1999 Crop Circle Articles

1999 Crop Circle Articles


Boy In Holland Claims To Have Witnessed Crop Formation

July 13, 1999 - By Nancy Talbot - Director, BLT Crop Circle Research Team - Hoeven, Holland

"This event is in southern Holland - and it's concerning again this boy, Robert van den Broeke, who has the ability somehow to know when these things are getting ready to happen and who has been in the middle of a formation when it occurred - this was a couple of years ago. And subsequently, there has been a lot of crop circle activity around where he lives. And Sunday night - actually for several days - the entire weekend, he was having these anxiety feelings that he gets, pacing back and forth, feeling unwell physically which is a phenomenon that occurs prior to one of these situations. And his parents insisted that he go to bed finally Sunday evening, which he did. They in fact checked on him before they went to bed and he was sound asleep.

But what happened is that at 12:15, he woke up and knew to go to the window. He opened the curtains and looked out. His window overlooks this little garden out back and this huge farm field which is directly behind their garden. And what he saw is just incredible! He describes a small, misty, pinkish-purple light - not a sphere, more football shaped - and a little bit smaller than a football, which was coming in over the field at a height of about 10 feet, maybe 12 feet over the field from quite a distance away. It's quite an enormous field. He watched it as it came closer and closer and closer to this spot that is about 50 meters behind his house. And this is where one of the snow circles occurred a couple of years ago. There was a circle in mustard seed there last spring. He's had a couple of circles in other crops in that general area. came right back to this area and stopped - the word he used was "hanging" - just stopped in the air and hung over this spot. Then, it started to elongate, spread out is the easiest way to describe it - and it apparently spread out and spread out becoming thinner and thinner looking like a disc, was then how he described it.

When it was about 30 feet in diameter, again, still hanging there - not moving at all except for this expanding motion - then he observed what he calls (Nancy makes sh, sh, sh sound) in Dutch for electrical discharge. He and I have these signals we give back and forth because he doesn't speak English too well and I don't speak Dutch at all. And what he means is that he watched electrical discharges coming from the underside of this disc-shaped, misty, pinkish-purple cloud or ball of light for -- I would gather -- it sounded like six or seven, eight, maybe ten seconds immediately over the field.

Then the light phenomenon simply dissipated, was gone. He was very excited, threw on some clothes and went running out the back and squeaked through the hedge and into the field and lo' and behold, right smack where that thing had been was a 30 foot diameter circle - I think it's wheat. They say grain and I'm not sure which kind of grain they mean. And a 10 foot circle very near by, both of which had not been there at 10 o'clock PM when he went to bed. It's still light in Holland at 10 and you can see out whether it was there and it wasn't. And here they were.

Q. Did it disappear, fade out or what?

As best as I could get it, the electrical activity stopped and then it just like poof!

Q. And now what's the time lapse between that poofing out and their discovering the circles?

Well, he went immediately - he literally took about 5 minutes to throw on some clothes. He was in the field within 10 minutes, I would say, and there it was. He said he could see it from his window after this light had gone. He could see there was at least one circle, and he thought there were two - and they were in fact there. And it looks like the whole situation - as it was coming in from way in the distance - that might have taken a minute or so to get up near his windows. But once it was there, everything that happened subsequently didn't take longer than another minute - the spreading out and then the discharge of whatever this was, and the whole thing happening.

Q. Did he hear any sound whatsoever as this transforming took place?

He didn't comment on sound. I think he would have commented if he heard anything, but he didn't mention. What he did say was that when he got in it, he felt this very strong energy and it was very positive, he said. "love, love, love!"

Q. In the circles?

In the circles. This wonderful surge of energy and his parents told me that he came to wake them up after he had been in the circles - he just sort of sat in this big one, I think, for awhile and then he went to tell his parents because he was so excited. They went and looked at it and they said it was remarkable because every time it happens with this kid, he feels very ill. He is not a happy camper at all several days prior to the event. And it was a transformation -- he was full of beans and feeling great and energized and all the illness forgotten completely -- which they've seen happen before.

This is very interesting. he was very clear that it was not a UFO. It was a light, a misty, foggy light, and it apparently retained that character, even when it became disc-like looking. In his opinion, it did not look metallic or solid the way I know many of these reports are. In his mind, or to his eyes, it retained this sort of misty character, even when it became disc-shaped rather than football-shaped.

Q. So it remained the pink, glowing?

Yeah, and he said he had never seen a color quite like that -- it was amazing to him. Pinkish-purple.

Q. Did he ever feel at that point that he got any images in his mind as if there was any kind of telepathic communication?

He didn't say anything about that either, although he has had encounters in the past - this time when he was in the field and these small, sort of grapefruit-sized whitish balls were in the field - that was a daytime encounter, two years ago now, and he was simply riding in the field on his bike and had stopped off in this one field that he particularly likes. And observed hundreds of these grapefruit and tennis ball-sized white - milky white sort of opaquish balls, some of which approached him and began circling around him. At which point, he became unconscious and when he woke up he was in the middle of this crop circle - a brand new one.

At that time, he also saw an entity - a form - that he perceived as female and it did transmit information to him, or he had the impression of that. And that figure has returned at least one more time - I think two more times - once to the garden out back of his house and once in his bedroom actually. He has a name for it. He thinks he knows its name which iIbelieve he prefers to keep private. He has a name for it he prefers to keep quiet. And it does transmit some sort of telepathic communication about the crop circles being very important for mankind to be paying attention to and he thinks that it has something to do with the environment and deceit - that the crop circles are somehow or other an antidote or there is something about the crop circles that is to fight deceit.

Q. To fight deceit as lying and hiding?

Yes, in humankind generally. That something like that - he doesn't understand it all. It's not clear. And he has no idea why he himself is involved, but as a parallel to all this - what has happened with him is that he has developed this incredible apparent healing abilities and he has people coming - he makes appointments all day long - now they've limited it to, I think, three days a week - where people come with all sorts of physical and mental problems and he has some ability that he doesn't understand at all to identify what their trouble is and often to heal them. In fact, apparently in the majority of cases, they become well after a session with Robert. And that happened - all this came about after he started getting involved with the crop circles.

Q. It's interesting that he would say that they might have something to do with fighting deceit because the thing that has struck all of us over the past decade is they are worldwide, they are right there in front of you, and it is as if something has been trying to do signaling or communication outside of the restricted paradigms of political systems.

Yeah. I have to say, I know this boy pretty well. I know his family pretty well. These are very straight, middle-class Dutch hardworking people. There is nothing flamboyant, there is nothing foolish about these people at all. And they have questioned and questioned all this up until fairly recently. And now they have just accepted that it's happening and are doing their best to cope with whatever it means. But I am about as sure as I can be that Robert is simply telling exactly what he saw to the best of his ability. And he himself is trying like crazy to understand why it happens where he is, what he's supposed to do about all of this, and then just proceed.

Nancy Talbot is the director of the BLT (Burke, Levengood & Talbot) crop circle research team in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has worked with biophysicist W.C. Levengood in Michigan for the past several years to analyze plants from formations in Europe, Israel, Australia, Canada and the U.S.

Levengood hypothesizes that plants in some sampled formations were affected by a spinning plasma vortex that contains microwave energies. The microwaves heat plant cells, softening and collapsing the stems into the fluid patterns we have come to associate with genuinely mysterious formations. But Levengood does not know the source of the spinning plasma vortex. This eyewitness in Holland has now seen two different phenomena associated with the creation of fresh formations which suggests there might be different mechanisms for different patterns.

The BLT Research Team Inc. is a non-profit, tax-exempt U.S. corporation whose purpose is the scientific examination of plants, soils and associated materials sampled at crop formation sites around the world. The BLT team is headed by Michigan biophysicist, Wm. C. Levengood, who has been examining crop circle plants and soils since 1989 and includes American colleagues Nancy Talbott and John Burke, as well as hundreds of field personnel in many different countries.

To-date three papers presenting the research findings have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as well as more than 100 lab reports on individual crop formations in the U.S., Canada, England, The Netherlands, Germany, Australia and Israel. These scientific papers and laboratory reports outline the physical abnormalities discovered so far in the plants and soils, clearly indicating a causative agency other than human-directed mechanical flattening of the plants, suggesting instead an energy system which emits microwaves and associated unusual electrical and magnetic fields.

For further information, or to volunteer to help in the field-collection of plants and/or soils at crop circle sites, please call, write or fax the BLT office:

Nancy Talbott Field Research Coordinator BLT Research Team Inc. PO Box 400127 Cambridge, MA 02140 USA Tel: 617/492-0415, Fax: 617/492-0414




Mysterious circles keep cropping up

By BBC News Online's Giles Wilson - May 20, 1999

Three mysteries of the 80s remain: Eddie The Eagle, Limahl's haircut, and crop circles. But the greatest of the three is crop circles.

For a while, many people thought strange forces could be at play. Circles were popping up across the south of England like huge patches of alopecia. And on the edge of the circles, people looked on in wonder.

Aliens, some thought. Freak weather conditions, said others. Weird electromagnetic forces, still more claimed. Even magic was mentioned. Or could it be mischievous pranksters, pulling the wool over the eyes of a gullible public?

Most people seemed to shrug their shoulders and conclude it was probably the latter. But a hardened group of devotees still maintains there is more going on the fields of Wiltshire, Hampshire and elsewhere than one could imagine.

The debate even survived the admission by Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, two retired artists, that they had been responsible. Doug Bower even demonstrated on television earlier this year how to make your own crop circle with a plank and length of rope.

Yet for the legions of crop circle believers that is not enough. At least half a dozen organisations operate in England which can count their members in the hundreds. And they all think something is going on. It is a view which has been given a shot in the arm by the announcement that US billionaire Laurance Rockefeller, 88, is to fund research into whether they are genuine.

Photographer Lucy Pringle is just one of the many in no doubt that hoaxers cannot be responsible. Having researched crop circles for the last 10 years, she has written books on the subject and is a firm believer. Just because some circles have been claimed by hoaxers, she says, it does not mean "the genuine thing" does not exist.

Mrs Pringle, who lives in Hampshire, believes the circles (or "formations", as she calls them) are caused by low frequency microwave radiation, and that they occur on the earth's "energy lines". As for what causes the radiation, she says she cannot answer. But one possibility is that other worlds are trying to contact us. "Are they a means of communication? We don't know, but we have tried to communicate with others. We've sent up messages in universal languages to Mars and so on, so it stands to reason that perhaps others are trying to communicate with us." In any case, there is a different atmosphere inside "genuine" formations than in hoax ones, she said. One woman told her it was a personal experience that words could not describe. "A lot of people are perfectly chatty before they go into the formation, then when they are inside it's like a cathedral. You feel terribly small and insignificant in the vast majesty of a sacred place." It's not just the feeling that's different inside hoaxed circles, she said. The stems of the crop show when they have been pressed down by hoaxers. But the microwave radiation instead makes the stems bend under their own weight. Hoaxed circles had flaws in their geometry but genuine ones were mathematically accurate, even when they had hugely complicated designs.

George Bishop of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies points to a figure of only 3.5% of circles being fakes. And at the same time he estimates that only 40% of circles are noticed. While they agree that hoaxers are not responsible, opinions still vary on what is responsible. Others in the crop circle community refuse to believe that such intricate patterns can be replicated at night-time by people with planks.

here were 450 reported sightings before 1980 and any media interest. There was even a report of one in 900AD in Lyon, he said.

But the crop circle community continues to flourish, nowhere more so than on the Internet.

The spread of stories about paranormal happenings posed difficult problems for people who campaigned for scepticism, he said.

Earlier this year, the BBC programme Country File filmed crop circle hoaxers - including Doug Bower - at work. Lindsey Morris, one of the production team, said the programme was not intended to show that crop circles were hoaxes, but that circles could be fabricated. "They did create a complex circle," she said, "and did it in about two hours." But it did not happen without a certain amount of resistance from some crop circle believers, which included chasing the hoaxers.




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