Crop Circles: An Overview
While a blog post could never cover the decades of history surrounding crop circles, I think any legender would enjoy a good overview. Many people are vaguely aware of crop circles and their association with alien activity, but that’s about where their knowledge ends. So, first off, what is a crop circle? It is a pattern created in a crop (typically a kind of cereal). That’s the simplest definition. But where does it come from? Some believe it is alien activity, others believe it to be a hoax. Become a temporary cerealogist (a person that studies crop circles) with me.
One of the reasons crop circles are so captivating is many appear to happen overnight, which seems like an insanely short amount of time to create something so large. According to LiveScience, people haven’t just seen crop circles in the 20th century...but the lore of the crop circle goes back centuries. “Their primary piece of evidence is a woodcut from 1678 that appears to show a field of oat stalks laid out in a circle. Some take this to be a first-hand eyewitness account of a crop circle, but a little historical investigation shows otherwise.” However, this woodcut simply highlights a well-known folklore creature - the mowing devil.
Despite some claims of longevity, many of the first sightings of crop circles began in the latter half of the 20th century, especially during the 1970s.
In the United Kingdom, simple circles began appearing all over fields in the English countryside. At first, it was an oddity, but as the years passed the complexity of the designs increased and reached a peak around the 1980s-90s.
Most crop circles feature, well, circles. They almost always appear overnight and have never been recorded being created. It is also suggested, especially in the United Kingdom, that crop circles tend to appear by roads (or by landmarks - such as the crop circle that appeared across the road from Stonehenge). Some crop circles also have evidence of the crops being bent, but not broken, which would be difficult for a human (and even animals) to create.
Like every good astonishing legend, there are seemingly endless theories of what it could be. One of my favorites is that the circles weren’t caused by aliens in the sky...but hedgehogs in the ground. The patterns and weird circles were simply the work of very horny hedgehogs who really went above and beyond in the chase.
Some, like molecular biologist Horace Drew, think that the answer is in our strange skies. Drew, and others, believed the designs were either from time travelers or aliens as markers in their travel or that they left the designs as messages to be decoded in English.
Another, less complicated alien-theory, is not that the circles are markers or messages...but simply a factor of a ship getting too close to the earth and leaving behind a mark.
Of course, there are also the hoaxers who claim that they created this work as a big trick. And, this theory has been proven true for some crop circles. One of the most infamous were Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who confessed to creating approximately 200 crop circles beginning in the 1970s. They said their inspiration was tied to a 1966 UFO sighting in Queensland, Australia where a flying saucer landed and left a depressed area in the grass. The friends loved creating the circles, which they did with ropes and boards, and as the years went on they said their circles grew more complex.
Richard Taylor suggests that physics may be behind the elaborate crop circles carried out by hoaxers. Instead of rope and board like Doug and Dave used, he believes that hoaxers today use GPS in conjunction with lasers and microwaves to create their patterns. The energy would allow stalks to fall over (which would explain the lack of breakage) and create intense details.
In my mind, I think it is a possibility that there are multiple theories that could be true. I truly think that there could be a large element of hoaxing involved...but that some complex circles may just be something else (whether they are hedgehogs or aliens, who knows).
The blog image depicts “Swiss Crop Circle Detail of a crop circle between Steckborn and Hörhausen, discovered in the early morning of the 12th July 2009. Switzerland, July 25, 2009.” Taken by Kecko and licensed under CC BY 2.0
