The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Almost all crop circles are known to have been caused by pranksters. In 1991 UFOlogists and artists Doug Bower and David Chorley admitted to faking 250 circles in England, including the first to appear in the 1970s. To make the circles, they used their feet, string and a board. There remain a small number of puzzling circles in which the biological structure of the flattened plants has changed. Sometimes in these circles the local magnetic field appears to have been affected, resulting in electrical equipment failure, even in airplanes flying overhead.

Cerealogists (after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture) speculate on a number of origins for these non-prankster circles. The favoured theories are that they are caused by eddies in the Earth’s magnetic field or by «plasma vortices», mini-tornadoes of electrically charged gas. The plasma vortices theory, propounded by meteorologist Dr Terence Meaden, would account for the apparent heat burst in a crop circle which causes nodes on affected plants to burst. Meaden also hypothesized that a plasma vortex would create a whining sound. When, in 1991, a couple claimed they’d been standing in the middle of a crop circle as it formed, a whining sound is exactly what they said they’d heard.

Crop circles are caused by aliens: ALERT LEVEL 4

Further Reading

Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews, Circular Evidence^ 1989

Jim Schnabel, Round in Circles: Physicists, Poltergeists, Pranksters and the Secret History of the Cropwatchers, 1994

Dead Sea Scrolls

In early 1947, near Qumran on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, a Bedouin herder named Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed (or el-Dhib, «the Wolf») tossed a stone into a cave in an attempt to flush out a missing goat. To his surprise there came back not the bleat of a goat but the sound of pottery breaking. Entering the cave, he found an ancient jar containing scrolls wrapped in linen. Later, through the offices of a local cobbler and antiquities dealer, Khalil Eskander Shahin («Kando»), el-Dhib managed to sell some of the scrolls he’d discovered, and word slowly spread about the discoveries in the desert. The first archaeological excavations took place in February 1949. In 1952, another series of caves was found, and eventually over 800 scrolls were recovered from 11 caves around Wadi Qumran. The scrolls — many of which exist only as fragments — include versions of all but one book of the Old Testament, along with Biblical commentaries, non-Biblical texts on religious conduct, and oddities such as the Copper Scroll, which lists the hiding places for treasure in Israel. Mostly written in Hebrew, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been carbon-dated to as early as 200 BC. The scrolls thus include the earliest edition of the Bible; before Mohammed el-Dhib tossed his stone into that cave, the oldest known Bible was the Ben Asher text, written in ad 1008.

Most of the discovered scrolls were published promptly, the notable exception being the scrolls and fragments found in Cave 4, which represented nearly 40 per cent of the total Qumran material. The publication of the Cave 4 documents was entrusted to an «International Team» led by Father Roland de Vaux, a Domincan scholar from Jerusalem, and all others were barred from even viewing the material by the so-called «secrecy rule». Even after de Vaux’s death in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused to allow publication even of photographs of the Cave 4 finds. Speculation began that the «International Team», predominantly Catholic, had found something in the Cave 4 that it sought to hide. Fanning the fires of surmise were the academics Andre Dupont-Sommer and John Allegro, who noted that the «Teacher of Righteousness» described in some of the Qumran documents strangely paralleled Jesus the Messiah. Then Professor Robert Eisenman, another Scrolls scholar, pumped pure oxygen into the blazing speculations: he mooted that the «Teacher of Righteousness» was actually James, Jesus’s brother, and that James was the true founder of Christianity. Paul (Saul), in Eisenman’s theory, was a Roman fink seeking to bring James’s true Word into disrepute.