Contrary to recent claims Film Director Steven Spielberg is
NOT planning to make a movie about the alleged crash of an alien
spaceship at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Here's part of the
original article in the London Daily Mirror (22nd December
1993):
"Ace director Steven Spielberg is deserting science fiction - for science fact. The genius behind the movie blockbusters, ET, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Jurassic Park is secretly working on a # 50 million movie that he claims will unmask a government cover-up of an alien spaceship crash in New Mexico in 1947. Project X is based on the Roswell Air Force base incident which gave the world the term "flying saucer" [not true, PF]. Spielberg believes the US military took away alien bodies from the crashed UFO. Hollywood insiders say the director has got hold of previously unseen film footage of the flying saucer crash scene taken by a military officer. "Everybody is talking about Project X," says a Tinseltown source. ... "
Well, according to messages that have appeared on both the PARANET
and FIDONET BBS in March Sheldon Wernikoff discovered that
this story was false by simply speaking to Spielberg himself! In
an article in USA TODAY (8th March 1994) it is revealed
that :
"One project that's not on the Amblin [Entertainment film company] plate: a movie about the supposed UFO crash in Roswell, N.M., in 1947. The New York Daily News this week reported that word is the U.S. government has given the E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind moviemaker secret footage of the site. Says [spokesman Marvin] Levy, 'Not true. We have never had that project.' "
So, it seems that another attempt to uncover The Truth about
the Greatest Cover-up in the history of the human race appears to
have been nipped in the bud. No doubt we will be hearing the
"real" reasons for this turnaround in coming months.
Meanwhile, in the Skeptics UFO Newsletter (July 1994)
Philip Klass attacks the Roswell case with some hard hitting new
evidence, eg (1) a newly released memo dated 11 October
1948 appears to imply (if it is genuine) that top US Air Force
Intelligence officers were never informed of the alleged recovery
of alien hardware a year earlier, (2) the discovery of the
then Top Secret Project Mogul operation involving giant,
high-flying balloons designed to detect Soviet nuclear
explosions, which may have been launched from nearby Alamogordo a
few days earlier according to a contemporary newspaper account, (3)
one of the original balloon scientists involved with Project
Mogul never read the original description of the Roswell wreckage
and missed all the news coverage at the time. The discoverer of
the alleged spaceship Mac Brazel described the wreckage as having
"some tape with flowers printed on it" in a
contemporary newspaper report. The balloon scientist recalled
that such tape was used in some of the early balloon launches.
Klass suggests that the Roswell wreckage was really a cluster of
weather balloons with multiple radar corner reflectors to aid in
ground tracking.
At the 1993 IUN Conference at Sheffield UFOlogist John
Keel made a strong case for a balloon explanation for the Roswell
case, suggesting that before the satellite era high-flying
balloons were a common method used by the USA to spy on
unfriendly foreign powers. Klass' explanation would make a great
deal of sense if we assume that Project Mogul was so top secret
that only one small branch of the US military knew about it. The
urgent need to discredit the Project Mogul debris with a fake UFO
crash story (with fake alien victims ?) is a classic piece of
military dis-information which may have been used many times over
the past forty years (eg the Rendlesham Forest
"skycrash" of 1980). Despite these developments the US
Government Accounting Office enquiry into the Roswell case is
still continuing following the request by Congressman Steve
Schiff. SUN can be obtained from 404 "N" St. SW,
Washington DCD 20024, USA.
Clas Svahn has rung me from Sweden to report that crop circles
have appeared at all the usual locations in Sweden (see CW19).
It is assumed that all are hoaxes.
From Montague Keen :
Dear Paul, It was a little unfortunate (in someone so
sensitive to the risk of libel actions) that in the course of
your lengthy and informative review of John Macnish's Cropcircle
Apocalypse you should reprint a passage which is defamatory
of me. I burden you with this not because my ego is dented but
because you and your readers might otherwise be left with an
impression which is both false and damaging to others who have
spent in a largely vain attempt to solve the crop circle mystery
- or at least to establish whether there is indeed a mystery to
solve.
You quote the passage in which, after referring to Jim
Schnabel's hoax demonstration on my farm on July 3rd 1993 (not
1992, please note) John records that I had told him in no
uncertain terms that he would not be welcome (to act as official
photographer) since I was angry at having discovered that he had
commissioned the East Meon formation. He then continues in a
passage you quote:
"I was fast realising how dedicated these believers were,
not only in self-deception, but also in their determination to
mislead the public. Their co-called scientific project would only
include plants from formations which were of 'unknown' origin,
the main motive being, presumably to reduce the chances of anyone
producing evidence that a circle they had diagnosed 'genuine' was
mad-made."
You then add your own challenge to the CCCS to respond
to these criticisms.
Well, this isn't it. I am no longer on the CCCS council
and do not speak for it, but I can speak for all those who were
associated with the scientific project to which it is absolutely
clear Macnish is referring, and all of whom are unwarrantably
tarnished by this uncharacteristic, ill-conceived and muddled
smear.
First, however, let me confirm that I was indeed angry with
John, and so were all the CCCS council when it became
apparent that Macnish, whom we all liked and trusted, and whom I
had invited to be official photographer for the circle-making
competition the previous year, had been quietly sabotaging
Operation Argus in 1992, although I have no doubt this was an
unintended side-effect. Of the two chief aims of the
international Argus team, one was to collect samples of soil for
analysis to see whether we could confirm preliminary findings of
the existence of short-lived radioactive isotopes (which would
have been an almost unassailable litmus test of genuiness); and
the second, more time-consuming and elaborate, was to collect
plant samples in accordance with an agreed protocol for analysis
by Dr W C Levengood, to whose Michigan biophysical laboratory
they were airmailed. The CCCS was a partner in the
financing and organisation of this enterprise, the outcome of
which was wholly negative as far as soil samples were concerned
and (still) ambiguous in the more complicated field of plant
physiology, for reasons given by me at considerable length in the
official report published the following spring. We were all
obsessed with hoaxing, and the fear that mischievous people would
not merely cause us needless time and expense collecting material
from faked formations, but that, by doing so, they might vitiate
any conclusions, or certainly make any statistical evaluation of
results much more difficult.
Although I had originally invited John to film the Schnabel
demo, I soon realised from a discussion at a CCCS council
meeting that his presence in the light of the East Meon
revelation would provoke hostility; and although I subsequently
understood why John felt obliged to engage in this subterfuge, it
was understandable that I should feel sore about his duplicitous
role. And it's clear from his book that he felt, to say the
least, uncomfortable about it. He was clearly narked by my
withdrawal of the invitation, although at the British UFO
Research Association presentation he gave on 4th December, of
which you have written an excellent and comprehensive account, he
gave no sign of resentment, or hint of the fact that his book
would contain an accusation that I and my associates under the
guise of disinterested scientific research were really intent
only on misleading the public. It is clear that not only did John
get his dates seriously muddled, since the scientific project
that immediately followed the Schnabel demonstration, Operation
Relate, was not concerned with plant sampling, but he failed to
understand the nature of the crop examination procedure. We were
not comparing one formation with another. That would have been
scientifically inept, indeed meaningless. The intention was to
compare visible and measurable appearances in the cellular
structure of parts of the nodes of plants taken from inside with
the appearance of identical cellular tissue in control plants
taken from outside that formation. In addition steps had to be
taken to compare these with slides from plants artificially
flattened. The fact that there were, and are, methodological
problems with this approach is irrelevant. What matters is the
integrity of those scientists and others whose prime aim was to
discover whether plant behaviour could provide a key to
determining the genuiness or otherwise of a formation. Most of
those participating were either agnostic on the question whether
there was a genuine phenomenon at all, or else they doubted
whether hoaxing could explain the entire phenomenon but held
firmly to the view that the first step must be to find a certain
way of telling whether we were all wasting our time. To say that
scientists who had volunteered to come long distances at
considerable personal sacrifice had embarked on an elaborate
series of experiments in order to mislead the public would be
considered by any court to be a serious libel. I am sorry that
you have repeated it.
I wrote to John in gentle terms pointing this out and
suggesting a form of words which might be included in or attached
to further copies of his book which would set the matter right
without loss of face. But I simply received an angry and
remarkably silly letter threatening me with legal terrors,
although it did contain an assurance that he never intended to
criticise scientists associated with Argus. Since I have more
rewarding ways of spending my time and money than in sueing
people, I simply left it with the hope, vain it would appear,
that he might just do the decent thing. No response. Much like
our amanuensis friend Ken Brown, whose method of dealing with
criticisms or answering letters is to return the unopened
envelopes to the sender.
Can I deal with a couple of other matters raised in your
review ? You record John's "revelation" that the CCCS
knew that the 1990 Etchilhampton formation was created by two
people more than a year before the UBI had their cover
blown by Irving and Schnabel in the Independent magazine. So why,
you ask, did the CCCS refrain from disseminating this
information to farmers and the public ?
I can give you the answer: because every part of the
allegation about Etchilhampton is incorrect or misleading. The
facts are these. In 1992 an old school friend of my son, who had
heard of my interest in crop circles, told him that, with two
companions, he had made the Etchilhampton formation. I spent two
hours cross-examining this young man about his technique,
motives, timing, etc. He was a highly intelligent, well-informed
Cambridge graduate, and far from sceptical about the phenomenon.
He declined to go public without the consent of his associates,
both of whom were inaccessible, in far distant parts of the
world. I was entirely satisfied that he was speaking the truth,
and had made the formation out of curiosity, not primarily to
deceive, and had been surprised and embarrassed to find that
leading cerealogists had found it so impressive. I reported all
this to my colleagues on the CCCS. Those who had examined
the formation continued to be convinced of its genuiness, and
thought I had been misled. This is how matters still stand. There
is no proof one way or the other. A very odd occurrence took
place in the formation a day or so later. It had nothing to do
with the UBI, Irving or Schnabel. Schnabel wasn't around
then. The CCCS could not properly have either promoted
Etchilhampton as genuine or exposed it as a fake. There was, in a
word, nothing for it to disseminate to farmers and others.
Then you go on about the CCCS's protection of Bill
Bailey. For those who have not had the benefit of reading my
lengthy report into the claim by Bill Bailey, aka Julian
Richardson, that he made the last formation of the 1993 season,
known and widely reproduced and praised as the Bythorn Wonder. I
should explain that this young man's obsession with creating
increasingly complex geometrical patterns in someone else's corn
had been discovered by the admirable Michael Inns, and drawn to
the attention of a number of leading CCCS figures in 1991.
The efforts of Inns and others to dissuade him from continuing
his malpractices were unavailing. The young man, however, was no
hoaxer and did not want to cause mischief among cerealogists or
waste their time sampling what were spurious formations. So he
arranged to give advance notice, normally without being so
specific about time and place as to make his CCCS contacts
feel obliged to alert the farmer and frustrate the projected
nocturnal artistry. In return for this valuable information, the
receipt of which would clearly avoid much wasted effort and
misleading the public, his contacts agreed to respect his
anonymity while continuing to urge him to desist. I note that you
adopt a high moral tone about this quite sensible arrangement,
and it was not in fact one of which CCCS council was
informed, or for the main part aware of, but if someone is intent
on committing these acts anyway it is surely useful if damage
limitation steps are taken. Anyway when George Wingfield assured
people that the Bythorn formation was Bill Bailey's work he was
howled down. My investigation shows beyond reasonable doubt that
he was responsible. The reception it has been given in some
quarters has also revealed how difficult it is to dislodge true
believers from their entrenched faith, no matter how impressive
the evidence to the contrary.
But even before you preen yourself and excoriate the slaves of
an alien intelligence, in the false belief that only occultists
are subject to this syndrome, let me remind you that I have been
waiting for nearly three years for a satisfactory answer from
you, or Terence Meaden or other supporters of the plasma vortex
theory (trimmed down to exclude anything uncircular), for a
solution to a puzzling problem. It is this :
If a circular, horizontal force is swirling round at a
strength sufficient to flatten the crop at the periphery, but not
wrench it out of the ground, then it cannot be strong enough to
produce exactly the same effect at the pivotal point. If it is
strong enough to flatten crops at the centre, then it will become
steadily stronger as it progresses towards the circumference, by
which time the effect on the crop would be devastating. The
greater the distance to the circumference (ie the bigger the
circle formed) the stronger and more destructive the force. Now I
am aware that, to meet this objection, Meaden has postulated -
but not been able to demonstrate in anything approaching field
conditions - the existence of a force descending like a polo
mint, but however you look at it, on the evidence of the
circularity of the crop lay, there must be a substantial circular
movement throughout the circle. No amount of vertically
descending force can produce the sort of lay which we know to be
typical of nearly every circle. So we have two forces, vertical
and horizontal, acting together. Not merely together, but in
close harmony, since we are forced to postulate a miraculous
inverse ratio law. This says that as the radius of the circle
increases so the circular motion of the force declines while the
strength of the downward pressure increases. Only the maintenance
of a careful balance between these two forces can account for the
appearance of the crop. The stalks have to be bent over before
the downward force can complete the pressuring work. A simple
downward pressure would produce a terrible mess. Not only is
there no evidence for the existence of this automatically
adjustable ratio : it is inherently improbable that any such
phenomenon could exist in meteorology. One reason for this is the
highly variable levels of resistance of different crops to
flattening forces. This varies with the type of crop, the
variety, the manurial and agrochemical practices, the type of
soil, the height of the stem and the growth stage. So, in
addition to the automatic adjustment of these two forces every
time a circle is created, there is a more subtle factor which has
to be incorporated into the ratio. God knows how.
Yours Sincerely,
Montague Keen. Suffolk.
PF Notes: If readers wish to read my response to
Montague Keen's letter please send a small SAE to the Editorial address on page 28. CERES'
David Reynolds reports that ring vortices have been known for
hundreds of years - whenever a pipe smoker blows a smoke ring,
this is a ring vortex. The top of the mushroom cloud in an atomic
bomb test behaves in the same way, turning over and over and
being drawn up into the expanding mushroom before turning
outwards.
In 1976 Professor Fujita of Chicago University discovered
another kind of ring vortex - the downburst that can form during
severe thunderstorms - after inspecting tornado damage from a
helicopter. It is this kind of vortex that has recently attracted
a lot of attention in both the scientific and popular press as
the probable cause for some tragic aircraft accidents. Thus there
are several kinds of ring vortex that are already accepted by the
meteorological community.
From Mr Anonymous:
"I must admit that although I have been very interested
in the crop circle phenomenon since 1981, and have collected all
the books and videos etc on the subject, I have never been an
enthusiast of your work. This is due to the fact that I have been
led up the garden path, like so many other people, by the so
called experts of the crop circle subject.
I always thought that you were the great skeptic, or debunker.
This was of course due to the fact that you were portrayed as
such by the various crop circle researchers. I must say that
since 1990 I have not been very happy with the various crop
formations which have formed. They did seem to be very contrived
indeed, and were becoming very silly looking to say the least. It
was only after reading John Macnish's Cropcircle Apocalypse
that it became clear to me that the whole subject could well be a
man-made myth.
After reading Apocalypse I then persuaded various
people to buy a copy for themselves to see what they thought of
the points raised. Also after reading Apocalypse myself I
then obtained a copy of Round in Circles by Jim Schnabel.
Both books did open my eyes to the obsessions and deceptions
involved in the subject.
Although Apocalypse has various grammatical errors etc,
I feel that the content of the book is very good. I also found Round
in Circles very revealing indeed. And even though both books
reveal so much about the subject I do also feel that they both do
have various weaknesses as well.
Apocalypse' treatment of all the evidence which
supports some kind of phenomenon is almost non existent, which is
a shame because there are various phenomena. associated with crop
circles which are not easily put down. ... The main point from
both books seems to be that there is a genuine phenomenon but it
is not as extensive as has been portrayed by the various pro
alien or otherwise intelligence researchers and so called
experts."
From a well known member of the crop circle community who
has requested anonymity.
Readers of the Daily Mail, 15 April, will have seen an
article about the famous Gordon Faulkner photograph that
apparently started the entire Warminster UFO industry in 1965.
According to the Daily Mail "Retired print worker
Roger Hooton, who now lives in Adelaide, owned up after reading
in UK Mail, the Daily Mail's international edition,
that another famous photo - supposedly of the Loch Ness Monster -
was of a model mounted on a toy submarine.
'I decided to come clean, although I don't know why no one ever spotted it in the first place,' said Mr Hooton. 'It always seemed obvious to me because it looked so stupid. But it fooled everyone at the time and carried on fooling them. The flying saucer was even accepted as genuine by the British UFO Research Association and is listed in [John Spencer's] UFO Encyclopedia'."
According to the Mail Hooton and Faulkner hatched up
the plan in their local pub. They made the flying saucer out of a
cotton reel and a milk bottle cap with a button on top. Hooton
dropped it whilst Faulkner photographed it against background sky
as it fell.
"After the photo appeared in the Warminster Journal, the Thing took on a life of its own. A national newspaper took up the story and Warminster throbbed with hundreds of people hoping to see an alien. The town even spawned its own UFO newsletter.
"The joke had got rather out of hand,' said Mr Hooton. 'It had sparked a whole new industry and it seemed a shame to stop it."
Readers may recall that BUFORA 's UFO Times
carried the original story of this expose back in issue 17
(Spring 1992). BUFORA's John Spencer tells the story of
how he was introduced to Hooton and was able to verify the story
as far as was possible. Due to his current poor health it proved
impossible to determine just how much of this hoax was known by
Arthur Shuttlewood at the time. Nevertheless it seems clear that
a great deal of what happened at Warminster was triggered by this
audacious hoax.
There are interesting parallels between the way the Warminster
Thing grew and the way in which the crop circle hoax developed.
Both were initiated by hoaxes that attracted publicity. Both were
promoted by naive and often unscrupulous elements in the media
and the UFO community. Both led a lot of people down the garden
path.
Writing in UFO Times John Spencer states that
"Even if [the Faulkner] photograph was a fake it still led
to a concentration of presumably genuine claims which were then
collected together over a period of time and published in several
books". As the Daily Mail points out, two of those
books were by Spencer, one of which has now been falsely promoted
as "BUFORA's encyclopedia". It seems to your
editor that Spencer misunderstands the fact that if this
"first" photograph was a fake, and if Shuttlewood was
"in" on the hoax (which has yet to be demonstrated),
then almost everything which followed must - by definition - be
regarded as highly dubious in the extreme - the result of the
social processes which helped make Warminster the Mecca to UFO
believers all over the world. Of course, Shuttlewood's role in
the promotion of this photograph has yet to be established.
In this regard the crop circles are comparatively lucky. We
have photographs and anecdotal material predating the
"first" circles - the ones Doug and Dave claim they
made at Cheesefoot Head and Westbury in 1978 and 1980. Many of
our historical cases come from overseas and some were even
recorded or photographed at the time. For this reason it seems
plausible that not all crop circles recorded throughout history
can be hoaxes, although many certainly are.
A feature length video of approximately 60 minutes, including
stunning aerial film of cropcircle formations, previously unseen.
Incredible night-time and day-time footage of the force behind
the mystery circles seen for the first time ever. Genuine footage
and stills of formations under construction. How this
surveillance to capture the circlemakers at work was undertaken,
and the results for the cropcircle world.
The fallacy of 'genuine' features and how they can easily be
attributed to man from the early days up to 1993, examined on
film; with pictures of the earliest circles taken by the hoaxers
themselves after their work. Reactions to formations, by the
makers and the experts; a detailed look at the 'Hoaxing
Competition'.
Hoaxers why they do it, how, and where. The links to
indigenous tribes explored. The UFO and cropcircle connection
exposed - exclusive footage.
Write to Circlevision PO Box 36 Ludlow Shropshire SY8 3ZZ
England. Cost # 15 incl p&p for UK residents. Outside UK # 20
or # 35 (please specify NTSC/PAL). Allow 28 days for delivery.
PF:This super video will be reviewed properly in our
next issue.
The new Levengood/Burke report is nonsense, watch out, Rob is
back ! ... The Cerealogist is about to fold, subscribers
will be able to get their money back (this is more than buyers of Circular
Evidence ever will)...
From Saucer Smear, May 15th 1994 :
"Subliminal Vision Expert and Bigfoot Hunter ERIK
BECKJORD writes:
A new book called 'Crop Circles Apacalypse' [sic] shows time-lapse photos of various hoax circles being made, and therefore I now say that no crop circle is valid unless I see it being made right in front of me ! Time to go back to UFOs !" ...
The Lancashire Aerial Phenomena Investigation Society (LAPIS)
will be holding a two day UFO conference over the weekend of
August 27/28th at The Station Hotel, some 100 yards from
Blackpool North railway station. Speakers include Dr Serena
Roney-Dougal, on the link between UFO reports and the pineal
gland, Albert Budden, who will be presenting his latest findings
on the link between UFOs and electronic pollution, Jenny Randles,
who will be discussing the effect of alien communications on
mankind, Lucy Pringle, of the CCCS, who will be discussing
the 1994 circles and some strange effects associated with them,
and Arthur Tomlinson, who has been chronicling UFO reports and
his own UFO experiences for over half a century. Refreshments
will be available throughout the day. There will also be a live
gig by the Cosmic Folk Band "Story Teller" in the
evening. The cost is # 5 for one days attendance, # 9 for both
days. Please write to Sam Wright, 15 Knaresboro Avenue, Marton,
Blackpool, FY3 9QW for further details and assistance on
accommodation.
Don't forget to buy Crop Circles, A Mystery Solved by
Jenny Randles and Paul Fuller, Robert Hale Ltd (2nd edition),
ISBN 0-7090-5267-7, paperback price # 6.99.
