There are lots of websites that contain collections of crop circles, and I’ve been using a handful of them.

Crop Circle Connector is a community-oriented site which contains an individual page or two for most recent circles. Visitors to the site can file “field reports”, so the site is full of anecdotal information.

These anecdotes provide hours of entertaining reading, and there is even a little useful information tucked in there, amidst the elaborate descriptions of the benevolant Arcturians, who apparently employ their advanced worm-hole technology for the purpose of bending our wheat.

For example, very few crop circle publications provide much commentary from the farmers whose fields the circles appear within. From the second-hand reports on Crop Circle Connector, You will find that the reaction of farmers varies from anger, to bemusement, wonder, and profiteering.

Crop Circle Connector collects good photos of each new circle. In the UK, the most prolific aerial photographers appear to be Steve Alexander and Lucy Pringle, who both apparently have a volume discount on helicopter rides, and who appear to earn a living from glossy publications. I prefer the wide aerial views of Mr. Alexander, because they more often show the circle in the context of the surrounding community. With a good wide aerial shot, it is also possible to pin down the location of the circle using Google Earth, to within a few meters. I’ve been building a .kml file of crop circle locations, for use with Google Earth and Google Maps, but it is a slow and laborious process.

Bertold Zugelder is one of a handful of illustrators who produces clean illustrations of each design. His website, cropcircle-archive.com, contains an archive of all his illustrations, and some minimal info about each circle, although there is a nominal fee to access older records. Other illustrators (all based in germanic countries, it seems) include Andreas Muller and Tommy Borms.

Paul Vigay’s site, cropcircleresearch.com, offers a searchable database and the data is completely free. I’ve been using this data to put together some statistics, which I’ll be sharing in an upcoming post.

Despite the prevalence of names like “research” and “science” in these website names, none of the sites listed above offer the data in a particularly well organized format, such as a single downloadable CSV or XML file. No site yet provides the latitude and longitude coordinates for the circles they have on file, and there is no standard naming or taxonomy system for classifying the circles. Instead, each researcher seems to have developed their own internal methods.

In that idiosyncratic spirit, I offer my own crazy method of organizing crop circles (shown above). An interactive mosaic of all the crop circles on Paul Vigay’s site, for which there are color photographs.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Jim's Projects, Linkydinks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.