BY JOE NICKELL in OCTOBER, 2002 on csicop.com
Since they began to capture media attention in the mid 1970s, and to proliferate and evolve through the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, crop circles have provided mystery and controversy. New books, touting “scientific research,” continue the trend. The topic is also getting a boost from a new Hollywood movie, Signs, starring Mel Gibson as a Pennsylvania farmer who discovers a 500-foot design imprinted in his crops and seeks to learn its meaning.

They can range from small circles only a few feet in diameter to elaborate “pictograms,” some now as large as a few hundred feet across. By the end of the 1980s books on the crop circle phenomenon had begun to spring up as well, and soon circles-mystery enthusiasts were being dubbed cereologists (after Ceres, the Roman goddess of vegetation). Circlemania was in full bloom (Delgado and Andrews 1989; Nickell and Fischer 1992; Schnabel 1994).

A police officer contacted British UFO experts after seeing three aliens examining a freshly made crop circle near Avebury, Wiltshire.

 The sergeant, who has not been named, was off-duty when he saw the figures standing in a field near Silbury Hill, and stopped his car to investigate.

However, as he approached the 'men' – all over 6ft tall with blond hair – he heard "the sound of static electricity" and the trio ran away ''faster than any man he had ever seen''.

By Benjamin Radford on January 24th, 2013 on livescience.com
According to some estimates, crop circles appear every week somewhere around the world. The strange circles and patterns appear mysteriously overnight in farmers' fields, provoking puzzlement, delight, and intrigue for both locals and the news media.

The circles are mostly found in the United Kingdom, but have spread to dozens of countries around the world in past decades. But who — or what — is making them?

By Stephen Wagner on Unknown Date on Paranormal.About.com
Although science regards them as no more than clever man-made designs, many researchers say there is compelling proof that the origins of these mysterious formations is unexplained.

They began as simple circles laid down in fields of wheat, corn and other crops. Then the formations became more complex, some taking the form of pictograms that seemed to be ciphers for messages of unknown meaning. The phenomenon has continued over the years, and each summer season we are treated to ever-more complex and often beautiful crop circle designs.

We’ve all seen them on TV or in summer fields, and have marveled at their beauty as well as wondered who made them. Alien crop circles began as simple concentric rings of wheat, barley and corn that had been tamped down, usually in a round, geometric form. However some formations have been quite complex taking the form of pictograms with unknown meaning.
 
In this section MUFON presents articles from credible paranormal sources regarding the growing number of examples of the temporary “earth art” more commonly known as crop circles. Readers may be interested to learn that crop circles are among the earliest known land anomalies whose creation had been attributed to beings from other realms.