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What force or unseen hand in the night creates crop circles.

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This Australian farmer is convinced they're made by the UFOs he saw taking off from these

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reed beds.

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Can he be right?

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Our fields of energy, as yet unknown to science, generated within the crop circles.

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Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communications

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satellite.

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Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.

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There are fashions in mysteries as in everything else.

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In the early 20th century, spiritualism was all the rage.

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In the 1950s, there was a veritable plague of flying saucers.

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Then in the 1980s, reports of a strange new phenomenon came flooding in from the English

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countryside.

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Crop circles were amazed and usually annoyed to discover huge circles of flattened corn.

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Each year more and more crop circles were reported, 20 in 1986, 300 in 1989 and twice

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as many only a year later.

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Crop circles were turning up all over the world, here in the Far East, in the paddy fields.

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Soon, all the remaining crops were in danger of being flattened too, this time by investigators

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and inquisitive tourists.

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From the controls of his plane, Busty Taylor has harvested more crop circles than anyone

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alive.

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Every day through the English summer, he scans the broad acres for fresh formations.

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Across the ancient chalk downs of Wessex and the fertile pastures of the Thames Valley,

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he's logged and photographed each puzzling pictogram.

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He's seen the whole range from simple rings to ever more intricate designs and he's garnered

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all the explanations, from mating hedgehogs to aerobatic helicopters, from extraterrestrial

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parking lots to unknown forces of the earth and wind.

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He's seen symbolism in King Arthur's West Country.

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Mathematics wrangled in the Cambridge Corn and even humour to celebrate a cycle race.

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This man, George Pedley, has been haunted for nearly 30 years by something that he saw

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here.

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It happened deep in these isolated reed beds in Australia's tropical northeast.

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George believes he had a fleeting glimpse of a UFO taking off.

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The reed beds rang with an unearthly sound.

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The experience left a mark on him and on the landscape.

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At first he thought the hissing sound was coming from his tractor.

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I remember standing over there beside the tractor looking in and trying to convince myself that

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I didn't see it.

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It looked like a flying saucer object.

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I didn't see it for very long.

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It just disappeared.

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Moments later, a mat of reeds several feet thick shot to the surface of the lagoon.

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It looked like a gigantic nest.

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The reeds were flattened into a clockwise swirl 30 feet across.

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George called in his neighbour.

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Albert Penisi grows sugarcane on this land.

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He too was amazed by the circle, especially its strength.

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It was two feet thick and easily supported his weight.

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I think it could hold at least 10 or 12 men.

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George and I were discussing the reeds and how they were turned into a pontoon.

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It was very thick. You couldn't walk through them anyway.

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To this day, both George and Albert remain convinced that extraterrestrials visited Tully

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and left the evidence in the reeds.

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What George saw, a UFO take off from the lagoon, so I suspected it was a UFO that made the circle.

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Then you hear people saying it could be caused by helicopters upside down.

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Spoon bills tramping around and making a circle.

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Alligators mating with grabbing each other's tails and swinging around.

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Some of the questions were put to me.

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Every day of every summer, the circles are sought out

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by those who believe that the rings have special powers.

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They come from around the world to the fields of Britain,

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as though drawn by a magnetism they can't resist.

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Dousers, layliners, communes with nature.

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All seeking forces they believe emanate from the depths of the earth.

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Three, four, five, six, six.

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And it brings the centre, seven.

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And strangely, all the spirals in all of the circles all have seven coils.

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I'm going along very slowly, using my hands as sensors for any engine.

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I feel a tremendous tingle there, but it wasn't bent off.

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So it was going on.

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Yes, a tingling. I'm mad there.

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I think we'll stop there, do no mind.

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And that one just takes them off because those energies are very, very strong

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and really quite uncomfortable.

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LAUGHTER

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OK, Lynn, your aura should have expanded by now,

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so we'll just see how far it's expanded.

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There we are, that's the difference.

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MUSIC

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In the 1930s, a teenage girl was missing her lessons.

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Kath's skin had been kept off school that summer with scarlet fever.

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One afternoon, she walked out into this field.

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She sat for a moment under the hedge.

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That day, too, was thundery.

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Kath's skin only revealed what she had seen when crop circles

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began appearing by the dozen half a century later.

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It was a lovely, hot, sultry day.

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And, you know, a sort of day like this today is if there's a storm coming.

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But in front of me, there was this great big field of wheat.

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I was chewing a bit of wheat just as I am now.

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And all of a sudden, I saw a blessed great whirlwind

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right in the middle of the field.

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And it was throwing up stuff about 30, 40 feet up,

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and all of a sudden it dissipated and all the stuff fell down to the ground.

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And I was fascinated by this.

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And it was amazing. It was a wacking great circle,

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a flattened-down corn.

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And I had sandals on,

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so I felt that the corn was ever so hot to my feet.

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And all around, you know how you have a pack of cards

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and they all fall against each other.

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Well, the corn was like that in a clockwise direction.

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And all the ears of corn were sort of intertwined

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and all the way around made a lovely sort of periphery.

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It could only be very strong pressure to press all the corn down so hard

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onto the ground and in that particular pattern.

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It was all the letters in the paper about these marvellous circles

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appearing all over the country and some were obviously man-made.

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And it's when they started off about aliens that I got annoyed

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because I thought, well, I've seen the blooming thing made.

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So I know it's nothing to do with aliens and foreigners.

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It would be interesting to know how they are formed,

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what makes it, whether it's an electric current,

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whether it's something actually in the ground

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that performs differently according to weather conditions.

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I don't know.

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But if you find out, you let me know.

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This lady's story is especially valuable.

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It's one of only a handful of eyewitness accounts

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dating from before the 1980s.

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The earliest studies of such basic crop circles were made by meteorologists.

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They had no reason to suspect hoaxes and wondered

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if the phenomenon was caused by whirlwinds.

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Dr. Terence Meadon investigates unusual weather phenomena.

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His reports come from people like farmer Tom Gwynett.

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Tom says he too has seen a crop circle forming,

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but his experience was accompanied by eerie effects.

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His car cut out.

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There was a humming sound and he saw sparks dancing in the air.

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As I come back up the road, the headlights on the car and the ignition,

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everything cut out.

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So I heard this humming sound coming from the opposite side of the road

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in one of our fields and I just couldn't make out what it was.

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So I walked up and had a look and it was only very low humming,

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like a singer-song machine in the distance, more or less, you know.

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And it was eared.

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There were occasional small red sparks.

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Not anything, just in the dim light you could see these sparks.

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Well, the next morning I went round and I stopped at the gate

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and there was a perfect circle in the field, a corn circle.

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She was about 10 foot across.

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That was that.

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For the meteorologist Terence Meadon,

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Tom Gwynett's experience was the evidence he'd been looking for.

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Dr Meadon believes that a rare combination of temperature and landscape

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can set up a very localised whirlwind or vortex,

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which spins till it drops, leaving a circle of flattened corn.

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This is quite a perfect situation for circle formation

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in the sense that I predicted that they could happen.

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That is to say there is a hill of some importance,

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just there to the west.

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And the conditions being quiet that night,

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I'm sure that the hill itself provided the obstacle that made a lee vortex.

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I was very pleased to have Tom's telephone call telling me about his observations.

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Very few people have been fortunate enough to see this.

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And Tom is such a credible witness.

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He's a good countryman, a good observer,

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and has no reason to court publicity at all.

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My theory does very well for the ordinary crop circles.

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Indeed, there's no competitor at all.

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No one else has come along with any other suggestion at all.

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If my theory is not right, what's it going to be?

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Is it going to be the fairies?

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With insight of York's ancient minster,

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agronomist Dr John Graham has been called in to give his verdict on the latest crop circle.

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He's an expert on how cereal stalks bend and break.

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And he's travelled the length of Britain investigating the natural, the unnatural,

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and what some would claim is the supernatural.

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Having had a look at everything around me here,

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looking at the nature of the damage to the plants in this circle,

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which is only a very approximate circle,

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and considering that we're on a very visible site next to a major main road,

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we're about half a mile away from an agricultural college,

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I think it's fairly likely that we've got a fairly routine hoax here.

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One of the things that I do look at, though, when I'm looking at a circle

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to see what I think has been going on,

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is to actually look at the precise nature of damage to the plants.

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And if we actually look at a plant from this circle here,

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you can see that the damage to it has occurred in the form of a very precise kink

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down at the base of the plant.

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That's usually indicative that a fairly major force has been applied to the plant,

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and it's collapsed under the weight,

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and that would typically be occurred by somebody making a circle artificially.

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It's possible that this could have occurred naturally,

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but according to the wind tunnel test, which I've done,

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you would need a wind speed in excess of 150 miles an hour to cause this damage,

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and in a normal English summer, that doesn't normally occur.

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If this damage had taken place naturally,

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I think we'd see something looking much more like this down here,

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where the plants have actually bent right over in the soil,

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and there is no actual mechanical damage to the plants themselves.

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That would indicate to me a far greater likelihood of a natural occurrence,

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whereas something like this is almost certainly as a result of a mechanical force

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applied by a human agent.

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I think the more important factor is what force is actually being applied

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to the plants in the first place.

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We've already talked about hoaxes,

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and the hand of mankind seems to rear itself very, very frequently.

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Now, just to prove to you, Ollie, this is what we used to get up to at night.

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Now, I'm going in here, and I'm going to start making a circle for you.

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Right. I'll be interested.

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I'm sure you will.

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Now, we used to lay the stick down there like that, look.

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Artist Doug Bauer claims he was behind the first hoaxed crop circles in Britain.

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Unknown to his wife, he and a friend decided to try to fool people that UFOs were landing.

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All they needed to flatten the corn was a plank and a rope.

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To begin with, their designs were simple,

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but they soon progressed to ever more complicated patterns.

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Well, this was the most difficult part of all when we decided to do these designs,

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was how to create a completely straight line in the dark across a cornfield.

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It was no good following the tram lines because they would say that human beings were doing it,

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and we didn't want them to believe that.

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So, I punched a hole in this baseball cap, threaded some wire through it,

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and this little ring that you can see here, and you walk into the field,

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and against the evening sky, which is then not quite dark in the summertime,

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you can get a silhouette of a tree on the horizon,

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or perhaps the farmer's cottage he might be in bed with the light still on,

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and you could centre this through this ring,

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walk straight towards it, and lo and behold, you've got the lovely straight line that you could wish for.

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And then of course, as the footmarks were placed into the corn in the straight line,

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we would come behind it and tread it down four feet wide,

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so all our corridors were created in that way.

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Well, the so-called diehards, the so-called professionals,

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wouldn't believe our story at all.

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No, do you believe me, Eileen?

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Oh, yes.

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Look how it's growing.

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Yes, it is, increasing by eight foot every time you go around.

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Yes.

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So, I wasn't up to anything at night, as you see, only this.

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Well, you were, what you're doing now?

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No one suspected hoaxes when more than 90 circles appeared in Wales.

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The mountain sides were too inaccessible.

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The lines of rings stretched for hundreds of metres,

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but when excited researchers contacted the landowner about the phenomenon,

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Sir Andrew Duff Gordon had disappointing news.

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Well, they were very disappointed when I told them that they were man-made,

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and I told them the reasons why we'd done it,

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which is because we have such very wet springs in Wales.

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We couldn't burn the heather that year,

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and so we decided to try and experiment and cut some circles on the hill.

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Well, the young grice need young heather to feed on,

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and they're very small,

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and if you can't burn the heather, which is obviously the best way of doing it,

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you have to cut the heather to hope to regenerate the young heather coming up,

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which is much more palatable to the small grice.

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I did think it was very funny,

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considering I made the Markster Sir Andrew, you know, cut them for his grouse.

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I did think it was very funny then,

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but with everybody saying, you know, it was all UFOs and all those sorts of things,

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it was quite different.

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Many crop circle groups believe that there are still mysteries to solve.

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These investigators hope to discover whether grain gleaned from the flattened wheat

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has in some way acquired special properties.

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How much did you say we needed, Shreela?

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No doubt.

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The ultimate test is to bake bread from these ears

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and compare it with loaves made from corn conventionally harvested from outside the circle.

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To carry out the experiment,

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they've turned to the British baking industry's own research laboratories

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on the outskirts of London.

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Whatever its hidden properties,

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the grain must be turned into bread by conventional methods.

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Each loaf is baked to the same recipe to ensure the test is fair.

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Two of the harvesters have come to take part in the experiment.

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I have a background in science and I've always been interested in food chemistry,

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so I'm rather interested to see whether the whatever force created the crop circles

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has in fact altered anything in the wheat.

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Well, they smell good and they look normal.

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Normal, yes.

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This is standard commercial type.

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They're comparing the taste of three loaves,

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one commercially produced,

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one from outside the circle

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and the other from right in the middle.

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This is outside the crop circles.

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Is that inside the crop circles?

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Quite different.

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I wouldn't recommend this as a...

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The bread from inside the crop circle proves to be far from magic.

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It has none of the qualities of a good English loaf in texture and especially in taste.

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You find a different taste there.

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There's a must eat after taste.

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There's a must after taste.

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There's a real bite to the tongue.

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A tang.

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I don't think it even feed the ducks with this.

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I believe that crop circles began as a rare and little understood natural phenomenon,

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which was then adopted by mystics and hoaxers.

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But as much more complicated designs appeared,

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I began to joke that they were hoaxes made by feeble minded extra-terrestrials.

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Well, there are still a couple of questions left unanswered.

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How do the hoaxers get away with it

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and why aren't hospitals overflowing with them

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peppered with buckshot by angry farmers?

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But nothing will put off the truly committed hoaxes.

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Strangely, they too feel the circles have life enhancing powers.

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But they're certain these come not from other worlds,

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not from paranormal forces,

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but from long nights drawing their vast pictures on the sleeping fields of England.

301
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Oh, there's just such a thrill out of it.

302
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To see people's face the next day when they can sort of view these formations,

303
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being able to sort of enter them, dousing and getting healed

304
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and all these sort of fantastic things like that when I knew that I was there last night

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and it was calm and you're in a totally different world.

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It's so peaceful out there and the shapes that you're sort of creating,

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they sort of come from within.

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It's a good feeling.

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And it's such a challenge to be able to dream up of these complicated designs

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and then to see them on paper all nicely drawn to scale,

311
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then that's the challenge to get it in the field and it's exactly right.

312
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And I get a good buzz out of it.

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Well, I'm quite impressed by the interest that my circles

314
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and other, well, possibly human-made circles cause.

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Now, the experts go around and they have their fancy techniques.

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A lot of the times I can end up falling them into believing that they are actually genuine formations.

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Even though on a couple of occasions I have told them a couple of days afterwards that I actually made it

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and I offered them a few ideas as to how I'd done it

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and even putting measurements down and drawing diagrams for them, they won't believe it.

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Music

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Well, I was so amazed at the aerial photographs.

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They look totally different from what I'm viewing on the ground

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and to see them, they really are beautiful.

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Music

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Music

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Music