Cropping Up, Blowing Down

It seems like crop circles appear every week all around the world. The tremendous strange circles and patterns appear mysteriously overnight in farmers' fields, inducing fear and puzzlement, delight, and intrigue for both UFO fans and the news media. They are mostly found in the United Kingdom, but have spread to dozens of countries around the world in past decades. But who — or what — is making them?

From Life Magazine Special - "Strange But True: 100 of the World's Weirdest Wonders"
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In 1678, a pamphlet was published depicting a woodcut illustrating a story entitled "The Mowing-Devil: Or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire." It showed the devil mowing a round shape with a scythe in a farmer's field. The farmer insisted that this was what had happened: In the dark of night, some evil force had harvested his crop, and had done so in large, precise circular patterns. The farmer professed himself terrified, and who wouldn't have been?

Hertfordshire (as the town is now spelled) and Wiltshire in England have long been fertile breeding grounds for crop circles. What are they, precisely? They are enormous geometric formations made in grain fields by laying the growing plants flat. The big question has always been: What flattened all those stalks? These patterned shapes usually appear in the space of one night, and some observers of them insist that the manpower required to create them indicates that some unfamiliar force is at work. Extraterrestrials, with their whirring spaceships, have long been suspects, and the 2002 horror film Signs, starring Mel Gibson, did much to boost this theory.

All of Great Britain and much of the world was gaga over a rash of fantastic circles that appeared throughout the countryside in the late 1970s, until two young men stepped up to take credit for several of them. Mysterious patterns still form on regular occasions through-out the world. They represent, collectively, an enigma in a hayfield. Making crop circles seem like cute little pastoral curiosities is the Tunguska Event of 1908. At around 7:17 on the morning of June 30, some-thing—a large asteroid? a comet fragment?—exploded approximately six miles above the earth's surface. Below, the region around Siberia's Podkamennaya Tunguska River was devastated by the blast, which packed a hundred times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Eighty million trees were blown down in an area of 830 square miles. It is fortunate indeed that the explosion occurred over a rural region. A blast of that size could have destroyed a city.

Witnesses to the event saw a bright light streaking across the sky only minutes before the explosion, but no one could say for certain what it was. Of course there are some who hold that it was a spaceship.

From Life Magazine Special - "Strange But True: 100 of the World's Weirdest Wonders"
Purchase here!