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This chapter looks at the various attempts that have been made to conduct scientific investigation of the circles. We have already seen that a scientist, Dr Meaden was amongst the first to take an interest in the subject, but others have tried to apply scientific methods of investigation, with varying degrees of success. One of the goals of this research has been to find a 'test' which would allow 'real' circles to be distinguished from man-made events, a ‘litmus test’ for the circles. To this end, much of the scientific work that has been carried out involves testing of samples, either soil or crop, to determine if significant differences can be detected between circle samples and controls from the same field. We begin by returning to Dr Meaden's ideas about circle formation. These are described in Chapter 4. Here we are concerned with what experimental evidence can show about his theories. As his ideas developed to include the concept that plasmas are involved, he was contacted by Japanese researchers one of whom, Yoshi- Hiko Ohtsuki, had. been experimenting with the production of small plasma balls In 1991 Ohtsuki was contacted by an employee of the Tokyo underground system, who thought he would be interested in a discovery that had been made by maintenance workers; circular markings left in the dirt on the walls of the tunnels, some of which had rings. Back in his laboratory, he was able to reproduce a similar effect, through a simple refinement to his existing equipment for generating and observing plasma balls, or 'plasmoids': by placing a tray of aluminium in the microwave chamber, he was able to record the imprint left by the plasmoids. The importance of this was in confirming experimentally that plasma balls could, in a suitable medium, produce rings and circles just as Dr Meaden suggested. These were very small-scale events, barely comparable with the size of even small circles. However, some of the eye-witness accounts of larger glowing masses in association with subsequent circles, correspond well to what a scaled-up event of this kind could appear like. The unpredictable nature of such events makes detection and recording extremely difficult, as the surveillance attempts described in earlier chapters demonstrate. At Dr Meaden's 1990 conference at Oxford some possible radar evidence of a large plasmoid moving at speed, detected on a ship's radar, was presented. The advantage of research directed at samples of crops or soil is in being able to control more of the variables and in being able to apply the results unambiguously to the circle in question. In 1990 Colin Andrews referred to experiments that demonstrated a 'molecular change’ had occurred in samples of grain from a circle. This was later published, as photographs in The Latest Evidence, with text asserting that this was proof that any meteorological explanation was ‘dead’. Unfortunately, 5. Science and the Circles Plasma Research in a laboratory at the University of Waseda. Crop and soil research