UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Author Merrily Harpur has logged a fascinating account from one George Price, who had an undeniably bizarre experience on Salisbury Plain, England in September 2002, while then serving with the British Army. It was at the height of a military exercise, Harpur was told, and Price was a “commander in the turret of our tank, and we were advancing to contact our warriors.” Suddenly, Price’s attention was drawn to a “large, ape-like figure” that “looked scared because of the noise from the engines and tanks were moving at speed all around.” Although the beast was not in sight for long – it raced for the safety of “nearby prickly shrubs” – an amazed Price could see that “its fur was similar to an Orangutan in color…its height was impressive…[and] it seemed to run with its back low, i.e. bent over.” Salisbury Plain is not just home to military maneuvers, however. It is also home to one of the world’s most famous ancient stone circles: Stonehenge.

While most students of the legendary structure conclude it had its beginnings somewhere around 3,100 BC, evidence of human activity in the area has been found suggesting a presence as far back as 8,000 BC. And a degree of that same presence is indicative of ritualistic activity, even at that incredibly early age. But, regardless of when, precisely, large-scale construction of Stonehenge actually began, what can be said with certainty is that it is comprised of a ditch, a bank, and what are known as the Aubrey holes – round pits in the chalk that form a huge circle. And then, of course, there are those massive stone blocks.

No less than eighty-two of Stonehenge’s so-called bluestones, some of which weigh up to four-tons, are believed to have been transported from the Preseli Mountains in southwest Wales to the Wiltshire site, a distance of 240 miles. Although, the actual number of stones is in dispute since, today, barely more than forty remain. Certainly, such a mammoth operation to move such huge stones would be no easy feat in the modern era, never mind thousands of years ago. And yet, somehow, this incredible and mystifying task was successfully achieved. Stonehenge’s thirty giant Sarsen stones, meanwhile, were brought from the Marlborough Downs, a distance of around twenty-five miles. This might sound like a much easier task than having to haul the bluestones all the way from Wales. Hardly. As noted, the Welsh stones are in the order of four tons. Some of the Sarsen stones from the downs, however, weigh in at twenty-five tons, the heaviest around fifty. And people wonder why so much mystery and intrigue surrounds the creation of Stonehenge?

Now we come to the Rollright Stones, which are situated near Long Compton, a centuries-old little village in the county of Oxfordshire. Collectively, they are comprised of a tomb, known as the Whispering Knights, a classic circle of stones called the King’s Men, and a solitary stone referred to as the King’s Stone. As for the time of the construction of the Rollright Stones, this appears to be a clear-cut issue: in the Neolithic and Bronze Age eras. As with Stonehenge, legends and pet-theories abound as to the particular origin of the Rollright Stones. Certainly, the most engaging is that which surfaced in 1610 from a historian named William Camden. The story goes that the stones were not always stones. They originally represented an unnamed visiting king and his faithful knights who were turned to stone – in classic Gorgon-style, one might well suggest – by a legendary local witch, one Mother Shipton. The king, not surprisingly, became the King’s Stone. The bulk of his men were turned into the King’s Men. While a few who had initially avoided – but not for long, unfortunately – Mother Shipton’s malevolent powers quickly and collectively became the Whispering Knights.

In 1977, author Paul Devereux established what became titled the Dragon Project; the purpose of which was to study claims that certain British prehistoric sites had unusual forces or energies attached to them, including magnetic, infrared and ultrasonic anomalies. While investigating none other than the Rollright Stones, Devereux reported that one of the team members – described as being a well-known archaeologist – was sitting in a van when an unidentified, hair-covered beast of considerable size walked by. An instant later, it utterly vanished, never to put in a re-appearance. It’s also worth noting that a large and lumbering beast was seen near the Peak District-based Ladybower Reservoir in November 1991. Less than one mile away, on Stanton Moor, stands a stone circle called the Nine Ladies. It was constructed during the Bronze Age era, and is a place at which, every year, druids and pagans alike celebrate the summer solstice. As the legend goes, the circle takes its name from nine women who were turned to stone as punishment for dancing on Sundays!

The Nine Ladies (Wikipedia)

Perhaps, in light of the extraordinary data contained in this article, we should be focusing our attentions far less on what’s going on in the relevant location of ancient stone circles right now, and far more on (A) the matter of what may have occurred there centuries or millennia ago, and (B) the issue of what may continue to linger and wander and, sometimes, terrorize the good folk of Britain, long after physical death claimed their lives in times past and largely forgotten. For the final word on the potential connection between unidentified, upright, hairy animals and places of specifically archaeological, spiritual, and historical nature, I refer you to the writings of one of the world’s leading authorities on the phenomenon of werewolves, Linda Godfrey, the author of such fine pieces of essential reading as The Michigan Dogman, Werewolves, Hunting the American Werewolf, and The Beast of Bray Road.

Of the Native American phenomenon known as the Skinwalker – which Linda describes as “entities created by magic ritual that look like animals but are really spirit doubles of the shaman that either go out from the physical body or envelope it like a supernatural costume” – she says they are “related to the Tibetan ideas” of Tulpas. Rather significantly, when one takes into account the various encounters that occurred in the vicinity of, or relatively close to, famous standing-stones, such as Stonehenge and the Rollright Stones, the following words from Linda most assuredly stand out as being of keen relevance to such matters. She says, still on the subject of Skinwalkers: “I can tell you that Native Americans from various locations have indicated to me that these things absolutely exist, as do zoomorphic (animal-shaped) spirit guardians made to watch over sacred grounds [Author’s Note: Italics Mine].” Linda also notes that in relation to ancient Native American burial mounds (“shaped like traditional ‘water panthers'”) the mounds are “located in almost exactly the same sites as manwolf posts.”

Perhaps, then, the American “man-wolf,” or werewolf, was created, Tulpa-style, to watch over ancient American sites of deep significance, in much the same way that Bigfoot-like creatures seem to be doing precisely likewise at a multiplicity of standing-stones, and circles of stone, in the U.K. One beast may exhibit ape-like characteristics and the other a far more wolfish appearance, but, at the end of the day, they may very well both be definitive supernatural “guard-dogs,” still faithfully patrolling the old sites they were created to protect all those centuries and millennia ago.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity shows that gravity is the result of a mass, such as a planet or star, warping the geometry of the merger of time and space known as spacetime.

(Credit: koya979/Shutterstock)

Rod Serling knew all about dimensions.

His Twilight Zone was a dimension of imagination, a dimension of sight and sound and mind, a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It was all very clear except for the space and time part, the dimensions of real life. Serling never explained them.

Of course, ever since Einstein, scientists have also been scratching their heads about how to make sense of space and time. Before then, almost everybody thought Isaac Newton had figured it all out. Time “flows equably without relation to anything external,” he declared. Absolute space is also its own thing, “always similar and immovable.” Nothing to see there. Events of physical reality performed independently on a neutral stage where actors strutted and fretted without influencing the rest of the theater.

But Einstein’s theories turned Newton’s absolute space and time into a relativistic mash-up — his equations suggested a merged spacetime, a new sort of arena in which the players altered the space of the playing field. It was a physics game changer. No longer did space and time provide a featureless backdrop for matter and energy. Formerly independent and uniform, space and time became inseparable and variable. And as Einstein showed in his general theory of relativity, matter and energy warped the spacetime surrounding them. That simple (hah!) truth explained gravity. Newton’s apparent force of attraction became an illusion perpetrated by spacetime geometry. It was the shape of spacetime that dictated the motion of massive bodies, a symmetric justice since massive bodies determined spacetime’s shape.

Verification of Einstein’s spacetime revolution came a century ago, when an eclipse expedition confirmed his general theory’s prime prediction (a precise amount of bending of light passing near the edge of a massive body, in this case the sun). But spacetime remained mysterious. Since it was something rather than nothing, it was natural to wonder where it came from.

Now a new revolution is on the verge of answering that question, based on insights from the other great physics surprise of the last century: quantum mechanics. Today’s revolution offers the potential for yet another rewrite of spacetime’s résumé, with the bonus of perhaps explaining why quantum mechanics seems so weird.

“Spacetime and gravity must ultimately emerge from something else,” writes physicist Brian Swingle in the 2018 Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics. Otherwise it’s hard to see how Einstein’s gravity and the math of quantum mechanics can reconcile their longstanding incompatibility. Einstein’s view of gravity as the manifestation of spacetime geometry has been enormously successful. But so also has been quantum mechanics, which describes the machinations of matter and energy on the atomic scale with unerring accuracy. Attempts to find coherent math that accommodates quantum weirdness with geometric gravity, though, have met formidable technical and conceptual roadblocks.

At least that has long been so for attempts to understand ordinary spacetime. But clues to a possible path to progress have emerged from the theoretical study of alternate spacetime geometries, thinkable in principle but with unusual properties. One such alternate, known as anti de Sitter space, is weirdly curved and tends to collapse on itself, rather than expanding as the universe we live in does. It wouldn’t be a nice place to live. But as a laboratory for studying theories of quantum gravity, it has a lot to offer. “Quantum gravity is sufficiently rich and confusing that even toy universes can shed enormous light on the physics,” writes Swingle, of the University of Maryland.

A strange type of spacetime with unusual curvature known as anti de Sitter space, illustrated here, is nothing like the universe we live in, but could nevertheless provide clues to the quantum processes that may be responsible for producing ordinary spacetime.

(Credit: U. Moschella/Seminaire Poincare 2005)

Studies of anti de Sitter space suggest, for instance, that the math describing gravity (that is, spacetime geometry) can be equivalent to the math of quantum physics in a space of one less dimension. Think of a hologram — a flat, two-dimensional surface that incorporates a three-dimensional image. In a similar way, perhaps the four-dimensional geometry of spacetime could be encoded in the math of quantum physics operating in three-dimensions. Or maybe you need more dimensions — how many dimensions are required is part of the problem to be solved.

In any case, investigations along these lines have revealed a surprising possibility: Spacetime itself may be generated by quantum physics, specifically by the baffling phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.

As popularly explained, entanglement is a spooky connection linking particles separated even by great distances. If emitted from a common source, such particles remain entangled no matter how far they fly away from each other. If you measure a property (such as spin or polarization) for one of them, you then know what the result of the same measurement would be for the other. But before the measurement, those properties are not already determined, a counterintuitive fact verified by many experiments. It seems like the measurement at one place determines what the measurement will be at another distant location.

At least that’s the proposal that current research in toy universes has inspired. “The emergence of spacetime and gravity is a mysterious phenomenon of quantum many-body physics that we would like to understand,” Swingle suggests in his Annual Review paper. Vigorous effort by several top-flight physicists has produced theoretical evidence that networks of entangled quantum states weave the spacetime fabric. These quantum states are often described as “qubits” — bits of quantum information (like ordinary computer bits, but existing in a mix of 1 and 0, not simply either 1 or 0). Entangled qubits create networks with geometry in space with an extra dimension beyond the number of dimensions that the qubits live in. So the quantum physics of qubits can then be equated to the geometry of a space with an extra dimension. Best of all, the geometry created by the entangled qubits may very well obey the equations from Einstein’s general relativity that describe motion due to gravity — at least the latest research points in that direction. “Apparently, a geometry with the right properties built from entanglement has to obey the gravitational equations of motion,” Swingle writes. “This result further justifies the claim that spacetime arises from entanglement.”

Still, it remains to be shown that the clues found in toy universes with extra dimensions will lead to the true story for the ordinary spacetime in which real physicists strut and fret. Nobody really knows exactly what quantum processes in the real world would be responsible for weaving spacetime’s fabric. Maybe some of the assumptions made in calculations so far will turn out to be faulty. But it could be that physics is on the brink of peering more deeply into nature’s foundations than ever before, into an existence containing previously unknown dimensions of space and time (or sight and sound) that might end up making The Twilight Zone into Reality TV.