Crop Circles: A Mystery Solved

Jenny Randles is a confirmed "believer" in UFOS; nevertheless, she tends to "call them the way she sees them." She has more recently co-written an entire book (The UFOs That Never Were) debunking certain UFO reports (including Rendlesham, which she earlier endorsed in her book Sky Crash: A Cosmic Conspiracy). Crop Circles really began in England in the summer of 1980; but it was the 1989 publication of Colin Wilson's and Pat Delgado's book Circular Evidence: A Detailed Investigation of the Flattened Swirled Crops that really brought them fame. The field of "Cerealogy" took a major blow in 1991 when two men, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley came forward to admit that they had created many of these crop circles, and demonstrated (live on TV!) how they did it. But Ufologists pointed out that they certainly couldn't have created ALL of the circles, nor the more elaborate ones appearing more recently. In the first edition of this book, Randles and Fuller attribute crop circles not explainable by hoaxes to "a fascinating natural phenomena" (that "glows, rotates, and hums due to the presence of electostatic fields") identified by Dr. Terence Meaden; however, in the 1993 Afterword, they conclude that "it seems certain that many (perhaps most) of the recent British crop circles are man-made.....(but) that nobody can reliably distinguish between man-made circles and allegedly 'genuine' ones." The standard "skeptical" treatment of crop circles is Round in Circles: Poltergeists, Pranksters, and the Secret History of the Cropwatchers; but this book (particularly since written by England's best-known ufologist) is of considerable interest, as well.