The magazine of the photo-essay
Mar / Apr 2021 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
I was commissioned to do a feature, with journalist Clive Aslet on crop circles in 2010, as it had been a
bumper year for sightings.
The centre of the crop circle world, is the Barge Inn at Seend in Wiltshire UK and most of the circles
usually appear within a few miles radius. There had been much speculation, as to their origins.
Aliens was perhaps one of the most popular or some sort of weather anomaly, although the latter got
discarded, as the designs became more and more complex. Clive and I visited some of the corn fields to
look more closely into the phenomena, on the ground, looking at the flattened crops more closely and
then we viewed the area by helicopter, seeing several different sites.
In the biggest formation, there were dozens of people, many lying on their backs, as some sort of
homage to the greater power that had made these incredibly complex creations, they were mainly in the
'created by aliens' camp and took the subject very seriously. The farmers who owned the land had in
some cases set up honesty boxes, for donations from visitors, who tramped over their crops.
Some years later and after a television expose, I met one of the 'aliens', who lived locally and he told me
in some detail, how he and several others could make these designs, using GPS, stakes, ropes and planks
to flatten the crops under the cover of darkness...perhaps it might have been more fun to continue
believing that aliens were the creators.
by Christopher Jones
