CROP CIRCLES, THE STORY BEHIND THE PHENOMENON
The modern history of crop circles began in the 1980s when simple circles started to appear in the fields of Hampshire and Wiltshire, in England. Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado, two local engineers, started looking into them and it was Colin Andrews who coined the term "Crop circles".
During the 1980s the crop circles were becoming so numerous that in 1989 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher felt it necessary to call a meeting with her cabinet to try and find out what was going on.
In 1990, Polly Carson, the wife of the farmer who farmed the East Field in Alton Barnes, Wiltshire, noted, with some regret, that crop circles appeared everywhere else, but never in their fields. She didn’t however have long to wait. At dawn on July 12, 1990, the village of Alton Barnes woke up to discover one of the most spectacular formations ever seen, in the East Field. It was aligned with the tractor ‘tramlines’ and visible from all the high ground around the field and the surrounding area.
This crop circle, the most remarkable so far, did not fail to draw attention to itself and it quickly became one of the most famous of all time, made even more so by the group Led Zeppelin who used it for one of their LP covers.
Terence Meaden, one of the scientists studying crop circles, made the following observation concerning this latest crop circle in the East Field in his book 'Circles from the Sky' published in 1991: “The magnificent set of circles that formed in the East Field, between the village of Alton Barnes and Walker's Hill on the night of Wednesday to Thursday July 12, quickly became the most famous crop circle in the world. These circles are found in the Pewsey Valley, immediately south of the Chalk Hills and a few miles south-east of Devizes, Wiltshire. After a week of cheerfully tolerating a degree of intrusion into his field, farmer Tim Carson decides to welcome visitors for £1, a sensible response that allows thousands of interested researchers and enthusiasts to discover these magnificent authentic circles.”
Two weeks later, on July 25,
was set up. One might wonder whether this operation was put in place as a reaction to the arrival of the East Field crop circle, or if it was already in the pipeline as a response to the meeting of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet in 1989.
On July 25, 1990, the British Army launched an operation on the high ground overlooking a wheat field at Bratton Castle in Wiltshire. The aim of this operation, called “Operation Blackbird”, was to attempt to film, with the help of the BBC and Nippon TV, a crop circle in the act of forming. Why this specific location was chosen remains unclear, although it had been visited by crop circles in previous years, and was on land owned by the army.
The cameras were set to run continuously, day and night, to capture and record everything that was happening in the field below, and the filming was to be broadcast live to an audience worldwide. Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado were recruited as experts and were expected to follow the directives given by the chief of staff in charge of the operation. He assured them that the field had been cordoned off and that no-one could get into it without being seen.
Very early in the morning of the second day Colin Andrews was informed that a crop circle had appeared in the field during the night. Although it was still dark and he had not had the opportunity to go down to check out the new formation, he was asked to make an announcement on live television. Colin Andrews knew the procedures to follow before issuing an opinion on the provenance of a crop circle, that is a complete inspection of the site, however in this case it appears he was working under orders and was obliged to trust the army. He couldn't imagine it was anything other than the genuine article.
After making the televised announcement and when light permitted, Andrews and Delgado went down into the field only to discover that they had been set up. The crop circle turned out to be a poor quality hoax, with an astrology board game placed in the centre. Andrews and Delgado had been made to look foolish and were quite rightly very angry.
The consequences of this disappointing episode were felt immediately and public interest in the crop circle phenomenon wained considerably. Pat Delgado was so disgusted that he abandoned his crop circle research altogether.
Once Operation Blackbird had spread the message that crop circles were, after all, just hoaxes it would have been necessary to identify the perpetrators, as questions would almost certainly have been asked. A year later, two men in their sixties, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, came forward to claim authorship of the circles that had appeared in the fields of Hampshire and Wiltshire. These two men were taken seriously by the press and their story went around the world, with front-page coverage under the headline "THE MEN WHO CONNED THE WORLD".
All this would have been set up to discredit a real phenomenon which, especially after the East Field event, was beginning to seriously concern the authorities. As a result of Operation Blackbird and the arrival of Doug and Dave public interest in the subject dropped dramatically, and crop circles lost their appeal to much of the world's population.
This did not, however, stop the genuine phenomenon and crop circles were still being reported by those who had not been convinced by the Doug and Dave story, and in 1996, the arrival of the magnificent Julia Set formations of Stonehenge and Windmill Hill rekindled public interest. The crop circles that appeared in the last years of the 20th century were among the most spectacular ever seen, so much so that even the Queen and Prince Philip started to take an interest in them, and in 1999 Laurence Rockefeller offered Colin Andrews financial support to get to the bottom of the mystery, which was beginning to be seen as a real problem.
Then, after a truly spectacular 2000 season, Colin Andrews dropped his bombshell; that 80% of all crop circles were man-made, leaving the remaining 20%, the smallest and simplest, to an unknown force. This was not the opinion of many researchers who were very disappointed by Colin Andrews, in whom they had come to trust.
It was however easy to say that 80% of formations were man-made, but that left one question: who was capable of creating such masterpieces? Doug had died in 1996 and anyway it appears that the two sixty-year-olds had stopped their exploits in the fields some years before.
In late summer 2000, Michael Glickman, a well-known crop circle researcher, said, on a televised chat show, that he would like to see someone create a crop circle which expressed seven fold geometry. An architect by profession, Glickman considered that it would be almost impossible to do this in a field of wheat. A certain Matthew Williams took up the challenge, and flattened a large pattern in the shape of a seven-pointed star, then bragged about his accomplishment. As a result, he was ordered to pay £100 for criminal damage, and a new ‘circle maker’ was born. Whether this was all planned in advance and put in place to fill the void left by Doug and Dave is of course just conjecture.
The following is also conjecture and should be considered as such. Like Doug and Dave, whose exploits were exported around the world through newspapers and the media, Matthew Williams' trial was also picked up by the same organisations, although not at all on the same scale. This form of publicity was probably not considered appropriate this time around for a global audience. It is possible that the film "A Place to Stay" was designed for this purpose, to highlight the skills of Matthew Williams where his reproduction of the 1995 "Earth Missing" crop circle, set to play a central role in the film, would have been seen and appreciated by a wide audience around the world. Regardless, the appearance of the huge "Galaxy" crop circle on Milk Hill during filming may well have put an end to that idea.
The Milk Hill “Galaxy” was to represent the ultimate peak of the crop circle phenomenon. Although genuine crop circles continued to appear during the first decade of the new century, their frequency gradually declined, eventually being eclipsed by an increasingly intensive hoaxing campaign led by such groups as Team Satan/ The Circlemakers.
This relentless campaign of hoaxing testifies to the great need of the authorities to smother a real phenomenon. By 2010 years of hoaxing, ridicule and propaganda intended to discredit the crop circles had taken their toll. The last genuine crop circle recognised as such by us at Culture-crop.com dates back to the oilseed rape formation at Rutlands Farm in 2009.
To return to the present, the campaign of hoaxing appears to have slowed significantly after so many years of activity, with only 20 formations reported in England in 2023.
But is the intelligence behind the crop circles still present somewhere? We believe so. We were given a sign at Bishop’s Cannings in 2018. You only need one.
April 2024 - William Betts