In 1991 two Englishmen, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, admitted to creating over two hundred crop circles in fields all over England. Since the 1970s dozens of crop circles had been appearing every year, sparking all kinds of theories on the phenomenon. Naturally, some said aliens were the cause. More shockingly however, others thought it might just be some pranksters. Of course the second group rejoiced as soon as Doug and Dave admitted to their pranks, pointing out that all of these unexplained crop circles must therefore be the work of pranksters all over England. Based on Doug and Daves’ claims of making about thirty per year though, this left over a thousand unexplained crop circles in England alone at the time. Since the BBC covered this in 1991, the phenomenon has exploded into a worldwide pastime. Since the 70s over 10,000 recorded crop circles have appeared, usually overnight, usually by artists who remain anonymous, and without being recorded. Some are created by companies who contract the work for advertising or tourism, such as this Olympic icon created before the London Olympics back in 2012. Some are created by known hoaxers like Doug and Dave, but the vast majority remain unclaimed. The air of mystery surrounding them is so potent that a new scientific discipline was coined, cereology, the study of crop circles. This has been since coopted to mean anybody who has an interest in them, including those who create the circles. Regardless of any supernatural explanations some might reserve for ‘genuine’ crop circles, clearly humans create these complex designs on their own, often without receiving any credit or recognition, much less monetary gain. So the question becomes, why bother? I think the answer lies at the heart of human obsession with mystery. Our innate curiosity drives us not only to investigate the natural, but to delve deeper. The supernatural, even if we have to make it ourselves, holds too much intrigue to ignore.

The first crop circle competition was held in 1992 by John Mitchell and Rupert Sheldrake, which you can read more about here. The key takeaway was this:

“The experiment was conclusive. Humans could indeed make all the features of state-of-the-art crop formations at that time. Eleven of the twelve teams made more or less impressive formations that followed the set design. The contest was reported in most of the British newspapers and on radio and TV. Some people jumped to the conclusion that all crop circles must be hoaxes. The sceptics were pleased with the outcome, although they had been so sceptical about the competition itself and had refused to cooperate in its organization. Ridley’s team was the only one that did not attempt to follow the set design, producing a question mark instead.”

Since then people have created plenty of impressive crop circles. A group in England called the Circlemakers regularly takes commissions to create geometric patterns that would seem impossible to form at first glance, such as this example created for the BBC back in 2005:

Even with large groups of people taking credit for some of the most complex creations, dedicated experiments to prove their viability, and countless admitted hoaxers, some still believe these circles are sometimes created by supernatural phenomenon. It’s not hard to see why, given the scale of some of these creations. Here is one of the largest ever created, 450 meters or almost 1500 feet across.

John Lundberg, the founder of that Circlemakers group I mentioned, called this one a ‘Jaw Dropper’ and apparently claimed the artists would have had to create each of the 409 circles within about thirty seconds a piece to complete this in a single night, though I could not find a source for that quote listed in the article.

Here’s another one that was created on the same hill, Milk Hill in Wiltshire. Apparently the aliens must love those people the most because that’s also the county where Stonehenge is.

That one clearly seems to be going for more of a message than a raw artistic design.

I think these circles hold the same allure you can find in the greatest magicians, the most moving artists, and of course, the best writers. They imply the existence of something real and powerful beyond the scope of human knowledge, the essence of the unknown. Or in this case, it might be better to say, the unknowable. A mystery that can be solved is temporary. It was just a hoax, or a company paid for it, or a natural phenomenon created it are all simplistic, anticlimactic explanations. It’s much more fun to fuel worldwide speculation about the mysteries of the universe by leaving a hole where the explanation should be. Like negative space in art, a blank where the artist’s name should go can be filled in by the imagination with the spectacular. It’s not Dave and Doug from Wiltshire creating those circles, it’s pychokinetic microwave forces generated by nesting UFOs.

Ironically, I think buying into the supernatural might actually be a more simplistic explanation than Doug and Dave’s escapades though. When the results of a process are just too hard to believe, its natural to seek alternative explanations. There’s no way a woman could have appeared in that chair so quickly. Must be the magician’s sorcery. Ironically, this is actually the simplest explanation. In reality, an engineer had to design a chair with a false bottom that an exceptionally flexible woman could fit within. Then, after hours of practice, the magician and the assistant can work together to create a smooth illusion. Repeat this dozens of times for all the tricks performed, each one requiring a new and equally intricate set of steps, none of which are linked by a single explanatory cause that us humans so enjoy. Like a crop circle, the question becomes, why bother to go through all that work? That’s so complicated, and for what benefit? Surely there must be a singularly elegant solution. Occam’s razor in this case, has led us astray. You’d have to assume that the magician is doing all sorts of nefarious things just to fool you rather than the single, simple assumption that magic is real and this person studies it. By purposefully abusing an unhinged level of complexity, magicians and cereologists can generate the illusion of the supernatural. Writing off all of a magician’s most spectacular tricks to the supernatural is, in some ways, a bigger anticlimax than Dave and Doug spending countless nights stomping around in the muddy fields for hours, just for the pleasure of fooling some tourists. What kind of characters must those two be to do something like that? What complex events in their lives led to them to putting in all that effort for so little gain? There’s no way anybody in their right mind would waste their time on such things. It must be aliens sending a message.

Remember that crop circle competition I mentioned? Here’s how the winning team did it:

“The demonstration by the winning team was fascinating. The young engineers employed very simple apparatus. For flattening the crop, they used a roller consisting of a piece of PVC piping with a rope through it, pushing it with their feet. In order to get into the crop without leaving footprints, they used two lightweight aluminium stepladders with a plank between them, acting as a bridge. For marking out a ring, they did not put a post in the centre, but rather used a telescopic device made out of plastic pipes of different diameter projecting from the top of an aluminium step ladder. A string was attached to the end of it in such a way that by holding the string and walking in a circle around this central position a perfect ring of flattened plants could be marked out without leaving any trace on the ground in the middle.”

Here Dr. Sheldrake calls it a ‘simple apparatus,’ but I think it’s only simple with the benefit of hindsight. If you asked someone who’d never seen these crop circles before, I don’t think that two engineers using a telescoping mechanism, ladders and boards to create bridges over the crops, and rolling pipes around with their feet would occur to anyone as a reasonable explanation. Again, why would anybody do all that? It sounds more absurd than aliens sending a message.

I think the real reason these crop circles exist is because we like to have fun on an unprecedented scale. Like all artists, Dave and Doug wandered out into the fields in the middle of the night on so many occasions because drinking beers and crushing crops under the moonlight to fool some tourists is simply way more fun than sitting around doing nothing. Those who look on and wonder about the origins of the circles also have a lot of fun being fooled, and skeptics have a lot of fun shooting them down. People like me get to immerse themselves in the mystery and wonder what it’s all for. Scientists get to explore the methods by which humans screw around. It’s all in all a good time for everyone. Especially for the aliens who like to poke us and watch us run around like ants whose nest has been disrupted.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley