Maybe there will never be an answer to the secrets and the mysteries behind Stonehenge, but it hasn’t stopped people from trying.
The most recent attempt has been by the Royal College of Art in London, suggesting that the famous rock formations in Wiltshire, England, were brought to the site because of their unique acoustic properties.
So sound? That’s what this whole thing is about? There are plenty of other theories about the site, as still no one is quite sure how they got there and by who: A floating glacier or people taking them from Wales.
As part of a larger study of the acoustic elements of the Pembrokeshire landscape where the bluestones hail from, it turned out that many of the rocks issue a metallic sound, similar to that of a bell or a gong, when hit with a hammer stone.
According to the study, a Presli village used the bluestones as a church bell through the 18th century. According to the BBC, thousands of rocks were tested and many of them rang just like a bell when hit.
And it’s not just one sound – there are different tones and the musically gifted can actually make a tune if they know where to hit them. The stones at the famous site did return a sound, although the fact that some of them are reinforced by concrete resulted in a slightly muted one.
So was it all one big musical conspiracy? It seems that with each study something new comes up – a theory is born, and another is scrapped. However, making such an effort just for the sound of it does sound like a bit of a stretch.
National Archive documents recently released show that the UK government's very own UFO department, which had reported on sightings for over 50 years, was shut down three years ago. The department apparently never revealed any "potential threats" to the country, so the Ministry of Defence closed both the hotline and email address that fielded the public's sightings of UFOs. A civil servant briefed the current defence minister, Bob Ainsworth, saying: "The level of resources diverted to this task is increasing in response to a recent upsurge in reported sightings, diverting staff from more valuable defence-related activities." The recently released files also covered some of the sightings reported from across the UK in 2009, which included, perhaps unsurprisingly, Stonehenge.
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