Photos by Andrea Felliziani, Andrew King, Lucy Pringle, David Russell, Freddy Silva and Russell Stannard.

After last year's crop circles, I had a gut feeling this year we'd be seeing very, very few genuine designs, less than a dozen in fact; I also felt that there would be a general move towards expressions based on spirals.

Whether my feeling was correct or not, the fact remains that out of nearly 100 crop circles this year, less than a dozen struck me with awe; and the vast majority of those I was fortunate enough to examine at ground level throughout Wiltshire did not meet what are, for me, the signs of authenticity. But that's my opinion. However, the spiral designs certainly made a very dramatic entrance. Or should that be en-trance?

Spiral motion is the essence of manifestation. It is a fundamental movement that gives rise to our physical world. And yet it is also a translator from one form to another, from one dimension to another. Alter the properties of spin and it may be possible to permit the flow of energy from the vacuum of space and into our physical space. And back. When two spirals are balanced, and complementary opposites of energy are balanced, we get dinergic spirals. This balancing act of nature was seen in 2-D early this season at Sompting (above).

Later, a more complex set of dinergic spirals appeared at West Overton. The sheer beauty and precision of this pattern could be appreciated not just from the air but also on the ground, for each spiral begins at each 'ball' and not, as would seem logical, at the centre. Here, two swirl motions working in separate directions create two 'eyes' and generate the walls of each 'ball'. The crop then flows inwards and along the path that eventually forms the inward-flowing spirals. At the centre of the design, the meeting of the two spirals was marked by an area of plants that had been boiled from the inside, as evidenced by charring on the stalks. Interestingly, each 'ball' registered opposite polarities; the central circle (in actuality an ellipse) generated a perfect still point of energy.

Geometrically, the diameter of each 'ball' was exactly 8º from the centre, or 4º at each 'eye' - a possible reminder that the Earth's magnetic field appears to shift 4º within crop circles. The entire design is referenced within 36-fold geometry, one tenth the circumference of a circle. 36 is the sum of the integers from 1 to 8, and ironically, 8 represents balance, just as eight points define the corners of a cube - the symbol of matter. And matter is generated through the spiral motion of energy.

This creative energy of organic growth, harmonizing opposite polarities in perfect equilibrium, is found in one of the most important elements within living cell structures ­ blood corpuscles ­ which group themselves in double spiral patterns resembling the West Overton crop glyph.

The theme appears to have developed further in a large glyph which appeared a mile from Stonehenge, at Normanton Down (above). Framed within a cove of eleven tumuli, this unfolding hexagonal pattern resembles ribbons fluttering in a wind, yet its apparent spiral motion is actually a series of simple, interlocking crescents. The design appears to be symbolic of the unfolding, ribbon-like 3-D structure of a molecule, as seen through X-ray crystallography. It is interesting that the geometric array of crystalline structures is typically hexagonal; the hexagon is also the 2-D model of inverted tetrahedra, a prime bonding pattern of matter.

Taking this idea further, the Normanton crop glyph and its hexagonal framework neatly fits into an octahedron, the third of the Platonic solids (right). Again, the references to matter abound.

The Normanton glyph registered EM readings in the very high MHz range; many people, including the farmer and his wife, felt a strong heating and tingling sensation on their bodies upon entering the field, and scores of people including myself felt dizzy, disoriented, and fatigued, some for the best part of a week. This is all rather intriguing because I had an uneasy feling that this design may well have very human origins – especially the way it has been force-fitted into group of tumuli, extremely simple geometry, and a meeting with a local landowner suggested he was well aware that the design had been done in covert operation barely a mile from Stonehenge.

However, similar readings and feelings were experienced at the crop circle in Alton Barnes (below, right), and this time I had no doubt that this was the real phenomenon. I wondered whether a connection existed between the two patterns. The folded 'knot' design suggests the opposite of the unfolded ribbon design, or put another way, the Normanton glyph's 'molecule' in a bonded state. This 'rope' effect is also suggestive of the spiral movement of water, and water is a mysterious substance in itself. For example, the wake produced by an object in water is 19.47º; this is similarly the angle of energy upwelling on many planets in our solar system. Curiously, one of the magnetic (geodetic) energy lines upon which this glyph appeared came from the local Neolithic long barrow of Adam's Grave, which lies 19.5º north of this crop circle.

As with the geometry of the aforementioned spiral glyph at West Overton, the Alton Barnes glyph features 36 elements. And from the research of my colleague, Paul Vigay, each of the three diminishing 'squares' are in a ratio of two-thirds. This ratio has important relationships to matter: both the Earth and the human body are two-thirds water, and water is vital to life; two-thirds also marks the point of energy transredimensioning in our solar system.

And so we come to one of the most evocative, most graceful of patterns: the Pewsey 'shells' (above). This elegant glyph appeared in a part of the Pewsey Vale that is, historically, not a haven for crop circles, and a few fields across from my UK home. As a matter of synchronicity, the glyph appeared two days after the publishing of my book, and almost exactly a year to the day when a simple circle also appeared at the same location (on the very day my book had been accepted for publishing). So, someone out there is reading my mind. Or my mail.

The shell, of course, is a symbolic expression of life ­ the creative interplay of light, gravity and sound (this shell also resembles the cochlea in the human ear). As such, the radius from the centre of the large shell to its tip and the radius to the little shell are in a ratio of two-thirds. There's more: the size ratio between the two shells is exactly one tenth ­ the same increment bound in the geometry of the West Overton spiral!

The design, its angles and its dimensions also encode references to other formative principles. For example, 11.060606, the sunspot cycle (the Sun being our biggest local distributor of hydrogen, the most abundant element and part of the water molecule); the glyphs' 29 lines reference the leap lunar month and, numerically, the bones in the human skull; and the angle of the shell is 39º magnetic – or twice 19.5º.

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