Cornography Despatches From The Crop Circles
Simone Whitmeyer
Crop circles are an almost exclusively British phenomenon. Thousands have been reported in Britain over the past 30 years; Wiltshire is widely regarded as the world capital and the county tourist department promotes it as such.
Sceptics argue that the circles are man-made. In 1991 Doug Bowers and Dave Chorley, two elderly artists from Southampton, claimed that, for a laugh, they had fashioned 200 circles, dice spots, pendulums, crescent moons and whirlpool shapes between the late 1970s and early 1990s using wooden planks, a garden roller and rope. There is even a Circlemakers website which provides a comprehensive how-to guide.
Yet many researchers continue to believe that most circles are not made by human hands, some attributing their formation to wind and soil; others, notably Glickman, insist that they are created by extra-terrestrial life.
For Glickman, crop circles were no joking matter. He was delighted in 2000 when an apostate former croppie, Matthew Williams, a 29-year-old unemployed computer programmer, made legal history as the first person ever to be prosecuted for causing criminal damage by making a circle.
After creating the design on his computer, Williams and a friend crept out over three nights to a field of wheat at West Overton, near Marlborough in Wiltshire, and, using poles and string, flattened the ripening crop into the seven-pointed star pattern.
Michael Neil Glickman was born in Manchester on May 16 1941 to Charles, an electrical goods retailer, and Florence (ne Werner). The family moved to Lytham St Annes, where he attended King Edward VII School. He went on to qualify as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, graduating in 1965.
In 1968 he established his own practice, and in the early 1970s moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he eventually became an assistant professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California. He then spent a year designing exhibitions for the famous furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames.
In addition he wrote regularly for the architectural press and taught at the Architectural Association, the Bartlett School of Architecture, and the Royal College of Art. By the time he returned to the US in the 1990s to teach in Los Angeles, however, he had become involved in the arcane world of crop circles.
Like many others, Glickman started out as a sceptic, but the beauty, complexity and mathematical perfection of some of the designs soon convinced him that they had been created by extra-terrestrial forces as messages for him to interpret.
In 1999, diagnosed with a degenerative illness affecting his mobility, he returned to Britain and settled in a cottage near Devizes, which attracted visitors from around the world. He was the regular keynote speaker at the annual Glastonbury Crop Circle Symposium.
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