UK Crop Formations '99

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The London Daily Mail, one of the London large mainstream papers, ran a huge article the first week of August '99 on the story developed from a formation which they claimed to have hoaxed. The paper hired locals to spend the night undetected out in the particular field making a huge formation under cloud cover with no light. They worked throughout the night trying to get the massive job completed with their crude tools - obviously did not have electromagnetic energy, gravitational microwave radiation, ultrasound or pulse beam weapons to help with the process. The next morning at first daylight they placed a little collection box at the farmer's fence, as is the usual custom, to collect a few pounds which help offset the farmer's crop destruction loss. Then, as the word spread of a new formation and people began to arrive at the location reporters and photographers already there from London interviewed each and recorded emotions and feelings, expressional statements, and full names for their article. "What a down and dirty deed," Joyce of Beyond Boundaries said on the Sightings Show with Jeff Rense broadcast live from England. "If you consider the formation as a work of art using the planks and ropes as tools and the wheatfield as the canvas, then people passing by would be justly allowed expressions of emotion and awe at the masterpiece displayed here," Joyce angrily exclaimed on the show.

The expedition team had worked closely with Jane Ross and Freddy Silva, former close associates for several years of Colin Andrews, in getting orientated to recent activities and formations in the area before actual arrival in Wiltshire, England. A very positve article appeared this same week in the Gazette and Herald, a local newspaper, telling the story of Jane's vision of a soon to happen formation, which occurred only a couple of days later , the Circle of Life as she named it. Freddy explained to the group that the original circlemakers were thought to have finished their work a year or so ago and this year the team would discover new artists with a completely new style, which they soon did. There were more right angled mechanical like designs, some with almost a repulsive but beautiful attraction and definitely not the soft, curves, and fluid lines of years past.

Freddy Silva states on his website, the following history and explanation of the cropcircles phenomenon:

The crop circle phenomenon was first reported during modern times in 1972 when two witnesses, Arthur Shuttlewood and Bryce Bond, sat on the slope of Star Hill near Warminster, England, hoping to catch a glimpse of the strange unidentifyed flying craft that had made this part of England a UFO Mecca for almost a decade. But what they witnessed on that moonlit night was something more extraordinary: a hundred feet away they saw an imprint take shape, a large circular area of plants that collapsed like a lady opening a fan. Since then some eighty eyewitnesses from as far away as British Columbia have reported the formation of a crop circle, which takes less than twenty seconds to materialize, often accompanied by sightings of unusual lights and balls of light beaming shafts of light onto the field the night before.

Crop circles are sometimes accompanied by a trilling sound, since captured on tape and analysed by NASA as artificial in origin. But it was not until a decade later that the phenomenon began to really manifest itself in a quantitative manner. To date there have been over 9000 reported and documented crop circles throughout the world, with some 90% emerging from England. It is also fair to say that many more go unreported each year.

If you happen to buy the story that all crop circles were done by two sexagenarians with planks of wood, string and a ouija board, you are not in the minority. Once in a while, governments like to control public interest in unexplained phenomena by generating a disinformation method called 'debunking', a technique invented during the Cold War for the sad purpose of controlling mass opinion in the face of unexplainable phenomena (this was the prime motive of the 1953 Robertson Panel, obtained in 1977 under the US Freedom of Information Act). This method works because the media provides little or no scientific or factual data with which the public can form an educated opinion on the subject. This absence of evidence is then replaced by ridiculing the subject through association with other 'fringe' topics, or so-called experts are brought-in to explain away all the events as freak weather conditions or the work of general pranksters. So let's put the hoaxing story to rest.

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