The Crop Circle Phenomenon

Crop circles, you gotta love ‘em.

As it happens I’ve actually seen one. I saw it from the motorway, while driving up North to York in the autumn of 1996 and I can tell you nothing else about it, except that it was there. The UK media interest in crop circle was reasonably high until hoaxers “Doug and Dave” claimed (in 1991) to have made all the crop circles in southern England – since 1978. For most people that was the end of the story – crop circles were clearly the juvenile japes of jolly jokers.

Doug and Dave demonstrated their prowess by making a circle in a corn field using nothing more than a few boards and some string and thus claimed their 15 minutes of fame. Some observers were not convinced, but the media quickly lost interest. It is a minor miracle that no farmers sued them, as farmers are not great fans of the crop circle  phenomenon, which prompts sightseers to tramp all over their fields and damage the harvest even more than the pattern itself does. 

The Doug and Dave explanation is, in any event, a little unlikely, as crop circles are a global phenomenon (admittedly, the phenomenon is headquartered in Wiltshire, suspiciously near Stonehenge and 90 percent of reported crop circles seem to happen in the UK).

There is, quite naturally, a Doug and Dave conspiracy theory. Doug and Dave were not jolly jokers at all, but agents of British Military Intelligence working in collusion with the CIA, who wished to discredit the phenomenon for the sake of …. er, what? 

The conspiracy theory collapses in the telling. How do crop circles affect national security, encourage international terrorism or threaten anything other than a small portion of the harvest of a few unlucky farmers? If you Google “men in black” and “crop circles” you get about 38,500 hits. So quite clearly the men in black are also out there suppressing information on crop circles, but they are doing a terrible job because the web is awash with pictures of crop circles, reports of crop circles and crop circle web sites. (Google gave me 700,000 hits). 

As it happens, there are about 80 eye-witness reports of people watching crop circles form and none of these reports describe Doug, Dave, string and boards. Apparently (see this site) the patterns form in about 20 seconds and the phenomenon is associated with dancing lights (not UFOs, by the way). Now apart from the fact that whoever or whatever designs them has a excellent appreciation of what makes an interesting pattern, nothing else is known about crop circles. No-one has a decent explanation of the phenomenon, and to be honest, I can’t even think of one.

It is what it is.