Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, Beeps, Downed Corn and Giant Cabbage
In 1975 in Orton, Ontario, Lindy Tucker and her neighbors began experiencing events of such high strangeness that Tucker's subsequent investigations led to founding a research organization and having some of her work published in the MUFON Journal. Tucker launched Phenomena Under Reasonable Evidence (PURE) Research and her article, Tracing Sound to UFO Encounters [1], was published in the October 1994 Journal. The article presented an excellent summary of Tucker's research into beeping sounds associated with UFOs.
While the UFO sightings and accompanying beeps that were experienced in the Orton community were plenty strange in and of themselves, there were further events worthy of consideration in the context of the crop circle phenomenon. In an article titled Second Sight [2], Tucker further explained the strange goings ons in southern Ontario during the spring and summer of '75.
Following at least two sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, in which Tucker perceived what she described as “telepathic contact,” she experienced electronic anomalies, including telephone disconnections and appliances inexplicably turning on. Tucker further reported “compasses spinning” in her hand and “odd rashes or burns after being out late in the fields trying to get closer to this mysterious force.”
While all this was taking place, one day Tucker discovered a nearby field of corn “went down.” Every single stalk in the field, as far as the eye could see, she wrote, was “laid down” and the crops “looked singed.”
Then her garden produced a whopping 75-pound cabbage.
Tucker with the amazing cabbage.
Tucker went on to investigate crop circles and is currently a member of the Independent Crop Circles Researchers' Association (ICCRA). She explained in Second Sight that following her introduction to Colin Andrews in 1991, he provided her with crop circle locations in North America. She began mapping the locations with the beeping UFO cases, and wrote, “Remarkably, they are all super-imposed in the same locations, time and time again.”
I suppose it largely depends on the reader as to what they suppose Tucker's experiences and research indicate. Proponents of the ETH will no doubt see evidence of aliens in between the lines, while those who prefer to believe all crop formations are hoaxes, regardless of what they think about UFOs, might prefer to think the downed corn near Tucker's home had little or nothing to do with her other strange experiences.
Yet another perspective might be held by people who notice the likely presence of concentrated amounts of electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) and microwave pulses as suggested by Tucker's descriptions of electronic anomalies, malfunctioning compasses, singed crops and unexplained burns. Such are indeed the things that research projects of the era and overexposure to EMFs are known to be made of.
I cannot say with any certainty if humankind is the only intelligence using microwave and electronic frequencies, if there are visiting aliens that also use such forces, if some kind of natural yet intense EMFs were manifesting in Orton or, for that matter, if intense EMFs were present at all. Combinations thereof are also possible and I by no means claim to conclusively know exactly what has taken place around Lindy Tucker. As promised in the first post of this series, I will simply present facts and encourage readers to form their own opinions about what the facts indicate.
While I do not know the extent intense microwave forces may have been present in Orton during the UFO flap and strange occurrences of 1975, I do happen to know that artifacts of intense microwave energies have been identified in not only select crop formations, but also quite likely in the homes of select alleged alien abductees. There are indeed curious circumstances that justify further research, whatever one may suspect such circumstances ultimately indicate.
William Levengood on Microwave Energy and the “Most Unusual Crop Formation”
The work of William C. “Lefty” Levengood (pictured left) includes examinations of crop circles and cattle mutilations, as well as investigations of alleged alien abduction. Levengood, a Michigan biophysicist and consultant to ICCRA who has personally examined plants from over 300 crop formations, was credited with identifying glassy particles curiously located in the homes of select alleged abductees [3]. Interestingly, such particles were not found in a sample of homes of non-abductees.
We can only speculate on exactly what caused such apparent trace evidence, but I find it noteworthy that, according to Levengood and other researchers, similar glassy particles have been located in select crop circles. While intense microwave pulses might be among the possible factors on a list of potential, even if just partial, explanations, we need not entirely speculate when it comes to identifying circumstances that virtually certainly establish a connection between an alleged abductee and extremely unusual EMFs.
An extraordinary tale [4] was making the rounds in which Levengood had quite cleverly instructed an abductee as to how they might possibly obtain evidence that something was indeed regularly taking place, whatever that something might eventually turn out to be. As the story went, Levengood supplied the female abductee with an assortment of hair curlers, each having a plastic capsule stuffed in it which had seeds, allegedly wheat seeds, placed in it. Each night, before going to sleep, she was to put a hair curler in her hair. Each morning, she was to properly date and store the curler, documenting in a journal if she had experienced anything unusual during the previous night or 24 hours.
According to various Internet sources, the woman experienced some type of high strangeness, or possible alien abduction, one night during the experimentation period. Levengood would later find the seeds to indeed be altered which coincided with the date of the strange experience. As the story went, the seeds were completely fried.
I contacted William “Lefty” Levengood in 2010 so I could find out more about such extraordinary claims. Levengood graciously agreed to participate in two telephone interviews conducted during July of 2010. As is often the situation with tales circulating around the Internet, Levengood informed me there is truth mixed with inaccuracy in the hair curler story. However, in this case, I found the truth even more interesting!
From the outset of our discussions, Levengood stressed he was committed to accuracy. He clearly wanted assurance his statements would be presented properly and not taken out of context. He wanted it clarified he discourages unfounded speculation and had made no conclusive connections between phenomena such as reported crop circles, alien abductions and cattle mutilations. Actually, he went as far as to discourage the discussion of such phenomena in the same context, as connections are not yet conclusively established. An example of his commitment to accuracy can be observed in his preference of the term bovine mutilations to cattle mutilations.
“The problem is people do not like to think,” Levengood told me, “and that's where you come in, to communicate to these people.”
Levengood is quick to warn there is a vast spectrum of microwave frequencies, and that assumptions should therefore not be made about microwave artifacts necessarily originating from the same source. He also pointed out it would take a great deal more work to quantify accurate details surrounding the glassy particles.
He explained that only about ten percent of the total energy used by a home microwave oven is actually allocated to microwave energy, stating, “If we had used more efficient, higher energy microwave wave lengths, we couldn't have it on when we had our television on or our telephone or our radio – we wouldn't be able to hear them. In other words, the microwave energy would completely wipe them out.”
Explaining why microwave oven manufacturers are limited to “such a low efficiency,” Levengood continued, “If they'd allowed higher frequencies of microwaves, which are more efficient, then, yes, you could stick your food in there and it probably wouldn't take over ten seconds to heat it up, but you wouldn't be able to run any other electrical communications devices, like televisions and so on, while you were using your microwave. So they only allowed the microwave people to work in this very inefficient range.”
I found this subject matter very interesting in the context of electrical anomalies, as are commonly reported during and following certain events of high strangeness. I asked about microwaves and their apparent relationships with crop circles.
“The microwave that's applied in crop formations – that is of the very, very efficient wave length,” Levengood said, pointing out that electrical devices and batteries are subject to malfunction within certain crop formations.
He further explained how early on he conducted some experiments. Michigan farmers were helpful in supplying Levengood with fresh samples of wheat, and he would take it home and “stick it in the microwave.” While he was able to duplicate plant abnormalities as found in authentic crop formations to a certain extent, the process took too long and was therefore not an entirely accurate simulation, he said.
“The nodes bent all right,” Levengood recalled, “but they were just totally limp. In other words, the microwave heated the whole node. It took probably 15 to 20 seconds to get a node to bend. Well, that was too long – the nodes just collapsed. They didn't produce a precise bending like I find in the crop formations. The reason was for the reason I just told you (inefficient microwave ovens).”
Further emphasizing his point that authentic crop circles are created with intense and highly efficient microwave forces, he continued, “The microwave in the crop formation, that probably is applied in a matter of micro-seconds - it can bend the wheat that fast. With the inefficient wave length that we use in our microwave ovens in our homes, it takes 15 to 20 seconds to get the node to bend and therefore the whole thing collapses.”
I asked about the hair curler incident. The story did actually happen, as Levengood thought it would be a good idea to use seeds to try to document the presence of abnormal energies surrounding the female abductee.
“I could give you a whole day's lecture on work just with her,” he proclaimed.
The first inaccuracy in the story was the type of seeds. The actual seeds used were Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant in the mustard family commonly used by the international research community.
He said the woman followed instructions very well, doing an excellent job of documenting details of her activities. Every seven days Levengood would retrieve the hair curlers from the previous week while supplying her with seven more, each packed with a plastic capsule containing seeds. He would then dig the plastic capsule out of each returned curler, review the related written information, and, interestingly enough, plant the seeds. He eventually came across the journal entry indicating an experience of high strangeness and the corresponding plastic capsule.
“My God, I was dumbfounded,” Levengood recalled.
The two halves of the capsule shell were melted together, he said, and the entire capsule appeared to be imploded. He carefully worked at the capsule long enough to separate the two halves, at which time he said it made a whooshing noise, indicating it had been placed under some kind of vacuum.
“It was heated, of course,” he said.
I confidently suspect Levengood's assertion the capsule had been heated is why the inaccurate detail circulated that the seeds were fried, a detail that was simply incorrect. According to Levengood, the seeds were not wasted. Quite the contrary. Levengood stated the seeds in question grew with “increased vigor,” significantly outgrowing the other seeds!
Upon discovering this to be the case, I was immediately reminded of Tucker and her 75-pound cabbage. I was therefore eager to hear more about circumstances of which Levengood was aware in which growth rates of plants were obviously altered by whatever was taking place around them. Quite interestingly, one such circumstance included what Levengood called the “most unusual crop formation” he ever saw.
“This crop formation was in Kansas,” he explained. “It had no bent nodes, the crops were not knocked down, there were no expulsion cavities, there were no visible signs, except, in these circles, the wheat grew at a different (increased) height!”
Levengood continued, “That was very, very interesting to me. It was one of the most interesting I've looked at because of the absence of all these things that I'd been talking about before; the internal cell changes, etc. Well, the reason was, for the first time ever, this particular formation seemed to have no component – now get this – no component of microwave energy, or extremely low, and a very high component of the other primary energy, and that is ion electron avalanches.”
Further investigation revealed related circumstances have indeed been of interest to researchers - and for quite some time. Stimulation of plant growth has been explored for decades by means of exposing seeds or plants to low doses of ionizing radiation or by the use of radioactive fertilizers.
In my next and final post in this series, we will explore what Dr. Jacques Vallee has written about such peculiarities. More on William C. “Lefty” Levengood, including his published reports and related hypothesis, which consists of the likelihood select crop formations are created by organized ion plasma vortices and electromagnetic energy absorption through the atmosphere, may be viewed at:
References:
[1] The Virtually Strange Network: Tracing Sound to UFO Encounters
[2] Colin Andrews: Second Sight
[3] Alien Abduction Experience and Research (AAER): Alien and UFO Research
[4] Our Strange Planet: High Heat
