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04/08/01: Memo from Firetop Mountain:
Stranger than Fiction
Hey, folks.
As some of you know, I work as a reporter
for a small-town newspaper in the mystical land of Haldimand County, Ontario.
Occasionally, even on my very rural beat, the job involves brushes with
stuff straight out the tabloids - usually lurid occult clap-trap. "Haunted"
houses, witch covens, abandoned houses daubed with excrement-painted pentagrams,
a psychic who knows where a child's bones are buried, etc. For the most
part, these stories crumble under casual investigation. (Though some weird
things did happen in a pet cemetary a few months back.) Sometimes, it feels
like my life is starting to resemble the adventures of some of my role-playing
game personas. Well, the really boring ones, anyway.
Anyway, the biggest "weird" story to hit
the area was the appearance of some crop circles on an Indian reserve just
a few miles from the paper's head office. Literally hundreds of thousands
of people from far and wide came to see the circles. They were granted
a kind of "skeptical immunity" by the fact that the Native elders and seers
declared them to be the genuine article. Questioning them was akin to questioning
Native religious beliefs.
This made it hard for me to cast aspersions
on the circles when I did a follow-up story on them shortly after arriving
at the paper. Frankly, though, I think they're faker than Hitler's halo,
and I have a pretty good idea who made the bloody things.
The whole thing was a nine-day wonder.
The circles disappeared come the harvest, and the UFO tourists faded back
into the trailer parks and conspiracy newsgroups. However, the belief persisted
locally. The editor of North America's largest Native newspaper, located
on the same reserve, wrote about lights people had seen in the sky. A prominent
environmental issues organization backed their authenticity, and continues
to do so. Recently, a meteorite was discovered on a farm about 5 km away.
I'm sure this will somehow be woven into the web of thick-skulled 'Star
People' musing soon enough.
My involvement in this affair began when
a billboard was constructed on the country road nearest the crop circle
field. It bore painted representations of the circles and the caption
"The Star People are Here to Help the New World." It's still there. What
follows is an article I wrote for the newspaper shortly after the billboard
was erected. I'm sharing it with you now, in the interest of injecting
a little "real world" news into the 'zine. Enjoy!
Crop Circles a fraud?
Last summer, thousands of visitors from
as far away as New Zealand crowded into a field on the New Credit reserve,
near Hagersville, Ontario, hoping for a glimpse of the beyond. They were
here to see a pair of crop-circle formations, large complex patterns laid
down in a field of wheat. Some said they resembled Sumerian letters, others
said they were Native petroglyphs. Fringe religious groups claimed to have
prior knowledge of their appearance. Pseudo-Scientific organizations like
the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) showed up to take radiation counts. A number
of Native Elders and seers came to inspect the site, and declared it genuine.
Some said that more were on the way.
Ken and Clynt King were the first ones
to tell people about the circles. Ken owns the land the formations appeared
on, while his brother Clynt rents a house nearby. Clynt first spotted the
circles on June 22 of last year. "I was the third person to see them...
and the first person to start telling people about it," said Clynt in a
phone interview. Clynt, who works for the First Nations Environmental Network,
said that he expects more circles to appear at some point.
His brother Ken, a burly, good humoured
mechanic in his late 40s', is pretty sure that the formations are real.
He's not sure who or what created them, but he's almost certain that the
creators weren't human. "Everybody I told, their first reaction was 'Yeah,
right.' And that was my reaction too. But not after they'd been there to
see them," he said. Ken pointed to factors like the difficulty in getting
into the field unseen, and the time required to make them as reasons for
their inhuman genesis. "It would've taken hours and hours to do it if it
was man-made," he said. He said that if humans had flattened the wheat,
they would have damaged it. "It (the wheat) was all interwoven. When you
really looked at it, you could see the wheat was still inside the chaff."
Brian Bower, the provincial section director
for MUFON, inspected the field with a number of tools, including a geiger
counter. Acocrding to Bower's inspection report "The size and complex nature
of the formation... argue against... the possibility of the formation being
man-made." He claimed to have found traces of residual radiation higher
than normal. However, according to Ken "Two days later a girl came with
a counter and said it was back to normal."
Elders and psychics told the Kings that
the formation was real, and that it was a message. One seer, who claimed
to be named "Xpotelovskil," wrote down a message she had received from
the "Star People." Child, We have waited a long time to speak to you in
this way...we weep for your earth, for it will soon be as dry as this spot
you sit on," it reads in part. The message goes on to describe coming apocalyptic
events and calls on readers to "clear yourselves of toxins and alcohol."
It also advises "Tell them not to worry about the science of what has happened,
but rather spread the message of peace." It claims that more circles will
appear.
Despite the advice of the message to "not
worry about the science of what has happened," one question must be asked.
Are the formations a fraud? If the history of the phenomenon is any indication,
the answer is a resounding yes.
Crop circles first appeared in England
in the late 1970s'. They began as simple circles. As media attention began
to spread, the circles spread as well. They started to become more and
more complex. Finally, they spread to Europe and America and spawned a
small industry devoted to their study. Dedicated experts, dubbed "cereologists,"
wrote books about them.
Then, in 1991, a pair of British college
professors named Doug Bower and David Chorley admitted to faking more than
250 of the circles over the years. They claimed they had taught others
to create the circles using flat boards and other simple tools. They were
able to produce complex crop formations indistinguishable from allegedly
real formations. Numerous deliberate hoaxes over the years have been declared
as the real thing by believers. Hoaxers can, and do, create fake crop circles
just as complex as supposedly real ones.
Ken admits that there is a chance that
the formations are fakes, but feels that it is unlikely. "It would have
to be very smart people," he said. He joked that it might be a hoax on
the part of playful aliens. "Maybe there's... renegade alien bikers that
go out and cause havoc," he laughed. Clynt dismissed the idea of a hoax.
"No. I don't think it a fraud. It's a genuine message," he said. "Relatives
from other worlds are the ones that helped put it there. They used the
energy from the Earth to help create it."
The Kings, and many others, are convinced.
One thing is certain. If the formations are a fraud, as seems likely, someone,
somewhere, is rather cruelly playing on deeply held spiritual beliefs."
Since the article appeared, the Kings
have changed the field into a Bison farm. It is uncertain how this will
affect the placement of future messages.
In other news, I have a some neat stuff
planned for the 'zine in coming months. I'm starting to get regular contributions,
which is really swell. Watch for new columnists, serials, and an opinions
section! Also coming soon is something of a personal project - a collaborative
RP fiction based on a 4 year long online role-play session between MU's
Radar (Jen Wylie) and myself. Jen penned most of it, and it's looking good.
Stay tuned!
Seriously, next month Pieter will tell
you all about the Firetop Mountain thing..
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