# Crop circles are made by aliens or unexplained energies

**Verdict: Contradicted.** Two English pranksters admitted making circles with planks and rope in 1991, and a whole community of artists has produced ever more elaborate formations ever since; the plant-anomaly claims that outlived them have never been independently replicated.

Category: UFOs & Aliens · Era: Modern era · First circulated: Late 1970s · Believed by: A minority, concentrated in New Age and UFO communities
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/crop-circles

## Summary
Elaborate geometric patterns appearing overnight in English fields were once billed as evidence of alien visitation or mysterious energy vortices, until two retirees admitted they had been making them with a plank, a rope, and a baseball cap.

## The claim
That crop circles (geometric patterns of flattened cereal crops that appear overnight, chiefly in southern England) are created by extraterrestrial spacecraft, plasma vortices, or other unexplained energies, rather than by people.

## Origin and timeline
- 1966: In Tully, Australia, a farmer reports a saucer-shaped craft rising from a swamp, leaving a circular patch of flattened reeds, the 'saucer nest' case that later inspires English hoaxers.
- Late 1970s: Simple circular flattened patches begin appearing in fields around Wiltshire and Hampshire, England, drawing UFO researchers who dub them 'saucer nests'.
- 1980s: Formations grow more numerous and elaborate (circles with rings and satellite dots) and a cottage industry of 'cereologists' emerges to study them.
- Jul 1990: Operation Blackbird, a monitored overnight watch at Bratton in Wiltshire organized with the BBC and Nippon Television and led by the leading researchers Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado, rings a field with cameras and sensors to record a circle forming. Circles appear overnight on July 25 and are announced on television as potentially genuine, then found to contain a board game and joke items at the center: a hoax caught on the researchers' own stakeout.
- 1991: Doug Bower and Dave Chorley tell the newspaper Today they made over 200 circles since 1978 using planks, rope, and a wire sight, then demonstrate the method for journalists.
- 1990s–present: Circles proliferate worldwide and grow far more intricate as an open community of artists, including the collective Circlemakers, takes up the practice, including for paying corporate clients.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The patterns are too large, precise, and complex for people to make overnight in the dark.
  Evidence: Bower and Chorley demonstrated their method for journalists in 1991, and modern circlemaking teams (some working commercially) routinely produce far more complex formations in a single night using surveying tools, rope, and planks.
- Claim: A proper scientific stakeout with cameras and instruments would have recorded the true cause forming.
  Evidence: One was tried, and it caught people. In July 1990, Operation Blackbird, a monitored watch at Bratton in Wiltshire organized with the BBC and Nippon Television and led by the leading cereologists Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado, ringed a field with cameras and heat, light, and sound sensors. When circles appeared overnight on July 25, the researchers announced them on television as potentially genuine, then found a board game and other joke items placed at the center. The instrumented watch meant to catch a mysterious force had caught human hoaxers instead.
- Claim: Bent plant nodes show elongation and cellular changes that mechanical flattening cannot explain.
  Evidence: Researcher William Levengood published papers reporting node anomalies, but no one has independently replicated his results, critics identified circular reasoning and methodological flaws in the work, and controlled experiments have reproduced elongated nodes in plants flattened by ordinary means.
- Claim: The circles are found almost exclusively in England because of some unique local energy field.
  Evidence: A 2002 academic study found UK crop circles cluster near roads, footpaths, and tourist sites like Stonehenge and Avebury (the geography of easy human access, not of a geophysical anomaly) and the phenomenon spread globally only after the English method became public.
- Claim: Around 10,000 crop circles have appeared worldwide, far more than two men could have made, and many in places Bower and Chorley never visited.
  Evidence: Bower and Chorley never claimed to have made all of them; they said they originated the modern phenomenon and were responsible for more than 200 of the early English formations. The worldwide total grew precisely because their 1991 confession, and the global publicity around it, seeded an open community of copycat makers: the phenomenon spread to other countries only after the English plank-and-rope method became public, which is the reverse of what a natural or extraterrestrial cause would predict. A large tally produced by many makers over several decades is not evidence that the original pair were not hoaxers.

## Why people believe it
- The genuine scale, precision, and beauty of the best formations feel implausible for anonymous night work, so awe gets misread as proof of something more than human.
- A profitable ecosystem of tours, books, and 'crop circle researchers' has a financial and identity-based interest in keeping the mystery open even after the makers came forward.
- The deliberate anonymity of circlemakers is the point of the art form itself: both hoaxers and believers benefit from not fully resolving the question, which keeps the wonder alive.

## Sources
- Anatomical anomalies in crop formation plants, Physiologia Plantarum, vol. 92 (Wiley, peer-reviewed) (1994): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1399-3054.1994.tb05348.x
- The Crop-Circle Phenomenon: An Investigative Report, Skeptical Inquirer (Joe Nickell & John F. Fischer) (1992): https://skepticalinquirer.org/1992/01/the-crop-circle-phenomenon-an-investigative-report/
- Do 'little green men' cause those circles? (contemporaneous wire report on the monitored Wiltshire crop-circle watch that became Operation Blackbird), United Press International (UPI Archives) (1990): https://www.upi.com/Archives/1990/07/24/Do-little-green-men-cause-those-circles/1542648792000/
- Do 'little green men' cause those circles? (wire coverage of the 1990 crop-circle watch in Wiltshire), United Press International (UPI Archives) (1990): https://www.upi.com/Archives/1990/07/24/Do-little-green-men-cause-those-circles/1542648792000/
- Levengood's Crop-Circle Plant Research, Skeptical Inquirer: https://skepticalinquirer.org/newsletter/levengoods-crop-circle-plant-research/
- Spatial distribution of England's crop circles, Jeremy Northcote (academic GIS study of 2002 formations) (2002): https://www.siue.edu/GEOGRAPHY/ONLINE/Northcote06.pdf
- Physics could be behind the secrets of crop-circle artists, Physics World (Richard Taylor, University of Oregon) (2011): https://physicsworld.com/a/coming-soon-to-a-field-near-you/
- Doug Bower (British crop circle hoaxer), Encyclopaedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Doug-Bower
- Crop Circles: The Art of the Hoax, Smithsonian Magazine (2011): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/crop-circles-the-art-of-the-hoax-2524283/

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