(word processor parameters LM=8, RM=75, TM=2, BM=2) Taken from KeelyNet BBS (214) 324-3501 Sponsored by Vangard Sciences PO BOX 1031 Mesquite, TX 75150 There are ABSOLUTELY NO RESTRICTIONS on duplicating, publishing or distributing the files on KeelyNet except where noted! March 8, 1992 CIRCLES3.ASC -------------------------------------------------------------------- This file shared with KeelyNet courtesy of Mathew Bevan. -------------------------------------------------------------------- SOURCE: The Times DATE: 27 July 1990 George Hill goes down on the farm and discovers that corn circles are grist to a media mill, whether messages in Sumerian, natural phenomena or simply hoaxes . In spite of the giant graffiti mockingly imprinted this week on a cornfield just under their noses, the research team seeking to crack the mystery of corn circles at Westbury Hill in Wiltshire mean to continue their vigil until the crop is harvested in two or three weeks' time. The standing corn is the writing-paper on which some little- understood influence inscribes, with uncanny precision, signs which seem to grow more numerous and more complex every year. With five low-light video cameras trained day and night on the ripening cornfields which stretch away to the horizon from their vantage- point on the chalk ramparts of the prehistoric Bratton Fort, the team hopes to catch the moment of formation of one of the circles. The scene at Bratton Fort on Wednesday, on the morning the hoaxers had been at work, did little to promote the credibility of the circles as a genuine scientific phenomenon. Down below was the evidence of the work of a party of buffoons to damage somebody else's property and livelihood, while high on the escarpment the angry and excited figure of Colin Andrews, one of the leaders of the project, was letting himself be drawn by bands of the international media into dropping hints which will not help workers in the field to gain respectable backers for future research. An atmosphere of silly-season gaiety hung over the encampment. It will be harder than ever now to wrest the subject from the mystics who prefer supernatural to natural explanations, and the cynics who are satisfied that everything can be explained on the basis of bucolic humour or press circulation-battles. Because the story is all about ripening corn, it breaks every year just at the time when serious news tends to be afflicted by its usual summer drought. As Mr Andrews spoke of ``an airborne consciousness'', which he declared could not inappropriately be described as ``supernatural'', the representative of the Today newspaper stood at his shoulder with a proprietorial smile. For those who have been so merrily making hay out of the corn in recent weeks, any turn in the tale, whether hoax or otherwise, can Page 1 be turned to account except one: a natural explanation. A solution to the mystery would spoil the fun and they would be thrown back on the Loch Ness monster. So successful has the drive to mystification been, that a spokesman for the Meteorological Office yesterday was still taking the classic attitude of conservative science to a puzzle with overtones of the occult, and dismissing the whole phenomenon as ``a glorified hoax''. In spite of Wednesday's prank, and earlier jollities like the appearance of the message ``WEARENOTALONE'' on a Hampshire hillside in 1983, and last year's report of rings at an Essex village called Littley Green (Littley Green Men: geddit?), there can be no doubt that many circles are not hoaxes. If the 400 rings which have been reported this year are all man-made, then the sun must have touched an alarmingly large number of industrious humourists. Many are in remote spots where the chances of publicity would be slight. Similar circles have been reported in many other countries where there has been no ballyhoo to encourage pranksters, and as long ago as 1936, 1918, and even 1678. ``It is usually easy to distinguish a natural circle from a man-made one by looking at the way the stalks have been pressed down,'' says Paul Fuller,the joint author of Crop Circles a Mystery Solved, to be published next month. ``If you visit a fresh one, you can see how the crops have been pressed down in a spiral or circular pattern, sometimes so gently that they have not even been flattened, sometimes pressed so firmly into the soil that they leave a mark in it. The traces left by human intervention are quite different.'' But there are aspects to the circles which make them tempting subjects for science-fiction speculation. Witnesses who have been nearby when they form frequently speak of strange lights and buzzing noises, or sensations similar to those associated with strong fields of static electricity. Tests with instruments have sometimes confirmed that electric phenomena are involved. The growing number of circles may be partly explicable by changes in agricultural practice, but it is impossible to account for the eerily systematic patterns of recent examples. Fancy and superstition have ranged exuberantly in proposing explanations for the phenomenon. Claims that the cause involves flying saucers, fungal infections, ley-lines, giant hailstones, rutting stags or mass-movements of hedgehogs have been suggested, and gleefully perpetuated by those who thrive on mystification. This year, the bouillabaisse of red herrings has been enriched by a suggestion that the signs are a warning of ecological disaster written in 3,000-year-old Sumerian script although it has not been explained why an entity which has not yet discovered the ABC should be supposed to have any up to date information about other events on earth. The mystifiers are less happy with the evidence of the small number of witnesses, including some impeccably sober citizens, who have actually observed the formation of circles. Their testimony threatens to spoil the fun. One of them is Melvyn Bell, a Wiltshire Page 2 labourer, who saw a circle in 1983, long before the story was taken up by the tabloids. ``It didn't seem a matter of great interest to me at the time,'' he says. ``I was riding on the old Ridgeway near Lavington at about eight in the evening one day in August. About a quarter of a mile away I saw a small cloud of dust above a cornfield it looked like one of those spinning clouds of debris you sometimes see outside a supermarket. I was looking down the hill towards it, higher up than the top of the cloud. It was all over in a few seconds. It laid out a circle about ten yards wide in the corn. I heard no buzzing noises.'' Of all explanations, the whirlwind solution is the one that commentators drawn to occult answers dislike most. Mr. Andrews mentions it briefly and dismissively in his own book, Circular Evidence, written jointly with Pat Delgado and published last year. Supernaturalists have suggested that Mr Bell's evidence should be discounted because he is an employee of Dr. Terence Meaden, an academic specialising in research into atmospheric processes, whose book The Circles Effect and Its Mysteries, also published last year (there must be a supernatural explanation behind this exponential growth in the number of books on the subject). Dr. Meaden is the first writer to put forward a theory which explains most of the characteristics of the circles on a basis of current scientific knowledge. In the process, he goes far to providing a rational explanation for many of the UFO reports which have puzzled researchers for decades. Drawing partly on the extensive records gathered by Mr Andrews and his colleagues, he shows that circles tend to appear in very specific conditions of weather and topography. ``I would say there is no mystery about the basic process,'' he says. ``The primary thing is a vortex formed on the lee side of a hill in very still atmospheric conditions. If a mass of air near the ground becomes electrically charged, as it can be by friction where a dry crop and dust have been stirred by the wind all day, very complex processes might develop, and produce the buzzing and glowing that have been described.'' In their familiar form, whirlwinds happen only in daylight, when warm air creates upcurrents which spin as they rise. But where a layer of cool air lies above a warm layer, parts of the upper layer can fall away, and as they sink, spiral formations like smoke-rings may form. These spinning masses, some larger than others, some hitting the ground quite hard, and others scarcely brushing it, might well be the most credible explanation for many of the detailed characteristics of the circles, including the delicate concentric forms sometimes seen. It is more difficult to understand how they could produce treble and quintuple patterns of rings, and harder still to see how they could lead to the complex angular spurs and key-patterns photographed this year. ``Imagine a round clock falling to the ground,'' Dr Meaden says. ``If it falls gently, it may leave a plain round impression behind. If it falls so hard that it smashes, then parts of the mechanism might shoot out this way or that. Further vortices inside the main vortex might fly out as it disintegrates. I think many of these patterns are genuine, and offer clues to the internal Page 3 structure of these objects.'' But not even Dr Meaden can offer a clear explanation for the apparent tendency of the patterns to grow more complex year by year. If that trend continues, a degree of mystery will continue to cling to the circles, and it may not be long before it seems worthwhile for us to brush up on our Sumerian. (c) Times Newspapers Ltd. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 1990 SOURCE: The Times DATE: 25 July 1991 Crop Circles; Letter From Mr Ralph Noyes Sir, I read with interest your report on the reappearance of crop circles (July 16). Hoaxing is undoubtedly taking place in some cases. We in the Centre for Crop Circle Studies are cooperating closely with the Wiltshire police in the hope of eliminating this nuisance, which is not only troublesome to farmers but muddies the scientific record. The event in the field near Alton Barnes which occurred on July 1-2 (there has since been a second formation in the same field) was seen within hours by members of CCCS. It will by now have lost much of its delicate texturing as a result of sight-seeing by members of the public. But in its pristine state it showed the hallmarks of a genuine occurrence, particularly in the complex layering of the grain where the main shaft of the formation crosses the central elements of a ring and circle. We do not believe it could have been a hoax. Mr. and Mrs. Carson, who farm the land, have our full support in repudiating the suggestion of trickery. Yours faithfully, RALPH NOYES (Honorary Secretary, Centre for Crop Circle Studies), 9 Oakley Street, SW3. July 16. (c) Times Newspapers Ltd. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 1991 SOURCE: The Times DATE: 12 June 1991 Tokyo scientist rustles up corn circle Yoshi-Hiko Ohtsuki By Nick Nuttall, Technology Correspondent A JAPANESE scientist who has been enthralled by the annual appearance of crop circles in Britain has created the phenomenon in his laboratory. The shapes, identical to those which started to re- appear last week, were made without the assistance of UFOs, farmers' lads, rutting deer, frenzied hedgehogs or any of the other exotic theories which have sprung up around the phenomenon. Yoshi-Hiko Ohtsuki used a machine which he developed to produce ball lightning. The professor of physics at Waseda university, Tokyo, has thus helped to confirm theories proposed last year by Terence Meaden, former associate professor of physics at Dalhousie university in Halifax, Canada, and founder of the Tornado Storm Research Organisation at Oxford polytechnic. Dr. Meaden suggested, to gales of derision by lovers of more outlandish explanations, that the topography and climate of such counties as Wiltshire and Hampshire triggered the formation of mini- whirlwinds. As they broke down over fields, he suggested, a doughnut-shaped eddy within the column swept downwards, swirling the crop. Page 4 Dr. Meaden said yesterday that Professor Ohtsuki, who first visited Britain two years ago to examine the phenomenon, had told him in a letter that he fired mini-whirlwinds over plates of fine aluminium powder in his ball-lightning machine to replicate the swirls. The findings have been lent further weight by another Japanese scientist, Tokio Kikuchi of Kochi university, who has developed a mathematical model based on Dr Meaden's theory which has been shot on video. It also creates more complex shapes, similiar to those that have appeared in recent years. Supporters of more exotic theories had said that a scientific basis for corn circles is defied by these complicated configurations. Dr. Meaden believes that the final answer to the circles' complexities might be found in the appearance of sun spots which lead to electromagnetic changes in the Earth's atmosphere and crust. If so, the number of complicated corn circles may fall over the coming years. Solar activity is believed to be on the point of declining from a 200 - year peak. (c) Times Newspapers Ltd. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 1991 SOURCE: The Times DATE: 10 September 1991 LONDON'S most famous occult bookshop, Waktins, is having no truck with the Southampton hoaxsters who confessed to newspapers yesterday that they were responsible for the mystery of the corn circles. ``The newspapers are full of lies,'' said an angry spokesman for the shop, which specialises in books on magic, astrology and psychic phenomena. The enigma remains, insists the shop. So, too, will its window display, erected last week, of books on crop circles, explaining the phenomenon by reference to aliens from outer space, energy currents and other causes far more plausible than two men with a ball of string, an old baseball cap and 4 ft wooden plinths. (c) Times Newspapers Ltd. 1991 -------------------------------------------------------------------- If you have comments or other information relating to such topics as this paper covers, please upload to KeelyNet or send to the Vangard Sciences address as listed on the first page. Thank you for your consideration, interest and support. Jerry W. Decker.........Ron Barker...........Chuck Henderson Vangard Sciences/KeelyNet -------------------------------------------------------------------- If we can be of service, you may contact Jerry at (214) 324-8741 or Ron at (214) 242-9346 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 5