Q: I understand that an early crop circle seems to be depicted in a famous seventeenth-century woodcut. What can you tell me about that?
—C. Blennerhassett
A: Crop circles first appeared in the English countryside about fifty years ago. The designs—simple circles at first that grew in size and complexity over time—were mostly formed in wheat or barley, less commonly in oats or rapeseed. The distinctive patterns of flattened stalks rarely appear in other crops such as corn, cotton, vegetables, rice, and legumes; wheat and barley happen to be the types of plants that “lay down” the best when trampled, making them a natural choice for hoaxers.
Many people believe that crop circles have been reported for centuries, a claim repeated in countless books and websites devoted to the mystery. Their primary evidence is a woodcut from 1678 that appears to show a field of oat stalks laid out in a circle by a mysterious figure (see Figure 1).
The image is cited as evidence of early crop circles
by some of the most respected and prominent crop
circle researchers. Lucy Pringle, in her book
Crop Circles: The Greatest Mystery of Modern
Times, writes that “One very common misperception
is that crop circles are a recent phenomenon. … The
earliest representation of a crop circle occurs in a
woodcut of 1687, which depicts the famous ‘Mowing
Devil’” (Pringle 1999, xii). In
Crop Circles: Signs of Contact, Colin
Andrews mentions it as “reference to an event that
many of us today might describe as an account of the
formation of a crop circle” (Andrews 2003). In a more
empirical realm, physicist Richard Taylor, in an
August 2011 article for Physics World, wrote
that “the woodcut print … indicates that the stalks
within the circle were flattened rather than broken—a
practice that continues today” (Taylor 2011,
27).
Paranormal proponents struggle with the incontrovertible dearth of hard evidence for their claims and often are at pains to explain why there’s so little historical record of apparently modern mysteries. This often occurs in the context of cryptozoology, for example, when indigenous myths and legends of spirits and figures are retroactively claimed to represent early sightings of particular mysterious creatures. In the pages of this magazine, I’ve written about examples, including the lake monster in British Columbia (see “Ogopogo the Chameleon,” January/February 2006) and the Puerto Rican vampire el chupacabra (see “Mistaken Memories of Vampires: Pseudohistories of the Chupacabra,” January/February 2016).
Researchers must be careful about accepting native stories and legends as true accounts of actual creatures. Just because a given culture has a name for, tells stories about, or depicts a strange or mysterious beast—be it Sasquatch or Ogopogo, dragon or leprechaun—doesn’t necessarily mean that those references were meant to reflect reality. In Lake Monster Mysteries, which I coauthored with Joe Nickell, I refer to this as the Bangles Fallacy, after the 1980s rock group that hit the charts with “Walk Like an Egyptian.” The song playfully assumes that Egyptians walked as depicted in ancient artwork.1
Artwork was of course one of the first mediums in which legends and stories were told throughout history, especially in preliterate ages. A sensational or intriguing image would anchor storytellers and their audiences, as well as help standardize the stories. This is especially true of religious morality tales intended to convey important lessons to the faithful about proper conduct. The innumerable artistic images of biblical miracles, for example, may be beautifully rendered but are not accurate depictions of historical events and aren’t claimed to be (outside of strict Bible literalist circles).
As Michael Goss notes in the journal Folklore, “The contents of ‘The Mowing Devil’ seem to prove the rule that there is no new anomaly under the sun and that, given time, some industrious researcher is bound to turn up a historical precedent” for a recent phenomenon (Goss 1992, 190). Indeed, researchers John Michell and Bob Rickard note that when the woodcut was “rediscovered in 1989, the story was claimed as an early record of the crop circle phenomenon” (Michell and Rickard 2000, 188).
Thus the “crop circle” image must be interpreted with caution, through folkloric and historical perspectives. Though the woodcut is often presented out of its original context, we can locate the story it illustrates in an August 22, 1678, pamphlet (see Figure 2). The woodcut actually illustrates what in folklore is called a “mowing devil” legend, in which an English farmer told a worker with whom he was feuding that he “would rather pay the Devil himself” to cut his oat field than pay the fee demanded.
The story, titled “The Mowing-Devil: Or Strange NEWS
out of Hertfordshire,” begins with a tantalizing
teaser summary that would not have been out of place
on the cover of National Enquirer some three
centuries later:
Being a True Relation of a Farmer who, bargaining with a Poor Mower about the cutting down Three Half Acres of oats; upon the Mower’s asking too much, the Farmer swore that the Devil should mow it rather than he. And so it fell out that very Night the Crop of Oats showed as if it had been all of a Flame, but next Morning appeared so neatly mow’d by the Devil, or some Infernal Spirit, that no Mortal Man was able to do the like … But not to keep the curious Reader any longer in suspense, the inquisitive Farmer no sooner arrived at the place where his Oats grew but to his admiration he found the Crop was cut down already to his hands; and as if the Devil had a mind to show his dexterity in the art of Husbandry and scorn to mow them after the general manner, he cut them in round circles and placed every straw with that exactness that it would have taken above an Age for any Man to perform what he did that one night; and the man that owns them is yet afraid to remove them. (Quoted in Newman 1945)
Thus, a close reading reveals that the connection to crop circles is tenuous at best. Not only do we have the original account stating twice, explicitly, that the crop was cut rather than laid down, but indeed the woodcut itself clearly shows a dark horned figure with a scythe—which cannot “lay down” stalks but can only cut them. Unlike in crop circles, the source of the harvesting is neither unknown nor mysterious—it is Satan himself, complete with signature horns and a tail.
To his credit, Colin Andrews eventually grudgingly acknowledges that the famous “crop circle” woodcut almost certainly has nothing to do with crop circles and that legends such as these “can be dismissed as pure fiction, although one could see the medieval mind interpreting natural phenomena as paranormal occurrences” (Andrews 2003, 39). Countless crop circle and paranormal enthusiasts, however, still refer to this as proof of centuries-old formations.
In fact, the first real crop circles didn’t appear until the 1970s, when simple circles began appearing in the English countryside, made by two men (Doug Bower and Dave Chorley) who created them as a hoax to make people think UFOs had landed. They were inspired by a widely reported 1966 incident in Tully, Australia, in which flattened grass was assumed to be related to a UFO sighting. The pair inspired countless copycats, with the number and complexity of the circles increasing dramatically, reaching a peak in the 1980s and 1990s. There are many theories about crop circle origins, but the only proven cause—and also the most parsimonious explanation—is artistic, mischievous humans. There’s no need to give the Devil more than his due.
Note
- This error occurs in many other fields as well, such as pseudohistorians mistaking depictions in ancient Mesoamerican and Egyptian engravings and art for spaceships and so on. For more, see Kenneth Feder’s Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology, as well as Philip Senter’s article “Dragon Hoaxes: Piltdown Men of Creationism,” SI, May/June 2019; Scott Burnett’s article “A Stegosaur Carving on the Ruins of Ta Prohm? Think Again,” July/August 2019; and Massimo Polidoro’s columns “The Lure of Mysterious Paintings,” May/June and July/August 2014.
References
- Andrews, Colin. 2003. Crop Circles: Signs of Contact. Franklin Lakes, New Jersey: New Page.
- Goss, Michael. 1992. Alien big cat sightings in Britain: A possible rumour legend? Folklore 103(2).
- Michell, John, and Bob Rickard. 2000. Unexplained Phenomenon: A Rough Guide Special. London: Rough Guides.
- Newman, L.F. 1945. Some notes on the folklore of Cambridgeshire and the Eastern Counties. Folklore 56(3): 287–293.
- Pringle, Lucy. 1999. Crop Circles: The Greatest Mystery of Modern Times. London: Thorsons.
- Taylor, Richard. 2011. Coming soon to a field near you. Physics World (August 4).