Forbidden History - Maltese Alien Skulls

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

In Malta lies an incredible underground complex dating back over 5000 years, known as the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum. This World Heritage Site is an ancient temple containing the remains of 7,000 humans. Among these remains, strange, elongated skulls were found, demonstrating baffling anomalies which have confounded experts for over a century. But why are they so strange? Who did they belong to? Could they be from another world, as some people have suggested? Why have some of them mysteriously disappeared?    Cast List: Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian  Dr. Karen Bellinger: Anthropologist, archaeologist, and historian  Silvia DeBono - Historian Dominic Selwood: Historian, barrister, bestselling author, novelist and frequent contributor to national newspapers including The Independent, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph Hugh Newman: Author & Researcher Dr. Janina Ramirez: Cultural historian, broadcaster and author based at the University of Oxford Sharon Sultana: Curator & Expert, Heritage Museum, Malta Dr. Peggy Brunache: Historian, archaeologist and lecturer at University of Glasgow Dr. Luke Daly-Groves: Historian, author and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire Emilio Persiano: Taxi Driver Dr. Anton Mifsud: Paediatrician Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. The island of Malta is home to one of the world's greatest ancient mysteries. A 5,000-year-old temple dug deep into the earth. According to some, it was once home to an advanced culture capable of engineering marvels. When you go down there in the dark, you feel like you're connecting with the origins of civilization itself.

Inside, archaeologists discovered the fragmented remains of thousands of human bodies, including 11 bizarre skulls. There was elongation. Some were missing the cranial knitting. Since their discovery, authorities have seemingly tried to hide the skulls from public view, leading to some wild theories. It makes you wonder why? What makes them different? Are they from another world? What is the truth behind these mysterious skulls found in one of the oldest structures in the world?

And who did they belong to? These small islands hold one of the greatest ancient enigmas. On the Maltese archipelago, formed by the islands of Malta, Gozo, and Camino. The town of Paola is a few miles outside the capital city. In 1903, archaeologists, led by Emmanuel Magri, begin excavating a newly discovered buried structure. Inside, they unearth a set of 11 strange skulls. There must have been a shiver that went down their spine when they found themselves in this very strange, odd, underground place.

But then in their hands, they were holding a skull that, barely looked human. But it wasn't just the discovery of the skulls that had archaeologists perplexed. The underground complex in which they were found was also groundbreaking. They named it the Hal Cephline hypogeum. The Hypogeum is a real mystery, beginning with how it was even created by this Neolithic culture that just had stone tools, essentially. Today, the Hal Saflini Hypogeum, which means underground temple or tomb, is a UNESCO World Heritage

site. And despite a century of investigations, little is known about this impressive subterranean complex. Historian Sylvia de Bono has lived on the island of Malta for the last 20 years and has closely studied the hypogeum and its secrets. Just underneath these normal houses lies the hypogeum, 11 meters on the ground, a series of caves and tunnels. So if you were to drive by without knowing that the hypogeum was here, you wouldn't even notice. Yet its true purpose remains a mystery, and very little is known about the people who built it.

The first thing that really strikes you about the hypergeum is just how modern it is how modern it is, I mean, it could almost be some kind of weird art deco building. It just doesn't look like it was built by people in the Stone Age with antlers and chisels made out of stone. The Hypergium is built on three underground levels. And as you descend downwards, it's like going into the belly of the world. It's incredibly claustrophobic. It's an ancient labyrinth with dozens of small chambers radiating off it,

many of which are decorated with intricate and mysterious symbols that we still haven't deciphered. The discovery of the Hypergium found that this was a highly sophisticated, advanced civilization who incorporated not only brilliant stone carving techniques but also acoustics into the design of their temples. Within the Hypergium there is the Oracle Room where the acoustics are so carefully refined that if you whisper in the center it amplifies the Some people believe that it's built to generate 111 hertz to be exact, which is the kind of

frequency that apparently produces endorphins in human beings. This has been proven scientifically that actually affects your consciousness, and so was that the purpose? Yet few people get the chance to experience this astonishing structure. Access to the Hephaeum is so limited and restricted that it's impossible to walking form the street to the side. The official reason given is that it's to protect the microclimate within it and the wall paintings, but it has made a lot of people wonder if there's something that's being kept secret.

While limited access to the hypogeum has added a layer of mystery to the structure, it's what's inside that's baffled scholars for a century. The thing that struck archaeologists straight away was this film of red that covered the whole space. When archaeologists started to get down into this red soil and investigate it, what they found were the skeletal remains of 7,000 people. The remains puzzled them because the bones weren't arranged as bodies. They seemed to be distributed around the caves in a completely random way as if there were

no logic to it. And among them is a group of 11 skulls which really defy explanations. to some people's minds. In 1903, archaeologist Emmanuel Magri and his team were able to salvage the 11 near-complete skulls. But soon after, research was brought to a halt. Sharon Sultana is the senior curator at the Museum of Archaeology in Malta, which houses the mysterious skulls.

Whilst Magri was excavating the hussephrine hypodium, he was sent to Tunisia on another expedition. And unfortunately, for us, Magri died there, and none of his excavation notebooks were ever found. It's quite a problem that we don't have Emmanuel Magri's original notebook, because those would have been the first excavations that were carried out, so giving an insight of how things were really, really found. In 1907, archaeologist Temi Zammett takes over Magri's excavation and makes a startling discovery.

All the ancient skulls were long-headed. What do we mean when we say long-headed skulls? It's when the width of a skull is less than 75% of the length of the skull. And it's actually a very rare proportion found in the human population overall. The multi-sculls mathematically, they are so long that they are unusual. Because we know what the human skull looks like or should look like, it is off-putting for many people to come across a unique version of that skull. It makes you wonder why?

What makes them different? Are they actually not like us? Are they from another world? Unusually shaped skulls of itself is not actually unique. Cultures have performed headbinding around the world right up until the 20th century. Headbinding or artificial cranial modification has been seen across the globe throughout history. It might sound barbaric.

In fact, it was a practice that had to be performed in the first two years of life, and the skull would be essentially compressed between boards, perhaps, and bound tightly with a piece of fabric. And this wasn't done as a punishment. In fact, it was generally done to distinguish. the individual as special. Headbinding might be a perfectly rational explanation for long-headedness, although only one of the 11 skulls shows a squash-like shape, a possible sign of having been headbound.

The rare skull structure could be a clue as to what long-headedness represented to this lost culture. Given that one of these skulls shows an artificial manipulation to which you can't the long-headed look. It raises the possibility that the skulls that are present in the hypogeum were associated with high status individuals in this society.

And we know that many cultures around the world, this was linked with elites, but also it could have had a practical purpose, and this could have been to affect the brain chemistry and the pineal gland. If you're stretching it and moving things around in the head, it could produce different psychic abilities. It proves you're a semi-divine being. Malta is actually home to some of the

very oldest ritual building that we've ever identified in the world. Temples that stretch back to 6,000 years and are incredibly sophisticated in their construction. Although a handful of the ancient megalithic temples have been identified, remains from dozens more structures can be found across Malta and Gozo. There are bigolithic structures all over Europe, but it's the fact that there's so many on Malta in such a small space that makes one wonder whether this island has some kind of sacred significance. Gigantea on the small island of Gozo is the oldest recorded temple on the Maltese archipelago. This temple was built by the same people who built the hypogee and these are what we're

we call the temple people. These temples, they are older than the pyramids of Egypt. They are older than stonehenge in England. And at that time, there were no tools, no machinery that we know today. We have to remember we're just seeing virtually nothing of what was there. They would have been much grander, much more precision engineered.

Erected with nothing more than wood and stone tools, these buildings would have required a mass effort from the population. Relatively speaking, Gozo is pretty small. The population today is only 32,000 people. So if we go back to when the temple was built, it would almost certainly have been a communal effort of virtually everybody on the island.

Although built hundreds of years earlier, the layout of Gigantea seems to have inspired the curved configuration of the hypogeum, one of the last temples to be built on these islands. There's a walkway, there's chambers, There's an altar in a very regular location. And what's really fascinating is when researchers examine the hypogeum, in comparison, there were a lot of similar features found.

A serpent depiction was originally found at the entrance to Gigantea. In fact, these snake-like spirals adorn all of the remaining Maltese temples. Perhaps it was an important symbol to this ancient culture. Because written documentation doesn't exist from this time period, clues found inside the temple walls are open to interpretation. There are some evidence found around some other temples that might shed a light on these rituals performing. Artifacts that were found in the hypogeum include a beautiful statue of a woman

reclining as if she were sleeping. The sleeping lady has often been interpreted as representing the goddess of fertility, an important deity for the temple people. We can always imagine that if these people, at one point, they were worshipping the goddess of fertility, most probably they would have performed such rituals as orgies in these temples. Another common hypothesis is that the sleeping lady personifies death and the eternal.

This might explain the ancient remains found near the temple site of Gigantea. Five hundred yards away from the temple, 30 more long-headed skulls were found. That goes to show that long-headed people probably were around everywhere in this archipelago. So who was this ancient population that built these astonishing structures? And were they all long-headed? The human cranium has a general shape which is universal. Within the human population at large, that's going to vary between extremes, with certain shapes prevailing and having a genetic propensity to be passed on in a given community.

And to me, that's enough to explain the presence of these long-headed skulls. Malta, of course, is an island that would have created a population. that was relatively inbred. So if there was a characteristic trait, it would be accentuated in that sort of an environment. But many people in Malta believe there's more to it. Taxi driver Emilio Persiano knows every corner of these islands. According to him, some claim that the sophistication

of the temple structures, along with the skulls found at the hypogeum, can only be attributed to otherworldly beings. Many people, especially my grandmother, always said the discourse, could be aliens, yeah. Malta is a very mysterious place. Many things, many temples in Malta, especially the hypogeo. They think that it was built from the aliens. I don't know because I'm 50 years old.

But the story is always the same. Aliens that were here before a long time ago. Hoping to solve this mystery once and for all, Dr. Anton Mifsud, a pediatrician by profession, has spent the last 36 years investigating the hypogeum's elongated skulls. It all started when one skull named Safflini 11 sparked his interest. Well I saw this skulls for the first time I was fascinated by Safflini number 11. The skull number 11 was a mystery to me because I could not explain it. In 1985 my father gave me in a camera and I wanted to three.

and I was interested in the museum, so I went. There were six skulls being displayed, and there was this particular one which struck me. It had these huge orbital bosses. And I photographed it from all angles and I thought I would study it. Well, as a medical doctor, we're different from archaeologists. We spent about two years of our lives just studying in anatomy, so we know the skull inside out.

So whenever I see something that is fond, something that is far out of the ordinary. I mean, you're amazed. Why were our ancestors in this shape? What made them have this shape? I mean, why are their forehead so pronounced? Today, the skulls are housed at the Museum of Archaeology. But that's not the full story.

Initially, there were 11 skulls, so we don't know when the numbers started to dwindle. But certainly, between 1955, and between 59, there was no real museum of archaeology, there was no transitional phase. Now, during that time, five went missing. We don't know why. In my view, there were a lot of undesirable specimens that were taken off of the radar. They just disappeared. Anton has never had the chance to study the five missing skulls.

Just getting access to the remaining six was difficult and required him to work. and required him to work around years of red tape. After the photographs I had taken, they were taken off the shelves of the museum where they were displayed. Access was totally impossible. There was this whole debate going on about having human remains on display in museums.

So I think the authorities back then wanted to be cautious and they removed all the skeletal material, which was on display and they put it in storage. I published this photograph of these skulls, 1999, and after that there were a number of people who were interested and who tried to get access to them to see this long-headed skull. It was clear from the photos published by Anton

that the skulls looked strangely elongated. Combined with limited access, it added fuel to the fire, Theories started to come up. Were there aliens, were they from another continent? The Maltese authorities have been very protective, should we say, about these skulls. And really, the more they do that, the more they're engendering suspicion and mistrust. That was disturbing the prevailing paradigm of the time. And they wouldn't have that happening.

So could it be that the authorities are just too terrified to find out that that human history may have to be rewritten. Could these skulls be an absolute revelation as to who we are and where we came from? It's only been in the past decade that the skulls have been made accessible for viewing. But speculation continued. People coming to the museum to see

these halls of Lena hypogeum skulls were expecting to see long headbound skulls. But in reality, the skulls are what they are. So people started saying, that the museum was hiding the real skulls from the hypogeum, and the government is making us hide them for security reasons. What we have tried to do is study these skulls and give access to the public so that people can decide for themselves.

Today, Anton is working with the National Museum of Archaeology in Malta to further scientific research into the skulls and get to the bottom of who their Malte's ancestors really were. But why are these remains so strange? Anton's medical background has helped him uncover some of the truth behind their appearance. Now, this is Sufflinia number 11, and I think it was responsible for all the various theories of aliens. Now, chief among which was the long-headedness, it's one of the most long heads of the hypodium skulls. Apart from that, it does not possess a sagittal future here, which is normally present.

on skulls. Because the skull develops at the same rate over the person's lifetime, it's very odd to find the skull with one suture still prominent, but the other not visible. How is this possible? Are there any scientific explanations for this drained skull? Dr. Anton Mifsud has spent the last four decades researching the strange Hal Cephany hypogeum skulls. His medical background has helped him uncover the truth behind the

their appearance. One of them, named Saflini 11, is missing the satchel suture, a seemingly impossible trait. On a skull, the cranial sutures are the lines that one usually sees. One goes from left to right over the top of the skull, and the other goes from that line all the way down to the back. When a baby is born, the plates that form the cranium have not yet fused, making the sutures very visible. But as the plates fuse, the lines become less and less distinct, so in much older people the lines can almost have disappeared. Remarkably on skull number 11, the coronal suture from left to right is evidently open,

but the sagittal suture is absent. In rare instances, one suture can fuse prematurely, such as when a skull is headbound in infancy. But headbinding only accounts for some of the skull's anomalies. For the rest, Anton has another explanation, which lies in a medical condition called thalassemia. Thalassemia means anemia of the Mediterranean. It's a disease in response to malaria. What happens in malaria is that mosquito bites the human being and injects the baby malaria. Parasites inside the bloodstream, and they mature inside the red cells.

of the human. A red cell will last 120 days before it's destroyed. So that gives the parasites sufficient time to grow, mature, burst, and then cause the malaria. To counter this process, the body has adapted and produced another sort of red blood cell, known as hemoglobin F. It will cause blood cells to break up earlier, preventing the parasite from maturing inside them and killing the infected individual. But to counterbalance the rapid destruction of blood cells, the body has to produce more and more of them. This process takes place inside the bone marrow. If you go to the front of the skull, there are very prominent eyebrows which reflect a higher degree of blood regeneration.

Because the increase of blood cells in the bone marrow causes it to expand and thicken, some of the facial features will become more prominent. According to Anton's observations, all the remaining skulls from the hypogeum show evidence of fallosemia. Although thalassemia does not explain long-headedness, it does explain some of the features of the skulls, particularly on skull number 11. He would certainly have had an appearance that was really noticeable. He would have a high, a large skull, he would have very prominent eyebrows, very high cheekbones, cheekbones, the eyes would therefore be deeply inset because of the Jones associated with the breakdown of the red cells, it would also be yellow.

It would have been weak because of the rapid turnover of red cells. Further scientific analysis carried out on a Neolithic skull confirmed Anton's theory that the disease was present on the islands at the time. Surprisingly, Anton believes that this disease may have been an asset for these affected individuals. They had no physical strength, but they had the brains. Their brains were receiving a lot of blood, and they might have been in a better position to use their brains. So they were the masterminds. I believe that the people with Talasinia with their striking features were enrolled as serpent priests.

The serpent priest was basically the communication between the divine and the human. There were the intermediaries. According to Anton, these highly intelligent serpent priests, with their supposed reptilian appearance, would have been the ruling elite of the ancient people of Malta. I made a study of all the remains of Neolithic people that I managed to find now. 97% of them were long-headed. The elite I consider the ones who had the theresthesia. Because apart from being long-headed, they had these striking features.

They had a mastery of things like medicine, astronomy. If we actually look at some of the carvings, even the 3D relief carvings we find all over Malta and Goza, we see serpents depicted everywhere. They were called serpent priests because part of their function, was healing. For pretty much as long as we know, the snake has been a symbol of healing, and it's even today used around the world

as a symbol of medicine and pharmacies. It also symbolized the link between us and the fur underground, because the snake's litters. Were these serpent priests really as advanced as experts say? According to Anton, one of the hypogeum skulls

still bears evidence of these highly skilled healers. One of these skulls demonstrated signs of a successful operation. And this sounds incredibly frightening for this time period. The operation is known as trepanation. Strepanation is a hole in the skull. Tree panning would be carried out because there was maybe some kind of pressure

that had built up in the head that the person was experiencing enormous pain. They may even have been having fits of some kind, epilepsy. There was just a belief that by boring into the head, they may have relieved physical pressure or they may have released, they felt, some kind of demon that was lurking within the patient. The defect is underlined by growth of bone here. So this shows that the individual survived an operation that is considered today to be a dangerous one. And just imagine no anesthetic, no surgical conditions, somebody drilling into your head with a stone-aged tool, a flint or obsidian knife or something like that, and you survive.

These risky operations would have been conducted by the serpent priests inside the temple up until it was mysteriously abandoned. So from the earliest times, the temple was used by the serpent priests to affect healing procedures. on late Neolithic Maltese, and also interpret dreams maybe, for firm surgery like trepination. This serpent elite, these were the designers and the instigators of creating all these ancient temples. They may not have built themselves,

they may have got other people involved, they may have got the local populace. The hypogeome is the last megalitic temple to be built. There were three zones. There was the zone for the public. Then there was the intermediate zone, where the public communicated with the priests, and there was the third zone, which only confined to the priests. The Neolithic people built the temples around about 2,600 BC. These structures were used for over a thousand years. Then something happened. These temples stopped being used, completely.

There was a period on the islands where we think that there was no population. It could be that they depleted the resources and they probably had to move on, or a catastrophe of some sort happened on the island and they died. Discoveries made at the Halciflini Hypergium might give us an insight into what really happened. They found a fascinating collection of Neolithic artefacts, but also the bones of what they thought were around. 7,000 people. It was just a whole jumble of bones, human bones, implements pottery, all mixed together with no anatomical relationship between parts.

So how is it that the remains of potentially 7,000 people plus these elongated skulls were found in the hypergeum? The jury's out as to what really happened to them. Now even the archaeologists themselves admit there was no evidence of warfare. There were no no evidence of any disease that wiped them out like COVID. In 1907, when the excavation was carried out, archaeologist Temi Zammett determined that it was impossible to calculate the true number of bodies due to the deterioration. Yet based on the number of bones found, he estimated there could be 7,000 disjointed bodies inside the hypogium.

To Zammett's trained eye, the space was too small for that number of people to be buried. We don't even think it was a primary burial site. We probably think that the bodies were placed there afterwards. It was probably an underground sanctuary, which was then used as a burial place. Since the place has three different levels, probably each level was used for a different purpose. For Anton, the random layout of human bones and pottery might be a clue as to how the population disappeared. During the excavation, there was only one skeleton that was anatomically aligned. Now, Temiz Ahmed described the posture of the person. He was not buried on his left side.

This is traditional multis, Neolithic burials, but he lay on his. his right side and his hand, his right upper was clenched, was flexed and in this position. Now that in medical forensic medicine is known as cadaveric spasm and implies a very emotional debt and it's typically by drowning. So that would imply that the person who was the only one who was anatomically disposed was at the time inside the hypogeum when flood waters came down. So could the drowned man be the key to how the whole population disappeared? There's evidence for a tsunami.

About 4,200 years ago, there was a tsunami which came from the northeast and that is attested to by modern geologists. The tsunami came and whatever was inside the hypogeum went down to the lower layers. and the people on the ground were wiped out. There was no trace. Now we have to imagine that person in the hypergeum at the point at which it was filling with seawater

as the tsunami crashed across Malta. The terror, the realization you're going to die, the inability to escape from this space. Dr. Zammett in 1907, he described it as a homogeneous mass of red soil that contained all these various objects of human bones and instruments and pottery. And that indicated what is called an alluvial deposit. An alluvial deposit is a deposit that's created by water.

And that could explain why we see the motley collection of bones and pottery in the hypogeum. Because if they built up over time, we would expect to see them layered. According to Anton, the bones of ancestors would have been initially displeased, displayed in the upper level of the hypogeum, placed in a specific formation, and exposed to the worshippers visiting the temple. The floodwaters carried the soil from the surface. There were bones at the top being displayed there.

The whole thing came down, and the person was down in the second layer and was obviously flooded and drowned. There's a story told on Malta about a group of school kids who went with their teacher to visit the Hypergeum in the 1940s. Now this was a time when it wasn't as well organized with all the health and safety stuff that you get there today and they ventured deeper and deeper down into the Hypergeum until they disappeared. Nobody was able to see them calling out to them resulted in nothing. They simply vanished and yet some people say that for weeks afterwards they were

able to hear the cries of the children crying out for help. But nobody knew how to get to them. It sounds a little bit embellished, if you ask me. You can't just have a number of schoolchildren and their teachers disappear in your heritage site without an investigation properly being made. From the lack of eyewitness accounts, it's hard to know what really happened to these children and whether this is an urban legend. But this is not the only claim about strange things happening inside the hypogeum.

Around the same time, a woman named Lois Jessop told a chilling story. Lois Jessup, who was involved in exploring some of the underground caverns, which go further beyond the hypergeum that you see today. And the story she claims were witnessed these kind of fair-skinned, blonde-haired giants inside the hypergeum, who scared her so much, she ran out. So these are kind of connected these stories that not only are there kind of potentially humanoid beings who are giants living in the hypergeum, but also kids have disappeared in there and never to be found again. So what do we make of these stories? I think these kind of legend or stories are made as to stop people in that time to go down the hypergium.

These tales and legends might live on for years to come. But for most experts, credit should really be given to the ancient Maltese who built these long-lasting temples. All of these speculations about otherworldly influence aside, these temples and the hypogeum, I mean, they are absolute wonders of the world. There is something quite mysterious about the hypergeum. The way that this space has been created, to house extraordinary human bones, these elongated skulls, they do tap into our innate desire for unsolved mysteries.

It's human nature to ponder about these mysteries, particularly when it's about our ancient ancestors that don't look like us anymore. People tend to associate prehistoric people with savage capabilities, savage caveman. But from what we have on the islands dating to that period, we have a completely different picture. These people were people like us, with needs like us, with feelings like us, you know, they just didn't have the resources that we have nowadays. But in my opinion, they left us Maltese a legacy which we should all really be proud of. deserves more credit and more acknowledgement of its ancient culture.

But the extinction of the multi-stampal culture was so massive that it's been totally forgotten and it caused into oblivion. Details of life that long ago can seem very out of reach, but archaeology, in fact, moves very quickly and it only takes a few discoveries to unlock far richer contexts contexts around things that happened in the past, so although we may not know much about them now, it is very likely that in the future we will get a lot closer to them and understand far more about their world. With ongoing scientific research and recent technological advances,

experts might soon be able to unlock some of Malta's ancient secrets. Until then, debates surrounding the mystical hypogeum and the Neolithic human remains will continue.