It could get exciting in England next summer. Last summer, out of the blue, a £100,000 ($158,899 today) Challenge was offered for duplicating one of the best circles ever. But, the requirements weren’t clear and that could be why no one applied. This coming summer, a revised version will be offered with requirements that could be met if the best crop circles indeed were made by people. So, there would be no reason, if hoaxers have done the great circles, for them not to apply.

If anyone wins, we’ll be privy to what will turn out to have been one of the greatest pranks ever perpetrated on the world. For decades, with hundreds of circles a year in 40 to 50 countries, and no one even caught in the act. How did people do that?

With its size, anyone who could win the reward would figure to go for it. So, if no one meets the terms we could have news about other-worldly origins. If it’s verified we’re not alone, that would be the biggest story ever for humanity.

I’m thinking about a TV reality show next summer, in England. Any team members out there? The Challenge is a peg to hang all things about the phenomenon on, that would educate and entertain. Please send any pipelines you might have to selling it.

It’s Sarah Miles, who starred in many films and was nominated for an Academy Award, who’s at the forefront of the Challenge. In giving my two cents, I’ve gotten involved in next year’s action. I’m smitten by Sarah, who I was surprised to discover was such a friend of the circles. You’ll get a taste of my feisty cohort in this gossipy piece, and here’s her Wikipedia page.

Here’s something about the circles that I even learned something from, that Sarah wrote a few years ago:

Blake’s Jerusalem
By Sarah Miles

I have been down our English country lanes experiencing crop circles for over quarter of a century; always curious for more investigation, for more understanding; forever keen to revel in the continuing mystery. I seek the freshly fallen pictograms, as they are sometimes known. It is fascinating to experience the diversity of conflicting energies within these fresh creations because, in that first day of their falling, the energy is at its most potent; as the days go by, it seems to dissipate. Usually a pictogram’s potency is benign, often profoundly uplifting. Yet there were some, mainly the insect shaped formations that came down about a decade ago, that made some people nauseous and a few complained of migraines. Indeed, I once came out of one with a hefty headache myself. I put it down to the energies within them being too dense for us mere mortals to assimilate quite yet.

I might be fairly sensitive to different energies – (there’s nothing remotely clever in this by the way, it’s simply a fact, just like the wrinkles massing on the backs of my hands) – but there are a few individuals whose sensitivity to a variety of different energies is truly astounding.

In the early nineties I went regularly to Malta to study with a small esoteric group. Andrew Bertie was one of the group members and at that time he was the Grand Master of Malta as well as a Cardinal in the Vatican. Andrew didn’t believe crop circles were created from outer space because, from his viewpoint, “belief” was too frail a word. Apparently they used to have open debates on crop circles in the Vatican. Oh, how I dream of the day when England might follow suit and begin open debates!

Another member of the group, George De Trafford, was quite an extraordinary fellow. So highly regarded was George for his sensitivity to energy in the late ’80s and 1990s, most of England’s crop circle fraternity would send photos of crop circles to Malta for George to test. They believed that George had the miraculous gift of being able to feel energetically whether a crop circle was a hoax or the real McCoy.

In the summer of 1992, I was driving with George along the A272. He had his right palm up like a dog sniffing the air. Quite suddenly he boomed out, “Stop the car!” He leapt out and scampered off, and there, about a quarter of a mile from the A272, hidden from view behind a hedge, was a fresh crop circle.

“It’s a virgin!” he exclaimed excitedly, picking a bunch of crop stems and gallivanting off up the field. He turned round to face the circle roughly eight feet away and proceeded to set fire to his cluster of stems. Once a healthy spew of smoke had been created, he stamped out the remaining stems quite ferociously.

“Arson won’t help to keep the farmers on side, they’re off side enough already!” he joked, and after more foot stamping he began scrutinizing the belch of smoke as it traveled downwind towards the circle.

“If it’s a hoax the smoke trail will travel straight across the circle, but if it’s a genuine circle, the smoke will be unable to penetrate the outer wall of energy surrounding the circle; it will simply climb upwards, perpendicular, higher and higher into the air until it drifts up, out of sight.” And so it did.

George gave me a huge gift that day: proof with my own eyes that perhaps I wasn’t deluding myself over experiencing certain energies after all.

There were some formations that fell several years back, where the birds refused to fly through the outer wall of energy. I once took the famous medium and healer Betty Shine and a zither player into a fresh formation. We recorded him playing while we all sang along. When we heard it back outside the circle, we were puzzled. An eerie, hollow echo reverberated on the tape, making it sound as if both the zither and our singing were coming from a recording studio made entirely of glass. We checked if there was something wrong with the tape recorder. We did some recording outside the circle for a few minutes and everything was normal. We went back inside and the same echo effect appeared again!

Another way of distinguishing the genuine article from a hoax is the way the crop has been laid out with its varying styles of crisscross weaving to create the artwork. Whatever the crop, no stem would be crushed or broken. Each stem would be gently bent into its basket weaving, and still growing as if caressed flat by some gentle wind of intelligence.

What I find so bewildering is the fact that they are right here, these monumentally uplifting art forms, in greater numbers than anywhere else in the entire world – and using England’s most glorious Wessex countryside as their canvas. Even if we assume, at a conservative estimate, that two thirds of them are hoaxes, it still leaves us many geometrically perfect art designs to revel in. How come there is no mention anywhere of how privileged we are that they are here? Some believe Blake’s Jerusalem may be right here on our doorstep, upon England’s green and pleasant land, and we may never even know it.