David Stonehouse Features

Fields of dreams

No one knows for sure who creates the crop circles that appear each year on farms in B.C. and around the world

By David Stonehouse

It was a day unlike any other for Larry Bangs, though it started out as most Sundays did for the Vanderhoof businessman, with a free-spirited flight behind the controls of his small plane.

But not far from the Vanderhoof airport that day in August 1998, he looked down at a sight that perplexed and astonished him: a string of perfectly formed circles stamped into the crops of a field farmed by his sister-in-law Margaret Hall. It was no hallucination -- his son, Jay, saw it too.

There were 11 of them, circles of all sizes grouped into three clusters -- the largest looked to be nearly 30 metres across.

They did not breathe a word of it at first -- not even during Sunday brunch with Margaret, who tended that very field.

It came out slowly, tentatively, in uncertain tones. Neither father nor son could make sense of it themselves -- never mind what others would think. Margaret Hall was dumbfounded. Sure, she had heard of this sort of thing before. But in Vanderhoof?

If it weren't Larry telling her about the circles, she would have been inclined to think it was a joke. But this was her conservative brother-in-law talking, confessing he had no other reasonable explanation.

They sat there pecking at their meal, unsure of what to do next. It's not as though you can look up crop circle in the yellow pages and have someone out for a look.

Bangs and his son decided to take to the skies again after breakfast for another look, and this time Jay took his camera.

By the next day, an excited Jay Banks was taking his pictures to the local paper, the Omineca Express. Word was spreading quickly, even before it hit the press. Banks actually wasn't the first to discover the circles. A few days earlier, on Aug. 28, a pilot returning to Vanderhoof after patrolling the forest for fires had spotted the circles. He went back up with friends and photographed it from the air, then explored the field looking for signs it was a prank. Convinced it was genuine, they started telling others.

By the time the weekend was over, word had spread like wildfire and hundreds of people began converging on the field to see for themselves the province's first authenticated crop circles.

"Nobody had ever heard tell of anything like that round here at all," Hall recalled in an interview this week.

B.C. isn't known as a hot spot for crop circles -- only about a dozen sightings have been reported since the mid-1990s, and the Vanderhoof incident has been the most impressive so far. The only other significant and well-documented case was in Agassiz back in 1995 -- a single circle that appeared in a corn field. But even though it isn't renowned for
sightings, B.C. is home to some of the country's leading crop-circle experts.

And these days, with the crop circle "season" in full swing and a Hollywood blockbuster on crop circles in wide release, they're busy. The strange phenomena are high profile this summer following the debut of Signs, a new thriller by Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan. Mel Gibson stars as a former priest in Pennsylvania beset by anxiety turned
to fear when strange events start unfolding around him, including crop circles that appear on his farmland.

At least 12 crop circles mysteriously appeared last weekend at a bed-and-breakfast/dairy farm near Montreal, the same weekend Signs opened.

The renewed interest in crop circles has left Paul Anderson feeling a little worn. The Vancouver graphic designer's phone is constantly ringing with reporters wanting interviews and folks reporting new sightings. Anderson, 35, is founder and director of the Canadian Crop Circle Research Network, and one of chief Canadian trackers of the
phenomenon.

Last year, according to the network's annual report, there were 20 different formations reported in Canada. Saskatchewan is this country's hot spot, with half of the reported formations discovered there. Three were from B.C. and four from Alberta, while Nova Scotia, Ontario and Manitoba each reported one.

This year's B.C. reports include semi-circular patterns found in a hay field in Duncan, the largest stretching about eight metres across. Many of B.C.'s cases remain inconclusive, however, even in the minds of crop-circle believers. Earlier this year, experts were called to Surrey after Canada Day to examine some circles discovered off the Trans-Canada
Highway near the Port Mann Bridge. But they turned out to be a hoax -- shaped in the crude form of a Canadian flag.

Anderson has been fascinated with crop circles since seeing an episode of Unsolved Mysteries in 1990, and set up the non-profit research group in 1995. Although he doesn't often travel to reported sightings to view them personally, he's got affiliates in seven provinces and who he can tap to investigate reports that come in.

The curiosity has hit such a fevered pitch that his Web site is overloaded by the demand. If you were trying to hit the crop circle network's page this week, you probably got a message to try later.

A Mel Gibson movie is always guaranteed to capture some attention, but Anderson is afraid it will feed the notion that aliens from outer space create crop circles. While not discounting this as a possibility, he is skeptical.

"I feel there is evidence of purpose behind these of some kind -- that there is somebody, something, doing this. It isn't just random acts of nature." he says. "And yet I find myself leaning more away from the idea of aliens, per se. There are too many aspects of the whole thing that one explanation just doesn't answer.

"Other people say it is military testing satellite technology making the formations, but that doesn't explain the very complex patterns that you see in a lot of these. That's another misconception out there -- that these are just flattened-out crop.

"In some cases it is but, in other cases, it is flattened down, it is woven together, it's braided, it is multiple layers stacked on top of each other -- sometimes half a dozen layers stacked on top of each other going in alternate directions," he says. "In cases like that, it isn't just something that a bunch of kids went out and did for fun. It is more
complicated than that."

Believers speculate it could be some unknown but powerful Earth force creating them, a quirk of nature, that humans themselves are unwittingly willing them to appear, or even some other invisible presence.

"Some people would say angelic, some people would say demonic," Anderson says. "Who knows?"

The existence of crop circles could suggest "another kind of intelligence that is around, or has been for centuries," he says, and may be a sign that the human race isn't the most intelligent or most advanced life form or species on the planet. "That is something we have always assumed, but maybe we aren't. I don't know."

The alien theory, he says, does not explain some of the bizarre things people have reported experiencing inside the circles -- electronics acting up or powering out, animals avoiding the area or acting strangely, visions and premonitions. Anderson counts himself among those who have had premonitions, recounting how he had lucid, detailed dreams
about circles only to receive reports of nearly identical formations within a day or two.

Skeptics, take note: Anderson isn't the only one to make such claims.

'Stuff like that happens," says Chad Deetken, a Vancouver man touted as the best crop circle investigator in this country. Unlike Anderson, Deetken regularly travels to crop circle sites to study and document the occurrences, and his visits have led to some surprising experiences. While investigating a formation in Lethbridge a decade ago, he decided to lay out in it at night to see what would happen. After a while, he says he felt a slow paralysis move up his body, starting at his toes. It felt so strong, he says, he bolted up in fright when it reached his chest. Two others with him reported hearing footsteps nearby when no one else was there.

"Some may see a white horse running across the field really fast, like a phantom," he says. "Other people have a very, very deep religious or spiritual experience. Three German guys were sitting in one and all of the sudden they were completely overcome with emotions, all three of them were crying."

About an hour after he heard about the crop circles in Vanderhoof, Deetken hit the road for the nine-hour-plus trek to check them out. Still, it was four days after they were first spotted, and the avid crop circle investigator did not arrive until after nightfall, which meant he had to wait until the next morning to begin his sleuthing. Deetken was dismayed that so many people had already been tramping through the oat field, leaving trails that would complicate efforts to prove the mysterious formation was not a man-made hoax.

But, examining some of the untrampled circles, he became convinced that this was no prank and set about taking measurements for his report and collecting stalk samples.

He interviewed neighbours and others, some who told how their pets acted strangely afterward. One neighbour reported seeing an eerie, orange glow over the forest nearby around 2 a.m. on Aug. 28 that she thought might have been a fire. Within the hour, she said, the glow had disappeared.

He collected stalk samples for testing at a lab in Michigan. When the results came back, they reported a change in the cell structure and swelling, which he says indicates there was an intense, short-lived energy similar to microwaves that hit the stalks.

What caused that energy blast is the big mystery -- part of that wider mystery that Deetken and others like him are so keen to solve: what is it that is carving out these things? Not that he ever expects to find the answer.

"I don't hold my hopes up for it," the 57-year-old says. "It's been elusive for so long."

Still, he makes an annual trip each summer to England -- a global crop-circle hotspot -- to explore and chum with fellow enthusiasts. But why? Why does he traipse the Canadian and English countrysides in pursuit of the ever elusive? In part because he is in awe of crop circles, he says, and finds it comforting to be inside them.

"I get a very strong spiritual sense in the formations, a feeling of a presence -- that there is someone else there. You just feel that there is someone watching you. But it's totally benign -- it's not aggressive, there is no sense of danger. It's actually a nice sense," he says.

"There is a very powerful energy there. You get the sense that they are put there deliberately, to get you to come to look at them and possibly be energized by them."

Deetken has been doing this for the past 12 years. For more than four of them, it was a way of earning a living -- bankrolled by Las Vegas millionaire Robert Bigelow, who was keen to investigate crop circles and other bizarre phenomenon.

These days, Deetken works as a first-aid attendant at movie sets. But he still devotes plenty of time to his passion. He still holds a glint of hope in his heart that it will someday be explained.

"Everybody loves a mystery -- this is one of the greatest. It really is," he says. "I am there to get the answer. Hopefully."

Deetken is not the only one in B.C. looking for the answers. Sunshine Coast filmmaker Robert Nichol, who is wrapping up a 72-minute documentary on crop circles for the Space Channel, says one of his field crew had a painful knee injury soothed while visiting one.

"It healed up tremendously," says Nichol, a long-time believer in things extraterrestrial who became intrigued with the circle phenomenon seven years ago after coming across some photos of them.

He believes the circles are an attempt by some higher intelligence -- " whether it is inter-dimensional or extraterrestrial or from the future" -- to communicate with us.

Barry Beyerstein, a Simon Fraser psychology professor who studies human behaviour and deception, firmly believes crop circles are nothing but hoaxes.

"It's not that I don't believe in them -- it's a question of who made them, and I have no belief at all that it is anything supernatural or done by aliens or anything like that. And they have all the earmarks of hoaxes," he says.

"On top of it all, there has never been anything produced -- any artifact left or any physical evidence that is credible -- that couldn't be done by hoaxers. When they carve one into the nose of George Washington on Mount Rushmore, then I will start to listen."

He does not doubt that people have unexplainable experiences inside a crop circle.

"If you are a believer and you think you are in a sacred spot and you are in some kind of a time warp or energy vortex, whatever their preferred explanation is, I have no doubt they can psyche themselves up into eerie feelings and even hallucinatory things. That happens all the time."

The hoax theory was heavily debated during the 1990s when two people came forward and claimed responsibility for creating crop circles: retired British artists Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who said they had been pulling off circle pranks since 1978. In 1999, Bower demonstrated in a BBC documentary how they created the patterns with ropes and planks.

Believers in crop circles concede there are hoaxes out there -- that's why they look for signs of human tinkering and trampling when they investigate the patterns. But they doubt humans could engineer some of the patterns they have seen, especially the intricate and remote ones. To them, it just doesn't make sense.

"That means teams of people, well-trained, would have to be travelling all over the planet over the last 20 years -- in some cases in very, very remote areas that only pilots have seen from the air -- to do this," Nichol says.

He sees no motive for anyone to do that either, saying there is no financial reward, and any claims to artistic reasons are doubtful since the patterns are not signed. Not that he is trying to convince anyone.

"People can choose to believe what they want to believe," he says. "We should have some compassion for those people who cannot accept the reality of this wonderful phenomenon, because their denial is basically a defence mechanism."

For Toronto-based author John Robert Colombo, who has written more than a dozen books about paranormal and supernatural phenomena, the inexplicable nature of crop circles is part of their appeal. "He who cannot pause to wonder is as good as dead," Colombo says, quoting Albert Einstein. "I'm quite pleased to leave their explanation vague. What strikes me as interesting is that they exert such a tremendous amount of
fascination. We can't shake them off."

In the end, Colombo suspects crop circles come from "inner space, not outer space. You really can't conclude too much from them."

But he's still proud to note that the first modern crop circle may in fact have been Canadian. Forms of the crop-circle phenomenon date back to pre-Christianity, he says, citing ancient belief in fairy rings, for instance. And during the Middle Ages, strange circular formations were described as the work of the devil, who cut down crops with a scythe. But modern crop circles are a phenomenon of the past few decades, Colombo says, and the earliest credible report he's come across was in Canada, on a Saskatchewan wheat farm in 1974. An RCMP report of the incident, which occurred in a field of rapeseed near Yorktown, noted " there were five distinct circles caused by something exerting what had to be heavy air or exhaust pressure over the high grass."

"I think of this one as the grandfather of crop circles," he says, adding that modern examples of the phenomenon didn't emerge in Britain until the 1980s.

"They're a fascinating phenomenon," he adds. "They're beautiful, they're puzzling and they're open to a million interpretations."

Margaret Hall may not have an explanation for them, but she is certainly a believer. Almost exactly three years after the 11-circle creation mysteriously appeared in her oat field by the Vanderhoof airport, another set of crop circles appeared nearby -- this time on another parcel of land she leases for farming.

"They are so perfectly made, it just seems unbelievable that they would be created as a hoax sort of thing," she says. "Particularly the first set, which were close to a fairly busy road. If people were to be out there doing something like that, it would be hard pressed for them not to be noticed."

Even before the second set showed up last year, folks around began whispering that maybe she was behind it all. Were there to be a third set -- well, that would just be too much of a coincidence for some to bear.

"I hope they show up again," Hall says, "but in somebody else's field."

David Stonehouse last wrote for Mix on the proliferation of robots in everyday life.