The Face in the Fields

U.K. Cropcircle investigator Lucy Pringle, who creates our beautiful crop circle calendars and postcards, talks about her research of the Face and Computer Disk crop circle, which was the most controversial circle of the recent season. She writes:

It all started late on Thursday evening when I received an email sent at 8pm, August 15th, alerting me to the fact there was a formation in a field east of Winchester just off Sarum Road. The man told me had entered the formation and had judged it to be about 300 feet in length. I immediately researcher Paul Vigay click here who put the location up on his website. The farm where the circle appeared is owned by Mike Burge, who graciously allowed entry to this formation and agreed to keep it unharvested. The formation was located at Crabwood, 8 miles from Chilbolton, where the famous Arecibo message and Face appeared beneath the radio telescope in August 2001.

Like many places in England, the history of Crabbewood (Crabapple Wood) dates back to Roman times and before. There is evidence of occupation dating back to between 12,000-550BC and 100AD. Part of the Roman road, Sarum Road, runs alongside the field that contained the Alien formation. Old Sarum lies high above Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire overlooking the ancient city of Salisbury. It is an huge hill fort, originally named Sorviadum (the fortress by the gentle river) by the Celts. It was later occupied by the Romans, and in Saxon times a town grew up within the prehistoric ramparts, that defended the local people against attack from the marauding Vikings. The settlement consisted of a castle, palace and cathedral all built inside the earthwork. Winchester was the capital of England from 495 to 1068AD. Its history is also linked to the celebrated King Arthur and his knights.

On Friday, August 16th, a woman telephoned the Ocean FM radio station to report a crop formation that was clearly visible from Sarum Road. This was broadcast at 9am. I made a close examination and spoke to the farmer, Mike Burge and we agreed that this field couldnt be seen from any road. It is completely hidden and lies beneath the radio towers at Crabwood.

It has since transpired that a woman riding her horse along the top of the field below the radio towers saw the formation and telephoned the radio station. Traffic reporter Pippa Head, while flying over her area, was notified of this formation by a link from the radio station to her single engine Piper Warrior aircraft and was asked to investigate. She confirmed that this formation was present and sent back a report. She was the first person to see the formation from the air.

Mary Hill, who lives in one of the farmhouses beyond the bottom of the field, reported that either a helicopter or generator was heard making a loud noise in or above the field between 12:30 and 1:30am on the morning of Thursday, August 15th. She had gone to bed about midnight and was about to go to sleep, when she heard a throbbing sound which came closer and closer and then appeared to hover, the noise continuing in-between 10-20 minutes. (Note: This is a commonly described sound of UFOs, except when theyre silentwhich is most of the time).

Stephen Short was in the field on the night of August 21st and fell into conversation with 3 young middle-aged women who were staying at the campsite the other side of the radio towers. They reported that during the night of Thursday August 15th, they had witnessed an amazing display of dancing lights over the field which kept darting about, spiraling down to the ground and then back up again; then going round in circles, then down and coming back up again before disappearing like a shooting star.

On Sunday, August 25th, I got a telephone call from Marie Wakelam whose house borders the Crabwood field. She had just returned from visiting the formation and had fallen into conversation with a family who had shown her stalks of wheat taken from inside the formation that were slightly singed and blackened. Marie thought this was curious as at about 11-11.30pm on the evening of Thursday, August 15th, she had been surprised to smell a strong smell of burning, like a bonfire coming from the field.

I flew over the field on Friday, August 16th, and neither the pilot nor I could work out the meaning of the formation there appeared to be no coherent shape that we could decipher. But having flown over the face at Chilbolton last year, I said to the pilot that we would just have to do the best we could and hope that something intelligible would come out of the roll of film. Geoff Knight rushed through the development and printing of the film and this, much to my amazement, is what we saw, click here and scroll down and click here and scroll down.

Mike Burge kindly opened the field to all those who wished to visit it. On Saturday, August 17th, two friends accompanied me and as we entered the formation at the top of the head, we all felt dizzy and our heads were throbbing. We hastily moved away from that position and the sensations diminished until by the bottom of the formation, they had disappeared completely. This could be due to the frequencies given off by the radio tower and indeed while filming one day with a Mexican team, the pulsing noise was so great in the headphones we had to move to the bottom of the formation away from the towers before recording became possible.

The lay in the “Alien” was one I had seen only once before, in the Chilbolton “Face” of 2001; it seemed as though the flattened, swirled crop around each standing tuft had been laid individuallya task that would surely be beyond the ability of man during the short hours of darkness at this time of year. None of the stalks were broken in either formation; they were bent at the base. Whether the origin of the formation is of man or of a complex energy as yet unknown to man, it is most impressive in every respect. It would appear that, if man-made, a technology was used that is unknown to all but a few selected people.

In the photographs, the formation appears in the positive, while previously, apart from the 2001 Chilboton event, the large majority of events have been in the negative (i.e. in this instance, the standing crop has determined the pattern rather than the fallen crop). It is the subtle shadowing of the standing wheat that creates the image of the face. Another similar aspect is that the meaning of this formation is completely unambiguous. It is the face of an extraterrestrial, no more, no less; there is no other possible interpretation.

One noticeable aspect of the disk was that there was no evidence of a single seed head missing from any of the standing clumps of wheat inside the circular shape. In order to construct a circle, it is likely that a person would stand at a central point holding a rope and his accomplice would hold the other end of the rope while walking around the perimeter of the circle. In ripened crop, when the seed heads are heavy and hanging down against the stem, they are very fragile and any movement of a tightened rope stretching across the standing wheat will catch against the seed heads, flicking them off as it passes. I examined the circular dish minutely and did not find a single wheat stalk with a missing head.

On Tuesday, August 20th, I returned to the field to interview Mike Burge and the tractor driver Sid Colles. Sid Colles told me that on Wednesday, August 14, at 1pm, he had gone into top of the field where the head of the alien was and he saw the edge of the frame and a few of the grid lines going across.

Tuesday, August 20 was the first time he had been back to the field since Wednesday, August 14. I asked him to retrace his steps of the previous week exactly and when he entered the top of the formation, he was amazed to see a large flattened area to his right that had not been there on his first visit. He then continued to walk down the right hand side as he done before and once again was amazed to see a complex circle where originally the line had stopped. He assured me that he could not possibly have missed seeing the additional elements of the formation if they had been there on his first visit. Both he and the farmer are of the opinion that this enormous and complex design, measuring some 300 feet x 200 feet, could not have been made overnight but both are still skeptical about the origins of the formation.

It would appear that the tufts of standing crop inside the circular element (the computer disk) are not random. Binary is the language used by NASA when trying to communicate with other intelligences; it is also the basic language used by computers. In order to convert binary into our alphabet, a code called the ASC11 set was developed by the ANSI (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) in the 1960’s.

Paul Vigay and Eltjo Haselhoff, author of The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles,click here have found that the circular dish contains a code that consists of binary. By using the ASC11 character set which consist of 128 characters and translating the binary digits and sequences into their decimal equivalent and then looking up them up in the ASC11 character set in order to see which letters they correspond to, they arrived at the following decoding: “Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. (Damaged word). There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING (BELL SOUND).”

When trying to communicate with external intelligences, we have always used universal symbols such as were encoded into the Arecebo message, giving such basic information as the numbers 1-10, the atomic numbers needed for life on earth, such as Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Oxygen. The message also included our DNA structure, the population on planet Earth in 1974 and our solar system. Paul suggests that if this formation is genuine, we could be dealing with an intelligence far more advanced than previously imagined; an intelligence which is able to bypass universal symbols and interact directly, using our language. In contrast to this possibly advanced level of interaction with our planet, I am disappointed in the content of the message which does not seem to me to be commensurate with a higher intellect.

One question is: is there an interactive process occurring between the circle making force and the microwave frequencies given off by the radio towers that plays a vital part in the formation of these images Also, in all the photographs, the Alien appears to be of a sinister appearance and if man made one wonders why it was depicted in this mode. Over the years the powers that be have not, despite all their efforts, succeeded in their quest to destroy the appeal of this phenomenon by ridicule or by producing trumped-up people, such as Doug and Dave. Maybe to plant fear in the minds of people could be their new line of disinformation

The media interest in the Crabwood formation has been intense and extraordinary. People have traveled from all ends of the earth to visit this formation. Many of us have been interviewed by TV producers from the BBC, Mexico, America and Slovenia. Jaimie Maussan from Mexico traveled 5,000 miles to see the formation in person. Investigators from Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain and many other European countries were among the throngs of fascinated people crowding into this event.

To access Lucy Pringle’s website, click here.

NOTE: This Insight, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.