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

FLOWER POWER ON LONG FURLONG, 1999

Copyright Valerie Martin 1999

History is something that occurred yesterday — or in this case, history was made one hot summer's night. Crop circles have become a fact of life, especially when they have been witnessed close to hand in the Findon area.

I noticed an amazing crop circle in the shape of a beautiful flower early in the morning on the 1st August 1999 on the Long Furlong Road leading out of Findon and put it on my website. I then discovered that others had reported seeing it two days earlier on 30th July. It was on the west side of the busy A280 approaching Patching, map reference 090 070. The occasion was the second time that a crop circle had manifested itself on the Long Furlong road — the last being fourteen years ago in 1985.

The circle was positioned on an east facing sheer incline in a field of wheat. The crop had been flattened at ground level, sometimes in clockwise swirls and occasionally anticlockwise. Whether this phenomena was man-made or not is a matter of conjecture. The result was a fascinating geometrical design.

Witnesses to the actual formation of crop circles, declare that the patterns are completed in a record making time of less than seven seconds. As far as I am aware, no witnesses have come forward to say how long the "flower" took to blossom.

Some crop circle stories are hard to believe but seeing is believing. One has to keep an open mind on such ideas as the paranormal and the power of the "energy line" theory. With the latter it is suggested that hypothetical straight lines emanate from the nearby hills in the Findon location, such as Cissbury Ring.

Many people refute the existence of "earth energy" but it is generally accepted by those with the gift of dowsing. It is maintained that the earth is criss-crossed by intricate strips of energy, generated by moving hidden water and geophysical pressure found in mineral deposits, crystals and rocks. Dowsing is an interesting and ancient ritual, which with the aid of forked rods and pendulums, is able to discover "earth energy" (water being the most common).

It is thought that earlier men discovered how to locate these forces and they built their temples and standing stones to mark and focus on specific points where such lines met.

Whether this is believed or not, dowsers maintain that circles in fields of cereal crops nearly always appear at similar places of energy concentration, which is maybe why they proliferate around prehistoric sites such as the Findon area.

I then saw a combine harvester appear in the field off Long Furlong on the 6th August and by 4 o'clock it was erasing the beautiful flower and slicing its way through the wheat. A fortnight later I could still see the scar of the "flower" and the distinctive petals remained scarified in the stubble on the escarpment. I can confirm that the pattern amazingly lasted as a green outline in the field until the 7th September when the area was ploughed.