Crop Circles- Fact or Fiction?

Despite evidence to the contrary, some people remain convinced that crop circles were made by extra-terrestrials brought by UFOs. I can’t understand why they would believe that myself. Can you imagine a spacecraft touching down in a field, and a couple of little green beings emerging, who decide that the first thing they were going to do was rearrange some wheat?

Crop circles are really no mystery

These expansive forms of landscape art are made by people. Two lads in fact, named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, were responsible for most - if not all - of the crop circles that appeared in fields in Wiltshire, Oxford, Somerset and Gloucestershire in the UK. Who would have thought that two people could create such a widespread phenomenon with nobody noticing?

The crop circles that Chorley and Bower took their inspiration from were found in Australia in 1966, though they weren't actually crops; they were patches of flattened, floating reeds in a lagoon in far north Queensland. The farmer who found them claimed to have seen a flying saucer whizzing away, but locals said such circles were common during the wet season. According to the Cairns Post, the most likely explanations were downdrafts of wind or small vortices known as ‘willy-willies’ (dust devils similar to mini tornadoes). Other theories have speculated the circles were due to unusual animal behaviour - in 2012, crop circles in a Tasmanian opium field turned out to be the result of disorientated Bennett’s wallabies wandering in circles after eating poppies.

But back to Bower and Chorley

These two were pals who lived near Winchester, England. In 1978, the two were sitting in a pub, ‘planning what they could do for a laugh’, Chorley told TIME magazine in 1991. Inspired by earlier reports of UFO landings — which gathered steam after a retired Air Force officer gave an interview about the Roswell incident, claiming that something extra-terrestrial had crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947 — Bower and Chorley decided to create their own fake UFO landing sites.

Night work

They were made at night, and over the years they became more complex, gigantic patterns, many metres across. Some who studied crop circles were convinced that their intricacy and the fact that crops appeared to be bent but not broken weren’t human activities, and were therefore messages from intelligent life not of this planet. But in 1991 Bower and Chorley confessed to having made more than 200 crop circles since the late 1970s with nothing more scientific than ropes and boards, and they delighted in confounding the expectations of those who studied the circles.

Fairy Circles

But is there some truth in the extra-terrestrial theory? Ring-like ‘pock marks’ of vegetation surrounded by barren patches of soil exist in Namibia and Australia, but no one knew why. These patterns were called ‘fairy circles’, and had baffled scientists about what exactly they were. A global assessment of these round vegetation patterns discovered over 300 of them, spread over three continents and 15 countries, according to an environmental team from the University of Alicante in Spain. They undertook a systematic survey using high-resolution satellite imagery, and using machine learning to analyse the results, they studied 574,799 hectare-sized plots of land around the world.

They were rewarded with a vastly expanded vision of fairy circle sites, and it seems they have one thing in common – an arid, desert environment, high temperatures and high precipitation seasonality, soil with low nutrients, and a high sand content.

One theory is that plants that don’t have enough water in the top few centimetres of soil will grow longer roots to find it. If they fail, they die quickly, which is apparently what happens in these fairy circles. But no reason as to why the circles are uniform in size and equal distances apart. Some say it’s down to sand termites, others say it is the plants organising themselves. Mushrooms do it naturally all the time; it’s to do with their growth underground, sending out mycelium threads and in time, mushrooms pop up in a circle.

Who knows? Maybe it really is aliens.

Marilyn writes regularly for The Portugal News, and has lived in the Algarve for some years. A dog-lover, she has lived in Ireland, UK, Bermuda and the Isle of Man. 

Marilyn Sheridan