Sunday 26 March 2023

Crop Circle TV Nostalgia

 
The 2023 crop circle season is about to begin; what it will produce, we'll have to wait and see. Therefore it seems fitting that I came across a vintage TV talk show about crop circles on YouTube. It was broadcast on the 16th of May 1990 and is from a series I remember well called Central Weekend. This was an ITV late night programme similar in format to the BBC's Question Time, but with a wider scope that covered more than just politics. This episode is about crop circles and features a few familiar faces, although obviously looking much younger than they do today, such as Colin Andrews, Jenny Randles and Busty Taylor. The programme will definitely astonish the modern UFOlogical viewer with its seriousness and sheer honesty. This far exceeds even the post-2017 renaissance typified by pundits like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. Personally, I found watching it an emotional experience; loaded with that untranslatable Welsh word hiraeth. It was just a year later than everything changed. The Today newspaper rolled off the press with the huge lurid headline FOOLED YOU! It showed a photograph of Douglas Bowers and David Chorley, two elderly Wiltshire men who confessed to having made the crop circles themselves using simple tools. They had been hoaxing them nationwide since 1976 when on their way home from a pub one night they had used a ladder to make a structure in a wheat field that they called a "nest". It's interesting that the word confession was used again and again in every article dropping this bombshell; however, it is a perfect example of the "CTCS" that I detail in my recent skeptic lecture, see: https://youtu.be/DFl3V4JRDns?t=5897. Even before then, Colin Andrews and his colleague Pat Delgado were duped by the government. There was an official investigation by DEFRA that worked alongside the research project Colin talks about in the programme, but they tricked him into looking in the wrong locations while the government themselves gathered all the data. The tone of crop circle and UFO reports in the British media totally transformed overnight from sober discussion to flippant mockery. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dxAufrPFxg.
 
This informational Dark Age dragged on almost uninterrupted from 1991 until 2017. The real hoax was actually not Doug and Dave fooling the world, but the government using Doug and Dave, along with other methods, to fool the world. I'm ashamed to say that I fell for that scam. I, like almost everybody, lost interest in crop circles for years. It was only when I saw Andy Thomas on an obscure afternoon programme with Esther Rantzen that I gasped and asked myself: "What!? Is it still going on?" I find it especially ironic that at the same time I am watching this, I have open an article by John Greenwald announcing that the US government is refusing to release any information related to "Objectgate", see the background links for detail. Source: https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/u-s-air-force-denies-release-of-all-photos-videos-of-balloon-shootdowns/. The cover-up goes on, but documents like that 1990 TV show remind us that it doesn't have to be like this. We can do better; we have had better. If we never let ourselves forget that, how much longer can the cover-up go on?
See here for background: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2023/02/ufo-disclosure-2023-its-all-gone-quiet.html.

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