Are Crop Circles A Hoax?

If you have an interest in the crop circles that have been appearing around the world for the last 30 years, you're not alone. The topic of crop circles has gained more and more popularity over the years, and the recent M. Night Shyamalan movie, Signs, is the focal point of this mystery, which, much like in real life, tells the story of the mysterious appearance of odd patterns made in crop fields. Fueling debate that has endured the last few decades, many skeptics have discussed whether or not these designs are the creation of humans, supernatural forces, or aliens. As England is one of the most popular locations for crop circle sightings around the world, it leads the way in popularizing and glamorizing this seemingly unsolved mystery. Ever since the 1970s, when a surge of strange but immaculate circular shapes began appearing in fields in southern England, people from around the globe have sought answers to this enigma.

A crop circle in the form of a triskelion

1678 pamphlet on the "Mowing-Devil".

English: Crop circle in Switzerland

As hypotheses and explanations were brought forth, two Englishmen came clean about their nocturnal practices in 1991. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, two men in their 60's at the time, claimed that they were responsible for the crop circles that everyone was talking about. Armed with planks of wood, garden rollers and string, the men would stomp and mark an area of a field, thus creating crop circles as we know them. As television documentaries would have it, Bower and Chorley admitted their involvement in all the crop circle creations in the English county of Wiltshire, but considering that half of the creations were found outside of Wiltshire, their story had some flaws. Later changing some of their prior claims, the two men were not able to explain some of the more complex shapes found in a number of fields. Furthermore,