From: rpattree2@gmail.com   
      
   Fertilized By Belief    
      
   Clyde Lewis Wants to Believe in Crop Circles. But What If the Nothing is Out   
   There?    
      
   by Frank Bures | August 01, 2002    
    feature-5904.jpeg    
   - Andrea J. Wright    
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   Clyde Lewis stands in the middle of the crop circle and calls upon the wisdom   
   he has gathered over the years.    
   "I think this is a typical agroglyph," he says with the air of an   
   archeologist. "It looks real."    
      
   Together with some friends, Lewis has come to investigate reports of an   
   anomalous formation in a field outside Forest Grove. He seems to be struggling   
   with which line to take: Is it real or a hoax?    
      
   "There's no hole here," he says pointing to the middle of the circle. "What   
   they'd probably have to do is put a broom stick there or something, and do a   
   complete sweep around, but I don't see a hole. That's the only way I can see   
   they could have put it    
   together."    
      
   That is the professional opinion of the self-described "talk show   
   host/journalist" and Portland's nearest incarnation of Fox Mulder. On his   
   radio program, "Ground Zero," he frequently totters between reason and belief   
   while discussing everything from    
   aliens to chupacabras to government mind control, with guests that include   
   everyone "from crackpots to weirdoes."    
      
   Now we will be discussing crop circles.    
      
   The flattened wheat is arranged in a complex design that gives an eerie effect   
   and raises strange questions. Is this where the ship landed? Was there a rift   
   in the space-time fabric? Is it some undecoded message from another planet? Or   
   did the new Mel    
   Gibson movie, Signs, give local kids ideas?    
      
   Mel Gibson he's not, but Clyde Lewis--mullet and all--is in fact a movie star.   
   He has three horror films to his credit, including Nightfall, Cage In Box   
   Elder, and most famously, a starring role as the hero's voice in Citizen   
   Toxie: The Toxic Avenger 4.    
      
   Now, though, he focuses mainly on his radio show, which he started in Utah,   
   and has continued doing since moving to Portland in 1999. He says he was the   
   first one to synchronize The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the   
   Moon. He was also a    
   Mormon missionary in Argentina, where he met voodoo priests, satanists,   
   witches, communists, and Muslims. The experience blew him open.    
      
   "It just expanded my horizons," he says, "to the point where I felt like I was   
   cheating myself out of experiencing other people's beliefs." When he came   
   back, he quit the Mormon church and has been experiencing other people's   
   beliefs ever since.    
      
   Lewis crouches down to the earth. "This is what I find interesting," he says   
   gently touching the wheat. "How they're bent. I don't know if they're bent or   
   broken, but they're bent they're bent well."    
      
   A first-grader could tell you that all the wheat shafts are broken, snapped   
   clean at the base, which is a dead giveaway that bored teenagers were out here   
   with two-by-fours and ropes in the middle of the night. In "real" circles,   
   according to most    
   researchers, the shafts are bent and unharmed, and the plants keep growing   
   across the ground. There is also allegedly an electromagnetic distortion that   
   makes compasses spin.    
      
   "My mind isn't linear enough to figure something like this out," Lewis says,   
   hinting at the enormity of the task, "but I'm sure there are people who   
   could."    
      
   Though down the totem pole from Art Bell and Jeff Rense, Clyde Lewis does   
   consider himself a serious researcher. This investigation consists mainly of   
   standing around, spouting off hunches and theories and bits of hearsay cobbled   
   together from the    
   internet. Other Ground Zero investigations have delved into things like,   
   "Alien Sun Gods and the Icarus Theory," "Baalzebub: The Great Watcher in the   
   Wings" and "Project Homunculus: Preparing for the Alien War."    
      
   In his search for the truth, Clyde Lewis has left no stone unturned.    
      
   But Lewis is no mere wallflower at the paranormal party either. He claims to   
   have been visited by the legendary "Men in Black." (They bombed his car in   
   1996 "to scare him.") He is haunted by demons. He is plagued by the numbers   
   222 and 444 (and sometimes    
   23). And he boasts of an uncanny knack for happening into news, like the time   
   he sat next to a British man on a plane, who told him the royal family were   
   incestuous, blood-sucking reptilians, engaged in a conspiracy to rule the   
   world (again). This led    
   him to a devastating conclusion.    
      
   "I have determined," Lewis says, "that Prince William has every chance of   
   being the Anti-Christ."    
      
   Clyde Lewis also has three ex-wives.    
      
   WHERE CROP CIRCLES COME FROM    
      
   Yet, in spite of his trafficking in all things wacky, the Forest Grove circle   
   is only the second "glyph" he's ever been to. The first was in Logan, Utah,   
   where he saw a blind girl in the circle's center, playing the violin because   
   she heard angels.    
      
   At the Forest Grove glyph, he seems reluctant to relinquish the mystery. (He's   
   got to have something for his show tomorrow night). His own theory about the   
   circle seems a bit muddled. "I have a belief," he says, "that the real ones   
   happen because of    
   tremors in the ground causing the crops to flatten. There are a lot of   
   elements that have to happen where " He trails off, and goes over to where   
   someone has found some odd imprints in the wheat.    
      
   Yet there is no shortage of theories among those at the circle. It could have   
   been caused by: a) water somehow running clockwise; b) a funnel cloud that was   
   in the area the day before; c) some sort of electrostatic effect; d) eddies in   
   the    
   electromagnetic field; e) aliens; f) kids.    
      
   But there is no way to test these hypotheses, so we're left to our hunches.    
      
   Which is the beauty of crop circles: You can think what you want about them.   
   They grow in a muddy field of pseudoscience, are watered by myth, and are   
   fertilized with belief. And many of those beliefs have built up over the last   
   decade in a frenzy    
   surrounding the formations. Each year, as the circles seemed to grow more   
   intricate and complex, the temptation to attribute intelligence to them became   
   too much, especially as the millennium approached. It was an orgy of   
   speculation that swept even Led    
   Zeppelin away.    
      
   The end was coming and the wheat was trying to tell us something.    
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)