Are the strange designs in cereal fields more than just a joke? Crop circle researchers around the world providing new remarkable theories. Against the wide-spread opinion, that crop circles are a modern-day phenomenon or material from fairy tales and legends, there are numerous convincing reports of what we would call today crop circles, that date back decades even centuries ago. The renowned "Nature" magazine describes crop circles in the English county of Surrey already in 1880. The origin of the partial highly complex designs in shortest time however remains so far to a large extent puzzling.
Self confessing and self claimed hoaxers were soon a pretty gentle explanation for the press and aired media while those claims not only didn’t match but even neglected the known facts. Also according to Gerald Hawkins, a Boston University mathematician and astronomer, the complex geometry of some figures can’t possibly be designed in the few hours of the darkness in cereal fields. They are based, as Hawkins wrote in 1992 in the magazine "Science News", on complicated theorems of Euclidean geometry.
Laboratory based biophysical analyses support the hypothesis of the crop circle researchers that numerous formations cannot be man-made. William Levengood of the "Pinelandia Biophysical Laboratory" in Michigan found significant anomalies at the plant samples, which had not been found so ever in circles made by human hand. Some of the determined changes, as for instance burst or clearly expanded growing nodes, could be reproduced in the laboratory by microwave irradiation. In other cases a glaze-like ferric oxide layer on soil and stems, which in this form probably only forms at temperatures of over 500°C was found in a crop circle formation.
A study on behalf of Nancy Talbott, president of the "BLT Research Team Inc." in Cambridge, Massachusetts seems to confirm this idea. Soil samples from a Canadian crop circle formation and control samples from their environment were examined by x-ray diffraction analysis that examines the crystalline structure of the clay minerals. The increased crystallinity found in the samples develops either under heat influence or enormously high geological pressure. Since the latter can be excluded as an explanation, heat remains the only option. Since it is however improbable that the required high temperatures could arise in nature over several hours unnoticed, researchers assume a clearly more intensive but at the same time only for nanoseconds working heat component.
The hypothesis provides the idea of a mysterious "plasma vortex" as a kind of electrically charged vortex system. According to Terence Meaden founder of the "Journal of Meteorology" this model could explain also the numerously observed and documented light phenomena over crop circles: The friction of carried particles could produce the so-called „triboelectric effect“ that ionizes the whirling air mass by charming the mysterious shining lights over the fields.
Particularly impressive was the giant formation made out of 409 circles covering an area of approximately 50,000 square meters found in August 2001 in the English County of Wiltshire. More than 6000 crop circles and formations are documented so far in over 60 countries. Every year 150 to 300 new formations appear world wide. The fascinating designs produced by this - as some claim - natural phenomenon, will remain thus further a subject of research and controversial discussions.