Text ©Lucy Pringle.

In July 1990 a flight over the crop formation fields had been planned and I was very excited at the prospect. The evening before I had been playing a ferocious game of tennis and had damaged my right shoulder so badly that later that evening I could not raise my right arm up to clean my teeth. The following morning I drove to Thruxton, nursing an extremely painful shoulder. We took off and the pain was soon forgotten as we flew over the first gigantic pictogram ever to appear, situated in East Field, Alton Barnes. Formation after formation swept beneath us in a seemingly never ending succession of beauty. Alas, all good things have to come to an end and we started our drive home. We had not gone far when my shoulder started to trouble me so badly we had to stop, and as luck would have it we pulled in to a lane beside the Morestead formation. As usual on entering, I dowsed for the Yin and Yang properties, (Chinese doctrine identifying the polarities in nature, in ourselves and everything around us) in order to assess the best place to sit. After a few minutes, I felt a tingle run through my shoulders, and yes, my shoulder was completely cured. Margaret Randall, who with my sister made up the party, also experienced remarkable healing in the formation and was able to lie flat for the first time in fifteen years. (The Crop Circle Enigma. Edited by Ralph Noyes. Gateway Books 1990)

What had happened to us and what was the cause? So started my quest to try and determine what was happening not only to people but also animals after visits to crop formations or being in their vicinity.

Diana Clift joined the team shortly afterwards and together we devised a questionnaire which has since gone out to hundreds of people. This is constantly amended according to need. We then began to explore the astonishing number of reports that started coming in. These were particularly fascinating as many were no only contradictory but contrary to expectation. Also multiple effects were often experienced within a single formation. Over the years many people have read my reports and have put the effects down to over active imaginations...that is...until they themselves have a crop circle experience. Then their attitude changes completely and they realise the value of personal experience. "What is all knowledge but recorded experience?" (Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881). I believe that the vast majority of reports come from sober minded, level headed people and as such cannot be dismissed, ignored or underrated.

In 1995 alone I had 300 reports on my data base.

The research to date can be divided into several categories, namely; physical, psychological (emotional), animal and bird behaviour, remote effects, luminosities (internal viewing), mechanical failures, audio effects.

The physical effects have been diverse. They include reports of nausea, headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, and tingling, as well as cases of short or long term healing. "The pain seeped out of my toes." "Severe migraine disappeared, then reappeared on leaving formation." "Whilst I was in the circle, the chronic pain in my left shoulder and wrist became intense and gradually my whole left arm, hand and left part of my chest became very hot. Leaving the formation and for a couple of hours later, my left arm felt slightly `paralysed`. Later in the evening the symptoms totally receded and from the next morning till several days afterwards the chronic pain disappeared." "I could lie down for the first time in fifteen years." "Extreme fatigue, head and stomach - yuk!" "Felt as though I am being pulled apart by a magnet." "Felt so sick I had to make a dash for it."

The psychological and emotional effects are no less numerous and unlike the physical section which is currently running at 60.5% unpleasant, the emotional effects are largely beneficial, 64%. These include feelings of euphoria, calmness, joy, and heightened awareness. With these time losses and mind suspension are often experienced. I have lost over an hour on occasion in crop formations and most people unless they have had an unpleasant experience will usually lose all sense of time during a visit.

On the darker side there have been several unpleasant experiences such as fear, uneasiness and sadness; " I felt bowled over, brain-washed, disturbed, irritable but elated." " All three of us found ourselves `addictively gripped. We were `enchanted` or `englamoured` in a manner which seems to resemble the experiences reported from folklore in which mortal man makes the mistake of engaging with the faery folk!" "The unease became worse, changing to foreboding, through panic to almost terror." "The feeling got worse and I felt I had to get out of the formation. It felt really claustrophobic and was quite terrifying at the time."

Not all reports come from direct exposure to the circles; these are classified as remote experiences. The most notable of these was sent to me by Barbara Berge, who after eating grain she had collected from inside a formation suffered increasingly uncomfortable effects, "The first effects were like having ingested speed, ie; high energy, sleeplessness, nervousness and loss of appetite. I felt I was flying." She did not associate these effects with the grain until she returned to the States now fully recovered, when she found some left over grains and ate them. "Within fifteen minutes the same symptoms had reappeared" and when she arrived at her workshop where she makes jewellery, the electrical equipment in the room shorted as she approached it.(The Circular. Vol 4 No 1. June 1993)

Birds and animals have also reacted in strange ways, many dogs, even the most normally placid creatures, becoming frantic the night a formation appeared. "He had almost scraped and bitten a hole right through the thick wooden door in the kitchen." Others will not enter a formation, whilst others even a year later will not walk on the spot where a formation was located the previous year. What strange energy are they sensing?

A sinister happening occurred at Wanborough in July 1994. I was called out to a simple ringed event as "it looks as though something had exploded" in the centre of the circle. I hurried over and when I got there we found an area measuring 13\14 feet radius from the centre, covered in blood, tiny feathers and minute bits of flesh, not just on the surface but penetrating every layer right to ground level. There were no bones or any distinguishable parts of the bird and the `mess` was totally different in appearance to the pile of feathers in the outer ring, clearly once belonging to a pigeon and clearly killed by a fox. Whatever had been in the centre of the circle had disintegrated with the `force` when the circle was formed. I believe the birds were already dead when it happened. There is shooting in the area and birds unlike the unfortunate Canadian porcupine which freeze when danger is about, believing their quills will protect them, (there have been several casualties, that were dragged into formations and microwaved) sense when danger is approaching and make their escape.(The Circular Vol 4:3 Issue 15 December 1993)

Lights or luminosities are often associated with crop formations and are seen either hovering, moving or stationary over a fields where the following morning a crop formation is found. Many people see little balls of light dancing inside the formation. When people report luminosities not seen by other people, it must be questioned, are they describing visual hallucinations or physical sightings? This is another area where rigid conclusions cannot be drawn. One report tells of a woman who saw "small glistening vortices, whirling around the flattened corn towards the perimeter." Could these little balls of light be ionised plasma, as suggested by Dr Levengood in his recent research?

Another account " A mass of pulsing tiny lights, shaped like a doughnut or a blood cell. It was about 3 ft across and just 1 ft high. It didn't come up to me particularly so I was surprised that no-one else seemed to notice it. As I watched I could see red streaks like tiny lightning flashes in the sky above the crop. The shaped light was orangy\white. Then it drifted off and speeded up and zoomed off over the hill. Later that day in Bristol I could see big bouncing orange balls of light following us, bouncing into people and being `absorbed` or dissipating into them!"

Noises. Just as our vision is extremely limited, so too is our hearing. However there are several sounds associated with the crop circles that fall within our range...humming, buzzing, clicking and trilling. These have been well documented and written up over the years. The most curious one I experienced was whilst we were having a meditation at the Healing Centre in Shere, where I had been giving a talk. I had put the famous Dancing Man (Michaeldever Station 1991) slide up and we were meditating on the chakras of the body, when I was disturbed by a clicking sound. Eventually I managed to ignore the noise but during the discussion session afterwards, one of the audience mentioned how difficult they had found the meditation due to the clicking! It turned out that more than 30 people had heard it. Was it a clock? No, there was no clock in the room or vicinity of the room. Was it the heating pipes! No, the heating was not in use, it was the height of summer!

Mechanical failures are frequent and include camera, video and mobile telephone malfunctions. In one case a mobile telephone failed to work whilst inside a formation, yet when held over the standing crop outside, immediately came to life. This test was repeated several times with identical results.

Model aircraft have also gone into glitches over certain formations. Again these tests have been repeated.

So what is happening in the fields? My thanks to the many people who kindly sent me reports (they are confidential unless permission to use them is given), but as yet no rigid conclusions can necessarily be drawn from the resulting figures. However certain areas clearly need further research and due to the number of instances in which people have gone into altered states of consciousness whilst visiting a formation indicated this particular area warranted further investigation. To that end over the past two years Peter Staples and Isobel Maxwell-Cade (Max Cade was a pioneer in the biofeedback technique and wrote "The Awakened Mind") have kindly lent their time, equipment and expertise and have performed E.E.G.(monitoring brain rhythms via Electro-encephalograph) and E.S.R (Electrical Skin Resistance, measuring peripheral skin resistivity) tests on volunteers, by first testing them inside a house (control tests), followed by identical tests in a crop circle. The reports have shown dramatic differences in certain people and in all cases have shown heightened right brain activity. We will be continuing with the tests this year. (The Circular. Vol 4:4 March 1994 and Vol 5:4 May 1995)

I have long believed that certain formations could have homeopathic qualities, so another area of research has been to bury 20 ml brown, glass bottles of water, (all taken from the same source) inside formations and control samples outside the formation to see if, when analyzed, there was any change in the structure of the water. At each event the bottles are all buried at the same time and collected at a later date and all removed simultaneously at that later date, depending on opportunity. As they have been buried, this test also developed into a wonderful dowsing experiment and the many people who have accompanied me and assisted me, have found to their surprise that they can dowse too! We have found over 90% of the bottles.

Subsequently great difficulties arose and the samples were not tested due to equipment failure and other problems. Was it all to be in vain? After all water is the blood of the planet and our bodies are comprised of 90% water, thus water carries great emotive meaning to the very essence of our being.

Success at last; Dr Cyril Smith (Electromagnetic Man. Health and Hazard in the Environment. W. Cyril Smith. Simon Best. Pub: Dent. 1989) kindly agreed to blind test samples using his radiesthesia technique. The preliminary results, recently received, are exciting and show a measurable difference between the control and formation samples. (The Circular Vol 5:4 May 1995). Clearly what is needed is a team of scientists who, using different methods, will test identical samples. If they all show anomalies it will be a break through. I am simply delighted and very honoured to have enlisted the help, in addition to Cyril Smith, of Dr Jacques Benveniste, the pioneer of the water memory hypothesis, also Dr Roger Talyor who is keenly interested and has done much valuable research in the field of vibrational medicine and Joan Davis. The latter will be testing the samples for bacteria in her laboratory in Switzerland.

There is a third area that given the opportunity I would like to investigate...taste. I have personally experienced a most curious taste and the closest I can come to describing it is `metallic`. It is cloying and invasive and no matter how hard I try to get rid of it, I cannot. I experience it only in the crop formations or their vicinity. Since I have mentioned this, other people have also come forward, having experienced the same sensation. In fact one experienced `croppie` uses this as a litmus test to determine whether a formation is genuine or not.

Conclusion

As yet there is no ready solution to what is happening in the fields. This is an area of research where it may never be possible to prove that any of the effects are as a result of visiting a crop formation. Maybe the beneficial ones are due to spending a relaxing day in the country, in good weather and often with agreeable companions? Maybe the adverse ones are due to tension, fear, trepidation or possibly tiredness after a long journey? It could be argued that all the results are because, the majority, even the hoaxed circles, are placed on energy lines. Research conducted in many countries, is revealing the beneficial or adverse effects of positive and negative energy lines on people and animals, even insects and trees.

Personally I do not believe that we can dismiss these results for the above reasons. Three hundred independent reports is possibly only 5% of the actual number, that for diverse reasons never reach me. This may be because many people are not members of the CCCS, nor do they read the Circular or the Cerealogist and therefore do not know where to send their reports. Others may feel embarrassed at what has happened to them, or alternatively feel it is unimportant. I would like to reassure everyone that nothing is too small or insignificant...all happenings however trivial they may seem to you, are part of this phenomenon and as such vital to this research. So please, keep sending them to me.

I would however like to issue a word of warning...if you do not feel well whilst inside a crop circle, don't hesitate, come out. If you are pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant, I would advise you not to visit a circle. This is not meant to be scary, but the fact remains that as yet we do not know what is happening and it is not worth taking risks. I would also advise any `croppies` who make regular visits to the circles, to have a yearly check-up with their doctor, including a blood test. Finally a word of advice to dowsers...it is strongly advisable to protect yourself when working. I have recently had several examples of dowsers getting into trouble for not making a conscious observance of this. Use whatever method you find comfortable and in which you have confidence.

I have been into well over 100 formations over the past 5 years and 90% of the time I feel extremely well, but on the occasions when I don't, I have to leave very quickly. That there an energy present is not contested, (as demonstrated by `exploded birds` at Wanborough) but what exactly the energy is, its strength and duration, clearly varies from formation to formation.

Is there any connection between the effects on people and animals and Dr Levengood's findings, in which he proposes that the energy originates in the microwave area of the electromagnetic spectrum? He contends that this energy, in the form of ionised plasma, results in the softening and subsequent flattening of the crops, together with several other anomalies, such as nodes expanding both laterally and vertically and seed distortions. That the force appears with tremendous speed and intensity, flattening the crop in nanoseconds, is borne out by the few reliable people who have witnessed a circle forming.

It seems to me that there is little doubt that we are dealing with microwave activity which will vary in strength; the more chaotic the energy, the greater the power, but how exactly it is affecting people and whether there are any long term effects, is yet to be resolved.