Transcription
[choir singing]
[narrator] The north Apennines. Italy. Here, in the mountains just outside Florence, a young Leonardo da Vinci spent much of his time examining the mysteries of nature. Because his parents were not married, he was excluded from the prestigious academies attended by many of his contemporaries.
[Coppens] In Florence, the Platonic Academy is reformed, and this institute of learning comes about. Now, we know that Leonardo da Vinci is not allowed to enter this academy.
[Wallace] This is a young man who's pretty much left on his own, in some ways, for up to 19 years, traveling around the countryside. He was looking at rocks. He was studying birds. He was looking at the flow of water. He was studying mountains. He was literally immersed in nature.
[birds tweeting] No other artist in the Renaissance really showed that much interest in the natural world and the surrounding world. He strived for knowledge. He strived for information. He is able to create a body of knowledge which is on par with the body of information which the Platonic Academy, as a group of beings, is able to put out.
[narrator] It was also in the north Apennine Mountains that Leonardo was believed to have discovered the cave that he wrote about in his journal.
[Roberts] The story of the cave, it's very likely that it happened around 1480, since it appears that that's the moment at which this is written in the codex. The fact that Leonardo chooses to record this encounter with the cave I think indicates that it had a significant impact on the artist psychologically.
[narrator] But although the exact location of the cave and the date, Leonardo discovered it, remains unknown, there are many who believe that it may provide the key to understanding the source of the artist's incredible genius, and the answer to the mystery of what happened to him during his missing two years.
[Henry] He goes inside the cave, then he disappears. And it suggest to me time travel portals. He's opening portals, or stargates, and beaming to either the past or the future, and then returning to the present time.
[Childress] In history, you have certain people, like Leonardo da Vinci, whose genius is just so incredible, and the visions that they have... In many ways it's like they're able to see the future. And they're not going to just influence the world then. But what they're gonna do is gonna dramatically change the world forever. And you have to wonder where people get this kind of inspiration. And in the case of Leonardo, he was able to see things and invent them, in a sense, things that we weren't gonna have for hundreds of years.
[narrator] Is it really possible that Leonardo da Vinci may have obtained his incredible creative and scientific knowledge as the direct result of an extraterrestrial encounter? Or might Leonardo have fallen through a time portal, one which allowed him to actually visit the future? A future where robots, helicopters, military weapons, and other amazing machines actually existed. And which the artist would later try to duplicate. Some ancient astronaut theorists believe the answer can be traced back to work he did on the Annunciation, and the significance of his so-called disappearing angel. Leonardo and Verrocchio's Annunciation portrays the moment at which the angel Gabriel has arrived and is telling the Virgin Mary that she's pregnant with the Son of God.
[Tsoukalos] What some scholars have speculated is that by painting the angel in the Annunciation so that it disappears under x-ray, he is telling us that, like Gabriel, he is the messenger. And then, with his next painting, we're told that this great gift to mankind has arrived. And Leonardo da Vinci's contributions to mankind are truly a gift to the world.
[Childress] You have to wonder if Leonardo wasn't doing this because he was being encouraged in secret by some kind of extraterrestrial masters who were somehow behind him.
[narrator] Might Leonardo da Vinci, the man many have called the greatest genius who ever lived, have been chosen by extraterrestrial beings to accelerate the advancement of the human race? Or was he merely trying to communicate the incredible future inventions he had witnessed firsthand.
[Harris] Without doubt, the most influential personality of the first millennium was Jesus. Now you go to the second millennium. And I believe Leonardo is the most important, dominant personality, made the most contributions in the most areas during those thousand years.
[Coppens] Wherever we look in ancient times, we find that a genius was always identified with superhero, divine qualities. Even today, we put geniuses on a separate pedestal and almost worship them. This is really something throughout mankind's history. So the question is, where does this come from? And whenever you look into mythology, you'll also find that the geniuses were the ones who were created by the gods. Genius and divine go hand in hand.
[narrator] Florence, Italy, 1503. Leonardo da Vinci begins work on a portrait commissioned by a wealthy silk merchant for his wife. But it is a painting he will never part with, obsessing over every detail for what would be the last 16 years of his life. The Mona Lisa. It is only a portrait, and yet it seems to have dimensions and mysteries that have yet to be explained. The Mona Lisa's smile is not the kind of smile that we tend to see in portraits. She seems to know something that we don't.
[Kemp] What starts as a portrait, a representation of a woman, turns into something quite different. It turns into a kind of philosophical medication on all his intellectual concerns.
[narrator] What was it about the Mona Lisa that would so consume the final years of Leonardo da Vinci's life? And why would he dedicate so much of his time to a single 20-by-30-inch portrait? There are a lot of theories that Leonardo has secret symbols and secret messages in his paintings. Everything he's doing, he's rethinking even traditional subjects in the very beginning, and really imagining them in new and creative ways.
[narrator] All his life, Leonardo da Vinci incorporated a technique called mirror writing. Is it possible that he also used a similar technique in his artwork... leaving hidden messages that can only be revealed with the use of mirrors? The mirror writing is something which defines him. And so the possibility that he was also using the mirror as an unknown dimension, whereby he needs to have the mirror to see certain things put in his paintings, is actually something which I think we need to explore.
[narrator] At Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, graphic designer Terrence Masson uses computer technology to search for hidden messages in Leonardo's masterworks. You know, that he was insatiably curious about reflections and refractions and optics and the human anatomy of the eye, and how that mirrored reflections of conical-shaped mirrors.
[narrator] Is it possible that Leonardo applied his mirror technique to hide secret messages in the Mona Lisa? But if so, why? So, our classic Mona Lisa. Leonardo's portraiture always had very dramatic hand positioning. This hand position was a clue to the access points of rotation of these mirrored angles. So if we try this, what do we see?
[narrator] Is this helmet-shaped creature simply the product of a parlor trick? If so, then why can a similar creature be seen in another famous painting by da Vinci? Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
[Masson] Well, this painting, Virgin of the Rocks, we always notice the dramatic hand poses of Leonardo. Is that giving us a hint about where to put the reflective plain? So we're in a 3D environment here. We can do anything we want. We just make a little duplicate. Come in a little closer. That's a little spooky. So, interesting similarity to what we did with the Mona Lisa, right? We've got something close to modern understanding of alien heads.
[narrator] Could there really be hidden messages in Leonardo da Vinci's paintings? Messages that reveal the artist's connection to otherworldly beings. Amboise, France, 1513. At Château du Clos Lucé, a 61-year-old Leonardo da Vinci begins work on what will be his final painting. Three years later, he completes his portrait of an androgynous figure emerging from a shadowy background. St. John the Baptist. Picture this painting in a dimly lit chapel. Before lighting the candle, you don't see anything. You light the candle, and the light of the flame illuminates the painting, and there emerges, against a dark background, St. John the Baptist. And the pointing upward to heaven, saying, "I'm from the light. I'm witnessing to the light." He's pointing to another realm.
[Kwakkelstein] Oh, yes. This is where divine wisdom comes from. This is the source of everything. The first words of St. John are, "I saw the light. I will come to this earth." Wow.
[Picknett] Leonardo was encoding extraordinary secrets in his paintings. He wanted to imbue his work for the future generations with his own private message. His paintings are like portals to another world, where the real Leonardo inhabits. But whether we're big enough to accept what he has to say is quite another matter. I think he had some very subtle messages he wanted to convey to not the people of that time, but to the people of our time. And we have to look for it. Is he talking about extraterrestrials? Is he talking about the future? Investigators have recently found some pretty astonishing things about Leonardo da Vinci's painting John the Baptist. And they mirror the image to create a double image. And then through an enhancement process, they're able to bring out what seems to be the face of an extraterrestrial. It's a pretty unusual thing. And we know that da Vinci did use this mirroring technique. And so, this isn't something that is so far-fetched that he would do. Da Vinci is one of a long line of artists who have told us, beginning with the Ancient Egyptians and running through the early Christians and Tibetans, that art is a medium, it's a conduit, through which ordinary people can connect with higher dimensional beings, even extraterrestrials. And I think this is the ultimate message that Leonardo placed in the codes and the symbols within his paintings.
[narrator] Did Leonardo da Vinci experience an extraterrestrial encounter, one that opened his mind to what was once considered forbidden knowledge? Florence, Italy, 2002. Using infrared diagnostic techniques, Dr. Maurizio Seracini uncovers the underdrawing, or preliminary sketch, done by Leonardo da Vinci for his unfinished painting Adoration of the Magi. Commissioned in 1481, the work depicts the Biblical story of the Three Wise Men visiting the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. But by viewing the painting with this new technology, it becomes apparent that Leonardo's original sketch actually included many more details than those that could be seen with just the naked eye. The first time I aimed the camera, the infrared camera, through the Adoration... I felt very privileged. Because for the first time in 500 years, I managed to see probably the best creativity effort of Leonardo on a work of art. And science can help you to go back, like if you were in a time machine. And I saw dozens of figures. Fighting horses. Nature. Architecture. And now my eyes alone could not see them because they were covered by a brownish monochrome layer of paint that later I understood was not applied by Leonardo. In the background of the top left, you could see a couple of people sitting in despair on stairs of a temple in ruins. Well, aiming the camera at this scene, then suddenly a completely different view came out. The detail that was painted over was a scene of a pagan temple that was rising up through the ruins of a Christian church. And this was considered problematic during the Renaissance period with Christianity as the one and only true religion.
[narrator] Upon close examination of da Vinci's original sketch, instead of a temple in ruins, the artist seemed to be depicting a scenario in which an Egyptian temple is being rebuilt. Most notable is the fact that one of the temple columns is capped by a lotus flower, which in Ancient Egypt represented the so-called flower of life.
[Cory] The flower of life is the information behind how the universe was created. Everything in the universe is geometric. Sacred geometry implies that there is intelligence behind it.
[man] It's believed by mystics to be a symbol of advanced super-consciousness. A way of plugging into the knowledge possessed by extraterrestrial beings. Da Vinci, we can fairly say, was practically obsessed with it. And one wonders if da Vinci actually tapped into the ultimate cosmic secrets represented by the flower of life.