2006 Crop Circles World Championships

The 2006 Crop Circles World Championships were held in Wiltshire, England on March 18. Each year, teams from eight countries are selected to participate by the International Crop Circles Federation (ICCF) from the many teams who submit examples of their previous years' work for evaluation. With £50,000 prize money up for grabs, the 2006 competition included teams from England, Scotland, USA, Canada, France, Germany, Brazil and, for the first time, a team from Australia.

Many of the competing teams had perfected their design and technique in clandestine training camps in their own countries, avoiding publicity in an attempt to not reveal the detail of their plans for the night of competition. For the 2006 World Championships, wheat fields were planted especially for the competition and each team was allowed a maximum of five team members and had six hours to complete their design from 10 pm to 4 am. No machinery or electronic equipment was permitted and an official from the ICCF was assigned to watch each of the teams.

The competition is judged by representatives from each of the competing countries and the ICCF who only see the crop circles when they are completed and are not told which design belongs to which team. They give each crop circle a score out of ten for design and a score out of ten for technical execution and these scores are added to give the team's final score. The design score is based on aesthetics, originality and incorporation of mathematical elements while the technical execution score is based on the precision of the shapes wheat flattening.

The winning design from the English team was of a fractal snowflake (pictured) with intricate patterns of circles at the edges. The judges awarded the English team three perfect scores for their technical execution in their total score of 83. The Canadian team came second with a score of 71 and were closely followed by the team from the USA with a score of 69. The Canadian team faced disqualification when the USA team protested that their design, a depiction of a three armed spiral galaxy made entirely of circles, was unoriginal but the protest was not upheld by officials from the ICCF. The Australian team put in a fair effort but their design, inspired by Australian Aboriginal dreamtime art, was deemed to be not sufficiently based on mathematical principles and was spoiled when a junior member of the team fell over and crushed wheat plants that were supposed to remain standing.

Crop circles are incorrectly but widely believed by the public to be created by paranormal phenomena such as UFOs or energy fields from the Earth and to contain hidden messages in their symbolism. This is, in part, due to the formation of spoof websites created by many of the crop circles teams as a means to display their creations in a light-hearted manner and to allow them to practice their art without interruption. This will all change in 2007 when the World Crop Circles Championships move to Canada and, for the first time, will be televised live to an international audience on cable TV.

 

 Hmm , 1st April . Hope it was posted before Midday :)

Perry_Scope, April 1, 2006 8:15

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