look who's talking
i'm serious about it yes.
"I personally don't find myself adequately qualified to assess the BLT research since I'm not a doctor of plant biology, but then neither – allegedly - are any of the BLT team. I wish them well with their work, and am glad they're doing it; however, I will lodge a few caveats.
The first is that they have found similar anomalies in lodging, that is, wind-damaged crop. One might expect that BLT would go back and reassess their crop circle findings in light of this fact, but instead they theorise that some lodging - they call it 'strange lodging' - is in fact malformed crop circles, or to put it another way, was caused by the same 'forces' that make crop circles but which lacked the extra oomph to be able to render a geometric pattern. I've seen a lot of lodging over the years, and nobody has ever quite been able to tell me precisely what the difference is between 'strange lodging' and plain old 'lodging', aside from the fact that crop anomalies have been found in the former. This reminds me a little of the fact that nobody has ever been able to tell me precisely what a 'genuine' crop circle is, or to give me date and location of a 100% genuine crop circle, together with the 100% proof, despite the fact that I have asked for it on numerous occasions. But I digress.
My second BLT caveat is that crop anomalies have been found in formations known to have been made by people. A group of researchers led by Dr Simeon Hein – who as far as I can tell is a real Doctor (of Sociology, I believe) conducted a number of experiments in which they paid farmers for the use of their fields and then made formations and analysed them afterwards. Here are some pictures from a formation they made near Cherhill in Wiltshire in 2003, showing bent and blackened nodes.
[20 / 21 Cherhill 2003 pic 1 and pic 2]
This kind of research is generally ignored by the crop circle community, and there's a sense that Hein – who started out just like any other curious croppie - is almost committing an act of betrayal by even undertaking it. But invariably, anybody who starts out as a croppie and then conducts research which demonstrates man's ability to make circles is quickly shunned or insulted or deemed to be in the pockets of government agencies, and their work is rapidly forgotten. Which is, I think, a shame.
Another formation in which anomalous crop samples were found is this one.
[22. Avebury, July 1999]
This was commissioned by the Daily Mail, and made in a field overlooking Avebury in July 1999. When later asked in an interview what anomalous crop findings were doing in a commissioned formation, Levengood posited that a plasma vortex had hit the field a few weeks beforehand, and was of sufficient strength to affect the crop but not of sufficient strength to make a formation, and thereafter – by an amazing coincidence – a team of circlemakers just happened to construct a formation on exactly the same spot weeks later. Now maybe it's just me, but I personally don't find that a very satisfying explanation."