A public record · 7,551 formations · 1590–2026
Every crop formation anyone published, once.
Three archives have recorded crop formations for thirty years, and each records a different set, under different names, with different dates. This is all of it, folded into one record per formation — dated, placed, measured where a source measured it, and traceable back to the page it came from.
A public record · 1590–2026 · gallery view
Every crop formation anyone published, once.
7,551 formations, 2,406 of them with a photograph that may be shown. Every picture is credited to its photographer first; a drawing is badged as a drawing; a formation with no picture is shown as its own record.
The most recent season the archive holds, as it was reported. Each plate is one formation: a photograph where one may be shown, credited to its photographer; a drawing where only a drawing exists, labelled so; otherwise the record itself.
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
drawing
drawing
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
photograph
The shape of a season
every season, 1590 to 2026 →Crop formations are a summer phenomenon and a crop phenomenon: 92% of the 6,315 formations with a known day were reported between May and September, and the count collapses when the fields are cut.
The ring is every day of the year. A spoke's length is how many formations across the whole archive were reported on that day.
The busiest days on record
- 25 July
- 107 formations, all years together
- 15 July
- 103 formations
- 23 July
- 101 formations
- 22 July
- 98 formations
- 28 July
- 96 formations
One bar per year of report. The shape of this curve is coverage — who was publishing, and when — and not a measurement of how many formations there were.
Bold years hold fifty formations or more.
The whole record, by section
What this archive is, and is not
Read this first
A reported date is the date a formation was found and reported, not the date it was made, and this archive records what three sites published, not what happened in the fields.
Nothing here is evidence that a formation was made by anything in particular. Where an author of one of the archive's documents claims otherwise, the page records that they claimed it, in their own words, and says how the claim was counted.
5,144 of 7,551 formations have no photograph in the archive at all, and 6,689 are held by a single source, so nothing about them can be cross-checked. Where that is so, the page says so.
7,197 formations carry a coordinate. None of them was published by a source as a coordinate: each is derived from the place name a source printed, and each page states how precise that makes it.