by Nancy Talbott.
- Nancy Talbott
- BLT Research Team lnc.
- PO Box 400127
- Cambridge, MA 02140 (USA)
- ph: 6171492-0415
- Event Date: Monday, August 21, 2001
- Time: 3:15 am location: Field directly behind v/d Broeke home, Hoeven, Holland
- Weather: Temperature high-70s, sky overcast, no precipitation
- Witnesses: Robbert v/d Broeke (from 1 st floor kitchen)
- Nancy Talbott (from 2nd floor bedroom)
- Crop: String-beans (approx 1-1/2ft to 2ft tall, and mature)
On August 8, 2001, 1 arrived at the v/d Broeke home in southern Holland to begin a two-week research project in conjunction with U.S. parapsychologist Dr. William Roll of the Parapsychological Services Institute lnc. Dr. Roll, whose work with recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK) phenomena had led him to question whether there might be a human consciousness element involved in the crop circle process (similar to that documented by him in multiple poltergeist and haunting cases), wanted to gather geomagnetic and electromagnetic data at the v/d Broeke home and at recent crop circle sites when Robbert v/d Broeke had had pre-cognitive intuitions of their arrival.
For my first 10 days in Holland Robbert and I visited several formations in the area which had occurred prior to my arrival, gathering the baseline data which Dr. Roll's protocol required. During the nights we bicycled out to the fields with the night-vision camcorder and several flash cameras, in order to carry out photographic experiments.
For years Robbert has been taking flash photos at night inside crop circles which, when developed, show single or multiple strange semi-opaque orbs and other light phenomena not usually visible to the naked eye. He has found that such experiments are most productive in new crop circles, but that - in some cases - unusual lights/orbs can be photographed even weeks or months after the initial event. More recently he has discovered that he can actually see quite a few of these light objects before they are photographed and has also noted that many of the objects now being caught on film are not only much brighter and more dense, but are much more complex in structure. I, too, seem to have become more sensitive to the presence of the objects, often seeing brief flashes of light which - when I can get off a shot or two in their direction quickly enough - result in the objects apparently being caught on film.
On the night of August 20-21, 2001 Robbert and I had decided not to go into the fields and were at his parents' home. Mr. and Mrs. v/d Broeke had retired to their bedroom on the first floor at the front of the house at around 11:30 pm. Robber's younger sister, had gone to her bedroom on the second floor at the back of the house around this time also, leaving only Robbert and me in the kitchen downstairs. The kitchen window was open and looks out over the 80ft-long back garden, at the end of which is a chain-link fence and a 4ft-deep trench which runs along the edge of the farm field immediately beyond. By 3am Robbert and I had been in the kitchen discussing the crop circles, their possible causative mechanisms and origins, what they might mean, etc. for several hours. I was tired from weeks of tromping about the fields during the days recording data and then nights of flash photography and videography, and realized that I felt pretty much like I was - or might have been - chasing my tail. I recalled my first visit with Robbert and his family back in 1998 and the incredibly dramatic light display I had witnessed with Mr. and Mrs. v/d Broeke on my second night in the house. And I thought about all of the other really peculiar incidents on return trips, occurring with increasing frequency - and all of the work that has been done to document and attempt to understand these events - and it suddenly seemed to me that the phenomenon was just too complex, too elusive, too difficult to study. I suppose partly out of fatigue and partly out of frustration I decided to go up to bed, telling Robbert that I was tired of all this 'pussy-footing' around and asking, 'why can't this phenomenon be more obvious, more direct?'
I was sleeping in Robbert's old bedroom which is 'on the second floor at the back of the house, over-looking the garden and farm-field. The bed is placed so that it faces directly out through two floor-to-ceiling glass doors which go out to a small balcony overlooking the garden and farm field beyond, and there are thin, gauzy curtains hanging at these glass doors. The farm field is clearly visible from the bed. Robbert was still in the kitchen downstairs. Once upstairs I pulled the curtains closed (leaving one of the doors open), changed into my nightgown and propped myself up with pillows to read in bed for a while. The lights were on and the room was well lit. At about 3:05am I heard a few cattle nearby bawling raucously, as cattle do when they are disturbed. From years of talking with farmers and ranchers who have had crop circles (and other unusual events) occur on their properties, I immediately realized that this bawling might be a sign that something strange was afoot and, in the back of my mind thought 'I should go to the windows and pull back the curtains because I might see something.' Whether because of fatigue or some sort of intuition, I stayed in bed and did not pull back the curtains. The cattle quieted down for a few minutes but, at about 3:10am they started up again. And again I thought I should go to the windows and open up the curtains..... and, again, I stayed put (in my notes from that night I have written that I was 'scared'). After a minute or so the cattle were quiet again.
Then, at about 3:1 5am, a brilliant, intense white column, or tube, of light - about 8 in.-1ft. in diameter from my vantage point-flashed down from the sky to the ground, illuminating my bedroom and the sky as brilliantly as if from helicopter searchlights. My room was so bright I can't, in retrospect, understand how I could so very clearly see the 'tube' of light outside - it's distinct edges - but I could for about a full second, and there seemed to be a slight bluish tinge along the sides of the tube. Then this tube of light disappeared and both my room and the outside went dark. While the tube of light was there it was so bright I couldn't see exactly where it was touching down and wasn't sure how close it was.
Photo © Nancy Talbot
Computer reconstruction by Andreas Müller, ICCA
http://invisiblecircle.de
By the time the third tube of light flashed down to the ground I was half out of bed yelling to Robbert, who was still downstairs in the kitchen. He, at the same time, was running up the stairs to get me, having witnessed the event from the first-floor kitchen windows. From the kitchen he could see that the tubes of light had hit the bean-field, just beyond the fence at the back of the garden, and he reported also that the sky had lit up like daylight when each column of light had occurred. He however had seen only two tubes of light, apparently because he had jumped up after the second one, leaving the kitchen to come and get me upstairs. He further indicated in the drawing he made immediately afterward that these tubes of light were spiralling down to the ground. (Actually, when I got out the drawing I had made shortly afterward, I have also indicated a spiralling motion inside the tubes of light.) Robbert had perceived the tubes of light as being smaller in diameter than I had, but he also saw them as definite, contained, columns that remained the same width all the way down. Neither of us saw anything in the overcast sky from which these tubes of light had originated. Later that night Robbert reported that he had heard the dog next door barking furiously just prior to the appearance of the light-tubes.
Our yelling back and forth to each other up the stairway had awakened both Robbert's sister and Mrs. v/d Broeke, who both emerged into the hallway in excited states. Robbert and I were equally agitated, due to our shared impression of the stunning force of the energy involved .... and our mutual, clear, impression of it's purposefulness. All four of us went immediately to the glass doors at the back of the house off the dining room (directly underneath my bedroom's doors) somewhat timidly, not certain of what else we might expect.
Looking out these glass doors we could sec nothing up in the sky and after a minute or so Robbert went to the back door off the kitchen and stepped out; I joined him and, tentatively, also went outside. So far as we could tell everything seemed oddly normal and very dark - looking up we could see only an overcast sky. We headed for the back fence and the farm-field and there, just over the fence about 15ft. into the bean-field - just barely visible in the darkness - was the new crop circle. When we turned my flashlight onto the field we could see that half of the crop in the downed area was laid away from us and the ether half was laid toward us, and I thought I could faintly see steam rising from the freshly-downed beans (which L attributed to the interaction of the tubes of light with a heavy night-time dew covering the crop).
At dawn the next day, from my bed, I could clearly see the new circle - which turned out to be, in fact, an ellipse of about 35 ft. in length (running East/West) and 20 ft. in width (North/South diameter), with a 20 ft.-long pathway adjoining the northern edge which ended in a crossbar (like the capital letter 'T').
The epicenter of the ellipse was considerably West of the actual center, and the northern half of the stringbean plants (heavy with beans) were swept counter- clockwise in what looked to be one wide sweep all the way around the ellipse and back along the southern edge. The eastern and western edges of the ellipse were slightly squared, ending abruptly at a row of beans on either side and leaving the plants in these rows along the edges totally unaffected. The pathway off to the North was laid away from the ellipse to its end, the crossbar at the end being laid left (West) and right (East) in simple single sweeps. The width of all the pathways was one row of beans only, about 1 to 1-1/2ft. wide.
We were unable to go into the field until the evening, due to the need to obtain permission from the farmer and to our lack of a ladder to help us negotiate the fence and the steep ditch on the other side. On the evening of the 21st, at about 6 pm, we did go in and carried out a number of procedures.
The compass showed no deviations within the laid crop (nor at control locations outside the new event) and the electromagnetometer registered a steady 0.2m, the same reading I obtained at the control locations and at alt of the other crop circle sites 1 had tested in the past two weeks. No EM spikes were noted. Examination of the plants showed them all to have been bent over at the base and no broken or split stems were seen. There was no visible trauma to the stems or leaves, or the very healthy-looking beans beneath them. The soil appeared relatively dry both inside and outside the laid-crop area and was fine-grained and dark in appearance (mineralogical characterization of the soil in this field a year previously by BLT lnc.'s consulting mineralogist, Dr. Sam Iyengar, had indicated that this field is very well maintained and high in organic content and very low in clays).
