In the night of 13-14 May 2008, three large circles appeared in a wheat field at Nieuw-Vennep, very close
to Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. It turned out to be part of a a commercial by multinational Phillips. The
reason why I have put this report on my website, is because of the many e-mails I received from all over the world with questions
about this formation and the story behind it...
Upon entering the circles I saw straight away that something was very weird, to say the least. At first glance, the crop seemed
to have been burned to the ground. Contrary to what one may expect in a formation in young crop, the damage was enormous and
beyond repair. The plants had been destroyed, harvesting this crop at the end of the season was out of the question.
These plants would not grow back to the sun, they were dead...
The majority of the plants in all three circles had been badly scorched, burnt, or even entirely turned to black dust.
The perimeter of the circles (the standing edges) were remarkably dry and lacked colour. The plants were significantly
shorter; the contrast with the healthy green of the rest of the field was shocking. Within this ring of shorter, dehydrated,
and scorched plants was a small flattened ring of burnt plant remains.
There were countless ridges, as if the soil had been handled with some sort of (undeep)
plough that had lifted and subsequently thrown back the clay. The ridges formed a spiral, but not a perfect one.
Some ridges became one, others suddenly split up into several new ones.
This handling of the earth caused many plants to simply disappear underneath the clay. There were quite a few piles of
warped clay and plants; upon opening them the buried plants became visible. They were still green and moist.
Many plants had been pulled out of the ground totally and thrown back again. They were reasonably green and probably still alive.
I found quite a lot of tightly twisted and turned bundles of wheat plants. Most of them were dead, only some were still green...
In all of my 15 years of experience as a crop circle researcher, I had never before seen anything like this.
I was shocked to see the damage, it was as if 'weapens of mass destruction' had been used here. It wasn't until the next
day that the owners of the field admitted Phillips' involvement. The idea was to present the new Nivea for Men shaving system
as something from out of space that had touched down, scorching the crop as if a UFO had landed in the field. Phillips had
explicitely asked for the scorching effect, which was carried out by the owners of the field by using a small portable
gas burner. Prior to that they had set out the circles by using a 25 meter rope, subsequently using a rotor harrow (twice!) to cut through the soil
and the plants. This caused the plants to end up upside down in the soil, as well as the spiralling ridges inside the circles.
The gas burner did the rest...
Thank God it was a hoax. Had this been a genuine event, something must have gone wrong big time... As my friend Frits said (who was there
with me that day): "I don't think I would have been ready for this". Let's hope the first real formation comes soon in our small
country of tulips and windmills...
