Three Circles is a short history of crop circles. Each installment covers a specific period of time and features three circles important to the development, evolution and public perception of the phenomenon. 

Part two covers 1990, arguably the high point of crop circle history. 

Looking back across the history of cerealogy, 1990 stands as its undoubted highpoint. Perhaps not in terms of what was created in the fields of Wiltshire, Hampshire and beyond, but for memorable, high profile events and a simple, but all-changing evolution in the phenomenon’s form.

Entering the season, public interest in crop circles was at an all time high. During the previous year, cerealogists Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews had their book Circular Evidence — A Detailed Investigation of the Flattened Swirled Crops Phenomenon published by Bloomsbury. BBC Television’s Daytime Live show had picked up on its release and produced a short feature on the men and their work, complete with an odd in-circle moment when electrical interference affected filming.

Whilst Andrews and Delgado at least proposed a thinly veiled paranormal theory — namely, ‘the circles are created by an unknown force field manipulated by an unknown intelligence’ — rival cerealogist Terence Meaden stuck to his idea of crop circles being the product of whirlwinds. For Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who began the contemporary phenomenon in the mid-1970s, the mundane nature of Meaden’s ideas were not to taste. They had started their work to lull ufologists into believing UFOs were landing in the fields of Hampshire. ‘We had to do something to stop him,” Bower said of Meaden to John Lundberg in The Field Guide. Doug’s solution was to introduce straight lines into their work.

Bower and Chorley’s first ‘pictogram’ was produced on land worked by Chilcomb Farm in the pair’s usual territory close to Winchester. The former explained to Lundberg how he overcame the issue of making straight lines in darkness: ‘I had the bright idea of the baseball cap. I got a bit of picture framing wire hanging down from the baseball cap with a round ring on the end of it and I thought to myself if I look through that ring onto a silhouette of a tree or something on the horizon and keep my eye trained on that walk towards it, I’m bound to keep a straight line. And it worked.’

The new crop circle was tidily described by Andrews as ‘a large circle with a connected central avenue. Both sides of the avenue contained two sets of rectangular boxes … The central avenue was reduced in size and stopped before the top circle, which was smaller in size than the other.’ 

Andrews seemed not to notice that the ‘central avenue’ directly followed and overlapped the tramline (tractor path). Nonetheless, this detail was not wasted on Meaden and he couldn’t ignore the chance to swipe at his foe when he reflected upon the year’s crop circles in October 1990’s Journal of Meteorology. At the same time, he demonstrated a stubborn commitment to his meteorological theory. ‘For the present,’ Meaden began, ‘it is enough to say that multiple-circle alignment with tractor marks … is likely to have a perfectly intelligible, scientific explanation without recourse to the absurd ‘alien intelligence’ ideas being aired by certain anti-scientists.’

In spite of all Bower and Chorley’s effort and innovation, Terence Meaden was going nowhere. 

The large pictogram that appeared in East Field, just beyond the twin villages of Alton Barnes and Alton Priors is almost certainly the most famous crop circle of all time. It has been immortalised on the front cover of Led Zeppelin’s Remasters compilation album and retains a special mystique for anyone with a love of early 1990s British popular culture. Indeed, given the media interest that surrounded this crop circle at the time, it can be pinpointed as the formation that made the world aware of the pictogram.

Much of the fuss surrounding the East Field event can be attributed to at least three separate factors. 

First, there was the size of the formation. Writing for The Circular, Bob Kingsley surveyed the circle as being ‘approximately 370′ 4″ (135m), or even longer when the small circles [at both ends] are included.’ Such a scale was unprecedented at the time.  

Second, the circle’s arrival at least coincided with some unusual occurrences. Candida Lycett Green (daughter of poet John Betjeman), then a resident in the nearby village of Huish, recounted some of them in The Cerealogist: ‘Carline Watson who lives in Bottlesford heard the dogs barking and howling at two o’clock on that Thursday morning. Well so did most of the people in the village and its surroundings because all the dogs were barking. Roofs shook very slightly and tiles rattled at around the same time that the dogs were making a racket. Somebody was driving past and their car engine cut out. Another man saw the circles at dawn on that morning. He tried to walk down into them and, ‘a force stopped me,’ he is quoted as saying in the local newspaper.’

Finally, there was the placement of the circle at the foot of Knap Hill, a location that offered grandstand views. It helped that farmer Tim Carson was willing to open up his field and allow access to paying visitors. It should also be acknowledged that the East Field circle was one half of a pair that appeared on the same night. The other circle was located to the west, close to the neighbouring village of Stanton St Bernard. Almost identical in appearance, albeit without the crispness of the East Field formation, this site was not so readily accessible. 

Within his book Round In Circles, Jim Schnabel describes the East Field pictogram as turning Alton Barnes into ‘a kind of New Age Lourdes. The little road beside the field became clotted with gawking cars, and the police were called in to keep traffic flowing. Even on a weekday afternoon, the formation was likely to be full of people. Some glowed with the energies, some became nauseous, some developed headaches, but most simply marvelled at the thing … Richard Ingrams, one of the founders of the satirical Private Eye, took a helicopter ride over the formation with his family, and came down a crop circles believer. The helicopter pilot, incidentally, was charging £15 a flight, and by this time the thoughts of Tim Carson also were turning to commerce. Having endured several days of his crops being gang-trampled by pilgrims, he decided to park a caravan by the field gate, with a hired hand to stand guard, and a sign that read: ENTRY: £1.’

For Terence Meaden, the East Field and Stanton St Bernard pictograms’ adherence to the tramlines in both fields were further evidence of his whirlwind theory, albeit one that necessitated a change. Writing in the Journal of Meteorology from April 1991, he explained, ‘I propose that the primary vortex, if electrified … sometimes finds itself attracted to tractor-line regions because of local electric field anomalies initiated by the repeated passage of tractors up and down the field … Reasons for the development of electric-field anomalies, if that is what they are, have yet to be evaluated. I suggest that one is that the repeated passage of heavy farm equipment leads to compaction of the thin chalk-dust laden soil to depths approaching the bedrock. This would affect the flow of sub-surface water and hence modify the electrical conductivity of the dry chalky soil and therefore the local geo-electrical field.’

With public interest in the circles now at an all time high, the nation’s focus soon switched from Alton Barnes to the cropwatch being run by the BBC and Nippon TV from the vantage point og Bratton Castle, close to the town of Westbury. Andrews and Delgado were utilised as coordinators for the keen volunteers who manned the site, as well as being the go-to experts should any new crop circle appear for the cameras, which, of course occurred in very public circumstances.

Around dawn, at the end of the second night of the watch, a member of the volunteer team spotted the shadow of a pictogram in a field half a mile from the base caravan. Having been informed of the discovery, Andrews set off for Bratton, alerting members of the press and television corps about the exciting news. Infamously, he even spoke to BBC’s Breakfast Time, confidently telling presenter Nicholas Witchell there was no way the circle could be a hoax.

What followed was neatly summarised in issue 2 of The Cerealogist magazine:

‘In the event, it was the watchers who were caught out, and the two famous crop circle writers involved in Operation Blackbird fell victims to their own ambush. Under their very noses, in full view of the recorders and night-visioned cameras on Bratton Castle, an elaborate crop circle formation was manufactured by an audacious, well drilled but unidentified group of people. The result was not merely to make the unfortunate Blackbird team look foolish but, more importantly, to cast suspicion upon the entire crop circle phenomenon. If crop circles were so easily simulated, perhaps all of them were man-made. This idea was enthusiastically taken up in the press. Crop circles, declared the Times, “are now thought to be hoaxes.” Thus the hoax explanation took over from [Terence Meaden’s] meteorological theory as the official rationalization.’

If the media had now come to view the crop circle phenomenon as all but explained, people now wanted to know who was responsible. The obvious finger of blame was pointed at members of The KLF, a pop band with a developing reputation for conceptual art. Indeed, the day after the spectacle unfolded, Andrews received a poem from the band apologising for the affair. Another suspect was George Vernon, otherwise known as Mystic Merlin, a Bristol based oddball who created board games discovered by Andrews and Delgado inside the hoaxed formation. Within the croppie huddle, the Operation Blackbird disaster gave rise to conspiratorial rumblings. In The Cerealogist, George Wingfield suggested the hoax had been perpetrated by ‘a specially set up detachment of the Army’ to create a narrative that would ease public pressure on a ‘perplexed’ British Government that ‘said nothing, did nothing’ on the subject of crop circles. 

Tales such as Wingfield’s must have been a boon for Andrews and Delgado who had been reduced to figures of ridicule in the national press. Nonetheless, the pair remained bullish as 1990 reached its end, though what followed in 1991 would come as an even more unpleasant awakening for the big name investigators — but not before cerealogy was treated to new style pictograms and a brief glimpse of the future of the phenomenon. 

You can read a more detailed examination of Operation Blackbird by clicking here.