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Over the weekend, certain portions of FaceBook were abuzz with stories of a possible alien visitation at the Merry Maidens stone circle near Lamorna in Cornwall. There was a report of a metallic structure which had appeared in the centre of the circle sometime before sunset on Friday. Video footage showed a metallic obelisk similar to those which have been reported in the news recently at various sites around the globe. Sites which included Utah, California, Romania, the Isle of Wight and Dartmoor among others.
With my fact-checking hat on, I paid the site a quick visit on Saturday morning, but unsurprisingly, no obelisk was to be seen. What was present in the centre of the circle was a plate on the floor, bearing a QR code.
We first mooted the idea of using QR codes at ancient sites for informational purposes back in 2011, and reported on a commercial application of such codes a year later. In this case though, the QR code at the Merry Maidens is not for informational purposes, but for entertainment.
When scanned, the code points to a web site, http://plan8.earth/monolith, which when used with a Facebook app currently in development, will display the obelisk reported as an Augmented Reality (AR) image.
It remains to be seen (pun intended) whether this technology will be widely implemented, or just used as a ‘proof of concept’ experiment in this single case. Either way, it is to be hoped that no damage will be caused to any of our ancient heritage sites, and that no modifications or physical installations will be made to the sites without the requisite permissions.
The Heritage Journal 
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