What A Load Of Nonsense
Every now and again social media throws up a Walter Mitty type character, keen to tell us of their own or their friends’ circle making activities. Almost without exception they’re talking total bullshit.
Our latest member of the Mitty club is one Dave Townsend. Over on (Un)Official Crop Circles UK Group he writes:
Not mentioning any names, but a few years ago I used to know a very secretive little group of people that made crop circles in the south west of England, some very impressive, large and intricate ones sometimes too. Most were created in daylight as they were mainly made in quiet inaccessible areas to the public.
They would always ask the farmers permssion if they could do it first and most of the time the farmer would be OK with it and would sometimes charge a small ‘donation fee’ for access to his field for people to come and see it.
They always said that 95% of the artworks were man made but there were always those niggling few about, usually just regular circle formations, that even they couldn’t explain the origin of.
Now, let’s look at each piece in turn.
Not mentioning any names, but a few years ago I used to know a very secretive little group of people that made crop circles in the south west of England, some very impressive, large and intricate ones sometimes too.
Dave hasn’t mentioned any names because he doesn’t know them. He didn’t know any ‘secretive little group’ of circle makers at all. The Croppie is fully aware of pretty much everyone who has been operating in the fields since 2010ish. Oh, we count the ‘south west of England’ as being the ceremonial counties of Devon, Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire. It’s only the last three that regularly receive circles and, of these, there’s nothing secret about what has gone down in Somerest and Dorset in recent years.
Most were created in daylight as they were mainly made in quiet inaccessible areas to the public.
Crop circles are not created in daylight (with the exception of commissioned works) as nowhere is truly inaccessible. Drones, planes, helicopters; all of them allow observant spotters to see people in a field flattening plants. The skies of Wiltshire are not quiet places in the summer months. We’ve seen ourselves in the summer of 2024 that the pilots of small planes who spot a crop circle will circle back around for a closer look. We even witnessed an RAF Chinook helicopter hover close to the formation at Stoke Charity in Hampshire, an area with fewer circles than Wiltshire.
They would always ask the farmers permssion if they could do it first and most of the time the farmer would be OK with it and would sometimes charge a small ‘donation fee’ for access to his field for people to come and see it.
No, farmers are extremely unlikely to give permission for anything other than a commercial job in which they are compensated. We’re not going to cover old ground except to say it is worthwhile reading our piece on the myth of the complicit farmer.
They always said that 95% of the artworks were man made but there were always those niggling few about, usually just regular circle formations, that even they couldn’t explain the origin of.
So, after all of their stomping, Dave expects us to believe his circle making buddies couldn’t explain away the origins of simple circles? Like they couldn’t be created using exactly the same methodology? Doug Bower and David Chorley showed us exactly how to make simple crop circles as far back as 1991.
Now, to finish, let’s be fair to Dave. If (and that’s a very big ‘if’) he’s not making this nonsense up, he needs to think about who he is listening to. We’ve encountered all of the circle making canards in his post before. The nameless makers … the co-operative farmer … the ‘genuine’ simple circles … the inaccessible areas where the makers can work without interruption in the day. It’s a tale that fits too neatly into the narrative of too many other crop circle legends we’ve heard through the years.
