On the 29th of July, 1880, John Rand
Capron, an amateur scientist, published an account (in Nature magazine) of a crop circle he observed near
Guildford, in Surrey:
The storms about this part of Surrey have been lately local and violent, and the effects produced in some instances curious. Visiting a neighbour’s farm on Wednesday evening (21st), we found a field of standing wheat considerably knocked about, not as an entirety, but in patches forming, as viewed from a distance, circular spots.
What did Capron find as he looked at the "circular spots" more closely?
Examined more closely, these all presented much the same character, viz., a few standing stalks as a centre, some prostrate stalks with their heads arranged pretty evenly in a direction forming a circle round the centre, and outside these a circular wall of stalks which had not suffered.
Capron made a sketch of what he found, but it was not published:
I send a sketch made on the spot, giving an idea of the most perfect of these patches. The soil is a sandy loam upon the greensand, and the crop is vigorous, with strong stems, and I could not trace locally any circumstances accounting for the peculiar forms of the patches in the field, nor indicating whether it was wind or rain, or both combined, which had caused them, beyond the general evidence everywhere of heavy rainfall. They were to me suggestive of some cyclonic wind action, and may perhaps have been noticed elsewhere by some of your readers.
Was Capron a reliable observer? He published other works on scientific subjects. Did he actually see a 19th century crop circle?
Who can say?
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