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Australian Crop
Circles Surprise
Rights to all articles are held by
the authors and permission to reprint must be sought from UFO
Research Queensland.
Richard Giles © April 2004
Images Christopher White © 2004
Richard Giles
is a Queensland astrologer, Feng Shui practitioner and
geomancer who also works part time for Nexus magazine,
Australia and has read on and researched crop circles for 12
years. For full report and images,
visit
here.
From time to
time sets of crop circles have appeared in the Australian
landscape and surprised local media or UFO groups and
researchers. A number of reports over the last few decades
have placed circles in Victoria, South Australia, New South
Wales and Queensland. Perhaps the most famous were the Tully
"flying saucer nests" of 1966, when a local farmer reported
that he had found circle-like indentations in reed beds near
his cane fields in north Queensland. This find was accompanied
by a very suitable media hoo-ha at the time, with accusations
of nutters, freaks and fakes.
Other reports
of circles were in wheat fields in rural Victoria and South
Australia. The best known circle, in South Australia, was
reported by an airline passenger in the mid 1990s who first
spotted it from the air in CSIRO experimental grain plots
right near Adelaide city.
Little has been
reported in Queensland until recently. Then late Sunday 28th
March, two local boys Eli Colbran and Tom Braby were walking
alongside a local property by Aherns Road at Conondale (near
Maleny on the Sunshine Coast) and spotted a pattern in the
pasture grasses. One recognised it from his memory of the UK
phenomena as a typical crop circle design. They were just
metres from Aherns Road but in such a position, the land being
raised above the road, that it would normally never have been
seen. There were four circles in all.
One boy rushed
home to get his father, who reported it to a local UFO
researcher, and just after sundown two local researchers with
torches were combing through the grass. They took a series of
flash photos and went home determined to arrive back at first
light to search on Monday morning. Photos they took that night
contained some intriguing images only discovered days later on
the developed positives. The patterns of the four circular
flattened areas were spread over a distance of 24 metres. The
first circle was 3.8 metres in circumference, the second 7.9
metres, the third 1.5 and the last 0.85 metres. They were on a
close North-South axis with small variations in the centres,
each circle being slightly off centre from the next. They all
had neat clockwise swirl patterns and contained grasses laid
down in a classic unbroken pattern. The line of the four was
arranged to point at exactly 20 degrees East of magnetic
North.
Each circle had
classic centres with the grass formed into a cone in the
middle, again slightly off centre. In the centres each seemed
to have a very tiny raised mound of earth underneath according
to Kate Dash of Montville. Kate has travelled to England a
number of times to visit UK circles and attend UK circle
conferences.
The grass was
mixed pasture grasses. The seed heads were intact and
according to local photographer and researcher Christopher
White, "It doesn't appear as though it could have been
trampled or squashed down. That would have broken off the seed
heads".
The smoothness
of the layered lines of grass within the circles were
beautifully laid and interwoven. Nothing in the circles showed
broken or battered stems as you would find when they are done
with human intervention.
Due to job
commitments I was only able to visit the site on Wednesday
afternoon 31st March. The circles were still reasonably intact
but grass stems were beginning to rise and the surrounding
area had been trampled by dozens of visitors over the previous
two and a half days. The site still had a certain energy
quality to it, but Kate Dash told me nothing compared to the
pristine energies on site on the Monday morning they first
arrived.
Locals
speculated that there may be some meaning to the pattern of
four circles and their relative sizes may contain some meaning
as yet to be deciphered. The medium size came first then a
very large circle followed by the two much smaller ones at the
northern end of the axis.
Two local
residents living within a kilometre of the site who spoke to
Christopher and Kate reported seeing bright blue flashes of
light at about 11 or 12 midnight on Saturday, and another
spoke of a strange musical note they heard around midnight.
Others told me of strange lights they had seen at night around
the Conondales valley over the last few years. One women told
of a spectacular aerial light display she and her girlfriend
saw late one night several years back. The valley does seem to
have a history of unusual lights.
In that vein,
two photos taken on the Sunday night show light anomalies in
the frames. Neither lights were visible when Christopher took
the photos. One photo shows a single light hovering above the
ground with a slight double image. The other shows a light
which appears to be moving fast as there are five multiple
images of the light overlapping each other. To do this it must
have been moving incredibly quickly to be caught in a flash
photo. Both lights are in the immediate foreground of the
shots. Having seen both video and still footage of the lights
caught in UK circles, to my eyes these look very similar.
This multiple
formation is the first apparently genuine crop circle ever to
be reported in southern Queensland. Kate Dash feels that it
could be the forerunner of things to come that could surprise
us all.
Meanwhile local
farmer Doug Sands, on whose property they appeared, maintains
that they were formed by wind-whirlies, which he says happen
all the time on his place. If he has seen these and similar
circles in the past it looks like his winds are mighty fine
draughtsmen to arrange such beautiful and intricately woven
patterns. Unfortunately he ploughed them in one week later.
We do look
forward to more of the same in the future.
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