Why aliens stopped leaving crop circles and who really made them

The mysterious circles in wheat fields that captured the imagination of the world in the 1990s and early 2000s have completely disappeared from the information space in recent years, despite the fact that social media is the perfect environment for such viral stories. It was believed that those amazing drawings were either messages from alien visitors or traces left by their spacecraft when they landed or took off.

They have been "hunted" for, studied, and attempted to be reproduced using various methods. However, now it seems that no one wants them. And this is despite the fact that the topic of UFOs continues to be a hot one. IFLScience recalls the history of this phenomenon and explains who was really behind the "alien" messages.

In the 90s, when UFO mania took over the world (not without the help of the hugely popular TV series Top Secret, of course), strange circles in fields were discussed by everyone from teenagers on the streets to the national media. And this was despite the fact that the world lived in an era before social media, blogs, and the Internet was not very accessible. Nevertheless, it was reported that "greetings" from aliens were seen literally all over the world.

However, they did not appear 30 years ago. They were born much earlier. Back in 1678, strange signs appeared on grain crops in Hertfordshire, England. At that time, evil spirits were blamed for everything, and later it was considered the first recorded case of "alien" circles in the fields. However, it is worth noting that, unlike traditional circles, the stalks of the crops in Hertfordshire were cut, not bent. Thus, this case should not be associated with the phenomenon at all.

Another mention of circles on fields appeared in 1880 when the journal Nature published a letter from John Rand Capron, who saw several "round spots" appearing on the field with his own eyes. He believed that the circles were caused by cyclonic winds.

In the second half of the twentieth century, circles in the fields began to appear more and more often and attracted more and more attention. In 1963, English astronomer Sir Patrick Moore described a crater he saw in a field in Wiltshire. He suggested that the crater was the result of a meteorite impact. He also said that he had noticed spiral-shaped formations on the crops in some neighboring fields. Moore speculated that they were probably made by "strong air currents caused by the falling body" and also claimed that all the patterns on the wheat led to the crater.

Despite Moore's attempts to find a natural explanation for the phenomenon, alien theories began to grow around it. Subsequently, similar circles appeared in Australia, which were immediately recognized as the work of aliens. At the same time, stories about circles in the fields that resembled a giant alien ship's engine began to appear in the UK.

People's curiosity about aliens reached its peak in the late 1970s when a retired US Air Force officer shared the 1947 Roswell incident, in which a spaceship allegedly crashed in the New Mexico desert.

Meanwhile, two Englishmen from the countryside got bored one evening and came up with what would be called a prank in our time. Doug Bauer and Dave Chorley came up with a fairly simple method that allowed them to create circles in fields of varying complexity, and the distance from city life left their nighttime activities unnoticed. The men used wooden planks with ropes attached to them to create circles in fields on the border between Hampshire and Wiltshire.

By stepping on the board, they created wide lines and also bent the stalks rather than breaking them, making it look like they were bent by a powerful wind.

Over the course of almost 20 years of pranking, Bauer and Chorley created more than 200 circles until they admitted to it in the early 1990s. Despite the fact that the human hand behind the alien drawings had been exposed, ufologists continued to believe that aliens were behind it all.

Bauer and Chorley's confessions not only did not put an end to the appearance of these drawings in the fields but also went viral around the world. People from other countries, using the idea of the British, began to draw even larger and more amazing circles in the fields.

Eventually, however, interest in this phenomenon gradually waned as it became increasingly difficult to interpret it as reliable evidence of the existence of aliens.

Today, crop circles have rather become an art form that no one associates with UFOs.

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