A well hidden secret

Well, here I am with some thoughts to share… Thoughts on cropcirclemaking ofcourse, that’s what we went for. To start with I can assure you that the cropcircle we visited was man-made. I should have brought my videocamera to the circle, not for filming the crop or the circle but for shooting the arguing men… one shouted (from a smaller circle) at the other that he had no permission to enter this smaller circle, the other screaming he knew the farmer and had permission, then again the first one screamed the other would be officially trash if he would be trashing the crop, etc, etc. Not a very peaceful discussion on this spiritual spot, but interesting however.

I must admit.. I was a bit of an eavesdropper… and it became worse… I was standing there, very close to the man who was now officially trash, just pretending some meditative staring in the wheat stalks but in the meantime listening to the monologue he was having  with a random visitor. He was suspecting criminal involvement and was researching the possibility of a gentleman’s agreement between the farmer (owner of the cropfield) and a local photografer and reporter of cropcircles. Aha!! that would be some evidence for my newly considerated belief on cropcircles. That morning when Mike told us about the new formation I was excited and at the same time the idea of a ‘cropcircle-industry’ popped up…

I didn’t give much attention to this thought but during that day and the rest of the week the ‘cropcircle-industry idea’ seemed more reasonable to me. Agreements between farmers, cropcirclemakers, photografers, microlightpilots, shops, researches, writers, touristic establishment etc. A well-hidden secret.  The nice thing about the man officially declared to be trash and his monologue was his interest in this case, he wanted to separate the real circles from the manmade ones because all the people who are visiting, chanting and meditating in these places, are cheated by this criminal act of human cropcircle making.

My question is: Do they always send a person like this in to have this sort of ‘gossip’ in a circle to keep everybody on the wrong leg??? I just love the idea of a cropcircle industry, they do this very complicated secret stuff for years and years, can you imagine? Chapeau!

Lovely conspiracy theorie, the only thing I can’t fit in is the fact that a lot of tourists camp out and do nightwatches… 

And if you think I have lost my spiritual orientation… I had not.. yet..

I truly believe we are not alone out here. If earth was a peppercorn and Jupiter a chesnut, you’d have to place them 100 metres apart to get a sense of the real distance between them. And this universe is only one of many. What about the chances that there are many more populated earths, just like ours, in other universes? And that’s just space. But I guess other intelligences don’t use cropcircles to communicate to us. They have easier ways… whispering in you ear in a way you’d think it’s your own thoughts 🙂

 

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Galactic communication?

Hey Karin,

How are you two doing… still under a blanket on the couch?

This afternoon I found some time to read your posts and the ‘order of time’ website you were writing about. Pretty interesting and this time-stuff is indeed related to what I teach in my ‘Tzolkin-courses’. For me the Tzolkin (or Mayan-calender although it is not THE mayan-calender, there is no such thing as THE mayan-calender) is about recollecting our connection with the galaxy… I realize this might sound a bit hocus pocus to you… but living with this calender synchronizes us with our spiritual path and gives us a deeper understanding of what it is to be a ‘galactic human’ on earth. So, I guess my perspective on galactic time is even a bit more elaborate then what I read on this website. 

Although I am very into uncommon ideas about time(perception), natural time-stuff, lunar, solar and galactic calenders I am not sure the only way to interpret cropcircles is to see them as an expression of alien or galactic beings (don’t forget we are also living in this galaxy and therefore are galactic beings as well) searching for contact and waiting for an answer. In my opinion galactic communication takes place at a different level and those wanting to contact us find ways, they are not waiting for a stamp in the grain. Anyway, If we are talking about this kind of subjects we have to go beyond the scope of our normal human mind… we have to think out of the box!

So, I can appreciate most things written on this site and in this article… And I’m sure the time-management/calenders we use reflect our mindset and our way of managing this planet as a collective but I find the cropcircletheory they propose a bit hollywood-like… (een beetje erbij gehaald, zou ik zeggen).

Well, are we getting any wiser on this cropcircle-stuff? I feel the need to visit one (not the best timing now) to experience for  myself. Everything I have read about the believerside of this subject is the same beautiful inspiring story, all echos from each other.

What to do? Let’s go plan our trip!  When do we have a meeting?

Hope you and Eise soon will be better (Let me know what you think about a distant healingsession, I know somebody…)

Love, Dees

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Critical review on W.C. Levengood’s crop circle research

Hi Dees,

No trip to Bloemendaal & Haarlem this weekend, unfortunately. Eise caught the flu (and an additional ear infection) and I’m not feeling too well either. So I thought this was a good moment to start reading some of the supposedly scientific research into crop circles myself.

But before I got to reading the articles, I found a nice review on W.C. Levengood’s crop circle research. This review addresses two issues I’ve mentioned before, the lack of double blind testing and the circular reasoning (“Although there are no guaranteed genuine formations on which to conduct research, the research supposedly proves the genuineness of the formations.”). Besides these two points, the author (Joe Nickell, Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), how cool does that sound!) also points to a fact I hadn’t even realised myself, namely that the correlation Levengood finds between structural and cellular alterations in plants and their location within crop-circle-type formations does not at all show a causal relationship. Of course! This reminds me to something I read earlier, that stalks that have been bent grow longer nodes (one of the signs of a “genuine” crop circle, according to Levengood and other croppies) because they simply have to elevate themselves again.

Just another nice skeptical read! 😉

By the way, I’m quite curious about Karlo’s opinion on crop circles and our blog, couldn’t you push him to leave a comment??

Bye, Karin

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Crop circle denial

Yo Dees!

Wow. I’m flabbergasted. I stumbled upon this website which is a “participation platform for alternative time consciousness”. It’s called The Order of Time, do you know it? They posted an article on Crop Circles and the Key to the World Order. This article is full of conspiracy theory views on man-made crop circles (their reaction to the circlemakers website: “Apparently this is an action of legally covering it up”) and the author seems convinced of the fact that crop circles are made by an intelligence that tries to communicate with us (“The conclusion is that some intelligence is writing messages in symbol circle code to us on the face of mother earth and we are baffled.”).

The article is mostly about what the intelligence is trying to communicate with us and what we should answer them (“we, from our own selfrespect of conscious control, owe them an answer.”). The author finally comes to the conclusion (I could not really follow the analysis and interpretation) that the meaning of the crop circles is related to time (“From the above as well as from many other religious, philosophical and political options we have to depart from a threefold division of time representing the relationship of our earthly management of time and organic life.”). So Dees, maybe you can connect this to Maya calendars!!

The author ends with designing an answer we could give to the genuine crop circle makers, which is supposed to represent our own complexity of time consciousness. I couldn’t really understand how the explanation of crop circles resulted in this design, maybe you can make something out of it….

I really wonder what you think of this article. You can probably guess my opion…

Cheers, Karin

 

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Entertainment

Hey Dees,

Well, that was fun! I just watched the Terzake show and thought it was quite cool. I tried keeping some notes, let’s see if I can decypher my scribbles. For my own comfort I’ll just list my observations:

• Two new terms: agroglyph, another word for crop circles (which seems to be a mostly French term, I learned from a Google search), and the more than fantastic name Cereal Killer :-D.
• People dressed in Napoleon style are by no means credible. Never.
• The thought that crop circles are negatives of the thoughts of people living in a fifth or sixth dimension (I was very curious about your reaction to this Dees!!).
• Crop circles mostly appear near historic monuments. I was thinking, if I wanted ‘facilitate’ the creation of urban myths around something I had made, I would definitely choose such spots on purpose too.
• Crop circles are visited by over 5000 people. There must be a business model to that!
• Just a quote: “Amongst experts, this circle is described as “real”.”. I liked the subtle skeptic tone here…
• I noticed that the Wallonian researcher who took some stalks for further analyses in the lab only took them from within the crop circle, not from outside. So no control sample. They did not find anything out of the ordinary, but I think they should have compared the sample from the circle to a true control sample anyway. Maybe they did not show this in the video, I don’t know.
• Apparently, many of the videos showing balls of light creating a crop circle are hoaxes. I thought so.
• Another really nice quote (I’d like to refer back to my business model note): “Crop circles are big business in new age circles.”.
• OK. Janet Ossebaard. Even you did not really appreciate the arguments she discusses in her book to ‘prove’ that crop circles are not man made, did you? She totally did not convince me. I am just repeating her here: “You ask such difficult questions!”. Really. I did like the fact that the reporter thought of her ideas as an ‘ambitious hypothesis”.
• Should we attend the annual Crop Circle symposium in Glastonbury? Bookings can be made from February onwards. I might want to spend some money on that! Entertainment guaranteed I guess. Going just one day isn’t that expensive, 40 Pounds.
• Then we had firm believer and conspiracy theorist Andy Thomas (a quick search led me to this website). He claimed that crop circles are not explicable in normal terms. I am completely not convinced of that! So far, the explanations that I have seen for the creation of crop circles by humans is quite convincing. Do you think he would even take the evidence disproving his theories seriously?
• John Lundberg, the guy behind circlemakers.org mentioned a movie he was making about crop circles with some Japanese people. Note to self: check this out!! I also loved Lundbergs customer list, including Microsoft, Nike, the BBC…
• Some things that were frequently said about creating a crop circle: “it is simple”, “it is quick”, “he just makes crop circles for fun”.
• I really liked the interview with crop circle maker ‘Cereal Killer’. Especially the part about why he never exposed himself as the maker of some famous crop circles (because then myths and urban legends rise, people try to explain what happend, which is quite fun. Also, when everyone would know a crop circle was man made, the crop circle itself (which very often is a beautiful piece of landscape art) would get far less attention. It probably all boils down to acknowledgement. In an anonymous way.) This guy was quite concerned about the take up of crop circles by sects and religious groups though, which might also be an interesting issue to explore further (another note to self).
• Apparently, making a crop circle isn’t that difficult, as long as you prepare it well and make sure your planning and organisation are in order. I can do that! I think.
• Do you think someone ever made a calculation of the loss of income for farmers because of crop circles?

It is time I started doing some real research myself again, but ah, time…. You know the feeling! I’ll try to remember I ask for Eise’s library card next time I see him (I’m more of a single girl these days!!). Buying crop circle books is just one step too far for me… :-S

Cheers!

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Persuasion?

Hi Dees!

Just a short message from a rather long meeting in Madrid… Glad you liked my crop circle post card! I found it at the airport and I really had to send it to you! What I enjoyed most about it, is that the crop circle was commissioned by Wakker Dier, so it’s a crop circle for a good cause!!

I must admit, I was a bit surprised by your post! Of course I am happy to read that you also find the skeptics’ reviews plausible, but I didn’t expect you to be convinced this soon! Interesting development… I am still curious to read convincing spiritual accounts of crop circles as well, so let me know if you find any! I hope that I have time to pick up Haselhoff’s book in the library this weekend (they do have it, according to their catalogue). Also, I am planning to dive into English literature on crop circles, there should be more information available, shedding light on both sides of the story.

Another thing I’d like to do is to find the tv broadcast about the Dutch guys making a crop circle in Flanders. For sure I would like to see how they fooled Belgian croppies, but I am even more interested to see how they made the crop circle!

I like what you say about the experience of creating a crop circle. I could do some user experience research into making crop circles (should try to find funding for that 😉 )! Perhaps making a crop circle does give some people a spiritual (or other kind of nice) experience, perhaps it is even an addictive experience! Which I think also relates to your question of we do not know the exact amount of crop circles that are man-made. I wouldn’t be surprised if some corp circle makers get pleasure from the fact that they are able to fool croppies into believing that some crop circles are not man-made… Also, an explanation might be that if people make crop circles for their own, personal (spiritual) experience, why would they want to make that public? They might be sued by angry farmers, for destroying part of their crop…

Family traditions of making crop circles, that’s a nice idea! It’s like Scottish (kilt) tartan patterns! Maybe someone did research into crop circle patterns…

Wow, still plenty to think about and to find more information about…

One final note… In my search for pictures of beautiful crop circles, I found this crop circle table… Weird thing! Can’t find more info on it, but I’m quite curious about its purpose. Maybe a practice tool for crop circle makers?

Adios!

Karin

P.S. You are right, all crop circles are real, good thinking!

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Commonsense spirituality

Bonjour Karin,

You did a great job there during your lunchbreak… wauw, I should implement this kind of lunchbreaks in my life too! 

I just read the articles from skepp and skepsis and must say that I really liked the down-to-earth approach and humorous style… and ofcourse their arguments are very straight forward. At this moment I have serious doubts about the extraterrestrial origins of crop circles. Not much left of the croppie I could have been…  My common sense is catching up with my spiritual notion here, or maybe I should opt for a ‘commonsense spirituality’, that sound better to me.

Still I find it hard to believe that these highly complex and beautiful crop circles are made by people!

The teamwork and creativity that is needed and also the satisfaction after succeeding must generate a high vibrational energy, or flow, that makes the creation of a cropcircle a spiritual exercise in it self. So Karin, that would be a nice spiritual exercise for you (while I am doing my yogapractice in another circle) 🙂

What comes clear to me is that we are lightbeings ourselves… there might be no higher intelligence who will give us hidden messages in the crop to reach enlightment or something like that. We ourselves ARE capable of doing things that we think of as extraordinary, unique or cosmic. At last we live on this earth as a part of this galaxy, as a part of this universe, as unique beings. And the wisdom we need is inside of everyone of us, just open up!

the cropcircle makers (whatever species they are) give us a great example of something extraordinary we can achieve, they inspire… at least they inspire us to have this nice research en discussion!

Yess, back to business. I was at the library and found the book of Janet Ossebaard and some other. Started to read during my traintrip to Breda this wednesday but fell asleep, not much of a good job here…  I will get back to you on that later. For now there’s one question which is bothering me, about the ‘real’ and ‘fake’ circles (in my opnion all of them are real because they are laying there), when most of them are handmade, why do we not know the exact amount that is made by humans? That could be verifyed, don’t you think?

Have a nice stay in Madrid! Talk to you soon!

Dees

Ps. Our friend Bauke thought there might be a tradition of circlemaking in certain families… isn’t that a nice idea?

 

 

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Skeptic exploration

Hi there Dees!

My my, I do need to make time for our crop circle research! Too busy…. So now I’m dedicating my lunch break to our blog 😉 .

Wow, those microlight flights are so cool! Do you think they have aircrafts for more than two persons? Otherwise we’ll have to take some lessons first! How was your trip to the library, found anything interesting?

I have been searching a little on skeptics’ websites (I thought that would be the best starting point for the skeptic girl 🙂 ). I’m not nearly finished, of course, but I found two book reviews of the (self-proclaimed) crop circle scientist we already saw in the You Tube video I posted last Sunday: Eltjo Haselhoff. Apparently, he published a few books about his scientific approach to researching and explaining crop circles and of course, one of these books was very critically reviewed by the skeptics’ websites I visited. I have to admit that I haven’t read Haselhoff’s books myself, so I cannot really say whether I agree with the skeptics. But they did raise some interesting issues which I would like to explore further.

The first review I read was published on the website of Skepp, a Flemish group of curious people who study “statements and phenomena that are highly unlikely or impossible according to the current state of the art in science”. It is a review about Haselhoff’s book called “Geheimzinnige graancirkels”. The first thing in the review that caught my attention was a couple of terms used to refer to people who study crop circles. That’s us!! Although Wikipedia adds to the definition: “especially one who believes that they are not man-made or formed by other terrestrial processes”. That’s not me. Apparently these people are called cereologists or croppies.  So that’s another set of words to add to our search vocabulary. The main critique of Skepp on Haselhoff is that he claims to be a true scientist, while they doubt his scientific approach. They conclude that he doesn’t obey to many common scientific rules. Apparently, some of his hypotheses are based on very few observations and (more concerning), his experiments and tests were not done (double-) blind. An interesting problem that is explained is the fact that cereologists are trapped in a circlular argument. They study differences between ‘genuine’ and man-made crop circles to find explanations for the genuine crop circles. However, they don’t know which crop circles are genuine and which are man-made! Interesting thought…. The review ends with a list of common skeptics’ arguments for the hypothesis that all crop circles are man-made. This is quite an interesting list, you should read it! I recognized a lot of counter arguments used by croppies (love the term!!).

The second review I read I found on the Dutch counterpart of Skepp: Skepsis (what’s in a name?). Skepsis’ goal is “to critically study exceptional statements”. They reviewed the same book by Eltjo Haselhoff. Similar to Skepp, the Skepsis reviewer was impressed by the beautiful photos of crop circles. Also, they applaud the idea of approaching crop circle research from a scientific angle, as Haselhoff claims he does. However, Skepsis is also quite disappointed in the scientific explanations provided in the book. The largest part of the review was based on the mathematical and geometrical analyses and conclusions of Haselhof. As you know I am not a mathematician, so forgive me for any mistakes in interpreting Skepsis’ review, but if I understand the reviewer correctly, he used two methods to prove that Haselhoff’s analysis is not correct.

So, what should we conclude from this? I feel I should read Haselhoff’s book myself to decide whether I agree with the reviews. The Skepp review even suggests to buy this book if you’d want to read just one crop circle believers’ book because of the photographs and because Haselhoff is a bit more critical than many croppies. I have to say though, I liked the lines of reasoning from both reviewers! Also, I do feel somewhat more comfortable in refuting croppies’ arguments about why they believe many crop circles cannot be made by humans. There seem to be very plausible scientific explanations for many of the often mentioned phenomena.

A final interesting article (also by Skepsis) is a general review of Haselhoffs work and thoughts. Again, his scientific claims are seriously questioned, and I tend to agree with the skeptics here. Arguments Haselhoff is using just don’t seem right to a researcher such as myself. Two examples (from the article): Haselhoff apparently cannot imagine that one of the eye witnesses he spoke to was not telling the truth, and therefore what this eye witness saw is undeniably the truth. And my favourite: double-blind testing is a waist of time because good researchers are not influenced by any foreknowledge. Really!! Dees, even you don’t agree with this, or do you? 🙂

So please read the book review of Skepp and the article of Skepsis, I am so curious of what you think of it! Let me know!

Cheerio!

Karin

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believer

Hey Karin!

perfect idea this teaparty! although I have read some stuff about cropcircles the last two years I was very inspired by our browsing last night and also surprised about what we found out about Hoaxers (people that make beautiful cropcircles at night). I knew there are some people who like to do this but didn’t know that about 80% of the circles are handmade by humans. To be honest… I was shocked! Until yesterday I was a believer. I love to believe that some highly intelligent and very loving entities or energies from somewhere far beyond our galaxy are playing ‘kiekeboo’ with us and leave some puzzles for mankind so we can squeeze our brains and in the end (when we don’t find the answer) open our hearts and expand our consciousness to include the idea of a small and beautiful earth as a part of a intelligent and living universe. Well, there’s still a 10-20% to investigate, and I can’t wait to be in a cropcircle and see and feel for myself.

Today I read about Tony’s microlight. Tony is a real cropcircle pilot, we can fly with him in his microlight and he will show us all the cropcircles. sounds nice… www.wiltsmicrolights.com

I also read an article in mindstyle magazine ‘Happinez’ (number 3, 2009) where cropcirclesexpert Janet Ossebaard was quoted. She thinks cropcircles want to show us something, a language we are going to learn. She says it migth be a transmission of energy we can experience and absorb. It might be about a frequency which will expand our consciousness. A higher frequency/state of consciousness which will change our way of thinking. Sounds interesting to me… I guess the hoax-shockeffect I wrote about wasn’t big enough to really change my beliefs.

Tomorrow I will visit the library and get back to you when I find some more intesting stuff!

Catch you later,

Dees

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First browsing

Hidy ho Dees!

That was fun, our first action to browse for information about crop circles and sightseeing trips! I was especially charmed by the Hello Kitty crop circle we found on the Circlemakers website :-). Also, what struck me was that even crop circle believers (no offence!) clearly admit that 80 to 90% of crop circles are made by humans. The problem for me is that these people seem to automatically assume that the remaining crop circles have other origins than humans. I’d like to assume that of the remaining crop circles, we cannot know for sure that they were made by humans. But we can also not know for sure that they were not made by humans… I wonder whether there are any crop circles that are certainly not made by humans, I think we can never say for sure that no humans were involved in makin them. How would we ever know that?! I do agree with the crop circle believers however, that the 10 – 20% of the crop circles that were not accounted for by human creators are the most interesting circles to focus on!

I’ve also been thinking about the YouTube video we watched including a recording of a couple of lights that seem to be making a crop circle. One thing that was explained in the video is that most recordings of crop circle creations by entities of light show the strange phenomenon that the lights do not follow the laws of perspective, they do not become smaller when farther away or larger when closer to the observer/camera. I cannot help but thinking that this might be just a suggestion of poor video editing skills…. I have to say that most of the eyewitness stories don’t seem very convincing. I think I would be able to write a fictitions eyewitness report that is more convincing than the ones I have been reading so far!

But, I have to be fair here, this was the first time I seriously read some websites about crop circles, so I really need to dive deeper into all perspectives on the matter to form a solid opinion. I really think we should be saving up to make that helicopter ride to see the crop circles from above, there are some truly spectacular examples I’d really like to see. I think I am going to save all of the pictures of really beatiful circles and post my favourite one each time I write on this blog!

Talk to you soon!
Cheers, Karin

P.S. I was thinking, maybe we should organise a bi-weekly tea-party to brainstorm about our trip and our findings, what do you think?

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