After taking a year off last summer, it was time for my wife and me to resume our favorite pastime this year – hunting for crop circles. We’ve been “croppies” ever since our first encounter with a circle back in the early ‘90s, and so each time we go to England, our fingers are crossed. One never knows when and where the circles will appear, so it’s all a matter of chance or synchronicity, plus maybe even a little bit of the power of intention (more on that later).
In the past, it was truly a matter of luck to find out about the circles. We came across our first one, almost 30 years ago, because of the pack of cars we saw pulling over by the side of the road in the middle of farmland in Wiltshire, the county that’s always the epicenter of crop circle activity. Sure enough, everyone was stopping to look at a newly formed circle. Another more reliable method for finding out about new circles was to pay a visit to The Barge Inn, a pub in Alton Barnes that became the unofficial meeting place for croppies. In 2009, we saw some newly posted photos on their bulletin board and headed straight out to see the circle – an amazing image of a phoenix rising from the ashes: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5540634/Phoenix-crop-circle-may-predict-end-of-the-world.html
Not surprisingly, the media dubbed it “Farmageddon” – they’re always looking for the dark side of an inspiring story!
But now we’re in the internet era, and new info gets posted almost instantly, thanks to websites like this one: https://www.cropcircleaccess.com/latestcropcircles/
Even that link didn’t help us last time, though because the summer of 2024 was a particularly slow one. For the entire grain-growing season (May – August) only a half dozen reported circles seemed genuine, or at least were not obvious fakes (more on that distinction later). But this year has been a bonanza for the circles, as they have been cropping up thick and fast (you can relax now that I’ve gotten that pun out of my system!). We were just in England for 3 weeks and headed home on July 19, and by that time there had already been 15 sightings. For overhead drone views of these circles, check out the Crop Circle Connector website:.
We started our quest by checking for the latest reports of sightings near our rental cottage, whose location was strategically chosen to be in the hottest portion of Wiltshire, near the famous stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury. Armed with a postal code locator address, we headed out to Tidcombe, near Marlborough, only to discover that this Zip Code cue for our car’s sat nav system (that’s British for “satellite navigation”, aka GPS) only brought us to the village itself, without identifying the specific field where the circles were seen. But Tidcombe was small enough (population 61, down from a peak of 243 in 1831!) that we tried roaming the few roads in hopes of finding a local to ask.
Two arborists in a van told us that “over that ridge” were fields that might be what we were looking for (they hadn’t heard of any nearby circles). That was a dead end, but we ran into another croppie on the same mission, one who was armed with a Smartphone. We fed his phone a more exact map grid number, one that had been of no use to us because we didn’t have the correct app to access it. On the way there, we passed another farmer who pointed us down a side road to the unnamed field that we’d ID’d online. The three of us spread out to cover the field in true surveillance fashion, walking along the tramways, tracks that had been laid by the tractors when the seeds were planted, and where crops could no longer grow.
And sure enough, we hit the jackpot. Here’s what it looked like to us on the ground,
And here’s a drone’s-eye view of the full pattern, revealing a bigger picture that wasn’t clear to us from the ground level.
And here’s a stunning video clip of the drone’s flyover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiXymPZIvj4
This pattern was a little unusual, without the more common circular flavor and symmetrical appearance that other circles show. No telling what it means. They’re more like Rorschach inkblot tests – what does this pattern suggest to you?
So that’s Part 1 of our England story. Part 2 will be posted soon, so stay tuned for our story about the stone circles of Avebury and the birthday present I received there (how’s that for a hook!).
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