Text by Freddy Silva. Photos by Freddy Silva, Lucy Pringle.

I wish to start my appraisal of the 2003 crop circles season with a very big thank you. Thank you to the tens of thousands of you who purchased my book Secrets in the Fields. You have made it a success, and helped raise awareness of this magnificent subject. My gratitude also goes to the hundreds of you who've e-mailed best wishes and positive thoughts ­ I am touched by your notes of encouragement, particularly as the past few years have been particularly challenging for me. It is reassuring to know that the knowledge I have tried to pass along has been well received, and the information is being shared throughout our world in an effort to bring about positive change.

My sincere gratitude to you all.

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Before each season gets under way, I am often asked to predict what the ensuing crop circles will be doing. Back in March I had a feeling of absence, and I followed through, by suggesting to a few select individuals, that I expected to see very few genuine crop circles in 2003. Truth be known, I stuck my neck out and, in confidence, suggested to these people we'd see no more than three. Incredibly, they all agreed.

Time will tell just how close to reality these predictions were, yet out of all crop circles analyzed (98% of reports in Wiltshire/Hampshire), only three appeared genuine out of 81 reports from the UK. One could argue that I/we felt compelled to validate a predisposed belief, yet the evidence on the ground cannot be overlooked.

Generally speaking, a crop circle is a physical manifestation of energy ­ both electromagnetic (light) and sonic ­ and the prime motion of this energy is spiral. Crop circles are also inextricably linked with water, particularly in southern England, home to the world's deepest aquifer. Adding EM and spin to water creates an energy field, and by homeopathic rule, it only requires one 'dose' to imprint a 'message' in the water. In essence, therefore, one circle suffices when it comes to imprinting information which then travels around the Earth. And the Earth, like its human inhabitants, is composed of two-thirds water.

In my experience, the first genuine crop circle of 2003 appeared not far from the church of St. Michael at West Overton, on May 20/21 (a nice birthday present, thank you). Once again, the Circlemakers appear to have re-written the instruction manual, on this occasion by manifesting a glyph with the plants laid in exquisite fashion: they had been gently brushed over in near-vertical position. In fact, from the air it is hard to believe there was a crop circle there at all!

As the plants began to rise towards their normal, upright posture, they did so in alternate bundles; viewed from the ground they resemble a rippling, standing wave pattern on an oscilloscope.

The design itself is a series of six-petaled flowers in harmonic expansion. A number of people have attempted to draw this crop glyph using circles, yet careful observation reveals that it may in fact be constructed from a series of logarithmic and mirror-logarithmic curves ­ just as in the double rainbow, where the colours of light are refracted upside down in the mirror rainbow. This use of spirals is also consistent with the development of crop circles established over the past two years.

The only circular features present are the expanding rings that mark the intersection points of the petals, and these are defined by ratios according to the notes in the pure music scale. If one takes note C as a starting point, each ring references the notes A, B, and C.

Could this glyph - through its use of spirals and music - be demonstrating the involvement of sound and light in the process of manifesting matter? Maybe, but I was surprisedby the way that the construction of the reverse, mirror spiral requires a twist of 19.47 degrees – that strategic angle on planets where energy upwells from the centre (also the latitude degree made by the points of a tetrahedron that is contained by a sphere, a prime shape in the manifestation of matter).

The next genuine crop circle manifested around June 15 in a remote part of the Wiltshire Downs, near the town of Ogbourne St. George, and on land previously owned by the Knights Templars. As with the West Overton glyph, the plants were unusually laid: in the central circle, a central spiral motion rotated outwards in eight movements (a numerical reference to the octave), with stems barely touching the ground; in-between, the remaining plants appeared to have been gently pushed approximately 20 degrees from the vertical. It was as if someone had simply brushed their hand lightly over the young wheat.

The subtle construction method was in marked contract to the energy of the site, one the strongest my colleagues and I have experienced. The electromagnetic nature of the circles affects the human body because it, too, is electromagnetic. Likewise its brainwaves, and such sympathetic vibrations contribute to the befuddlement people experience when attempting left brain tasks in the circles, such as measuring or other logic functions. My colleagues and I required up to five visits to the site (with permission from the farmer) to complete otherwise simple tasks ­ on the first visit alone, simple measuring became progressively more difficult to carry out; we even forgot to measure the main circle.

Given that field access was heavily restricted to the site, the formation remained in near-pristine condition throughout its physical life. This enabled the plants to rise, for the most part undamaged, and with a linear, ripple effect along the formation 'floor' - they rose in alternate segments along different nodes, as with the West Overton formation. As I will discuss later on, this laying technique proved very useful in helping to distinguish from the hoaxes, and demonstrates a foreknowledge by the genuine Circlemakers.

Preliminary investigations show that this design may contain a myriad of technical information, much of it related to formative principles associated with consciousness and energy; and each of the circles' diameters relate to the diatonic music scale.

The aerial pictures of this pattern can be misleading to the eye: angles are not what they appear, for when double-checking alignments on the ground, subtleties reveal themselves that cannot be clearly observed from the air. In fact this design reveals many secrets, and what it doesn't show is perhaps the key in its decipherment. To many, this design is based on eight-fold geometry, and yet minute discrepancies show it is not. It is in these subtleties where much of the encoded information lies. This will require months of work and observation, hence I do not wish to be specific at this stage, merely state the possibilities present.

One thing I noticed while standing in the centre of the formation was the way it was strategically aligned to the local sacred site at 19 - 20 degrees magnetic. Again, it is known that on most planets in the solar system, 19.47 degrees marks the spot where energy upwells, and it is not by accident that reminders of this strategic angle keep popping up in the designs, in one way or another.

On one occasion, up to twenty balls of light were filmed one afternoon, flying in and around this formation. Like many similar cases, they appear to have been golf-ball size, and some flew out and up into the sky at incredible speed.

Thirty three days after the first genuine crop circle, the season appears to have completed when, on 22nd June, a series of lunar crescents appeared below the group of tumuli on Windmill Hill.

The simple arrangement is reminiscent of earlier designs bearing three- and six-fold geometry, each encoding hitherto unknown mathematical theorems. While this pentagram-based design lacked the definition of its predecessors (possibly due to its appearance in barley) the encoded geometry shows a series of nested pentagrams in outward expansion. Its position -­ on the 8000 year-old ceremonial site of Windmill Hill ­ certainly added to the sense of place, while its energy field was felt by many as soothing, and certainly in marked contrast to the two previous glyphs.

Thus concludes 2003, with an estimated three genuine crop circles. As I illustrated earlier, don't let this small number seem insignificant, for it only takes one to imprint the message onto the Earth's energy grid.

At one point in the season, international reports of crop circles ­ particularly from the USA and Canada ­ began out-pacing those from the UK, helped to a degree by the surge of interest in the phenomenon overseas. Copycats of the movie Signs aside, a number of reports appear to have merit: an orderly design appeared along the alignment of Serpent Mound, a Neolithic sacred site in Ohio; there were several reports near the San Francisco Bay Area (predictably followed by the kind of cynical spin in the media one usually sees in Britain), and one notable event in Wisconsin which was eyewitnessed by the farmer himself. A detailed field report by a colleague from Michigan, Jeffrey Wilson, suggests this to be a genuine event. (read the full report at this link)

At the time of writing, 44 reports have been submitted from overseas.

As a fitting end to the year, I wish to pay tribute to the late Gerald Hawkins, who passed away on May 26. Astronomer, mathematician, author, and friend, Gerald wrote the ground-breaking Stonehenge Decoded, helping us in the modern era to understand some of the many true functions behind one of the world's most enigmatic monuments. Gerald's pioneering work and vision were held in great esteem by many throughout the world, particularly in the halls of academia. His contribution to the understanding of crop circles remains one of the cornerstones of the phenomenon, given how he extracted from them five new theorems, all based on Euclidean logic.

To date, this work has held up to academic scrutiny, and hoaxers, in they dogmatic attempt to pull the wool over the public's eyes, shy away from discussing his work. However, this did not prevent the writer of Gerald's obituary for The Independent newspaper (UK) from adding his personal slant, saying how Gerald had thought crop circles to be man-made (he never did, in fact quite the contrary), and adding that crop circles were all made by people with boards and string. Just why a newspaper's staff writer would add such a personal slander to an otherwise exemplary obituary is a mystery, but it does show how the debunking machine is alive and well, and how much easier it is to destroy credibility when the individual has no right of reply. Or perhaps Gerald himself will do so next season! In any case, a written complaint to the newspaper was met with typical silence.