Crop Circles: The Art of the Hoax

They may not be evidence of UFOs, ancient spirits or secret weapons, but there is something magical in their allure

  • By Rob Irving and Peter Brookesmith
  • Smithsonian.com, December 15, 2009, Subscribe
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Crop Circles
Crop circles are seen by many to enchant a mystical landscape: here, a circle pattern from 2009, 200 feet across, in a Wiltshire wheat field. (Rob Irving)

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When Doug Bower and his co-conspirator Dave Chorley first created a representation of a “flying saucer nest” in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England, in 1976, they could not have foreseen that their work would become a cultural phenomenon.

Almost as soon as crop circles became public knowledge, they attracted a gaggle of self-appointed experts. An efflorescence of mystical and magical thinking, scientific and pseudo-scientific research, conspiracy theories and general pandemonium broke out. The patterns stamped in fields were treated as a lens through which the initiated could witness the activity of earth energies and ancient spirits, the anguish of Mother Earth in the face of impending ecological doom, and evidence of secret weapons testing and, of course, aliens. Today, one of the more vigorously promoted ideas is that they are messages, buried in complex numerological codes, concerning a Great Change connected to the pre-Columbian Mayan calendar and due to occur in 2012.

To appreciate how these exotic responses arose, we need to delve a little into history. Before today’s circle-makers entered the picture, there had been scattered reports of odd patterns appearing in crops, ranging from 17th century pamphlets to an 1880 account in Nature to a letter from astronomer Patrick Moore printed in 1963 in New Scientist. In Australia, the mid- to late-1960s saw occasional reports of circles in crops, and they were often ascribed to UFO landings. At around the same time in England, the Wiltshire town of Warminster became a center of UFO-seeking “sky watches” and gave birth to its own rumors of crop circles, or “saucer nests.” None of these, unfortunately, was photographed.

It was such legends that Bower had in mind when, over a drink one evening in 1976, he suggested to his pal Chorley: “Let’s go over there and make it look like a flying saucer has landed.” It was time, thought Doug, to see a saucer nest for himself.

Since then, crop circles have been reported worldwide in a multitude of crops. In southern England, which sees most activity, circle-makers tend to concentrate on canola, barley and wheat. These grow and are harvested in an overlapping progression: canola from April through May, barley throughout May and June, and wheat from June until early September. In recent years the occasional rudimentary pattern has been found in corn, extending the crop circle season as late as October. Since Bower and Chorley’s circles appeared, the geometric designs have escalated in scale and complexity, as each year teams of anonymous circle-makers lay honey traps for New Age tourists.

A crucial clue to the circles’ allure lies in their geographical context. Wiltshire is the home of Stonehenge and an even more extensive stone circle in the village of Avebury. The rolling downs are dotted with burial mounds and solitary standing stones, which many believe to be connected by an extensive network of “leys,” or paths of energy linking these enchanted sites with others around the country. It is said that this vast network is overlaid in the form of “sacred geometries.” The region has also given rise to a rich folklore of spectral black dogs, headless coachmen and haunted houses.

Crop circles are a lens through which we can explore the nature and appeal of hoaxes. Fakes, counterfeits and forgeries are all around us in the everyday world—from dud $50 bills to spurious Picassos. People’s motives for taking the unreal as real are easily discerned: we trust our currency, and many people would like to own a Picasso. The nebulous world of the anomalous and the paranormal is even richer soil for hoaxers. A large proportion of the population believes in ghosts, angels, UFOs and ET visitations, fairies, psychokinesis and other strange phenomena. These beliefs elude scientific examination and proof. And it’s just such proof that the hoaxer brings to the table for those hungry for evidence that their beliefs are not deluded.

False evidence intended to corroborate an existing legend is known to folklorists as “ostension.” This process also inevitably extends the legend. For, even if the evidence is eventually exposed as false, it will have affected people’s perceptions of the phenomenon it was intended to represent. Faked photographs of UFOs, Loch Ness monsters and ghosts generally fall under the heading of ostension. Another example is the series of photographs of fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths at Cottingley, Yorkshire, between 1917 and 1920. These show that the motive for producing such evidence may come from belief, rather than from any wish to mislead or play pranks. One of the girls insisted till her dying day that she really had seen fairies—the manufactured pictures were a memento of her real experience. And the photos were taken as genuine by such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—the great exponent, in his Sherlock Holmes stories, of logic.


When Doug Bower and his co-conspirator Dave Chorley first created a representation of a “flying saucer nest” in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England, in 1976, they could not have foreseen that their work would become a cultural phenomenon.

Almost as soon as crop circles became public knowledge, they attracted a gaggle of self-appointed experts. An efflorescence of mystical and magical thinking, scientific and pseudo-scientific research, conspiracy theories and general pandemonium broke out. The patterns stamped in fields were treated as a lens through which the initiated could witness the activity of earth energies and ancient spirits, the anguish of Mother Earth in the face of impending ecological doom, and evidence of secret weapons testing and, of course, aliens. Today, one of the more vigorously promoted ideas is that they are messages, buried in complex numerological codes, concerning a Great Change connected to the pre-Columbian Mayan calendar and due to occur in 2012.

To appreciate how these exotic responses arose, we need to delve a little into history. Before today’s circle-makers entered the picture, there had been scattered reports of odd patterns appearing in crops, ranging from 17th century pamphlets to an 1880 account in Nature to a letter from astronomer Patrick Moore printed in 1963 in New Scientist. In Australia, the mid- to late-1960s saw occasional reports of circles in crops, and they were often ascribed to UFO landings. At around the same time in England, the Wiltshire town of Warminster became a center of UFO-seeking “sky watches” and gave birth to its own rumors of crop circles, or “saucer nests.” None of these, unfortunately, was photographed.

It was such legends that Bower had in mind when, over a drink one evening in 1976, he suggested to his pal Chorley: “Let’s go over there and make it look like a flying saucer has landed.” It was time, thought Doug, to see a saucer nest for himself.

Since then, crop circles have been reported worldwide in a multitude of crops. In southern England, which sees most activity, circle-makers tend to concentrate on canola, barley and wheat. These grow and are harvested in an overlapping progression: canola from April through May, barley throughout May and June, and wheat from June until early September. In recent years the occasional rudimentary pattern has been found in corn, extending the crop circle season as late as October. Since Bower and Chorley’s circles appeared, the geometric designs have escalated in scale and complexity, as each year teams of anonymous circle-makers lay honey traps for New Age tourists.

A crucial clue to the circles’ allure lies in their geographical context. Wiltshire is the home of Stonehenge and an even more extensive stone circle in the village of Avebury. The rolling downs are dotted with burial mounds and solitary standing stones, which many believe to be connected by an extensive network of “leys,” or paths of energy linking these enchanted sites with others around the country. It is said that this vast network is overlaid in the form of “sacred geometries.” The region has also given rise to a rich folklore of spectral black dogs, headless coachmen and haunted houses.

Crop circles are a lens through which we can explore the nature and appeal of hoaxes. Fakes, counterfeits and forgeries are all around us in the everyday world—from dud $50 bills to spurious Picassos. People’s motives for taking the unreal as real are easily discerned: we trust our currency, and many people would like to own a Picasso. The nebulous world of the anomalous and the paranormal is even richer soil for hoaxers. A large proportion of the population believes in ghosts, angels, UFOs and ET visitations, fairies, psychokinesis and other strange phenomena. These beliefs elude scientific examination and proof. And it’s just such proof that the hoaxer brings to the table for those hungry for evidence that their beliefs are not deluded.

False evidence intended to corroborate an existing legend is known to folklorists as “ostension.” This process also inevitably extends the legend. For, even if the evidence is eventually exposed as false, it will have affected people’s perceptions of the phenomenon it was intended to represent. Faked photographs of UFOs, Loch Ness monsters and ghosts generally fall under the heading of ostension. Another example is the series of photographs of fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths at Cottingley, Yorkshire, between 1917 and 1920. These show that the motive for producing such evidence may come from belief, rather than from any wish to mislead or play pranks. One of the girls insisted till her dying day that she really had seen fairies—the manufactured pictures were a memento of her real experience. And the photos were taken as genuine by such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—the great exponent, in his Sherlock Holmes stories, of logic.

The desire to promote evidence of anomalous and paranormal events as genuine springs from deep human longings. One is a gesture toward rationalism—the notion that nothing is quite real unless it’s endorsed by reasoned argument, and underwritten by more or less scientific proofs. But the human soul longs for enchantment. Those who don’t find their instinctive sense of the numinous satisfied by art, literature or music—let alone the discoveries of science itself—may well turn to the paranormal to gratify an intuition that mystery dwells at the heart of existence. Such people are perfectly placed to accept hoaxed evidence of unexplained powers and entities as real.

And so, the annual appearance of ever more complex patterns in the wheat fields of southern England is taken by “croppies”—the devotees who look beyond any prosaic solution for deeper explanations—as signs and wonders and prophecies. The croppies do, however, accept that some people, some of the time, are making some of the formations. They regard these human circle-makers as a nuisance, contaminators of the “evidence,” and denounce them as “hoaxers.” The term is well chosen, for it implies social deviance. And therein lies the twist in the story.

In croppy culture, common parlance is turned on its head. The word “genuine” usually implies that something has a single, identifiable origin, of established provenance. To the croppy it means the opposite: a “genuine” circle is of unknown provenance, or not man-made—a mystery, in other words. It follows that the man-made circle is a “hoax.”

Those circle-makers who are prepared to comment on this semantic reversal do so with some amusement. As far as they’re concerned, they are creating art in the fields. In keeping with New Age thought, it is by dissociating with scientific tradition that the circle-makers return art to a more unified function, where images and objects are imbued with special powers.

This art is intended to be a provocative, collective and ritual enterprise. And as such, it is often inherently ambiguous and open to interpretation. To the circle-maker, the greater the range of interpretations inspired in the audience the better. Both makers and interpreters have an interest in the circles being perceived as magical, and this entails their tacit agreement to avoid questions of authorship. This is essentially why croppies regard “man-made” circles as a distraction, a “contamination.”

Paradoxically, and unlike almost all other modern forms of art, a crop circle’s potential to enchant is animated and energized by the anonymity of its author(s). Doug Bower now tells friends that he wishes he had kept quiet and continued his nocturnal jaunts in secret. Both circle-makers and croppies are really engaged in a kind of game, whose whole purpose is to keep the game going, to prolong the mystery. After all, who would travel thousands of miles and trek through a muddy field to see flattened wheat if it were not imbued with otherworldly mystique?

As things stand, the relationship between the circle-makers and those who interpret their work has become a curious symbiosis of art and artifice, deception and belief. All of which raises the question: Who’s hoaxing whom?


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Like Bigfoot and UFO's, some Crop Circles are fakes and some are not. There are always those who are willing to take credit for something they had nothing to do with.

Posted by Ralph Cramden on November 30,2012 | 05:30 PM

Check out circlemakers.org. They obviously have made intricate and well formed designs in crops. Since they can be manmade and many have been for sure, the simplest assumption (not to mention logic) is that all the crop circles are manmade. I like the only example I know of in the US, the one for the Korn concert in Bakersfield CA. And see the video of the Norwegian lady 'researchers' going gaga over a design actually featuring a program logo commissioned by the BBC. I love the work of all the 'hoaxers'. But the vehement denial of all the believers (and they seem to be particularly strident in the US) is a bit scarey.

Posted by Dean Sherwin on May 4,2012 | 08:58 PM

Until this moment, I believed that Smithsonian was a trusted source of scientific information; I guess it is true that "you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Or, was this Smithsonian's April Fools Day article? Otherwise, where is your scientific evidence that crop circles are a hoax? Of course, somebody will confess just for the publicity, but why have we NEVER caught anyone in the act? Why are the circles all so perfect... people are not consistently capable of such perfection. So far, the only thing for certain is that they exist.

Posted by Richard Olszewski on April 3,2012 | 04:41 PM

Of course there are many fake crop circles. Even the huge intricate ones could be done by a group of guys -it would only need an army of men with GPS (only relatively recently available) -and certainly lights, communication, maybe helicopters:- all of which would make a lot of noise and would require some serious funding. Yet some highly intricate and perfect forms a third of a mile long sometimes appear silently from dawn to dusk. No boot trails. To automatically rubbish such events isn't showing a scientific mind, but a closed one.

Posted by Sam Seaman on April 1,2012 | 12:22 AM

There is no way that human beings could have created these complex patterns in living crops that CONTINUE to grow. They are called "aliens." Give me a break. They are our family, and probably seeded the earth with people. Do we believe in God? Should we limit Him to creating humans only on this planet? Wake up, folks. Life is teeming in this Universe, and the crop circles are a way for the Others to help our planet in the form of sacred geometry.

Posted by Gloria Morotti on April 1,2012 | 10:59 PM

Crop circles are among my favorite pieces of art work. They are selfless gifts to all who wish to receive them. placed within the sacrid beauty of Nature, upon earth as a canvas, these temporary beauties pass with time and always allow room for more, without crowding/clogging up the world! Energy is flowing freely within the "world of crop circling". To me, this is the epitome of beauty in a 21 century world. Also, (for me) crop circles represent "extreme art" -- like extreme sports. The form is extensively multidisciplinary, involving design, math, aesthetic sensibility, philosophy, social enthusiasm, photography, site location ability, physical agility, communication skills, scripting, etc... Article well intended!

Posted by Denise Gentile on April 1,2012 | 05:24 PM

Many of you should realize that crop circles are clearly one of three phenomenon. First, they could be generated by Yeti because they are intelligent,often leave no footprints and very difficult to see during the day. Second, they be generated by the Virgin Mary to send a message to adults as opposed to the little children in Portugal she did one hundred years earlier. One more and even better explanation is that God is directly sending us a message to do better in math in school. In any case, I keep my doors locked at night from the Yei, I pray to the Virgin Mary, and I fear God for He is all powerful.

Posted by Chuck Roche on April 1,2012 | 11:18 AM

I for one believe that those crop circles are pure public opinion manipulation. The term hoax is too weak for such a propaganda operation. It is clear that the ones behind it work by an agenda, in order to strengthen certain beliefs and weaken others. On thing is sure, those circles cannot be the haphazard traces of so-called ufos. The patterns are intended a little bit like logos. It is clear that the religion to be propagandized is the new age thing, not any form of Christianity (despite the fact that an even richer visual symbolism is already available in the Norman cathedrals very nearby), nor any form of Islam (whose symbolic geometry would be ideal for such patterns), nor any form of real hinduism (which has little to do with the new age counterfeit of it), nor any religion of the kind of those simple people having a devout faith in God and invisible forces without the help of any media or book-learning past and present, like the Breton peasants used to be, like many Haitians still are. The crop circle symbolism can only appeal to half-learned and ill-bred people already in quest of curiosities, and that is most contrary to real faith which demands persistence in simple activities such as traditional agriculture, as for instance is recommended not only by the Gospels but even more so by Zen monks. A real believer in things spiritual would not marvel at those patterns but deplore the suffering caused to the plants themselves supposedly done by evolved beings. On the other hand it is not an amateur's work, considering not only the sheer number to those patterns, but the necessary technology to achieve such an elaborate result, including the molecular transformation of the plants involved, but such a technology is available to great earthly powers, albeit costly. I don't buy that extra-terrestrial thing : real extra-terrestrials would either keep perfectly unnoticed and abstain from such ego-showing pseudo-artworks, or go and talk directly to people.

Posted by Miville on January 22,2011 | 02:10 AM

To view an article written by aliens, see the large field near Winchester...

Posted by ZedzDed on August 9,2010 | 09:58 AM

Have any of you people read even one of the many published books on crop circles? No one is speaking of the SCIENTIFIC lab analysis between the hoax circle plants and the "real thing" plants. The hoax plants are crushed and show no chemical to cell structure changes, nor do they have uniform 90 degree angle bends of all the plants. "Hoax" circles have flattened areas of crop, while the "real thing" has consistent evidence of vortices, nesting phenomena in the center of circles, and a precise weaving of all the stalks that could never be done with ridiculous clumsy use of boards. Also, crop circles have been reported since the 1700's all over the world. People who refuse to accept that there is an unseen force that is capable of making this happen are stupidly ignoring the fact that an unseen force also makes your heart beat, your fingernails grow, the sun heat our world,the planet spin, the ocean tides happen...get the idea? If you believe in "God" and that with God all things are possible, you insult that very same God's ability to BE by saying "no aliens, no UFO's, no crop circles, no invisible forces, no anything that my puny little human brain can't understand..." Be the believers you say you are when you go to your church, synagogue or other place of worship, and believe that whatever made you can do whatever it pleases, and understand that it has, it does, and it will even without your arrogant approval. Crop cirles have been made by man and they have been made by invisible forces. Have you ever heard of any forgery without first having an original to copy? People who cannot accept this idea are afraid. Just simply afraid... Of accepting that they are not the masters of the universe.

Posted by Lin Nowicki on June 12,2010 | 09:19 AM

What a disappointing story. Any science writing student who turned in this as an assignment would get an F from me. No substance. No new information. Just sneering attitude supporting commonthink.

Posted by Diana Somerville on May 18,2010 | 03:23 PM

CROP CIRCLES are awesom beatiful sacred geometri thanks to who madeit they are ENCANTADORES

Posted by David Vega on May 1,2010 | 01:27 PM

Another example of amazing man made art in the fields: http://www.hemmy.net/2007/09/23/rice-field-art/

Posted by Tessy on April 23,2010 | 04:40 AM

this stuff is all crazy.............first of all aliens?! come on now get serious people. ant anybody can make a crop circle all you need is the right tools and the time to do all that work.....but the other ones who kee talking about UFO's, ALIENS, WARNING SIGNS, AND ETC... yall need some prefessional help

Posted by lola on February 22,2010 | 08:49 AM



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