Reports of Unidentified Flying Object: The English Corn Circles in 1988 – Circle Characteristics
The Com Circles may have been with us for many years, but they have hardly been a regular feature of agricultural life in this country. They appeared in small numbers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and we have a few reports from earlier years, although some farmers claim to have seen Circles in their fields as long ago as the 1930s and 1940s. A woman whose husband farmed in Hampshire forty years ago remembers seeing Circles then; the country people would not hand-reap them, since they thought them “uncanny and of devilish origin. ” But unfortunately such reports cannot be verified since there is no photographic evidence to confirm that this was indeed the same phenomenon.
Since 1980 the number of Circles found each year has risen slowly but steadily to nearly 100 reported in 1988.
The Circles themselves vary in size from about five to sixty feet in diameter and the crop within is flattened in a spiral swirl . The crop in question is usually wheat or bar ley, though some Circles have been found· in rye, oats, rape-seed, and occasionally long grass. The Circles occur between late May and September when the crop is growing and has reached a fair height. Most strikingly, the flattened com is laid with an almost geometric precision, leaving the standing crop at the perimeter upright and virtually untouched. The plants are almost invariably bent, but not broken, so that they lie flat and continue to grow horizontally. Sometimes, though, the force is such that a few plants are ejected from the ground and flung out of the Circle. Very often the swirled com is layered, with the lower plants pointing at different angles to those above; an effect that would be very hard to produce artificially. Most of the Circles are slightly elliptical in shape, although this is rarely apparent to the untrained eye. And one never finds indentations in the ground indicating that any solid object has landed, though a Circle found at Childrey, Ox fordshire, in September 1986, exhibited a clean-cut cylindrical hole, nine inches deep and a foot across, from which the soil had vanished.
The most noticeable feature of the English Circles, un like the Jew which have been reported from abroad, as far as we know, is that they occur frequently not only in multiples , but in elaborate formations. There have been doublets, triplets, quadruplets, and quintuplets, some of which are illustrated in the accompanying diagrams. There are also ringed Circles and double-ringed Circles. But let us deal with what was found in 1988.