RICHARD GILES investigates in more detail the first circular events of 2004…


From time to time sets of crop circles have appeared in the Australian landscape and surprised local media or UFO groups and researchers. A number of reports over the last few decades have placed circles in Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland.

Perhaps the most famous were the Tully "flying saucer nests" of 1966, when a local farmer reported that he had found circle-like indentations near his cane fields in reed beds up in north Queensland. This find was accompanied by a very suitable media hoo-ha at the time, with accusations of nutters, freaks and fakes.

Other reports of circles were in wheat fields in rural Victoria and South Australia. The best known one in South Australia was reported by an airline passenger in the mid 1990s, who first spotted it from the air in CSIRO experimental grain plots right near Adelaide city.

Little has been reported in Queensland until recently. Then, late Sunday 28th March, two local boys, Eli Colbran and Tom Braby, were riding their bikes alongside a local property by Aherns Road at Conondale (near Maleny on the Sunshine Coast) and spotted a pattern in the pasture grasses. One recognised it from his memory of the UK phenomena as a typical crop circle design. They were just metres from Aherns Road but in such a position, the land being raised above the road, that it would normally never have been seen. There were four circles in all.

One cycled home to get his father who reported it to a local UFO researcher and just after sundown two local researchers with torches were combing through the grass. They took a series of flash photos and went home determined to arrive back at first light to search on Monday morning. Photos they took that night contained some intriguing images only discovered days later on the developed positives.

The patterns of the four circular flattened areas were spread over a distance of 24 metres. The first circle was 3.8 metres in circumference, the second 7.9 metres, the third 1.5 and the last 0.85 metres. They were on a close North-South axis with small variations in the centres, each circle being slightly off-centre from the next. They all had neat clockwise swirl patterns and contained grasses laid down in a classic unbroken pattern. The line of the four was arranged to point at exactly 20 degrees East of magnetic North.

Each circle had classic centres with the grass formed into a cone in the middle, again slightly off centre. In the centres, each seemed to have a very tiny raised mound of earth underneath, according to Kate Dash of Montville. Kate has travelled to England a number of times to visit UK circles and attend circle conferences.

The grass was mixed pasture grasses. The seed heads were intact and, according to local photographer and researcher Christopher White, "It doesn't appear as though it could have been trampled or squashed down".

The smoothness of the layered lines of grass within the circles were beautifully laid and interwoven. Nothing in the circles showed broken or battered stems as you would find when they are done with human intervention.

Due to job commitments I was only able to visit the site on Wednesday afternoon 31st March. The circles were still reasonably intact, but grass stems were beginning to rise and the surrounding area had been trampled by dozens of visitors over the previous two and a half days. The site still had a certain energy quality to it, but Kate Dash had told me it was nothing compared to the pristine energies on the Monday morning they first arrived.

Locals speculated that there may be some meaning to the pattern of four circles and their relative sizes may contain some meaning as yet to be deciphered. A geometric representation is shown here (see picture). The medium size came first, then a very large circle followed by the two much smaller ones at the northern end of the axis.

Two local residents living within a kilometre (two thirds of a mile) of the site who spoke to Christopher and Kate, reported seeing bright blue flashes of light at about 11 or 12 midnight on Saturday, and another spoke of a strange musical note they heard around midnight. Others told me of strange lights they had seen at night around the Conondales valley over the last few years. One woman told of a spectacular aerial light display she and her girlfriend saw late one night several years back. The valley does seem to have a history of unusual lights.

In that vein, two photos taken on the Sunday night show light anomalies in the frames. Neither lights were visible when Christopher took the photos. One photo shows a single light hovering above the ground with a slight double image. The other shows a light which appears to be moving fast, as there are five multiple images of the light overlapping each other. To do this it must have been moving incredibly quickly to be caught in a flash photo. Both lights are in the immediate foreground of the shots. Having seen both video and still footage of the lights caught in UK circles, to my eyes these look very similar.

This multiple formation is the first apparently genuine crop circle ever to be reported in southern Queensland. Kate Dash feels that it could be the forerunner of things to come that could surprise us all.

Meanwhile, local farmer Doug Sands, on whose property they appeared, maintains that they were formed by “wind whirlies”, which he says happen all the time on his place. If he has seen these and similar circles in the past it looks like his winds are mighty fine draughtsmen to arrange such beautiful and intricately woven patterns. Unfortunately he ploughed them in one week later.

We do look forward to more of the same in the future.


[Richard Giles is a Queensland astrologer, Feng Shui practitioner and geomancer who also works part time for ‘Nexus Magazine’, Australia and has read on and researched crop circles for twelve years. E-mail - ricgiles@powerup.com.au]