THE SPACE PEN CLUB, OUTTAKES 2: Margie’s Minnesota Crop Circle

Sure. Ok. I can hear ya all the way through these permeable technological walls.

“Crop circles were all faked by 2 blokes in the English countryside, “Doug and Dave.”

Remember them? Back in the ‘90s, they got a lot of press. All over the globe even. Easy press. Lazy press. And the metaphorical sons and daughters of Doug and Dave have been making them ever since. I saw some  photos of new ones appearing in the Wiltshire countryside in England recently where many seem to  appear. Are they the real ones? Who made them? Why?

Let somebody else figure it out.

I’ll just say hoaxed crop circles sometimes are as unusually and ultimately beautiful and enigmatic as the ones that aren’t hoaxed. How can you tell? Can you tell? Do you care? Read on.

For all the noise and news crop circles have generated through the years, I can guarantee you Doug and Dave and their got-nothing-better-to-do offspring didn’t make the one that a friend and I investigated way back when in the early ‘90s on a hobby farm near the Twin Cities.

This Minnesota “croppie” story – now an outtake -- didn’t make it into the bigger story although it could have. The reason I left it out is because it seemed to be a very minor sub-story of the bigger one in that chapter. Plus, we didn’t take  photos. But we did take samples. And we talked to the woman whose land it was on. Let’s call her Margie.

My buddy Kevin (the guy who rode with me to the first Star Knowledge conference in South Dakota, where we saw a stunning image of a chalk-like arrow in the sky midafternoon) got a call from someone he knew. His friend had talked to Margie who explained some strange things happened the night before, all alone in her little farmhouse.

When we talked to her the next day, she gave straightforward answers with no hesitation and apparently no agenda either. She was like your sweet ‘ol grandmother, about 60 or so. We didn’t press her on that. We did press her on what she saw and what she thought it was, several times, like a couple of badgering Private Eyes.

Margie said she was reading her Bible about 10:30 at night when she noticed a very small light – about the size of a regular flashlight illumination -- moving through her yard, about 200 feet from her house.  No sound. But bright enough to catch her attention. She watched it until it – the enigmatic it -- moved out of range. She peered out into the yard, into the dark. But the event was over.  She called a friend to talk about it. Margie wasn’t frightened by it really, she admitted. Startled a little, but not frightened. She went to bed and slept soundly.

Once Kevin got the call from the friend who had talked to Margie, we called her to see if we could visit. Of course, she obliged, she was like your sweet ‘ol grandma with cookies. Except Margie didn’t offer cookies, only her astonished account of the strangeness on her property while reading the Bible the night before.

She led us to the area where she’d seen the object. A few yards away, there was a distinct impression in the tall grass that skirted the mowed part of the property toward the house. It wasn’t very big – maybe a couple feet across and half that vertically -- and it looked half-baked, like whatever insignia or image the light – if it was “a light” -- was trying to make never took hold.

There was however a good trace amount of a white powdery substance. It lay in the center approximately. My buddy and I had read enough about crop circles and the residue sometimes found near patterns in other places to know this was probably the best evidence of it being genuine. We told her about Dr. William Levengood, a biophysicist in Michigan who did scientific research on this phenomenon.*

We asked Margie, could we take some samples of the white residue and the soil and send it to him?  Of course, she said, ‘cuz, you know, Granny. We scooped up the samples, careful not to touch them with our hands and contaminate the goods. We placed the soil and white powdery stuff in a pail. I talked to her a while longer as Kevin headed to the car. Then I bid farewell and thanked her effusively for allowing us to visit.

As I approached the car, Kevin was waving frantically and yelling, “You gotta hear this!” I could hear the radio was on. As I got closer, he smiled like the Cheshire Cat in that trippy Alice book and pointed at the radio: “Do you hear that?!”

At first, I didn’t. But then it was clear. A revised arrangement of the theme from Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind was pouring out of the dashboard. As they say on the playground and in bars, “I shit you not!”

There are many such synchronicities in my book/tale that spike the narrative like the wildest seasonings you can imagine. I still don’t know what they mean, I mean ultimately. Might you?

We sent our Margie sample to Levengood. But we never heard back. He’s in some movies, should you care to check them out. And from the looks of it, he probably had enough samples to study from other places, like from across the pond where every season, especially in Wiltshire, the formations blossom again and again. Simple, sophisticated, mind-blowing, laughable, lovely and any other adjectives one could think of, these cerealgrams from somewhere, someplace, someone. Some source. Or many.

They’re fetching earthy works of art, and I don’t care who makes them.  Ultimately.

 *More about Dr. Levengood’ s Scientific Work on Crop Circles

 “Data from nearly 300 circles in seven countries was analyzed. More than 90 percent of the crop formations sampled show recurring abnormalities in crop circle plants and also magnetic material in the soil. Talbott writes that these changes are "consistent with exposure to an intense and complex energy system which emits heat [possibly microwaves] along with highly unusual electrical pulses and strong magnetic fields." –Baltimore Sun, August 2, 2002

Noted biophysicist, Dr. Levengood, analyzed 350 plant samples from unexplained crop circle throughout his career. He concluded that molecularly, crop circles are formed by spinning plasma vortexes from high above in our atmosphere. These vortexes create an energy system with enough intensity to cause unnatural bending without breaking the plant’s stem. –Ancient Aliens Facebook post (yeah, I went there…)

But I also went here:

Anatomical Anomalies in Crop Formation Plants – Levengood Abstract, October 1994

Crop formations consist of geometrically organized regions ranging from 2 to 80 m diameter, in which the plants (primarily grain crops) are flattened in a horizontal position. Plants from crop formations display anatomical alterations which cannot be accounted for by assuming the formations are hoaxes.

Near the soil surface the curved stems often form complex swirls with ‘vortex’ type patterns. In the present paper, evidence is presented which indicates that structural and cellular alterations take place in plants exposed within the confines of the ‘circle’ type formations, differences which were determined to be statistically significant when compared with control plants taken outside the formations.

These transformations were manifested at the macroscopic-level as abnormal nodal swelling, gross malformations during embryogenesis. and charred epidermal tissue. Significant changes in seed germination and development were found, and at the microscopic level differences were observed in cell wall pit structures. Affected plants also have characteristics suggesting the involvement of transient high temperatures.