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This book has aimed to introduce you to the circles and provide you with the starting points for your own investigations. This chapter tries to summarize what we have seen along the way and, with the benefit of hindsight, revisits some of the main ideas about the circles. We saw at the beginning of the story how the circles have been inextricably linked with UFOs, which might be described as a mixed blessing. On the positive side, this connection has provided circles research with some of its best historical evidence for the existence of the phenomena, since UFO groups have often recorded 'ground traces’, usually in the belief that they are ‘landing marks'. The downside of the UFO involvement is the long history of hoaxing, mischief making and the out and out weirdness of the wilder fringes. A further consequence of this is the difficulty in getting the subject taken seriously, a situation which overtook crop circles very early on. However problematic, the UFO connection is evident from so many accounts of circles, that any attempt to explain the phenomenon must include this. Even the case of the Mowing Devil includes an account of how the farmer's field was ‘all aflame’ during the night preceding the discovery of the (supposed) crop circle: it is not too fanciful to see in this account some sort of light in the sky. While some writers and observers are prepared to make unequivocal statements to the effect that extra- terrestrial space vehicles are responsible for making circles, it should be remembered that despite thousands of Sightings and reports of UFOs, there is still no definitive proof of the extra-terrestrial hypothesis for the origin of UFOs. of observations, we can consider this part of the problem without the further complication of hypothetical extra-terrestrial beings. In this context it is possible to interpret UFO Sightings as natural events connected to the Earth's geophysical or atmospheric processes. Several writers have suggested that humans in close proximity to UFOs may have their consciousness affected by electromagnetic effects, which could account for the strange accounts of alien encounters or abductions. explanations about the circles generally say more about individual psychology than anything objective about the actual phenomena. This writer would prefer to understand the association of UFOs with the circles 1 in the context of natural mechanisms. The fact that some individuals are more prone to experience UFO Sightings and those cases where adjacent observers are not able to see a UFO, apparently, visible to one of their number, ties in with the reported experiences of the human circlemakers who have had UFO Sightings when producing circles. It is their state of a mind, I would contend, that allows or produces such effects. The meteorological ideas which were developed by Dr Meaden have undergone several revisions, the most radical one coming in the wake of the revelations of Doug and Dave. Reflection on the implications of their story led him to virtually abandon the subject, accepting only the simplest events as genuine and consistent with his theory. In this respect he had been forced to accept the criticism made consistently by many other researchers, that many formations showed design complexity that was simply not consistent with a natural force. 11. Putting it all together If we confine the meaning of the term UFO to its literal sense, as a convenient shorthand for a variety What all this means for the circles is a matter of one's own beliefs: as we saw in Chapter 9,