Crop circles - genuine or hoax?

[Croppie_Ray]

Right, I will start the thread this forum has been avoiding. Crop circles. We are the world capital of them, the fields under Milk Hill and around Alton Barnes get the best formations on Earth every summer, and yet half of you will not discuss them seriously. So let me put the honest case. Yes, some are hoaxed, demonstrably; the night-stompers with planks and garden rollers are real and I have met them. But I have stood in formations laid down overnight that are a quarter mile across, mathematically precise, the crop swirled and layered in ways a plank does not do, the stems bent and not broken, sometimes with the nodes blown as if from inside. Explain those to me. I am not saying aliens. I am saying I have done this twenty years and there is a residue I cannot account for, and the laughing does not make it go away.

More here - Crop Circle Connector https://www.cropcircleconnector.com/interface2005.htm

[Devizes_Mech]

its blokes with planks ray. all of it. the precise ones just means theyre good at it and theyve had the practice, theres basically competitions. you want it to be a mystery so you see a mystery. ive watched a team do one in a night with string and a board, takes hours and a plan but thats all it is. bent not broken is just the crop being green and springy. no offence but twenty years and youve never once caught the actual cause, because the actual cause is blokes you arent looking at because theyre not interesting enough.

[Croppie_Ray]

None taken, Mark, you have been making that argument as long as I have been making mine, and I respect it. I have watched teams make them too, that is the thing. I know exactly what a made one looks like, how long it takes and what it leaves. That is precisely why the others trouble me. I am not comparing a formation to a photo in a book; I am comparing it to ones I have watched being built. Some match. Some do not, and the ones that do not are the ones laid in the small hours, in a single short window, over ground with no tramlines in and no flattened path leading out. I cannot make one of those, and nor can the teams I know. That is all. Just that.

[Marlborough_Skies]

For what it is worth from the dull empirical corner: I am up on the downs at night more than most, with the telescope, and I have twice seen the small lights people associate with the formations. Low, orange-white, moving over a field without sound and then simply not there. I logged them as aircraft or lanterns, because that is what a sensible man logs them as. But I will say only that I logged them, that the formation was there in that field the next morning, and that I have not got a tidy account of the gap between those two facts. I keep an open notebook and a closed mouth, mostly.