Crop Circle Comeback!

The often ridiculed phenomenon starts a new season

‘Tis a new crop circle season!

I wrote about these bad boys in great depth in Quetzalcoatl Returns (2006). In fact, I think the 100 or so pages on the crop circles in that book still represent one of the best overall introductions to the crop circles. Below, I have reprinted a chapter — please pick up a copy for the full experience.

I studied the math, the science, interviewed researchers and hoaxers, and described my direct experiences visiting the formations — along with the various synchronicities, energetic frequency shifts and subtle paranormal events that accompanied my research. I was compelled by the theory that the crop circles reflect a slowly unfolding “dimensional shift” (from the third to the fifth dimension, according to the late Michael Glickman, one of the best researchers into the phenomenon). Today, this “dimensional shift” seems to be ongoing and accelerating.

I am happy to see a new generation of students and enthusiasts exploring the crop circles such as Robert Edward Grant and Melissa Victoria, via SpiritSTEM. If you know of other work being done currently in the field, please let me know in the comments or via email.

This one only existed for one day! Field Barn, Nr Winterbourne Bassett, Wiltshire. Reported 4th June (thank you, cropcircleconnector.com)

Through the Internet, I discovered the crop circles, geometric patterns appearing in agricultural lands across the world, in Europe, Eastern Europe, the United States, and South America, though especially concentrated in the UK. Like most people, I had assumed they were junk—a long-running hoax designed to fool the gullible community of UFO fans and New Agers, grist for late-night exposés on trashy cable TV shows. The crop formations had developed into a far more extravagant, even awesome, phenomenon than I imagined. I spent many hours reading geometrical and biophysical studies of the formations, testimonies by hoaxers, extraterrestrial hypotheses, and personal accounts of the patterns, studying pictures of them.

On August 12, 2001, the largest crop circle ever recorded had appeared in southern England, on Milk Hill, in the county of Wiltshire, near the Avebury stone circles. The size of two English football fields, the formation imprinted thirteen spirals of circles of decreasing size, 409 total circles, radiating out symmetrically from a center point. The precisely executed design was spread over nine hundred feet of a gently rolling hillside. Despite the unevenness of the ground, the massive spiral appeared perfect when photographed from above. Among the small community who studied the formations, the Milk Hill spiral was considered an emphatic culmination of several decades of patterns that steadily increased in size and complexity.

Milk Hill, 2001: Appeared in one night, perfectly placed. Absolutely nothing interesting to see here.

Two days later, on August 14 (the date, I noted, of my daughter’s birth), a rectangular “crop circle” was found in a wheat field beside the Chilbolton radio transmitter, used to transmit and receive signals from space, in Hampshire. When photographed from above, this glyph was shown to reveal an enigmatic face, executed in precise halftones, like a photo in a newspaper. No image in any way like it had been seen in the fields before that date.

A few days later, a second rectangular glyph appeared in the fields beside the Chilbolton transmitter. Once again flawlessly rendered in twisted and fallen crop, this image appeared to offer a direct response to a message broadcast by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in 1973, to the star cluster M13. Less a serious attempt to contact aliens than a publicity- seeking gesture orchestrated by the popular science writer Carl Sagan, the original message from SETI included a little human stick figure, the schematics of our DNA code, the atomic building blocks of life on Earth, and the planetary configurations of our solar system. The message returned in the Chilbolton field included a smaller humanoid figure with a larger head—similar to “the visitors” described in numerous alien abduction accounts—and a slightly altered solar system. A third strand had been added to the DNA coil. The atomic elements making up the extraterrestrial life- form were expanded to include the element silicon. These formations, despite their spectacular virtuosity and startlingly suggestive content, were not reproduced or discussed anywhere in the U.S. media—where the phenomenon had long been dismissed, unreflectively, as the work of bored teenagers or drunken farmers with boards. If I hadn’t sought them out on the Internet, I would never have known such images existed.

These two enigmatic crop circles appeared in 2001 . One was a direct response to the Arecibo Radio transmission we sent into space decades earlier. To hammer home the point, they appeared next to the Chilbolton Advanced Meteorological Radar (CAMRa) antenna.

Of course I realized the subject might be deserving of ridicule, but I also felt that I couldn’t know that was the case unless I investigated for myself. My exploration of shamanism and psychedelics—subjects also dismissed and ridiculed in knee-jerk fashion by the mainstream media—opened me to the possibility that there could be something happening in those fields that demanded careful consideration. At the very least, the photographs on the Internet did not suggest an amateur operation, but a highly skilled one. If the phenomenon was orchestrated by teams of human circlemakers in different countries, it would be the largest-scaled, most significant project of anonymous land art known to the world, deserving attention and acclaim on that score. If it was not entirely created by humans, the formations would clearly be of tremendous significance, compelling a paradigm shift in our understanding of the cosmos. But if any attempt to fathom it was met with derision and disregard, dismissed from public discourse, there could be no discoveries at all.