Crop circle

A crop circle in Switzerland.

A crop circle is a sizable pattern created by the flattening of a crop such as wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rapeseed.^[1][2]

In 1991, self-professed pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley stated that they had started the phenomenon in 1978 by making actual circles on crops with the use of simple tools.^[3] However, crop patterns not only persisted, but became astonishingly complex. Some even came to resemble stereotypical extraterrestrials as portrayed by science fiction movies, fractals, and archaeological, religious, or mythological symbols, thus leading to speculation and passionate debate. Among others, paranormal enthusiasts, ufologists, and anomalistic investigators have offered arousing yet hypothetical explanations that have been criticized as pseudoscientific by skeptical groups like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.^[4][5][6][7]

Most of the observed patterns have been revealed to be products of deception, artistic expression, and business^[8] or tourism^[9] interests. Some cases have been examined by a few researchers via the scientific method.

History

Bower and Chorley

1678 pamphlet on the "Mowing-Devil".

In 1991, two men from Southampton, England, announced that they had conceived the idea as a prank at a pub near Winchester, Hampshire. Inspired by the 1966 Tully Saucer Nests, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley made their crop circles using planks, rope, hats, and wire as their only tools: using a four-foot-long plank attached to a rope, they easily created circles eight feet in diameter. The two men were able to make a 40-foot (12 m) circle in 15 minutes.

The pair became frustrated when their work did not receive significant publicity, so in 1981, they created a circle in Matterley Bowl, a natural amphitheatre just outside Winchester, Hampshire—an area surrounded by roads from which a clear view of the field is available to drivers passing by. Their designs were at first simple circles. When newspapers claimed that the circles could easily be explained by natural phenomena, Bower and Chorley made more complex patterns. A simple wire with a loop, hanging down from a cap—the loop positioned over one eye—could be used to focus on a landmark to aid in the creation of straight lines. Later designs of crop circles became increasingly complicated.

Bower's wife had become suspicious of him, noticing high mileage in their car. Eventually, fearing that his wife suspected him of adultery, Bower confessed to her, and subsequently, he and Chorley informed a British national newspaper. Chorley died in 1996, and Doug Bower has made crop circles as recently as 2004. Bower has said that, had it not been for his wife's suspicions, he would have taken the secret to his deathbed, never revealing that it was a hoax.^[10]

In 2002, Discovery Channel commissioned five aeronautics and astronautics graduate students from MIT to create crop circles of their own, aiming to duplicate some of the features claimed to distinguish "real" crop circles from the known fakes such as those created by Bower and Chorley. The creation of the circle was recorded and used in the Discovery Channel documentary Crop Circles: Mysteries in the Fields.^[11]

Scientific American published an article by Matt Ridley,^[12] who started making crop circles in northern England in 1991. He wrote about how easy it is to develop techniques using simple tools that can easily fool later observers. He reported on "expert" sources such as the Wall Street Journal who had been easily fooled and mused about why people want to believe supernatural explanations for phenomena that are not yet explained. Methods to create a crop circle are now well documented on the internet.^[13]

Art and business

Aerial view of crop circle in Diessenhofen, July 2008

Since the early 1990s the UK arts collective founded by artist John Lundberg, named the Circlemakers, have been creating some crop circles in the UK and around the world both as part of their art practice and for commercial clients.

On the night of July 11–12, 1992, a crop-circle making competition, for a prize of several thousand UK pounds (partly funded by the Arthur Koestler Foundation), was held in Berkshire. The winning entry was produced by three Westland Helicopters engineers, using rope, PVC pipe, a trestle and a ladder. Another competitor used a small garden roller, a plank and some rope.

In a gathering in Switzerland, crop circle artists stated that:^[14]

Legal implications

In 1992 Hungarian youths Gábor Takács and Róbert Dallos, both then 17, were the first people to face legal action after creating a crop circle. Takács and Dallos, of the St. Stephen Agricultural Technicum, a high school in Hungary specializing in agriculture, created a 36-meter diameter crop circle in a wheat field near Székesfehérvár, 43 miles (69 km) southwest of Budapest, on June 8, 1992. On September 3, the pair appeared on Hungarian TV and exposed the circle as a hoax, showing photos of the field before and after the circle was made. As a result, Aranykalász Co., the owners of the land, sued the youngsters for 630,000 HUF (approximately $3000 USD) in damages. The presiding judge ruled that the students were only responsible for the damage caused in the 36-meter diameter circle, amounting to about 6,000 HUF (approximately $30 USD), and that 99% of the damage to the crops was caused by the thousands of visitors who flocked to Székesfehérvár following the media's promotion of the circle. The fine was eventually paid by the TV show, as were the students' legal fees.

Rockefeller study

In 1999, researcher Colin Andrews received funding from Laurence Rockefeller to conduct a two-year investigation into crop circles. His team concluded that 80% of all crop formations that appeared in England throughout 1999 and 2000 were unquestionably man-made and instigated by business and media interests. However the team could not account for the nature of the remaining 20%, which were termed "genuine". Andrews stated that he had encountered such "unexplainable" patterns 20 years earlier.^[15]

Andrews's figures have been disputed by CSICOP who argue that his criteria for distinguishing between man-made circles and non-man-made circles were insufficient, as no official standard exists for determining the nature of a crop circle. Furthermore, these circles were in England, where the hoax is most operative.

Funding from L. Rockefeller has also led to the creation of the BLT Research team,^[16] a group of scientists and researches focused on providing thorough scientific documentation regarding all aspects of crop circle phenomena.

Explanations

A crop circle in the form of a triskelion

A 780 ft crop circle in the form of a double (six-sided) triskelion composed of 409 circles. John Lundberg has claimed responsibility for its production. Location: Milk Hill (England), 2001

Weather

Some people have suggested that crop circles are the result of extraordinary meteorological phenomena. This hypothesis probably originated from a 1880 publication in Nature by investigator and amateur scientist John Rand Capron. Part of the publication reappeared in the January 2000 issue of Journal of Meteorology:^[17][18]

Paranormal

Since appearing in the media in the 1970s, crop circles have become the subject of speculation by various paranormal, ufological, and anomalistic investigators ranging from proposals that they were created by bizarre meteorological phenomena to messages from extraterrestrials.^{[19][20][21][22]}

The location of many crop circles near ancient sites such as Stonehenge, barrows, and chalk horses has led many New Age belief systems to incorporate crop circles, speculating their existence in relation to ley lines.^[19][23][24]

Some New Age supporters have arbitrarily related crop circles to the Gaia hypothesis, alleging that "Gaia", the earth, is actually alive and that crop circles are messages or responses to stimuli such as global warming and human pollution. It asserts that the earth may be modeled as if a single super-organism, in that earthly components (e.g. biota, climate, temperature, sunlight, etc.) influence each other and are organized to function and develop as a whole.^[25]

The main criticism of alleged non-human creation of crop circles is that while evidence of these origins, besides eyewitness testimonies, is essentially absent, some are definitely known to be the work of human pranksters and others can be adequately explained as such. There have been cases in which researchers declared crop circles to be "the real thing", only to be confronted with the people who created the circle and documented the fraud (see above).^[26] Many others have demonstrated how complex crop circles can be created.^[13][27] In his 1997 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan discussed alien-based theories of crop circle formation. Sagan concluded that no empirical evidence existed to link UFOs with crop circles. Specifically, he pointed out that there were no credible cases of UFOs being observed creating a circle, yet there were many cases when it was known that human agents, such as Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, were responsible.^[28]

Animal activity

In 2009, BBC News reported that Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, stated that Australian wallabies had been found creating crop circles in fields of poppies after consuming some of the opiate-laden crop and running in circles.^[29]

Human activity

In 2000 Matthew Williams became the first man in the UK to be arrested for causing criminal damage after making a crop circle near Devizes.^[30].

The artist John Lundberg and his collaborators claim responsibility for covertly creating hundreds of the world's largest and most elaborate crop circles, including the Milk Hill Circle.^[31] His crop circles have brought offers from art collector Charles Saatchi.^[32]

See also

• Geoglyph
• Mowing-Devil
• Nazca Lines
• Out-of-place artifact
• Tanbo art

References

Further reading

• The Field Guide: The Art, History and Philosophy of Crop Circle Making by Rob Irving and John Lundberg, edited by Mark Pilkington, 2006, Strange Attractor Press, ISBN 0-9548054-2-9.
• Round in Circles: Physicists, Poltergeists, Pranksters, and the Secret History of the Cropwatchers by Jim Schnabel, 1993, Penguin, ISBN 0-14-017952-6.
• The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles: Scientific Research and Urban Legends by Eltjo H. Haselhoff, ISBN 0-285-63625-1.
• Carl Sagan, 1996. The Demon-Haunted world: Science as a Candle in the Dark; "Aliens" pp 73ff.
• Noyes, Ralph (editor) The Crop Circle Enigma: Grounding the Phenomenon in Science, Culture and Metaphysics The Hollows, Wellow, Bath U.K.:1990 Gateway Books, ISBN 0-946551-66-9

External links

• National Geographic News This is an introduction to crop circles with a special emphasis on their value as art.
• Circlemakers.org Crop circle making arts collective in the UK.
• The Center for Scientific Investigation, a sceptical look at crop circles by Joe Nickell "Circular Reasoning: The 'Mystery' of Crop Circles and Their 'Orbs' of Light"
• How Stuff Works: Explains how crop circles are made and how to make your own, with step-by-step pictures and complex circle patterns.
• Video demonstration of circle making techniques, CSI