THEY have been dismissed as the work of modern-day pranksters – but crop circles continue to bamboozle the boffins.

And latest research suggests that they could date back 4,000 years, long before anyone got a bird’s eye view of the ground below.

Zulu shamen say their ancestors planted corn or millet on sacred sites, into which no-one was then allowed.

Only the birds who fed on the seeds, and small animals who lived there, entered the protected fields after the planting.

Tribesmen were accordingly astonished when circular patterns were later found in the centre of the crops.

“These circles were an amazing sight to see,” says Zulu holy man Credo Mutwa. “The gods never cut the stalks of the corn or millet when they formed these depressions. It appeared as though a great circular disc-shaped force had descended on the field.

“It pressed the corn into the ground without breaking the stalks or damaging the plants. Then the force appeaed to have spun, resulting in the strange spiral appearance of the fallen stalks.

“Whenever a circle appeared in the fields, the people rushed to erect a fence of poles around the circle. They would dance and perform other sacred rituals honouring the star gods and the Earth Mother.

Aboriginal cave drawings in Western Australia also appear to depict crop circles, as do ancient etchings in Ireland. Later, in 1678, a woodcut titled ‘The Mowing Devil’ told of a circle in Hertfordshire.

In more recent times, crop circles have sparked a storm of UFO speculation. Others have suggested supernatural forces at work, angered by our failure to care for the environment.

The location of many circles close to sacred sites such as Stonehenge, barrows, and chalk horses has led to New Age beliefs that they are formed in relation to ley lines and give off energy that can be detected through dowsing.

But in 1991, pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley from Southampton, announced that they had conceived the idea as a joke.

They claimed they had been making crop circles since 1976, using planks, rope, hats and wire as their only tools. Using a 4ft long plank attached to a rope, they easily created circles 8ft in diameter.

Their designs grew larger and more complicated until Chorley’s death in 1996. Bower continued creating crop circles until 2004 – but later admitted the pair took credit for unexplained circles, too.

And in 2001 researcher Colin Andrews concluded a two-year investigation into crop-circle hoaxing by saying that although 80% of cases had been man-made, he could not account for the remaining 20%.

A new book, Crop Circles: Art In The Landscape, presents dramatic photographs of circles which have appeared in the last fifteen years across Britain but does not seek to explain how they were made.

It remains a mystery how such intricate designs have been created over the centuries.

During a crop-circle making competition in 1992, the winning entrant recruited three Westland Helicopters engineers, using rope, PVC pipe, a trestle and a ladder. The Zulu tribesmen would certainly have been amazed.
http://www.sundaymercury.net/news/midla ... -26027043/

They wouldn't happen to be in Arizona would they?

mabey who knows

Didn't the crop circles just start to appear in the 70s or 80s? Why arn't there more accounts of them throught history?

By the way I just noticed the alien floating in your coffee

hehe


i think crop circles hase been with us through history.
The Nazca Lines in Peru
An imposing and enigmatic legacy
http://images.google.no/imgres?imgurl=h ... s%3Disch:1

I believe too

Maybe the crop circle makers just took a break for a while then started up again

http://divinecosmos.com/index.php?optio ... &Itemid=70

CROP CIRCLES ARE NOT NEW


As incredible as this may sound, documented reports of crop formations go back to at least 815 AD. Agobard, the Archbishop of Lyons, issued an edict prohibiting pagans from taking seeds out of crop circles for their fertility rituals.



Obviously they were a regular phenomenon for this to be mentioned so casually in the official church records.

These next three excerpts help round out the story. Even the BBC covered this story at one point (emphasis added):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/871607.stm

When do the circles date from? One of the earliest reports was in Lyon in 815AD, and a late 16th Century woodcut depicts the devil mowing a field into patterns.

http://www.mysteriousworld.com/Journal/ ... Fragments/


The oldest known recorded crop circle event occurred in the 9th century in France, where the Bishop of Lyon sent out a prohibition to the recently converted locals against using seeds taken from crop circles for pagan fertility rituals.

http://www.philipcoppens.com/nexus07_1.html

In 815 AD, Agobard, the archbishop of Lyon, wrote “Against the foolish opinion of the masses about hail and thunder ” and reported that people believed in “Tempestarii ”, which had conjured cloud ships from Magonia, a far-off place in the skies.

These resulted in fierce storms, and a ransom was demanded on behalf of the Magonians in the form of crops they had flattened.

The account was made famous by UFO researcher Jacques Vallee in his “Passport to Magonia ”, in which he underlined that the UFO phenomenon seemed to be a modern variation of an ancient theme...



"FAIRY RINGS" DATE BACK TO AT LEAST THE 12TH CENTURY

There is a rich history of crop circle legends where these formations are referred to as "fairy rings" or "fairy circles." This Wikipedia entry has a surprisingly large amount of links and supporting data regarding these historic accounts. It was believed the circles were formed in the aftermath of fairies and other mythical beings dancing in circles.

In some cases it seems you have a ring of mushrooms or flowers that grow in a circle, as we will see, but other legends seem consistent with what the Bishop of Lyons was referring to in 815 AD.


You can see from the Wikipedia entry that the "fairy ring" legend is vast in scope and extends through many different cultures, over at least several hundred years -- to at least the 12th century:

The Middle English term elferingewort ("elf-ring"), meaning "a ring of daisies caused by elves' dancing" dates to the 12th century.

Hall, Alaric (2007). Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity. Rochester, New York: Boydell & Brewer. ISBN 978-1-84383-294-2


An illustration of a "fairy ring" was also posted in the Wikipedia entry, found in a book on British folklore from 1880. This is photographic evidence clearly establishing that the fairy ring legend was associated with flattened circles of crops:



This next excerpt on fairy rings goes into greater detail about the "fairy ring" phenomenon as it relates to modern crop circles:


http://www.philipcoppens.com/nexus07_1.html


Indeed, circles on the ground have always had a magical connotation. Take, for example, the fairy rings, which are linked with tales of passers-by that were lured away to the land of the fairies. As such, these fairy rings were “doorways into other dimensions ”, which is another theory proposed about what crop circles might represent.


In German-speaking Europe, fairy rings are known as Hexenringe, or “witches rings ”, stemming from an old medieval belief that the rings represented places where witches would have their gatherings.


In English folklore, fairy rings were said to be caused by elves, fairies or pixies dancing in a circle, wearing down the grass beneath their feet. These mythical creatures, of course, are often associated with mysterious balls of light.


THE MOWING DEVIL


You may remember that our BBC article mentioned a woodcut of "the Devil mowing a field into patterns," but it didn't go into detail. This is a fascinating chapter in the history of crop circles, documented as happening in 1678.

In short, a farmer was trying to hire someone to harvest his crops, and the laborer wanted to charge more than the farmer could afford. The farmer angrily chased off the laborer, saying something like "I'd rather have the Devil cut my crops down than pay your price!"

That night a very bright light appeared over the crops -- "as if it had been all aflame" -- which the farmer clearly noticed, and the next day a crop circle had appeared -- "so neatly mow'd... that no Mortal Man was able to do the like".

The farmer attributed this phenomenon to the so-called "Mowing Devil." Here is an actual image of the woodcut, complete with a picture of what the crop circle looked like, along with an illustration of the alleged devil. After the image we have a transcript of what it actually says:

THE MOWING-DEVIL: OR, STRANGE NEWS OUT OF HARTFORD-SHIRE. Being a True Relation of a Farmer, who Bargaining with a Poor Mower, about the Cutting down Three Half Acres of Oats: upon the Mower's asking too much, the Farmer swore That the Devil should Mow it rather than He.

And so it fell out, that very Night, the Crop of Oat shew'd as if it had been all of a flame: but next Morning appear'd so neatly mow'd by the Devil or some Infernal Spirit, that no Mortal Man was able to do the like. Also, How the said Oats ly now in the Field, and the Owner has not Power to fetch them away. Licensed, August 22nd, 1678.


You can see this was taken at least semi-seriously at the time. This was before the rise of scientific materialism, where people would automatically write the farmer off as insane or misinformed.

PROFESSOR ROBERT PLOT DOCUMENTS CROP FORMATIONS IN 1600s


During this same time period, very clear, documented evidence of "crop circle" formations can be found in the records of Professor Robert Plot (December 13, 1640 -- April 30, 1696). Plot was an English naturalist, the first Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum.


As it says here, he was also known to look for natural curiosities in several English counties -- and actually discovered a fossilized femur of a Megalosaurus dinosaur, which he considered to be the scrotum of a "giant." This may very well be the first documented homo-erotic paleontological discovery:



Plot found various crop circle formations and had a rather fanciful theory of how they formed. He believed the wind was creating geometrically-perfect vortexes that then affected the crops on the ground. In these next two illustrations he tried to draw how he thought this was happening:


Dr. Plot also found anomalies in the soil where these formations occurred. The exact same observations would be recorded over 300 years later by Dr. Gil Levengood, perhaps the most thorough modern researcher providing proof that some formations are definitely not manmade by any conventional means:


http://www.eso-garden.com/index.php?/weblog/2007/05/


Plot examined multiple such formations and states that the soils "under all of them were much looser and dryer than ordinary, and the parts interspersed with a white hoar... much like that in mouldy bread, of a musty rancid smell, but to the tast[e] insipid." --A Natural History of Staffordshire (1686)


TOP SCIENCE JOURNAL DOCUMENTS CROP CIRCLES IN 1880


Another clear report of crop-circle activity can be found in the prestigious scientific journal Nature from 1880:


http://www.stonehenge-avebury.net/scien ... ircles.htm

J. Rand Capron, a spectroscopist who lived in the country at Guildown near Guildford, Surrey, in the south of England, [found crop circles in 1880]. The reference is Nature, volume 22, pp 290-291, 29 July 1880.

"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.

Examined more closely, these all presented much the same character, viz., a few standing stalks as a centre, some prostrate stalks with their heads arranged pretty evenly in a direction forming a circle round the centre, and outside these a circular wall of stalks which had not suffered..."



Capron tried to explain this as the result of vortexes in the atmosphere creating perfect circles in the crops -- just like Professor Robert Plot did two centuries earlier. Some people still believe this concept, albeit with a few extra flourishes to explain some of the other mysteries.

As you are about to read in the next set of excerpts, we have independent, unique eyewitness reports from the 20th century where people actually watched crop circles forming in real time. Nothing was there except for light, sound and / or swirling wind.

More recent reports also have indicated balls of light and high-pitched noises during the night.

LATE 1940s CROP CIRCLE EYEWITNESS


Here we have the first of two testimonies confirming historical crop circle activity in the 20th century, where people actually saw it happen right in front of them:

http://www.stonehenge-avebury.net/scien ... ircles.htm


An eye-witness case from South Wales was brought to the attention of researchers in 1991 following a letter to the Sunday Mirror. This was on farmland at Cilycwm, 6 km from Llandovery, Dyfed.


Mr William Cyril Williams wrote: "With reference to the corn circles mystery I actually witnessed one being made. I was standing in a cornfield one morning and saw a whirlwind touching the ground and forming a circle in the corn. It was just the strength of the wind in the whirlwind that formed the circle".


The event happened in the late 1940's when he worked on his father's farm, Penfedw Farm at Cilycwm. He was then in his twenties. The area is surrounded by hills on all sides, and circles had been seen there "frequently".

On this occasion, a weekday in August, at about 10.30 to 11 in the morning [or circa 0930-10 GMT] Mr Williams had gone into the wheat field on harvesting day in advance of the cutting and binding machinery, and was crossing the middle of the field when he heard the buzzing noise of a whirlwind starting up only a few metres away.

He then saw a spinning mass of air with dust in it, and, as he watched, in a matter of "only a couple of seconds or so the wheat fell down producing a sharp-edged circle 3 to 4 metres in diameter".

It looked just like the other crop circles he had seen before, except that this one was completely flat-bottomed -- whereas some of the earlier ones had stalks standing at their centres like a conical pyramid. The vortex then died out rapidly, but during its brief lifetime (under 4 or 5 seconds) it remained at the same place.


EYEWITNESS REPORT OF CROP CIRCLE FORMING FROM 1972


This next excerpt is of a similar eyewitness report from 1972. Bryce Bond and Arthur Shuttlewood watched the crops get "pushed down" by an invisible force in a clockwise direction. The only explanation to what might have caused this is a sound -- and other witnesses have since documented hearing high-pitched chirping sounds:


http://web.archive.org/web/200702271412 ... early.html

Suddenly, I heard a noise. It seemed as if something pushed down the wheat. That night the air was completely still. I looked around. The moon had just appeared, shining brightly. In front of my eyes I could see a great imprint taking shape. The wheat was forced down in a clockwise direction."

- Bryce Bond and Arthur Shuttlewood, first modern crop circles witnesses, Warminster, night of August 12, 1972

one of last year's splendid 'crop' of circles