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How the hell is no one talking about the fact that the CIA basically released the real-life version of The X-Files back in January 2021? I don’t know if it’s because everyone’s awaiting Adele’s new album, because they’re anticipating the next dumb thing Trump is going to say, or because they’re busy worrying that a new variant of COVID-19 will send us all back into quarantine, but the United States government literally just provided us with pretty convincing evidence that aliens exist.
Just think about that for a second. Now, if you have a healthy skepticism towards the United States government (which I would say is completely warranted based on their track record), maybe you think that these documents, collectively known as the “Black Vault,” are just another hoax. However, accounts of UFO sightings have been popping up for a long time, and so it’s worth considering whether they have any possible validity.
One of the oldest ways that extraterrestrials have supposedly interacted with humans is through their alien art. I’m talking about crop circles. While certain instances of crop circle appearances have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be hoaxes carried out by humans, other instances remain inexplicable and may, in fact, be actual works of alien art.
They certainly have a nice aesthetic to them; their geometric, fractal patterns make them quite nice on the eyes, which is probably why there has been such a rise in the popularity of crop circle tattoos. The method by which crop circles are created is still largely unknown (if they are actually created by creatures from another planet). Do they come down to Earth and burn the patterns into cornfields with laser beams? Or can they create these works of alien art from their home planets, sending some sort of beam across the cosmos to form these patterns?
Let’s shift the focus back to UFOs and aliens for this article (and away from Adele’s album and COVID-19) because, in case you forgot, the evidence for aliens being real just got a whole lot stronger. And, if you believe that there is extraterrestrial life out there, it may be time to start looking back at those crop circles and start considering what they might mean. Let’s check out the history of this alien art form and see if we can shed some light on the mystery of crop circles.
The First Crop Circles
Many crop circle enthusiasts have claimed that crop circles have been appearing throughout the world for centuries. Oftentimes, they cite a woodcutting from 1678 titled “The Mowing-Devil” as the first-known account of a crop circle citing. The woodcutting shows a figure in an oat field cutting the stalks to form a circular pattern.
At first glance, the woodcutting looks very similar to many of the crop circles that have appeared across the globe since (if perhaps a bit more rudimentary). However, with a little investigation into the origin of this woodcutting, we can say with relative certainty that this is not a depiction of a crop circle.
“The Mowing-Devil” is a depiction of a legend from the English countryside. According to the story, a farmer was feuding with one of his workers and told the worker that he’d rather pay the Devil himself. As a result, the Devil then actually appeared to cut the man’s oat field. The figure in this woodcutting is not an alien, but rather Satan. And the circular design is probably just meant to show that, if you hire Satan, he’s not going to cut your field the right way.
Apart from this woodcutting, one of the earliest accounts of crop circles is the Tully, Australia crop circle from 1966. According to news reports, a farmer by the name of George Pedley was driving his tractor past a lagoon on his property in Tully, Queensland, Australia when he heard a loud hissing noise. Then, he saw a large flying saucer emerge from the reeds and fly off into the sky. Apparently, the flying saucer left a nest-like mark in the lagoon and caused many of the reeds to fuse together, probably with the heat of the flying saucer’s engine.
The story of George Pedley and the Tully crop circle sparked hot debate. Meteorologists tried to explain the phenomenon by saying that it was created by some sort of whirlwind, but this was never confirmed. After the story of the Tully crop circle made its way around the world, people across the globe started reporting crop circles of their own, many of them fake. In fact, two artists, Doug Bower and David Chorley, have admitted to faking hundreds of crop circles. \
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Crop Circles Evolve
While the Tully crop circle was more of a simple circle (and not what we’d really associate with a crop circle in modern times), the real works of alien art began appearing in the 1970s, particularly around England. This phenomenon came to a boil in the 1980s and 1990s when crop circles started getting increasingly more frequent and far more complicated, some of them even depicting complex mathematical equations.
In 1996, a crop circle was discovered across a highway from the already-mysterious English landmark Stonehenge. As if its proximity to Stonehenge wasn’t enough to make this crop circle one of the most intriguing ever, this piece of alien art also displays what’s known as the “Julia Set,” a complex fractal pattern.
Before this particular crop circle, people often tried to claim that strange weather patterns were the source of crop circles; however, this one was undeniably created by an intelligent being. The biggest question was whether that intelligent being was a native of Earth or some other planet.
To make things even stranger, this Julia Set, apparently, appeared out of nowhere in less than an hour during the daytime. If this claim was true, obviously, it would have been impossible for a human being to accomplish such a complex pattern in such a short span of time. For some time, the Stonehenge crop circle served as definitive evidence of alien life for many people.
This is, however, until three hoaxers revealed that they created the crop circle early in the morning that it had been discovered. Still, similarly complex crop circles have appeared around the world and have still never been explained.
Explanations for Crop Circles
There have been a myriad of explanations for crop circles offered up since the 1970s. One particularly popular explanation that emerged in the 1980s was that this so-called “alien art” was actually caused by the sexual patterns of hedgehogs. Other, more rational people claimed that these crop circle patterns may have been caused by invisible energy fields acting on these fields. Still, there were others that claimed that crop circles were simply the result of odd weather patterns.
Some have claimed that crop circles are not alien art whatsoever, but actually the creations of human beings from the future. Yes, some believe that crop circles are messages from the human race of the future or, possibly, ways for people from the future to navigate the past. Whether this explanation is more or less far-fetched than the alien explanation is hard to say.
While it pains me to say this (as I would consider myself part of the “I want to believe” sector of the population), most crop circles have been proven to be hoaxes carried out by humans. Still, there is a small percentage of crop circles that still lack any solid explanation.
While there’s no way to reliably distinguish real crop circles from fake ones, I think that the recent CIA release makes the case that there are real crop circles out there just a little bit stronger. Am I saying that extraterrestrial beings have definitely left their alien art in the cornfields of Earth? Not necessarily. I’m just saying that it’s better to keep your mind open to the possibilities.
