My first... crop circle

Artist and filmmaker John Lundberg (35 years old), has been drawing crop circles for the past ten years.

In 1994, there was little media interest in crop circles. Artist Rod Dickinson and I decided to try to revive this phenomenon. I saw it as an art, and Rod initially saw it as an unusual hobby.

Having developed plans for making circles of unprecedented size and complexity, we started making our first circles in May.

Rod, sculptor Gavin Turk and my then girlfriend Rachel and I drove along the M4 from London to Wiltshire.

Wiltshire has a mysterious landscape with many sacred sites, such as Avebury and Stonehenge. It seems appropriate to create circles there.

Eventually we saw a field that was flat enough to work on. It was in the middle of nowhere, Newbury was the nearest town. We pulled off the freeway and parked. At midnight we got to work. We planned to make a raised crescent in

flattened circle: something relatively simple to start with.

Each of us had a "stomper for stalks" - a 4-foot wooden board with a rope loop at the end, which you hold like

the reins. You put one foot in the middle of the board and use it to level the crop. We used geodetic tapes to make measurements. The rod described a simple 8-foot circle, marking the center of the formation. Then we described the outer perimeter. Rod held one end of the ribbon in the center of the circle, and Gavin and I walked along the line until we reached the right distance. I pulled the tape tight and started walking around

crops in an arc, walking sideways, leaving a path behind. Gavin followed, leveling a 4-foot strip of trim inside my walkway with his stomper and creating a well-defined perimeter for the formation.

Then we created crescent arcs and finally trampled all the remaining crops in the places of the formation that needed to be leveled. The circle was 150 feet in diameter. I was very nervous. I didn't want to be caught before we completed the circle, after all the effort we put into planning it. When we finished, at about 2.30 am. we drove back to London. We were exhausted. Creating crop circles is hard work.

A couple of days later, Gavin and I drove back to see the results of our work. It's disappointing because the oilseed rapeseed it was a bit immature, we could only see the design from the road. It's

The formation did not ignite the world, but a group called the Center for Crop Circle Studies really found it and entered it into their database.

That season we did more than 50 laps in the fields. Some of them just dropped their jaws. We would not like to claim authorship

there were no specific formations, but there were many designs based on scorpions. A lot of them appeared in newspapers and on television, which was nice.

The pleasure of this is not so much in the creation of the pattern itself, as in observing the myth and folklore develops around it. We are still very active. This year we will go out into the field again. People need their crop circles.