Who Built the Moon? Read Online Free Page B

the site had been intended to do – and then redesign it himself. He quickly gained an empathy with the Stone-Age builders that gave him a real insight into the purpose of each site that would possibly be lost on a conventional archaeologist. Once he had a picture in his mind of what he thought their plan had been, he went away to create his own solution to the assumed problem. Having drawn up his own design he then returned to compare the site layout to his own blueprint. Through this process he could predict the location of missing stones and, on further inspection, he would usually reveal the socket hole that confirmed his theory.
    Thom developed a new statistical technique to establish the relative positions of the stones and, over time, something spectacularly unusual emerged from the amassed data. These prehistoric builders had not been lugging huge stones willy-nilly; they had manufactured these structures working with a standard unit of measurement across a huge area of thousands of square miles of what was then dense forest and barren moorland.
    It was amazing that these supposedly primitive people could have had an ‘international’ convention for a unit of length, but the mystery deepens because Thom was eventually able to describe the supreme accuracy of a unit he called the Megalithic Yard. This was no approximate measure taken from paces or body parts; it was equal to 2.722 feet +/- 0.002 feet (82.96656cm +/- 0.061cm). Thom was also able to demonstrate that the unit was frequently used in its double and half form as well as being broken down into forty sub-units for use in design work that he designated as ‘Megalithic Inches’.
    Most archaeologists refuted the finding on the basis that the idea that a unit of measurement that was more accurate than a modern measuring tape was absurd. Thom admitted that he could not suggest how it could have been achieved but he stood by his evidence that simply said it ‘had’ been done. In our previous book,
Civilization One
, we described how we set out to investigate the concept of the Megalithic Yard. Our initial hypothesis was that if the unit was not an error of Thom’s data analysis it logically should have two properties:
It should have an origin in something meaningful, rather than just being an abstraction that was adopted by everyone.
It should have a means of reproduction that could be used by anyone without reference to any sort of standard measuring rod, that would have been difficult to manufacture and impossible to keep accurate across centuries.
    We realized that our assumption could be wrong on either or both counts but as it turned out, we were correct on both. Thom had not made an error.
    As we describe in
Civilization One
, the Megalithic Yard is a geodetic unit, in that it is integral (has a whole number relationship) to the polar circumference of the Earth. We found that these early Megalithic builders viewed a circle as having 366 degrees rather than the 360 degrees that we use today. We realized that there really
should be
366 degrees in a circle for the very good reason that there are 366 rotations of the Earth in one orbit of the Sun – the most fundamental of all circles in human existence.
    One solar orbit is, of course, a year but there is a very slight difference between the number of rotations of the planet and the 365 days in a year. This is because the mean solar day is based on the time between the Sun being at its zenith on two consecutive days (86,400 seconds) but an actual rotation or ‘sidereal day’ takes 236 seconds less. All of those ‘saved’ seconds add up to exactly one more day over the year. A sidereal day can be easily appreciated by observing a star returning to the same point in the heavens on two consecutive nights. This is one spin of our planet because it is unaffected by the secondary motion of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

Wheels within wheels
    Early cultures frequently took their lead from nature and