[music playing]
NARRATOR: London England, 2013.
For six years, the UK Ministry of Defense
has been in the slow process of releasing
the entirety of their UFO files to the National
Archives of England.
Now the final batch of declassified reports
are released to the public.
Despite Ministry claims that no credible evidence or alien
craft was discovered in over 50 years of study,
one report from January 14, 2009,
includes a fascinating photo of a disk-shaped
craft hovering above the world's most famous megalithic site--
Stonehenge.
Stonehenge has been the site of a number of UFO encounters
over the years.
The county of Wiltshire itself is something of a UFO hotspot.
Dating back over the lifetime of the Ministry of Defense's UFO
Project, there have probably been several hundred,
if not low thousands, of sightings recorded
in the county of Wiltshire.
NARRATOR: Could the unique construction of Stonehenge
play a role in the unexplained phenomena
witnessed around the site?
Perhaps clues can be found by examining
the mysterious engineering of the megalithic structure
and the remarkable size and power
of the ancient stone circles.
The British Isles, 55 BC.
Julius Caesar begins a military campaign to extend
the Roman empire into Britain.
His forces are met by ferocious resistance
from the native Celtic tribes, led by their druid priests.
The tribes of Britain were all united against the warring
Romans by the druids to repel the greatest
general who's ever lived.
NARRATOR: It would take the Romans nearly
a century to conquer Britain.
Once they succeeded, they turned Stonehenge into a temple
of their sun god, Apollo.
But the Romans were not the first to adopt
this monument as their own.
The Celts themselves had migrated into Britain
some 2,500 years before.
When they arrived, Stonehenge was already there.
But the country was eerily deserted.
The people who are responsible for Stonehenge, for erecting
it, are nowhere to be seen.
And this is a puzzling piece of information that we know now.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists today believe
that this great neolithic stone circle has stood
on the plains of Wiltshire, England,
for no less than 5,000 years.
An outer ring of 30 four-ton stones
surrounds five huge arches, whose massive blocks weigh
22 tons each, and which were somehow transported
from 120 miles away.
It's an astonishing feat of ancient engineering,
and the mysteries about its construction still remain.
HUGH NEWMAN: Some of the stones at Stonehenge
weigh between 50 and 70 tons.
Some of the stones are even heavier.
So how could you have moved these into place?
How could you have moved them from Wales, where
the bluestones, the spotted dolomite
came from, within Stonehenge?
The bluestones, from which the original Stonehenge
was constructed, were transported from 120 miles
to the west, from a place called the Preseli Mountain, which
is the only place in the British Isles
where you can get that kind of stone.
Now, how they were moved is a mystery.
NARRATOR: The predominant theory as to how the megalithic blocks
were moved is that the builders fashioned sledges and rollers
out of tree trunks to lug the bluestones from the Preseli
hills, then transferred them onto rafts
and floated them first along the Welsh coast,
and then up the River Avon towards Salisbury Plain
You know, this idea that all these ancient blocks
were moved with wooden rollers is very interesting.
However, do you know what happens to wood when you
put 20 tons on a wooden roller?
It'll just get crushed to smithereens.
GRAHAM PHILLIPS: However they did it,
it must have been very important for them
to move these particular stones to Stonehenge.
And that's a mystery.
That doesn't happen anywhere else at stone
circles in the country.
They only come from stone that's quarried locally.
NARRATOR: However Stonehenge was constructed,
it involved moving much more than just the stone blocks
that stand today.
According to researchers, this is just
25% of the original monument, the center of a much larger
structure that was surrounded by multiple concentric circles,
constructed over a period of more than 1,000 years.
So Stonehenge is very interesting in that it
evolves over a very long period of time.
And the first thing that goes up at Stonehenge
is not there anymore.
It's the 56 holes that today are known as the Aubrey
Circle that used to be filled with the bluestones
from Preseli.
Around the outside of the stone
circle is constructed a ditch and embankment.
This is the so-called "henge structure"
that stands around Stonehenge, from where it gets its name.
NARRATOR: Many mainstream scholars
suggest that Stonehenge was simply a place
of worship and a burial ground.
But why would the ancient people of Britain
have spent more than 1,000 years to build what amounts
to a church and a cemetery?
HUGH NEWMAN: And the big problem is, we don't really
know who these people were.
We don't really know where they come from.
So we find similar structures around the world that
show incredible levels of sophistication,
like the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt,
like Machu Picchu in Peru.
So why not, in ancient Britain, why not have a very
advanced civilization here?
The fact that we now know that Stonehenge was part of a much
larger superstructure indicates to me that we've only
barely scratched the surface.
What did it all mean?