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	The Crop Circle Phenomenon Introductory Article Updates

	A Brief Education on Crop Circles Freddy Silva, The Crop Circular An excellent article on the basics of crop circle formations can be found here.

	Updates by Chris Malcheski - October 12, 2009 The summer of 2009 was the hottest on record - not only for those monitoring the local weather, but also for crop circle activity in the traditional hotbed of Wiltshire County, England. Between April 4 and August 29, 2009, 105 formations were reported worldwide. The distribution of these formations is shown below: 62 UK Wiltshire 12 Germany 7 Italy 5 UK Oxfordshire 4 France 3 UK Hampshire 3 Russia 3 Netherlands 2 UK Warwickshire 1 UK Essex 1 Switzerland 1 Slovakia 1 Belgium What's up with Wiltshire? If anybody knows, they're not talking. Stonehenge is located there; this could either be part (or all) of the reason for the concentration of activity in the Wiltshire area, or Stonehenge itself could have been placed where it was for the same reason the formations are so heavily centered there. Whatever the case, Wiltshire was hot this past summer, and only time will tell how next summer (2010) will compare. The time frame immediately following the Summer Solstice saw the peak of activity. Wiltshire became a veritable circus. There are more stories of enraged farmers trying to cope with the influx of investigators and spectators than Clinton had women. Through July, so many cameras (infrared and normal) and eyeballs were trained on such a small area, 24/7, that it was well beyond impossible for anything to occur there without many eyes and many cameras capturing it. And yet formations continued to appear, sometimes three or four in a day, sometimes measuring four hundred fifty feet across. The serious investigators who are active in this area of study would put the average debunker to shame with their knowledge, thoroughness, tenacity, and above all else, their very rigid scientific approach. These are serious individuals. They're very good at what they do, and they know how to do it. If there's evidence of a hoax, they'll be the first ones to come out with that assessment. If they label something "genuine," they have plenty of evidence to back it up. Of special note was the heavy solar activity very accurately predicted by more than one formation, days before it occurred, with those formations being deciphered by researchers I can only stand in awe of. Search on Linda Moulton Howe's site for more details on this subject; look for headline entries during the month of July. Activity drops off in the fall simply because the crops are harvested. The Etch-A-Sketch is gone; there's no more canvas to paint on. In 1996, author Doug Ruby published a book called "The Gift," which dealt with deciphering crop circle formations. The book received effectively no attention, and Mr. Ruby can no longer be found via standard search efforts- which is not at all surprising, considering the reception his book received compared to what it should have gotten. It was absolutely groundbreaking. The basic premise was to treat many of the formations as if they were parts of a plastic model on the "tree" coming out of the box. Snap them off and assemble them. Don't just look at the formation the way it's laid out in the field. Work with it, manipulate it, move things around. I firmly believe that Mr. Ruby's work will end up being absolutely central to the entire "solution" to what these formations are truly all about, should we ever reach that point of understanding. In the meantime, we have version 1.0 of Formation Animator, which lets us put these formations in motion. Version 2.0 will follow; it will allow the type of "moving around the pieces" that Doug Ruby was forced to do with mechanical models because of the restricted capability of home computers at the time the book was written.