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A most interesting account of the long history and mystery of Stonehenge, a large collection of massive rocks that exist in a circle in Britain.
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00:00Thousands of years ago, a great work was begun on a barren landscape.
00:07The people behind the project erected a ring of colossal stones according to precise calculations.
00:13When the job was finished, a complex machine stood in the middle of no place.
00:19Then, they disappeared.
00:22But their monument is almost intact.
00:25It is called Stonehenge.
00:30The glow of ancient knowledge has faded, but a strange power still seems to linger over the stones.
00:36It beckons some men to worship, others to search for the magic of Stonehenge.
01:00The architects are unknown.
01:11Their purpose has been forgotten.
01:13But for many, the magic of Stonehenge is still fresh.
01:17This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.
01:30The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine.
01:38It is among the classic mysteries of the world, an immense circle of stones that stands on the Salisbury Plain in southern England.
01:49For centuries, men have called it Stonehenge and wondered at its purpose.
01:55The mystery of Stonehenge is two-fold.
01:58Who built it and why?
02:00Archaeologists normally have the answer to one of those questions and can deduce the rest.
02:05But until now, we've known very little about Stonehenge and understood less.
02:10Only recently has evidence come to light that points to Stonehenge being an exceedingly complex machine, yet with a purpose so simple it was overlooked for centuries.
02:21But finding the why of Stonehenge only increases the mystery of who built it.
02:28Stonehenge is a puzzle that seems to defy the usual methods of archaeology.
02:33There are no written clues to explain it.
02:36Theories that it was a city of the dead or a pagan temple of sacrifice have been based as much on pure speculation as on evidence.
02:45The first breakthrough in understanding came in the mid-1960s when a young astronomer entered the search.
02:52It was a solution based on pure numbers and pure directions.
02:59His name is Gerald Hawkins, author of Beyond Stonehenge.
03:05And strangely, it did require a new look.
03:12It required perhaps an astronomer to look at it as I did.
03:15And just looking through the archways, I felt that it must be more than a temple.
03:22The idea of doors in an open plain didn't make sense to me.
03:28And I felt I should see something through these archways.
03:33So began the quest for a solution to the riddle of Stonehenge.
03:39Hawkins began by investigating the few known facts.
03:43The earliest holes in the ground seem to date now to 2500-2700 BC.
03:51Roughly the time of the Egyptian pyramids, maybe a few centuries ahead.
03:56Then the Stonehenge proper was built approximately 2000 BC.
04:02They were working there for centuries, perhaps even a thousand years.
04:09The world at 2500 BC was dotted by no more than a handful of civilizations.
04:14Much of the world's population lived in caves.
04:17Man was learning how to forge crude tools out of bronze.
04:23In Egypt, the slaves were still toiling over the great pyramids.
04:34The walls of Jericho were yet unbreached.
04:40In Mesopotamia, the Sumerians were just beginning to use a new tool called writing to record their history and legends.
04:49It would be centuries before the Jews would hide the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves of Qumran.
04:59From the tiny island of Crete, the Minoan Empire ruled the Mediterranean world.
05:06Their ancient sea kings had not yet sailed their ships beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.
05:18No explorer had touched the shore of North America, crossed its wide expanses, or glimpsed any of its wonders.
05:28Yet in that remote time, an army of men was mobilized on the Salisbury Plain to build Stonehenge.
05:35Why?
05:36At one time, the suggestion was the stones came down by glaciers, but it seems that the stone was indeed quarried.
05:50We have pretty well proved that it was quarried because recently museum replicas went there and found a stone with an actual drill hole.
06:01We have a sample of it here.
06:03It was cut into and shows the two halves.
06:07This stone is so tough it takes half an hour to cut with a diamond saw.
06:12Yet they drilled in with no equipment except perhaps some flint chips and a piece of wood.
06:18Why did the ancient engineers select blue stones that can be found in only one place in the world, the Presley Mountains?
06:30Rocks so hard, they dull modern cutting tools.
06:33This is one of the inner circle of blue stones which geologists have found were brought all the way from the Presley Mountains in Wales.
06:49And it does seem that there is really only one place in the world where they could have come from.
06:53But there is also a theory...
06:55Another investigator, Francis Hitching, has been probing the legends of Stonehenge, roping for a key to unlock its mystery.
07:03There is still a lot of unanswered questions.
07:06The main one being, why on earth did they bother to put up these as opposed to those?
07:11What special kind of power did these stones contain?
07:16Hitching believes that for the ancient Britons, the countryside was alive with supernatural spirits
07:22and that even the rocks were endowed with magical powers.
07:26Local folklore is rich with tales like that of the Devil's Heel.
07:31It is said that the Devil stalked the woods one night and left his mark in stone.
07:37According to another legend, nine maidens were frozen into stone
07:42when the morning light caught them frolicking on the moors.
07:47Other rocks were thought to dance on Midsummer's Mourn.
07:52It was a matter of firm belief that evil spirits presided over certain boulders.
07:59Like the hunchback gnome that lurked under a roof of stone.
08:06Or the witch who cast a spell over tingle stone, making it unsafe to touch after dark.
08:13Positive powers were attributed to other monoliths.
08:16Like the one called Stanton Drew, which could supposedly cure a sick child of the pox.
08:25Or the fairy stone, which was believed to emit a strange energy, like an electrical charge.
08:31What all these legends add up to, it seems to me, is that a certain kind of power existed in them and was known to the people at that time.
08:43And as recently as a couple of years ago, there were reports of witchcraft ceremonies taking place in a series of stones called the Rollwright Stones in the Midlands.
08:54From the Presley Mountains, where the Stonehenge Rocks were quarried, they were hauled some 240 miles across the landscape of England.
09:04No powered vehicles existed.
09:09Forests and narrow streams clotted the path between the quarry and the final site.
09:13How were the stones moved?
09:17In 1954, the British Broadcasting Company recruited 40 schoolboys to retrace the steps their ancestors might have taken.
09:28The purpose of the experiment was to determine the likely methods used to transport the stones.
09:33A concrete slab, only one-fiftieth the weight of a blue stone, was used.
09:42Nothing like this astonishing feat of transportation was ever attempted by any other people in prehistoric Europe.
09:53Their task was so arduous that later generations believed the builders must have been aided by the magician Merlin.
09:59According to legend, Merlin made the stones so light that they could float on water.
10:05But there were still casualties along the way.
10:12If magic is excluded as a source of power for the Stonehengers, then most of the population of Southern Britain must have been involved in hauling the stones to Salisbury.
10:21We're speaking very glibly about it.
10:22I estimate one and a half million man days of work and many broken legs and so on drive an effort and achievement that they got a great satisfaction out of.
10:39As to what was in their minds, at least I have uncovered certain very hard facts, numerical relationships, an interest in precision, an interest in time patterns, and this means something very fundamental to their psychological basis and to their beliefs.
11:01What they were doing was a complete entity to them.
11:06It must have been extremely satisfying.
11:09They did not do it by being driven as slaves.
11:12They did not do it for money because there wasn't a monetary system.
11:15They did it because they wanted to.
11:17And here we have perhaps the beginning of our civilization, the essence of civilization, a community with a common purpose and a common set of ideas.
11:25Surely, the masterminds of Stonehenge could not have inspired an army of workers unless the people were held in the spell of a great, perhaps even magical idea.
11:39A religious sect called Druids claims spiritual descent from the architects of Stonehenge.
11:51There is little evidence to support their claim.
11:54Their ritual reenactments on the site are of little help in solving the puzzle, for the Druids were apparently latecomers.
12:00The people who put up Stonehenge came from a time before people could read and write, and really this is one of the big mysteries about Stonehenge.
12:11How they came later on to have a mathematical, geometrical, astronomical knowledge which seems quite beyond the conceptions of primitive and barbarian people.
12:21But perhaps more remarkable than that is the fact that scattered all over Britain are some 300 other circles, some of them still intact, which can do the same job.
12:35And the man who has discovered this, spent half a lifetime doing it, is Professor Alexander Thom.
12:42Professor Alexander Thom.
12:45An engineer by training, Thom was convinced that there was a calculated design behind what appeared to be a random arrangement of stones.
12:53Using advanced mathematics, Thom was able to prove that the stones were aligned both to one another and to the movement of the planets in the night sky.
13:04The implications of his discovery are staggering.
13:08It now seems possible that the whole of prehistoric Britain was landscaped according to a deliberate and far-reaching plan.
13:26There are a number of theories as to whether there is any reality to legends about the magic power of megaliths.
13:31And perhaps the one which has been most widely written about is that the whole of Britain is criss-crossed with a network of invisible straight lines called ley lines.
13:44These are supposed to link all ancient sacred sites like some unimaginably complicated spider's web.
13:51And the stones, all the sites, burial mounds, tombs, they're supposed to have been put on certain key places which were chosen because they had some kind of power.
14:05Fortresses were built atop sacred mounds as if to absorb the power of old ruins.
14:12And monks erected churches on sites where pagan priests once gathered to recite magical incantations.
14:21In folklore, some key sites retained their magic long after the builders disappeared.
14:30It is known that around some of these sites, underneath tombs, around the standing stones, there are anomalies in the Earth's magnetic field.
14:43And here, I think, may lie the secret to the power in these megaliths.
14:53If Francis Hitching's theory is correct, what prehistoric man called magic may have been akin to 20th century electromagnetic energy.
15:02Is it just possible that people in those times somehow knew how to tap the electromagnetic anomalies that are in these stones and use them in their healing?
15:14Is it perhaps also possible that they used it, as birds do and as dogs seem to, in telepathy?
15:21They could find their way by these stones.
15:23They could perhaps communicate from one stone to another.
15:26They were like a giant psychic grid which could be used for telepathic purposes.
15:32Like the animals of the forest, the inhabitants of prehistoric Britain may have been attuned to the Earth's signals.
15:39Some have theorized that electromagnetic energy may be the basis of extrasensory perception.
15:45If this is true, perhaps the Stonehenge-ers used that psychic energy on a level never achieved since.
15:54At the very center of this hypothetical communications network stood Stonehenge.
16:00As a quantitative scientist, I saw a fundamental pattern that intrigued me and reached my brain and mind.
16:07And so, with calculations, I was able to go back in time to 2000 BC and, as though it were, stand there and watch the sunrise and moonrise and planets and stars.
16:22And with the computer, very quickly, we could see that the pattern of stones matched the pattern of the sky.
16:31Therefore, a ritualistic temple became a much more fundamental device.
16:37It had at least some purpose, and that purpose reached out to the stars.
16:44With the aid of a computer, Dr. Gerald Hawkins was able to do what no man before him had done.
16:51Prove that Stonehenge was in part a calendar and an observatory.
16:55Each giant block points to a specific position of a planet or star as it moves in its journey across the heavens.
17:04In such a way, sky and earth were inextricably bound through a Stone Age machine.
17:11The most celebrated alignment is the Heel Stone that points to the rising sun on Midsummer's Mourn.
17:17The popular assumption is that the Druids used the site for rituals of incantation and human sacrifice.
17:25But were they the designers of Stonehenge?
17:29Archaeologists and antiquarians have argued for centuries about who put up this great erection of stones here.
17:36The best bet seemed to be the Druids, because the Druids were known to have existed here in Britain before Caesar arrived.
17:47In fact, Caesar described the Druids.
17:49So, 18th century antiquarians such as William Stukeley used to draw fanciful pictures of the Druids as they thought taking part in ceremonies around Stonehenge and similar kinds of circles.
18:02Now, we're almost certain today that this conception is absolutely wrong.
18:09And the kind of people who you see taking part in Druid ceremonies here on Midsummer Mourning are nothing more than a 19th century invention.
18:20Druids, in fact, what we do know about them, they had a strong priestly class who used to gather on the whole in oak groves,
18:29where their secret ceremonies took place.
18:32They were a bloodthirsty race.
18:35Caesar describes them as hanging people up in baskets and burning them.
18:40Otherwise, we know that they were indeed expert astronomers.
18:45If, as Hitching and other investigators have concluded, the architects of Stonehenge were not the Druids, then who did design and build it?
18:53Far from being mere hunters or cave dwellers, the prehistoric Stonehenge seemed suddenly to have become possessed of a superior, highly sophisticated intelligence.
19:05Otherwise, they could never have devoted their total energies to a grid that covered all England and focused on the axis of Stonehenge.
19:13One must wonder, from where did they get this incredible spurt of knowledge, a spurt that was 5,000 years ahead of its time?
19:23The answer may never be known, but the stones still have a power for many who worship in the manner of the Druids.
19:30And Stonehenge still intrigues men who seek to understand the workings of an ancient machine.
19:35I wonder if they were not worshipping a new type of god to us, a god of time.
19:42The idea just comes to me now that perhaps the repetitive security of time, following time, was of value to them.
19:52And perhaps even Stonehenge itself was built to perhaps defeat the ravages of time in that time had a concept to them.
20:00If ever we can find out an idea that explains what they did, it will be really dramatic.
20:07I don't feel that we've come close to any idea yet, but you can imagine a god of time.
20:11We don't have it. We hate time. But maybe they look forward to it.
20:19What were the Stonehenge's looking forward to?
20:22Was it merely the observations of the cycles of time or the predictions of eclipses?
20:27Or did they expect some even more magical communication from the outer cosmos, where time has no limits?
20:46Stonehenge is not alone as a riddle of ancient design.
20:49In the thick jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula, an ancient observatory called the Karakul charted the phases of Venus as accurately as 20th century telescopes.
21:01Buried deep within the same jungle, a Mayan pyramid was aligned to the midsummer's sun.
21:076,000 miles away, Egyptian pyramids mapped the rising and the setting sun on the same day.
21:19And in the distant past of India, holy men gathered to watch the sky.
21:24For what were they waiting?
21:37We have some understanding now of the possible explanation for Stonehenge and the other monuments around the world that have puzzled investigators for so long.
21:44The question which still eludes us is who erected these working monuments?
21:50Clearly, they were the work of people more advanced than we had thought possible for that time.
21:55We can speculate that our ancestors were possessed of knowledge that was somehow lost to succeeding generations.
22:01Or perhaps, they had help.
22:14The dream of theiling of the sky is easy, and can they find them also the same way?
22:17The horizon is the time to explore, and theONEYCAP would basically create an earth as an end.
22:22The spiritual戰略, the sky is the same way, and the sun is about to make a difference.
22:27The sun is the sun is about to look more than the stars, and the sun is about to look more than the sun.
22:32The sun is about to look more than the sun as the sun's sea.
22:38The sun is about to look more than the sun is about to look more than the sun in the sun.
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