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baskets of dirt to Silbury to build one of the largest mounds on Earth. In 1848 a group of investigators burrowed a tunnel into it, going from the top to the bottom in hope of finding some clue. All they discovered were some picks made from red deer antlers. Recently these objects were given the carbon 14 test and were found to be from around 800 B.C. This was most upsetting to the theorists who believed the mound was at least a thousand years older than that. At the present time a team of American and British archaeologists are busy digging new holes in the Silbury mound, searching for new clues. Man-made mounds of unknown origin and purpose number in the thousands all over this haunted planet. In Ireland they are called sidhe, or fairy mounds, and are purportedly the homes of the little people. St Patrick is supposed to have stood on Croagh Patrick, a mound in County Mayo, when he ordered the snakes out of Ireland. Hundreds of these mounds are scattered throughout the United States, where they are popularly called the Indian mounds, even though the Indians have no legends to account for them. Some of the mounds in Ohio, Minnesota, and in the Southwest are skilfully laid out in geometric patterns which can be seen only from the air. When viewed from above, they represent elephants, birds, snakes, and other animals. Whoever laid these things out apparently intended them to be seen from the air. From the ground they appear to. be nothing more than symmetrical hills with flat tops. fields and earthwork (some covering fifty thousand acres and some as long as a thousand miles) in at least five scattered locations. The ridged field at Lake Titicaca in the Andes covers two hundred thousand acres and is spread over 160 miles. These man-made ridges and mounds may have been part of a complex agricultural and irrigation system. ! Other mounds and ridges of this sort are spread throughout Europe and Asia. Stone chests found in mounds in the Mississippi Valley are identical to chests dug up in mounds in Yorkshire, Eng- land. But most of the mounds have yielded little or nothing to patient diggers. Yet the presence of these mounds everywhere is an indication of a worldwide culture in prehistoric times which regarded mound building as an important activity. We do know that mound building persisted as part of the burial rites of ancient peoples. Early historians such as Homer and Herodotus describe these rites. Alexander the Great is supposed to have spent a fortune to erect a huge mound over the grave of his friend Hephaestion. The kinds of ancient Scythia on the Black Sea were buried under mounds. Archaeologists assume that this mound building practice led eventually to the development of the Egyptian pyramids. The desert sand was. a poor mound-making material, so the Egyptians switched to stone blocks. But how did mound building spread to the Americas in the pre-Indian epoch? Flying saucer cults read great significance into the fact that many modern UFO sightings seem to congregate around the old ‘Indian’ mounds. Strange lights, bobbing and weaving and blinking in intelligent patterns, periodically cavort above the mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Since UFOs have a tendency to appear in the same geographical locations year after year, century after century it is possible that ancient peoples saw them too and erected the Aerial surveys of South America have revealed elaborate, ridged