Crop Circles:

American Labs Confirm Israeli Encounters:

by Barry Chamish

Last April's crop circle in the Jezreel Valley has remained the country's top UFO story through the summer. It is now accepted that the formation was, in fact, a landing site. This conclusion has been reached by the shape and symmetry of the formation. Within the site were seven indentations filled with a white powder and red oil. These are now believed to have been landing pods of the craft.

When I reported the incident, I wrote that I had samples of the oil and powder collected by Israel's most enthusiastic young ufologist, Gil Bar and promised to supply samples to any lab willing to test them. The response to the appeal was quite wonderful and Dr. W.C. Levengood, Dr. Nancy Talbott and Whitley Streiber all arranged lab testing. When the results are in, within three months, I will announce them.

Until then, I have other results of laboratory testing which are of great interest. In return for sending him the most recent physical evidence of an Israeli UFO landing, Dr. Levengood supplied the results of his tests of materials I collected and sent to him in 1995 for testing on behalf of the TV show Sightings. The tests, conducted by Dr. Levengood at the Pinelandia Biophysical Lab and by John A. Burke at the Am-Tech Laboratory are most enticing and are being publicly released for the first time.

The Kadima Circle:

UFO landings in the central Israeli town of Kadima began in 1993 and were characterized by an abundance of silvery shards within, tested in Israel and found to be a highly pure silicon; and by grass swirled clockwise and imbued with a red oil tested locally and found to be mostly iron but with a high level of liquid cadmium.

Drs. Levengood and Burke subjected the grass, metallic shards and oil to thorough laboratory testing and, quoting directly from their reports, discovered the following:

Grass Formation- The grass was from 15-20 cm in height and the stems ranged from 1.5 to 2mm diameter. Control grass was received from an area outside the formation.

• a. microscopic examination revealed that the nodes appeared to be expanded and in some cases collapsed inward even though the stems were still hydrated. This suggests a rather prolonged localized heating at the node positions.
• b. one of those sub-apical nodes contained an expulsion cavity typical of those found only within crop formations in other countries.
• c. microscopic examination of the parenchyma tissue within these expanded nodes disclosed the presence of elongated cell wall pits with "stretch marks" - again confirming the presence of energetic alterations similar to those observed within many crop formations.
• d. the presence of twisted "nests" within the formation indicates the presence of a high degree of turbulence within the energy vortex.

Silicon Crystals- Several fragments of what appeared to be silicon were found at the center of the circle formation.

• a. the energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) curve confirms the fact that these crystals are pure silicon.
• b. it is interesting to note that there are no "growth lines" as would normally be expected if these crystals were thermochemically grown as a pure single crystal. Silicon does not normally occur in this pure form.
• c. it is highly unusual to find this type of material out in a field or pasture, since it is very expensive to produce.

Red Material On Grass- Coating of a red granular material on the stems and leaves of plants, termed "red hay" by collectors.

• a. non-magnetic and does not appear to be pure iron oxide.
• b. in some regions there is a smooth surface, as if the material had dried from a volatile base such as paint.
• c. The EDS shows a high iron peak with the presence of several elements.

Among the elements identified are cadmium, potassium, and aluminum. Drs. Levengood and Burke admit, in the case of the oil, that "the elements in the EDS do not really confirm the origin of this material."

However, the results of the shard and grass testing are most gratifying for Israeli ufology. The shards had previously been tested by the National Geological Institute Laboratory in Israel and the University of Manchester's Materials Science Laboratory in England and found to be at least 99.35% pure silicon. Levengood and Burke confirm previous testing results but add an important fact. Because a prankster was loose in Kadima, many in the Israeli ufological community feared he planted the silicon in the circles. Levengood and Burke prove that the type of silicon found would be far too expensive to be spread about by a hoaxer.

They next tested sand and soil gathered from the Shikmona Beach site, near the northern coastal city of Haifa. In 1987, a UFO flashed a red light beam and an image of the craft and its pilot was burnt into the sands below. Levengood and Burke confirmed that a most mysterious incident had taken place:

Soil Samples From Shikmona Beach- Samples of a red clay collected on Sept. 28, 1987. One sample collected from a dark ovoid form in the soil and a control taken some distance away.

• a. the control appeared to consist of normal soil particles from a red clay type soil (fine particle structure).
• b. the formation sample consisted of very dark red or almost black granular particles which appeared to be well mixed with the clay soil. An odor similar to kerosene was detected in the bag.
• c. when attempting to take photomicrographs of the two soil samples for comparative purposes the microscope light was positioned for reflective illumination. During this set-up process the soil matrix of the formation sample was observed to literally "melt down," that is it became bubbly, and when the heat source (microscope light) was turned off the "soil-liquid" hardened into a black mass of rounded particles.
• d. thermal studies indicated that the soil "melting" temperature was in the range of 50 C (around 120 degrees F). This indicates the presence of a very low melting point hydrocarbon.
• e. in consultation with a Geophysicist we were told that he was not aware of any material with these properties existing in the natural environment.
• f. this very unusual, low melting point material repeatedly re-solidifies into the black globular form, therefore it was not in the liquid form when samples were originally taken.

If one wishes to know how the Shikmona Beach UFOs (there was a similar incident eight months later) "burnt" their images onto the sands of Shikmona Beach, Levengood and Burke provide the answer. The craft "painted" the sand with an unidentified low melting black hydrocarbon.

The laboratory analyses only confirm what has been obvious to most Israeli ufologists; their incidents are amongst the most unusual and believable anywhere. The Shikmona Beach and Kadima incidents both passed muster after strict laboratory testing and must be counted as amongst the best proved UFO encounters of the past two decades.

Notes:

1. William Levengood had no "doctor" degree; this was purely invented.
2. The case is a "classic" UFO landing trace case, with no legitimate "crop circles" aspect.