We launched Circle Makers Speak after our Instagram account Crop Circle Explorer ran a brief question and answer session with a human circle maker. In mid-2025 we decided to repeat the exercise and received more than 70 questions from curious readers. 

We have collated the best of these questions and reproduce them here, together with answers from a very real human circle maker. 

Due to the length of this piece we have decided to split it into a series. Here is the first installment:

How did you learn how to make crop circles and can anybody do it?

I learnt the basic theory of crop circle making from a book called The Field Guide, written by Rob Irving and John Lundberg. Both had a reputation for being excellent circle makers.

In the book, they explain how you can make a simple crop circle in the darkness using a surveyors tape, stomper (a wooden plank attached to a rope) and a metal barbecue skewer.

Whilst the practice was more difficult than I anticipated, I learnt enough from those early adventures to be of some use to the makers I subsequently linked up with.

Can anyone do it? Yes, provided you are mobile and able to find your way around a field at night. The main barriers to it aren’t really physical ones, they’re more related to the unsociable hours involved, the beginner’s worry of being caught, and the promise of getting soaked by the rain in some remote, isolated field. My advice is that if you want a go, try it and stick at it and you will eventually become competent.

What is the main reason you make crop circles?

My motivations today are very different to what they were when I first picked up a stomper. These days I most enjoy watching how my circles influence the people who find meaning in them.

I suppose that means all circle makers are in a weirdly influential position. We don’t want recognition and do our work in the dead of night in all weathers. That makes the appearance of a crop circle something genuinely mysterious. Who is going to go out and do something that crazy on a wet night? That mystery deepens if the circle is made in an area rich with its own mythology. Quite a few croppies will think the circle is linked to the existing folklore, right? They think there has to be a correlation.

I guess our influence may be subtle rather than overwhelming but, if you’ve ever recognised this as a maker, you will appreciate why you keep coming back for more. It’s nothing to do with ego, just the possibilities of shaping and creating folklore through a kind of social experiment.

​I don’t understand why humans need to make [crop circles]. Can you explain?

I think everyone has different motivations so it’s hard to pin down anything specific that’s common to all circle makers. But there is never a need to go into a field. It’s a choice and we all have our reasons for doing it. Some people genuinely see themselves as pictorial artists and want to see what they can create. I also think there’s ritualistic and counter-culture elements involved in the process too.

For me, beyond what I’ve already said in the previous question, circle making can be simple fun. I love being out in the darkness in the countryside, especially as it’s not something I do a lot, and every place has its own particular ambience. It isn’t always good. There’s one [specific location] I know that I sometimes pass in the daytime. It looks quite picturesque and welcoming, but at night it has a really peculiar feel. It makes you feel on edge.

I am showing my age here, but circle making can be like stepping into a corrupted Famous Five novel [a series of books written by children’s author Enid Blyton between the 1940s and 1960s]. You have mini adventures and get into some scrapes. Sometimes you think you’ve been spotted or something weird happens. But you make memories and you’re appreciating the simple things in life like owls, mist over the fields and the moonlight giving everything a surreal glow. It’s a romantic thing. That’s what really matters and it keeps me coming back.

Who are the greatest crop circle makers?

Not everyone will agree with me, but I choose Doug [Bower] and Dave [Chorley]. We wouldn’t have crop circles without them. I think it’s just as important that they kept the [joke] going for over a decade and fooled so many people who should have known better. It must have been quite a shock for them in 1990 when they saw the big pictogram in East Field [Alton Barnes, Wiltshire, 1990] as that was the day they were overtaken by people who could do bigger things.

I know some people will laugh at my answer and will mention names that are far more contemporary. Each and every one of them could still produce circles far more complicated and elaborate than anything Doug and Dave made. But that pair were the originals. We are doing this Q&A because of them.

Is there always a meaning behind the symbols [in crop circles]?

I can’t speak on behalf of anyone except myself here. I’ve always liked circle designs featuring motifs that look a little familiar but are hard to pin down. That ambiguity gives anyone looking at the circle a chance to interpret it however they want. I think it’s far more interesting than a pictorial reproduction of something easily identifiable. A good example here is the dragonfly crop circle. Don’t get me wrong, that circle [Yatesbury, Wiltshire, 2009] was an astonishing piece of work, but it didn’t make me look deeper into its meaning or the thought process behind it.

Thoughts on the Milk Hill crop circle of 2001?

It’s genuinely iconic but it came with a lot of controversy. I think Freddy Silva was the first researcher to question its origins but it has never publicly been claimed. And I know one team was naughty, putting the idea out there that they were responsible for it when they weren’t. On the other side of the fence you had another researcher [Charles Mallett] who said he was camping nearby and didn’t hear anything unusual. And you’ve got a lot of people who said it was too complicated and intricate to be man made.

Whatever way you look at it, that circle is hugely impressive given its size and the [409] circles it contained.

There are a few positioning errors with some of the smaller circles, but I had no idea they were there until I saw them pointed out online. It’s irrelevant really. The people who criticise couldn’t do any better themselves. Nobody said extraterrestrials are infallible.