crop circle

Circular area of flattened grain found in fields especially in southeast England, with increasing frequency every summer since 1980. More than 1,000 such formations were reported in the UK in 1991. The cause is unknown, but they are thought to be made by people.

Most of the research into crop circles has been conducted by dedicated amateur investigators rather than scientists. Physicists who have studied the phenomenon have suggested that an electromagnetic whirlwind, or ‘plasma vortex’, can explain both the crop circles and some UFO sightings, but this does not account for the increasing geometrical complexity of crop circles, nor for the fact that until 1990 they were unknown outside the UK. Crop circles began to appear in the USA only after a US magazine published an article about them. A few people have confessed publicly to having made crop circles that were accepted as genuine by investigators.