EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF A CROP CIRCLE FORMING
IN THE NETHERLANDS.

An eyewitness account by Nancy Talbott, a member of BLT Research Team Inc. bltresearch@attbi.com

 

Monday, August 21, 2001, 3.15 am

 

On August 8th, 2001, I arrived at the v/d Broeke home in southern Holland to begin a two week research project in conjunction with US parapsychologist Dr William Roll and the Parapsychological Services Institute Inc. Dr Roll, whose work with recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK) phenomena had led him to question whether there might be a human consciousness element involved in the crop circle process (similar to that documented by him in multiple poltergeist and haunting cases), wanted to gather geomagnetic and electromagnetic data at the v/d Broeke home and at recent crop circle sites where Robbert v/d Broeke had had pre-cognitive intuitions of their arrival.

For my first 10 days in Holland Robbert and I visited several formations in the area which had occurred prior to my arrival, gathering the baseline data which Dr Roll's protocol required. During the nights we bicycled out to the fields with the night-vision camcorder and several flash cameras, in order to carry out photographic experiments.

For years Robbert has been taking flash photos at night inside crop circles which, when developed, show single or multiple strange semi-opaque orbs and other light phenomena not usually visible to the naked eye. He has found that such experiments are most productive in new crop circles, but that - in some cases - unusual lights/orbs can be photographed even weeks or months after the initial event. More recently he has discovered that he can actually see quite a few of these light objects before they are photographed and has also noted that many of the objects now being caught on film are not only much brighter and more dense, but are much more complex in structure. I, too, seem to have become more sensitive to the presence of the objects, often seeing brief flashes of light which - when I can get off a shot or two in their direction quickly enough - result in the objects apparently being caught on film.

 

On the night of August 20-21st 2001, Robbert and I had decided not to go into the fields and were at his parents' home. Mr and Mrs v/d Broeke had retired to their bedroom on the first floor at the front of the house at around 11.30pm. Robbert's younger sister, Madelon, had gone to her bedroom on the second floor at the back of the house around this time also, leaving only Robbert and me in the kitchen downstairs. The kitchen window was open and looks out over the 80'-long back garden, at the end of which is a chain-link fence and a 4'-deep trench which runs along the edge of the farm field immediately beyond.

By 3.00am Robbert and I had been in the kitchen discussing the crop circles, their possible causative mechanisms and origins, what they might mean, etc. for several hours. I was tired from weeks of tromping about the fields during the days recording data and then nights of flash photography and videography, and realized that I felt pretty much like I was - or might have been - chasing my tail. I recalled my first visit with Robbert and his family back in 1998 and an incredibly dramatic light display I had witnessed with Mr and Mrs v/d Broeke on my second night in the house. And I thought about all of the other really peculiar incidents on return trips, occurring with increasin frequency - and all of the work that has been done to document and attempt to understand these events - and it suddenly seemed to me that the phenomenon was just too complex, too elusive, too difficult to study. I suppose partly out of fatigue and partly out of frustration I decided to go up to bed, telling Robbert that I was tired of all this "pussy-footing" around and asking, "why can't this phenomenon be more obvious, more direct?"

I was sleeping in Robbert's old bedroom which is on the second floor at the back of the house, over-looking the garden and farm-field. The bed is placed so that it faces directly out through two floor-to-ceiling glass doors which go out to a small balcony overlooking the garden and farm field beyond, and there are thin, gauzy curtains hanging at these glass doors. The farm field is clearly visible from the bed. Robbert was still in the kitchen downstairs.

Once upstairs, I pulled the curtains closed (leaving one o the doors open), changed into my nightgown and propped myself up with pillows to read in bed for a while. The lights were on and the room was well-lit. At about 3.05am I heard a few cattle nearby bawling raucously, as cattle do when they are disturbed. From years of talking with farmers and ranchers who have had crop circles (and other unusual events) occur on their properties, I immediately realized that this bawling might be a sign that something strange was afoot and, in the back of my mind, thought "I should go to the windows and pull back the curtains because I might see something." Whether because of fatigue or some sort of intuition, I stayed in bed and did not pull back the curtains. The cattle quieted down for a few minutes but, at about 3:10am they started up again. And again I thought I should go to the windows and open up the curtains... and, again, I stayed put (in my notes from that night I have written that I was "scared"). After a minute or so the cattle were quiet again.

Then, at about 3:15am, a brilliant, intense white column, or tube, of light - about 8" to 1' in diameter - from my vantage point-flashed down from the sky to the ground, illuminating my bedroom and the sky as brilliantly as if from helicopter searchlights. My room was so bright I can't, in retrospect, understand how I could so very clearly see the "tube" of light outside - its distinct edges - but I could, for about a full second, and there seemed to be a slight bluish tinge along the sides of the tube. Then this tube of light disappeared and both my room and the outside went dark. While the tube of light was there it was so bright I couldn't see exactly where it was touching down and wasn't sure how close it was.

Approximately one second of total darkness elapsed and then a second tube of the same brilliant white light, slightly edged in a bluish tint, appeared slightly to the left of where the first tube had been. Again the room and the outside lit up spectacularly, somehow leaving the intense tube of light clearly visible for about one second. Then, after another second's darkness the third and final tube descended to the ground. There was no sound at any time during the light incident (the neighbour's cattle were now quiet), nor did I smell anything out of the ordinary at all.

There was also no physical sensation of exposure to increased electromagnetic energy (such as the tingling I had experienced a few years prior in this same house during an earlier encounter). The entire light display took 5-6 seconds; if the bawling cattle are considered to be part of this situation the total time would be about 10 minutes.

By the time the third tube of light flashed down to the ground I was half out of bed, yelling to Robbert, who was still downstairs in the kitchen. He, at the same time, was running up the stairs to get me, having witnessed the event from the first-floor kitchen Windows. From the kitchen he could see that the tubes of light had hit the bean field, just beyond the fence at the back of the garden, and he reported also that the sky had lit up like daylight when each column of light had occurred. He, however, had seen only two tubes of light, apparently because he had jumped up after the second one, leaving the kitchen to come and get me upstairs. He further indicated in the drawing he made immediately afterward that these tubes of light were spiralling down to the ground. (Actually, when I got out the drawing I had made shortly afterward, I have also indicated a spiralling motion inside the tubes of fight.) Robbert had perceived the tubes of light as being smaller in diameter than I had, but he also saw them as definite, contained, columns which remained the same width all the way down. Neither of us saw anything in the overcast sky from which these tubes of light had originated. Later that night, Robbert reported that he had heard the dog next door barking furiously just prior to the appearance of the light-tubes.

Our yelling back and forth to each other up the stairway had awakened both Madelon and Mrs v/d Broeke, who both emerged into the halfway in excited states. Robbert and I were equally agitated, due to our shared impression of the stunning force of the energy involved... and our mutual, clear, impression of it's purposefulness. All four of us went immediately to the glass doors at the back of the house off the dining room (directly underneath my bedroom doors), somewhat timidly, not certain of what else we might expect.

Looking out these glass doors we could see nothing up in the sky and after a minute or so Robbert went to the back door off the kitchen and stepped out; I joined him and, tentatively, also went outside. So far as we could tell, everything seemed oddly normal and very dark - looking up we could see only an overcast sky. We headed for the back fence and the farm-field and there, just over the fence about 15' into the bean-field - just barely visible in the darkness - was the new crop circle. When we turned my flashlight onto the field we could see that half of the crop in the downed area was laid away from us and the other half was laid toward us, and I thought I could faintly see steam rising from the freshly-downed beans (which I attributed to the interaction of the tubes of light with a heavy night-time dew covering the crop).

At dawn the next day, from my bed, I could clearly see the new circle, which turned out to be, in fact, an ellipse of about 35' in length (running East/West) and 20' in width (North/South diameter), with a 20'-long pathway adjoining the northern edge which ended in a crossbar (like the capital letter "T").

Measurements and photographs were taken and a visible difference in leaf colour inside the downed crop areas was observed to be due to the fact that some of the plants were laid away from us, showing the undersides of the leaves, and in other areas the plants were laid toward us, showing us only the tops of the leaves, thus reflecting the light differently. Along this flow-line near the centre of the formation plants growing immediately next to each other were cleanly bent over at their bases in opposite directions, with no visible damage to either the plants or the beans. There was a slight swirling of the plants in the 'epicentre' area which, in this case, occurred in the south-eastern quadrant, considerably West from the actual geometric centre of the ellipse.

The northern half of the string bean plants (heavy with beans) were swept counter-clockwise in what looked to be one wide sweep all the way around the ellipse and back along the southern edge. The eastern and western edges of the ellipse were slightly squared, ending abruptly at a row of beans on either side and leaving the plants in these rows along the edges totally unaffected. The pathway off to the North was laid away from the ellipse to its end, the crossbar at the end being laid left (West) and right (East) in simple single sweeps. The width of all the pathways was one row of beans only, about 1 to 1.5' wide.

We were unable to go into the field until the evening, due to the need to obtain permission from the farmer and to our lack of a ladder to help us negotiate the fence and the steep ditch on the other side. On the evening of the 21st, at about 6.00pm, we did go in and carried out a number of procedures.

The compass showed no deviations within the laid crop (nor at control locations outside the new event) and the electromagnetometer registered a steady 0.2m, the same reading I obtained at the control locations and at all of the other crop circle sites I had tested in the past two weeks. No EM spikes were noted. Examination of the plants showed them all to have been bent over at the base and no broken or split stems were seen. There was no visible trauma to the stems or leaves, or the very healthy-looking beans beneath them. The soil appeared relatively dry both inside and outside the laid-crop area and was fine-grained and dark in appearance (mineralogical characterization of the soil in this field a year previously by BLT lnc.'s consulting mineralogist, Dr Sam lyengar, had indicated that this field is very well maintained, high in organic content and very low in clays).

Because of the Foot and Mouth disease which has been prevalent in Holland (as well as in other western European countries) during the summer of 2001, and the subsequent likelihood that US customs would not allow importation of either plants or soils from Europe into the US, no attempt was made to take soil or plant samples. I did, however, harvest a few handfuls of beans and enjoyed them at dinner a few nights later. So far, I've noted no sequelae.

In preparation for one new BLT study, which will evaluate the effects of various energies on normal (non-crop circle) plants and soils, I have had many discussions with microwave and laser experts who are convinced that the crop circles and at least some of the associated light phenomena are simply either "mistakes" by the military and/or industrial research community and/or perhaps pranks by one or another of these groups on the citizenry. If they are "mistakes" it would seem - particularly in light of the recent ghastly events in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania - that we are all in more trouble than was immediately apparent. And the idea that they might be pranks strikes me as perhaps even more frightening, and for the same reason: idiots at the helm is hardly a comforting image. What I suspect, instead, is that these highly trained and proficient microwave/laser engineers just aren't really "tracking" the available facts yet... like the majority, it seems, of the rest of the population.

On the other hand, in recent conversation with one of the new scientists participating in ongoing BLT Inc. studies, a man highly regarded by his academic colleagues, the idea that we are instead perhaps dealing with a "new kind of energy," something not seen before, has been discussed. I suspect this idea is much more reflective of reality than is the notion of an inept or adolescent military/industrial research group gone amok.

Was the occurrence of this crop circle related to my frustration over the elusiveness of the phenomenon and my wanting a more obvious indication of the agency involved? It did occur within 10-15 minutes of my having stated my disgust, and it did occur in the closest growing plants (string beans, the first time a circle has been reported in this crop) to my physical self - the whole incident clearly visible from my room; in fact, the very bed I was sleeping in. It was also placed dead-centre between the North and South boundary lines of the v/d Broeke property and about as close to their perimeter fence as possible.

Robbert and I, from our slightly different vantage points, were each quite convinced of both the intense power AND THE PRECISION of the light "tubes" - both of us perceiving the incident as "deliberate, on purpose." Are our perceptions - not just of this current event, but of multiple crop circle experiences over many years - simply anthropocentric? What are the chances that this recent amazing display was just coincidental? And if it was, why have similar events - the crop circles and all the stunning light phenomena associated with them - been occurring for the last 25-30 years, with increasing frequency and complexity, all over the world? And why repeatedly in fairly precise locations? Why don't they occur everywhere? And what are the light objects? Are they in fact becoming more complex too, perhaps mirroring the evolution in design of the flattened plants?

Are Robbert and I (and, apparently, many other people) victims of our imaginations? Or is it possible that human faculties are capable, at least in some situations, of recognizing external consciousness and/or purpose in energy-forms or life-forms currently unknown to us and un-named? Robbert and I perceived these light tubes as "on purpose." Was there a consciousness in those light columns? Or, was there a consciousness directing them? Was it our sub- or unconscious? If not ours, was it Jung's collective unconscious? Was it a consciousness inherent in Nature? Or was it from another dimension, galaxy or, perhaps, directly from the Almighty? Robbert and I don't know. What we suspect is that the answers to these questions - in fact the actual pursuit of these answers ­ will greatly affect human awareness. What we hope is that 21st Century humanity will recognize this possibility soon and join in the effort to uncover new aspects of reality we may currently only faintly imagine.

Nancy Talbott, BLT Research Team Inc., PO Box 400127, Cambridge, MA 02140 (USA)

Photos and diagram by Nancy Talbott.

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