Dear Martha,

What really causes crop circles? My friends say it could be extra terrestrials, like in the movie.

--Mel

Dear Mel -- if that's really your name,

Crop circles have been a mystery to many modern Earthlings since they first started appearing in England in 1978. They're often called a hoax, but that's a misnomer. Crop circles are real (they're in the dictionary, after all). But their origins are much less exotic than many people originally thought.

And it's easy to understand why. They looked so perfect, seemingly too perfect for a person to make. They appeared swiftly and mysteriously, emerging overnight in fields of corn, barley, and other crops. What humans could do this without getting caught?

Thus, crop circles were a mystery. Some wondered if a vortex of wind or plasma could have caused it. Others wondered if they were the result of something called a "mind-energy field." Or perhaps military experiments, chemicals, or buried ruins. The possible causes bandied about are many, most exciting among them the idea that they were extraterrestrial in origin.

The movie Signs, which I quite enjoyed, does nothing to dispel this myth. In Signs, aliens somehow managed to cross the universe, but needed to make crop-circle navigational marks so they could find their way around big, bad Earth. Whatever.

The people who still think aliens are responsible for crop circles clearly were hiding in their pantries when the inventors of the modern crop circle, two British chaps named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, first started making them with implements no more mysterious than some rope and a 5-ft iron bar for bending the corn. (They later enhanced their equipment, and ultimately confessed to their hijinx in the early 1990s.)

That's all it takes, people. I've seen it demonstrated on TV. Even the claims of ancient crop circles (such as the Devil's Circle in Scotland) could be made the same way. This is pretty primitive stuff, even if it is elegant to look at.

Even so, there are some people who cling steadfastly to the hope that at least some of the crop circles are not made by people. Some of them claim the crop circles made by humans are hoaxes. But how could they be? They're crop circles--they're not fake just because we know how they're made.

The people hoping for an exotic explanation would probably be better off holding out for a sequel to Signs; maybe then, the people of Earth will have the good sense to mow down the crop circles before Mars Attacks. Ak ak.

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