My Take On Crop Circles

I listened to Art Bell once and some guy came on who sounded real laid back who said crop circles are my life. Seems he actually made his living going around studying crop circles. Where can I sign up?

I worked with a lady once who said she'd seen lights in the sky while in the middle of the ocean on a navy ship. She said strange metals had been found at crop circles. I said they might find strange metals if they looked elsewhere in the field.

The crop circle guy seemed to be on a spiritual quest, not a scientific one. There are people who have gone out, and using simple tools, created an elaborate design in only a few hours. This puts a burden on a real scientist who shows up to study a crop circle. They have to rule out any possibility that the crop circle was man made.

Since it has been proven that humans can create crop circles, a legitimate scientist, upon arriving at a crop circle, will assume that it is man made unless he can prove otherwise. UFO researchers, like the new age guy on the Art Bell show, assume that every crop circle is automatically of extra terrestrial origin.

UFO researchers have examined wheat sample from a circle to show that the wheat has supposedly been stressed, and they have found metals, like I mentioned before. A real scientist would get specimens from other areas of the wheat field and compare them to the ones found at the site. A legitimate scientist shares his work with others to see if they get similar results. Scientist also have this thing called peer review where other scientist look at their work and see if they think his claims are valid. It can be very difficult to get a claim accepted by the majority of scientist.

For example. People have claimed for years to find evidence of a human presence in South America earlier than the accepted date. Archeologist Tom Dillehay found a site at Monte Verde Chile. Only after the evidence was examined by numerous scientist was his new date recognized as valid. Crop circle investigators should face the same scrutiny.

And crop circles being an attempt by aliens to communicate makes no sense. Why would extraterrestrials make patterns in one medium that is only around during part of the year? Why would they choose a rural location instead of an area of high habitation? What message could they be trying to communicate? Anyone trying to make contact would use something simple. In the movie "Close Encounters" it was musical notes. Any intelligence using pictures would start with simple shapes then probably take a mathematical approach.

The Egyptians did not have helicopters or aircraft. That is a fact! Some hieroglyphics in the Temple of Osiris at Abydos appear to depict highly developed crafts of different levels of technology, specifically a 1960s era helicopter, a submarine like the Civil War Hunley, some form of flying saucer of the far future, and a jet plane with a tail that is too big.



Acording to www.catchpenny.org “The glyphs are a result of both erosion of the stone surface (evident elsewhere in the temple) and the process of filling in and re-carving the stone to replace some of the original hieroglyphics. The technical term for such a surface that has been written on more than once is a palimpsest. The usurping and modifying of inscriptions was common in ancient Egypt throughout its history. The Abydos glyph was modified at least once in antiquity, and perhaps twice. Some of the filling has fallen out in places where the older and the newer inscriptions overlap, and the result is unique and odd-looking.”

Glyphs super imposed.

“The text is part of the titulary of Ramesses II and can be translated as "The one of the Two Ladies, who suppresses the nine foreign countries." This replaces the royal titulary of Seti I that was originally carved into the stone. More technically, the actual "helicopter" seems to be a portion of the psd.t sign and the X3s.t sign on top of each other, with portions missing. An apparent change in scale also mucks things up.”

Glyphs in context.

Like I have said in earlier post, we know about Ancient Egypt. There are numerous artifacts and lots of writing. The Egyptians were conservative. They maintained the status quo, thus Egyptians were not innovators and thus were not interested in experimenting with advanced technologies. “If the ancient Egyptians had vehicles such as helicopters, submarines, and jet airplanes, one would expect to find some evidence of this other than in a single inscription on the lintel of a single temple. This type of large machinery requires a vast amount of support (including fuel, parts, factories, etc.) but there is no trace of any such support in all of Egypt. The Egyptian literature is also bereft of any boast, much less passing mention, of advanced aircraft.”

All artifacts found are Bronze Age type. The Persians were able to defeat the Egyptians (would that have been possible if the Egyptians had had advanced technology?), and Alexander the Great was later able to defeat the Egyptians, and he did not pick up helicopters from them.

The Egyptians would have had no use for a submarine. They sailed up and down the Nile, going North by drifting with the current going south by sail. They hardly ever ventured into the open sea.

More On UFOs

Here are several observations that have a bearing on supposed UFO sightings.

One: I was walking across campus one day when I ran into my roommate. He was staring at something and saying that he felt the way Mosses must have felt when he encountered the burning bush. He directed my gaze to a plant under a magnolia tree that had branches that spread wide out but it was clear underneath. The lone plant was one of those long ones that tapers to a point. A slight breeze caused it to sway, while nothing else around moved. There wasn't much else around. I didn't think the phenomenon was all that spectacular. It didn't compare in magnitude to a burning bush.

Two: I was watching an airplane flying by in the small town I lived in at the time. The airplane was towing one of those advertising signs. Across the street was a building. The airplane flew toward the building, got square with the building, and then I was momentarily jarred when it passed in front instead of disappearing behind. The airplane turned out to be a small radio controlled aircraft rather than the big manned airplane I'd thought it was.

Three: I was walking at night and saw a group of six circles of light that spun about in a circle, the circle getting wider and narrower as they danced. In the fog the apparitions appeared to be only ten feet away. This was an astonishing illusion, as I knew that the sky light that projected those beams was far away.

Now if I had not known about the skylight, and had been drunk, or eager for a religious or mysterious encounter, like my roommate had been. I might have thought I'd seen a UFO. And the radio controlled plane shows when something is in the air and you have no visual cues to judge scale, you might think you saw something strange when it might just be something ordinary. And it shows how easily UFO photos can be faked.

Four: I was laying semi awake on my bed in my apartment once, and saw what appeared to be a kid, dressed in a down jacket, like what had been in fashion in the 70s, this happened in the 80s. I tried to call out, "What are you doing here?" or something like that. As I did so I awoke, and the vision vanished. I did not feel scared, I did not feel a presence, I did not feel anything except a mild bemusement. In no way did I think I had seen a ghost, and I have never had that kind of dream experience again. In that apartment or elsewhere.

Atlantis Part 2

Where do I sign up for the job? For someone to pay me to go tramping around the globe looking for lost cities? The idea has captured the imagination of many, but I believe there is no evidence that it actually existed.
In Plato's account, Atlantis was a naval power lying "in front of the Pillars of Hercules" that conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa subjecting its people to slavery 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately 9600 BC. After a failed attempt to invade Athens, Atlantis sank into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune".

The Athenians led an alliance of resistors against the Atlantean empire, and as the alliance disintegrated, prevailed alone against the empire, liberating the occupied lands.

The island was larger than Ancient Libya and Asia Minor combined, but it afterwards was sunk by an earthquake and became an impassable mud shoal, inhibiting travel to any part of the ocean."
One TV show I saw said that the story described Atlantis as being larger than Europe Asia and Africa combined. This would be way too big to fit in the Atlantic Ocean. They suggested that it was a mistranslation, and that the text really read “in the middle of.” This supports the idea that the island of Crete was the inspiration for Atlantis.

The eruption on the island of Thera around the 17th or 16th century BC, caused a large tsunami which is believed to have devastated the Minoan civilization that existed on nearby Crete. And some historians believe that the time scale has been distorted by an error in translation, probably from Egyptian into Greek, which produced "thousands" instead of "hundreds", this error would rescale the time to 900 years before Solon, a much more realistic date than 9600 BC.

The Island being larger than Ancient Libya and Asia Minor combined, as says in Wikipedia is also much more realistic.

People who go off in search of Atlantis overlook some very important elements of the story. Critias. In the dialogue sees ancient Athens as the "perfect society" and Atlantis, its opponent, is the opposite. It is not described as a Utopian society but as a ruthless war making society that invades Europe and attacks Athens.
If such a devastating war really happened, there would be more of a record of it.
Also notice that the tsunami also killed the soldiers of Athens, not just Atlantis.
Also there is this little detail that after it sank it became an impassable mud shoal, inhibiting travel to any part of the ocean.

People get so caught up in the idea that they just don’t see that Plato is clearly using what has become a standard device of fiction — stressing the historicity of an event (and the discovery of hitherto unknown authorities) as an indication that what follows is fiction. Edgar Allen Poe used this device, as did Michael Crichton in Jurassic Park. The idea is to illustrate a point through parable.
Science lends no support. Continental drift, and plate tectonics demonstrate the impossibility of a lost continent. And satellites have mapped the ocean floor. You can get an Atlas or a globe that shows the mid ocean mountain ranges which curve in an exact mach to the edges of the continents, and there is no hidden land mass there.

Some scholars have pointed out that there is another Pillars of Hercules in the Mediterranean, and reckoning from that Pillars Crete again becomes a candidate. Perhaps a distant point in the Atlantic Ocean could refer to what to the Greeks at the time may have seemed the vast expanse of the Mediterranean.

I think that Plato probably did mean the Atlantic Ocean. If you create an imaginary place, you need to put it somewhere that is not well known. If he had placed it in the Aegean Sea then people would have said, “I’ve sailed all over that sea and I never saw any Continent.” The Atlantic, past the Straight of Gibraltar, was unknown; therefore anything could be there. Jonathon Swift placed one of his lands in Japan, then little known. Eldorado, the city of gold, was supposed to be in the New World somewhere. H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe put fictitious places in the then little explored Antarctica.

Technology, which allowed further exploration, erased those places from possible existence. Yet still people cling to the ideal of an Atlantis. The idea that a perfect world once existed, but is now gone, and maybe we could find it again. If only we look hard enough.

Atlantis Part 1

One of the most foolhardy things, I believe, is the search for Atlantis. Atlantis Plato's Dialogues Timaeus and Critias and there is no other primary account. The name has become a byword for any and all supposed advanced prehistoric lost civilizations.



Thanks to Wikipedia I can relate the basic story,

"For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State stayed the course of a mighty host, which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot. For the ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,' there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. For all that we have here, lying within the mouth of which we speak, is evidently a haven having a narrow entrance; but that yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent.

But at a later time there occurred portentous earthquakes and floods, and one grievous day and night befell them, when the whole body of your warriors was swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down.

Perhaps the stupidest Atlantis search I ever heard about was on a TV show where some guy reasoned that there was no large land mass beyond the Pillars of Heracles (Hercules in Latin) then Atlantis had to be in South America. He found a Toltec or Mayan ruin and then using the kind of convoluted logic that these kind of obsessed people have, he calculated that a cubit was a different length at that latitude, I think shorter, so when using that measure the dimensions came out as written in the legend.

Did the Atlanteans know that the earth is round? They were supposed to be advanced, but would they have known that they were supposed to change the length of their measuring sticks when they founded the city? “Hey, bubbastotle. You need to cut your cubit stick shorter.”

“What are you talking about?”

“BillyBobatsophanes says that at this latitude cubits are shorter.”

“What’s latitude?”

“Just cut off 10 decicubes.”

“But this cubit stick has been passed down in my family for generations”

"Well now you can pass down a shorter cubit stick.”

The guy only paid attention to the parts of the story that suited him. He didn’t notice, “an island comprising mostly mountains in the northern portions and along the shore, and encompassing a great plain of an oblong shape in the south ‘extending in one direction three thousand stadia [about 555 km; 345 mi], but across the center inland it was two thousand stadia [about 370 km; 230 mi].’ Fifty stadia [9 km; 6 mi] from the coast was a mountain that was low on all sides...broke it off all round about... the central island itself was five stades in diameter [about 0.92 km; 0.57 mi].”

I don’t know what stadia are, but I’m sure that that description is of a land mass much shorter smaller than South America And could a city on the other side of the Atlantic attack the European mainland and threaten Athens? There were no ships at that time capable of making a transatlantic voyage. How do I know? Archeologists have found ships from that era. Many of which are shipwrecked in the middle of the Mediterranean. People had a hard enough time sailing around in the Mediterranean sea, much less the Atlantic. Odysseus spent ten years wondering around a small area, and the Argonauts that it was a big deal going to the Black Sea. Nor do they find any evidence of Ocean going craft in South America.

Then what about "wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down." One key part of the Atlantean story is that the continent sank. This guy found a ruin on dry land.

Nostradamus

After watching a recorded program recently I caught a snatch of a show on the History Channel about Nostradamus. They were saying he predicted 9 11 and other recent events.

I remember, about five years ago seeing another show on the History Channel from the 1970's. I think it had been a feature film. It reviewed the so called predictions he had made, like Hitler. The show said that he had predicted the then current event of the Shah fleeing Iran and coming to the U.S.

Then the show set out to predict what was in store for the future based on "The Prophecies," No's 1555 book of peculiar quatrains. In the twenty five years that had followed since that film not a single thing they predicted had come to pass. Thank Goodness! A middle eastern despot wearing a blue turban has not taken over the world.

The brief clip I saw of the new show marveled at the accuracy of his predictions of the last thirty years. That is amazing considering that No said the world would end in 1988! Well it is easy to apply his prophecies to things that have already happened. Particularly when they do games like change 1999 to 9111 to say he predicted the September eleventh World Trade Center attack.

The proof is in the pudding. Predicting things before they happened failed utterly. That feature film is still around as proof. Unless they destroyed it.

I get amused when people on shows, like late night talk shows, talk about The Great Pyramid and their crackpot theories about its purpose, as if it were the one and only pyramid in Egypt. If you look you can see the there is pyramid right next to The Great Pyramid that is almost as large, and one that is about half the size then there are several more smaller ones. Look around and you see more small ones.

To Egyptologist the pyramids are not even close to being a mystery. They were tombs. I remember some show on TV long ago where some man spent his life trying to prove that The Great Pyramid was the Old Testament in stone. I don't know how you could say that that section of stones is the 23rd Psalm. That would be particularly remarkable since the Pyramid was built before the Old Testament was written!

Another of the myriad so called theories was that The Great Pyramid is encrypted data. The person did not suggest what the data might be. He didn't realize that it would be undecipherable now because most of the facing stones are gone. In any case if it was data important enough to be encrypted, why did they not build another pyramid later to update their data?

Contrary to what people who have not done their homework may think. The Great Pyramid was not the crowning achievement of Egyptian Architecture. The Egyptians still had two thousand years of history to go after the Pyramid was built.

I remember seeing Erich von Daniken (of ancient astronaut fame) on TV in the 90's (Ithought his theories had been discredited years ago.) on the History Channel saying that it was obvious that aliens made the pyramids because they were beyond the capabilities of humans at the time.

Not only is that an insult to humans, but if aliens built the pyramids then: They travelled billions of light years to reach earth in order to show humans how to build with stone, went through a series of trail and error to figure out how to build them, built the causeway, funarary chapel and other outbuildings as well as the workers housing.

Egyptians built mastaba, a rectangular shelter of stone above the graves of people. A guy named Zoser decided to stack mastaba on top of each other and ended up with the Step Pyramid. Next there was a guy named Sneferu who made a pyramid that is called the Callapsed Pyramid because they made a mistake in the building and it wasn't stable. Next he built a pyramid that was not anchored on solid bedrock was had a slope that was too steep. They had to change the slope at the top, thus it is called the Bent Pyramid. Finally he got it right and built the Red Pyramid.

Khufu (Cheops) was the pharoh who had The Great Pyramid built. Inside is a thing that looks very much like a sarcophagus, where he was originally buried. We don't know exactly how the pyramids were made, but they were materpieces of craftsmanship, not technology. They may have used ramps of sand, or levers. One guy even thinks they might have put cemicircular shaped wood on the stones so they could be rolled. None of these required intervention from Aliens.

In the workman's quarters archelogists have found graffitti. None of which mentions any alien overseers.