...another unmistakable symbol appeared, this time at the opposite end of the country near Cambridge University. It was a replica of a Mandelbrot Set, an important element of chaos theory which was discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot who, ironically, had taught at Cambridge. Even more coincidental was that this crop circle had appeared one year to the day when a lead article in New Scientist Magazine had admitted that it was impossible to draw this diagram without a computer.

Originally posted by wittleryouth
...think back 15/ 20 years ago of what crop circles looked like??crude? you bet! but they got it down to a fractal art now..and ask any wheat farmer how much money he lost in crop damage for the practis shots on his crops..

In 1686 an even earlier British account of geometric areas of flattened plants is found in A Natural History of Staffordshire, written by Professor Robert Plot, LLD, the first "keeper" of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum and a professor of chemistry at Oxford. Professor Plot describes not just circles, but flattened areas "obtaining three parts of a circle, others being Semicircular, some of them Quadrants." These various designs were found both in "arable grounds" and in "open pastures ... And not only in a single, but sometimes in double and treble Circle[s], one within the other."

In July, 1880 the prestigious science journal Nature (Vol. 22, pp. 290-291) published a letter from British spectroscopist J. Rand Capron in which he described his discovery and subsequent examination of multiple circular areas of flattened wheat on a farm in southern England. He describes areas of crop "forming ... circular spots [with] a few standing stalks as a centre, some prostrate stalks with their heads arranged pretty evently in a direction forming a circle round the centre, and outside these a circular wall of stalks which [have] not suffered." Capron suggested that these flattened circles were the result of "some cyclonic wind action" and enclosed a sketch of the "most perfect" of these circles which, unfortunately, Nature did not publish.