I'm super cereal, you guys!

Hey there dear readers, I realize that it's been quite a few days (4 to be exact I think). I have exams coming up this week so tonight's post will, unfortunately, be a little short. Hopefully towards the end of the week we will be back on a more regular schedule as far as posting goes.

Anyway on to tonight's story.  I caught this via both the Daily Grail and also over at ATS. This Science Daily story offers an alternative to the standard "rope and plank" explanation behind the Crop Circle phenomena. Now personally I have never been a huge fan of Crop Circles. I can't really say why for sure, they just never really grabbed me as something of interest.

This new article however purports to offer a new potential solution to the Crop Circle enigma. From the article:

According to Taylor, physics could potentially hold the answer, with crop-circle artists possibly using the Global Positioning System (GPS) as well as lasers and microwaves to create their patterns, dispensing with the rope, planks of wood and bar stools that have traditionally been used.
Microwaves, Taylor suggests, could be used to make crop stalks fall over and cool in a horizontal position -- a technique that could explain the speed and efficiency of the artists and the incredible detail that some crop circles exhibit.

Follow this link in order to read the entire article. I feel fairly confident that this isn't a new theory in the field of Crop Circle research. As a matter of fact I believe that Jacques Vallee offered this same (or similar at least) opinion just a few years ago.

Turns out I was right, from that article written by Jacques Vallee:

These studies point to the crop formations as the result of sophisticated electronic warfare experiments conducted by defense contractors. The answer to question (1) provides the first clue: If you are trying to calibrate a beam, drawing a pattern on a wheat field can yield precision information within the diameter of one stalk over hundreds of feet, an ideal test situation. The answer to question (2) narrows down the type of energy that can be responsible, because the amount of heat radiation that needs to be coupled into one node of a stalk of wheat to vaporize the water content is a known quantity, as laboratory tests in France and in the United States soon established. The answer to question (3) points to the likely authors of the tests.

It is tempting to jump to the conclusion that some sort of space-based weapon is being developed. I am reluctant to assume this because of the cost involved. Even if satellites represent the ultimate platform for such a weapon, which does not seem obvious to me, the calibration tests can be carried out far more cheaply from a conventional aircraft. In those cases when witnesses on the ground have seen formations in the process of being created, they have described a reddish glow at ground level, with the vegetation bent over in a matter of minutes. This would be consistent with a beam directed at the field from a hovering dirigible, painting a figure very much in the same way as an electron beam "paints" a digital image on a computer screen. From conversations I have had with the investigators involved, the beam would be unlikely to be a simple infrared beam. Instead a combination of laser and microwave transmitters may be involved, or a form of maser. Perhaps the increasingly sophisticated tests are designed, precisely, to discover optimal combinations.

Here is the link to that original article. Well I'm happy that at least some scientists are looking at alternative theories to the Crop-circle enigma beyond just the straight forward “rope and plank” theory. I just wish that perhaps sometimes they would listen to some of the thinkers in this field first.