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JENNY RAN DLES
I believe a weather effect was probably involved as well. On that summer morning in 1 963, however, the world was yet to hear of crop circles when at 6 am Leonard Joliffe, a dairy worker from the farm, heard a loud explosion. At first little was thought of it, but then a few hours later another Manor Farm worker entered the boundary between a potato field and barley crop to came upon the real source of the mys足 tery: a big hole in the ground. It was relatively shallow-just some 4 inches deep, as if
scooped out by a spoon-but measured irregularly across a circular zone between 9 and 12 feet in diameter. Directly in the center was a vertical hole which appeared to be several feet deep and had radiating spoke marks leading from it. If a lightning strike was responsible for this it had dug the earth remarkably deep. It seemed more like an explosion had come from beneath-or possibly, that a heavy object had landed and created the trace.
ENTER THE M I LITARY Land owner Roy Blanchard was taking no chances. He called the police, who in tum rapidly summoned the army. Captain
John Rogers from the Horsham unit of the bomb disposal
squad arrived to take control. After a preliminary inspection Rogers told the now waiting media that he was baffled. He discussed the problem with his superiors but confirmed there were no scorch or burn marks suggestive of an explosion. That appeared to scupper the early theory that a buried World War Two bomb had gone off thanks to chemical decay across the 20 years since it had been discarded by a fleeing enemy bomber. This sort of thing was not uncommon in many parts of Europe at the time. Roy Blanchard pointed out some of the things that were intriguing the army but about which they had kept silent. His potato crop had not been exploded. It had vanished. There was no trace of it anywhere in or around the crater. Moreover, the small rocks in the soil were crushed to powder. He had no