Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience Page 5

  But the main purpose of the Nine was to announce a mass landing of UFOs on Earth, which would last for nine days, and would finally convince the human race of the reality of the space beings.

  According to Tom, the purpose of the Nine is to bring about an alteration in the consciousness of ‘planet Earth’, which has become a kind of bottleneck in the universe. ‘This planet was originally created to teach [human beings] balance between the spiritual and the physical world, but in this physical world they got involved in the material world, and so [they] never evolve beyond the belt of this planet . . . It is important for the level of consciousness of this planet to be raised’.

  But, by the time Puharich, Whitmore, and Phyllis Schlemmer had averted another Middle East war by meditating in a hotel room overlooking the Golan Heights, ‘Tom’ had apparently forgotten about the mass landing on planet Earth.

  It is, of course, easy to dismiss Puharich as a gullible romantic, led astray by ‘spirit messages’ that probably originated in the medium’s unconscious mind. Yet, when we take an overall view of his experiences, it becomes difficult to maintain this attitude. The first messages from the Nine came in 1952 via Dr. Vinod. In 1956, they seemed to be confirmed by the encounter with Dr. Charles Laughead, who passed on more messages from the Nine. This certainly seemed to suggest that the Nine were not a creation of Vinod’s unconscious.

  So, when the Nine again spoke in a Tel Aviv hotel room while Geller was in a trance, Puharich had every reason to believe in their genuineness. If he had any doubts, the ‘miracles’ that followed must have removed them. UFOs that hover at the end of the street, tape recorders that record without being touched, cassettes that dematerialise in front of the eyes—these are enough to convince anyone that he or she is dealing with real forces.

  Here I have to admit that my own attitude has changed since I first read Uri in 1974, and wrote my own book The Geller Effect a year later. At that time, I took it totally for granted that so-called ‘poltergeist’ activity was a kind of unconscious ‘psychokinesis’ (mind over matter) caused by the minds of disturbed teenagers. I had no doubt that our minds are full of extraordinary unconscious forces over which we have no control. I found it difficult to explain the manifestations that took place when Geller and Puharich were together, since neither was a teenager, but that still seemed to me the only logical explanation.

  Five years later, in the early 1980s, I was commissioned to write a book on poltergeists, and began to research the subject, beginning with a visit to a house in Pontefract where violent poltergeist activities had taken place over a long period. To my embarrassment, I soon found myself in no doubt whatever that poltergeists are disembodied spirits, who can make use of the energies of psychologically disturbed people.

  I also began to believe that ‘spirit possession’ cannot be explained away as a kind of medieval superstition. This was why, when Grof told the story of Flora, I had no doubt that it was not a case of possession by some ‘archetype of the collective unconscious’. I do not accept that the ‘spirit’ that possessed Flora was the Devil, or even a devil, but it was certainly some extremely unpleasant disembodied entity.

  The result was that when I came to reread Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller, in the course of researching the present book, I found that my whole attitude towards it had changed. By then, I had read John Mack’s Abduction, as well as Budd Hopkins’s Missing Time and Intruders, and David Jacobs’s Secret Life, and I could see that the subject was far more bizarre and complex than I had at first assumed. Now I saw why Geller and Puharich had disagreed with my theory that they themselves had been responsible for ‘poltergeist effects’. They must have thought me appallingly obtuse, and been too polite to say so. They had seen tapes dematerialise, plugs pulled out of sockets, car engines immobilised. They knew they were dealing with some kind of paranormal force, not their own powers of psychokinesis. Both of them knew that when Uri snatched the first tape, and it vanished in his hand, he was being controlled—used as an instrument of these forces—just as John Mack’s Catherine was being controlled when she experienced an odd desire to drive around Boston suburbs in the early hours of the morning. Which certainly suggests that the unseen entities possess some alarming powers . . .

  But what are these entities? Are they, as Puharich believed, intelligent beings from space, who have been watching our planet for thousands of years, and who have intervened in human history more than once? Or are they, like most poltergeists, simply the juvenile delinquents and time wasters of the spirit world?

  This is the question that I set out to answer soon after the trip to Marion. The first thing I wanted to know was: can they be considered intelligent? Most poltergeists show little more than a kind of rudimentary intelligence, often downright stupidity. If these ‘space beings’ demonstrated more than that, it would certainly be a strong argument in favour of some of their claims.

  And it was at that point that I heard about the investigations of the astronomer Gerald Hawkins into crop circles.

  [1]. My Story, by Uri Geller, 1975.

  2

  CROP CIRCLES AND FROZEN MUSIC

  Westbury, fifteen miles from Stonehenge, is a small weaving and glove-making town, whose most famous feature is the great White Horse cut into the turf of Bratton Down. It was first cut to celebrate King Alfred’s victory over the Danes there in AD 878, but was recut in 1778 in a form that looks like an exceptionally tired and dispirited carthorse.

  The farm of John Scull lies within sight of the White Horse, on the Wiltshire downs. In mid-August, 1980, Mr. Scull was walking around the edge of his oat field when he was outraged by the sight of what looked like wanton vandalism. Someone had been trampling his oats on a vast scale. But, when he surveyed the damage at close quarters, he realised that it was more organised than it looked. There were three immense circles, each sixty feet in diameter, spread out over the field. The ripening oats had been neatly flattened in a clockwise direction, yet without breaking the stalks—the horizontal oats were continuing to ripen.

  It looked as if some practical joker had worked out an elaborate hoax—elaborate because the circles must have been produced manually rather than mechanically; there was no sign of the disturbance that would have been made by some kind of machine. In fact the circles were surrounded by undamaged oats, which made it hard to see how anyone had approached. But then, all cornfields have ‘tramlines’—double lines made by the farmer’s tractor as he adds fertiliser or weedkiller—and a careful hoaxer could have trodden carefully along the tramlines without leaving any signs of disturbance.

  But to what purpose? What kind of a madman would want to spend a whole night making three sixty-foot circles—presumably with long planks, or a piece of rope stretched from the centre?

  The Wiltshire Times printed the story on 15 August 1980, together with a photograph. The report brought Dr. Terence Meaden, editor of the Journal of Meteorology, to Mr. Scull’s farm. And, as he examined the three sharp-edged circles, Meaden realised that they had not all been made on the same night, but on three different dates between May and July. John Scull had simply not noticed them.

  But made by what? Meaden was baffled. The only suggestion he could come up with was a summer whirlwind. But that seemed unlikely. Many country people have seen a summer whirlwind—a spiral of dust that dashes around a field and sucks up anything in its path. But summer whirlwinds are not usually sixty feet across—that would be a tornado. Neither do they stay in the same place. A summer whirlwind would have made a random path through the crop. Meaden’s explanation was untenable even at the time, but it was the best he could do.

  Later, he was to elaborate his theory, suggesting that when a gust of wind meets a hill, it forms a vortex, which meets the stationary air on the other side of the hill to create a spiralling column.

  The next expert on the spot was another magazine editor: Ian Mrzyglod. He carefully measured the circles, and made the interesting discovery that they were not cir
cles, but ellipses. Radiuses drawn from the edge of the circles to their centres varied by several feet, from twenty-six and a half to thirty-five. So the idea of a man with a long plank or a length of rope had to be abandoned.

  If anyone had been interested, they might have learnt that John Scull’s circles were not the first—that other farmers in the south of England had found their corn flattened in a clockwise circle since 1978. But, since there is something oddly boring about a mystery with no obvious solution, nobody had paid much attention. And now, for the same reason, everyone soon forgot the three circles in the Westbury oat field.

  A year went past. Then, in August 1981, it happened again. This time it was in Hampshire, in a natural amphitheatre called Cheesefoot Head, where Eisenhower had addressed the troops before the 1944 D-Day landing. In dry weather, the foundations of some old building, possibly Roman, show through the turf. And when it is used for wheat—as it usually is—the great circle of golden yellow stands out sharply among the surrounding green hills.

  In this ‘punchbowl’, on 19 August 1981, there appeared three circles in the wheat. Unlike the Westbury circles, which had been spread all over the field, these three were neatly in line: one large circle, about sixty feet across, and two smaller ones, about twenty-five feet, placed neatly and symmetrically on either side. They were again slightly elliptical. And they had been made on the same night.

  If they were caused by a whirlwind—as Meaden still maintained—then it had to bounce three times. In fact, the Cheesefoot Head circles seem almost designed to refute Meaden’s theory, as if they are saying: ‘No, we, couldn’t be due to whirlwinds, because we are in a straight line, and are of different sizes’.

  The following year, 1982, was quiet, with only a few single circles over southern England. Then, in 1983, once more in the punchbowl field at Cheesefoot Head, no fewer than five circles appeared on the same night: a large central circle, and four circles spaced neatly and symmetrically around it. This was the coup de grace to the whirlwind theory—although Meaden refused to acknowledge it. There was obviously no way that a whirlwind could bounce five times in a neat pattern. And, as if delighted to have made its point, the invisible prankster went on to make ‘fivesomes’ all over the south of England—one below the White Horse, another below the Ridgeway, near Wantage, in Oxfordshire, and another at Cley Hill, near Warminster, a town that had been noted for its sightings of UFOs.

  Suddenly, the media discovered crop circles. The British press often refers to summer as the ‘silly season’, because for some odd reason, there is often a shortage of good news stories in the hot months, and the newspapers have to manufacture stories out of events that would be ignored in the winter. Crop circles were ideal for the purpose, and they were soon featuring regularly in most British newspapers, then all over the world. ‘Artistic hippies’ were widely suspected, although UFO enthusiasts insisted that the only plausible explanation was flying saucers.

  When yet another ‘quintuplet’ found below the White Horse turned out to be a fraud, the sceptics seemed to be justified. Bob Rickard, the editor of the Fortean Times, a magazine dedicated to ‘anomalies’ and the memory of the late Charles Fort, was one of those who went to look at this new circle, and noted that its edges seemed less clear-cut than in most circles. He pointed this out to Ian Mrzyglod, who proceeded to investigate, and soon uncovered a hoax. The Daily Mirror, irritated that its rival the Daily Express had scooped so many crop-circle stories, had paid a family named Shepherd to duplicate the ‘quintuplet’ below the White Horse. They did this by entering the field on stilts, and then trampling the corn in a circle. Yet the fact that they needed to enter the field on stilts, and that their hoax was so quickly detected, seemed to argue that the other circles were either genuine or created by far more skillful hoaxers.

  Now crop circles were reported not only from England, but from all over the world: Australia, Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, Norway, the United States, Canada. In fact, Canadian circles had been reported from as early as 1974. On 1 September 1974, Edwin Fuhr, a farmer, of Langenburg, Saskatchewan, was driving his tractor in a field of rapeseed when he noted a round, shiny disc, about eleven feet across, whirling above the crop and causing it to sway. Then he noticed four more, all doing the same thing. He sat frozen with fear, and watched them for fifteen minutes, until they took off, going straight up in a grey vapour. And his rapeseed had five crop circles, eleven feet in diameter. They drew crowds of journalists.

  Circles that appeared in a field near Rossburn, Manitoba, in 1977 seemed to refute Meaden’s whirlwind theory, in that they were in flat prairie land, with no hills to form vortices.

  As the number of circles also increased, so did their variety. There were circles with ‘rings’ around them—flattened pathways that ran around the outer edge—double rings, triple rings, quadruplets, quintuplets, sextuplets, even swastikas. It was as if the circle makers were trying to outflank the sceptics. When someone pointed out that all the circles had been flattened anticlockwise, a clockwise circle promptly appeared. When someone suggested that the circles could be made with the aid of a helicopter, a circle appeared under a power line.

  In August 1991, a British couple were present when a circle was formed. They were Gary and Vivienne Tomlinson, and they were taking an evening walk in a cornfield near Hambledon, Surrey, when the corn began to move, and a mist hovered around them. They reported a high-pitched sound. Then a whirlwind swirled around them, and Gary Tomlinson’s hair began to stand up from a build-up of static. Suddenly, the whirlwind split in two and vanished across the field, and, in the silence that followed, they realised they were in the middle of a crop circle, with the corn neatly flattened.

  This certainly seemed to support Meaden’s whirlwind theory, and he had himself photographed with the two witnesses. Meaden’s response to the question of why, if the circles are formed by whirlwinds, they started in the late 1970s, and were not (apparently) found before that, was that they had been. He cited a pamphlet of August 1678 called Mowing Devil, concerning a field in Hertfordshire in which a circle was found in the corn, and attributed to a demon. But this still failed to explain why no crop circles were found between 1678 and the modern outbreak.

  In a book called The Goddess of the Stones, Meaden speculates that the spirals often found carved on old stones were inspired by crop circles. But again, the problem is: why, in that case, do we not find references to crop circles in ancient literature?

  Bob Rickard’s interviews with witnesses—people who claimed to have been present when circles were made—may or may not be taken as confirming Meaden’s whirlwind theory: these are a patchwork of their comments:

  Suddenly the grass began to sway before our eyes and laid itself flat in a clockwise spiral . . . A perfect circle was completed in less than half a minute, all the time accompanied by a high-pitched humming sound . . . My attention was drawn to a ‘wave’ coming through the heads of the cereal crop in a straight line . . . The agency, although invisible, behaved like a solid object . . . When we reached the spot where the circles had been, we were suddenly caught up in a terrific whirlwind . . . [The dog] went wild . . . There was a rushing sound and a rumble . . . then suddenly everything was still . . . It was uncanny . . . The dawn chorus stopped, the sky darkened . . .

  In Bolberry Down, Devon, on 16 June 1991, a ham radio operator named Lew Dilling heard a series of high-pitched blips and clicks that drowned Radio Moscow and the Voice of America. He had heard them before—at the time of crop-circle incidents. The next day, a seventy-foot circle, with a ‘bull’s eye’ in the middle, was found in the centre of a nearby field. But this differed from earlier crop circles, in which no serious damage had been done. In this case, the owner of the field, Dudley Stidson, found his corn burnt, as if a giant hot plate had been pressed down on it.

  The landlord of the local pub, Sean Hassall, could work out what time the circle had been made from the fact that his spaniel had gone berserk in the night and had begun t
earing up the carpet, doing considerable damage.

  A few days before this, a Japanese professor had announced that he had solved the crop-circle riddle. Prof. Yoshihiko Ohtsuki, of Waseda University, had created an ‘elastic plasma’ fireball in the laboratory—a plasma is a very hot gas in which some electrons have been stripped away when atoms collide violently. Fireballs, or ball lightning, are still one of the unsolved mysteries of science. They are created during storms, and drift around like balloons before exploding—often causing damage—or simply vanishing like a bubble. So Ohtsuki’s achievement in manufacturing one in the laboratory was considerable. His fireball created beautiful circular rings in aluminium powder on a plate. This certainly sounded as if it could be the solution to the crop circles that everyone was looking for. Then someone pointed out that many of the latest crop circles had had rectangles associated with them, and that one at Alton Barnes (of July 1990) had keylike protuberances sticking out of its side. (In fact, this one was so complex that it should have taken far more than a night to create.)

  A critic had pointed out to Professor Ohtsuki that most fireballs are about the size of grapefruit, and that a seventy-foot fireball would attract attention for many miles around. Besides, no fireball of that size had ever been known.

  Stories of crop circles began to appear in the Japanese media. On 17 September 1989, on Kyushu Island, a rice farmer named Shunzo Abe found two wide circles in his fields. He thought at first that they were caused by a wild boar, then noted that there were no footprints in the soft Earth.

  Back in England, another curious phenomenon had been noted: that the ‘circle makers’ responded to the suggestions, and even the thoughts, of the investigators. In August 1986, Busty Taylor was flying home near Cheesefoot Head, when he remarked to his passenger George Wingfield that he would like to see a pattern with a central circle surrounded by satellites and rings. In his mind, he said, were the words ‘Celtic cross’—a form of cross with arms emerging from a central circle. The next day, flying over the same spot, he was astounded to find a Celtic cross in the field below him. Colin Andrews, another of the first ‘cereologists’ (as crop-circle students came to be called) lay in bed one night and visualised a Celtic cross, literally asking for it to appear in a nearby field. The next day, a local farmer rang him to report an elaborate Celtic cross in his field.