Lying Down in a Crop Circle

 Several folks have told me they liked the story about lying down in the field in my last post. Lying in the grass is something many of us have done and benefited from! I'm reminded of another time, quite different, when I was lying down in a field with a bunch of others in England. Twice before I retired, I went on Sacred Site Tours in southern England, led by a friend from North Carolina. Each lasted a couple weeks, and we stayed in thatched cottages around the English countryside, visiting Stonehenge, Avebury, and a number of other places known for their history as sacred sites. Early in the first tour, we learned that there had been crop circles appearing near us. I don't believe our leader had included anything about crop circles in our agenda, but she looked up an expert on the phenomenon and hired her to be our guide to at least one circle. What an adventure it turned out to be!

The guide turned out to be wonderful. None of us had any experience with crop circles, nor really any knowledge of them. But we definitely didn't want someone who was a fanatic trying to convince us that aliens were communicating with us.  In contrast, our guide was a clear-headed lovely woman who had been studying the mystery of crop circles for years since they regularly appeared near where she lived. On our first morning with her, we piled into our van and traveled to a field where a crop circle had appeared the night before. As opposed to the story of "men with boards", real crop circles appear in seconds. Still no one knows how this happens. You can only see a crop circle clearly from above, for it follows the contours of the land, and down on the field you don't have this vantage point. That would imply that it comes somehow from above.  Yet no one has ever seen a flying vehicle floating over the field beforehand. As reported from people who have witnessed the making, one second it isn't there, and the next second it is. 

We learned that farmers really don't like these things occurring in their fields. They attract people (of course!), who tromp all over. So usually a farmer will mow down the crop (and crop circle) as soon as the circle is discovered..That means to see them we needed to get there soon after they appeared, before the farmers cut them down. We also learned that the Crop Circle Cafe is the place to call, if you want to know what has appeared on a given day. So our guide had called and found out that a new circle was discovered in the morning, and later that morning our van took us on a narrow dirt road to a path going up to the field in question. We walked up the hill, came into the field, and started carefully walking around. The crop circle was very large, probably about the size of a football stadium. And clearly there were patterns at our feet. The stalks of grain were bent over to form the picture, so there were lots of areas where the grain still stood tall, and then areas where it was bent to form shapes. As we'd been told, we were not able to see the whole scene from the ground, but as we were there, a small plane flew over taking pictures. Later we got to see a picture of "our" crop circle, and it was truly a beautiful pattern.

Once we got to the crop circle came the "lying in the field" part. We were all standing around, and we all started feeling like we wanted to lie down but were too embarrassed to mention it. Then someone brave enough asked our guide if we could do that.  She laughed and said that everyone who came to crop circles wanted to lie down! So we did. We each found a spot where we wouldn't disturb the pattern, lay down, and watched the clouds and the birds and soaked up the atmosphere. Later we found out that it was not good to bring electronic equipment into a newly created crop circle, for there was some kind of electrical energy that fried them (or at least broke them). We also found out that the bends in the grain that crop circles cause are not breaks. They look a bit like a microwave hit them at the point where they bend, and the crop keeps growing afterward. Another interesting thing is that for years after a crop circle appears in a field, the image is retained. The area of the bent grain somehow is fertilized so that it always grows greener and taller in subsequent years. Quite a mystery.

After that first experience with a crop circle, our group started calling the Crop Circle Cafe every morning to see if another circle had appeared near us. We were there in June,  which is evidently prime time for crop circles to appear, and we were able to see at least two more during that first sacred sites tour. During the second trip, crop circles were on the agenda from the beginning, and we took in at least two or three. One day our group was scattered out in a large crop circle, lying down, and another group came into the circle.  Some of the people were talking relatively loudly, and I heard one man mention Iowa City (!). I got up and asked him if he was from Iowa, and he said that he'd just heard there was a major flood in Iowa City that had washed into some of the buildings on the university campus. Here I was in England, and someone next to me in a crop circle told me of flooding back home! And when I got back to Iowa, I found the whole area was indeed recovering from historic flooding.

So what do I think of crop circles? Do I have theories about what causes them? All I know for sure is that they are a mystery. If you've experienced them first hand, you just laugh when someone says they are created by people. That is clearly not true, or not unless someone somewhere has created some kind of technology that does this huge artistic creation from a distance and instantly. I know that their designs are beautiful and they are labeled as "sacred geometry" by many. They do not have clear messages, no words. If they are some form of communication, I'm not smart enough to know what they mean. They seem to occur along what are called lay lines (not sure I've spelled that right), which I think are lines of magnetic resonance. Frankly, I don't need to know where they come from. It is nice to still have some mysteries in the world. But if you're ever lucky enough to encounter a crop circle, lie down!