Think of the ideal. We are in contact. They are helping us. Their technology makes Earth thrive. Whether our relationship is directly physical or not, can you imagine what that would do to each and every one of us? It would be a new framework in which to experience life. We all would be learning life again. We would be so uplifted. The beyond the beyond in our lifetimes. And while we have been confined to Earth, they have been traveling, so what is in this vast universe that they can open us up to? What picture they can bring us of life out there?

To get us open to a next reality, consider how likely it is that ETs would be friendly. If otherwise, wouldn’t they have attacked by now? And why we’ve had no friendly visit could be they are waiting for us to get that they’re for real. If we were open to them, they could come in with no force or fear in play.

In looking to the circles as a doorway, there’s GREAT NEWS for crop circle fans! What On Earth? is on iTunes. It can really spread around now! Word of mouth can do it. Please let people know.

You could post this on Facebook and Twitter:

GREAT NEWS. Best crop circle movie is on iTunes. WHAT ON EARTH? http://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/what-on-earth/id430909932. Enjoy!

Do Reports on Crop Circles Even Belong in a UFO Magazine?

by Drs. Bob and Zohara Hieronimus

The answer is yes if you acknowledge that UFO readers are curious and open-minded people interested in any true planetary mystery. Although there is no apparent link between the two phenomena, much like the UFOs that are explored in this magazine, crop formations are a true Earth mystery. Many have assumed a UFO connection, especially in the 1980s before crop “circles” grew into elaborate formations. Back then, some people were even calling them landing sites for UFOs.  Now that the geometric and mathematically elaborate patterns consist of more than just circular shapes, many still assume a UFO connection, if only because they appear so darned non-human. Famed Harvard psychiatrist and abduction researcher, Dr. John Mack, became entranced with crop circles shortly before his death in 2004, calling them “the most dramatic and most extraordinary crossover from the other dimension in the history of the human race.”

Mack is one of many fascinating people featured in Suzanne Taylor’s film, What On Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery, produced by Mighty Companions (http://theconversation.org). Taylor, long an appreciator of the phenomenon, engages with many “croppies” — scientists, philosophers, geometers, educators, and artists from all over the world — who gather in England every summer, where the most and the best formations appear.  Like the UFO community, they are pooling their experience and background to come up with theories based on the patterns they have identified. What On Earth? won the EBE award for Best Feature Documentary at the UFO Congress Film Festival, where Patty Greer’s crop circle film, The Wake Up Call, won that award in 2010, and Crop Circles: Quest for Truth, for which Suzanne was Executive Producer, won the Audience Award in 2003.  It’s obvious that the elegant, mysterious beauty of this anomaly has captivated the UFO audience. Taylor says, “Fortuitously, the UFO people think of crop circles as part of their world. I’m very happy to get their award, which, by the way, looks like an Oscar, only it’s an alien with a little camera on his shoulder. He’s very cute.”

On 21st Century Radio, with Dr. Bob Hieronimus, Suzanne Taylor explained that as a long-time student of consciousness and the human potential, she was attracted early on to the crop circle mystery. Back in the 1980s, she “zeroed in on them as a possible transformative agent,” and began producing programs about them in Los Angeles. She made her first trip to England in 1993, and the more she learned the more she was convinced that “the circles present an opportunity for a radical shift of our worldview.” We all worry that Earth is in danger of destruction at the hands of humans, Taylor says. “If we knew we were being visited, we would be one humanity in relation to ‘the other,’ and, as someone in the film says, ‘That could be what saves this civilization.’”

“Look, nothing’s working,” elaborated Taylor on 21st Century Radio. “We can’t make things work because we’ have the wrong idea. We’ve got a system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and war is perfectly acceptable. You can’t run a world this way. It doesn’t hold together. It’s a dangerous time and we need a shift in our fundamental worldview about who we are and what we’re doing here. Of course, if we blow up half the world, that would change things. Horrible disasters can change the fundamentals. But, I like to think something peaceful could, too. I mean, by accepting the fact that we’re not alone and the ramifications of that, just think how that would ripple out and  get us to revise our perspectives on who we are and what we’re doing here.”

There has been a recent groundswell of highly credible sources from the government and the military “going public” about UFO experiences, and several countries recently have released their classified UFO files. Average Americans, who never thought twice about the UFO phenomenon beyond it being a joke and a hoax, are experiencing a dawning realization that maybe we are being visited from elsewhere. “Governments, armies, and the church don’t want that out, because it changes the world; it changes humanity,” says Janet Ossebaard, a researcher from the Netherlands who is featured in Taylor’s film.

In the early 1990s, when the crop circles began developing into elaborate, geometric formations, theories shifted from them being landing sites for UFOs or weather phenomena, to the possibility that they are a form of communication. One of the most popular questions for the croppies, reports Taylor, is whether anyone has been able to “crack the code,” as if you could string all the formations together and they would solve a puzzle. While many individual formations are loaded with information expressed in symbols and codes from many disciplines — astronomy, biology, chemistry, and other systems of knowledge — Taylor tells us that the geometers are the ones making the most exciting connections. The circlemakers are delivering “a virtual curriculum in geometry and number,” she says, with the mathematical information encoded in them. Taylor noted that “they started with circular elements only, and then went into triangles, and then squares, and then 5-sided, 6-sided, 7-sided, 8-sided shapes. They just kept adding more facets to the patterns, and the free-form designs that also appear are becoming more and more complex.”

The sophistication of the geometric patterns is one of the hints to determine that any particular formation is not a human-made hoax. However, the hoaxers have gotten better, and now they also create some splendidly complex formations necessitating other tests to rule out human hoaxes. The most definitive tests are done in the laboratory on the crop and soil samples using strict scientific protocols. There are physical changes to the crops and the soil in the mysterious circles that do not appear in formations made by humans flattening the crops with boards, and the results of these experiments have been published in peer-reviewed science journals.

Before samples can be sent to a lab, however, while inside the new formations, croppies are on the lookout for things they can see, like markings or damage made by boards and feet. They are also looking for things they can’t see, like the anomalous phenomena that often occur inside a mysteriously delivered crop formation. Similar to the phenomena reported during close encounters with a UFO and within locations purported to be haunted, inside crop circles investigators will often report that batteries will drain, mobile phones won’t work, and magnetometers and voltage meters go haywire. “But if you step right outside the circle,” says Taylor, “phones will work again. Step back inside the circle, and they won’t. If any of that happens,” she claims, “you can pretty well know you’re in a genuinely mysterious glyph.”

Those practicing the ancient art of dowsing are richly rewarded in the formations. “If a dowser closes his eyes in a formation,” says Taylor, “he can tell you where the pattern changes, and a lot about the construction. One of our dowsers was blindfolded 90 miles away from a formation, and just using his dowsing rods he told the driver where to make turns to get to that crop circle.”

And what are we to make of the predominance of these formations appearing near the ancient, sacred sites that proliferate in southern England (Stonehenge being only the best known)? Crop formations have been recorded in forty other countries, as well, and Taylor says that all over the world they tend to land near sites with spiritual histories, like Indian burial grounds in the United States.  Taylor calls this “picking the bull’s eye spot,” quoting one of the croppies in her film, theorizing that the circlemakers are “calling us back to a time when we were more connected to the earth, when we were more whole beings, when we weren’t split off from the sacred and weren’t worshipping the material.” She believes that the formations are appearing in crops, the basis of our sustenance, as a means of “calling us to something more elemental than the life we are living now.”

As the world moves toward a re-uniting of science and spirit, and our perspective becomes more holistic, it is the hope of Taylor and other optimistic croppies that these incredible formations will pull humanity into conversation focused on what to do in relation to them. It certainly seems that the circles are being made with the intent of being seen and with the purpose of accomplishing something. They even seem to respond to human interest, delivering more formations when and where people gather to study them. As Taylor concludes, on her website, “It could be that the contact established via the circles will create a new beginning for humanity – the start of an era when awe and wonder will supplant the dangerous oppositional behaviors prevalent today.”

See the film trailer and buy the DVD, with the feature film and great bonus material, at http://www.CropCircleMovie.com.

Article prepared by Laura Cortner. Transcription by Mike Donahue.

They all believe there’s someone watching over you
They’re watching every single thing you say
And when you die
They’ll set you down and take you through
They’ll realise one day

That the grass is always greener on the other side
The neighbour’s got a new car that you wanna drive
And when time is running out you wanna stay alive
We all live under the same sky
We all will live, we all will die
There is no wrong, there is no right
The circle only has one side side side

We all try hard to live our lives in harmony
For fear of falling swiftly overboard
But life is both a major and minor key
Just open up the chord

But the grass is always greener on the other side
The neighbour’s got a new car that you wanna drive
And when time is running out you wanna stay alive
We all live under the same sky
We all will live, we all will die
There is no wrong, there is no right
The circle only has one side side side

Track written by Fran Healy

Weird scenes inside the gold mine

by Billy Cox

The SETI Institute’s podcast interview with journalist Leslie Kean on Monday should be Exhibit A in the case to disqualify it from any future American media discussions on UFOs. That won’t happen, of course, but if you’re on the fence about SETI’s mind set, you need to give this a serious listen(Link). When it comes to sophistry, SETI’s “Skeptic Check: The Saucer’s Apprentice” is stone-cold gold.

Hosted by astronomer Seth Shostak, the SETI thing — also known as “Our Monthly Look at Critical Thinking” — was 50 minutes of mostly rehash bemoaning the lack of UFO evidence to study. It featured the predictable reassurances of experts like Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait and Skeptical Inquirer managing editor Benjamin Radford, alongside Harvard alien abduction skeptic Susan Clancy. There was also an attempt to nudge Indiana University folklorist/abduction researcher Thomas Bullard into the skeptic’s corner, but alien abduction is another discussion altogether.

What made the session noteworthy was its invitation to Kean, whose skillfully presented UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record(Link) confronts debunkers with their most formidable challenge in recent memory. But it became immediately clear that Shostak (“I have an open mind”) not only wasn’t interested in evidence, he probably hadn’t bothered to read the book.

In his subsequent discussion with Radford, Shostak stated: “The other argument that’s frequently made is that scientists simply dismiss this phenomenon out of hand, that they won’t look, and this is one of the arguments in the new book by Leslie Kean … that there may be something real here and nobody will look at it …”

“Well, there’s a couple of errors right there,” Radford replied. “First of all, UFO sightings have been investigated. The claim that the U.S. government has never looked into these things is patently false. They have looked into these things …”

Whoa, time out. Kean mentioned Project Blue Book, the USAF study, in On the Record. Who claimed Uncle Sam “has never looked into these things”? Nobody. Except maybe Radford. Shostak, who didn’t bother to correct him, is a clever guy who really knows how to bait the hook. Here’s how he opened the Q&A with Radford:

“Ben, in your long career as someone who has investigated UFOs and sorted through the evidence, has there ever been a case that convinced you that aliens have visited the planet?”

Who said anything about aliens? Kean’s book dealt with an extraterrestrial hypothesis — the hypothesis that keeps SETI in business — but as she told Shostak earlier on the show, “I’m not even willing to assume that these are aliens.” On the Record deals with radar data, military reports, analysis of plant and soil damage, photo analysis, etc. Reviewing the data doesn’t amount to endorsing aliens. Shostak knows that. And yet, his tortured contortions to avoid said evidence are becoming cartoonish.

“You say a lot of them are disc-shaped,” he countered to Kean, “but isn’t the fact that we call them flying saucers, that we expect them to be disc-shaped, simply due to a reporter’s error back in 1947, when Kenneth Arnold … said he saw objects that moved across the sky like saucers skipping in water, he wasn’t describing the shape of course, he was describing the motion, and ever since, people have seen saucers — that strikes me as a little odd.”

Kean corrected him by mentioning the multiple shapes on record, and added that the USAF coined the UFO term for accuracy’s sake. Shostak was all over the board, even invoking Carl Jung’s collective unconscious as a possible explanation for abductions without mentioning how the Swiss psychoanalyst ultimately concluded UFOs had a physical component that could not be confined to symbolic projections(Link) .

Kean was interviewed for half an hour, knowing in advance their discussion would be trimmed for length. Two UFO cases came up: the 2006 Chicago O’Hare incident, and the 1989-90 Belgian triangle wave. The latter involved an F-16 scramble, radar data, detailed photo analysis, and a military press conference assembled by the colonel in charge of the Air Force investigation, who would later become a Major General . You don’t need a crystal ball to figure out which incident got sliced out of  Kean’s nine-minute segment.

The Belgian investigation, “which included a group of university scientists working on it outside of the government,” Kean wrote in an e-mail to De Void, “would have made a strong case for the listeners as to the genuine mystery here. The O’Hare case does not have the same level of gravitas because it was not repeated, and because it didn’t involve an official investigation and a report by a Major General, who had worked closely with scientists over an extended period.”

Shostak, naturally, had an explanation for everything. “Our choice of which parts of each interview to run were based on using the most compelling and clear stories,” he e-mailed De Void. “I think that O’Hare won out over the Belgian wave because of its immediacy, fame, and relevancy to our broadcast audiences. It certainly wasn’t an attempt to ‘load the dice’ in any way I can assure you.”

Maybe the weirdest part of “Our Monthly Look at Critical Thinking” was the kicker, reserved for a discussion of the best Hollywood ET spacecraft. For eight fetish-like minutes, Shostak and sidekick Molly Bentley detailed the special properties and features of the make-believe hardware in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “District 9,” “Independence Day,” and 1953’s “War of the Worlds.”

De Void asked flat out if Shostak had actually read Kean’s book. Or the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena’s analysis of the O’Hare incident(Link) (a former NASA guy led the study). Or, for that matter, MUFON’s radar-saturated report(Link) on the 2008 Stephenville incident.

No reply yet on those questions. But we’ll keep you posted.

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.