The second part of MARY BENNETT’S important investigation into the mysterious ‘sand spiral’ which appeared in the Egyptian desert, looks more deeply into the contradictions and anomalies in the ‘official’ explanation and examines the story’s links to other works of ‘land art’ with similar implications. Not read Part One yet? Scroll through our Headlines and do so first – otherwise, read on…


THE STORY SO FAR: In May 2001 a photo of an Egyptian ‘sand formation’ appeared in the croppie press. Having seen images of this years before, I was not persuaded and set out to trace its origins. Several weeks later, confusion and conundrums abounded. With my phone bill in intensive care, I had contacted the artists responsible for this sculpture. They were going to send me proof of their enterprise. Would it persuade the croppie community? My only certainty so far was that nothing was what it seemed to be…



i) GREEK GAMES


While I waited for my postman to bring me my gift from Greece I wondered if it would turn out to be something of a Trojan Horse, and if so what exactly would it be hiding?

I’d started out on this enquiry because a photo turned up in 2001 that was immediately attributed to the crop circle phenomenon - with no questions asked. From my previous knowledge I thought this wasn’t the case and that a minimum amount of research would be better than taking everything at face value. Despite making known the results of my preliminary enquiries, two months later The Spiral published an incorrect map in which the actual site of the ‘sand formation’ was not even within it’s prescribed boundaries! The picture caption was also completely inaccurate in every respect; nor were its readers in possession of the precise number of components making up this project, so the number theories which subsequently appeared in letter responses to their original sand spiral article were based on the wrong quantities of cones and hollows actually present in the desert. While the readers’ interpretation of location, symbols, myth and number may have been correct in themselves, they could NOT relate to this desert Spiral. [1]

By the time I talked to both Dr Hartmut Endlich and Boris Stobe, I was definitely in the domain of ‘man-made artefact’ and despite opposing viewpoints on matters philosophical and cosmological, Dr Endlich was both charming and helpful. Boris Stobe also gave me as much information as he could – and I thank them both, since they weren’t obliged to speak to me at all. However, in my attempt to establish what had happened in the Egyptian Desert, the Greeks and Egyptians might have felt that I was devaluing their creative ingenuity and philanthropy respectively. If that was so, they hid it well during our conversations. Indeed both the D.A.ST. sculptor, and Orascom’s marketing executive were nothing but courtesy.

This politeness didn’t stop them both from studiously ignoring many of my emailed questions (and they still do, because despite my flagging phone bill, I keep asking!) from which I can only conclude that my questions cause problems. But all of this didn’t hinder D.A.ST.’s generosity - when my particular Trojan Horse arrived it was full of goodies including a large 52 page photographic essay detailing the sand spiral ‘Desert Breath’. While inclined to look my gift horse in the mouth, I still had to sort out my oddities bag, so I read the book, studied the images, watched the video and then the CD-ROM, which was basically the same in content as the artist’s web site. [2]

Taking the photography first, if one takes the point of view that this entire project – video and photographic documentation included - is a ‘body of work’, then whether the photography is ‘real’ or computer generated, or a mixture of both, is no longer relevant. However, as I was becoming more and more persuaded that D.A.ST. had indeed spent their time making sand castles in Egypt, I shall mention in passing that I did question these photos with the sculptor. I was told that the photos were not computer generated, except for some of the top shots – and that I would easily be able to tell the difference. Hmmm. Concerning my shadow problems, I was told that in her experience, lighting conditions in the Eastern Desert between sunrise and sundown were not the same as elsewhere. Another Hmmmm. Look at the web site and decide for yourselves.

Turning to the text in this catalogue, I was astonished to discover words and dates that contradicted not only the statements made by Orascom, but also those made by D.A.ST. themselves. Artists are usually extremely fussy about the presentation of their work – it is their calling card. If these discrepancies were printing mistakes, then why were they not spotted? As the text was copyrighted 1997-1998, there had been plenty of time to ‘get it right’. Here is a sentence from the introduction: “The fact that the sand’s ‘fluidity’ might at any time betray their sculptural invention was what in turn ensured the principle, as they imagined, of its obliteration”. [4]

We visualise soft and flowing sand dunes. And many of the images tell us the same soft story [see pic]. But don’t drift off into dreamland, because this isn’t quite how it is. The D.A.ST. team’s text describes the desert at that particular site differently: “compact, containing a large percentage of silt and salt. When sprayed with water and compacted it becomes very hard and creates a strong dry layer on the surface that is subject to wind erosion. The earth under this crust retains humidity for an extended period of time and doesn’t behave in the fluid manner of sand dunes”. So, you see, no danger of imminent betrayal after all. This fundamental difference in the nature of the sand/soil at their chosen location, combined with the (never, ever mentioned) judicious use of cement in some parts of this project, renders this introduction at best ineffective, at worst, misleading. Especially when they write “Desert Breath was constructed out of sand and water. Transient elements, elements which were offered from the site itself.” Well, never mind the integrity of the text, where exactly was this site?

It lay between the Red Sea coast and a body of mountains and was once an ancient sea bed -hence the silt and salt composition of the earth. It also lay within sight of a main road. To get an idea of the area covered by this sand spiral, think of Avebury. The largest bank and ditch enclosure in the world contains an area of just over 28 acres/11.5 2ha. The El Gouna sand spiral Desert Breath covers an area of nearly 24.7 acres/10.16ha. Or if it’s easier, you could think of it as being larger than the Millennium Dome, which covered an area of 20acres/8.2ha.

The standing cones were created from the sand dug out to form the inverted cones. 178 conical volumes (89 of each) form two interlocking logarithmic spirals moving out (with a phase difference of 180 degrees in the same direction of rotation) from a common centre. As the D.A.ST. team saw it, this centre was the heart of this project: it consisted of a large inverted cone some 98ft/30 metres in diameter. From within this a standing cone emerged, making, therefore, a total of 180 cone components. Originally filled with water to nearly the tip if its standing cone, this central pool reflected the sky (and the surrounding mountains in some pics). Despite mixing this silt/salt/earth with cement to retain the water, this soon evaporated, leaving the central cone as you see it in Boris Stobe’s pic. The pool was supposed to be refilled several times a year. My questions as to the maintenance of this water ritual have gone unanswered. But then, as the artists wrote “We were addressing the desert as a state of mind, a landscape of the mind”. So, it seems, am I.

On the surface of it (all puns intended) theirs appeared to be a somewhat incoherent state of mind. On one page I read: “the actual construction began at the end of June 1995”, but two pages later it states: “on-site excavation began in the beginning of August 1996”. I have met this sort of dating muddle before, and on that occasion it had betrayed a deep-rooted problem with the chain of actual events. Was this going to be the same? Right now I just didn’t know. What I did know, because they told me so in their book, was that the principle of time, “beginnings-endings”, was a vital and integral part of this artistic work. So it was even more amazing that the basic beginning date of actual construction had two different versions from the artists themselves! If you think I’m nit-picking, listen to this from another two pages further on: “the time-planning for the construction was a very important issue, the simultaneous completion of all the elements to converge upon one single moment in time, the moment of geometrical precision, which marks time zero before the work is turned over to the forces of nature to begin its gradual transformation”. Or not so gradual, depending on that ‘glow’/glue I had been told had been a vital part of holding the structure together (see Part One). Of course, artists don’t necessarily have to “tell us how they did it” but when they voluntarily devote an entire book to doing just that, one has to ask why some aspects are seemingly glossed over or plain contradictory? Why is there a lack of transparency in a process devoted to revealing all? While I was busy writing in these potential puns (I still don’t know what that ‘glow’ is) my phone rang, but I was engrossed in reading about the construction processes relating to this sand castle of all sand castles and took no notice. Bells would be ringing much louder later.

They spent the first month (choose your own year) on site, doing “general surveying of the area, orientation and positioning and installing a pipeline to bring water from the nearby Oasis”. They also conducted final tests for the application of their selected construction method. For the duration of the Greek’s project Orascom gave them open access to their engineering and surveying departments. They had a surveying team on site with them - on a daily basis. They had a site engineer, two foremen, and an average crew of 60 workers. According to an article on the D.A.ST. CD-ROM, a crew of 70 worked on a rotating basis. [5]

Remembering that I’d been told that the artists worked with “old people and children” I had a look for them in the video and the pictures I was sent, but try as I might, all I could see was lots of men, working with machinery, carrying sand and moving water pipes – none of them looked ancient, nor did they look like children. They looked like a bunch of construction workers with hard muscles. In fact, the sculptor’s statement didn’t fit with any of the documentation, whether written, photographic or video and, in any case, it was totally unnecessary – so why make it? Here’s another bizarre moment from our conversation: These three Greek women had worked: “from sunrise to sundown seven days a week and slept in mud houses”. The inference was of a primitive abode and a desperate race against time. “We were like soldiers” she said to me and I had privately wondered who their General was and what the war was about. [6]

If this particular battle was with the forces of nature, I could see their point – the wind blows with such a force that the palm tree leaves are at right angles to the ground; but it is virtually constant, so there’s no point in trying to beat it. [7] If their battle was against time, because of limited funds, I could also see the point. However, despite the fact that Orascom had also lent them two heavy loaders, a mechanical digger, several tractors and trailers, together with the gift of any other materials they required - such as cement for that central pool, metal poles of varying lengths (to mark the central core of each cone) and possibly that ‘glow’ - despite all of this, according to D.A.ST. the whole exercise “wasn’t very expensive at all”. And surely, if the sponsors had felt that it truly was a question of ‘time is money’ they would indeed have pressured the artists, who would not then have made a point of telling me how cheap their project had been. So what was the imperative that made it necessary to work flat out from sunrise to sundown using rotating crews of workers to get the job done? Why not go about creating a work of art in ‘normal’ time – as a part of life, and not as the quasi-military exercise described to me? I didn’t ring Greece to ask for answers to all this; I was tired of sending e-mails full of questions that either got cherry-picked, or were ignored. My phone bill was still in convalescence after its recent stroke and if I was being given at best, misinformation, there had to be a reason for it. Right now two things had become clear: everybody concerned seemed to be up against extreme pressure to get the project done fast. Someone was also apparently prepared to put up a lot of money to build a work of interactive art that would thereafter be mentioned as little as possible – never would be even better - but then nothing is perfect in three dimensions!

I decided to make a out a timetable of events. Ignoring, just for the moment, that ’mistake’ of June 1995 being day one excavation date, according to the record we have:

June 1995 – first site visit. “Inspiration”!
June-Sept 1995 – intensive experimenting of “inspired idea” back in Greece.
September 1995 – Chairman of Orascom agrees to sponsor project.
September 1995-June 1996 – collaboration with “a group of architects, engineers, mathematicians and geologists, to resolve construction problems”. Several site visits. Criteria for documentation of project established, involving Greek sponsors.
August 1996 – actual work of excavating cones starts.
November 16th 1996 – a storm of unprecedented proportions floods the area and greatly damages the construction. Inauguration, set for 13 days later, is cancelled.
March 1997 – project finally finished. 24.7 acres of desert have been covered with cones and wells.
September 1997 – follow-up photos taken, two appear in this catalogue together with a description of the erosion process thus far (minimal).
There follows world-wide, a handful of reviews, mostly in the art press. D.A.ST. use the documentation material for a few art exhibitions. The group go about their separate careers.

The D.A.ST. publicity material insisted that their work of art near El Gouna was designed to be seen from two points of view: “In order for the visitor to comprehend the work in all its dimensions he had to see it from two visual angles: one by walking inside it in order to appreciate the spiral motion through the change of rhythm and the scale of the cones, and the other from above where he acquires a total image of the work.” [8] With this in mind is it not even more astonishing that this fundamental artistic principle has not been exploited by the El Gouna publicity machine, promoting this project as a unique interactive artistic experience for their tourists? Or that the artists would be a little more vociferous about the lack of attention to their work? Orascom did send me, by e-mail, an article purporting to be from the ‘El Gouna web site of Spring 2000, celebrating Desert Breath’s third anniversary. But there were no pictures of the spiral circa 2000, not even copies of D.A.ST.’s September 1997 photos - only old construction pics prior to April 1997. I can’t say for sure that this article ever appeared on the El Gouna web site, nor can I understand how the El Gouna web site can show such an article without bothering to send someone 10 minutes down the road to take an updated picture to go with the text. Still, I do see that if they couldn’t do it for themselves they were hardly going to bother sending me an updated photo!

I had questioned the sculptor about Orascom’s seeming lack of awareness concerning their sculpture and apparent desire for no publicity. Her suggestion that with the exception of the chairman, Orascom ‘s organisation was filled with young people who didn’t know what was going on, ran against all the research that I had done on this company and its owners, the Sawiris family, of whom in 1998 ‘The Cairo Times’ stated: “The men with vision are back, unafraid to take risks with their venture capital. Which is why today, [just like the Suares family years ago] they are duly recognised by Egypt's government and head of state”. [9] Yet these brave visionaries are afraid of mentioning their philanthropic and expensive creation of the most extraordinary collection of mud pies ever to be poured out of a bucket. It has been more like a mirage in the desert. Until May 2001 when Boris Stobe flew over it and sent his picture to the heart of croppie country at a particularly interesting moment of croppiedom’s evolution. According to some, we had hit the 80% ho-axe mark (that one’s for Andy). Foot and Mouth was prevalent throughout our Island, Silbury Hill had either an earth carving of a hole (if you remembered those three huge holes in Switzerland), or a serious structural problem if you belonged to the English Heritage school of thought. And although we didn’t know it then, we were soon to hear of that claimed ho-axing percentage going to ‘probably almost 100%’! [10] So, whether there is more than meets the eye to the arrival of the Stobe photo on this particular scene is for you to decide, but whatever your conclusions might be Boris Stobe can be thanked (by us anyway) for putting this spiral back on the planet’s cultural map after several years absence.

Here are some of the options so far available concerning the reality of this desert sculpture:

A) If the cones and wells of this sand spiral WERE made by the same phenomenon (choose your own definition) that is behind the crop glyphs [11] and recognised by the authorities as not belonging to the ‘Doug & Dave School of Art’ (choose your own definition, I call them ‘Plankers’ but it might not cover all the options), then the quickest containing response would have been to take those Orascom bulldozers and flatten it back into the desert. No more problemo.

B) If nothing ever really existed in the desert and the entire exercise was a computer-generated ‘art event’ then why do we have a photo from Stobe dated August 2000?

C) If nothing now exists in the desert because it has worn away - which could go some way to explain the lack of publicity by the local resort, it doesn’t explain why they can’t say so, rather than ignore my requests for updated photos. And also begs the question as to why The Spiral magazine has received an old photo pretending to be a current photo?

D) If these sand castles were made as advertised by three Greek women, together with a myriad of experts in maths, engineering, geology etc; and if they are still there, then why is there such a monumental desire to ignore the whole thing from both the sponsors, the art world and the Egyptian tourist authorities? And why so many inconsistencies within the artist’s PR material?

I had started out convinced that there was nothing there in 2001 – Option B – and was therefore fussed about the Stobe input. My research to date leads me to change that attitude and I am now pretty much convinced that the Eastern Desert of Egypt was indeed turned into mud pies thanks to Orascom and the D.A.ST. team – Option D. I say ‘pretty much’ because the inability/unwillingness from both the artists and the sponsors to respond or even acknowledge specific questions (including such things as precise latitude and longitude for the spiral) indicates, to me at least, that something is wrong. I made out another list of people to call and my phone bill looked alarmed. When it saw where I was going to phone, it fainted. I’d made some connections and now it was time to see how many bells – dring!! - I could ring – in more ways than one.


ii) JUST DESERTS..?

On August 10th 1990, in an isolated part of south-east Oregon, USA, but under a well-patrolled Air National Guard training corridor (dring!!), 13.3 miles/22km of lines, were discovered. They had been precisely carved into the compacted earth of an ancient dry lake bed (dring!!) known as Mickey Basin. These furrowed lines had seemingly appeared overnight. Certainly no pilots had reported any designs in progress during the preceding days. The displaced soil lay in astonishingly even and regular lines each side of its furrow - and remember we are talking sun-baked hard pan, no grasses or scrub grew upon it. Dr James Deardorff noted that Mickey Basin is of the same hardness as the high speed test surface of the Bonneville salt flats of Utah. The furrows themselves were also even-sided (10ins/25.4cms wide) and of precisely equal depth (3ins/7.6cms). It also turned out that this linear arrangement a quarter mile square made a definite and recognisable pattern: a giant Sri Yantra (a Hindu mandala) had been carved into the surface of North America. By mid-September it had been surveyed (dring!!), documented and announced in the press. Interestingly, during the surveying it was found that the outer lines were not absolutely square, deviating by as much as eight inches – yet from the air, this deviation disappeared and the image was perfect. I can’t resist adding in here the fact that I was expressly told by the Desert Breath sculptor that there were no shots of their sand spiral from directly overhead. As this was entirely unsolicited information, at the time I wondered why it had been necessary to point this out. At the time I didn’t know the details of the Sri Yantra survey. [12] One claim of authorship emerged after the press reported the Mickey Basin event. It was allegedly made by “four artists and a cultivator” (dring!!) - post grads of the Doug and Dave School of Art, no doubt. Their video, filmed by the fifth member of their team, utterly failed to convince the researchers and surveyors of this earth carving, but Bill Witherspoon and his merry band certainly persuaded many members of the Idaho Air National Guard that human beings were totally responsible for this pattern – and the minimal amount of press coverage these artists received no doubt did the job of sending the rest of the population back to sleep as well. As to quite why anyone would want to slog their way through this dry lake bed for the virtually unique appreciation of the Idaho Air National Guard we have no answer for as yet (I’m still waiting for information here). But, hey, this is ringing my bell with a loud dring!!: huge amounts of effort, no tangible rewards, minimal media exposure, all for ‘art’s sake’ – the same model as in Egypt some five years later.

Three years after the Egyptian event, or eight years after the Sri Yantra event, on the other side of our planet some 497/miles/800km south east of Uluru (the ‘navel’ of the Australian continent, according to the Aborigines), a seemingly similar event took place. South-east of the dry land salt lake bed (dring!!) of Lake Eyrie, between the small town of Marree 12miles/20km to the east and the Finnis Springs Aboriginal Reservation to the west, and lying just outside the Woomera military restricted zone (which covers a whopping 321,800sq.mile/200,000sq.kms of South Australia State), was a plateau of red soil upon which sparsely covered scrub grasses were growing. And it was above this isolated spot, on June 28th 1998, that a Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper satellite picked up and returned to Earth the extraordinary image of a literally fabulous man. Dubbed ‘Marree Man’ after the nearest settlement of 80 souls, this figure was some 2.48miles/4kms from top to toe. If you walked the entire outline you would cover 17miles/28km. But – this outline was also 90ft/27metres wide and made up of rows of furrows (dring!!). Naturally, accusations as to whom was responsible were soon flying around and over time suspects have included: an artist (dring!!) the Australian Army, miners, the Aborigine population and foreign ‘military personnel’ (Woomera & Pine Gap facilities). Nobody has owned up to it, yet both in England and Australia there have been mysterious media shenanigans associated with it which echo much of the mischief associated with crop circle disinformation. Pubs and local newspapers near British chalk figures were faxed by unknown sources, with cryptic messages about the connection between Marree man and their own local carvings.

The Aborigines completely disowned this figure and did not consider it as a part of their mythos, despite the best attempts of Australian anthropologists to prove otherwise. And this being so, we have to look elsewhere for the mythical origins of this figure. Given that we have had an ancient symbol from India appearing in north America, is it so astonishing that we have possibly an ancient Greek symbol turn up in South Australia? Or indeed, an ancient Egyptian symbol? Because this figure has two remarkable facets: viewed close–up [see pic] it looks like the Greek bronze statue of Zeus of Artemisius. The hair line and beard are clearly drawn. Albeit this earth carving is the reversed image, so that it is throwing with the left hand. Yet viewed from a distance, when those details are less distinct, the tied back hair becomes a beak and turns this figure into the Egyptian god Horus the Hawk looking over his left shoulder [see pic]. It is considered that Marree Man will survive for decades. He was untouched by an abnormal downfall of heavy rains in an area of extremely low rainfall (dring!!) - which is very appropriate given that both Zeus and Horus were associated with the weather.

Surveyors of the Marree Man thought that the physical origins of this figure would have needed bulldozers and a GPS system to be able to set this figure out on the plateau accurately – yet no one has come forward to claim this event and, most interestingly, despite the police “following strong clues” – ‘I do assure you!’ - concerning the perpetrators of this carving, they completely called off their investigations at the exact same time that the government annexed this plateau by arbitrarily extending the boundary of the Woomera restricted zone. The fact that this was public land was apparently not an issue! By August 1998 there was also talk of banning flights over the area as well (so, no further top shots – dring!!). These actions went against all the publicised claims that this figure had been made by humans to enhance tourism in South Australia (dring!!). The journalists who have written about this event ask why no one should be allowed to see it or visit it. Good question, well put – but answer came there none.

Looking at all these events, I dug into my oddity bag and brought out the following nuggets: Has anyone else except me made a connection with the events around the Marree Man’s arrival - June 28th and early July - and the Roswell event of 51 years earlier? What about that number 51 in relation to the not-quite-square base of the Sri Yantra and the not-quite-square base the Great Pyramid? What about the south-eastern location of the El Gouna Spiral in relation to the Great Pyramid, and the south-eastern location of Marree Man in relation to Uluru? Now does the distant hidden image of Horus in relation to the closer overt image of the Greek god Zeus make more sense? I remembered what author James Cowan had written: “Landscape alone holds the key to understanding the un-revealed nature of The Dreaming. This is because landscape is the true nature of myth. Words are only adjuncts, as are chants and ceremonies. Therefore in order to understand, indeed, revere the earth, Aborigines maintain that we must learn to interpret landscape in a way that reveals to us its inherent power, its Angel, its djang. It is the one lesson that we must all set ourselves before it is too late’. [14]

With all that I had discovered during this enquiry I was ready to add Option E to my list of possible Desert Breath explanations: What if, in June 1995 (and far too close to civilisation to be conveniently ignored), two logarithmic spirals made up of a series of circles were ‘furrowed’ into the compacted earth of the Eastern Egyptian desert? Having been measured and surveyed as soon as these circles were found, their presence on the earth as ‘Phase 1 of Greek project’ is conveniently justified. Did these incised circumferences then have to wait while everyone went away to work out how to cover them up in an acceptable manner? A process which took from June 1995 through to June 1996, and which explains that discrepancy between “we started the actual construction in June 1995” and “we started the actual construction in June 1996”? Both turn out to be absolutely correct! None of the construction images that I have seen would discount this hypothesis, and the anomalies that I have encountered in my conversations with both sponsors and artists tend to support it. As D.A.ST. wrote: “In June 1995… during this visit to the site, the fundamental idea for Desert Breath was conceived in what can only be described as a moment of unanimous inspiration”. Quite!

I must emphasise that any conclusions I have drawn during these articles are not derived from wishful thinking about the nature of reality and our place in the Universe. My conclusions are arrived at because of the documentation and responses provided by the artists and their Egyptian sponsor. As the Greek artists of ‘Desert Breath’ observed: “One has the lingering feeling that, years from now, or perhaps even centuries, when the work has been absorbed by its natural environment, the energy which created it will always be traced”.

Now for the final oddity in my bag: in Britain, we have been alerted to the presence of something not unlike our crop glyphs, sitting on the Eastern Desert in Egypt, by three different magazines. In the chronological order in which these ‘alerts’ occurred they were :

INTERIORS
COVER
THE SPIRAL.

Coincidence?

Just as this article was about to be uploaded onto Swirled News, an echo of the 1996 Windmill Hill triple spiral and of the 1996 Egyptian desert double spiral - for this was a six spiral - arrived in the fields of Wiltshire on August 13th. With a diameter of near to 1000’ and 409 circles, it was the biggest crop glyph to date. Was this timely arrival just another coincidence?


Copyright © Mary D.M. Bennett, August 2001




NOTES

[1] Spiral Magazine no’s. 62 & 64 of May & July 2001. I left many messages for the Editor before publishing this Part Two, but my calls were never returned.
[2] For the full story of how this spiral was constructed with accompanying photos, try website www.danaestratou.gr
[3] Spiral/ground shot, courtesy of Orascom Hotel Holdings
[4] Introduction by Efi Andreadi and initially published in May 1997 edition of ARTI magazine.
[5] MACEDONIAN PRESS AGENCY NEWS IN ENGLISH Thessaloniki, November 8, 1996.
[6] Conversation with sculptor Danae Stratou, July 2001. I was also told that cement was NOT used in the rest of the cones and wells.
[7] El Gouna website has pics at www.elgouna.com
[8] In interview with Anna Kafesi on: http://www.culture.gr/2/22/225/22500/22500b/st/e2250st1.html
[9] Cairo Times, December 24, 1998: ‘FROM SUARES TO SAWIRIS’ by Samir Raafat: “A hundred years ago the Suares trio of brothers did for the Egyptian economy what the Sawiris clan aims to do today”.
[10] These percentages are sometimes stated within the context of ‘all crop circles since always’ and sometimes ‘season of’, depending on the time of day.
[11] Author’s caveat: I am NOT referring to the D&D School of Art and their graduates when I refer to the crop glyph phenomenon.
[12] Little rainfall occurs in this part of the world – however, it was expected that rainfall would eventually destroy the Sri Yantra, and Springtime was ‘the rainy season’. None of the web sites tell us what happened to this carving but I have been talking to the pilot who discovered it, so I’ll post the update on Swirled News’s Feedback as soon as I get it. Two good web sites for the Sri Yantra: http://www.oregonuforeview.com and http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/ilyes
[13] Marree Man article, ‘The World is Full of Marree Man’, Andy Thomas, SC, issue 83, Mar/Apr 1999.
To find other articles on Marree Man try
http://www.ofomind.com/misc/1998/sept/d09-001.shtml
[14] James Cowan, ‘The Aborigine Tradition’, Element Books 1992.