Our very own web columnist Michael Glickman features heavily in the latest issue of the Fortean Times, in yet another tirade against crop circles…


In its now traditional and very un-Fortean style of debunking (though they deny debunking is their business, of course), the current issue of Fortean Times (FT 148, July 2001) features an article by Peter Brookesmith entitled ‘War of the Words’, which purports to be a balanced piece about the polarisation between ‘Sceptics’ and ‘Believers’. It is, in fact, actually subtitled ‘Sceptics vs Believer: Round 1’.

In the course of this, crop circles naturally pop up as a prime example of such polarisation, but FT’s idea of ‘balance’ appears simply to be another opportunity to knock people’s belief in the phenomenon and spread the usual unfounded hoaxing myths.

Michael Glickman is presented as an extreme example of the ‘Believer’ camp and is liberally quoted from articles published elsewhere, while the likes of John Lundberg (from the alleged circlemaking group ‘Team Satan’) fill the other camp.

During the course of this attempt to belittle Glickman’s personal convictions, we have to suffer the reinforcement of long-discredited hoax claims, such as the ‘fact’ that the Bythorn mandala 1993 was made by one lone individual who took photos of the formation in its different stages to prove his authorship. The truth is, of course, that no such convincing evidence has ever come forward – the two photos in question, taken at a uselessly oblique angle (why not take them inside?) from a nearby road were so blurry and indistinguishable from one another that even ‘The Cereologist’ magazine accidentally printed the same photo twice at the time.

Team Satan’s alleged creation of the 1999 Daily Mail triangular formation is cited as an example of how believers will never look at evidence, and the Oliver’s Castle video controversy is also raked over briefly, while Glickers’s views are presented as confirmation of the croppie madness we all allegedly suffer from.

Buy it for the record if you must, but approach with caution.