So why do people have extraordinary experiences then? Flying ball of lights were seen in and around crop cirlces. Or is it an alien intelligence which try to communicate with us? The geometry which can be found in crop circles, inculed a lot of mathematics which can be also found in nature.

Because, for example, this 200ft image of a pipe-smoking alien – carved into a Wiltshire field – could have been created using an ordinary microwave oven, according to scientists.

From kitchen to field: Microwaves may have created this 200ft alien crop circle near Cherhill, Wiltshire

A handheld device called magnetron – made using parts from the common household cooker and a 12-volt battery – may have ushered in a new generation of crop circles. Professor Richard Taylor, a physicist, claims to be able to reproduce the intricate damage inflicted on crops using such a gadget developed by his team at the University of Oregon. He believes similar advances have been made by others – despite avid UFO spotters insisting that the growing phenomenon is beyond scientific understanding.

Prof Taylor said microwaves – the radiation waves that are capable of heating food when utilised in an oven – cause crop stalks to fall over and cool in a horizontal position. The technique could explain the speed and efficiency of the artists and the incredible detail that some new crop circles exhibit, such as the alien, which was created two weeks ago alongside an ancient white horse at Cherhill, near Stonehenge. Dispensing with rope, wooden planks and bar stools that have traditionally been used to create such designs, Prof Taylor suggested these spectacular patterns could also be carved with lasers.

And he believes the satellite Global Positioning System could track the markings. Mathematical analysis of some of these ever-more complex designs has revealed the use of constructions lines, invisible to the eye, that are used to design the patterns. Writing in Physics World, he said: ‘Crop-circle artists are not going to give up their secrets easily. ‘This summer, unknown artists will venture into the countryside close to your homes and carry out their craft, safe in the knowledge that they are continuing the legacy of the most science-oriented art movement in history.’

Physics World editor Matin Durrani said: ‘It may seem odd for a physicist such as Taylor to be studying crop circles, but then he is merely trying to act like any good scientist – examining the evidence for the design and construction of crop circles without getting carried away by the side-show of UFOs, hoaxes and aliens.’ But as fascinating as the patterns are to scientists, farmers find crop circles infuriating. Tim Carson, who owns the land where the recent alien design appeared, has had 125 circles on his land since 1990. The price in ruined crops is particularly steep this year because of soaring fuel and fertiliser costs, and a 25 per cent drop in wheat yields due to the drought.

‘I’m beginning to get a bit tired of it all,’ said Mr Carson. ‘Each circle costs me £1,000 in lost income. This year, I decided to destroy circles as soon as I found them, but that means losing more crops. And, whatever you do, the circles affect the growing next year, as the thick mat of crops covers soil, compromising its quality.’ Every year, 50 to 60 circles materialise in the rolling chalk downlands of Wiltshire. In the rest of the world put together, only 40 to 50 appear annually.

And, in recent years, a booming tourist trade has developed. From Belgium, Holland, America, Norway and Australia, crop-circle enthusiasts come in their thousands — each with their own theory, each rushing to a new site as soon as it is reported. This week, within hours of the first reports of a new circle on Windmill Hill — near the neolithic stone circle at Avebury — a Dutch tour party of nine people rushed to the spot. ‘There are heaps of biophysical anomalies here,’ said the tour leader, Janet Ossebaard, 45, author of Crop Circles: Scientific Evidence.

‘This wasn’t made by people, otherwise you’d see damage from board marks [where hoaxers lay planks to flatten the wheat]. It’s been hit by a plasma vortex. ‘You can see the burn marks on the crops and cavities,’ she says, holding up a grain stalk, which does indeed have small holes in it. ‘We also found a half-fried caterpillar. This is a vortex that has been intelligently guided — not by hoaxers, nor the Army [which is heavily represented in this part of Wiltshire].’

Crop circles have been reported in England since 1678, when a Hertfordshire news pamphlet referred to The Mowing Devil, a creature that cut a farmer’s oat crop into a series of concentric circles. In the 19th century, occasional circles were recorded and the first-known photograph of one appeared in Sussex in 1932. But it wasn’t until the early Nineties that Wiltshire crop circles started multiplying at an extreme rate. In 1990, Led Zeppelin released an album, Remasters, with a picture on the cover of an elaborate crop circle created on Mr Carson’s land.

Source: Daily Mail [Aug 1st, 2011]

They are likely to make farmers especially cross in what has already been a tricky year. Fuel and fertiliser prices have risen; a dry spring means yields are expected to be down 25-30% on last year in the south-west. Now Wiltshire is being trampled by summer tourists, many of them mystically inclined. Some circular formations are visited by thousands of these enthusiasts, causing further damage to crops and sometimes property.

Occasionally, there is an upside for farmers. In 1998 commercial circle-makers acting for Mitsubishi, a Japanese carmaker, paid Mr Carson for the right to cut an outline of a new model named the Space Star in his fields. The commission “more than compensated for the loss of crop”, he says. Shredded Wheat, a breakfast cereal, once had its logo carved in a wheat field. Some landowners charge for entry or solicit donations, though the tale of the farmer who made £30,000 from tourists is exceptional.

But while farmers tend to suffer, others gain. The circles augment a mystical aura that emanates from Stonehenge, and that contributes hugely to Wiltshire’s £850m tourism industry. Visitor shops are stuffed with crop-circle memorabilia; coach tours frequent them. At the Barge Inn, a community-owned pub in Honeystreet, drinkers enjoy tipples named Croppie, Alien Abduction and Away With The Fairies. The pub has customers from all over the world, even out of season, and the nearby formations have “no doubt benefited the business”, says Terry Kemp, who works there.

The exact value of crop circles to the broader economy is unclear. Visit Wiltshire, the county’s tourism agency, is understandably reluctant to comment, given that acts of trespass and criminal damage are involved. But perhaps if the upside were better understood, the benefits might be more fairly shared.

Source: The Economist [Jul 7th, 2011]

In his book Round in Circles, crop circle researcher and author Jim Schnabel wrote that in 1989, Jenny Randles, the well-known British investigative writer on all-things Fortean “received a surprising piece of information from a local historian named Betty Puttick, from St. Albans, Hertfordshire [England]. Mrs. Puttick had just read Randles and [Paul] Fuller’s Controversy of the Circles, and it had reminded her of a seventeenth-century woodcut she had come across in a recent book on Hertfordshire folklore.”

Schnabel added, somewhat significantly: “The woodcut, which decorated the first page of a four-page pamphlet, depicted a small, black, horned figure, scything down oatstalks along a circular path, leaving what appeared to be flaming stalks in his wake.” The woodcut in question, dated 1678, was titled The Mowing-Devil: Or, Strange News out of Hartford-Shire. Written in the distinct style and wordage of the 1700s (which, needless to say, is very different to that of today!), it stated: Continue reading, ufomystic.com

Jacques Vallee is a computer scientist, partner in a venture capital firm, and author of more than 20 books, including Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, The Invisible College, and The Network Revolution.

In Sept. 1991, I published in a New Age magazine my own hypothesis about the Crop Circles phenomenon. I speculated they involved a military aerial device (not a space-based instrument) for generating such designs using focused microwave beams, such as a “maser.” At the time nobody wanted to hear that the beautiful pictures in English corn fields might be crafted by a technical team inside some lab, bouncing signals from a hovering platform and using individual corn stalks as simple pixels to calibrate a lethal device. So my paper was met with dead silence.

More recently, however, New Scientist has run an article titled “Microwaves could defuse bombs from afar” (April 18, 2009 issue). It begins: “The next weapon in the US army’s arsenal could be a laser-guided microwave blaster designed to destroy explosives. The weapon, called the Multimode Directed Energy Armament System, uses a high-power laser to ionize the air, creating a plasma channel that acts as a waveguide for the stream of microwaves.” Continue reading, BoingBoing.com

During the 1990s multiple specific and distinctive plant abnormalities were repeatedly documented in several hundred different crop formations which had occurred in various European countries as well as in the States and Canada. Extensive laboratory examination of thousands of these crop circle plants and their controls by American biophysicist W. C. Levengood established the presence of consistent changes in the circle plants which were not present in the control plants (plants taken at varying distances outside the crop formations, but in the same fields) — changes which control studies revealed were not caused by simple mechanical flattening of the plants (with planks, boards, cement rollers or human feet).

For detailed discussion of the plant (and subsequently soil) anomalies documented between 1990-2002, see http://www.bltresearch.com/published.php and http://www.bltresearch.com/xrd.php.

Because some crop formations are known to be mechanically flattened by people (see a vain attempt by some M.I.T. undergraduates in Ohio, in 2002: http://www.bltresearch.com/published/mit.php) circle enthusiasts have long desired simple indicators of the “real McCoy” — in particular, parameters they could easily recognize while out in the fields. And while we appreciate this desire, the BLT Team’s plant and soil research indicates that any reliable determination requires the documentation of multiple plant and/or soil abnormalities — some of which documentation does require microscopic or other laboratory analysis — to ascertain with certainty the origin of any specific event.

However, there are four scientifically-documented visible plant changes which are hallmarks of genuine crop circles — and all of these, if present, are (a) thought to be caused by the exposure of the plants to the heating component (most likely microwave radiation) of a plasma energy discharge which our work indicates is involved in the creation of many crop circles, and (b) except for the inhibited seed/seed-head development, the other three will be present immediately after a formation occurs: Continue reading, BLTResearch.com