Navigational Stones

As a boy, my father took me to see the navigational stones of Arorae, a tiny island in the Pacific. The stones are apparently ancient. They point far over the horizon, mostly to islands more than 100 km distant, and apparently to islands thousands of kilometres away. I stood in front of one -- as I remember it now, a square, flat-topped stone -- taller than the level of my eye. A ship's captain described the stones in 1962: Memoir No.34. Polynesian Navigation (the image here shows how they point). Last week, a Pacific islander posted photos of Arorae on Facebook. I asked him whether he could put up photos of the stones. He went there especially, in the morning, to photograph them. Alas, it looked as though they were all destroyed, although their remains are still in the ground.

POSTSCRIPT: One may also see Erich von Däniken's Taboo Points and Navigation Stones. My blog post relies on the interpretation of a ship's captain, Brett Hilder. Hilder factored in ocean currents, while the controversial Von Däniken, using a compass, found that the stones pointed to vastly more distant islands. The ship's captain, with his system, could not explain one of the stones (Stone E), which he said pointed to hell.