By "crop circles" it is customary to understand drawings in the form of circles, rings and other geometric figures that were formed in the fields by lodged plants. The sizes of the drawings range from small to large. There are circles so huge that they can be fully seen only from an airplane.
The public became interested in crop circles in the 70s and 80s of the last century after they were often found in the south of the UK.
There are many hypotheses on the appearance of circles, starting with the trivial one, claiming that a person had a hand in their appearance, and ending with alternative ones, indicating the effects of microtornadoes, ball lightning, or aliens from other planets.
Description
In shape and size, modern figures (after the 90s) are presented in the form of huge complex pictograms, numbering hundreds of elements and depicting various symbols, animals, and even mathematical equations. Images of a DNA helix, cobwebs, etc. were also observed. Some symbols are easy to guess, for example, Yin-Yang. Others can be interpreted in different ways.
A close examination of the circles shows that the ears, although twisted and crumpled, are not broken. The direction of the twist can be both clockwise and counterclockwise. It happens that the same circle consists of multidirectional layers.
A similar phenomenon was observed in about 40 countries. By 2008, the number of crop circle reports exceeded 9000. Most of them (about 90%) came from England. Most often, the figures were recorded in a fifty-kilometer zone around Avebury - a prehistoric structure - a megalith.
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History
The first documentary mention is the English brochure "Mowing-Devil" (translated as "devil-mower"), dated 1678. There are other sources in which there are references to plots of crushed wheat (for example, in "Little Humpbacked Horse").
In the modern era, the formation of the first circle dates back to 1972. Bruce Bond and Arthur Shuttlewood - two eyewitnesses from England - on one moonlit night went to the hillside in the hope of seeing a UFO, which caused frequent visits of ufologists to England. However, they were able to contemplate something more fascinating, namely, how part of the ears lay in the form of a fan, while forming a perfectly even circle.
But this phenomenon became known only in the early 90s, when about 500 figures were already discovered, and then in the subsequent time their number began to be measured in thousands. In our time, such phenomena are already recorded almost daily, and their form is constantly becoming more complex. At this stage, the so-called circles are presented in the form of very complex formations. An example is the figure that was discovered in Wiltshire on August 14, 2001. Its diameter reached 450 meters, and its configuration consisted of 409 circles.
The year 1991 was marked by the fact that two Britons - David Chorley and Douglas Bauer - declared themselves the first hoaxers, revealing the secret that since 1978 they have been able to make more than 250 crop circles with the help of ordinary sticks and ropes, which laid the foundation for this phenomenon. Others, such as the artist John Lundberg, have become their successors.
Study of the phenomenon
In 1686, Robert Plot, a professor at the Department of Chemistry at Oxford, who wrote the book "The Natural History of Staffordshire", tried to explain the phenomenon of field circles.
The first message was published on July 29, 1880 (issue 22 of the journal Nature). In the 1980s, about 500 circles, rings and other geometric figures were discovered in the fields of mature wheat in Anglio, which in 1986 served as material for the booklet by Paul Fuller and Jenny Randles "The Mysteries of the Circles", which was sent to all possible serious media, after which a symposium was even organized in London.
Nowadays, scientists have lost interest in this phenomenon, which has now become the lot of enthusiasts.
In 2001, the editorial board of the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" conducted an experiment to fake crop circles. At the same time, the emergence of evidence of the so-called "eyewitnesses" of non-existent phenomena was demonstrated, as well as the fact that ufologists were never able to recognize the fake.
The mid-2000s saw the NBC news program hired a group of well-known circle creators to travel to New Zealand to create a very high-quality figure, which, however, never passed authentication.
Theories of origin
Hoax
In September 1991, the British Douglas Bauer and David Cherleigh publicly announced that they had a direct hand in creating circles. They admitted that under the impression of photographs of the tracks that were left by agricultural machinery in the grain fields, in 1978 the men made the first pattern.
Further, John Landberg founded a whole group of creators of field circles, while proving the possibility of making almost all circles and even those that were recognized as genuine by cereologists.
Joe Nickel, Senior Fellow of the Committee for Scientific Research of the Paranormal, has no doubts about the fake circles, since most of them were found in southern England, their configuration becomes more complicated over time, and the creators remain anonymous.
In contradiction to this, a version is put forward that the parts of the figures studied recently, definitely reflect complex structural changes in plants, which cannot be reproduced in the field. In addition, the complexity of the forms and their large sizes are indicated, which contradicts the time interval of their creation.
Natural causes
One theory suggests the creation of circles due to small eddies (more common in the hilly regions of the UK) sending strong air currents to the ground. In this case, the plants are crushed.
At the same time, Terence Meden, who has been studying storms and tornadoes for many years, put forward an assumption about the energy charge of vortices, in which dust particles caught in the spinning charged air are capable of emitting light, which the "eyewitnesses" speak of. The only mystery is how air vortices create such very complex pictograms?
Another mind
According to ufologists, the pictograms in the fields are nothing more than a trace of an alien mind. However, there is still no scientific evidence of its existence, despite the likelihood of its existence (Fermi paradox). All scientific research aimed at finding extraterrestrial civilizations is now focused only on finding a certain frequency of the radio signal, which looks like an artificial one.
Victoria Vetrova