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Lectures |
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The Circular Challenge Crop circles in 2007 Delivered at the Nexus Conference 2007, Brisbane, October 22 2007
“Cerealogy” – or crop circle science – was created by Colin Andrews, whose book “Circular Evidence” (published in 1991) was the first attempt to make crop circle research appear as a scientific discipline. Eventually, Andrews would argue that 80 percent of crop circles were fake. Andrews arrived at this conclusion in 2001, after having received funding from Laurence Rockefeller, with which he conducted a two year investigation into crop circle “hoaxing”. Andrews studied circles that had been commissioned by various media outlets and worked with several groups known to be creating man-made circles. With this information in hand, Andrews concluded that 80 percent showed “unassailable” signs of having been man-made. He argued that he could not account for the remaining 20 percent, for which he was unable to find signs of human interaction. One
group of such crop circle artists is the UK based Circlemakers.org,
which have been asked to create numerous crop circles since the
mid 1990s for movies, TV shows, music videos, adverts and PR stunts.
Clients have included Greenpeace, Microsoft, Nike, Shredded Wheat,
Pepsi, BBC, The Sun, Mitsubishi and even Big Brother. My
own interest in crop circles began in 1995, when the month of
July involved, amongst others, a visit to Glastonbury and attending
the crop circle conference – in the presence of none other
than our esteemed host, Duncan Roads. Events were largely akin
to a “Church of Circle-ology”, most speakers affirming
their belief in the otherworldly nature of the phenomenon –
almost on par with scientists today unquestioningly pledging their
allegiance to the dogma of man-made global warming. But amongst
the delegates was the devil – not even in disguise –
in the form of a group of crop circle makers who largely remained
stoic throughout the proceedings, as well as the more vociferous
and high profile Rod Dickinson, at the time perhaps the most outspoken
crop circle “faker”.
1991
is hence seen by many as a marker in time, differentiating BDD
from ADD – Before and After Doug and Dave. Doug and Dave
have been labelled everything from liars to disinformation agents,
paid by the British government to discredit the entire phenomenon.
But probably the sanest account of the controversial episode is
that of John Macnish, a television producer, who in “Cropcircle
Apocalypse”, explains the antics of these two somewhat archetypal
Englishmen.
Cerealogists
have made a series of claims about the impossibility of human
interference with these designs. Some of these are based on circular
reasoning. For example, that people would have a hard time making
these circles in the middle of the night works both ways: it is
rather bizarre that circles always appear at night; a truly otherworldly
force would unlikely distinguish between night and day for creating
such glyphs and would seriously be able to impress us if it could
form a circle by daytime, in mere seconds. At
the height of the 1990 crop circle fever, Andrews seemed to have
a direct line to the BBC, and hence phoned in to BBC Breakfast
News, noting his team of crop circle watchers had just witnessed
– overnight – the creation of a crop circle in Bratton
Castle. The interviewer asked: “Are you quite sure you couldn’t
have been the victim of some elaborate hoax last night?”
These examples clearly show that man-made crop circles are definitely on par, if not superior, to any circle that cerealogists deem to be “anomalous”. Furthermore, despite Andrews’ two year campaign to learn from the makers himself (which in retrospect was too little, too late), as early as 1992, a crop circle competition was organised. The idea came about by none other than scientist Rupert Sheldrake, who also invited D&D to participate. The pair turned down the offer if only, in my opinion, because they knew their circles were by now far inferior to what others were able to achieve. The contest involved the teams having to copy a design given to them by the judges, and resulted in eleven almost identical pictograms, each showing little or no sign of entry. Where
does this leave the crop circle phenomenon? At one level, the
theories proposed by some of the cerealogists have been totally
discredited, yet are at the same time not very far from a possible
truth.
So,
whereas Andrews accepts eighty percent to be man-made, are, in
fact, 100 percent of circles man-made?
Almost one thousand years earlier, in 815 AD, Agobard, the archbishop of Lyon, wrote “Against the foolish opinion of the masses about hail and thunder” and reported that people believed in “Tempestarii”, which had conjured cloud ships from Magonia, a far-off place in the skies. These resulted in fierce storms, and a ransom was demanded on behalf of the Magonians in the form of crops they had flattened. The account was made famous by UFO researcher Jacques Vallee in his “Passport to Magonia”, in which he underlined that the UFO phenomenon seemed to be a modern variation of an ancient theme. Like crop circles, UFO researchers have instead preferred to maintain 1947 as the birth of the phenomenon, despite hundreds of reports and incidents that predate that year, including the anomalous foo-fighters of the Second World War. Indeed,
circles on the ground have always had a magical connotation. Take,
for example, the fairy rings, which are linked with tales of passers-by
that were lured away to the land of the fairies. As such, these
fairy rings were “doorways into other dimensions”,
which is another theory proposed about what crop circles might
represent. This
medieval folklore has changed little from the earliest agrarian
civilisations, which were reliant on successful harvests, at the
time one of the greatest revolutions Mankind had witnessed. As
such, within the pantheon of gods, certain deities became corn
deities. It was the Roman earth goddess Ceres who would give her
name to cereals and cerealogy, the “science of the crop
circles”. This
legend also provides further detail to the modern phenomenon.
The name of Persephone was often seen as taboo, for the Greeks
knew another face of Persephone: her role as the queen of the
dead. She was also at the centre of the secret initiatory rites
at Eleusis, which promised immortality to their participants.
The nature of the rite has never been revealed, but some argue
that a hallucinogenic substance was administered to the initiates,
whereby their mind opened to other dimensions. Various substances
have been proposed, but perhaps the most logical one, in the context
of a corn deity, is ergot, a fungus that can be found in grain.
The resulting visions are often reported as being similar to LSD;
lysergic acid, a molecule used in the synthesis of LSD, can be
isolated from ergot.
This
overview makes it clear that the phenomenon is much older than
most authors on the subject give credit for. This leaves us with
another, even more important question: is there a non-human intelligence
behind the phenomenon – and I would underline we are talking
about crop circles, not crop pictograms. The
most notorious example of an interaction between lights and circles
no doubt occurred in 1996, with the infamous Olivers Castle video
footage, filmed on August 11. The video was allegedly shot by
John Whaley (some sources write his name as Wheyleigh), who claimed
to have witnessed the lights in the early morning hours, whose
appearance and display was seen as being responsible for the creation
of a crop circle formation. If genuine, the footage would be seen
as the Holy Grail of cerealogy.
Still, since this faked footage, a number of other videos have shown anomalous lights circling over or near crop circles, such as the Milk Hill footage of 1991, which nevertheless does not show any causal relationship between the light and the formation. Other, similar evidence includes the 1976 eyewitness statement of crop circle researcher David Kingston, who at the time worked in British military intelligence. He was part of a group investigating UFO activity in Wiltshire. One night, they watched six or seven “spheres of light” hover in the air, then merge into a long sphere. The long sphere ascended to the height of the stars, then blinked out. At daylight, they found a straightforward circle, thirty feet in diameter, in wheat. One
of the few scientific paper published on the crop circle phenomenon
is by Dutch biophysicist Eltjo Haselhoff in “Physiologi
Plantarum”, a scientific journal on plant physiology and
biophysics. In this paper and his more popular books, Haselhoff
proposes that crop circles are created by “single-point
sources of electromagnetic radiation” – thus arguing
that balls of light are responsible for the creation of some of
the crop formations. Though at present there is no evidence –
let alone hard evidence – for Haselhoff’s theory,
his theory is nevertheless very similar to medieval proposals
as to how “fairy lights” were responsible for flattening
crops. So,
where are we in 2007? Remarkably, very much as if it was 1996.
No doubt the most sensational crop circle in 2007 occurred in
East Field in Pewsey Vale, in the early hours of July 7, 2007.
So
where does this leave the phenomenon? Crop circles definitely
are a sign of our times – though unlikely of any end time.
Rather than continue to debate whether crop circles are man-made
or natural, crop circles are, in my opinion, perhaps the best
example of an archetype that is at work in our society. The involvement
of ancient deities like Ceres and Persephone are clear evidence
of an archetypal component to the phenomenon. Furthermore, archetypes
exist in a Jungian framework as “thought formats”
of another dimension. They are, like the ancient Egyptian gods,
“charged” by belief and devotion by human beings;
archetypes die without devotion and belief. Equally,
crop circles have become a modern form of divination. In an age
where tealeaves, animal intestines or urine have become less favourite
mechanisms of interpreting the desires of the beyond and the gods,
and specifically the future they have in mind for us on an individual
and global level, crop circles have become a new form of divination
whereby Mankind is hoping to interpret the messages from the gods.
We seek meaning in the circles, from alchemy, as was the case
in Barbury Castle, to other topical notions, such as the Mayan
calendar. Gerard Hawkins and John Michell both followed this approach
for many years and today, enigmatically shaped designs continue
to function as a Rorschach test on the cerealogists. In
1993, Jim Schnabel’s “Round in Circles” underlined
how insular thinking in crop circle research meant that the field
had created experts of its own, which went around arguing in circular
logic, in efforts to try and convince the public of the scientific
nature of their research. More than a decade onwards, crop circle
research is still going round in the same framework, trying to
find “the evidence” that will convince the world of
the non-human nature of the phenomenon. |
Since
the early 1990s, the crop circle phenomenon has become part and
parcel of the alternative scene, and specifically the science
fiction industry – and even the subject of a movie, “Signs”,
by M. Night Shyamalan. Equally, in the mini-series “Taken”,
crop circles are featured briefly, where they are “discovered”
to be a hoax. Both movies highlight the debate that has existed
for almost two decades, as to whether they are man-made creations
or the result of an otherworldly or extraterrestrial force.
Despite
Andrews’ 2001 conclusions, cerealogy has not moved with
his 80-20 conclusions. Hence, cerealogy today or in 1995 is very
much the same. The problem is that the “new science”
had not even had its breakfast before someone peed in its cereals
– and Andrews played a pivotal role in this episode. 
From
their early efforts in the late 1970s, for five years, their efforts
went unnoticed. When their creations were finally receiving some
attention, the media largely reported them as anomalous, with
one Dr. Terence Meaden claiming they were due to natural causes.
Over the next decade – the 1980s – Doug and Dave tried
to create ever more elaborate circles, in the hope of forcing
Meaden to admit no natural phenomenon could achieve such damage
to a field. Unfortunately, as the circles grew in complexity,
so did Meaden’s theory. As such, a design that was obviously
meant to leave the impression that a four-legged UFO had landed
in one field, was explained as the result of a freak weather phenomenon.
The
“best evidence” in many people’s book for an
otherworldly origin is the apparent complexity of the circles.
But to underline the human perfection that can go into circles,
four examples should suffice. Two examples were made by Circlemakers.org,
the first a design for a Wheatabix advert, the second a commission
for a BBC television documentary. Whereas the Wheatabix circle
is unusual, the perfection in creating what appear to be from
a distance uniform letters, including openings in the letters
e, a and b, underlines the expertise of some of the makers. The
BBC design is of a complexity on par with at least 80 to 90 percent
of the circles that appear today. The end result was a 300 feet
design in barley, which incorporated some level of sacred geometry.
The
experience also gave the media the idea to seriously test the
scientific capability of the cerealogist. Hence, in 1991, Channel
4 would use a group of students, working under the name of “Wessex
Skeptics”, setting up crop circle enthusiast Busty Taylor
and Terence Meaden. In September 1991, the Today newspaper, when
scooping the Doug and Dave revelation, created yet another circle,
this time in Kent, this time in an effort to expose Pat Delgado
as a fool. 
The
Tully case is but one in several – if not hundreds –
in which reports referenced UFOs leaving certain marks on the
ground – and if that ground was a field – a circle
in grass or crop. Often, this “sign” took the form
of burning or flattening and was seen as a CE-II: a Close Encounter
of the Second Kind, in which physical evidence was deemed to be
present. 
One
little-known account states that in the first half of the 20th
century, the existence and origins of crop circles was quite well-known.
Young lovers were said to have made such circles to “enjoy
themselves”, without being seen by family members. Apparently,
several such circles were made in different locations, so that
the young lovers had various places of close encounters of the
sexual kind (CE-X?), without parental oversight. One woman noted
that when some of the circles were discovered – though without
any sexual encounter apparently in progress – “the
disturbed corn was often put down to the deer.”
Robbert
Van den Broeke
Olivers
Castle 1996 Crop Circle
Apart
from this notorious incident, England anno 2007 “only”
had 50-odd circles, with around one hundred circles – twice
as much – worldwide. Still, the British formations were
better and more complex than anything the rest of the world was
able to offer, with some notable exceptions. As in previous years,
pictograms that dominated the 1990s remain elusive (though are
more common outside the UK), the majority of formations being
complex circles.