As a follow-up to my earlier article on a potential connection between Mothman and the Crop Circle phenomenon, I thought I would share with you another strange story from Crop Circle maker, Matthew Williams. As I noted in the previous article, Matt is someone who openly admits to having made numerous, complex formations – primarily (but certainly not exclusively) in the fields of the county of Wiltshire, England. Matt, however, does not take the view that he is a straightforward hoaxer. Rather, he concludes that some form of presently unknown phenomenon deliberately interacts with the Circle makers, driving them to make the impressive formations that appear every year in the U.K.

Matt told me a very strange story of a remarkable incident that occurred in the summer of 1996. It all began just after he parked in his car atop Knap Hill, which is an ancient hill situated deep in the heart of Wiltshire’s Crop Circle country. Matt was looking down on what has become known as the East Field, a location where a number of intricate Crop Circle formations have appeared over the years, when: “I was sitting in the car about 9 o’clock at night, and suddenly saw this light that seemed to be coming from Adam’s Grave [a 196-foot-long, 19-foot-high, long-barrow with an ancient burial-chamber at its southeast end], which is on Walker’s Hill. I had all my equipment with me – cameras, night-scopes and binoculars – and so I jumped out of the car and focused on Adam’s Grave. It was a bright, moonlit night and Walker’s Hill was all lit up.

“Through the binoculars I could see a chap on top of it holding what seemed to be a torch. I could tell he was wearing what looked like either a long, dark coat or a black cloak. So, I then got my night-vision equipment for a better look and could see he was walking back and forwards on Adam’s Grave. Well, I watched him for a few minutes and then went back to the car to get some food. Then, about ten minutes later, I thought I’d take a look again.”

It was at that point, as Matt revealed, that things became decidedly strange: “When I looked up again, I could see that there was a group of figures standing in a circle around this man. What was stranger was that I could only make out their shape, but not their clothing. And as I watched, they began what looked like a dance: a ritual dance like those of the Native American Indians. But the weird thing was that he was just stood there, and it was like he couldn’t even see them.”

But that was nothing compared to what happened next, as Matt made very clear to me: “Whatever these creatures were, they suddenly began to shrink in size, to about the size of small children. They carried on doing this wild dance, like a ceremony; but what was odd was they seemed to glitter, particularly on their arms, like little globes of light flickering. I thought: What the hell are they? So, I packed the equipment back in the car, edged my way towards Adam’s Grave and hoped no-one could see me, and then sprinted the last bit to surprise them and see what was going on. But when I got there, the figures were gone and the chap was gone, too. The moon lit up the whole area, but there was no-one, nothing. I stood around for a while, searched out the whole area, and then went back to the car. There wasn’t really much more I could do.”

You can have most any “fringe” beliefs or interests and still disguise yourself as an upstanding, yet adorably eccentric, member of normal society, but Atlantis is the point of no return. Once you start talking about Atlantis, you’re done for. So, let’s talk about Atlantis. According to Plato, The lost city of Atlantiswas an ancient island superpower ruled located in the eastern Atlantic ocean—which was named after the lost city.  Atlantis was, according to Plato, a stunningly gorgeous and opulent place, built upon concentric circles of land and water. It was wealthy and powerful beyond measure until, in the course of one day and one night, the whole thing went sideways and a cataclysm wiped the city of Atlantis off the map and out of the history books. According to some esoteric traditions, Atlantis was the birthplace of the so-called “Mystery Schools” that wove their way through western philosophy after the city’s destruction.

The accepted explanation for Plato’s story of Atlantis, however, is that it was just a story, meant to teach a lesson of morality and show Plato’s philosophy on governance. Still, there are countless people who believe that Plato was talking about a real place that was destroyed by a real cataclysm. Plato himself says, in effect, “I know this sounds like nonsense, but I swear I ain’t lyin’.” But we’ve never found evidence, and now that we can image the sea floor, and have found evidence of sunken cities, shouldn’t the fact that we haven’t found Atlantis put this whole thing to bed? Well, what if we haven’t been looking in the right places? What if the ruins of the island-bound seafaring superpower were sitting, right under our noses the whole time, in the middle of the Sahara desert?

An Idealistic Depiction of the Atlantean Mystery Temple by J. Augustus Knapp for the book The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall (1928).

It sounds like a stretch. Yet, that’s what a new video by YouTube channel Bright Insight is proposing, building off the work done by George S. Alexander and Natalis Rosen in the documentary Visiting Atlantis. In a 20 minute long video that’s surprisingly clear, sober, and well edited Bright Insight lays out the case for the Richat structure—also known as the eye of the Sahara—being the true location of Atlantis.

The Richat structure is an earthen structure of unknown origin in Mauritania, on the northwest coast of Africa. It consists of concentric circles of raised ground, bordered by mountains to the north and facing the sea to the south. It’s very big. It also happens to be almost the exact same size as the measurements Plato gave for Atlantis (depending on how you interpret ancient Greek units of measurement).

Plato states that the city of Atlantis was 127 stadia in diameter. According to Dictionary.com, one stadia is approximately 607 feet. This is the conversion used in the video, which works out to 127 stadia equaling 77,089 feet and 23.49 kilometers. Measuring the Richat structure in Google Earth gives a diameter of between 22 and 24 kilometers. That’s pretty close to the measurements for Atlantis. However, other sources say that a stadia is between 607 and 630 feet, which doesn’t seem like a big difference until you realize that 27 feet of variance per stadia, multiplied by 127 stadia, comes out to 3429 feet. While that’s the upper end of the possible variance, it has to be said that the Richat structure would fit the bill a bit less if it was three quarters of a mile too small. It’s not a lot, but it sure wouldn’t be perfectly exact.

Bird’s eye view of the Richat structure.

The surrounding areas match the description of Atlantis fairly note-for-note as well. Plato describes the city as being bordered to the north by mountains notable for their great number and beauty. The Richat structure is indeed ringed by mountains to the north. In the video, mention is made of geologic surveys which show that the mountains to the north of the Eye of the Sahara had waterfalls falling from them when the Sahara desert was not yet a desert, which would be fairly noteworthy.

Further arguments made include the timeline of the fall of Atlantis matching up pretty nicely with the proposed date of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which argues that the impact of a comet or asteroid triggered the Younger Dryas period of rapid and sudden climate change and sea level variation.

It’s an interesting proposal and a surprising one. Usually when you watch a YouTube video on subjects like the lost city of Atlantis, you come out of it measurably dumber for having done so. It is hard to believe that if there’s an argument this convincing to be made (ignoring whether or not it’s true), I somehow haven’t heard of it before. That generally means something is either being deliberately suppressed, or is easily and thoroughly debunked. Unfortunately, it’s usually the latter. Without the credentials to make a real judgement, I’ll say this: I’m certainly more interested in the topic of Atlantis than I was before, and I’m really glad to know there are people on YouTube who appreciate production value.

Last week, here at Mysterious Universe, I wrote a couple of articles on the Roswell affair of July 1947. My position on Roswell is very clear: I think that a highly-classified, and highly controversial, experiment was at the heart of the case, and not the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its crew. For the vast majority of people in Ufology, Roswell is considered to be the most credible crashed UFO case of all. But, if Roswell does collapse – as a UFO event, at least – then what does that say about the rest of the high-profile crashed UFO incidents on record? The fact is that when we go digging, we do see solid reasons why we should be wary of the supposed credibility of these incidents, too. We’ll start with the 1950s and a case that allegedly occurred less than a year after the Roswell event took place.

Of particular note is the fact that in the early 1950s, Newton was quietly approached by military-intelligence personnel. In an astonishing state of affairs, the two men in question made it very clear to Newton that they knew his story of a crashed UFO at Hart Canyon was absolute bullshit, but they wanted him to continue to promote the story. Was this a way for those same military-intelligence personnel to further bury the Roswell incident amid more and more tales of crashed UFOs, and far away from controversial experiments? Almost certainly. Whatever the answer, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Newton was used – by the military – to promote a bogus crashed UFO event.

In 1952, a story surfaced to the effect that a Flying Saucer had fallen on the island of Spitsbergen, off the coast of Norway. The CIA took an interest in the saga and wrote the following: “Writing in the German magazine Der Fliger, Dr. Waldemar Beck says that a flying saucer which recently fell at Spitsbergen has been studied by eminent Norwegian and German rocket experts. He writes that Dr Norsal, a Norwegian expert in rocket construction, went to the place where the flying saucer had fallen a few hours after it had been discovered in the mountains of Spitsbergen by Norwegian jet planes.”

Agency staff had this to say, too: “In the wreck of the apparatus the expert is said to have discovered a radio piloting transmitter with a nucleus of plutonium transmitting on all wavelengths with 934 hertz, a measure that has been unknown so far. The investigation has also shown that the flying saucer crashed because of a defect in its radio piloting system. The saucer which carried no crew has a diameter of 47 meters. The steel used in the construction is an unknown ally. It consists of an exterior disc provided at its peripheral with 46 automatic jets. This disc pivots around the central sphere which contains the measurement and remote control equipment. The measurement instructions have an inscription in Russian.”

What is particularly intriguing about all this is not the CIA’s response to it, but the reaction of the National Security Agency. Under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, several hundred UFO-themed documents have surfaced from the vaults of the NSA. One of those documents tells the story of the Spitsbergen case, but notes that it was, and I quote, “a plant.”Planted by who? The United States? The Russians? We still don’t have the answers to those questions. But, yet again, we have what appears to be a fabricated story of a crashed UFO, disseminated for reasons that are not fully clear.

In May 1953, a UFO is alleged to have crashed outside of Kingman, Arizona. A man named Arthur Stansel – but who went under the alias of “Fritz Werner” – claimed knowledge of the crash, and also of the recovery of a small, humanoid body at the crash-site. It’s a classic case of its type. But, again, we have good reasons to dismiss it as a UFO event. At the time, Stansel worked on an atomic-bomb-based program called Operation Upshot-Knothole. It was overseen by the Atomic Energy Commission and ran from mid-March 1953 to early June 1953. The Kingman crash occurred in the middle of the tests. Ufologists have suggested that the blast of one of the bombs caused a UFO to crash to the ground at Kingman, killing the pilot. But, when we dig deeper we find a far more plausible story that offers a definitively down-to-earth explanation for the mystery of Kingman.

Early Cloud Penetration is an Atomic Energy Commission document that tells the story of something very intriguing. Although it is dated January 27, 1956, its focus is on certain events that occurred back in 1953: “In the event of nuclear warfare the AF is confronted with two special problems. First is the hazard to flight crews who may be forced to fly through an atomic cloud. Second is the hazard to ground crews who maintain the aircraft after it has flown through the cloud…In the 1953 Upshot-Knothole tests, monkeys were used so that experiments could be conducted on larger animals nearer the size of man. QF-80 drone aircraft were used, their speed more nearly approximating that of current operational aircraft.”

There are rumors that one of the QF-80 drone planes developed a problem and, as a result, crashed near Kingman. The alien? A charred monkey, found in the wreckage of the doomed plane. To hide the extent to which the United States was researching the effects of radiation on military aircraft, amazing tales of a crashed UFO and a dead alien were encouraged to be spread. And, let’s not forget that Stansel was himself working on the very same program that was using the monkeys.

I started this article with Roswell – which occurred in the 1940s. Today’s article casts a great deal of doubt when it comes to some of the crashed UFO tales of the 1950s. Next, I’ll turn my attentions to the 1960s, and the crashed UFOs that were actually nothing of the sort.