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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crop circle | 3/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_circle | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:18:24.899510+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Bower and Chorley == In 1991, two self-professed pranksters, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, made headlines by saying they had started the crop circle phenomenon in 1978, using simple tools consisting of a plank of wood, rope, and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in straight lines. To prove their case they made a circle in front of journalists; a "cereologist" (advocate of paranormal explanations of crop circles), Pat Delgado, examined the circle and declared it authentic before it was revealed that it was a hoax. Inspired by Australian crop circle accounts from 1966, Bower and Chorley claimed to be responsible for all circles made prior to 1987, and for more than 200 crop circles in 1978–1991 (with 1,000 other circles not being made by them). Writing in Physics World, Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon said that "the pictographs they created inspired a second wave of crop artists. Far from fizzling out, crop circles have evolved into an international phenomenon, with hundreds of sophisticated pictographs now appearing annually around the globe."
== Art and business == After reports of simple circles in the 1970s, increasingly complex geometric designs have been created by anonymous artists, in some cases to attract tourists to an area. Since the early 1990s, the UK arts collective Circlemakers, founded by Rod Dickinson and John Lundberg, and subsequently including Wil Russell and Rob Irving, has been creating crop circles in the UK and around the world as part of its art practice and also for commercial clients. The Led Zeppelin Boxed Set that was released on 7 September 1990, along with the remasters of the first boxed set, as well as the second boxed set, all feature an image of a crop circle that appeared in East Field in Alton Barnes, Wiltshire.
On the night of 11–12 July 1992, a crop-circle-making competition with a prize of £3,000 (funded in part by the Arthur Koestler Foundation) was held in Berkshire. The winning entry was produced by three Westland Helicopters engineers, using rope, PVC pipe, a plank, string, a telescopic device and two stepladders. According to Rupert Sheldrake, the competition was organised by him and John Michell and "co-sponsored by The Guardian and The Cerealogist". The prize money came from PM, a German magazine. Sheldrake wrote that "The experiment was conclusive. Humans could indeed make all the features of state-of-the-art crop formations at that time. Eleven of the twelve teams made more or less impressive formations that followed the set design." In 2002, Discovery Channel commissioned five aeronautics and astronautics graduate students from MIT to create crop circles of their own, aiming to duplicate some of the features claimed to distinguish "real" crop circles from the known fakes such as those created by Bower and Chorley. The creation of the circle was recorded and used in the Discovery Channel documentary Crop Circles: Mysteries in the Fields. In 2009, The Guardian reported that crop circle activity had been waning around Wiltshire, in part because makers preferred creating promotional crop circles for companies that paid well for their efforts. A video sequence used in connection with the opening of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London showed two crop circles in the shape of the Olympic rings. Another Olympic crop circle was visible to passengers landing at nearby Heathrow Airport before and during the Games. A 3 ha (7 acres) crop circle depicting the emblem of the Star Wars Rebel Alliance was created in California in December 2017 by a father and his 11-year-old son as a spaceport for X-wing fighters.
== Legal implications == In 1992, Gábor Takács and Róbert Dallos, both then aged 17, were the first people to face legal action after creating a crop circle. Takács and Dallos, of the St. Stephen Agricultural Technicum, a high school in Hungary specializing in agriculture, created a 36 m (118 ft) diameter crop circle in a wheat field near Székesfehérvár, 69 km (43 mi) southwest of Budapest, on 8 June 1992. In September, the pair appeared on Hungarian TV and exposed the circle as a hoax, showing photos of the field before and after the circle was made. As a result, Aranykalász Co., the owners of the land, sued the teens for 630,000 Ft (~$3,000 USD) in damages. The presiding judge ruled that the students were only responsible for the damage caused in the circle itself, amounting to about 6,000 Ft (~$30 USD), and that 99% of the damage to the crops was caused by the thousands of visitors who flocked to Székesfehérvár following the media's promotion of the circle. The fine was eventually paid by the TV show, as were the students' legal fees. In 2000, Matthew Williams became the first man in the UK to be arrested for causing criminal damage after making a crop circle near Devizes. In November 2000, he was fined £100 plus £40 in costs. As of 2008, no one else has been successfully prosecuted in the UK for criminal damage caused by creating crop circles.
== Creation ==