14 replies to this topic

[whitecrow]

Hello,

I am pleased to have found this forum.  I live in southern California in the US.  For many years, hiking the back country has been one of my favorite pastimes, and this is a wonderful area for that.  I've discovered that the area where I live is home to dozens of standing stones which are spread over such a large area that no one has realized they are part of a massive complex.

The Indians of this area - the Kumeyaay, Luiseños and Cupeños mostly, have lived here for upwards of 10,000 years.  There is no evidence that they ever set up megaliths.  If the stones I've found are not natural formations (some of them surely are), they are older than that.  So far I have discovered about 30 stones are scattered over fifty square miles.  Some of them can be seen for miles in any direction.  Some are in residential neighborhoods, and I suspect that many of the smaller ones have been destroyed in the name of progress.

In researching at the library and visits to local archaeologists, I've discovered that very little research has been done about the period before the Indians arrived.  Egyptian, Roman and Chinese artifacts have been found in the area, although this is anecdotal.  This area is rich in petroglyphs and even intaglios that can only be seen from the air.  

I am a part-time journalist and have been attempting to raise awareness about these stones before they are all dynamited and have houses built on their sites.  I hope to get ideas from the forum about preserving the complex.  If I am right, there is no corresponding monument anywhere in North America.  I have many photos of the sites.  If I can figure out how to post them, I will.  Meanwhile I'll be most interested in any comments.

[mickeybowman]

whitecrow, on 7 April 2009, 16:46, said:

Hello,

I am pleased to have found this forum.  I live in southern California in the US.  For many years, hiking the back country has been one of my favorite pastimes, and this is a wonderful area for that.  I've discovered that the area where I live is home to dozens of standing stones which are spread over such a large area that no one has realized they are part of a massive complex.

The Indians of this area - the Kumeyaay, Luiseños and Cupeños mostly, have lived here for upwards of 10,000 years.  There is no evidence that they ever set up megaliths.  If the stones I've found are not natural formations (some of them surely are), they are older than that.  So far I have discovered about 30 stones are scattered over fifty square miles.  Some of them can be seen for miles in any direction.  Some are in residential neighborhoods, and I suspect that many of the smaller ones have been destroyed in the name of progress.

In researching at the library and visits to local archaeologists, I've discovered that very little research has been done about the period before the Indians arrived.  Egyptian, Roman and Chinese artifacts have been found in the area, although this is anecdotal.  This area is rich in petroglyphs and even intaglios that can only be seen from the air.  

I am a part-time journalist and have been attempting to raise awareness about these stones before they are all dynamited and have houses built on their sites.  I hope to get ideas from the forum about preserving the complex.  If I am right, there is no corresponding monument anywhere in North America.  I have many photos of the sites.  If I can figure out how to post them, I will.  Meanwhile I'll be most interested in any comments.

[mickeybowman]

How interesting.  Thanks for sharing your observations. I am a retired science teacher and have long been interested in the megaliths, not scholarly, I just find them fascinating.  

I do sculpture and move stone using the equipment we have available today and am in awe as to how these huge stones could get quarried, moved long distances, and carved with tools that surely were significantly more rudimentary than the ones I have.

I look forward to responses you may get.

Mickey Bowman
Byron, IL

[whitecrow]

mickeybowman, on 7 April 2009, 9:33, said:

I do sculpture and move stone using the equipment we have available today and am in awe as to how these huge stones could get quarried, moved long distances, and carved with tools that surely were significantly more rudimentary than the ones I have.

This question comes up a lot.  The landscape here is extremely rocky, and features thousands of boulders from the size of buildings on down.  Some rocks have plainly been hauled into place, and that would take a group effort.  For others, simply excavating a large enough hole under one end would allow gravity to do the work.

Attached Files

•  mesarock03.jpg   51.29K   14 downloads
•  standingstone01b.jpg   50.25K   13 downloads

[tiompan]

whitecrow, on 7 April 2009, 17:41, said:

mickeybowman, on 7 April 2009, 9:33, said:

I do sculpture and move stone using the equipment we have available today and am in awe as to how these huge stones could get quarried, moved long distances, and carved with tools that surely were significantly more rudimentary than the ones I have.

This question comes up a lot.  The landscape here is extremely rocky, and features thousands of boulders from the size of buildings on down.  Some rocks have plainly been hauled into place, and that would take a group effort.  For others, simply excavating a large enough hole under one end would allow gravity to do the work.

Sounds very interesting , might be an idea to GPS  the stones as well as pics .

Thanks george

[whitecrow]

tiompan, on 7 April 2009, 10:30, said:

Sounds very interesting , might be an idea to GPS  the stones as well as pics .

That's been my idea, too.  I'm pretty broke but hope to get my hands on a handheld unit one of these days.  Meanwhile I'm using GoogleEarth a lot.

[tiompan]

whitecrow, on 7 April 2009, 18:43, said:

tiompan, on 7 April 2009, 10:30, said:

Sounds very interesting , might be an idea to GPS  the stones as well as pics .

That's been my idea, too.  I'm pretty broke but hope to get my hands on a handheld unit one of these days.  Meanwhile I'm using GoogleEarth a lot.

It's not unknown for local archaeologists to lend equipment  .
Good luck

George

[whitecrow]

I had a short article published about the sites I've found.  I thought you folks might be interested to read it.  It has about 15 photos associated with it which I won't include here, but the article follows....


San Diego’s megalithic mystery
04-09-09
by David Lambert


Just north of the intersection of the 15 and the 78 is a sight that millions of people see every year.  Towering above a steep ridge north of Escondido is an enormous boulder called Mesa Rock.  Sticking up like an off-kilter office building, it dwarfs the cars and trucks on the freeway far below.  Depending on where you’re standing, you can see it as far as ten miles away on a clear day.  Kids used to drive up there and make out, back in a safer and more innocent time.  Now, the ridge is falling victim to creeping development, and cul-de-sacs curl toward it like tentacles.  I’ve heard people say Mesa Rock looks like a sea lion, a beaver, or a giant stone thumb.  I’ve always thought it looks like someone put it there.

[photo: mesarock03]

People have lived in southern California area for at least 12,000 years, and probably far longer.  Back then the sea was around 300 feet lower, and camels and wild horses still roamed the canyons and the desert.  The climate was cooler and wetter.  By 10,000 years ago, both the camels and horses had gone extinct, and the area was being populated by the same Luiseños, Cupeños and Kumeyaay that live here today.  In the desert, large areas were sparsely populated with members of the Serrano and Cahuila groups.  Those are not the names they gave themselves, of course.  The southern tribes spoke Hokan, while to the north various Utic-Aztecan dialects were spoken.  These tribes left behind ollas, flints, petroglyphs and rock paintings.  In the desert people still find arrows, baskets, mats and other fibrous materials.  For the most part, these people lived a peaceful, productive life, and lacked for very little.  All of San Diego County has turned up artifacts and other traces of their life here.

But these folks didn’t roll big rocks around.

So who did?  Before asking that question, we should ask if anybody did.  After all, this is a rocky landscape.  It’s made of rocks, from the pebbles underfoot to boulders the size of buildings.  Our mountains and hills are girded with a granite skeleton that protrudes through the hard soil and gives us our gorgeous cliffs, canyons and ridges.  If you want to see this rugged landscape at its best, simply drive north from Escondido toward Temecula.  If you really look (maybe it’s best to let someone else drive), you’ll see formations that are as spectacular as any piles of boulders anywhere in North America.  And some of them are singular, huge rocks that jut up from ridgetops to form landmarks that must be visible from other ridges for miles around.  Many of these are natural landmarks, features of the way our hills erode from the top down, exposing their bones.  So why would anyone suppose that Mesa Rock was anything else?

[photo:  mesarock01]

Well, look at it.  Look at where it is.  Mesa Rock is visible from San Marcos to the south side of Escondido, and from Jesmond Dene and Daley Ranch to Hidden Meadows.  If you were to pick the one place where a landmark could be seen over such a large area, this is where you’d put it.  If you drive along Old Highway 395 on the east side of the I-15 and pull over and get out of your car and look, you’ll see that Mesa Rock is not a single rock but one of a row of enormous boulders that stud the ridge like a row of broken teeth.  Natural?  Hey, it could happen.  Look twice.  What are the odds?

In 2005 I discovered Daley Ranch, just above Dixon Lake in northeastern Escondido.  This gem of unspoiled habitat has thirty miles of rugged hiking, biking and riding trails that wind through an old cattle ranch.  I’ve been hiking there ever since, as often as I can get out there.  There are a lot of big rocks at Daley Ranch, and some of them are standing up in places where they look like someone put them there.  One of them even is turned so that it appears to be a human profile, facing south.  There are a lot of other strange things at Daley Ranch too.  There are rows of hilltops where the boulders looks as though someone had arranged them into defensive ramparts.  I thought they were natural formations too, until I visited Mule Hill at the east end of Lake Hodges.  On this hill in December, 1846, a company of Americans soldiers held out against the Mexicans after the Battle of San Pasqual.  They moved boulders into defensive positions that are there today, and they look exactly like the hilltops at Daley Ranch.

Whoever did this, it was a long, long time ago.  Once I began connecting dots, I started keeping my eyes open for other standing stones, or menhirs.  So far I have found around forty, running in a band from the northern county line south to Rancho Bernardo and Poway, and eastward into Valley Center.  Some of them are on private property.  Some have, no doubt, been destroyed for the sake of development.

[photo:  standingstone01a]

In the graphic below, the yellow arrows represent the approximate locations of standing stones that I’m reasonably certain are not and could not be situated as they are without someone putting them that way.  The red arrows represent stones or groups of stones that could be natural but then again, they might not.  There are additional sites not on this image, mostly to the south in Rancho Bernardo.  I’m not a geologist, but I’ve been talking to a few.  I’ve talked to a few archaeologists too, and although no one wanted to be quoted for this article, no one has laughed at me because there isn’t any real written history prior to the Spanish invasion.  Beyond that, dreary archaeological texts and dry articles in obscure journals talk about population density, language groups, types of relics and the places where they’ve been found.  The general outlines of Indian history are traced in books back for a couple thousand years.  The Indians themselves claim to have been here for 10,000 years, and they’re probably right.  But they didn’t heave huge boulders onto ridgetops where they could be seen for miles.

[graphic:  google01]

Indians did set up stone markers.  For the most part they are subtle.  Small piles of stones, set atop boulders or ridges, marked the way to significant places, and also guided early travelers across the desert.  There are many, many sacred sites that the White Man will never see.  All through the mountains and across the desert, there are examples of rock art, some of which are thousands of years old.  Very few of these sites are on any map, because the ones that are have been heavily vandalized.  And over the ages, pictographs and petroglyphs fade away and are slowly covered with lichen and desert varnish until they are difficult to see.  But the big stones last pretty much forever.  There are Indian stone markers and petroglyphs at Daley Ranch, but they’re not as old as Mesa Rock and its companions.  

[photo: standingstone01b]

Who put them there?  Your guess is as good as mine.  The research just isn’t there.  But these rocks could have been heaved into place before the pyramids were built.  I don’t know how many of them there are.  They’ve never been surveyed.  But the fact is that the area from Rancho Bernardo to Rainbow is home to a megalithic mystery like none other in North America.  

None of the archaeologists I’ve talked to have laughed at me because most of them were honest enough to admit they don’t know any more about it than I do.  One old fellow didn’t tell me much, but he winked in a way that made me think he knows more than he was telling me.  

By the way, I like archaeologists and archaeology.  But the evidence against their uniformitarian, linear view of history has been accumulating for decades.  Archaeologists hate the thought that ancient peoples sailed the oceans, but Chinese and African artifacts have been found in the New World, as well as Egyptian, Roman and of course, Viking.  And geologists can only maintain their theories of slow, steady, predictable change by ignoring evidence of upheavals and mass extinctions.  These dogmas are slowly changing, and around the world new discoveries are forcing old ideas to be re-examined.  In these matters, academia is massively conservative.  No one’s rushing to re-write the history books, it would cost too much and toss too many pigeons out of too many ivory towers.  

We live in one of the most amazing areas in North America.  Our range of habitats and climates, our variety of wildlife, our geological beauty and drama, and the richness of our history are the stuff of movies and legends.  What we’ve covered up with our urban sprawl is ancient and sacred.  But traces of it remain, and there are many mysteries yet to be unraveled.  Take a look around wherever you’re driving in southern California and you may be able to see through windows into the past.  Was there an ancient megalithic culture here, comparable to the ones that set up Carnac and Avebury?  Take a look at the rocks and decide for yourself.

[remainder of photos in album]

[tiompan]

whitecrow, on 13 April 2009, 17:57, said:

I had a short article published about the sites I've found.  I thought you folks might be interested to read it.  It has about 15 photos associated with it which I won't include here, but the article follows....


San Diego’s megalithic mystery
04-09-09
by David Lambert


Just north of the intersection of the 15 and the 78 is a sight that millions of people see every year.  Towering above a steep ridge north of Escondido is an enormous boulder called Mesa Rock.  Sticking up like an off-kilter office building, it dwarfs the cars and trucks on the freeway far below.  Depending on where you’re standing, you can see it as far as ten miles away on a clear day.  Kids used to drive up there and make out, back in a safer and more innocent time.  Now, the ridge is falling victim to creeping development, and cul-de-sacs curl toward it like tentacles.  I’ve heard people say Mesa Rock looks like a sea lion, a beaver, or a giant stone thumb.  I’ve always thought it looks like someone put it there.

[photo: mesarock03]

People have lived in southern California area for at least 12,000 years, and probably far longer.  Back then the sea was around 300 feet lower, and camels and wild horses still roamed the canyons and the desert.  The climate was cooler and wetter.  By 10,000 years ago, both the camels and horses had gone extinct, and the area was being populated by the same Luiseños, Cupeños and Kumeyaay that live here today.  In the desert, large areas were sparsely populated with members of the Serrano and Cahuila groups.  Those are not the names they gave themselves, of course.  The southern tribes spoke Hokan, while to the north various Utic-Aztecan dialects were spoken.  These tribes left behind ollas, flints, petroglyphs and rock paintings.  In the desert people still find arrows, baskets, mats and other fibrous materials.  For the most part, these people lived a peaceful, productive life, and lacked for very little.  All of San Diego County has turned up artifacts and other traces of their life here.

But these folks didn’t roll big rocks around.

So who did?  Before asking that question, we should ask if anybody did.  After all, this is a rocky landscape.  It’s made of rocks, from the pebbles underfoot to boulders the size of buildings.  Our mountains and hills are girded with a granite skeleton that protrudes through the hard soil and gives us our gorgeous cliffs, canyons and ridges.  If you want to see this rugged landscape at its best, simply drive north from Escondido toward Temecula.  If you really look (maybe it’s best to let someone else drive), you’ll see formations that are as spectacular as any piles of boulders anywhere in North America.  And some of them are singular, huge rocks that jut up from ridgetops to form landmarks that must be visible from other ridges for miles around.  Many of these are natural landmarks, features of the way our hills erode from the top down, exposing their bones.  So why would anyone suppose that Mesa Rock was anything else?

[photo:  mesarock01]

Well, look at it.  Look at where it is.  Mesa Rock is visible from San Marcos to the south side of Escondido, and from Jesmond Dene and Daley Ranch to Hidden Meadows.  If you were to pick the one place where a landmark could be seen over such a large area, this is where you’d put it.  If you drive along Old Highway 395 on the east side of the I-15 and pull over and get out of your car and look, you’ll see that Mesa Rock is not a single rock but one of a row of enormous boulders that stud the ridge like a row of broken teeth.  Natural?  Hey, it could happen.  Look twice.  What are the odds?

In 2005 I discovered Daley Ranch, just above Dixon Lake in northeastern Escondido.  This gem of unspoiled habitat has thirty miles of rugged hiking, biking and riding trails that wind through an old cattle ranch.  I’ve been hiking there ever since, as often as I can get out there.  There are a lot of big rocks at Daley Ranch, and some of them are standing up in places where they look like someone put them there.  One of them even is turned so that it appears to be a human profile, facing south.  There are a lot of other strange things at Daley Ranch too.  There are rows of hilltops where the boulders looks as though someone had arranged them into defensive ramparts.  I thought they were natural formations too, until I visited Mule Hill at the east end of Lake Hodges.  On this hill in December, 1846, a company of Americans soldiers held out against the Mexicans after the Battle of San Pasqual.  They moved boulders into defensive positions that are there today, and they look exactly like the hilltops at Daley Ranch.

Whoever did this, it was a long, long time ago.  Once I began connecting dots, I started keeping my eyes open for other standing stones, or menhirs.  So far I have found around forty, running in a band from the northern county line south to Rancho Bernardo and Poway, and eastward into Valley Center.  Some of them are on private property.  Some have, no doubt, been destroyed for the sake of development.

[photo:  standingstone01a]

In the graphic below, the yellow arrows represent the approximate locations of standing stones that I’m reasonably certain are not and could not be situated as they are without someone putting them that way.  The red arrows represent stones or groups of stones that could be natural but then again, they might not.  There are additional sites not on this image, mostly to the south in Rancho Bernardo.  I’m not a geologist, but I’ve been talking to a few.  I’ve talked to a few archaeologists too, and although no one wanted to be quoted for this article, no one has laughed at me because there isn’t any real written history prior to the Spanish invasion.  Beyond that, dreary archaeological texts and dry articles in obscure journals talk about population density, language groups, types of relics and the places where they’ve been found.  The general outlines of Indian history are traced in books back for a couple thousand years.  The Indians themselves claim to have been here for 10,000 years, and they’re probably right.  But they didn’t heave huge boulders onto ridgetops where they could be seen for miles.

[graphic:  google01]

Indians did set up stone markers.  For the most part they are subtle.  Small piles of stones, set atop boulders or ridges, marked the way to significant places, and also guided early travelers across the desert.  There are many, many sacred sites that the White Man will never see.  All through the mountains and across the desert, there are examples of rock art, some of which are thousands of years old.  Very few of these sites are on any map, because the ones that are have been heavily vandalized.  And over the ages, pictographs and petroglyphs fade away and are slowly covered with lichen and desert varnish until they are difficult to see.  But the big stones last pretty much forever.  There are Indian stone markers and petroglyphs at Daley Ranch, but they’re not as old as Mesa Rock and its companions.  

[photo: standingstone01b]

Who put them there?  Your guess is as good as mine.  The research just isn’t there.  But these rocks could have been heaved into place before the pyramids were built.  I don’t know how many of them there are.  They’ve never been surveyed.  But the fact is that the area from Rancho Bernardo to Rainbow is home to a megalithic mystery like none other in North America.  

None of the archaeologists I’ve talked to have laughed at me because most of them were honest enough to admit they don’t know any more about it than I do.  One old fellow didn’t tell me much, but he winked in a way that made me think he knows more than he was telling me.  

By the way, I like archaeologists and archaeology.  But the evidence against their uniformitarian, linear view of history has been accumulating for decades.  Archaeologists hate the thought that ancient peoples sailed the oceans, but Chinese and African artifacts have been found in the New World, as well as Egyptian, Roman and of course, Viking.  And geologists can only maintain their theories of slow, steady, predictable change by ignoring evidence of upheavals and mass extinctions.  These dogmas are slowly changing, and around the world new discoveries are forcing old ideas to be re-examined.  In these matters, academia is massively conservative.  No one’s rushing to re-write the history books, it would cost too much and toss too many pigeons out of too many ivory towers.  

We live in one of the most amazing areas in North America.  Our range of habitats and climates, our variety of wildlife, our geological beauty and drama, and the richness of our history are the stuff of movies and legends.  What we’ve covered up with our urban sprawl is ancient and sacred.  But traces of it remain, and there are many mysteries yet to be unraveled.  Take a look around wherever you’re driving in southern California and you may be able to see through windows into the past.  Was there an ancient megalithic culture here, comparable to the ones that set up Carnac and Avebury?  Take a look at the rocks and decide for yourself.

[remainder of photos in album]

Thanks David , is there any way to see the pics  ?

George

[whitecrow]

tiompan, on 13 April 2009, 12:53, said:

Thanks David , is there any way to see the pics  ?

Sure.  Here's the link to the article... http://www.examiner....ithic-mysteries

Should have thought of that.  Duh.

[Pete G]

I asked a Prof I know in the USA and showed him the website,
his response is below,
PeteG

"Although I am not familiar with the San Diego site, the photographs of the boulders along the ridge lines appear consistent with glacial deposition and subsequent erosion.  Unless someone demonstrates that there is a man-made observation platform (e.g., on the valley floor) for observing luni-solar extrema, my preliminary interpretation the boulder placement is that humans were not involved."

[whitecrow]

Pete G, on 16 April 2009, 14:22, said:

I asked a Prof I know in the USA and showed him the website,
his response is below,
PeteG

"Although I am not familiar with the San Diego site, the photographs of the boulders along the ridge lines appear consistent with glacial deposition and subsequent erosion.  Unless someone demonstrates that there is a man-made observation platform (e.g., on the valley floor) for observing luni-solar extrema, my preliminary interpretation the boulder placement is that humans were not involved."

This is the kind of response I'd expect.  I'm openminded:  he may be perfectly right.  However, it doesn't take a degree in geology to know that southern California has never been covered by glaciers.  And, there may be reasons besides astronomical ones for alignments.  I have, in fact, discovered one alignment that is beyond coincidence.  It points SSW, so it's plainly not astronomical.  

My growing theory is that these rocks are markers denoting a sacred gathering place of some kind.  They are found nowhere else in southern California but this relatively small area.  And I fully agree that some of them, maybe even most of them, could be natural features.  I've said that all along.  If this is simply a chance cluster of big rocks, it's an extraordinary coincidence that they should all be in one area, and nowhere else.

There does seem to be a central area.  There is a prehistoric lake bed which is today a level meadow over a mile long, but only a couple hundred meters across.  This meadow is ringed by faults in the earth which can clearly be seen from the air.  More than one person has said that this area seems to be "energetic."  I'm very cautious when people talk of earth energies and mystical stuff, but the fact is that this is exactly the kind of thing that ancient shamans and holy men tuned into.  

And they can say what they will, but the research into the earliest habitations in this area has simply not been done.  What I read again and again is the classic archaeologist's lament:  "Almost nothing is known...."

Because I am not an academic I've been very cautious about this, hiking and photographing the area and making notes for several years before saying anything to anyone.  I have been in contact with others who've believed they had found ancient ruins in the mountains and desert, and I've been a debunker because I know very well how these strange rocks can take the appearance of having been sculpted.  

I'm not dogmatic about this...but neither am I awed by the dogmas of academia.

[whitecrow]

This alignment is somewhat speculative as I cannot prove that the "sacred grove" is in fact, that.  If you were there, you'd know what I mean.  The central point is this stone:



In the aerial view (see thumbnail), you can clearly see the faults in the earth.  They are marked by treelines, as they allow groundwater to approach the surface.  Many people, walking across these lines, say they "feel" something.  Like I said I'm skeptical about this, but.....

Attached Files

•  google02.jpg   205.81K   7 downloads

[Pete G]

Hi whitecrow,
it's not my neck of the woods (I'm Avebury based) thats why I asked friends of the late prof Gerald S Hawkins to take a look.
No doubt I'll get some more feedback on the website in due course which I will post here.
It certainly looks intriguing from here,
PeteG

[BuckyE]

Google "southern california glaciation" Apparently there may have been local ones, as there are still in northern California. But I'm not the expert.