What to make of those crop circles

Commentary by Joe McWilliams

There are definite disadvantages to living in a town which isn’t surrounded by grain fields. I used to think the advantages mostly ran the other way, but I’m starting to change my mind. I showed up at the M.D. of Lesser Slave River council meeting the other day and Tim Walmsley says to me, “Did you hear about the crop circles?” Of course, I hadn’t. “On Schiller’s place. It was in the Westlock paper.” People are always saying to me, “You didn’t know about that? I thought you reporters knew everything!” My reply: “I don’t know anything until somebody tells me.” In the case of the Flatbush crop circles, I learned of them approximately 10 days after the fact - too late, evidently, to go have a look for myself, because the property owners are sick and tired of being bothered. So, after a five-hour M.D. council meeting, I got back to the office to find a note to call Nancy Talbott at some place with a 617 area code. It turns out she’s a crop circle researcher with an organization called BLT (Burke, Levengood, Talbott) Research, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was trying to find out which newspaper had written the story about the Flatbush phenomenon - news of which was evidently ‘out there’ already. It wasn’t our paper, but that didn’t stop Talbott from bending my ear for 15-20 minutes on the topic. And I have to admit, it was pretty interesting. Talbott says there’s an important distinction to be made between the hoaxes (what we call pranks with planks) and others, which defy easy explanation. What there are, Talbott says, are some intriguing characteristics emerging from some of the sites. They include a strong magnetic field, microwave impulses and sometimes even chemical changes to the soil. The results of the BLT research can be viewed at bltresearch.com. What it all adds up to is, of course, unclear. “There are lots of possibilities,” Talbott told me. One of the favourites is something like lightning, but not lightning, that for some reason science has no record or hard evidence of. How does “an unstable plasma vortex” grab you? Talbot says she witnessed a couple of these in a field in Holland, which left crop circles in their wake. That story is also on the website. Whatever the case, I’m delighted to finally have crop circles so close to home. I don’t really care how they were created, although in the absence of hard evidence otherwise, I’ll assume it was via human agency. To those who are quick to ascribe supernatural causes to “mysterious” phenomena, I’d advise them not to underestimate human mischief and ingenuity. I already know, for example, that Slave Lake’s great unsolved UFO caper of 1982 was a result of a lot of the former and maybe a little of the latter. But let’s keep an open mind. Perhaps some far out meteorological phenomenon is the culprit. If so, sooner or later somebody will get a video of it. As for the UFO theory ... well, I’m out of space.

Copyright © 1999-2005 South Peace News. All Rights Reserved.
No part may be reproduced without written permission.

View our Privacy Statement.
Send website suggestions to the Webmaster