In the first of a two episode series, I’ll be speaking with academic and scientist Jeff Wilson, Director and founding researcher of the Independent Crop Circle Researchers' Association.

Jeff is probably the world’s most knowledgeable expert on the crop circle phenomenon in the USA—crop circles are often thought of as being exclusive to the UK, but in fact thousands of crop circles have been appearing in America’s amber fields of grain for at least a century.

I got in touch with Jeff after my article, Land Surveying and Crop Circles, appeared in the December 2023 issue of The American Surveyor magazine. I wanted to know what a serious investigator thought about my article, and he was happy to tell me.

Assuming you’ve ever traveled by plane, train, ship, or automobile, or received a package in the mail or by shipping company or have used an autonomous drone or vehicle of some sort, or perhaps played a video game then you have likely benefitted, albeit unknowingly, from some piece of technology developed by Mike Horton. Now though, Horton is turning his attention directly to the problem of GNSS signal interruption, particularly due to space weather, and his new tech startup, GEODNET, can be described as an attempt to create the world’s largest and most accessible RTK network via crowd sourced receivers funded by a bespoke crypto coin, the GEOD token, with proof of accuracy protocol and token distribution enabled by blockchain.

Land surveying in scripture and folklore. Also, vampires! Dustin Gardner is a 4th-generation land surveyor licensed in three western states and currently employed as Principal Survey Analyst at Rick Engineering. Despite the family history, Dustin’s path to surveying as a career was anything but conventional and followed the attainment of degrees in literature, criminal justice, and mathematics. And before settling on that degree path, he seriously considered the pursuit of a PhD in religious studies, with the aim of becoming a professor of folklore and mythology. Well, academia’s loss is land surveying’s gain: Dustin published a very interesting essay on the importance of boundary location and land surveyors. In his article, titled “Sacred Boundaries,” Dustin was able to firmly connect the profession of land surveying to the surprisingly extensive folklore and mythology of vampires, also known as ‘revenants’ and that is an interesting aspect of the noblest of trades that certainly never occurred to me.