Crop Circle Season: an early bird?

Weeks before swallows return, we may see an early start to crop circle season

I believe the 2010 Crop Circle Season is imminent. I don’t mean this July. Much sooner. Possibly even next week.

I made a few notes on dates previous seasons began – even after atrocious winters – thinking I had at least another week before I needed to post this, another week of research and doublechecking the facts. But, in going over it again, I realize Crop Circle Consciousness is upping the ante.

H2O molecule or octohedron, West Overton June 1999

A decade ago the first crop designs in Wiltshire and Hampshire appeared when barley and wheat were beginning to show signs of ripening at the end of May and the first week of June. Similarly, in the early years of the 1990s’ decade, seasons began May-June. But as the decade got older, consciousness quickened and seasonal appearances started happening earlier. By the last year of the ‘nineties, 1999, the first crop circle appeared in Over Wallop Hampshire on April 3rd! In the early ‘noughties, up to and including 2006, the season didn’t begin until well into May or even June (2003-2004) in ripening barley and wheat. Then, bang, as if the last years of the decade again brought anticipation and focused interest on the phenomenon, the season started earlier: 2007: April 15th at Oliver’s Castle, Wiltshire; 2008: April 20th Waden Hill, Avebury. Last year, the first crop circle appeared in oil seed rape – not yet in flower – on April 14th at the Ridgeway.

April 14th is less than a week away. And there are already a number of fields planted in oil seed rape (canola) in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire.

Picked Hill, Wiltshire August 2000 'flower of life' crop circle

This year April 14th is also Vedic New Year: Vikridhi; the name itself occurs only once in 60 years. A week later, it’s Earth Day (Arbor Day), a northern hemisphere date chosen to celebrate the birth of naturalist John Muir, but more recently absorbed into the Earth-First culture of organic growers, tree-lovers and tree-huggers everywhere and, naturally by analogy, those who celebrate the earth’s crowning glory in crop form: the Croppies.

We all know the crop circle phenomenon has been getting more notice of late: worldwide attention, in fact. On the internet alone, it features in websites as diverse as ρѕу¢нє∂єℓι¢ α∂νєитυяє run by supreme techwiz ‘CO’, to the photographic marvels of Karen and Steve Alexander to the ultimate in documentary archives, the Dutch-run multi-lingual Crop Circle Archive which seems to have catalogued every crop pattern in every country since the beginning of Creation!

Then there are the more philosophical and ‘mystery school’ sites like Freddy Silva’s Crop Circle Secrets, Krsanna Duran’s Timestar and Paul Vigay’s leading-edge research site, Crop Circle Research.

Given that in all self-realized culture, ‘consciousness equals reality’, we’re speaking about a large slice of humanity who follow such blogs and website updates; a large group of people whose consciousness is willing the new season to begin.

CO runs an international blog, unfunded by donations, a labor of love. He’s very good at what he does, his blog-traffic is astounding (one hit every five seconds) and he has a distinctly Vedic following. The Alexanders, Cropcircleconnector and Lucy Pringle, on the other hand, are a little more conservative, receive handouts with solid Brit, or WASP, backing (Americanese for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), and have a slightly more ‘English’ approach to the subject. You are encouraged to buy a T-shirt or log on and read a plea for financial support before you can be routed to the goodies. The Dutch archive site offers a diagram catalogue of every crop circle, is volunteer-funded, but its attitude is open and its following represents perhaps half the First World. I like to think of CO’s following in the Indian Subcontinent as the Second World. The Third World is, so far, unrepresented.

So, give or take a few million, let’s say half the world is anticipating the new crop circle season. Not consciously, perhaps, but after a hard winter with only images in one’s mind or on one’s computer to feed off, it is hungry for a new influx. The future is wide open: will it show more mathematical code, more Mandelbrot sets, develop wild sacred geometry, or will it take the form of a Fibonacci spiral’s striking beauty? Or, or. . . will we of human culture stretch our superhuman electromagnetic circuitry and present ourselves with something we’ve never conceived before?

‘You mean, crop circles are rock ‘n’ roll?’ Julian Cope

Before he died, Paul Vigay wrote of his amazing work in crop circles. It ranged from simple on-the-ground measuring data and observation of cell-structure change in wheat, through correspondence with Gerald Hawkins on sacred geometric design, through illuminating discoveries in ultrasound. His work with Hawkins led to a previously obscure relationship between sacred geometry and intervals on the music scale noticed by the ancient Egyptians: something they likened to ‘frozen music’. It seemed to him a natural progression that he should later make recordings of pixel images of crop circles played through a computer program which converted pixels to sound, and discovered that the resulting music had a quality conducive to meditation, relaxation and deep contentment: essentially sounds in the ‘alpha wave’ band. He said:

Inspired by the work of Gerald Hawkins and our conversations on musical theory, I felt there was an important link between music and crop circles. Combining the two, I developed some computer software that could convert crop circle images into musical notes to see what ‘tunes’ were composed by them.

He recorded several soundtracks from different crop formations which can be downloaded from his website – maintained lovingly since his death. It did not surprise him that others ‘heard’ music while walking or kneeling or sitting inside crop circles which had been recently formed.

There are also a number of ‘coded’ messages which have been received and transliterated over the years. The Chilbolton radio telescope message is only one of many. I would recommend for code-lovers the lengthy study made by Robert Boerman in 2001 after an attempt to communicate with the circle-makers elicited a ‘reply’. This early documentary evidence was one of Hawkins’ favorites and its interpretations are fully discussed on the Dutch Crop Circle Archive.

Mandelbrot set visual in fractal geometry

I mentioned the chaos theory aspect of mathematics represented by the Mandelbrot set. It’s a complicated concept, even for a mathematician, discovered by French-American ‘father of fractal geometry’ Benoît Mandelbrot, aged 85, and still theorizing! Joseph Mason, a student of human consciousness (dream-sequences, results of concentrated intentional motivation), chose to experience learning its potential by his own method of study: concentrating by day, dreaming by night – and noting down his own responses, intuitive actions, human motivation.

Mandelbrot crop circle formation appeared after his dreams

As a non-mathematician, he familiarized himself with its complex form in chaos theory which, when projected visually, creates a satisfyingly circular heart-like geometric pattern with frilly edges, called a Mandelbrot Set. He made copious notes as he went along and was not surprised when, nine months after he started the experiment, a Mandelbrot Set design appeared as a crop circle. It convinced him even more firmly that our own consciousness is creating the formations.

The last few seasons of crop designs have made an unprecedented advance in complexity and beauty; our Group Consciousness is indeed making us sit up and observe the Earth with new eyes.

This dear planet we call home is where we are nurtured – particularly in the warm summer months when the Earth showers us with blessings. If only we might allow ourselves a break from thinking ‘poverty consciousness’ (‘running out of oil’) and instead dream up new ways to operate (‘an electric motor run on magnetic particles rather than coils’), within the bounds of her precious resources.

We are the caretakers. If we start taking better care of her, she will provide us with everything. All our needs will be met. We have only to think of miracles for miracles to occur.

We’re already wired for the upgrade. Our DNA has been receiving increasing light boosts since our rendezvous with Galactic Center at midwinter. Consciousness equals reality. We are capable of creating wonders beyond our wildest dreams.

And, what’s more, the new season of crop circles may show us the way…

Crop Circle Code: Messages in a Cosmic Bottle

'Eye of God', 8000 light years distant, Hourglass Nebula in constellation Musca

Mysteries have always intrigued us, the human species. It isn’t difficult to see that if someone ‘out there’ wants to send us a message, one of the quickest ways to get our attention is to say it in code.

Crop circles in the last few years have been full of it.

Compared with complex designs appearing in crop circles between 2001 and 2007, however, the summers of 2008 and 2009 have been spectacular in attracting an array of this now universally-known phenomenon. We discussed the rather esoteric code delivered in 2002 in a field of swirling wheat and barley next to the radio telescope of Chilbolton. This was clearly a reply to the Arecibo message sent to the stars. One year earlier to the day in the same field another message in binary code was accompanied by a ‘face’, as though making animate the urgency of the transmission. The 2001 message, decoded, read:

Beware the bearers of false gifts and broken promises; much pain but there is still time; believe there is good out there; we oppose deceit (the deceivers); conduit is closing.

It seems we weren’t listening.

In May and June this year the earth stood within a solar minimum; no sunspot activity at all. At that time one crop circle in particular at Waden Hill, Avebury, Wiltshire appeared to predict a sudden coronal mass ejection (CME) for July 7th to coincide with the first of three eclipses. Scepticism surged. Astronomers could not agree. Solar minima didn’t traditionally spurt out a CME in the middle of a solar calm.

But that’s exactly what happened.

All day July 6th and during the total lunar eclipse of July 7, 2009, a large CME blasted out from the sun’s prominences and headed for Earth.

There had been another message in a crop circle bottle, summarily dismissed along with the July 7th prediction as ‘unlikely’ by astronomers: this crop circle suggested an even larger solar flare for the second occultation, a total solar eclipse over Asia on July 22, 2009. Recorders went back to the ‘bottle’ to see what it contained.

On July 22nd during totality, a solar flare did not materialize, but something different, something much greater, did.

It is difficult to understand the size of the plasma ejection which poured into the jet stream on that day and for subsequent 72 hours.

Butterfly nebula M2-9 in constellation Scorpius

A massive energy outburst of this magnitude is usually associated with deep space; not our little sun. It is the kind of cosmic halo which surrounds the explosion of a supernova, a high energy source such as a black hole, the last expression of a dying star like the beautiful butterfly nebula, 4000-light-years distant, or the creation of a stellar collision like the hourglass nebula featured (top).

Yet such a plasma outburst occurred within the energy emission at approximately 12 hours Universal Time on July 22, 2009 and its effects were felt on Earth for the next two months.

The message in the bottle was fairly direct. It materialized. So why aren’t we paying much closer attention?

Sextant Crop Circle, Alton Barnes, solstice, June 2009

There have been other communications. Like the sextant as a guide to the stars which appeared on three successive nights in wheat at Alton Barnes, Wiltshire on June 23, 2009; and the swallow series. Swallows with even more convoluted Mayan code attached to their tails.

Swallow crop circles appeared at Milk Hill, Adam’s Grave, Wiltshire in August 2003 in wheat; a simple circular formation was created at Wexcombe Down, Wiltshire in May 2007; a double formation of swallows created in two overnight phases appeared in July 2008 in South Field, Alton Priors, Wiltshire. A year later in the same field, a gigantic Swallow crop circle appeared on June 27, 2009 with apparent Mayan-style codex symbols streaming in its wake.

Swallows come to save Earth: Hopi believe they are messengers from Great Spirit

Swallow in totemism signifies ‘light in the darkness’, objectivity and perspective; even on the most prosaic rustic level, the arrival of swallows in country barns and farm steadings heralds the onset of summer; implies protection and warmth in the home. When swallows depart, summer is gone too.

A bird in flight is the universal symbol of spirit and spiritual ascension. In New Age spiritual terms, humanity’s unified presence takes the form of a vast white bird: it flies in formation with a host of smaller birds as One. It has been called the Merkabah, the Birdstar, the Swallow. It is our vehicle for mass ascension.

There are those who would prognosticate doom and gloom as the message in the myriad crop formations over the last few years connected with the Great Cycle of the Maya, completing in 2012. That is material for several blogs in itself. Others point out that, while swallows arrived in Britain 10 days early this year, they left at equinox: an unprecedented five weeks early. Separation anxiety, war, famine, pestilence, plague.

Conversely, New Age teaching advocates the coming together of humanity as like-minds, like-bodies, like-spirits; suggesting the sooner we begin to feel our unification as a species, the sooner shall we ascend to the next level of evolution. The coming of swallows in crop circles seems to predict an event where we rise as One and grasp our power as individuals and as a Race. The Swallow, the Bird Star is not some fantasy starship or alien vessel come to call; the swallow is the symbol of our Unified Presence as the Mind of the Planet.

Judging by messages in 2008-2009 crop circles, coded or otherwise, their predictions are being fulfilled within a brief timespan of their imprint in the earth.

It would be a illuminating to believe that the message in the spiritual bottle brought by the swallows suggests that we, humanity, are standing on the threshold of a new dawn; that we are about to shed our earthbound worries, fears, doubts, differences and fledge as One over the New Earth.

We are Stardust taking Destiny into our own hands

Sacred geometry, sacred comfort zone

The crop circle phenomenon is really rocking the boat; even though there have been no further crop circles imprinted on Wiltshire farms (or elsewhere) since August 29th this year, world interest is piqued and they’ve picked up the baton and won’t put it down. Even Google, when I opened my mailbox this morning, had ‘Google’ written in croppie image in the bookmarks bar. If Google knows about crop circles, I assure you the whole world knows.

What is less certain is why we have become obsessed with these beautiful creations.

A very small percentage of world population lives in rural Wiltshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire, but that is where the crop circles are: each summer another series more sophisticated and intriguing than the summer before.

Holland and Germany, Scotland and the NW Pacific states of the U.S. have had a smattering, but the bulk of appearances has occurred within the sacred precinct of ancient tombs and temples in the Cotswolds and Marlborough Downs. They are often accompanied by high frequency sound and more-than-average people-friendly feelings.

There are already an enormous number of electro-magnetic nodes in this rolling countryside. They attract fluctuations in compass readings, making dowsers mightily confused: cell-phones are turned off because their signals are useless; camera batteries recharge spontaneously. The magnetic nodes are what Neolithic farmers noticed in the land; it inspired them to build solar doorways made of stone: lunar alignments in megalithic grandeur stretch as far as the eye can see.

Now a more cosmic imprint appears in this anomalous zone. And it is affecting visitors who have described sensations of ‘deep peace’, a desire to be ‘at one with’ and share their experience with others in the circle, an ‘inner glow’.

Is it too far-fetched to call them messages from the stars?

Before he died in 1996, American astrophysicist and quantum astronomer Carl Sagan was convinced we as an evolving race were capable of using our intelligence and technology to reach the stars. He would have been the first to express jubilation at the fact that the stars may be reaching out to us in return.

‘We are stardust taking our destiny into our own hands’: his words.

One of his ‘babies’ was SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence; he spent years devising mathematical code which could be sent in pulses via (in his day) the world’s largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. He envisioned pulses returning from a distant intelligence, advanced enough to understand and use mathematical signatures as a common cosmic language. When Sagan died of bone-marrow cancer in 1996, computers were large, but the internet was in its infancy. He could only dream that a radio beam of binary pulses would elicit a response from a stellar region in the middle of the Milky Way; of how a mere 13 years later computer code would be the new means of communication. He might have guessed.

He called the essence of number the ‘Rosetta stone’, the common language of science and mathematics. He was prophetic when he described distant intelligence as ‘someone fond of mathematics’, using our own knowledge to beam back to us a message we too might understand.

Fractal Wave image near Avebury Wiltshire June 2008

Sacred geometry and music have much in common: harmony of sound is reflected in the harmony expressed in mathematical Fibonacci numbers – or a cascade of increasing dimensions seen as visually perfect, the Golden Mean. After 2007, a year of curvaceous designs leading the eye and enhancing the land, 2008 brought patterns that upped the ante: in June a Pythagorean Comma graced a Yatesbury field near the ancient sacred site of Avebury. This ‘standing wave fractal’ was described by University of York electronics expert James Lyons as a pictorial rendition of the harmonic scale on a piano. “The Universe is a glorious keyboard with strings between every atom of matter (holographic) and by implication all mankind!” In July a crop circle depicting swallows (the totem bird of perspective) had a second layer added on a successive night. There were other ‘multiple’ sequential patterns. August culminated in a magnificent sacred ‘rose window’ motif (top) and several indications of the number eight or viewed laterally, infinity. Visitors to August formations were seen to kneel in prayer, sound the ‘Om’ and share food, water and animated conversation with their fellows in the barley.

The 2009 season has been heavily laced with 2012 images from the calendar of the Maya: the single remaining earth civilization still to count mankind’s progression in ‘Ages’. We humans are nearing the end of the final Mayan ‘Great Cycle’, scheduled to complete on 12 December 2012 (12/12/12). Also a record number of cropcircles in 2009 produced images of Fibonacci sequences, DNA strands of our own double helix as well as an enhanced multi-strand variation (significant, below), and a plethora of holograms or three-dimensional material bridging the divide between sound, mathematics, philosophy and spirituality.

In all this splendour, a little croppie found in a Chilbolton field in Hampshire in 2001 may have been overlooked:

Binary sequence sent from Arecibo

The Arecibo message sent on November 16th 1974 by Carl Sagan and his SETI cohorts was by design formulated as a sequence of 1679 pulses of sound in binary code (zeros and ones). It was beamed at the M13 stellar cluster in the constellation of Hercules, 25,000 light years distant. Because SETI was attempting to communicate with high caliber intelligence by means of a cosmic language (feet, meters, inches would have no meaning) it used the combination of two prime numbers, 23 and 73, as the logical format: 23 columns of 73 rows (23×73=1679) figure at left. For clarity, the zeros and ones are shown as black and white.

The message was brief. It gave in simple terms the numbers 1 – 10; Atomic numbers 1,6,7,8,15 of the elements of Life, Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen and Phosphorus; a larger section describing the sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA with its double helix; a human figure (stick man) with a height of 5ft9ins expressed in ‘wavelength units’; earth’s then population of 4.29 billion (1974 value); a diagram of the solar system, nine planets and sun, with Earth placed above the others to indicate origin of the code; and a curved diagram of the radio telescope from which it was sent.

In 2001, 27 years after transmission, an answer came back. With a few differences. Binary code of zeros and ones highlighted in black and white, appears below, right. Differences are highlighted in red. On the left is the ‘answer’ which arrived on the night of August 21st, 2001 in Chilbolton, Hampshire in a field next to the Chilbolton radio telescope. (Arecibo has no barley fields; it’s on a mountain top). At Chilbolton, flattened crop are zeros, standing stalks are ones.

Chilbolton variations on an Arecibo theme

Numbers 1 – 10 return unaltered. In the second sequence, the atomic weight, 14, of silicon has been added in its correct position on the Periodic Table. [Silicon is the constituent of crystalline structure; this should excite light beings and crystal consciousness supporters everywhere]. There is a change in the number of nucleotides in DNA, which is coincidentally given an additional strand. Our stick man is replaced by a shorter being (3ft 4ins) with larger head. The ‘population’ figure in decoded binary sequence equates to 21.3 billion. In addition to Earth, the fourth and fifth planets are highlighted.

Chilbolton radio telescope and crop circle

Perhaps the population figure is intended to cover all three planets. Or it may represent a distant planetary system where the fourth and fifth are the ones with life. ET doesn’t say. The final sequence depicts not a radio telescope, but a crop formation occurring in the same field the year before. Their previous communication (2000) had fallen on deaf ears. ET was hoping this one didn’t.

While there was a flurry of interest shown in astrophysical circles at the time of the Chilbolton appearance, the general public was unaware of its significance. Criticism ensued from astronomers who knew that a radio transmission would take hundreds of years to reach a distant star system. The crop circle response was generally discredited.

It is interesting to note, however, that after Carl Sagan died, Arecibo sent a second transmission in 1999, this time aimed at the Vega, Deneb, Altair triangle and at the time there were several solar system planets and the moon in the transmission ‘window’. If the code happened to get fielded by ET in the Jupiter moon system, or one of Saturn’s orbiting bodies, the time lapse for a response is less fantastical, more worthy of consideration.

Any transmission from the stellar regions is worth our consideration, don’t you think? Our world may be about to change beyond all recognition. Our future may depend on it. Carl Sagan come out, come out, wherever you are.

Much of the research on the Chilbolton crop circle was carried out by Paul Vigay, a talented mathematician and electronics wizard, to whom this blog is dedicated. He died suddenly in 2008.