Top of the Croppies 2021

Dec 27, 2021 | Croppie Gossip, Top of the Croppies

INTRODUCTION

December means Top of the Croppies time! And to think it almost wasn’t going to happen. 2021 has been a quiet year both in the fields and outside of them, with many of the better known croppies staying under the radar. Maybe they’re scared of this website. Even the usually reliant Monique Klinkenbergh of the Crop Circle Information Centre didn’t spend much, if any, time on these shores.

Thankfully there were a few individuals prepared to cause a bit of a stir and give us some content, but even their number shrank. Canadian troll Jack Jane sloped off after getting herself banned from her favourite Facebook group, whilst the reigning two-times chamption Matthew Williams has been occupied getting ill, arrested and being a total arse in the unrelated sphere of urban exploration.

The constant droning, moaning, attention seeking and feeling hard-done-by emanating from Somerset has faded into tired irrelevance. And let’s be real, when you do nothing but repeatedly spam your own work in your own Facebook group it becomes mere background noise. The Croppie can’t even be too hard on the said self-pitier’s adopted son given how he’s brought in over £1,000 to this site through merchandise sales and an agreement with a photographer. We”d probably place these two as contenders six and seven, but they can’t count that far.

Anyhow, here’s the rundown of the contenders and the new top croppie!

CONTENDER No.5: Guy Cross

Imagine being sooooo cool as to be travelling around the world and sharing the details online. Imagine having your shirt off, long hair billowing as you meditate and tell your YouTube viewers just how awesome you are. Imagine living in an area where there are crop circles and thinking you could use them to spread the word about yourself. You could even try and become a crop circle maker, get more subscribers and look totally hip and authoritative as you talk about it. Once the details are out you could move on to something else and not be burdened by the sin of having crunched down some barley. You’ll still have those subs and likes. Spiritual, yaa? That’s Guy Cross, the self-named ‘Welsh Ginger Hobo’.

As it turned out, no circle makers of any repute wanted to become fodder for a YouTube video, so the supposed ‘Hobo’ threw his toys out of the pram and cried when he was called out on it. He even threatened legal action as if everyone had been born yesterday. Thankfully, Cross is now happy making circles on the sand, safe in the knowledge he’s not harming any awns, stems or grain. All’s well that ends well if you think being an attention-craving melt is commendable.

 

CONTENDER No.4: The Stalker

No names will be mentioned here as it’s not good to kerb-stomp a mange afflicted dog, but The Croppie has been plagued for a good few years now by a rather unhinged individual. For 2021 this weirdo upped their game and began leaving all sorts of bizarre comments on these pages. They’d have us believe The Croppie and its associates were under surveillance by a mysterious Anonymous type group with boots on the ground as well as eyes on the internet. Vehicle number plates were mentioned as well as addresses and allegations of oil thefts (WTF?). Hilariously, these ‘mind games’ were centred around information that was already in the public domain or could be obtained from mutual acquaintances. Was anyone supposed to be scared by this nonsense? Not here, especially knowing that the ‘boots’ belonged to a pair of village idiots with a collective IQ of one.
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The lame attempts at menace were accompanied by rather unpleasant packages with Middle Eastern postmarks. A croppie who wishes to be known only as Geoff received three successive parcels of worn, soiled underwear. For calling out the stalker on their disgusting activities, Geoff was informed he was going to be the subject of a ‘defamation complaint’. He is still waiting.

CONTENDER No.3: Mr Emery of Upham

It is perfectly understandable why a farmer may not want a crop circle on his or her land. There is the (often exaggerated) financial cost of the circle itself plus the damage hundreds and hundreds of tourists will cause as they trample through the field. But what should a farmer do about the crop circle itself? They could take it on the chin and leave the circle where it is, maybe even charging admission fees to recoup some of the costs incurred from the damage. Alternatively, they could follow the tried and tested precedent set by other circle-loathing farmers, cutting the formation out and drying the newly harvested crop. Weirdly, farmer Emery at Upham, Hampshire, decided to follow his own path and deal with the crop circle in his wheat field by rolling it! The end result was increased damage to the crop and a shiny, penny-like circle that still attracted a good number of visitors! It’s not exactly clear why Mr Emery chose such a bizarre action, but it has been put to The Croppie that this could have been the result of some very misguided police advice.

This photograph by OrionSM Photography shows the weird but not unappealing effect of the roller:

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CONTENDER No.2: Paul Jacobs

Perhaps Paul Jacobs isn’t someone you’d expect to be competing for the Top of the Croppies 2021 crown. This is the guy with the Citroen van who passes time collecting money on behalf of farmers at the entrances to circle bearing fields. You’ve probably had an argument with him at some point by trying to get into a field when he’s shutting up shop dead on 9PM. I bet you even found another way into the field and ignored Paul’s howls of protest.

A ‘character’ Jacobs may be, but why is he here? Well, since Michael Glickman’s time in this dimension came to a close The Croppie had been wondering just who would take on the vacant mantle of croppiedom’s most self-important, blinkered and haughty true believer. Harsh? Well, how can anyone take Jacobs seriously when he refused to accept that the commissioned crop circles near Broad Hinton (made for Epic Games’ Fortnite and singer Lorde respectively) could be anything bur paranormal in origin.

Furthermore, Paul has used social media in 2021 to come into his own and rumble on endlessly about how it was the aliens and really can’t be people. It isn’t so because the barley is combed over and he knows all about phototropism although in this case it can’t be that because he knows better blah blah blah. Love yaddayadda and blah blah blah light. We are such a simplistic species because we can’t get along blah blah blah and the way to get along is to open our minds and not be blinkered which means we should listen to St Paul Jacobs as he’s been in the research field so long he knows his stuff and can’t possibly be wrong because he’s Paul Jacobs and he knows best and you’re wrong if you point out a possible flaw in what he’s selling because you’ve not been around as long as him and he’s Paul Jacobs who knows everything and he’s had crop circles appear just yards from his caravan and you haven’t so you are an agitator and a spreader of disinformation and a hacker or a blocker you need to listen to him because he knows what he’s on about. Especially when it comes to energy leaks. Blah. Blah. Blah………

Paul has a bit of an issue comprehending why people might find him overbearing, tiresome and self-centred. Sure, his heart is in the right place, but he needs to reign in all of the zealotry.

CONTENDER No.1: Enzo Brabazon

Crikey, where do we start with this one? Enthusiasm really isn’t in short supply when it comes to this fellow, but neither is the digital paper trail of bullshit that follows him around. If you believe his story, Gibson is part-alien and is in communication with the circle making entities including a local man turned light being who goes by the name of Mark Richards. It’s weird stuff, but no odder than his tale about the first crop circle of the season at Stanton St Bernard: apparently Gibson and his alien kin made it, even though he’d spent the night filming car headlights on Hackpen Hill and wandering aimlessly around the Ramsbury area having lost his vehicle. Even then he managed to confuse UFOs with the landmark transmitter at nearby Membury. Gibson somehow eventually ended up at Stanton St Bernard and claimed to have confessed to being the circle maker. We imagine the farmer was none too happy.

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Next up, Gibson supposedly starting receiving telephone calls from the aliens. Lawrence made his way to Silbury Hill, probably trashed a field of oilseed rape and later made a video all but confessing to his actions. In the following days he claimed to have received more telephone calls from his alien friends, sending him off to Dorset after a crop circle that was never discovered.

Beyond this stuff we’ve witnessed Gibson strop about a Photoshop job pulled on the Silbury Hill formation, drone on about how the aliens encode his name in new circles, confess to a caution for drugs offences despite working in an education setting, claim to have been miraculously cured of AIDS, try to dig up a crashed UFO, attempt to channel Karl Marx and, last but by no means least, set up a website designed to lure in gullible paying customers to part with their cash for a psychic reading. Even the usually tolerant nutters on Circle Chasers have taken to criticising the nonsense Benzo Blabberzon comes out with.

Top of the Croppies 2021: Richard Skerman

It’s often painful watching those who know little about the circles scene making out they have a grasp on it. Crypto currency obsessed Richard Skerman is one such example. He turned up out of nowhere, got banned from various Facebook groups, cried about it, said something about brain upgrades, being ‘fascinated by elongated skulls’ and immediately began banging on about the ‘gravy train’, ‘puppet masters’ and ‘crop circle Illuminati’. Yes, he’d had the usual suspects in his ear and was recycling their nonsense about the supposed fortune to be made from crop circles (ha!), photographers paying circle makers (ha ha!) and those researchers who apparently control the scene for their own nefarious means (ha ha ha!). Nobody controls crop circles, Richard. The circles appear as and when their makers choose. Furthermore, the truth about the extent of human circle making has been in the public domain since the 1980s.

Richard gave The Croppie one of those incredible WTF moments in autumn after he popped up for interview on the obscure community radio station of Oban, a small Scottish town. He dropped a few clangers, including one about ‘iron balls’ in crop circles and was subsequently torn apart by his so called Facebook friends. But this was just an extension of the ‘know-all but know-nothing’ attitude displayed by Skerman as he dismissed the Chilbolton face and Arecibo circles as no more than ‘simple dot matrix’ patterns, asking ‘how hard can it be? It’s only flattened crop.’

As of December, Skerman was telling the world his ‘task was to awaken the greatest minds on Earth’. Lord help us all.

Skerman would be just another noisy new croppie with a messiah complex like the aforementioned Guy Cross — one naive to the difference between a Gibson and a Gibsone — were it not for his attempt to organise a circle making competition for 2022. Apparently it was to feature twelve teams (ha ha ha ha!) competing for a prize of one whole Bitcoin (ha ha ha ha ha!). That’s something in the region of £30,000. Sure. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha etc.

Forgive The Croppie for being sceptical, Richard, but your competition was perceived in some quarters as no more than a honeytrap to lure circle makers into outing themselves. You underestimated the intelligence and motives of your targets and did yourself no favours by repeatedly failing to verify the prize funds or place them into escrow. Despite what you may have heard, no circle maker makes a profit from going out into the fields and making a formation. Money isn’t a consideration. In fact, ask yourself just who in the 21st century can make a living wage from crop circles? Nobody. At least you did the right thing by calling time on your misconceived plan that fooled nobody but a bunch of halfwits and a breathing cadaver with a makeup fetish.

We live and learn, and you, Richard, are a worthy winner of Top of the Croppies 2021. Maybe you want to be a somebody but crop circle history dictates there is no happy ending for those people. Take that on board and you’ll enjoy the 2022 season much more than this. Perhaps you’ll even top this list again for a more positive reason.