[music playing] NARRATOR: Winchester,
England, April 24, 2022-- a mysterious formation emerges
in a field of mustard plants. The perfectly symmetrical
design is a phenomenon known as a crop circle. And it is just one of
many strange patterns that appear in the English
countryside, every year. MARK OLLY: Crop
circles are basically features, designs, illustrations
of high complexity in crops. They tend to be complicated
designs of unknown origin. RICHARD TAYLOR: In terms
of the patterns themselves, they've been undergoing
this amazing sort of ramp up in sophistication. You can find these huge what
they call pictographs that span hundreds of feet
across a whole field and feature multiple components. And they're arranged with
mathematical precision. Crop circles appear in
more than 50 countries. And there literally have
been thousands of them-- maybe over 10,000 crop
circles that we're aware of in the modern era. NARRATOR: Today,
thousands of people visit these formations,
including researchers who take measurements
of the patterns, collect stalks and soil samples,
and record aerial images for further study. Documentation of these
mysterious impressions may also include
eyewitness accounts of strange lights and objects
seen around the same time a crop circle appears. Such accounts have been widely
reported since the mid-1960s. The first modern example of
the discovery of a crop circle actually being made
was by George Pedley, in 1966, in Australia. What George Pedley saw was an
object rising out of a lagoon. And then the object-- he couldn't tell
how they did it. The object actually
made a pattern in the foliage in the
lagoon-- a geometric pattern from that object. WILLIAM HENRY: He
finds a circular area where the grass and the swamp
or the reeds are matted down. This is reported in
the Australian press. And they start labeling
these UFO nests or flying saucer nests. NARRATOR: While crop circles
have been documented for more than 60 years, there is
evidence that these mysterious formations have been
appearing in farmer's fields for centuries. Hertfordshire, England,
1678-- a woodcut pamphlet called "The Mowing
Devil" is published, that portrays a
devilish figure creating a circle in a field of oats. ANDREW COLLINS: It
refers to a supposedly true story of a farmer that
saw these mysterious lights in a field. And the next morning,
when he went out there, he found these circular
depressions in his land, you know, actually
within the crop. RICHARD TAYLOR: The
stalks weren't broken, but they were folded over. And people even started
to blame the devil-- what was called the mowing devil. NARRATOR: While the mowing
devil woodcut attributed the mysterious crop
formation to an evil entity, 200 years later, English
scientist John Capron applied his scientific analysis
to what he witnessed in 1880, when he proposed that a
cyclonic wind of unknown origin created perfectly circular
patches of flattened crops. Capron might be
the first person to connect crop circles to what
we today call UAPs or UFOs, because he's describing some
kind of a whirlwind that is coming out of the
sky and is having this effect on the ground. It's creating what we
call a crop circle. NARRATOR: Ancient
astronaut theorists suggest that these incidents,
along with modern crop circle accounts, provide evidence
that these strange formations may be connected to visitations
by otherworldly beings. The eyewitnesses
who have reported seeing crop circles
manifest have described some extraordinary phenomena. They described tubes of lights,
swirling beams of light. Very famously,
back in the 1990s, there was balls of light
flying across the field that were actually seen to
lay the crops flat. And within a space of
only a couple of minutes, they were filmed actually
producing one of those designs. NARRATOR: Many researchers
suggest there are now enough reports of unusual
activity around crop circles to disprove a highly
publicized claim, made over 30 years ago, that
all such formations are manmade.
