See also Geoglyphs and Crop Circle Phenomena

On publishing Alien Intelligence and the Pathway to Mars, the Australian magazine New Dawn invited me to write further on the Marree Man. Renewing my research into this geoglyph, Google Earth and subsequent reports from CNN and NASA among others, revealed that the measurements originally provided for this geoglyph did not compare with the reality on the ground. Worse: nor do the December 2019 reports from CNN and NASA Earth Observatory even concur amongst themselves!
This article can be best read in conjunction with the material in Chapter 11 of The Pathway to Mars as well as in Geoglyphs and Crop Circle Phenomena.

The Marree Man geoglyph was discovered in 1998 just over 120 miles northeast of what is now the Woomera Heritage Centre in South Australia on a plateau some 60 metres above the banks of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre and 65kms away from Marree, after which it was named.¹ This extraordinary outline of a naked man, brandishing what was thought to be a throwing stick (called a Woomera or Atlatl), created headlines across the world.

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Fig 1. Location of the Marree Man on its high plateau showing the positioning of the geoglyph relative to the length of the plateau. Inset: image showing traces of water at the base of the plateau.

As most Australian readers of the magazine New Dawn will be aware, it was generally considered to be a mischievous prank variously attributed to a well-known landscape artist; the Australian or US military personnel stationed in the region; mining workers, or the indigenous Arabana Aborigines.

Many considered the geoglyph had been designed to boost tourism in Australia, especially since Sydney was going to host the Olympics in 2000. Although in this regard, it must be noted that a far better fit was that two months before Marree Man appeared, ABC TV aired the first episode of what would become the famously successful satirical show The Games. To the apparent displeasure of The Games creators, in 2012 the BBC screened a show in the UK Twenty Twelve based on exactly the same premise – the incompetence of those involved with the promotion of the Olympics.²

As there was insufficient evidence for any one of these origin stories to take hold, the rumours and arguments they engendered merely kept the pot boiling. Despite the fact that in 1998 the satellite Global Positioning System (GPS) that would have been necessary to construct this image was not available to the general public, no one got around to asking exactly how the geoglyph had been made. Or mentioning the words extraterrestrial involvement with any seriousness.

Perhaps you can tell what this riddle may be

The above is familiar territory for Australian readers of New Dawn. What is less well known is the media messaging and faxes emanating from Australia some two weeks after Marree Man’s appearance, linking it to ancient chalk geoglyphs of the equally naked Cerne Giant in the UK and to the faceless outline of a surveyor called ‘The Long Man of Wilmington’. For the crop circle community of the UK, this messaging was met with much cynicism.

Having experienced hoax shenanigans around crop glyphs that were a seasonal feature of the landscape around these two chalk geoglyphs, the fuss engendered by these faxes were considered a distraction allied with a disinformation exercise. The UK fields were also graced with the presence of scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), who were half-heartedly attempting to be incognito while looking at the crop glyphs and generating their own mythology about these events within the croppie community.

Indeed, both Britain and America’s governmental departments and media seem closely entwined when it comes to anomalous events and the management of same. The techniques used around Marree Man had already been deployed decades earlier in the UK. In July 1963, Manor Farm in Charlton, Wiltshire, was featured on the national news because of a highly strange crater, eight feet in diameter and about one foot deep, that appeared in a potato field. In the centre of that large crater was a smaller hole some three feet deep.


Fig 2. Diagram of Charlton fields after Patrick Moore.

Astronomer Patrick Moore, at the time a TV personality and presenter of The Sky at Night on BBC TV, was dispatched with a crew to the site on 25 July. The farmer had already noticed that the crop around the crater was flattened, and Moore took note that the grain crop in the adjacent field had both elongated and circular areas of spirally-flattened crop and standing tufts in the circular centre. So far, so good.

Variations on a theme

Moore’s subsequent reports across the media and within his own writings diverge as to the timing of events, the measurements of the holes, and the actual details at the site. The army bomb disposal squad found a piece of metal in the small hole. Later reports confirmed it to be magnetite, but none of Moore's post-event reports mention that fact. Nor do his reports mention something he later majored on in his 1972 book Can You Speak Venusian?³

Prior to Moore’s visit to the site, Dr Robert J. Randall, an Australian from the “rocket proving ground at Woomera,” made a statement linking this event to the “blast-off of a saucer from the planet Uranus.” Given Moore's status as an astronomer, the chemical make-up of the planet Uranus, and the fact that no Randall was working at Woomera (they checked), this looks like the old ploy of confuse the public with inconsistencies and sheer rubbish and everyone will stop paying attention to what actually happened here. And since it worked then, it’s no surprise the same ploy was put into action in 1998 when those faxes started appearing after Marree Man’s arrival.

From another angle – how relevant was it to the arrival of Marree Man that in March 1998, the American NBC-TV group paid three British crop circle hoaxers to design a crop circle in the dark in under four hours. They selected the town of Winton on New Zealand’s South Island for the filming of the event. When completed, the documentary omitted to tell viewers that two huge arc lights hoisted by four-ton cranes had been employed and that before filming, the team had been on-site for two days surveying and staking out the pattern, that it eventually took them five and half hours to complete, and all this was cut out immediately after filming ceased. The segment was included in Unmasked: The Secrets of Deception, which aired in the US in May and was distributed around the world in the following weeks, thereby topping and tailing the arrival of the Marree Man geoglyph. It’s no wonder the authorities were spooked, as that arrival did not help their anti-extraterrestrial intelligence stance.⁴

How widely known was it that the Marree Man had been preceded by two geoglyph events of equally anomalous origin, both associated with ancient salt lake beds that became hardpan deserts? These two events might well have contributed to NBC’s desire to skewer notions of psychic activities in general and crop circles in particular on a bamboo-surveying stake.

Eight years earlier, in August 1990, furrowed lines had formed a Sri Yantra symbol on the ancient lakebed of Mickey Basin in Oregon, USA. Then, in 1995, a sculpture was created in Egypt on an ancient lakebed just outside the Red Sea resort of El Gouna. Ostensibly the work of three Greek artists, this ‘artwork’ would later intrude into the British crop circle community of Southern England in May 2001. The paradoxes surrounding this whole affair, and the links of both these events with the Marree Man, led me to undertake a thorough investigation of this Greek-Egyptian creation which was published on the web in July and August 2001.⁵

Nothing that has occurred in the world of weird ever since has caused me to retract my opinion that the Mickey Basin Sri Yantra was a real anomalous event, and that the El Gouna artwork had been specifically created to disguise a very inconvenient anomalous event. Also, the data concerning the extraordinary Marree Man has been used to confuse the public, while at the same time refuting the idea that extraterrestrial/ alien intelligence could be involved in the creation of Marree Man, or indeed any other terrestrial artworks, be they geoglyphs or crop circles.

Events that do not fit with current understandings or accepted paradigms as to ‘how things work’ are an inconvenience to our leading scientists, religious and academic figureheads, and most governmental departments, especially the military. If at all possible, such intrusions into the status quo are largely ignored, or when that is not clearly out of the question, disinformation and multiple rumours are spread to dismiss the event in the minds of most ‘sensible’ people.

In the case of Marree Man, all the above were applied, especially since the local Aborigines went so far as to disown it: they didn’t consider the ground on which it had been placed to be a sacred site. Nor did the head’s styling or the chest scarring represent anyone from their Arabana culture. In that regard, since parallels are often drawn between Marree Man and the Nazca geoglyphs, it’s of interest that several of the geoglyphs on the Nazca plateau also represent "foreign species". The famous Spider Monkey is a prime example. It lives on the other side of the Andes in the Brazilian rainforest canopy. ‘Foreign’ is a term used by our western military to describe ‘alien craft or intelligences’.

Another tall story

Back to the Marree Man. In July 1998, the Woomera base quietly expanded its authority over that region to effectively shut down the immediate conversation. To this day, nobody knows who made Marree Man. In fact, it gets worse, because over time the details are increasingly confusing, and the origin stories constantly fluctuate, as do the measurements of this geoglyph.

Take the original sightings first: in the UK we learned that this geoglyph was spotted by a US Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper satellite. This was the image that featured in the international media at the time. We did not know that in Australia the first sighting was attributed to a local pilot, although the identity of this pilot is a bit of a mystery in itself, ranging in the media from anonymous, as in “a tourism operator” and “a local pilot.” A later report from BBC News in 2018 asserts that outback pilot Trevor Wright (the owner of Wrightsair) was the first to discover it by chance, while an Australian ABC report of 2019 goes with pilot “Trec Smith”. The ABC report repeats all the old stories about the glyph, reiterating that to date, nobody knows who executed the original glyph and plugs that old chestnut: the mystery is more important than actually knowing the facts about the matter.

Then there’s the niggling problem of accuracy. While not wishing to impute a deliberate intent to deceive by any single individual associated with Marree Man, there is, across the board, a lot of complacency about the actual facts. There is the problem of size: in the ABC article of 24 August 2019, pilot “Trec Smith” is cited as saying that he spotted the geoglyph from an altitude of 6,000ft and that it was “huge.”⁶ In an ABC Earshot podcast dated the same day, James Vyner, the journalist who authored the article, interviewed Trec Smith who said that he saw this image at a height of 5,000ft. This altitude is also written into the article advertising the podcast.⁷

When this geoglyph first appeared on 26 June 1998, Google Earth was not available to the public, but today it is possible for anyone to check distances and altitudes, so that’s what I did using Google Earth Pro. As it turns out, the altitude quoted is irrelevant. At either 5,000 or 6,000ft, it would be difficult to evaluate the size of the entire design (see Figure 1).

Fig 3. Close up view of Marree Man at 6000ft.

It is necessary to fly to an altitude of some 13,115ft (4km) before the whole image fills the screen. Other statistics supplied in the article do not fit either the original data or present statements made by the very jolly Phil Turner, owner of the Marree Hotel. NASA states that the Man is 3.2km in length. The British croppie press went for 4km. The Australian press chose 4.2km, and everyone agreed that the outline of the figure was 28km in circumference.


Fig 4. Marree Man’s outline and height in relation to the plateau, which is located some 60 metres above ground level.

However, an approximate measuring around the restored Marree Man finds a 13.47km circumference, and assuming that ‘length’ refers to the distance from the top of the head to the sole of the foot, gives a height of 2.62km, a height that is a quarter the length of the plateau upon which it rests (see figure 4).


Fig 5. Circumference around the Marree Man.

As for the length of his penis, said to be 400 metres by Phil Turner (to the amusement of his clients), again that figure is nearly twice as much as the 215 meters it turns out to be (see Figure 6).

Fig 6. The yellow line is the actual length of the penis, the white line is the length of 400 metres described by Phil Turner. However that 400 metres is not the linear measurement but the measurement around the outline of the penis.

Verifying other distances on my computer, the ‘as the crow flies’ measurements over very large distances are accurate, so there is no reason to doubt the sizes of Marree Man supplied by Google Earth Pro. The program only has an average error rate of 1.61% for off-road measurements, therefore it cannot be blamed for these inconsistencies.

When it was possible for anyone to check the data properly, why have these inaccurate figures not been corrected? Surely Turner, who was fully involved with the restoration of this geoglyph back in 2016, must know they are incorrect. Or is it necessary to maintain a specific mythology concerning this figure, and if so, quite apart from the notions of extreme masculinity relating to the genital measurements, what is that mythology meant to be telling us, sotto voce? There seems to be an effort to keep this anomalous event in the very basic world of humans. At the same time, the more one digs into the inconsistencies surrounding this event, the more one finds traces of a deliberate attempt to create unspoken links to matters off-planet.

Red myths

Turner says that an image from H.H. Finlayson’s 1946 book titled Red Centre: Man and Beast in the Heart of Australia was a mirror image of the Marree geoglyph, and he adds that one of the 'clues' faxed around the country produced a quote from that book. However, on purchasing the book, he could not find the quote. Turner suggests there might be another edition that he has not seen (and indeed, Red Centre was reprinted in 1979 with an extra 14 pages). Later in his podcast, James Vyner says that seen from the plateau, the landscape looks like Mars.

Associative thinking leads us back to Google and their Mars mapping program. Using Google Mars to find the famous Face on Mars at Cydonia is a whole other exercise in difficult since Cydonia alone won’t give a result, and it requires a knowledge of Martian geology and geography to choose from three locations relating to the word Cydonia. Interestingly, entering ‘The Face on Mars’ prior to the publication of my book Alien Intelligence and the Pathway to Mars always elicited the response: ‘sorry there are no results’, and I noted as such in the manuscript, explaining to readers how to get there. However, writing this article some two months since its US publication, I now find that the Face on Mars is listed as such, and it zooms into the location! Mostly. If the ‘no result’ comes up, another click sometimes unblocks it.

In contrast, Marree Man has always been listed, and Google Earth Pro takes you straight there, no quibbling, happy to oblige! But it’s of interest that the historical data for this plateau is very patchy. There is one shot from 1985, ten years before it arrived and then – nothing! Until 2007, when the geoglyph is very faintly discernible. Then nothing again, until 2010. After which there are sporadic postings: two in 2010, one in 2011, one in 2012, 2013 and 2015. None are legible since they consist of an amalgam of intercuts and coloured overlays, and zooming in is an equally useless operation.

Then we come to more inconsistencies over its restoration. In an interview with ABC, it is stated that Phil and Maz Turner bought the Marree Hotel in 2011 precisely because of Marree Man. In 2012, the native rights issue was settled, and the Arabana peoples got title to the land – and the Marree Man plateau. By 2016, the restoration of the geoglyph was decided. Discussing the restoration in a BBC report of June 2018, Turner said:

You could see some evidence on the ground of the original work – the right-hand side of the man had totally disappeared but we did find, in doing our ground surveys, about 250 original bamboo nursery skewers (stakes) that were used to peg out the Marree Man back in 1998.⁸

In the UK, we have experience of discovering crop glyphs that were clearly not made by human beings flattening crop, and which had been accessorised with additional props to create the impression they were man made. Quite apart from the odd plank and rope outfit, the usual accessory was the bamboo pole. And in the UK these too can be purchased in nursery garden centres.

Elsewhere he opines that the original makers must have used bamboo poles all around the circumference. Seeing those 250 bamboo stakes might have given him the idea they would have been laid out all around the circumference, but as he also suggests the original makers were using GPS to guide their efforts, these poles would be somewhat redundant. With the best will in the world regarding these bamboo poles, Turner is either making assumptions or asking us to associate this geoglyph with human beings stomping around in the dirt and grasses on top of the plateau. Unless, of course, he has firsthand knowledge concerning the original creation crew, Oz division. He professes not to have that knowledge, and indeed recites the charming tale of his efforts to extract information about Marree Man from four governmental departments under the FOI Act, which only resulted in him receiving back the fifteen pages of emails he had sent them while trying to get the restoration underway!

There were, he says, apparently numerous other pages of information they did not send him because the information “was too sensitive to be released to the public.” Turner said in an interview that the restoration work started on a Monday and took until Friday afternoon to finish. Five days. Elsewhere this restoration is said to have taken eleven days. Of course, these lesser niggles might be discrepancies in grammar accrued over time, but even so, generally inaccurate reporting leads to doubt and confusion in the mind of the receiver of such information and discredits the event itself.

An additional mystery, Turner recounted how on finding it difficult to establish a proper survey of the plateau and the old outline of the glyph, miraculously (his word) – just as in the old days with those faxes – he received an anonymous email with the GPS coordinates that he needed. There’s a lot wrong with that statement, but frankly it would be tedious to deconstruct it. Suffice to say that once again, mystery is being deliberately interwoven into the saga of this geoglyph.

This has been presented to the public with multiple confusing accounts of its origin and varying measurements, which few can verify unless they are in situ. Over time, the anecdotes have been maintained while the image fades from the landscape and the public’s memory, helped by Google’s lack of clear imagery. Then, when the major interest declined, the enigma was restored and used for the very tourism purposes it was allegedly created for in the first place, according to one of the 1995 origin stories. Now, if that were true, it would have been welcomed even at the time of its creation back in 1998. That it was not belies that origin story (in Europe, we understood that planes were forbidden to fly over it in the early days).

Finally, the fact that it has taken some 20 years for it considered to be ‘safe’ enough to be a source of tourism while at the same time new mysteries are being woven around the restoration process, indicates there is more going on here than simply drumming up the tourist trade for outback South Australia.

I touch on the Marree Man event of 1998 in Alien Intelligence and the Pathway to Mars. New Dawn’s request for this article inspired me to catch up on the story over the decades and dig a little deeper. It was Sir Winston Churchill who coined the phrase, “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” relative to the unforeseeable outcomes generated by apparently inexplicable responses to a specific set of circumstances.⁹ It is an entirely apt description of the way in which Marree Man has been managed.

In my view, events such as the Marree Man are signs of an ongoing conversation and communication between our collective consciousness and others – off-planet. An exchange that we do not always recognise as such and that some do not want to recognise. Which is why the enigma box and the mystery wrapping paper are still being used to stop anyone reflecting on the actual riddle at the heart of this geoglyph.

Riddle me, Marree me. Were you made for me – or a gift from me?

Mary Bennett

Aulis Online, January 2022

Originally published in Australia’s New Dawn magazine September-October 2021 issue

Continue with Geoglyphs and Crop Circle Phenomena

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Footnotes

1. South Australia’s Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre is a natural wonder
2. The Games references the UK involvement, Wikipedia
3. Moore was aged 40 at the time of the Charlton incident. A writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Can You Speak Venusian?, first published in 1972, was an investigation into pseudoscience, but nonetheless provided a much more detailed account of the Charlton crater site and events than he published elsewhere. For a brief biography, see SF and Fantasy Bibliography
4. Author Freddy Silva’s 1998 analysis of this event can be found here
5. The links between these three geoglyphs are featured in Alien Intelligence and the Pathway to Mars. The two articles of July and August 2001 can now be found on the under the title Geoglyphs and Crop Circle Phenomena.
6. An Outback Enigma, ABC.net
7. The Mystery of the Marree Man, ABC.net
8. Marree Man: The enduring mystery of a giant outback figure, BBC News
9. Word Histories

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