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'Round in Circles: Physicists, Poltergeists, Pranksters and the Secret History of the Crop Watchers'
Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Round in circles, hardcover, Good, A good, clean, copy.
296 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1993
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About the author
Jim Schnabel
12 books4 followersAmerican science writer.
Schnabel has written for Nature, Science, New Scientist, the Washington Post, The Guardian and the Independent.
Subjects of his books include: crop circles, alien abduction en psychic detectives.
Schnabel has written for Nature, Science, New Scientist, the Washington Post, The Guardian and the Independent.
Subjects of his books include: crop circles, alien abduction en psychic detectives.
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April 16, 2025
AN EXPLORATION OF THE CROP CIRCLE PHENOMENON IN BRITAIN
Science writer Jim Schnabel wrote in the Preface to the American edition of this 1994 book, “They came from England, tended to provoke hysteria wherever they appeared… They were the ‘crop circles,’ strange swirled patterns that appeared mysteriously overnight in ripening fields of grain. The crop circles are now also a North American phenomenon, for on this continent at least fifty formations have been reported each summer since 1990…
“[A] scattered band of UFO enthusiasts, New Age millennialists, and anomaly afficionados … have ensured that crop circles wherever they appear are likely to get a going-over, radiologically and electromagnetically… Such a social and scientific and religious reaction, on a massive, national scale, drawing into its vortex Parliament, prime minister, and the monarchy itself, is what occurred in England during the 1980s, and it is this story that [this book] records.”
He wrote in the Foreword, “I first became aware of the crop circle phenomenon … [in] 1989, when I read a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal headlined, ‘Mysterious Circles in British Fields Spook the Populace.’ … [in] 1991, while I was a postgraduate student living in England… '39 British and Japanese scientists, equipped with radar, and automatic weather station, thermal imaging equipment, and other monitoring equipment, were gathering at ‘a secret site in Wiltshire.’ … I went out and bought a book on the crop circles by the apparent ringleader of the 39 scientists… a freelance meteorologist named Terrence Meaden… [I] phoned Meaden and asked if I could help out at the secret site… I assured him my perspective was scientific… What I found [when I got there]… was a cheap marine radar antenna… two elderly volunteers… Dr. Meaden… who with a visiting Japanese physicist amounted to TWO scientists occasionally present at the site, not 39… by the time the secret site emerged from its thick morning fog… I was on my way home to a warm bed…
“I never gave up hope that some kind of scientific advance would result… from the study of crop circles. But the brief glimpse I’d had of Meaden, of the … other characters… convinced me that the most interesting aspect of the phenomenon was the human one---the obsession with anomaly, the longing for meaning… the paradigm shifts and conspiracy theories, the… hoaxes, pagan rituals… and countless press releases. And so I … began this enterprise---a backstage look, as it were, at one of the strangest popular mysteries of our time.”
He explains, “Meaden… stuck with the meteorological vortex theory … arguing that the sharp divide between laid and standing stalks more or less occurred because ‘dry stalks, when bent beyond a critical limit, are irreversibly damaged'… He more or less dismissed the idea that alien spacecraft were here at work… But then the summer of 1983 came, and suddenly things become complicated. It was the year of … big circles surrounded by four ‘satellite’ circles… The apparent year-by-year jump from singlets to triplets to quintuplets suggested that the formations were being made by intelligent beings---which to them could only mean humans.” (Pg. 16-20)
He observes, “The Cheesefoot Head quintuplet [crop circle] was noteworthy because it had only been discovered by several farm managers inspecting their crops by helicopter. It wasn’t easily visible except from the air, a fact which seemed to rule out a hoax.” (Pg. 23)
He recounts, “by … the summer of 1988, it was becoming clear that … their growing network of farmers and farmhands and lorry-drivers and pub-keepers and private pilots and dowsers and journalists could stand on its own. They didn’t need Meaden’s network any more. It was too small to provide them with anything they didn’t already have.” (Pg. 66)
He reports, “For Terrence Meaden, it was a summer of unprecedented media attention… What could he plausibly say about these new shapes? That they were hoaxes? Not even he believed that. They were simply too complex, too well-woven. No human, nor organized team of humans, could have made such shapes within the four or five hours’ darkness available on an English midsummer night. It simply couldn’t be done…. [But] he felt they were also within theoretical reach, especially since there was so much unknown about plasma vortices anyway.” (Pg. 159)
Researchers Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado were filmed and observed by a crowd as they inspected a circle: “Andrews did most of the talking. ‘As soon as I saw the edge of the first circle… I knew it was a hoax. It was damaged and ill-formed and the wheat had just been broken down… I saw at once that we had an obvious hoax… This hoax was totally irresponsible. It was funny for about ten seconds…” (Pg. 169)
At another circle, “an elderly local asked Meaden, ‘Is it a hoax?’ ‘It is not a hoax,’ Meaden said authoritatively. ‘Not at all. There are eight circles… I very much doubt that hoaxers would have gone to the trouble to make all those.’ ‘This was a hoaxing,’ one of Ohtsuki’s students [named Kondo] told me that afternoon… According to Kondo, there were several giveaways. First, there was a footprint at the edge of the circle… Secondly, many of the stalks were broken, as if by a solid weight. Thirdly, the [image] when viewed from above was … more scuffed-looking, than they had come to expect of genuine formations.” (Pg. 186-187)
He then recounts, “on BBC Radio… two men… Mr. Doug Bower and Mr. Dave Chorley, were claiming responsibility for the crop circle phenomenon, and had been making circles in English fields since 1978… The two men, both in their sixties, had apparently dreamed up the idea as a prank in 1978, and had started swirling simple circles with an iron bar… They claimed to have made all the circles in the early years, and then a decreasing proportion … as other hoaxers began to imitate their work.” (Pg. 260-261)
He continues, “Meaden, like everyone else on the crop circles scene, has strong suspicions regarding Bower and Chorley… It was assumed that Bower and Chorley had… exaggerated their claims, and had then sold them to a gullible tabloid… After a few weeks, Meaden softened his views… admitting that their claims… were probably genuine.” (Pg. 263)
He explains in the Epilogue, “I should point out that the act of making a crop circle causes little of no material damage… [farmers say that] unless a formation has been severely trampled by tourists, it can be harvested without loss merely by lowering the blades on the harvesting machine… Only the formations which draw crowds until harvest time will be so flattened as to be unreachable by the harvester, and these will have amply compensated the former for the damage caused… An acre of wheat sells for about 350 [pounds]. The receipts from the thousands of tourists who visited … must have run at least ten times the value of the lost wheat.” (Pg. 284)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying crop circles.
Science writer Jim Schnabel wrote in the Preface to the American edition of this 1994 book, “They came from England, tended to provoke hysteria wherever they appeared… They were the ‘crop circles,’ strange swirled patterns that appeared mysteriously overnight in ripening fields of grain. The crop circles are now also a North American phenomenon, for on this continent at least fifty formations have been reported each summer since 1990…
“[A] scattered band of UFO enthusiasts, New Age millennialists, and anomaly afficionados … have ensured that crop circles wherever they appear are likely to get a going-over, radiologically and electromagnetically… Such a social and scientific and religious reaction, on a massive, national scale, drawing into its vortex Parliament, prime minister, and the monarchy itself, is what occurred in England during the 1980s, and it is this story that [this book] records.”
He wrote in the Foreword, “I first became aware of the crop circle phenomenon … [in] 1989, when I read a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal headlined, ‘Mysterious Circles in British Fields Spook the Populace.’ … [in] 1991, while I was a postgraduate student living in England… '39 British and Japanese scientists, equipped with radar, and automatic weather station, thermal imaging equipment, and other monitoring equipment, were gathering at ‘a secret site in Wiltshire.’ … I went out and bought a book on the crop circles by the apparent ringleader of the 39 scientists… a freelance meteorologist named Terrence Meaden… [I] phoned Meaden and asked if I could help out at the secret site… I assured him my perspective was scientific… What I found [when I got there]… was a cheap marine radar antenna… two elderly volunteers… Dr. Meaden… who with a visiting Japanese physicist amounted to TWO scientists occasionally present at the site, not 39… by the time the secret site emerged from its thick morning fog… I was on my way home to a warm bed…
“I never gave up hope that some kind of scientific advance would result… from the study of crop circles. But the brief glimpse I’d had of Meaden, of the … other characters… convinced me that the most interesting aspect of the phenomenon was the human one---the obsession with anomaly, the longing for meaning… the paradigm shifts and conspiracy theories, the… hoaxes, pagan rituals… and countless press releases. And so I … began this enterprise---a backstage look, as it were, at one of the strangest popular mysteries of our time.”
He explains, “Meaden… stuck with the meteorological vortex theory … arguing that the sharp divide between laid and standing stalks more or less occurred because ‘dry stalks, when bent beyond a critical limit, are irreversibly damaged'… He more or less dismissed the idea that alien spacecraft were here at work… But then the summer of 1983 came, and suddenly things become complicated. It was the year of … big circles surrounded by four ‘satellite’ circles… The apparent year-by-year jump from singlets to triplets to quintuplets suggested that the formations were being made by intelligent beings---which to them could only mean humans.” (Pg. 16-20)
He observes, “The Cheesefoot Head quintuplet [crop circle] was noteworthy because it had only been discovered by several farm managers inspecting their crops by helicopter. It wasn’t easily visible except from the air, a fact which seemed to rule out a hoax.” (Pg. 23)
He recounts, “by … the summer of 1988, it was becoming clear that … their growing network of farmers and farmhands and lorry-drivers and pub-keepers and private pilots and dowsers and journalists could stand on its own. They didn’t need Meaden’s network any more. It was too small to provide them with anything they didn’t already have.” (Pg. 66)
He reports, “For Terrence Meaden, it was a summer of unprecedented media attention… What could he plausibly say about these new shapes? That they were hoaxes? Not even he believed that. They were simply too complex, too well-woven. No human, nor organized team of humans, could have made such shapes within the four or five hours’ darkness available on an English midsummer night. It simply couldn’t be done…. [But] he felt they were also within theoretical reach, especially since there was so much unknown about plasma vortices anyway.” (Pg. 159)
Researchers Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado were filmed and observed by a crowd as they inspected a circle: “Andrews did most of the talking. ‘As soon as I saw the edge of the first circle… I knew it was a hoax. It was damaged and ill-formed and the wheat had just been broken down… I saw at once that we had an obvious hoax… This hoax was totally irresponsible. It was funny for about ten seconds…” (Pg. 169)
At another circle, “an elderly local asked Meaden, ‘Is it a hoax?’ ‘It is not a hoax,’ Meaden said authoritatively. ‘Not at all. There are eight circles… I very much doubt that hoaxers would have gone to the trouble to make all those.’ ‘This was a hoaxing,’ one of Ohtsuki’s students [named Kondo] told me that afternoon… According to Kondo, there were several giveaways. First, there was a footprint at the edge of the circle… Secondly, many of the stalks were broken, as if by a solid weight. Thirdly, the [image] when viewed from above was … more scuffed-looking, than they had come to expect of genuine formations.” (Pg. 186-187)
He then recounts, “on BBC Radio… two men… Mr. Doug Bower and Mr. Dave Chorley, were claiming responsibility for the crop circle phenomenon, and had been making circles in English fields since 1978… The two men, both in their sixties, had apparently dreamed up the idea as a prank in 1978, and had started swirling simple circles with an iron bar… They claimed to have made all the circles in the early years, and then a decreasing proportion … as other hoaxers began to imitate their work.” (Pg. 260-261)
He continues, “Meaden, like everyone else on the crop circles scene, has strong suspicions regarding Bower and Chorley… It was assumed that Bower and Chorley had… exaggerated their claims, and had then sold them to a gullible tabloid… After a few weeks, Meaden softened his views… admitting that their claims… were probably genuine.” (Pg. 263)
He explains in the Epilogue, “I should point out that the act of making a crop circle causes little of no material damage… [farmers say that] unless a formation has been severely trampled by tourists, it can be harvested without loss merely by lowering the blades on the harvesting machine… Only the formations which draw crowds until harvest time will be so flattened as to be unreachable by the harvester, and these will have amply compensated the former for the damage caused… An acre of wheat sells for about 350 [pounds]. The receipts from the thousands of tourists who visited … must have run at least ten times the value of the lost wheat.” (Pg. 284)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying crop circles.
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