How large are crop circles?
Size can vary from circles of just a foot or so across (‘grapeshot’), to designs covering many hundreds of feet. A Brief History of Crop Circles When two retired English pranksters, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, claimed in 1991 to have invented the crop circle phenomenon as a joke a decade or so earlier, they couldn’t have been aware that almost 300 documented formations predated their alleged exploits. Reports go back centuries and a seventeenth century illustration even shows the figure of the Devil creating what certainly looks like the type of marking in fields which began to attract serious attention from the 1980s onwards. Swirled into growing crops, these circular indentations of carefully flattened stems looked at first like the result of freak whirlwinds. Some were a few feet across, but others were the size of tennis courts. It wasn’t long before the appearance of symmetrical patterns and other unusual variations began to throw the weather theories into doubt. By the late 1980
