Rudy! This is hilarious! I was going to post this right now! Are you getting the CCCRN newsletter or something? I have talked to this woman, Nancy Talbot, on the phone and we talked about the crop circle that formed where i live. Cool!

Here is the main thrust of the accumulated research:

Nancy's report follows:

After constant delays (mostly due to financial constraints) the X ray diffraction study of clay minerals in crop circle soils, which was begun in 1999 and completed in late 2001, is now available on the BLT Research Team Inc.'s web-site. BLT is most
grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Lyman D. Rogers of Newtown, Connecticut, whose financial support made this possible, and to web-site personnel Kim McDonald Gazecki, William Bombardier, and Abby Lewis who did the actual work of transferring the study to the web.

This study, funded by Laurance Rockefeller, examined specific clay minerals (those which are called "expandable" clays and which are most sensitive to heat) in crop circle soils, in an attempt to gather further data which might inform us regarding the hypothesized presence of microwave radiation at crop circle sites. Multiple scientists were involved (see "Study Personnel"), most of whom were totally unacquainted with the crop circle phenomenon at the time they carried out their individual work on the project. These scientists were carefully chosen, not only for their specific expertise, but because they were unaware of the phenomenon, thus ruling out any potential assertions
by skeptics of "experimenter bias."

The results are startling. Specific clay minerals(illite/smectites) are shown to exhibit a subtle, but statistically significant, increase in degree of crystallization....a change heretofore seen only in sedimentary rock, which has been exposed to the massive pressure(called "geologic" pressure) of tons of overlying rock and to heat from the earth's core over hundreds, or thousands of years. To our knowledge this increase in degree of crystallization has never been reported previously in surface soils (as is the case here).

If "geologic" pressure had been present, obviously the plants would have been obliterated. And, of course, they were not. Further, if the intense heat required (a minimum of 6-800 degrees C, over a period of many hours) to produce the crystalline change (in the absence of such geologic pressure) had been present, the plants would have been incinerated. And, again, they were not. The plants did show the well-documented changes (elongated apical nodes, presence of expulsion cavities) regularly found in crop circles which are not created by mechanical flattening (i.e., with planks and boards). What is MOST interesting is the fact that both the documented plant changes and the increases in clay-mineral crystallization occurred at the SAME sampling locations. A regression analysis found that the node-length increases in the plants were correlated with the increase in crystallization of the clay minerals in the soils at the 99.2% level of confidence, a truly extraordinary result!

So the data appear to indicate that whatever caused the plant changes, also caused the soil changes at the same sampling locations. And yet we realize that the intense energy situation required to produce the soil effects would have destroyed the plants altogether. As Dr. Reynolds, the Dartmouth mineralogist and recognized authority on clay minerals and the XRD technique whom we asked to review our study stated, we are apparently dealing with an energy currently unknown to science.

As is often the case in science, new and intriguing questions have been raised. The notion of mechanical flattening, however, is without question ruled out.

We hope that all interested members of the crop circle community will take the time to examine the new study. All of the data and personnel involved have been included on the web-site. BLT
welcomes comments and/or questions. Please note, also, that many other changes and additions have been made to other pages on the site, including the following pages: "Home," "Plant Abnormalities," "Clay-Mineral XRD Study," "Other Facts," "Professional Consultants," "Lab Reports," and "Contact."

Nancy Talbott
BLT Research Team Inc.