Though I did this interview a year ago, the information is still current.
Hilary
Crop Circles:
An Interview with
Dr. Chet Snow
and
Chad Deetken
Dr. Chet Snow and Chad Deetken have spent years attempting to unravel the mysteries of the phenomenon known as Crop Circles. While their distinct approaches to these formations may initially appear divergent, in essence, much of their core understanding and findings are quite similar. In speaking with both Dr. Snow and Mr. Deetken, what became immediately apparent was a blending of facts and beliefs richly imbued with psychology, hard science, myth, as well as ancient and contemporary wisdom. I enjoyed my time with these gentlemen immensely and I am deeply grateful that they took time out of their hectic schedules to be interviewed.
- Hilary A. Thomas
HT: How did your interest in crop circles begin?
Dr. Snow: This is a little run down of how I got involved with crop circles because that is very personal to me. If you had asked me about crop circles ten years ago I probably would have had a confused blank look in my eyes and asked, ‘What do you mean? A crop running around in circles in a crop field?’ At that time, I wouldn’t have had any idea about them. Most people that I know, first really became aware of them in the early 1990s. I certainly became aware of them in 1990 [December of 1990 or January of 1991] when a friend from England, Dean Holden, came to visit and brought me a picture. I had never seen them before. I think it is worthwhile to note that it was really about that time that the circles became much more pictograms than just plain circles, circles in a line or, even circles in a pattern. They suddenly became patterns that looked like something and it became very clear that they were intelligently made. They weren’t just a random event out in a field. That was the first thing I wanted to say. The second point is that this introduction to the crops circles was a very synchronized experience for me. Within a month of meeting Dean, the elders from one of the Hopi villages called me up to visit them on a completely different matter. Something intuitively said to me, ‘Why don’t you take these pictures with you?’ I brought the picture when I went to meet them in February of 1991. That was really quite an eye-opener for me because suddenly they recognized certain of these patterns as having meaning to them. They took us out into a sacred canyon and showed us at least one set of petroglyps on the rock wall that really resembled one of the crop circle formations that I had shown them. I showed them a couple of other pictures with what seemed to be the English peoples’ interpretation and they said, ‘No, no, no. You have to turned it upside down and it means something else.’ They were very excited about them and the fact that they were showing up now somewhere else in the world had meaning to them. I was excited by their reaction as I am quite interested in the prophetic aspect of the Hopi. Later on as I studied more, I’ve learned that many of agriglyphs, or pictograms, seem to have meaning for other native or indigenous people including Australian aborigines. This is when I got involved with crop circles. Information about these formation eventually spread wider into our Western world maybe even at an unconscious level. People began to see these increasingly beautiful and complex formulas. This was a time (1990) when we began to get good aerial photos. Suddenly people, maybe even unconsciously, had a recognition of something they didn’t understand that attracted them. Soon the media picked it up on the story. People got involved with wanting to do research on them. Then, for what ever reasons, maybe many different ones, many people got turned off at a public level. The media certainly got turned off, in part because they couldn’t solve the mystery. They wanted it all to be wrapped up neatly and decided. Who was making them? How were they making them? And what was being made? The story of the crop circles didn’t unfold that neatly. Since that time, it seems as if a very self selected cadre of people of no more than 100 to 150 people, seem to be the ones that return year after year.
HT: Did the Hopi have any specific interpretations about any of the circles?
Dr. Snow: One of the sets, the one they got the most excited about, is very similar to part of their Creation story. I won’t go into all of their prophecy but, one of the parts of their prophecy is that we are moving from one world civilization to another. We are now in the fourth world, as they call it, and we are about to move into the fifth world. One of the sets of events that has to happen, or that is prophesied to happen, will be that there will be signs around the planet that are showing the recreation of the world starting to happen. One of the Hopi creation pictoglyphs is very similar to some of the crop circle glyphs that were coming in the 1990, 91, 92 time frame. When that happened they got very excited to see it because it was confirmation, I guess, for them that this sign was happening around the world. Another crop circle that was very similar to that, and that had great meaning for them, was formed in 1992 and was the very first moon sign to occur. We had never had a crop circle that had crescents in it, such as a moon crescent. Collin Andrews went to visit some Hopi elders at that point. They were very excited because one of their prophecies said that the moon had to appear on the Earth. This formation was a way for the moon to appear on the Earth.
HT: There was also one formation that showed the orbiting planets of which Earth was missing.
Dr. Snow: That was a later one and that also seemed important to them because it showed that there was a possibility that we, not that the planet was going to be wiped out but, that the world was going to be changed.
HT: Or ascend or go into the new world.
Dr. Snow: That’s right, a change from one world to another world which could, maybe in more metaphysical language, be considered to be a change in dimension. Indigenous people don’t talk in those terms but, they talk about going from one world to another. If one world suddenly disappears well, that means its gone to the other side - to the other world.
HT: Mr. Deetken, how would you define crops circles or describe their defining characteristics?
Mr. Deetken: I have a different background than Chet. When I go to England I look the technical aspects of crop circles. I do some of the on the ground research. I don’t have a background in this sort of thing at all. In 1990, I just happen to be channel surfing on TV and one of the programs that flashed across was Unsolved Mysteries. They just happen to have a spot on crop circles. I immediately became so fascinated by this mystery that within four or five months I was looking at crop circles myself in the province of Saskatchewan in Canada. 1990 was one of the first years that they really appeared. I’ve been at it ever since. It just kind of grabbed me by the pants. I’ve been going to England since 1992 every single year and staying for about a month.
HT: What is your background?
Mr. Deetken: My background is really varied. I’ve got a general university education. Job wise, I worked as a student loan administrator at the University of British Columbia for fourteen years and various other colleges for about four years after that.
HT: So this really is off the mark for you.
Mr. Deetken: Off the mark, yes. I don’t think it matters what your background is to be fascinated by crop circles. It seems the more varied the background the better perspective you get on this phenomenon because there are so many aspects to it. You have to be knowledgeable in some many different disciplines. If you specialize in one area, such as in astronomy, and if you look at it from just that angle it would really limit you.
HT: It’s also testimony to the drawing power that the crop circles have in interesting people from such a large cross section of careers and cultures.
Mr. Deetken: Yes, very powerful and Chet had alluded to that before. There are 100 to 150 or so hard core people who are attracted to this phenomenon, not all of whom necessarily go to England; there are some people researching in the United States. There is certainly a very small group of people who bond with the formations. I’ve talked to most of these people and I don’t think anyone really knows why they have this attraction. It is something deep within us. The crops circles are something very particular. Possibly, something with these formations is that there is a spiritual element to them. Maybe that is why it attracts these certain types of people. But, to your original question, what is a crop circle to me? I would have to say that quite simply it’s a geometric impression in a field, in a planted field, generally in a cereal crop although there are a few exceptions. The majority are impressions in wheat, oat, barely, etc. They range from very simple circles, particularly earlier on and 70s and early 80s, to incredibly complex patterns such as you see today.
Dr. Snow: I think that one defining parts is that in the genuine crop circle it most of the stalks of those crops are not killed. They are bent over, in some unusual way but, they are not flatten. It’s only when people walk in it later that they actually get flatten. The crop will continue to grow and mature. Sometimes in the wheat fields in England, for example, some circles come in early June or July and the crop won’t be harvested until August. The crop will change color just like the rest of the field and actually grow several inches while it’s bent over at a 45 or 50 degree angle.
Mr. Deetken: I have spent most of my time looking at the anomalous effects on the ground. Regardless of what the hoaxers may say, or the people who claim to be making them, they can not account for the things that you see on the ground if you spend the time looking at the bends. Generally the bends at the nodes but, also the ones that are simply crimped over, they are not broken either. You don’t see footprints on them and you don’t see any other damage. If you are walking on the stalks in the process of making a circle you are going to break their stalks. You are not going to just bend them above the ground level. Where you step you will cause damage. You crack them, you break them. In a green crop, there is a very light coating, a waxy coating on the stalks and the leaves. If you step on it you’ll leave the imprint of your shoes or whatever. It’s fairly easy to see. A genuine circle will not have those or any other types of damage. Additionally, the soil is not compacted. The soil is untouched. It’s simply the stalks that go down.
HT: The crop circles seem to be becoming more elaborate on many levels, not only in the size and the complexity of the design but, also internally with the weaving. The weaving itself is becoming more complex. I heard there was an incident where there were two porcupines caught in them and the quills were actually woven into the pattern. That’s a complex process.
Mr. Deetken: That is extremely infrequent. The case you are referring to was at Saskatchewan, Canada and the one, which I didn’t actually go to investigate but, I spoke with the farmer and reporters and several of the researchers. That porcupine appeared to have been caught at the edge of the formation and dragged in because there were drag marks through the soil. Broken quills that had broken off and stuck in the soil were found in the center and the remaining quills were swirled in the general direction of the pattern itself. We were trying to figure out why could it happen to a porcupine and why doesn’t it happen to birds and mice. Why don’t we see dead insects or birds or mice which are plentiful in the wheat fields. Possibly one of the answers is that animals have more senses then we do. If there is any warning to a crop formation, due to the energies being released to create the formation, these animals will likely have a chance to escape as they do before earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other events of that nature. Porcupines have a different mechanism. When threatened, they simply roll up in a ball. That’s their defense. There were actually three incidents, over about six years, all in Canada involving porcupines. Their natural defense response may explain why they were found in the formations. Again, this is extremely rare.
Dr. Snow: I think that is really important. There have been three different incidents over a long period of time. As far as I know in England, there has never been any dead animal found in any formation. You will occasionally find bird feathers as if the bird were startled and flew off suddenly. The same thing occurs with insects. We have never found dead insects yet, anybody who walks in a wheat field, or even if you lie down in a crop circle that has already been formed, you often find insects.
HT: Yes, I had heard it was because porcupines do tend to ball up instead of running away that they had been caught up in the formation.
Mr. Deetken: They are one of the few creatures that does that.
HT: Approximately how many crop circles are known to have existed?
Dr. Snow: We can each give an estimate but, it is only an estimate. It is obviously in the thousands. In England alone since 1990, there have been, in the highest years, over one hundred separate formations. Now, I guess this last year, it was in the sixties but, of course, the formations are so much bigger and contain many more circles now than they used to that it is hard to estimate. For awhile, people were counting the numbers of total circles. But, then they gave up on that when the formations went up into 100, 190, even 200 circles.
Mr. Deetken: It is difficult to get an accurate count. For one thing, we don’t know how many are unreported. Of the ones that were, again it depends on your method of counting, I think a low estimate for just England would be about 2,000. A high estimate would be about 3,000 to 4,000. These are the numbers that I’ve determined. I actually did some research into that just a few weeks back to try to get an accurate record. But, again, you don’t know how many were not recorded. As far as foreign countries go, there are probably another 500 to 1,000 scattered around the world.
Dr. Snow: I think there have been 34 countries that someone has reported that there has been a crop circle or even just a simple circle at some point in those countries between 1980 and now. I don’t think they were being reported in other countries until the late 80s as far as I know. It was a pretty much a phenomenon in England until that time.
Mr. Deetken: Yes, possibly in Australia as well but, they called them saucer nests in the late 60s and early 70s. We’re not sure what constitutes a crop circle and what denotes a saucer nest. It’s a nebulous distinction but, if you say there have been approximately 3,500 formations world wide I think you’d be in the ball park.
Dr. Snow: I think that that is accurate and this number indicates separate formations not circles. If you are counting individual circles then you have to multiply that sum by at least ten.
Mr. Deetken: Absolutely. Especially since 1990 because with these formations we’ve had up to 200 circles making up one single formation.
HT: What do you think the strongest arguments are that crop circles are a legitimate yet, unexplained phenomenon.
Dr. Snow: We were talking about this last night actually. To my way of looking at it, there are two arguments that stand out. Remember that I was a bit skeptical when I initially got involved. Firstly, there have approximately 2,000 formations created in England. The English government has made it very clear that they consider this to be an illegal trespass. The farmers, in many cases, have tried to control their fields, or to take action against potential saboteurs, or trespassers and yet in what is well on 18 plus years now, there has never been a single arrest, or person found in a field at night in any case ever in England or in any country that I know of. So, to me that is very strong evidence that this is a phenomenon that isn’t taking place the way the media, or alleged hoaxers are claiming. That’s a very strong argument because the farmers have a strong interest in keeping people out of their fields, because it does destroy some of their field ultimately. The second argument is similar with a more governmental twist. I worked for the Air Force for a number of years. I didn’t work in surveillance. However, I was aware that we have spy satellites and spy airplanes that fly above sensitive areas that can take photographs both infer-red and regular photographs all day and all night. The capabilities of this equipment can show great detail down to the identity of a person, such as the insignia on their shoulders. In all of these years, the focus of crop circles in England is within thirty miles of the Salisbury Testing Range which is England’s largest military complex where they test weapons. I’m sure, that like it or not, our government and other governments have satellites that watch that part of England all the time. If this, in fact, were a hoaxed phenomenon it would be very simple to release a piece of tape showing people in the fields doing it. No such tape has ever been forth coming in the eighteen or twenty years that this has been going on.
Mr. Deetken: That’s a really good point. I was a member of project Argus in 1992 as a scientific attempt to come to grips with the crop circle phenomenon in England. One of the things that we did was to make a crop circle and see how long it takes. We made it in broad daylight, broad daylight being the best of conditions. There were two of us. Our circle was a circle with a ring around it. It measured 35 feet with an overall diameter and a path coming off of it ending in a sort of letter "E" as well as one separate circle which is called a "grape shot". It was very simple. It took us two full hours and I did a lot of the stomping. I was really exhausted. I’m in pretty good shape. I do a lot of hiking. So, I know it’s a lot of work. In 1995, Author Clark sent a film crew to Wiltshire because he wanted to put this into one of his television specials. They hired three people, two we know had experience. There are hoaxes; we know that. It’s not a secret. Two people had experience, one person was a friend, and again in broad daylight with the farmer’s permission, they made a formation that had a flower petal shaped. It was fairly simple - five petals, ring around the outside, a large circle in the center as the center of a flower. They did it in broad daylight - beautiful sun with all the implements and all the drawings in place. It took them four and a half hours under absolute perfect conditions just to make this thing. It didn’t look bad from the air I have to admit but, on the ground it looked very mechanical, very epicenter where they had to stand to measure the circles, etc. The area was completely trashed. The stalks were all broken. One of the formations last years was approximately 1000 feet in diameter, the Windmill Hill one. It consisted of approximately 194 circles. It was huge. It came at night. We know that the vast majority come at night. We have witnesses who are farmers or delivery people. How in the heck are you going to make a 1000 footer in the middle of the night. You are not able to use light because you will be seen. There are a lot of researchers, or cropies as we call them, out in the fields trying to catch the phenomenon at work as well as irate farmers and the police, etc. So, you’d have to be working in absolute darkness. Quite often you can not see ten feet ahead of you. It is ludicrous to think that people can make something on that scale in the middle of night. Don’t forget, in the summer which is when all of these occur July and August, you only have about five hours of absolute darkness.
Dr. Snow: I would add that the one at Windmill Hill was a triple spiral. It looked like an octopus, or the blades on a fan. That had formed on the night of July 28th-29th and it just so happens that my wife and I were driving by the next morning. It was a very misty, cloudy night. It had rained the day before. We were the first people to discover it on the ground. We went looking for a hedgerow up to where you could walk down the tramlines. That’s the proper protocol. The tractors always use the same lines in England. When we walked down that into the first circle and eventually to the middle circle there was absolutely no breakage of the stalks.
Mr. Deetken: Chet just hit upon another really good point. It rains a lot in England and the fields, even a day or so after a rain, are quite muddy. Wiltshire, which is the epicenter of the crop circle country, is notorious for having a clay which sticks to your shoes. If you try to walk into a formation when the ground it like that and you leave big clots of mud. During project Argus, we found that 60% of the formations that we were sure of and that occurred on a particular night, showed up on a night when it was either raining or the ground was extremely wet. And there were no footprints. You’d have to be hanging off a helicopter rope not touching the ground to create something like that and not leave any prints. Also, I know in England most of the fields have, what they call tramlines where the tractors go up and down to spray herbicides or pesticides and fertilize during the summer so, it’s fairly easy to walk into a field when it is dry and not leave a print. In Canada and the United States there are no tramlines; they aerial spray. I have personally seen a half of dozen formations in Saskatchewan. I was the first one there. There was not a single trace of anything going into the field. Even if a deer walks through the field you can see it. It will leave a trail. There is no way to get into those fields at all, unless again, you are lowered by a helicopter. In England between the tramlines there is about 50 to 65 to 70 feet, depending on the type of equipment they are using. If you have a formation made of many different circles, a lot of them are between the tramlines so someone would have to jump a good 25 feet to get in there. Again, there are not trails.
Dr. Snow: So, those are really the basic arguments I think. Again the weather has a lot to do with it because if people where to walk up those tramlines they would get mud all over their shoes. Tramlines are just earth. It’s not like you are walking on grass. You are just on mud.
Mr. Deetken: There are dozens of other reasons, we don’t have time to go into them. That’s what the majority of us do over there. The number one goal is to prove that they are not made by people. The second objective is to try to figure out what energies are involved. The third effort, I guess at this point, is to determine what, or who, is behind these energies.
Dr. Snow: I’d say one last thing just to bring in a different perspective. There has certainly been a limited amount but, some serious scientific research on the effects of the energies on the circles themselves. This is what Dr. W. C. Levengood in Michigan is doing. People have gone and collected samples of the grain, or the stalks in circles, both inside and outside of the circles. He has shown in his tests that inside the circles the grain is desiccated, in other words the water has been pull out of it. He also found that there are changes at the cellular level that take place that can only show up under a microscope and that obviously couldn’t be created by somebody doing a mechanical pushing down of a crop in a field.
Mr. Deetken: Dr. Levengood is a planet biophysicist with 45 years experience in cereal crops so he knows what he’s talking about.
HT: Just to play the devils advocate, what would you say are the strongest arguments that crop circles are hoaxes?
Dr. Snow: I think the strongest argument is that we can’t explain it. People want it to be explained. If your world view can not go beyond the concepts that we are at the top of the intelligence chain here on this planet, and we are the only specie that has that level of intelligence, then you have to say it was manmade since you can’t hold another view.
Mr. Deetken: It’s the simplest most obvious answer to something that bothers a lot of people. People want a simple answer. They don’t want something that has problematic answers that would change the whole way that they think about things so, the first thing that everybody says, ‘Oh, they are just hoaxed. People are very ingenious. They do the weirdest things. And they are capable of very cleaver things.’
Dr. Snow: I suppose the other argument is that there are a few people who have repeatedly, over a number of years, made claims that they have done them. Now, the problem with that isn’t where that falls a apart a little but, where the story breaks down completely. In a few cases, they have been foolhardy enough to take up the challenge of either the media or of researchers to make one. In almost every case when they have been forced to make one, they haven’t been able to make them nearly as beautiful, as pristine, as precious as the ones you find naturally.
HT: And in ideal conditions?
Dr. Snow: Oh, they always make them under ideal conditions. Except there have been some that have been made at dusk or at night. However, nonetheless that’s not been on a foggy, rainy, cloudy night.
Mr. Deetken: The key word here is that they claim to be making formations. The hoaxers all claim to be doing them. They have virtually no evidence. They’ve never been able to provide evidence that they are making them. We always ask, ‘Well, why don’t you make a formation and take a picture with a flash or whatever, or do it in the daytime, show us when it is a quarter done, half done, three-quarters, finished.’ Just show us some evidence. Doug or David, you’ve probably heard were the original ones who claimed to have made most of them. Or guys like Robert Irving or others. They’ve never been able to come with the evidence. We have a lot of evidence that points to quite the contrary. When we confront them with this evidence that we have and ask, ‘Well, how did you do that? How did you produce this effect?’ They don’t even know what we are talking about.
Dr. Snow: Coming back to the psychological angle, I think that there is an unconscious desire of people to have it solved, to have an explanation. People don’t like things that keep coming back as a mystery, most people don’t anyway. I think that the media plays up on this. Then whether or not there is a governmental conspiracy to keep people from researching them or not, I don’t know. I think that it would satisfy the government not to have mysterious phenomena occurring again within 40, 50 miles of some of Britain’s top military installations.
HT: That brings me into my next question. I can understand why scientists would dismiss crop circles. But, I understand that the military has been active in completely wiping some of them out as soon as they form, I’m referring to the US military. I’m surprised that the US military would have any involvement and I was wondering if you had thoughts about this.
Dr. Snow: I would qualify that a little bit. It’s not my experience that the military have been directly involved in wiping them out in very many cases. Apparently, there was a case in 1991, what was called the Mandelbrot Set that took place near Cambridge where Professor Mandelbrot who is one of the fathers of chaos theory had shown on a computer how you could generate through random number generation and came up with a beautiful pattern. This pattern then appeared in a crop circle. My understanding is that the British military, not the American, set fire to the thing within a day or two and that they had the farmer drive a tractor through it first. Other than that, I don’t know of any case where they physically destroyed a crop circle. They have certainly harassed researchers going into crop circles with helicopters. These are not farmers with helicopters. They just don’t have that capability. These are British military helicopter buzzing you, flying down so low that you have to duck your head because of the wind from the helicopter might knock you down. I myself have seen the helicopters. I even have pictures of them over certain formations particularly back in the early 1990s.
Mr. Deetken: I haven’t had much evidence either personal, or from other people, that the military have been involved in either cordoning crop circles off to the public and destroying the evidence whatever. There have been a few cases. Chet mentioned one and I believe there was another one in the states where they cordoned off an area where there was a crop circle and wouldn’t let anyone near. Their explanation was that there was a fugitive. He had murdered somebody and that he was suspected of being in the area. That is why they cordoned it off and kept everybody out. Now, that may be a cover up explanation, who knows. But, why just do it at one or two but? It’s certainly not wide spread. In fact, I would say, it’s extremely rare.
Dr. Snow: But, the harassment is pretty wide spread.
Mr. Deetken: Harassment, yes, and black helicopters, surveillance I think, is probably the most obvious interest of military and government. They are keeping their eye on this. Publicly, they say it’s a lot of malarkey that they are all made by humans or weather phenomena, or this or that. Privately, we know that they [military] are there.
Dr. Snow: I know people who have worked in the crop fields longer, like Colin Andrews. He knows they harass them quite deliberately, coming down and swooping the researchers trying to make them leave the field. We can’t explain why that is the case. If there are any crop circles on the Salisbury Range, obviously no outside observer would see them because it is off limits both on foot traffic and to private airplanes. You can’t fly within so many miles of that. No private pilot would dare to do it because they would lose their license.
Dr. Snow: That is why I wouldn’t want to say that they are doing terrible things about it. Basically, I think that their best shot at this is to try to discredit.
Mr. Deetken: Yes, they have been active in that. There’s been a lot of attempts to discredit this phenomenon. I think a classic example is Doug Bower and David Chorley. They came out of the blue and suddenly claimed that they had made nearly all of the crop formations in England since 1978. Well, to their surprise, the first one recorded was in 1976. So, they messed up but, they were very adamant that they had made them all. They set a trap for one of the researchers, Pat Delgado, who was Colin Andrew’s partner at the time. The story got into the press through a tabloid newspaper who probably paid them for the story. It went around the world and within 48 hours just about every major newspaper, TV, etc., carried the story.
Dr. Snow: And then it became case closed.
Mr. Deetken: This just does not happen. This is a minor story as far as world events are concerned. How it got to be in every major paper around the world was really bizarre. I’ve spoken to newspaper people. One person, who has very good connections with the government, said it was bizarre that this story gained that sort of headway as a major story.
Dr. Snow: In other words, somebody, somewhere was pushing on it to make it happen.
Mr. Deetken: Another person was Jim Schnabel, an American, who had spent a fair bit of time in England. Nobody knew what he was really doing there except he said he was a journalist. He wrote a devastating book after having infiltrating a few of the research groups which basically targeted the people themselves to discredit them not the phenomenon. There appeared to have been something behind him because his book had such limited circulation that he must have lost a lot of money on it.
Dr. Snow: This Jim Schnabel has also written on remote viewing in the exact same way taking the point of view that remote viewing, and remote viewers, are liars and there isn’t anything to it to speak. This, of course, is the point of view that also came out from the CIA itself saying, ‘Oh, yeah, we tried that and it didn’t work very well.’ When if you know anything about the topic, and know anybody who has even worked in it, you know that they were apparently very successful especially in the Gulf War. Again, this is a disinformation campaign and it is suspect when you see a journalist, or a supposed journalist, writing on one subject after another always taking a tact of a personal smear campaign. That’s how his books are. He smears the people to make them seem not credible rather than to discredit the phenomenon because he doesn’t have enough information, he really can’t do that. Then you have to question what’s behind it.
Mr. Deetken: So, this could be the extent of government involvement, in being behind certain people who discredit the phenomenon and the researchers in particular. It’s very effective.
Dr. Snow: I think that’s their real desire is to keep people away from the formations. If you have someone who writes the same kind of books on these two topics and takes the line that is very clearly the line that the government itself has put out, I think that it’s not unfair to extrapolate and to say that he’s doing the same thing in his other work to.
HT: Do crop circles tend to form near or away from power sources?
Dr. Snow: It’s my understanding that often crop circles form under high tension power lines. I know of at least four that I’ve been in in the last few years that were right under high tension power lines.
Mr. Deetken: Not the majority but, a fairly large percentage of them form either under, or very close to power lines.
HT: Do you think that it is a relative matter or that it is just coincidence?
Mr. Deetken: I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I don’t know what the relationship is but, I’ve been in too many crop formations that have high tension lines running over head.
Dr. Snow: Another characteristic of fields that have crop formations is that they have some source of water near by.
HT: Well, that would be a good conductor of energy.
Dr. Snow: All of those are good conductors of electromagnetic energies.
Mr. Deetken: Water as in underground aquifer.
Dr. Snow: Particularly, underground aquifers. Sometimes it is a little lake or cattle troth, as well. Many people have seen that there are underground aquifers in the fields in which there are many crop circles - especially the ones that seem to come back year after year.
Mr. Deetken: Speaking of energy, another interesting aspect is that a great number of the formations are on, what they call ley-lines in England - the Earth energies which you can dowse. You can detect them going through fields. Obviously, the Stonehenge Avebury area is very strong in these Earth energies. It also happens to be the center of crop circle phenomenon so, that is surely not a coincidence. I dowse just about all the crop formations that I go into and I find these energy lines running through them. Possibly some of the ley-lines divert after the formation comes down and runs through it. On others, the formation actually comes right dead on top such as the St. Michael and St. Mary lines. One, the Spider’s Web at Avebury three years ago, I dowsed the Mary line right after the formation appeared. The Mary line, instead of being a single line, was broken up into at least two to three dozen lines. Right at the formation. Some went through it but, most of them went around it. This formation dispersed the energy. That following year I went back, it was all harvested an gone, and the Mary line again was one single stream.
Dr. Snow: The crop circles do tend to fall, or often fall, on ley-lines. One thing, that I mentioned that I think is important for readers to understand, is that the crop circles, just as Chad said, may disturb the energies for the time of the crop but, after the crop is harvested and the field is plowed and re-planted new circles with different patterning may appear in the exact same field and have a different energy to them.
HT: I have heard that the grain inside the crop circle is affected.
Mr. Deetken: We have done experiments with the germination of seeds from the crop formations and compare those to controls from the same field but, well outside of the crop formation. It seems that when you germinate those seeds, and I’ve done it myself, the ones in the crop formation germinate faster with a higher percent of them germinating. You don’t have as many dead ones and once they start to grow they grow at a faster rate than the control samples to a certain point and then the control samples catch up. There does appear to be an acceleration of growth. Dr. Levengood has done some work on that.
Dr. Snow: That seems to apply to crop circles everywhere. I think it’s important that you make this distinction. It doesn’t mean that the crop that was already planted came in stronger in that field or something like that.
Mr. Deetken: No, as a matter of fact, one of the few apparent effects on the crops, visual effects at least, in a crop formation is, if the formation occurs earlier in the growing season before the heads really form or mature then the seeds are very often stunted up to 30 or 40% than the control samples. Sometimes the seed heads look like they formed but, there is no actual seed in them. That’s from Levengood’s research.
Dr. Snow: So, it doesn’t seem to have a positive effect on the crop that is right there but, if you were to take that seed, which I personally feel our government should be doing, and saving it or using it again then it seems to have a stronger effect. The seed that is in them is potentized. It may indicate that not all the formations are made from the same source or using the exact same methods.
HT: This leads into the next question. These patterns seem to be organized rather than random which would suggest some kind of intelligence. I’m sure you’ve thought about it. Would you care to comment on what you think that source of intelligence is?
Dr. Snow: Well, I think we’ve all thought about it. I would guess that the crop circle research teams divide up into two basic camps. The two camps are: do you believe that this could be extraterrestrial, meaning some kind of physical intervention by beings that are not from Earth or you don’t. Perhaps your personal world view or mindset determines which side of the fence you fall on.
Mr. Deetken: When you cut through all the strange theory, I think the most prevalent two that remain is the nuts and bolts type of people who are into UFOs, physical crafts with laser guns blasting patterns into the fields trying to communicate in some way with Earth. The other people are more spiritually oriented. Spiritually could mean extraterrestrial or terrestrial or inter-dimensional.
Dr. Snow: Some sort of super natural force as we would define it that has intelligence. God would be defined as a super natural force that is intelligent. I think that their are a number of people who do believe that this is some kind of connection to extraterrestrials. Steven Greer, and his group of the CSETI project, have done a number of summers where they’ve gone and done meditational work. They feel that they have been answered by crop circles forming on the days or nights after they have done their work they feel they were asking them to come. Therefore, that is their answer. I think that there are other people, perhaps even a larger majority of people, who are involved in the research that feel that there is a spiritual force and that the message will ultimately be understood as spiritual.
HT: Can I guess that you fall in the latter group of the spiritual?
Dr. Snow: It’s odd but, I’m like a lot of indigenous peoples. I can believe A and non A at the same time. It doesn’t bother me. It may well be spiritual and extraterrestrial or, some of them are extraterrestrial who are copying the spiritual ones or vice versa. I’m not sure they are all from the same identical source. Personally, I sense energies, and I have been very fortunate in being among the first people that visit within the first day or so. Every year, within at least two or three formations, sometimes they feel very different than other times. Sometimes they feel personal and meditative and intuitive and sometimes they are very harsh and discordant and difficult to be in even though physically they may look as beautiful as the others.
Mr. Deetken: I’ve seen formations that were extremely disappointing and I’ve seen ones that were incredibly beautiful and intricate and well made and everything in between. It’s like there are all different kinds of artists involved. There is energy that is applied, sometimes it is over applied sometimes under applied. Just like with artists, some are really good and some are not that great.
HT: Mr. Deetken, what do you think the source of this intelligence is?
Dr. Snow: I’m glad you’ve used that word [intelligence] because of all the theories that are out there, and this is really a personal matter since we don’t really know what’s behind it all, whatever your pet theory maybe you have to add the word intelligence. This is definitely an intelligence. There is no doubt about it. It’s not a random act of any sort. My personal feeling is that it, and this is from experience, is that it is spiritual. I really don’t know where it is coming from. To me, it almost feels like a communication of some sort from the past to the present about the future. That’s probably the best way to put it.
HT: I’ve never heard that interpretation. I like it.
Mr. Deetken: Yes, it just struck me. I’ve never heard it from anybody. It came me in the fields. On quite a few occasions, I really had a powerful feeling that I was being watched. There were beings behind me or, forming a circle around me, that they had something to do with our past. Again, they were communicating with the present about the future. Also, I think there is something to the timing of the crop formations. They came into being in 1976-78, and there may have been some before but, that’s when it came to the public’s attention. I was involved with environmental concerns for quite a long time, and still I am but, this is about the time people began to worry about the environment or shortly thereafter. It may be a coincidence, maybe it’s not a coincidence that these crop circles have something to do with our treatment of our planet. It’s a very strong possibility.
Dr. Snow: I would second that. I think that it’s a very important message that the symbols of our ancient cultures are being used and therefore obviously something has been aware of us for a long time. If it is inter-dimensional in nature, or super natural in nature, has the ability to look back through time and see what symbols have affected people. In general, the symbols used in the early 1990s are symbols that would have meaning to people four to six thousand years ago which is just about the time that that part of England was settled. When Wiltshire was first settled, the first settlements were about that long ago. As time has moved forward, 1989 to 1994 to 1997, much of the symbolism has come closer to us in time. I have been noticing for the last two to three years there have been many more symbols from the Judo, Christian, Muslim worlds then there were before. I wonder if this might indicate or refer to what you said about something from our past speaking to the present about the future. It may equally be something from our future speaking about the past or the future to us in present. Definitely this involves time. I think everybody who gets into crop circles gets a feeling that they are outside of time. There have been a couple of cases in which people felt that they were actually transported back into the past by being in the circle. I believe the message does have to do with our stewardship of this planet. I think it echoes a lot of what the indigenous people like the Hopi are telling us. We have made a wrong turn here and that we need to correct our course of action and our attitude about Earth, the planet and maybe even our own role here. For me, that is the primary message of the circles. It’s no accident then that they are coming in a key point in our food chain.
Interview date: 12/11.97
Internationally-acclaimed author, lecturer and regression therapist, Dr. Chet B. Snow has degrees from Columbia University, The Sorbonne and The International Institute for Advanced Studies. From 1983 to 1985 he studied with Dr. Helen Wambach, a pioneering researcher into the psychology of reincarnation or past lives. His story, supplemented by painstaking research into ancient prophecies and the reports of hundreds of other present-day "time travelers," forms the basis of his ground-breaking book, "Mass Dreams of the Future." Dr. Snow's writing style has been hailed by such authorities as Marilyn Ferguson who said he'd tackled his subject "with the thoroughness of a scholar and the spark of a story teller," and Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, "I couldn't stop reading this fascinating book." http://nen.sedona.net/earthshift/
Chat Deetken was raised in Ontario but has lived in Vancouver, B. C. since 1973. He received a degree in Arts from the University of British Columbia in 1976. For 15 years he was a Student Loans Administrator for UBC and later for several colleges. Six years ago, Mr. Deetken started a small business based on nutrition and have been involved with that since. In 1992, Mr. Deetken was invited to participate in a scientific investigation called "Project Argus." Argus involved several dozen people, many of them scientists, who would spend the summer of '92 in England researching this phenomenon. His duties were to observe, detail and photograph anomalous effects found in the crop and to compare formations with those in Canada. Since 1992, Mr. Deetken has spent one month every summer in England to continue his research. There, he works and cooperates with leading investigators as well as scientists. Mr. Deetken has written numerous articles and reports and have been interviewed extensively on TV and radio, including two hours on the Art Bell Show.
CC information sources on the Internet:
Crop Circle Connector
http://www.alpha.mic.dundee.ac.uk/ft/crop_circles/1996/connect.html
Crop Circles: A review of crop circle web sites: http://wol.pace.edu/csis/dyson/crop1.html
Crop Circle Central: http://www.paradigmshift.com/
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