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6: Dutch crop circle research
197 Plays1 year ago
I am joined by Dr Eltjo Haselhoff, a well published physicist and long-term researcher into the crop circle phenomenon, to discuss some key aspects of his work in the Netherlands and beyond.
In this episode you will learn about
- Why some crop circles are hard to explain in terms of human hoaxes or known natural phenomena
- The recurrent biophysical and mathematical anomalous properties of some crop circles
- The relationship between crop circles and orbs/balls of light
- How to approach the question of what crop circles may mean
More about Dr Haselhoff’s work:
RearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eltjo-Haselhoff-2/research
Website: https://www.simplerelativity.info/news.html
Book on crop circles: The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles: Scientific Research & Urban Legends. Frog Ltd. Berkeley, California. 2001
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Welcome
00:00:05
Speaker
you
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode number six of European UFOs. I'm your host Sebastian and if you like this episode then please make sure to subscribe and leave a review, it really helps.
Crop Circles: Complex Patterns and Anomalies
00:00:25
Speaker
The occurrence of complex geometric patterns imprinted onto the crops of agricultural land has in many countries become as certain as the seasonal harvest of the crops themselves. Global in scale, one of the many countries where this phenomenon manifests itself is the Netherlands.
00:00:43
Speaker
Here, as elsewhere, some crop circle formations exhibit a range of highly anomalous features that cannot be easily explained in terms of human hoaxes or known natural causes.
Scientific Interest in Crop Circles
00:00:54
Speaker
Ranging from biophysical anomalies to complex and hidden mathematics, these formations have properties that have caught the attention of PhD scientists such as Elcho Hasselhoff. Histicates of serious scientific research lead to one unambiguous conclusion, something very strange is going on.
00:01:13
Speaker
you
00:01:15
Speaker
Hi, Elcho. Great to have you on the podcast. How are you doing? Good morning, Sebastian. And thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. And I'm doing great. Thank you. Excellent. Well, perhaps a candid admission on my part from the outset, crop circle research about which we're going to talk today has never really been on my radar. And I think
00:01:43
Speaker
part of the reason for that is that I grew up in the late 80s and mid 90s in Ireland and the UK and I just remember as a kid and teenager being you know inundated by documentaries about crop circles which were always along the lines of
00:02:05
Speaker
Oh, you know, there are some drunk farmers going into the field with a board and, you know, a rope and creating these intricate patterns. And I think that impression, unfortunately, lasted with me for a very long time, which is why I'm very happy to have you here today.
Elcho's Journey into Crop Circle Research
00:02:24
Speaker
And and also your book on crop circles has really helped me understand the actually the complexity of this phenomenon.
00:02:34
Speaker
And so this just as a kind of proviso from me from the outset. But before we get into the deepening complexity of crop circles, could you give us an overview of who you are and how you got into crop circle research because you're a man of many talents, so it's quite interesting to hear a bit about your background.
00:03:00
Speaker
Well, yes, I got into crop circles before you were born, if I understand it correctly. It happens because a colleague of mine, he was from Scotland, and he was probably one of the smartest persons I've ever met. One of these people that know everything and never forget anything. They learn.
00:03:21
Speaker
was kind of my mentor in those days and trying to teach me physics. And he actually mentioned that he saw a documentary on crop circles. He was the first one to introduce me to the phenomenon. And it was the craziest story I'd ever heard, of course, because it was like the circle imprints and
00:03:43
Speaker
bent, but not broken and all those kinds of things.
Investigating Crop Circle Phenomena
00:03:46
Speaker
And if anyone else would have told me this story, I probably would have laughed and not paid any attention to it, but because it was him and he was the smartest person I knew, I figured, well, if there would be
00:03:59
Speaker
A trivial explanation. He would have come up with it right away, but he didn't. He was sort of puzzled. And he said to me, you should have seen this documentary. You would have been impressed. And that sentence said by him, by the smartest person I knew, sort of triggered me and got me interested into the phenomenon. And then luckily enough, within a year or so, we had a crop circle appear in the Netherlands.
00:04:24
Speaker
where I lived. And so I decided to go there and pay a visit. And yes, that was actually when I first noticed some very strange, peculiar things about that flattened area of crop, which also this colleague of mine had told me. And for example, in this particular case, it was the fact that it was a huge area of flattened crop, perfectly flattened, by the way, like a carpet.
00:04:53
Speaker
which is something I could not reproduce myself if I tried to flatten it, it would always sort of jump back and become kind of messy. But at the same time, the soil underneath the flattened crop was perfectly untouched towards the little crumbs of earth that were underneath. And if I walked over this flattened crop, I would crunch them, I would flatten them. And so it was clear to see that nobody had walked on top of this flattened crop.
00:05:19
Speaker
And that puzzled me very much, and that sort of made me keep my interest and made me go to the second crop, so that appeared a couple of weeks later, and that's how it started. And yeah, it continued to go like that. I always found these strange things I couldn't explain, and that's what it keeps you going.
00:05:41
Speaker
And you have a background in physics, right? So for you, it was even more interesting if you can't reproduce anything in the natural world, I suppose. Yeah, it's all about, I think physicists are pretty much about understanding things, and if they don't understand something, it drives them crazy.
00:05:56
Speaker
And they keep on going and that just happened to me. Yeah, cool. So for our general audience who are not familiar with crop circles or perhaps have this impression that they are just, you know, made by students or farmers somewhere in the fields of wheelchair.
00:06:16
Speaker
Could you perhaps from a scientific perspective give an overview of what you are looking for if you go into a newly formed formation? Is there like a checklist or is it more intuitive what defines a crop circle?
00:06:31
Speaker
Well, first of all, obviously, there are drunken farmers or students and particularly artists, crop so called artists that make these patterns. Now, we all know that and I've talked to this person personally. I know them. Even I made crop circles myself. So yes, that happens. And there are some studies out there to try to make an estimate of the percentage
00:06:52
Speaker
I remember Colin Andrews a while ago said something like 80% would be man-made, and the others were of unknown origin, other states the other way around.
Motivations Behind Creating Crop Circles
00:07:01
Speaker
I don't think it really matters very much. The fact is, yes, there are artists there, more artists than drunk farmers, by the way. These people that create crop circles take their job very seriously, and they can actually be quite good at it.
00:07:15
Speaker
And they see it as almost like a spiritual mission sometimes, you know, it's much more than just a joke to them. That is important. Okay. Can I just ask you about this? Because I think that stuff's really interesting. So from what I gathered, you've had some touch points with it with these individuals. So is it? I mean, do they do it?
00:07:36
Speaker
If we were to generalize, do they do that because they feel it's spiritually important just for themselves? Or do they do it to kind of proselytize or gain followers? Do they do it with a public awareness? I'm just trying to understand the motives of doing these rather big landscape arty things in fields. It's kind of peculiar to me why someone would do that.
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, it varies. I mean, this started a long time ago. It started, I think, even in the 80s already. So that's long before Instagram and Facebook and all the other social platforms that people would sort of try to use today. It varies really. I mean, the persons I talk to, some of them were almost like,
00:08:28
Speaker
like personal mission or personal interest or actually seeing how people would react. Some do it for the money, you know, sometimes for publicity or commercials, they create these landscape arts.
00:08:43
Speaker
Some say that the farmers pay them so that they can have visitors pay an entrance fee in their crop circles on their land. I don't know if that's true, but it's not what would be a strange thing. I mean, it would make sense. So the reasons are quite different. I think the most, I never really went into that very deeply. The thing that interested me was that the crop circle makers who are often
00:09:11
Speaker
presented to the general audience as people that only want to fool others, often have many other reasons. It's not really about fooling others or having making a joke. They have a deeper meaning and it depends on the person. It's more than just a joke to them. They take it very seriously.
00:09:31
Speaker
But do you think? I think the most important thing is that yes, we know there are these man-made crops, locals. However, the thing that keeps me busy is that I've seen too many times formations that are just too strange to be true.
00:09:47
Speaker
And in general, the more simple crop circles, if there's a beautiful pattern of a flower or something, some mandala-like shape, I'm less interested than when there's an ordinary circle in a potato field, for example.
Mysterious Findings in Crop Circles
00:10:03
Speaker
This is just one example. I remember one day I was called by a farmer who was very very anxious really and said, please come to me, come to my house, come to my land because last night I saw a flying saucer above my house.
00:10:22
Speaker
And when somebody calls you on a Sunday morning and tells you that story, it's hard not to hang up, you know. You get out of bed with a cup of coffee. But in this case, I said, okay, well, and then I said, there's a circle in my potato field. And I figured, okay, that's a circle in the potato field. That is not the usual wheat. So, okay, so I went there,
00:10:45
Speaker
And this guy was very, very scared. He didn't dare to go into that field. He warned me it's in that direction and I'm not going there because, you know, I don't know what happened.
00:10:56
Speaker
So I went there in that potato field and indeed there was a large circle. The emitter was about 10 meters at least, so pretty big, where all the potato plants had fallen over. They were not really flattened, but they were fallen over in a spiral. So there was a spiraling pattern inside this perfectly round circle.
00:11:16
Speaker
And that is strange enough by itself. And what was even stranger was that the soil was very soft, so I could see my own footprints very clearly where I walked. And there was not a single footprint in that circle. I mean, potato plants are planted pretty far apart, so you could very well see the soil in between. There was not a single footprint. Everywhere I walked, I left an imprint of about an inch
00:11:40
Speaker
So, that was very strange. Whoever did that, if it were a drunk farmer, didn't walk in that field. These were some hanging upside down from a hot air balloon or whatever, I don't know, but it was not, he didn't walk there with the boards and rows. And the second thing that was extremely strange was that I studied those little plants and it turned out the reason they had fallen over
00:12:03
Speaker
was because all the stems were dehydrated over a very limited section of the summer. So about a few inches from the soil, there was a little piece in the stems that was completely dehydrated, and the rest of the plant was untouched. And in a dehydrated part, they had fallen over. They had sort of bent and fell over in a perfect spiral.
00:12:25
Speaker
And if you look at that, then it puzzles you. How did they do this? The only thing I could think of was that in order to recreate that, if I would have to recreate that, I would have to make a bridge
00:12:38
Speaker
from one side of the field to the other, so to reach that area without walking there, they would have to hang upside down with a soldering iron or something and touch all those plants one by one to dehydrate them, to burn them, to not even burn them, but carefully, so only dehydrate them, then bend them over and sort of arrange them in a spiraling pattern over the emitter of 10 meters circle.
00:13:02
Speaker
That's ridiculous. I mean, who would ever do such a thing? And how do you do that in one night? That was not how it was done. That's the only thing I could think of. So, yes, this keeps you awake at night. If you've seen this once, it keeps you awake at night and you think, how on earth did they do this? How did this happen? And until today, I don't know the answer.
00:13:22
Speaker
Absolutely and I mean as a scientist or a scientist we do love good puzzles. It's always good if you have something to keep you busy and to intrigue you.
00:13:34
Speaker
Earlier you mentioned that you're more interested in the relatively simple circular designs. Why is that? For two reasons. The first one is that they are simpler. As long as there are so many answers they cannot give.
00:13:52
Speaker
It's sort of modesty. Let's start with the simple things. Second reason is that in my experience, these simple formations often review more of these weird phenomena. If you have the big, beautiful patterns, it's more likely they were created by an artist. Not always, by the way, but it's sort of a filter to make sure you don't drive up there for nothing.
00:14:17
Speaker
And particularly when there are many formations, you know, it's impossible to visit them all
Mathematical Intrigue in Crop Circles
00:14:21
Speaker
and you have to make kind of pre-selection. So the modest ones that nobody would go to are often the ones that are more interesting. Also because if it's a real nice one, everybody goes there and they walk around there and they trample and ruin the entire thing before I come. So that's another reason to keep it to the simpler ones. And there's enough to see in these simple formations already.
00:14:42
Speaker
And I think if we continue the checklist of what is indicative of a non-man-made crop circle, if we want to call it like that, although I guess you can never really
00:14:57
Speaker
in the realm of possibilities rule out that, you know, perhaps there is, sorry, I am. But anyway, so in reading your book, The Deepening and Complexity of Crop Circles, one thing I find really fascinating, well, that's also a bit beyond my non-mathematical mind is the kind of hidden mathematics in crop circles. And obviously with your background in physics, you were able to dissect that. So
00:15:25
Speaker
Is that another feature you would say of these anomalous crop circles, which we can't really explain in human terms?
00:15:34
Speaker
Well, not necessarily, but it is an extremely interesting aspect. And of course, that relates to the non-simple crop circles, because if one circle, there's not much you can say about it that we didn't know already. But it turns out that when there are patterns of multiple circles or more complex shapes, that quite often there are, like you say, these
00:15:59
Speaker
interesting mathematical, these consistent mathematical relationships between the dimensions of the individual parts of that formation. For example, the ratio of the diameters of the circles or the position of the circles or other shapes. And in fact, quite early in the 70s, they discovered that there were these sort of consistent, almost like guidelines
00:16:25
Speaker
on the distribution of circles and the mutual proportions of the circles is something that just came back all the time. I remember there was a book by Colin Andrews and actually the analysis was done after the circles had been made. So it's not like somebody could have
00:16:41
Speaker
read the book and then sort of try and make the next circles according to this consistency. It had already happened. And it had to do with the mutual proportions between the diameters particularly and also the position of the circles with respect to each other. And the thing is that it's not something you can see if you just look at it. You have to perform the measurements and you have to know which ratios you are looking for.
00:17:06
Speaker
And one of the ratios that came back very often, for example, were the same ratios at the frequencies on the musical scale, like Gedora Mifasa, and then you have certain frequencies, and they have certain proportions, certain ratios, and the same ratios were found back in the proportions of the circles, which is interesting. And then you wonder why would somebody do that? And the only reason you can think of that somebody does that, hoping that someone else will discover it,
00:17:30
Speaker
and then be stunned. The point is that often the mathematics are so complex that nobody would actually sort of look for these kinds of things. So only a few gearheads like myself and some others, mathematicians sort of go for this and then they try to explain it to the general audience and the general audience doesn't really care.
00:17:51
Speaker
It's even hard to explain to them what you're doing and show their guys crazy. It is not really something to seek attention to the mainstream public. It is something else. Of course, it could be done by humans just to have a great joke, but it's going to be a very private joke just between them and a few individuals in the world.
00:18:09
Speaker
And interestingly, I found that the artists, so the people that make crop circles, the ones that I spoke to, are not at all interested in this. I mean, they make these patterns for their beauty, and they make it from their heart and their creativity, and they're not going to make a scientific design or a mathematical design, also because often they lack the knowledge of mathematics to do this, and they don't care about it at all.
00:18:36
Speaker
So it is very curious indeed. And quite honestly, I never found a real explanation for it. The only explanation that sort of makes sense is and which some people give is that they say this is a form of communication and whomever makes them tries to sort of reveal knowledge or something they know in terms of other things that we also know, because clearly there's a huge language barrier between us.
00:19:04
Speaker
Which makes sense, you know, that that is possible, indeed. But on the other hand, to solve the highly, highly speculative, of course. But the fact is, yes, this mathematics is in there. Sometimes it's incredibly complicated. I have found formations that looked like
00:19:21
Speaker
a random distribution of circles and rings. But if you look at them, then it turns out that it's the only shape that fulfills all the criterion that has been published so far. So all those criterion in one formation, it's the only shape that obeys this. And then you get what looks like a random distribution of circles and rings, but it isn't. It's like a one of a kind thing.
00:19:47
Speaker
So yeah, that is quite an interesting and intellectual approach. But on the other hand, like I said, you need a real, well, a new, a real fanatic to discover this. And at the same time, nobody seems to care about it.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah, I remember when I was doing my research for this episode going on to YouTube because I found it quite interesting with the correlation between music and the mathematics behind crop circles and listening to kind of, you know, musical translation.
00:20:22
Speaker
of the crop circle, I don't know, melody or whatever you want to call it. And it sounds very bizarre, kind of nice, but also very bizarre. That's just an impersonal. They actually transformed the patterns into music between quotes. They made a transformer that
00:20:44
Speaker
read a crop circle and produce a sound to it. And yes, I've heard that too. And it indeed sounded, yeah, well, interesting, fascinating. Yeah, there was something not random about it without doubts. Yes. So I think you mentioned a very important thing. So that despite these inexplicable and very intriguing findings, there's, you know,
00:21:10
Speaker
not a lot of interest amongst the general public in these formations, even though they do appear regularly, annually, and are just a consistent pattern on a global scale.
Public Perception and Media Influence
00:21:23
Speaker
So why is that? And I'm asking because I have a background in archaeology and I'm very interested in kind of the material traces as evidence of something that may have happened or may not have happened. So
00:21:38
Speaker
So to me, I think perhaps it goes back to what I said earlier that the tabloid press has been ridiculating this phenomenon for quite a long time unjustifiably. But why do you think that there's such a lack of interest amongst the general public for this phenomenon?
00:22:01
Speaker
Oh, that is an excellent question. And actually it relates to the fact that besides the mathematics and the physics and the biophysics about crop circles, there's also a very interesting psychological aspect to it. I mean, you could write a thesis, a PhD thesis on the crop circle psychology. I'm convinced about that, that the behavior of people and the reaction of people is extremely interesting. And as you pointed out correctly, I think one of the reasons is that, yes, there has been a very active
00:22:30
Speaker
debunking of mainstream media on the phenomenon. They tried to ridicule it very much. They have done so for many, many years. And quite honestly, I don't know what the reason was. Some people say that more like conspiracy thinkers that has all been done on purpose and there's the government paying them and so on. I don't know about that.
00:22:50
Speaker
could be, but on the other hand, I don't know. You can also imagine that people are just uncomfortable being confronted with things they don't understand and they prefer to sort of make up an explanation rather than accepting the fact that they don't have an explanation. So that sort of drives these reporters to, at the end of the article, come up with a, to them, most plausible solution, which is the drunken farmers or the students and so on.
00:23:17
Speaker
But yes, there has been a very active debugging campaign until today. And even until today, most crop circle stories that are written, if they're written, are always amongst the same lines, you know, the miracles and the mysteries and so on, and biological anomalies. And at the end, there's always, oh, but it was Doug and Dave, and they did it. And it's always the same structure, almost always.
00:23:40
Speaker
And it has happened to me as well, to quite extreme cases where, for example, I was doing television interviews where people would ask me questions such as, is this a natural phenomenon? And I would say, well, it's too complex for that.
00:23:53
Speaker
And then they would ask me, do you think it's man-made? Can it be man-made? And he said, yes, of course. No, I for very well possible. And then when it was broadcast, you heard the report around the question, has this one been man-made? And it answered, no, it's too complex for that. So they deliberately, instead of edit it.
00:24:11
Speaker
you know, to make me look like a clown. And so, yeah, they must have very strong reasons to go so far. And I think that is one of the reasons they did a very good job in misleading the grand general audience, absolutely. And also because the general audience probably is not willing to really dive into this deeply, because if they would sort of take some more time and really sort of try to separate the
00:24:40
Speaker
There are many, many stories from the few serious contributions. They would probably figure it out themselves, but most people don't want to take the time for that, and they have other things to do clearly.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that listeners of this podcast are well aware of that problem because in UFO studies, we're very much facing the same issue.
Challenges in Crop Circle Research
00:25:06
Speaker
Even if only 1% of all sightings are scientifically interesting, that is still very significant.
00:25:16
Speaker
amongst the general public and also due to being ridiculed by the tabloid press. What is a really interesting phenomenon has been debunked for decades and put outside of the realm of scientific inquiries. That's a really unfortunate situation when researchers can't really
00:25:38
Speaker
focus on a phenomenon out of fear of being ridiculous. That's not a healthy situation. Have you also faced the same sort of criticism or lack of understanding from your colleagues in the scientific community?
00:26:04
Speaker
Interestingly, well, yes and no. I mean, those in the scientific community who didn't know me have been very, very harsh. I mean, even to the personal point, many attacks which were not even scientific were just personal.
00:26:19
Speaker
particularly some skeptic groups, obviously. And they really do everything to burn you down. From the context I have, personally, is that people interact with not very much. No, not at all. I think I've given lectures to audience of radiologists, for example, during the conference, like a leisure lecture in the evening about crop circles. And those are all highly educated people, cardiologists and PhDs in
00:26:49
Speaker
medicine and medical science, and they were very interested. Actually, this book that you're holding in your hand has been proved read by famous American radiologists working in Cleveland Clinic.
00:27:05
Speaker
I think once people take the time to listen, they want to ridicule the phenomenon. But it's the lack of interest to actually sort of get a little bit more profound knowledge about it that makes people ridicule you. Or another reason that I don't know, like these news reporters that edited my interview. I don't know what drove them.
00:27:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's just pretty bizarre. I mean, also the other guests I've had on the podcast so far, they are serious scientists. Often they suffer from a lack of funding, which is kind of an ideological problem or political problem because research into these more arcane but nevertheless interesting subjects obviously doesn't get a lot of funding. But nevertheless, their research methods are very rigorous.
00:27:57
Speaker
you know, adhere to all scientific standards. Nevertheless, a lot of their colleagues almost have this ideological agenda of not wanting to hear about it. And that's something I never really understood. And, you know, I've read your scientific papers and they, you know, they're excellent. And also your book, even though it's aimed at a general
00:28:18
Speaker
audience is excellent as references at ASL scientific standards. And so it's just one more brick in the wall of this issue that other scientists are on this ideological quest of not really wanting to hear about what could be potentially an interesting phenomenon.
00:28:43
Speaker
Speaking of your scientific work and research into crop circles, perhaps you could focus a bit more on your series of work articles on the Höven Formation.
Scientific Experiments and Results
00:29:02
Speaker
I'm not sure if I pronounced it correctly. That's close enough. Höven, yeah, correct.
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah, well, that was a very interesting one because there had been several accounts of eyewitnesses who claimed that they saw a crop circle appear.
00:29:21
Speaker
And the stories were all very similar. They talked about kind of a wind, about heat, and the crop circle forming in a matter of seconds only. And the latter actually makes perfect sense because there are many formations that are just too large to be made by people.
00:29:41
Speaker
just the amount of work, only to flatten that area of crop would require like 100 man hours and information appeared within two or three hours. So there's no way 30 people would actually go into that field. And there had been several eyewitness reports, very similar, and this was another one. But the interesting thing here was that many of these eyewitness
00:30:05
Speaker
eyewitnesses mentioned the appearance of balls of light, so little sort of fairy lights sort of flying over the field while the crop circle was made. But this particular person saw these lights where it was standing still.
00:30:21
Speaker
Most of the time they were moving and this time it was standing still. And that was the only account where the person sat there. There was a source of light, a little lamp hanging above the field. It was hanging there, it was standing still and in that moment the crop circle sort of appeared underneath. And he entered the formation and it was warm. He said it could still feel the air trembling with heat and the ground was warm, everything was warm.
00:30:48
Speaker
And the reason that was interesting that this light was standing still was because it turned out that it left an imprint in the stems of that particular circle. It was a phenomenon that has been known already that the nodes in the stem, so the little knuckles, increased in size inside crop circles.
00:31:14
Speaker
And quite honestly, I don't think that is really the case. I think it's more that they shrink less when they dry. But in the end, when you start measuring them, it's the same thing. So you have to sort of harvest or take samples, you let them dry, and then you measure the length of these nodes at various positions inside the crop circles.
00:31:34
Speaker
And it turns out that samples taken from within the flattened area, they have considerably longer nodes than samples taken from outside crop formation. So that's the control samples. And if I say considerably more, it's like two or three times longer. So it's not like a small statistical difference. It's really very, very significant. And in this particular case, the very interesting finding was that the distribution of the thickness
00:32:03
Speaker
had exactly the same shape as the heat pattern from a radiation source that was standing still. If you have, for example, a light bulb on the ceiling, then you can see on the floor that the intensity of the light is not the same everywhere. It's brightest right underneath the light bulb, then towards the edges of the room it gets less.
00:32:22
Speaker
And that distribution is very well known. You can calculate it very accurately. And the exact distribution depends on the height of that lamp. If you place it very close to the floor, you have a very bright spot right underneath and it will fall off very quickly. And if the light is higher, if the ceiling is higher in the room, then it will be more uniform, but it will always have a sort of bell-like shape.
00:32:47
Speaker
So that means that from the shape of this intensity curve, if you want, you can make an estimate of the height of that light source. And that is what we did in this case. So we found this perfect symmetry very interesting in the center of the circle, the nodes where I think about two or two and a half times larger than the controls and gradually fell off with perfect symmetry towards the edges.
00:33:12
Speaker
And then I estimated the height of this light, and if I remember well, it was something like four meters, four meters and 10 centimeters, I think. And interestingly, the eyewitness who was standing 10 or 20 meters away from that circle said it was about that height, and he sort of indicated with his hands, and that very well corresponded to about four meters. It was not just above the circle, he said, or not even high up in the sky. It was actually where he pointed that.
00:33:39
Speaker
And that is very, very interesting because it looks like this node length increase is caused by the radiation intensity of an electromagnetic point source because the symmetry is exactly that.
00:33:54
Speaker
And that had been suggested by others as well, by other researchers, by William Lavengood, amongst others, quite earlier. But it was the first time we could make a quantitative analysis that perfectly correlated the distribution pattern of these nodes length with the intensity pattern of a point source at a certain height above the ground, which corresponded to what this eyewitness said.
00:34:18
Speaker
So, I think I published a paper. Yes, I had published in Physiology of Plunterum, I think. There was actually a paper about that that sort of explained this and showed this. And in my book, actually, I also showed it in quite some detail. You see all the graphs there.
00:34:34
Speaker
And for me, that was very interesting because, first of all, you never find this massive node length increase in the control samples. And also, if you flatten the crop by hand, you do get some effects caused by gravitropism and some biological changes, but it's not in this amount.
00:34:56
Speaker
And it certainly doesn't have this symmetry. It will just be the same everywhere. It will not have a symmetry which is corresponding with the imprint in the field. So I thought it was an incredible finding. But of course, there are many others who say, well, this is just the wind. It's just the sun. It's just whatever is probably
00:35:15
Speaker
Well, of course it isn't. I was convinced, but in order to bring it forward, a couple of years later, we decided to reproduce that circle in the same field, in the same crop, same dates, same everything, same sampling times, same protocol.
00:35:33
Speaker
And so we could compare. We had one circle that was made by, we don't know, which was actually the original one, and one circle made by us with boards and ropes at the same position, at the same place, same time, same season, same everything.
00:35:51
Speaker
And we did exactly the same analysis. And we found that, as expected, no. I mean, there was some node length increase. It was much less. There was no symmetry there. It was sort of a random shape, which is exactly what you would expect, right? So that's how we show that, no, it is not because there are shadows along the edge. It was sending crop. It's not because of the wind blowing differently over the Latin area and so on.
00:36:16
Speaker
There was no biological explanation for this symmetry and for this massive amount of node length increase. And to me, it's a strong indicator that whatever they do to make these crop circles, it does involve heat. It doesn't involve electromagnetic radiation.
00:36:32
Speaker
And speculating, I think it has to do with the fact that if you heat the stems up, they're easier to flex, they're easier to bend. If you just press them down when they're cold, they will snap and it will break. And if you heat them up,
00:36:47
Speaker
they will actually bend more easily because, you know, the cellular structure gets sort of so soft. You know, we know it's the same way to build a violin, you know, to make this good odds so that you can actually bend it. And then it will keep its shape. And the same thing is what you see in this crop server. So whatever they do, I'm pretty convinced it involves heat, it involves electromagnetic radiation.
00:37:08
Speaker
and then some way with probably winds that flattens to the information. That would have been my next question. How would you do that? That's a question quite honestly. I do exactly because I found so the EM radiation and the node lengthening I find very fascinating but one thing
00:37:28
Speaker
I never really understood how or is that causative for the bending already of the crops or is an additional force needed for that apart from the point source.
00:37:42
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. There must be an additional force that bends them afterwards. And this heating is, I think, only something to prepare them, to make them weaker, to sort of loosen the molecular or the cellular bonds between the cells so that they bend more easily. And then by
00:38:03
Speaker
What eyewitnesses call wind, they are actually made. And it is something that all eyewitnesses, as far as I know, mention. They mention the heat, they mention the wind, and they also mention the balls of light. The interesting thing is that also in the other crop circles, you find this node length increase.
00:38:22
Speaker
But you don't find this very strong symmetry in the shapes because the lights are moving. You can imagine if the lights are moving and they're sort of heating up the field while they're moving, you get an arbitrary pattern of radiation distribution. From understanding still, you keep this spherical symmetry, which in this one particular case we need found. And that's what makes this case so interesting.
00:38:50
Speaker
Apart from the node length increase, I believe he also did some very interesting research in the germination patterns from these affected areas. Could you elaborate on that a bit? Yes, that is actually something that was discovered by a biophysicist named William Levengood, an American scientist.
00:39:11
Speaker
And his interest was particularly because he discovered that the seeds out of crop circles would germinate faster than sometimes much faster than the ones which were taken out of this standing crop. And that, of course, is very interesting, because if you know why that happens, I mean, they were anomalously fast and they would germinate very, very rapidly. And that's something that all farmers want, because if you throw your seeds on your field and the birds eat it,
00:39:38
Speaker
It's a waste of money, but if you can have something that makes them germinate faster, that is very, very interesting, even from a commercial point of view. I think that was what drove him initially to sort of see what happened. But then it turned out it was more complex than that. It turned out that if the crop formations would occur early in the season, so when the seeds were not ripe yet, the germination would be slower.
00:40:03
Speaker
And if they would occur when the crop was ripe, almost, the germination would be faster. So it was indeed some manipulation of the seeds, something that changed them. And depending on the majority of the seeds, the effect would be different. And I've done the experiment a few times. In my case, not many times, like three or four times, I think. And in my case, I found consistently that they germinated much slower.
00:40:30
Speaker
So, and indeed, it was early in the season, that was correct. But it was, again, a very, very clear effect. Statistically, very, very reliable. You had the p-values and that stuff. All the scientific and statistical criteria were fulfilled. I mean, there's no doubt about it that this effect was very real.
00:40:47
Speaker
And all the seeds taken from the standing crop were just germinating with the speed that they were supposed to. And all the ones taken from outside the flattened circle were just going much, much slower in my case, or didn't germinate at all. So some damage had taken place to these seeds very clearly. And it was not mechanical damage, because that's what some people say clearly. If you step on these seeds, you will crunch them, and they will not germinate. That was not the case. I mean, these plants were completely untouched. They were bent over, yes.
00:41:16
Speaker
But the soil was untouched. Nobody walked there. There was no mechanical damage whatsoever. So that was not the explanation. It's something else. And it might very well be this radiation, whatever it is, that sort of
00:41:26
Speaker
that changes the chemical composition of the seeds. That's very well possible. I guess an implication of all this, which I didn't really think about until I read your book, is that we actually consume crops from crop circles, which is an interesting thought. I mean, you have a nice little anecdote in your book where you say that a mouse in your garage where you were storing a wind, that the crops didn't actually touch it.
00:41:55
Speaker
And that is another thing which was absolutely mind-blowing. I was flabbergasted when I saw that. And the problem with these experiences is that it happens to you, and at that point in time, you are completely convinced. I mean, you need no more proof. I'm just for the listeners. I had taken crop circle samples.
00:42:19
Speaker
and I labeled them all and I hang them up in my garage to try them. And then I wanted to perform my germination experiments and I found that actually the seeds had been eaten by mice. But only the control seeds and the mice didn't touch any of the crops of the seeds. So there were like 50 bunches of 20 to 30 stems with crops of big pile of straw.
00:42:45
Speaker
and the mice perfectly identified in this huge pile of straw the ones that were tinged from the crop soil and the ones that were controlled. So that was remarkable. The problem is that
00:42:54
Speaker
If you tell this to somebody else to look at you and nod and say, yeah, right. I mean, yeah, I could take pictures, but they say, well, that doesn't prove anything. It's just a picture of some way. I mean, I could have labeled them afterwards. It's frustrating at times because if it happens to you, you know, you don't need and you cannot have more evidence of something is going on. If you try to convince others, it's almost impossible because it's too weird to be true.
00:43:20
Speaker
Anyway, and it ruined my experiment, of course, because it didn't have any income. That's how it goes sometimes there. Of all the scientific theories, explanations you've come across and counted so far, which ones do you
00:43:40
Speaker
would give the most credibility to, I mean, for instance, Terrence Meaden's idea of plasma vortices, these whirlwinds creating crop circles. Do you think of all the explanations that have been put out there, one is more convincing than the other? You already mentioned there's a plant physiological phenomenon of gravitropism and so on.
00:44:05
Speaker
To your mind, is anything convincing or do you think we need to go back to the drawing board and really rethink what's going on?
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think that Terrence Mead and his explanations are, Plasmon-Vortes says, yeah, quite honestly, I don't know exactly what it is. It explains some of it, but not everything. I think that is the problem with most hypotheses. There are some elements that would make sense, but it doesn't tell the complete story. And that is what's lacking at the moment. One consistent theory that explains it all.
00:44:39
Speaker
And quite honestly, I've been into this for many, many years now. And sometimes after feeding that, the more I think about it, the less I understand about it. See, this is really, really, very, very complex. So I don't have all the answers. Some say it's alien communication, or that's a very popular one. So it's actually extraterrestrial intelligences trying to communicate with us.
00:45:04
Speaker
Which, of course, is possible, you know. Well, I mean, you can't say that it's impossible because, well, you know, it's better at the same time. I wonder if there are clear indications that that would be the case. Personally, I don't think
00:45:20
Speaker
I think there's alien civilizations out there. They have other things to do to communicate with us. That's my personal instinctive feeling. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what if... And even if they would, then they would probably know a smarter way to do it. And if they wouldn't, they wouldn't bother to communicate with us. But yeah, I mean, by all means, it is a possibility. But that's also the end of the discussion because the time is speculative, of course.
00:45:45
Speaker
Exactly. But looking at the phenomenon as it presents itself from a scientific point of view, I always have the impression that whatever intelligence is accountable for for crop circles isn't too bothered what humans think about it because they do it
00:46:02
Speaker
you know, in an almost clandestine way, you can only really appreciate the complexity from literally a bird's eye perspective in many cases.
Comparative Phenomena: Hessdalen Lights and Historical References
00:46:12
Speaker
And as I said, it often happens in a hidden manner. It kind of reminds me of the Hestanen lights in Norway, where you also have these lights flying around in the sky. I have been observed scientifically studied.
00:46:28
Speaker
I had a research on the podcast talking about this, but there's no indication that it has anything to do with extraterrestrials or that they are particularly bothered about what humankind thinks or does about it. I completely wish you there. I've compared it to ants, for example. If you are working in your garden and you're putting weeds or whatever, there are ants walking around there.
00:46:56
Speaker
You're not going to communicate to those. You know you're there, but you're not going to try to manifest yourself to those ants and say, hey, yeah. And those ants might have discussions between them saying that, well, I've seen a human. No, you're crazy. No, humans don't exist. Yeah, they're huge. They walk on two legs. Come on, everybody walks on six legs. They've got the same thing. And then they say, well, if humans exist, why don't they reveal themselves to us?
00:47:20
Speaker
Well, because we don't care. We have to pull weeds from our garden. We're not going to try to reveal us to ants. So I think if it needs extraterrestrials, it's likely there's something similar to that. We're very anthropocentric, of course. The humans think they're the single biggest thing in the universe, but clearly we're not.
00:47:41
Speaker
Yeah and I think we're kind of delving into a very interesting question topic now which is the meaning of all of it really and you know bearing in mind the scientific findings and that we are pointing towards that
00:47:58
Speaker
towards something that's incredibly complex, we can't really account for. I think that's one situation we just have to write down for now as it is. But part of the human condition is wanting to make sense of all of this. And my personal impression is that this can only be done on a very personal level. You have a very fascinating chapter in your book where you
00:48:23
Speaker
Adopt the perspective of different people you've encountered or rather report their impression of what crop circles may be and stand for So this is kind of to bring it back to you because you've been in these formations With what kind of feeling do they leave you? This is just a very you know on a very subjective level. Have you experienced any sort of
00:48:48
Speaker
feeling that you would only get in crop circles because you've been doing this for a very long time and I suspect that it's not just the kind of scientific conundrum that's behind it but that's also on a personal level that you have to really figure out what the meaning is and that leaves you with certain experiential qualities that no other thing probably has.
00:49:13
Speaker
Yeah, well, first of all, I'm a very Western, male, unsensitive, scientific person, so I'm not
00:49:24
Speaker
very much into anything that is spiritual. I mean, to certain points, I'm really entering this thing like an engineer and a scientist. And I have not had real, if you would like to call them paranormal experiences as far as I can remember. It is true though that when you enter these formations, it is very impressive, very beautiful. I mean, it impresses you. It sort of keeps you
00:49:50
Speaker
It makes you shut up for a minute, particularly with the better ones. So yeah, it's nice. Entering a graph circle is a nice experience. It's a piece of beauty most of the times. And if they're not like this potato circle and other circles and carrots fields and so on,
00:50:08
Speaker
then maybe they're not beautiful, but they have these other things that are so curious that they also make you shut up for a few minutes because you dance. So yeah, it does impress you. They do impress me most of the time.
00:50:22
Speaker
Having said that, I do know many people that have experienced all the strangest feelings and so on, people getting acute headaches, people getting sick and so on, which was very real. At the other hand, you can say, well, that is just sort of between their ears. So they're sort of fooling themselves and it doesn't make it a less real experience to them, but it is kind of
00:50:52
Speaker
not caused by the circle, but more by the personal psychology. On the other hand, I've also seen animals, dogs getting sick inside crop circles. And that is a different story. I don't think a dog would understand the complexity. So yeah, it seems that there are indeed effects in these circles that, or something on the circle that affect people on an emotional or spiritual or psychological or even physical level.
00:51:21
Speaker
But personally, I haven't experienced that as much. But again, sometimes I was really impressed by seeing these things. And what particularly impresses you is that the flatness of the formations. I mean, there's no way, let's put it this way, I've never been able, I've never seen anyone flatten a crop formation as flat, as perfectly flat as I've seen them.
00:51:47
Speaker
What I mean is that if you lie down on the ground and you look over them, you're just from one or two inches above the soil, you see there's not a single stem sticking out. It's like it's been cut into the... It's amazing. That is really something that impressed me several times.
00:52:07
Speaker
Have you been, over the years, approached by many people who think they know what crop circles are all about? I'm speaking with people who are spiritually inclined and have their own certain theories of what they might be and not? Oh yes, absolutely. Oh yeah, many of them. There are many people who've told me what they are.
00:52:29
Speaker
And they're convinced and good for them, but they haven't convinced me. I mean, it's the classical theories like aliens, of course, you know, extraterrestrials preparing us for the return to Earth. It's the gods, it's Mother Gaia, the Earth itself.
00:52:45
Speaker
It's our common awareness that sort of telekinetically creates these shapes on Earth. It's pranksters, clearly. It's the farmers that want to have money. Those are the more basic explanations. But yeah, there are many people knowing that it's the Earth people or the Skype people or the fire, the fire creatures or the demons or the angels. And yeah, many people are convinced to know what it is.
00:53:16
Speaker
Maybe they're right. I'm not telling they're wrong, but while they haven't convinced me so far, that's also probably because I'm a scientist and I want some very consistent and simple story that explains it.
00:53:29
Speaker
I found the consistency so far. I can make a consistent story which is not simple, or a simple story which is not consistent, and I haven't found something that compounds both yet, but we'll keep trying. Indeed. What is interesting though, I'm just looking at chapter one of your book. There's this very
00:53:49
Speaker
interesting figure of the mowing devil from 1687. So, you know, a crop circle from the 17th century, where this artist has also tried to make sense of or attribute meaning as to what was going on. And here, literally, the devil showing quite
00:54:12
Speaker
quite nicely doing this, well, creating this crop circle. So I think this, and we haven't really talked about this today, but it's also historical phenomenon on this idea, you know, or this phenomenon of ascribing meaning to crop circles.
00:54:29
Speaker
It's just something humans have always done, I suppose. I think crop circle research only really took off in the 1970s and 80s, but it's a much more historically saturators. The Boeing Dell actually is extremely interesting. And that's a story that later has been debunked again by the TABIC press many, many times with all kinds of
00:54:56
Speaker
my opinion, silly arguments, the silliest of them is that in the text somewhere it said that the crop had been cut by the devil. And then the argument is, well, it is not cut, it is flattened, so it was not the crop's fault. Well, that's not the point. The thing is that most people that see crop circles today, see pictures of crop circles today, think it's cut still. And they see the picture, oh, the crop has been cut. That's what they think.
00:55:20
Speaker
And so what happened back then, and I'm convinced of that, is that these people saw this thing. They also thought it was cut because that's what everybody still thinks today. And they didn't check. I mean, if they think it's work about the devil, they're not going to enter that thing. They will run away. I mean, this is like 1678. I mean, they're not going to... The devil was something... It was a big problem in those days to them. So I'm sure they didn't enter it. They didn't check it out. They wrote it first. Maybe later they did.
00:55:48
Speaker
But the interesting thing about the Moam devil is that if you look at that picture, you see these, you see two things. You see the perfect flattening that this artist tried to indicate a perfect flattening of this, this perfectly aligned, all these stems are exactly the same distances. So this neatness, this perfectness he tried to sort of draw and also the spiraling pattern.
00:56:10
Speaker
And those are the two first things that strike you even today. When you see a crop circle, when you enter that, there's two things that say, wow, it's perfectly flattened as if it was cubed. And it's in this nice spiraling pattern. And those are the two things that this artist clearly was trying to express. And that convinces me.
00:56:30
Speaker
with close to 100% that this was indeed the same thing that we're seeing today. Now, I mean, it looks uncannily similar and, you know, granted that there's always a bit of artistic freedom, I think that's probably as close as you get. It translates the impression that today, I mean, it's very clear that this guy who draw that saw it. It's not like he wasn't telling something or somebody else told, he saw it himself and he draw it there.
00:56:55
Speaker
And this is exactly what, like you said, what do you think, what do you feel when you enter the crop formation? It's exactly what is seen in this picture. The book flattening, the neatness and the spiraling pattern.
00:57:10
Speaker
Great Elcho. Before we end this episode, I just wanted to briefly ask you to talk a bit about your latest research because I think you were kind enough to forward it to me.
Theoretical Exploration: Physics and the Universe
00:57:28
Speaker
namely Einstein's relativity theory and how you can, in fact, if I understood correctly, make it more simpler through applying Newtonian physics. This isn't really probably the right podcast for it, but I think it's, I mean,
00:57:48
Speaker
I think it's really so fascinating, I mean not understanding all the mathematics obviously, but it did quite interest me because it also points to Plato's original idea of the shadow on the wall and that reality might be actually, or most certainly is more complex than we are able to fathom, so if you could perhaps talk a bit about that.
00:58:12
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. And actually it does link in a little bit to both crop circles as well as UFOs, I think. There are some connections. I've said that this theory creates a bridge between contemporary physics and UFOs and all crop circles. So it's not completely out of the stream of this discussion.
00:58:39
Speaker
How do I tell this in not too many words? The point is that the motion of objects, so things moving around us, and I'm talking about horses and cars and falling rocks and apples falling from trees,
00:58:54
Speaker
There's something that has been understudied forever by people and even the ancient Greek had their own physical models of how things were moving and how mechanisms work. And they were actually pretty good at it. The ancient Greek thousands of years ago could already make
00:59:11
Speaker
like a gearbox, which allowed them to pull the ship on the beach by just one guy, because they had a mechanism of many gear wheels, which would have increased the force of one single person. They were actually pretty good at it. At the same time, they made many mistakes in the theory as well. It wasn't until the 17th century when Sir Isaac Newton first really established the modern classical mechanics, as we call it, which is the physics that describes
00:59:40
Speaker
the motion of objects. And so that was quite an accomplishment because it was thousands of years after we already thought we knew how it worked. So it was the 17th century. And that's a theory that we still learn in school today. So that's about a car accelerating and the distance traveled by a car at a certain velocity after a certain time and those kinds of things. And we use that also to launch a rocket and to send a rocket to Mars even. So it's still very, very valid.
01:00:10
Speaker
However, somewhere at the end of the 19th century, some experiments were performed where they discovered that the series doesn't always work, and it doesn't work when the velocities get very high.
01:00:24
Speaker
And it doesn't work for the speed of light. The speed of light is very, very strange. Usually the velocity of something, the speed of something depends on your own speed as well, because if you are standing still, then a car that approaches you at 50 miles an hour doesn't approach you as fast as in the case where you were also approaching that car at 50 miles an hour, because then it approaches you at 100 miles an hour, right?
01:00:46
Speaker
And that last thing is something that does not apply to the speed of light. They found that the speed of light is always the same regardless of your own motion. And that is something that is very curious if you think about it and that sort of it cannot be explained with the classical mechanics. So that's what when Einstein came aboard and Einstein then created this sphere of theory relativity. That's an alternative theory that also describes the motion of objects. But in case the velocities get very high,
01:01:16
Speaker
Currently, in the scientific consensus, we have two different models. One is the classical mechanics. That's for describing motion of objects when they're going slowly. If they're going very fast, approaching the speed of light, so you need that in particle accelerators and in astronomy sometimes, you can use another theory, which is Einstein's theory of relativity.
01:01:36
Speaker
And then you get all kinds of strange things happening. You get these things that you probably know about, that time is slowing down when you're going fast and the dimensions of objects change when you're going fast and so on. It's fascinating.
01:01:52
Speaker
I've always had problems with the fear of relativity because the first time when he told me about it, I was like 16 and I said, no, no way. That's impossible. That's what everybody would say, by the way. But I sort of insisted even after many years, it didn't feel, I don't know, I always had something with it.
01:02:08
Speaker
And the paper I published a couple of months ago actually I think is very interesting because what it shows you is that, what it suggests, to put it this way, is that our universe, our world that we're seeing is a four-dimensional universe. So we have four spatial dimensions.
01:02:27
Speaker
And if you look at Einstein's relativity, there are also the four dimensions, but that is like up, down, left, right, and forward, backwards, plus time. So the fourth dimension is time. And in my model, it's four spatial dimensions. You could measure the length in each four of them. So it's left, right, up, down, forward, backwards, and then that's a fourth one.
01:02:48
Speaker
which we cannot imagine because we cannot imagine a four-dimensional space, but we only see three dimensions, but that doesn't mean the fourth one isn't there. So why would I assume that? Well, I assume that because it turns out if you create this four-dimensional space mathematically, I mean, you cannot imagine it, but you can calculate in it, we can adapt to mathematics. So we make a four-dimensional space with four spatial dimensions,
01:03:14
Speaker
And we apply the Newtonian mechanics to the 17th century mechanics to the four-dimensional space. And then we calculate the projection. So we only take three dimensions of this form. We only look at those three. And those three make up a three-dimensional space, which is something that we can see around us. It turns out that projection behaves exactly like this theory of relativity of Einstein predicts.
01:03:39
Speaker
So the time dilation, the time going slower, objects, the changing shape, all those kinds of things can be explained with 17th century mechanics. If you assume that the actual universe is four dimensional, and we only see like a three dimensional shadow of it,
01:03:57
Speaker
And the interesting thing is that it makes relativity much simpler because it turns out it's just Newton's first law, Newton's second law, f equals m times a, that kind of stuff that we all learn in secondary school, except we're looking at the shadow.
01:04:12
Speaker
of the four-dimensional reality in our three-dimensional perception. And so the three becomes much simpler. And in addition, it also eliminates a couple of inconsistencies that there are, in my opinion, contemporary physics. We don't need two different models with certain rules and certain exceptions. You just have one model, which is a 17th century physics. It eliminates all the inconsistencies, and it generates exactly the same formulas
01:04:39
Speaker
that you can derive from the theory of relativity, except it only takes you
01:04:44
Speaker
two lines of algebra rather than four pages. So it's much simpler, much more consistent, I think much more elegant and it gives you the same results. And, and that is very interesting. If there's a four-dimensional universe and we are only in the three-dimensional shadow of that, it means there must be three other three-dimensional universes. I mean, we're living in the XYZ if you want, but there are four dimensions, XYZ and let's call it W.
01:05:11
Speaker
And we live in the XYZ dimension, but that means there's also an XYW dimension and an XZW and a YZW dimension. So those are those other three-dimensional spaces, which are sort of parallel to ours, if you want.
01:05:27
Speaker
They're also even touching our own world, but we can't see it. One of the things that always puzzled me very much in crop circles and also the UFOs is that these balls of light that contain a lot of energy enough to heat up an entire crop field or a UFO, which you can see, which is there and then it just disappears into nothing. What does it go to?
01:05:50
Speaker
Well, if it would go into the WYZ dimension, yes, that it would still be there, but I couldn't see it anymore. And the same appears to do balls of light. So sometimes I speculate that maybe that is why these UFOs are hiding or are going to, when they seem to disappear from ours, but they're just going into another shadow, if you know what I mean.
01:06:11
Speaker
they're actually sort of making the jump from one three-dimensional shadow to another one in our four-dimensional universe. And somehow they have the technology to do that, and we don't. So this theory not only makes everything much simpler, it also sort of opens up a gateway to give kind of a scientific explanation to what we see when UFOs disappear or when balls of light appear and disappear.
01:06:35
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for elaborating on this. It's definitely very, very interesting and kind of brings us full circle back to what many eyewitnesses also reported with credible UFO sightings that they kind of seem to
01:06:51
Speaker
Phase out jump in to our reality and yeah, it's definitely an interesting model to to perhaps think about these these sorts of phenomena and what I also find interesting and you know relating to crop circle research the
01:07:07
Speaker
your model here presupposes a kind of geometric reality if understood correctly. And obviously, crop circles are inherently geometrically meaningful, so kind of also, to me at least, interesting. Now, that's the case. Yeah, and actually the most fascinating thing personally, I think, is that, and you already mentioned that Plato
01:07:30
Speaker
I don't know, 3,000 years ago, something already said this. He actually suggested that the world we see around us is a shadow of a more complicated world, and he compared it to the shadow on the wall of a cave.
01:07:46
Speaker
were the people that were inside, that were chained inside that cave, and they could only see the shadow of the outside world. So they said, to them, the world is a two-dimensional black and white scene, whereas we know it's a three-dimensional and in color. And they said, but what we see, three-dimensional and in color, is actually also only a shadow of a much more complicated universe. And that is exactly what my theory is about.
01:08:10
Speaker
And I knew about this a long time ago, and it has always fascinated me very much. And it was also an inspiration to get to this theory. And now I'm really puzzled, how did Plato know? Because he was spot on, in my opinion. So did somebody tell him? Did some alien maybe talk to Plato? I mean, how could he figure it out? It's amazing. This has been like 3,000 years ago. That's what fascinates me most right now.
01:08:36
Speaker
I think there's no better way to close an episode than with a discussion of Plato, so that's absolutely excellent. I wish that could be the case for every episode. Well, thanks so much, Elcho. It's been a real pleasure talking about Kroll's work on physics and very, very, very intriguing.
01:08:56
Speaker
For our audience, where can they find your work relating to crop circles, but also all the other endeavors you might be up to? Do you have online resources? Where can people find you? There is one website which is called simplerelativity.info.
01:09:19
Speaker
And that is where I am currently publishing my latest, we call it the simple theory of relativity work. Currently, I don't have a crop circle website anymore. My books are, most of them I think are out of print. My latest book has been translated into five languages, but you can still find them in secondhand books. They're still available, but not fresh from the press anymore.
01:09:46
Speaker
I am considering writing an update. So when the people are really interested, I would recommend them to stay tuned because there are some new things, some new developments. And like you said, my latest book has been out there for quite a while and I think it merits a little update with some adrenaline and so on. And if that's the case, I will definitely put it on the internet in such a way that everybody who wants to find it will find it immediately.
01:10:14
Speaker
Perfect. Thanks a lot Elcho and I'll make sure to link your book and all to the website in the in the blurb of the podcast. Thanks and hopefully have you again on again soon.