photo from article in News on 6

Hey, we’re baaaack! Albeit just briefly. Could not ignore this nifty news item sent in by alert and helpful reader Matt Penny, aka @salisbury_matt , still a friend of the blog, Salisbury and Stonehenge enthusiast, and still, as far as we know, perpetrator of the Salisbury and Stonehenge website.

Faculty members at Tulsa Community College’s West Campus have discovered a functioning henge, hidden (as is the method of secret societies like the Illuminati!!1!1!) in plain sight. Henge detector extraordinaire, Earl Goodman, Jr., noticed the suspicious array of posts (see above) and began to plot shadow positions over time. Lo and behold, Voila!, Aha!, and other exclamatory interjections–Mr. Goodman was able to mark out the tracks, or analemmas, showing how the sun’s position moves over the course of the year. Read it here. And here. Although the second link lacks the crucial video–more on that later.

Okay, admittedly we’re being silly here, frankly, in a desperate and pathetic effort to be entertaining, but if we may be serious for a moment, well, we need to put a cape on this guy and a brilliant logo incorporating the letters HD , and send him around the world with the mission of detecting hidden henges everywhere!!! We’re not saying that being stuck in Tulsa for a lifetime is a tragic waste of human life (Why bother? We’re sure others have and will say it.), but let’s face it, someone with this man’s talent could be rooting out henges everywhere, causing education and knowledge to smite people with the suddenness and power of a million lightning bolts!

*Wipes foam from mouth* Ahem. Aaaanyway, we’re pleased to see that so far no one is clamouring to have the whole structure ripped out to save students from pagan influence, as they are at Arlington Texas’s Caelum Moor. The professors are right that this is an excellent learning opportunity and we applaud them.

And now to the extra geeky joy of all this, a special moment in that video at the first link. At around 5 seconds into that video, a henge appears on the screen behind the newsperson. Wait! What is that?! Pause and look . . . that ain’t Stonehenge, people! We used to pride ourselves on being able to name any Stonehenge replica just by looking at a thumbnail, but we’re a little rusty these days. Still, our best guess is that we’re looking at the UK’s Foamhenge, a temporary henge built for a BBC project. It’s possible it’s the Texas Hill Country’s Stonehenge II, but the proportions look wrong. At any rate, we were excited to see another Stonehenge replica involved in the story, even if it’s by mistake.

This is not, as the faithful readers we fantasize about would know, Oklahoma’s first permanent Stonehenge replica. That title goes to the replica at Stonehenge Realty in Stillwater, Oklahoma. These south central states certainly have their hidden corners. Oklahoma and Texas together now have 6 entries on our list of large permanent replicas. Hey, what’s really going on down there?!

Many thanks to Mr. Penny. Keep those cards and letters coming in, friends. We’ll add ’em as fast as you send ’em. Well, almost.