The world’s largest annual international crop circle conference, ‘The Glastonbury Symposium: Investigating Crop Circles and Signs of our Times’, took place in July to great success and hundreds of attenders in its new larger and classier venue at Glastonbury Town Hall. BARBARA WADDELL looks at the themes and threads which bound the weekend together…


Most of us who click onto this website probably believe that the crop circles are a message of some kind. We’re just not sure what the message is. To use Michael Glickman’s nice distinction at the Twelfth Glastonbury Symposium, held on 19-21 July 2002, I believe that a message is not necessarily a communication. A message, said Michael, is something like “I’m on my way, turn the oven on”, while “having our hair stroked” is an example of communication. A communication turns US on. And perhaps the oven message might be code for a communication to follow…

In those terms, I see each crop circle as a coded message which – since we create our own experience of reality – we may or may not choose to take on board and may or may not come to appreciate as a communication until months or even years later, when our consciousness has expanded sufficiently to realise it. This year’s Symposium audience seemed more or less of one mind in having got the message that would make them ready now or later to receive a meaningful communication. I mean, there was no talk of purely material explanations, no heated arguments from the floor – or at floor level during breaks, at least none that I heard! – and little reference from the platform to hoaxers or even defence against character assassination by former believers…

Palden Jenkins – in splendid form as our tour guide on one of the pre-Symposium coach trips to recent crop formations (he also performed a guided tour of Glastonbury itself on the Wednesday) – called himself an unrepentant believer in crop circles as having significance, so anyone who had some materialist explanation for the phenomenon was regrettably on the wrong coach! Since we gave him an enthusiastic hand at the end, it would seem that we were on the coach that was right for us.

Across the weekend, then, in its new and sumptuous venue which immediately felt like home, with colourful banners and mood lighting splashed across the hall, we were treated to a wide selection of speakers, many of whom created threads of continuity that bound the event together.

Mark Haywood told us of ‘conversations with the Circlemakers’, based on the many coincidences that arose concerning the first major crop circle to be recorded in the UK Midlands – which his group had asked the circlemakers to provide during a meditation.

Andreas Müller, reporting on formations in Germany (where they have had a record number so far this year), similarly said “We ask for a crop circle, accompanying it with a wish.” He indicated that there they ALWAYS appear in sacred landscapes (ie. near ancient sites), and that their design invariably reflects the geometrical Golden Section.

Michael Glickman, the master of sacred geometry in the crops, revealed new depths to the geometric patterns, which are surely the way in which the communication enters our subconscious. I think this happens to me personally more from the aerial photographs than from standing in the crop. Steve Alexander supplied the opportunity to let that happen with his now traditional photo gallery of the year’s formations, set to music.

Steve’s photography features in William Gazecki’s film, ‘Crop Circles: Quest for Truth’, of which we were given a special preview. Well, we saw the first 45 minutes, which are excellent, comprising interviews with the main figures in the croppie world (I counted 17 in what we saw alone), who all expressed a constructive idea of the phenomenon, even though their views may have fluctuated over the years. The director would have been with us in person but, this not being possible due to last minute editing deadlines, he recorded a message – sorry, a communication – specially for the Symposium. His intention for the film was to redress the balance after so many years of negative reporting, and to show it all over the world. This will enable many more people than can visit them to be exposed to the positive effect of the formations. And, as Palden told us, the number who do visit is more than we might think: many thousands visited the large formation by Stonehenge in 1996.

Andy Thomas’s Saturday morning presentation on ‘World War Three and Other Non-Events’ was not ABOUT crop circles so much as inspired BY them. “We have to address serious issues,” he said. But even so Andy had a bit of fun (fully acknowledging the influence of cartoonist Brett Parrott) with two aliens in boiler suits wearing masks of the Chilbolton ‘face’ formation, one of them unrolling a large copy of the accompanying Chilbolton ‘code’ as a strip looking like a doormat: “We have come about the rugs your planet has been advertising.” Sending the aliens on their way, this interruption was making the point that we have to be careful not to make presumptions – how can we be sure we have got the right message?

Andy went on to say that an important issue right now is the spreading of fear in the world. It has being deliberately stirred since 11 Sep 01 and that spreading of fear is not a conspiracy – it is open policy, blatant. We have also been deliberately fed false information, such as the television clip purporting to be Arabs celebrating the killing of people in the twin towers, but which was actually archive footage from the Gulf War. Governments, he said, have not tried to understand what led to the event of 11 Sep 01, but instead have talked of a necessary war on terrorism and used this to justify totalitarian laws we would not have stood for 18 months ago. Plans to invade Afghanistan were already three months old by September 2001 and it is now certain that a war against Iraq was already on the agenda. But there are other options.

Random Event Generators [machines which produce random streams of 1s and 0s, but which have been shown can be influenced into structured sequences by the human mind] placed around the world as part of the Global Consciousness Project registered a surge of non-random number sequences three hours before the attack on the twin towers, showing that at a certain level we collectively foresaw the event. (These REGs, as I understand it, take advantage of ‘non-locality’ to register focussed attention of human consciousness all over the planet.) This demonstrates not only that consciousness can affect machines – but that we know more than we think we know and our collective response not only registers events, but demonstrates a combined energy enough to exercise a power over them. It therefore becomes possible to realise that, by taking individual responsibility for what we think, we can collectively withhold, say, consent to war with Iraq. “This is the key to turning this planet into a place we want it to be”, said Andy, though he also acknowledged there are practical things to deal with too, such as the Arms trade. “Don’t use the collective consciousness as simply an abstract concept – it is the key to putting events right.”

It is to Lynne McTaggart’s book ‘The Field’ that I owe my (very slender) lay understanding of REGs. That book describes, in terms even I can follow, the ‘Zero Point Field’, an invisible energy field which can loosely be described as a replacement of the concept of the ether – space is not empty. “It is a sub-atomic hive of activity with more energy than all matter in the world,” she told us at the Symposium.

In her presentation, Lynne said that in the course of her medical research she discovered that alternative support works. So the body must be operating a dialogue with the space around it and all the other people. Everything we have been told about biology, physics, etc. is therefore incorrect. Darwin was wrong. Various experiments around the world, each giving a new insight into a part, would add up to a completely new view of the world as a whole. So she added them up – enabled by the realization that the Field permeates everything, holding everything together. “I was discovering that we have control. This science will give us back a sense of hope.”

So let’s not give the control back to “the secret rulers of the world”, the subject of Jon Ronson’s [author of a book on conspiracy theorists] pitch, by thinking about them. You get what you concentrate on, so, as Andy says, let us concentrate on the planet as the place we want it to be.

The evidence supplied by REGs was also touched upon by Jim Lyons, talking on ‘Crop Circles and Consciousness’ – which really was the underlying theme of the weekend. But also, “Let’s come back to the old ideas”, he said. Numbers that appear in crop circle geometry were in the stone circles 9000 years ago. The basic numbers of Chaos are found at Giza. Mind is the connection between General Relativity and Quantum theories.

Robert Temple, demonstrating his determination to explore the ideas implicit in the ancient site of the ‘Oracle of the Dead’, was also going back to old ideas of consciousness. As was Isaac Tapeiro, indicating the significance for him of the Kaballah. John Anthony West also added new material in support of his theories of a very different consciousness in a more Ancient Egypt than orthodox Egyptologists allow for. In their architecture of visual harmony, each temple was consecrated to a principle, expressed as a god. “Science,” he opined, “doesn’t deal with principles” – though he also said that the cosmological scene in a temple was put in a way that would be understood by modern scientists. Perhaps he was thinking along similar lines to Allan Brown who, talking about ‘Crop Circles and the Geometry of Creation’, referred to seeking a union of the polarities of thought – spirit first AND matter first.

Crop circles are a modern-day opportunity to get in touch with the same principles expressed in 13-14C cathedrals or the temples in Egypt, said Karen Douglas. Just by looking at them, we are following the human mind.

And just by looking at Robert Byrne’s manipulation of objects – conversation with them, he calls it – to demonstrate the mathematics of ‘inversion’, we could see something of the geometry of living forms. “The objects are nothing – it is the process, the flow, the inversion.” This reminds me of what Michael Glickman called the fourth universal law: “Everything changes. We are emerging from the era when only one reality was available. Now we have several possibilities that are all right.”

As Stanley Messenger said during his ‘spiritual musings’, “We are moving into an area of consciousness in which something becomes something else.” “It is the end of the 25,000 years of the planetary cycle. The moment humanity has not experienced before… Crossing the threshold, you have to change the point from which you experience this universe.”

Hamish Miller and Newell Fisher described journeys they had made, Newell wanting to walk sacred space across the English landscape as a kind of pilgrimage, Hamish following the energy line from St Michael’s Mount to Jerusalem, showing how his dowsing of the energies registered a change as he progressed.

Rings obviously feature strongly in crop formations. We learned from Sir Laurence Gardner a vast amount about the myths and legends involving the symbol of the ring in our consciousness.

Geoff Stray gave us a fantastically detailed update on his previous Symposium presentation, showing how the end of various ancient calendars at the same moment in 2012 reflected a knowledge of astronomy and – somehow – the birth of planetary consciousness. Something was “changing the laws of physics or changing our perception of the laws of physics.” There was a correlation of increased incidence of solar activity, earthquakes and volcanoes. He then claimed my full attention by saying that ghost activity correlates with the geomagnetic activity of the sun. A friend of his had worn a magnetic headbelt over a period – and saw a ghost figure which became more obvious as he thus trained his pineal gland. Fault lines help – and sacred sites! Well, I’ll give it a whirl!

As a past-life regressionist and UFO enthusiast with 16 years’ experience, Dolores Cannon (the after-dinner speaker at the end of the Symposium) does not see beings from other dimensions. Nor does she channel them. She has conversations with them when they channel via her regression therapy clients and reveal that they are apparently friendly and co-operative. In her book ‘The Convoluted Universe’, they tell us how their normal communication involves transferring whole blocks of information from mind to mind. When she asked about crop circles, she was told that it was the same thing: the symbol transfers a whole block of information into the mind. It is not being done by the people on the spacecraft, it is the beings in the other dimensions.

What I so much like about Dolores’ work is that she explores the ET viewpoint – they trust her not to censor what they say – and then travels the globe to convey this to as many people as possible, so that a relationship can develop between us and them. This addresses the problem highlighted by US journalist Michael Miley at the beginning of the weekend, that we do not understand UFOs because we do not understand ourselves. Mind you, some of us don’t really want to KNOW there are other beings out there, some of whom are more advanced than we are, some of whom may be responsible for some of the crop circles. For, as Palden says, “the search for answers is a neurotic occupation”. We are hooked on the search and, if someone seems to know the answers, we are immediately suspicious because we feel more comfortable believing in our own uncertainty.

To quote the channelled entity Seth (to whom Stanley Messenger briefly referred):

“There are those who make a practice of seeking aid from others, using this is a means of avoiding responsibility… You must begin to trust yourself sometime. I suggest you do it now. If you do not, then you will forever be looking to others to prove your own merit to you, and you will never be satisfied. You will always be asking others what to do, at the same time resenting those from whom you seek such aid….
“You will find yourself exaggerating the negative aspects of your life.… Make no divisions between the physical and the spiritual in your lifetimes, for the spiritual speaks with a physical voice and the corporeal body is the creation of the spirit.
“Do not place the words of gurus, ministers, priests, scientists, psychologists, friends – or MY words – higher than the feelings of your own being. You can learn much from others, but the deepest knowledge must come from within yourself.”

This is similar to what Dolores said when asked how she could evaluate the different stories about UFOs. “Think for yourself: Don’t believe what I say totally, don’t give up your power to anyone. If it makes sense, then believe it.”


More photos and reactions to the Glastonbury Symposium will soon be available on the official Symposium website at:

www.glastonburysymposium.co.uk