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1989 saw a large jump in numbers of circles; Dr Meaden's database showing 305 circles that year. It was also the first year that a systematic attempt to 'catch' a circle forming was made. Andrews and Delgado set up 'Operation White Crow’, at the Cheesefoot Head site in Hampshire, with the intention of mounting a 24-hour watch on a known circles location, using infra-red and image intensifier cameras to supplement human observers. For 10 days a team of up to 50 people manned the site in shifts, but no circles formed in the field under surveillance. The operation did, however, produce two events of note, one of which has passed into circles legend. The first occurred ¢ on 1 the night of 12/ 13 June, when observers saw and captured 0 on 1 videotape an The second was during the early hours of 18 June, when six participants in the operation were sitting in a circle which had formed some three weeks earlier, with the intention of trying to establish contact with the 'circlemakers'. A strange trilling noise was heard, continuing for some time and appearing to move around, as if under intelligent direction. One of the participants, George Wingfield, addressed a request to the sound; 'please will you make us a circle?'. The following morning, a new circle was discovered about half a kilometre (a quarter of a mile) away. The sound was also recorded and has been the subject of controversy since. Some saw it as the 'signature' of the circlemakers, others as the song of the Grasshopper Warbler, a small bird known to frequent cornfields and to sing at night. Its song is a remarkable mechanical whirring noise, which in the absence of a direct observation, is hard to associate with a bird. 1989 saw several developments in circle design. At Beckhampton, near Avebury, a ringed circle was found of more than 30 metres (100 feet) in diameter, comfortably the largest found at that time. A circle near Winchester had a curving tail and was nicknamed the tadpole. For the first time 'grapeshot' were seen, scattered across fields like shotgun pellet marks. But the most significant circles were two which showed a unique lay, with the crop swept out from the centre in four sections at right angles to each other. The centre showed a typical swirl. The importance of these events was the non-circular nature of the lay, apparently contradicting ideas that some form of whirlwind was responsible. These were found at Winterbourne Stoke, in Wiltshire. Again, during 1989, the majority of circles discovered in the United Kingdom were either in Wiltshire or Hampshire, the CERES database showing only 73 out of 305 circles occurring outside this region. The publication of Circular Evidence prompted much greater media coverage and the BBC covered the subject on several occasions. It was during the filming of one of these items that a noise was 3. The Golden Age 1989-91 Surveillance Attempts orange stationary light above the field. No conclusive interpretation was made of this. Design Developments