- Meteorites are very difficult
to fashion into objects. Anybody, even today, who has
ever worked with a meteorite will tell you that because
of the high nickel content, they're very, very brittle and
very difficult to work with. NARRATOR: Considering the
difficulties of working with meteoric metal, even
with today's technology, how did metallurgists 3,300
years ago perform such tasks? JEFF WILLIAMS: This dagger
is completely out of place in the fact that, unlike
simple objects like beads that can be simply hammered
out and rolled, this has been perfected
to a point where it has no hammer marks on it. It's completely smooth. It has a nice edge all
the way around on it. It almost looks as
if it had been cast. But in order to
achieve that, you would have to reach
temperatures of 3,000 degrees in order to melt that
meteorite, and then, of course, add the necessary fluxes
to get the impurities out, and then cast the blade,
which brings up even more questions for the researchers. If they were smelting iron, it
would change our whole outlook on Egyptian history. NARRATOR: What could
explain the presence of this mysterious metal
dagger in King Tut's tomb when no other similar artifacts
have been found in Egypt dating back to this period? Might Egyptian metallurgists
have had help working with this difficult compound? Ancient astronaut
theorists say yes and suggest stories found
throughout the ancient world reveal that extraterrestrials
taught our ancestors the secrets of
metallurgy in order to help move society forward. True metallurgy, in the sense
of putting different metals together as alloys, dates back
to maybe 3,800 BC, when bronze was first discovered as an
alloy of tin and copper, maybe the second most
important development after the harnessing of fire. As we think of modern times
and our emphasis on technology, here is the secret
roots to all of that. Stories emerged out of
all the religious systems about the gods as metalworkers. Hephaestus in the
Greek imagination made the weapons and
the armor for the gods. In the Celtic imagination, it
was the great goddess Brigid, who made beautiful and wonderful
and powerful things into metal and then into fabricated form. In Japanese lore, Kanayago
came to Earth to teach the people metalworking. JASON MARTELL: There seems to
be a ubiquitous understanding from ancient cultures that
metallurgy is from the heavens. Could there be some tie that
in the past certain abilities were originally brought to man,
possibly by extraterrestrials, and things we would create had
a certain energy or myth about them that still is alive today? NARRATOR: According to
ancient astronaut theorists, the most compelling
of these stories originates in the same place as
King Tut's mysterious dagger-- Egypt, where they
worshipped a sacred object called the Benben stone. Ancient Egyptian texts
describe the Benben stone as a meteoric, iron object
that belongs to the heavens. The original Benben stone
mysteriously disappeared, but many ancient
depictions of it remain. The Benben stone has
a very strange origin. It is a thought that the Benben
stone descended from the sky like a firebird. If you look at the
Benben stone, sometimes it is described or depicted with
people coming out of the stone. Now to me, this looks very
similar to a lunar module. You have the idea
that this firebird is descending from the
sky with fire and smoke. Well, if you look at
a rocket descending, these are firebirds. So our ancestors perhaps
witnessed some type of a craft descending
from the sky, out of which these extraterrestrials
came, which set in motion our technological evolution.
