Free Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience by Colin Wilson

by either hoaxers or whirlwinds.
    Between 1991 and 1993, an American biophysicist, W. C. Levengood, examined samples from known hoaxed circles, as well as some believed to be ‘genuine’. He discovered that the ‘genuine’ samples showed changes in the cell-pits (in Britain called pips or seeds), enlargements that he was able to reproduce only in a microwave oven. He also noted cell changes in the hoax samples—a lengthening of the pits—but these were due to being trampled on and squeezed through the cell wall. Even though Levengood concluded, ‘Whatever is doing these formations is affecting the fundamental biophysics and biochemistry of the plant’, cereologists, who had hoped for an instant test to distinguish hoaxes, had to admit that it was not as clear-cut as they might have wished.
    Linda Howe tells how, in September 1992, Levengood was contacted by a farmer from Clark, South Dakota, about a six-hundred-foot circle that had appeared among his potatoes. The plants were all dead. Levengood studied the dead plants, and again found pit enlargement, often of more than a quarter, while the potatoes themselves had yellow streaks and cracks.
    In Austinburg, Ohio, a gardener named Donald Wheeler discovered a large rectangle in his maize; the stalks had been flattened but not broken, and were all lying in the same direction. The wet ground showed no sign of footmarks. Dr. Levengood examined maize from inside the rectangle, and undamaged maize from outside. The ‘tassels’ on the undamaged corn were closed, while those on the damaged corn were open, indicating that their growth had been somehow accelerated. Linda Howe published photographs of the wheat, potatoes and maize examined by Levengood in her Glimpses of Other Realities, where the difference can be clearly seen.
    One startling development—although at the time no one recognised how startling—was a long review of three books on crop circles in the New York Review on 21 November 1991. What was so unusual was that it was by Baron Zuckerman, one of the most distinguished members of Britain’s scientific establishment—perhaps the most. He had ended a brilliant academic career as chief scientific adviser to the British government. And, by 1991, he was eighty-seven years old. So why was such a man getting involved in a subject that most scientists dismissed as lunacy?
    The answer may lie in the fact that Zuckerman had retired to a village near Sandringham in Norfolk, and that Sandringham happens to be one of the royal residences. There is, among cereologists, a persistent rumour that crop circles appeared on the Queen’s estate at Sandringham, and that the response of Prince Philip was to send for their old friend Baron Zuckerman to ask his opinion. Zuckerman certainly went to the trouble of personally examining a number of crop circles.
    One result was the New York Review article, written two years before his death, and two years after his alleged visit to Sandringham.
    ‘Creations of the Dark’ is a curious piece. There is no hint of that carping tone that has become the standard response of scientists to such bizarre matters. He begins by speaking of mysteries of the British landscape, like Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and the white horses cut in the chalk, then, moving on to crop circles, mentions that almost a thousand appeared in England between 1980 and 1990. He goes on to speak sympathetically and at length about Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews, authors of Circular Evidence, one of the books he is reviewing.
    They believe that the circles are ‘caused by some supernatural intelligence’, he explains—yet still with no touch of the critical scepticism one would expect of a senior scientist. Even when he mentions that one of the cornfield inscriptions reads WEARENOTALONE, it is with no hint of scorn. This appears only at the end of his summary of the views of Terence Meaden, when he says: ‘How a downwardly directed turbulent vortex . . . could explain the