch of time. Now, that is simply not what hunter-gatherers do. That is what civilizations do. On top of it, these T-shaped pillars aren't just structural supports. They're abstract depictions of the human form. And some of them have arms carved down the sides, hands resting carefully on the stomach, even what looks like belts and clothing etched into the stone. But there are no faces, no individual features, just the shape of a person, standing there faceless,

but somehow watching. And crawling all over these pillars are carvings of wild animals, lions, foxes, gazelles, scorpions, birds with their wings spread. And moreover, these animals are not carved into the stone but are popping out of it, meaning that a whole lot more effort and tolling needed to be used to remove all that stone around it in order to accomplish that. So, pretty sophisticated stuff from a very long time ago. At some point, for reasons unknown, the people who built Quebec Leitepe didn't abandon it, but instead they deliberately filled the enclosure in with rubble, packed it down tight, and buried the whole site on purpose.

Now, why would they do that? Why take the one? one thing that proves you existed and put it in the ground where nobody would find it again for 11,000 years. As it turns out, once people started paying attention to Gobeckley-Tepe, they found out it isn't even alone out there. A few miles away sits carry-on-tepe, part of a wider cluster of sites now being uncovered across the region that archaeologists have started calling the Tass-Tepler network. They're the same style, same age, same eerie faceless figures. which kills the idea that Gobeckli-Tepe was some kind of freak accident, a one-off. This wasn't a fluke.

This whole thing was organized. It was an entire network. But where did the people who built it go? About 600 miles west from Gobeckley-Tepe is a region of central Turkey called Cappadocia, famous today for its hot air balloons and its strange cone-shaped rock formations. But underneath all that postcard scenery is something else. entirely. In 1963, a man there was doing some basic renovation work on his home. He knocked down a wall in his basement, expecting to find dirt or bedrock behind it. Instead,

he found a passage. And behind that passage, once people started exploring, they realized they'd found an entire city underground. Nobody living there had known it existed, sitting directly beneath their feet the entire time. That city is called Darren Kuyu, and the numbers on it are honestly hard to process the first time you hear them. It runs close to 280 feet straight down into the earth, across as many as 18 distinct levels. An estimate suggests it could shelter as many as 20,000 people at once, along with their livestock, their grain stores, and their water supply. It had wine presses, had stables, it had chapels carved into the rock for worship, ventilation shafts that still functioned today, pulled fresh air down through more than 165 feet of solid stone.

As to who built this and when, well, no one can agree, so we just don't know. But it certainly took a whole lot of work in planning and sophistication. It's also worth reiterating that this place and go back to the same. Tepe were both found on accident by random people who just live by them, which makes you wonder what else is just beneath our feet. What we do know about Darren Kuyu is that it was built to be sealed. Each level had its own massive circular stone door, carved to roll into place from the inside like something out of a bank vault, closing that section off completely from anything trying to get in from above. Every floor could be sealed

independently of the others. So if something came down through the upper levels, whoever was below could shut themselves off entirely and keep going deeper. And Darren Kuyu wasn't even unique either. Researchers believe a tunnel runs from miles between it and another underground city called Kemeckli. And once researchers started properly surveying the region, they found that The Cappadocia alone holds more than 30 separate underground cities. These are not caves or simple storage cellars. Entire cities, built downward instead of outward, hidden beneath a landscape that from the surface looks like nothing more than rolling hills in strange rock spires.

The mainstream explanation is that these were safe spaces. They were built and expanded by later populations, retreating from invading armies. They could hide under there until the danger passed. overhead. That sort of makes sense, but when you consider the actual design of the place, that explanation starts to strain a bit. A refuge from what exactly, that required sealed stone doors on every single level, ventilation systems, engineered to sustain thousands of people for months at a time, and enough infrastructure to essentially operate as a fully self-sufficient civilization with the sun never touching it. That's not a place you duct

into for a few days until the Raiders move on. That's a place you built to disappear into, permanently, if you had to. And it's not just Turkey either. Go back further, and you've got Herodotus, the Greek historian, writing about a structure in Egypt, he simply called the labyrinth. This is from Herodotus's histories in the 5th century BC, and he says, for this I saw myself, and I found that greater than words can say, or if one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all the great works produced by the Hellenians, the Greeks, they would prove to be inferior in labor and expense to this labyrinth. And this was a sprawling complex near Lake Morris that by his account held 3,000 rooms,

1,500 above ground and 1,500 below, wrapped around 12 massive covered courts. And he walked through the upper level himself. The lower level, the priest wouldn't show him. They told him it held the tombs of the kings who built the place and the graves of their sacred crocodiles. For most of modern history, that description got filed away as ancient exaggeration. By the time archaeologists actually got out to the site in the 1880s, but there was nothing left above ground but rubble. This whole thing, it had been quarried for its stone over centuries.

However, in 2008, a joint Egyptian and Belgian survey team ran ground penetrating radar across the site, and underneath the sand, roughly 25 to 30 feet down, the scans picked up something. It was a massive, regular, grid-like network of walls and chambers spread across several acres, sitting almost exactly where Herodotus said it would be. And nobody's dug it up. Egyptian authorities have never approved a full excavation. So what's really down there, but we don't know. The point being, it's the same. same pattern showing up again and again. Megalitz and Gobeckli-Tepe, an underground city in Daring Kuyu, the labyrinths in Egypt.

They're all ancient, all separated by thousands of miles, and all of them underground. And that's the thing. Most of this planet's interior is still genuinely completely unmapped. We know more about the surface of Mars than we do about what's sitting a few miles beneath our own feet. A deep ocean floor, it's the same story, still mostly a blank space on a map. And so here's where we're at. Human beings in our modern form go back at least 300,000 years in the fossil record, and it's likely we're much older, possibly double that or more.

And we now know that people were capable of building complex, coordinated, monumental structures long before anyone thought that was even possible. How far back they actually go, well, nobody knows for sure. But if we've genuinely been here that long, what if 6,000 years ago isn't when civilization started? What if it's just when the survivors started over? And what if we're not the first chapter of this story? And we're the epilogue? The people who came before us didn't fail to build anything.

They built something for sure. and then they left and took the story with them, which left us to stumble along just the edges of it, one buried temple at a time. I'll be stray with you, even the authors of the most serious academic paper on this whole topic which we're about to get into admit flat out, well, they personally think the hidden civilization idea is probably false.

But probably false isn't the same as impossible. And if there's even a sliver of a chance it's true, then that would be the biggest story in all of human history. But at the very least, it's interesting to think about. I think what the UFO phenomenon is teaching us is that we don't understand time and space. Here are objects. I think we have to call them objects

that are physical, that interact with the environment, and yet are capable of, appear to be capable of manipulating time and space in ways that go beyond what our physics understands today. Back in the 1970s, researchers John Kiel and Jacques Vallet started pushing back hard against the popular idea that UFOs and the strange beings people reported seeing were visitors from other planets. Their argument was that these beings had never been extraterrestrial in the first place, but the label itself was wrong. And they coined a different term for it, ultraterrestrial.

something that originates here on Earth, just operating on a level we haven't figured out how to perceive yet. And then in 2010, a writer named Mac Tonys took that idea a step further with a book that coined the term cryptoterrestrial. The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis basically sort of maintains that we are sharing the planet with a species that's possibly as far in advance. I think one thing that this of this secret civilization among us has going for it is a very, prolonged, and very well-cultivated sense of stealth. I think that they thrive on secrecy. I think that's a big asset. His theory was that there's a hidden sister race sharing this planet with us,

a group that survived by perfecting two things above all else. Incredibly advanced technology and the art of never being seen. Staying hidden as a survival strategy, not as an accident. There's a detail about Tony's that. it adds an eerie texture to all this, whether you take that theory seriously or not. He died suddenly in 2009, at just 34 years old, in his sleep of cardiac arrhythmia. His book on Crypto-Torrestrial Hypothesis came out the following year in 2010, and he never got to see the idea take off. He never got to see it become one of the most discussed fringe theories in the entire UAP research community,

or watch it eventually walk its way into an academic paper with Harvard names attached. Now, he just planted it, and then he was gone. And for a long time, his idea stayed on the fringe, talked about by people interested in the subject, but never touched by anyone with actual institutional credibility. That all changed in 2023, though. Around the same time Congress was holding those hearings on unidentified aerial phenomena, when all the videos and clips were coming out showing actual UFOs.

Congressman Mike Gallagher went on the Pat McAfee show, and he floated one possible explanation for what people were seeing. I'm paraphrasing here, but it was that it might be an ancient civilization that's simply been hiding here this whole time and is only now starting to show itself. A sitting congressman actually said that, on a big show that reaches millions.

Then in 2024, it went even further. A formal academic paper was published in the journal, Philosophy and Cosmology. It was written by three researchers, Tim Lomas and Brendan Case, both out of Harvard Human Flourishing Program, along with biological anthropologist Michael Masters. In it, they seriously examined

the cryptotorrestrial hypothesis as a legitimate potential explanation for unidentified anomalous phenomena. So, a once-fringed theory had officially stepped up into the mainstream. And this is where it stops being about buried temples and hidden cities, and it gets a lot bigger. Because that paper, it doesn't just entertain the idea in a vague way. It actually breaks the hypothesis down into four distinct possibilities. 1. A surviving ancient human civilization, something like the builders of Gobeckli-Tepe, never actually went extinct and instead went underground.

2. Is that a completely separate intelligent species had evolved here on Earth in parallel with us, and had simply gone its own way and stayed hidden the entire time, i.e. underground, hidden inside mountains or even under the ocean. And three, these UAPs were former extraterrestrial or time travelers who arrived long ago and established long-term bases here, effectively becoming residents rather than visitors. And four, what the paper calls magical cryptotorrestrials. Basically the fairies, the elves, the little people of centuries of folklore, reinterpreted as a real hidden population rather than pure superstition. But it's that third one, and it's overlap with something else in the paper that may just be the strongest in this whole theory. One of the paper's three authors, Michael Masters, has spent years developing his own separate idea, when he calls the extra tempestrial hypothesis.

His argument is that a meaningful percentage of UAP sightings might not be alien visitors from another planet at all, and they might be us, just not us right now. I've written three books about whether they could be future human time travelers coming back to visit their own past in the same way I would as a biological anthropologist if I had access to that technology. That is one of the possibilities we include in this paper as well. The 2024 paper itself points out that the time traveling future human idea and the cryptotorrestrial idea aren't necessarily two competing theories. They might be describing the same phenomenon just viewed from two different angles.

A hidden population that started out human kept evolving in isolation, whether that isolation was underground in another dimension or simply further down our own timeline than we can currently perceive. So the aliens, they're us, just further down the line. And so where does all this actually leave us? A species with 300,000 years on the clock for sure, and only 6,000 of them spent building anything we'd called civilization. A temple in Turkey, older than farming, built by people organized enough to move stone pillars

that weigh tons, who then bury their own greatest achievement rather than let it stand in the light. A city underneath Cappadocia, big enough for 20,000 people sealed from the inside, one of more than 30 just like it in that region alone. And a gigantic labyrinth in Egypt, yet to be looked at in modern times, and potentially countless other structures underground that have yet to be discovered at all? What is all that really, and where did the builders go? You know, we keep building bigger telescopes, launching more satellites, and pointing all of it further out into the dark, hoping to finally catch something coming toward us from somewhere

else. But we never do. Maybe that's because the idea is totally backwards. We've all seen the videos, the photos, the pilot encounters, the radar footage, the reports that keep piling up. Maybe some of you have even looked up and seen something yourselves that you couldn't explain. I mean, there are literally thousands of documented sightings out there right now, thousands of images of something we simply cannot identify.

And when you think about it, in the vastness of space, Earth isn't even the size of a grain of sand somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. So ask yourself, what actually makes more sense? that's something out there across that kind of distance found this one specific grain of sand and decided to drop in on us on what is apparently a fairly regular basis or that whatever we've been seeing never left here in the first place and maybe the oldest evidence we've actually got

keeps pointing away from the skies entirely and in the other direction down into the rock into the hillsides we've been farming and building on top of for thousands of of years without us ever once asking what might already be underneath there. So that's going to do it for today's episode of Everytown. Hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, we'll go on and check out another episode because we got a ton more for you to investigate alongside me.

And remember to come back here next week for another episode filled with scary, strange and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.