As crop circle interest grows in the US North-West, the ‘Oregonians for Rationality’ are staging counter-attacks, as CAROL PEDERSEN of the Oregon branch of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies reports…


In 1999 I received a phone call from a Mr Ted Clay in Medford, Oregon, who professed little knowledge of the crop circles and ignorance of the circles in Oregon in particular. He asked me to send him information, which I did, including a beautiful colour photo of our Whiskey Hill 1998 formation. I later found out that he was giving a presentation on crop circles in Portland and I went anonymously to see it because I wondered why a person professing so little knowledge was giving a speech about the subject.

At the presentation, which was attended by about 60 people and was done on a ‘Power Points’ computer image production process, I sat and observed him twist the information I had given him to suit the party line of the ‘Oregonians for Rationality’, an affiliate of the CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) organisation, which is dedicated to making sure people will ignore and scoff at anything paranormal.

During the presentation he put up my colour photo and said it was "the worst doodle he had ever seen." My remarks about this meeting were printed in the CCCS’s ‘Circular’ magazine issue #35 in June 1999. I never heard from Ted Clay again until recently, when, out of the blue, he called me on the phone. This person, who presents himself cloaked as the most "rational" of men, said he wanted to "have a constructive talk with me" about the circles, but the real reason he called was to tell me that he had found out about my 1999 article and that I wasn’t "polite" to have written my article and not sent him a copy. This, I suspect, was his idea of a constructive talk. I told him I was not obligated to be polite to someone who misrepresented himself to me, used my material without my permission and twisted the truth of it. I promptly ended the conversation.

I have recently read on Swirled News that the CSICOP organization is busy buying up shares of media stock in order to influence television, particularly Viacom, parent company of the CBS Network, and they are targeting other stations. They consider interest in the paranormal as something that needs to be controlled and are exerting their influence in this new fashion. Over the years, direct evidence has been presented from Dr W C Levengood, Gerald Hawkins and other cutting-edge scientists regarding the validity of the phenomenon of genuine crop circles. It appears to me that this CSICOP group and its affiliates are stepping up their programme of disinformation and mind control and are continuing to harass those of us who speak up against it.