2-18 FB Crop Circles

Crop circles…a mixture of sci-fi and agriculture.

Most of us have seen or heard of crop circles in the movies or news or reality TV shows. A crop circle is an unexplained sizable pattern created by the flattening of a crop such as wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rapeseed. Crop circles are also referred to as crop formations, because they’re not always circular in shape. While the exact date crop circles began to appear is unknown, the documented cases have substantially increased from the 1970s to current times.

 Dr. Lou Greub is a retired professor of agronomy with an interest in crop circles. He's been studying them since they first started appearing over 30 years ago. Greub notes most of the occurrences have been in England - and mostly in fields of small grains. Where they come from is a mystery: “There’s a few fakes. There’s a group in England that goes out and just does some of these for sport but the vast majority of them, we don’t know what’s causing it. People watching at night report a bright flash of white light or red balls of light zipping around and then there’s a crop circle somewhere in the area.”