There’s a lot of buzz now about Leslie Kean’s new book — I brought you a clip of her on MSNBC, being interviewed about it. Well, I went back and dug out how I first came across Leslie. Here’s a post I made, that still sings the right song, on my old html site.

From my CROP CIRCLE DIARY

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL

Leslie Kean: Origin of crop circles baffles scientists

SINCE THE RECENT release of the movie Signs, crop circles have been thrust into the limelight. Major publications such as Scientific American and U.S. News and World Report have echoed the common belief that all crop circles are made by stealthy humans flattening plants with boards. This assumption would be fair enough if we had no information suggesting otherwise.

However, intriguing data published in peer-reviewed scientific journals clearly establishes that some of these geometric designs, found in dozens of countries, are not made by “pranks with planks.” In fact, a study about to be published by a team of scientists and funded by Laurance Rockefeller concludes “it is possible that we are observing the effects of a new or as yet undiscovered energy source.”

In the early 1990s, biophysicist William C. Levengood, of the Pinelandia Biophysical Laboratory, in Michigan, examined plants and soils from 250 crop formations, randomly selected from seven countries. Samples and controls were provided by the Massachusetts-based BLT Research Team, directed by Nancy Talbott.

Levengood, who has published over 50 papers in scientific journals, documented numerous changes in the plants from the formations. Most dramatic were grossly elongated plant nodes (the “knuckles” along the stem) and “expulsion cavities” — holes literally blown open at the nodes — caused by the heating of internal moisture from exposure to intense bursts of radiation. The steam inside the stems escaped by either stretching the nodes or, in less elastic tissue, exploding out like a potato bursting open in a microwave oven.

Seeds taken from the plants and germinated in the lab showed significant alterations in growth, as compared with controls. Effects varied from an inability to develop seeds to a massive increase in growth rate — depending on the species, the age of the plants when the circle was created and the intensity of the energy system involved.

These anomalies were also found in tufts of standing plants inside crop circles — clearly not a result of mechanical flattening — and in patches of randomly downed crops found near the geometric designs. These facts suggested some kind of natural, but unknown, force at work.

Published in Physiologia Plantarum (1994), the international journal of the European Societies of Plant Physiology, Levengood’s data showed that “plants from crop circles display anatomical alterations which cannot be explained by assuming the formations are hoaxes.” He defined a “genuine” formation as one “produced by external energy forces independent of human influence.”

In another paper for Physiologia Plantarum (1999), Levengood and Talbott suggested that the energy causing crop circles could be an atmospheric plasma vortex — multiple interacting electrified air masses that emit microwaves as they spiral around the earth’s magnetic-field lines.

Some formations, however, contain cubes and straight lines. Astrophysicist Bernard Haisch, of the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics, says that such “highly organized, intelligent patterns are not something that could be created by a force of nature.”

But Haisch points out that since not all formations are tested, it is unknown how many are genuine. Nor is it likely that such complex designs could evolve so quickly in nature. “Natural phenomena make mountain ranges and form continents — they don’t learn geometry in ten years,” says Haisch, who is the science editor for the Astrophysical Journal.

In 1999, philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller made possible the most definitive — and most revealing — study to date. The BLT Research Team collected hundreds of plant and soil samples from a seven-circle barley formation in Edmonton, Canada. The plants had both elongated nodes and expulsion cavities, and the soils contained the peculiar iron spheres, indicating a genuine formation. The controls showed none of these changes.

Mineralogist Sampath Iyengar, of the Technology of Materials Laboratory, in California, examined specific heat-sensitive clay minerals in these soils, using X-ray diffraction and a scanning electron microscope. He discovered an increase in the degree of crystallinity (the ordering of atoms) in the circle minerals, which statistician Ravi Raghavan determined was statistically significant at the 95 percent level of confidence.

“I was shocked,” says Iyengar, a 30-year specialist in clay mineralogy. “These changes are normally found in sediments buried for thousands and thousands of years under rocks, affected by heat and pressure, and not in surface soils.”

Also astounding was the direct correlation between the node-length increases in the plants and the increased crystallization in the soil minerals — indicating a common energy source for both effects. Yet the scientists could not explain how this would be possible. The temperature required to alter soil crystallinity would be between 1,500 and 1,800 degrees F. This would destroy the plants.

Understanding the possible ramifications of these findings, Talbott sought the expertise of an emeritus professor of geology and mineralogy at Dartmouth College, Robert C. Reynolds Jr., who is former president of the Clay Minerals Society. He is regarded by his colleagues as the “best-known expert in the world” on X-ray diffraction analysis of clay minerals.

Reynolds determined that the BLT Team’s data had been “obtained by competent personnel, using current equipment.”

The intense heat required for the observed changes in crystallinity “would have incinerated any plant material present,” he confirms in a statement for the Rockefeller report. “In short, I believe that our present knowledge provides no explanation.”

Meteorologist James W. Deardorff, professor emeritus at the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University, and previously a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, states in a 2001 Physiologia Plantarum commentary that the variety, complexity and artistry of crop circles “represent the work of intelligence,” and not a plasma vortex. “That is why the hoax hypothesis has been popularly advocated,” he says.

However, he points out, the anomalous properties in plant stems thoroughly documented by Levengood and Talbott could not possibly have been implemented by hoaxers. Deardorff describes one 1986 British formation in which upper and lower layers of crop were intricately swirled and bent perpendicular to each other, in a fashion that “defies any explanation.”

“People don’t want to face up to this, and scientists have to deal with the ridicule factor,” he said in a recent interview.

Adding to the puzzle, professional filmmakers have documented bizarre daytime “balls of light” at crop-circle sites. Light phenomena were observed by multiple witnesses at the site of the Canadian circle so meticulously examined under the Rockefeller grant.

Eltjo Hasselhoff, a Dutch experimental physicist, has taken on the study of what he describes as “bright, fluorescent flying light objects,sized somewhere between an egg and a football.”

Scientists face real and serious questions in confronting this mystery. Could this be secret laser technology beamed down from satellites? Is it a natural phenomenon? Is there a consciousness or intelligence directing an energy form yet unknown to us?

“To look at the evidence and go away unconvinced is one thing,” says astrophysicist Haisch. “To not look at the evidence and be convinced against it … is another. That is not science.” It’s not good journalism, either.

Leslie Kean is an investigative reporter and producer with Pacifica Radio based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here’s her bio today:

Author of the new book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record, published by the Crown Publishing Group/Random House (www.UFOsOnTheRecord.com). The book includes a foreword by John Podesta and first-person contributions written by highly credible military and government officials from nine countries, including five Generals.

Kean is an independent investigative journalist who has been published nationally and internationally in the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Providence Journal, International Herald Tribune, Globe and Mail, Sydney Morning Herald, The Nation, and The Journal for Scientific Exploration, among other publications. She is coauthor of Burma’s Revolution of the Spirit: The Struggle for Democratic Freedom and Dignity, and was also a producer and on-air host for a daily investigative news program on KPFA radio, a Pacifica station.

Kean began publishing on the UFO subject in 2000, when her feature story about the French COMETA Report appeared in the Boston Globe. In 2002, she co-founded the Coalition for Freedom of Information (CFi), an independent alliance advocating for greater government openness on information about UFOs and for responsible coverage by the media based on a rational and credible approach. As director of the CFi, she began working on the Kecksburg UFO case in 2002, with the cooperation of Stan Gordon. Kean was the plaintiff in a successful, four-year Freedom of Information Act federal lawsuit against NASA, in which the agency was required to release hundreds of documents under court supervision. She and her coalition have launched an ongoing initiative to affect US government policy so that scientists and aviation authorities can gain greater understanding of the still-unexplained UFO phenomenon.

Kean was a producer for the 2009 independent documentary I Know What I Saw, directed by James Fox, and is currently working with Break Thru Films, an award-winning film company, on a new feature documentary. She lives in New York.