Who Built the Moon? (15 page)

Mechanisms were then put in place to remove a stream of material from the young planet, that would be spun into a new planet in close Earth orbit. The design was such that the regulator would slowly increase its orbital distance until it reached an average range of around 384,500 kilometres at the expected time of the arrival of intelligent life. This would mean that to the creatures on the planet’s surface, the disc of the regulator would appear, with the naked eye, to be the same size as the star at the centre of the system – which would be the first line of the message to make the developing Earth creatures become curious about the regulator. The realization that the factor for each was precisely 400 would also indicate that the message would be delivered in base-ten arithmetic.

Perhaps the UCA used something like black-hole technology to carefully strip only lighter elements from the infant planet. A black hole is a super-dense entity with so much gravity that even light is jsucked into it, like dust into a vacuum cleaner. A black hole with the mass of Mount Everest would have a miniscule radius – roughly the size of an atomic nucleus – and current thinking is that it would be hard for such a black hole to swallow anything, although it would certainly attract material like a giant magnet. Such an idea might explain the mascons (the regions of high gravity) still found on the Moon.

However the engineering job was undertaken, the biggest challenge was to communicate the message that the intelligent creatures endemic to the Earth would spot, because the very familiarity of seeing the regulator in the night sky would cause them to take it for granted. And the UCA knew that intelligence sometimes leads to a dulling of imagination, resulting in confusion between ‘describing’ and ‘understanding’. Contrary to what some intelligent individuals consider, the ability to describe something does not equate with understanding it.

The next levels of the message needed to be more difficult to ignore. The decision was made to create number patterns that stand out as very strange.

The UCA realized that it needed to draw further attention to the artificial nature of the regulator by building on a truly fundamental number that represented the planet. The number that was chosen was the planet’s spin rate per orbit of the star, which would have to be instantly recognizable as a value that was unique to the planet – a natural PIN (personal identification number) for an entire world. So, in this case it was a Planetary Identification Number that was required.

At the required time window, the planet would be rotating at a rate of 366 revolutions for each orbit around its mother star, and the use of the number value 366 would therefore be easily spotted as the Planetary Identification Number.

The intelligent creatures would recognize the PIN number from an early date as it requires only very basic astronomy to appreciate that this three-digit number is the most fundamental of all numbers that are unique to the planet.

Surely these Earth-dwelling creatures would be very surprised when they calculated the relative size of their planet to the orbiting regulator and discovered that the one is 366 per cent larger than the other.

The regulator was also engineered with a PIN number that was meaningful to the intended intelligent creatures. That number would be the reciprocal of the planet’s PIN number – the mirror image of 366.

The mathematics was simplicity itself. The regulator’s PIN number would be arrived at by considering its size as 100 per cent and dividing it by the relative size of the planet, namely 366 per cent. Working to five decimal places the result is:

100/366 = 0.27322

The regulator was then carefully engineered so that at the key point in time it would be orbiting the planet at a rate of once every 27.322 planetary days.

Surely, the creatures would notice that? And as an extra layer, if they looked at the issue the other way around, the size of the regulator compared to the planet has precisely the same number value – being 27.322 per cent of its parent.

Surely the intelligent Earth creatures could not fail to be alerted by such an unbelievably improbable number matching? There is absolutely no reason why the regulator’s orbital period in planetary days should numerically echo the relative size relationship it also enjoyed with the Earth.

The consequence of these arrangements would not be lost on the new life forms because they would easily realize that for every 10,000 of their planetary days, the regulator would complete exactly 366 orbits of the planet. Surely they would spot the use of round base-ten numbers and the PIN number 366 being echoed by the regulator?

But then, if they did not recognize these message patterns it would mean that they still lacked the intelligence or imagination to be considered mature.

It struck us as extremely likely that the UCA must have had some control over the Earth’s rate of spin and its orbital speed, so that they could ensure that it got to the magic 366 rotations at the required time. From everything that is known about the Earth, its orbital speed has been steadily decreasing for a long time but to the astonishment of scientists at the National Institute for Science and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, it suddenly stopped this deceleration in 1999. CNN reported the story on January 2
^nd
2004 saying:

‘Experts agree that the rate at which the Earth travels through space has slowed ever so slightly for millennia. To make the world’s official time agree with where the Earth actually is in space, scientists in 1972 started adding an extra ‘leap second’ on the last day of the year.

For twenty-eight years, scientists repeated the procedure. But in 1999, they discovered the Earth was no longer lagging behind.

At the National Institute for Science and Technology in Boulder, spokesman Fred McGehan said most scientists agree the Earth’s orbit around the sun has been gradually slowing for millennia. But he said they don’t have a good explanation for why it’s suddenly on schedule.’

This caused us to look up the actual speed that the Earth has settled at in its circumnavigation of the Sun, and we were surprised to find that its mean orbital velocity is almost exactly one ten thousandth of the speed of light in a vacuum. At 29,780 metres per second, the variance is less than two-thirds of one percent.

We thought that this was probably a coincidence – but we could not pick and choose which factors are, and are not, significant. And we had to remember that the value 10,000 had already shown up in the number of Earth days for every 366 lunar orbits.

We next turned our attention to the Sun. The diameter of the Sun is estimated at 1,392,000km and as the average diameter of the Earth is 12,742km, so it follows that 109.245 Earths could be placed side by side along the diameter of the Sun. This is not a number that stands out for any reason – at least not immediately. But when we looked at the number of Sun diameters in the Earth’s aphelion (its greatest distance to the Sun) we found that there are 109.267, effectively an identical value because the estimate of the Sun’s diameter is within this tiny margin.

How strange. There are the same number of Earth diameters in the Sun’s diameter as there are Sun diameters between the Earth and the Sun. This is a near perfect echo that does not work for any other planet in the solar system.

These numbers are ratios and are therefore real and independent of units of measurement. But the number also stood out because there are 10,920.8km in the Moon’s equatorial circumference. At the time we noticed this, we considered that it really did have to be a coincidence because the number of kilometres in anything just could not be relevant since the metre is a unit that is an invented human convention.

But then we realized that the Moon turns at a rate of precisely one kilometre every second at its equator and that did strike us as very odd. Maybe we had been too hasty in rejecting the role of the metric system.

Our observations about the patterns inherent in the size and movement of the Moon, in terms of ratios, stand out as being beyond mere accident. Although we accept that the apparent patterns that rely on units of measurement, such as kilometres, are far harder to accept without an explanation of how this could have come about. Any ‘reasonable’ person would immediately reject such factors as meaningless – but then we think there is a great deal in the old adage that ‘all progress is dependent on the unreasonable person’.

And some people would not even get to the point of recognizing the patterns in the ratios within the Sun–Earth–Moon system. A scientifically trained person looking at any one of these points would almost certainly respond by saying that ‘all numbers are equally valid’. A value such as 100 or 40,000 dropping out of the mix is just as likely as any other number.

We absolutely agree with this view and we would ignore such results if they were only happening once or even twice, but we are confronting a whole list of non random-looking values that add up to create what would otherwise be the most unlikely series of chance events in the history of the cosmos. And, in our view, anyone who dismisses all of these points as coincidence is being either very illogical or downright dishonest.

It is absolutely true that if someone tosses a coin 100 times and it comes out heads every time, the chance of the next toss resulting in another head is exactly 50/50. However, if this ever happens to you in the real world, we would suggest that, before you let them toss the coin again, you check that it is not double headed. Only a fool would not be suspicious.

Scientific discovery has always been a process of identifying patterns that stand out from the chaos of random events. For example, identifying areas where there are more cases of a specific illness is likely to point to a local factor such as radioactive bedrock, a leakage of harmful industrial effluence or a contaminated food plant. When something varies markedly from the norm there is usually a reason.

If we look at the available information logically, and without preconceptions of what is and is not possible, the Moon appears to have been inserted into the Sun–Earth relationship with the accuracy of the proverbial Swiss clockmaker!

It appears that no one has previously spotted this message and we only came across it because of our findings relating to Megalithic units. We suspect that the problem is one of too much knowledge and a loss of the ability of experts, in our super-technological world, to think simply. Perhaps if Galileo or Isaac Newton had access to the information that we have today they would have noticed these issues concerning the Moon, but, alas, they did not have the accurate measurements that we have today and therefore they could not observe the patterns. Today we have the necessary information, but astronomers are understandably more interested in quasars, pulsars and all kinds of deep space objects rather than the fundamentals of the Earth–Moon relationship.

We now needed to consider a scenario that would explain how the Megalithic Yard came to be involved in this ultra-long-distance message.

Maybe the UCA was aware of the potential problem of the message headline being missed due to over-sophistication and took steps to inject extra information near to the key moment when the message needed to be interpreted. Perhaps, we mused, the UCA had stepped in at a number of key points throughout the process of human development.

These thoughts were more complex than the set-and-forget scenario of an unknown agency building a planetary regulator that was, in effect, an incubator for life. The idea that some entity, probably an advanced species from another galaxy, established a mechanism to foster life and then moved on seemed reasonable in the face of such evidence. But to have an agency that has maintained a periodic involvement with humankind across several billions of years is much harder to reconcile.

However, we decided to stick to our methodology of viewing the reasons ‘why’ ahead of dealing with the reasons ‘why not’. We needed to review the material from ancient history and prehistory that had brought us to look so hard at the Moon.

Firstly we had to remember that it was because the stone structures from the fourth millennium BC were apparently created to study the Moon, that Alexander Thom began his lifetime quest to investigate them. Could these large standing stones be pointing deliberately at the Moon and the Sun? The orientation of the Megalithic structures certainly led him to identify the Megalithic Yard as being a unit of 82.96656cm – give or take 0.61cm. And this in turn led us to the findings laid out in this book.

As stated earlier, we had discovered that the Megalithic Yard was merely the starting point of a holistic measuring system that dealt with linear distance, mass, volume and time. It was an utterly brilliant system and we found that many modern units had descended from it, such as the imperial pint and the pound. We had been unable to imagine how the pound and the pint could have survived across so many millennia but it is a fact of mathematics that they are directly related, either by design or by an incredible series of coincidences.

To recap, the most intriguing fact about the Megalithic Yard lay in the way it had been ingeniously devised to fit accurately into the circumference of the Earth. Megalithic geometry was slightly different to the 360-degree geometry invented by the Sumerians, which is still in use more than four thousand years later. It had been based on 366 degrees, apparently (and very logically) because the Earth revolves once on its axis whilst it travels in its great orbital circle around the Sun. Under this Stone-Age system of geometry, each of the 366 degrees was split into sixty minutes of arc and each minute of arc into six seconds of arc.

The incredible beauty of the system is that when the globe of the Earth was treated as a huge circle, the polar circumference of the Earth is exactly the right size to give 366 Megalithic Yards to a polar second of arc.

We had been very surprised at the way the Megalithic Yard bisected the circumference of the Earth, but what we didn’t expect to discover was any direct connection between the Megalithic Yard and other bodies within our solar system. And there are none – apart from the Moon and the Sun.