On 19 January 1966 a farmer named George Pedley drove his tractor past a lagoon near this Queensland town and, by his account, saw a grey craft about nine metres across rise out of the reeds. A circular patch of about the same size was left on the water, the reeds flattened and twisted into a spiral. The nest was photographed, the police took a statement, and several more such circles were found in the district within a week. Botanists explained them as a combination of a whirlpool and the root structure of the reed, which floats up as a disc when it tears from the bottom. The explanation is convincing — but outside Australia the case is remembered as the world's first circle, long before the fields of Wiltshire.

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Fyffe, Alabama's UFO Capital

The town of Fyffe in DeKalb County, situated atop the Sand Mountain plateau in Alabama, USA, is a small agricultural community with a population of around one thousand, officially designated by the state legislature as the "UFO Capital of Alabama." The town gained national notoriety in 1989 following a widespread wave of unidentified flying object sightings and unusual occurrences on local farms.