Stonehenge

Although the Sarsens in Stonehenge clearly come from nearby Marlborough Downs, there are conflicting explanations about how Stonehenge’s builders managed to transport the bluestones, which geologists believe originated in the Preseli Hills of Wales, to Salisbury Plain in England, where the monument was erected; some argue that they used brute muscle power to load the stones into boats and drag them overland, while another recent theory holds that an Ice Age glacier actually did the work of moving them.

Believers in UFOs, however, offer a third possibility—that extraterrestrials with advanced technology may have done the dirty work for humans. Controversial Swiss author Erich von Däniken, author of the 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods and other books, has promoted the idea that alien astronauts who visited Earth in ancient times had a role in the creation of Stonehenge and other giant structures that otherwise would have been beyond the ability of humans.

Another hypothesis advanced by UFOlogists is that Stonehenge’s human builders replicated the shape of an alien spacecraft to pay homage to extraterrestrial visitors, in the fashion of the cargo cult that sprang up the island of Tanna in the South Pacific, where indigenous people worshipped World War II American aviators who had brought them supplies.