Crop circles

Crop circles

Type	Term
Also known as	crop circle

A crop circle, crop formation or corn circle is a pattern made by flattening a crop, usually a cereal. The term was coined in the early 1980s.^[1] Crop circles became famous in southern England in the 1980s, when they were widely linked to UFOs, and have since spread around the world. There is no scientific evidence for natural or alien causes, and all crop circles are consistent with human making.^[1] In 1991 two British men, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, said they had been making them since 1978. Since then, teams of artists have produced ever larger and more intricate designs.^[1][2] Physicist Taner Edis has said that all crop circles fall "within the range of the sort of thing done in hoaxes."^[1]

History

Before 1970

• The Mowing-Devil, 1678. This English news pamphlet describes a field of oats cut in circles. Researcher Jim Schnabel does not count it as a precedent, because the stalks were cut, not bent.^[1]
• Fairy rings, 1686. The naturalist Robert Plot described rings of mushrooms and blamed air currents.^[1]
• Capron's letter, 1880. The amateur scientist John Rand Capron wrote to Nature about circles of flattened crops after a storm, suggesting "cyclonic wind action."^[1]
• The 20th century. Archaeologist E. C. Curwen saw "lodged" barley rings near Chichester in 1932. David Wood told Fortean Times that he made circles with ropes in Gloucestershire in 1940. Patrick Moore described flattened areas around a crater in Wiltshire in 1963.^[1]

In the 1960s many UFO sightings and circular formations were reported in Australia and Canada. In 1967, Canadian defence investigators concluded that three circles at Duhamel, Alberta, were artificial, though they could not say who made them.^[1] The best-known was the 1966 Tully "saucer nest" in Queensland. A farmer said he saw a saucer-shaped craft rise from a swamp and found a roughly 10 by 8 metre area where the reeds lay flattened in clockwise curves. Local police, the Royal Australian Air Force and the University of Queensland put it down to natural causes such as a down-draught, waterspout or "willy-willy" (dust devil).^[1] Such early formations were always simple circles that whirlwinds could explain.^[1]

The English circles

From the late 1970s circles appeared in growing numbers in the English countryside, and the media made them widely known in the late 1980s, especially in Hampshire and Wiltshire. Researcher Colin Andrews documented them, and in 1989 he and Pat Delgado published Circular Evidence.^[1] Local people often welcomed the tourism, offering bus and helicopter tours, T-shirts and books, though farmers worried about their crops.^[1] The 1974 science-fiction film Phase IV, which showed geometric crop patterns made by super-intelligent ants, has been suggested as a possible inspiration.^[1]

Bower and Chorley

In 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley made headlines by saying they had started the phenomenon in 1978, inspired by the 1966 Australian reports. Their tools were a plank, rope and a baseball cap fitted with a wire loop to sight straight lines. They claimed all circles made before 1987 and more than 200 between 1978 and 1991. To prove it they made a circle for journalists, which the "cereologist" Pat Delgado examined and declared genuine before the hoax was revealed.^[1][2] When some refused to believe them, they added straight lines and squares that no natural cause could make.^[1] Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon wrote that their work "inspired a second wave of crop artists," turning circles into an international phenomenon.^[1]

The two accounts of when they began differ: Bower and Chorley told the 1991 press they started in 1978, but the folklorists Rob Irving and Peter Brookesmith, writing in Smithsonian in 2009, say they first made a "flying saucer nest" in a Wiltshire wheat field in 1976. Bower had in mind the UFO "sky watches" at the Wiltshire town of Warminster and the rumours of "saucer nests" there, none of which had been photographed; over a drink he suggested to Chorley, "Let's go over there and make it look like a flying saucer has landed."^[2]

Since 1991

After 1991 circles appeared worldwide; by 2001 about 10,000 had been reported, from Britain, the former Soviet Union, Japan, the United States, Canada and elsewhere. They correlate with recent media coverage and the absence of fences or trespass laws.^[1] In the 21st century, formations have grown in size and complexity, some with up to 2,000 shapes and mathematical features. Physicists have suggested that the most complex may be laid out with GPS and lasers.^[1] In 2002 researcher Jeremy Northcote found that UK circles appeared near roads, populated areas and ancient monuments such as Stonehenge and Avebury, always in easily reached places. This strongly suggests human makers. Nearly half of the UK's 2003 circles lay within 15 km of Avebury.^[1]

Art and business

• Circlemakers. The UK arts collective founded by Rod Dickinson and John Lundberg has made crop circles as art and for commercial clients since the early 1990s.^[1]
• The 1992 competition. A crop-circle-making contest was held in Berkshire on 11–12 July 1992, organised by Rupert Sheldrake and John Michell. It was won by three Westland Helicopters engineers using rope, plastic pipe, a plank and stepladders. Sheldrake called the result "conclusive": humans could make every feature of the most advanced formations of the time.^[1]
• MIT students. In 2002 the Discovery Channel had MIT students reproduce the features said to mark "real" circles.^[1]
• Advertising. By 2009 makers in Wiltshire increasingly preferred paid promotional work.^[1]
• Popular culture. Crop circles have appeared on the Led Zeppelin boxed set (1990), in the 2012 London Olympics and, in 2017, as a Star Wars emblem in California.^[1]

The circle-makers and the "croppies"

Irving and Brookesmith describe crop-circle making in southern England as following the farming year: oilseed rape from April to May, barley through May and June, wheat from June to early September, and occasionally maize as late as October.^[2] The designs have grown in scale and complexity each year, laid, they write, as "honey traps for New Age tourists" in a landscape of stone circles, burial mounds and supposed ley lines around Stonehenge and Avebury.^[2] By 2009 one of the most vigorously promoted ideas was that the formations carried numerological messages about a "Great Change" linked to the Maya calendar in 2012.^[2]

The devotees who look for deeper meanings — "croppies" — accept that people make some formations but call them "hoaxes" that "contaminate the evidence"; to them a "genuine" circle is one of unknown origin.^[2] The circle-makers see themselves as artists, and Irving and Brookesmith argue that both sides share an interest in keeping authorship mysterious, since a circle's power to enchant depends on its maker being anonymous: "Who's hoaxing whom?"^[2] Folklorists call such manufactured evidence for a legend "ostension", and compare it to the Cottingley fairy photographs of 1917–1920, which one of the girls who made them always said were a memento of a real experience.^[2] Doug Bower, they report, later told friends he wished he had kept quiet and carried on his night-time work in secret.^[2]

Legal cases

In 1992 two Hungarian teenagers who made a 36-metre circle near Székesfehérvár were sued by the landowner. The judge held them liable only for the damage within the circle, about 6,000 forints. He ruled that 99 percent of the damage was caused by the thousands of visitors drawn by media coverage.^[1] In 2000 Matthew Williams became the first person in Britain arrested for criminal damage over a crop circle, near Devizes. He was fined £100.^[1]

Explanations

The scientific consensus is that crop circles are made by people as hoaxes, advertising or art, usually by crushing plants with a board on a rope tied to an anchor point.^[1] Researchers who declared circles "real" have repeatedly been caught out. Delgado was fooled by Bower and Chorley and by the tabloid Today. Meteorologist Terence Meaden was hoaxed by the Wessex Sceptics and Channel 4's Equinox.^[1] Writer Matt Ridley, who made circles himself from 1991, described how easily they fooled observers. When he criticised "cereologists," he was accused of being an MI5 agent.^[1] Carl Sagan concluded in The Demon-Haunted World (1995) that circles were the work of Bower, Chorley and imitators, and suggested ufologists ignored the evidence in order to keep believing.^[1]

• Weather. Meaden proposed whirlwinds, then a "plasma vortex." Stephen Hawking said in 1991 that circles were "either hoaxes or formed by vortex movement of air." By the end of 1991 Meaden conceded that complex designs were made by hoaxers.^[1]
• Wallabies. In 2009 Tasmania's attorney-general reported wallabies making circles in opium-poppy fields after eating the plants.^[1]
• Plant changes. Biophysicist William Levengood and physicist Eltjo Haselhoff claimed that plants inside circles were altered. Joe Nickell replied that correlation is not causation. He called the reasoning circular, since there was no proven "genuine" circle to study.^[1]
• Paranormal ideas. Paranormal and ufological ideas range from ball lightning to messages from Gaia, God, devas or extraterrestrials, and links to ley lines. Indonesia's space agency LAPAN called circles "man-made." No credible evidence of an alien origin has been presented.^[1]

Crop circles are culture-dependent, appearing mainly in developed, secular Western countries and Japan, where New Age beliefs are common, and not at all in some other regions.^[1]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Crop circle”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.