4. The Underground City of Derinkuyu was NOT built under the direction of alien city planners to provide humanity secure bunkers to survive global disasters
The Derinkuyu underground city is an ancient multi-level complex in the eponymous district of Nevşehir Province, Turkey. Spreading across 11 known levels covering an area of approximately four square miles, including schools, chapels, stables, and other amenities, the city possessed over 15,000 air shafts and could have reasonably been inhabited by 20,000 people along with the necessary supplies and livestock to survive underground almost indefinitely. Only re-discovered in 1963 by accident during a home renovation, the site is still being further excavated with the deepest known points of the underground city currently around 278 feet.
One of over 200 underground cities in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, of which Derinkuyu is the largest known example, alien conspiracy theorists have contended since discovery the site is evidence of extraterrestrial city planning on Earth. Citing the complexity and supposedly unnecessary nature of the underground city, as well as 500 kg circular rocks designed to block off tunnel entrances, ancient astronaut theorists assert such cities were gifts from off-world beings to serve as bunkers during global disasters.
Whilst the exact origin of the underground city admittedly remains unknown, it is much more likely the cave systems were initially constructed by the Phrygians, an Indo-European people who inhabited the region in the 8th-7th centuries BCE, and later expanded by Greek Christian residents of above-ground Derinkuyu during the Byzantine era to include chapels and other Christian iconography. Faced with constant assaults during the Arab-Byzantine wars (780-1180 CE), and later by the Mongols, the use of underground refuges for civilian populations is a known and plausible explanation for the caves’ existence; in fact, residents of Derinkuyu are known to have used the underground city into the 20th century to escape Ottoman persecution, with such an occurrence recorded in 1909.