I smell ‘willful destruction of property’ AND ‘theft of trade secrets’! [Thank you legal.] Who has jurisdiction in space?
The episode which triggered my memory, Electric Vendetta, is all about crop circles. For me, this episode is unique because I find the plot more far-fetched and less engrossing than usual for the series. There are goofy special effects too: blue-sparks representing ‘electrocution’ not unlike those from the movie Highlander. Altogether, Electric Vendetta seems rushed and poorly written– and I’m not the only one to think so. According to Wikipedia:
“The episode is notable for the fact that one of the deaths is not adequately explained in the denouement due to a mistake in the editing process.”
Electric Vendetta is the first of two episodes written by Terry Hodgkinson, a new writer hired after the series’ first flush of success who was only intermittently engaged by the producers. Hodgkinson writes a lot about WWII and MI6.
I’m telling you this, because the tackiness of this episode reminded me of the tacky ‘crop circle’ phenomenon, which was centered around the southern U.K., where I lived for a time during the 1990s.
I remember that time vividly: pop culture was saturated in UFOs, aliens, The X Files and crop circles. Believing in aliens was ‘fringe’ like being a hippie was ‘fringe’– an acceptable way of being eccentric. A lot of people wanted to believe.
I do not believe that aliens, cosmic rays or psychic energy creates these circles. They’re made by people; that’s obvious. I think it is irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
Therefore, it’s very interesting to me that so many media outlets in the 1990s were at least willing to entertain the idea that crop circles might be supernatural, or extra-terrestrial, in origin. The alien mania reached such a fever pitch at that time, that any attention to the ‘phenomenon’ of crop circles– by ‘skeptics’ or otherwise– just fanned the flames higher.
Take, for instance the ‘International Crop Circle Making Competition’ sponsored by The Guardian of Snowden fame; the German magazine PM; the leading crop circle journal in Britain, The Cerealogist; as well as a foundation set up by CIA agent Arthur Koestler and The Observer editor David Astor, The Koestler Foundation. This competition is mentioned in most ‘crop circle’ histories as being authoritative proof that man could have made *some* of the circles.
In a fantastic twist of logic, competition organizer Rupert Sheldrake describes the results in this way:
After the competition I took part in many interviews, in which I pointed out that although the results showed that it was possible to hoax crop circles, it did not prove that all were hoaxes. The fact that it is possible to forge a £50 note does not prove that all £50 notes are forgeries.
Sheldrake, show me the last £50 note aliens gave you.
The mind games don’t stop there– Sheldrake suggests crop circle skeptics are ‘conspiracy theorists’, if their arguments are taken to a logical conclusion:
Thinking through the hoax hypothesis to its logical conclusion led into the treacherous territory of conspiracy theories. Who were all the hoaxers apart from Doug and Dave? Were they in the military or intelligence services?
Isn’t that a marvelous bit of horse-talk? What Mr. Sheldrake is doing here is tarring skeptics with the slur ‘conspiracy theorist’ while deflecting from a very real concern, that military or intelligence services were/are involved in a psychological operation aimed at the British public. It is important that Sheldrake chose to discredit this concern because there are links between the crop circle phenomenon and the intelligence services.
First of all, the county where crop circles were first reported is Wiltshire, home to the UK Ministry of Defense’s ‘Defence Evaluation and Research Agency’ (DERA), a large military research facility which included a Protection and Life Sciences Division (PLSD). I was unable to find a description of what the UK PLSD did, however the US Army Research Laboratory runs something called a Life Sciences Research Office, which contains a ‘Social and Behavior Science’ program tasked with the following:
The development of a systematic and efficient approach to collect and analyze data to describe fundamental social processes and detect changes in institutional structures combined with theories of cause and outcomes in the behavioral realm will provide military decision makers with the capability to anticipate and mitigate behaviors that impact U.S. interests and national security.
As well as…
The program encourages the collection of primary data for the development and testing of theoretical models and for the development and advancement of methodologies for data collection, statistical methods, and research designs that have the potential to help advance scientific understanding of human behavior. This includes, but is not limited to, research on physiological and/or behavioral responses to social situations at multiple levels of analysis including: population level adaptation and response to natural and human induced perturbations including, but not limited to, climate change, mass migration, war, and attempts at democratization; the role of culture, cognition, institutions and other intermediary level factors in accounting for variations in human behavior; the impact of social context on individual human decision-making under risk and uncertainty; and the search for organizing principles to describe emergent and latent properties of dynamic social systems and networks.
The emphasis is my own. Could a UK Life Sciences program have been measuring the population level effects of crop circle induced perturbations? Could they have been looking at how institutions like The Guardian or the Koestler Foundation affect public debate? Were they interested in seeing where copycat crop circle makers first appeared, and how long the phenomenon took to spread outside of the United Kingdom?
Whatever the Life Sciences program was doing, it’s *probably* now being done by a private company called QinetiQ, which was created when 75% of DERA was privatized in 2001. (Privatization is the best way to take programs out of public scrutiny!)
QinetiQ became a public private partnership in 2002 with the purchase of a stake by US-based private equity company the Carlyle Group. — QinetiQ.com
The aliens want you to expand your mind with a pipe… like Aldous Huxley.
Nobody should be surprised that people like Rupert Sheldrake want to draw attention away from the intelligence services, seeing as he works closely with the Koestler Foundation, which was started by a guy who made his mark as a CIA asset by manipulating public opinion in favor of the ‘Non-Communist Left’. (Read all about that in Frances Stonor Saunder’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters). Koestler was also interested in things like ESP, mass propaganda and using drugs à la Timothy Leary– all things which fall squarely in line with research objectives of the CIA’s MKUltra project. So, nothing ‘intelligence services’ about the Koestler Foundation! And as far co-founder David Astor goes… intelligence has been an Astor family tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, David to Tony.
But for crop circles to have anything to do with the military or intelligence is a conspiracy theory…
Another intelligence link to crop circles comes from the man who is credited with first calling them ‘crop circles’ in the early 1980s: Colin Andrews.
Colin received a grant from Laurance Rockefeller, of the famous American Rockefeller family, to study the crop-circle ‘phenomenon’. The Rockefeller family, particularly Nelson Rockefeller, was instrumental helping British-aligned spy William Stephenson set up what would became the CIA.
So what were Andrews’ findings? It’s hard to tell from Colin Andrews’ website, but The Museum of Unnatural History characterizes them this way:
Another circle researcher, Colin Andrews, working on a grant from Laurance Rockefeller, came to the conclusion that 80% of circles made in the years 1999 and 2000 were manmade and either prompted by business and/or media interests.
So much like David Astor’s and Arthur Koestler’s foundation’s findings, Rockefeller’s findings are that *some* of the circles are man-made, thus preserving the ridiculous claim that some *aren’t* man-made. Astonishing.
Of course, the question we should all be asking is: cui bono from the crop circles? Is there any value in leading gullible members of the public down this man-made path?
Just keep watching the circle.
The crop circles, as we know them, started in the late 1970s, increased in the 1980s and by 1991 researchers like Sheldrake were counting 800 a year with some being very complex. So the ‘phenomenon’ is a modern one, with no historical precedent. We know that the program started in the late 1970s, a few years after psy-ops like the CIA’s MKUltra programs were outed. Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind debuted in 1977, as did George Lucas’ Star Wars , so aliens were in the public consciousness. Was the time ripe for a social experiment?
A running theme with the crop circle ‘phenomenon’, as with the alien ‘phenomenon’, is that ‘the government denies their existence’. We’re all supposed to get some kind of ‘closure’ from the government ‘fessing up and admitting that Roswell happened and that 20% of the circles are ‘real’.
Is this crop circle thing just an experiment to see how best to sell propaganda to the public? To investigate how even a *ridiculous* claim can be gradually sold or worked into the collective consciousness? Does the crop circle phenomenon have the added benefit of increasing government prestige, because if the government ‘admits’ something, then we all know for sure that it’s true?
Thought experiment: If Washington D.C. ‘admitted’ tomorrow that it had found the Loch Ness Monster in 1948, would that mean the Loch Ness Monster really existed? Like WMD?
Think carefully before you answer. :)
Whistle-blowers died to bring you this photo.
