Subject: WINGFIELD Waffles NO More...3/3 From: rschatte@aol.com (RSchatte) Date: 23 Nov 1995 09:19:03 -0500 Message-ID: <491vsn$luq@newsbf02.news.aol.com> Continued from last message The background -------------- This possibility simply does not become evident until one examines the background of Irving, Lundberg and Dickinson as hoaxers. From 1992 onwards Robert Irving has been a leading crop circle hoaxer and has in that time produced many complex designs in the cropfields of southern England. He has been closely associated in this enterprise with Jim Schnabel, a former employee of the CIA, who once worked for the DDI (Deputy Director of Intelligence) at CIA headquarters in Virginia. Whether or not Schnabel's stay in England from around 1989/90 until 1993, ostensibly to pursue a Ph.D. course at Oxford University and later at Bath, had any connection with his previous line of business is a moot point. Schnabel and Irving claimed that their circlefaking activities were aimed at finding out who had been producing the circles and pictograms in Wiltshire from 1988 onwards; many of these have never been explained. In fact their chief delight seemed to be in deceiving crop circle and UFO groups researching the phenomenon and which were often engaged in watching the fields and the skies at night. Besides making many different crop formations, this pair next took up launching hoax UFOs in the form of light-carrying or luminous-painted balloons in the area of Alton Barnes (Wilts) in order to fool the CSETI group and others who had organised such watches in 1992 and 1993. During 1992-1993 Irving and Schnabel met with John Lundberg and Rod Dickinson both of whom had also taken up circlefaking. A network of circlefakers evolved and the various teams often met to plan and co-ordinate their activities. These culminated in 1994 in some highly elaborate designs the most dramatic of which were made by Lundberg and Dickinson, occasionally assisted by Irving. An article by myself in the Winter 1993/4 issue of The Cerealogist, entitled "O, what a tangled web we weave ...", exposed their activities and identified them as the creators of several well known formations such as the Froxfield Flower (August 4 1994), the Spider's Web at Avebury (August 10- 11 1995) and the large 1994 Scorpion designs, though of course none of them admit to authorship of these circles or any other particular formation. Although Lundberg and Dickinson described themselves as circlemakers or "crop artists", their circlefaking activities were none the less illegal and involved considerable deception. Their compulsion to fake circles and UFOs was best illustrated in an exhibition which they put on with some help from Jim Schnabel at the Independent Art Space in London in February- March 1994. This included pictures of many of their crop circle formations and also faked UFOs - "four anomalous photographs of disk like objects" produced by Rod Dickinson. But their theme of 'the paranormal as art', and their unspoken ideal of creating icons for the true believer, ran even to the inclusion in the exhibition catalogue of two brief items on cattle mutilations. One, by John Lundberg and Bill Ellis, was entitled "Altered Steaks" and the other was an extract from Linda Howe's "An Alien Harvest", reproduced as a project for IAS by John Lundberg. (I do not suggest in any way that either has ever hoaxed cattle mutilations!) Also in the exhibition were 7ft by 7ft oil paintings of the alien head from the cover of Whitley Strieber's book "Communion". Alien HILDA ----------- The logical progression from here was, obviously, to create an alien. Not just a model or a statue of an alien but one that would be widely accepted as the real thing. Certainly a model - a special effects dummy - was required to do this but it had to be filmed in such a way that people would believe that it was genuine. I suggest that is exactly what was done. For anyone who still doubts that it is possible to create a convincing special effects dummy of this sort, I recommend that they read "Alien Autopsy -- Faked or Fiction?" by The Truly Dangerous Company