Croppie Gossip: You Will Remember Dene Hine

Oh, not this fellow again. The balding, fat crybaby from Yeovil with a puppy’s scrotum growing under his left eye? The one who endlessly posts the same photos of the same crop circles in the hope he’ll get some likes? The one who steals the work of other people, claims it as his own and erupts in tears when karma catches up with him? The one who advocates violence against women? The one who can happily give abuse but says he’s cried to the police as soon as someone stands up to him? The guy who wears really bad Crocs designed for fourteen year old, wannabe dope smokers? Yes, that’s him. Dene Hine.

We’d just about stopped laughing at the ranting, hair pulling, wailing, self-pitying, threats and teeth grinding our most recent mentions of Hine had provoked in him. Then Messenger pinged and we were pointed to a new Facebook post left by him; one so delusional, dumb and self-important that we had to rub our eyes. What did it say? Well:

Wow. Does he really think so? Let’s look at the latter sentence first. The official record states that Hine holds a criminal conviction for fraud by deception. He’s not the same Dene Hine who was, prior to a fallout over the non-existent money pot, making crop circles and reporting them to the same outlets he now decries? Surely he’s not the same Dene Hine who worked with a farmer at Ansty to fool people that an advertisement for a bong manufacturer was a mysterious crop circle? The same Dene Hine who has told people he led the 2001 Milk Hill ‘Galaxy’, even though he didn’t pick up a stomper until more than half a decade later? Yes. You have to wonder how someone so insignificant, so hypocritical has the temerity to talk about himself in such high esteem.

But none of this matters because, in the wider scheme of things, Hine will not be remembered as an artist, at least not when it comes to what he’s fouling the fields with. It will be the same for his more talented peers.

Delusion at its finest. Hine doesn’t want you to know that the design of the jellyfish put in the field wasn’t his own. It had to be reworked by someone immensely more talented to make Hine’s original etchings usable.

Look at what crop circles are. They’re oddities that have relied upon an element of mystique to keep them relevant in the public mind. They were huge news at the back end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, but now they are little more than an annual curiosity. Names like Dexter and Roderick may linger in dated articles that are gathering dust, but in a broader sense these are known only to the few. The wider world tends to view crop circles as the work of some supernatural force (hence they’ve no interest in Hine or other bigmouths) or ‘those two old blokes’: Doug Bower and Dave Chorley.

In both historical and pop-culture contexts, Doug and Dave are the only circle makers that will be remembered. They were the ones who solved the causation conundrum. In the eyes of the media it was their confession that closed the casebook. Other circle makers may have had five minutes or more of fame in their time, but what does it matter? They are names who come, go and ultimately fade from view. Someone such as Rod Dickinson is arguably the best circle maker of all time, but how many croppies and non-croppies are familiar with him? Ask your average person who Julian Richardson is and they’ll shrug their shoulders. The general public simply isn’t interested in the names of crop circle makers unless they’re called ET.

The Croppie hates to break it to you Dene, but the average double leg amputee has just as many toes as there will be people remembering you as an artist. Mention your name to any member of the public in half a century and they’ll ask if you’re the man who made the local newspaper website having fallen down a flight of stairs. Or maybe their sister’s former neighbour. That was Dene someone… But, most likely of all, they’ll say they have absolutely no idea who you were. That hurts you, doesn’t it?