What, more crop circles? Aliens, too? God, how I've missed 'em. Well, apparently they're back, according to the Daily Telegraph, which is rapidly becoming the one-stop online shop for UFO phenomena (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5406187/Crop-circle-found-Wiltshire.html.)  It seems that a local off-duty policeman came upon a remarkably intricate crop circle and its perpetrators, three gentlemen from outer space. Thrillingly, the aliens P.C.Plod ran into were tall blond guys who, on being spotted, took off at high speed with a terrible noise of intestinal gas...sorry, "static electricity." And here I thought the whole crop circle phenomenon was cleared up, brushed aside, defined for all times as the handiwork of a couple of underemployed blokes, Doug Bower and David Chorley, who 'fessed up to using a few old boards and a bit of rope to create all those fabulous New Age wheatfield works of art, with references to the Mayans, Atlantis, Venusians, and the usual suspects. This was back in the '90s, and almost all of the circles that popped up then did so in the delightful southern English county of Wiltshire, of Salisbury and Stonehenge (and the world's strongest cider) fame. Indeed, the enterprising lads were awarded the ignoble Ig Nobel Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize) for their efforts, which must have paid for a few pints down the pub, and limited but lucrative fame among the local beauties ("ooh, THE Doug Bower? I know a nice Indian down the street, and then we can go to the pictures, they're showing this Yank film called 'Signs'.. and then, who knows, ducky?") But no, here we go again, in Wiltshire no less, with a respectable (or "respectable") member of the county's finest declaring that not only did he find this splendid crop circle, but also encountered said three blond "aliens" who out-bolted Usain Bolt and who, needless to say, haven't been seen since.  

I was in Wiltshire and environs a couple of times, for cider-tasting purposes, in the glorious summer of '76, after I'd left university behind and was arming myself for the squalor and excitement of life in London. Of Wiltshire itself, I remember Stonehenge, of course, smaller than expected, as everyone always says; Salisbury Plain, where the army test-fires its howitzers; Salisbury Cathedral, one of the greatest Godhouses anywhere, the real thing improving on Constable's painted version, although not by that much; and hedgerows hanging heavy over the sides of ancient Saxon droving paths. In the Hardy country of neighboring Dorset I came across the Cerne Abbas giant, a neolithic carving of a strapping figure with a ten-foot boner carved in a hillside by...who knows? The desirous neolithic maidens of Cerne Abbas village (Hardy's "Abbots Cernel")? Cerne Abbas was where I also found one of the Royal Oaks, trees in which the future Charles II was said to have hidden from Cromwell's pursuing Roundheads, back in the 1640s. I sank gratefully into the pasture beneath that oak, one hot July afternoon, overcome by four or five pints of scrumpy at the Royal Oak pub and the sheer joy of being young and alive and pissed out of my gourd. I knew nothing, then, of aliens, blond or otherwise. That was for my mature years.