From: Dave Haith <visions@ntlworld.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2002 12:56:24 +0100
Fwd Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2002 09:45:46 -0400
Subject: Re: Vallee On Crop Circles - Haith


Below, with his permission to post, is a piece sent to me by
Montague Keen, who from 1990 to early 1994 was on the UK's
Council of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies and acted as their
scientific advisor.

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From: MKeen7225@aol.com
To: visions@ntlworld.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2002 4:34 PM
Subject: (no subject)

Interesting speculation by Jacques Vallee, but littered with
misunderstandings and dubious assumptions. Here goes:

The massive publicity accorded Doug and Dave's exploits in Sept.
1991 arose from a world exclusive claimed and staged managed by
the Today Newspaper (decd).

The Mandelbrot set, found in a field several miles south of
Cambridge, UK, in '92, was almost certainly the work of a
Cambridge maths student althouugh I (as about the only person
who was able to locate and examine it before it was combined)
got quite excited about it at the time.

"Vegetation is bent becaused the nodes are exploded. The stalks
are not broken and indeed plants are often reported to grow
again." The first statement is a misleading summary of W.C.
Levengood's work from 1990 onwards, when he found apparently
exploded microscopic pits (not to be confused with much larger,
surface stomata) in the parenchyma tissue of some nodes of grass
pants (mainly wheat and barley) from formations in Southern
England, and concluded that the plants had been struck by a
powerful force which vaporised the moisture instantaneously, and
was therefore inconsistent with a man-made hoax. Whether the
stalks are broken, and whether the plants recover, depends on
the growth stage, or degree of senescence (and hence turgidity
or brittleness) of the stems, i.e. the moisture content and
degree of lignification. Up to a certain stage in their
development, plants will normally recover and grow upwards after
crushing. Levengood's methodology and conclusions were later
challenged, chiefly by me, but the most recent discoveries, of
which Vallee is apparently unaware, look as though the old
pioneer might be vindicated after all.

The statement that all significant formations have been observed
in areas close to major defence research facilities is highly
questionable. It all depends, among other things, on what you
mean by significant. One might be forced to the desperate
hypothesis advanced by Terence Meaden in defence of his vortex
theory, that all formations bearing characteristics inconsistent
with it were hoaxes. This is to fit the facts to the theory,
not the theory to the facts. Vallee's assertion is bland, and
not supported by evidence. In any event, the implications are
that there are scores of such establishments in England, all of
them interested and involved in this highly specialised and
totally secret method of creating criminal trespass on farmers'
crops; and that these tests had been carried out furtively for
twenty years or more from invisible space ships of which there
has been neither disclosure nor suspicion.

Morever, formations have been reported from scores of countries
where even the British defence establishment's writ doesn't run.
  We don't know how many of them are mad-made on the ground, of
course, but it's pushing things to argue that they must all be
spurious because they're not within easy reach of a secret
British weapons development, research or testing establishment.

All very negative, especially since the alternative hypothesis
must be even more incredible if the everything's-a-hoax
assumption is found unacceptable. But I trust this moderate
clarification may help to confuse the issue -:)

Montague Keen

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Dave Haith