crop circle

or the irrigation method that produces circular fields of crops, see center pivot irrigation.

A 780 ft crop circle in the form of a double (six-sided) triskelion composed of 409 circles. John Lundberg has claimed responsibility for its production. Location: Milk Hill (England), 2001

A crop circle is a sizable pattern created by the flattening of a crop such as wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rapeseed. Crop circles are also referred to as crop formations, because they are not always circular in shape. While the exact date crop circles began to appear is unknown, the documented cases have substantially increased from the 1970s to current times. Twenty-six countries ended up reporting approximately ten-thousand crop circles, in the last third of the 20th century, and 90% of those were located in southern England.^[1] Many of the formations appearing in that area are positioned near ancient monuments, such as Stonehenge. Nearly half of all circles found in the UK are located within a 15 km radius of Avebury.^[2] Formations usually are made overnight, but have also been made during the day. The most widely known method for a person or group to construct a crop formation is to tie one end of a rope to an anchor point, and the other end to a board which is used to crush the plants. More recent methods include the use of a lawn roller.
Some crop formations are paid for by companies who use them as advertising.^[3] Other formations are sometimes claimed by individuals or groups without any evidence to support their assertion, usually after undesirable legal repercussions become unlikely.^{[citation needed]}

1678 pamphlet on the "Mowing-Devil".

Certain evidence, such as the Mowing-Devil, suggest the appearance of crop circles well before the 20th century. Nevertheless, there are important differences between that story and modern crop circles. The story of the mowing devil involves the cutting of the crops following a dispute over crop harvesting and an invocation of the devil, no geometric patterns were reported.

[edit] Bower and Chorley

In 1991, self-professed pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley stated that they had started the phenomenon in 1978 by making actual circles on crops with the use of simple tools.^[4] After their announcement, in a demonstration the two men made a crop circle in one hour.
After the revelation of the hoax, crop circle-like patterns continued to be made and became more complex. Some even came to resemble extraterrestrials as portrayed by certain science fiction movies, fractals, and archaeological, religious, or mythological symbols. Among others, paranormal enthusiasts, ufologists, and anomalistic investigators have offered hypothetical explanations that have been criticized as pseudoscientific by skeptical groups like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.^[5][6][7][8]

[edit] Art and business

Since the early 1990s the UK arts collective founded by artist John Lundberg, named the Circlemakers, have been creating some crop circles in the UK and around the world both as part of their art practice and for commercial clients.^[9][10]
On the night of July 11–12, 1992, a crop-circle making competition, for a prize of several thousand UK pounds (partly funded by the Arthur Koestler Foundation), was held in Berkshire. The winning entry was produced by three Westland Helicopters engineers, using rope, PVC pipe, a trestle and a ladder. Another competitor used a small garden roller, a plank and some rope.
In 2002, Discovery Channel commissioned five aeronautics and astronautics graduate students from MIT to create crop circles of their own, aiming to duplicate some of the features claimed to distinguish "real" crop circles from the known fakes such as those created by Bower and Chorley. The creation of the circle was recorded and used in the Discovery Channel documentary Crop Circles: Mysteries in the Fields.^[11]

[edit] Legal implications

In 1992 Hungarian youths Gábor Takács and Róbert Dallos, both then 17, were the first people to face legal action after creating a crop circle. Takács and Dallos, of the St. Stephen Agricultural Technicum, a high school in Hungary specializing in agriculture, created a 36-meter diameter crop circle in a wheat field near Székesfehérvár, 43 miles (69 km) southwest of Budapest, on June 8, 1992. On September 3, the pair appeared on Hungarian TV and exposed the circle as a hoax, showing photos of the field before and after the circle was made. As a result, Aranykalász Co., the owners of the land, sued the youngsters for 630,000 HUF (approximately $3000 USD) in damages. The presiding judge ruled that the students were only responsible for the damage caused in the 36-meter diameter circle, amounting to about 6,000 HUF (approximately $30 USD), and that 99% of the damage to the crops was caused by the thousands of visitors who flocked to Székesfehérvár following the media's promotion of the circle. The fine was eventually paid by the TV show, as were the students' legal fees.^{[citation needed]}
In 2000, Matthew Williams became the first man in the UK to be arrested for causing criminal damage after making a crop circle near Devizes.^[12]

[edit] Other explanations

[edit] Weather

Some people have suggested that crop circles are the result of extraordinary meteorological phenomena. This hypothesis probably originated from a 1880 publication in Nature by investigator and amateur scientist John Rand Capron. Part of the publication reappeared in the January 2000 issue of Journal of Meteorology:

"The storms about this part of Western Surrey have been lately local and violent, and the effects produced in some instances curious. Visiting a neighbour's farm on Wednesday evening (21st), we found a field of standing wheat considerably knocked about, not as an entirety, but in patches forming, as viewed from a distance, circular spots... I could not trace locally any circumstances accounting for the peculiar forms of the patches in the field, nor indicating whether it was wind or rain, or both combined, which had caused them, beyond the general evidence everywhere of heavy rainfall. They were suggestive to me of some cyclonic wind action..."^[13][14]

[edit] Paranormal

Since appearing in the media in the 1970s, crop circles have become the subject of speculation by various paranormal, ufological, and anomalistic investigators ranging from proposals that they were created by bizarre meteorological phenomena to messages from extraterrestrial beings.^{[15][16][17][18]}
The location of many crop circles near ancient sites such as Stonehenge, barrows, and chalk horses has led many New Age belief systems to incorporate crop circles, speculating their existence in relation to ley lines.^[15][19][20]
Some New Age supporters have related crop circles to the Gaia hypothesis, alleging that "Gaia", the earth, is actually alive and that crop circles are messages or responses to stimuli such as global warming and human pollution. It asserts that the earth may be modeled as if a single super-organism, in that earthly components (e.g. biota, climate, temperature, sunlight, etc.) influence each other and are organized to function and develop as a whole.^[21]
The main criticism of alleged non-human creation of crop circles is that while evidence of these origins, besides eyewitness testimonies, is essentially absent, some are definitely known to be the work of human pranksters and others can be adequately explained as such. There have been cases in which researchers declared crop circles to be "the real thing", only to be confronted with the people who created the circle and documented the fraud (see above).^[22] In his 1997 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan discussed alien-based theories of crop circle formation. Sagan concluded that no empirical evidence existed to link UFOs with crop circles.^[23] Many others have demonstrated how complex crop circles can be created.^[24][25] Scientific American published an article by Matt Ridley,^[26] who started making crop circles in northern England in 1991. He wrote about how easy it is to develop techniques using simple tools that can easily fool later observers. He reported on "expert" sources such as the Wall Street Journal who had been easily fooled and mused about why people want to believe supernatural explanations for phenomena that are not yet explained. Methods to create a crop circle are now well documented on the internet.^[24]
Responding to local beliefs that "extraterrestrial beings" in UFOs were responsible for crop circles appearing in Indonesia, the government and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (Lapan) described them as "man-made". Thomas Djamaluddin, research professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Lapan stated: "We have come to agree that this 'thing' cannot be scientifically proven. Scientists have put UFOs in the category of pseudoscience.