A very simple explanation for crop circles is that they are a form of human-made landscape art.
Some people continue to believe that crop circles were created by aliens transported by UFOs, despite evidence to the contrary.
But how did flattened areas of cereal grains and mysterious flying objects end up being connected? How come southern England has historically been linked to these patterns?
Doug Bower and Dave Chorley are the straightforward answers to all of these queries.
A couple of pals named Bower and Chorley resided close to Winchester, England. According to Chorley, who spoke to TIME magazine in 1991, the two were in a bar in 1978, “wondering what we could do for a bit of fun.” The UFO was inspired by prior stories of UFO landings.
Bower and Chorley entered a field and began working on their masterpiece after arming themselves with some boards, rope, and a twist of wire attached to a baseball hat brim for placing their patterns. Nobody took note. Before their newly created crop circles were picked up by the international media, the two had to make repeated excursions into the southern English countryside over several years. The creators came forward and acknowledged their deception after the story went viral and UFO enthusiasts started to gather in large numbers.
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Since then, crop circles have evolved into a type of landscape art as well as a popular tourist destination. Crop circles’ reputation as extraterrestrial relics is no longer as strong as it once was, but genuine believers, known as “croppers,” still believe that at least some of them were created by aliens. Marketers are more likely to be to blame these days because crop circles have been utilized to promote the Olympics and computer chips.
What are crop circles?
Crop circles are large-scale patterns made by flattening crops such as wheat, barley, or canola. Crop circle artists still use boards of wood to stomp out patterns, as a National Geographic documentary filmed in 2004 illustrated. The artists hide their tracks in existing tractor-tire ruts, making it seem as if the design dropped out of the sky.
Crop circles can be simple circles or more complex patterns. Southern England remains a hotspot for crop circle artists, with masterpieces incorporating triangles, spinner shapes, and crescents. They’ve also popped up elsewhere around the world, with one article in the Illinois newspaper Courier & Press calling them a “plague” in the state in the 1990s. (“We think it’s probably just kids,” Rock Island County Sheriff Tod VanWolvelaere told the paper decades later.)
Sometimes, “crop circles” appear for apparently natural reasons. The crop circles that Chorley and Bower took their inspiration from were found in Australia in 1966, though they weren’t crops; they were patches of flattened, floating reeds in a lagoon in far north Queensland. The farmer who found them claimed to have seen a flying saucer whizzing away, but locals said such circles were common during the wet season. According to the Cairns Post, the most likely explanations were downdrafts of wind or small vortices known as willy-willies (similar to dust devils).
Famous crop circles
The first report of a crop-related mystery now linked to crop circles was a woodcut chapbook, or small book containing ballads and poems, and tracts, called “The Mowing Devil,” dating back to 1678. According to Oxford Reference, this chapbook tells the tale of a cheap farmer who refused to pay a laborer to cut his oats. Overnight, the devil did the job instead, “cutting them in circles.” Though the oats of the story were mowed, not flattened, crop circle believers used this fable to bolster their case for crop circles’ long-ago roots.
In 1996, a famous crop circle known as the “Julia set” appeared near Stonehenge. A local pilot claimed that he flew over the field an hour before the crop circle appeared and saw nothing, and then flew over it again, only to see a spiral of progressively larger circles, according to the Skeptical Inquirer. This supposed sudden appearance raised excitement that the crop circle had to be of paranormal origin. But according to the Skeptical Inquirer, these eyewitness accounts were sketchy — and a local crop-circle creator claimed to know who made the Julia set and that it had been done the night before the crop circle was spotted, not during broad daylight.
Perhaps the cutest crop circles to make international news were simple ones spotted in Tasmania’s legally grown opium field in 2009. Opium is grown for the pharmaceutical industry, which uses plants to make drugs such as morphine. According to the Australian state’s attorney general, wallabies were getting into the fields and hopping in circles after eating the opium poppies and “getting high as a kite,” NBC News reported that year. The disoriented wallabies were stomping on the poppies, causing crushed circular patches.
Additional resources
Crop circles are human-made, but they’re still visually stunning. Smithsonian Magazine’s The Art of the Crop Circle (opens in new tab) delves into the history and artistic merit of these structures. National Geographic’s 2018 article “Inside the mystical world of crop circle tourism (opens in new tab)” looks at the travel spurred by crop circles. For documentation of southern England’s crop circle art, the website Temporary Temples (opens in new tab) offers stunning aerial photos and context.
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