Podcasts: Curious Dimension — The Allan Brown Interviews
Twenty years is a long time. In 2005 Allan Brown and John Michell self-published Crooked Soley: A Crop Circle Revelation, a small book that explored the geometry and odd synchronicities surrounding the enigmatic 2002 crop circle which appeared close to the east Wiltshire hamlet of the same name. In the subsequent years so much has changed. The circles have declined in number and most of their makers seem preoccupied with fame hunting rather than the phenomenon itself. Lung cancer took Michell from the world, whilst Brown stepped back into the shadows without any fanfare.
In the second half of 2024 Brown unexpectedly reappeared on two consecutive episodes of Curious Dimension, a podcast presented by Matt Barone covering UFOs, disclosure, alternative histories, esoteric texts, sacred geometry and crop circles. When compared alongside other cerealogical guests Barone has featured, he’s the odd one out. He’s closer to crop circle reality than Gary King and Freddy Silva, whilst fresher to the ears than Lucy Pringle or Karen Alexander.
The beauty of these two interviews between Barone and Brown is that the croppie here has nothing to sell. There’s no need to tell tall tales. Brown came to the fields, wanted the circles to be paranormal, conducted his own research and concluded the phenomenon is probably human in origin. Having had some fantastic opportunities along the way to study the geometries of crop circles, Brown made his peace with the subject and withdrew. He quietly accepted that others will experience their own cerealogical journeys and come to their individual conclusions.
The first of the two interviews largely covers Brown’s geometrical studies of the humble quintuplet, notably the different solutions they have provided to ‘squaring the circle’ — which, according to Wikipedia, is the ‘challenge of constructing a square with the area of a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with a compass and straightedge.’ As Brown explains, it’s an impossible task, but some quintuplets come extremely close.
Interview two is the more engaging of the pair and is given over to the Crooked Soley circle, its story and its relationship to its surroundings. There is discussion of the oppositional place names that the Soleys, Straight and Crooked, hold. Likewise, a poem links Doug Bower, the crooked and the straight to woodland near the circle. It’s fascinating and reminiscent of Anthony J Bell’s largely forgotten concept of ‘lexi-linking’, where certain keywords seem to cross with others in terms of their meaning, spelling, pronunciation, or the context in which they appear.
Both episodes of Curious Dimension discussed here are wonderfully understated. They represent labours of love. There’s no bile towards circle makers, there are no sensationalist factoids attempting to convince us that 7/7/7 was a paranormal event. It is just two men in calm discussion. In an era where social media sees so many croppies demanding instant answers as to meanings and origins, Allan Brown reminds us that measured and undramatic analysis still have their rightful place.
