DVDs

See Resources page for relevant links to these DVDs.

Crop Circles: the Hidden Truth

A Film by Richard D Hall

RichPlanet.net £10UK/$15US

Richard Hall, a ufologist and electrical engineer, opens up an intriguing and potentially seismic line of inquiry in this documentary (December, 2009) offering a new slant on the crop circle mystery with an investigative approach for which he is to be applauded.

The first half of the 57-minute film features an avuncular trio of lesser-known crop circle researchers, David Cayton, Robert Hulse and Roy Dutton. UFO investigators Cayton and Hulse turn accepted wisdom on its head by claiming that only a tiny percentage of crop circles are of unknown origin – less than five per cent, they say – and that, generally, it’s the more complex formations that are man-made and the less complex ones that are not.

Dutton, meanwhile, a former aerospace engineer who has been endeavouring for more than 20 years to convey testable scientific proof that extraterrestrials are monitoring Earth and using aerial technology to create crop circles, suggests how such forces might operate. The question, following the reasoning of Hulse and Cayton, of how and why humans often make better crop circles than highly-advanced aliens is not addressed.

As the film turns from this laid-back threesome into the second half, it takes a dramatic turn - in no uncertain terms - with an attempt to link John Lundberg, the man seen as Britain’s foremost crop circle hoaxer, and certain elements of the media, with MI5. Hall produces a raft of circumstantial evidence to support his case - derived from some fascinating detective work on his part - that Lundberg has been working for military intelligence to confuse profoundly the issue of crop circles.

Why would MI5 recruit him? Because it knows that “we are not alone” (Cayton, Hulse and Dutton agree) but it does not want the general populace to know. Whether or not Lundberg is in the pay of MI5, I can imagine him having a good chuckle over all of this.

However, the inference is that he, and possibly others like him, must be making both complex and simple formations. As I have stated elsewhere, in the summer of 2008 I pinpointed a formation made by Lundberg - who never reveals any of his locations, apart from those staged for commercial reasons – and in no degree did it match the most accomplished formations that appear every year.

Of course, if Lundberg never reveals any location, then it can be claimed that he has created any formation whatsoever, further blurring any distinctions to be made between them. Thus, ironically, Hulse and Cayton, with their “less than five per cent genuine” assertion, play into his hands.

Hall’s notion of an “information war” being waged by governments and big business is certainly acceptable in the face of such other obfuscated issues as climate change, the “war on terror”, and world economy and health care, and his findings undoubtedly merit further investigation.

There’s long been speculation about military involvement in crop circles – experimental super-lasers directed from satellites, for example - and government cover-ups over UFOs. Hall’s film tantalises with its raising of the Lundberg/MI5 question - but the truth, indeed, and as ever, remains hidden.

►Postscript: Henry Hemming, in his 2008 book, In Search of the English Eccentric, quotes former art student Lundberg as saying his circle-making activities are “manipulating belief”. Lundberg told Hemming: “I’d been interested in the paranormal from a very young age, but I’d never been able to combine my interest in the paranormal with my art. Then I had what you could call an epiphany. Suddenly I realised that making crop circles presented unbelievably fertile ground in which to be making art.” Hemming says Lundberg’s very existence is denied by elements of the “crop circle fraternity” who call him “a fraud, a charlatan, a perpetrator of a heretical hoax, or they’ll claim he’s a covert member of the British secret service employed by the government to spin a web of disinformation”.

What on Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery
Mighty Companions $24.95

Made in 2008, and now released on DVD (November, 2009), this is a worthy effort to provide a substantial primer for those uninitiated in the intricacies and controversies of the crop circle mystery, the producer and director, Suzanne Taylor, in the process of realising her mission to bring the phenomenon to the attention of a wider public.

It is interesting that Suzanne never set out to be a film-maker, but the moment she witnessed the “awesome mystery and beauty” of crop circles, everything changed. “Somehow, the circles and their secrets filled me with a sense of wonder, of joy - and of hope for myself, for humanity and for our world,” she says. “Above all, I was filled with the desire to share this incredible experience.”

Winner of the UFO Congress Film Festival’s Best Feature Documentary award, What on Earth? turns polemical about half-way through its 81-minute running time to champion the received New Age ideology - Suzanne’s view is that most crop circles are created by some “highly intelligent non-human agency”, that we are being “visited and signalled”. Soft-pedalling on the science and the geometry, the film - set mainly in the UK - focuses on the wonderment and mystery surrounding crop circles, but offers unpretentious reportage within a cool, calm approach to the subject matter, along with a pleasing soundtrack of traditional folk music.

A wide range of opinion comes from many figures central to crop circle research, including Karen Alexander, Francine Blake, Michael Glickman, Bert Janssen, Charles Mallet, John Martineau, Andreas Muller, Janet Ossebaard, Lucy Pringle and Andy Thomas – although, to my taste, there are a couple of lesser characters whose high cringe-rating the film could have done without.

And, one feels duty bound to say, there are some important omissions – the astonishing event of July 7, 2007, when Win Keech filmed a vast crop formation being laid down in the East Field, Alton Barnes, Wiltshire, the “ET” message at Crabwood, near Winchester, Hampshire, of August 2002, and the Julia Set spiral formation which appeared near Stonehenge in July, 1996.

A cookbook author, painter and actress, and mother of three grown-up girls, Suzanne first heard about crop circles in the 1980s when the son of a friend visiting England sent back reports and photos. Soon, Suzanne was making trips to the UK to see what was happening for herself, and holding discussion groups at her home in Los Angeles.

Her captivation by the enigma is in itself a fascinating story, and that she went to the lengths of making this film can be only to the credit of her questing vision, as well as a much-needed eye-opener to many.

Suzanne founded the Mighty Companions group which is now enrolling people to call for an official investigation of crop circles. She sees herself as a “transformational strategist”, producing projects and events where self-aware and thinking individuals can meet, engage and further the “consciousness shift now sweeping through humanity”.

The Rosslyn Frequency: Uncovering the Hidden World of the Knights Templar

Reality Films $19.95/£9.99

Since the 15th-century Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh, Scotland, featured in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, it has become a chiliastic shrine for occult investigation and a symbol of extra-dimensional portals and possibilities.

A whole industry of extravagant associations has sprung up around it - the Knights Templar, the quest for the Holy Grail, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, and fabulous buried treasure.

This film, under Philip Gardiner's distinctive directorial stamp of psychedelic CGI and billowing musical soundtrack, is about one man's encounter with the mysteries of Rosslyn. Bluff Scotsman Brian Allan, a paranormal investigator, describes his strange experiences at the chapel in the company of various psychics, including mediums and a dowser. In one place, the floor rolls like the deck of a ship, in another, he seems to levitate.

The Rosslyn "frequency" concerns the hundreds of peculiar cubes with strange carvings that adorn the chapel, each arch of cubes terminating in a stone angel playing a medieval instrument. Allan suggests they represent a musical chord, the augmented fourth, known as the devil's frequency because of its power to induce unease in the listener, and apparently banned by the Catholic Church for this reason. Perhaps it would be better called the demented fourth!

Despite the film's sub-title, there's not much at all about the Knights Templar. Rosslyn Chapel is a treasure trove of medieval imagery but it was not built by the Templars and, as far as I know, it has no connection with them at all. The Templar order was destroyed more than a century before the chapel was built, although the main base of the Scottish Templars had been a few miles from Rosslyn Castle. Indeed, the St Clair family, who built the chapel, testified against the Knights Templar at trials in Edinburgh in 1309.

And as Allan points out, the architecture of the chapel closely follows that of the east choir of Glasgow Cathedral, rather than being based on Solomon's Temple or any Templar blueprint.

From the enigma of Rosslyn, Allan takes an unexpected turn into quantum science which to him seems to suggest the underlying gnosis of existence - well, "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy".

Allan's idea of "quantum magic", the ability to affect reality by application of the will, echoes the definition of magic made long ago by Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune - causing changes in consciousness at will - and this seems to tie in with how, at the sub-atomic level, the experimenter affects the experiment.

This is interesting but it's not immediately clear what it has to do with Rosslyn, unless it's Allan's suggestion that the enormous increase in visitors in recent years has been draining the chapel of its energies - so much so that it could take another 500 years to recharge itself and make itself ready once more for "experiment".

Again, on behalf of the general viewer, as with Ancient Code: The Movie (reviewed below), I would have liked an explanation of terms - in this case, for example, epiphany, boson, God particle, gnosis. But I expect it was thought this would slow the pace. It's also a pity that there's no actual film of Rosslyn Chapel, only stills and computer graphics.

Ancient Code: The Movie

Reality Films £9.99/$24.95

I have long thought that the world is in the midst of the third gnostic revival which began about 200 years ago with the Romantic and neo-Platonic movements in Western Europe. The first revival was at the time of Christ which, I believe, tapped into a lost wisdom from a more distant past, and the second was led by the Cathars in the 12th and 13th centuries.
I have no doubt myself that, as this film suggests, there is an "ancient code" waiting to be deciphered which will lead us to the essential knowledge and wisdom of our distant ancestors, and that gnosticism is a part of that elusive truth. We are only just beginning to realise that the code was written into the monuments of the ancient world, and awaits our supreme efforts to crack it - before it's too late!

Written and directed by the prolific and ubiquitous Philip Gardiner, the international author and researcher into world mysteries, on his laudable quest to bring enlightenment to the world, the film is a useful primer for those who would seek further initiation into the idea of an ancient wisdom and how it can lead to the discovery of one's true self through a harmonious reconnection with nature and the universe at large.

A failing though, I felt, was a lack of explanation of terms, especially gnosticism (although I grant the DVD may be part of a series which explains this subject elsewhere).

Gnosticism embraces the belief in the alienation of human beings from their true selves, and the yearning to restore unity with the cosmos, and the conviction that knowledge - gnosis - is the pathway to change which, as the film also underlines, must come from within the individual. Indeed, we are the key to the code if we could only find the means of turning it.

Today, the message of the Gnostic Gospels has become relevant again because, through their mysteries, we encounter the ultimate question of where our salvation lies, and in Ancient Code: The Movie a number of authors and researchers, including Johnny Ball, Dr John Jay Harper, Professor Hugh Montgomery, Dr Tim Wallace-Murphy and Steve Mitchell (Gardiner's co-producer here), offer their particular slants on the issue.

I would have liked some background about the work of these commentators, whose contributions often start too deep into their beliefs, which sometimes leaves one wondering where they're coming from. And I longed for a feminine voice to counter the ever-so-earnest all-male line-up - it didn't appear until Nick Ashron's music video at the end, and by that time it was most welcome.

Gnosticism became the major prefiguration of the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, and the film's theme and narration do seem to draw heavily on his work, although without any attribution. Jung saw the alchemy of the Middle Ages as the bridge between gnosticism and the modern psychology of the unconscious.