[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.