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ZS2ABF > UFO 22.02.09 10:09l 439 Lines 25567 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 680570ZS2ABF
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Subj: UFO INTEREST GROUP 242
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Sent: 090222/0716Z @:ZS0ELD.ELD.ZAF.AF #:806 [807] FBB7.01.35 alpha $:680570ZS2
From: ZS2ABF@ZS0ELD.ELD.ZAF.AF
To : UFO@WW
South African Ham Radio UFO Interest Group. Known as (SAHRUIG).
NEWS Volume 1 News letter No.242
Don't forget to "LOOK UP TO THE SKIES" you may see something exiting.
Your Comments, Sightings or UFO/Paranormal stories will be welcomed and
are needed. When submitting Sighting reports please send as much detail as
possible.
Address them via Packet to ZS2ABF @ ZS0ELD.ECP.ZAF.AF
Posted to BBS : /01/2009
I'm sorry for the delay, but our BBS has been down and had to be re
installed.
Many people say Crop circles are the work of Alien technology. Others say they
are done by hoaxers.
Below is a constructive article on his phenomenon.
Let me know if it is interesting to you or not?
*********** ************** ************
Crop Circles and their Message by David Pratt, June 2005
Part 1 of 2
1. Introduction
Every year over 200 designs appear in crops around the world. These patterns
of flattened plants have been reported on every continent,
in around 30 countries, but the majority have appeared in southern England.
Since the early 1990s, the original simple circles have
developed into huge, intricate, geometrical patterns of stunning precision and
beauty. Most appear in wheat, barley and oil-seed rape,
but they have also been reported in rye, oats, flax, maize, sugar cane, peas,
potatoes, sunflowers, grass, fruit orchards, rice paddies,
snow, and ice.
Over the years, crop formations have been attributed to a variety of mundane
causes: drunks armed with string and boards,
wild young farmers, disillusioned art students, out-of-work journalists, over
application of fertilizer, interference from mobile phones,
squabbling birds, geometrically-gifted cows, and sex-mad hedgehogs. Although
the general public, mass media and scientific establishment
tend to dismiss the entire phenomenon as the work of human pranksters, there
is strong evidence that an unexplained force and guiding
intelligence are at work.
2. The Doug and Dave scam
On 9 September 1991, the British tabloid Today ran a front-page story
headlined: the men who conned the world. The story claimed that
all the crop circles in England were the work of two pensioners, Doug Bower
and David Chorley, aged 67 and 62 respectively. Their tools
included a four-foot plank of wood and a ball of string, along with a piece of
wire dangling from a baseball cap to serve as a sighting device,
enabling them to construct perfectly straight lines by focusing on a distant
object – at dead of night! To flatten the crop in areas
that did not overlap tramlines (the tracks made by tractors when spraying
crops), they said they had stood inside a tramline and then
jumped or pole-vaulted into the standing crop; this would involve
pole-vaulting a distance of up to 35 feet – an Olympian achievement!
They said that the idea of making crop circles had come to them after a boring
evening at the pub in 1978, and their only motive was
to have a laugh. Not only had they never been caught in the act, but their
wives had never even noticed their nocturnal absence.
They showed that they could create crude circular designs in broad daylight –
but lacking the geometrical precision, complexity and beautiful
crop lays found in the finest formations. At that time, the circles had
already evolved into complex pictograms, but Doug and Dave could
not convincingly explain how they had created these. They could not even
duplicate on paper a Celtic cross design they claimed to have made.
Confronted with evidence that they had nothing to do with certain formations,
they began to backtrack. Even if their grossly exaggerated
claim to have made 250 crop circles in England since 1978 were true, that
would still leave 1750 formations in England and other countries
unaccounted for, as well as numerous pre-1978 formations.
This did not stop the public at large swallowing the idea that all crop
circles were made by humans. Many people find this far more palatable
than the possibility that unsolved mysteries are taking place in the fields.
So Doug and Dave certainly conned the world – though not in
the way most people think! Despite their retirement, the crop circles were
back as usual in 1992 – but without the intense media interest.
3. Crop-circle evolution
When Doug and Dave claimed to have invented the crop circle phenomenon as a
joke in 1978, they weren't aware that almost 300 documented
formations predated their alleged exploits. There are sporadic reports of crop
circles being found in England throughout the 20th century.
But reports actually go back several centuries earlier.
In 16th and 17th century folklore we find stories about fairies and elves seen
dancing in the fields and leaving circles of trodden grass.
The earliest representation of a crop circle occurs in a woodcut from 1678,
which depicts the mowing Devil reaping a field of oats into
a flattened circle. The story behind it is that a farmer refused to pay the
amount asked by a particular reaper, muttering that he would
rather the Devil took his oats. During the night strange sounds and lights
were heard and seen, and the following morning the farmer found
part of his crop lying in neat circles.
In 1686 a British scientist, Robert Plot, published a book entitled A Natural
History of Staffordshire, which contained accounts of
geometric areas of flattened plants found on both arable land and pastureland.
He describes not only circles but also spirals and squares
within rings, up to 150 feet across. He reports that the soil under them was
much looser and drier than normal, and that a whitish, musty
substance or hoar, like that in moldy bread, was sometimes found on the
plants. He hypothesized that the designs were created by
lightning exploding from the clouds. In July 1880 the science journal Nature
published a letter from a scientist who described finding
multiple circular areas of flattened wheat on a farm in southern England. He
suggested they were the result of some cyclonic wind action.
Since the late 1970s the number of circles has increased dramatically,
especially in the southern English counties of Wiltshire and Hampshire,
and the designs have become increasingly elaborate. Single swirled circles
gave way to multiple circles, sometimes arranged nonrandomly.
The first quintuplet (a circle surrounded by four smaller, evenly-spaced
satellite circles) appeared in 1978. Later, quintuplets appeared
with rings connecting their outer satellites, creating Celtic crosses. Circles
with multiple concentric rings around them also started to appear.
1990 saw the first pictograms, consisting of long chains of circles, rings,
rectangles, straight lines, and tridents, keys or claws.
Whales/dolphins and insectograms began to appear the following year. Crop
glyphs from 1994 included thought bubbles, which by incorporating
crescents mutated into glyphs resembling spiders and scorpions. That year also
saw the first astronomy-related glyphs, which include galaxies,
asteroid belts and planetary orbits. Since the late 1990s the formations have
developed into spectacular and incredibly complex geometrical
designs or mandalas. Sevenfold geometry first appeared in 1998, nine fold
geometry in 1999 and eleven fold geometry in 2000.
Since 1999 several crop formations have created the illusion of being
three-dimensional.
In total, over 10,000 crop formations have been documented worldwide. Over 700
of them appeared in 1991. Of the 229 formations reported from
around the world in 2004, 33.9% of them appeared in England, where crop
circles tend to cluster around sacred megalithic sites such as Stonehenge,
Avebury and Silbury Hill. Other countries with crop circles included Germany
(13.2%), the USA (9.2%), the Czech Republic (8.4%), and Italy (8.4%).
4. Characteristics
In authentic crop circles, the flattened plants are largely undamaged (until
visitors arrive!) and tend to continue growing, whereas in hoaxed
circles the stalks are generally broken, crushed and often killed. The stalks
of flattened vegetation in genuine circles are bent at angles of
up to 90 degrees, and are often laid in a strikingly intricate and beautifully
woven fashion.
Circular components of a design are usually swirled clockwise or anticlockwise
from a centre point outwards. But instead of the swirl going round
and round out from the centre in a tight spiral, as tends to be the case in
man-made formations, it often flows widely outwards, sometimes
in a distinct S-shape. Spirals are often made of thin strips, not 3-ft-wide
swaths, as when planks or garden rollers are used. Where different
flows merge, the plants tend to be plaited over and under, suggesting that all
the plants have collapsed in opposing directions simultaneously.
The centre of a swirl of crop is often marked by a bare area of soil or a hole
in the middle of a whorl of stems, and is frequently offset from
the mathematical centre, sometimes by several feet. In some formations
individual stems have been drawn into the outer edges of circles from behind
standing crop, which clearly precludes the use of physical implements. The
direction of crop flow is often different below the top layer of
flattened crop. Multi-tiered, multi-directional layering has never been
replicated by the use of feet, planks, garden rollers or plastic pipes.
The circle-making force can apparently discriminate between the maturity of
plants, for less mature plants, whether standing in a row or scattered
throughout the flattened area, are sometimes left standing. The force also
seems to be able to select between plant species, for red poppies or
thistles may be left standing amid flattened barley or wheat. This feature,
too, rules out the use of planks and garden rollers. The force is so
precise that curtains of wheat one stalk wide are sometimes all that separate
one circle from another.
Biophysicist William Levengood and a number of other researchers have
discovered that flattened plants frequently have enlarged nodes
(the little knuckles along the stems of corn-type plants) and sometimes have
expulsion cavities in the same areas, where moisture seems to have
exploded outwards. Seed germination trials have shown that when a formation
occurs in immature crop, the seedlings usually do not develop, or their
growth is severely reduced, but if a formation occurs in more mature crop, the
seeds grow at up to five times the normal rate. (See next section.)
60% of circles appear on rainy nights. Yet farmers and researchers often
notice that there is no mud on flattened crop, which there would have
been if it had been flattened by humans using mechanical implements. Moreover,
readily crushable balls of chalk are sometimes found intact beneath
the flattened plants. And when a formation occurs on soil containing small,
sharp rocks such as flint, the stems rest on top of the rocks without
leaving crease marks, showing that no weight has been applied.
The soil inside crop circles often shows differences with the soil outside
them. In one Canadian formation, for example, the soil had been baked
as hard as cement, whereas the rest of field was moist and muddy. Reports of
baked soil under flattened plants in crop circles also come from other
countries, such as Russia. In 50% of crop circles the soil inside is
noticeably drier than outside. (As indicated in section 3, this was also
reported by Robert Plot in 1686.) Many of the effects on plants and soil are
consistent with the generation of intense heat during the creation
of crop circles.
Strange substances, such as jelly-like or powdery deposits, are sometimes
found on the plants and soil inside crop circles. Powdery deposits that
have been identified include high-purity silicon dioxide, magnesium oxide, and
magnetite (magnetic iron ore). The latter may be meteoric dust,
which is constantly drifting down through the atmosphere to the earth's
surface; the concentration in circles is up to 600 times higher than the
normal value, indicating the presence of strong magnetic fields around crop
circles. Nearly 90% of crop circles appear over aquifers and/or over
chalk and greensand (an olive-green sandstone). They are often aligned with
ancient sacred sites and with ley lines or lines of earth energy,
as detected by dowsing. The positioning of crop circles is sometimes
undeniably nonrandom. For instance, three identical whale-like pictograms
from 1991 formed a perfect isosceles triangle across several miles when
linked with lines on a map.
Some formations seem to make use of tractor tramlines as guidelines, but
others don't. Many formations have appeared in Canada, yet Canadian fields
are sprayed by airplanes so there are no tramlines to provide hoaxers with
easy access to the fields. In the UK, pictograms often used to be
surrounded with dozens of mini-circles, or grapeshot, a couple of feet in
diameter, located in places that cannot be reached on foot without
leaving obvious traces. Doug and Dave's pole-vaulting yarns have become comedy
legend.
In the case of a small percentage of formations, both simple circles and
complex designs, there is clear visual evidence in the newly-planted field
of the previous summers crop circle. The new plants in the area where the
previous circle was located may be shorter or taller than the surrounding
crop or slightly different in colour. This effect usually lasts no more than
two years after the original formation.
Dead wild animals are rarely found in crop formations, but there have been a
few exceptions. Some birds had apparently been caught up in the
creation of a 1993 formation, and had been blown apart and disintegrated by
the force. Mixed in with the blood and feathers were minute bits of flesh,
but there were no bones, or any distinguishable or recognizable parts.
Laboratory tests on some of the remains confirmed that they belonged to an
exploded bird. Two dead porcupines were found in two different Canadian crop
circles. One had almost disintegrated into blackened parts and the
other had been squashed like a pancake. Scrape marks and a row of standing
broken quills indicated that the latter porcupine had been dragged to the
centre of the formation from the perimeter. The flow of flattened quills on
its body went in the same direction as the lay of the fallen crop.
Analysis of the other porcupine showed that the blackness of the remains was
not due to burning. Most animals probably sense something is about
to happen and run away, but porcupines respond to danger by simply raising
their spines and sitting tight. In one crop formation, numerous dead flies
were found stuck by their tongues to the seed heads of the plants, with their
legs and wings spread out widely, as if in a spasm. Some appeared
to have exploded. Other flies were still in a perfect state, but most were
nevertheless dead. Some were still alive but stunned, and after being
liberated from the plants, they flew away. F. Grassi argues that a fungus
(Entomophtora muscae) is the most likely explanation, rather than some
mysterious circle-forming mechanism.
5. Scientific research
The work of the BLT research team (consisting of John Burke, William
Levengood, and Nancy Talbot) has placed crop-circle research on a firm
scientific footing. Of the 300 or so crop formations sampled and examined
since 1990, more than 90% showed anomalous effects in plant tissues
and/or the soil. During this period, three research papers have been published
in peer-reviewed scientific journals,* establishing that the creation
of many crop formations involves something much more intriguing than human
pranksters with planks and boards. Skeptics have objected that much of the
BLT’s work has not been conducted in a double-blind manner (so that
experimenter bias might have influenced the results), but they haven't been
able
to show that the anomalous effects in question can be produced by flattening
crop by mechanical means.
*W.C. Levengood, anatomical anomalies in crop formation plants, Physiologia
Plant arum, vol. 92, 1994, pp. 356-63; W.C. Levengood, semi-molten
meteoric iron associated with a crop formation, Journal of Scientific
Exploration, vol. 9, 1995, pp. 191-9; W.C. Levengood and Nancy P. Talbot,
dispersion
of energies in worldwide crop formations, Physiologia Plantarum, vol. 105,
1999, pp. 615-24.
As already mentioned, the forces involved in creating crop formations
physically alter the tissue of the flattened (and sometimes the internal,
upright) plants in several ways. Stalks are bent up to 90 degrees without
being broken, particularly at the nodes, as if the plant tissue softened
significantly at the moment of flattening. This is even true of oil-seed rape
(canola), which is normally as stiff and brittle as celery, and snaps
if bent more than 40 degrees.
Stalks of flattened crop are usually enlarged and stretched, as if they have
been heated from the inside. Sometimes this effect is so powerful that
the node literally explodes, blowing holes in the node walls and spewing sap
outside the stalk. Node expansion is not always entirely confined to plants
within the flattened area of crop, as if some spillover of the energy involved
has occurred. There are known mechanisms that explain an increase in node
length after a crop is flattened, such as gravitropism (whereby a plant tries
to straighten itself after being pressed down), but some studies suggest
that this mechanism cannot account for node-length increases of more than
about 20%, whereas increases of up to 200% have been measured in crop
formations.
Node elongation and expulsion cavities have been induced in plants in the
laboratory by placing them in a microwave oven for 20 to 30 seconds.
Microwave radiation heats the moisture inside the stem which, as it turns into
steam and expands, either stretches the more elastic fibers at the
top of the plant, or blows holes in the tougher nodes farther down the stem.
In their 1999 article, Levengood and Talbot argue that crop formations are
created by plasma vortices, which emit microwave radiation and thereby
produce heat. In 2001 Eltjo Haselhoff wrote a comment on their article,
pointing out a couple of serious errors and arguing that crop formations
were created by a point-like or spherical source of radiation rather than a
plasma vortex.* He reported a study of plant samples from two circles
in the Netherlands, which appeared after lights were seen above the field.
Samples were taken along three diameters. The greatest node lengthening
was measured at the centre of the formation and declined towards the rim. He
concluded that this was consistent with heat being induced by a small
electromagnetic source 4.1 meters above the field. A curious and unexplained
finding was that the node-length changes along each sampled diameter,
on either side of the circles centre, precisely mirrored each other, but each
diameters node-length changes differed from those found along the
other two diameters.*E.H. Haselhoff, dispersion of energies in worldwide crop
formations (Opinions and comments),
Physiologia Plantarum, vol. 111, 2001, pp. 123-4; Haselhoff, 2001, pp. 71-81.
Grassi et al. have attempted to debunk the articles by Levengood, Talbot and
Haselhoff and their claim that electromagnetic radiation is involved
in the creation of crop circles. In particular, the three researchers are
accused of following flawed sampling and analytical procedures, and of
data selection. Grassi et al. also contend that heating alone could not
produce the node elongations measured. Haselhoff has published a rebuttal
of some of their criticisms.*
*F. Grassi, C. Cocheo and P. Russo, balls of light: the questionable science
of crop circles, Journal of Scientific Exploration,
vol. 19, 2005, pp. 159-70; www.cicap.org/crops/en. Response by Haselhoff and
further response by Grassi et al.,
Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 21, 2007, pp. 576-82.
Germination tests show tremendous differences in the development of seeds from
flattened and no flattened plants. If a crop circle occurs before the
flowering of the plant and the development of the seed, the plants somatic (no
reproductive) tissue continues to develop normally, but seed development
ceases or is impaired. If a circle occurs at a slightly later growth stage in
young crop where the seed is still forming, the seeds are smaller and stunted
and exhibit reduced or repressed germination. In more mature plants, seeds are
visually stunted, but the effects on reproduction vary. In mature plants
with fully formed seeds, seeds often exhibit a massive increase in vigor and a
growth rate up to five times that of control seeds.
Measurements in two crop formations only a few hours old revealed that the
stalks of flattened plants were left with a surface electric charge.
The degree to which the stalks were bent over was proportional to the degree
of electric charge on them. Studies show that the cell wall pits in
the thin bract tissue surrounding wheat seed are abnormally enlarged and that
bract tissue shows increased electrical conductivity, consistent with
exposure to an electric charge.
Microscopic particles of unusually pure iron (assumed to be meteoric dust)
have been found in two thirds of the 32 formations from which soil has been
sampled. Sometimes clusters of these very small, spherical, magnetic particles
are found; sometimes larger spheres are discovered adhering to bits of
soil covered or intermixed with a partially-melted glaze of the same material.
The particles are usually found clustered around, or just outside, the
perimeters of circular crop formations, as if the centrifugal force from a
spinning vortex is distributing this material to the edges. But sometimes the
particles are concentrated in soil at the centers of circles, with amounts
dropping off toward the perimeters, while in other cases the material is
deposited linearly, usually in increasing amounts toward the perimeters. If
crop circles are made by plasma systems, this would explain the attraction
of magnetic dust particles, since plasma spiraling around geomagnetic field
lines creates its own magnetic field. But the different distribution patterns
of the magnetic dust are puzzling.
An x-ray diffraction study of clay minerals in crop-circle soils, conducted by
the BLT team from 1999 to 2001 with the assistance of independent
scientists, revealed that specific clay minerals (elite/smectites) exhibit a
subtle but statistically significant increase in the degree of
crystallization (i.e. greater ordering of the atoms). Increased
crystallization has never been reported previously in surface soils. It has
been seen
only in sedimentary rock that has been exposed to the pressure of tons of
overlying rock and to heat from the earth's interior for hundreds or thousands
of years. Clearly, if geologic pressure had been present, the crop-circle
plants would have been obliterated. The crystalline change could also be
produced by intense heat (at least 6-8000ÝC over a period of many hours), but
this would have incinerated the plants.
The plants in the sampled circles showed the well-documented changes
(elongated nodes, expulsion cavities) regularly found in crop circles not
created
by mechanical flattening. The plant changes and increased crystallization
occurred at the same sampling locations, suggesting that whatever caused the
plant changes, also caused the soil changes. Yet the intense energy required
to produce the soil effects would have destroyed the plants altogether.
A mineralogist involved in the study concluded that an energy currently
unknown to science must be involved.
Areas of randomly flattened cereal crops – called lodging by farmers – are a
common occurrence worldwide, and are usually attributed to
over fertilization and/or weather damage. Aerial photos frequently reveal
areas of irregularly flattened crops in the same fields as geometrically
flattened patterns. A very significant finding by the BLT team is that no
geometrically downed crop sometimes shows the same bent and elongated
nodes that are found in crop circles. This suggests that the same formative
forces are involved, but that sometimes they act chaotically rather
than in an ordered fashion.
*********** ************** **********
FAIR USE NOTICE:If This page contains copyrighted material the use of which
has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner.
SAHRUIG distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed
a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such
copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.
This document is shared information that is intended to assist anyone and
everyone with a further understanding of UFO information from around the
world.
73's and Bye from Peter ZS2ABF - East London, South Africa.
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