CROP CIRCLES IN THE NEWS

Man Fined For Making Crop Circle   Updated 12:50 PM ET November 6, 2000 

DEVIZES, England (AP) - A self-described researcher in the paranormal told a court Monday precisely how a crop circle appeared in a field in western England. 
He did it himself. 

Matthew Williams, 29, said he and a friend made an intricate crop circle to prove to a competing researcher that the patterns may not be the work of space aliens. 

However, his seven-pointed design angered a farmer, who told the court it caused $300 in damage to his crops. 

The court fined Williams $150. 

Thousands of circles have cropped up - mostly in Britain and the United States - since 1980. UFO groups say they are proof of extraterrestrial visitors, or some unexplained natural force. Skeptics say they are obvious hoaxes that can quickly and easily be produced with simple tools. 

(First appeared in the Detroit News Front Page October 16, 1995)

Caption: These designs were found carved in a cornfield near Filion. Some say they were created by UFO lasers. Most just don't know. 

By Tom Greenwood, The Detroit News

Call it "Close Encounters of the Corn Kind."

Farmers near Filion, a heartbeat or two north of Bad Axe in Michigan's Thumb, are scratching their heads over what some believe might have been a visit by a UFO to a cornfield. 

Scores of visitors have been drawn to the field on Thomas Road to gape at a strange design cut into the rows of dry, rustling corn. Seen from the air, the design is roughly an L-shape, with the longer, upper rectangle rounded at each end.

The mystery deepens once inside the rectangle: At each end, there's a "fort" that has been constructed by folding in three or four rows of corn stalks at about the three foot level, forming a rough canopy that a person could crawl beneath.

The forts are ringed by hundreds of stalks of corn that have been sheared off at levels varying from a few inches to about two feet off the ground, and the direction of the cuts vary from row to row. The upper stalks are missing, and the remaining sheared red stalks are blackened on the end, as if they've been subjected to intense heat.

Nearby, piles of shucked corn litter the ground, their husks black and sooty compared to the light brown husks on nearby stalks. About 20 rows to the north, there's a second area roughly 15 by 40 feet, where the corn has been smashed as if crushed by a heavy weight.

There are no signs of machinery tracks entering the field at either area.

"It's the talk of the town," said Everett Koth, who works at Conner's Hardware, in Filion.

"It just doesn't make sense. Some people thought kids might have done it, but it would have taken hours and kids just don't have that kind of patience. Others thought it might have been hunters who wanted corn to bait deer. If that's the case, why the design? Why take the stalks too?"

And, as Koth noted, deer bait is available at $3 for a 50-pound bag.

"That's a lot of work for something you can buy on almost any corner around here," Koth said.

The field is owned by longtime residents John and Kathy Holz.

"I found out about it about two weeks ago when John came in from harvesting beans and he had this strange look on his face," Kathy Holz said.

"I asked him what was up, and he said he couldn't explain it. He said I had to see it, so we went out there. It is strange, and it doesn't make any sense. Kids don't have the imagination to do something like this.

"There was a man out there last week who said he was an expert on UFOs. He said the corn was cut by lasers. That's why it's blackened on the ends....

"I'm not saying it can't be a UFO. We've explored the moon, maybe someone is exploring us."

Why would a UFO visit a remote cornfield in Michigan?

"Why not?" said Rita Parsch, as she sniffed a blackened stalk of corn.

"A few years ago, my husband started acting quiet and withdrawn. After a few weeks, I finally got him to tell me what the problem was. He said he saw something 'funny' flying through the skies one night. He turned white as could be when he was telling me about it.

"There's a chance it could be a UFO. I can't believe we're the only intelligent life form in the universe. I'm more humble than that."

After seeing the field, Parsch's friend Rita Jeffers said: "I don't think I'll ride my bike alone after dark anymore."

Her husband, Dannie, who'd like to go for a ride in a UFO, is a believer.

Why?

"Because I've seen UFOs before," he said.

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Crop Circle in Filion, Michigan 1995

Nearby, piles of shucked Cornfield could be site of UFO visit or husky hoax  

(First appeared in the Detroit News Front Page October 16, 1995)

Caption: These designs were found carved in a cornfield near Filion. Some say they were created by UFO lasers. Most just don't know.   

Call it "Close Encounters of the Corn Kind."

Farmers near Filion, a heartbeat or two north of Bad Axe in Michigan's Thumb, are scratching their heads over what some believe might have been a visit by a UFO to a cornfield. 

Scores of visitors have been drawn to the field on Thomas Road to gape at a strange design cut into the rows of dry, rustling corn. Seen from the air, the design is roughly an L-shape, with the longer, upper rectangle rounded at each end.

The mystery deepens once inside the rectangle: At each end, there's a "fort" that has been constructed by folding in three or four rows of corn stalks at about the three foot level, forming a rough canopy that a person could crawl beneath.

The forts are ringed by hundreds of stalks of corn that have been sheared off at levels varying from a few inches to about two feet off the ground, and the direction of the cuts vary from row to row. The upper stalks are missing, and the remaining sheared red stalks are blackened on the end, as if they've been subjected to intense heat.

Nearby, piles of shucked corn litter the ground, their husks black and sooty compared to the light brown husks on nearby stalks. About 20 rows to the north, there's a second area roughly 15 by 40 feet, where the corn has been smashed as if crushed by a heavy weight.

There are no signs of machinery tracks entering the field at either area.

"It's the talk of the town," said Everett Koth, who works at Conner's Hardware, in Filion.

"It just doesn't make sense. Some people thought kids might have done it, but it would have taken hours and kids just don't have that kind of patience. Others thought it might have been hunters who wanted corn to bait deer. If that's the case, why the design? Why take the stalks too?"

And, as Koth noted, deer bait is available at $3 for a 50-pound bag.

"That's a lot of work for something you can buy on almost any corner around here," Koth said.

The field is owned by longtime residents John and Kathy Holz.

"I found out about it about two weeks ago when John came in from harvesting beans and he had this strange look on his face," Kathy Holz said.

"I asked him what was up, and he said he couldn't explain it. He said I had to see it, so we went out there. It is strange, and it doesn't make any sense. Kids don't have the imagination to do something like this.

"There was a man out there last week who said he was an expert on UFOs. He said the corn was cut by lasers. That's why it's blackened on the ends....

"I'm not saying it can't be a UFO. We've explored the moon, maybe someone is exploring us."

Why would a UFO visit a remote cornfield in Michigan?

"Why not?" said Rita Parsch, as she sniffed a blackened stalk of corn.

"A few years ago, my husband started acting quiet and withdrawn. After a few weeks, I finally got him to tell me what the problem was. He said he saw something 'funny' flying through the skies one night. He turned white as could be when he was telling me about it.

"There's a chance it could be a UFO. I can't believe we're the only intelligent life form in the universe. I'm more humble than that."

After seeing the field, Parsch's friend Rita Jeffers said: "I don't think I'll ride my bike alone after dark anymore."

Her husband, Dannie, who'd like to go for a ride in a UFO, is a believer.

Why?

"Because I've seen UFOs before," he said.

Back

Confirm Crop Circles are Made by Balls of Light

August 8, 2001 7:35 CDT



Throughout the years, many people have claimed that they have witnessed just how "balls of light" created a crop circle. Now recent scientific studies have confirmed these statements. Circumstantial evidence has shown that crop circles may actually be created by balls of light.

The stems of corn-type plants are distinguished by little 'knuckles', at several positions along the stems. These nodes act like sort of a ligament, allowing the plants to bend towards the light, even after they have grown to their full length. In the early 1990s, the American biophysicist William Levengood found that plants inside crop circles often had much longer nodes than those in the undisturbed, surrounding crop.

While some known biological effects can create node lengthening, these could be easily ruled out. It was clear that something else had happened. The effect could be recreated by placing normal, healthy stems inside a microwave oven. The heat from the microwaves made the liquids inside the nodes expand, similar to the mercury inside a thermometer. This caused the nodes to increase in length, while the amount of lengthening increased proportionally to the amount of microwave energy that was generated.

This finding led scientists to conclude that the node lengthening effect may be caused by the involvement of heat, and possibly by microwave radiation. Traces of heat have actually been found innumerable times in crop circles all over the world, such as dehydrated plants, burn marks, and molten snow.

The number of 'balls of light' seen by eyewitnesses has increased considerably over the last couple of years. These bright, fluorescent, flying light objects, sized somewhere between an egg and a football, seem to be somehow related to the crop circle phenomenon. They usually appear in the fields during the night when a crop circle forms, and have been seen (and filmed!) many times in and around crop circles.

Several people even claim to have witnessed how these balls of light actually created a crop circle. In 1999, William Levengood and Nancy Talbott published a scientific paper containing a study about the node lengthening effect in three different crop circles, two in England and one in the USA. The authors presented a 'quantitative analysis', trying to explain the amount of node lengthening throughout the crop circle through physical models. The authors concluded that the heat that had made the nodes swell was electromagnetic in origin.

A year later, Dr. Eltjo Haselhoff contributed a paper in response to the one by Levengood and Talbott. The paper reinterpreted the data published by Levengood and Talbott and showed that the node lengthening as measured in all three of the crop circles could be perfectly explained by assuming that a 'ball of light' had caused the node swelling effect. An identical analysis performed on a famous man-made formation (Dreischor, Holland, 1997) did not show these characteristics at all.

Dr. Haselhoff says his statements can be interpreted as follows: "Imagine a dark room with one single light bulb hanging on the ceiling. If you switch on the light, you will notice that right below the light bulb the light intensity on the floor will be brightest. Towards the edges of the room, the floor will gradually become darker. This light distribution on the floor is well understood, and can be described with high accuracy.

"The exact light distribution on the floor depends on the HEIGHT of the light bulb. When the light bulb is hanging very low, almost touching the floor, the floor underneath the light bulb will be very bright, but the intensity will rapidly become less as you move away from it. When the light is hanging high on the ceiling, however, the light intensity underneath the light will be much less and be more evenly distributed over the floor.

Because this mechanism is so well known, one can actually derive the height of the light bulb after measuring the light distribution on the floor." As Dr. Haselhoff explained, the swollen nodes inside the crop circles can be likened to many little thermometers, expanding their length with increasing heat. If one assumes that the heat was induced by a small spherical shape emitting electromagnetic radiation, the theoretical heat distribution on the floor can be accurately determined. Dr. Haselhoff demonstrated that the measured node lengths in all of the three crop circles studies by Levengood and Talbott perfectly matched the temperature distribution that would be caused by a small ball of light hanging in the air above the center of the circles, emitting intense heat.

An identical analysis was repeated on a formation in Holland. An eyewitness claimed this crop circle was created in a matter of seconds, while a "ball of light" was floating in the air, right above the center of the circle. The results are shown in Figure 4. The yellow bars show the average node length measured at seven different positions across the crop circle, from one edge (position b1), through the center (a4), to the opposite edge (b7). One can see the remarkably perfect symmetry. Similar graphs were obtained from two different cross sections through the circle, revealing a perfect circular symmetry: long nodes towards the center of the circle, with shorter nodes towards the edges.

The thick, continuous, bluish line represents the theoretical value of the node length across the circle, if it were caused by a ball of light at a height of 4 meters and 10 centimeters. (This height corresponded to the estimate of the eyewitness). Like the three crop circles analyzed by Levengood and Talbott, the theoretical values for the node length (blue line) correspond perfectly to the measurements (yellow bars).

The circumstantial evidence left behind in the fields was in perfect agreement with the words of the eyewitness: the crop circle was indeed created with the involvement of a "ball of light".

Source: Press Release

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The Chilbolton 'Arecibo Message' Formation, 2001        

Follow the links below to see a major crop formation.  One is a possible reply to a message we sent into space in 1974, along with a crop formation that depicts a human-like face!

Steve Alexander (The Crop Circle Connector)

circlemakers.org

crop circle  research.com

Art Bell

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August 24, 2004

A mystery in the age of certainty. An oddity on a corner where corn and hay and soybeans are as predictable as the sun coming up.

What's a 71-year-old farmer to do?

John Polomcak of Lawton just wants a better idea of what might have caused a patch of corn in one of his fields to lay down flat, plants all pointing east.

A team of independent researchers may not have that answer. But they have confidence that research such as theirs is the only way to find it. So they will converge today on the field with measuring instruments, notebooks and specimen bags to collect samples of plant tissue and soil for analysis.

It's an effort the researchers hope eventually will shed some light on what might cause the curious phenomena called crop circles.

Skeptics roll their eyes. But Detroit high school biology teacher Charles N. Lietzau says the medical community also once scoffed at the scientists who said tiny microorganisms were responsible for disease.

Lietzau, with Indiana residents Roger Sugden, an aerial photographer, and Ted Robertson, a master harpsichord maker, are part of what they term a "response team" for the International Independent Crop Circles Researchers' Association.

"I just hope they're good," Polomcak said. "I want to know what's going on."

It's a question he's been puzzling over since he and his son first noticed the disturbance a few weeks ago.

About half a dozen rows into the field, barely visible from the road, the men found a rectangular area about five rows wide and 12 feet long that opens onto a larger rounded area about 32 feet in diameter. "My boy and I hauled some cattle and he come around the corner and said 'some son-of-a-gun ran through the corn,' " Polomcak said. "He got out to look at it and said 'Come and look. All the corn is laying ... all down the row -- it's all same direction.' "

Polomcak said the impression is far different from someone driving through a field. "No way I could see that any one could drive up and back and up and back without bending them stalks both ways," he said.

Nor does it appear to be the damage that sometimes comes with harsh weather or disease, said Polomcak, who has farmed for more than 60 years, and grown hundreds of acres of corn each year.

"I've been farming all my life and I never seen anything like it," he said, adding neighbors have suggested it's a prank.

A similar incident was reported last year in a wheat field near Howell. The ICCRA team reports that circle was "authentic," Lietzau said.

When Detroit newspapers ran that story, it was followed the next day by another story -- that an area radio station's hosts claimed credit for a hoax.

But the station later retracted that claim when the radio personalities were unable to demonstrate for television news crews how they had created the pattern and the farmer threatened to make them responsible for damages to the field.

Lietzau and his fellow investigators stand by their original determination.

The researchers will examine Polomcak's corn for specific evidence of ruptured stalks, swollen nodes, patterns of discoloration and evidence of magnetic and radioactive fields. "Our rule we operate by is that the data is the only authority," Lietzau said.

Broken stalks and abrasions may suggest a hoax, with its perpetrator using a board to flatten stalks into a pattern, Lietzau said.

More subtle cellular damage, or soil anomalies, may suggest a release of energy is behind the flattened stalks.

Some of the distinctive plant damage noted in the crop circles the group has deemed authentic can be duplicated using microwaves. They think sound waves may be able to create similar effects, though such experiments have not yet been done to bear that out.

Where these energies come from is entirely hypothetical, Lietzau said. "Each of us is free to hold our own beliefs and speculation because it may guide us toward certain experiments, but we only make statements based on conclusive scientific evidence."

That strict adherence to standard science may not be enough to offset the doubt that springs, perhaps, from the group's respect for diverse opinions about likely causes, reflected in its online newsletter's links to sites such as UFO Magazine, abd Aliens Truth. "It really doesn't matter (what people think of the investigators) but we find local people are seriously interested in the truth," Lietzau said. "National media are just looking for something to play as a joke."


Kalamazoo Gazette  Michigan

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