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Cheesefoot Head and the First Crop Circles

added03 September 20261978

Circles in wheat began appearing in Hampshire and Wiltshire in the late seventies; they were explained by plasma vortices, landing craft and earth energies, and by the end of the eighties scientists and television crews were driving out to the fields. On 9 September 1991 the newspaper Today printed the confession of two pensioners from Southampton, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley: they had been making the circles at night since 1978, starting near Cheesefoot Head, where Bower had bet in a pub that he could cause a commotion. The tool was a plank on a rope pulled with the foot, and a wire sight on a cap to keep the line straight. In front of reporters they made a circle that the leading researcher Pat Delgado immediately pronounced genuine.

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Crop circle — Wikipedia

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Helen Duncan and the Last Witchcraft Trial

The Scottish medium Helen Duncan produced ectoplasm from her mouth, out of which the shapes of the dead were formed. In 1931 Harry Price obtained a sample after a London sitting: cheesecloth stitched to paper and stiffened with egg white. On 19 January 1944 police arrested her in the middle of a séance in Portsmouth — above the naval port preparing for the Normandy landings, where she had been telling relatives that a ship was lost before the Admiralty said so. She was tried at the Old Bailey under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, for pretending to call up spirits, and given nine months. It was the last conviction under that Act in British history; the Act itself was repealed in 1951.

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Stonehenge

Stonehenge is a world-renowned prehistoric megalithic monument situated on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, southern England. Constructed between 3000 and 1500 BC, the earthwork and stone circle complex consists of an outer ring and inner horseshoe of massive sarsen silcrete monoliths joined by lintels via tongue-and-groove and mortise-and-tenon joints, along with smaller volcanic bluestones. Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it remains the ultimate archaeological icon of the British Isles, historically enveloped in folklore involving Celtic druids, the wizardry of Merlin, extraterrestrial beacons, and modern conspiratorial "1954 construction" hoaxes.

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Silbury Hill and the Fields Around It

The largest man-made mound in prehistoric Europe — forty metres of earth raised around 2400 BC. Why is unknown: excavation inside found nothing. In this subject it is known for something else: the fields around Silbury and neighbouring Avebury have produced more crop circles since the 1980s than anywhere else on earth. The figures appear overnight, sometimes a hundred metres across, sometimes mathematically elaborate. In 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley demonstrated how they had been making circles with planks and rope since 1978, and the question of origin largely closed. The circles still appear every summer — made openly now, with some of the makers known by name.

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