The producers of NBC's Emmy Award-winning The Mystery of the Sphinx are completing another prime time NBC special called The Mysterious Origins of Man. The one-hour special will be hosted by Mr. Charlton Heston and is scheduled for airing sometime this fall.

The program will blend science and entertainment to question if what we are being taught about man's origins and development is supported by the evidence.

Viewers will meet authors Richard Thompson and Michael Cremo, whose book Forbidden Archaeology documents many cases of anomalous evidence like bones of modern man found in rock strata dated to over 50 million years old. They explain how we have not heard of many of these finds because a kind of knowledge filter is at work: People tend to filter out things that don't fit, that don't make sense in terms of their paradigm or their way of thinking. So, in science you find that evidence that doesn't fit the accepted paradigm tends to be eliminated.

The crew traveled to Mexico to examine the site of a controversial discovery with Dr. Virginia Steen-McIntyre. Several years ago, several spearpoints and other tools of modern man were found under a layer of volcanic ash. When Dr. McIntyre, a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, was invited to date the overlying ash, the archaeologists thought it could be as old as 20,000 years old, pushing the arrival of man in the New World back around 5,000 years. No one was prepared when uranium series dating and fission tracking methods provided the astounding age of 250,000 years. Dr. McIntyre shares what happened next: I thought, okay, we got something big here but I'm going to stick with the dates. I didn't realize it was going to ruin my whole career.

The Mysterious Origins of Man examines evidence that lies outside many of our accepted theories about man, including how he is said to have evolved from the apes. Dr. Richard Milton, author of The Facts of Life; Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, gave us a tour of the Evolution exhibit at London's Museum of Natural History. It looks rather like a cathedral or a church, and in a way that's what it is. It's a kind of temple to Darwin's theory of evolution. He shares his findings that there is very little evidence to support evolution's claim that man evolved from primates. In fact, the missing link, the famous Lucy found by Donald Johannsen is merely an interpretation.

Those same bones can be and have been taken by scientists and identified as simply an extinct ape, nothing to do with us at all.

The audience will also meet author and explorer David Hatcher Childress who presents evidence that some dinosaurs may have survived until the present time. The field of Cryptozoology is discussed and stories of pterodactyls which still exist in remote parts of the world. Childress explains how our time scale may be off: the whole time line of millions of years versus only thousands of years can be explained in a cataclysmically geological view of the past where rather than geological events taking place over millions of years, they take place more quickly. And what is a million years on a geological time scale is, in fact, only, say, a thousand years.

Was there a technologically advanced civilization of this planet before our history began? A Turkish map, dated to 1513 may hold an answer. The Piri Reis map accurately depicts the continent of Antarctica, as it looks under the thick layer of ice. But, as late Professor Charles Hapgood pointed out, Antarctica had not even been discovered in 1513! Author Rand Flem-Ath (When the Sky Fell) explains Hapgood's theory of crustal displacement and offers a surprising insight into the mystery.

Graham Hancock, author of best-seller Fingerprints of the Gods, shares his interpretation that many monuments like Stonehenge and The Great Pyramid were left all over the planet by a previous, highly advanced race; a remote third party civilization unidentified by historians that had a presence in Mexico, a presence in South America, a presence in Egypt and elsewhere, and that left behind a legacy of knowledge in all of those places.

One of those places is the mysterious Tiahuanaco, high in the Bolivian Andes. In addition to capturing the dramatic beauty of many ancient megalithic sites, our cameras recorded a scientific investigation which examines the ancient temples and their incredible precision. The conclusion of this investigation is that Tiahuanaco could be the oldest city in the world.

Are we the descendants of apes and cave men, or could we be the descendants of a lost race of advanced humans like ourselves? Our picture of man's past could reveal a legacy richer than we have ever imagined.