This writing by Peter Sorensen is excerpted, with permission, from Mysterious Lights and Crop Circles © 2000 by Linda Moulton Howe, to be published by Paper Chase Press in Fall 2000. Please see Linda's other works listed in the Bookstore at www.earthfiles.com, or at amazon.com or barnes&noble.com.

The strangest thing I ever saw was curving beams of light which I observed one night in England with Ulrich Kox.

The sighting occurred after the 1996 circle season was over, and Ulrich was about to depart for Germany the following morning. It was already well into the evening when he offered to take me to a secret location in the vicinity of Alton Barnes, where he had seen anomalous lights on previous occasions.

It was a wonderful Wiltshire night, with a billion stars in the crystal clear sky, but no moon. There was a heavy, low lying mist, only about a foot deep that covered the stubble of a large, recently cut field. The mist glowed with a strange intensity -- as if there was a full moon. I remarked that it was hard to believe that the stars alone could illuminate it so brightly. Ulrich said in his opinion it was energy in the field itself that caused the glow. He had seen it there before.

We stood at the edge of the field, talking and enjoying the stars (people who live in cities haven't ANY idea how beautiful the Milky Way is!). I might point out that, although we had enjoyed a few beers earlier, we were not then drinking or partaking in any kind of drugs, and in the chilly night air we were quite sober.

It must have been nearly two hours later, with nothing unusual seen, we were getting tired and about to leave, when it happened:

Two beams of light shot up from the middle of the field, looking very much like wartime searchlights hunting for planes. They went up into the sky hundreds, if not thousands, of feet, waving lazily to and fro. They looked just like something out of a World War II movie, except they were flexible -- bending like they were made of translucent rubber!

They persisted scanning around, with the distant end of their cones lagging behind the brighter bases, for about seven seconds -- definitely long enough for us to be sure of what we saw. There was sufficient time after we realized that the lights were curving for us to double-check the bizarre behavior.

After we recovered from our amazement, we hurried to where the lights had emerged from the field, but of course there was nothing to be found.

We waited around for another hour or so, when our patience was rewarded with another, shorter display, just at the moment that we decided to leave. It was as if the lights heard us and said, "farewell!" Of course that made us stick around even later, but we saw nothing more.

There had been no sound, and no static electric tingle or other unusual phenomena during the entire period we were there.

What we saw was "impossible," of course. Normal light beams are caused by photons leaving a light source at 186,000 miles a second, illuminating dust particles in their path, so their sides are perfectly straight. Physics as we know it would require a TREMENDOUS gravitational field to bend a beam of light. It's more likely that it was some kind of glowing plasma.

Ulrich had exclaimed in wonder, "What is it -- some kind of ghost?!" And, indeed, what we witnessed was perhaps more like spirits attempting to communicate than a technological light show.

PS: I'm glad to say that I recently learned that Colin Andrews has three other reports from the area of curved beams of lights in his files!