How the corn-circle hoaxers run rings round the gullible

Matt Ridley - 1 November 1991

Armed with rope and stick, Matt Ridley went out at night on his Northumberland farm and within minutes came up with an answer to a recurring summer puzzle.

Each summer since about 1980, farms in Wiltshire and Hampshire have been suddenly pockmarked by neat discs of flattened corn. These crop circles have become a cult for the credulous and a sure bet for feature writers of every newspaper from the Sun to the Wall Street Journal. Theories abound to explain them, and all, save one, are given great publicity.

That single exception is the theory that they are the work of hoaxers — or rather that the neat ones are done by hoaxers and the ragged ones by wind and rain. But this is a boring theory and is therefore always dismissed with a sentence such as, “Scientists admit that some may be the work of hoaxers, but that cannot be the explanation for them all.”

It is unfashionable to disagree with this orthodoxy, and to ask, “Why not?” I have never heard an argument that convincingly answers this simple question. Yet I can persuade hardly anyone that crop circles are fakes. Hardened cynics suspend all their scepticism when confronted with the things.

We know that people can make crop circles, and in some cases have admitted to making them. It is surely more logical to conclude, therefore, that the human hand (and foot) made them all than that hitherto unseen forces of plasma physics, ball lightning or whatever did so — forces that work only in Wiltshire and Hampshire, have been at work only since the early 1980s and show a remarkable tendency to operate on demand. Yet not only do all the articles and programmes about crop circles Fail to come to this conclusion, they go out of their way to dismiss it as a hypothesis.

When I say this I am met with a sigh and a rolling of the eyes and one of the following arguments:

1. They are impossible to make.

2.They happen in remote spots where people are not likely to find them.

3. There are far too many of them to have been the work of hoaxers.

4. Nobody has ever seen one made.

5. What motive would hoaxers have?

6. It would require a conspiracy of silence among the hoaxers.

7. Real scientists believe in them; you’re not a real scientist.

8. Balls of lightning can make circular swirls.

l answer as follows:

1. Impossible to make? I made one the other night. It was five yards in radius, perfectly circular, completely without footprints and the wheat lay in a perfect clockwise swirl. Ten yards from the centre was another ring of flattened wheat, three feet wide. Between the two, the wheat stood upright. It took me and my brother-in-law 20 minutes, in the dark, using the following equipment: a sharpened stick and a laundry rope.

Drive the stick into the ground, tie the rope to it, pull it taut and walk in a circle bashing down the corn with your feet: you have made the outer ring. Shorten the rope and repeat, this time bending the corn down with the rope and making it stay down by pushing it over with your hands {it’s best, we found, to do this on your hands and knees). Always step on flattened corn, not on the earth, to avoid leaving tracks, and take care to fill the hole left by the stick when you leave. To make straight lines, key shapes, satellite circles and so on is just as easy. The corn stalks are merely bent, not broken: it is a characteristic of near-ripe wheat and barley that the weight of the heads holds them down once pushed over.

2. The circles happen in remote spots where people are not likely to find them. This is a classic argument applied to the manifestations of all pseudo-science, from poltergeists to yetis. The fact that people are around to see the circles proves that their location is not that remote. In any case, there is no such thing as a remote part of Wiltshire. A television crew I talked to the other day said they had been filming crop circles. And how did they find them?

“We asked about them in the local pubs and a few days later people said they knew of some.” Surprise, surprise!

3. About 800 in 10 years, most of them simple circles, is by no means far too many to have been made by hoaxers. My technique would take about 10 minutes for a simple circle, 30 minutes for a more complicated pattern. One person could do 24 in four hours. Three nights’ work and he has done almost the total for a year.

4. If it were true that circle-watchers had sat up all night and seen nothing but there, mysteriously, in the morning was a circle, I would be puzzled, but you usually find there was fog, or they were at the other end of the field. Besides, is it not odd that nobody has ever seen ball lightning in these fields? In fact people have seen circles made — but only by hoaxers.

5. I can think of plenty of motives. Newspaper articles admit that farmers now charge people to see circles in their fields. Ah, comes the reply, but that is only recently, and the loss of corn is an expensive gamble: an acre of wheat is worth nearly £400. Local pubs also cash in on the circle fever, selling keyrings and snacks named after the circles. Even so, I do not think that money is the main motive. More likely, it is the satisfaction a hoaxer derives from viewing the industry he has spawned. True, it must have taken some imagination in the first place, but I can imagine all sorts of people who would enjoy trampling out regular shapes in fields.

6. There is no conspiracy of silence. Hoaxers occasionally own up, only to be told: “Yes, maybe yours was a fake, but others are not.”

7. For some reason, people think scientists are immune to stupidity. I was a scientist once, and I will never make that mistake again. The scientific annals are full of “expert” opinions that were proved wrong.

8.To great excitement among circle enthusiasts, a Japanese professor made a ball of lightning over a plate of aluminium powder and, behold, the powder swirled into a circle. On this logic, because I can knock down a house of cards with my breath, so the wind will blow over the Empire State Building.

I have never doubted that roughly circular swirls are made in corn by the wind and rain: I have seen them myself, often. But I suggest that only the deeply gullible think the two known agents of crop circling — wind for the rough ones, hoaxers for the neat — are supplemented by an unseen force of nature.

The author is American Editor of The Economist.