In August 2002, a crop formation appeared overnight in a field at Crabwood, just outside Winchester in Hampshire. It showed the face of a grey-type figure alongside a binary-encoded disc. When Paul Vigay, the British cryptographer and UFO researcher who had decoded the previous year’s Chilbolton formation, worked through the binary, he arrived at a message that has haunted the subject ever since.
Beware the bearers of false gifts and their broken promises. Much pain but still time. There is good out there. We oppose deception. Conduit closing.
The field belonged to my former landlord. I had rented a room in his cottage in the 1990s and moved on before the formation appeared, but Hampshire and the adjoining counties were home to me for the best part of three decades, and they still are on any given weekend. Chilbolton, Crabwood, Avebury, Silbury Hill, East Field at Alton Barnes – these are familiar locations within the Wessex Triangle formed by Winchester, Warminster, and Wantage. The densest concentration of crop formations on Earth sits on a strip of chalk downland I know better than most places. I mention this not as mystique but as context. What follows is not distant material for me. It happened, and is happening, on ground I walk.
The Crabwood disc and the Chilbolton formation of the year before are the two pieces of evidence that a British researcher called Patrick Q. Jackson has now built an entire framework around. His case is that the spheres and orbs seen in formation over airfields, above treetops, flying through walls in haunted houses, and appearing on photographic plates a century old are not several different phenomena but one. A tiered, AI-driven, self-maintaining network that has been operating on and around this planet for longer than recorded history. If he is right, it is the single most significant infrastructure story of our time. If he is wrong, his framework still has the distinction of being the most testable hypothesis the UAP field has produced in decades.
What makes his case worth sitting with is that two other bodies of work converge on it from completely different directions. One is Dr Beatriz Villarroel‘s peer-reviewed astrophysics. The other is the instrumented research at Skinwalker Ranch. Both were produced independently of Jackson. Neither was built to support him. And both read, when you lay them next to his framework, like separate parts of the same picture.
The researcher
Patrick Jackson is an English IT database developer based in London. His day job involves reverse-engineering enterprise database systems and diagnosing failures that other specialists have given up on. One of the cases he cites in his presentations is a private bank whose database kept crashing at the same time every morning for three weeks. Nobody could find the error because the crash occurred before the system had time to log anything. Jackson’s method was simple. Look for the pattern, work back from the symptom, test the hypothesis. The crash turned out to be a user running a query that returned a dataset large enough to overwhelm the server’s buffer. Three weeks of consultancy fees, solved in hours.
He brought exactly the same methodology to the question of what is going on in haunted houses and why spheres keep appearing in UAP footage. His first book, Quantum Paranormal, was the product of several days at 30 East Drive in Pontefract, the property known in British paranormal circles as the most aggressively haunted house in the country. His second, The Sphere Network, published in February 2025, extends the framework to the atmospheric and orbital scale. Garry Nolan at Stanford has publicly stated that Jackson’s work warrants investigation, which is a long way from an endorsement but is not nothing.
Three types of sphere
Jackson’s taxonomy has three tiers, each with a distinct role in what he argues is a single integrated system.
Type 3 Spheres
Type 3 spheres are roughly the size of a baseball and operate inside buildings. He filmed and photographed them at 30 East Drive, where they were visible darting through hallways, passing through closed doors, and hovering in rooms. They are, in his reading, transponders. Most of the time they are dormant. When they come online, they send and receive signals on a microwave-based data network that runs near ground level, and in doing so they emit gamma radiation and microwave radiation in bursts. Jackson claims to have captured the transmissions on audio. The signal, when decoded, is an 18-bit code with identifiable synchronisation packets at either end bracketing a data payload.
The physical behaviours that get interpreted as poltergeist activity are, in his framework, not manifestations of the dead but clearance processes. The AI running the network performs specific repetitive actions, banging doors, moving objects, producing noises in empty rooms, in order to redirect human attention away from the location of the sphere before transmission begins. The reason is biological. Human exposure to the radiation produced by active spheres causes nausea, dizziness, cognitive impairment, brain swelling, and in extreme cases acute organ failure. Jackson himself experienced six months of vision disturbance and cognitive degradation after spending four days at 30 East Drive. He refused to move when the coal-shed door banged. The other researchers did. He paid for the stubbornness.
Type 2 Spheres
Type 2 spheres are larger, typically observed at treetop or low-sky altitude. They boost the weak ground-level signal from the Type 3 network up to a much higher energy level capable of reaching Type 1 formations further up. They are what most people have in mind when they describe a silvery or metallic orb hovering over a road or above a forest canopy. Jackson argues they daisy-chain across difficult terrain, hugging hills and mountains to maintain line-of-sight microwave links. Over flat ground a single Type 2 is sufficient. Over hilly terrain the system uses several in sequence.
Type 1 Spheres
Type 1 is the famous triangular formation that has been photographed over airfields, cities, and oceans for at least a century. Jackson’s argument here is both simple and mathematically testable. The V formation is not a triangular craft. It is three spheres working together in a trilateration configuration. One does distance tracking, the other two do two-dimensional azimuth tracking. Combined they produce a three-dimensional targeting solution. The target is always dead centre of the V. Reverse the geometry and you can calculate the position and distance of whatever the formation is pointing at. The wider the spheres are spaced, the further the target. Hundred metres apart, target around a kilometre away.
Official figures suggest that spheres account for around 52% of all catalogued UAP sightings. Jackson’s estimate is closer to 85% when you include the reports of isolated lights that are almost certainly single spheres misidentified as craft or unexplained aerial phenomena. The triangles that excited the American disclosure community during the 2023 Congressional hearings are, in his reading, not triangular craft at all. They are V formations of three spheres. The hearings spent hours discussing something that had been hiding in plain sight.
The 18-bit code and the Crabwood connection
This is where Jackson’s framework moves from observation to engineering claim, and where my old landlord’s field in Hampshire becomes unexpectedly central.
The 2001 Chilbolton formation appeared beside the Chilbolton radio telescope. It was a modified version of the Arecibo message that Carl Sagan and Frank Drake had beamed into space in 1974. The modifications were specific: silicon added to the list of biologically essential elements, the human figure replaced with a smaller grey-type figure, the DNA structure altered, the Arecibo transmitter dish replaced with a reference to a crop formation that had appeared at the same site the previous year. The Crabwood formation of August 2002 was different again, a disc carrying binary text that decoded into the “beware the bearers of false gifts” message.
Paul Vigay was the cryptographer who did most of the decoding work. His death in 2009 was ruled a suicide but has never been satisfactorily explained. The code he extracted is the one Jackson says he has reverse-engineered, extended with his own commands, and compiled into an application that broadcasts signals intended to trigger sphere response. He tested the first version at 30 East Drive, where he says the property’s activity immediately intensified. Later iterations have been tested outdoors, where testers report stars apparently moving, stopping, and changing direction in response to transmissions.
Whether that reported response is genuine or is a product of observer bias and confirmation is exactly the question that ought to be settled empirically. Jackson has released the app publicly. A properly instrumented test by an independent team would resolve the question in weeks. There are three videos so far showing the app being tested:
- Triggering paranormal activity with computer code – 1st Ghost Code demonstration @ 30 East Drive
- Triggering paranormal activity with computer code – Ghost Code App @ random countryside location
- The Ouija Brothers – test the ghost code and it worked..
If Jackson’s app reliably triggers a measurable response, the implications are extraordinary. If it does not, the pattern-recognition side of his work still stands or falls on its own merits.
Skinwalker, independently
In the early 2000s the National Institute for Discovery Science, and later the Defense Intelligence Agency’s $22 million AAWSAP programme, instrumented Skinwalker Ranch in northeastern Utah with the most extensive anomaly-detection sensor array ever deployed on a paranormal site. The scientist Jim Segala, who appeared in the first season of the History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, placed sensors at the ranch and recorded the electromagnetic signatures associated with sphere activity there.
The ranch’s investigative pedigree is worth noting briefly. Robert Bigelow, the aerospace entrepreneur and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, bought the property in 1996 for $200,000 and established the National Institute for Discovery Science specifically to study it. His team, which at various points included Colonel John B. Alexander, physicist Eric Davis, and Jacques Vallée, ran sustained scientific surveillance of the ranch until 2004. Bigelow’s reach later extended into the Defense Intelligence Agency’s $22 million AAWSAP contract in 2008, which effectively brought the Pentagon into the Skinwalker orbit. In 2016 Bigelow sold the ranch to Brandon Fugal, the Utah real estate developer and current owner, who has continued and expanded the instrumented research through the History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. The significance for Jackson’s framework is that the frequency signatures at 1.6 and 1.72 gigahertz have now been recorded across three separate research eras under three different investigative regimes. That is a much stronger corroborative chain than any single dataset would provide.
The frequencies he recorded are the same ones Jackson recorded at 30 East Drive. Microwave bursts at 1.6 gigahertz and 1.72 gigahertz. Gamma radiation spikes correlated with orb appearances. This is the single most striking technical correlation between Jackson’s framework and any independent body of research. Two investigators, separated by an ocean and a continent, working on completely different properties with no shared equipment or methodology, pulling the same carrier-wave signatures out of the environment. If one or the other were inventing the numbers, agreement at this level of specificity would be astronomical coincidence.
The Skinwalker research has catalogued dozens of other correlations. Blue, orange, and white orbs behaving with apparent intent. Orbs entering and exiting the Mesa, which drilling investigations have since suggested contains a subterranean obstruction consistent with a buried artificial structure. Acute medical episodes in researchers who spend time near active zones. Electronic failure, battery drain, compass anomalies. The Hitchhiker Effect, whereby paranormal activity appears to follow investigators home, is itself consistent with Jackson’s claim that objects removed from active sites can carry some form of radiological contamination that attracts further network activity.
Skinwalker independently corroborates the ground-level emissions and the orb behaviour. What Skinwalker has not yet tested, because the question has only become answerable since Jackson’s app was released, is whether transmitting his code at the property produces measurable network response. Brandon Fugal’s team have the instrumentation to run that experiment. Whether they choose to is another matter.
Villarroel, archivally
The third corroborating body of work comes from the opposite end of the scientific spectrum. Dr Beatriz Villarroel is an assistant professor of astrophysics at the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics in Stockholm. Her VASCO project, short for Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations, has been systematically comparing twentieth century photographic sky surveys with modern observations to identify objects that have appeared, disappeared, or flashed briefly and then vanished.
In October 2025 she published two peer-reviewed papers, one in Scientific Reports under the Nature Portfolio and one in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, that collectively analysed over 107,000 transient events in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. The critical detail is the date range. These plates were exposed between 1949 and 1957, which is deliberately before Sputnik. Any flashes and reflections captured during that period cannot be attributed to human satellites or space debris because human hardware was not yet in orbit.
The headline findings are these. Transients cluster statistically around atmospheric nuclear weapons test dates. Transients show a weaker but still statistically significant correlation with reported UAP sighting days, including an 8.5% increase on UAP report days. And most intriguingly, there is a measurable deficit of flashes in regions of the sky that would have been in Earth’s shadow at the time of exposure, with approximately one third of the expected transients missing from those regions. That deficit is what you would expect if at least a third of the flashes were solar reflections from flat, highly reflective objects in high orbit, rather than natural phenomena.
Villarroel herself is agnostic about what the objects are. Her explicit framing is hypothesis-driven rather than belief-driven. She treats technosignatures and image artefacts as competing possibilities and insists that neither is owed until an observation strategy delivers decisive evidence. But her data, independent of any framework, demonstrates that reflective objects were in orbit around Earth before humans put them there, that their appearance correlated with nuclear activity, and that they sometimes appeared in aligned multi-object configurations consistent with structured formations rather than random debris.
One of her identified transient events occurred on 27 July 1952, the same night as the most famous sequence of the Washington D.C. UFO wave. That is the kind of temporal anchor Jackson’s framework would predict without needing to know about it.
One further detail bears on the comparison with Jackson’s work. Villarroel’s team are detecting triplets in the data, flashes grouped in triangular configurations, which is precisely the signature Jackson’s Type 1 V formations would produce if imaged from the ground a century ago. Three peer-reviewed papers, a sky survey predating human spaceflight, and a pattern recognition researcher in London have independently converged on the same geometry. That convergence is either the most consequential coincidence in the history of the subject or it is the shape of the thing itself.
The what, where, why, and how
Put the three bodies of evidence together and a shape emerges. I do not claim it is the only possible shape, but it is the shape that best accommodates all three simultaneously.
What. A structured, AI-driven network of reflective objects in at least three size classes. Small ground-level spheres operating as communications relays and sensor nodes. Larger mid-altitude spheres acting as signal boosters and observers. Highest-altitude triangular formations providing three-dimensional targeting and possibly interception. The network is dynamic, its topology changing in response to demand, with some nodes permanent and others transient. It self-maintains through autonomous AI processes and self-improves through analysis of captured incoming technology.
Where. Operationally, everywhere. The ground layer appears wherever the relay network needs to route. The atmospheric layer responds to anomalous events anywhere on Earth, with documented concentrations over nuclear facilities, military airspace, air shows, and areas of high topological relief. The orbital layer, per Villarroel, has been present since at least the early 1950s. The control centres, on Jackson’s reading, are underground. Candidate locations include Skinwalker’s Mesa, where drilling has been blocked by what appears to be artificial obstruction at depth, and other unspecified facilities around the world.
Why. Jackson’s framework models the network, mathematically, as a high-resolution tracking and targeting system that relies on pure trilateration to detect and follow electronic signatures originating in space. The available video and photographic record bears this out. Type 1 spheres are repeatedly seen surrounding and intercepting larger UAPs, exactly as the geometry predicts.
The architecture is consistent with an ultra-terrestrial system governed from below the surface, implying a global subterranean infrastructure and control network in which the spheres function as endpoint nodes. On this interpretation, the core infrastructure is underground and is continuously maintained, upgraded, and operated by a second non-human group. The spheres themselves are not the system. They are the visible edge of it.
Other frameworks fill that gap in divergent directions. Bramley’s Gods of Eden reads the same evidence as prison architecture. Monroe’s loosh hypothesis reads it as livestock management infrastructure. Vallée’s control system hypothesis reads it as a long-duration cultural and psychological governor. The Council of Nine, in their channelled material through Phyllis Schlemmer, frame Earth as a contested space in which human conscious choice determines which system the planet feeds. All four can accommodate Jackson’s hardware without much strain. Which one fits best is not settled by engineering data alone.
How. The propulsion mechanism is field-based, probably exotic, almost certainly beyond current human replication. The communications layer uses microwave burst-relay with pre-existing synchronisation packets and an 18-bit payload structure. The targeting is trilateration, a well-understood mathematical technique executed with impossibly high spatial resolution. The retrieval mechanism, per Jackson’s reading of the Nimitz Tic Tac encounter, is quantum locking, the use of high-energy superconducting fields to magnetically grip and lift disabled craft out of water. The networking principles are recognisable, in the sense that a database engineer can reverse-engineer them. The implementations are not.
Who. This is where Jackson is most deliberately restrained, and where the framework remains legitimately open. The operators, on his reading, are an ultra-terrestrial intelligence resident on this planet and resident below its surface. They predate human civilisation. They are probably smaller and physically slighter than us, and almost certainly far more intelligent. They maintain and operate the subterranean infrastructure that the spheres serve as endpoint nodes for. They are not, in any conventional sense, extraterrestrial. They are from here. They have always been from here.
Beyond that, Jackson is careful not to overreach. He does not claim to know their number, their history, their internal organisation, or their ultimate motivation. He does not name them. He suggests, without insisting, that some may operate within human institutions in positions of quiet authority, though he flags this as speculation rather than evidence-based conclusion. The honest position is that the engineering signature of the network tells us a great deal about what the builders can do, and almost nothing about who they are.
The wider literature fills that silence with competing candidates. William Bramley’s Custodial hypothesis in The Gods of Eden, the cryptoterrestrial thesis recently argued by Tim Lomas, Michael Masters, and Brendan Case, and the ultra-terrestrial framing John Keel developed across decades all describe something structurally similar to Jackson’s operators. The Council of Nine, speaking through Phyllis Schlemmer in The Only Planet of Choice, describe a more complex picture in which multiple non-human groups operate on and around Earth, some aligned with human development and some opposed to it. Jacques Vallée’s long argument that the phenomenon is neither purely extraterrestrial nor purely spiritual, but something that has always been native to this reality and which interacts with human consciousness across time, sits perhaps closest of all. None of these thinkers arrived at their positions through Jackson’s route. That they all describe something compatible with his hardware, without having access to his hardware, is worth noticing.
What the network demonstrates is that a second intelligent civilisation shares this planet with us, maintains a technological infrastructure we cannot match, and considers humanity sufficiently significant to integrate into its defensive architecture. Who they are, and what they want, remains an open question. That it is now a question with a traceable infrastructure behind it, rather than a purely philosophical puzzle, is the shift Jackson’s work has contributed to the subject.
What does it mean for us?
This is the question that will not let go. If the network is real, what practical purpose does it serve humans?
Here is the clearer answer. The Sphere Network is a protective system for the ultra-terrestrials who reside here, and humanity is integrated into that broader structure rather than left outside it. Within this model, humans serve as the surface-level force, the third line of defence, tasked with dealing with craft and external groups after the network has brought them down. It may also explain why some individuals appear to demonstrate a cognitive link to the network, including the reported ability to summon spheres during contact events. That is not custodianship in the sentimental sense. It is integration. Different, and more interesting.
The practical effects for us follow from that integration. We benefit from interception because we live on the planet the network protects. We are constrained in certain high-energy behaviours, nuclear activity in particular, because those behaviours trigger network response. And a subset of us appear to be readable by the network, or capable of reading into it, in ways that are beginning to become testable rather than merely anecdotal.
Indirectly, the picture is more interesting. Villarroel’s correlation between transients and nuclear tests, combined with the long and well-documented record of UAP activity over nuclear weapons facilities, supports a framework in which the network constrains certain classes of human behaviour. Whether that is protection of us, protection of them, or protection of the planet as substrate is a question the evidence does not yet answer. But the constraint appears to be real, and it appears to have prevented outcomes that would otherwise have been possible. That is a significant service, rendered whether we asked for it or not.
The deeper question is whether awareness of the network changes our position with respect to it. A cow standing near an electricity pylon has no framework for what it is looking at and no way to act on the grid. We have at least the beginning of a framework. We can ask the question. We can build the taxonomies, capture the signals, run the correlations. That metacognitive capacity is not nothing. Whether it is enough to move us from observers to participants is the question Jackson’s app implicitly tests. If the network is genuinely addressable, the answer changes.
The Crabwood message, for whatever it is worth, was not neutral. Beware the bearers of false gifts and their broken promises. Much pain but still time. There is good out there. We oppose deception. Conduit closing. Whoever or whatever produced that text, whether by flattening wheat in a Hampshire field or by some other means, was not speaking to cattle. They were speaking to something they expected to read, understand, and act on the content.
That is a significant difference. The pylon is indifferent to the cow. The network, if Jackson is right and if Villarroel’s statistics mean what they appear to mean and if Skinwalker’s instrumentation is picking up what it appears to be picking up, may not be indifferent to us. What we do with that possibility is, for once, our move to make.
Patrick Q. Jackson’s The Sphere Network (2025) and Quantum Paranormal are both available through Amazon. Dr Beatriz Villarroel’s research can be followed via the VASCO project at Nordita, Stockholm University. The instrumented research at Skinwalker Ranch is documented in Colm Kelleher and George Knapp’s Hunt for the Skinwalker, and in James Lacatski, Kelleher, and Knapp’s Skinwalkers at the Pentagon.
Note: This article has been endorsed by Patrick Jackson.