Reports of Unidentified Flying Object: The English Corn Circles in 1988 – Distribution of the Circles
Besides the English Com Circles, there are various reports of single Circles in Australia, Canada and Japan, and a very few in the U.S.A. Photographs of some Australian ones show that we are dealing with the same phenomenon, but there is no indication that the foreign Circles display anything like the complexity of pattern and the frequency of occurrence of the English Circles.
Those who regard the Circles as meteorological phenomena maintain that they are most likely widely distributed throughout the British Isles. The fact that the great majority of those reported in Britain during the 1980s have been clustered in Wiltshire and Hampshire, with just a few in adjoining counties, is solely because that is where the Circles investigators have been looking, they say. This supposition is patently untrue. In the last few years an increasing number of pilots have become aware of the Com Circles, and many first reports come from them. It is al most certain that the vast majority of Circles do not go undetected. Not only do they occur mainly in very specific parts of Wiltshire and Hampshire, but at two principal sites, Cheesefoot Head and below the White Horse at Westbury, they have also returned to the very same fields with annual regularity since about 1980. This is more reminiscent of a rare bird ‘s nesting habits than of a meteoro logical effect! And when they do appear, they of1en proliferate like mushrooms, as at Yatesbury.
In June 1988 I photographed the luxuriant green wheat field below the ancient Westbury White Horse, which is carved in the chalk hillside. No wind damage of any kind was to be seen in the crop. I knew with complete certainty that the Circles would soon return to this field, and indeed they did so on June 30. The “loose” triple set and the linear triple which appeared that day can be seen in Photo. Each set consisted of a small (20-ft), medium (30-ft), and large (50-ft) circle which were swirled both anticlock wise and clockwise. They reappeared within yards of the positions where Circles of different configurations had been found in 1987 , and also in previous years.