August 1, 2000

This is the view from our bed and breakfast -- the same place I stayed on my last trip here in 1996, when I was the first guest in its new three bedroom wing. It's very English and very cute -- all chintzy (flowery, not cheap), with a veggie garden and lots of real flowers outside. If the camera swung a little left, you'd see cows. The white horse on the hill is one of five that got carved into the limestone in the late 1700's -- inspired by one, actually a dragon, that's several thousand years old -- and the live version belongs to our hosts (last time it had a just born foal).

We went to the big crop circle pub last night, which you could have seen across the field if I'd panned still further left -- the Barge, called that because it's on a canal. Lucked out and met one of the researchers to whom I'd sent a little money when she asked for help a few years ago. She is going out today with a German lady to a particular formation where she can demonstrate her theory of how the circles are made, and we get to go along.

August 3, 2000

Here's the famous Barge Inn, a lively place for picking up the crop circle buzz. A German and a Belgian go out pre dawn and drive a route that covers the area we are in, which is the crop circle hotspot, to see what they can spot that came in overnight, the time most formations land. (Many only can be seen from planes, and there are formations in other areas of England, too.) The croppies come in when light dawns and madly dash to whatever's new, with surveying tools and cameras and long poles to hoist the cameras on high to get pictures that encompass whole formations. (There's no way when inside a complex one, which most of them are now, to get a good idea of its shape.) There's also a small plane and helicopter aspect, which researchers and enthusiasts like me hire to get overhead views.

The second shot is in the poolroom of the Barge. It's a compilation of pictures of the formations so far this year, alongside a map pinpointing locations. The red dots are circles from 2000. To the side of this, off camera range, are all sorts of rough drawings and data about the latest things that haven't had time to get their photos up. The whole wall is a gathering place for ooing and ahing and comparing notes, especially about the newest things so that those who know more can tell those who know less what they've seen and what they think.

Yesterday, we went to meet someone I've been emailing for the last few years and never have met, Diahann Krishna, who lives right in the middle of Avebury, the much larger stone circle that is said to have more juice than Stonehenge. Her house is in a little village inside the ring, which was built of the stones before people knew they should preserve artifacts. (One thing to note about the circle phenomenon is that it is most concentrated in southern England in an area that is chock full of ancient sacred sites and monuments and energy lines -- seeming to be one reason why this landscape has been picked as the canvas for the best circlemakers' art.) We got lost and stopped to ask someone at the side of a country road where to go. He turned out to be a person from Denmark I'd also been emailing, whom we took along because he needed to connect with the person we were going to see -- the producer of "Unusual Experiences," an event we'll go to on Sunday involving people from the larger community of intrigue about this strange universe. (Presenters include Robert Bauval -- co author of a book that I can't remember the name of which blew everyone's mind with how astronomical correspondences redate Egyptian history. I heard him a few years ago at "Return to the Source," a great conference in Delaware that redated the age of the Giza Plateau to some 10,000 years or so before the time we thought that the pyramids and the sphinx were built.) Got the Dane and the producer both on video, and Kim is already picturing how her techie genius will apply to the movie making we're getting footage for.

Day before yesterday we were in that incredible moiré pattern circle that I talked about in the last WebRadio mailing.

Seems to be a template that's echoed in another formation we will go into -- a la what happens with these circles, where new design bases get introduced each year. Another new patterning this year is eleven-fold geometry -- one through ten already have appeared, and something to say about this is that what the circlemakers do is beyond our design capacity, where they work with more geometries at one time than we could. All we can do is effort to decipher what they have done.

Off to see our friend Simon Peter Fuller this morning. He lives in this neck of the fields, and is touring a couple of people who are flying in. We'll tag along.

August 5, 2000

Now we've been into the amazing moiré pattern which landed July 22, before we got here. A diagram of it is here, along with a couple of shots of it lifted from our video footage. I chose the close-up to show you a feature of many crop circles, where there's a lay going a different direction under what you see on the surface. (Sometimes there are more than two layers.) Let people with boards do that! The other picture is a view from inside the formation.

Ran into a man from Arkansas in this one. When I asked if he knew Pennell Rock, my good friend from Arkansas and the person I'm talking with in the WebRadio show we posted right before we left, it turned out he taught Pennell junior life saving and dated his sister. Pretty cosmic, don't you think?

Re new patterning that often starts a new theme, click to see a formation that arrived August 1, after we came, that's the moiré echo. We haven't been into it -- it's a long walk across the fields and we've had intermittent rain for the last few days that restricted us to shorter jaunts. (Tomorrow we're spending the day with my old friend from pre-circle days, Peter Sorensen, now the leading videographer of the circles, who supplied the computer enhancement part of this page.)

Today we tooled around with Simon Peter Fuller. Many of you met him in my living room, where he did a great slide show about humanity's march on its way to discovering and embodying its sacred blueprint (Rising Out Of Chaos is his book). Simon Peter is a wonderful tour director -- he's taken groups all over the world -- and we talked about his guiding my friends in crop circles and in southern England's sacred sites next summer -- 2001. Let me know if you might be interested, and save the last two weeks in July!

August 8, 2000

We are in the very heart of crop circle action this year, and it has been buzzing as the season draws to a close. Four came in night before last, and the picture with the two of us is from one of them. In the aspect of the situation where the research community is family, when we got into this formation one of those men who rides the dawn route looking for new ones was taking pole shots. He so kindly put our video camera up, which is why you can see the two of us in one shot from an overhead perspective. In order to find this formation, which we were told was at the foot of the Pewsey white horse, we drove up the road above the horse and looked down, shooting the video from which we got the other picture. This formation had a feature never seen before, which you can't see in the shot -- in the smaller circle, there is a feathery ring a few feet across and one stalk wide, with a lovely lay within it. No geometric or astrological or other interpretation of the three stars in the larger circle and the curtain ring in the smaller one have been made yet, but we're awaiting it on the Crop Circle Connector site we keep sending you to. (You can track what comes in at the Crop Circle Connector's 2000 circles page. Pictures go up first, and then reports follow. Watch for the Pewsey White Horse reports.)

On our way out of the Pewsey formation we met the angry farmer, who yelled at us for not getting his permission. We had trusted that with the people already in it the coast was clear. As we were getting out, Mark and Stuart, the lovely guys who run the Crop Circle Connector, approached with their poles and weren't allowed in. We had shortly before this just run into them -- after years of email correspondence as their Website subscribers -- when we got out of the previous new formation we'd been in. (At that time, they were standing with the jolly farmer who owned that field, authenticating that he was a legitimate person to be collecting a pound apiece from us.) Dejected at being denied entry at Pewsey, Mark and Stuart got in our car to view our video footage. Kim this morning emailed them many shots from our video, so the documentation for all of history includes what we shot!

That circle where we met them was a wonder. Kim, who is sensitive to energy, had her first experience of being bowled over. The phenomenon has moved from her head to her being -- she says she'll "never be the same." It is hard to describe the beauty of this formation. It's not in the shape, per se, as it was in the moiré pattern, but in the details. This is barley, which has a wavy sweep to it, and the lay of the crop is like an ocean undulating in concentric waves. In the second circle, there is a mane-like thing of standing stalks making waves -- something that has never been seen before -- that forms a radius, going halfway in. There are also three "nests" -- they are like large bird's nests, all woven together, although there's no scooped out part. Not sure if any pictures will do this formation justice, but see Kim for shivers up your spine.

Last night, we went to a little post-event gathering at the home of Diahann, who produced the Unusual Experiences Conference on Sunday, which was about crop circles and more. (My favorite speakers were a couple who, driving along with their two children ten years ago, had a life-changing encounter with a big craft, after which the children became smarter than their school could handle!) We talked about antagonism in the croppie community -- no different from elsewhere. There are copyright battles over ownership of images and much warring about how much hoaxing is going on. It's the hoaxing argument that really got contention here going strong -- some people think there's none at all (prime evidence for which is that the formations would take a very long time to make and no one ever has been caught, while poachers are apprehended all the time) and others think most of them are fakes. However, there's no one in the croppie community who thinks they all are fakes, and wouldn't it make more sense to be in awe at what's real rather than bog down in arguments about what isn't? For a long time I've wondered what would happen if this small collection of people came into alignment appreciating the real -- perhaps the circlemakers would shake their hands. Well, last night, at the gathering, this perspective got legs: at 4:00 o'clock this afternoon we met in Windmill Hill 2 (which the eight of us who gathered last night all coincidentally had been in at 4:00 o'clock yesterday) for an alignment event! A few people who just happened to be in the formation joined us, and all hearts swelled in appreciation for the phenomenon and for the sweet energy that we all invoked.

Feels like old home week here -- maybe we'll bring some of the folks to L.A. to dazzle you all...

August 13, 2000

It's Saturday night, and since last night we've been at a weekend conference where our minds are being stretched to think further and further into the unknown that lies deep within our psyches and reaches out to the laws and the energies that permeate the universe. One graphic picture, painted for us by Francine Blake, the visionary person who runs the July conference (that we'll attend if we bring a group back next year), is of the relationship we are in with the circlemakers being comparable to the relationship ants have to us -- we see them, but not visa versa.

At this conference, we just heard a Dutch researcher speak of a nineteen year old boy in Holland who started seeing balls of light (commonly associated with crop circle activity) when he was nine. He was put into an asylum for a year, and, after being released, one after another of his two sisters, his mother and finally his staid banker father (who thought everyone had gone mad) also started to see them. So too, now, with various of his neighbors and with people who come to investigate what's going on. This boy has come to be at the center of much crop circle activity (Holland and Germany have the most and the best after England), where he can tell a day or two before a formation appears that it will come in and where it will be. An aspect of this is some depression the boy experiences, which the presenter related to work that Carl Jung did with depressed people. Jung had them doing spontaneous art work, where, as they made more and more pictures, the images went from chaotic to geometric -- and, of course, astonishing geometry is at the heart of the circle phenomenon. See how we are finding the whole universe coming into more and more interconnected resonance as the circle phenomenon is probed!

This probably will be our last communique before we come back home Monday, day after tomorrow, unless the season finale arrives (a spectacular one comes in every year) and we change our plane reservation to see it. Thanks for all the appreciations you've been sending in, as we continue to thank the great power that made our reports possible.

Background Crop Circle Diagrams © 1995 Peter R. Sorenson