Kornsirkler er jo et kjent fenomen. Finnes snøsirkler?
Kornsirkler er mer vanlig fordi det er letter å skjule sine
spor i en kornåker. Man har brukt stylter for å komme inn i åkeren.
Studiet av kornsirkler kalles cerealogi.
Cerealogi og UFOlogi utstiller den evig-eksisterende fare som
ligger i menneskenes vilje til å tro på nonsens:
http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/cropcircles.html
THE TWO middle-aged likely lads used to meet every Friday at the
Percy Hobbs pub near Winchester to sit in their usual corner, sipping
ale and showing each other their latest watercolours.
But, on a lovely summer day 20 years ago, they changed the routine.
Clutching their cheese rolls and pints of ale, they strode out to
look at the surrounding cornfields. And that was when Doug Bower and
Dave Chorley became two of the most successful con artists the world
has ever seen. Doug looked at the rolling fields of corn and recalled
a story he had read when he and his wife Ilene had emigrated to
Australia in 1958, staying for eight years. Mysterious circles had
appeared like alien graffiti in a field of corn in Queensland, and it
had started speculation of spacecraft landings and UFOs.
'How would you like a bit of a laugh,' he asked Dave. They went to
Doug's picture-framing shop in Southampton, picked up the iron bar he
used to secure the door and returned in the night to the cornfields.
While Dave stood on one end of the 5Ft bar, Doug pulled it around in
a circle, bending the corn carefully as he went.
For two years the growing number of circles - usually 80ft across -
appearing in these flat fields excited little comment. Dave wanted to
quit but Doug promised him that, one day, there would be traffic jams
and hundreds of people lined up to see their crop circles while
policemen tried to hold them back.
He was right. Today, there are still credulous people who believe
that Martians have Landed, leaving behind the evidence of their
arrival engraved in the corn. Some 40 books have been written about
the phenomenon, notably Patrick Delgado's bestseller 'Circular
Evidence'. Farmers have made small fortunes charging enthusiasts from
all over the world entry fees to see the latest manifestation that
time-travellers have left their calling-cards.
Explanations of the increasingly elaborate geometric patterns have
ranged from spiralling wind vortices to rutting hedgehogs dementedly
running round in circles. For 13 years, Doug and Dave laughed as the
experts stepped deeper and deeper into the mire 'explaining' the
beautiful patterns to an ever-growing army of pilgrims. For the first
seven years Doug and Dave didn't even tell their wives that they were
responsible for a craze that had gripped the nation.
Dave died two years ago and Doug, now 74, stands alone, looking out
over the Devil's Punchbowl at Cheesefoot Head, a 200ft green hollow
in an area of out-standing natural beauty near Winchester in
Hampshire.
After two years of obscurity this was the turning point for us .' he
says, a fond light in his eyes, his calm centre quickening with
excitement. 'I realised that for people to really take note of our
circles we needed a site with a viewpoint, so people could sit having
picnics and look down in wonder on our work. One day I was driving
past with Ilene and I noticed that corn was being planted here for
the first time. Dave and I couldn't walt for the crop to grow. One
summer night we came here and made a crop circle.
'Twenty-four hours later it was on the television news.' Along came
the 'experts'. It became an obsession for them, for the public and
for the two likely lads. 'Eventually,' says Doug, 'we we found
ourselves shoulder-to-shoulder with the experts as thousands of
people lay down in the circles to absorb the "cosmic energy". 'I've
been making nature recordings at night for 25 years, so offered to
keep my eyes open for more circles. We'd make a circle at night, then
ring up the experts the next morning to say I'd spotted another one.
We did 200, mostly around Warminster in Wiltshire because it is a
well known centre for UFO sightings.'
When an Oxford meteorologist came up with a theory that
downward-spiralling winds were creating a vortex that flattened crops
with its circular movement they were pushed into more elaborate
designs, with dead straight passages linking circles and decorative
'ladders' that, coincidentally, resembled designs made by the Hopi
indians of North America.
Doug used to sketch them out in his studio workshop, then they would
take their plank and rope to a cornfield. Doug would walk around with
the rope in ever increasing circles and make a passageway leading to
another identical circle. To keep the passage line straight, Dong
used a baseball cap with a hole in the visor. A wire, twisted so that
it formed a circle, dangled over his left eye. He would look through
this 'sight' to help him move in a straight line to where the pair
would repeat the first circle.
Unlike the copy-cat pranksters who would use stilts to avoid leaving
tell-tale access tracks, they simply moved in a high-stepping, loping
course that left no trace. Any Martian watching them at work would
have been sorely bemused. For Doug and Dave, they were magical
nights. 'It was just pure enjoyment,' he recalls, 'on those beautiful
summer nights for two artistic people under the stars amid all those
cornfields. We were both 19th Century people really. We were in
another world. 'I don't consider being on a planet for 60 years is
much use if you don't leave your mark. We didn't want to make
publicity. We just wanted to make fools of the experts who were
springing up everywhere. 'My wife said Dave and I were like chalk and
cheese, but we were a team in tune with nature.'
But while they fooled the experts, they were keeping secrets much
closer to home. For seven years Ilene was kept in the dark,' says
Doug, and his gentle, humorous face saddens because they've been
married for 50 years and he loves her dearly.'I was such a
perfectionist you see, and keeping the secret was all a part of
that.' Doug and Ilene had met at a village wedding party in 1948 and
he had wooed her with bunches of sweet peas he had grown himself and
of his lovely watercolour paintings.
At first Ilene had been surprised, and then delighted to find the
rich sense of humour behind Doug's serious face. But over the years
of their happy but childless marriage, she had grown used to the
twinkle in his eye and accepted those 'boys-night-out Fridays'.
She never for a moment thought he could be seeing another woman, but
she was his bookkeeper and became increasingly puzzled by the
frequency with which his car needed servicing. When she realised
there was 26,000 miles a year on the clock at a time when their
Saturday picnic excursions were getting shorter and shorter, she
asked for an explanation.
It was then he confessed that he was the strictly earthbound creator
of the now famous crop circles. She was unconvinced. It just didn't
seem possible. He dumped an enormous pile of crop circle cuttings in
front of her together with his original designs. When that didn't
work he persuaded her to design a crop circle and took her with him
while he created it in a cornfield. It became their shared secret for
another six years until Doug and Dave attempted to confess to the
world in 1991 through a newspaper series.
By then he had even created a crop circle next to the home of former
Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey. The great man photographed
it and the picture was used in the Daily Mail under the headline
'Healey's Comet'.
The day before his confession, Doug had the good grace to go round to
Patrick Delgado's to warn him. It was the worst day of Delgado's
life, but he accepted defeat well. Enough was enough, and it was time
to come clean. What Doug didn't reckon on was the dogged persistence
of the crop-circle fanatics. When he confessed some branded him a
liar and went on looking for UFOs as imitators continued to create
crop circles at the rate of 50 every summer.
When Dave was in hospital dying of cancer, Doug promised him that he
would never stop trying to convince the world that they had been
responsible for the world-famous hoax.
Last Sunday, true to his word, he appeared on a BBC1 TV Country File
Special on Crop Circles, telling the world once again that the only
aliens, as the corn grew high as an elephant's eye, were Doug and
Dave.
Yet there is a curious twist to this engaging tale. Doug Bower, the
man who debunked the UFO hunters and made monkeys out of the
self-appointed experts, believes we have been visited by aliens. "I
think I was programmed to do all this," he says. Some force made me
sitb down and plan these designs. When I went to my village school as
a boy in Upham, ten miles from Southhampton, there was a local man
who'd go to the pub every night and on his way home he'd take off
every garden gate and leave it further up the lane. He was a
practical joker and it rubbed off on me. He was my hero. The circles
were my chance to emulate him.
But if you ask me do I believe in UFOs, I'd have to say yes. I've
seen one. I was out in the forest when I saw five lights stationary
in the sky and bright as car headlamps.
'It's obvious that in all those millions of planets we saw out there
in the night sky there must be people out there. 'I think a planet
died millions of years ago and we had a visit from its former
inhabitants. There must be space craft buried in the sand somewhere.'
It is impossible to decide if he is joking. 'Other people made money
out of the corn circles,' he smiles. 'The experts, the farmers who
charged entry, but all Dave and I got was a really big laugh. 'But
its been a wonderful experience and I wouldn't have missed it for the
world.' This world and all those out there presumably.
From the Daily Mail, Friday January 8, 1999
--
jo
"La vérité est en marche et rien ne l'arrêtera."
-- Emile Zola,"J'accuse ...", 1898.