This website, created by Valerie Martin, contains scenes from her home village of Findon, West Sussex, U.K. 

CIRCLES OF MYSTERY — LONG FURLONG, 1985

Text first published in the West Sussex Gazette in June 1998

Text copyright Valerie Martin 1999

The phenomenon of the crop circle season comes upon us each year. This is the time when crop circles manifest themselves. The Findon vicinity has done fairly well in terms of putting its name to crop formations under strange circumstances.

During the summer of 1985 I am told that a mysterious crop circle effect was pressed into the Fair Field off the Long Furlong road. Much to the farmer’s consternation, the damage to the crops appeared under cover of darkness in a field at Tolmare Farm (map reference 104 079), located on the eastern slopes of Blackpatch Hill, some 200 yards from the busy valleyed A280 road.

It was an excellent example of a precise five-ring pattern flattened in waist high wheat. The larger circle was the central one and about 50 ft. in diameter. Four attendant smaller circles surrounded this, each about 15-ft. across. Local witnesses driving their cars along Long Furlong to work, saw clouds of vapour rising from the field on the morning it was spotted. Later in the day, sightseers arrived and cameras clicked. At first, the scene appeared at close hand as a trampled mess. On closer inspection the plants inside the crop circle were revealed to be neatly laid down and swirled in a very precise spiral, either clockwise or anticlockwise and sometimes both. The wheat appeared to have been singed.

Tony Wicks, the farm manager at Tolmare told local reporters that he thought it was the work of hoaxers. He suspected they wanted to give the impression that aliens had landed in the field.  Could this mischievous deception have been done under cover of nightfall — within sight of the main road? 

Nevertheless  Tony Wicks had to mount guard on the road to stop sightseers walking through his fields to the cirlces.  The amount of damage  caused to his crop was said to amount to about £100 at the time.

The story is still debatable and pranksters may have been to blame but they went to elaborate lengths to suggest that an Unidentified Flying Object had landed.   The main circle was so symmetrical that the hoaxers would have had to use string or wire to pace it out.   Then they had to trample the wheat flat to make it look as if it had been scorched.