Welcome to our new website

It’s been a long time coming, but our lovely new website is finally finished and published. It’s been a very, very steep learning curve to get it here. Until now Steve and I have always handed the running of our website over to others. For the first time we have decided it was time to learn how to do it for ourselves, and as complete novices that’s not been easy! Neither one of us has ever edited a website before. It’s something we have avoided, and while I’m quite a quick learner of most new things, much of this process has been counter intuitive to me and I’ve had to press myself very hard to get a grip on it! Both of us would like to thank all who helped in the building of this website, especially Sam and Chris who have patiently talked us through all the things we have needed to learn to get to where we are today – thanks so much!

Improved Image Galleries

As with all challenges, this one has been an opportunity too. One of the most satisfying things about putting this website together has been filling out our Image Library. Steve has spent hours, days and weeks going through his old negatives and transparencies from the early years and picking out images that we wanted to share. It’s been a massive undertaking, scanning, cleaning up scratches and age related imperfections, but it was amazing to realise what a legacy that collection of images is and to reminisce about our years in the fields, finding lost formations and images we haven’t published before.

As of 2015, we have spent over twenty years in the fields (and above them) together. Although we both were involved in the circles before then, it has been our work together that forms the body of the work you will see on this website. While it’s not been possible to tell our stories about each formation included, we hope that the extended image library will provide a depth of coverage of this phenomenon not found anywhere else. As you will see, the library doesn’t just include aerial images of the crop circles, it is also full of pole shots, ground shots and many other photo techniques too.

More depth of reporting on new circles

It has also been very satisfying to finally to do something a little more in-depth with the new circles. As you will see, we now have a detailed page for each new circle which will allow us to provide more information, commentary and links, rather than just images. Where we can we’ll add in pole-shots, ground shots, drawings exploring the geometry of the formations and video. We won’t be able to cover every formation in depth, much depends on access etc, and not all the information will be available straight away, but we will go back and fill in these details as we get them. We will let you know when pages have been updated via our newsletter. We won’t be able to cover every circle, or circles in other countries, but there are other websites that do this. As always though, we do aim to cover as many circles in the UK as we possibly can.

New blogs

I also very much hope to get this blog up and running regularly. During 2011 & part of 2012 I very much enjoyed writing a regular blog, but our old website has been in a kind of limbo since then. Now that we have this new site and I am able for the first time to post the blogs myself, I am looking forward to writing about what happens in the fields and my experiences of it. I also hope to share many more of my drawings with you along with my enthusiasm and passion for this phenomenon. You can read some of my old blogs on this new website as they have been transferred over – to give you a flavour of how I approach this phenomenon.

Before writing this I looked back at my very first blog and saw this passage, I thought it would be a good thing to repeat it – just to remind everyone reading this of my style and approach to the subject matter.

“I  wish to state for the record that I am not a crop circle politician, nor am I a gossip columnist. As one who has from time to time stuck her head above the metaphorical crop circle parapet, I can confirm what most of you must instinctively already know, that it hurts enormously when someone fires a bullet at you! This blog will not be the O.K. Corral of crop circle debate. If that’s the kind of crop circle exchange you enjoy – best you look elsewhere for it!

The other thing you are quickly going to learn is that I am not a crop circle fundamentalist. 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. It is often the first thing that I am asked when I talk to people about the circles, “What do you think makes them all?” or “What do you think they mean?” Gently and with great care I explain that I don’t know. What I do know however, is that the crop circles are important, both culturally and spiritually. They draw many to them who are sensing that a shift in human consciousness is in progress and that the crop circles are playing some vital role in that shift.

So I hope to be able to offer you some musings about the crop circles, share with you what I’m currently thinking about, or researching, or offer some of my thoughts on specific formations. My blog won’t always be a series of articles, sometimes it might be a series of thoughts – some short, some longer.

My one hope for this blog is that I may encourage you to think about the crop circles in a bigger way – to lift your thinking about them above the usual real/not real didactic way of thinking and to contextualize them. My doggedly open-minded approach has often allowed me to transcend these kinds of arguments and 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. I hope to both explain and share some of that with you as we go…”

New Online Shop

We have also put a lot of work into updating our online shop. It is sales of our photos and books that pay for our flights, so sales through our shop are a very important and vital part of what we do. We have been able to add many more product images for you to look at and have installed a new shipping programme that accurately calculates shipping costs world-wide.

Patience

We both have little doubt there will still be a few glitches to iron out as we get the new site established. So please bear with us. But we both really hope you enjoy our new site and that you’ll share it with your friends. We hope you’ll enjoy all the pictures, drawings and blogs and that you’ll support our continued work in whatever way you can.

Karen Alexander