Contact: Anthony Peratt, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico Tel: (505) ,

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1 EMBARGOED FOR PRESS RELEASE OCTOBER 17, CELESTIAL CATASTROPHES IN HUMAN PREHISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, OCTOBER 17, Contact: Anthony Peratt, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico Tel: (505) , Stonehenge, A Giant Petroglyph? Philadelphia, PA. A research scientist from New Mexico will announce that many items of antiquity including petroglyphs (pictures carved on rock) are interrelated by world-wide observations of an intense aurora that may have lasted for centuries. The discovery culminates decades of speculation and debate as to whether or not an intense electrical storm enveloped the Earth some four thousand years ago. Anthony Peratt, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and collaborator to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, will give a presentation on Talking Rocks at the Museum s annual Celestial Catastrophes in Human Prehistory lecture October 17. Peratt made the discovery by digitally recording many tens of thousands of petroglyphs in the Southwest while noting their positions and orientations through global positioning satellites. The data was then processed on a large computer to look for similarities between the petroglyphs themselves as well as with other objects made by man thousands of years ago. Peratt, who studies phenomena associated with intense electrical currents and discharges such as those found in the aurora, the Sun, and in space said the discovery was totally unexpected. I attended a seminar on Celestial Catastrophes last year on the urging of some colleagues. I really had no idea of what they were talking about other than it was electrical and dealt with space plasmas. Plasmas are collections of negatively charged electrons, positively charged ions, and neutral particles in the laboratory or in space.. The name plasma was borrowed from blood-plasma by Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir in 1923 because the electrons and ions behaved as if they were alive in his laboratory experiments. The electrons and ions flowing down the Earth s magnetic fields near its poles is what produces the colorful and dynamic curtains of light that are the aurora. After the seminar, the organizer ed him some pictures. It was unreal, recounts Peratt. The pictures were those of an obscure instability in a plasma discharge. But the pictures were more pencil-like than photographic. It was hard to believe that someone outside the space-plasma community had knowledge of these. When I inquired further as to their source, I was told they were carved on rock. According to Peratt, I immediately wanted to know where these rocks were stored. It was at that point that I found out that they were called petroglyphs and existed all over the world. Peratt s weekend duties were greatly altered. He and interested volunteers spent some eight months recording petroglyphs throughout the Southwest. Ultimately, they surveyed fields containing some 200,000 petroglyphs. Other data from around the globe were then added to the data bank.

2 According to Peratt, It was really quite simple. We already knew the answer. Ancient people had recorded all the phases of a plasma discharge, a lightning stroke that must have been unprecedented in intensity and duration. But that meant that through computer processing we might make a movie of the phenomena with bits and pieces of petroglyphs from around the world in spite of the fact that they were often drawn as crude looking figures. It was at this point that Peratt acknowledges he greatly underestimated the information carried on the rocks. Many parts of the hastily created movie stood still in spite of the fact that the individual frames were photos taken a thousand miles apart. That is, they were exactly the same image or images having differences related to where on Earth the observer stood or cultural perceptions. The first movie showed a background precession of different shades of brown, dependent on whether the picture was recorded in New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, California, or Australia or South Africa. But then some green ones went by. These turned out to be structures a thousand times the size of the petroglyphs: the giant stone circles or megaliths of northern Europe. Among these was Stonehenge, one of the world s most famous prehistoric monuments. The overlay shows the preciseness and sky-surveying skills of peoples five-thousand miles apart, remarks Peratt. But he emphasizes that the overlay shown is the first detected, not the best. Stonehenge has an inner horseshoe-shaped structure of giant trilithons, stones weighing some forty tons. While this particular petroglyph has captured the electrical filaments between the dots (actually cross sections of pinched electrical currents that shine like a car s headlights), it does not show the horseshoe as do countless other petroglyphs. From experimental data, the horseshoe is a known feature of the intense electrical current into the structure. But the horseshoe construction must have dismayed the builders; it is the fastest changing part of the phenomena whose constant reorientation would have been noticed within several decades of construction. In any event, Stonehenge appears to be a giant petroglyph, a result of a world-wide flurry of activity by mankind terrorized by an immense electrical discharge some four millennia ago cites Peratt.

3 Figure 1 Caption. Overlays of a petroglyphs/pictographs from the Columbia River Gorge and in Arizona (gray) with Stonehenge near Salisbury, England (white). Top left; Columbia River petroglyph. The holes carved in basalt underneath a protective overhang are 2 cm deep. Holes outside the overhang are barely discernable. The diameter of the petroglyph is twelve inches while the outer diameter of Stonehenge is 330 feet. The innermost petroglyph ring aligns with the horseshoe that opens toward the incoming current (upper right). The next ring overlays Stonehenge s outer bluestone circle while the third ring is aligned with the outer sarsen circle of stones. As in experimental data, the third or outer ring is an electrical terminus for filamentary currents that start at Stonehenge s innermost Z holes and stretch out towards the second ring of Y holes. The outermost ring of holes are the fifty-six Aubrey holes, so named after the pioneering seventeenth century archaeologist John Aubrey. The dim outer markings are mounds and ditches that replicate the outer sheath of a sheet current. The gray elongated object to the upper right is the slaughter stone while the light green patches are places

4 where stones once stood. While the inner (white) hole markings match those on the petroglyph, the outer holes match precisely only at the top. At the bottom the ratio of Stonehenge to petroglyph holes are two to one. This is a feature of two electric currents in close proximity. They attract and spiral together to become one elongated object (The petroglyph has accurately captured the offset of some of the dots due to this spiraling). Because of the orientation of the bottom holes, the petroglyph shown is thought to have been recorded several decades after the original Stonehenge plan. Other petroglyphs fit precisely the outer holes indicating that they were contemporary with Stonehenge's sky recording. Top right; Columbia River pictograph. Bottom left; Arizona petroglyph Anthony L. Peratt. Figure 2 Caption. Left; Photograph of 56 Aubrey hole Stonehenge superposed with a partial drawing of its Avenue. Right; 56 ray, concentric petroglyph, northern New Mexico. Petroglyphs having a tail attached to concentric, 56 rayed or dotted petroglyphs are recorded by the thousands world wide Anthony L. Peratt.

5 Figure 3 Caption. South Australia Flinders Ranges gorge. Left; Obliquely carved, 56 rayed petroglyph on basalt with an unimpeded, 25 inclination off horizon, field-of-view (FOV) polar south. Overlaid are 56 white marker lines. Right; Petroglyphs along gorge (yellow dots). From top (N) to bottom (S), where the FOV polar south loses its inclination observation angle, the petroglyph locations, within 5 latitude, switch from the left-side of the gorge to the right side. These orientations are universal for all petroglyphs within the latitudes 70 N to 38 S.