To be fair, the average person doesn’t know that henge is a word with a specific meaning, and Stonehenge is just the name of a place with stones stacked in a pattern. So this is kind of like that.
Also, continued public interest is probably one of the reasons that research grant money continues to be available to study something that was found 15 years ago.
So cut the general public some slack :)
I don't care that it's not actually a "henge", it's just that the mental picture of it is all wrong. Even just adding the word "small" or some such would greatly improve things.
Gotta love glam rock mockumentary pisstakes from the 80s.
If you told people that a crashed UFO was found beneath the lake, people would probably support funding more investigations - but that would be a lie. Likewise, describing the structures as what they are not like is a lie.
Unfortunately for Dr. Holley, it doesn't seem to have been working out that way in this case (from his page linked above):
> ...state politics in previous years have meant that we have only been able to obtain limited funding for research and as a result little progress has been made.
> The word henge is a backformation from Stonehenge, the famous monument in Wiltshire. Stonehenge is not a true henge, as its ditch runs outside its bank, although there is a small extant external bank as well
So the word henge comes from the name Stonehenge, but Stonehenge is not a henge. This could be incorrect, however, as nearly every etymology I've found online seems to use almost the exact same wording as either Wikipedia or dictionary.com (the source cited on Wikipedia)
It would take a journalist literally 1 sentence to explain what a henge is and why this is not it. But hey, saying they found Stonehenge II in the US probably sells more.