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ReligionNewsBlog.com • Item 550 • Posted: Sunday August 25, 2002  

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U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 26, 2002
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020826/misc/26crop.htm
BY THOMAS K. GROSE

SOUTH[TON, ENGLAND–Will the circle be unbroken? Apparently not. The fuss over crop circles has come around again, and that’s got Doug Bower peeved. It’s old news, a tired story that’s been told ad nauseam, he complains, clearly itching to hang up his phone. Nevertheless, he finally relents and agrees to an interview at his small workshop in this English south-coast city, where he operates a picture-framing business. Bower, 78, is half the duo credited by many with inventing crop circles, or at least popularizing them–master hoaxers who inspired countless imitators.

When Bower and his partner in pranks, the late Dave Chorley, finally confessed their “art” with one last, well-publicized scam 11 years ago, Bower figured, “Well, this will be the finish of it.” And for a while, it was. Yes, the hard-core true believers–croppies–continued to investigate every new creation. And, yes, obsessive circle makers continued to ply their craft on farmland worldwide, using computers to design ever more complex pictograms. But most of the world stopped paying attention, and crop circles were put out to pasture.

Now, filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has teamed with superstar Mel Gibson to make the film Signs, released to enormous box office success earlier this month. The alien-invasion flick, which uses crop circles as a plot device–as well as a smart marketing hook–resurrected the circles from exile. And Doug Bower’s legend has caught up with him once again.

Circle madness. In the wake of the hit flick, the media have renewed the debate over the authenticity of crop circles, often leaving open the possibility that some are not man-made. It has also given circle makers renewed motivation to create as many new formations as humanly possible. Notes George Wingfield, a British author and researcher: “The whole thing is a zoo at the moment. There are so many hoaxers, it’s become ridiculous.”

The mysterious circles captivated public attention for much of the 1980s. First appearing in southern England, they eventually cropped up elsewhere around the globe, in the process becoming much more elaborate than mere circles. Many of today’s formations are surprisingly intricate, such as “the Mitsubishi,” created as a publicity stunt, which portrays an SUV in great detail. Self-appointed experts–”cereologists”–and a few scientists debated their origin. Were they human-made? Alien signals? A natural phenomenon caused by spiraling air? Efforts to solve the conundrum failed. Operation Blackbird in 1990, financed by the BBC and a Japanese TV network, ended in ridicule when hoaxers created a circle while eluding the lenses of state-of-the-art video cameras. Then along came Doug and Dave, best friends and artists. With one perfectly executed caper they apparently solved the mystery with all the finality of a death-row confession.

In September 1991, after 13 years of circle making in secret, they decided to go public and embarrass the experts. They contacted Today, a now defunct British newspaper. The editor asked for a demonstration circle in a field near Seven Oaks in Kent. If Pat Delgado, a much-quoted expert at the time who strongly hinted that the circles were alien creations, spotted the hoax, there would be no article. If Delgado was fooled, a big, splashy story was guaranteed.

Cropping up. Of course, by this time, copycats were making summertime circles as predictable as rain on a holiday weekend. “That was about the only cornfield left in England without a circle,” jokes Bower, who, despite his earlier protestations, clearly still relishes retelling his tale. Bower says the Today circle took about an hour to complete. “Of course, Delgado said it was the finest thing he’d ever seen,” he recalls. The next day, Doug and Dave were famous.

The seeds of the Today hoax were sown in the summer of 1978, on a Friday night at a pub outside Southampton, where for years Doug and Dave would meet weekly for drinks and a chat. That night, Bower, who had spent eight years in Australia, recollected a story he’d seen in newspapers down under about mysterious circles appearing in cropland. The locals called them “UFO nests.” Then Doug said to Dave, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if we could devise a way to make these circles?”
Because their first circles were made on flat fields with no surrounding highlands, for two years no one noticed them, except perhaps for the occasional farmer riding high on a combine harvester. “Dave was getting fed up with it,” Bower admits.

Meanwhile, the duo refined their crafty craft. They constructed a stalk-stomping board, a two-by-one length of lumber with a rope looped to each end that allowed them to press down great swaths of crop with each step. How to create a perfect circle? One of them would stand in place holding an end of a long piece of string; the other would walk around with the other end, keeping it taut. To make a straight line, Doug looped a ring on a piece of wire and fastened it to a baseball cap bill. By keeping a distant object–say, a lighted farmhouse window–centered in the ring and walking sideways, the wearer created razor-straight lines every time.

In 1980, their circles finally captured world attention. They had long known that a perfect spot was inside the Devil’s Punchbowl, a valley easily seen from some major highways. But it was only in that year that the Punchbowl was planted with corn. “We couldn’t wait for that corn to grow,” Bower says, chuckling. “That’s when it all started, what got it on the television news. There were experts popping up all over the place after that.” Doug and Dave got into circle making for a laugh, and the experts gave them plenty of fodder. “They made themselves such damn fools by saying they knew this and they knew that. Of course, it was getting more hilarious than ever. They just egged us on.”

Cereologist Lucy Pringle, author of Crop Circles: The Greatest Mystery of Modern Times, wrinkles her nose at the mention of the pair. People who think Dave and Doug are the origin of circles are scared, she tut-tuts. “Their fear of the unknown, the unexplained is such that they’re willing to accept anything, no matter how cockeyed it is.” Clearly, some crop circles are hoaxes, but not all, Pringle says, though she won’t estimate how many she thinks are genuine. Unlike their man-made counterparts, “real” circles don’t destroy any of the crop and often have healing powers, she says. Self-appointed expert Colin Andrews, who coauthored Circular Evidence with Pat Delgado and advised the Signs filmmakers, believes that the simpler formations–about 20 percent of all crop circles–are inexplicable.

To which Joe Nickell retorts, phooey. They’re all hoaxes, says the senior research fellow at the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and there is not one circle that has been authenticated as genuine. “The burden of proof is on those who make the claims,” he asserts. “The best evidence we have is that 100 percent are man-made.” Cereologists who insist some circles are genuine never use double-blind testing to eliminate bias from their experiments. When they test plants for anomalies, they always know beforehand which plants came from circles, he says. And, Nickell adds, they often resort to pseudoscientific explanations, like “plasma vortexes.”
If some are really unexplained phenomena, what is the possible cause? Pringle is open to several possibilities: “Maybe it’s a manifestation of our subconscious, a parallel world, other realms, other planets, other galaxies.” However they’re created, Pringle says, “I think there is an intelligence behind it.” On that point, a twinkling-eyed Doug Bower would certainly agree.

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