The Truth Is Out There: The Crop Circle Controversy
This is the first time I’ve ever re-posted a 3 Quarks Daily article. I was led to re-examine the idea of visits by Aliens—particularly in the UFO phenomen—by two incidents. One was the announcement on May 8 of this year to release new, never-before seen files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). This footage is being released on a rolling basis and is available to view on War.Gov/UFO. The other is the upcoming release of a new Steven Spielberg film about UFOs called “Disclosure Day.” The film is fiction, but contains references to a lot of what we believe to be true about UFOs, aliens, abduction and crop circles, most of which has come from Mr. Spielberg’s imagination: E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Between these two forces, PURSUE and Spielberg, I wonder how much truth will actually be revealed.
I have updated this article, which was originally posted in September 2017. It described our experience touring Wiltshire, England in 1994 searching for Crop Circles. These beautiful and symmetric circles in ripe fields were originally thought to be communications from aliens, or landing sites of UFO’s, and they began to appear during the 1990’s obsession with aliens. My husband Rick and I wanted to see these other-worldly apparitions for ourselves; the thrill of touching something that was touched by alien beings was unbelievable. And perhaps we’d see a UFO nearby, too.
1994 was the height of the alien frenzy. There were bestseller books, magazines, and TV shows about crop circles, flying saucers and alien abductions. A 1990 Gallup believed we had alien visitors. The highly popular “X-Files” weekly show had a large viewership who tuned in every Sunday evening to watch Special Agents Scully and Mulder investigate paranormal phenomenon, focusing on alien abductions; their slogan was “the truth is out there.” Sensational alien stories swept the nation in these pre-social media days, as people relied on news media and best-seller books for their information. And there were plenty of books and TV specials to stoke your imagination.
A 1994 best seller, Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, by Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, discussed interviews with people who claimed they were abducted by aliens; Oprah interviewed abductees. There were books about dead aliens from a flying saucer crash hidden by the government at the top-secret Area 51 in Nevada. And the first book about crop circles was Circular Evidence: a Detailed Investigation of the Flattened Swirled Crops Phenomenon jointly written by Colin Andrews, an electrical engineer from England, and Pat Delgado, a former NASA engineer. These authors inaugurated the new “science” of crop circles, or cereology. Other self-styled experts from around the world quickly came forward to examine the circles and advance their own theories. More books were written, and organization and institutes devoted to cereology sprang up like, well, crop circles.
Experts combed these circles, taking soil and plant samples, looking for signs of a space ship’s propulsion, such as remnants of a plasma vortex or of radiation. The origin of crop circles was hotly debated. It was generally assumed that they couldn’t be man-made because no one could produce works of this magnitude so quickly, in the dark of night, unnoticed, with such perfect symmetry! Instead, they were attributed to ball lightning, plasma vortexes, wind, and animals, but the most favored explanation was they were made by visitors from outer space landing a flying saucer. One expert, Joachim Koch, felt these “cerealoglyphs” were coded messages and actually wrote back to the aliens through a circle that he produced!
My husband is an electrical engineer with a degree in Space Sciences, and a PhD in plasma physics–better credentials and more experience than most cereologists. He just couldn’t make sense of their speculations, which didn’t seem to obey the laws of physics. Still, he thought there might be something to this phenomenon that could be explained scientifically. Because unlike reports of UFOs and abductions, crop circles were real, physical objects. You could see them, touch them, and feel them. He wanted to see for himself. Me? I thought it was a splendid idea for a vacation. I had just finished a sabbatical in London and longed to see more of England.
In August 1994, we booked our flights and lodging, and headed to England to see for ourselves. Landing in Heathrow, we drove our rental car about 90 miles west, heading toward a B&B in a farmstead, Wayside Farm, in the little town of Devises. Little did we know that our farm was only 35 miles away from Highclere Castle, where Downton Abbey would be filmed in 2010.
We were enchanted by Wiltshire. It abounds in mysterious and unexplained landscape phenomena, some of which originate before recorded history. Many of these take the form of circles: there is Stonehenge, and the lesser-known stone circles of Avebury, as well as some circular earthworks attributed to Roman occupation; there are the mysterious circular and oval-shaped earth mounds–the tors– such as Silbury Hill and Kennet Long Barrow, which have now been shown to be prehistoric burial sites.
The building of these ancient sites has been attributed to Neolithic people. Archaic humans lived in the region nearly one million years ago. After the last ice age, continuous human settlement began around 13,000 to 11,700 years ago; the tors and stone hills of Wiltshire were built around 5,000 years ago. And who built these monuments? The people of England have always felt a connection to these ancient people, who laid the foundations of civilization, and may even have been travelers from outer space.
Aliens as Neolithic people building Stonehenge
Perhaps these aliens left after their work was done, but return periodically to check on their handiwork with a quick visit via a crop circle.
Silbury Hill is a 4,500 year old man-made hill which is a frequent site of UFO’s, crop circles and mysterious lights . It is a frequent location for UFO sightings, mysterious lights, and crop circle activity. A photograph of a UFO above Silbury Hill taken by a tourist was reported in the Telegraph Newspaper in August 2012. In October 19, 2009, a police officer contacted British UFO experts after seeing three aliens examining a freshly made crop circle near Avebury, Wiltshire
We stopped at the Westbrook Free house (no relation) for a quick pint on the way to our lodgings at Wayside Farm, which was rather difficult to find using paper maps in those pre-GPS days. We settled in for a quiet evening after walking to the nearby pub, and got up to an early and hearty breakfast at the farm table. The farmer was very helpful in directing us to new crop circles; word would get around when one appeared, and he’d give us the road intersections, which gave us our morning quest through the golden countryside. It’s striking to see these beautiful creations, carved into the crops and stretching across the field. Among the five that we found, one was close to the road and easily accessed through the tractor pathways. We began our analysis.
Local pub near our lodging
Crop circle near Avebury which was visited by aliens in 09.October2009 . We took our time driving the 90 miles from London, enjoying the Wiltshire countryside. We made the requisite stops at Stonehenge, but were more intrigued by the circle at Avebury, which is not fenced like Stonehenge, so you can touch the stones and walk within the 1/5 mile diameter. We had lunch at the Red Lion pub, which lies at a crossroads in the center of the Avebury circle.
We were soon joined by a small tour group led by a German self-styled expert. He pointed out to us that the wheat stalks were “bent not broken,” which, he said, clearly indicated an unusual force pushing them down. (I found that if I stomped on the wheat in the field I would get the same result, but what do I know? I wasn’t a cereology expert like he was.)
crop circle in Wiltshire that we visited.
German expert
Our colleague was intrigued by Rick’s small portable Geiger counter, but sadly disappointed that it registered no radioactivity greater than background. In fact, there was no evidence of any unusual forces, no sign of burning by hot plasma or rocket fuel, nothing but tramped down wheat circles filled with a number of crop circle enthusiasts.
Rick examines the crop circle
Overall, this was a relaxing visit to a lovely part of the world, but we didn’t make any remarkable discoveries or find physical evidence of forces that may have created these splendid circles. There was nothing to suggest that they were anything but man-made. I looked at them as artistic expressions, and for some they were an expression of belief in and desire for alien contact, but man-made nonetheless.
What we didn’t learn until we returned to the US, was that crop circles had already been exposed as being man made: On Sept 11, 1991, two pint-loving English watercolor artists, Doug Bower and David Chorley, revealed to the British press that they created these circles, making their first one in 1978. Apparently, after a few drinks in a pub, they were inspired to create a “flying saucer nest,” which they did in the dead of night by walking in a field and using simple planks and ropes. AS the press got interested, many more followed. You can see Doug and Dave in action in this expose video from their 1991 TV broadcast.
What was remarkable to us is that this news never made a big splash in the US! Mysterious crop circles were news; exposing them as a hoax was not. Truly, no one wanted to hear that crop circles were man-made!
The expert cereologists also refused to believe that the circles were all man-made. Dave and Doug’s were “fake” circles, because “real” crop circles had otherworldly origins. So many people believed these experts that they were not about to change their beliefs. Many of the crop circle experts have since back-pedaled and accept human creation for most–but not ALL–crop circles. The Journal of Cereology is still being published, and crop circles are still appearing in many sites around the world, the majority still being in Wiltshire, and mostly man made.Croppies continue to insist on their alien origin.
To me, the most interesting question about crop circles is why belief in their alien origin persists, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The answer, I feel, is that these beliefs reveal a desire to believe in a higher power that transcends humanity. In these days of declining acceptance of organized religion, believing in superhuman aliens fills this need for many people. To them, connecting these mysterious apparitions to other presumed alien interventions gives substance to their beliefs. I am reminded of the poster displayed above Agent Mulder’s desk on the TV series “X-files.” It depicted a flying saucer, with the caption, “I want to believe.”
X-files logo
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Two huge unknown objects captured in Hubble Live Stream — Alien Spacecraft?.jpg)
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