CROP CIRCLES 101
There's a breakthrough science story waiting to be made public. It's about
an Intelligence that has been visiting the Earth for perhaps thousands of
years, using crop fields to make artworks. There have been some 2,000
occurrences worldwide since 1989, when the phenomenon came under close
scrutiny. (In 1989, the Intelligence went from making simple circles to
delivering complex geometric patterns and recognizable symbols.) The crop
circle phenomenon has been documented and studied now to the point where
there is proof that's been provided in science labs and reported on in
scientific journals, our agreed upon mechanism for determining what's real,
that sophisticated communications are being sent by a non-human source.
The good science that has been done, however, has not been enough to crack
the shell of skepticism that surrounds the phenomenon. That no doubt is
because the truth would represent the biggest leap our science ever will
have made, which will affect our fundamental idea about our relationship
with the universe. The last development that was as big was when human
beings split off from the apes. It's a new reality we are facing, and the
old one -- predictably in a world held in place by a power structure that
would be undermined by these new revelations -- dies hard.
The formations are full of information. They obviously are being sent here
with an intent to show us they are meaningful. Many patterns depict symbols
from mathematics, the sciences, and different spiritual traditions. Many of
them contain mathematical ratios conforming to a musical scale. And whatever
makes the designs knows geometry better than we do -- we learn from what the
circlemakers deliver. Another category of meaningfulness is that new genres
of patterns that come in are quickly followed by variations on them, as if
to dazzle us with what can best be described as artistry. Pure design is
giving us a demonstration of awareness. It's not what they say that's
perhaps as significant as that they are saying something.
Another outstandingly noteworthy aspect of the phenomenon is the lay of the
crop, which can look like multitudes of carpet weavers had arranged all the
stalks. The 1989, the turning point crop circle -- where we went from
relative simplicity to great complexity -- was divided into four quarters,
with the lay of each quarter going in opposite directions. In some
formations, the shafts of all the plants are parallel, flowing like rivers
that ingeniously weave around standing shapes. Other times, a few stalks are
wrapped together by a little piece of straw-like material, and bundles of
these are laid side by side. There must be a department in charge of centers
of circles, which are done in many styles, from tightly woven tents and
nests, to tufts, to splays. And sometimes the whole lay is like a false
floor, revealing another lay underneath -- occasionally there are third and
fourth layers. In the last few years, an intricate basket weave style has
been used in a couple of formations, and there have been a fair number of 3D
effects that can seen from the air when the sunlight casts shadows. The
last two years have seen radically different methodologies of laying the
crop -- we got a dot matrix face in 2001, a half tone effect to make a face
in 2002, and each of these had a message aspect in another new laying style
of little squiggly tufts that translate via binary code.
There are other things to mention that give evidence to there being
non-human sources for the phenomenon. In genuine formations, you find many
single stalks that somehow have not been affected by the energy, left
standing in downed crop. And you also find stiff stalks bent into right
angles, with the plants not damaged at all, so that, if they are young, they
turn back up and continue to grow. Some of the formations are in very hilly
places, yet from the air their patterns are absolutely symmetrical, as if a
master surveyor had compensated for the irregular terrain. In fact,
surveyors say that it would take them days to lay out some of the complex
formations -- and English nights, during which most circles are made, are
about 4 hours long. Another thing that precludes people stomping the crop
down with boards is that there are times when all the stalks in the lay are
bent several inches off the ground. And sometimes downed crop is in lines
too narrow for people to pass through. Then there are formations or parts of
formations that are in the middle of fields, too far from the tram lines
that are used by farm equipment to get to the crop -- which is the way
people walk in without hurting the farmer's fields, and how hoaxers, for the
shabby formations they make, gain their access.
Another thing that's part of the mystery is the failure of different kinds
of electro-magnetic equipment inside the formations -- from cell phones to
compasses, things don't work inside them that do work just outside them.
Cameras, which sometimes catch strange light effects on film that weren't
seen by the naked eye, actually have been broken by the force -- stymieing
camera repair people with never before seen damage. And video cameras
occasionally catch balls of light streaking right above the formations.
A whole other aspect of what is happening is that the Intelligence can
understand what people communicate to it. When people meditate on a shape,
designs that correspond to what they had in mind frequently appear. I know
the Japanese researcher who had a group of Japanese tourists with him,
meditating one night on getting a shape that would be delivered especially
for them -- in the morning, an origami pattern was in that field. And the
phenomenon seems to have a winking sense of humor -- a TV crew mounted a
several week watch in a likely field, and the day they left a formation
appeared. During another watch, while cameras were trained on the field, a
mist descended, and when it lifted, with the motion sensors having recorded
nothing, there was a formation. Andrew Lloyd Weber was mystified in 1995
when he got formation behind high walls on his well guarded estate, and the
summer of 2002 saw a formation in the heart of London, again behind a high
wall, at a botanical garden.
As the world is plagued by terrorists, the crop circle community is plagued
by hoaxers. They make some formations, say they make others, and thus give
the public ammunition for skepticism. It defies logic to think that
incredibly complex patterns are delivered with flawless precision in the
dark during the short English nights, with no mud in them even when they
arrive in storms. Year after year, all over the world, this phenomenon gets
more widespread and more complex, and the thought that people, who get no
credit for their work, would derive enough satisfaction from such massive
efforting is just absurd.
Toward the end of the summer season in 2001, England got the biggest
formation ever. It covered an area as large as two football fields, and its
spectacular size and beautiful fractal design attracted the world press.
That press, however, missed an even bigger story that came right after this,
having to do with the arrival in one field, a few days apart, of two unusual
formations. One was a face -- the first one ever -- that was rendered in
the first ever dot matrix patterning of the crop. The other was the first
clear message, which arrived in a first ever use of binary code. Very
uniquely, it was an answer to a binary code radio telescope message we had
sent into space in 1974, which Carl Sagan had a hand in designing. The crop
circle band of dedicated researchers from all over the world, who spend
their summers in Southern England (where most of the formations, 75-300 a
year, appear), thought that newspaper headlines would say "CONTACT." The
pattern in the field told us about the sender in a correspondence to the
information we had sent about ourselves. SETI, our Search for
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, in typically dismissive fashion, said if it
was another intelligence it would have communicated by radio waves and not
in a crop field, and that was that.
This is being written after the 2002 summer, which was most remarkable for
an end of the year formation that is being hotly debated as to its
authenticity. It's an alien face much like we've seen in our science
fiction, holding a disk which contains another clear binary code message:
"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but
still time. (Damaged Word because of tram track). There is GOOD out there.
We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING (BELL SOUND)"
In terms of what would happen if it was broadly known there was contact,
here's what Paul Horowitz, SETI Project Director, had to say:
"We consider ourselves morally, or culturally, or intellectually unique. But
if we were to find a signal from another star system, another thinking
being, we would know that none of that is true. A connection with another
intelligence would be the first bridging across four billion years of
independent life in evolution...It will be without doubt the greatest
discovery in the history of humankind."
It defies the imagination to foresee what will happen as this new awareness
spreads in humanity, but this phenomenon is so beautiful and so benign that
it feels to promise only good. A great power has come to us, and it behooves
us to join forces.
