Customer Reviews

Crop Circles: The Greatest Mystery of Modern Times

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book has numerous photos in color and black & white and easy to understand text. The author covers a variety of aspects of crop circles such as physical and emotional effects, animals reactions to, hoaxes (and how to tell them from the real thing), mechanical failures, missing time and "other dimensional" experiences. There are also many eye witness testimonies which lend even more credence to an unusual phenomenon.

The author is an aerial photographer and took some gorgeous pictures of very interesting crop circles. But if you would like to know (as we would) answers to the important questions, this book won't help you. Like: Who made the crop circles? What do they mean? Why are they being made? What does the British Gov't say about these questions? How about the British Army? How about Prince Charles or the Queen? What about top British Phd's and researchers? The problem with this book is that the author has no access to top people in high places who might know something of value.

At first, the author did a good job explaining some of the theories. For example, one can tell a real crop circle from a fake, using five variables. Real crop circles have unbroken stems, are stretched and bent at the base of the plants, and leave an electromagnetic signature that can be measured with sophisticated instruments. There are three other variables the experts look for to determine a real circle from a hoax. They materialize out of nowhere in a matter of minutes. Some are 1500 feet in diameter. Unfortunately, Ms. Pringle did not tell us which crop circles pictured in her book were real and which were phony. This left us feeling like she wanted to mislead the public. We know that 80% of all crop circles are manmade (fake). The other 20% are unexplained. Ms. Pringle did not help us to learn which ones pictured in the book were not genuine.

For example, there was a photo of the most mysterious crop circle of them all (in our opinion), which is a glyph of ancient Mason Text from the time of Augustus Caesar. I saw this glyph shown on a television show, and some PhD's translated it. The glyph resembled the latin words "Oporto Apsos" which translates roughly into "we opose cunning and deceit." But Ms. Pringle didn't say a word about this glyph in the book! She had the picture in the book, but didn't confirm if the words were real or a hoax. She didn't give readers the translation either. So this made us feel like she was a bit slopply in her research. One would expect an analysis of each picture. Again, here is an example where we felt like the book was too vague.

Real crop circles display sophisticated elements of Euclidian Geometry, and some are related to musical composition. Ms. Pringle did not do an analysis of the Geometry, which really dissappointed us. I have seen Geometry analysis done by other researchers in this field and this is crucial information in understanding the special intelligence and perfection of workmanship displayed in a real crop circle. Lastly, Ms. Pringle devoted a good portion of the book interviewing local witnesses about various phenomenon. We didn't find this very credible. This portion of the book seemed unscientific, and poorly researched. The local witnesses came across as uneducated and superstitious. Their observations were sometimes silly and childlike. Some of the witnesses seemed to exagerate normal occurances. For example, a witness is sitting in the center of a crop circle in the pitch black of night, and suddenly hears footsteps and "strange" noises. The witness firmly believes that the noises are alien crop circle makers. Later on in the book, another witness from the same village speaks about deer, birds and other animals being injured in the crops. If you put two and two together, deer and birds can also sound like "footsteps" and "strange noises" in the night.

In summary: The book's photos left us in awe at the simplistic beauty and sophistication of the crop circles. But we wish we could have learned more. We are still as baffled as ever.

This is a thorough and well reasoned, and well-balanced examination of a phenomena that has excited strong feelings on both sides. (See the previous review--though its author appears not to be aware that the hoaxers he speaks of were unmasked as having exaggerated the number of sites they created--there are also significant differences in the sites they are known to have created and the "genuine" sites.) This book should be of interest to both believers and skeptics and to my mind presents the most thorough account to date.

Lucy Pringle's Crop Circles is a unique collection of stories and anecdotes about peoples' strange experiences with crop formations. Anyone reading this book cannot escape the conclusion that crop circles are a mysterious phenomenon that create nonordinary perceptions and energy effects.
There are wonderful accounts of people who witness the spontaneous creation of these crop patterns, very similar to those told by researcher Colin Andrews. Anyone who thinks that crop cirles are merely exotic designs in the field needs to read this book.
Pringle discounts the idea, unfairly in my view, that humans might be involved in making many of these patterns. Nonetheless, the book demonstrates that crop circles are truly weird phenomena, not easily explained away.
(Simeon Hein is the author of Opening Minds: A Journey of Extraordinary Encounters, Crop Circles, and Resonance (Mount Baldy Press, 2002).)

Researcher and writer Lucy Pringle begins this well-illustrated book of more than 150 black and white and color images with eyewitness reports concerning crop circle creations. One of the most haunting cases involved a couple in 1990 while walking in the early evening near their Hambledon, Surrey home. They were suddenly confronted with a strong gust of wind and felt as if they were being sucked upward. "Looking down we saw a circle being formed around us. It only took a couple of seconds. A spiral appeared anti-clockwise and grew outwards from the centre, about two metres in diameter. In the centre of the circle there was a small pyramid of corn, the stalks stacked up against each other."

Others over the years have reported seeing mysterious lights associated with cereal crops going down in various parts of the world. The lights rarely have structure and have been an enigma since the Warminster, U. K. flap of the 1970s which also involved crop circles.

Lucy also documents a variety of effects on animals such as dogs and birds, both of which are known to detour from crop formations as if sensing something to avoid not visible to humans.

This is a beautiful introductory book on the subject. I recommend it if you still need to discover what crop circles are. Many pictures are really beautiful and left me speechless.
But if you already know something about crop circles and want to know more, this is not where you will find it.

The beautiful photographs highlight the inescapable mystery of crop circle geometry. I cant understand the lack of serious scientific investigation into these incredible formations.

The VERY FIRST crop circles were made by pranksters with ropes and boards. They have video taped footage of themselves doing it. Did the aliens then pick up on and improve on this method of "communicating" with pretty circles, or is it all just a big hoax that certain conspiracy addicts refuse to see?

Open your eyes. It's a joke.