It was a stifling hot day in Little Eversden, Cambridgeshire, England in the 1930s, and a young teenager, Kath Skin, was absent from school with scarlet fever and so she was taking a walk through the fields near her home. She sat down under a hedge for a few minutes rest and looked up into the sky which seemed to be threatening a thunderstorm. Looking out over the field she was in she saw what appeared to be a whirlwind that was throwing up wheat and dust 30 or 40 feet into the air. She continued to watch it until it dissipated and the debris fell back down to the ground, she then made her way over to where it had been, and when she got to the spot she saw that in the wheat was a flattened circle. As she was wearing her sandals she could feel that the ground was hot and was warming her feet through her thin soles. The wheat stalks in the circle had fallen against one another in a clockwise direction, like a pack of playing cards and the ears appeared to be intertwined. Kath forgot all about the unusual incident until almost fifty years later when these circles began to appear with alarming regularity in the fields of southern England, and she found laughable the fact that people were attributing them to U.F.O.s and little green men. To this day she remains one of an almost elite group of people that have seen a crop formation being made, and she was certainly one of the first.
Another eye witness of a circle forming, this time at night was a farmer from Lydney, England called Tom Gwinnett. He was driving his car at the time and suddenly his engine stopped and his headlights went off. He got out of the car and he could now hear a low, almost distant humming sound, and over the hedge at the side of the road he could see strange lights in the air over the field. He returned to the same spot the next day when it was light, and there in the field he could see a flattened circle.
At around 9 pm on May 17th, 1990, Gary and Vivienne Tomlinson were out walking in the fields of Surrey when a "vortex" formed next to them. It developed from a quiet rustling to a sound like a high pitched flute and they were forced down to the ground, finding themselves in the middle of a circle as it formed. Gary's hair stood on end because of static electricity as the wind roared around them before it eventually moved away and formed two more circles.
Dr. Terence Meaden, meteorologist and circle investigator since 1980, gives great credence to Tom Gwinnett's account, from a man he refers to as "most observant" and he says that a rare combination of temperature, atmosphere and landscape are what is necessary for a crop circle to form.
The circles tend to appear in the summer months between May and September, and Meaden says that the air would need to be calm (usually between evening and early morning and as the wind comes up against a hill, the downward airflow as it passes over the top creates a "Lea Vortex" and the smaller the lea vortex is, the more violent it is, rather like an ice skater who spins round faster and faster as they tuck themselves into a ball and spins more slowly as they extend their arms and legs. In humid conditions the vortex would be visible as a whirling column or a hollow sphere which some witnesses have reported, or it may be seen as the friction in electrical charges in the atmosphere which would explain the humming sound and the lights that dance in the air. Also television and radio interference may be apparent.
Not surprisingly, Terence Meaden feels that his explanation for crop circles is the only credible one that has been put forward, but one man who disagrees with him is George Pedley of Tully, Queensland in Australia's tropical north east, and he proffers the most frequently quoted explanation. Pedley is a farmer, and one day he was out in his fields driving his tractor when he heard "an unearthly sound like a hiss" and at first he thought that it was coming from his tractor, but when he looked up he saw a U.F.O. taking off, and it was this that was making the hissing noise. He went to the spot he had seen it rise from and he saw that it was a lagoon, and as he stood there watching, the surface of the water was broken by a woven mat of reeds that was two feet thick and thirty feet across. George went and told his neighbour, Albert Pennisi, who was amazed at not only the circle of reeds itself but also by its sheer strength which was enough to support ten or twelve men because it was so thick. Following this occurrence both men are convinced that extra terrestrials are responsible for crop circles after disregarding some of the alternative theories that were put to them at the time such as helicopters flying upside down, trampling by spoonbills or mating alligators. Though some farmers have seen foxes and their cubs playing in flattened circles there is no evidence to connect them to the forming of the circle itself.
In 1985 it was proven that helicopters could not be responsible for crop circles when many experiments were carried out by Lieutenant Colonel Edgecombe of the Aviation Standards branch of the Army Air Corps based at Middle Wallop, Hampshire. Edgecombe's duties involved assessing helicopter damage to farmland for army insurance claims, and he showed that the downward draft from a helicopter's rotors spreads out radially in all directions rather than in a swirl pattern, and as it spreads the draft peters out rather than stopping abruptly in a circular shape. Tests were also carried out by two B.B.C. television documentaries, "Secret Circles" in 1989 and "Running Rings Around Arthur" screened on October 9th 1988, which ironically showed a statue of Alfred not Arthur. They used different types of helicopter flying just above ground level, and all of the results were the same. The crop simply swirled about in a random manner and was not laid flat in a neat pattern.
Another theory put forward was that crop circles were caused by ancient field markings left behind from ancient history by farms, Roman roads, pits and Bronze Age ring ditches. Though ring ditches do sometimes cause markings which from the air do resemble crop circles, but when viewed more closely they don't have the tell tale swirl patterns, well defined edges or "layering" of the crop.
Also discounted as a culprit were giant hail stones falling from aeroplanes as they empty their toilets high up in the atmosphere, and the waste then freezes until it hits the ground and melts. This cause was for a time tied in with a jelly like substance that was found inside a crop circle at Goodworth Clatford in 1985, and which made everybody who had handled it feel ill. The substance was analysed at the University of Surrey and the National Testing Laboratories at Wisley who said that it was "some kind of confectionery that had gone off" though they found no sign of glucose syrup which is present in most, but not all, confectionery.
Archaeologists noticed that there is a similarity in size and in shape between crop circles and the shape and size of stone circles. Could it be a coincidence that by far the majority of circles are found in the county of Wiltshire which also gives us the stone circle sites of Avebury, Silbury Hill and of course Stonehenge? It could be a link but then again it could be the hoaxers using the county to their own advantage to add some more mysticism to the phenomenon. Ley Lines are often said to join ancient sites, and Paul Deveraux, author of various books on them, and widely heralded as the world's leading authority on Ley Lines, says that in all of his work in this field has seen no evidence that would point to a connection between them and crop circles.
A survey of cereal farmers carried out by BUFORA in 1987 asked what they thought could be responsible for the circles that were appearing in their fields, and the results were that 78 of them blamed hoaxers, 68 said that they thought it was the weather and only 17 said it could be U.F.O.s. The Ufologists obviously don't use this in their argument, but the more "natural" causes that are discounted, the more they say that an intelligent cause must be responsible. They say that the early formations were just lone circles, and as we found more and more ways to try and explain them the more complex the circles got so that there was no way that we could mistake them for anything but an intelligent phenomenon.
The more conservative minded people say that the simple formations and single circles have a natural cause while all of the complex ones must be hoaxes, and as with any such phenomenon, if one circle previously thought to be genuine turns out to be a hoax then all the others will have some doubt thrown upon them.
It was in the 1980s that reports of crop circles reached astronomical proportions and they soon came in from all over the world; Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, U.S.A., Canada, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Russia and Japan to name but a few, but it was the southern counties of England that would play host to more formations than any other place in the world, and in particular it was the two counties of Hampshire and Wiltshire, and three sites in those counties proved to be most popular. They are the Cheesefoot Head "Punchbowl" near Winchester, Hampshire, the Westbury White Horse, near Bratton, Wiltshire, and Cley Hill near Warminster, Wiltshire.
Cheesefoot (pronounced Chez Foot) is perhaps the most well known site and produces circles most years which are clearly visible from the nearby A272 Winchester to Petersfield road. The White Horse carved into the chalk of Westbury Hill overlooks the most productive single site that yields at least a dozen circles every summer, and Cley Hill has long had associations with the mysterious as it was a popular place for U.F.O. sightings in the 1960s, but Cheesefoot and White Horse have associations that go back even further than this as they both have ancient "Devil" names which folklorists believe suggest a link with unusual occurrences in ancient times, but possibly they just possess the correct layout of hills and valleys, and the right climate to produce the conditions necessary for Meaden's vortexes.
Some countries and continents produce no circles of a genuine nature at all such as Africa and Asia, and there are very few from France. Others such as South America produce ones that consist mainly of burned circles which are usually associated with U.F.O. sightings, as are those from Australia, and it appears from the Australian reports that George Pedley's "nest of reeds" is one of many similar accounts from around Tully, Queensland. They date from 1966 and continue to some extent to the present day and there are now more "conventional" circles appearing in other parts of Australia and it is interesting to note that they occur during the Australian summer when the Northern Hemisphere is in winter. Australia, like Canada, is one of the countries that had circles before 1990, but only time will tell if they will come to "suffer" from them to the same extent that Britain has.
Each of the formations brought about as many, if not more, possible explanations, and of course there were the usual cranks and hoaxers claiming that they had made them, and no doubt a fair share of them were, and still are, hoaxed, but often the formations would appear in the middle of a field with no signs of footprints leading to or from them. More disturbingly there were circles found on sand where footprints could not be covered up, and also in Boston, Massachusetts circles were found on ice that was too thin for people to walk on. It wasn't just the lack of footprints that put certain formations beyond the capabilities of the hoaxer but also in some cases it was the time scale, because some have been known to form in a matter of minutes, in some case up to twenty circle formations in one night, too many to be the work of the nocturnal hoaxer.
It wasn't too long before the almost obligatory U.F.O. theory came along, and for once it didn't seem too outrageous when you consider that a lot of accounts of circles being formed mention humming sounds, lights in the sky and interference with electrical equipment such as radios and televisions, but as usual many people were reluctant to accept this as a plausible explanation, preferring instead to go along with a more natural cause, but there was a hard core of believers, notably the press, who seemed to "push" the U.F.O. cause and people would want to believe it to be true hoping that the markings in the crops were caused by U.F.O.s as they landed, but better still that they were a kind of message that had been written for us, an attempt to communicate using signs, but markings would sometimes appear beneath power cables and telephone lines so they clearly couldn't be from a landing U.F.O.. This didn't stop the media from whipping up the theory with reports such as the crops being "contaminated" and that they should be "kept out of the food chain" ("The People", July 9th 1989), or the claim that a dead fly discovered "clinging" to a stem at the centre of a circle had been "zapped dead" by some "mysterious force" (Sunday Times July 9th 1989) and the report that circles could be a message from "some form of intelligence" trying to tell us that "if you destroy this food, your planet is finished." (Wall Street Journal August 28th 1989). In this same year the change in the molecular structure of affected crops was blamed for the food scares of that time, but to date no molecular damage has been found in affected crops.
While the early circles were single ones or sometimes up to 4 or 5 circles it seemed that it could well be a natural phenomenon with an "earthbound" cause and Meaden's theory looked quite water tight, but as the formations became more and more complex it was looking less and less so and it seemed that a new theory was needed. One particular formation in Leicester, England in 1988 sparked debate in the press, partly because it was in this year that Meaden went public with his work and his theories which initiated a response from British engineer and consultant to the "Flying Saucer Review," Pat Delgado.
Delgado said in the "Leicester Mercury" on July 8th 1988 that "A natural force could not create such intriguing patterns." to which Meaden replied in the press five days later "Some people believe these circles were formed by U.F.O.s. That is nothing but pie in the sky which is wasting a lot of people's time." On July 21st Delgado was at it again, this time in the "Winchester Extra", he told the paper that "we are so disgusted with Meaden" and "we don't want anything to do with him" but a recent appointment of Meaden's was at a meteorological conference in Oxford and he had further work published in major publications, and later that year he was asked to lecture at a conference on atmospheric physics in Tokyo, so he clearly wasn't the black sheep that Delgado made him out to be with comments such as the Meteorological Office in Bracknell, Berkshire "falling on the floor laughing at Meaden's ideas." Further fuel was added to the fire by leading researcher George Wingfield who says that the link between U.F.O.s and crop circles is not in doubt because U.F.O.s have been seen in proximity to circles and "pictograms." "He said "When circles have appeared in new locations, they have often been preceded by sightings of unidentified flying objects."
Could the sightings of U.F.O.s in the 1960s and the formation of crop circles at Cley Hill be related? Perhaps caused by Tectonic Stress like the U.F.O. sightings in the Yakima region of Washington State, U.S.A., and if so what had manifested itself in ancient times to make the area be given a "Devil" name?
The natural cause theory and the hoax theory began to look very doubtful as the complexity of the formations increased and they would be made up of many circles, sometimes in geometric patterns, sometimes as circles with concentric rings, circles with other "satellite" circles round them and circles joined by straight lines.
Peter Sorensen video tapes crop circles in England, and he says that after ten years or so of ordinary circles he saw an "evolution" of patterns of circles, and it was at this point that he discarded the natural explanation. He says that: "Obviously these straight lines are not caused by a storm." He has noticed not only an evolution year upon year, but also throughout each individual year as well, the first one of the year being relatively simple, and they then escalate in complexity until the last one of the year which he says is the most complex, and is often referred to as the "Grand Finale." His favourite formation is the Grand Finale from 1994 which was a huge spider's web inside a circle, but what is most interesting about it is that it appeared over the course of two nights, a fact which could be used to argue that it could not be the work of hoaxers who would be unlikely to return to the "scene of the crime" or, on the other hand it could be used to argue that if it was an intelligent cause that can make other formations in minutes, why did this particular one take two full nights?
The characteristics of formations have been examined very closely to try and help "experts" determine which ones are hoaxes and which ones are "genuine" so that they can spend their time investigating the right ones and not waste time on fakes. The key features found were that there is a definite edge to a circle, it does not fade out but fallen stems lie right next to unaffected stems. The stems are flattened in spirals which "flow" around the circle and emanate from the "spiral centre," though the spiral centre is not always the centre of the circle and can be up to a metre away. When the circle is formed on a steep slope it is not circular but is oval, with the elongation running along the gradient of the slope so that when viewed from above it does look circular. It is a myth that all circles are perfectly round because they are not, in fact relatively few are, most are oval, and it is as though the round ones are just a coincidence. Some circles have two spiral centres, usually less than a metre apart, though far more common is just one, and the swirls which emanate from them are more commonly in a tight pattern, but some appear as what is referred to as a "starburst" as though whatever caused it didn't whirl around but dissipated outwards very quickly, but even then there is still a definite edge to the circle. There is roughly an equal amount of clockwise and anti clockwise circles and some formations display both, surely not possible if the cause is a natural one? Some circles will swirl in one direction while the rings around it swirl in the other. There is no known reason for the differing swirl directions and there is no record of multi directional swirls before 1986. Could this be because the phenomenon had only evolved to this stage by then, or it is equally possible that nobody was documenting such features before this?
Circles range in size from only a metre or so in diameter to the largest ever which was found to be forty five metres in diameter, though most commonly they range from ten to twenty metres. They have appeared in many and varied crops, and as long as the stems are pliable enough to deform permanently they will remain long enough to be examined. In England the crop is usually cereals such as wheat and barley but, formations have been seen in many crops such as rye, oats, rape seed, rice, mustard, runner beans, soya beans, spinach, tobacco, maize and sugar beet, and also of course in sand, dirt, snow and ice. Some have been known to appear in long grass but these tend not to last very long and are soon distorted or blown out completely by the wind. The straight lines that also appear in formations sometimes follow tractor tram lines in the field but this is not always the case, so it is not always true to say that they follow the weakest path through the crop. The crop itself is not damaged and the stems are not uprooted but flattened to the ground as though pushed from above. The heads are undamaged and show no signs of being affected and they also continue to grow.
Experts say that these features cannot be hoaxed, and that they can spot a hoax, but some hoaxers claim to have fooled the so called "experts" many times. One such man is an artist named Doug Bower who began faking circles in 1978 using a plank of wood with rope tied to each end, and holding one of the ropes in each hand he would use the wooden plank to trample the corn down. He now "works" with a friend called Dave Chorley, and some of their designs can be quite complex. It was said that hoaxers may be able to create a circle, and this may be why most are not actually circular, but would they be able to create a straight line, particularly in the dead of night? Doug says that he is able to create a straight line in a field by using a peaked cap with a piece of wire attached to the peak. The wire has a loop in the end, and he would use it like a gun sight and line up this loop with a landmark on the horizon such as a tree or a house, and with one eye looking through the hoop at his landmark he would walk towards it, flattening the crop as he went and leaving a straight line behind him. Doug and Dave claim that they can do this in the dead of night without being seen or heard, and one night they were watched by the "Today" newspaper to prove it. Doug says that he just wants his story to be believed and to be told that he was right all along, and to try and prove that he was right, he even sent pictures of formations he was making, giving their measurements and saying both when and where they would appear.
As a test the two of them were set a task in the form of a complex formation which contained all of the features they claim to have hoaxed in the past, and they were filmed on infra-red camera as they made the formation in the dark. The next morning the farmer whose field they had worked in telephoned various circle investigators, and after examining the men's handiwork one of them said that the crop wasn't laid out in a spiral but in an outward blast of up to six layers and it must have all happened at the same time. He said that "It's impossible to replicate that." So clearly the so called "experts" can be fooled.
Some hoaxers not only seek to create the markings in the field but also recreate the lights in the sky using a balloon with a bulb inside it, and they flash the bulb on and off as they make the circle. They said, mockingly, that they do this to cheer up the Ufologists after all the hoaxing that had been uncovered so that they could once again link the circles to U.F.O.s, but many hoaxers themselves believe that not all formations are hoaxes, one said "There is a genuine phenomenon that lies beneath all the hoaxing. I'm not sure what the nature of it is but I believe it's there."
In 1992 Dr. Rupert Sheldrake organised a circle making competition (which Doug and Dave refused to enter), to see just how good the hoaxers were, and as night fell twelve teams entered a Buckinghamshire field to begin, and the organisers asked "experts" from the Centre for Crop Circle Studies to come and judge them. Sheldrake said that all of the entrants had done far better than he had expected, and during the night he had expected to see more lights and hear more noise as they were working. He did say though that there was less subtlety in the laying of the corn than he had seen in other circles. One journalist covering Sheldrake's 1992 competition said that he still doubts the totally human answer, but he thought that the top three entrants had been very good, and an "expert," Richard Andrews, was asked how he could tell them apart from real circles, and he replied that he had to be careful but one characteristic they all shared was a "lack of flow" in the laying of the stems, but this laying has been hoaxed well enough in the past to fool the experts, and in one case without even trying.
In 1991 a group calling themselves "The Wessex Sceptics" hoaxed a formation just to test the experts and to see if they would identify it as a hoax. They were in the field for a couple of hours after which they all felt that their efforts had gone badly. One member of the Wessex Sceptics was a French man who hadn't fully understood his instructions and had made his circle spiral in the wrong direction, but the experts made a great deal out of this, and one of the group, Dr. Robin Allen said that even when you make a mistake you can get away with it. Allen also heard that during the subsequent investigation a dowser had entered the formation and his rods had become uncontrollable which Allen doesn't find surprising as he sees dowsing itself as laughable. The experts said that the braiding of the stems (which the team had made no attempt to do) meant that it could not have been hoaxed by human beings and it was "100% genuine, a text book example." A friend of Allen's says that one day they will have to take all the crop circle books from the pseudo science shelf and move them to the art shelf.
One man who would agree with this sentiment is Ken Brown who began investigating the phenomenon in 1991 and he says that he has found "underlying pathways" which he used to formulate his "earthbound cause" theory, and he says that all satellite circles are joined by pathways, sometimes very narrow, where people have walked through the crop sideways between them. He has also noticed that as a straight line spur meets a circle, the corn in the spur will be flattened into the circle and then the corn in the circle will overlap it so the damage is clearly not done at one time, but the circle is flattened after the spur, clearly supporting the hoax theory.
The new phase of formations were called "Pictograms" and they featured some or all of the features seen to date, i.e. circles with rings, circles with satellites, straight line and arcs, and they were usually on a grand scale. They were said to be far too complex to have been hoaxed overnight, and one film director said that if he and his team were to reconstruct one without leaving any evidence of having done so, it would take them six weeks and they would not be able to do it without the farmer seeing them.
It is these pictograms, sometimes in recognisable forms, that are the most interesting to the circle fanatic as they would seem to point to an intelligent cause, and not only this, but there would also seem to be an "awareness" behind them as they can apparently respond to outside influences. For example in 1989 there were three books available in print that pointed out the observation that three ringed circles always consisted of contra-rotated corn (flattened in alternate directions), but then in that year the first one appeared in which the circle and its rings all rotated in the same direction, and this prompted one commentator to say that "The circles display a sense of humour."
This apparent sense of humour was further emphasised when news of the falling human male sperm count was made public, and in a field near Chequers, the Prime Minister's country retreat, there appeared a huge formation in the shape of a phallus. Similarly when scientists were making the first big discoveries in the field of the DNA strand, a field near Avebury, Wiltshire produced a huge double helix, and an offer was made for hoaxers to try to recreate it next to the original, but none were forthcoming. From other competitions and challenges such as this we know that hoax formations can take three or four hours to produce, but we also know that genuine formations can appear in a matter of minutes. One that I visited myself across the A303 from Stonehenge featured 151 circles varying from 2 to 9 feet in diameter, and in all the whole formation was 918 feet from end to end, yet it had appeared in less than fifteen minutes, and what's more it had done so right next to the main road and without anybody seeing its cause. The farmer whose field it had appeared in, and whose crops have been affected many times, told me that he was at first sceptical about any cause other than hoaxers being responsible, but as time goes by he is slowly changing his mind. Clearly what was needed was some conclusive proof of a cause, and an attempt was made in 1991 to capture on film a circle being made, this effort was named "Project Chameleon" and it was run by John Macnish and David Morgenstern.
They focused their attentions on Morgan's hill near Devizes, Wiltshire and they used cameras, infra-red surveillance and sound recording equipment and they settled down for a long wait. This particular site had produced both a quadruple ringed circle and a Celtic cross the previous July on the 1st and the 5th respectively, and with many fields now producing formations year after year this seemed as good a site as any.
Set up around the field by Mike Carrie who is the director of "Cloud 9," a company who market security systems, were intruder alarm devices which would let the team know if anybody were to enter the field, and if they should do so a remotely controlled camera mounted on a 150 foot arm would monitor them. The night of June 28th/29th was cloudy and damp but the team sat it out and waited. At 3am a mist descended which then turned into a fog which all but obscured any view, but they decided to keep the cameras rolling and the microphone switched on. As dawn came and went the fog remained, and as 6 o'clock approached it began to slowly lift from the field until it finally dissipated, and there in the field was a crop formation. The field's boundaries were checked and showed no signs of entry, nor did the formation itself, the intruder alarms had not been triggered, the cameras showed nothing and the microphone had recorded nothing on any frequency from 2 to 40,000Hz which covers the spectrum from infra-sound, through audible sound and some ultra-sound. The first man into the field to examine the freshly formed "dumb bell" formation was Mike Carrie who had previously doubted the genuineness of crop circles, and he now says "Now I just don't know what to think."
One day Carrie was examining another formation in Etchilhampton near Devizes when his head was surrounded by a powerful whirring noise, and ever since then the circle phenomenon seems to have followed him. A few days later when he returned to his Nottinghamshire office he saw in nearby fields a dumb bell formation that was the same shape and size as that at Morgan's Hill, but this time the direction of the swirl in each of the circles was reversed, perhaps more evidence of the "responsiveness" of the formations, and perhaps evidence against the natural explanation.
An attempt at filming a crop formation that was apparently successful happened in 1996 when a pictogram appeared in a field near Stonehenge, and soon afterwards a video tape surfaced which showed two strange lights darting about in the air above the field while the formation appears quickly in the wheat beneath them. The film was examined by an author and researcher, Colin Andrews, who thought it was promising as it showed a real formation that many witnesses had seen, and there were lights above it while it formed, but despite him having linked formations with U.F.O.s in the past, he felt that he needed to find out more about the cameraman who had shot the film before he took what he was seeing as read. He discovered that the more he found out about him the more suspicious he became as he is a co-owner of a film company where they have some very complex and advanced equipment that is used for film editing.
Optical Physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee has also seen the film footage and he says that it is a hoax. He says that it is done by filming the scene before a circle is there and then filming the same scene again after the circle is there, and then the film can be run through a computer which will fill in the sequence where the circle is formed, and it can also put the dancing lights on as well so it appears that the lights are responsible for the formation.
By now we were well into the age of the pictogram, and perhaps the greatest pictogram to date is that found in a field bear Barbury Castle, Swindon. It was the largest and most complex at the time it was discovered by Nick Bailey who flies over the area in his helicopter regularly at 9am, and he had not noticed it the previous evening at 9pm. The pictogram was made up of a huge equilateral triangle whose sides measured 180 feet each. This was over a large double ringed circle, each ring being about seven feet wide. The angles of the triangle were bisected by straight lines that began in the centre of the triangle and extended to circles that lay outside the triangle, each one of which had a different design inside it. One design was a plain ring of 75 feet in diameter, the second was a similar size ring with six equal segments and the third was a spiral that did not spiral outwards smoothly, but in steps every 90 inches.
Terence Meaden looked a very worried man that evening, and he was asked "... you don't think this was made by an atmospheric vortex?" and he replied that he could see that some of the stalks were broken, yet he didn't believe that anybody could have faked this formation in the hours of darkness. This was the general consensus but it was felt that the stalks were broken as a result of people walking through the formation afterwards rather than at the time of its forming as not many of them were broken, but the next day Meaden told the media that this was a hoax - what else could he say? - yet the experts disagreed, saying that it was in fact genuine as it had been witnessed. The manager of Waterstones bookshop in Bristol, Brian Grist, had been "crop watching" with two friends at Beckhampton, Wiltshire, when at around midnight they saw a pulsing light moving across the sky silently, and over the next hour they saw five more, some of which pulsed green, red and white, and they likened them to something out of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Barbury Castle lay just five miles away and some of the objects were sighted in this direction, and at the time of the first telling of the story, Grist was unaware of what had been found in the crop there. Further reports of the same lights in the sky were received and the Warden of Barbury Castle who lives in a bungalow on the hill heard "a colossal roar" and a pulsing hum at around 3:30am, but this may have been an aircraft as Barbury Castle is close to R.A.F. Lyneham, however the warden is used to the sound of aircraft engines and he says that this sound was not like a low flying aircraft, it was different.
It seemed to be around 1990 that things took a change, up until that point the formations had been made up of circles with concentric rings, multi circles and circles with satellites, and in 1991 we saw the advent of the "linear spur" and more complex geometrical patterns and also what were termed "dumb bells." These were circles which were joined by a straight line, and around this time we also saw the advent of the next "evolutionary" stage, the Insectogram. As the name suggests this was a formation that took the shape of an insect, and as 1991 drew to a close a spectacular one appeared in Ickleton, Cambridgeshire, and this would come to be known as "The Mandlebrot Set" and, like the phallus and the double helix, it was another "determinable" shape. It was named after Benoit B. Mandlebrot for his work on geometric forms, a field he calls "Fractal geometry" - the study of forms having a fractional dimension. Fractional Geometry is used to study chaos theory and the study of growth patterns in the natural world, and the Mandlebrot Set is representative of this.
The Mandlebrot Set appeared overnight and it was in a field of wheat that was 30 inches tall. It was a very precise formation with very precise circles, and at the base of the heart shaped body it tapered down to a single stalk. The stalks were flattened an inch above the ground and there were no foot prints around it, and the only thing the formation was missing to be complete was the "solar flares" which should emanate from it. Opinions on the formation vary, while on the one hand there are those who say "undoubtedly we are dealing with an intelligence, or intelligences, of a high order in the circle makers." on the other hand there are those who disagree and say that "... it must be a hoax because it couldn't be anything else."
During 1990 the mid west states of America, in particular Kansas and Missouri, began to encounter many circles and once again the same potential causes were put forward, whirlwinds, wildlife, U.F.O.s and hoaxes. On Roger and Linda Lowe's farm, between Odessa and Bates City, Missouri, two circles appeared in a field of sorghum - a coarse plant up to eight feet in height - one circle was thirty feet in diameter and the other was fifty feet. Though nothing out of the ordinary was seen that night, power cuts were registered in the Odessa area, but the Lowe farm was not affected in the power cuts and the weather was clear and calm. The larger circle soon expanded into an uneven shape the size of a football pitch and this is often seen with British circles as the wind distorts them over time. Residents joked that they were the landing markings of a U.F.O. or Bigfoot on the rampage and sceptics said that they were due to "atmospheric microbursts" or spinning winds called "dust devils."
Meteorologist and Professor of civil engineering at the University of Kansas, Glen Marotz, said that "when the atmosphere is faced with an energy imbalance, it acts like you would expect it would. It tries to get rid of them. One way is to create a spinning vortex." and to some extent this goes along with Terence Meaden's lea vortex theory although the landscape around Kansas and Missouri is notoriously flat.
It is interesting to note that a study of North American crop circles or U.G.M.s (unusual ground markings) published in 1991 categorised them into;
Though there is relatively little documentation on Russian formations, what there is, is very interesting. Early reports are mainly of burned circles while more recent cases appear to be very similar to our own, yet one circle which appeared in wheat near the town of Yeisk, in the Krasnodar region, was preceded by a white and blue luminescent object in the sky which was described as looking like a welding arc. The next morning an oval that measured 35 metres by 45 metres was found in the same spot, and the locals were afraid to enter it. A week later an investigating team led by Yuri Stroganov came to investigate the by now slightly damaged formation.
The crop in the oval was flattened in an anti clockwise direction, but in the centre was another oval of untouched, standing crop that measured 2 metres by 1.5 metres, and the large oval was aligned north to south while the smaller one was aligned east to west. In the flattened crop were two paths that were 40 centimetres wide and 40 centimetres apart, and they were circular though their centre didn't align with that of the ovals. The crop in these paths was brighter in colour than elsewhere and their radiation level was nil, whereas the rest of the formation showed background radiation. Though the team of investigators experienced no health problems, those who had entered the formation when it had been new complained of headaches, and the team concluded that these symptoms were consistent with U.F.O. visitations.
Other reports from Russia include photographs and data on a variation of the crop circle, these are vertical cylindrical holes dug that are in the ground overnight, one such hole near Tomsk measured 4 metres by 6 metres and these holes have been compared to similar ones found in Switzerland, and by no stretch of the imagination could such holes be the work of lea vortexes or dust devils. To add further confusion to the phenomenon is a case which happened in Germany where it would seem that the formation of a pictogram was followed by what appears, to all intents and purposes, to be a "Man in Black," although he isn't described as wearing black or driving the customary pristine old car.
The formation appeared at Grasdorf, near Hildesheim, and consisted of 13 circles and a ring with a cross in it. The farmer charged people 3DM to go into the field and look at it, and one man arrived with a metal detector and asked the farmer's permission to use it in the formation. When the farmer agreed to let him, in front of television cameras and many other witnesses, the man found three places, each at the centre of a circle, where he said that metal was buried. He dug down at each spot to a depth of forty centimetres where he found a metal plate that was thirty centimetres in diameter. He put the plates in his car and said that he would take them for scientific analysis but he was never seen again, however he did send pictures to the press which showed the plates to be embossed with the layout of the very same pictogram they were found in, and he is also believed to be responsible for an anonymous phone call in which the caller said that the plates were made of gold so he was keeping them.
In the 1960s crop circles tended to be reported by Ufologists and they were often seen in the same place as U.F.O. sightings and strange lights, and they were nicknamed "U.F.O. nests" but circle investigators nowadays have often tried to dissociate themselves from the U.F.O. link and have adopted the title of "Cereologists." The phenomenon is complex in that there have been many potential explanations for the cause of it, but no one explanation would seem to fit all the formations adequately, not all can be caused by U.F.O.s, not all can be caused by rampaging wildlife, not all can be hoaxed, but perhaps the most likely explanation is the natural one, that put forward by Terence Meaden, but it is not without its flaws and also, for that matter, its critics.
Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado wrote in "Circular Evidence" in 1989 that information Meaden had sent them was "a joke" and "an insult to one's intelligence" and they did not include any of it in their book. Delgado says that a whirlwind is caused by a pocket of air rising and rotating, so there is no way that it could press down and flatten a crop, and this is basically true, yet Kath Skin saw a whirlwind which made a circle and also threw debris thirty or forty feet into the air. Whirlwinds also rely on insolation (the sun's heat) and so cannot be the cause of circles at night, but what Meaden is proposing is a different kind of whirlwind, what he terms a lea vortex.
Meaden is head of the Tornado and Storm Research Organization which is an independent group of scientists based in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, and he is also the editor of the Journal of Meteorology. He has been researching crop circles for longer than most and his theory is generally well received, and in "Crop Circles, A Mystery Solved" Jenny Randles and Paul Fuller believe that it is the true answer to the mystery and can explain all the characteristics that are found in formations.
Meaden say that a lea vortex is caused by a rotating ball of electrically charged air which is known as a plasma vortex because it is made up of air molecules that have lost their negatively charged electrons, and so it is a cloud of positively charged ionised gas which may glow in a variety of colours, and has been compared to, but is not the same as, ball lightning. He says that it may form in the atmosphere and may hover for many minutes before descending and producing crop circles. It is generated by the flow of air over and around hill slopes and it tends to be surrounded by a strong electromagnetic field which can cause electrical phenomenon beyond the vortex which could cause interference with things such as radios televisions, engines and, to some extent, human beings. If there is such an energy field present, then can it be detected? There is a group of people who state categorically that it can, and they are often associated with crop circles. They are of course dowsers.
Whatever the legitimacy of dowsing the people that do it report feeling energies when they are inside a formation, but unfortunately they also report energies inside hoaxed formations, so dowsing alone cannot be used as a test for a genuine formation, but can we rely on their feelings of energies at all?
One man who was dowsing near Rathfinny Farm, Seaford, Sussex found that the high energy levels in the area made it both difficult and unpleasant to dowse as it was causing him to feel dizzy, disorientated and to suffer lapses in concentration, so he decided to return a few days later. When he did so he felt that something had happened in the area, and indeed it had, a crop formation of five circles had appeared nearby in the shape of a cross where two energy lines intersected, and people could only remain in the formation for about ten minutes at a time before feeling sick, so it wasn't only the dowser that felt it.
We know that animals can be sensitive to strange phenomena, and a dog in Langenburg near Regina, Saskatchewan, Australia, in September 1974 began barking one night at midnight and wouldn't stop until about 3am no matter what the owners did. All the time that it was barking the dog had been looking in the same direction, and the next morning a nearby farmer, Edwin Fuhr, found a crop formation in one of his fields which lay in the same direction that the dog had been looking the night before. However, the dog had sensed something and been barking for about three hours which is of course ample time for a hoaxer to create a circle so it could just have been barking at the intruders rather than at anything more untoward.
The fact that Meaden proposes that a hill could cause a lea vortex to form could be backed up by the fact that 50% of crop formations appear within 1 kilometre of a hill, but perhaps another feature could substitute itself for a hill, such as a house or a group of trees. The theory requires a stable layer of air close to the ground which occurs mainly at night or in the early hours of the morning when most circles appear. Perhaps farm mechanization and the removal of hedgerows allow a greater incidence of this low lying layer of air so this is why we are now seeing more and more formations every year. Perhaps the warm air normally associated with a "normal whirlwind" was not present in 1982 when the country experienced a bad year weather-wise, and this may possibly explain why it was also a bad year for crop formations. Could the two be related? Possibly, if we look at Kath Skin's experience when she was in the fields near her home on a hot summer day and she saw a circle forming, she walked into it with only a pair of sandals on her feet and she could feel that the ground was warm inside the circle. This may also explain the circles that have been found on ice if the warm air rushing around in the vortex melts the circle of ice.
Eye witness accounts are vital evidence but sadly they are few and far between, one experienced by Melvyn Bell of Keevil, Wiltshire was very similar to that of Kath Skin. Towards dusk one day in late July or early August 1983, Bell saw dust, dirt and light debris spiralling into the air and a few seconds later there was a ten to twelve metre circle in the wheat. At a distance of 50 to 60 metres he was unable to determine any sound coming from it, but other witnesses who have been closer than this to a forming circle have heard it making a sound such as a high pitched humming sound. In Dundee, Scotland in 1989 naturalist Sandy Reid experienced "an unusual condition of the atmosphere" that he found hard to put into words. In Thanet, Kent on August 10th Wilfred Gomez and a friend experienced a plasma vortex and also saw the glowing effects that they can produce. Gomez was driving along an unclassified road near Lydden, Kent at half past midnight when he saw what he described as a "solid hurricane of light" with a fuzzy, indistinct top but a more clearly defined base which was hovering over an adjacent cornfield. It was white with a bluish tinge and it seemed to be rotating. When he wound down his window he could hear a low, even "humming" sound coming from it. Both he and his friend could see the light for about four seconds until it seemed to "blink out to one side" and the humming stopped. Gomez stopped the car and they both made their way into the field and, by the light of the half moon, they found a small circle approximately five metres in diameter, and five metres further into the field they found another twenty metre circle.
Although there was no hill nearby there was a small incline fifteen metres away which sloped down towards the circles, and subsequent weather checks showed that there had been a five knot wind flowing down the slope in the direction of the circles and there were power lines above the site. These and other eye witness accounts would seem to validate several points about Meaden's theory: Atmospheric vortexes;
Ordinary whirlwinds which may appear over water or dusty deserts have been studied closely by meteorologists, and they have found that they typically leave behind them a spiralling pattern which is caused as the air rushes into them at the bottom from all directions and rises up into the vortex. These vortexes tend to travel along at ground level and they can move at relatively high speeds even if the surrounding wind speed is low, and it is this which deters many people from believing that they can be responsible for making crop circles as it is widely believed that a whirlwind can not, and will not, remain stationary. Just how some appear to be able to do so is not known at the moment, but there are good eye witness accounts of some that have done, and also some that have remained stationary for a time and then moved away, such as the one that was seen in the Egyptian desert and which made a "swishing" sound as it gathered up sand and vegetable debris around a circle as the axis remained still. The vortex was wide but was only about a foot high and remained still for about thirty seconds before moving away and slowly dying down.
Another initial thought about plasma vortexes was that they could not have a clearly defined edge which could create a crop circle with a definite edge as most whirlwinds have a fuzzy area at their extremities which seems to move slightly slower than the rest of it, and a whirlwind such as this would create an uneven shape. There are accounts of vortexes with poorly defined outer zones, or "sheaths," but the part that creates the circle is a well defined inner zone, or "funnel," but often the "perfect" circle is damaged by the outer sheath. There are accounts though that suggest that in stable atmospheric conditions some vortexes may be able to create precise, well defined circles, but what about ringed formations?
At sea there is a phenomenon known as water spouts which are a kind of localised whirlwind, and which have been seen with up to three outer sheaths that are able to either ascend or descend. They are always concentric with the central "funnel" and they also rotate alternately clockwise and anti clockwise. If one of these were to form over a crop field then could it cause a ringed formation?
For ringed formations that contra-rotate (all in the same direction) Meaden suggests that there may be an invisible, gentle sheath in between the stronger ones so that all the rings would rotate in the same direction, and aerial shots of water spouts suggest that there are indeed further outer sheaths which are not visible from the ground - so far so good - but how could they produce a linear spur?
Meaden suggests that as a vortex is dying, the charged particles may cluster together in the outer rings and as the vortex breaks down the particles are blown away from the circle, probably along the line of least resistance which may well be straight, but again, would the edges be so clearly defined? As for multi-circle formations one possibility is that they could be caused by more than one vortex in an area, but though they do exist and have been seen to exist, multiple vortex sightings are very rare, far rarer in fact than multi circle formations, but they "have" been seen to exist.
The vortex theory is still, years after it was first proposed, not yet fully understood and it clearly needs a lot of work on it to see if it could bear close cross examination, mainly in the proposal that the vortex, like a whirlwind, could descend or cause downward pressure and be triggered by the lea slope of a hill.
One formation that was seen near Cley Hill, Warminster consisted of four circles, one of which was fifteen feet across. It wasn't near the base of a hill and so it didn't suffer the full effects of the vortex and that showed in the circles themselves. The crop wasn't fully flattened to the ground but was merely angled over, and they weren't circles but ovals, and it was suggested that this could be because the wind had been moving and dissipating as it partially flattened the crop.
This site at Cley Hill often produces formations and it was also a U.F.O. hotspot in the 1960s so could the two be connected? Could it be the particular area that causes these unusual phenomenon? Perhaps Cley Hill could share similar properties with the Yakima Region of Washington State, U.S.A. and the phenomenon could be caused by tectonic stress which produces lights in the sky, but could this electrical activity also cause crop formations? Can it actually manifest itself above ground level? One kind of electrical phenomenon that can is ball lightning which is itself a very little understood phenomenon. Again though, there is a problem, ball lightning has been caught on film and can be seen to be a random phenomenon so it is unlikely if not impossible that it could produce a complex crop formation, and what's more it is extremely rare, again far more rare than simple or complex crop formations, and also far more rare than water spouts at sea.
As I said earlier, crop circles are a phenomenon that no one answer would seem to fit fully. There is no doubt that a lot of crop formations are hoaxed, but there is no way that all of them can be. The only other feasible explanations are a natural cause or some form of intelligent cause. The natural cause is likely a perfectly sound one, and the eye witness accounts of vortexes cannot be easily ignored as they prove that the phenomenon does exist, but what we don't know is just what it is capable of in terms of complex formations and to what extent it can do damage to crops. Admittedly a lot of the most complex formations will be hoaxed, but what of the percentage, however small, that are not hoaxed? It is these ones that are, and always will be, connected to some "intelligent" cause that seems to be able to "respond" to outside influences, the phallus at Chequers, the DNA double helix, Mandlebrot's Fractal equations, and in this it is similar to the poltergeist phenomenon in that "they" also seem to respond and also evolve throughout their duration from simple raps and scratches to voices and moving objects.
There is no one solid piece of evidence to connect these formations to an intelligent force, be it U.F.O.s or not, and they will, for the moment at least, remain truly a mystery, linked romantically if nothing else with little green men trying to give us a message, but if they really wanted to do this, couldn't they write it in something a little more permanent in future?
Another eye witness of a circle forming, this time at night was a farmer from Lydney, England called Tom Gwinnett. He was driving his car at the time and suddenly his engine stopped and his headlights went off. He got out of the car and he could now hear a low, almost distant humming sound, and over the hedge at the side of the road he could see strange lights in the air over the field. He returned to the same spot the next day when it was light, and there in the field he could see a flattened circle.
At around 9 pm on May 17th, 1990, Gary and Vivienne Tomlinson were out walking in the fields of Surrey when a "vortex" formed next to them. It developed from a quiet rustling to a sound like a high pitched flute and they were forced down to the ground, finding themselves in the middle of a circle as it formed. Gary's hair stood on end because of static electricity as the wind roared around them before it eventually moved away and formed two more circles.
Dr. Terence Meaden, meteorologist and circle investigator since 1980, gives great credence to Tom Gwinnett's account, from a man he refers to as "most observant" and he says that a rare combination of temperature, atmosphere and landscape are what is necessary for a crop circle to form.
The circles tend to appear in the summer months between May and September, and Meaden says that the air would need to be calm (usually between evening and early morning and as the wind comes up against a hill, the downward airflow as it passes over the top creates a "Lea Vortex" and the smaller the lea vortex is, the more violent it is, rather like an ice skater who spins round faster and faster as they tuck themselves into a ball and spins more slowly as they extend their arms and legs. In humid conditions the vortex would be visible as a whirling column or a hollow sphere which some witnesses have reported, or it may be seen as the friction in electrical charges in the atmosphere which would explain the humming sound and the lights that dance in the air. Also television and radio interference may be apparent.
Not surprisingly, Terence Meaden feels that his explanation for crop circles is the only credible one that has been put forward, but one man who disagrees with him is George Pedley of Tully, Queensland in Australia's tropical north east, and he proffers the most frequently quoted explanation. Pedley is a farmer, and one day he was out in his fields driving his tractor when he heard "an unearthly sound like a hiss" and at first he thought that it was coming from his tractor, but when he looked up he saw a U.F.O. taking off, and it was this that was making the hissing noise. He went to the spot he had seen it rise from and he saw that it was a lagoon, and as he stood there watching, the surface of the water was broken by a woven mat of reeds that was two feet thick and thirty feet across. George went and told his neighbour, Albert Pennisi, who was amazed at not only the circle of reeds itself but also by its sheer strength which was enough to support ten or twelve men because it was so thick. Following this occurrence both men are convinced that extra terrestrials are responsible for crop circles after disregarding some of the alternative theories that were put to them at the time such as helicopters flying upside down, trampling by spoonbills or mating alligators. Though some farmers have seen foxes and their cubs playing in flattened circles there is no evidence to connect them to the forming of the circle itself.
In 1985 it was proven that helicopters could not be responsible for crop circles when many experiments were carried out by Lieutenant Colonel Edgecombe of the Aviation Standards branch of the Army Air Corps based at Middle Wallop, Hampshire. Edgecombe's duties involved assessing helicopter damage to farmland for army insurance claims, and he showed that the downward draft from a helicopter's rotors spreads out radially in all directions rather than in a swirl pattern, and as it spreads the draft peters out rather than stopping abruptly in a circular shape. Tests were also carried out by two B.B.C. television documentaries, "Secret Circles" in 1989 and "Running Rings Around Arthur" screened on October 9th 1988, which ironically showed a statue of Alfred not Arthur. They used different types of helicopter flying just above ground level, and all of the results were the same. The crop simply swirled about in a random manner and was not laid flat in a neat pattern.
Another theory put forward was that crop circles were caused by ancient field markings left behind from ancient history by farms, Roman roads, pits and Bronze Age ring ditches. Though ring ditches do sometimes cause markings which from the air do resemble crop circles, but when viewed more closely they don't have the tell tale swirl patterns, well defined edges or "layering" of the crop.
Also discounted as a culprit were giant hail stones falling from aeroplanes as they empty their toilets high up in the atmosphere, and the waste then freezes until it hits the ground and melts. This cause was for a time tied in with a jelly like substance that was found inside a crop circle at Goodworth Clatford in 1985, and which made everybody who had handled it feel ill. The substance was analysed at the University of Surrey and the National Testing Laboratories at Wisley who said that it was "some kind of confectionery that had gone off" though they found no sign of glucose syrup which is present in most, but not all, confectionery.
Archaeologists noticed that there is a similarity in size and in shape between crop circles and the shape and size of stone circles. Could it be a coincidence that by far the majority of circles are found in the county of Wiltshire which also gives us the stone circle sites of Avebury, Silbury Hill and of course Stonehenge? It could be a link but then again it could be the hoaxers using the county to their own advantage to add some more mysticism to the phenomenon. Ley Lines are often said to join ancient sites, and Paul Deveraux, author of various books on them, and widely heralded as the world's leading authority on Ley Lines, says that in all of his work in this field has seen no evidence that would point to a connection between them and crop circles.
A survey of cereal farmers carried out by BUFORA in 1987 asked what they thought could be responsible for the circles that were appearing in their fields, and the results were that 78 of them blamed hoaxers, 68 said that they thought it was the weather and only 17 said it could be U.F.O.s. The Ufologists obviously don't use this in their argument, but the more "natural" causes that are discounted, the more they say that an intelligent cause must be responsible. They say that the early formations were just lone circles, and as we found more and more ways to try and explain them the more complex the circles got so that there was no way that we could mistake them for anything but an intelligent phenomenon.
The more conservative minded people say that the simple formations and single circles have a natural cause while all of the complex ones must be hoaxes, and as with any such phenomenon, if one circle previously thought to be genuine turns out to be a hoax then all the others will have some doubt thrown upon them.
It was in the 1980s that reports of crop circles reached astronomical proportions and they soon came in from all over the world; Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, U.S.A., Canada, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Russia and Japan to name but a few, but it was the southern counties of England that would play host to more formations than any other place in the world, and in particular it was the two counties of Hampshire and Wiltshire, and three sites in those counties proved to be most popular. They are the Cheesefoot Head "Punchbowl" near Winchester, Hampshire, the Westbury White Horse, near Bratton, Wiltshire, and Cley Hill near Warminster, Wiltshire.
Cheesefoot (pronounced Chez Foot) is perhaps the most well known site and produces circles most years which are clearly visible from the nearby A272 Winchester to Petersfield road. The White Horse carved into the chalk of Westbury Hill overlooks the most productive single site that yields at least a dozen circles every summer, and Cley Hill has long had associations with the mysterious as it was a popular place for U.F.O. sightings in the 1960s, but Cheesefoot and White Horse have associations that go back even further than this as they both have ancient "Devil" names which folklorists believe suggest a link with unusual occurrences in ancient times, but possibly they just possess the correct layout of hills and valleys, and the right climate to produce the conditions necessary for Meaden's vortexes.
Some countries and continents produce no circles of a genuine nature at all such as Africa and Asia, and there are very few from France. Others such as South America produce ones that consist mainly of burned circles which are usually associated with U.F.O. sightings, as are those from Australia, and it appears from the Australian reports that George Pedley's "nest of reeds" is one of many similar accounts from around Tully, Queensland. They date from 1966 and continue to some extent to the present day and there are now more "conventional" circles appearing in other parts of Australia and it is interesting to note that they occur during the Australian summer when the Northern Hemisphere is in winter. Australia, like Canada, is one of the countries that had circles before 1990, but only time will tell if they will come to "suffer" from them to the same extent that Britain has.
Each of the formations brought about as many, if not more, possible explanations, and of course there were the usual cranks and hoaxers claiming that they had made them, and no doubt a fair share of them were, and still are, hoaxed, but often the formations would appear in the middle of a field with no signs of footprints leading to or from them. More disturbingly there were circles found on sand where footprints could not be covered up, and also in Boston, Massachusetts circles were found on ice that was too thin for people to walk on. It wasn't just the lack of footprints that put certain formations beyond the capabilities of the hoaxer but also in some cases it was the time scale, because some have been known to form in a matter of minutes, in some case up to twenty circle formations in one night, too many to be the work of the nocturnal hoaxer.
It wasn't too long before the almost obligatory U.F.O. theory came along, and for once it didn't seem too outrageous when you consider that a lot of accounts of circles being formed mention humming sounds, lights in the sky and interference with electrical equipment such as radios and televisions, but as usual many people were reluctant to accept this as a plausible explanation, preferring instead to go along with a more natural cause, but there was a hard core of believers, notably the press, who seemed to "push" the U.F.O. cause and people would want to believe it to be true hoping that the markings in the crops were caused by U.F.O.s as they landed, but better still that they were a kind of message that had been written for us, an attempt to communicate using signs, but markings would sometimes appear beneath power cables and telephone lines so they clearly couldn't be from a landing U.F.O.. This didn't stop the media from whipping up the theory with reports such as the crops being "contaminated" and that they should be "kept out of the food chain" ("The People", July 9th 1989), or the claim that a dead fly discovered "clinging" to a stem at the centre of a circle had been "zapped dead" by some "mysterious force" (Sunday Times July 9th 1989) and the report that circles could be a message from "some form of intelligence" trying to tell us that "if you destroy this food, your planet is finished." (Wall Street Journal August 28th 1989). In this same year the change in the molecular structure of affected crops was blamed for the food scares of that time, but to date no molecular damage has been found in affected crops.
While the early circles were single ones or sometimes up to 4 or 5 circles it seemed that it could well be a natural phenomenon with an "earthbound" cause and Meaden's theory looked quite water tight, but as the formations became more and more complex it was looking less and less so and it seemed that a new theory was needed. One particular formation in Leicester, England in 1988 sparked debate in the press, partly because it was in this year that Meaden went public with his work and his theories which initiated a response from British engineer and consultant to the "Flying Saucer Review," Pat Delgado.
Delgado said in the "Leicester Mercury" on July 8th 1988 that "A natural force could not create such intriguing patterns." to which Meaden replied in the press five days later "Some people believe these circles were formed by U.F.O.s. That is nothing but pie in the sky which is wasting a lot of people's time." On July 21st Delgado was at it again, this time in the "Winchester Extra", he told the paper that "we are so disgusted with Meaden" and "we don't want anything to do with him" but a recent appointment of Meaden's was at a meteorological conference in Oxford and he had further work published in major publications, and later that year he was asked to lecture at a conference on atmospheric physics in Tokyo, so he clearly wasn't the black sheep that Delgado made him out to be with comments such as the Meteorological Office in Bracknell, Berkshire "falling on the floor laughing at Meaden's ideas." Further fuel was added to the fire by leading researcher George Wingfield who says that the link between U.F.O.s and crop circles is not in doubt because U.F.O.s have been seen in proximity to circles and "pictograms." "He said "When circles have appeared in new locations, they have often been preceded by sightings of unidentified flying objects."
Could the sightings of U.F.O.s in the 1960s and the formation of crop circles at Cley Hill be related? Perhaps caused by Tectonic Stress like the U.F.O. sightings in the Yakima region of Washington State, U.S.A., and if so what had manifested itself in ancient times to make the area be given a "Devil" name?
The natural cause theory and the hoax theory began to look very doubtful as the complexity of the formations increased and they would be made up of many circles, sometimes in geometric patterns, sometimes as circles with concentric rings, circles with other "satellite" circles round them and circles joined by straight lines.
Peter Sorensen video tapes crop circles in England, and he says that after ten years or so of ordinary circles he saw an "evolution" of patterns of circles, and it was at this point that he discarded the natural explanation. He says that: "Obviously these straight lines are not caused by a storm." He has noticed not only an evolution year upon year, but also throughout each individual year as well, the first one of the year being relatively simple, and they then escalate in complexity until the last one of the year which he says is the most complex, and is often referred to as the "Grand Finale." His favourite formation is the Grand Finale from 1994 which was a huge spider's web inside a circle, but what is most interesting about it is that it appeared over the course of two nights, a fact which could be used to argue that it could not be the work of hoaxers who would be unlikely to return to the "scene of the crime" or, on the other hand it could be used to argue that if it was an intelligent cause that can make other formations in minutes, why did this particular one take two full nights?
The characteristics of formations have been examined very closely to try and help "experts" determine which ones are hoaxes and which ones are "genuine" so that they can spend their time investigating the right ones and not waste time on fakes. The key features found were that there is a definite edge to a circle, it does not fade out but fallen stems lie right next to unaffected stems. The stems are flattened in spirals which "flow" around the circle and emanate from the "spiral centre," though the spiral centre is not always the centre of the circle and can be up to a metre away. When the circle is formed on a steep slope it is not circular but is oval, with the elongation running along the gradient of the slope so that when viewed from above it does look circular. It is a myth that all circles are perfectly round because they are not, in fact relatively few are, most are oval, and it is as though the round ones are just a coincidence. Some circles have two spiral centres, usually less than a metre apart, though far more common is just one, and the swirls which emanate from them are more commonly in a tight pattern, but some appear as what is referred to as a "starburst" as though whatever caused it didn't whirl around but dissipated outwards very quickly, but even then there is still a definite edge to the circle. There is roughly an equal amount of clockwise and anti clockwise circles and some formations display both, surely not possible if the cause is a natural one? Some circles will swirl in one direction while the rings around it swirl in the other. There is no known reason for the differing swirl directions and there is no record of multi directional swirls before 1986. Could this be because the phenomenon had only evolved to this stage by then, or it is equally possible that nobody was documenting such features before this?
Circles range in size from only a metre or so in diameter to the largest ever which was found to be forty five metres in diameter, though most commonly they range from ten to twenty metres. They have appeared in many and varied crops, and as long as the stems are pliable enough to deform permanently they will remain long enough to be examined. In England the crop is usually cereals such as wheat and barley but, formations have been seen in many crops such as rye, oats, rape seed, rice, mustard, runner beans, soya beans, spinach, tobacco, maize and sugar beet, and also of course in sand, dirt, snow and ice. Some have been known to appear in long grass but these tend not to last very long and are soon distorted or blown out completely by the wind. The straight lines that also appear in formations sometimes follow tractor tram lines in the field but this is not always the case, so it is not always true to say that they follow the weakest path through the crop. The crop itself is not damaged and the stems are not uprooted but flattened to the ground as though pushed from above. The heads are undamaged and show no signs of being affected and they also continue to grow.
Experts say that these features cannot be hoaxed, and that they can spot a hoax, but some hoaxers claim to have fooled the so called "experts" many times. One such man is an artist named Doug Bower who began faking circles in 1978 using a plank of wood with rope tied to each end, and holding one of the ropes in each hand he would use the wooden plank to trample the corn down. He now "works" with a friend called Dave Chorley, and some of their designs can be quite complex. It was said that hoaxers may be able to create a circle, and this may be why most are not actually circular, but would they be able to create a straight line, particularly in the dead of night? Doug says that he is able to create a straight line in a field by using a peaked cap with a piece of wire attached to the peak. The wire has a loop in the end, and he would use it like a gun sight and line up this loop with a landmark on the horizon such as a tree or a house, and with one eye looking through the hoop at his landmark he would walk towards it, flattening the crop as he went and leaving a straight line behind him. Doug and Dave claim that they can do this in the dead of night without being seen or heard, and one night they were watched by the "Today" newspaper to prove it. Doug says that he just wants his story to be believed and to be told that he was right all along, and to try and prove that he was right, he even sent pictures of formations he was making, giving their measurements and saying both when and where they would appear.
As a test the two of them were set a task in the form of a complex formation which contained all of the features they claim to have hoaxed in the past, and they were filmed on infra-red camera as they made the formation in the dark. The next morning the farmer whose field they had worked in telephoned various circle investigators, and after examining the men's handiwork one of them said that the crop wasn't laid out in a spiral but in an outward blast of up to six layers and it must have all happened at the same time. He said that "It's impossible to replicate that." So clearly the so called "experts" can be fooled.
Some hoaxers not only seek to create the markings in the field but also recreate the lights in the sky using a balloon with a bulb inside it, and they flash the bulb on and off as they make the circle. They said, mockingly, that they do this to cheer up the Ufologists after all the hoaxing that had been uncovered so that they could once again link the circles to U.F.O.s, but many hoaxers themselves believe that not all formations are hoaxes, one said "There is a genuine phenomenon that lies beneath all the hoaxing. I'm not sure what the nature of it is but I believe it's there."
In 1992 Dr. Rupert Sheldrake organised a circle making competition (which Doug and Dave refused to enter), to see just how good the hoaxers were, and as night fell twelve teams entered a Buckinghamshire field to begin, and the organisers asked "experts" from the Centre for Crop Circle Studies to come and judge them. Sheldrake said that all of the entrants had done far better than he had expected, and during the night he had expected to see more lights and hear more noise as they were working. He did say though that there was less subtlety in the laying of the corn than he had seen in other circles. One journalist covering Sheldrake's 1992 competition said that he still doubts the totally human answer, but he thought that the top three entrants had been very good, and an "expert," Richard Andrews, was asked how he could tell them apart from real circles, and he replied that he had to be careful but one characteristic they all shared was a "lack of flow" in the laying of the stems, but this laying has been hoaxed well enough in the past to fool the experts, and in one case without even trying.
In 1991 a group calling themselves "The Wessex Sceptics" hoaxed a formation just to test the experts and to see if they would identify it as a hoax. They were in the field for a couple of hours after which they all felt that their efforts had gone badly. One member of the Wessex Sceptics was a French man who hadn't fully understood his instructions and had made his circle spiral in the wrong direction, but the experts made a great deal out of this, and one of the group, Dr. Robin Allen said that even when you make a mistake you can get away with it. Allen also heard that during the subsequent investigation a dowser had entered the formation and his rods had become uncontrollable which Allen doesn't find surprising as he sees dowsing itself as laughable. The experts said that the braiding of the stems (which the team had made no attempt to do) meant that it could not have been hoaxed by human beings and it was "100% genuine, a text book example." A friend of Allen's says that one day they will have to take all the crop circle books from the pseudo science shelf and move them to the art shelf.
One man who would agree with this sentiment is Ken Brown who began investigating the phenomenon in 1991 and he says that he has found "underlying pathways" which he used to formulate his "earthbound cause" theory, and he says that all satellite circles are joined by pathways, sometimes very narrow, where people have walked through the crop sideways between them. He has also noticed that as a straight line spur meets a circle, the corn in the spur will be flattened into the circle and then the corn in the circle will overlap it so the damage is clearly not done at one time, but the circle is flattened after the spur, clearly supporting the hoax theory.
The new phase of formations were called "Pictograms" and they featured some or all of the features seen to date, i.e. circles with rings, circles with satellites, straight line and arcs, and they were usually on a grand scale. They were said to be far too complex to have been hoaxed overnight, and one film director said that if he and his team were to reconstruct one without leaving any evidence of having done so, it would take them six weeks and they would not be able to do it without the farmer seeing them.
It is these pictograms, sometimes in recognisable forms, that are the most interesting to the circle fanatic as they would seem to point to an intelligent cause, and not only this, but there would also seem to be an "awareness" behind them as they can apparently respond to outside influences. For example in 1989 there were three books available in print that pointed out the observation that three ringed circles always consisted of contra-rotated corn (flattened in alternate directions), but then in that year the first one appeared in which the circle and its rings all rotated in the same direction, and this prompted one commentator to say that "The circles display a sense of humour."
This apparent sense of humour was further emphasised when news of the falling human male sperm count was made public, and in a field near Chequers, the Prime Minister's country retreat, there appeared a huge formation in the shape of a phallus. Similarly when scientists were making the first big discoveries in the field of the DNA strand, a field near Avebury, Wiltshire produced a huge double helix, and an offer was made for hoaxers to try to recreate it next to the original, but none were forthcoming. From other competitions and challenges such as this we know that hoax formations can take three or four hours to produce, but we also know that genuine formations can appear in a matter of minutes. One that I visited myself across the A303 from Stonehenge featured 151 circles varying from 2 to 9 feet in diameter, and in all the whole formation was 918 feet from end to end, yet it had appeared in less than fifteen minutes, and what's more it had done so right next to the main road and without anybody seeing its cause. The farmer whose field it had appeared in, and whose crops have been affected many times, told me that he was at first sceptical about any cause other than hoaxers being responsible, but as time goes by he is slowly changing his mind. Clearly what was needed was some conclusive proof of a cause, and an attempt was made in 1991 to capture on film a circle being made, this effort was named "Project Chameleon" and it was run by John Macnish and David Morgenstern.
They focused their attentions on Morgan's hill near Devizes, Wiltshire and they used cameras, infra-red surveillance and sound recording equipment and they settled down for a long wait. This particular site had produced both a quadruple ringed circle and a Celtic cross the previous July on the 1st and the 5th respectively, and with many fields now producing formations year after year this seemed as good a site as any.
Set up around the field by Mike Carrie who is the director of "Cloud 9," a company who market security systems, were intruder alarm devices which would let the team know if anybody were to enter the field, and if they should do so a remotely controlled camera mounted on a 150 foot arm would monitor them. The night of June 28th/29th was cloudy and damp but the team sat it out and waited. At 3am a mist descended which then turned into a fog which all but obscured any view, but they decided to keep the cameras rolling and the microphone switched on. As dawn came and went the fog remained, and as 6 o'clock approached it began to slowly lift from the field until it finally dissipated, and there in the field was a crop formation. The field's boundaries were checked and showed no signs of entry, nor did the formation itself, the intruder alarms had not been triggered, the cameras showed nothing and the microphone had recorded nothing on any frequency from 2 to 40,000Hz which covers the spectrum from infra-sound, through audible sound and some ultra-sound. The first man into the field to examine the freshly formed "dumb bell" formation was Mike Carrie who had previously doubted the genuineness of crop circles, and he now says "Now I just don't know what to think."
One day Carrie was examining another formation in Etchilhampton near Devizes when his head was surrounded by a powerful whirring noise, and ever since then the circle phenomenon seems to have followed him. A few days later when he returned to his Nottinghamshire office he saw in nearby fields a dumb bell formation that was the same shape and size as that at Morgan's Hill, but this time the direction of the swirl in each of the circles was reversed, perhaps more evidence of the "responsiveness" of the formations, and perhaps evidence against the natural explanation.
An attempt at filming a crop formation that was apparently successful happened in 1996 when a pictogram appeared in a field near Stonehenge, and soon afterwards a video tape surfaced which showed two strange lights darting about in the air above the field while the formation appears quickly in the wheat beneath them. The film was examined by an author and researcher, Colin Andrews, who thought it was promising as it showed a real formation that many witnesses had seen, and there were lights above it while it formed, but despite him having linked formations with U.F.O.s in the past, he felt that he needed to find out more about the cameraman who had shot the film before he took what he was seeing as read. He discovered that the more he found out about him the more suspicious he became as he is a co-owner of a film company where they have some very complex and advanced equipment that is used for film editing.
Optical Physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee has also seen the film footage and he says that it is a hoax. He says that it is done by filming the scene before a circle is there and then filming the same scene again after the circle is there, and then the film can be run through a computer which will fill in the sequence where the circle is formed, and it can also put the dancing lights on as well so it appears that the lights are responsible for the formation.
By now we were well into the age of the pictogram, and perhaps the greatest pictogram to date is that found in a field bear Barbury Castle, Swindon. It was the largest and most complex at the time it was discovered by Nick Bailey who flies over the area in his helicopter regularly at 9am, and he had not noticed it the previous evening at 9pm. The pictogram was made up of a huge equilateral triangle whose sides measured 180 feet each. This was over a large double ringed circle, each ring being about seven feet wide. The angles of the triangle were bisected by straight lines that began in the centre of the triangle and extended to circles that lay outside the triangle, each one of which had a different design inside it. One design was a plain ring of 75 feet in diameter, the second was a similar size ring with six equal segments and the third was a spiral that did not spiral outwards smoothly, but in steps every 90 inches.
Terence Meaden looked a very worried man that evening, and he was asked "... you don't think this was made by an atmospheric vortex?" and he replied that he could see that some of the stalks were broken, yet he didn't believe that anybody could have faked this formation in the hours of darkness. This was the general consensus but it was felt that the stalks were broken as a result of people walking through the formation afterwards rather than at the time of its forming as not many of them were broken, but the next day Meaden told the media that this was a hoax - what else could he say? - yet the experts disagreed, saying that it was in fact genuine as it had been witnessed. The manager of Waterstones bookshop in Bristol, Brian Grist, had been "crop watching" with two friends at Beckhampton, Wiltshire, when at around midnight they saw a pulsing light moving across the sky silently, and over the next hour they saw five more, some of which pulsed green, red and white, and they likened them to something out of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Barbury Castle lay just five miles away and some of the objects were sighted in this direction, and at the time of the first telling of the story, Grist was unaware of what had been found in the crop there. Further reports of the same lights in the sky were received and the Warden of Barbury Castle who lives in a bungalow on the hill heard "a colossal roar" and a pulsing hum at around 3:30am, but this may have been an aircraft as Barbury Castle is close to R.A.F. Lyneham, however the warden is used to the sound of aircraft engines and he says that this sound was not like a low flying aircraft, it was different.
It seemed to be around 1990 that things took a change, up until that point the formations had been made up of circles with concentric rings, multi circles and circles with satellites, and in 1991 we saw the advent of the "linear spur" and more complex geometrical patterns and also what were termed "dumb bells." These were circles which were joined by a straight line, and around this time we also saw the advent of the next "evolutionary" stage, the Insectogram. As the name suggests this was a formation that took the shape of an insect, and as 1991 drew to a close a spectacular one appeared in Ickleton, Cambridgeshire, and this would come to be known as "The Mandlebrot Set" and, like the phallus and the double helix, it was another "determinable" shape. It was named after Benoit B. Mandlebrot for his work on geometric forms, a field he calls "Fractal geometry" - the study of forms having a fractional dimension. Fractional Geometry is used to study chaos theory and the study of growth patterns in the natural world, and the Mandlebrot Set is representative of this.
The Mandlebrot Set appeared overnight and it was in a field of wheat that was 30 inches tall. It was a very precise formation with very precise circles, and at the base of the heart shaped body it tapered down to a single stalk. The stalks were flattened an inch above the ground and there were no foot prints around it, and the only thing the formation was missing to be complete was the "solar flares" which should emanate from it. Opinions on the formation vary, while on the one hand there are those who say "undoubtedly we are dealing with an intelligence, or intelligences, of a high order in the circle makers." on the other hand there are those who disagree and say that "... it must be a hoax because it couldn't be anything else."
During 1990 the mid west states of America, in particular Kansas and Missouri, began to encounter many circles and once again the same potential causes were put forward, whirlwinds, wildlife, U.F.O.s and hoaxes. On Roger and Linda Lowe's farm, between Odessa and Bates City, Missouri, two circles appeared in a field of sorghum - a coarse plant up to eight feet in height - one circle was thirty feet in diameter and the other was fifty feet. Though nothing out of the ordinary was seen that night, power cuts were registered in the Odessa area, but the Lowe farm was not affected in the power cuts and the weather was clear and calm. The larger circle soon expanded into an uneven shape the size of a football pitch and this is often seen with British circles as the wind distorts them over time. Residents joked that they were the landing markings of a U.F.O. or Bigfoot on the rampage and sceptics said that they were due to "atmospheric microbursts" or spinning winds called "dust devils."
Meteorologist and Professor of civil engineering at the University of Kansas, Glen Marotz, said that "when the atmosphere is faced with an energy imbalance, it acts like you would expect it would. It tries to get rid of them. One way is to create a spinning vortex." and to some extent this goes along with Terence Meaden's lea vortex theory although the landscape around Kansas and Missouri is notoriously flat.
It is interesting to note that a study of North American crop circles or U.G.M.s (unusual ground markings) published in 1991 categorised them into;
- Flattened circles.
- Flattened rings.
- Burned circles.
- Burned rings.
- Burned and flattened.
- Concentric rings.
- Vegetation missing / damaged.
- Depression.
- Holes.
- Other markings or residue.
Though there is relatively little documentation on Russian formations, what there is, is very interesting. Early reports are mainly of burned circles while more recent cases appear to be very similar to our own, yet one circle which appeared in wheat near the town of Yeisk, in the Krasnodar region, was preceded by a white and blue luminescent object in the sky which was described as looking like a welding arc. The next morning an oval that measured 35 metres by 45 metres was found in the same spot, and the locals were afraid to enter it. A week later an investigating team led by Yuri Stroganov came to investigate the by now slightly damaged formation.
The crop in the oval was flattened in an anti clockwise direction, but in the centre was another oval of untouched, standing crop that measured 2 metres by 1.5 metres, and the large oval was aligned north to south while the smaller one was aligned east to west. In the flattened crop were two paths that were 40 centimetres wide and 40 centimetres apart, and they were circular though their centre didn't align with that of the ovals. The crop in these paths was brighter in colour than elsewhere and their radiation level was nil, whereas the rest of the formation showed background radiation. Though the team of investigators experienced no health problems, those who had entered the formation when it had been new complained of headaches, and the team concluded that these symptoms were consistent with U.F.O. visitations.
Other reports from Russia include photographs and data on a variation of the crop circle, these are vertical cylindrical holes dug that are in the ground overnight, one such hole near Tomsk measured 4 metres by 6 metres and these holes have been compared to similar ones found in Switzerland, and by no stretch of the imagination could such holes be the work of lea vortexes or dust devils. To add further confusion to the phenomenon is a case which happened in Germany where it would seem that the formation of a pictogram was followed by what appears, to all intents and purposes, to be a "Man in Black," although he isn't described as wearing black or driving the customary pristine old car.
The formation appeared at Grasdorf, near Hildesheim, and consisted of 13 circles and a ring with a cross in it. The farmer charged people 3DM to go into the field and look at it, and one man arrived with a metal detector and asked the farmer's permission to use it in the formation. When the farmer agreed to let him, in front of television cameras and many other witnesses, the man found three places, each at the centre of a circle, where he said that metal was buried. He dug down at each spot to a depth of forty centimetres where he found a metal plate that was thirty centimetres in diameter. He put the plates in his car and said that he would take them for scientific analysis but he was never seen again, however he did send pictures to the press which showed the plates to be embossed with the layout of the very same pictogram they were found in, and he is also believed to be responsible for an anonymous phone call in which the caller said that the plates were made of gold so he was keeping them.
In the 1960s crop circles tended to be reported by Ufologists and they were often seen in the same place as U.F.O. sightings and strange lights, and they were nicknamed "U.F.O. nests" but circle investigators nowadays have often tried to dissociate themselves from the U.F.O. link and have adopted the title of "Cereologists." The phenomenon is complex in that there have been many potential explanations for the cause of it, but no one explanation would seem to fit all the formations adequately, not all can be caused by U.F.O.s, not all can be caused by rampaging wildlife, not all can be hoaxed, but perhaps the most likely explanation is the natural one, that put forward by Terence Meaden, but it is not without its flaws and also, for that matter, its critics.
Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado wrote in "Circular Evidence" in 1989 that information Meaden had sent them was "a joke" and "an insult to one's intelligence" and they did not include any of it in their book. Delgado says that a whirlwind is caused by a pocket of air rising and rotating, so there is no way that it could press down and flatten a crop, and this is basically true, yet Kath Skin saw a whirlwind which made a circle and also threw debris thirty or forty feet into the air. Whirlwinds also rely on insolation (the sun's heat) and so cannot be the cause of circles at night, but what Meaden is proposing is a different kind of whirlwind, what he terms a lea vortex.
Meaden is head of the Tornado and Storm Research Organization which is an independent group of scientists based in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, and he is also the editor of the Journal of Meteorology. He has been researching crop circles for longer than most and his theory is generally well received, and in "Crop Circles, A Mystery Solved" Jenny Randles and Paul Fuller believe that it is the true answer to the mystery and can explain all the characteristics that are found in formations.
Meaden say that a lea vortex is caused by a rotating ball of electrically charged air which is known as a plasma vortex because it is made up of air molecules that have lost their negatively charged electrons, and so it is a cloud of positively charged ionised gas which may glow in a variety of colours, and has been compared to, but is not the same as, ball lightning. He says that it may form in the atmosphere and may hover for many minutes before descending and producing crop circles. It is generated by the flow of air over and around hill slopes and it tends to be surrounded by a strong electromagnetic field which can cause electrical phenomenon beyond the vortex which could cause interference with things such as radios televisions, engines and, to some extent, human beings. If there is such an energy field present, then can it be detected? There is a group of people who state categorically that it can, and they are often associated with crop circles. They are of course dowsers.
Whatever the legitimacy of dowsing the people that do it report feeling energies when they are inside a formation, but unfortunately they also report energies inside hoaxed formations, so dowsing alone cannot be used as a test for a genuine formation, but can we rely on their feelings of energies at all?
One man who was dowsing near Rathfinny Farm, Seaford, Sussex found that the high energy levels in the area made it both difficult and unpleasant to dowse as it was causing him to feel dizzy, disorientated and to suffer lapses in concentration, so he decided to return a few days later. When he did so he felt that something had happened in the area, and indeed it had, a crop formation of five circles had appeared nearby in the shape of a cross where two energy lines intersected, and people could only remain in the formation for about ten minutes at a time before feeling sick, so it wasn't only the dowser that felt it.
We know that animals can be sensitive to strange phenomena, and a dog in Langenburg near Regina, Saskatchewan, Australia, in September 1974 began barking one night at midnight and wouldn't stop until about 3am no matter what the owners did. All the time that it was barking the dog had been looking in the same direction, and the next morning a nearby farmer, Edwin Fuhr, found a crop formation in one of his fields which lay in the same direction that the dog had been looking the night before. However, the dog had sensed something and been barking for about three hours which is of course ample time for a hoaxer to create a circle so it could just have been barking at the intruders rather than at anything more untoward.
The fact that Meaden proposes that a hill could cause a lea vortex to form could be backed up by the fact that 50% of crop formations appear within 1 kilometre of a hill, but perhaps another feature could substitute itself for a hill, such as a house or a group of trees. The theory requires a stable layer of air close to the ground which occurs mainly at night or in the early hours of the morning when most circles appear. Perhaps farm mechanization and the removal of hedgerows allow a greater incidence of this low lying layer of air so this is why we are now seeing more and more formations every year. Perhaps the warm air normally associated with a "normal whirlwind" was not present in 1982 when the country experienced a bad year weather-wise, and this may possibly explain why it was also a bad year for crop formations. Could the two be related? Possibly, if we look at Kath Skin's experience when she was in the fields near her home on a hot summer day and she saw a circle forming, she walked into it with only a pair of sandals on her feet and she could feel that the ground was warm inside the circle. This may also explain the circles that have been found on ice if the warm air rushing around in the vortex melts the circle of ice.
Eye witness accounts are vital evidence but sadly they are few and far between, one experienced by Melvyn Bell of Keevil, Wiltshire was very similar to that of Kath Skin. Towards dusk one day in late July or early August 1983, Bell saw dust, dirt and light debris spiralling into the air and a few seconds later there was a ten to twelve metre circle in the wheat. At a distance of 50 to 60 metres he was unable to determine any sound coming from it, but other witnesses who have been closer than this to a forming circle have heard it making a sound such as a high pitched humming sound. In Dundee, Scotland in 1989 naturalist Sandy Reid experienced "an unusual condition of the atmosphere" that he found hard to put into words. In Thanet, Kent on August 10th Wilfred Gomez and a friend experienced a plasma vortex and also saw the glowing effects that they can produce. Gomez was driving along an unclassified road near Lydden, Kent at half past midnight when he saw what he described as a "solid hurricane of light" with a fuzzy, indistinct top but a more clearly defined base which was hovering over an adjacent cornfield. It was white with a bluish tinge and it seemed to be rotating. When he wound down his window he could hear a low, even "humming" sound coming from it. Both he and his friend could see the light for about four seconds until it seemed to "blink out to one side" and the humming stopped. Gomez stopped the car and they both made their way into the field and, by the light of the half moon, they found a small circle approximately five metres in diameter, and five metres further into the field they found another twenty metre circle.
Although there was no hill nearby there was a small incline fifteen metres away which sloped down towards the circles, and subsequent weather checks showed that there had been a five knot wind flowing down the slope in the direction of the circles and there were power lines above the site. These and other eye witness accounts would seem to validate several points about Meaden's theory: Atmospheric vortexes;
- can remain stationary for a length of time.
- can form some geometrical patterns in the atmosphere.
- don't always cause acoustic and electrical phenomenon.
- are caused, in part, by air pressure.
- happen on the lee slope of a hill.
Ordinary whirlwinds which may appear over water or dusty deserts have been studied closely by meteorologists, and they have found that they typically leave behind them a spiralling pattern which is caused as the air rushes into them at the bottom from all directions and rises up into the vortex. These vortexes tend to travel along at ground level and they can move at relatively high speeds even if the surrounding wind speed is low, and it is this which deters many people from believing that they can be responsible for making crop circles as it is widely believed that a whirlwind can not, and will not, remain stationary. Just how some appear to be able to do so is not known at the moment, but there are good eye witness accounts of some that have done, and also some that have remained stationary for a time and then moved away, such as the one that was seen in the Egyptian desert and which made a "swishing" sound as it gathered up sand and vegetable debris around a circle as the axis remained still. The vortex was wide but was only about a foot high and remained still for about thirty seconds before moving away and slowly dying down.
Another initial thought about plasma vortexes was that they could not have a clearly defined edge which could create a crop circle with a definite edge as most whirlwinds have a fuzzy area at their extremities which seems to move slightly slower than the rest of it, and a whirlwind such as this would create an uneven shape. There are accounts of vortexes with poorly defined outer zones, or "sheaths," but the part that creates the circle is a well defined inner zone, or "funnel," but often the "perfect" circle is damaged by the outer sheath. There are accounts though that suggest that in stable atmospheric conditions some vortexes may be able to create precise, well defined circles, but what about ringed formations?
At sea there is a phenomenon known as water spouts which are a kind of localised whirlwind, and which have been seen with up to three outer sheaths that are able to either ascend or descend. They are always concentric with the central "funnel" and they also rotate alternately clockwise and anti clockwise. If one of these were to form over a crop field then could it cause a ringed formation?
For ringed formations that contra-rotate (all in the same direction) Meaden suggests that there may be an invisible, gentle sheath in between the stronger ones so that all the rings would rotate in the same direction, and aerial shots of water spouts suggest that there are indeed further outer sheaths which are not visible from the ground - so far so good - but how could they produce a linear spur?
Meaden suggests that as a vortex is dying, the charged particles may cluster together in the outer rings and as the vortex breaks down the particles are blown away from the circle, probably along the line of least resistance which may well be straight, but again, would the edges be so clearly defined? As for multi-circle formations one possibility is that they could be caused by more than one vortex in an area, but though they do exist and have been seen to exist, multiple vortex sightings are very rare, far rarer in fact than multi circle formations, but they "have" been seen to exist.
The vortex theory is still, years after it was first proposed, not yet fully understood and it clearly needs a lot of work on it to see if it could bear close cross examination, mainly in the proposal that the vortex, like a whirlwind, could descend or cause downward pressure and be triggered by the lea slope of a hill.
One formation that was seen near Cley Hill, Warminster consisted of four circles, one of which was fifteen feet across. It wasn't near the base of a hill and so it didn't suffer the full effects of the vortex and that showed in the circles themselves. The crop wasn't fully flattened to the ground but was merely angled over, and they weren't circles but ovals, and it was suggested that this could be because the wind had been moving and dissipating as it partially flattened the crop.
This site at Cley Hill often produces formations and it was also a U.F.O. hotspot in the 1960s so could the two be connected? Could it be the particular area that causes these unusual phenomenon? Perhaps Cley Hill could share similar properties with the Yakima Region of Washington State, U.S.A. and the phenomenon could be caused by tectonic stress which produces lights in the sky, but could this electrical activity also cause crop formations? Can it actually manifest itself above ground level? One kind of electrical phenomenon that can is ball lightning which is itself a very little understood phenomenon. Again though, there is a problem, ball lightning has been caught on film and can be seen to be a random phenomenon so it is unlikely if not impossible that it could produce a complex crop formation, and what's more it is extremely rare, again far more rare than simple or complex crop formations, and also far more rare than water spouts at sea.
As I said earlier, crop circles are a phenomenon that no one answer would seem to fit fully. There is no doubt that a lot of crop formations are hoaxed, but there is no way that all of them can be. The only other feasible explanations are a natural cause or some form of intelligent cause. The natural cause is likely a perfectly sound one, and the eye witness accounts of vortexes cannot be easily ignored as they prove that the phenomenon does exist, but what we don't know is just what it is capable of in terms of complex formations and to what extent it can do damage to crops. Admittedly a lot of the most complex formations will be hoaxed, but what of the percentage, however small, that are not hoaxed? It is these ones that are, and always will be, connected to some "intelligent" cause that seems to be able to "respond" to outside influences, the phallus at Chequers, the DNA double helix, Mandlebrot's Fractal equations, and in this it is similar to the poltergeist phenomenon in that "they" also seem to respond and also evolve throughout their duration from simple raps and scratches to voices and moving objects.
There is no one solid piece of evidence to connect these formations to an intelligent force, be it U.F.O.s or not, and they will, for the moment at least, remain truly a mystery, linked romantically if nothing else with little green men trying to give us a message, but if they really wanted to do this, couldn't they write it in something a little more permanent in future?
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