JayPinkerton.com - Urban Legend Database - The Mystery of the Crop Circles!

Pretend you are a farmer. One bright spring morning you wake up in a pile of hay in your barn, as all farmers do, put on your farm pants and look forward to a day packed with farming. You pause to eat a breakfast of fresh foods made from the earth with your own hands, like carrots and wheat, and things pulled from animals with your own hands, like eggs, meat and hair.

Your stomach full of hair and unprocessed wheat, you stumble out of your house-barn and into your work-barn, where you prime up your tractor and head out to the fields for an honest day's labor of... driving around on your tractor, doing whatever it is farmers do.

But your farm day is destroyed utterly when you get to your field... and find this:

The sight confounds you. And not in the way that most things confound you, like when you can't find your work- barn or suddenly snap out of a blackout with dirt in your mouth. This confounds you in a way that frightens you. In fact, it might have been less confusing if we'd just said the sight frightened you and left out confounded altogether.

You slowly remove the corncob pipe from your lips and look down at your faithful hound dog, a loyal mutt named Corncob Pipe. "What in tarnation, Corncob Pipe," you say, putting the corncob pipe back in your lips and leaning against your farming tractor, the S.S. Corncob Pipe. Suddenly you realize what has happened to your field.

And for decades, men of science agreed. Throughout the sixties and seventies It was taken as established fact that the phenomena of flattened wheat — or crop circles to the layman — was the work of homosexual Communists. For a brief period in 1962 a faction of scientists put forward the then-shocking hypothesis that the phenomena of flattened wheat — or hay roundies to tack-swallowing idiots—may be caused by natural phenomena, like wind and rain. Luckily sanity ruled the day, and scientists of the time agreed it was most likely natural forces, working in tandem with shadowy unnamed people, most likely to forward the cause of gay Communism.

But in 1977 all conventional wisdom went out the window, with the release of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Suddenly men of science realized that both nature and communism combined simply couldn't stand up to the cold, unflinching grasp of reason: aliens had flown flying millions of light years across the galaxy to nefariously flatten our Earth corn at four in the morning. In fact, it was actually so obvious once people thought about it for a minute that they agreed to simply accept it and never think about it again.

For the last two decades amateur crop circle specialists have put forward bold and exciting new theories about crop circles, all of which are basically a verbatim repeat of the first theory. X-Files episodes and Mel Gibson films have exhaustively documented the subject for future generations.

Though hard evidence is difficult to come by in this lucrative and, yes, even stupid field, here is what we do know for sure. 1.) It's commonly accepted by circle experts that it's impossible to form a complex pattern on the ground without first viewing it from space, and 2.) Whatever wheat-flattening technology caused these circles, it won't be available on this planet for another 100,000 years.

Circle Researcher Rory Tate died in 1997 to bring us this second fact. He was found crushed to death under the wheels of his truck some hundred yards from a crop circle, presumably driven over by alien beings for getting too close to the scandalous truth.

Some claim time travelers create the circles as location markers; others say it is the product of a fungus that weakens the stalks; still others put forward the hypothesis that bizarre and precise wind patterns could be the cause, even though that's just dumb. When confronted, the precise wind guys will usually try to wedge in something about gay Communists to save face.

The first circles appeared in England some thirty years ago, where the townspeople immediately declared them to be the work of Satan. Scientists studying the phenomena scoffed, and confirmed that they were in fact the work of witches working magically on behalf of Satan.

A group of English artists came forward about five years ago and admitted that they were behind the original circles, making them with two lengths of rope and a board, using simple surveying techniques available to builders for centuries. That is, they drew the patterns on a piece of paper and stepped off the distances according to scale. The increasingly-complex patterns that have emerged since, they say, have been copycats looking for notoriety.

The world scoffed at this explanation as ridiculous.

We did six months' of research, examining some 2,000 individual crop circles in England, the USA, Australia and South America. The first thing any scientific observer will notice is the increased levels of iron oxide in the area surrounding a crop circle. No group of practical jokers could increase the occurrence of a certain element in the atmosphere in the course of a hoax.

Most researchers agree that Satan is an iron oxide-based being, and that his influence can be traced via an excess of that element in an environment.

Experts have disagreed as to whether this is a sign of direct satanic involvement or simply the work of humans channeling Satan's power. I find this very question to be ridiculous. Obviously the lack of bloody animal sacrifices in most sites (84% of the instances studied DID NOT include charred animal carcasses) indicates direct Satanic involvement, not involvement via proxy. The nature of the designs seems to correspond with Satan's round, flat shape. The finding of boards, lengths of rope and foot prints at each site seems to confirm the 1984 University of Minnesota study which theorized that Satan travels by flinging himself from place to place via a system of rope-and-wood catapults.

We considered the matter settled, however, when we found one of the original men to have claimed he "perpetrated" the "hoax." When questioned about iron oxide levels, he became frightened and told us he would call the police—foolishly, of course, as this only served to let us know how damn close we were to the truth.

Holding him down, we quickly and scientifically soaked him in gasoline and set him alight. Sure enough, the so-called "hoaxer" had in fact been Satan all along. When the flames subsided, all that was left was a skeleton and ash. Wherever the Dark Lord had catapulted himself to, it would seem, he would have to do so with one less of his Earthly body-costumes.