Germany has long been an upcoming runner-up in terms of crop circle numbers compared to England, but this year it is actually overtaking the English count... Is the traditional homeland's time as circle central being challenged, in quantity if not design? ANDREAS MÜLLER looks at the huge recent increase in German formations...


This year Germany is facing an unexpected increase in crop circles never seen before. With at least 32 formations and a few rumours still to be confirmed, Germany has even more reports than the circle's motherland England.

Like other places in the world, such as the Avebury area in central Wiltshire for England, the crop circles also have their German focal points. For many years the landscape around the city of Kassel in Hessen has been one of the most known of these epicentres - here we have had six formations so far. Meanwhile, the most northern region, a area called Angeln in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, that saw numerous and beautiful formations from 1996 to 1999, is asleep at the moment, but other places have taken over. So we now have two other epicentres.

One, the most north-eastern, is the Isle of Ruegen, at Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the Baltic Sea. Here we currently have eleven confirmed formations - one is a pretty, delicate and beautiful one in a field of clover and phacelia flowers. The field was blooming in purple when discovered and now, within the flattened areas, the clover has taken over the formation and shows in white, while the rest is still purple.

A more southern epicentre has developed over the years in the south-west, in the Hohenlohe area between the towns of Sinsheim and Schwaebisch Hall in Baden-Württemberg. Here we now also have eleven formations - nine of these are placed within a single huge field of barley and each formation is quite small - but they are not one large connected design.

All epicentres share some common aspects. All host a remarkable number of ancient places, such as standing stones, hillbarrows and sacred sites, and the formations do appear in close proximity to them. In Baden-Wuerttemberg, for example, all eleven formations gather in different fields of wheat and barley around a little wood that hosts several tumuli within. In all epicentres we find local residents reporting to us about old crop circles dating back decades ago and in plants we have never heard of before being used by the phenomenon, such as circles in 'cat-tail' on the Isle of Ruegen. Those aspects are also shared by other less visited crop circle sites.

It is quite a discussion within the covering media and researchers as to why we have such an increase this year. While many simply refer to the coming 'Signs' movie hitting the screen in September, the real cause might be something more difficult. Most of all the 32 formations are nearly invisible from any road or viewing point. Many were discovered so late that they had already disappeared again in the young crops, and nobody, not even Disney, used it for their aims. We are in close contact with the promo-team for the German 'Signs' release and they confirmed to us that they, at least, are not planning to commission hoaxes to push the movie.

Most of the formations are pretty small and have not the amazing pictorial quality as at the latest formation at Stonehenge on July 4th, but they are nonetheless impressive on the ground and in their own details. Many of this year's German formations also show the known biophysiological anomalies identified from analysis by the BLT laboratories and others.

Of course, there are also less impressive formations and we are not thinking that Germany is a hoax-free zone, but we are most interested in the real phenomenon that leaves its impressions all over in Germany: in people's mind, in thoughts and in the fields.

To find out more about the German formations and the research, please visit our homepage. All reports on the 2002 formations are also available in English:

http://invisiblecircle.de/ser/darchiv.html


Andreas is a key member of the websites 'Invisible Circle' and 'ICCA -The International Crop Circle Archive', which can be found at:

http://invisiblecircle.de


Andreas can be contacted at:

mueller@invisiblecircle.de


Frank Laumen (photos above) has his own website at:

http://www.visiblesigns.de