SAD LOVE QUOTES: Fields of gold: How crop circles that once only attracted conspiracy theorists have become a booming business worth millions

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By Harry Mount

Last updated at 8:01 AM on 1st August 2011

You can't help but feel sorry for any farmer in Wiltshire whose wheat field is next to an ancient white horse or stone circle. From April until August, these fields are prime targets for crop-circle makers — or, if you prefer, aliens.

A couple of weeks ago, a new circle cropped up next to Stonehenge, with another sprouting earlier this month beneath the white horse on Milk Hill, near Alton Barnes.

And, every time, it's the poor farmer who bears the cost. Tim Carson, from Alton Barnes, has had 125 circles on his land since 1990. The price in ruined crops is particularly steep this year because of soaring fuel and fertiliser costs, and a 25 per cent drop in wheat yields due to the drought.

Booming: Crop circles in Wiltshire are attracted tourists to the area to see them, but farmers are unhappy with the lost income they cause

'I'm beginning to get a bit tired of it all,' says Mr Carson. 'Each circle costs me £1,000 in lost income. This year, I decided to destroy circles as soon as I found them, but that means losing more crops. And, whatever you do, the circles affect the growing next year, as the thick mat of crops covers soil, compromising its quality.'

Every year, 50 to 60 circles materialise in the rolling chalk downlands of Wiltshire. In the rest of the world put together, only 40 to 50 appear annually.

And, in recent years, a booming tourist trade has developed. From Belgium, Holland, America, Norway and Australia, crop-circle enthusiasts come in their thousands — each with their own theory, each rushing to a new site as soon as it is reported.

This week, within hours of the first reports of a new circle on Windmill Hill — near the neolithic stone circle at Avebury — a Dutch tour party of nine people rushed to the spot.

'There are heaps of biophysical anomalies here,' said the tour leader, Janet Ossebaard, 45, author of Crop Circles: Scientific Evidence. 'This wasn't made by people, otherwise you'd see damage from board marks [where hoaxers lay planks to flatten the wheat]. It's been hit by a plasma vortex.

'You can see the burn marks on the crops and cavities,' she says, holding up a grain stalk, which does indeed have small holes in it. 'We also found a half-fried caterpillar. This is a vortex that has been intelligently guided — not by hoaxers, nor the Army [which is heavily represented in this part of Wiltshire].'

Janet comes over from Holland twice a year for nine days, bringing two parties of 15 people apiece. This morning, the remainder of her party were in microlight planes, looking for crop circles from the air; one of them spotted this particular one.

Popular: The circles are now being visited by tourists from across the globe, with each having their own theory about how they got there

The circle consisted of two vast spirals, around 40 yards in diameter, connected so that it looked like a pair of wacky, swirly-eyed spectacles.
In the field, you can barely make out the circle until you're very close.

Then, you see a curving path of flattened wheat, spiralling in ever-decreasing circles, until you reach a clearing in the middle — with a sheaf of untouched wheat in each spectacle lens.

Also surveying the scene, dressed in a kilt and bearing a staff, is Dr Ian Baillie, 57, a retired physics teacher from Folkestone.

'I've been studying circles since the late Eighties, and making annual visits since 1994,' he says. 'The patterns are all mathematical. There's sacred geometry there. There's ancient history and classical mythology, too — and intelligently-guided energy.

'Just look at the bloom on the wheat,' he says, pointing to the thin sheen of dust on the wheat stalks. 'That would be wiped off if someone was flattening it, but you can still see it.'

Cropping up: This circle is one of those that has appeared at Devizes in the last few weeks

Whoever's responsible — aliens, hoaxers or some other intelligently-guided force — they've certainly been much busier over the past 20 years.
Crop circles have been reported in England since 1678, when a Hertfordshire news pamphlet referred to The Mowing Devil, a creature that cut a farmer's oat crop into a series of concentric circles. In the 19th century, occasional circles were recorded and the first-known photograph of one appeared in Sussex in 1932.

But it wasn't until the early Nineties that Wiltshire crop circles started multiplying at an extreme rate.

In 1990, Led Zeppelin released an album, Remasters, with a picture on the cover of an elaborate crop circle created on Tim Carson's land. Then, in 1991, two hoaxers, Dave Chorley and Doug Bower, confessed that they had been faking circles for 13 years.

Working at night in groups of six, with a skilled craftsman directing, teams can produce elaborate patterns in just a few hours using simple tools: string, tape measures, bamboo sticks for marking and 3ft-wide wooden planks to flatten the crop. In badly-done circles, you can see the marks from the planks.

In the early Nineties, a group of professional crop-circle producers emerged, making designs for promotional use. In 1998, Mitsubishi commissioned a design in the shape of their Space Star car. Shredded Wheat also paid for its logo to be cut into a wheat field.

Thanks to hoaxers — and, if you're a believer, intelligently-guided forces — the circles have become a familiar feature of the Wiltshire landscape.
They do appear elsewhere — Lincolnshire had a new one this month and there have been others in the Midlands, Kent, Essex, Dorset and Hampshire — but Wiltshire is home to three-quarters of all British circles.

The season begins in April with the first yellow flowering of rapeseed and continues through the summer as barley, wheat and linseed crops mature. The season ends in August with the wheat harvest.

Over the course of the season, thousands of enthusiasts make their way to the Silent Circle information centre in a handsome old school-house in Yatesbury, Wiltshire.

Elaborate: This 409 circles in this creation brought the farmer whose land it was on thousands in media fees and helicopter landing fees

'I divide the circles into three groups,' says Charles Mallett, 41, from Avebury, a researcher of anomalous phenomena who founded Silent Circle in 2002. 'First, there are the idiot hoaxers out for an ego kick. You can spot the systematic way they've laid the strips, and the wheat is smeared with mud. To me, this is just vandalism.

'Then you get serious people who produce incredible designs in covert circumstances. They are making mysterious art. They're not doing it for a joke or an ego trip.

'And then you get circles that can't be explained by human intervention and deserve investigation. I've seen crops, such as rapeseed and linseed, that are almost impossible to flatten without snapping, which have been bent back with no damage, and crops that have been laid in one single big sweep — not in strips. I've tried to replicate the effect, and I can't.'

Whoever makes the circles, the farmers always suffer, although some put an honesty box near the circle so sightseers can donate money.

However, Tim Carson says they are often stolen. 'You've got to check on them three times a day. Last year, some bright spark had the idea of installing his own honesty box in my field!'

In 2001, perhaps the most elaborate-ever pattern — 409 circles, connected in a six-sided triskelion (a shape consisting of six interlocked spirals) at Milk Hill — brought the farmer thousands of pounds in media fees and helicopter landing charges.

This month, there's another new circle at Milk Hill, just below the 200-year-old white chalk horse. It was cut on two separate nights.

'They did the outline first,' says Charles Mallett. 'And came back to fill in the middle — which makes you think it was humans.'

Meanwhile, the gawpers have arrived. Twenty cars are parked in the field. The tourists do their best not to trample the crops, making their way via tramlines used by irrigation machines. But some damage is unavoidable. In the middle of the circle lie a couple in a Druid-style embrace. Nearby, a woman is on her knees, staring into the middle distance.

Hard at work: Crop circles are often made by groups of six who work at night using basic tools such as bamboo sticks, tape, and 3ft-wide wooden planks

Mirjam Masen, 42, an artist from Ostend, Belgium, is in England for a month studying the circles.

She says: 'All round here, there's bad energy,' explaining this is caused by the Army using the area for exercises. 'The circles bring positive energy to balance the negativity.

'The crop circles are messages from a world teacher, suggesting we should put harmony before violence.'

Shelley Lemaire, 39, a child worker from Auckland, New Zealand, says: 'You can feel the energy. There's a higher frequency, a star frequency coming from other realms.'

Even if the farmers don't benefit from these enthusiasts, the Wiltshire tourist industry — worth an annual £850 million — certainly does.

Crop-circle coach parties stay in the nearby market town of Devizes for as much as a week at a time. Local tours ferry tourists around 'Avebury's Fields of Dreams' for £50 a day.

Just a five-minute journey from the latest crop circle, and much favoured by enthusiasts, is the Barge Inn at Honeystreet, a Georgian pub on the Kennet and Avon canal. Among the beers on tap is locally-made Croppie, with a picture on the pump of intersecting circles and loops.

Sitting in the pub garden is Jean Anderson from Queensland, Australia. She says: 'I've been interested in crop circles for years and was gobsmacked when I saw them for myself. Does it really matter if they are man-made? They're beautiful.'

But beauty doesn't compensate the farmers. As Tim Carson says: 'If someone offered £5,000 to do a circle, that would be a different matter.'
Until then, I'm on the side of the farmers, rather than the artists — or the aliens.