Although some crop circles are hoaxes and are created by humans for publicity, many crop
circles are authentic and are deliberately made by supernatural beings. "Just 10 years ago the
concept 'crop circle' was foreign to us. Then we saw the first pictures. Questions could not be
suppressed. Who or what could be behind these mysterious signs?"(Anderhub, 2002). There are
many theories, from the reasonable to the completely absurd. "Anything but normal was the
plethora of alternative theories: drunks with string, wild young farmers, disillusioned art students,
out-of-work journalists, disinformation people from the military, over-application of fertilizer,
interference from mobile phones, flocks of geometrically gifted crows, even sex-mad
hedgehogs."(Silva, 2002). There are basically five possible causes, or creators, of crop circles:
aliens or supernatural beings, animals, weather conditions, aircraft such as airplanes or
helicopters, plasma vortices, and the human hoaxes. It is most likely that supernatural beings are
What is a crop circle? "In their simplest form crop circles appear as roughly circular
markings in grass, or crops such as wheat, barley and oilseed rape. On the ground, the crop is
seen to be pressed flat, with a distinctive swirled pattern, ending with a sharply defined edge,
beyond which the standing crop is unaffected. The spiral pattern can be either clockwise or
anti-clockwise and, when viewed from above, appears strikingly beautiful, as if stamped or
printed into the crop."(Manistre, 1999). Not all crop circles are swirled, however. "Occasionally
crop formations are not spiraled. The crop is laid straight out radially like spokes in a bicycle
wheel."(Howe, 2002). This is the exception though, not the rule. There are also several
noticeable differences between the alien created authentics and the human made hoax...