Crop circles in England got off to a good start this summer, with formations that landed in June being of a quality not usually seen until later in the growing season. After 2004, when there were fewer interesting formations than usual and hoaxers disturbingly improved their capacities to mimic the real thing, the circle community is relieved that the profusion of good ones this year exceeds how many that hoaxers, given the number of them, could execute. Here are some of the beauties of the season so far. Click on their links to see more pictures and get more information about each one:
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2005/Lurkley/Lurkley2005a.html
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2005/hundredacres/hundredacres2005a.html
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2005/Laneenddown/lanedown2005a.html
What could account for hoaxers making better fakes as of last year? Perhaps they are paid by whatever doesn't want the truth told. That could explain better designs, where good geometers could have been hired, but the improved execution, where some ground lays look better than they have before, is puzzling. There isn't any place to practice, yet intricate formations are executed, without any mistakes, during four hours of darkness. Maybe hoaxers are planting seeming evidence of their handiwork in genuine formations that they find before researchers do. Or maybe the military base in the area, which civilian planes can't fly over, has practice fields. Or or or. Perhaps the otherness keeps dangling mystery at us to keep us stretching to meet it, to join it in a oneness that could supersede the dualistic frame of mind in which we are destructive to planet Earth and to each other.
In 1991, while the world was agog in amazement at what was happening in English crop fields, two Englishmen proclaimed they had made all the circles — and the idea of hoaxing was born. The press release about the infamous Doug and Dave was a well-coordinated world-wide effort by a P.R. firm that worked for the British equivalent of the CIA. Despite the circles occurring all over the world, and that they go back way before Doug and Dave were at it (the first reports on record are from 1590), the public fell for the ploy and is still by and large of the opinion that all crop circles are made by people.
In the U.S., we had the Robertson Panel, which was secretly organized by the CIA, in 1953, to set policy about how to handle reports of UFO sightings. They decided to debunk anything that couldn't be explained in order to spare the public from what might be frightening. Maybe the goings on these days, where financial support has to be going to hoaxers to expend the great effort it takes to make formations — for which they never can claim credit because they would be arrested for vandalizing — are just more of the same policy being applied to the circles. You wonder about it being worth the effort, but look at how dark the world is and how challenging to our paradigm “contact” would be. If we were not in the grip of scientism, which doesn't recognize that we are in an ensouled world, we'd be behaving in opposite fashion: everyone would be astonished at the phenomenon, given that all roads point to it being outside the box of conventional reality.
To give you an inside look at how the public is misled, this was email sent a few days ago to The Daily Mail, an English newspaper, by David Kingston, who operates a major circle site:
I usual read The Daily Mail because I find the articles factual. I must say I was disappointed after reading 15th July 2005 page on Crop Circles.
I firstly noticed that no reporter had taken credit for writing the very brief introduction to the wonderful picture page. I'm not surprised!
Quote: “once thought to be the work of aliens but are now known to be intricate works of human art designed using computer technology”.
Did the writer not bother to research the subject? No, I hear the strong answer!
If he had he would have soon discovered the serious research that has been going on for years.
There is no denying that humans are responsible each year for creating havoc by trespassing and causing criminal damage on farmers' land. This is a well known fact, and does not provide explanations for other “genuine formations” that occur each year.
If your reporter had bothered to present the article in the “usual Daily Mail standards” he would have realised that Nancy Talbott and biophysicist W. C. Levengood, of BLT Research, are convinced that whatever causes the crop circle phenomenon uses a rapid and intense energy which produces cell changes in affected plants. This cannot be created by the hoaxers who visit the fields armed with their planks of wood.
The research that your article's aerial photographer, Lucy Pringle, has carried out over the last decade also shows that not all formations are made with a plank of wood, no matter how complex a computer programme can be. I have only mentioned a couple of existing research programmes; there are more. I would suggest very strongly that in the future your reporter at least bothers to do research into a subject he obviously know nothing about whatsoever.
I'm afraid this was the worst journalistic rubbish I've read for a long time.
And photographer Lucy Pringle, whose pictures appear in the piece, wrote this to the paper:
Editor Andrew Yates telephoned me last evening to ask if the pictures of crop circles that I had submitted to The Daily Mail were all in the south of England. I asked him to include a short piece in his editorial about my long-standing research into the effects of electromagnetic fields on living systems: changes in brain activity and hormone levels, and on protein levels in seeds produced by genuine crop circles. He refused saying it was only going to be a very short piece. I then asked him to tell me what had been written and he replied just a couple of paragraphs saying that these formations were to be found in the fields in Southern England. At no time did he tell me that he had written that crop circles were now known to “be intricate works of human art designed using computer technology”. On reflection, I can now see why did not reveal what he had written and why he refused to include my work on electromagnetic fields as it would have been in direct conflict with his editorial. I have had many happy years of association with The Daily Mail working with people of integrity who researched their subject correctly instead of making bald statements for which they have no evidence and which in consequence mislead their readership.
Am off to England next week to do more filming for a circle project. I've been too enmeshed in editing to make any posts lately — and, in truth, in the news of the world I haven't seen unique pieces with rays of hope and original thinking that I like. While Rome burns, I am grateful to the circles for giving me my own personal awareness of a possible way we might get out of the mess we are in.
Ending this post with a treat, have a look at Nick Kollerstrom's new Web-based geometry course: http://www.hypermaths.org/cropcircles. It's derived from the circles — you will be amazed at the geometric sophistication of the formations — and is available to high school teachers. Pass the url along if you know any.
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