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revels in the countryside, where flattened grass circles mark the dances of him and his followers. Some observers see these mischievous characteristics in the behaviour of the circlemakers; night time In the east, whirlwinds are personified as djinns or giinis, due in part to the apparent inquisitiveness or mischievousness of their behaviour. William Corliss, in his Handbook of Unusual Natural I turned and observed a large revolving ring of sand, less than a foot high approaching me slowly. It stopped a few feet away and the ring containing sand and small pieces of vegetable debris in a sheet less than one inch thick, revolving rapidly around a circle of about 12 feet diameter while the axis remained stationary. It then moved slowly around me... and slowly died down. Other accounts show very localized effects, such as a fatality that happened in Bradford in 1911, when a narrow funnel-shaped whirlwind picked up and dropped a girl from 6 metres (20 feet), leaving As described in Chapter 1, a meteorologist was among the first investigators to examine the 1980 circle at Westbury. Dr Terence Meaden had a long-standing interest in tornadoes and other unusual atmospheric phenomena, such as ball lightning. He had founded an academic journal, The Journal of Meteorology, which was one of the first publications to include regular articles on the subject of the circles, and also founded an organization, the tornado and storm research organization, TORRO, to The original case had been referred to him by lan Mryzyglod, who had heard of his organization through the UFO community, when Meaden had offered an opinion on a supposed UFO sighting. Meaden checked the weather records for the period at which the circle was known to have arrived, and discovered that the prevailing conditions had been hot and windless. The markings described to him (the field had been harvested by the time he saw it) did not sound like tornado damage, but could be understood as the product of some kind of whirlwind or ‘land devil’. These are a species of vortex, caused by thermals, rising air masses. He began to develop an idea that thermals rising from ground level might be set into a rotary motion by wind currents in the lee of low hills - the surrounding topography at Bratton. He wrote a report for The Journal and followed this with a further article in 1981, when circles appeared at Cheesefoot Head, slightly refining his first ideas to account for these circles having been found to windward of the hill. The discovery of the quintuplet sets in 1 983 led to the next refinement of the theory. Meaden knew from the literature on tornadoes that the main funnel could be surrounded by smaller ‘satellite’ tubes Robin Goodfellow or Puck is a mischievous sprite known for his tricks on humans and nocturnal activity and the confusion of human researchers through trickery. Phenomenon, describes several instances of small whirlwinds displaying what is anthropomorphically seen as curiosity: nearby bystanders unaffected. Meteorological Theories research tornadoes and other unusual weather events.