Swirled Harvest - contents

Views from the Crop Circle Frontline

With a foreword by Sir Laurence Gardner

introduction
content
extracts
the author Andy Thomas

FOREWORD

by Sir Laurence Gardner, author of Bloodline of the Holy Grail, Genesis of the Grail Kings and Realm of the Ring Lords.

INTRODUCTION by Andy Thomas

1: A BRIEF GUIDE TO CROP CIRCLES

As a starter, some basics for those unfamiliar with the crop circle phenomenon... This piece was written as a concise guide for the general public and has appeared in various guises over the years. It has been oft-quoted – and sometimes liberally ‘lifted’ without permission! – but here it appears in its complete form.

2: WAITING FOR REG

It’s easy to forget the wide-eyed innocence of coming anew to the charming and treacherous world of cerealogy. This piece, a diary of a few days spent in the Wiltshire circle heartlands in 1992, just a year after my first discovery of the phenomenon, attempts to capture this spark. This was the first season to follow the Doug and Dave hoax claims, and the resulting and, in retrospect, largely unjustified paranoia and doubt which gripped the scene at the time underlies the narrative, though I’m proud that even by then I was sounding appropriately suspicious of certain assertions. That said, these were still times when some of us would spend a night out in the freezing cold on the say-so of a retired rock star.

3: THE EVENING NEWS

Media treatment of the crop circles is notorious for being shallow and overly-sceptical, yet there’s still an odd, if trepidation-filled thrill to seeing one’s favourite phenomenon suddenly thrust into people’s living rooms on TV screens. What on earth must Mr and Mrs General Public make of it..? This chapter takes just one television news report as an example of how the phenomenon is portrayed to the outside world.

4: SELLING THE NEW AGE

Each year, London hosts England’s largest ‘New Age’ fair, a vast room stuffed with smells, bells, trinkets and therapies to enhance and enlighten our lives. But what does it all mean? One year I went along to discover for myself and to find out whether my humble crop circle background had really prepared me for the full New Age experience, as this chapter describes.

5: DOWSING DILEMMA

The art of dowsing, in which energy fields are detected using rods and pendulums, has long been practiced as a circle investigation technique. However, placing total faith in such a method for the purposes of authentication has its pitfalls. In 1995, a series of proposals were made by the Centre for Crop Circle Studies for the exclusive use of dowsing as a "litmus test" in circle research, causing controversy and threatening the purity of circle reportage, as this piece records.

6: END GAME

The Centre for Crop Circle Studies’ search for circle "litmus tests" moved on from the more esoteric pursuits of dowsing to encompass more physical methods of analysis, and in 1995 it boldly drafted in the assistance of the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Foods (MAFF) to perform a series of soil tests. Intriguing results were forthcoming, but pitfalls awaited, leading to suspicion of interference by conspiratorial forces.

7: CLOSER ENCOUNTERS

Two decades on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in a culture overloaded with images of aliens and UFOs, what possible relevance could Steven Spielberg’s seminal film about such things still hold for the 90s generation? Well, maybe more than one might think, as this chapter explores…

8: FLAKY: THE OLIVER’S CASTLE VIDEO

It says something about the enduring power of the 1996 video purporting to show a ‘snowflake’-like crop formation appearing under balls of light that this piece will probably stir up more controversy than any other in the book, simply by daring to raise the subject publicly again. This article was written in the immediate months following the events reported and is thus a raw and very detailed account of what happened or was believed AT THE TIME – not what legend and myth have introduced through evolving retellings by various sources in the years since. Seven years after the events, there is still fierce debate in some quarters over the whole issue, and the video’s status is still not known for sure, whatever some might claim. The value of this piece is that it records a classic example of the way the croppie world deals with controversial issues and of how such a seemingly simple situation can produce so many grey areas and differences of opinion.

9: CONFERENCE SEASON

One of the delights of the croppie world is the cluster of crop circle gatherings which take place across the summer in the UK. These provide forums to take the temperature of opinion and present new information. They are chances to see particular ‘names’ in the flesh, buy – or complain about – all the latest circular merchandise and, of course, with all the inevitable gossip and scandal, commune with the eclectic characters who make the whole thing such a joy to explore. Each separate event caters for slightly different tastes and reveals much about some of the various factions within the cerealogical world. This piece is a valuable record of a typical mid-90s (1997) season of gatherings.

10: X DOESN’T MARK THE SPOT

When The X Files hit television screens with its heady brew of paranormal paranoia in the mid-1990s, it was hailed by paranoid paranormalists as the answer to all their long-unheeded cries that such subjects were never given high-profile media coverage. In the wake of its huge success, many ET and conspiracy-fixated magazines and websites were born, and public interest in the whole genre of the "weird" shot up to a level not witnessed for many years. But was the programme quite the panacea that it seemed, as this article, written two or three seasons in, explores, or was it all in itself a conspiracy?

11: ATTACK OF THE RED CAPE

Sometimes commercial enterprises will go to any lengths to attract attention to themselves, even masquerading as UFO seminars to sell hi-fi… As if maintaining credibility after having gone along with such a wheeze isn’t bad enough, what does one do when the BBC, in a prime-time spot, stands you next to a raving lunatic trying to contact ETs by playing a toy xylophone?

12: MEDIA SCRUM

It is a frightening thought that the majority of the world’s population hears about the crop circle phenomenon only through the very narrow filters of the media. For every good piece or programme which decides to tackle cerealogy, there are several bad ones, developed with dubious agendas for entertainment purposes alone, devised to stir journalistically interesting, but ultimately banal conflicts. The truth is usually the first casualty of this short-sighted approach, and scepticism generally reigns. This piece records the torturous media machinations of the summer of 1998, which saw a slew of attention towards the crop circles.

13: THE WORLD IS FULL OF MARREE MAN

When the largest representation of a human figure in the whole of history was found etched into an Australian desert in 1998, it stimulated little more than a few column inches in the world’s press, but did initiate a mysterious treasure hunt on the other side of the world. Yet, the huge aboriginal-looking man still remains totally unexplained.

14: THE MAN FROM ATLANTIS

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it is often said. Sometimes people appear on the lecture circuit bearing what seems to be such evidence. But further scrutiny must be applied when things don’t add up. This is a cautionary tale of one man who claimed he had found the lost city of Atlantis.

15: GALAXY LEGACY

When, in 1994, three ‘galaxy’ crop formations, clearly meant to be read as star maps, appeared in the fields, it took several years before their meaning was realised. When it was found that they were showing a planetary alignment in Cetus due to occur at midnight GMT on the 6/7th April 2000, there was a flurry of speculation as to what might occur on that date. This piece was written shortly after the date arrived, recording what transpired and providing a valuable snapshot of the feelings of expectancy at this time.

16: DUST TO DUST

Some formations present unexpected surprises in the fine details. Who would have thought a pile of white dust found in a 2002 crop circle would create so much fuss? Though subsequent investigations into the dust threw up more questions than answers, this previously unpublished article records some of the discoveries and speculations so far…

17: CRIMES OF THE SIGNS

In 2002, Hollywood finally caught up with the fictional potential of crop circles with the arrival of the movie Signs, starring Mel Gibson battling crop-vandalising, water-fearing aliens. Despite its simplistic and, for some, crass portrayal of the phenomenon, the film hugely raised its public profile after several fallow years, as this chapter records.

18: THE LAST WORD

How will the crop circles be looked back on by history? Why have they been so savagely criticised with such a disproportionate intensity? How can those branded as ‘believers’ ensure the legacy of this remarkable phenomenon goes on and stand up to the never-ending sceptical attacks? This, then, is a last will and testament.

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