On February 19, 2010, Benjamin Radford, managing Editor of Skeptical Inquirer and member of the zealot skeptical group CSICOP, printed another defamatory rant in Discovery News against crop circles. Quite why a large organization such as Discovery Channel allows a member of a group with a one-sided agenda to publish their work is beyond me, for it violates the fundamental laws of journalism. But then this is not the first time such a large and influential show has done this. Obviously Radford & Co have friends in neat places.
 
CSICOP has for a number of years been a keen debunker of crop circles, thanks in part to a well-choreographed disinformation campaign through their friends in the media, namely The Discovery Channel and National Geographic. But then that is precisely what people with a cynical agenda and a closed mind does, they destroy. For it is far easier to do so than to create. So, just in case I, myself, am accused of ranting, let me demonstrate the lies Radford expounds in order to satisfy his cynical agenda.
 
CSI's mission statement is "to encourage the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view" (incidentally, The Skeptical Inquirer states it is not a "formal scientific magazine", so why they claim to adopt "scientific methods" to destroy their victims means they already stand on a very dubious foundation).
 
In Radford's article "Mr. Pringle Solves Crop Circle Mystery", Radford uses a recent advertisement for Pringles— in which some teens make the Pringle's logo as a crop circle—as an opportunity to debunk a highly-complex subject. Using an ad to prove a scientific point!? Mr. Radford must be desperate for attention. But, having trained as a psychologist, he sees an opportunity in using a popular medium onto which he can graft a theory and thereby influence mass opinion. This is psychology used in a very damaging way. Goebells employed similar tactics in Nazi Germany, as have other puppet masters through the ages.


 
Less smart is what he writes in the article. Let's examine. His first statement concerning what makes crop circles deftly takes you to a link on, surprise, surprise, CSICOP's website, where you will only read the cherry-picked details of crop circles research, the ones that serve the skeptic's narrow-minded agenda. Careful observers will note that not one shred of the published hard evidence on real crop circles is made available.
 
Then he states that "all the theories lack one important element: good evidence." Talk about a complete lie. There are by now vast amounts of published evidence on the subject, from W. Levengood's scientific reports on the effects of energy on crop circles plants to eye-witness accounts. I published all of it in my own book, Secrets In The Fields (as have others) which, as a best-seller, would not have gone unnoticed by Radford. And yet, even in CSICOP's website, my book and its evidence are strategically avoided (as it is on Wikipedia; in fact any reference is usually deleted within minutes of editing the page on 'crop circles').
 
Let's move along. "Crop circles...only date back 30 years." For a man who claims scientific and factual scrutiny above all aims, this is absolutely false. Again, there is handy, published evidence to prove eyewitnesses have been seeing crop circles since at least 1890 and some reports go back centuries (see 'The Secret History of Crop Circles' by Terry Wilson). Why should Radford side-step this issue? Simple, he is setting you up to introduce Doug and Dave as the creators of all crop circles. In my book I outline how Doug and Dave were set up as fronts by the British Ministry of Defense. And yet shortly after their media circus in 1991, at a press conference in Marlborough, UK, their story was picked apart and exposed as a pack of well-choreographed lies. By the end of the afternoon not even Doug and Dave knew what they had made, or where, or if they had made any crop circles at all. They could not even account for the details of their work, later blaming other hoaxers for making the circles they had originally claimed. Radford also uses this hole in his evidence to also lay the blame on "other hoaxers" who, naturally, he cannot prove. At the time even the quality newspaper, The Independent, wrote "after witnessing the work of Doug and Dave I have less trouble believing in little green men than in the story of these two as the makers of crop circles." Sorry Radford, you scored no goal here.
 
My favourite statement comes next: "...It is a proven fact that hoaxers created crop circles—even very complex ones." Proven? By whom? There is no evidence of this. Which brings us to the biggest slip-up of all: "no one has ever demonstrated any differences between a 'genuine' crop circle and a hoaxed one: they are exactly identical." After thirty years of research, there is abundant published information describing the difference between the two, including testimony from experts in their fields who stated the real crop circles show no sign of human, mechanical flattening, that an outside energy has influenced the plants to bend without damage, and even the soil crystalline structure has been exposed to temperatures of 1500 degrees Celsius in a fraction of a second.
 
In his puritanical zeal, Radford has seen it fit to write whatever his tiny mind wants to see. Because, after all, only a closed mind is certain.

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