Crop Circles and Astrology: Is there a Connection?
Christopher Harwood
A brief history of crop circles tells us that there have been recorded instances of this phenomenon in past centuries. One example from the 17th century was a print showing an illustration of the devil mowing a field at night. Others have been reported since, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but they seem to have been largely ignored and forgotten. However, since August 1980, the number seems to have grown exponentially, with a few hundred in the early years but now many thousands with sightings being reported from all over the world. However by far the greatest number of these has been in the southern part of Britain mostly in the counties of Wiltshire and Hampshire and many have been the vicinity of prehistoric stone circles such as Stonehenge and Avebury Ring.
Without any doubt many of them have been fakes, some, a few hundred attributed to two middle aged gentlemen named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley back in the nineteen eighties. They eventually confessed their activities and even gave demonstrations of how to do it with string and planks of wood. However in 1998 the surviving member of the deceptive pair declared that some unknown force had guided him initially. Highly skilled land artists whose complex patterns have been a marvel to behold made others and it is these that have been largely responsible for the whole thing being dismissed as just clever pranks.
However, there are a hard core, perhaps only a few perhaps more that suffer no such explanation especially as the way the crop is flattened is quite different in the genuine circles. Indeed a Japanese film crew who came to investigate in 1989 actually witnessed one as it occurred, describing coloured balls of light and a whirling vortex of energy, which moved around taking just 15 seconds to leave a new example in the field they were observing.
