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  • DAVID CHILDRESS: These are the mysterious ruins

  • of Puma Punku,

  • high in the Altaplano of Bolivia.

  • It's made out of gigantic blocks of sandstone and granite.

  • Some of them are weighing over a hundred tons.

  • Many of the granite blocks are finely articulated,

  • as if they were made by precision power tools.

  • Archaeologists are baffled by this structure.

  • They don't know what was here,

  • or what the purpose of Puma Punku originally was.

  • BRIEN FOERSTER: Puma Punku is unique

  • in terms of its construction.

  • Nowhere on Earth do we see the same style

  • of cutting into the stone

  • and the same obvious use of highly precision tools

  • in the distant past.

  • That's what makes it so mysterious.

  • Not only do these granite blocks have precision corners,

  • but they also have these difficult drill holes

  • that are going right through the rock.

  • Whatever kind of drilling mechanism they're using here

  • has to penetrate this very hard granite.

  • FOERSTER: It's an astonishing piece of work, and how anyone could think

  • that primitive human beings could have done this...

  • GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: In Puma Punku, the stone seems vitrified, too.

  • It is so smooth, it's as if you touch a bathroom mirror.

  • That's how perfect it is.

  • The so-called "H-blocks" are, in fact, shaped like dovetails

  • where there were clear deviations

  • in the width between the front and the back.

  • And possibly, they held something in place.

  • The question is, what?

  • FOERSTER: The great mystery

  • about Puma Punku is that the local people,

  • the Aymara, have only lived there for 900 years,

  • so they have no idea of who made Puma Punku and when.

  • The Inca also didn't know.

  • No one, in fact, on Earth knows

  • who built Puma Punku

  • and how far back in time it was first constructed.

  • That's the great mystery.

  • TSOUKALOS: Of all the ancient sites

  • we can find around the world,

  • I think that Puma Punku is the only one

  • that was actually built by extraterrestrials.

  • And perhaps these extraterrestrials knew

  • that some time in the future

  • another generation would stumble across this and wonder

  • how was such a thing even possible,

  • forcing us to acknowledge their existence in the remote past.

  • CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS

DAVID CHILDRESS: These are the mysterious ruins

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