The Good the Bad & the Ugly

The crop circle season 2000

Charles R Mallett © 2000

As the traditionally wet and windy April came around once again, the expectations
of the crop circle research community were, as usual, high for the upcoming season of cereal thrillers that now seemed imminent.

As one has come to expect from years of circle research, what we expected didn't happen. In fact, virtually nothing happened through April and May. Huge expanses of oil-seed rape lay unadorned for weeks on end leaving people dazed and confused with no explanation for the almost total absence of quality formations in the pungent yellow flowers. At this stage of the season in the previous year, huge and extremely impressive designs were appearing in healthy abundance throughout southern England, and indeed across the globe.

This early season situation set the scene for what would turn out to be a summer of fits and starts, incorporating some of the most spectacular formations of all time and, to the other extreme, some of the most spectacular corn crunching hoax claims and dodgy statements of all time. This coupled with the usual mix of irate farmers and a media intent on ignoring the facts regarding this most profound phenomena, made for a season to remember for lots of good reasons, and a few bad.

The Good

Good is possibly not the best word to describe the early stages of the 2000 circle season. Early April saw a blanket of snow covering Wiltshire that lay over the beautiful chalk downs for some weeks. Eager to see and experience the phenomenon first hand, as in previous years, we set about the task of watching the fields we considered most likely to be visited by the real circle makers. In previous years, this tactic had paid us huge dividends with many fresh formations discovered and examined at first light. During such night forays it has been very often the norm to experience light and audio phenomena that we consider to be very much associated with the arrival of the crop circles. This year, however, experiences of the aforementioned would prove to be few and far between with many bitter cold nights going by and no serious action to report. It must have been somebody else's turn for the weird stuff this season.

As it turned out the level of weird behavior displayed by various individuals associated with the crop circles was far stranger than anything experienced in the fields over the previous years of involvement with the circles. More on this later.

April saw just one formation in Wiltshire which was rather small and disjointed with a somewhat unspectacular, crude finish. It was discovered in a field of rape-seed at Cherhill, Wiltshire on the 27th. Into May we drifted with still no serious action until, on the 14th, a small double triangle formation appeared at Furze Hill close to Alton Barnes that displayed fine quality layering of the thick brittle rape stems and gave us a clue as to the theme for much of the season (i.e., triangles). Link to field report. A week later saw the arrival of the first of the season's circles in Barley. On the morning of the 21st after a night of torrential rain, a large harlequin style formation was discovered in the famous East Field at Alton Barnes. Due to the terrible weather conditions the formation was quickly ruined and any finesse that had been incorporated into this rather impressive undertaking was lost forever. Link to field report. To our horror, after walking the muddy tramlines, we vacated this saturated field only to find ourselves locked out of our own car. Various suggestions for gaining entry to our vehicle were banded around including smashing a window. Our seven-year old, who took full responsibility for the lock out, felt he was up to the job and grabbed a large rock with a keenness that left us a little worried. After ten minutes or so of standing in the monsoon conditions the car door was opened with the wire in the window rubber trick. The elation we felt getting out of the storm and into the car made the emotion we felt stepping into the formation a little earlier, quite insignificant.

May gave way to June, with the prospect of better weather, fast ripening cereal crops and longer days. These factors combined gave us renewed hope that the season was about to splash down some major crop circle activity. On the second of June the first of the fine weather formations arrived across the road from the imposing Silbury Hill and next to the West Kennet long barrow.

A large, rather embryonic twelve-pointed star appeared that, over the course of the next night, mutated and evolved into a beautiful and pleasing full-blown formation. Link to field report. This part of the landscape was, on the night prior to the discovery of the embryonic twelve pointer, under constant surveillance from a nearby hilltop. Various anomalous phenomena were observed during the course of the night that ties in very closely with the arrival of this shape-shifting formation. Link to Anomalous lights field report.

Almost a week went by before a quite outstanding little formation arrived at the rather remote Grafton Down near Upavon, Wiltshire. We entered this series of beautiful fluid circles with the farmer of this land hot on our heels who, on his arrival in the glyph, looked at what lay about him with a look of what could be described as bewilderment. What he was expecting was an obvious flat hoax; what he actually observed on the ground was far from flat, or a hoax. Link to field report.

Three days later, 11th June, the Silbury Hill area received two formations in the same field on the same night. These two beauties were positioned next to each other and occupied the same field as last year's Horus Wing glyph. Link to field report. During our visit to these two fine works we had the unfortunate pleasure of bumping into a couple of members of a local circle-facilitating group, as they are now calling themselves. In real terms, they are fakers. At one stage we observed one of these people cough up and deposit a large mouthful of greenish saliva onto the floor of the formation. I guess he must have been spreading his DNA as a spiritual offering to mother Earth; either that, or he was showing total disrespect for the formation he had placed himself within.

A few days later, Windmill Hill (close to the Avebury stone circle complex), received its first of many visits from the circle makers this season. On the 18th of June, a visually stunning and very large formation that, when viewed from the air, produced a spherical illusion, rather like an inflated pillow coming up out of the Earth. It was formed using many various size squares and rectangles that lay in the flat field of immature wheat. Link to field report. On this same night the circle makers were busy a couple of miles up the road producing an even more bizarre illusion in the wheat. On this occasion triangles of standing crop were arranged to create three pentagrams clinging to a sphere. Link to field report. The geometric innovation displayed within this sophisticated two hundred footer left us and a lot of others in awe of the wonders that were appearing before us. As if this wasn't enough to be going on, the very next night an extremely precise wheel of sixteen fans of standing barley was discovered in the Alton Priors area of Wiltshire. The sharp crisp finish to this sizable formation made for one of the major events of the season. Whilst examining the formation we came across numerous examples of plant heads that had been severely heat damaged; in some cases the entire top of the plant was shriveled and distorted from whatever had been present in the area of construction. On one seed head we observed a snail that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, the result being one very over-cooked young snail welded to the plant it had settled on. Link to field report.

As usual, the media had little or no time for these mysterious and inspirational ciphers. It seems that as the crop circles become increasingly sophisticated and technically challenging, the mainstream media deals with the phenomenon in a more and more ridiculous way. The Daily Mail rose to the challenge, yet again, of producing this year's main dose of disinformation. This article was so ridiculous and inaccurate, it had to be viewed as near laughable. Link to Team Satan and the Mail. On Sunday.

Several days later, on the 27th of June, the infamous Bishops Cannings basket cutter received a stunning eight-pointed star in a field close to his farm. This annoyed him greatly; a huge commotion took place at the roadside, which resulted in threats to researchers and a promise to cut the formation out if people entered. After some short time the farmer saw the economic sense of opening the field and decided that charging visitors to go in was the Christian thing to do. Link to field report.

By this stage, the season's formations were appearing at an increasing rate throughout southern England and indeed the north, which itself saw a number of spectacular formations. The circle makers, on several occasions visited Yorkshire during the summer months producing the type of sophisticated formations usually reserved for the Wiltshire hot spots.

June gave way to July with no letup in the action. In fact, right from the first of the new month, formations were appearing with increasing frequency across the landscape and sometimes very close to our home. The 1st of July saw the arrival of two new crop circles; the first one to be examined was at Milk Hill near Alton Barnes. This elegant six-petal flower lay directly below the white horse chalk figure in virtually the same spot as the 1997 snowflake fractal. Link to field report.

The second discovery of the day turned out to be one of the most sophisticated and bizarre formations I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing first hand. What we found ourselves standing in was a grid of no less than sixteen hundred alternating standing and downed sections of wheat that, from an aerial perspective, produced a pattern that was so complex and intricate that even various professionals in the field of mathematics had a real hard time dealing with it, and continue to do so. On the ground or from the air this was a truly amazing piece of work that deserves much closer attention from qualified individuals. From a logistics point of view this glyph poses major problems for
those who would dismiss it as a hoax. The eight hundred standing sections appeared to be individually created, rather than the whole thing being made up of long straight paths of downed crop. With this in mind, it is well worth considering the fact that at this time of year there is little more than four hours of darkness in the average night. Eight hundred blocks created in four hours -- that's about one every twenty seconds. WOW, these hoaxer chaps are getting rather slick these days. Must be the Viagra! Link to field report.

After all this excitement it was good to get a week or so off from the circles. The fatigue that sets in from visiting formations almost every day can really get to you. For this reason, the fact that nothing significant happened for the next ten days didn't bother us at all; at last we could do the washing up. The break ended on the 12th of July with a basket-weave style formation at Adam's Grave close to the mighty East Field. This version of the basket was nowhere close, in terms of complexity, to the Bishops Cannings basket of the previous year but nevertheless displayed qualities of a very high caliber indeed. Not least the fact that when we entered the formation very early on the day of its arrival there were a huge number of stems that were not broken or kinked in any way at all. I would guess that at least 80% of the stalks examined displayed no damage whatsoever, making this a very interesting circle. Link to field report.

A week later and we were hunting for a circle that had been reported in the Everleigh area of Wiltshire. Talk about far-out location, this one proved nearly impossible to find. When we eventually did find the formation down a long farm track and across a few fields we were not disappointed. Lapping over the top of a hill and encasing a prehistoric round barrow at its center was a Celtic Cross that, with the innovation of the barrow as a central feature, made this one unique to our experience, if not unique to the circle phenomenon. Link to field report.

For many people the next major event of the season was the highlight of the year. This formation arrived at Avebury Trusloe on the 22nd of July and consisted of a huge number of standing diamonds within a circle arranged to create the illusion of a wave, or magnetic field pattern. This was an extremely clever and effective design that continues to capture the imagination of most who view its deceptively simple beauty. Link to field report.

A couple of days later the Silbury Hill area took yet another hit with an arrangement of six pentagrams within a large circle of fast maturing wheat. Oddly, one of the standing points from one of the stars was disjointed from its rightful position within the scheme of the larger picture, as if it had been kicked to one side to create a deliberate imperfection or maybe to draw attention to some other aspect of the design that has thus far gone unnoticed. Link to field report.

The following day the last of the major formations of July appeared at Bishops Cannings in the same field as the eight-pointed stunner mentioned earlier. By this stage the farmer had totally given up on the idea of keeping people out of his field, opting instead to collect many times the value of the downed crop in entrance revenue. Link to field report.

During a visit to this circle location some days after the new arrival, we were dismayed to see the tramlines strewn with litter deposited by, no doubt, a tiny minority of the visitors to the pair of formations now resident in this field. Such lack of respect we found almost unbelievable,

The Final Fling

The first two weeks of August saw the concluding formations of the 2000 season, a season that thus far had produced some of the most spectacular and astonishing designs ever seen.

The 3rd of August was marked by the appearance of a large array of chunky rings and curves situated at the impressively named Giant's Grave near Oare in Wiltshire. Link to field report.

Three days later a little circle with an orbital ring and star appeared in a field of very mature wheat in extremely close proximity to our home at Horton, Wiltshire. Within this circle were features of a quite extraordinary nature including a huge and very compact twisted and standing tuft that rather resembled an old style wheat sheaf. All the crop from the entire central circle had been swept around from a focal point to create the sheaf feature in, it seems, a very swift, almost uncontrolled action. Bizarrely, the night this intriguing little glyph arrived on the scene a herd of cows in the field next to the wheat were going totally out of control. Their behavior was, and still is, completely inexplicable. At no time in our experience of living in this area have we heard livestock create such a
commotion; for this reason we feel it is at least possible that the animals were in some way affected by or responding to the process that created the circle.

The ensuing few days saw a flurry of quality formations including a very strange pictogram style glyph at Windmill Hill on the 7th. Link to field report. As the season came to a close the area of the Avebury landscape received a number of simple chaotic formations that although showed no sign of human involvement, were ragged and messy to the degree that one would have to conclude that whatever was responsible seemed to be quite random and unruly. To me, these things looked like a frustrated outburst of the energy involved in the creation of the crop circles.

All Cannings got a beautiful nine-pointed star on the 9th, followed by a flower in a field at Clench Common, not far from the earlier mentioned Giant's Grave. The farmer of the field that contained this crisp-cut marvel took extreme exception to the new arrival on his land and soon slapped an outright ban on anybody entering. Such was the anger of the man, that the thought of incurring his wrath was enough to keep at bay all but the most foolhardy or suicidal of circle fans. The local airfield even got a call warning pilots not to fly near or through his airspace -- a slight overreaction I feel. Link to field report.

The main event of the year was now imminent and duly arrived on the 13th of August at Woodborough Hill, Wiltshire. This was an immensely sophisticated design that from an aerial perspective resembled the complex natural geometry of a sunflower head, but on this occasion the scale was expansive and the precision, flawless. Hundreds and hundreds of standing sections fitting together in harmony that made for, I believe, the most complex crop circle of all time. How could the hands of a few people achieve such perfection? The area in question was under surveillance by a group of well-equipped researchers for the first part of the night. The group left the top of Woodborough Hill at 12-30am; all was quiet at this time. Just a few hours later the formation was discovered in all its morning glory. Link to field report.


The Bad & often rather Ugly

During the course of the season discussed above, numerous researchers and reporters of the circle phenomenon, including ourselves, were approached directly or via e-mail by a local group calling themselves the real crop circle makers or, as they now prefer, crop circle facilitators.

This group consists of the now infamous Mathew Williams and his less well known side kick, Paul Damon (who incidentally, is the character mentioned earlier who was observed splashing his saliva across the floor of a formation at Silbury Hill this year).

In early June, Mathew Williams turned up on the doorstep of our home wielding what he considers to be, "the new truth," i.e., "all formations are man made and we know this because we make most of them." Seventy percent was the figure offered to us. Mathew took the time to go into some detail about how he makes formations and continues to do so undetected.

On the face of it, MW comes across as quite plausible, with fast and sometimes convincing explanations to most questions put to him. When asked, how do you do it without being observed by crop watchers, sky watchers, etc? he replied, "well, the paranormal aspect of the phenomenon shields us with a strange mist or sometimes we are rendered invisible to all but each other." According to Williams, two separate teams of hoaxers created the two formations that arrived on the same night in the huge east field in mid 1999, neither group being aware of the other. This pair of glyphs, it must be remembered, were no more than fifty meters apart from each other and also were positioned very close to the edge of the field near Knapp Hill car park. On this particular night I was positioned on the slope facing the field just a few meters from the edge of the standing crop. From the position I had placed myself in that night I could clearly hear people chatting at a normal pitch in the car park, which was some quarter mile behind me. At (approx.) 12-30am I went to sleep, much to my annoyance, and awoke at 4-30am to discover these two expansive formations directly in front of me, very close to my position, somewhere in the region of 150 meters in front of me. Even a rabbit foraging at that distance in the barley created a commotion that would grab immediate attention from any observer on such still night. As this was, the likelihood of getting away with crunching about in the corn undetected for several hours was very slim indeed. I guess Mathew is lying to us, either that or there really were two teams of hoaxers out there being masked from me and indeed their fellow night stompers by a paranormal intelligence that works in tandem with the hoaxers. If the intelligence that conceals these people is so adept at manipulating the physical conditions in a field, why not make the circle under these conditions direct from the source, thus avoiding the hassle of protecting and hiding a cumbersome team of sweaty men?

I explained to Mathew my discovery and entry into these formations at first light and how I walked the wet (from heavy dew) tramlines into the first formation. I explained how my boots were caked with mud and that I was leaving huge and obvious muddy boot marks all over the clean and neatly laid barley. How come I can walk around a formation for ten minutes and it's immediately apparent that I have been there, but five or six hoaxers can tramp about for hours on end and leave no trace of their presence whatsoever? The only theory I can come up with to explain this apparent dilemma is that these guys must have been levitating -- either that, or they must be lying to us and the public as a whole. Mathew did explain to us that the people involved would have kept off the tramlines, thus avoiding getting muddy feet over the blanket of freshly laid barley. Anybody who considers this a viable or even possible answer should consider the fact that we have examined crop circles that we know are the work of Williams and Damon and they show extensive and very obvious action from foot and board slogging. The conditions observed within these known hoax formations are exactly what one would expect to see in a damp corn circle that had been walked to death for a few hours. This is an absolute observational fact. Anybody who feels they can walk in a damp or wet field of barley and leave no trace would be well advised to try it for themselves, as it is my experience that moving about in wet cereal crops is very a messy and sluggish experience.

Mathew told us that he and his team were capable of creating precise and immaculate crop formations incorporating sophisticated mathematics and geometry with ease. When we have visited and examined these efforts it has become quite quickly apparent that they are not at all precise, in fact they are more often than not, crap. Even in a formation created by these people during many hours of daylight, it contained some very obvious and major flaws. In a couple of places within the circle it was quite apparent that somebody had fallen over into the standing wall of crop and then picked all the damaged plants up as best they could, leaving an obvious blemish that could not be undone. Also all the points and right angles in the design displayed moderate damage just beyond the standing angular edge of the formation, as if somebody had stepped back into the crop to finish off that particular section. Besides this, there is the fact that this as well as the other half dozen or so formations created by this crew were as flat to the floor and broken down as the work of Doug Bower. How can this be when somewhere in the region of 90% of formations examined by us over the years are not at all flat to the ground? Quite the opposite is true. In fact, very often the corn is very neat, fluid and bouncy with a finesse that just isn't present within the formations created by the crew in question or for that matter the ones made by team Satan and chums. It can be said with all honesty that these formations bear very little resemblance to the large majority of crop circles examined by this writer and indeed many other honest researchers. But still the absolute conviction and insistence that they are making the circles remains. Our experience and observations tells us that they can't be making them; the discrepancies are there in abundance. I'm sure if Mathew was capable of creating large sophisticated and flawless formations he would have done it by now and provided undeniable supporting evidence to back up his claims. The fact that he has not speaks volumes in favor of the argument that he can't. I guess he must be lying, in view of the lack of evidence for large scale hoaxing. There is no other conclusion that seems tenable at this time.

Regardless of the fact that Mathew's claims are untenable for us, they are not for some people. During the summer 2000 season a number of researchers were offered the opportunity to witness the creation of crop circles, in daylight and at night. These demonstrations, it appears were enough to convince a few high profile members of the research community that Mathew and his team were indeed an integral component of the phenomena. It has to be asked, what is so convincing about a few shabby and badly constructed patterns in the corn? These researchers must have seen how messy and foot-trodden the formations they were standing in were.

After a cold night of anticipation, in a dark field, I would have been at least a little worried at the results that lay about me the following morning. At least one of the researchers treated to a display of Mathew's talent, or lack of talent, reported phenomena such as time distortion whilst the construction of a formation was under way. Perhaps this experience, if indeed it happened at all, was enough to convince him without the need to worry too much about a downright shabby formation. For whatever reasons some of these researchers were not at all worried about the messy formations. In fact, they fell over backwards to line up and proclaim that manmade formations were the "new truth." This lack of reasoning makes little sense, especially when considering the hard facts regarding construction quality and sheer geometric wonder and innovation that's readily apparent in most formations, which it must be said, is in complete contrast to the known fakes.

So why are people such as Mathew Williams doing this, or at least claiming to be doing it?

Maybe they are clever con men getting a big buzz from seeing researchers rollover when they sing. The ego is a major factor within many individuals involved with the hoaxing of circles, as indeed it is in many others who research this phenomenon from the other side of the fence.

Maybe they are part of some ongoing campaign of disinformation, designed to confuse and divide the research community. It is at least possible that these stated individuals are, knowingly or unknowingly, local pawns in a game that's being controlled from the highest level. Why did the relatively minor story of Mathew making a circle and his subsequent arrest and conviction for criminal damage receive such massive international media attention? Overkill is a major understatement in this case.

The bottom line here has to be: At this time it is impossible to reconcile the stated claims of these hoaxers and others like them, with what I and many other researchers experience on the ground in a large majority of the crop circles. Add to this soup the decidedly flaky theories and statements of professor Colin Andrews and we have a year of some of the most irrational behavior and statements the phenomenon has ever seen.

Lets hope for more fun this year, no doubt we'll get it.
 
Thanks to FM, MP, & NS

CRM