An awesome Reality Sandwich article worthy of passing along...
"What is a book without pictures?" said Alice.
The vast majority of humans living on Earth today probably do not believe that modern crop circles are any more than what the multinational media tells them: just pranks made by two old geezers from the pub, late at night like Santa Claus, all across southern England while no one is watching (see video here).
Other people believe that crop pictures may be no more than field art, planked out by groups such as the Circlemakers (here), to help companies sell their commercial goods. For example, there was an advertisement shown all across north America recently for Pringle's potato chips, where a group of healthy young people dance out into some farmer's field, in order to make a "potato chip" crop picture using rope and boards (here).
In addition to the Pringle potato chip company, who else keeps telling us that modern crop pictures are human-made? We have Wikipedia (here), the BBC (here), the Guardian (here), National Geographic (here), or the Discovery Channel (here).
Yet public opinion on this controversial issue may be changing rapidly! For example during the week of July 23, 2010, Yahoo News showed a disinformational movie about crop circles that immediately generated 2300, mostly vitriolic, reader responses (here).
The current situation appears to be as follows: a great many "authorities" on Earth have been telling people for over twenty years from 1990 to 2010, that nothing strange or mysterious is happening each summer in the fields of southern England, or elsewhere across Europe. Yet a small but ever-growing proportion of people have begun to rebel. They are defying peer pressure and group opinion, as if to say: "Yes, something strange is indeed happening there, and you are refusing to tell us the truth about it, Why is that? Are some of the people in power on Earth today, afraid of what might happen if everyone learned the truth?"
If the viewers of this article would like to read an independent assessment of crop circles, current to the end of 2008, please see "What Do Modern Crop Pictures Mean?" by Harold Stryderight and Charles Reed. Those are two of my various pseudonyms. As a professional scientist with a Ph.D. from Caltech, and having worked in research for 35 years at places such as UCLA, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge, or the national Australian science laboratory, I find that I need to protect myself from a small proportion of people who follow crop pictures, but do not adhere to the usual rules of human social conduct.
Daniel Pinchbeck and his famous book "2012: the Return of Quetzalcoatl" are certainly mentioned in that long review, because: (a) the entire crop circle phenomenon often seems to be focused on a year 2012; and (b) symbols for Quetzalcoatl sometimes appear in crops, most spectacularly perhaps on July 5, 2009 near Silbury Hill (here).
So begins my progress report on new crop pictures which have appeared during the summer of 2010. It has certainly been a season of social turmoil, among the small band of dedicated individuals who research or take photographs of crop pictures. But more on that later.
The 2010 season began spectacularly at Wilton Windmill in southern England on May 22 with a crop picture made in yellow oilseed rape, which is a plant with thick celery-like stems that is almost impossible to bend smoothly (rather than break) with rope and boards. Nevertheless, many plant stems in that remarkable crop picture were found to be bent smoothly, something like an iron bar subjected to high temperatures, then re-cooled into another shape (here). What did the new crop picture at Wilton Windmill tell us?
It showed a famous mathematical formula known as "Euler's Identity", using a binary form of computer ASCII code (here). Even British newspapers could not ignore this (here). Then a few weeks later on June 13 at Poirino in Italy (here), we saw the image of a six-month lunar calendar, in which all of the small "stars" coded for another famous equation "E = mc2", this time using a decimal form of ASCII:
Eight days after that on June 21 at Pewsey in southern England, we saw a cleverly coded version of the "golden ratio phi to ten digits", or 1.61803399 (here).
Whatever anyone chooses to believe about this controversial subject, it would have to be said that the "crop artists" (whomever they might be) are great mathematicians, and also great graphic designers!
Then in July of 2010 we saw three "cubic" crop pictures at Danebury Hill (here), Cley Hill (here), or Fosbury (here).
The Danebury crop picture showed a clever version of "Metatron's Cube", which is a famous shape in what is called "sacred geometry":
Cley Hill showed us another cubic art motif, which was made famous by Leonardo da Vinci:
Fosbury showed us a third cubic art motif, which was made famous by Archimedes:
Let us see now: Metatron, Leonardo da Vinci, or Archimedes, None of those "cubic" crop pictures look alien to me! Could the skeptics be right? Could all three have been made by local human fakers with rope and boards? Or might there be something wrong with our intellectual presumptions regarding this subject?
All three of those "cubic" crop pictures showed spectacular, highly elaborate field details, or what most researchers call the "lay of fallen crop." Thus from a purely technical point of view, they would have been hard to fake. We have a known fake from 2010 with which to compare, that was made with rope and boards in East Field on July 29-30, 2010 (here). It shows considerably less field detail than any of those three "cubic" crop pictures, while close-up photographs taken on the ground reveal a stomped-out mess (here).
Still, one cannot really be sure whether any or all of those "cubic" crop pictures might be paranormally authentic. That issue has driven a small (but vocal) minority of crop circle researchers into social turmoil this year. Some of them have argued (without any evidence) that all crop pictures from 2010 have been human-made fakes, and that there exists a huge "secret conspiracy" among mainstream crop circle researchers, who have been studying the subject since 1990, to commission large teams of workers to go out into the fields at night, in order to make fake crop pictures that can later be shown on calendars or jewelry, simply for the purposes of making money!
No doubt a little of this goes on. Yet one can only note here that the long-term researchers in question (who sell calendars or jewelry) are relatively poor by normal human standards, and would hardly have enough funds to pay for such large-scale efforts! And those crop pictures which are known to be "fake" usually seem quite obvious, and hence are not visited or regarded well by serious researchers, only by tourists. Finally, the intellectual content of modern crop pictures can sometimes be quite high, as shown above for Euler's Identity, E = mc2 or the golden ratio. "Are we really talking about the same people here, who would not have received an education in higher mathematics?"
Now in order to close this progress report, let us delve into the heart of the subject. Three crop pictures at Woolaston Grange on July 18, Beggar's Knoll on July 27, or Windmill Hill on July 27, seemed to show the first and second stages of a "proton-proton nuclear fusion reaction" which powers our Sun, or is used in man-made hydrogen bombs (here):
Are they advising us to develop new methods for energy generation, or might they be warning us about an upcoming nuclear war? There is little doubt in my mind that the real "paranormal crop artists" can somehow predict the future: see for example the first two slides here, which show how several crop pictures from 2007 anticipated the BP oil spill in 2010.
Finally, just a few days ago on July 30, 2010 at Wickham Green in Berkshire, we saw two circular crop pictures which showed apparently the "face of Jesus" as it appears on the Turin Shroud, along with a complex, unsolved message in binary code for everyone on Earth (here):
Does anyone seriously believe that those two highly-elaborate crop pictures were locally human-made? And what might their underlying binary code have to tell us?
In summary, the 2010 crop circle season has been an exciting time (so far). It has included many new crop pictures of a mathematical or geometrical nature, along with several other pictures which show nuclear fusion from subatomic physics, plus a recent pair of pictures which purports to show a "message from above" that is intended for everyone on Earth, if we can figure out what it means.
Where do modern crop pictures come from, if they are not made by local human fakers with rope and boards? There is no current consensus on this point, nor have the crop artists clearly revealed their identities in their pictures (except maybe on July 30). Some people believe that they are being made by extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth, while other people believe that they may come from some other spacetime dimension, whether physical or spiritual, which overlaps with our own.
One thing seems certain however: our current way of thinking about "consensus Newtonian reality" must be fundamentally in error, in order for those beautiful field pictures to keep appearing year after year in diverse places, almost as if by magic, never showing any mistakes, never being found half-finished, and their perpetrators almost never being caught, despite intense surveillance of the fields in England where they most commonly appear.
