Since our Instagram account Crop Circle Explorer ran a brief question and answer session with a human circle maker, we’ve had a fair few messages and emails from readers wanting to know more about the motivations and experiences of the makers. With time and persistence we’ve convinced some of the makers we know to fill us in on their experiences for a new series of articles. These aren’t people who regularly give interviews and they have asked to remain anonymous.

It’s the third installment and it’s third time lucky for everyone looking for answers to the question that always gets thrown at circle makers: Have you had any strange experiences whilst making a crop circle?

As some of the responses our circle makers have given are lengthy, we’ve decided to split their answers across two parts. The next installment will follow soon.

What I love about crop circles and the process of making them, is that they are all different and the experience you have is always unique to each one.

Investigators and croppies always want to hear about the paranormal events that happen inside a crop circle, but are these events genuinely paranormal in origin? Are they just tricks of the mind or down to the fact we are not out in a field during the night regularly, and we are not tuned into the natural occurrences that happen while we sleep?

One of the first thing I noticed early on are the flashes that occur in the night sky, almost like sheet lightning, but a lot more discreet. You can never quite catch it with your eye but you know it’s really happening. It can be quite scary at times, along with the noise of the night animals, especially rutting deer and owls. Seeing helicopters, planes and other flying objects in the sky overhead can also be eerie. I’ve got in the position of a scared animal trying to disguise myself, worried I can be seen from above on some thermal heat camera, which often makes my fellow circle makers giggle.

A night that really sticks in my mind was when myself and a fellow circle maker saw a red ball of light hovering inside the circle in front of us. There were four of us in the field that night, I would say the people I work with are all very level headed, normal individuals, certainly not people who painic, or get easily spooked. It was a hell of an evening, the crop was just awful to work in and the weather was horrible, cold and very wet with rain pounding on our heads all night. In the crop I am very sensitive to pesticides and how they feel on my hands and skin. I am convinced the field had been sprayed earlier in the day, and with the added water from the rain, I would say we were absolutely drenched in pesticide. We were a couple of hours into the formation when my fellow maker said ‘Look, look, what the hell is that?’ I looked at where they were pointing and in front of us, hovering, was a red ball of light. At first I thought it may have been from a tower in the distance, so I blinked a few times and rubbed my eyes, thinking it may help me focus more and see where this light had come from. But it was clearly not in the distance. It was hovering inside the circle itself. By this time, the other circle maker was in a bit of a state, totally freaked out, wondering if the Ministry of Defence had even sent over some drone to spy on us! The light came at us close and bobbed around, flying backwards and forwards for a few minutes before disappearing completely.

By now, other two other circle makers had seen what was happening and came over, concerned with how upset and spooked our teammate had become. We had to make a decision. Do we carry on, as the hours of darkness were fading and the formation wasn’t complete? Or do we take our teammate to the hospital? They were really looking unwell and it was totally out of character for them to be this way. Fortunately, they slowly started to recover and we decided to plod on. We kept looking, but the red ball of light never returned that night.

Obviously, after a couple of hours sleep, the previous night’s weird event was the topic of conversation. We both knew what we had seen was real and not a figment of our imagination. It is worth saying that three of us were unwell the next morning with upset stomachs and headaches. Looking further into this, after the event, I now wonder if we had actually been poisoned by the pesticide and it had caused a hallucinatory effect in us. My teammate is a smoker and had pesticide over his hands. I wonder if he had inhaled it as well as swallowing it when mixed with the rain running over his face. What happened will forever be a mystery, but it certainly felt very paranormal at the time.

On another occasion I most definitely saw a black dog next to the circle we were making. Dogs always worry me at night and they wouldn’t think twice about running at us in the dark and giving the game away. But this dog was just circling the field, silent. It wasn’t a fox or a deer, most definitely a dog. My other team member saw it too. As quick as it arrived, it vanished again. I’ve commonly heard of other circle makers also seeing black dogs that are not physically there.

I would like to believe that circles hold some sort of paranormal phenomena, but I think ex-circle makers like to jump on this to make themselves feel relevant and remembered, and possibly feel better about the criminal damage they have caused. If it involves something paranormal then I guess it’s ok! The truth is, plenty of us have seen unexplainable things at night, but I think that is exactly it; they are unexplainable rather than necessarily paranormal. Circle makers become physically and mentally drained, working in the pitch dark. Knocking out a pattern in the field can be really disorientating and often we all get lost and confused. My mind remains open to the paranormal, but personally I am not convinced.

The last thing one needs or looks for when in the middle of a half-made formation is an unusual or unexplained event. There’s enough to be worrying about – getting everything right, finishing before sun-up, not stomping the wrong bits – without those kinds of distractions. There have been a few odd occurrences while I’ve been out, but I’ve usually been able to identify them after some consideration. Though these aren’t the only examples I could give, a couple will suffice.

One night I was off on my own stomping while my team-mates were elsewhere working on another part of the circle, and something white and fast-moving caught my eye, flitting back and forth against a treeline at the edge of the field. After some study I realised it was probably an owl, but that was far from apparent. At first glance it looked like the archetypal ball of light.

Another night, I was side-stepping the perimeter circle and could hear a bestial and to be frank scary sound coming from off in the dark somewhere. I felt very vulnerable, at the end of a tape all by myself and a long way from my team-mates in the centre, but I did my best to ignore it and focus on the task at hand, even as it seemed to be encircling me and the formation we were putting down. After conferring with the other makers later, they said they’d heard it too and we agreed it was likely a stag on whose territory we had encroached. Again this was not immediately clear. One’s senses work in all manner of odd ways in a field in the dark, and misidentification is easy.

I also well-remember a night where nothing seemed to go to plan. Tapes snagged or snapped, the wrong bit of crop got flattened in a couple of places, measurements were out though we couldn’t understand why. And I felt a very strong sense of presence, as if not only were we not alone in the field but we weren’t welcome. I tried to explain this to my fellow-makers, who brushed it off, more concerned with trying to work around the evening’s mishaps and not leave a half-finished mess. In the end the circle came out beautifully, none of the mistakes were noticeable, and it was very well-received. But if it was up to me we wouldn’t have lingered in that field. Whatever I felt, it was malevolent in essence and didn’t want us there, but that could of course have been my imagination and paranoia.

The closest I’ve come to something unexplainable happened one night back in the day when we were walking a country path towards the field and hadn’t even begun our work yet. We all saw it; something black and shapeless in the sky, moving above the trees and away into the distance. It definitely wasn’t a bird, I know that – it was way too big, and besides the way it moved, as if afloat and adrift, ruled that out. To this day I have no idea what it was.

It does bemuse me that some croppies are sceptical or disbelieving of circle makers’ claims to have made circles, but at the same time are more than happy to accept a circle maker who says they’ve experienced unusual events. There seems to be a dissonance there. Some croppies even maintain that making circles acts as a strange attractor drawing in weirdness, or that circle makers function as channels for such things, but that seems to me to be more the last refuge of croppies who have accepted people make circles but at the same time still want to cling to a belief that the subject has a paranormal or inexplicable aspect to it. I’ve never seen any direct evidence that that’s the case. Similarly I think that for some more egotistical circle makers it adds to their own self-perceived importance, that they’ve somehow been chosen as conduits by otherworldly forces. No you haven’t, mate. You just knock out patterns in fields in the dark. Get over yourself.

All that said, I don’t automatically write off unusual events experienced by other circle makers. I know people it has happened to, who I don’t have reason to distrust or disbelieve. I also don’t feel the need to compartmentalise or explain everything away. There’s room enough for mystery in this world, and I don’t have any problem with being perplexed. It goes with the territory.