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human consciousness. Thus humans in the vicinity of earth tremors, fault lines or atmospherically produced field effects may experience perceptual disturbances. The fascinating aspect of this outbreak of lights, the ‘earth lights' of his title, was the close connection between the lights displays and a religious revival that took place at the same time. This was centred around a charismatic individual, Mary Jones. Contemporary accounts describe how some witnesses of the lights would end up at her chapel seeking spiritual guidance. The lights were incorporated into the prevailing religious beliefs of the day, as a response to the sense of awe that they created. Devereux speculates that these events might demonstrate what happens when a sacred site becomes 'live’. Fifty years later, the same kind of stimulus - lights seen in the sky -was interpreted in a different way, one which reflected the change in perception of a population who had seen the space race begin. The events at Warminster discussed in Chapter 2 were, this time, seen as flying saucers, or UFOs. A cult grew up around the location of the Sightings, just as it had done in Wales earlier in the century. It appears that we have a predisposition to try to fit anomalous events into some kind of framework and this tendency usually expresses itself in what can be broadly termed a spiritual sense. The response of many to the crop circles as they took hold of public consciousness has been to interpret them as divine or spiritual messages. This has been flavoured by the concerns of the times: growing ecological awareness and the need for some sense of hope or salvation from the problems we face. Mary Freeman's sighting at Avebury and the subsequent circles provided the focus for the development of what can be understood as a cult, complete with its own belief systems, as wary of any attempts to examine sceptically the foundations of these beliefs. One way of understanding the common core of these three sets of events, Barmouth, Warminster and the circles around Avebury, is through the process by which we project our unconscious needs, desires and fantasies on to strange events in the natural world. These projections always reflect the times; what is known as the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, and the meanings ascribed to the appearance of the circles are an example of this. Finally in this chapter we turn to the question of the psychology of the human circlemakers. We touched briefly on their motivation in Chapter 4. The more obvious of these explanations have parallels in other cases outside the world of crop circles. Hoax for financial gain has a long history in the art market and, interestingly, the exact status of a number of works ascribed to great painters, in collections all over the world, is open to debate. In 1983 the Sunday Times newspaper was taken in by a forgery of what they had been assured were the genuine diaries of Adolf Hitler, having paid a large sum of money for them. In such cases, where there is a lucrative marketplace, there is a straightforward motive. It is hard to make a direct connection between circle-making and financial gain, unless one believes that farmers who charge entry to circles in their fields would produce or commission such events. Psychology of the circlemakers Two further motives, circle-making to ‘discredit’ supernatural explanations and circle-making as pure