Crop Circles, Current Affairs, UFOs
Character Interview: “Doctor Ross” Boyd Interviews Philip Sims
Picture courtesy of Circlemakers. www.circlemakers.org
Readers will already know Philip Sims and Irwin Reed from the Circles trilogy (they meet in “Revolution”).
In my upcoming novel “Saved”, Ross Boyd joins “Prudent Doubt” magazine as the science writer “Doctor Ross”, where Mr Sims has been the crop circle expert for some years.
The following is an interview conducted by Mr Boyd with Mr Sims.
[G St Clare]“Doctor Ross” Boyd (RB): I’d like to welcome Philip Sims, the UFO researcher from “Prudent Doubt” magazine…
Philip Sims (PS): Can I stop you right there, Ross? I’m not a UFO researcher. I prefer to be called a “crop circle investigator”.
RB: Isn’t that the same thing?
PS: Not at all. UFO fans depend in their sightings being “Unidentified”. As soon as a flying object gets a positive ID, they lose interest in it and move on to fuzzier evidence. I try to use forensic techniques to differentiate real crop circles from fake crop circles.
RB: But crop circles are made by UFO’s aren’t they?
PS: Anything is possible; but so far, every time a crop circle has appeared at the same time as moving lights, the circle has been a poor fake. The most famous UFO crop circle video is so obviously just the torches of the hoaxers and a bit of video editing that I’d put that straight in the UFO camp, not the crop circle one.
RB: So you are saying that UFO’s aren’t real?
PS: Of course they are. I’ve worked on a farm since I could walk and I’ve seen many things in the sky that I don’t immediately recognise. You’d be hard pushed to find a single person on the planet who hasn’t. But let me read a quote from last week’s 60 Minutes to show you what I think.
Luis Elizondo, this year’s UFO “poster boy” says: “Imagine a technology that can do six to seven hundred G forces, that can fly at thirteen thousand miles an hour, that ah, it can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space and, oh by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsions, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of earth’s gravity. That’s precisely what we are seeing.”
PS: I agree with what that self-promoting paranoid says. It is precisely what we are seeing: people imagining crazy technology. It’s a real stretch to see all that while watching a duck flying in a straight line over the sea at 20mph, but if Elizondo asks his fans to imagine it, they are quite happy to do so. But do you mind if we drop this subject now? UFO’s are not my area of interest.
RB: Of course. But your view on the UFO craze is quite telling. Don’t the same arguments apply to crop circlers?
PS: Yes, of course they do. That’s why it’s so important that people like me do the hard work of looking critically at the evidence. As a teenager, my mentor was a man much like you, Ross. Dr Reed had a PhD in supersonic theory and first hand experience of objects deliberately designed to be unidentifiable. He was absolutely convinced that little green men exist and are here on earth, but admitted that he had never seen any evidence of their flying saucers. I try to be as honest about my research – honest to myself – as he was about his.
RB: So what’s this evidence you’re looking at? Who or what is making the crop circles?
PS: It’s funny, but long ago that’s what I was most concerned about; “little green men, natural and supernatural phenomena or hoaxers?” But I realised that it doesn’t really matter (apart from the hoaxes, of course). Every crop circle carries a message for us. Whether it is Gaia, bringers of Ancient Knowledge or external forces beyond our ability to even imagine, we should still take note of the message.
RB: Even if it’s from hoaxers?
PS: I filter those out, but why not? If there is a message of World Peace from a gang of schoolkids tagging a field with a lawnmower, it’s still a message of World Peace. You just need to treat kids a bit differently from supernatural forces.
RB: So what messages have you found in the crop circles?
PS: If you read Prudent Doubt, you’ll see how varied the messages are. It’s almost as though everyone is shouting at once. But I’d say there are only two types of message. The first are usually mathematical and say “we are here and would like to work out a common language.” The second type are more spiritual, saying “take better care of the Earth”.
RB: Why would they care?
PS: Are you religious, Ross?
RB: No. I’m Church of England.
PS: Then you won’t be offended if I say that we, humanity, are not separate from Gaia. There is no “they” to care or not care. Whatever is sending the message, it is “we”, not “they”.
RB: Don’t you think this is a bit of a dumb way for a super-intelligence to send us messages? Why not radio or a leaflet drop in plain English? Giant logos in crops is about the most inefficient way I can think of for communication.
PS: Inefficient, yes. Dumb, I’m not so sure. I think we are at fault here. For centuries, we’ve been using exactly this method to talk to the sky people. Look at the Nazca designs or the Great Pyramids. The Egyptians most enduring monuments are a reflection of the constellation Orion drawn out on a million square mile canvas. We sent the original message and they are just replying in a language they think we understand.
RB: I think you’re being selective about your evidence, Mr Sims. We broadcast thousands of channels of radio and TV. That stuff is much easier to pick up in space than looking at piles of rock.
PS: What about Voyager? We still use pictographs and symbology for important messages to ET’s. Do you think they would reply to the chatter they hear in the radio spectrum or use the same medium that we obviously hold in highest regard?
RB: Yeah, it’s probably better for us to be judged by our creation of Giza than “Shark Island Series IV”. Thank you for your time Mr Sims. I’m still not convinced but will read your next article with a different viewpoint.
For those who are detail oriented, there is a time discrepancy between this post and the novel “Saved”. The interview would have been conducted in July 2022 and published in the August edition of “Prudent Doubt” magazine.