Folk Horror MagpieJust a crop circle appreciation post to mark the season. July is boom time for crop circles, for obvious reasons (just like us, aliens prefer to go camping during warm weather)
Reports of crop circles pretty much originate in the 1980s, not long after the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But a curious precedent may come from as far back as 1678, with the printing of the English woodcut pamphlet The Mowing-Devil: or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire.
The tract concerns a farmer who was too cheap to pay a labourer to mow his field and in anger invoked the devil instead. That night the field could be seen aflame for miles around and in the morning the crops were neatly harvested ‘that no mortal man was able to do the like.’
Though more than half of crop circles have been discovered within twenty miles of Stonehenge and Avebury, the phenomena has been reported in locations as far apart as Russia, Canada and Japan.
Cyclonic air currents, ball lightning, meteors, fairies, wallabies high on opium poppies and running in circles, magnets, and the goddess Gaia enraged by climate inaction have all been put forward as their creator.
When in 1991 one of their circles was described as impossible to have been made by human hands, hoaxers Doug Bower and Dave Chorley came forward to claim their work, alleging that it was they who created the earliest crop circles that started the trend.
To prove their case Bower and Chorley produced an intricate geometric design using ropes and planks of wood that a leading ‘cereologist’ (an advocate of paranormal explanations of crop circles) declared was extraterrestrial in origin.
In recent years the number of crop circles springing up overnight has waned. The majority we see today are the result of marketing and promotional activities, with beer companies, Hello Kitty, and the 2012 London Olympics being recent examples.
#folkhorror #folkhorrormagpie #cropcircle #wheatfield #beltane #harvest #midsummer #wickerman
