John: I don’t. I think you learn very quickly as a circlemaker that entering into any discourse about your work with someone who has invested belief in it is an ultimately fruitless pursuit. The circlemakers and the crop circle researchers - or followers - have a very symbiotic relationship. We need each other - not that any crop circle researcher would ever admit that. They act as agents for our work, propagating the images across the globe, and more importantly weaving complex ever evolving and shifting narratives about the non-human origin of the circles. They come up with litmus tests that become an article of faith for them, terms such as ‘bent not broken stems’, ‘physiological changed to the plants’, etc are their ‘proof’ that the circles could not possibly be the work of mere human mortals. I think this attitude shows a complete lack of belief in human potential. Do these people not look around them and see what human civilization has achieved? The scientific, engineering and artistic marvels? We can get a man to the moon and back, but these people can’t believe that a few well organized artists can flatten cereal crops in a complex pattern. Of course within the same community there are those that don’t believe we ever sent men to moon.

Caryn: You mentioned a while back that you have received death threats from folk in the past, can you elaborate?

John: I think being a circlemakers is ultimately a masochistic pursuit. Traditionally when you think about art you think of it’s author, we refer to the work as a Picasso, a Warhol or a Leonardo, etc. But for the circles we create to function correctly, they must remain authorless, if we claim a formation we immediately drain it of all of it’s power, it’s taken out of the realm of the unknown and becomes just flattened crop. So it’s this gap in information about the authorship of the circles that enables them to function correctly. Although we have not - and never will - claim authorship of any individual crop circle, we do obviously talk about out work in general terms. So to the research community this immediately sets us up as a perceived threat and consequently a target. We are the heretics, calling their belief system into question by the mere fact that we exist and talk about our circlemaking activities.

Sometimes this spills over into threatening behavior on the part of the believer. We’ve had potatoes stuck up our exhausts, wing mirrors ripped off of our cars, and threats of physical violence, in person, over the phone, via email and through our letterboxes. Only last week I had someone call me and threaten to attack me if I continued to talk about my work. I just accept it as an unpleasant but necessary part of what I do.

Caryn: The main argument by the pro-circle researchers is that the designs are far too complicated to have been created by human hand. How do you respond to that argument?

John: Look at the Sistine Chapel. I could never conceive of creating something like that, but just because I’m unable to create it, I don’t believe that no human could have created it. I think this is the flaw with a lot of the researchers, they look at a complex crop circle design and they could not possibly conceive how it would be possible for them to create it under cover of darkness in one night, so therefore they inaccurately conclude that it can’t conceivably be man made. But, I assure you it is entirely possible and we’ve demonstrated our craft on numerous occasions. We would obviously not be flown all over the world to create crop circles for commercial clients if we did not have the necessary skills to create them.

Caryn: As the crop-circle makers come forward to tell their stories we are beginning to see a shift in consensus from ‘it can’t possibly be manmade’ to ‘A divine hand is at play, working through the circle-makers’. What would you say to that?

John: Divine inspiration? I don’t know really, I’m just doing what every artist before me has done, sucking my pencil end and waiting for that flash of inspiration and it can come from all sorts of places. A mobile phone cover, a quote from a book, or something one of the researchers has said. Sometimes it’s just a matter of play and experimentation, lots of times I’ve been working on one type of design then I’ve gone off completely at a tangent and discovered new construction techniques or geometries. Sometimes a design can look fantastic on screen – I now use CAD software to design all of the circles, it’s the type of software an Architect would use to design a building and it’s perfect for circlemaking – but once it’s been created in the field it doesn’t live up to the diagram, and conversely, sometimes a design that looks ok on screen can look stunning once it’s been created in the field.

Caryn: I noticed from your website that several folk mention observed anomalous occurrences whilst crop-circle making. Can you discuss your own experiences?

John: The thing I’ve most commonly experienced is very bright localized flashes of light, like a flash gun being held up to my face. Twice we’ve had journalists along with us and they’ve experienced the same phenomena. I’ve also seen a silent structured craft in the sky above Alton Barnes. It was a elongated cigar shape and read as a dark shadow in the sky blocking out the stars behind it as it moved in a arc from left to right across my field of vision. It would have been easy to miss, it was only because we’d stopped working on the circle for a while as there were people nearby, so we were all crouched down in a tramline waiting for them to leave. That’s when I spotted it. To be honest it’s quite amusing to see something like that when you’re part way through creating a design. I don’t know what it was, aliens from out of space, inter-dimensional beings, military black project, or another group of artists showcasing their latest creation, who knows…

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