All sorts of cosmic, religious, cultural, scientific and mathematical intentions have been inferred by loyal Brits doing their damndest to turn a pile of old rocks on Salisbury plain into something greater than a pile of old rocks.
In recent months there has been a dramatic breakthrough.
Work was being carried out to enlarge the car park to cater for the hordes of re invented latter day Druids who descend on the place to cavort around in bed sheets or surplus Ku Klux Clan outfits chanting the Welsh Edition of Lord of the Rings, for the amusement of US tourists, when workers uncovered a large stone, similar to those in the circle but which had collapsed owing to dodgy foundations and been buried by wind-blown dust.
Inscribed on the stone in the Phoenician script was a long diatribe in primitive Gaelic, which has just been translated by scholars from the University of Dublin.
By analysis of the allegory and other references, it seems clear that Stonehenge and similar Neolithic circles were constructed on behalf of interstellar visitors who spent the best part of a millennia bringing their anthropology students on field trips to Earth to study the development and interactions of primitive tribal society over several centuries, the visitors being a long lived species.
They engaged as building contractors Phoenician traders who had long been visiting Britain to trade for tin, and the Phoenicians employed as labourers local tribesmen who were instructed how to cut, haul rock, and arrange said rocks into totally useless structures so as to ascertain what social and developmental effects would take place over the centuries.
There was no suggestion of slavery being imposed, as this would have totally defeated the purpose of the exercise. The aliens had discovered that you could buy any British tribe for 6 months with 10 barrels of mead, a bucket of woad and a sack full of bronze ingots distributed by the Phoenician overseers.
Some interesting findings emerged.
It was seen that however useless the work or stone circles were, the workforce was happy to keep at it so long as the booze, war paint and metal was coming and if they could have regular work breaks for drunken orgies.
Though they did not have a clue or give a damn about the reasons they were doing all this work, the bludgers among them:- shamans, prototype Druids and assorted self-appointed seers spent many happy hours trying to dream up likely reasons, when not heavily hung-over, and came up with much of the philosophical claptrap that their present day descendants have re invented.
The work came to an end after a thousand years, around 2000 B.C. as apparently this represented one semester at the University of Alpha Centauri A (Planet 4) and the funds allocated had by then been expended.
By this time, however, the ancient Brutish had finally figured out how to brew their own booze and make bronze without having to haul around rock and reverted to boozing/fighting/bludging type - in fact DNA testing of neolithic remains has established that the present generation of soccer hooligans and the Barmy Army are pure-bred descendents of the builders of Stonehenge.
The new findings will not be well received by the current load of academics making a career out of these old rocks and in fact one respected Professor has already been apprehended while trying to explode a truck load of ammonium nitrate on top of the inscribed stone, while the Druids, or those currently out on day release, are rumoured to be positively livid under their nighties.
This unfortunate reaction totally overlooks the exciting fact that the existence of intelligent life in outer space has thus been confirmed, even if THEY utterly failed to find any intelligent life on Earth.