It has been realised – after the event – that the famous formation of 1995 actually showed the inner planets of our solar system in the exact positions for 3-4 June 2004, just a few days before the well-publicised Venus transit, not 6 April 2004 as originally thought. ANDY THOMAS reports on this unexpected revelation…


The famous formation which appeared at Longwood Warren, Hampshire on 26 June 1995, apparently displaying a diagram of our inner solar system with all the relevant planets marked except the Earth, has been revealed as co-inciding with a date just a few days before the Venus transit of 8 June this year, in which that planet was seen to cross the face of the Sun, a very rare occurrence.

It was already known from the work of astronomer Jack Sullivan (originally published in ‘SC’ journal, issue 84, May/June 1999) that the planetary positions shown in the formation fell into place every few years or so, with the first match on 16 January 1998. Placing the Earth back on the map for that date showed us sitting next to Venus, in ‘inferior conjunction’. Jack had calculated that the next match on was 6 April 2004, but he now acknowledges that for that date he made an error – instead, the cerealogical star map shows 3-4 June 2004.

The error came to light when we at Swirled News received a communication from Alvaro Garay, who wrote:


“I was reading your article about the Longwood Warren crop circle, and while I was looking at the picture I used an astronomy software I have called ‘Starry Night’, and I could see that one alignment is going to happen on 3 June 2004 exactly as the one in the crop circle.”


We contacted Jack Sullivan for his response to the discrepancy between this and his 6 April date, and he replied:

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“Further to our talk this morning, I have looked at ‘SC’ journal for May/June 1999 and yes indeed I did give a date of 6 April 2004 for a repeat of the field pattern, but with qualifications. This date is an error and it came about because the computer program ‘Red Shift 3’ uses an unusual form of dating ie. month/day/year [the standard US way of showing dates; see also letter in our recent Feedback on this issue – Ed]. On the screen I had the figures 06/04/2004, which, unless converted to our usual English dating, read as 6 April 2004. I am normally fully aware of this need to convert but obviously overlooked it when writing the ‘SC’ article. When the conversion is done we get 04/06/2004, ie. 4 June 2004, only one day from Alvaro Garay's discovery.

So I had, after all, considered this event back in 1999, but messed up my reference!

Regarding the event itself: The positions of the planets Mars, Mercury and Venus on both 3rd and 4th of June were virtually identical to those shown in the Longwood field formation. However, Venus was five days away from its true conjunction with Earth and its rare transit of the Sun. In those five days the angular relationships between Mars, Mercury and Venus changed considerably from the picture we were given in the original field formation and could not be matched to the actual Venus transit.”

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So, the crop formation, for reasons of its own, was apparently showing us the positions of the inner planets just four days before the much-publicised Venus transit – not the actual transit itself. With this, and all the other astronomical formations (see past Swirled News features) which have predicted dates by using star and planetary positions, once again we are left with a cryptic puzzle and a unknown motivation, but a breathtaking accuracy and ambition…

If anyone knows of anything of celestial significance which occurred on 3-4 June this year, we would be interested to hear from you.