This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 19, Issue 3, from 2008.
I am spending a few weeks in rural France at the moment and, while on a bike ride a few days ago, came across an almost perfect circle of flattened wheat, measuring perhaps three metres in diameter.
“What could be the cause of this?” I asked myself, “Alien spacecraft, soil fungus, earth energies, magnetic vortices or rutting hedgehogs rotating in unison?”
Yes, this sent my mind wandering back rather nostalgically to the heyday of the crop circle in the late 1980s and early 1990s when beautiful crop formations (the word circles no longer did them justice) appeared regularly on the national news both in the UK and overseas whilst various “experts” (from whom all of the above possible explanations originated) were called upon to comment on their origins.
Although crop circles continue to appear in the fields of Wiltshire and elsewhere, media interest has declined almost to zero, which is a shame as some of the more recent designs are extremely complex and very beautiful.
The crop circle phenomenon is one which, in my view, would be an excellent topic for a PhD thesis in sociology or psychology – and, for all I know, maybe such a thesis has already been written – as it provoked (and continues to provoke) interesting behavioural traits in individuals and groups of people.
When they first made it into the newspapers, crop circles really did seem to be a phenomenon worthy of scientific investigation. The circles in those days, however, consisted simply of individual circles of flattened crop, measuring thirty feet or more in diameter. And it seemed perfectly reasonable to speculate that the answer to the mystery of their origin may lie in animal behaviour or unusual atmospheric phenomena.
Of the various self-styled experts of the period, of whom Colin Andrews, Pat Delgado and Terrence Meaden were perhaps the best known, in my mind it was the latter, with his Tornado and Storm Research Organisation, who retained plausibility the longest.
Having seen films of developing twisters reaching down from the clouds, it didn’t seem impossible to me that a suitably static weather system over a cornfield could touch the ground and then recede, leaving a perfect circle of twisted corn. Vortices still seemed at least vaguely plausible when the first double formation was observed in 1980 but I intellectually parted company with the anomalous weather theorists in the following years when a profusion of multiple formations appeared. Yes, I could imagine that stable systems of vortices might exist and that they might give rise to the observed linked crop circle formations, but why would such systems have suddenly started up in the early 1980s only when the media’s attention was focused on the phenomenon? An early result of global warming, perhaps?
From this point onwards, as multiple circle formations grew connecting rings and lines, finally mutating into the complex pictographs of the 1990s, for me the possibility of an explanation that did not involve intelligent design receded to zero.
And this is where things get interesting from a psychological and sociological point of view as, in general, people with a scientific and sceptical mindset attributed the intelligence implicit in the designs to human agencies (even before the Doug and Dave hoaxing confession in 1992) whereas those with a more “spiritual” outlook started looking for answers in non-human intelligences resident in our cosmos who are trying, rather cryptically, to communicate with us.
The more complex and cryptic the formations became, the more the sceptics were convinced that they were all due to hoaxers, or conceptual artists (or whatever the appropriate term should be).
From the point of view of the “cerealogists”, however, the complexity was a clear indication that alien or cosmic intelligences were at work. This is a difficult gap to bridge as it depends on belief systems in both cases.
I guess I am correct in saying that in the opinion of most sceptics, all of the complex crop formations are hoaxed. However, even when the vast majority are proved to be hoaxed (and many croppies now accept this) it does not convince the devotee that there are not also “genuine” circles. For instance, cerealogist Paul Vignay writes in his online Enigma magazine:
Hoaxers on the other hand MUST be able to prove that ALL formations are hoaxes, for it is they that claim the subject is a hoax […] I have already stated that we know that some, possibly even a lot of crop circles are hoaxes. However, you only need a single genuine formation for there to be a genuine phenomenon.”
Perhaps even more difficult to deal with as an argument is the idea that even the hoaxed circles may, in some cosmic way be genuine:
Did the hoaxers pick up an energy form already present, and vectored the information onto a piece of paper.
Hoaxers’ brains being affected (without their knowing) by structured energy fields put in place by cosmic intelligences. Wow! Try arguing that one away in the pub.
In the meantime, although they no longer feature much in our newspapers, I would recommend looking on the web at some of the really beautiful “Mayan” crop formations that intelligences somewhere in our Universe are creating in the fields of southern England.
