The modern crop circle phenomenon was sparked by a famous 1966 incident in Tully, Australia, where a farmer claimed to see a UFO rise from a swamp, leaving a swirled depression of flattened reeds.
Inspired by the Australian reports, the phenomenon migrated to southern England. The very first recorded modern British crop circles of this wave began appearing in the late 1970s in the fields of Wiltshire and Hampshire.
The 1970s marked the literal birth of modern crop circle creation.
During the 1970s, crop circles laid the quiet, localized foundations for what would eventually explode into a global phenomenon in the following decade. Unlike the massive, intricate geometric patterns of later years, 1970s formations were rare, physically small, and treated primarily as local anomalies or evidence of flying saucers.
Formations in this decade consisted almost exclusively of single, simple circles or small clusters of basic circular depressions.
In 1976, two English artists and friends, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, sat in a pub in Hampshire and decided to see if they could create their own "UFO landing tracks" in nearby wheat fields. Armed with simple wooden planks, ropes, and wire sights attached to the brims of their hats, they began secretly stomping out neat circles under the cover of darkness. Throughout the late 1970s, they made only a few circles a year. Because the media and public were slow to notice them at first, the duo gradually increased their activity to see how long it would take for the world to react.
Unlike the media frenzy of the 1980s, the 1970s circles rarely made national news and were mostly discussed in regional newspapers or specialized UFO newsletters.
The tiny community of people who investigated them at the time almost universally assumed they were the physical imprints of physical spacecraft hulls or the residual energy fields of alien visitors.
Crop Circles and A.I.
There were a record number of crop circles in the year 1990, marking a massive turning point when the phenomenon exploded into global pop culture. During this year, the designs evolved from simple, basic shapes into massive, highly complex geometric patterns known as "pictograms".
The most famous crop circle of 1990 - and arguably of all time - was the Eastfield Pictogram, discovered in July 1990 near Alton Barnes in Wiltshire, England. It was a massive, 600-foot-long formation consisting of multiple circles, straight lines, and claw-like shapes. The design became so famous that the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin used a photograph of it for the cover of their Remasters album box set released in October 1990.
The sheer complexity of the 1990 formations triggered intense media coverage and scientific debate.
Researchers and "cereologists" (crop circle investigators) fiercely debated whether they were caused by extraterrestrial visitors, mystical Earth energies, or a rare meteorological phenomenon called "plasma vortices".
In the summer of 1990, high-profile copycats and pranksters also began actively tricking researchers. For example, the BBC Archive details a 1990 prank where perpetrators set up fake orange lights in the sky and left a Ouija board inside a poorly trampled field to mock over-eager scientists.
While 1990 was the peak of "crop circle fever," the mystery was largely solved just one year later. In September 1991, two English co-conspirators named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley confessed to creating over 200 crop circles across the English countryside since 1978 using planks of wood, ropes, and baseball caps with wire sights to walk in straight lines. Their confession inspired countless copycat artists, continuing the landscape art tradition throughout the decade.
Crop Circles and A.I.