Thursday, August 13, 2020

Synchronicity: Crop circle in Charlton

I have been reading Passport to Magonia, Jacques Vallée's seminal 1969 book on UFOs and fairy lore, which I have known about for ages but somehow never actually read until now. There is a bit comparing fairy rings and "saucer nests" (the now-familiar term "crop circle" had yet to be coined), and one account of the latter is introduced as follows:

July 16, 1963 will long be remembered in the annals of British ufology. Something appeared to have landed on farmer Roy Blanchard's field at the Manor Farm, Charlton, Wiltshire. The marks on the ground were first discovered by a farmworker, Reg Alexander. They overlapped a potato field and a barley field. The marks comprised a saucer-shaped depression or crater eight feet in diameter and about four inches in depth. . . .

Shortly after reading this account of one of the earliest crop circles (dubbed "the Charlton crater"), I checked Bruce Charlton's blog, as I do almost every day, and read a post called "Experiencing the animated world - what, specifically, do we need to Do?" In the post, he refers repeatedly to a lecture by Stanley Messenger called "Crop Circles: gateways to new worlds." As you can see in the comments on the post, Bruce has little interest in crop circles, and it's not the sort of thing he often writes about.

The coincidence, of course, involves crop circles being mentioned in connection with both a town called Charlton and a person called Charlton. Keep that in mind, because here comes a meta-coincidence.

Returning to the Vallée book, I read of how one Everett Clark, of Dante, Tennessee, reported that creatures from a UFO had attempted to steal his dog on November 6, 1957. After recounting this strange story, Vallée writes,

In another of the extraordinary coincidences with which UFO researchers are now becoming familiar, on the same day [November 6, 1957] another attempt to steal a dog was made, this time in Everittstown, New Jersey.*

The asterisk takes us to this footnote: "In yet another coincidence, the name of the town in the second case is similar to the name of the witness (Everett) in the first one" (italics mine).


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