Crop Circles
Crop circles are large-scale geometric designs created in agricultural fields — typically wheat, barley, or rapeseed — by the systematic flattening of the standing crop. They range from simple circular formations to highly intricate geometric and fractal patterns spanning hundreds of meters. While initially attributed to paranormal or extraterrestrial phenomena, the phenomenon is widely accepted to be of human origin, primarily following the 1991 public confession of Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who demonstrated that they had been creating formations across southern England since approximately 1976 using basic hand tools.
History
Simple circular formations in crops had been documented in scientific literature and folklore for centuries, but the modern crop circle phenomenon emerged in earnest in the late 1970s in Wiltshire, England. Formations grew increasingly complex through the 1980s, generating significant media attention and spawning a research subculture known as "cereology." The complexity of the designs — their geometric precision, bilateral symmetry, and scale — led many observers and researchers to conclude that human creation overnight was implausible.
Bower and Chorley Confession
In 1991, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley came forward to the British press and demonstrated their technique live. Their method was simple: a plank of wood attached to a rope anchored at a central point was used to flatten crops in controlled arcs; a wire sight fitted to a baseball cap enabled navigation of straight lines. They produced complex, geometrically precise formations in darkness in a matter of hours, settling the core question of feasibility.
The confession triggered a partial collapse of the cereology research community. Some researchers accepted it; others noted that formations had appeared simultaneously in multiple countries and argued that Bower and Chorley could not account for the full global phenomenon. In practice, their confession established that the technique required no special expertise or equipment, enabling copycat formations worldwide and the development of a professional "circlemaker" artform that continues today.
Additional Explanations
In 1992, researchers in Hungary documented a method of bending crops after recent rainfall, using the temporary pliability of wet stalks to create formations without visible stem damage. This technique, combined with the Bower-Chorley demonstration, provided a complete mechanical account of crop circle formation.
Assessment in UAP Research
The host of UAP Gerb explicitly dismisses crop circles as a distraction from genuine UAP evidence, noting that the confession and the well-understood human techniques make them of no evidentiary value for non-human intelligence research.