What on Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery is a new documentary on DVD about the crop pictogram phenomenon. I have long been fascinated by the subject and over the years my opinion about their creation has vacillated from "possible extraterrestrial source" to "completely man-made by clever circle makers" to "created with microwaves by satellites" to "arising out of human consciousness" to "some kind of psychic phenomenon." The documentary has not convinced me of any of these possibilities, although I suppose I did not expect it to.
Theories and Beliefs
The video, produced and directed by Suzanne Taylor, actually leans heavily toward another possibility: that some higher intelligence from somewhere – some other reality or dimension, perhaps – creates the pictograms to communicate a message to us humans. The content and meaning of that message is not quite clear, although according to many of the people interviewed in the film, it has something to do with our spiritual awakening, our relationship to the planet, etc. I've heard this theory before, of course, but the connection is never clearly made between the pictograms and the message about spirituality. How they get from one to the other is not clear, except, perhaps, that that's what they want the message to be.
In this way the documentary becomes very New Age-y and the people interviewed sound as if they are talking about – or from within – some new religion. Much of their language when talking about crop circles definitely has a religious tone. They very often sound like believers discussing the mysteries and wonders of their religion. And once people get sucked into a belief system, that's when the problems arise when it comes to paranormal phenomena because they cease to be objective.
Still a Mystery
Here's the thing though: these crop formations continue to be a mystery since, as far as I know, no group of people has even been caught making one of the very intricate and complex designs. Having said that, I suspect that very clever people are capable of designing and creating every single one of the crop formations found to date. There are a lot of very clever people out there.
However, there are other factors that keep this mystery a mystery. Why are there physical changes to the plants in many "genuine" crop formations that are not found in known man-made formations? Why are electronic devices often affected inside the formations, but not a few feet outside of them? Why are there sometimes electromagnetic anomalies in them? These are just some of the questions that debunkers have not satisfactorily answered.
From Consciousness?
And there's another one that is perhaps more profound. Several crop researchers (some of whom are interviewed in the video and in the DVD's bonus material) have reported that large, sophisticated crop formation designs have appeared in nearby fields just a day or two after they have thought about or meditated on those particular designs! Now this is just anecdotal information and I'd like to see such experiments fully documented, because if they are true they would give evidence to this being related to consciousness or psychic phenomena. This is now one of the most fascinating aspects of the crop formation mystery and worthy of deeper investigation.
The video is certainly worth a viewing by anyone interested in the phenomenon, and it has a lot of excellent video and stills of many of the amazing formations that have appeared over the years. It's available at this website.
