[GeoStL] Re: STLtoday article: Investigators ponder occurrence of crop circles here
- From: "the people in our house" <sydstyr@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <geocaching@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 08:57:23 -0500
-
I'm following myself, but ..
Apparently waypoint #2 is a bit closer than the Dog Star.
.
http://www.pjstar.com/stories/082506/REG_BAP5VRLQ.046.shtml
BY MATT BUEDEL
OF THE JOURNAL STAR
GENESEO - Jim Stahl stepped out of his Henry County farmhouse Saturday and
into a phenomenon that polarizes scientists, delights conspiracy theorists
and simply annoys those who write it off as a hoax - crop circles.
In his 90-acre soybean field on the western outskirts of Geneseo, Stahl
discovered five imprinted circles, the largest three about 50 feet in
diameter, and no tracks leading to or from the county road a few hundred
feet away.
"I don't even know when it happened," he said Thursday. "My neighbor saw
there was something wrong with my beans, so I went to take a look."
What he found proved more confounding than anything else. He called the
Henry County Sheriff's Department to file a criminal damage to property
report, which noted no trace of vandals. A news release from the department
humorously beseeched the public's help.
"The damage consists of several circles in the middle of the field with no
discernible cause," the statement read. "So, if anyone happens to see a
UFO - or any other suspicious vehicle - with soybeans attached, please call
the sheriff's office."
Mostly, media called. Then, earlier this week, a retired neurochemist showed
up at Stahl's doorstep and started taking soil and plant samples to be
analyzed for a group that studies crop circles the world over.
"We send people when (crop formations) occur and when they happen in an area
where we have field workers," said Nancy Talbott, president of BLT Research
Team Inc., a not-for-profit based in Cambridge, Mass., that has been on the
crop circle case for 15 years.
While the BLT volunteer scientists have responded to only a handful of crop
circles in the United States this year - typically they field between 20 and
30 reports annually - they've been in Illinois twice in the last few weeks.
The formations near Belleville and Geneseo harbor striking features that the
group considers anomalies among the, well, anomalies.
"I've never seen what we saw in these two cases this year," Talbott said. "I
don't quite know what's going on."
Unlike other crop circles they've studied, the small percentage of dead
plants in the Geneseo and Belleville formations are interspersed throughout
the circles, instead of clumped into one group.
Like most crop circles, a majority of stems are bent at sharp angles but not
splintered, and most plants are still alive. Fragile fuzz on the stems
remain, indicating the crops were not forced to the ground by human hands or
implements, Talbott said.
The BLT Research Team - BLT stands for Burke, Levengood and Talbott, the
founders - suspects, but cannot yet prove, that the natural cause of crop
formations is low-energy plasma from the ionosphere, about 100 miles above
earth's surface. High-energy plasma frequently reaches land in the form of
lightning from about eight miles up.
Talbott hopes one day to have that theory tested, proved and published in
peer-reviewed scientific journals, as three other papers the group has put
together have been in the last decade. Until then, she'll marvel at the
mixture of intrigue, apathy and suspicion expressed when crop formations
appear.
"I'm very interested in the emotional response to this idea that there's
something going on in our environment that nobody knows how to explain,"
Talbott said.
Farmer Stahl's curiosity, on the other hand, is limited. Most importantly,
his crop yield won't be drastically affected.
"What I'm interested in is did something change in the soil?" he said. But,
"To tell you the truth, it doesn't interest me all that much."
Matt Buedel can be reached at 686-3154 or mbuedel@xxxxxxxxxxx
----- Original Message -----
From: "the people in our house" <
Subject: [GeoStL] STLtoday article: Investigators ponder occurrence of crop
circles here
> -
> Forget lunch -- I want to know where to find THESE.
>
> Do you think there is a .1 light year mile rule among aliens? Crop
> Circles -- waypoint in a universal treasure hunt game?
>
> "Go to the planet Earth. Look for a field of new six-sided snowflakes
> about
> in the middle of their "North America" near two large bodies of water.
> One
> will be different from the others. From there, project a waypoint 8.5
> light
> years towards Sirius ..."
>
> C'mon you East Siders -- surely SOMEONE knows where to find these..
> PLEASE
> tell!
>
> Nancy
>
>
>>
>> This STLtoday.com article -- "Investigators ponder occurrence of crop
>> circles here"-- has been sent to you by: "> Crop circles? In
>> Belleville?
>>> http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/metroeast/story/B02506B0DDBEDFCE862571DC0014184F?OpenDocument
>>
>> Here is the story.
>>
>>SOMEWHERE NEAR BELLEVILLE
>>
>> The UFO people discovered them first.
>>
>> It was early August, around the time that tips of strange lights in the
>> sky
>> came in. Field investigators from the Colorado-based Mutual Unidentified
>> Flying Object Network, or MUFON, flew over in a plane after hearing those
>> reports and got photographic confirmation in early August.
>>
>> There was no doubt about it.
>>
>> Thirteen crop circles, varying in size between about 50 feet to 15 feet
>> across, were visible among the soybean plants on the sloping banks of a
>> gully that splits a farm near Belleville.
>>
>> Lacking expertise to continue the inquiry, the UFO people turned to an
>> outfit that specializes in this sort of thing.
>>
>> That's right.
>>
>> BLT Research Team Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., prides itself on searching
>> for
>> a scientific explanation for crop circles. The name has nothing to do
>> with
>> bacon. It comes from the three founders' initials. Since the 1990s, BLT
>> has
>> been looking into the bizarre patterns that sometimes materialize in
>> grain
>> fields.
>>
>> BLT researchers have been looking into the Belleville circles for the
>> past
>> month.
>>
>> "Fully one half, at least, of the crop circles I've seen are fakes," High
>> Ridge resident JoAnne Scarpellini said with confidence as she hiked along
>> the Belleville site Thursday. She's the group's Midwest investigator. If
>> there has been a report of a crop circle within 500 miles of St. Louis in
>> the past decade, she's been there.
>>
>> "We don't think these are man-made," she said of the Metro East circles.
>> They were tested for magnetic anomalies and subjected to a Geiger
>> counter,
>> but results were negative. A report notes that cell phones worked
>> properly
>> and neighbors reported no unusual animal behavior or electromagnetic
>> effects, which Scarpellini said are a possibility at crop circle sites.
>>
>> The exact location is still hush-hush, because the landowner did not want
>> gawkers trampling her fields. No other scientific or law enforcement
>> groups
>> are known to be investigating the site. A reporter was given a tour after
>> a
>> promise to keep the location as vague as possible.
>>
>> So what's BLT's explanation? Alien invasion? Bizarre weather event?
>>
>> Nancy Talbott, the group's president and the "T" in BLT, said she's not a
>> scientist but has been working with researchers to legitimize the field
>> of
>> study. She said she had produced outdoor country music festivals before
>> getting into crop circles.
>>
>> "People immediately jump to this other-worldly explanation," she said in
>> a
>> phone interview. "It might be a natural phenomenon."
>>
>> Scarpellini, 73, agreed that the circles' origins remain a mystery. "We
>> don't know," said Scarpellini, who said she retired years ago as a
>> researcher for Washington University School of Medicine. "One theory
>> that's
>> been proposed and worked over is a plasma vortex that's controlled and
>> manipulated somehow."
>>
>> In the month since the Belleville circles were found, the soybean plants
>> that weren't destroyed have continued to grow, spoiling the circles'
>> well-defined edges. But they are still visible.
>>
>> A few weeks after the Belleville circles appeared, a group of circles
>> showed up in soybean fields in Geneseo, Ill.
>>
>> Scarpellini visited those circles as well.
>>
>> "It doesn't bother me," she said of the negative reaction to the group's
>> efforts from skeptics. "Certain people have trouble accepting any
>> explanation. I was always interested in this sort of thing."
>>
>
>
>
> ****************************************
> For List Info or To make _ANY_ changes, including unsubscribing from this
> list, click -----> //www.freelists.org/list/geocaching
> Missouri Caches Scheduled to be Archived http://tinyurl.com/87cqw
>
****************************************
For List Info or To make _ANY_ changes, including unsubscribing from this
list, click -----> //www.freelists.org/list/geocaching
Missouri Caches Scheduled to be Archived http://tinyurl.com/87cqw
Other related posts:
