Messages From Above: The Unexplained Mystery of Crop Circles

“No human being could have done this.” - Pat Delgado

Imagine going to bed beside an ordinary field of wheat and waking the following morning to discover that several acres of it have been transformed into an enormous mathematical design. Hundreds of individual circles spiral around one another with remarkable symmetry. Lines intersect at precise angles, smaller circles decrease progressively in size and the completed image can only really be appreciated from hundreds of feet above the ground. Nobody saw anyone enter the field, nobody admits making it and the farmer insists that nothing was there the previous evening. This is the mystery of the crop circle, one of the strangest phenomena to repeatedly appear in the modern landscape.

Crop circles are not particularly rare. Thousands have been reported around the world, including in the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Australia, Japan and Russia. However, southern England remains their undisputed capital, particularly the counties of Wiltshire and Hampshire. Depending on which database and definition is used, several thousand individual formations have been catalogued, while a commonly repeated historical estimate suggests that around 10,000 had been reported internationally by the beginning of the 21st century. Counting them precisely is almost impossible because some are never officially recorded, some disappear when crops are harvested and others are simply variations of larger formations.

Wiltshire is an appropriate place for the mystery. Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill, ancient burial mounds and prehistoric earthworks are scattered across the landscape. These are places where people have been constructing enormous geometric monuments for thousands of years. Then, every summer, new pieces of geometry begin appearing in the fields surrounding them. The sceptical explanation is obvious: crop-circle makers deliberately choose these locations because the ancient monuments provide atmosphere, publicity and a ready audience. The alternative interpretation is considerably more interesting. Perhaps there is something about this ancient landscape that attracts whatever is creating them.

The earliest modern crop circles were nowhere near as complicated as those appearing today. During the late 1970s and 1980s, relatively simple circles began appearing in fields across southern England. Then the designs started evolving. Single circles became groups of circles. Groups became rings, lines and pictograms. By the 1990s, enormous fractals and sophisticated geometric formations were appearing. Eventually there were patterns resembling insects, mathematical equations, three-dimensional objects, astronomical diagrams and enormous mandalas consisting of hundreds of individual elements.

There is absolutely no doubt that some crop circles are made by people. In 1991, two Englishmen named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley announced that they had been creating them for years. Their equipment was almost comically simple. They used wooden boards attached to ropes to flatten the crop and reportedly used basic sighting devices to keep themselves aligned. They demonstrated their technique for journalists and successfully created formations capable of fooling people who had previously claimed to recognise supposedly genuine circles. Their confession was a major blow to those who believed every formation had an unexplained origin.

Unfortunately, Doug and Dave did not solve the entire mystery quite as neatly as is sometimes suggested. They claimed responsibility for large numbers of early British formations, and other teams of circle makers subsequently emerged and demonstrated that extremely impressive designs could indeed be created by humans. Commercial artists have since produced enormous crop formations for advertising campaigns using planning, surveying equipment, ropes and boards. Human beings are clearly capable of creating beautiful and complicated designs in crops, and anyone discussing crop circles seriously has to begin by accepting that fact.

The problem is that knowing some are hoaxes does not automatically identify the creators of every formation ever discovered. Many formations remain unclaimed, and some have appeared under circumstances that continue to generate arguments about how and when they were created. The most interesting cases are not simple rings in isolated fields. They are enormous geometric constructions whose reported appearance occurred within surprisingly narrow periods of time.

One of the most famous appeared beside Stonehenge on 7 July 1996. Known as the Julia Set because of its resemblance to a mathematical fractal, the formation consisted of approximately 149 individual circles arranged in a spectacular spiral. According to investigators at the time, a pilot and passenger had passed over the area during the late afternoon without noticing it. Less than an hour later, the formation was clearly visible beside one of Britain's busiest ancient monuments and close to the heavily travelled A303 road.

If that timeline is correct, it presents an extraordinary problem. Creating 149 accurately positioned circles of gradually changing size in broad daylight beside Stonehenge within approximately 45 minutes would be an astonishing achievement. However, the timeline is disputed. A crop-circle maker later claimed that he knew the people responsible and said three men had actually constructed it during the previous night in roughly two hours and forty-five minutes. The competing accounts illustrate the central difficulty of researching the phenomenon. The formation certainly existed. The narrow creation time is claimed rather than conclusively established.

Then came Milk Hill.

On 12 August 2001, one of the most extraordinary crop formations ever recorded appeared near Milk Hill in Wiltshire. It consisted of 409 individual circles arranged into six enormous spiralling arms. Estimates place it somewhere around 850 to 900 feet across. Viewed from the air, its scale is difficult to comprehend. Large circles are surrounded by progressively smaller ones while the entire design retains a remarkable visual balance across an uneven field.

The formation was discovered after a night of poor weather and appears to have been created during the hours of darkness. Nobody has conclusively established exactly when work began or how long its construction took. Supporters of an unexplained origin point out that creating 409 individually sized circles across hundreds of metres while maintaining the overall geometry would require extraordinary planning and coordination. A team working for five hours would have less than a minute on average for each circle if they worked sequentially, although obviously several people could work simultaneously.

This does not make human construction impossible. Skilled crop artists have repeatedly demonstrated that elaborate formations can be created surprisingly quickly when they are planned beforehand and several people work together. But Milk Hill raises a reasonable question. If a group of people produced it during one wet summer night using conventional equipment, their achievement was remarkable in its own right. They created one of the largest pieces of temporary landscape art imaginable and then apparently decided that anonymity was preferable to receiving any credit for it.

The physical condition of the plants has created an even more controversial mystery. Crop circles are usually described as areas where plants have simply been trampled flat. In many obviously human-made formations that is exactly what happened. Researchers investigating other examples, however, have claimed to find unusual changes in the plants themselves.

During the 1990s, American biophysicist W. C. Levengood examined plant material collected from numerous crop formations. In a peer-reviewed paper published in Physiologia Plantarum in 1994, he reported statistically significant changes in plants taken from within certain circles compared with control samples collected outside them. These included abnormal swelling of stem nodes, unusual cellular changes and, in some specimens, charred epidermal tissue. He argued that several characteristics were consistent with exposure to a brief period of intense heat.

Later work by Levengood and Nancy Talbott examined what became known as expulsion cavities. These are small openings found in some plant nodes that proponents argue could result when moisture inside the stem is heated extremely rapidly, turning into steam and forcing its way outward. Their proposed explanation involved short bursts of electromagnetic or microwave-like energy associated with atmospheric plasma.

This is where the popular claim that crop circles are “burned into the ground” comes from, although that description goes too far. Entire formations are not generally found as scorched outlines across fields. Rather, some researchers have reported microscopic or localised effects within particular plants that they interpret as evidence of rapid heating. Crop-circle investigators also report cases where stalks are bent close to their nodes without being obviously snapped, sometimes lying in elaborate swirling or interwoven patterns rather than simply being crushed vertically into the soil.

If rapid heating really was involved in producing some formations, the implications would be extraordinary. Instead of somebody physically pushing thousands of plants down one section at a time, energy could theoretically soften or alter plant tissues across a much larger area almost simultaneously. A sufficiently sophisticated directed-energy system might therefore explain both the speed claimed for some formations and the strange condition reported in certain plants.

Arthur C. Clarke's observation becomes rather appropriate here. Technology does not remain magical once we understand how it works. If someone in 1700 watched a modern aircraft cross the sky, they would have no technological vocabulary capable of explaining it. An unknown mechanism capable of transferring controlled electromagnetic energy across a field might appear equally impossible until the technology behind it became understood.

There is, however, an important problem with the plant evidence. Levengood's work has been heavily criticised. Sceptical researchers questioned the selection of samples, experimental controls and whether investigators could reliably establish that formations classified as unexplained had not actually been made by people. Some plant injuries attributed to unusual energy can also potentially result from mechanical damage, natural plant growth or environmental conditions. Most importantly, no universally accepted scientific test currently exists that can look at a stalk of wheat and conclusively announce that it came from a non-human crop circle.

That leaves us with an irritating position somewhere between believers and sceptics. Claims that every crop circle contains burned or mysteriously altered plants are not supported. Equally, published research into reported plant abnormalities does exist and cannot simply be rewritten out of the history of the phenomenon. Whether those abnormalities demonstrate an unknown technology is another question entirely.

The alien theory became considerably more interesting in August 2001. A formation appeared beside the Chilbolton radio telescope in Hampshire that resembled a human-like face created using a grid of different-sized sections of flattened crop. Days later, another formation appeared nearby that looked remarkably like the famous Arecibo message transmitted into space in 1974.

The original Arecibo message was a binary-coded transmission containing basic information about humanity, DNA, our Solar System and the radio telescope that sent it. The crop version resembled the original but contained deliberate-looking changes. The apparent biological information was different, the figure representing a human had been altered, the planetary system was changed and the transmitting device at the bottom no longer resembled the Arecibo telescope. To people already interested in extraterrestrial intelligence, it looked rather conveniently like a reply.

A year later another astonishing formation appeared at Crabwood in Hampshire. It depicted what looked unmistakably like the face of the stereotypical grey alien beside a circular disc containing a spiral of binary information. When enthusiasts decoded the pattern, it produced an English-language message warning about deception and “false gifts”. That detail actually makes a human origin more likely rather than less. An extraterrestrial civilisation crossing interstellar space and deciding to communicate in ASCII English through a Hampshire wheat field would have developed an unusually specific appreciation of our computer conventions.

Yet the alien hypothesis refuses to disappear because of the broader question. If another intelligence wanted to demonstrate its presence without landing on the White House lawn, enormous temporary geometric patterns would be an interesting method of doing it. They can be seen from the air, disappear naturally after harvest and create no permanent physical intrusion. The increasingly mathematical nature of some formations also fits the popular idea that mathematics might provide a language capable of being recognised by completely different intelligent species.

Others go in a different direction and connect crop circles with lost ancient knowledge. The concentration around Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill inevitably encourages comparisons with the prehistoric people who transformed the same landscape using geometry thousands of years earlier. Some researchers propose connections with sacred geometry, astronomical alignments or energy patterns within the Earth. More speculative theories suggest that ancient civilisations may once have understood natural electromagnetic phenomena or technologies that have subsequently disappeared, and that some modern formations represent either the rediscovery or continued operation of similar principles.

There is currently no physical evidence demonstrating that a lost ancient machine is producing crop circles. Nevertheless, the broader idea that forgotten technology can disappear is not ridiculous in itself. History contains technologies whose exact manufacturing methods were lost for centuries. The genuine question is whether crop circles provide evidence for such a technology, and at present they do not provide enough to establish it.

Perhaps the most sensible conclusion is also the least satisfying. Some crop circles are unquestionably made by people. We have watched people make them, their creators have admitted doing so and sophisticated examples have been deliberately produced for television programmes, companies and researchers. Beautiful symmetry is therefore not evidence of extraterrestrial involvement by itself. But “some are hoaxes” is not quite the same statement as “every crop formation has been individually explained”.

There are formations with no identified creators. There are disputed reports of enormous designs appearing during extremely narrow windows of time. There are published claims of unusual plant changes and transient heating, although their interpretation remains controversial. There are patterns hundreds of metres across containing hundreds of geometrically related components, produced in darkness and apparently without anybody claiming the considerable artistic achievement involved.

Perhaps humans made every one of them. Perhaps exceptionally talented teams have spent decades creating masterpieces during the night simply for the pleasure of watching the rest of us argue about them. Considering human behaviour, that explanation is certainly possible.

Alternatively, perhaps a small number involve something we do not yet understand. It could be an unusual natural phenomenon, some form of directed energy, an unknown technology, intelligence operating from somewhere above us or something stranger still. The evidence is nowhere near strong enough to announce that aliens are decorating Wiltshire, but it is also the unanswered portion of the phenomenon that keeps the story alive.

Every summer the crops grow again, creating another enormous blank canvas across the English countryside. Then occasionally, somewhere among the ancient monuments of Wiltshire, the morning sun rises over a field that no longer looks the way it did the evening before. Perhaps somebody spent the night there with ropes and wooden boards. Perhaps they did not.

Until somebody catches the creators of every unexplained formation in the act, there will always be room in those fields for something else.