I went a little crazy in the summer – found myself indirectly caught up in the UK Crop Circle scene, becoming something of an armchair expert, glued to websites like Crop Circle Connector, also sites put up by people like Lucy Pringle and Colin Andrews, for news of the latest goings on. I live a long way away from the epicentre of the mystery, which is mainly the sublimely lovely counties of Wiltshire and Hampshire, but it didn’t prevent me from appreciating the fact that it was quite a summer – the complexity and the beauty of the circles, also the madness of the post-hoc analyses put forward by their various interpreters, seeming to surpass anything that has gone before.
Personally, I think there’s a little bit of a mystery here largely obscured by what’s become a massive man-made social phenomenon, a sort of contemporary myth, but that doesn’t detract from the fact the Crop Circles, however they’re made and by whom, are fascinating – and I’m already anticipating the coming spring and the first circle of the season.
Anyway, I wrote an article about crop circles here. And I recently put up a short story, based upon the phenomenon, here and here.
