Mythic Writers Blog

Every once in a while, crop circles catch my attention. I guess I’m in a crop circle phase again right now, because I keep finding myself looking at pictures of them, reading articles…Maybe I need to write a crop circle story.

I was thinking that crop circles are rather a modern phenomenon and not particularly mythic. But they have so much speculation swirling around them (my favorite, mentioned on the Crop Circle Secrets website: “sex-mad hedgehogs”). I think that, even though we know at least some circles are manmade, they still fall into the “myth” category. Yes, there have been confessions from hoaxsters admitting to making some circles (this Wiki article has good info and links). But some of the circles I’ve looked at are mind blowing, and it’s hard to imagine how any people could create them in just one night.

Of course, lots of people have put forth explanations and many have even tried to replicate crop circles. Some students from M.I.T. did a really interesting experiment a few years ago complete with trying to duplicate some of the supposed mysterious phenomena associated with “real” crop circles. The video is worth watching; it was shown on the Discovery Channel so shouldn’t be too hard to find. It’s also interesting how different people, including the students themselves after the fact, seem to see different results from the experiment. The students seemed to feel in the video that they had found some interesting results, but in the article I just linked to, they seem to think of the whole thing as a joke, nothing more than a “hack.” On the other end of things this writer seems to feel that, based on the same video, that hoaxers couldn’t be making all the crop circles being discovered around the globe.

Anyhow…are crop circles mysterious and supernatural? Maybe. Are they manmade? Some are. Why are they fascinating? For the same reason any myth captures our attention—there’s no absolute way to tell truth from fantasy, speculation, and embellished reality.

One of the most intriguing things I’ve discovered as I’ve been researching crop circles for this post is that they aren’t actually just a modern phenomenon like I thought they were. If you start digging, you’ll find that there have been references as far back as 815 AD from Lyon (you can find a quote here, near the bottom of the page, from the original source). And there’s a famous woodcut from around 1647 in England that shows the “mowing devil.” I have to conclude that the late 20^th century self-confessed pranksters did not create these early circles. So what did?

I don’t know. And none of the arguments I’ve heard, either for or against crop circles being hoaxes, has been completely convincing. Any show I’ve watched or article I’ve read has been heavy with the biases of the authors or participants. I’m not sure there is one answer on this subject, but isn’t that the best part about myths? The impossibility of either proving them or completely discounting them? That’s what makes crop circles worth returning to, mulling over, perhaps even mythologizing. And definitely worth writing about.