Without exaggerating, this chase constitutes a cosmological mystery-tour of the very nature of reality – both the 'objective' reality around us and the psycho-spiritual reality within us. Once smitten with the cereological virus, it doesn't go away – even when skeptics, bank managers, hoaxers, tabloids, clandestine organisations, mysterious non-corporeal entities and the Great British Weather conspire to confound and discourage intrepid investigators.
It's dead serious – much more than an eccentric hobby. It tweaks at a deep part of us. It lies outside the brief of modern institutional science, religion and conventional wisdom, such that this brief is. Yet it has attracted researchers and lay-people of an extraordinary calibre. The many 'coincidences' experienced inside formations and on the cereological circuits have brought together people who have each and all undertaken to make a journey, the goal of which is utterly unknown – and the further one goes, the more profound the mystery gets.
This is no playground for lily-livered people who seek easy answers or who try to fit their experiences into preconceived explanations – it is totally deregulated, quakey ground. Rationalists have to become more sensitive and intuitives have to become more objective, to rise to the challenge the circle-makers, whoever they truly are, have posed. It's new territory with abstrusely new coordinates. One of the few certainties available is that the formations have come along to drag us into a vastness of uncertainties and riddles. It is never even certain whether, how, where or when the formations will reappear each year, yet they do, arriving between May and August. Each season brings new developments and issues, which means that a get-together for croppies is needed towards the end of the season to thrash it all out.
There are in fact three annual gatherings for cereologists, where we ventilate ideas, observations and researches and explore the ins and outs of the subject – and ourselves in relation to it. The gathering I believe to be most special has been this one, the Glastonbury Symposium on Crop Formations and Signs of Our Times. It's the one for believers – for those who are a little more willing, if necessary, to wander or fall over the frontiers of rationality. Such wandering does become necessary, and the ancient pilgrimage-centre of Glastonbury is a good place to do it, with its centuries-old metaphysical traditions.
The Symposium has been organised since 1991 by Roland Pargeter, who has been in the thick of this business since cereologically early days – the late Eighties. He is full of heart, visibly called by the spirit to be involved with the formations. His own cereological speciality has been to examine patterns and sequences of the intricate 'lay' of the crops within the formations, which is one of the verifying indicators of their genuineness. However, in my view, his biggest contribution has been to bring together people and agriglyphic thinking at the Glastonbury Symposia. Everyone plays their role in the unfolding chase.
During the dark days from late 1992 to early 1994, when hoaxers and skeptics seemed almost-successful in proving that cereology was but a wild-goose chase for fools, Roland kept the Symposium going. In the longer view, that's just as well. During the first two Symposia of 1991 and 1992 the atmosphere had been electric, exciting, engaging. Brilliant contributions were made in 1993, yet they were overshadowed by a weighty thralldom of doubt and disappointment raised by the assertions of hoaxers and by upsetting media disinformation and an atmosphere of interpersonal nastiness at the time. British heel-digging conservatism was at work even in the cornfields. People were being driven against one another and an argumentative, masculist mind-game was being fruitlessly acted out. It led nowhere – except inasmuch as it obliged croppies to confirm their inner beliefs in the formations, or to get out of the business.
Yet the reward came in 1994, a year when the technical and aesthetic excellence of the formations reached a new zenith. The circle-makers were moving the agenda forward. Cereologists from abroad, dismayed at the psychological mess in Britain, came in with B, forward-moving perspectives, and an unpolled consensus was emerging: it was time to get back on course. Thanks to Roland's uncynical encouragement of openness, keeping the debate open, the dark spell was exorcised. The mood of the Symposium swung back to the main question at hand: the formations themselves – and their makers.
Different researchers have very different perspectives and angles of investigation. That's one of the wonderful things about cereology. Since the circle-makers have played an astute interactive game with us, confounding everyone's rational theories yet donating tantalising cosmic gratuities, researchers have been thrown back on themselves. My own talks at the Symposia have been distinctly metaphysical and contextual, connecting circle-makers with extraterrestrials, yet I have been obliged to go by experiential evidence, not by wishful thinking or by adjusting evidence to pre-set pigeon-holes.
One of the most impressive pieces of research presented at the Symposia has been John Martineau's demonstrations of the geometric and symbolic mathematics and proportions of the formations. He has demonstrated that the thinking behind them is mathematically deliberate and advanced, relating to ancient megalithic geometries and even to the very orbital patterns of planets in our solar system. His key statement is that it is possible to break down the design of the formations into their mathematical components, yet it is impossibly complex for any person to build them up from scratch into a created formation, so elegantly are they intermeshed.
Contributions from engineers on toroid electromagnetism and gravitics, from computer scientists on design-simulation, from dowsers on energy-leys and polarities of charge, from overseas visitors providing detailed reporting of the formations in North America and Europe, garnished with anecdotes from an Alton Barnes farmer and circle-host, has given a rich array of things to dwell upon. Intense debates have unfolded over the nature of perception and reality, over the role of black helicopters, golden balls and white horses, over measurements, readings and inner feelings, across cafe tables as well as in Symposium speeches, making this an exceptionally stimulating forum of investigation not only into agriglyphs and people, but also into Life, the Universe and just about Everything.
There have been the gripping talks by Dr Steven Greer in 1992 and 1993, whose group CSETI has been 'vectoring in' ET craft in Mexico, USA and the fields of Wiltshire, setting up intentional close encounters and strengthening the case for an ET connection with crop formations. The psychic Isabelle Kingston, meanwhile, has brought inspiration and lightness with her tales of communications from 'The Watchers', who have given a series of instructions, hints, elucidations and conundra to add to the already- rich paraphysical stew.
The running battle between skepsis and belief has been embodied by several cereologists, but in recent years it has fallen on two major gladiators, George Wingfield and Michael Glickman, to give voice to many of the conflicting reality-problems posed by the circles. Both have had the courage of their convictions, daring to risk making fools of themselves before their peers rather than to hold back in self-protective silence. They have each embodied the conflict everyone has inwardly waded through – a painful conflict where intellect and heart are alternately riven asunder then rejoined again by the educational tricks of the circle-makers. While cereologists are clearly driven by an indistinct intuitive certainty, the mental hows and whys have been eluding us, inviting doubt.
Powerful snippets have emerged anyway. One American researcher in 1993 related agriglyphic design factors to musical scales. Some have examined short-lived isotope radiation and biophysical alterations in corn-stalks, while others have looked into Hopi rock-carvings and Senzar alphabets. The philosopher emeritus of cereologists, Stanley Messenger, has gently stretched people's concepts like a web of intricately-distinguished threads stretched between parallel universes, while Lucy Pringle has researched people's subjective responses to visiting formations, seeking to make sense of psychic, intuitive and healing responses, to draw attention to the observers as well as the observed.
The formations are captivating symbol-rich holes in England's cropfields. Yet they imply something, as signs of our times and as footprints of something more than we know of, of some intelligent, communicative, witty, sophisticated and powerful agency, not of this Earth. They imply a re-enchantment of nature, a catalysing of human awakening, a probable future technological breakthrough, an explosion of the paradigmatic walls surrounding mainstream science, a paradoxical national security risk and an immaculate study in elegance, artistry and form.
At the Symposia the air has been thick with ideas, drawing in every conceivable discipline and facet, interweaving emotion and imagination with rational analysis and plain old commonsense. Even Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson would find it daunting! It falls on every honest cereologist repeatedly to re-examine why we keep on with this chase. Each season, with each new round of developments, while no neat unifying theories emerge, the questions still keep us awake at night. It will probably take decades to crack this one. Yet the nub of it all seems to lie in our own psyches – has our paroxysm of doubt not demonstrated this?
The subject is crop formations, yet the real issues are the human condition and our next frontier, reality and unreality, belief and unbelief, the state of the world and the boundaries between worlds. The truth is, a crop formation is simply a perfectly-laid empty space! What this means is yet to be revealed. These annual Symposia have pressure-cooked cereologists as much as the crop-circles have microwaved us, yet the resulting stir-fried brains seem somehow the richer for it. Many different people have added to the wealth of understanding the phenomenon is wringing out of us. This meeting of minds and hearts at the Glastonbury Symposia has, for me, been a high-point of my year. I'm ready for more.
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