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Wednesday 8 January 2014

Canadian Crop Circles

CASE DETAILS

Mysterious light near crop circles
Crop circles have become a well known phenomena all across the globe.  Of the 10,000 documented cases, 80% have been proven to be hoaxes.  But what about the other 20 percent?
Two farmers from outside of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Rusty Manuel and Thelley
Whitman, woke up one day to find a crop circle formation on their land -- seven precise circles pressed into a field of thistle and barley.  Thelley was stunned:
“The grain was all flattened down. It almost looked liked a pattern, like petals, the way the grain came out and then the heads turned back in towards the center again.  It was just amazing.”
The Canadian Crop Circle Research Network, a volunteer organization that documents such cases, wasted no time getting to the site.  Judy Arndt is one of the group’s field researchers:
“It looked like the place had been electrocuted.  It was just amazing.  Looked like there had been a huge force of some sort.”

Interior view of crop circle
Skeptics dismissed the Edmonton crop circle as a hoax.  As shown in a documentary,  pranksters can make a crop circle using a piece of wood and some rope. They call their creations, “human land art.”  Paul Anderson, Director of the CCCRN, has studied many of the circles in western Canada: 
“Anybody can go out with a board and flatten down wheat.  And yet something you have to take into account is, it’s not just the formation itself, but it’s the complexity of how it’s actually constructed, like multiple layers going in different directions, one on top of the other, and so on.”
At the Edmonton site, Judy Arndt documented each of the circles within the formation and gathered up crop and soil samples for scientific analysis.  The samples were sent to Nancy Talbott, director of B.L.T Research Team, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Nancy worked with a network of scientists who have studied more than 350 crop circle cases from eight different countries: 
“The three major changes in plants in the real McCoy, as opposed to man-made crop circles, are node elongation, expulsion cavities at the nodes, and germination abnormalities.”
Each of these conditions was present in the Edmonton samples.  That means that the characteristics of the crops were profoundly altered in ways that could not be induced by humans using ropes and boards.   Colin Anderews is a researcher and author:
“The geometry is precise.  There are no tracks in or out.  The plants are not damaged,  they’re bent over. They’re not knuckled or broken.  The plants are changed in their internal structure at the cellular level.  You don’t find that in a hoax.”
The soil samples from Edmonton were sent to Dr. Sampath Iyengar in California.  Dr. Iyengar specializes in materials analysis: 
“We went ahead and looked at the mineralogy of the clays, using a technique called x-ray powder diffraction.”
The results showed a dramatic difference between soil samples taken from inside the crop circle compared to those taken from outside the circle:
 “This has been seen by geologists before, but this is in a geologic time over several millions of years. And this has to be some kind of a fantastic energy that’s causing this change. And I don’t have any idea what it is.”
Theories on what’s creating the circles ranges from geothermal and magnetic forces, to some kind of cosmic energy.   Colin Andrews has explored many of the theories:
“We looked at meteorology.  We looked at Earth energies.  We looked at chemical application of the farmers, and all of them led to a blank.  It just did not fit. What we now know is we have a solid mystery.  This cannot be explained in the terms of people making them.  We have many hundreds that are absolutely certainly not man made.  And that is a solid fact.”
Judy Arndt has one final theory that connects crop circles to UFOs:
“I was contacted by a young couple who had been driving along in late evening. He looked out the window and saw some lights and rolled down the window to make sure it wasn’t just a reflection on his passenger side window.  And the lights were still there and he got quite excited about it and asked his wife to pull over.  There were two small lights, brilliant bluish. Then they said these two lights were playing tag with each other.  This sighting occurred about a week before the crop circle formation was found.”
Around the same time, Edmonton farmers Rusty Manuel and Thelley Whitman had a similar experience:
“First, you thought it was a helicopter, ‘cause it moved like a helicopter.  But still, there was no other lights on it. It was just bright and would just hover over the field and sort of move off and then come back again. And it just seemed like it passed over the back end of the pickup. And it just disappeared.  It just was so fast.” --Thelley
“I tried to picture it as being an aircraft but it was much too big for an aircraft.”--Rusty
Was there a connection between the strange lights and the sudden appearance of the Edmonton crop circles?  Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, had this to say:
 “I believe that the aliens are out there, but I don’t think they’re visiting here. The fact that so many people feel that there may be something unusual going on here, I think bespeaks a psychological need that we all have to believe that there’s some powers that we don’t understand. And after all, it’s much more interesting to think that this pattern in the wheat here was graffiti from beings from another world than to think that it was students from the local university. That’s not a terribly interesting story.”
However, there are crop circles that simply defy logic, formations that show no sign of human intervention.  One, a giant ‘Star of David’, literally appeared overnight in Red Deer, Alberta, not far from Edmonton.  It measured 422 feet across.  But Seth Shostak is not convinced:
“I don’t understand how they’re all done. But to say that they are something other than humans is a radical or revolutionary claim.  And consequently, I’m not going to be swayed by what amounts to very anecdotal evidence.  It’s got to be better than that.”
Colin Andrews says:
“I don’t think we need, necessarily to be talking or trying to prove that it is or isn’t extra-terrestrial.  I don’t know that either.  What I know is what I’m looking at that has arrived in our fields.  Something knows what it’s doing here.  There is intelligence of some sort. And I know they’re not made by people.”
Over the past decades, more than 10,000 crop circles have been reported from around the world.  Assuming that 8,000 were made by pranksters, that still leaves 2,000 that are unexplained, and remain unsolved mysteries.

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