Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (7 page)

A critic had pointed out to Professor Ohtsuki that most fireballs are about the size of grapefruit, and that a seventy-foot fireball would attract attention for many miles around.
Besides, no fireball of that size had ever been known.

Stories of crop circles began to appear in the Japanese media.
On 17 September 1989, on Kyushu Island, a rice farmer named Shunzo Abe found two wide circles in his fields.
He thought at first that they were caused by a wild boar, then noted that there were no footprints in the soft Earth.

Back in England, another curious phenomenon had been noted: that the ‘circle makers’ responded to the suggestions, and even the thoughts, of the investigators.
In August 1986, Busty Taylor was flying home near Cheesefoot Head, when he remarked to his passenger George Wingfield that he would like to see a pattern with a central circle surrounded by satellites and rings.
In his mind, he said, were the words ‘Celtic cross’—a form of cross with arms emerging from a central circle.
The next day, flying over the same spot, he was astounded to find a Celtic cross in the field below him.
Colin Andrews, another of the first ‘cereologists’ (as crop-circle students came to be called) lay in bed one night and visualised a Celtic cross, literally asking for it to appear in a nearby field.
The next day, a local farmer rang him to report an elaborate Celtic cross in his field.

On 18 June 1989, six investigators, including George Wingfield, were in a crop circle at Cheesefoot Head when a trilling noise began.
It seemed to circle around the group in the corn.
A female member of the group said: ‘If you understand us, stop’, and the trilling stopped for a moment, then resumed.
Then Wingfield called: ‘Please will you make us a circle?’
The following morning, a new circle had appeared five hundred yards away, in the direction in which the trilling noise had finally moved away.

The six also noted that when the trilling stopped their watches showed them—to their astonishment—that it had gone on for an hour and a half, far longer than any of them remembered.

At exactly the same time the following year, 1990, a group including George Wingfield, John Haddington (the present Lord Haddington) and the publisher Michael Cox decided to set up a vigil at Wansdyke, near Silbury Hill.
On the first night, Wingfield and Haddington saw lights along Wansdyke, while elsewhere Michael Cox again recorded the trilling sound.
The following evening, the sound began again, and the lights moved from Wansdyke into the middle of the cornfield where they were standing: ‘They would flash on and off very quickly’, wrote Haddington, ‘and were an orange, red or greenish hue’.

Then, as they watched, hundreds of black rods began to jump up and down above the wheat.
(In 1987, Busty Taylor had succeeded in capturing this phenomenon in a photograph.) Michael Cox tried to pursue the trilling sound with his tape recorder, but was suddenly overwhelmed with nausea, and his knees gave way.
He had to stagger to the fence and sit down; but he had again captured the trilling noise on tape.
Haddington remarks: ‘To the human ear this most musical sound has the most beautiful bell-like quality, really indescribable as it is so high-pitched.
This does not translate on to a tape in a true fashion, coming out covered by a harsh crackling, static-like noise which is presumably caused by the discharge of high energy’.
He is obviously correct: there is no reason why a tape recorder should not accurately record any sound, unless the sound is a by-product of some energy vibration that spoils the recording.

When the American television investigator Linda Moulton Howe was in England in 1992, Colin Andrews told her the story about visualising a Celtic cross, and remarked that he thought investigators could influence the circles.
On 22 July a group of them went out circle-spotting, including a ‘psychic’ named Maria Ward.
She told them that, on the previous day, she had received a mental impression of a design of a triangle with a circle at each of its points—she drew it on request.
She added that she felt it had to do with Oliver Cromwell.
Two days later, this exact design was found in nearby Alton Barnes, in a wheat field below Oliver’s Castle Hill, where Cromwell had fought Charles I in 1643.

The problem with such data is that, scientifically speaking, it is worthless.
Even the two published accounts of the Busty Taylor episode differ slightly: he says he only
thought
of a Celtic cross, but did not mention it; George Wingfield, who was with him in the aeroplane, says he mentioned it.
We can see how events are changed slightly in recollection.
And a scientist would point out that no one could prove that Colin Andrews visualised a Celtic cross the night before one appeared, and that some hoaxer may have created the Alton Barnes triangle after hearing that a psychic had predicted it.

In fact, hoaxers quickly threw the whole phenomenon into doubt.
In September 1991, two elderly landscape painters named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who lived in Southampton, claimed that they were the authors of most of the crop circles, and that their main piece of equipment was a short plank.
Their claim was reported in the press around the world, and many people felt that this was the solution to the mystery—without reflecting that crop circles were now being reported from all over the world.
Doug and Dave—whose names became a synonym for hoaxing—were commissioned by a documentary film maker to create a circle design at East Meon, and responded with an admirable pattern like a dumbbell, with additional designs at either end—it took an hour and a half.
But they did it by trampling the wheat, and using short planks, often snapping stalks; on the whole, genuine crop formations show bent stalks—as if, Linda Howe says, rushing water had flowed over them.

The question is not whether they were telling the truth—they obviously were, in the sense that they had undoubtedly made dozens of hoax circles.
But could they be taken seriously when they claimed that they—together with a few unconnected hoaxers—made
all
the circles since 1978?
If so, why did they wait until September 1991 to claim credit?
It seems clear that they finally approached the now defunct
Today
newspaper because they wanted to claim the prestige due for what they regarded as a kind of artistic endeavour.
And obviously their story would be far less impressive if they claimed that they had been making circles only for the past two or three years.
If they were going to make their bid for notoriety, they would
want
to claim credit for all the circles.
But is it likely that two ‘artists’ would want to hide their light under a bushel for thirteen years?

That many of the crop circles are the work of hoaxers cannot be doubted; but the notion that they are
all
by hoaxers—including a circle in a Japanese rice field, whose soft Earth would show footprints—is hard to believe.
It was an investigation by Terence Meaden in 1991 that made it clear that the hoaxer theory was inadequate.
It was called ‘Blue Hill’, and was funded by Japanese universities, and associated with a BBC film project.
Both Meaden and the BBC installed radar equipment whose aim was to detect both hoaxers and whirlwinds.
Most of the six weeks of the project were uneventful, although new circles appeared further afield.
But, towards the end, two circles were found close at hand in the radar-booby-trapped area, demonstrating fairly conclusively that they had not been made by either hoaxers or whirlwinds.

Between 1991 and 1993, an American biophysicist, W.
C.
Levengood, examined samples from known hoaxed circles, as well as some believed to be ‘genuine’.
He discovered that the ‘genuine’ samples showed changes in the cell-pits (in Britain called pips or seeds), enlargements that he was able to reproduce only in a microwave oven.
He also noted cell changes in the hoax samples—a lengthening of the pits—but these were due to being trampled on and squeezed through the cell wall.
Even though Levengood concluded, ‘Whatever is doing these formations is affecting the fundamental biophysics and biochemistry of the plant’, cereologists, who had hoped for an instant test to distinguish hoaxes, had to admit that it was not as clear-cut as they might have wished.

Linda Howe tells how, in September 1992, Levengood was contacted by a farmer from Clark, South Dakota, about a six-hundred-foot circle that had appeared among his potatoes.
The plants were all dead.
Levengood studied the dead plants, and again found pit enlargement, often of more than a quarter, while the potatoes themselves had yellow streaks and cracks.

In Austinburg, Ohio, a gardener named Donald Wheeler discovered a large rectangle in his maize; the stalks had been flattened but not broken, and were all lying in the same direction.
The wet ground showed no sign of footmarks.
Dr.
Levengood examined maize from inside the rectangle, and undamaged maize from outside.
The ‘tassels’ on the undamaged corn were closed, while those on the damaged corn were open, indicating that their growth had been somehow accelerated.
Linda Howe published photographs of the wheat, potatoes and maize examined by Levengood in her
Glimpses of Other Realities,
where the difference can be clearly seen.

One startling development—although at the time no one recognised how startling—was a long review of three books on crop circles in the
New York Review
on 21 November 1991.
What was so unusual was that it was by Baron Zuckerman, one of the most distinguished members of Britain’s scientific establishment—perhaps
the
most.
He had ended a brilliant academic career as chief scientific adviser to the British government.
And, by 1991, he was eighty-seven years old.
So why was such a man getting involved in a subject that most scientists dismissed as lunacy?

The answer may lie in the fact that Zuckerman had retired to a village near Sandringham in Norfolk, and that Sandringham happens to be one of the royal residences.
There is, among cereologists, a persistent rumour that crop circles appeared on the Queen’s estate at Sandringham, and that the response of Prince Philip was to send for their old friend Baron Zuckerman to ask his opinion.
Zuckerman certainly went to the trouble of personally examining a number of crop circles.

One result was the
New York Review
article, written two years before his death, and two years after his alleged visit to Sandringham.

‘Creations of the Dark’ is a curious piece.
There is no hint of that carping tone that has become the standard response of scientists to such bizarre matters.
He begins by speaking of mysteries of the British landscape, like Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and the white horses cut in the chalk, then, moving on to crop circles, mentions that almost a thousand appeared in England between 1980 and 1990.
He goes on to speak sympathetically and at length about Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews, authors of
Circular Evidence,
one of the books he is reviewing.

They believe that the circles are ‘caused by some supernatural intelligence’, he explains—yet still with no touch of the critical scepticism one would expect of a senior scientist.
Even when he mentions that one of the cornfield inscriptions reads WEARENOTALONE, it is with no hint of scorn.
This appears only at the end of his summary of the views of Terence Meaden, when he says: ‘How a downwardly directed turbulent vortex .
.
.
could explain the more elaborate circle designs is not touched on .
.
.’, and goes on to quote Colin Andrews’s criticism that even a bouncing vortex could not make geometrical patterns.
And, a few sentences later, he quotes with satisfaction Wingfield’s remark that rectangular boxes in the corn have ‘driven the final nail into the coffin of the atmospheric vortex theory’.

Why, he wants to know, have scientists not taken a more active interest in the phenomenon?
The owner of one farm where Zuckerman went to look at circles told him it was owned by New College, Oxford, but that none of the science fellows there had shown any interest.
Neither had the science teachers at Marlborough School, only ten miles away.

One useful step, Zuckerman suggests, would be to train university students to make hoax circles.
If it proved to be easy, that at least would be one established fact.
And if it proved to be difficult .
.
.
well, we would be back at square one, still faced with the mystery.

What is perfectly clear, from Zuckerman’s admission that he has studied many of these circles, is that he does not accept either that they are natural phenomena, due to whirlwinds, or that they have all been created by hoaxers.
The final impression left by the article—and by the very fact that a man as distinguished as Zuckerman had taken the trouble to write it—is that he is far from dismissive of the suggestion that at least some of the circles are the work of nonhuman intelligences, and that he feels that scientists ought to be trying to find out.