#2941: Patty Greer

Crop circles are geometric designs of flattened or knocked-over crops resulting from simple pranks or the work of slam artists in line with a tradition started by David Chorley and Doug Bower in the 1970s. Crop circles were very popular themes in media in the 1980s and 1990s when it was still possible to convince teenagers and loons that they were caused by alien visitations, i.e. before the internet made it obvious to everyone that they were not (and no, it’s not like there is any remaining mystery: we know that they are man-made – except perhaps these – and how). Well, almost everyone: There are still some dingbat loons out there trying to argue that at least some of the crop circles are alien-made. These people, called cereologists, adher to the classical and time-honored pseudoscientific method of studying all bullshit that purportedly supports what they want to believe and carefully ignoring tiresome facts and reality. Perhaps the unofficial leader of this colorful group of conspiracy theorists is filmmaker Patty Greer, known for ‘documentaries’ like The Wake Up Call: Is Anybody Listening?; 2012: We’re Already In It; The UFO Conclusion; Crop Circle Diaries, and Orbs and Light Beings.

 

Greer apparently travels around to crop circles. When she arrives, she always make a bow at the entrance, heads to the center of some main circle and lays down in order to experience an intuitive connection with the “circlemakers” (not the people who actually made the circle, of course). Indeed, what spurred her “documentary” film making career was what she describes as a “life changing out-of-body-experience in the center of a UK Crop Circle in 2007”, in which “her perception of reality was forever changed” (we admit harboring some suspicion that she was plenty kooky prior to that experience, too – why else would she find herself at the center of a crop circle to begin with?). To Greer, the circlemakers are some “illuminated light beings” that a “stunned witness” saw “come out of orange balls of light” at a crop circle in 2010 because stunned witnesses talking about light beings trump the facts every time.

 

Her documentaries seem to touch on anything suitably flashy from the demented lifeworlds of whale.to contributors; much of it is, obviously, concerned with UFOs, and the documentaries cover every piece of nonsense ever covered on any History Channel Ancient Aliens show, including things like the Abydos helicopter. Her 2012: We’re Already In It documentary focuses on the projected 2012 apocalypse and offers “a rich medley of interpretations of the Mayan Prophecies blended with ancient wisdom and scientific probabilities, well known experts and druids share their predictions and perceptions about 2012”. For the record, ‘scientific’ in that passage does not mean scientific, and her ‘experts’ seem to be limited to C-list New Age novelists like Patricia Cori, Geoff Stray and Simon Peter Fuller, as well as Barbara Lamb, an instructor at the International Metaphysical University whose specialty appears to be “human–alien hybrids”.

 

In addition to being a mainstay at outlets like Coast to Coast AM, Greer also appeared as a feature at the 2015 Conspira-sea Cruise (one has to give the organizers some credit for its wonderfully Bob’s Burger-esque name) together with classic conspiracy mavens like Leonard Horowitz and Andrew Wakefield. Then there is this, which is entirely predictable and which we just leave here without comment.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, at level of caring for facts and reason, Greer is comparable to Wakefield, trapped as she is in an incoherent and flaky fantasy world of her own making. But as opposed to Wakefield, she is presumably entirely harmless.