Language of Angels

An essay by S D Anugyan 2026

This must be a strange deception
By celestial intervention.”
– The Eurythmics

The late 1990s were a heady time for me, many of the summers spent investigating crop circles in the English countryside. I had numerous interesting experiences and the subject is far too vast to cover succinctly, but here I wish to come in at a specific angle that affects what we already know about the phenomenon.

The story is not linear, but I’ll start with the afternoon I was driving back to Oxford from near Avebury, after visiting one of the well-known crop formations. I always kept a look out when driving for any formations that may have been missed and not made it online, and this is what I was doing when I came across something odd in a field adjacent to the road. I glimpsed through an open gate a disruption in a wheat field. I parked the car and went to have a look.

It was only a few metres down a slope from the road, easily missed if you were just driving past. It was a puzzle what exactly I was looking at. It could have been wind or bird damage, which often happens in the fields, but the wheat had been pressed down in two or three straight lines, as if in a school exercise book. Looking closer, there were distinct separations between the areas of compressed wheat. It was like I was looking at letters.

The sound of a car stopping behind me made me look up to the road. There are often interesting spontaneous gatherings at crop formations, and you never know who will turn up. It could be anything from New Age hippies to the military.

A woman got out of the car and walked down to join me. There was a moment’s silence as she took in what was before us, then she spoke.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“It looks to me like it was cuneiform, then it got partially erased by birds or the weather,” I said.

“That’s what I was thinking,” she said.

It wouldn’t be the first time a cuneiform-like formation appeared. Michael Hesemann in his superb book The Cosmic Connection details how in 1991 lettering appeared – actually not far from where I was – which was a mixture of ‘Phoenician, Hebrew and Iberian,’ translating as ‘The Creator, wise and kind.’ Sumerian symbolism also recurs frequently.

Hoaxers couldn’t be ruled out certainly, yet why would they target a field that nobody was likely to notice? The one I’d come across never got mentioned anywhere, in any of the forums or publications. It was only by chance that I’d chosen a small B-road and discovered such a discreet formation.

One thing that was clear at the time is that it was yet another formation that disproved the theory that the formations were caused by tornados or plasma vortices. The formations were often far too complex to have been created by ‘the weather’.

The main proponent of the plasma vortex theory was Dr Terence Meaden, founder of the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation, ‘specialising in atmospheric vortices, tornadoes, whirlwinds, waterspouts and ball lightning’. In his book The Circles Effect and Its Mysteries he quotes several witnesses who had experienced powerful electrically charged vortices, along with bright light effects only visible at night, often followed by compressed circular patterns in the field.

At the time I found his theory plausible but only for the most basic formations. It certainly didn’t explain the more complex, beautiful patterns. Or so I thought until coming across recent evidence that plasma may be sentient, as I outlined in my previous essay We Are the Anomalies. In Meaden’s aforementioned book, which I have been reading carefully this past month, there is a passage that tallies well with something else that I came across.

One evening I went with a friend to a lecture in Oxford on crop circles. What happened before it started was more interesting than the lecture itself.

My companion noticed two men sitting near us looking at photographs.

“Are those of crop circles?” she inquired.

They were momentarily surprised at her forwardness – this was England after all, and we hadn’t been introduced – then became surprisingly candid with us.

The gentleman nearest us told us his story and showed us what he had stumbled across. He had been at a crop circle one day and was about to leave as evening was approaching, when he took a picture of the landscape by the circle just to use up the last picture in the film.

“This is what was on the picture when it was developed,” he said.

The picture showed a white tube of light – I would guess about a metre in diameter – coming down from the sky, hitting the ground in front of the camera and lighting up the bushes nearby. Inside the tube was a helix of light distinct from the tube itself, as if the inner light were bouncing off the walls of the tube. It reminded me of diagrams I had seen of optic fibres, demonstrating what is known as total internal reflection (TIR).

At the time of the picture he hadn’t seen anything. Discussing it, we theorised that the phenomenon must have occurred for an incredibly small fraction of a second whilst the camera shutter was open, too fast for the human eye to record.

He became obsessed with trying to get more pictures of the phenomenon and started taking hundreds if not thousands of pictures at twilight of empty fields. This was before digital cameras, so the cost was huge and most of the pictures just showed – empty fields. But a small portion, which was the handful he had here, showed not only the white tube from the sky, but other strange light phenomena too, including orbs.

So it is, decades later, going carefully through Meaden’s book I discover accounts of what he calls ‘the self-luminous pipe’. People had actually seen these with their own eyes around the world. Speaking with a witness near Silbury Hill by Avebury, Meaden learnt ‘that the beam was pencil-shaped and hollow; in other words, it was not a beam at all but a pipe or tube emitting its own light.’ His theory is that ‘the pipe could have been channelling an electron leakage from cloud to ground, probably as a direct-current discharge’. There are no accounts of the helix within the pipe as captured in the photographs I saw, but I find it fascinating that this is a globally reported phenomenon which can be visible to the naked eye.

The idea of an exchange going on between the sky and the earth is interesting on many levels.

The English are notorious for moaning about the weather, particularly the rain. For me, however, I keep recalling an African belief I heard once that when it rains the sky is making love to the earth. So when it’s pouring down here and everyone is complaining, I simply smile to myself, pleased that the sky and earth are having a good time.

In Feng Shui weather ch’i is seen as the intermediary between tangible earth ch’i and ethereal sky ch’i. Put simply, it can be seen as a conversation between the two extremes. If plasma is sentient, then that could explain the complex patterns appearing in the fields and elsewhere – they are, as many have stipulated all along, communications.

Yet with all this complexity, strange lights and hypotheses, I keep coming back to a more direct and simple experience, one I had when first beginning to get interested in this phenomenon.

I was out walking in some hills south of Oxford one summer afternoon. There was a reason for me to be researching this particular area I won’t go into here, but I was hoping to encounter some crop circles. It was hot and dry with no clouds nor wind, and very quiet.

I was on one hill and looking across a valley to a ridgeway when I saw what could have been crop circles of some kind. I looked through my binoculars to try and see better. It was in a field at the top of the ridge that had been partially harvested, with bales of straw all tied up in stacks. Further down the slope were the aberrations in the crop that had piqued my curiosity. But I wasn’t sure. I could be just looking at wind or bird damage, and would need to get closer to be sure. It was about a mile away and I would need to go down into the valley then up the slope to get there.

As I was pondering whether it was worth it, a movement caught my eye at the edge of the binoculars’ field of view. Something was happening at the crest of the hill, where the stacks of straw were. I focused carefully.

On this still day there was evidence of wind building up at that one spot. Bits of straw and other vegetation were flying around by a stack.

This was quickly becoming more and more energetic as I watched, and in a circular motion.

I realised I was looking at a mini-tornado or a wind vortex.

The stack started shuddering with the force of the wind, particularly one bale on the edge.

Then to my astonishment, the single bale was lifted up from the rest of the stack, into the air. It was being turned round and round by the vortex.

The forces of the wind were so strong they started plucking the floating bale apart, so bits of straw were flying away, dispersing into the air.

Within a minute the entire bale had vanished.

The wind died down and everything quietened. The stack was exactly as before, minus one bale.

I decided to walk over there and examine the site more carefully. When I got there I discovered the aberrations in the field were, as I had suspected, simply wind or bird damage. Walking on, I got to the bales of straw where all was peaceful. There was no evidence anything had happened at all except for a bit of loose twine on the ground. I doubted whether the farmer would even miss the bale that had disappeared.

I stood alone in a quiet field on a hot still day with not a cloud above me.

There are no footprints in the sky, nor on the earth apparently.