Forgotten Ages Research

Signatures in Stone—Hidden Measurement Links Among Global Sites

Product ID: MM1

Report Topics:

• The placement of Stonehenge in relation to the rest of the planet and the mystery of how it was built
• Alexander Thom’s survey of British stone monuments and his discovery of the Megalithic Yard common to all of them
• Megalithic structures found world-wide—in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Korea, Japan, across the Pacific and even in the New World
• Significance of the presence of the Megalithic Yard and commensurate measurements in most global structures—evidence for a single plan and single authority that erected these structures all over the planet?

Full Report:

Antiquity does not easily surrender its secrets, and constant probing is necessary to extract even those minute fragments of surviving knowledge which enable us to get a glimpse of our ancestors’ accomplishments. But what has been discovered already only increases our eagerness to dig even deeper.

The mystery is intensified when we try to remove the obscurity from the thousands of stone monuments that are strewn across the world, for these prehistoric sentinels of humanity appear to have been erected for a singular definite purpose by a race of great intelligence now lost to us.

We begin our study with perhaps the most puzzling monument of all—Stonehenge, the enigmatic ring of stone standing in solitude on Salisbury Plain in southern England.

Since the seventeenth century, writers and scientists have pondered the purpose for which Stonehenge was erected, and many theories have been advanced to explain its origins.

One man who did more to unravel to mystery of the ring of stones is Gerald S. Hawkins, a radio astronomer and professor of physics at Boston University, who believed that the structure was a gigantic celestial observatory and calculator. After many years of careful research, Hawkins demonstrated with the aid of computers that the spaces between the monument’s stones were observation posts pointing to the specific points of the risings and settings of the sun, moon and significant stars at various times of the year. His calculations showed that by use of the stone apertures, celestial phenomena could have been accurately predicted, making Stonehenge a scientific instrument of the highest order.

Diligent archaeological examinations have revealed that the center of the monument underwent three distinct waves of construction, several centuries—perhaps even millennia—apart. In the last century, charcoal fragments taken from one of the chalk-filled pits known as the Aubrey Holes were assigned a carbon-14 date of 2000 B.C.E., plus or minus 275 years. Materials removed from other holes have been dated between 2200 and 2100 B.C.E.

However, more recently there have been questions concerning the validity of the carbon-14 dating technique, because of other forms of dating processes pointing backward to still earlier origins, by as much as a minimum of a thousand years.

Added to this re-evaluation is the discovery that there are tell-tale holes from other stone structures long vanished in and around Stonehenge which appear to have been present on the site long before the building of Stonehenge began. In other words, the site was held to be a Sacred Earth Point from a far earlier time, some estimates placing a pre-Stonehenge time-frame going back eight millennia.

Once Stonehenge One was completed, the second building phase did not start until about a thousand years later. Whereas the first phase had set the basic scientific philosophy for the center—or more likely had been borrowed and enhanced from the pre-Stonehenge structural complex that existed before—the main feature of the renewed building was the first assembly at Stonehenge of the megaliths, or “large stones.”

As many as eighty-two of the five-ton bluestones were erected around the center of the old ridge-ditch system, with the stones placed six feet apart and approximately thirty-five feet from the center point. It appears that the stones formed a double circle, with a pattern radiating spokes of two stone each. With the rings open to the northeast, facing the midsummer sunrise, the paired stones served as a series of observation points for the prehistoric astronomers.

However, it is not merely their sophisticated use that constitutes the real mystery, but also now these giant stones got to Salisbury Plain in the first place. Every archaeologist who has examined Stonehenge leaves with a different theory, or has even attempted to reproduce the feat of hauling multi-ton stones using wooden sleds pulled by teams of human haulers. The usual result is that a tremendous effort is made in moving the stones a few feet—which falls far short of the two hundred and forty miles, over both land and water, from the Prescelly Mountains in Wales where the original bluestones came from, to the construction site.

Stonehenge Three heightens the enigma even more, for several centuries after stage Two more than eighty more stones were added to the complex, some of them weighing between forty and fifty tons. Geologically the source for these rocks is the Marlborough Downs, lying about twenty miles north. Once again, the theory is that these immense stones were moved by dragging them on wooden sleds, this time rolled across log rollers.

But if this is what actually happened, it would have taken from eight hundred to a thousand men to pull each stone, with another two hundred to clear the path, guide the sled and move the log rollers from the back of the sled to the front. And with the weight of fifty-tons crushing against them, both the sleds and the log rollers would not have lasted very long before being reduced to pulp. Which means that, besides the tremendous manpower utilized in the moving of the stones, added to this would have been an even larger team of workers cutting down forests of trees and hauling the wood to the haul site, building new sleds and fashioning new rollers constantly needing to be replaced.

Plus we would have the additional number of workers constantly being rotated due to exhaustion or being hurt, plus the number of planners, managers and crew chiefs supervising the entire project.

Then there would be the number of women and children supplying and carrying an unending stream of potable water, and hunting for and cooking food, as well as tearing down campsites and setting up new campsites farther along the hauling routes.

We can begin to visualize that the final total of those involved in such a project would have been tremendous. In fact, one estimate puts the total as exceeding that of the entire population of Britain at any one moment during the Neolithic period. Add to this would have been the amount of wood used up stripping the British Isles bare of trees several times over.

Was there another way? There most certainly had to be. Is it possible that the surviving science of a lost civilization included a method of overcoming gravity?

While actual proof has not surfaced as yet, there is a medieval source that may offer a clue to an alternative explanation.

The twelfth century English historian Geoffrey of Monmouth told the legend of how the great boulders of Stonehenge came to be situated. He reports that under the leadership of Uther Pendragon, the father of King Arthur, a force of fifteen thousand Britons occupied the area where the stones for the monument were to be erected. Once they had secured the land, they set themselves to the task of moving the boulders, but were unsuccessful. Even when using “great hawsers, ropes and scaling ladders,” the army of men could move the gigantic megaliths “never a whit the forwarder.”

But Merlin the Wizard, who had accompanied the force, told the men to stand aside and began “putting together his own engines” with which he “laid the stones down so lightly as none would believe” possible. By means of these special “engines” Merlin employed a secret force “which proved yet once again how skill surpasseth strength.”

Geoffrey’s story of course is a legend, for we know from archaeological excavations and from local chronicles that the Stonehenge monument had already been in place thousands of years before the time of King Arthur and Merlin. Yet the story does contain elements of truth. As Geoffrey realized, simple brute force alone would have required tremendous amounts of human energy and resources to move the stones—if it were possible to do so at all.

The stones were undoubtedly transported in a special way unknown to us, and the “engines” and secret energies of Merlin indicates that some mysterious form of prehistoric machinery and power source provided the lift needed. The fact that modern cranes having industrial- sized diesel engines and sophisticated hydraulics equipment are barely able to move them today strongly suggests that Merlin—or the prehistoric Megalith Builders whose lost wisdom Merlin inherited—possessed a technology more advanced than our own.

Moving the multi-ton stones to Stonehenge was only one problem. Elevating them into their assigned positions was even more complex, for the entire observatory was built not on level ground but on a sloped surface. Measurements show that even this tilt was compensated for by the builders with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Hawkins commented:

“Such precision of placement is, or was, astounding. To erect a boulder so that is was horizontally aligned was a task difficult enough, to sink that great block into the ground just so far and no further, so that its tip was aligned vertically to an accuracy of inches, was an achievement requiring another whole dimension of skill.

“How, in fact, was it done? If, after erection, the stone had settled too deeply it would have been out of alignment—and how could it have been lifted? Of course, if it had not settled far enough its top could have been bashed away to lower it to the proper height--but the top was not bashed. Somehow, by a technology unknown, the Stonehengers figured out beforehand the depth of hole required to match up exactly, as far as the survey shows, with this collection of variables.”

If such a task was assigned to modern builders, Hawkins further explains, they would not be able to do so without the aid of a yard tape, plumb line, spirit levels, elevation sights, and blueprints showing the land contour and the particular design of each stone and its corresponding hole. If this was in fact the case, then the sophisticated builders of the Salisbury Plains monument had access to tools and instruments of precision and exactitude similar if not superior to those in use today.

When Hawkins initiated his research on Stonehenge, he approached it first from an architectural standpoint. Touring the monument, he noted that many of the apertures through the archways were very narrow, ranging from one to two feet in width. When an observer looks through two aligned archways, their view is restricted to a very small angle.

It appears that the builders had intended to limit the viewer’s field of observation so that only one specific phenomenon could be seen. It seems that the placement of the stones and archways had been made with the intension of stressing the importance of what was been observed.

Hawkins and several other astronomers before him surmised that the viewing lines have celestial significance. In order to test this theory, Hawkins followed the lead of previous researchers and made a meticulous record of all the possible viewing alignments through the archways, noting where each pointed to what location on the horizon. He then turned to a computer to reconstruct the way the night sky looked over the last several thousands of years, noting where certain celestial events associated with the sun, moon and stars once took place. It was then just a matter of programming the computer to find whether the Stonehenge viewing alignments and the positions of the sky events coincided.

What Hawkins found was that twelve of the most significant Stonehenge alignments pointed with a mean accuracy of better than a degree and a half to important sky positions of the moon, and twelve more alignments pointed to important sky positions of the sun with a mean accuracy of less than one degree. Checking further with the computer, the astronomer discovered that the probability that these Stonehenge alignments had not been planned was less than one in ten million.

Hawkins also noted a significant feature in the Stonehenge design that reflected on the choice of its placement. Inside the main ring are four points called the Station Stones, which together form a large rectangle with all four points tangent to the circle. Only at the latitude at which Stonehenge was built can an observer stand at all four Station Stones and observe through their alignments major significant lunar and solar events on the horizon.

If Stonehenge had been built only a few miles to the north or south of its present location, then the observation alignments would have altered the rectangle into a parallelogram configuration, changing its circle into an oval, and the whole simple yet unique circular geometry of Stonehenge would not have been possible.

Somehow the builders of the monument knew beforehand that only at that specific latitudinal location and nowhere else on the surface of the planet could the alignment design of Stonehenge work.

After his initial work at Stonehenge, Hawkins went on to study the alignments of several other Megalithic stone ring sites scattered across the British landscape. While admittedly not as impressive in size, these other rings were found to be equally sophisticated in the layout of their designs, and computer analysis revealed they too were aligned to many of the same lunar and solar observation points as Stonehenge.

About the same time as Hawkins’ research, Alexander Thom, a professor of engineering at Oxford University, conducted his own detailed survey of over six hundred Megalithic stone circles in Scotland, England, Wales and Brittany, from the standpoint of the accuracy of their design measurements. For example, not far from Stonehenge the megaliths of Avebury are set out with a scientific exactitude approaching 1 in 1,000, while those of Penmaenmawr have an error of only 1 in 1,500.

This accuracy Thom also found on a much smaller scale, for many of the stones have cup-and-ring markings which, when carefully examined, are found to have been carved with a diameter accuracy within a few thousandths of an inch.

The Oxford professor concluded from his investigation that the unknown builders of the British stone rings were an extremely accomplished people, who laid out their constructions in various geometric forms according to an exact unit of length, what he called the Megalithic Yard, equivalent to 2.720 feet. The uniformity of this prehistoric unit of measurement suggested to Thom that one central authority had planned and directed the building of all the rings:

“This unit was in use from one end of Britain to the other. It is not possible to detect by statistical examination any difference between the values determined from the English and Scottish circles. There must have been a headquarters from which the standard rods were sent out, but whether this was in these islands or on the Continent the present investigation cannot determine.

“The length of the rods in Scotland cannot have differed from that in England by more than three hundredths of an inch. If each small community had obtained the length by copying the rod of its neighbor to the south, the accumulated error would have been much greater than this.”

Professor Thom also remarked:

“The design of the necessary sectors, whether obtained by pure reason or by some complex empirical operation, demanded a highly trained intellect. The discipline necessary could not have arisen out of nothing. There must have been behind it a school or system of mathematical reasoning, evidenced by the remarkable designs that we find n the complex rings.”

One of Thom’s truly out-of-place discoveries was that many of the British stone ovoids, ellipses and circles were based on the use of Pythagorean triangles, a geometric concept which was thought to have originated with the Greeks, yet here they were incorporated into the Megalithic monuments which pre-dated Pythagoras by at least a thousand years.

Another most impressive of the stone circles is Callanish, situated on the Scottish island of Lewis, the northernmost of the Outer Hebrides. As seen from the Callanish megalithic avenue, the midsummer moonset occurs over Mount Clisham, and the avenue points its direction toward the mountain.

Because the Callanish complex lies only 1.3 degrees south of the arctic latitude of the moon, the Megalithic observers would have seen a peculiar phenomenon. Once every eighteen or nineteen years the moon would appear to stand still about one degree above the horizon.

The avenue stones are aligned in such a way that the prehistoric astronomers were able to observe what is called the moon’s wobble—the small amplitude ripple of the moon’s declination at extreme positions. Before Callanish was investigated, it was believed that this phenomenon was not discovered until the sixteenth century by Tycho Brahe.

The period of the wobble is 173 days, and the wobble reaches its maximum amplitude immediately before the seasons for lunar eclipses. The Callanish builders, it now appears, possessed a unique computer in stone for predicting lunar eclipses.

Significantly, the 18/ 19-year lunar cycle of Callanish is also recorded in the alignments inherent in Stonehenge. In fact, both Callanish and Stonehenge have key observation stones laid out in very similar geometric patterns. Callanish is situated at a latitude where the moon appears to skim the horizon, while Stonehenge is located at a spot where the extreme positions of the moon appear at right angles to those of the sun. If Callanish and Stonehenge are related works—and the fact that they used the same basic measuring unit of the Megalithic Yard in their construction—then the builders were aware of the differences in the celestial phenomena observed at both monuments. The comparison of these differences could have easily led to an accurate knowledge of the curvature and size of the planet.

Across the Channel from England, in the French province of Brittany, are several more Megalithic sites. At Carnac and Menac, within a distance of 3,250 yards, there are nearly three thousand menhirs or single standing stones, most of them in rows pointing toward the midsummer sunrise.

The menhir of Ile-Melon, unfortunately destroyed during World War II, originally weighted 90 tons. Even larger was the Fairy Stone of Locmariaquer. Broken by lightning in the eighteenth century, it once stood 67 feet high and weighed over 380 tons.

Far beyond Brittany, on or near the coasts of Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Portugal, Spain, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Malta, as well as at Tiryns and Mycenae in Greece, are numerous other examples of prehistoric stone works, skillfully laid out with the same kind of precision seen in Britain.

The track of the Megalith builders can likewise be seen in North Africa and the Middle East. In Morocco, dolmens or circles of stones capped by a larger stone are found in the district of Kabylia, and a stone circle exists near Tangiers.

Other dolmens have been discovered in Algeria, while Libya, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon have literally hundreds of circles and free-standing stones, all testifying to the Megalith builders’ presence in the forgotten past.

Three sites in the Middle East are of particular interest because advanced scientific and engineering skills involved in their construction. At Baalbek, in modern Lebanon, the Romans constructed their magnificent temple to the sun, but which was dwarfed in size by the immense prehistoric dressed-stone platform on which it was built. Of unknown age and origin, the platform is a feat of engineering that has never been equaled in modern history. It is made of individual stones 82 feet long and 15 feet thick which are estimated to weigh between 1,200 and 1,500 tons each.

Of the stones cut for the Baalbek platform, the largest one was not transported to the site but instead was left at the quarry half a mile away. It had been fully cut and dressed, and was ready to be moved before the whole project suddenly stopped. Called Hadjar el Goubel or the Stone of the South, it weighs more than 2,000 tons. There are no cranes or lifting apparatus in the world today that can budge, let alone lift, such titanic blocks. Yet there they are, cut and fitted together with such precision that a knife blade cannot be inserted between the stones.

The second site, equally remarkable, is located on the windswept moor of the Golan Heights in Israel-occupied Syria. There Israeli archaeologist A. Itzhaki uncovered the remains of five giant stone rings believed to be thousands of years older than Stonehenge. A line drawn through the area where the rings overlap points dead-straight to true north.

The engineering skills required to find true north were of a degree generally considered beyond the reach of prehistoric humanity—yet here it is preserved in the alignments of the Syrian rings.

The third site is far to the north, at Medzamor in Armenia, where the Russian researcher Dr. K. Megurtchian discovered what is thought to be one of the oldest large-scale metallurgical factories in the world. In close proximity to this, geometric patterns found cut into the volcanic rock and accented with several standing stones point to various celestial phenomena, with one prominent alignment marking precisely the place on the horizon where the star Sirius rose between four and five millennia ago.

In India dolmens dot the land from the Nerbuddha River to Cape Comorin. At last count the Neermul jungle of central India has yielded at least two thousand stone monuments it has hidden for centuries, and another two thousand have been located in Dacca.

Monuments of a similar nature have also been found in China, Korea and Japan. On the southeastern shore of Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands, the remains of a huge stone complex called Metalinin or Nan Madol faces the midsummer sunrise. There is every indication that in the days of the builders, the population was many times what it is today, for Nan Madol was sufficiently large enough to house two million people. The ruins, like those elsewhere, are composed of vast stone blocks weighing as much as fifteen tons each. These blocks were transported from a quarry over twenty miles away—with not a hint of how this was accomplished.

Three thousand miles away, southeast of Pohnpei on tiny Malden in the Line Islands, is a second group of ruins architecturally similar to Nan Madol. The ruins on Malden are connected to the rugged coastline by a number of prehistoric basalt-paved highways, the purpose of which remains unknown.

Similar stone highways linking together sacred stone platforms can also be found throughout the Hawaiian Islands.

Farther yet are perhaps the most enigmatic stone monuments of the Pacific, the monolithic heads of Rapa Nui, also named Easter Island by its European discoverers.

Scattered over the rocky ground, strewn about the meadows of sparse grass and sullenly peering from the slopes of the island’s volcanoes are hundreds of stone faces, either in a prone position or half buried and jutting out of the soil, each with the same mute and emotionless expression, long straight nose, narrow and tightly closed lips, sunken eye sockets and low forehead.

The enigma surrounding the Rapa Nui statues is not so much what they were supposed to represent, but rather how they were moved from their quarry at the edge of the volcano Rano Raraku to the sites of their stone platforms, usually located along the coast. Several archaeological teams, beginning with Thor Heyedahl in 1956, have attempted to move and raise a number of the stone heads with local indigenous people employing the heave-ho method, often ending in very disappointing results.

And these have involved some of the smaller of the statues being moved only a few hundred feet, nothing compared with the prehistoric transport of twenty- to forty-ton monoliths over several miles.

At Ahu Ririki on the island several stone heads once sat on ledges in a cliff wall whose sheer rock face plunges a thousand feet straight to the sea. The gusty winds at the top of the cliff are usually strong enough to blow a man off balance, while the sea currents below are so treacherous that a boat cannot approach the rock. Yet at an elevation of six hundred feet on the cliff wall stands a platform that bears the marks of a number of 25-ton statues that in a later age were toppled over, the remains of which now lie on the ocean floor. Modern engineers are mystified as to how these statues had been moved and placed in such a difficult and inhospitable location.

In the late nineteenth century, the French ship La Flore visited Rapa Nui with the intention of taking one of its statues back to Paris. It took a five hundred-man work force to carry off a seven and a half ton stone head, one of the smallest of the island. Today, much battered and bruised by its ordeal, it can be viewed at the Musee de l’Homme in the French capital.

The link between the Rapa Nui heads and the Megalith builders of old can be discovered in a group of stone buildings also found on the island. In several locations are stone walls which reveal the same jigsaw-puzzle building block configurations seen elsewhere around the world among Megalith remains. At Orongo are thirty-nine stone structures, each oval in shape measuring approximately seven yards in length and two yards in width, topped by a low circular ceiling. Investigator and author Francis Maziere was among the first to visit and describe the Orongo stone buildings as being nearly identical in shape and construction with those erected by the Megalith builders throughout the Mediterranean area. The Orongo site also has the remains of a solar observatory composed of standing stones with solar alignments identical to those of Stonehenge.

That the Megalith building project was truly a world-wide civilization can be seen in the fact that the Americas were by no means excluded in the appearance of the builders’ handiwork.

On the prehistoric site called Mystery Hill in North Salem, New Hampshire are twenty-two large stones standing majestically on top of a two hundred-foot high summit. The origin and significance of the site are shrouded in darkness, its age unknown. The only thing we are certain of is that it existed long before the European colonialists arrived, or even before the Indigenous Peoples settled the area. It had remained intact until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when it suffered partial destruction by having some of its stones removed in order to build a house. Yet its general plan remains intact, and is being preserved and rebuilt by archaeologists today.

The stones of Mystery Hill are arranged in an elaborate system of tunnels, menhirs and dolmens, most of which are celestially aligned. Each day on the first day of winter, for example, the sun—when viewed from the center of the hill—sets directly over what is called the Winter Monolith.

Mystery Hill is by no means unique, for other standing stones, dolmens and stone chambers are scattered across the New England countryside, from Maine to Maryland, and from the Adirondacks to Martha‘s Vineyard.

These are linked with Indigenous holy sites marked by sacred stones spread out across the Midwest and South, many associated with Mound Builder remains, which in turn are connected with Medicine Wheels and Kiva Circles still surviving throughout the American West and Southwest.

Going beyond, on the Central American island of Bonacca archaeologist F. A. Mitchell-Hedges discovered an ancient eight hundred-yard long wall enclosure with two large standing stones reminiscent of those found at Stonehenge. The stones measure approximately seven feet in height by two and a half feet in diameter. Also discovered are a number of oddly shaped carved stones that are dated older than the Maya, Toltec and Aztec civilizations.

Just outside Mexico City at the base of the Cuicuilco Pyramid, which one geologist dated to be older than 6000 B.C.E., is a dolmen and a double row of standing stones. A large carved standing stone sits before the main stairway that ascends the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan. At La Venta, once the capital of the enigmatic Olmec culture, are menhirs and troughs in long alignments that strikingly resemble the rows of Megalith stones found in Brittany. And near the base of the House of the Old Woman, the oldest pyramid structure at Uxmal, is a ring of phallic stones reminiscent of many such Megalithic circles in Europe and the Middle East.

Scattered throughout the countryside of Costa Rica are hundreds of perfectly carved stone spheres, some of them weighing several tons in size. They are found usually in groups of threes or up o forty-five in number positioned in dead-straight lines. The enigmatic spheres were placed in rainforests, fields, on hills, even on mountaintops. They are all composed of extremely hard granite, with no clues as to how they were moved or carved to a spherical accuracy to within one-one hundredth of an inch. Many theories abound as to the secret purpose behind these stones--that they were navigation beacons, star maps or energy enhancers. Of most significance is that many of them contain astronomical alignments linking them to other Megalithic monuments world-wide.

The mark of the Megalith builders continues on into South America as well. In Chile, high on the plateau of El Enladrillado, are 233 stone blocks placed geometrically in an amphitheater-like arrangement. The blocks are roughly rectangular, some as large as twelve to sixteen feet high and twenty to thirty feet long, weighing several hundred tons each. At the center of the plateau are three standing stones three to four feet in diameter which are perfectly aligned with magnetic north in one direction, and the midsummer sunrise in another.

A recent stone-ring find was made in 2005 at Amapa, Brazil, located near the village of Calcoene just north of the Equator and near the coast of Amapa State, which borders with French Guyana in northern Brazil. The find consists of 127 granite blocks, some standing nine feet high, spaced at regular intervals around a grassy hill, the full circle measuring over one hundred feet in diameter.

According to Mariana Petry Cabral, an archaeologist at the Amapa State Scientific and Technical Institute, the stone-ring was once an astronomical observatory. She and her research team discovered that inherent shadow-casts and alignments among the blocks point to solstice and equinox sunrise and sunset points. As Cabral noted:

“By transforming this kind of knowledge into a monument, the transformation of something ephemeral into something concrete, could indicate the existence of a larger population and of a more complex social organization. We may be also looking at the remnants of a sophisticated culture.”

In the meanwhile, the media has dubbed this new site a “tropical Stonehenge,” and the search is now underway for the possibility of similar astronomical aligning stones in the Amazon region.

Throughout the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco in Peru, and inside the Spanish Church which sits on the remains of the Coriconcha, the Sacred Center of the Inca Empire, are walls of great stones made with the tell-tale puzzle-piece configuration of the Megalith builders.

The stones are so perfectly fitted together that not even a knife blade can be thrust between the joints.

Just above the city, at the prehistoric fortress of Sacsayhuaman, are similarly designed massive stone walls topped by a stone ring calendar. The fortress is composed of three outer lines each approximately 1,500 feet long and 54 feet wide, made up of thousands of closely-fitted blocks carved with up to thirty-six sides and weighing anywhere from fifty to three hundred tons.

Within a few hundred yards of the fortress complex is a single stone monolith which was intricately carved with stairways and platforms, and had been intended to be a part of the construction. But an earthquake appears to have interrupted its being transported to the site, for today it lies abandoned, broken and upside down. What is truly impossible is that this single block is the size of a five-story building and weighs an estimated twenty thousand tons.

How such a single block was transported from its quarry twenty miles away to its present position, is anyone’s guess.

Nearby to Sacsayhuaman is a rocky spur called Kenko where menhirs and other roughly hewn stones have been found. Giant monoliths grace the summit of Machu Picchu, which archaeologists believe are older than the lost city built there by the Incas. Close by at Ollantaytambo are Megalithic walls and trilithon doorways, reminiscent of the three-stone archways at Stonehenge. The blocks here, however, weigh between one hundred fifty and two hundred tons. Atop the Ollantaytambo summit are even larger carved and dressed blocks, estimated between three and five hundred tons each, which were somehow transported from a quarry two mountains and a river valley away. As South American historian Hyatt Verrill noted:

“No number of men—Indian or otherwise—could duplicate this feat with only stone implements or crude metal tools, ropes, rollers and muscle power. And the blocks were moved both up and down one thousand-foot mountain cliffs, and at an altitude exceeding ten thousand feet. It is not a question of skill, patience and time. It is a human impossibility.”

Elsewhere, at Tiawanaku in what is today Bolivia not far distant from Lake Titicaca, are more enigmatic ruins showing strong Megalithic influences.

Though plundered by the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, the enormous site still poses its own set of mysteries. Scattered throughout are large carved standing stones and stone trilithon gateways—including the famed Gateways of the Sun and Moon, each with their significant solar and lunar alignments—made out of andesite, an extremely hard material and very difficult to fashion. Some of the carved standing stones depict such local deities as Viracocha, who sports a long beard, very unlike the local Indigenous peoples who have little facial hair. Viracocha means “sea foam,” indicating he came from across the ocean, and his skin was much paler than the Aymarans of the Lake Titicaca region.

Within Tiawanaku north of the Akapana pyramid complex is the Kalassassaya, a stone platform ten feet high and 440 by 390 feet to the sides, composed of blocks weighing 100 to 200 tons each. The Sunken Courtyard nearby has walls containing blocks up to sixty tons, and its stairway has steps which are over fifty tons each. In another part of the site is Puma Punku, wherein are the scattered remains of hundreds of finely carved blocks weighing an average of thirty tons each. The quarries for these were found from thirty to ninety miles distance. What is the real mystery is that Tiawanaku and its environs are located at 13,000 feet altitude, and though it was large enough to house a population of several thousand inhabitants, the harshness of the climate and lack of air would have prevented any crops to be grown on the altiplano plateau.

Perhaps the most amazing observation about Tiawanaku is that it contains within its vast construction a number of measurements which are commensurate with those of distant Stonehenge and the other stone sites of Britain.

In fact, we find that most of the Megalithic sites world-wide are related to one another by their inherent measurement factors. The reason for this is that the Megalithic Yard discovered by Thom is a geodetic unit, derived from the size and geometry of the Earth.

More specifically, it is a harmonic of the polar circumference of the planet, which is 48,221,838 Megalithic Yards, less than 0.005 percent off from its modern estimate.

While Thom found the Megalithic Yard in Britain and Brittany, other researchers have discovered it in practically every corner of the world, where it is related to other Earth commensurate measures. One second of arc of the polar equator is equivalent to 366 Megalithic Yards, also precisely equal to 1,000 Minoan feet and 100 Olympian or Geographical feet in ancient Greece. In India, beginning with the Harappan culture of the Indus, the gaz was almost identical to the Megalithc Yard, while in Sumeria the double-kush matched the length of one-half a Megalithic Yard. In Japan, the shaku—derived from a Chinese measure a thousand years older—is indistinguishable from the Minoan foot.

In Egypt, all the sides of the Third Pyramid at Giza exactly equals 500 Megalithic Yards, and the sides of the Sahure Pyramid at Abu Sir adds up to 380 Megalithic Yards. Even the Great Pyramid itself has a side base that is equivalent to 279 Megalithic Yards.

When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World, they discovered to their astonishment that many of the Maya temple complexes in Mexico and the Inca stone fortresses in Peru had incorporated into their designs the vara, an old Castilian measurement that is only seven-tenths percent greater in size than the Megalithic Yard. The reason for this slight discrepancy is because the Maya and Inca structures are closer to the Equator, where the Megalith harmonic measure would be slightly larger. North American researchers have also discovered full or fractional equivalents of the Megalith Yard inherent in the designs of such monuments as Serpent Mound in Ohio, Cahokia Mound in Illinois and Big Medicine Wheel in Wyoming.

As researcher and author Christopher Knight summarized:

“We have found that the further back in time we go, the greater the interconnection between units—and the deep science behind the very oldest measures makes modern systems seem arbitrary and trivial.

“It appears that before history was written there was an apparent single approach to measurement units that was based on the physical realities of the Sun, the Moon and the Earth.”

Looking now at what we know about the mysterious Megalith builders, we can make several observations. Examples of their handiwork can be found all over the Earth—in Europe, Africa, Asia, in the Pacific and in the Americas. Their conception certainly did not originate with one group of isolated people and then slowly spread to other neighboring groups. Rather, the system appears to have sprung up all over the world simultaneously, all within the same general time period, planned by an unknown sophisticated culture that must have surveyed the globe and charted its every geographical feature. As Megalith researcher John Michell commented:

“A great scientific instrument lies sprawled over the entire surface of the globe. At some period almost every corner of the world was visited by a group of men who came with a particular task to accomplish. With the help of some remarkable power, by which they could cut and raise enormous blocks of stone, these men erected vast astronomical instruments, circles of erect pillars, pyramids, underground tunnels, cyclopean alignments, whose course from horizon to horizon was marked by stones, mounds and earthworks.”

Such a global undertaking implies the existence of a single authority directing a unified effort involving the inhabitants of the whole world. The existence of a universal measurement system also implies a former universal knowledge and a universal language now lost to us.

Whatever its ultimate purpose, the global Megalith system appears to have operated for a certain length of time, but then something happened—something significant enough to mark a break in world conditions and to bring the world system of stone monuments to an end. Before the event the construction of the system had necessitated a unified world. At some specific moment in time that unity was decisively broken. The single directing authority lost its power and its ability to operate world-wide.

Following the event new conditions prevailed, and the people of the planet were fragmented into factions, making unity of effort and the coordinated working of the system no longer possible. As Michell further described it:

“All we can suppose is that some overwhelming disaster, whether or not of natural origin, destroyed the prehistoric system. All attempts at reconstructing whatever it was that collapsed during the great upheaval have ever since been frustrated by schism and degeneration. Falling ever deeper into ignorance, increasingly at the mercy of rivals, the isolated groups of survivors all over the world forgot their former unity, and, in the course of striving to re-create some local version of the old universal system, perverted the tradition and lost is spiritual invocation.”

Eventually, even the perversions—the myths and legends of the past—were partially garbled and forgotten, and the surviving local systems of standing stones and stone monuments were abandoned. Today we are left with only shadows and remnants of the former universal Megalith system.

Yet, in spite of what we do know, the question remains unanswered, what was the underlying purpose of this vast prehistoric construction project? Why was so much effort expended and over such a vast region—the entire surface of the planet?

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]