Crop circles:

The second formation of the season appears once again in the magnificent canvas of oil seed rape (canola to U.S. folk), this time situated at the Neolithic long barrow at West Kennett, which overlooks Silbury Hill. Created on May 4, between the hours of 3-5am from a Spanish photographer who happened to be out taking photographs of the setting moon. He fell asleep at 3am and woke up two hours later to this beautiful sight. It is around 250 ft in diameter with a center in standing crop. According to local residents there were severe power outages prior to the event, and even the local radio stations went out. These features are consistent with genuine crop circle events over the past twenty years.

The 33 'S' relate to a mystical number. It is the 33rd degree, the highest level of Freemasonry, and the 33 vertebrae of the spine; it is also linked with Jesus' age when crucified. The angle required to position each feature is 10.90909090º; by the conventions of geometry this gives us 1089, one of the principal dimensions of the New Jerusalem plan.

The long barrow is connected with the ancient beings who supervised the construction of this sacred landscape over 10,000 years ago; the earthwork is lined up to take in the solstice sun at its rise, and this crop circle appeared in front of its opening, sitting atop the female leye energy line, Morgana (christianized as St. Mary). Incidentally, the date of its appearance was three days after Beltane, the Celtic solar festival, presumably why this formation bears the look of the Celtic sun logos.

I have visited the Beltane Wheel twice and it is EXCEPTIONAL. Apart form being awesomely precise mathematically, it has the most wonderful feeling to it. Peaceful, tranquil, serene. Everyone to whom I have spoken feels the same. I met a young man this morning whose palms would not stop tingling when he pointed them towards the flattened crop.

This formation bears a striking resemblance to a mosaic in Fishbourne Palace, Chichester. A pilot who flew over the mound the previous evening declared the field was completely bare. At 5 am Early on the morning of Monday 4 May this enormous formation was discovered.

A colleague from the Wiltshire Group tells me that when she did a radio interview in the formation on Tuesday morning 5 May, for the local radio station, the tape speeded up so considerably that it stopped. Being accustomed to electrical failures inside formations, Francine suggested they take the tape machine outside the formation. At a distance of about 50 yards from the formation the tape machine worked perfectly. They repeated this test several times with identical results. The interview was played over the radio and sounded like gobbledegook as the tape speeded up. The interviewer who had previously been a skeptic, was so taken aback by these unexplained events, events that she has never experienced before, she is now convinced that this is a genuine phenomenon and wanted everyone to hear the strange recording!

This is not the end of the story. Later in the day, Western Television also visited the formation. Francine tells me that they were even more skeptical, pooh-poohing the whole subject and indicating that anyone who believed the formations were all other than made-made were thoroughly stupid and gullible.

Francine longed for something strange to occur that would convince them otherwise but as the time wore on and nothing untoward had happened, she felt despondent but resigned. That evening the pictures were shown on the local television with reporter coverage. However the next morning one of the members of the television technical crew telephoned Francine to say that the reason the reported coverage had been so short was due to the fact that their sound system had been so disrupted that most of the recording was unusable. He simply could not understand this, their sound equipment is of the very highest quality which would cope with any normal situation perfectly. It had never failed them before.