Three Circles is a short history of crop circles. Each installment covers a specific period of time and features three circles important to the development, evolution and public perception of the phenomenon. 

Part one covers the wide period of 1975 (or should that be 1975ish?) to 1989, a time when cerealogy was at its most innocent. 

One of the mysteries of the crop circle phenomenon is its true start date. Some will argue that the circles have been around for centuries, chronicled in European folklore. For our purposes, we look to the contemporary phenomenon which began in the 1970s, but even here there is no certainty.

What we do know is during 1966 at Tully, in Queensland, Australia, a banana grower called George Pedley claimed to have witnessed a flying saucer take to the skies. The craft appeared to have risen from a lagoon owned by farmer Albert Pennisi, leaving a floating bed of swirled reeds behind it. News of the weird occurrence spread quickly through newspapers. The story was noticed by an emigrant English painter and photographer with an interest in UFOs: Doug Bower.

Having spent eight years in Australia, Bower moved back to his native Southampton, Hampshire, where he opened an art gallery and picture framing shop. By the mid-70s, he had befriended another local artist and former RAF veteran, David Chorley. On Friday evenings in the summer months, the pair would make the twenty-five mile drive north to the eastern outskirts of Winchester where they would make time for a drink at the Percy Hobbs pub. From there, they would move on up the slope of Telegraph Hill to the fields at Cheesefoot Head and neighbouring Longwood Warren, taking in the view as inspiration for their paintings.

Speaking to John Lundberg in The Field Guide: The Art, History and Philosophy of Crop Circle Making, Bower explained how his association with crop circles came into being:

One night when we were strolling along [Cheesefoot Head] we sat down on the bank and I suddenly remembered the newspaper article about the Tully saucer nests. So I told Dave about it and said ‘It would be a bit of a laugh if we could find a way to make circular marks in these corn fields.’ He said ‘Yeah, that sounds like quite a good idea.’

To make their first creation, and excite UFO enthusiasts, Bower and Chorley utilised the five-feet long security bar from the inside of the former’s workshop door. ‘If we keep the right hand of bar stationary,’ Bower recalled from his conversations with Chorley to John Lundberg, ‘and the two of us kneel down and lift it up and go around, when we come around a complete circumference we’ve made a circle that’s 10 feet wide’ … I tell you what, it was damned hard work!’

But who knows where this very first, simple crop circle was made? Both Bower and Chorley named the location as the Strawberry Field, though pinpointing it has not been easy. In August 1992 Bower told Clas Svahn the location ‘was at the bottom of Cheesefoot Head near Winchester’. Ufologist Paul Fuller identified the field at Ordnance Survey Grid Reference SU5229, a field just down from the Percy Hobbs that straddles an area between Morn Hill Campsite and Pitts Farm House on the A31 Alresford Road. It is certainly possible to make the case that this location is at the bottom of Cheesefoot Head, yet its position is at odds with what Bower stated in his much later interview with John Lundberg. He explained ‘We were down below corn level and out of sight of the cars as they came around the corner over Cheesefoot Head. A more likely location is the one highlighted by Bower himself in BBC’s Countryfile special on circle making, released in 1998. This is the field at the foot of Telegraph Hill, straddling the A31 and A272 directly opposite the present day Winchester Science Centre.

It has been equally as challenging to pinpoint the date when Bower and Chorley made this circle. TODAY newspaper, which originally introduced the pair to the general public, gives 1978. In his Fortean Times eulogy for Bower, Rob Irving says 1976. However, there is testimony from farmer Ian Stevens that he saw a crop circle at Three Maids Hill, to the north of Winchester, in 1975.

Regardless of the date of the very first modern crop circle, the effort put in by Doug Bower and Dave Chorley passed without reward. If anyone else alongside Ian Stevens noticed these unusual circular depressions they chose to keep the details to themselves until years later.

Despite the initial efforts of Bower and Chorley going unnoticed, the pair continued to make crop circles. To make the task of flattening crops quicker and easier, they developed the ‘stalk stomper’, a wooden plinth attached to a rope rein. They also maintained efforts to make UFO enthusiasts notice their work. In 1980, they achieved a breakthrough. The two men made a succession of journeys to Westbury in neighbouring Wiltshire, putting down three basic circles underneath the escarpment at Bratton Camp. It was a shrewd move, with Westbury being close to Warminster, a town synonymous with countless UFO sightings from the mid-sixties into the 1970s. The Wiltshire Times featured the circles and drew the attention of Bristol ufologists NUFOR (South West). Unlike what one would have expected from many of their more sensationalist peers, the ufologists held back from crying alien, and instead turned to Dr Terence Meaden of The Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO) for his opinion. ‘The most natural explanation which comes to mind,’ wrote Meaden for the March 1981 issue of his Journal of Meteorology, ‘is that the near-circular flattening of the oats was caused by whirlwinds.’

When Bower and Chorley would later learn of Meaden’s views they would be dismayed. They had planned to toy with UFO buffs, not a physicist with an interest in abnormal weather conditions. ‘Had it not been for Dr Meaden,’ Bower told Svahn in 1992, ‘I suppose really we would have continued just in [making] the circles themselves, but we sort of made up our minds that we had to get rid of Dr Meaden by putting a circle [ie a ring] around the outside [of] the circle and then two circles [a second ring] round [the outside], one going one way and one going the other, clockwise and anti-clockwise, but Dr Meaden seemed to come up with an answer for all the different patterns that we did, then we started the four satellites, north, south, east and west’.

The circles with four equally spaced satellites around them have become well-known as quintuplets. The location and date of their first appearance is debatable. One may have appeared at Headbourne Worthy, on the northern fringe of Winchester, in 1978, though the first confirmed account comes from Cheesefoot Head in June 1983.

For a while the quintuplet was the archetypal, in-vogue crop circle, none more so than in 1984 when Bower and Chorley travelled to Cradle Hill, outside Alfriston, East Sussex, to get up to mischief. Speaking to John Lundberg, Bower recalled the trip he made to see his handiwork alongside his unsuspecting wife Ilene. 

‘The traffic was bumper to bumper all the way up the hill. People were stopping to look at our circle. ‘This is great,’ I thought. When we got to the car park, the chap who served me an ice cream said ‘My god, all this traffic down here, you should have been here a few days ago, they had the police here directing it. Did you see the Daily Mail the other day then?’

‘Unknown to us, when [Dave Chorley and I had] crept down over the field to do this circle we were right next door to [former Chancellor of the Exchequer] Denis Healey’s house. There’s a picture of Denis Healey with his camera around his neck – apparently he’d sold his photograph of our circle to the Daily Mail and they’d called it Healey’s Comet!’

Though the siting of their circle had undoubtedly contributed to the sensation, its popularity was in no small part due to its appearance: that of a Hollywood movie style flying saucer landing mark, complete with four equidistant landing pads. Such an obvious motif was manna for those who wished to link crop circles with the paranormal. Among them were Hampshire based investigators Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews. The duo would go on to become renown as the biggest names in cerealogy. Delgado had spoken of the previous year’s Cheesefoot Head quintuplet in Flying Saucer Review as having origins in ‘some force unknown to us’. 

Meanwhile, Terence Meaden refused to be shifted from his whirlwind theories. In the March 1985 issue of J. Met he simply batted the matter of the equidistant satellites away as pending further research, stating ‘Of the remaining problems, the most important must be to calculate how multiplet circles can develop, particularly the triplet and quintuplet states, and to elucidate the nature of the trigger responsible.’ Someone less blinded by the certainty of their own convictions would surely have started to suspect the involvement of a sentient intelligence. 

As Meaden set to chasing his tail, others began to suspect human hands and feet were playing a significant role in the making of crop circles. As early as August 1983, the Wiltshire Times outed Westbury based farmers Alan and Francis Sheppard for hoaxing a circle of their own. According to Paul Fuller and Jenny Randles in The Controversy of the Circles, ‘The hoax was perpetrated by the Sheppards because they had been contacted by the tabloid national newspaper the Daily Mirror to hoax a circle formation right next to a genuine (quintuplet) formation. The Daily Mirror hoped that a rival national newspaper, The Daily Express, would report the circle as the landing marks of a giant UFO, whereupon the Mirror could step in and reveal their hoax. Strangely, the Express never publicised the formation, although in subsequent years they did still cover the circles.’ More specifically to the Alfriston quintuplet, ufologist Philip Taylor pointed out to the Brighton Argus that the location of the circle — Cradle Hill — was identical to the legendary skywatching location for sightseers during the Warminster UFO flap. We will likely never know if coincidence played its part or Taylor had been correct in his theorising.

The crop circle landscape of 1989 was notable for a record amount of formations. Since 1987, more were appearing in Wiltshire than Hampshire. Indeed, when someone other than Bower and Chorley had made a circle at Cheesefoot Head in 1986, the pair responded by flattening ‘We Are Not Alone’ in the crop. (They would perform a similar act in 1990, angrily inscribing ‘copycats’ into a field near Avebury.) However, the look of 1989’s formations was mainly no different from previous years: simple circles, ringed circles, quintuplets and their variations.

Things changed on the 5 August. On one of their regular scouting flights from Thruxton airfield, Busty and Rod Taylor found a curious formation to the south of the A303 near Winterbourne Stoke, close to Stonehenge and Amesbury in southern Wiltshire. Two small circles of 6 and 5.35m diameter accompanied a much bigger 21.4m diameter circle. The largest of the three discs held a most unusual ground lay: a small central circle was swirled, with four equidistant spokes emerging from the centre in radial fashion. These lines essentially divided the circle into quarters. The lay in the first quadrant passed from North to South, in the second from East to West, with the pattern being repeated in the final two sections. The new discovery would become known as the ‘swastika’ for its aesthetic allusion to the Sanskrit svastika.

Six days later, a replica of the ‘swastika’ was discovered a mile from the original. Bower and Chorley would lay claim to the first of the circles, even showing a diagram following their decision to unmask themselves in 1991. The makers of the replica have never, to the best of our knowledge, come forward to claim responsibility, though in a 1992 interview with Clas Svahn, Bower suggested the circle making group UBI were responsible. 

Whilst the ‘swastika’ would never become commonplace in future formations, its appearance was a first for unusual ground lay. Its unexpected form was a precursor for the major developments that would occur in 1990.