Here’s another splendid example that has us asking if a comment is for real:

From her (admittedly hard to follow) comments, Sue is initially talking about Circlemakers.org. We have no idea where she gets the idea from that their members were anonymous. The names Rod Dickinson, John Lundberg, Rob Irving, Will Russell, plus the likes of Mark Barnes and Mark Pilkington are indeliably pressed into the crop circle record. These people were known to croppies. In his book Mirage Men, Pilkington recalls the occasion he and other members of the team were hissed at by croppies inside one particular circle. But why let facts get in the way of a good bit of poorly reasoned rubbish, Sue?

She then goes on to state, ‘The whole thing was founded on mystery, carrying on the work of Doug and Dave, even their wives and families didn’t know. The problem is the researchers and merchandisers that tured the whole thing into a money making industry based on lies[.] They want this to stop, as do I, and it’s the reason I’m here now.’

No Sue, the reason you’re in the Facebook cesspool is because you want someone to listen to you. You want to feel important. Yes, Doug and Dave built their legacy on mystery, but you are vastly over simplifying things if you think slack research and merchandising are something new. Sure, you don’t mention that here, but we’ve seen you say it elsewhere with regard to the Alexanders. (For what it’s worth, for a friend of yours to be describing the said pair as ‘the management’ is laughable. They have no influence over contemporary circle makers whatsoever.)

Merchandisers were selling t-shirts and the like at least as far back as 1990, not that there should be an issue with that. I’d be taking a closer look at the crop circle ‘authorities’ of the time, Sue, given that they upset you so much:

‘Researchers’ were aware that humans could make crop circles as far back as August 1983 (see the reference to the circle created by the Daily Mirror newspaper) but chose to overlook this because it didn’t fit with their theories. You may be unaware, but by the end of 1993, that is almost two years after Doug and Dave’s confession, Colin Andrews — weirdly upheld by Sue’s fellow Team Ten Watt buddies as some kind of upstanding example of a good researcher — was proclaiming the Bythorn mandala formation to be authentic even though (according to writer John Macnish) he knew full well it had been made by Julian Richardson.  In August 1993, circles sceptic Ken Brown wrote to retired cerealogist Pat Delgado, stating:

This subject of crop circles should have been closely investigated, wrapped up and put away as a man-made joke at the latest by 1983 soon after quintuplets started to appear. You must have known well before then that underlying tracks were present underneath every circle or didn’t you look in those days? Did it really take you a full 11 years till 1992 at Lockeridge to realise these were a man’s foot traces towards the centre? … Or is the real truth that you didn’t want to know?

Your naivete, if that’s what it was, has been astounding. You, Colin Andrews, [Terence] Meaden, Richard Andrews, [Busty] Taylor and [George] Wingfield i.e. the most prominent researchers, deserve the severest censure for propagating in the public domain your own private belief systems under the guise of ‘scientific’ investigations. You all belong to a long list of charlatans who will be found out and vilified in the end.

There’s no need to add anything else on this point.

Finally, who is Sue referring to when she says that ‘They’ want money-making on the crop circle scene to stop? We can find no record of Circlemaker.org saying such a thing? Sadly, Doug and Dave are no longer around to comment. Her pets? Herself? Whoever ‘They’ is really seems to have no idea of what is going on at this present time. Who is making money from crop circles? The Alexanders and Lucy Pringle for selling small print runs of calendars? Us for selling the odd sticker or t-shirt? We’ve grossed an income of less than £50 from the circles since we started heading to hills above Alton Barnes in 1990. We’ve spent thousands on our trips and, to a lesser extent, hosting this website. So what if Nick Bull gets a few quid from YouTube? Or Hugh Newman gets some for taking people around sites, including crop circles, in Wiltshire? Fair play to them for demonstrating their skills and work ethic. There’s nothing stopping anyone else doing the same. 

As for ‘They’, we can guess who Sue is referring to: bitter retired circle makers crying because they never made enough from the subject to fund their drink and drug habits. That’s the truth. Putting a crop circle down does not entitle the maker to financial reward. Once they leave that field, the crop circle belongs to the wider world. The farmer controls on-ground access and anyone is free to take photographs where permitted, or to copy the design for their own ends. Anyone is free to speculate on that circle’s origins, whether it be in the pub or in the pages of a book being sold. If any circle maker really thought they could amass a steady income through making anonymous works in a field, then, at best, they completely misunderstood what they were getting themself into.