The following article has been published in the
online crop circle research magazine, Swirled News:
By Marjorie Tomkins
Did the first perfect English cropcircle that
appeared in the ‘70’s arrive ex-novo, or did evolve out of something else ?
Even though we can’t turn the clock back to find out, people living in
countries with no cropcircles have had the unique opportunity to lie in wait to
try to catch the first signs of the phenomenon appearing in their fields.
This is exactly what we have attempted to do in
Italy over the last 10 years. There were still no cropcircle in Italy in 1994 –
with one significant exception which we will come back to later – and there
continued to be no trace of them for a number of years.
By 1994/5 cropcircles had begun spreading
throughout countries all over the world so we thought that chances were they’d
come to Italy too. We would go to England to study the fields so we could
recognize them in their earliest, most primitive stages if they ever got to
Italy. Our problem was, we didn’t know what that “primitive stage” consisted
of, unless it was as we tended to imagine, a small perfect simple circle.
In
England our attention was caught not only by the circles themselves but also by
the fields full of “lodging” of “wind damage” which almost invariably
surrounded the area where a cropcircle appeared. This was a phenomenon we had
never encountered in Italy.
We were intrigued by the way the wind damage
blots in areas like Uffington rounded out more and more and even acquired
(messy) central tufts as we drew nearer the area where the pictogram had
appeared. Sometimes we would find pieces of pictograms merged with lodged
areas: what had happened ?
Search though we did, we could find no examples
of this strangely behaving damage in Italy... until the summer of 1998, when
Italian fields from north to south were literally peppered with lodging, in
spite of the fact that there were no anomalous weather patterns that summer.
Italian farmers call this “allettamento” or
“bedding down” of the crop. Like English farmers, they say it is due to wind,
rain or excessive use of fertilizer.
On entering the early lodged areas, we were
surprised to see undamaged laid crop, sharply defined zigzag paths, “combing”
of the crop in two opposite directions on either side of a central “parting
line”, multiple multidirectional layering and other details of cropcircle lays
we’d seen in England. It was as if someone had been trying out brushstrokes
without attempting a unified design.
A person who commuted from the countryside to
work at Milan every day sent photos of almost –daily changes in the lodging in
a field his train crossed near the town of Vermezzo, Lombardy. The first day
there had been small downed areas surrounding standing cylinders of crop in the
corners of the field. Each successive day more of the field was laid until by
harvest time there were only isolated cylinders in a totally flattened field.
The neighboring fields were untouched.
To get a clearer idea of what was happening we enlisted
the help of two groups of volunteers: a group of “travellers” who reported
wind-damage areas to be later visited and studied, and a group of “permanent
observers” living in rural areas, next to or very close to fields which they
observe every day of the growing season. They note and report on any lodging
phenomena in the fields under observation, weather conditions, especially at
night, etc. If the lodging begins to expand (or contract) the field is visited
and photographed by researchers.
In those early days our secret hope was that
one day we might find, in the midst of a mass of lodging, the first perfect
Italian circle, just as we had found pictograms surrounded by heavily lodged
areas in the Usa and England. But what we were to discover was something very
different.
Thanks to the invaluable help of our network of
observers, here is a summary of some of the things we found out year by year:
1) More than 50% of the lodged areas observed
arrive or become radically “rearranged” on stormless, windless, rainless
nights.
However,
a substantial amount of downed areas, and formerly downed areas that have been
“redesigned”, have been observed immediately after storms which shroud the
field in mist or pouring rain. One of the mysteries of these crop-downing storms is that they do not create uniform
damage in the area hit. There may be only half of a single field affected (with
its other half untouched). Or one finds the “skipped field” pattern with 2 or 3
fields quite distant from each other downed while the many fields between them
are standing in perfect condition.
We
have asked farmers with fields downed on windless, rainless nights if they had
any information that explained the phenomenon. So far, all the Italian farmers
we have talked to have been so convinced of the wind/rain damage explanation
that they do not stop to consider the facts. Here is a typical exchange with a
farmer with heavy wind damage near Pisa in 1998:
Farmer: “The fields are like this because of the
storm. Everything was fine yesterday evening at 9 p.m. We woke up this morning
and that’s the state it was in”.
Us: “So you had a storm last night.”
Farmer: “No, last night was calm. The storm was 3
days ago. It’s the wind and rain that does this.”
2) A significant number of randomly downed
fields is revisited, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes at intervals of only 2 or
3 days. Each visit leaves the field looking completely different.
Usually the downed areas are expanded, but not
always. In 2002 part of the downed crop in a field in Dresano, Lombardy was
stood up on its feet again.
3) Lodging offers almost endless variations on
a theme, some of them quite bizarre.
Among these are “dice-lodging”, where the
stalks in given areas of the field are singed and diced up; or “clod-lodging”
where rectangular clods of earth up to more than a foot in length have been
extracted from the area under the downed plants and laid on top of them.
Probably the prize goes to the tied up maize
bundles found near Vigevano, Lombardy in 2003. Next to an area of lodged maize
was a large area of still-standing plants which had those leaves which were
growing at a height of 1½ metres incised as if by a laser. Each leaf had then
had its tip pulled through the incision in its neighbor leaf and tightly bound
around the stalk, corn ears and all to the top of the plant, just like a big
package. The leaf-tips were knotted with elegant Japanese-style knots, and the
2-metre tall maize bundles were green and growing.
4) Possibly the most interesting discovery is
that wind damage – at least in Italy – is not a stable event which repeats
itself in the way that other natural phenomena such as wind and rain do, but,
to the contrary, is at present quickly evolving.
During the first years of massive arrival of
lodging in Italy, there was a progressive increase in the number of lodged
fields and the size of the downed areas.
In the summer of 2000 we observed rudimentary
half-swirls united to the ground lay in the standing areas of some lodged
fields.
The summer of 2001 brought with it the first
clear, complete centre swirls similar to those found in the centre of English
cropcircles. The structure of the lodged fields surrounding these first small
swirls was still chaotic, but the boundary lines of the downed areas were
beginning to straighten out.
The year of 2002 was the turning point. As we
walked through the downed areas of fields with their Wiltshire-smooth ground
lays, almost-straight corridors, and admired the large “professional” swirls
which were placed closer and closer to the centers of still amorphous lodged
areas, we felt almost incredulous. Was the lodging actually structuring itself
into a semi-geometry ?
The answer came that autumn during the rice
harvest when two observers photographed a series of enormous, perfect
rectangles that had formed in the rice fields near Novara, Piemonte. They were
surrounded by a vast area of lodging, also with rough rectangular shapes.
With the 2003 season at least 20 cropcircles
and pictograms arrived throughout Italy. Curiously, for the first time since
1998, the number of lodged areas diminished drastically in all areas under
observation.
The 2004 Italian cropcircle season has
attracted the attention of the international community with its large,
generally well-laid designs, such as the unusual pictogram at Sabaudia, Lazio.
There is already a notable difference between the 2003 cropcircles and the
greater complexity and size of the figures and the better quality of the lay of
the 2004 cropcircles.
Lodging has returned in great quantity in 2004
and where it appears near crop circles, seems to have some sort of interaction
with them. For example, lodging that formed in the field next to the expanding
Rho, Lombardy, pictogram continued to expand nightly along with the pictogram,
as office workers overlooking the fields reported.
5) Lodging and crop circles have many
characteristics in common, perhaps almost all, apart from geometry.
It was during this 7-year period of the
metamorphosis of Italian lodging into pictograms that the world experts on the
biophysics of cropcircles, William C. Levengood, John Burke and Nancy Talbott,
confirmed that crop samples taken from lodged areas and tested in their
laboratory shared the characteristics of crop samples taken from crop circles.
They gave this downing caused by unknown forces
the name of “non-geometrical formations”. We will use this name (or the
abbreviated form, “NGF”) to refer to the cases of lodging where we are
reasonably certain that weather/fertilizer conditions are not involved,
especially since this name so well fits the process we have observed.
Over the 5-year period during which there
arrived only non geometrical formations in Italy, an entire range of phenomena
normally associated with geometrical cropcircles has been witnessed.
Among these was the sighting of large luminous
objects flying low over the fields and leaving an NGF in their wake. A good
number of these events happened during the daytime and in the presence of a
number of witnesses; in particular, in and around the city of Voghera in 2001,
where one of these objects actually hovered over a field next to a shopping
mall bustling with surprised clients.
Balls of light, luminous particles, and
anomalous sounds have been seen and heard inside these NGF formations, albeit
less frequently than in geometrical formations.
The great majority of NGF’s appear in “magnet
areas” whose characteristics are:
1)
presence
of water
2)
presence
of pre/historical sites
3)
presence
of any kind of pollution
4)
presence
of military facilities
5)
or a
combination of any of these
These magnet areas correspond to the type of
site that often “attracts” cropcircles.
We know of several cases of mechanical failure
in the non-geometricals, although, again, this happens more rarely than in crop
circles. On the other hand, both animals and people in NGF’s are often visibly
affected and have unusual sensations or behaviour.
This data is especially interesting in light of
the fact that no one would dream of hoaxing a non geometrical formation,
particularly in Italy, where the entire subject of cropcircles was practically
unknown to the general public up to the summer of 2004.
There had been, as we said, no cropcircles in
Italy before 1998, “with one significant exception”, which is a very big
exception indeed. We now have numerous testimonies that both cropcircles and
non geometrical formations have existed in Italy for at least several
generations.
The difference between the pre 1998 and post
1998 cropcircle arrivals is that before 1998 both cropcircles and NGF’s seem to
have regularly visited very restricted areas of 2 types:
1)
special
pre/historic sites
2)
military
facilities (or a combination of both).
For example, there is an area surrounding the
Bay of Cagliari in Sardegna where cropcircles arrived for years before they
came to the rest of Italy. Cropcircle researcher Stefano Carrera found articles
in the local paper archives on Internet documenting these events.
This area was once an important ceremonial site
in pre-Roman, Punic, and Roman times. At the end of World War II the Usa built
military bases in the same area.
As recently as the year 2000, military
personnel were quite incautious when a large cropcircle arrived right near the
base. Hundreds of visitors came to see it and, after prohibiting all air
photos, the base command ordered the farmer to cut the crop and plow up his
field immediately, declaring publicly “This is a military secret and leaving
the field in its present state will cause disturbance to the base.”
A similar area exists in the Ticino River
valley in the north of Italy, where there is the Remondò military base. In
recent years a luminous object was observed flying over the base, leaving
behind an NGF on its way. Military spokesmen denied both events even though
both were photographed. This was once a pre/celtic ceremonial area.
Farmers here remember their grandparents
talking about finding NGF’s and residents have seen NGF’s and the odd
cropcircle arrive for almost 20 years before the explosion of non geometricals
in 1998.
Cropcircle researcher Massimo Meda has studied specific
fields where NGF’s arrive year after year, as far back as the oldest resident
can remember. In some cases the historical records he has found show that these
fields were sites of ancient temples, churches, etc.
In the end, all this raises more questions than
it answers. Even if cropcircles in Italy have somehow developed out of non
geometrical formations, does this necessarily hold for other countries as well,
or do regional differences influence the development as well as the national
styles of cropcircles ? We would be very interested to know if anyone has
information about the early evolution of cropcircles in other countries. And by
what process is a non geometrical formation produced ?