About Our Website

Important things to know when using our website…

Aims & Service: The Temporary Temples website was built to fulfil several key aims. The first being an online archive (freely open to the public) to view pictures of the crop circle phenomenon as we have recorded it since 1994. Secondly, to provide a journalistic service reporting new circles whenever and wherever they appear. We also strive to provide educational and contextual materials about the locations, geometry and symbolism of each circle – giving map links, approximate measurements and some drawings which look at the number, math and geometry of the circles. Our website is free to view and therefore the images and information are an open resource to whomever needs them. We will aslo endeavour to keep this website free from  general advertising.

General Copyright: It’s important to know a couple of key things when using this site. It’s important to state that we do not own the copyright to the crop circles themselves (people often get confused about this point), the crop circles are created anonymously (their origins are unknown) and therefore the designs are widely considered to be in the public domain – this means they do not have a copyright owner we are aware of. Many people create artistic reproductions of the crop circle designs; some as paintings, some as sculpture, others as jewellery, T-shirts, even as quilts! The exception to this is when a circle is created for commercial reasons – like a trade-marked company logo for advertising – then the copyright for the design might be held by the commissioning party, or the person who made the design (or both). It is also important to state that any similarity some anonymous crop circles may have to existing images/artworks would be considered purely coincidental and not something that anyone could reasonably be held responsible for.

Copyright & Reproduction of our Photographic Images: If you are using our photographs for your own personal use then thats fine, it’s exactly what this website was intended for – the enjoyment, inspiration and exploration of the subject. However, if you want to reproduce any of our photos you will need to get our permission to do so as we do own the copyright on our photographs. Sometimes we may ask for a fee, sometimes we won’t, depending on the intended usage. You can email us using the Contact Us page for more information should you need it.

Copyright & Reproduction of  Drawings & Paintings: The same principles apply to the drawings and paintings featured on this website. These are drawn directly from each crop circle as they appeared in the field and from no other source. We do not own or claim the copyright for the designs themselves, only the specific renderings shown on the website (unless otherwise attributed). If you are using these images for your own personal use then thats fine, it’s exactly what this website was intended for – the enjoyment, inspiration and exploration of the subject. Karen’s  drawings/paintings are created as part her exploration of the number, geometry and symbolism of the crop circles; an educational process, the results of which are freely shared on this website. However, if you want to reproduce any of our images you will need to get our permission to do so. Again, you can email us using the Contact Us page for more information should you need it.

Products & Philosophy: We do sell a number of items on our online shop. This helps us raise the funds we need to continue to photograph the circles, provide our information service and run this website. We are always careful to keep them simple and tasteful, avoiding trinkets and keeping them in the general tone of the subject itself. We are a two-person team, we don’t have any staff or offices and our work fulfils a passion we both have to the transformative effects this phenomenon has had on us personally and the many people that either follow or are involved in the subject all over the world.

Finally, while there is much debate about how or by whom the crop circles are made, it would be remiss not to state that any person making a crop circle in someone’s field without their permission is committing an act of criminal damage and vandalism – which is subject to both criminal and civil prosecution. We work very hard to be mindful of the farming community in our work – see the ‘Visiting the Crop Circles’ section of our website for more information. 

We both really hope you enjoy this website, it represents over 25 years of our work, passion and commitment to the subject – it truly is a labour of love…

If you would like to report a crop circle you have found please Contact Us. Thank you!

About Us

Steve Alexander has been photographing the crop circles for almost 30 years. During that time he and Karen have provided an important service to the crop circle world by supplying professional quality photographic imagery of the circles to researchers, the media and the general public. Since 1999 they have produced an annual Year Book showcasing the very best formations of each year along with a written commentary researched by Karen Alexander. The Crop Circle Year Book books are beautifully produced and they contain some of the best crop circle photography you will find anywhere. They are self-published, in small numbers and are not widely available. To keep up with the latest circles as they happen you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We will send you information and pictures of the latest UK circles as soon as they happen directly to your inbox along with special offers from our online shop.

More About Us

With illustrations & memorabilia

Written by Karen Alexander

Welcome to our website. Thanks for looking around. We hope you find it interesting and that it inspires you to take a closer look at the crop circle phenomenon.

On this page you will find more information about us, and our long involvement in the crop circle subject, along with a smattering of curiosities and memorabilia from our personal archives in the photo gallery below! Click on the thumbnails to see the whole image!

Written by Karen Alexander

Both Steve and I have both been involved in the research and recording of the crop circles for many, many years now. Steve saw his first circle near Winchester in Hampshire (UK) back in 1981. He has had an interest in UFO’s and the paranormal since early childhood, prompted by a UFO sighting when he was just a young boy.

Similarly I have also held an interest in the mysterious and mystical since childhood and the crop circles first came to my attention in 1990, when they were making headline news in the British national newspapers. I visited my first crop circle in 1991. In 1992 I joined a newly forming crop circle research group, a branch of the then Centre for Crop Circle Studies where I quickly became interested in the metaphysical aspects of the circles.

During 1990 Steve travelled to Wiltshire to see the now famous Alton Barnes Pictogram. However, it was while walking on Milk hill overlooking another circle at Allington Down that Steve filmed a very strange luminosity. A small intensely bright light flew over the field below, glinting and flashing, sometimes dropping down into the crop before taking off at high speed over a tractor driver turning a field in the distance – the object flew over nearby Rybury camp (earth work) before ascending into the air and out of sight. Subsequent analysis of the film seemed to show that the object moved in and out of the frames of the film, as if it were moving in and our of the dimensions of space. It was the first time such phenomena had been filmed around the crop circles. The tractor driver was eventually tracked down and confirmed that he had also seen the light shown on the film, it temporarily stopped the engine of his vehicle as it flew overhead. Since them (of course) these luminosities have been filmed many, many times in and around the circles and their origin and nature remain unexplained. You can see Steve’s film here.

Steve too was an early member of the CCCS and in 1993 he began to photograph the circles with a second-hand camera he bought. At first his pictures were taken at ground level, but he was soon to move onto ‘pole shots’ where a camera is hoisted up into the air on a metal pole for a better overview of the formation.

During 1993 I became involved in putting together the newsletter for my local CCCS branch called The Circular Review and began to take my first small steps writing about the phenomenon for both the main CCCS journal and for the newsletters of other branches of the organisation. Together with other members of the group, 1993 had seen us mount an ambitious project to investigate the possible connection between the circles and human consciousness. I wrote the story up in a small book called Charley Knoll: An Archetypal Crop Circle Story (now OOP). I also took part in similar experiments a year later with another crop circle group, again the story was written up into a small book Quest for Contact by Andy Thomas.

In 1994 Steve took his first flight over the circles in a fixed wing aircraft. Back in the day, photographs were the only way of showing everyone what the circles looked like. The internet had not yet arrived in the crop circle world and there were no crop circle websites to post the pictures on. Consequently, small photo prints were often sold at conferences and photocopied into newsletters, or printed in the quarterly CCCS Journal, The Circular or included in the famous Cereologist Magazine.

Although Steve and I met in 1993, it was during the summer of 1994 that we became partners. With the help of my colleague and close friend Nick Nicholson I was in the process of transforming the small local crop circle newsletter I had worked on (The Circular Review) into something bigger. Steve worked with us and provided many pictures for those early editions. It was during 1993 & 1994 that I gave my first public talks on the crop circles.

By 1995 Steve and I were working together on our mutual love of the circles. Steve now flew more regularly using money from the sales of his pictures to fund more flights. He provided slides and pictures of the circles to other researchers for their presentations and to the media. 1995 saw the birth of the first crop circle website the Crop Circle Connector – we supplied images to the website for years before eventually going on to publish our own website.

Here essentially was the birth of the core service we still operate today, providing images of the crop circles to those who cannot fly over them or photograph them for themselves. We have now been providing this service for almost 20 years. While our first flights were via small fixed-wing aircraft, in 1999 we moved to flying in small helicopters, which we still use today.

During 1995 & 1996 Steve and I also participated in the gathering of plant samples from the crop circles for analysis in the US as part of the BLT project. From 1995 – 2000 we visited literally hundreds of formations at ground level photographing and recording what we found. For those five years we were totally committed to seeing as many of the circles as we humanly could. There were not many formations that occurred in Wiltshire and Hampshire, during those years, that we did not see first-hand.

In 2000 I became involved in the organisation and running of the Glastonbury Crop Circle Symposium. I helped to run the event for five years before going on to organise my own conference in 2005 with Steve and fellow researcher Michael Glickman. Held each summer in the Corn Exchange in Devizes, the Temporary Temples Crop Circle Conference  was the largest, most vibrant and respected events of its kind. Since 2020, in the light of the covid pandemic, the conference has moved online with the advantage that we can now have a truly global reach and everyone can attend from the comfort and convenience of their own home. We now hold the conference in October each year, with lectures and workshops talking place each weekend throughout the month. We have also made video recordings of these online events and you can buy access to the Video Archives of our 2020 and 2021 Conferences on our shop page. 

Ultimately, Nick Nicholson was to take on the sole mantle of Circular Review and publish it as a regular crop circle newsletter well into the 2000s. However for me, the design of those early editions went onto be the embryonic beginnings of our Crop Circle Year Books, which we began producing in 1999. More than anything it is the imagery of the formations that intrigues people, and it is that they want to see. Crop circles are fundamentally a visual phenomenon; you need to see them to understand anything about them. We were looking for a new medium in which to show the circles, until that point magazines and calendars were the media of choice. However, by slightly adjusting the format we came up with the idea of an annually produced photographic book, containing the years circles with room for comment and more general writing on the phenomenon the Crop Circle Year Books were born, our latest Crop Circle Year Book (2020) is our 22nd edition – we are currently working on our 2021 edition. 

The 2000s saw a significant re-orientation in our focus of work. We became more and more convinced that the circles were linked in someway to human consciousness and more specifically the evolution in our understanding of perspective, proportion, angle, space and time. I asked myself the question – “What is shape?” In 1997 I wrote the first in a series of articles linking crop circles to sound and vibration (cymatics), this lead to research over several years linking the crop circles to subtle vibration and it’s possible influence on the human psyche. It’s where the phrase ‘temporary temples’ originated, as I discovered that many ancient cultures were well aware of this link and actively used certain geometry and proportions in sacred buildings to ‘raise the vibration’ of the worshippers inside. Could this be why people experienced the crop circles as special, sacred spaces? Our researches then took us onto sacred symbolism, sacred landscape and beyond.

2003 saw the release of our first crop circle film – 65 Days: The crop circles of 2003. True to our artistic inclinations the entire film was shot on 8mm (cine) – film and set to an atmospheric soundtrack. It was to set a theme for all our subsequent films, films which have no narrative, but are a visual feast of moving and still imagery of the circles set to an equally inspiring soundtrack. Our last film – Altered Landscape: the crop circles of 2011 – goes back to our beginnings and mixes high quality high-definition footage with vintage-looking 8mm footage to capture the mood and atmosphere of the Wiltshire landscape and the crop circles that occurred there. Steve has produced nine crop circle films (from 2003-2012) showcasing the best circles from each year.

2006 saw the publication of our best-known work Crop Circles: Signs Wonders & Mysteries, a two-hundred page photo-book of the crop circles spanning over 15 years and containing a written overview and description of the phenomenon. Recently updated in 2009 and 2012, it is how many people first hear about us and find their way to this website! After several updates and reissues the book is now our of print – but we do still sell-on secondhand copies on this website – see the link above for more information. 

In many ways not too much has really changed since 1995. We are still essentially a two-person team. We do not have offices, or staff. Just about everything we do, we do ourselves. Even our books are self-published in very small numbers. We still provide crop circle imagery to researchers for presentations and articles, and to the wider media. We still sell our crop circle prints. We personally process, pack and mail every order placed on our online shop. Money from sales is ploughed directly back into our recording of the subject. The costs involved in flying regularly over the circles each summer are simply enormous and we could not continue to it without the sales from this website and the generous support of private donors.

Since his tentative beginnings in 1993 & 1994, Steve has evolved and developed his photographic technique to become perhaps the most influential crop circle photographer of the present day. His broad, sweeping and atmospheric landscape images of the circles set in their attendant landscapes are widely admired and often cheekily mimicked by many an aspiring newcomer. Always pushing the envelope, Steve is continually looking for new and interesting ways to photograph and record the circles from fish-eye to tilt-shift lenses, and a whole world in-between!

At the heart of Steve’s commitment to the crop circle subject is his work to capturing the formations in all their drama to provide a photographic legacy for future generations who were not here to see them. A simple snap shot of a circle is great as a plain record, but it in no ways conveys the power, majesty and sheer presence many of these gigantic shapes exude in the landscape. Steve now very much sees this as the mainstay of his work rather than in intellectual or ground research. However, don’t be fooled, working on this level commands an intimacy with the subject matter that is difficult to put into words. Steve may not write about the crop circles, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know a thing or two about them! We work actively with crop circle imagery, to intensify, echo and reflect the power of the formations.

What about the possible origins and meanings of the crop circles? I will admit freely and openly that what has served me best in my approach to this subject has been an unfailing commitment to open-mindedness. This approach has often allowed me to transcend the usual didactic arguments over real & not real, to reach for a deeper, more holistic understanding of the crop circles and their role in our culture at this time. In fact to try and let go of any attachment to a particular outcome or answer to this mystery has been enormously empowering as a researcher. However, I think there can be little doubt that the crop circles have moved, inspired, challenged and changed a great many people who have come to them. They have an unfathomable ability to capture the imagination and arouse the curiosity. More than that it could be that the circles are intimately related to our own evolving consciousness and are part of a transformation in human thinking and perspective currently thought to be underway.

We are now in our third decade in our work with the circles. Right now, as well as continuing to record the formations, our research is taking us into lots of new territories: the connection between the unfolding of human consciousness and our understanding of dimensions: the link between the evolution of consciousness and its expression in the visual arts and art as a ‘service’ in this process. We have also looked at Jean Gebser’s idea of the move through the archaic, magical, mythical stages of consciousness into our current mental/rational stage – and further beyond to the dawn of an integral state of consciousness and its attendant irruption of fourth dimensional thinking into the human psyche. Interestingly 2010 saw the first fourth-dimensional crop circles in our fields and 2011 saw our first fifth-dimensional design!  I have been regularly drawing and painting the crop circles since 2011, exploring and uncovering their form, geometry and number; you will see many of my images in the geometry galley sections of the crop circle gallery pages. I think being able to draw a circle creates an intimacy with the phenomenon that is hard to put into words and for those looking at the crop circles it provides much insight into the composition of the designs.

I am also deeply interested in the cultural impact of the crop circles and their mythologicalisation into our cultural identity. Since 2014 I have co-run a supervised group which meets regularly to discuss and explore the crop circle formations and their impact on the human psyche. This group is the cutting edge of my work with the circles today.

You can read more about my thoughts on the crop circles in our Crop Circle Year Books and on my blog posts to be found on each page on our Image Library (from 2014 to present day). I write-up most circles for the website with drawings and analysis. 

Both Steve and I have a deep love and appreciation of art and a passionate belief in its transformative role and function in society – again and again you will see this reflected in our work with the circles. Just as the crop circles are about inspiration, visual impact and the symbolic, so the work we do attempts to echo this. Mostly we try to let the circles do the talking! Crop Circles are Art (in its highest form) in the service of human consciousness. We see our service in providing crop circles imagery as firmly echoing this idea.

We both hope that you will enjoy this website. Most of all we hope that you will enjoy our image library of pictures going all the way back to 1994. We would like to thank you for taking the time to visit this site and hope that it will further pique your interest in this beautiful and inspiring phenomenon.

Come-on Get involved! We hold lots events each year (many online). Lectures, workshops, courses and our annual conference. Come and meet us, get involved, converse with many like-minded people and hear the latest news about the phenomenon. Please see our Events Page for more information. We very much look forward to meeting you!