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The rules also specified precisely the formation that was required and the detailed elements that should be included. The basic design was a dumb-bell, with a circle at one end, and a ring at the other. Various other components, such as grapeshot, an arc, straight boxes and a triangle were incorporated. Twelve teams entered, and their efforts were judged at daybreak by a panel of judges. The results surprised most people, including the judges and organizers. Jim Schnabel, working alone, had managed to finish second and, but for one mistake, would have won. There was general agreement that the formations would have been capable of taking in most observers, had they been discovered ‘unaware’, and it was clear that the extent of human ingenuity had been largely underestimated. Several observers commented on the apparently intoxicating effect of producing the circles at night, judged by the reactions of the teams as they came in from the field. The competition was won by Adrian Dexter's team and, the following day, they gave a demonstration of their technique. Since the formation had to sit between the tramlines, and marks were deducted for signs of entry, they had taken no chances by using an elaborate system of folding ladders to bridge over standing crop and avoided a single central stake hole by using a tripod arrangement as an anchor point for the radius rope. Frustratingly, most of the research described above has not proved to be repeatable (one of the requirements of any true scientific experiment), or later challenged on the grounds of accuracy. Two main criticisms of Levengood's work were made: firstly the minute differences in the structure which he claimed to have identified required accurate measurement on a scale so small that the magnification used could not allow it. Secondly, the control samples in all these experiments were taken from the standing crop in the same field. It was argued that this did not constitute a true control, since it did not allow the possible effects of 'mechanical' trampling to be considered. the dark, whilst escaping detection, since circles are often discovered in the morning. Evaluating the Research