Crop Circles 
How welcome (or unwelcome) should these alien vandals really be to planet Earth? Not only have they been accused of the murder and mutilation of thousands of cattle around the world, but there are a number of researchers who believe them to be guilty of the unprovoked destruction of our crops as well. Their formations have become known as crop circles, and have received much attention from the media over the past few decades. In the mid-1970's the first simple crop circles were reported in southern England. Some of their patterns consisted of a central circle surrounded by four symmetrically placed smaller circles, and were concluded by UFO experts to be the product of flying saucers landing on four landing pods. By the late 1980’s countrysides were graced with these immense geometrical figures, some the size of football fields. The complexity of some of these circles led cerealogists to believe that they had been created by beings of a “higher intelligence than any found on Earth”. They supported these claims with rumors that the crop circles were radioactive and that there were cellular changes in the plants within crop circles. More recently there have been reports, and occasionally video footage, of lights and other objects seen in the vicinity of crop circles. Convinced yet? 

Although this is an interesting story, unfortunately it turns out that the evidence linking crop circles to extra-terrestrials is not very rigorous: 
 

  1. The objects in the videos are often merely pieces of foil or paper being tossed around by the wind. 
  2. A number of photographs and videos of UFOs over crop circles have been proven as hoaxes. 
  3. Spectral analyses of soil taken from crop circles has shown there to be no readings above normal background levels.
  4. Photographs of alleged changes in the “crystalline structure” of wheat stems within crop circles have been shown to be very unreliable.
A number of scientists have stretched their imaginations to find a more naturalistic explanation for the crop circles, implementing forces such as ionized plasma vortices, ball lightning, and other less occult explanations involving natural forces such as wind, heat and animals. These hypotheses have been regularly published in the Journal of Meteorology, however, their proponents now agree that these natural theories can only explain simple circles, and aren’t even very compelling for these. The most likely naturalistic explanation for crop circles appears to be that they are predominantly hoaxes. 

This explanation gained credibility in 1991, when Doug Bower and Dave Chorley of Southampton, announced that they had been making crop circles for 15 years. They claimed to have flattened the wheat with heavy steel bars, planks and ropes. Their first efforts took only a few minutes; but, being inveterate pranksters as well as serious artists, the challenge began to grow on them, and they gradually designed and executed more and more demanding figures. Eventually, they tired of the increasingly elaborate prank (and the midnight commando missions that it required). They may have been annoyed by the fame and fortune accrued by reporters who merely photographed their artwork and announced aliens to be the artists. But they must have enjoyed being described as having a “higher intelligence than any found on Earth”.  They confessed, and demonstrated in front of reporters, how they made their most elaborate insectoid patterns. Since then, competitions have been held to see which crop circle hoaxers could fool the most crop circle experts. A significant proportion of these hoaxes were proclaimed by the “experts” to be genuine, casting much doubt on the reliability of their investigations. 

But even though a large proportion of crop circles have been proven to be hoaxes, it does not necessarily follow that they all are. There is still a small possibility that those alien vandals really are destroying crops around the globe, perhaps in an effort to impress us with their artistic abilities, or maybe to communicate to us through strange Sumerian symbols just how much they really like our planet's cattle. 
 
John the Cerealogist
You can e-mail John Marshall at: johnmm@ucla.edu