There were significant crop circle formations in the 1960s, and served as the direct inspiration for the global craze that followed. During this decade, they were rarely called "crop circles" instead, they were famously referred to as "saucer nests". They were widely interpreted as physical landing imprints left by UFOs rather than intentional art or hoaxes.
By far the most globally significant and famous formation of the decade occurred on January 19, 1966, in Tully, Queensland, Australia. A banana farmer named George Pedley claimed he heard a loud, ear-piercing hissing sound and witnessed a grey, saucer-shaped craft rise 30 to 40 feet out of Horseshoe Lagoon before flying away. When he went to investigate, he found a perfectly circular area about 30 feet in diameter where the tall swamp reeds had been completely flattened and woven in a neat, clockwise direction down to the water level.
The incident made massive international headlines and is historically crucial because English hoaxers Doug Bower and Dave Chorley explicitly credited the 1966 Tully incident as the idea that inspired them to start stomping out their own circles in the UK during the late 1970s.
Wiltshire 1963 - Famous British astronomer Patrick Moore wrote a letter to the scientific journal New Scientist documenting a crater in a potato field .In adjacent wheat fields, investigators found several large circular and elliptical areas of flattened wheat displaying distinct "spiral flattening" patterns.
August 8, 1967, another major international incident occurred in Duhamel, Alberta, Canada. A series of three circular imprints were discovered in a farm field.The case was taken seriously enough that investigators from the Canadian Department of National Defence officially stepped in to analyze the site. They officially concluded the markings were artificial but admitted they could not explain who made them or by what exact method.
While the 1960s designs lacked the geometric complexity of the 1980s or 1990s pictograms, they were vital in building the "flying saucer landing pad" mythology that defined the phenomenon's early history.
Crop Circles and A.I.