Immanuel Giel · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

UFO sightingGreen

Silbury Hill and the Fields Around It

added01 September 2026

The largest man-made mound in prehistoric Europe — forty metres of earth raised around 2400 BC. Why is unknown: excavation inside found nothing. In this subject it is known for something else: the fields around Silbury and neighbouring Avebury have produced more crop circles since the 1980s than anywhere else on earth. The figures appear overnight, sometimes a hundred metres across, sometimes mathematically elaborate. In 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley demonstrated how they had been making circles with planks and rope since 1978, and the question of origin largely closed. The circles still appear every summer — made openly now, with some of the makers known by name.

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51.41570, -1.85740

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Operation Blackbird

In the summer of 1990 the BBC and Japan's Nippon TV, with the British Army, set up round-the-clock surveillance of the fields near Bratton in Wiltshire: image intensifiers, thermal cameras, radar and a camp on the hill. It was called Operation Blackbird and broadcast live. On the fifth morning, 25 July, a flawless pattern of circles was found in the field beneath the cameras, and the breakfast bulletin went out announcing a breakthrough. Within hours it emerged that a wooden Ouija board and a cross of sticks lay at the centre of each circle: a hoax carried out in the night directly under observation. None of the equipment had recorded anything at all.

25 km away

FolkloreGreen

Stonehenge

Stonehenge is a world-renowned prehistoric megalithic monument situated on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, southern England. Constructed between 3000 and 1500 BC, the earthwork and stone circle complex consists of an outer ring and inner horseshoe of massive sarsen silcrete monoliths joined by lintels via tongue-and-groove and mortise-and-tenon joints, along with smaller volcanic bluestones. Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it remains the ultimate archaeological icon of the British Isles, historically enveloped in folklore involving Celtic druids, the wizardry of Merlin, extraterrestrial beacons, and modern conspiratorial "1954 construction" hoaxes.

26 km away

UFO sightingGreen

Warminster and the Thing

At Christmas 1964 people in this Wiltshire town began complaining of a strange noise — a low drone and crackle that shook roofs. The local paper called it the Thing, and that was the beginning. By 1965 hundreds were climbing Cley Hill above the town every night with flasks and binoculars; on the best weekends five thousand came. Warminster became Britain's first place of UFO tourism, decades before crop circles. The noise most likely came from the Salisbury Plain training area, which begins a couple of kilometres away. The lights over the hill were attributed to everything from signal flares to planets, and never entirely explained.

32 km away

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