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NARRATOR: What force or unseen hand in the night
creates crop circles?
This Australian farmer is convinced
they're made by the UFOs he saw taking
off from these reed beds.
Can he be right?
Are fields of energy as yet unknown to science generated
within the crop circles?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
author of "2001" and inventor of the communications satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other worlds.
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There are fashions in mysteries,
as in everything else.
In the early 20th century, spiritualism was all the rage.
In the 1950s, there was a veritable plague
of flying saucers.
Then in the 1980s, reports of a strange new phenomenon
came flooding in from the English countryside.
Farmers are amazed and usually annoyed to discover
huge circles of flattened corn.
Each year more and more crop circles
are reported-- 20 in 1986, 300 in 1989, and twice as many
only a year later.
Crop circles are turning up all over the world, here
in the Far East in the paddy fields.
Soon, all the remaining crops are
in danger of being flattened, too, this time by investigators
and inquisitive tourists.
NARRATOR: From the controls of his plane,
Busty Taylor has harvested more crop circles than anyone alive.
Every day through the English summer,
he scans the broad acres for fresh formations.
Across the ancient chalk Downs of Wessex
and the fertile pastures of the Thames Valley,
he's logged and photographed each puzzling pictogram.
He's seen the whole range, from simple rings
to ever more intricate designs.
And he's garnered all the explanations,
from mating hedgehogs to aerobatic helicopters,
from extraterrestrial parking lots
to unknown forces of the Earth and wind.
He's seen symbolism in King Arthur's West Country,
mathematics wrangled in the Cambridge corn, and even humor
to celebrate a cycle race.
This man, George Pedley.
Has been haunted for nearly 30 years
by something that he saw here.
It happened deep in these isolated reed beds in
Australia's tropical northeast.
George believes he had a fleeting glimpse
of a UFO taking off.
The reed beds rang with an unearthly sound.
The experience left a mark on him and on the landscape.
At first, he thought the hissing sound
was coming from his tractor.
I remember standing over at the other side of the tractor
looking in and trying to convince
myself that I didn't see it.
But it looked like a flying saucer out there.
Couldn't see it for very long.
And it just disappeared.
NARRATOR: Moments later, a mat of reeds several feet
thick shot to the surface of the lagoon.
It looked like a gigantic nest.
The reeds were flattened into a clockwise swirl 30 feet across.
George called in his neighbor.
Albert Pennisi grows sugar cane on this land.
He, too, was amazed by the circle,
especially its strength.
It was two feet thick and easily supported his weight.
I think it could hold at least 10 or 12 men.
It's George and I discussing the reeds
and how they were turned into a pontoon.
They were very thick in the root.
You couldn't walk through them, anyway.
NARRATOR: To this day, both George and Albert
remain convinced that extraterrestrials
visited Tully and left the evidence in the reeds.
But George saw a UFO take off from the lagoon,
so I suspected it was a UFO that made the circles.
And then you'd hear people saying,
well, could be caused by a helicopter
upside down, spoonbills tramping around and making a circle,
or alligators mating, grabbing each others' tails
and swinging around.
Some of the questions that were put to me. [LAUGHS]
Every day of every summer, the circles
are sought out by those who believe that the rings have
special powers.
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NARRATOR: They come from around the world
to the fields of Britain, as though drawn by a magnetism
they can't resist-- dowsers, lei liners, communers with nature,
all seeking forces they believe emanate
from the depths of the Earth.
Three, four, five, six.
And that brings us to seven.
Seven.
And strangely, all the spirals and all of the circles
all have seven coils.
And I'm very steady, using my hands as senses or [INAUDIBLE].
And I feel a tremendous tingle there,
but it wasn't anymore going on.
Yes, they're tingling like mad there.
I think well stop there [INAUDIBLE].
And those-- that one just shakes them off,
because those energies are very, very strong
and really quite uncomfortable.
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OK, Lynn, your aura should have expanded by now.
So we'll just see how far it's expanded.
There we are.
That's different.
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NARRATOR: In the 1930s, a teenage girl
was missing her lessons.
Kath Skin had been kept off school
that summer with scarlet fever.
One afternoon, she walked out into this field.
She sat for a moment under the hedge.
That day, too, was thundery.
Kath Skin only revealed what she had
seen when crop circles began appearing by the dozen
half a century later.
It was a lovely, hot, sultry day and a sort of day
like this today, as if there's a storm coming.
But in front of me, there was this great big field of wheat.
I was chewing a bit of weight, just as I am now.
And all of a sudden, I saw a blessed gray whirlwind right
in the middle of the field.
And it was throwing up stuff about 30, 40 feet up.
And all of a sudden, it dissipated and all the stuff
fell down to the ground.
And I was fascinated by this.
And it was amazing.
There was a [INAUDIBLE] great circle of flattened-down corn.
And I had sandals on, so I felt that the corn
was ever so hot to my feet.
And all around, you know how you have a pack of cards,
and they all fall against each other?
Well, the corn was like that in a clockwise direction.
And all the ears of corn were sort of
intertwined all the way around by the lovely sort
of periphery.
It could only be very strong pressure
to press the corn down so hard onto the ground
and in that particular pattern.
It was all the letters in the paper
about these marvelous circles appearing all over the country,
and some were obviously man-made.
And it's when they started off about aliens
that I got annoyed, because I thought, well, I've seen
the blooming thing made, so I know it's nothing to do
with aliens and foreigners.
It would be interesting to know how they are formed, what makes
it, whether it's an electric current, whether it's something
actually in the ground that performs differently according
to weather conditions.
I don't know.
But if you find out, you let me know.
This lady's story is especially valuable.
It's one of only a handful of eyewitness accounts
counts dating from before the 1980s.
The earliest studies of such basic crop circles
were made by meteorologists.
They had no reason to suspect hoaxes
and wondered if the phenomenon was caused by whirlwinds.
NARRATOR: Dr. Terence Meaden investigates
usual weather phenomena.
His reports come from people like farmer Tom Gwinnett.
Tom says he, too, has seen a crop circle forming,
but his experience was accompanied by eerie effects.
His car cut out.
There was a humming sound.
And he saw sparks dancing in the air.
As I come back up the road, the headlights
in the car and the ignition had been cut out.
So I heard this humming sound coming from beside the road
in one of our fields.
And I just couldn't make out what it was.
So I walked out and had a look, and it was only very low
humming, like a Singer Sewing machine at a distance,
more or less, you know.
And it was here.
There was like occasional small, red sparks,
not-- just in the dim light you would see these sparks.
Well, the next morning, I went round,
and I stopped at the gate.
And there was a perfect circle in the field, corn circle.
She was about 10 foot across.
That was that.
NARRATOR: For the meteorologist Terence Meaden,
Tom Gwinnett's experience was the evidence
he'd been looking for.
Dr. Meaden believes that a rare combination of temperature
and landscape can set up a very localized whirlwind or vortex,
which spins till it drops, leaving
a circle of flattened corn.
This is quite a perfect situation
for circle formation in the sense
that I predicted that they could happen.
That is to say, there is a hill of some importance, just there
to the west.
And the conditions being quiet that night,
I'm sure that the hill itself provided the obstacle
that made a lee vortex.
I was very pleased to have Tom's telephone call telling
me about his observations.
Very few people have been fortunate enough to see this.
And Tom is such a credible witness.
He's a good countryman, a good observer,
and has no reason to court publicity at all.
My theory does very well for the ordinary crop circles.
Indeed, there is no competitor at all.
No one else has come along with any other suggestions at all.
If my theory is not right, what's it gonna be?
Is it going to be the fairies?
NARRATOR: Within the site of York's ancient Minster,
agronomist Dr. John Graham has been
called in to give his verdict on the latest crop circle.
He's an expert on how cereal stalks bend and break.
And he's travelled the length of Britain investigating
the natural, the unnatural, and what some would
claim is the supernatural.
Having had a look at everything around me here, looking
at the nature of the damage to the plants in this circle,
which is only a very approximate circle,
and considering that we're on a very visible site
next to a major main road-- we're about half a mile away
from an agricultural college-- I think
it's fairly likely that we've got a fairly routine hoax here.
One of the things that I do look at, though, when I'm looking
at the circle to see what I think is being going on
is to actually look at the precise nature of damage
to the plants.
And if we actually look at a plant from this circle here,
you can see that the damage to it
has occurred in the form of a very precise kink
down at the base of the plant.
That's usually indicative that a fairly major force has
being applied to the plant, and it's
collapsed under the weight.
And that would typically be occurred by somebody
making a circle artificially.
It's possible that this could have occurred naturally,
but according to the wind tunnel tests which I've done,
you would need a wind speed in excess of 150 miles an hour
to cause this damage.
And in a normal English summer, that doesn't normally occur.
If this damage had taken place naturally,
I think we'd see something looking much more like this
down here, where the plants have actually bent right
over in the soil, and there is no actual mechanical damage
to the plants themselves.
That would indicate to me a far greater likelihood
of a natural occurrence, whereas something like this
is almost certainly as a result of a mechanical force
applied by human agents.
I think the more important factor
is, what force is actually being applied to the plants
in the first place?
We've already talked about hoaxes, and the hand of mankind
seems to rear itself very, very frequently.
DOUG BOWER: Just to prove to you, Eileen,
this is what we use to get up to at night.
Now, I'm going in here.
I'm going to start making a circle for you.
MRS. BOWER: All right.
I'll be interested.
DOUG BOWER: I'm sure you will.
So we just lay the stick down there like that.
Look.
NARRATOR: Artist Doug Bower claims
he was behind the first hoaxed crop circles in Britain.
Unknown to his wife, he and a friend
decided to try to fool people that UFOs were landing.
All they needed to flatten the corn was a plank and a rope.
To begin with, their designs were simple.
But they soon progressed to ever more complicated patterns.
Well, this was the most difficult part of all,
when we decided to do these designs,
was how to create a completely straight line in the dark
across a cornfield.
It was no good following the tram lines, because they would
say that human beings were doing it,
and we didn't want them to believe that.
So I punched a hole in this baseball cap, threaded
some wire through it and this little ring
that you can see here.
And you walk into the field and against the evening sky, which
is then not quite dark in the summertime,
you can get a silhouette of a tree on the horizon,
or perhaps the farmer's cottage.
He might be in bed with the lights still on.
And you could center this through this ring,
walk straight towards it, and lo and behold,
you've got the lovely straight line that you could wish for.
And then, of course, as the foot marks were placed into the corn
in the straight line, we would come behind it and thread it
down four feet wide.
So all our corridors were created in that way.
Well, the so-called die-hards, the so-called professionals,
wouldn't believe our story at all.
Now do you believe me, Eileen?
MRS. BOWER: Oh, yes.
Look how it's growing.
MRS. BOWER: Yes, it is increasing by eight foot
every time you go around. -Yes.
So I wasn't up to anything at night, as you see, only this.
MRS. BOWER: Well, you were, what you're doing now.
NARRATOR: No one suspected hoaxes when more than 90
circles appeared in Wales.
The mountainsides were too inaccessible.
The lines of rings stretched for hundreds of meters.
But when excited researches contacted the landowner
about the phenomenon, Sir Andrew Duff Gordon
had disappointing news.
Well, they were very disappointed when I told
them that they were man-made.
And I told them the reasons why we'd
done it, which is because we have
such very wet springs in Wales.
We couldn't burn the heather that year,
and so we decided to try an experiment
and cut some circles on the hill.
Well, the young grass need young heater
to feed on when they're very small,
and if you can't burn the heather, which is obviously
the best way of doing it, you have to cut the heather
to hope to regenerate the young heather coming up,
which is much more palatable to the small grass.
I did think it was very funny, considering
I made the marks for Sir Andrew, you
know, cut them for his grass.
I did think it was very funny then.
But with everybody was saying, you
know, oh, it was UFOs and all those sorts of things,
like you know, it was quite different.
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NARRATOR: Many crop circle groups believe that there
are still mysteries to solve.
These investigators hope to discover whether grain gleaned
from the flattened wheat has in some way
acquired special properties.
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How much did you say we needed, Sheila?
Eight ounces.
The ultimate test is to bake bread from these ears
and compare it with loaves made from corn
conventionally harvested from outside the circle.
To carry out the experiment, they've
turned to the British baking industry's
own research laboratories on the outskirts of London.
Whatever its hidden properties, the grain
must be turned into bread by conventional methods.
Each loaf is baked to the same recipe
to ensure the test is fair.
Two of the harvesters have come to take part in the experiment.
I have a background in science, and I've always been
interested in food chemistry.
So I'm rather interested to see whether whatever force
created crop circles has, in fact,
altered anything in the wheat.
Well, they smell good, and they look normal.
They look normal, yes.
This is standard commercial-type bread now.
NARRATOR: They're comparing the taste of three loaves, one
commercially produced, one from outside the circle,
and the other from right in the middle.
So make sure you're tasting the crumb, not just--
This is outside the crop circle?
That's outside the crop circle.
Is that inside the crop circle?
Mm.
Yes.
Quite different.
I wouldn't recommend this.
NARRATOR: The bread from inside the crop circle
proves to be far from magic.
It has none of the qualities of a good English loaf
in texture, and especially in taste.
You find a different taste, then?
Yeah.
It is. there's a musty aftertaste.
Musty aftertaste, yeah.
And there's a real bite to the tongue.
I don't even think you could even feed the ducks with this.
I believe that crop circles began
as a rare and little-understood natural phenomenon,
which was then adopted by mystics and hoaxers.
But as much more complicated designs appeared,
I began to joke that they were hoaxes
made by feeble-minded extraterrestrials.
Well, there are still a couple of questions left unanswered.
How did the hoaxers get away with it?
And why aren't hospitals overflowing with them,
peppered with buckshot by angry farmers?
NARRATOR: But nothing will put off
the truly committed hoaxers.
Strangely, they, too, feel the circles
have life-enhancing powers.
But they're certain these come not from other worlds,
not from paranormal forces, but from long nights
drawing their vast pictures on the sleeping fields of England.
Oh, there's just such a thrill out of it,
to see people's face the next day when they can sort of view
these formations, being able to sort of enter them, the dowsing
and getting healed and all these sort of fantastic things
like that, when I knew that I was there last night
and there was calm.
And you're in a totally different world.
It's so peaceful out there.
And the shapes that you're sort of creating,
they sort of come from within.
It's a good feeling.
And it's such a challenge to be able to dream up
of these complicated designs and then to see them on paper,
all nicely drawn to scale.
Then that's the challenge, to get it in the field
exactly right.
And I get a good buzz out of it.
Well, I'm quite impressed by the interest
that my circles and other, well, possibly human-made circles
cause.
Now the experts go around and they
have their fancy techniques.
A lot of the times, I can end up fooling them
into believing that they are actually genuine formations,
even though on a couple of occasions
I've told them a couple of days afterwards
that I actually made it.
And I offered them a few ideas as to how I'd done it.
And even putting measurements down and drawing
diagrams for them.
They won't believe it.
Well, I was so amazed at the aerial photographs.
They look totally different from what I'm viewing on the ground.
And to see them, they really are beautiful.
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