Is it really late December and Top of the Croppies time again? It only seems like a week or so ago that last year’s champion picked up his crown and, after a bit of reflection, broke down in tears. We initially assumed they were joyous beads of salt water, though by the sound of things, the folk of Dorset still haven’t seen the flood waters subside. Oh well. You can’t please everyone all of the time. 

If you’re new here, and you haven’t already guessed, Top of the Croppies is our annual prize-giving ceremony where we honour those individuals who have made an impression on the world of crop circles. Some of those impressions come through acts of warm-hearted positivity, whilst far more come from those who want to be famous, think they’re important or just want to bludgeon you into accepting their outlook. Love the former, hate the latter … they’re all here in our annual contribution to the society of the spectacle.

First, let’s get something out of the way. We will keep it short. We won’t name anyone although they will be fully aware of who they are.

The downward trend in crop circle numbers over the past decade was eventually going to present a tricky situation for those who have built their reputation — and brought in a bit of money, no matter how small — through the circles. It didn’t go unnoticed that certain outlets who knew the origins of this year’s hoaxes at Stonehenge Visitors Centre and Badbury Rings still chose to portray them as genuine crop circles. A hoax is a piece of land art with an owner. A crop circle is unauthored and anonymous. If you’re promoting crop circles then you should do just that, not jump on any bit of fake tat that is pressed into a field to fill a page on your website. When you bite the hand that feeds you, don’t be surprised if it finds better things to do. A sense of dignity is worth far more than a few pounds. Complaint over.

Now … Team Nine Watt. What a special bunch they always are. Regular contender Deiniol ‘Dan’ Davies told the whole world last year that he was now employed as a ‘professional circle maker’. We laughed and with good reason. Just what did his commissioned jobs bring him in 2024? Nothing. A big fat f-all. Instead, he contented himself by continuing his eerie fascination with one particular female croppie and throwing out lame insults at those makers who are so far beyond him that their very existence is perceived as a threat. To prove his greatness, Davies showed the world he’s unable to divide a circle into five equal portions inside a Dorset wheat field. After realising how shit this hoax was, and to protect a ginormous oaf who rolled around in the field with him, Davies then claimed his piece was really the work of thieves. Get real, nobody else in the circle making world could manage to make such a pathetic mess. It’s even more laughable given that Davies had posted the design of the circle to his Facebook account months before he went into the field to make it. And to think he described the wonder at Etchilhampton as ‘lacking mathematical precision’. Seriously? He’s in no position to judge. 

Joining Davies is his colleague Robin Knight, a peripheral poindexter who has become the most power-crazed person on Facebook since he was granted moderation rights by the owners of Offical Cess Pool UK. Everyone has to follow the rules … except him. Of more concern is the way he’s spent 2024 eerily fawning over every known human circle maker on social media. It’s no surprise to us though; on the one occasion we met him in person he was desperate for us to put him in touch with circle making teams so he could experience a night in the fields. Dream on, Robin. Nobody except those desperate for a polish and glaze will be inviting you out any time soon. 

Moving on, we shook our heads over Roeland Beljon’s decision to book Enzo Brabazon as a speaker for the annual Night Of Crop Circling event at the Coronation Hall in Alton Barnes. Come on now. We like you, but you took money from people to watch Enzo talk six reams of attention seeking lies on Teams? Just go the whole hog next year and book Walter Mitty. He can call in by video link from Connecticut. Talking of similar characters, wasn’t Paul Jacobs back to his most tiresome, self-aggrandising, blinkered and thoroughly convinced self? Crop Circle Truther can do one. And then there was Robert Hulse, the conspiratorial croppie who became the subject of most extraordinary podcast interview in which he claimed alien bases can be found at Silbury Hill and West Woods, near Lockeridge.

Meanwhile, we were dazzled by Gavin Potts’ self-published crop circle e-book. And whilst some of the gaps in his knowledge are as glaring as the blinding, truly overwhelming colour scheme chosen for the book, at least he got off his backside and did something positive. These days that sets him apart. Two others who also deserve praise are Barry Reynolds and the always amiable Andy Thomas, who contacted us to fill in some gaps within our documents archive. We were also impressed by the makers of Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country, a BBC documentary series that devoted the best part of half an hour to the circles. They handled the subject with sensitivity and humour, reaching an excellent conclusion: a crop circle is whatever you want it to be. 

Finally, we definitely need to acknowledge a young man whose name we don’t remember. The Croppie bumped into him at Wilton Windmill after he’d endured a rough drive from north of London. Even though it was practically dark, he still wanted to talk about crop circles and his sage words were a reminder of the positivity and generosity that can still be found in the crop circle world. He reminded us of why we love the circles so much: wonder, camaraderie and the allure of both the mysterious and ambiguous. There is good out there.

No, there isn’t really a person called It Can’t Be People. (We won’t mention what we believe to be their real identity as we are only 99.9999% certain we are correct.) However, it is the name of a Substack on the subject of apparently anomalous phenomena that has been experienced by circle makers through the years. If you’re lucky, you’ll even get to hear Team Nine Watt’s fan-gran Pompey Lil, sorry, Queenie, narrate the individual stories. We read that she sounds like the woman who works at a chippy on the seafront, but we reckon it’s more likely to be Mick’s Monster Burgers up on Portsdown Hill. 

So, why is this Substack featuring here? First up, it is apparently the ‘only media outlet’ to cover its subject matter. We almost choked when we read this. After all, we have covered the very same subject within our ‘Circle Makers Speak‘ series here and here in 2023. Even then, whilst the testimony was new, we were by no means the first to share the stories of circle makers. Circlemakers TV was there long before us and may possibly have more in the not too distant future … and that wasn’t the first either. But, yeah, we don’t have a forthcoming book we’re attempting to push. 

Second, and much more importantly, there’s the message that one form of unevidenced strangeness is more true than another. You have to only view the Substack owner’s attitude to ‘true believers’ on Facebook to see how dismissive he can be of individuals who believe crop circles are made by paranormal forces — which is rather distasteful given they were a circle maker and more than happy to play into the game when it suited them. Yet, they then expect us to accept that human circle makers are guided by, or experience, paranormal events across the process of planning and constructing crop circles. To paraphrase croppie Gavin Potts who was in discussion with a proponent of such a theory earlier in the year, it’s simply substituting one set of unevidenced ‘woo-woo’ beliefs with another. For all of the verifiable, scientifically collected evidence both sides possess, you may as well be making the case for orcs over faeries, or goblins over demons. My woo-woo is superior to yours. 

Then there’s the condescendingly messianistic aspect of it. You’ve got to be in it to feel it. To quote a circle maker in one of the articles when discussing the appearance of light phenomena around a crop circle in the presence of an observer, ‘It’s here, but it’s not going to perform party tricks for you. You have to respect it to see it’’. In other words, you really do have to believe in something to experience it, because that ‘something’ is sentient and apparently knows what you’re thinking. Really? None of this seems to balance with those circle makers who have shared their experiences with The Croppie, the majority of whom are not believers in the paranormal but have experienced weird events. Why did these occurrences take place if the experiencers don’t hold paranormal beliefs?

Maybe the chosen ones aren’t so chosen after all. It can’t be misattribution amongst the paranormalists, surely? We’ll leave them to argue it out whilst the Substack owner mistakenly points his fingers here and there in an attempt to fight for the honour of his narrator. 

It’s a massive ask for anyone to retain the Top of the Croppies belt, and the giant who stomped his way to last year’s title has, not for the first time, fallen short. Only on this occasion he probably won’t need an oxygen bottle and mask. Indeed, we didn’t even think Frank Smithland was going to figure at the business end of 2024, as he reacted to last year’s triumph with uncharacteristic silence. 

But …

Then the anguish became too much and he burst. Not quite like the legendary Mr Creosote, but in floods of extremely salty and bitter tears. How he wailed, writing a scathing post that caused fits of giggles inside The Croppie‘s office. We should take the opportunity to thank him for the out-of-season traffic boost it gave us. (Note to Robin Knight: remember than anyone who mentions this website needs to be banned from your group. One rule for the in-crowd, one for everyone else though.) Since Frank’s initial outburst, his tears have bubbled to the surface on a few occasions, complete with clarification that he is a Samsung Galaxy rather than iPhone user. So there.

After that, we didn’t hear much of Smithland until the season sorta got underway. Then it went wrong for him on the back of a badly constructed hoax at Badbury Rings in Dorset. For all of five minutes Frank was being smug all over Facebook because he’d gotten his drone up above the mess before the Crop Circle Connector‘s photographer of choice — by pure accident, apparently. Sure, Frank. But Nick Bull’s pics never appeared and with good reason: he’d stayed at home as he wasn’t prepared to visit a wonky piece of landfill made by the idiots of Team Nine Watt. Realising he was crowing over nothing, and looking rather silly as he did it, Frankie’s sense of achievement dissipated into nothing.

Putting the boot into a wounded man, someone then tagged Dorset Police into Fwank’s Facebook post. Panic ensued in the Smithland household and the thread was rapidly deleted. Big F knew he’d funked up and now lamely tried to shift the blame, suggesting third party circle makers, ‘thieving scum’ no less, had been responsible for the hoax. How we roared with laughter when it became apparent Smithland’s own Team Nine Watt boss didn’t get the hastily circulated memo and all but claimed responsibility for the pseudo-circle. We still don’t really understand why the mention of Dorset Police sent Britain’s brightest guitar teacher into meltdown. Why was he so scared of the 4am knock on the door? After all, he’d only stumbled on the crop circle — with his drone conveniently in hand — as an ‘unexpected bonus’. An innocent man surely has nothing to hide. It’s not as if he’d been up the previous night without any sleep … oh … okay then. 

Better luck next year, Fwankie, but just as Joe Biden will always be a POTUS, you’ll still always be a TOTC CHAMP. You can come out from under the sandpit cover in your back garden now. The flashing blue lights have gone.

In the six year history of Top of the Croppies, no other contender has started a new year in such impressive style. And nobody else has managed to lose their grip on such a huge lead. Nonetheless, Noel O’Gara brought us so much genuine, unbridled joy in the opening half of 2024 that he still comfortably finished as the year’s runner-up with a dozen lengths to spare.

O’Gara first caught our attention in 2023, posting in Facebook’s most antagonistic group about his circle making exploits on his own farm in his native Ireland. Our interest piqued, especially when we were reminded that Noel is also an author of an extremely controversial book and website on the man he believes to have been the real Yorkshire Ripper. Whilst we aren’t convinced by his detective skills, we became hooked as Noel offered his take on croppiedom. And doesn’t he have some very firm beliefs on crop circles! For example, makers are both ‘highly trained’ and ‘highly qualified’ artists; they work in the daylight hours and are in possession of a ‘magic stick’ to pick up any crop they mistakenly flatten. And then there was our favourite quote of the year from him, written like he has been Britain’s most active circle maker:

No need to search the fields of Wiltshire for messages from the stars. When the artists complete a successful plan on the ground, they will retrace their steps back out of the field, ensuring that they didn’t forget any of the gear and email the coordinates to the website cropcircleconnector. They will pass the Intel to their trusty drone pilots who will record the artwork for the fans worldwide. This year the ground is still very wet and you must have a dry bed for the stomp preferably surrounded by woodland and hillocks but the trees are starting to blossom now and the cover is getting better.

Now, come on. To the best of our knowledge, Noel’s circle making activity on this side of the water equates to nil. We’ve not seen any of his circles anywhere online, all of which means he’s very limited knowledge gained through personal experience. So, he’s been getting a lot of his stuff from a third party. Well, we don’t need to guess who has been talking. You see, as soon as any vocal newbie with a clear interest in crop circles arrives on CCUK, they have the usual crew of halfwits in their ears, desperate to win over anyone who will help blow their trumpet. So, that’s certainly a part of it, but what about the idea that crop circles are made in daylight? We just don’t know on that one, but we like it, especially as Noel writes with such conviction on the subject.

Whatever you think of Noel’s views, he is often extremely entertaining. He states what he believes to be factual, regardless of who is in his way. Best of all, Noel described the wonky starfish at Stonehenge Visitors Centre as having been put down by ‘half pissed’ makers, before going on to say ‘At least Dene Hine made artworks but this is a joke’. We bet this went down a treat as Hine later publicly admitted to having been the responsible party.

Noel O’Gara, The Croppie salutes you for the smiles you have brought to our face in 2024. But, sadly, you are not the winner.

So, just who is Top of the Croppies 2024? We can think of at least two people who will be jumping up and down in expectation. But, like everyone else, they will just have to wait until tomorrow, Christmas Day 2024, to see who has won the title … and who doesn’t even warrant a sniff of our long list because they’re nothing less than a total joke.