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THE PICK OF THE 2002 Crop CIRCLE SEASON THE PICK 2002 THE Crop CIRCLE SEASON After a slow start in England, the 2002 circle season sprang the phenomenon's usual surprises, including a mysterious image of an ET holding out an inscribed disc. n the traditional British heartlands of the crop circle phenomenon following a year of foot and mouth disease, hoax paranoia and then two stunning circular events at Milk Hill and Chilbolton which cleared the air somewhat, the 2002 season promised a much cleaner slate. Yet it looked for a while like nothing was going to happen at all. Events began very slowly—the slowest for several years—with a modest, ringed circle in a rape crop at Soberton, Hampshire, on 12 April. It then took a long while to get going before the mas- terpieces the UK was used to seeing returned, with only three minor formations reported in May. Events began properly at Avebury Trusloe, Wiltshire, on 2 June, with an attrac- tive Celtic-looking design resembling a sixfold knotted string within a ring of beads. Though progression was slow, there was a scattering of other noted formations through- out June. One was a beautiful double spiral at West Overton, Wiltshire, on 23 June, whilst the county of West Sussex also delivered some fine patterns. One of two forma- tions at Sompting was a convex triangle design found (by myself and Allan Brown) to contain a thick but fine white dust deposited inside. When Rodney Ashby (as recom- mended by Nancy Talbott of BLT Research) analysed the dust, he found it to be a particu- larly pure form of silica, very unlikely to be found in a field. No explanation could be found for its presence, but Nancy later revealed that such dust has recently been found in other formations around the world. Despite these offerings, it wasn't really until July that the UK scene came properly to life, finally delivering the numbers and array of ingenuity expected for the time of year. But then, what are the expectations with the crop circles, which always seem to confound predictions and complacency? It has now become traditional to await the arrival of the hugest formation of the year as some kind of "grand finale", as with the astonishing 800-foot Milk Hill spiral of the pre- ceding year, but in 2002 the largest-diameter formation (at least at the time of writing, in late August) arrived on 4 July near Stonehenge, Wiltshire. It was a wonderful 741-foot design, resembling six ribbons three-dimensionally fluttering in the wind. What impressed as much as its shape (actually, made from very straightforward curves) was its positioning within the field, poised perfectly between three round barrows and the perime- ter of the field, with little margin for error. Michael Glickman likened the task to "lower- ing an oil tanker into Trafalgar Square". This was the first formation of the year to catch the attention of the British media, and it found its way into newspapers and television reports to a suitably impressed public. But the UK is already well conditioned to the presence of crop circles. In the USA, many were discovering the phenomenon for the very first time—perhaps incredibly to British eyes—thanks to one particular film... August 2002 saw the US release of the movie Signs, starring Mel Gibson—a spooky UFO-invasion thriller in which tall green aliens create formations in maize crops as land- ing beacons for their craft. Putting aside the unoriginality of the plot and the portrayal of the crop circles as something so disappointingly mundane, the fact is that the movie raised the profile of the real phenomenon to a huge degree, bringing it to the attention of many Americans whom it had somehow previously bypassed. Magazines and newspapers swelled with articles and the airwaves buzzed with radio and television documentaries, news features and phone-ins on crop circles as if they had never existed before. It's interesting to note that most US "croppies" were deeply unimpressed with the film, many considering it a fear-mongering distortion of the true phenomenon, but those new to by Andy Thomas © 2002 Swirled News Southern Circular Research 13 Downsview Cottages Cooksbridge, East Sussex, BN8 4TA United Kingdom Websites: http://www.swirlednews.com http://www. vitalsignspublishing.co.uk NEXUS ¢ 59 by Andy Thomas © 2002 OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2002 www.nexusmagazine.com