The Why Files: Operation Podcast - 592: Proving Atlantis | The Megalithic Yard Mystery (STRIPPED)

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Thousands of years ago, ancient cultures across Europe built massive stone structures with extraordinary precision. Scottish engineer Alexander Thom discovered these sites all used the same exact unit of measurement: 2.72 feet, which he called the Megalithic Yard. This measurement appeared everywhere, from Stonehenge to the Scottish Isles, at sites separated by thousands of miles and built across thousands of years. These structures weren't just monuments - they were sophisticated machines that tracked celestial movements with astonishing accuracy. How did ancient people without writing or advanced tools achieve such mathematical precision? Why does this measurement connect to fundamental constants of the universe? And most puzzling: why did they suddenly stop building these structures? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B70KYVTJ1is&t=125s Sources: Bright Insight: You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update    • You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gob...  Bright Insight: The Gobekli Tepe “Situation” is WORSE Than I Thought    • The Gobekli Tepe “Situation” is WORSE...  Atlantis Rises, Lemuria Falls: The War that Sank a Continent    • Atlantis Rises, Lemuria Falls: The Wa... 

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These monuments puzzled researchers for centuries. Then came Alexander Thom, a Scottish engineer, an Oxford professor obsessed with numbers. He surveyed hundreds of ancient sites, measured every stone, calculated every angle, and found something impossible. A single unit of measurement, exactly 2.72 feet. This wasn't random. The same length appeared everywhere. At sites separated by thousands of miles, built across thousands of years, Tom called it the megalithic yard. Archaeologists called it nonsense. Stone Age people had no writing, no metal tools, no advanced mathematics. But the number appeared no writing, no metal tools, no advanced mathematics, but the

number appeared everywhere, at every major site, in every structure. This wasn't coincidence. Tom believed he'd found the blueprint of a lost system, a universal ruler connected to the stars, the sun, and the earth itself. The system required knowledge these ancient builders shouldn't have possessed. So if Stone Age people didn't create this technology, who did? Alexander Thom was a retired professor of engineering from Oxford University. He had the best survey equipment available. On weekends and holidays, he'd load his car with measuring tools, then drive to remote locations, visit stone circles that had stood for thousands of years. Tom wasn't looking for artifacts or treasure. He was looking for patterns.

Over decades of fieldwork, he studied more than 600 megalithic sites across Britain and France. Then Tom made an extraordinary claim. These ancient builders were using technology far ahead of their time. These Neolithic people were thought to be primitive. No writing, no advanced mathematics, but somehow they used a standardized unit of measurement. He called it the megalithic yard, 2.72 feet, or 0.829 meters. Not 0.828, not 0.83, exactly 0.829 meters. The same measurement appeared all over the ancient world, used for thousands of years. Alexander Thom knew he'd found more than a prehistoric ruler.

He found a key. As he analyzed data from hundreds of sites, a pattern emerged. The stone circles weren't crude piles of rock. They followed precise geometric designs, perfect circles and ellipses. The Ring of Brodgar in Scotland has 27 stones set in a perfect circle. But it was originally 60 stones. 60 matches ancient Mesopotamian math systems. 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 6 days of creation. Stone placement accurate to within half an inch over a 340 foot diameter. Modern surveyors with laser equipment couldn't do better. This wasn't primitive work. This was advanced engineering. The perimeter of the Sarsen Circle at Stonehenge measures exactly 120

megalithic yards. The width of each stone is 2.5 megalithic yards. These aren't rough estimates. These are exact values. Tom found the same geometric principles occurring again and again. Evidence of Pythagorean triangles, thousands of years before Pythagoras was born. They were encoding mathematics into the landscape, using the megalithic yard as their standard unit. But these weren't just monuments. They were machines. Giant instruments built of earth and stone.

Tom believed they were observatories. Sites like Kalanish on the Isle of Lewis. The massive complex at Avebury. These were immense clocks and calendars. Using the megalithic yard, builders achieved perfect alignment with the solstice sunrise. They tracked the equinoxes. Most people think the equinox is when day and night are the same length. Well, that's actually called the equilux, which happens a few days before. The equinox is when the

center of the sun crosses the Earth's equator. Stone-age people aren't supposed to know what the equator is. Some sites were precise enough to predict lunar eclipses. They even tracked the Moon's maximum northern and southern positions. This is almost a 19-year cycle. This required generations of observation and incredibly precise measurement. The Megalithic Yard wasn't arbitrary. generations of observation and incredibly precise measurement. The megalithic yard wasn't arbitrary. It wasn't just a convenient length

like a pace or an arm span. Tom believed it came from the cosmos itself, a unit linked directly to the planet. Some researchers think the megalithic yard was part of a system based on a 366-degree circle, not our modern 360-degree system. In that system, each degree had 60 arc minutes, each minute six arc seconds, each arc second equaled 366 megalithic yards. Now multiply all those numbers together, you get the circumference of the earth.

Think about that. People without writing, without modern mathematics, without telescopes or computers, somehow calculated a unit of measurement based on the exact size of our planet, thousands of years before we had accurate ways to measure this. Geometry, astronomy, mathematics. This wasn't superstition. This was science. These ancient cultures weren't in contact with each other,

but possessed the same ancient knowledge, which could mean only one thing. The knowledge came from a single source. You searched for your informant, who disappeared without a trace. You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed. You swept the city, driving closer to the truth. While curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible.

You searched for your informant, who disappeared without a trace. You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed. You swept the city, driving closer to the truth, while curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. This lost science, this cosmic blueprint etched in stone, presented archaeology with a big problem.

How did this knowledge spread? We're talking about hundreds of sites, from the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, down through England and Wales, across the Channel to Brittany and France. Sites separated by hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, built over hundreds of years, by cultures with no known direct contact. Yet they all used the same 2.72 feet, the same megalithic yard, with the same geometric and astronomical sophistication. How? Mainstream archaeology didn't have many answers. The conventional view was that Neolithic societies were isolated. They were small bands of people.

They didn't travel. They didn't trade. They didn't communicate. The idea of a standardized, precise measurement shared across such vast distances seemed impossible. But none of this was written down. No instructions were carved in stone. And there's no evidence of simple math and geometry getting more complex over the years. It's as if this sudden, highly advanced knowledge just appeared.

And once this knowledge arrived, it was all over Europe. Then researchers started looking for evidence of the megalithic yard in other parts of the world. They were mostly looking for ways to disprove the yard. Instead, they found more evidence of it. The ancient Egyptians used a remen, which measured 14.6 inches. Now, if you make a triangle that is one remen wide and two remen tall,

the diagonal or hypotenuse is 32.6 inches. That's exactly one megalithic yard. Again, calculated using the Pythagorean theorem thousands of years before he discovered it. Make a triangle that's one ancient Sumerian cubit wide and half a cubit tall, you get one megalithic yard. Other measurements from ancient Mesopotamia also hint at a common base unit and Pythagorean triangles. It was like finding fragments of the same ancient system scattered across the globe, remnants of a once universal language of measurement, a language that predated all known civilizations.

This raised a fundamental question. Did independent cultures independently arrive at the exact same unit of measurement? Highly unlikely. Did knowledge slowly spread through undocumented contact over generations? Possible but hard to prove. Or did it point to something more profound? Evidence of a common origin? A shared older source culture? The similarities across cultures were too strong to ignore. Egypt, Britain, the pattern pointed to a global system, a system inherited from a civilization that came before them all. A civilization that understood cosmic cycles, that possessed advanced mathematics, that

spread its knowledge across the ancient world. A civilization wiped from history, leaving only echoes of its knowledge, a civilization encoded in stone, preserved in the dimensions of sacred sites, a civilization hidden in plain sight for thousands of years, a civilization like Atlantis. Fragments of an ancient measurement system found across continents, linked by mathematical principles that shouldn't exist. A civilization like Atlantis

seemed like a ridiculous explanation, but Alexander Thom was just following the evidence. He wasn't searching for myths or legends. He was an engineer. He didn't believe in magic. He believed in math, in numbers, in patterns that couldn't be dismissed as coincidence. He spent decades mapping megalithic sites.

His detailed surveys uncovered something other researchers missed. The ancient sites weren't randomly placed. Their positions formed straight lines across Britain and France. When researchers plotted major megalithic sites on maps, unexpected geometric patterns emerged. Stonehenge, Averybury, Glastonbury Tor, they formed an isosceles triangle. The distance of the long sides? 19,000 megalithic yards exactly. And the angles between them are 23.5 degrees. That's the same angle of the Earth's axial tilt. The ring of Brodger, Kalanish, and Mayes-Howe created another perfect triangle whose size could be measured in perfect megalithic yards, not in fractions of yards, in whole numbers.

And the angle in that triangle is 27.5 degrees. That matches the Moon's lunar standstill angle. The Rollwright stones, Arbor Low and Stanton Drew, form a megalithic yard triangle containing the angle 43.2 degrees. 43.2 and 432 appear everywhere from Norse mythology to ancient Egyptian architecture, specifically the Great Pyramid. Other sites revealed similar geometric relationships. Sites separated by mountains, by water, by huge distances, yet maintained mathematical connections with each other. The strangest triangle connects three sacred sites, Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, and Old Sarum. The sides form a 3-4-5 Pythagorean triangle.

Perfect proportions. Perfect whole-number megalithic yards on all sides. A perfect right angle. It's the foundation of all architectural design. Neolithic builders were using this principle thousands of years before the pyramids were built in Egypt, and they were using it at a landscape level over miles of terrain. These alignments weren't visible from the ground.

They can only be seen from high above, very high, from high in the atmosphere, or from orbit. How did ancient people know these perfect alignments without aerial surveys, without satellites, without flight? The engineering required to do this wasn't just impressive, it was impossible, at least for Neolithic people with simple tools. The margin of error was smaller than the width of a human hair. But the sites maintained this accuracy over distances of hundreds of miles, over uneven terrain, over rivers and valleys. Even modern surveying equipment would struggle to achieve this.

These discoveries were revolutionary, but the academic establishment was not impressed. The findings were uncomfortable. Traditional archaeology couldn't explain them. Tom's work was dismissed and ridiculed. He was marginalized. But the numbers didn't lie. The alignments were real. The cosmic connections were real.

The ancient builders weren't just placing stones randomly. They were mapping something. Something flowing through the Earth. Alexander Tom didn't have the technology to detect it. But now he do. Critics of the megalithic yard focused on margins of error, but Tom saw more than numbers in the stones. He saw intention, design. The megalithic builders weren't just placing stones randomly.

They were mapping something, something flowing through the Earth's crust. These invisible pathways connecting ancient sites weren't just imaginary lines on maps. They were something real, something physical, something measurable. In 1921, amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins noticed ancient sites formed straight alignments across the British landscape. He called these paths ley lines. Watkins saw them as simple trade routes, old roads connecting sacred places.

But decades later, researchers found something stranger. These lines didn't just connect sites. They followed Earth's magnetic field lines. They tracked underground water sources. They aligned with natural fault lines in the Earth's crust. The Earth isn't solid rock all the way through. It's a dynamic system. Molten iron core, magnetic field, tectonic plates,

currents flowing beneath our feet. Modern instruments detect subtle electromagnetic fluctuations along these ancient alignments, places where the Earth's natural energies concentrate, flow, and interact. What if the megalithic yard wasn't just about measuring distance? What if it measured wavelengths, frequencies, energy patterns in the Earth itself? Some researchers believe megalithic sites were built where these natural energies peak.

The stones acted as markers, as amplifiers, as instruments tuned to the Earth's subtle energies. Scientists at Edinburgh University found that stone circles often sit above underground streams and geological fault lines, places where Earth's magnetic field shows measurable anomalies. The mythic yard could have been derived from these energy wavelengths, a unit calibrated to the planet's natural resonance. Ancient cultures around the world spoke of invisible energy lines. Chinese feng shui mapped dragon currents flowing through the Earth. Australian aborigines followed song lines across the continent.

Native Americans built on power spots where the Earth's energy was strongest. Same concept, different names. The megalithic builders may have been tapping into these currents, using stones to mark them, channel them, maybe even harness them for purposes we still don't understand. Not through primitive superstition, but through direct observation, through scientific measurement, through mathematical precision using the megalithic yard. If true, these prehistoric engineers weren't measuring miles or feet.

They were measuring the Earth's energy grid, a sophisticated technology hidden in plain sight, monuments built as instruments, tuned to the planet itself. Others point to the acoustic properties of these sites. Stonehenge, Newgrange, Karnak. They create unusual sound effects, standing waves, resonant frequencies. A drum struck at certain spots in Stonehenge creates vibrations that match the site's key measurements in megalithic yards. The correlation is mathematical. It's precise and deliberate.

The megalithic yard is 0.829 meters, a strange number, unless you start thinking in terms of harmonics. A 0.829 meter wavelength is 413.6 hertz. That's very close to the G-sharp note just above middle C, a harmonic tone. As we've covered before, many sites, including the Great Pyramid of Giza, resonate around harmonic frequencies. Stone chambers can amplify these frequencies. The precise geometry of stone circles, potentially laid out using the yard, might have created powerful acoustic chambers. What's interesting is hearing these sounds in the centre of the circle of stones. Today you can still hear some echoes.

So you hear the birds calling or if you clap your hands or if you play a musical instrument, you hear quite a subtle echo. But if you're listening, it is clearly there. Think of how sound behaves in a cathedral or specially designed concert hall. These ancient sites, built with massive stones positioned according to specific measurement, could have resonated at specific frequencies when exposed to wind, chanting or drumming. Archaeologists generally agree that Stonehenge was some sort of temple aligned with the movements of the sun. But a research team at the UK's University of Huddersfield believe its stones might also have been positioned to create acoustic effects.

And when you clap your hands, sound leaves your hands, goes off, then it hits all the stones in the circle and comes back. And because I'm right in the center, there's a bit of a focus. And we know that frequencies affect the human mind they can induce altered states of consciousness and the megalithic yard has another dimension it might connect to human biology the number 2.72 or more precisely 2.718 is the mathematical constant e Euler's number it's one of the most important numbers in mathematics. It's the base of natural logarithms, found everywhere in nature. The growth patterns of shells, the unfurling of leaves,

the distribution of prime numbers, even the way nerve signals travel through your body. It's a fundamental constant of reality. And the megalithic yard matches Euler's number. This is either the biggest coincidence in archaeological history or evidence of profound mathematical knowledge, knowledge that shouldn't exist in the Stone Age. And then there's the most radical idea,

that the megalithic yard wasn't developed by Neolithic humans struggling with basic survival, that it's a remnant, a piece of inherited knowledge passed down from a much older, far more advanced civilization that disappeared long ago. Survivors of a great flood, like Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, or maybe the great builders of Tartaria, or maybe visitors from somewhere else. Visitors who came to Earth and gave primitive humans a gift, a number,

a literal universal number that allowed humanity to take a great leap forward. The megalithic yard can be found everywhere you look for it, in stone, in the sky, running through the Earth. It's a number that wasn't just used to measure distance, but was a key related to frequency, vibration, sound, gravity, and consciousness. It's a number that seems to be connected to reality itself. Ancient Builders Ancient builders tapping into fundamental constants of the universe, encoding secrets in stone circles using a single precise unit. A unit rediscovered thousands of years later by a persistent Scottish engineer.

It's a great story. But is it true? Alexander Thom made a good case. But the better our technology gets, the more precisely we can measure things. So does Thom's theory hold up today. Thom claimed his unit 2.72 feet was used with remarkable precision across hundreds of sites. But later researchers applying more modern methods disagreed. Archaeologist Clive Ruggles said Tom's analysis suffered from selection bias. He focused on sites and measurements that fit his hypothesis while overlooking others. We see this with every urban legend, every paranormal or UFO story. People cherry pick the facts that support their story and ignore everything else. Like the triangles.

If you connect enough sites, you'll be able to find triangles with right angles. that support their story and ignore everything else. Like the triangles. If you connect enough sites, you'll be able to find triangles with right angles, but none of the triangles are as perfect as Tom claimed. Most ancient sites don't use the megalithic yard, but some do. Tom focused on those. The rest use measurements close to a megalithic yard,

but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, not when trying to explain a universal cosmic numerical constant. That kind of number should be consistent. It's not. Then there's the lack of direct physical evidence. We have examples of ancient Egyptian cubit rods. We have Mesopotamian weights and measures. But despite decades of searching,

no one has found a neolithic rod clearly marked with a measurement of a megalithic yard. So if not a precise standardized yard, why did Tom always record measurements of about 2.72 feet? Well, there are simpler, less exotic explanations. The length of 2.72 feet is very close to a comfortable step, especially for measuring ground. That's how we'd measure the backyard for football. We'd walk and count our steps.

The yard might be nothing more than the average stride length used by builders laying out sites. This method wouldn't create lengths that are perfectly uniform, but since humans are pretty much the same size, the length of their stride is pretty much the same length. This would result in measurements clustering around an average that Tom later identified as the yard. Tom took tens of thousands of measurements of all kinds of things from over 600 locations. That's a lot of data to choose from.

Modern survey techniques like LIDAR sometimes confirm Tom's measurements with surprising accuracy. Other techniques show subtle variations he might have missed. Honestly, the whole picture is complicated. But Tom's critics missed something important. The sites were used for astronomical observation. This is fact, not speculation. Multiple studies confirm this.

But here's where it gets weird. Some stone circles predict eclipses. The Arbery Circle at Stonehenge aligned with a complex 56-year eclipse prediction cycle. The ancient Greeks couldn't calculate this. The Babylonians couldn't predict this. Yet somehow, Neolithic farmers without writing, without mathematics as we know it, encoded this information in stone. The sites work.

They function as astronomical computers. The question isn't whether they used advanced mathematics. The question is how they knew it. So where does that leave us? Well, I think Alexander Tom is a hero. His dedication was incredible. His surveys provided invaluable data. He forced archaeologists to take another look

at many megalithic sites. These weren't random piles of rocks. It wasn't until the 1960s that computers confirmed that Stonehenge and sites like it were built with intention and great skill. But was there a single universal megalithic yard accurate to millimeters shared across Neolithic Europe? Probably not.

There's no physical evidence to support it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And we still don't have good answers as to how these sites were built. How did primitive people without metal tools or written language manage to quarry 30-ton stones, move them 20 miles, and stand them up? Well, in the 90s, archaeologist Julian Richards demonstrated how 140 people could move a 40-ton stone using Neolithic tools. Three, two, one, go! But it wasn't easy for them, and they weren't very accurate.

Yet these sites are over 5,000 years old and show complex geometry. Their structures are aligned precisely with the movements of the sun and the moon. The more we study them, the more we learn that Stone Age humans were making mathematical and cosmological connections thousands of years before anyone thought possible. The real mystery to me is not how our ancestors built these monuments, it's why they stopped. They moved mountains and mapped the stars and built structures aligned with cosmic precision.

Then suddenly, they didn't. Only 5% of Gobekli Tepe has been excavated. So why are we still at 5% and what is the holdup? Which is how I came to learn that a 20-year partnership that enabled the Dogas Group to oversee excavations and tourism management at Gobekli Tepe. This was literally announced at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. I mean, you can't make this up. There's a gap in human history. It's an uncomfortable gap that mainstream archaeology doesn't like to discuss. The director

of excavations of Gobekli Tepe has called for me to be sanctioned, essentially banned from the site itself or potentially the entire country of Turkey. What other knowledge did ancient humans possess? Why did they lose that knowledge and if so much knowledge can be lost once who's to say it couldn't happen again thanks for listening or watching the white file stripped where i try to get right to the point right to the story and then right to the truth. But like most topics we cover on The Y Files, today's is recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to see or learn more about, go to the Y Files.com slash tips. If you're watching on YouTube or other video platforms, remember The Y Files is also a podcast.

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