Getting back to our stones, and whether or not we can find even a hint that they were involved in some kind of technology, we note first of all that archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge once placed his hand on one of the stones and received a strong tingling sensation like an electric shock, and the huge, heavy stone felt as if it were rocking wildly. Many other people have received sensations of shock when placing their hands on certain stones, and photographs have occasionally shown inexplicable light radiations emanating from them. Upon examination, we find that many of the megaliths were engraved with “cup and ring” marks - concentric rings and channels. The first impression these designs give is that of a circuit board of a computer.
In Greek myth, the walls of Thebes were said to have been constructed by the skill of a musician called Amphion and his lyre. He played the lyre in such a way that stones were made to move. Phoenician myth speaks of the god Ouranus moving stones as if they had life of their own. This is one of numerous traditions from around the world that sound in various forms was used to levitate and move large stones.
Stones may have another interesting property that deserves serious research. In 1982, Tafter, the landlord at the Prince of Wales Inn at Kenfig in Mid-Glamorgan, Wales, complained of the sound of organ music and voices keeping him awake at night. To investigate, John Marke, an electrical engineer, and Allan Jenkins, an industrial chemist, connected electrodes to the wall of the pub after closing time one night. They fed 20,000 volts across the electrodes and locked tape recorders in the room for four hours. When the tapes were analyzed, they had succeeded in taping voices speaking in old Welsh, organ music, and a ticking clock. Interestingly, there was no clock in the room at the time. It has been suggested that the stones in the wall contained substances similar to those found in modern recording tape.
This last remark about “recordings” in stone brings us to another interesting item. Tom C. Lethbridge, the above mentioned archeologist (who became Director of Excavations for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and Director of the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology), wrote a number of excellent books that form a collection that has been called one of the most fascinating records of paranormal research ever compiled. In recent years, Lethbridge is finally beginning to be fully appreciated. Combining the skills of a scientist with a completely open mind, he conducted a series of experiments that convinced him of the existence of hyperdimensional realms that interact dynamically with our own. Colin Wilson called him a man whose gifts were far ahead of his time and credited him with one of the most remarkable and original minds in parapsychology. We agree most heartily and highly recommend his work to the reader. Over the past ten years or more, Lethbridge’s work has served us as a platform for many fruitful speculations and experiments about hyperdimensional realities.
Tom Lethbridge, the Cambridge don, took no interest in psychical research until after he had retired. But dowsing fascinated him. In the early 1930’s, he and another archaeologist were looking for Viking graves on the Isle of Lundy in the Bristol Channel. After finding what they came for, they were just killing time while waiting for a ferry and decided to try some experiments with dowsing, which had been an interest of Lethbridge for some time. Lundy Island is crisscrossed with seams of volcanic rock that extrude through the slate, and Lethbridge wanted to see if dowsing would locate them. So, he had his friend blindfold him and lead him about with a forked hazel stick. Every time he passed over a volcanic seam, the hazel fork twisted violently in his hands. The friend was carrying a very sensitive magnetometer and was able to immediately verify that Lethbridge had accurately located the volcanic seams of rock.
Lethbridge realized that, like running water, volcanic rock has a faint magnetic field. He had written about dowsing earlier, “Most people can dowse, if they know how to do it. If they cannot do it, there is probably some fault in the electrical system of their bodies”.
This remark makes us wonder if there are not people who have extremely powerful and well-developed electrical systems in their bodies, and if such conditions might not be a genetic inheritance? This question will come up again further on, so keep it in mind.
Lethbridge’s success with finding volcanic rock started him off on his investigations into other realms. Hidden objects could not stay hidden when Lethbridge was wandering around with his rods, twigs or pendulum. There didn’t seem to be any limits to what could be detected this way. He had proved to his complete satisfaction not only that dowsing worked, but that it was “mind stuff” — the rod or pendulum was connected to the mind of the person holding it in some way.
Tom Lethbridge’s results proved to be not only accurate but also repeatable, and he found the responses appeared to be governed by vibrations of various wavelengths. The wavelength of water, for instance, was different to that of metal. His principal instrument became the pendulum, and he found a lot depended on the length of the pendulum’s cord. He was able to test not only for minerals but abstract things and qualities like anger, death, deceit, sleep, colors, male, and female. In a lengthy series of trial and error experiments, he created a table of very precise measurements showing, for example, that a 22-inch length would reveal the existence of silver or lead, while iron demanded a 32-inch stretch, but sulphur a mere 7 inches. Stranger still, though, the pendulum would react to different emotions and attributes, with a different length for feminine (29”) and masculine (24”) objects, including human or animal remains. The details of his experiments are utterly fascinating. This open-minded and extremely literate man was aware that many people would regard his methods and findings with suspicion. He once wrote:
It is impossible for it to be imaginary. If you can use a pendulum to work out within an inch or two exactly where something lies hidden beneath undisturbed turf, and do this in front of witnesses, and then go to the spot which the pendulum has indicated and take off the turf, dig up the soil beneath and find the object. If you can do this same operation again and again and almost always succeed, this cannot be imagination, delusion, or any of those things. It is scientific experiment, however crude it may be.
Perhaps the reason why some still cannot accept dowsing is because it is so incredibly simple. At no cost at all you can produce an instrument no piece of expensive machinery can equal. But again, Lethbridge points out that everything depends on the operator.
Lethbridge found himself confronted with a very strange world — “far stranger I feel than anything produced by physics, botany or biology”—, and he wrote of millions of cones of force surrounding each of us in our homes and backyards which can be contacted instantly by something in our own “energy field”. It was much more difficult to comprehend than molecules, atoms and electrons, he said, because we had been brought up to take these for granted.
As we have already noted, if the infrastructure of our civilization were to be destroyed, then if a person a hundred years later tried to explain the theory of radio and television, people would find it impossible to comprehend. It would sound like magic.
Where does the power to work a pendulum come from? Lethbridge thought that it might be something invisible and intangible, a part of us, which knows far more than we do. Is it mind or soul? Some sort of electromagnetic or psyche field? Something linked to a higher dimension? He agonized over this and admitted he wasn’t wise enough to come to any definite conclusion, apart from the thought that ancient man knew far more about it than we do today.
Although, Lethbridge did a huge amount of experimental work in the field of dowsing, and his results deserve attention from any serious student of the deeper realities of our world, what we are interested in here is his work in another, though related, direction.
In 1957, Lethbridge left Cambridge in disgust at the narrow-minded attitudes of the scholars there. He moved into Hole House, an old Tudor mansion on the south coast of Devon. Next door to him lived a little old white-haired lady who assured Lethbridge that she could put spells on people who annoyed her and that she was able to travel out of her body at night and wander around the district. She explained that if she wanted to discourage unwanted visitors, she had only to visualize a five-pointed star in the path of the individual and they would stay away. Lethbridge, of course, was skeptical.
But, being an experimenter, Lethbridge was trying the visualization one evening while lying in bed. That night, his wife awakened with the feeling that somebody else was in the room. She could see a faint glow of light at the foot of the bed, which slowly faded. The next day the old lady came to see them and told them that she had come to “visit” them the previous night and had found the bed surrounded by triangles of fire.
Leaving aside whether or not we can prove this story to be anything more than a subjective experience, there are two important points we would like to make. The first one is that somehow, this practice of “visualizing pentagrams” seems to have a causal relationship to the appearance of the old woman in Lethbridge’s bedroom. It was almost as though the practice “attracted” the visitor, possibly even inspiring the wish or compulsion to visit. The second is that the visualized pentagrams appeared as triangles of fire. Theories of how hyperdimensional objects might appear in fourth dimensional space-time, or how four dimensional objects might appear in three dimensional space time, in mathematical terms, lends a modicum of credibility to this story. If the old woman had seen fiery pentagrams, we would not take such notice of the event. That a pentagon in our world might appear as a triangle in another realm suggests something very mysterious here. I am also intrigued by the possible relationship to the differences of these hyper-dimensional solids and the difference between the perspectives of the “triangle people” and the “circle people”. This is also a very important point related to the dangers of visualizing geometric shapes when we consider the susequent events that Lethbridge recounted.
Several years later, the old lady told Lethbridge that she was going to put a spell on the cattle of a farmer with whom she was quarreling. At this point, Lethbridge took her seriously and warned her about the dangers of practicing magic. She ignored him, and one day not long after declaring her intentions, she was found dead in her bed under mysterious circumstances. As it happened, the cattle of two other nearby farmers did get hoof and mouth disease, but the cattle of the farmer with whom the old lady was quarreling were unaffected. Lethbridge was convinced that the “spell” had rebounded on the old lady in some way. But, it was this event that led to an important insight for us here, which is why we have recounted the story.
Sometime after the old woman’s death, Lethbridge was passing her cottage and suddenly experienced a “nasty feeling”, a “suffocating sense of depression”. His curiosity aroused, Lethbridge walked around the cottage and discovered a most interesting thing: he could step into and out of the “depression” just as if it were some kind of invisibly defined “locus”.
This reminded Lethbridge of a similar experience he had had when walking with his mother as a teenager. It was in the Great Wood near Wokingham, on a nice morning, when suddenly the two of them experienced a “horrible feeling of gloom and depression, which crept upon us like a blanket of fog over the surface of the sea”. They left in a hurry and only later discovered that the corpse of a suicide had been discovered lying just a few yards from where they had been standing.
Some years later, Lethbridge and his wife went to the seashore to collect seaweed for their garden. As he walked on the beach, he again experienced the sense of depression, gloom and fear descending on him. Resisting this influence, Lethbridge and his wife began to fill their sacks with seaweed. After a very short period of this activity, Lethbridge’s wife, Mina, came running up to him demanding that they leave saying, “I can’t stand this place a minute longer. There’s something frightful here”.
In a discussion about the phenomenon with Mina’s brother the following day, the brother mentioned that he had experienced something very similar in a field near Avebury, in Wiltshire. When he said the word “field”, it clicked in Lethbridge’s mind and he remembered that field telephones often short circuit in warm, muggy weather. “What was the weather like?”, he asked.
“Warm and damp”, replied the brother.
Right there, the idea began to shape itself in Lethbridge’s mind. Water. On the day he had been in the Great Wood, it had been warm and damp. When they had been at the beach gathering seaweed, it had likewise been warm and damp. Experiment was obviously in order!
The next weekend, Lethbridge and his wife again visited the bay. Again, as they stepped onto the beach, the same bank of depression and gloom enveloped them. Mina led him to the spot where she had experienced such an overwhelming sensation that she had insisted on leaving the place. At that spot, the sensation was so powerful that they actually felt dizzy. Lethbridge described it as being similar to having a high fever and full of drugs. As it happened, on either side of this spot were two streams of water.
Mina went off to the cliff to look at the scenery and suddenly walked into the “depression” again. She actually had the sensation that something or someone was urging her to jump off the cliff! When she had brought it to the attention of Lethbridge, he agreed that this spot was as “sinister” as the spot on the beach between the streams.
As it turned out, nine years later, a man did commit suicide from that exact spot. Lethbridge wondered if there was some sort of “timeless” sensation that had been “imprinted” on the area via some sort of “recording” principle.
It seemed that, whether from the past or the future, feelings of despair were somehow recorded on the surroundings, in the very atmosphere, it seemed. The only question was, how? Lethbridge believed that the key was water.
A hint of what may be happening here is provided by the work of Y. Rocard of the Sorbonne, who had discovered that underground water produces changes in the earth’s magnetic field, and this was proposed as the solution as to why dowsing works. The water does this because it has a field of its own which interacts with the earth’s field. And most significantly to us here is that magnetic fields are the means by which sound is recorded on tape covered with iron oxide. This suggested to Lethbridge that
the magnetic field produced by running water could record strong emotions that, as Lethbridge also noted, produce electrical activity in the human physiology. Such fields could be “played back” continuously, and amplified in damp and muggy weather.
This would explain why these “areas of depression” seem to form invisible walls. If you bring a magnet closer and closer to an iron object, you notice that at a certain point, the object is “seized” by the magnet as it enters the force field.
Lethbridge’s experiments took a new turn at this point, and led to evidence that many things that are perceived as “hauntings” or “ghosts” are really just “recordings”. At some point he thought about the fact that ghosts are often reported to reappear on certain “anniversaries” which suggests that there are other cyclical currents that turn such recordings on or off or simply amplify them.
To answer the question that is growing in the reader’s mind, yes, it seems that some hauntings are the result of happy emotions, and strong happiness can also be recorded in the same way. It also seems that the type of material substance that the human “field” interacts with has an important role. For example, in the 1840s, a certain Bishop Polk told a Joseph Rhodes Buchanan that he could detect brass in the dark. He said that when he touched it, a distinctly unpleasant taste was produced in his mouth. Buchanan tested him and discovered that it was true, even if the metal was carefully and thickly wrapped in paper. Buchanan experimented with his students and found that some of them had a similar ability. In fact, it seemed that there were quite a number of substances that could be detected this way, and the only explanation that seemed reasonable was that
the nerves of the human being produce some sort of field - he called it the nerve aura - which interacts with a similar “field” of the object. Buchanan and others called the ability to “read” these fields “psychometry”, and it is popularly practiced today. What many people do not realize is that the principle of psychometry, that many take for granted - they can “feel the vibrations” - led Tom Lethbridge to some startling revelations.
As noted, Tom Lethbridge had concluded after a lot of experiments that a dowsing pendulum could somehow respond to different substances, and that lengthening or shortening the string was like tuning the pendulum to a particular wavelength. Lethbridge spent days testing all kinds of different substances. He discovered that the wavelength for silver is the same as lead: 22 inches. Truffles and beech wood both respond at 17 inches. This meant that there must be something further about such “paired” items to distinguish them. After some testing, Lethbridge discovered that it was not just the length of the string, but the number and direction of revolutions. For lead, the pendulum would gyrate 16 times and for silver it would gyrate 22 times.
It was beginning to look like nature had a truly marvelous and foolproof code for identifying anything. It is also beginning to appear to us that the ancients knew this and that they may have attempted to transmit this knowledge to us via myth and legend and the “Green Language”. (That magical mumbo jumbo might not be the solution to the mysteries is also becoming more and more apparent, but, let us continue into even more remarkable speculations of Tom Lethbridge.)
Through a variety of experiments, Lethbridge established the “frequency” for both death and violent anger: 40 inches. This also proved to be the frequency for cold and black. Indeed, colors have frequency. Grey is 22 inches— - not a surprise since it is the color of both lead and silver. Yellow is 29 and green is 30.
After months of experiments, Lethbridge had constructed his table of frequencies, and he had discovered that 40 inches was some kind of limit. Every single substance that he tested fell between zero and 40 inches. It was at this point that he discovered something curious:
Sulphur reacts to a 7 inch pendulum; if he extended the pendulum to 47 inches, it would still react to sulphur, but not directly over it. It would only react a little to one side. He then discovered that this was true of everything else he tried beyond the number 40 — it would react, but only to one side. He noticed another odd thing:
beyond 40 inches, there was no rate for the concept of time. The pendulum simply would not respond. Lethbridge realized that he was measuring a different dimension. However, when he lengthened the pendulum to 80 inches, there was a response to the idea of time. Lethbridge pondered this and finally theorized that in the realm beyond 40, the pendulum is in time itself, and that is why there is no reaction to the idea. But, beyond that, there are other “realms” where the idea of time exists in another world “beyond death”.
Lethbridge discovered that if he lengthened the string again beyond 80 inches, he got the same result, as if there were
still another dimension. Lethbridge realized that
he had discovered worlds in other dimensions, outside the limits of space and time, and theorized that we cannot see it because our physical bodies are limited detectors.
Tom Lethbridge continued with his experiments and determined that
the world of the “next” level beyond our own is one in which the energy vibrations are four times as fast as those of our world. The effect of encountering this reality is like a fast train passing a slow one. Even though they are both moving forward, the slow train seems to be moving backward. This hyperdimensional world is all around us, yet we are unable to see it because it is beyond the range of our senses. All the objects of our world are very likely just our limited perceptions of what is happening in this total reality.
His experiments with megaliths indicated that they were placed to mark places where the earth forces were most powerful, and to harness energy in some way now forgotten.
Unfortunately, Lethbridge died of a heart attack before he could complete his researches.
At this point we would like to note that Tom Lethbridge was not a spiritualist. He believed that magic, spiritualism, occultism and other forms of mumbo jumbo are merely crude attempts to understand the vast realm of hidden energies in which we live. We would like to add that expositions along the lines of most esoterica generally serve only to obscure, not to reveal; to disinform, rather than to produce real knowledge. Tom Lethbridge used logic and experiment and observation to come to the conclusion that there are other realms of reality beyond our world and that there are forms of energy that we do not even begin to understand.
