Chapter 4

“Stonehenge? Oh, goody! I love Stonehenge.” Roxanne was literally jumping up and down with excitement. When Roxanne jumped up and down, it excited me, too. With a body like that, she should be encouraged to jump up and down as often as possible.

“What is it you like about Stonehenge, Honey?” I knew what I liked, but wondered if it resonated with anyone else.

“The main thing I like is how it makes a mockery of accepted evaluations of scientific knowledge at the time it was built.”

“When was that?”

“We think it was between 2400 and 2100 B.C ... Not that it was built in a short period at some unknown time during that span of years. It could have been built linearly over the course of the 100,000 days included in the estimate. I think it is more likely that it was built slowly at first, then construction accelerated with experience and the growth of scientific knowledge.”

“Uh, what?”

“Ok. Take a deep breath. I will put some clothes on and sit down so you can concentrate better. Would that help?”

“It wouldn’t make me feel better, but it might help me concentrate.” Why do I allow myself to be lured into these situations where I am denied the unfettered enjoyment of my blessings?

“As I was saying”, she continued. Some say that Stonehenge was built by Merlin, with the aid of ‘gear and skill’. Others say the stones were bought by the Devil, from a woman in Ireland, and brought to Salisbury Plain. There are stories that they were ‘flown’ in from ‘Africa’? Might that have been Egypt? The pyramids of Egypt were built during this period. Was there a direct connection between Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, or was it merely the result of new technology being shared and applied in the two areas?”

“Those are great questions. There are also references to ‘giants’ being involved. Even if true, it is difficult to assign much benefit to the description, as it could mean a six foot, four inch Norseman or a seven foot tall Nubian, or a mythic creature unknown to science who might have been from another star system.”

“Let’s go. I can’t wait.”

We found ourselves in a featureless field. There were a few mounds about which may have been burial mounds for fallen warriors, but nothing else. “What year is this?”, I asked.

“This is the Summer of the year 2500B.C ... I wanted to establish a baseline before work began.”

“Good idea. Now what?”

“Well, three hundred years is a long time to scan linearly, so I thought we could strobe it.”

“Explain, please.”

“If we never stay longer than a few milliseconds, the human eye cannot perceive that we are present. Then we can return to the same viewpoint at the same time of day as often as we like and our eyes will merely see a time lapse movie of the events, but we will be invisible to the people there.”

“Well done, my dear. Let’s get started.”

We sat, entranced as we watched the seasons come and go, accompanied by differing angles of the Sun and variable ground cover. We scanned on a daily basis at a rate of 30 times per second. At this rate, 100,000 scans would require about an hour.

We watched, awestruck, as nothing happened for the first few minutes, then stones began arriving as if by magic. They were preceded by ditches that deepened as if they were snakes emerging from a hole. That may sound silly, but I can’t think of a better description.

“Why don’t we see any people?”

“For the same reason they don’t see us. If something isn’t in the same place for at least two or three scans, our eyes and brains never register it. They don’t see us and we don’t see them. Objects, such as the ditches and stones are there on every scan, so we register them.”

“What about tools? Why don’t we see them?”

“Apparently because they put them away every night and they are never in the same place from scan to scan.”

“Ok. I can see now that witchcraft was not involved and neither were aliens. The stones were floated in on log barges and tilted into place. It was simply a major engineering project of much less scale than the building of the great pyramids, which happened during the same general time line. If you like, we can repeat the process we just performed here at the site of the pyramids.”

“I would like to do that, but first, why don’t we repeat the scans we just did and film them? Although our eyes can’t register events of such short duration, cameras can. We can step through the camera images at whatever rate we choose. If we played them back at real time, we would still fail to see transient objects. If we step them through at half speed, we would see flickers of things that aren’t there every time. Pausing for longer times will allow us to see and review snapshots for any desired duration.”

“What a good idea. Consider yourself promoted.”

“To what? I’m already an effective demi-god.”

“Ok. Consider yourself now a demi-god with Oak leaf clusters.”

“Wow! Thanks.”

We did it. We repeated the scan with a camera, which only took an hour or so, then gave everyone a copy of the video file so they could analyze the data individually or in groups, as they chose.

After the lot of us had seen everything we thought important, someone suggested that we decrease the scan rate from daily to once per second for periods in which we thought something interesting was happening.

That is when the real magic became visible. It was the magic of knowledge. A handful of ‘beings’ (ordinary men in robes, extra-terrestrials or some unknown entity) directed operations, gathering workers and issuing directions.

We watched as the large stones were rolled on a series of logs, acting as temporary wheels, then were lifted into place by raising one end with the use of ropes to pull and poles to push. It was no harder, given the number of available hands, than the electrical utility poles my co-workers and I put into place when running a new power line, back when I was an electrician.

The mystery of how Stonehenge was constructed was resolved, but now we had a new mystery. Who, or what, were the beings and whence cometh they?

By unanimous consent, we picked up stakes, so to speak, and vamanosed to Egypt.