Read Online Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience by Colin Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

that spoils the recording.
    When the American television investigator Linda Moulton Howe was in England in 1992, Colin Andrews told her the story about visualising a Celtic cross, and remarked that he thought investigators could influence the circles. On 22 July a group of them went out circle-spotting, including a ‘psychic’ named Maria Ward. She told them that, on the previous day, she had received a mental impression of a design of a triangle with a circle at each of its points—she drew it on request. She added that she felt it had to do with Oliver Cromwell. Two days later, this exact design was found in nearby Alton Barnes, in a wheat field below Oliver’s Castle Hill, where Cromwell had fought Charles I in 1643.
    The problem with such data is that, scientifically speaking, it is worthless. Even the two published accounts of the Busty Taylor episode differ slightly: he says he only thought of a Celtic cross, but did not mention it; George Wingfield, who was with him in the aeroplane, says he mentioned it. We can see how events are changed slightly in recollection. And a scientist would point out that no one could prove that Colin Andrews visualised a Celtic cross the night before one appeared, and that some hoaxer may have created the Alton Barnes triangle after hearing that a psychic had predicted it.
    In fact, hoaxers quickly threw the whole phenomenon into doubt. In September 1991, two elderly landscape painters named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who lived in Southampton, claimed that they were the authors of most of the crop circles, and that their main piece of equipment was a short plank. Their claim was reported in the press around the world, and many people felt that this was the solution to the mystery—without reflecting that crop circles were now being reported from all over the world. Doug and Dave—whose names became a synonym for hoaxing—were commissioned by a documentary film maker to create a circle design at East Meon, and responded with an admirable pattern like a dumbbell, with additional designs at either end—it took an hour and a half. But they did it by trampling the wheat, and using short planks, often snapping stalks; on the whole, genuine crop formations show bent stalks—as if, Linda Howe says, rushing water had flowed over them.
    The question is not whether they were telling the truth—they obviously were, in the sense that they had undoubtedly made dozens of hoax circles. But could they be taken seriously when they claimed that they—together with a few unconnected hoaxers—made all the circles since 1978? If so, why did they wait until September 1991 to claim credit? It seems clear that they finally approached the now defunct Today newspaper because they wanted to claim the prestige due for what they regarded as a kind of artistic endeavour. And obviously their story would be far less impressive if they claimed that they had been making circles only for the past two or three years. If they were going to make their bid for notoriety, they would want to claim credit for all the circles. But is it likely that two ‘artists’ would want to hide their light under a bushel for thirteen years?
    That many of the crop circles are the work of hoaxers cannot be doubted; but the notion that they are all by hoaxers—including a circle in a Japanese rice field, whose soft Earth would show footprints—is hard to believe. It was an investigation by Terence Meaden in 1991 that made it clear that the hoaxer theory was inadequate. It was called ‘Blue Hill’, and was funded by Japanese universities, and associated with a BBC film project. Both Meaden and the BBC installed radar equipment whose aim was to detect both hoaxers and whirlwinds. Most of the six weeks of the project were uneventful, although new circles appeared further afield. But, towards the end, two circles were found close at hand in the radar-booby-trapped area, demonstrating fairly conclusively that they had not been made