Departures of note

In the mid-1950s, T. C. Lethbridge, a Cambridge-trained archaeologist, announced that he had discovered three giant chalk figures—a warrior, a hooded goddess, and a sun god—buried on Wandlebury Hill in Cambridgeshire. He had probed the ground with metal rods and then excavated to expose what he believed were ancient carvings, dating them to around 3000 years old. The discovery made headlines, but a committee of archaeologists and geologists concluded that the shapes were natural chalk formations created during the last ice age, not human-made figures. Lethbridge refused to accept the verdict, publishing his case in the 1957 book Gogmagog: The Buried Gods, which received no supportive reviews.

Born into a wealthy Somerset family in 1901, Lethbridge studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined the first expedition to climb the Beerenberg volcano on Jan Mayen island in the Arctic in 1921. After graduating, he became honorary Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, a post he held from 1923 to 1957. He excavated Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and other sites across Britain, producing sixty archaeological reports, and wrote books on boats and early medieval history. His unorthodox methods and willingness to trust instinct over professional consensus increasingly set him apart from his peers.

After resigning from the museum in 1957, Lethbridge moved to Devon and devoted himself to investigating the paranormal. He came to believe that ghosts were projections stored in rock and other materials, and he conducted experiments using a pendulum for dowsing, claiming that the length of string and number of oscillations could identify what was being detected. He published a series of popular books on these ideas, including Ghost and Ghoul (1961) and Ghost and Divining Rod (1963), and in later works argued that extraterrestrials had shaped human evolution and that stone circles were beacons for alien spacecraft. His parapsychological writings were largely ignored or derided by academics, but they attracted a cult following.

Lethbridge died in his sleep at a hospital in Exeter on 30 September 1971, aged 70, after years of heart disease. His unfinished manuscript was assembled by his widow Mina and the writer Colin Wilson, and published in 1976 as The Power of the Pendulum. While his later theories were dismissed as pseudo-scientific, some of his earlier archaeological observations—such as the idea that burial with Anglo-Saxon objects did not necessarily indicate ethnic descent from continental migrants—were later accepted by scholars. He has been described as a colourful and provocative figure in British archaeology, and his work continues to interest followers of the Earth mysteries movement.