"Bizarre shapes..." "LINDA MOULTON HOWE:" "What in the world is making these patterns and why?" "Intricate designs..." "David Wilcock:" "Scientists are now saying that this geometry is the secret keys to the higher dimensions." "And a mysterious method that defies explanation." "Nick Pope:" "Everyone was scratching their heads and saying, "What's going on here?"" "Narrator:" "Are the patterns appearing on fields across the globe part of an elaborate hoax?" "Or could there really be an otherworldly connection?" "GIORGIO TSOUKALOS:" "These are messages from elsewhere." "And elsewhere, in my opinion, means of extraterrestrial origin." "Narrator:" "Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has credited its origins to gods and other visitors from the stars." "What if it were true?" "Did extraterrestrial beings really help to shape our history?" "And if so... could they really be communicating using circles from the sky?" "Turin, Italy." "June 23, 2015." "Pilot Silvio Sirotto reports that while flying over a wheat field directly in the flight path of the local airport, he spotted a mysterious design seemingly pressed into the crops." "Investigators are baffled as to how the design could have been created without any detection in such a high-traffic area." "To date, it remains a mystery, but it is only one of the latest examples in a strange phenomenon that has been going on for decades, and possibly much, much longer." "Over 10,000 crop formations have been found worldwide." "They have been reported in over 50 different countries and on nearly every continent on Earth." "Commonly known as crop circles, the formations are designs pressed down into fields." "They range from small circles to elaborate pictograms hundreds of feet across." "They have been found in various crops, including wheat, barley, oilseed rape and corn." "And they've been making worldwide headlines since the mid-1960s." "One of the first, in 1966, it was Tully, Queensland, Australia." "A farmer heard a buzzing sound and literally saw this big, round, maybe 30-feet-diameter craft, disk, rising up out of what essentially was marshy, reedy ground." "And it goes up and disappears, and left behind the circle." "CHARLES MALLETT:" "Beginning in Tully, Australia, there seems to be a kind of a smattering of these circular impressions, relatively simple, but in several locations around the world." "1960s, '70s, '80s, liberal sprinkling of circles, 1990 bang, and the whole thing goes planet-wide." "Narrator:" "By 1991, over 2,500 formations had been reported across 23 different countries." "HOWE:" "As an investigative reporter who began about three decades ago, trying to get to the bottom of this phenomena," "I remember getting these photographs and reading that there were no footprints." "No one was walking around, because if they had, we would have seen broken stalks." "Everybody was raising this question:" ""What in the world is making these patterns and why?"" "They had scientists and meteorologists in the field, and it was really fascinating and people really got into it in a big, big way." "Pope:" "Nobody knew what to make of this." "Politicians, scientists, the UFO community everyone was scratching their heads and saying, "What's going on here?" "What is this?"" "Some people thought that it was extraterrestrial." "Others thought it was a meteorological phenomenon of some sort." "And other people said, "Well, it must be a hoax."" "Narrator:" "On September 9, 1991, two retirees from the English countryside," "Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, came forward with an admission that they were behind the crop formations." "Using nothing more than a board and strings, the hoaxers demonstrated their technique for pressing down the crop to form a design." "HOWE:" "I won't forget when the news came that there were these two men saying they were responsible for all the crop formations." "And immediately, because of all the work that I had been doing was, well, they weren't traveling to 23 nations," "Number one." "Number two, they were off-kilter." "They were not geometric." "And for those of us who have been in real crop formations, there's just no comparison." "MALLETT:" "Doug and Dave, "the men that conned the world."" "That was the headline in our local newspaper here." "And these two men came forward and said, "We done it all." "We made all the crop circles since 1976, everything."" "Most people pretty much swallowed that, hook, line and sinker." "Pope:" "There are some theories that, uh, Doug and Dave were just government stooges, that, uh, the plan was to bring the whole subject into disrepute, to discredit it, and to-to make the media just go away." "Narrator:" "But could it be that there is more to the crop circle phenomenon than a modern-day hoax orchestrated by pranksters?" "Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest that crop formations are not, in fact, a modern phenomenon at all, but can be traced back hundreds of years." "JONATHAN YOUNG:" "There is a report from the year 815, of the Bishop of Lyon, a warning, notifying another priest who was going to take over his parish that the locals are involved in something he considers devil worship." "They're gathering seeds in a flattened circle of the crops and using them in fertility rituals." "Wilcock:" "There are some very strange accounts in the 1600s." "One of the original scientists, Dr. Robert Plot, reported seeing crop circles appearing on his land in Staffordshire, England." "And he actually drew diagrams of what he was seeing." "We also have the infamous legend, in the 1600s, of the so-called "mowing-devil."" "TSOUKALOS:" "One of the first crop circles ever reported was a mowing-devil that was in England going through the wheat fields." "There's actually a woodcut that shows what, for all intents and purposes, looks like a crop circle, but has this black creature that just runs around with the horns." "So the idea was, in folklore, that something or someone laid down this formation in a wheat field." "And that goes back all the way to 1678." "Some even have suggested that there may be a description of a crop circle in the Dead Sea Scrolls." "WILLIAM HENRY:" "In the Dead Sea Scrolls is a cryptic reference to a light that leaves a mark on the ground." "Interpreters ask: is it possible that the marks on the land specifically on the barley and the lentil are crop circles?" "Narrator:" "Is it possible that crop circles have appeared for hundreds, if not thousands of years?" "And if so, could it be that while some of these formations have been exposed as hoaxes, many others are connected to otherworldly beings?" "Perhaps further clues can be found by putting a man-made crop formation to the test." "Narrator:" "Wiltshire, England." "This sleepy countryside, just over 100 miles west of London, is considered ground zero for the crop circle phenomenon." "It is also home to many mysterious ancient sites, including Stonehenge," "Avebury," "Silbury Hill and West Kennet Long Barrow." "MALLET:" "One could quite reasonably and easy make the connection that these crop circles are happening in these places because these places are markings of certain energetic corridors or crossover points or very special places that were used by people in the past for presumably metaphysical reasons" "meditating, praying, ritual, whatever." "Narrator:" "Today, ancient astronaut theorist and explorer." "Giorgio Tsoukalos is in Wiltshire to meet up with three men who have a unique perspective on crop formations." "Hi." " Giorgio." "John?" "Good to meet you." "Narrator:" "John Lundberg, Rob Irving and William Russell have over two decades of experience creating artistic designs in crops." "So, thanks very much for meeting me out here." "Narrator:" "Giorgio will challenge them to recreate a simple formation that many crop circle investigators suggest cannot be perfectly reproduced." "In 2005, overnight, the Golden Ball formation was created." "This is what it looks like right here." "You might be familiar with this one." "Got the different circles." " JOHN LUNDBERG:" "How big is it?" "96 feet in diameter." " Okay." "So it's not small, it's fairly large, and, um," "I was wondering if you could recreate this." "We can certainly try, yeah." " Right?" "Now, this was done overnight, so the most you'll have is about five to seven hours." " Okay." "And you'll be using these boards?" "Yeah, this is called a stalk stomper, which is the tool that we use for flattening the crop." "All right, well, shall we get started?" "Sure." " Okay." "Let's do it." "Well, you're starting on the ring." "Narrator:" "John Lundberg and his team begin by measuring out the design using a tape measure." "This one, here." "Narrator:" "After determining where to place the edges, they use their wooden stalk stompers to shuffle their way across the upright stems to create the desired pattern." "Keep going." "Narrator:" "The team is able to complete the challenge within the allotted time." "Well, that was quick." " Pretty good, huh?" "Really good stuff." "All right." " Thanks." "So, did you guys encounter any problems or any challenges?" "I think the only problem is-is the crop is a bit kind of tangly." "But I-I'm happy with it." "I think it should look great from the air." "Some more altitude." "Keep going." "Going up, going up." "Narrator:" "In order to get a side-by-side comparison of the designs," "Giorgio enlists the assistance of a local drone team." "They send a camera up over the field." "MAN:" "Climb a bit." "And hold there." "Oh, wow." "I mean, it's a really nice recreation." "There's no question about it." "Pretty identical." " Yeah." "Can't tell the difference really." " They're really impressive." "Narrator:" "While the recreation of the Golden Ball Hill formation looks very similar to the original from the air, crop circle researchers suggest that what made the formation truly unique was not how it appeared from above," "but how it appeared on the ground." "So to examine the recreation up close," "Giorgio meets up with crop circle investigator" "Charles Mallet." "Hi, Charles." "Hey, Giorgio." " Pleasure to meet you." "How are you?" " I'm okay." "You're good?" "Come to the center here." "Narrator:" "Mallet has been researching the crop circle phenomenon since the 1990s, and was one of the first investigators on the ground of the Golden Ball Hill pattern when it appeared in 2005." "What are the telltale signs that leads you to believe that something is real or man-made, or real, whatever that means." "I think we have to get over the notion that people can't make shapes in fields." "People can make really impressive shapes in fields." "So we have to get down there and look at the physical evidence before we start taking it further." "When I stand in this formation, I look at the carpet of flowers across the top of these plants, and then I look on the ground." "I see two separate situations undamaged and damaged, because they used a physical device, and it's men stepping with planks of wood." "So it's crush, crush, crush, crush." "And it produces a really clear pattern of damage." "So there's a lot of the flowers have just been wiped off." "And then if we were able to..." " Sure." "To maybe come and look right down into the detail." "We need to just look at some, uh, stems here." "Here's a good example of what happens to oilseed rape plants when they're physically pushed to the ground." "Huge, ugly kink, very mechanical." "Down here, there's bruising and scraping down the stems." "What you're suggesting or what you're telling me is that in a non-man-made, uh, scenario, the stalks would not be broken like this." "Absolutely." "Can you show me some of those pictures that you brought to see the comparison?" "Yeah, yeah, sure." " Great." "These are from taken from the original 2005 formation here." "This is what I would expect to see in a real crop circle." "Narrator:" "Incredibly, none of the flower heads on the original 2005 Golden Ball Hill formation were damaged or destroyed." "And the seamless lay of flowers suggests that it was not mechanically produced using boards and shuffling over the stalks." "In the original 2005 formation, there's nothing physical, nothing local, nothing mechanical made this circle." "That really opens the door to so many possibilities." "And the honest answer is:" "we do not know where these circles are coming from, the real ones." "Narrator:" "If the Golden Ball Hill formation was not made with boards, then how was it created?" "And by whom?" "Perhaps further clues can be found by examining the intriguing evidence left behind at the scene." "Narrator:" "Ann Arbor, Michigan." "At the height of the crop circle phenomenon in the 1990s, former University of Michigan research physicist." "W.C. Levengood and his team at BLT Research began scientifically analyzing samples from various crop formations found throughout the world." "ELTJO H. HASELHOFF:" "The BLT team performed many different tests, from simple inspection under a microscope, chemical analyses of the soils and the plants, germination tests, uh, node length measurements and so on." "They produced, uh, many, many lab reports and a couple scientific papers as well in which they explained what they found." "We found that there are two scientifically-documented, all-over-the-world changes." "The first is the apical node elongation." "Most crops have four or even five nodes, and they are the knuckle-like protuberances that are found along the plant stem all the way down to the ground." "The apical node is the very first node beneath the seed head," "and that node becomes elongated, stretched, as compared to the control nodes in the rest of the field." "Now, the node elongation can be a range actually between, say, 45% and over 200% elongation." "The second visible plant change that is well tested are the expulsion cavities, holes blown out at the lower stem nodes, usually the second but sometimes also the third and fourth nodes." "And literally, they're holes blown out at the nodes." "Best I can tell, these visible changes are beyond the capability of humans at this point in time." "This is indicative of some kind of intense heat that has hit the stalk" "and actually physically changed it." "Who or what would have done this?" "Narrator:" "Could the physical anomalies found within some crop circles be evidence that they were created with advanced technology?" "And, if so, what might this technology be?" "Pleasure to meet you." "Narrator:" "In January of 2000, using his own data as well as data collected by BLT Research," "Dr. Eltjo Haselhoff published a scientific paper suggesting that the formations might be created by an unknown electromagnetic energy source." "So you've actually done scientific analysis on some of those formations." "So what were some of your conclusions?" "The hypothesis is that somehow electromagnetic energy is involved in the creation of these crop circles, and that somehow this energy causes node elongation." "So the nodes in the stems get longer." "And the more energy, the longer the nodes are." "And that is very interesting, because all you need to do is take a cross section across a circle, like this, and measure the node length in each of these positions." "And actually, this is what you see." "This is in... at the perimeter." "See these nodes, these dark areas?" "This is somewhere halfway, and that's in the center." "So, you see, there is a huge difference in node length." "TSOUKALOS:" "I mean, it's a hu..." "I mean, this is fascinating;" "this is incredible." "HASELHOFF:" "And it's not just a little bit." " Okay." "It's a difference in size between a horse and an elephant." "It's-it's very, very significant, so you can actually make a graph of this." "So this is the node length at the edge, when the node length is about two millimeters." "So this is in the center of the circle, and the node length is, like, 4.2 millimeters." "And going towards the perimeter, that's about two millimeters." "You see, there is a massive change in node length." "They're actually more than twice as long." "Yeah, I mean, what, uh, what would do this?" "That's, uh, quite weird." "HASELHOFF:" "Well, in this case, it was very interesting, because this crop circle, uh, actually had an eyewitness when it was... when it formed." "And the eyewitness says, "I saw a ball of light, and it was standing still."" "And that is very important, because when a ball of light is standing still, we can very accurately predict how the energy will be distributed on the ground." "And we know that there will be more energy in the center." "And the more energy, the longer the nodes are." "And we can also predict what the node length would have been." "So you can check your hypothesis." "And in this case, it was a perfect match." "Amazing, isn't it?" "Now, this is where I get the goose bumps, because clearly there is something there, and no one denies that many of them are man-made, but then there is something bizarre." "Do you have any... idea how, or who, might be behind it?" "That's a very difficult question." "What I can say about that is..." "I don't know." "So it is something that remains a giant question mark." "Absolutely, yes." "I find it very disheartening in a weird way that something as open as crop formations are not studied closer by the scientific community," "that they are just offhandedly dismissed as flat-out hoaxes from the get-go, when there is concise scientific evidence that not every crop circle is man-made." "Maybe the origin is extraterrestrial." "Narrator:" "Does this peer-reviewed scientific research provide evidence that not all crop formations are the product of hoaxers?" "And, if so, could there be an otherworldly, perhaps extraterrestrial, origin to them?" "Perhaps further clues can be found by exploring eyewitness accounts of the crop circle phenomenon." "Narrator:" "Salisbury, England." "July 7, 2007." "Local paralegal and crop circle researcher Gary King spends the night camping out on Knap Hill, an area known for sightings of mysterious orbs and other strange occurrences." "It was the seventh of July 2007, so because it was a kind of an auspicious date the seven-seven-seven we decided we'd come here." "I came here with my girlfriend to do a night watch." "So we arrived here, and at about 3:00 in the morning, we had a big white flash of light, which completely encompassed the sky." "And about 20 minutes after that, we looked, and we could see this crop circle laid out in front of us." "The field it appeared in was this field here to the right that's yellow now." "It was actually wheat the year that it occurred, but they rotate the crops." "And it started from way back at... near those trees and then came over the brow of this hill." "It was absolutely enormous." "Narrator:" "The crop formation extended 1,033 feet long and 490 feet wide." "The over two-acre design contained 150 individual circles the largest, 164 feet across." "KING:" "I have no idea what made it." "What I do know though is that people with boards didn't make this." "Narrator:" "Gary King's experience is just one of many firsthand accounts of designs that mysteriously appear in a short period of time." "It is documented that there are approximately 70 cases of people having an eyewitness sighting of the formation of a crop circle where they are literally standing there in the crop, and it just spontaneously forms in front of them." "There is a loud tweeting sound in a lot of cases." "And then this sort of crackling electrostatic charge on the crops." "And then you just watch as almost like an oriental fan is unrolling, just... the crops just fold down." "In a matter of three seconds, it's all finished." "Narrator:" "Crop circle researchers cite that many of these eyewitness accounts include sightings of strange lights in and around a formation." "Milk Hill, Wiltshire, England." "1991." "Steve Alexander, a local photographer, is filming footage of a crop formation from a neighboring hill, when he captures a strange metallic light floating in the field below." "MALLETT:" "His camera caught sight of what seemed to be a white orb of light flying right across this field right next to a crop circle." "That orb of light, whatever it was, flew directly over a tractor working in the next field down." "And later on, that farmer was contacted, and he said," ""I saw this weird orb of light about the size of a melon or something fly over my tractor."" "I myself have seen several, and they are astonishing in their brightness." "We are dealing with intelligent plasmas that are sending and receiving information for another intelligence of unknown origin." "Orbs of light are a commonly associated phenomenon with crop circles, and this goes all the way back to the story of the mowing-devil in 1678." "The sighting of lights is often associated with these phenomena, and they do seem to suggest something we don't understand." "The ghost lights, the will-o'-the-wisp sightings represented some force of nature we had not entirely acknowledged or given sufficient respect to, some mystery that we need to come to grips with." "Wilcock:" "It could be an actual craft, or it could potentially be something like the stylus from an extraterrestrial hand that is somewhere far away, but this light is the projected form of a technology being used from the safety and comfort of space." "We have to imagine an advanced extraterrestrial race sending out orbs of light that are sort of like peepholes for exploration." "They come to a planet, they find something interesting, the peephole opens into a portal, perhaps through which these advanced visitors can pass, or perhaps through which a human could even enter and travel to the home planet of the orb." "Is this what a crop circle is?" "To me, the proliferation of wormhole-themed crop circles tells us that this is the method of communication as well as travel of these advanced visitors." "There is a possibility that we are dealing with time travelers." "The time travelers are using the crop formations to judge the accuracy of their time travel." "So are the crop formations designed for humans at all?" "Narrator:" "Just what purpose do crop circles serve?" "Are they landing codes for time travelers, as some crop circle investigators suggest?" "Or is it possible that they serve as a communication medium?" "One only meant for us to discover once we evolved enough to discern them from the sky." "Narrator:" "Winchester, England." "August 15, 2002." "A crop formation bearing the image of what appears to be a Grey alien emerges in a wheat field." "At the bottom right corner of the image is a disk-shaped object containing what some believe to be binary code, a computer language consisting of ones and zeros." "There was a crop formation that unmistakably looks like an extraterrestrial, the proverbial Grey with the almond eyes and the triangular-shaped head." "There's also at the bottom, there seems to be a computer disk and what looked like binary code." "The message allegedly says," ""Beware the bearers of false gifts and their broken promises." ""Much pain, but still time." ""There is good out there." ""We oppose deceivers." "Conduit closing."" "It was warning humanity about the deceivers, about dangers." "Narrator:" "Just a year prior, on August 21, 2001, another formation that contained binary code appeared in a wheat field next to the Chilbolton Radio Observatory." "Researchers are convinced that the design was a response to a message that was transmitted into space by astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan in 1974." "In November of 1974," "Carl Sagan and Drake at Cornell University sent out from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, a signal of binary code about Earth to whoever in the cosmos would receive our signal." "Narrator:" "The original message contained binary-encoded information, including the numbers one through ten, an image of our DNA strand, the figure of a human, and a graphic of the solar system with the position of Earth highlighted." "It echoed absolutely, line by line by line." "The DNA did not look like double helix." "It was very bizarre." "And then when you got down, instead of a six-foot human, it was this thing that was maybe a third the height of the human in Carl Sagan, and it was associated with a strange solar system." "It was a very complex, very strange, one-of-a-kind pattern." "We'd never seen anything like it before." "Narrator:" "In 2004, a mysterious rock was found near the Roswell crash site bearing the same image as a crop circle that was discovered in Chiseldon, England, on August 2, 1996." "On the Roswell Rock, you have an almost identical symbol in England." "To me, it's very fascinating, because it essentially shows that they're trying to somehow communicate with us." "So the idea is that perhaps some of these crop circles indeed are messages from elsewhere." "And elsewhere, in my opinion, means of extraterrestrial origin." "Narrator:" "Could it be that some crop formations serve as a medium for extraterrestrial communication?" "Many crop circle researchers say yes, and suggest further evidence of this can be found by examining the advanced astronomical, scientific, and mathematical equations contained within them." "One formation had everyone baffled, and people were saying, "Well, what is this?"" "Then a mathematician had a look at it and said," ""Wait a minute, that's a representation of pi." "And it's correct down to ten decimal places."" "It's a representation of pi in a geometric sense." "It's kind of interesting because the way you get pi out of it is the lengths of the different arcs in each segment." "And what happens is there's these little notches in the spiral that let you know you're at the end of an arc." "So you actually have to measure the arc lengths as you go around, and their lengths give you the digits of pi." "And there's a little circle to give you the decimal point." "So it's a really interesting example of using geometry as a code for representing digits and numbers." "Pope:" "It just shows the level of knowledge, mathematical knowledge, geometric skill that goes into making these things." "Many of the most famous crop circles actually derive from fractal patterns." "The Mandelbrot set, the Julia set." "To make these, you have to have knowledge of math." "Mathematics is, of course, the universal language." "If we ever encounter aliens, they're not gonna speak English or French or German." "We'll speak and we'll communicate via mathematics." "Could crop circles as some believe be an attempt from an alien civilization to reach out and communicate with us?" "Wilcock:" "There's a consistent amount of sacred geometry tetrahedrons, cubes, octahedrons, and even more complex geometric patterns." "Many of our best and top scientists are now saying that this geometry is the secret keys to the higher dimensions." "And it's right there in the crops, as if they're giving us a trail of bread crumbs, showing us how to get to the next level as a planet." "Narrator:" "Might crop formations that contain celestial patterns and mathematical equations really have been created by otherworldly beings attempting to communicate with humans?" "And if extraterrestrial forces are sending messages to mankind, why aren't world governments more interested?" "Some insiders say they are, and suggest that they are not only interested, but may even be directly involved." "Narrator:" "Avebury, England." "July 2006." "The shadow of a geometric pattern appears in a field." "The design echoes a crop formation that was created in the exact same location" "12 months prior." "Crop circle researchers refer to this phenomenon as a "ghost formation."" "The ghost formations are a really curious aside to the main crop circle phenomenon." "The following year or even later in the same year, there's an impression left in the field." "Even though the original crop circle has been harvested or cut down in whatever way, there's a residual effect on the ground." "That, to some people, seems utterly mysterious." "Narrator:" "The altered growth pattern of the affected crops has been known to persist for up to two years after the initial crop circle appears, but only on certain formations." "CHILDRESS:" "A number of crop circles reappear again." "It seems that it's some effort to communicate with us, from extraterrestrials, by putting these designs onto the ground over and over again." "And perhaps what they're trying to do is give us information that they think we need, but we just need to decipher it." "Narrator:" "Could there really be a message so important that the residual design persists in the crops for months and even years?" "If so, wouldn't the crop circle phenomenon be more closely monitored by world governments?" "Some crop circle investigators say yes and suggest that the U.S. and British governments currently utilize satellite technology to secretly photograph and catalog crop formations." "But others suggest their involvement may actually run much deeper." "Just as it was British government policy to downplay the true interest in UFOs, so it was the case with crop circles." "If there's an alien message there, of course government would want that knowledge and they'd want to keep it for themselves." "The intriguing thing there is, of course, that some of the formations that people are seeing might actually be made by the government." "Government scientists would be making the reply that goes out from us to the extraterrestrials." "HOWE:" "Whether crop formations are the residue of intelligent plasmas or extraterrestrials or a combination of both, why can't the whole world know what it is that the governments know about crop formations and lights?" "What would happen if the whole planet knew, if all humans knew we're not alone?" "Narrator:" "Is it possible that world governments are secretly working to uncover messages encrypted within crop circles," "and are even attempting to communicate with otherworldly entities by creating crop circles themselves?" "And if these formations really are messages from extraterrestrials, just what are they trying to communicate?" "HOWE:" "Something keeps laying things down in sequence as if it has a big picture of how it is communicating with this planet, but it is doing so in pieces." "If you looked at the math and you looked at the warnings, something champions us, wants us to evolve." "TSOUKALOS:" "I think that the crop formations are a calling card that we are being given, that is being put underneath our very eyes." "And we really should pay attention to those messages." "Those are little hints that are dropped worldwide that prepare us to change our point of view that we're not the only ones." "Narrator:" "Have extraterrestrials been using crop circles to communicate with mankind throughout our history?" "Are these complex designs pieces of a mathematical puzzle that, once put together and deciphered, will reveal the truth about both our origins and our destiny?" "Perhaps we will unlock the secrets of the universe not by venturing out deeper into space," "but by understanding the messages that are being given to us right here on Earth."