The real-life pranksters phoned the newspaper to come clean, according to Mr. Brough, now 62, who says he verified their claims by checking an archive of more than 200 crop circle designs stored in a shed behind Mr. Bower’s home. The designs were clearly aged and matched the patterns they had made over the years, Mr. Brough said. “I spent a week getting them to show me how they had done it all, and I have never laughed as much in my life,” he recalled. “The prevailing wisdom at the time was that aliens were about to land any day, but it had all been kicked off by these two blokes who’d have a couple of pints at their favorite pub and then head out into the night to have a bit of fun.”“The so-called experts were adamant that humans could not possibly have made these circles, but Doug and Dave showed me how they did it,” Mr. Brough continued. “They stomped down the crop without breaking the actual wheat shafts and used ropes tied to a central stake to make the circles and a bit of wire hanging down from a baseball cap like a gun sight to line things up and make sure their lines were straight.”The newspaper filmed the two men creating a pattern in a field in Kent and then showed it to Pat Delgado, a co-author of big-selling books on the mystery, who said it had definitely been made by a nonhuman “higher intelligence.”The newspaper quoted Mr. Delgado declaring that “In no way could this be a hoax.”“Delgado said that not only was it 100 percent made by aliens, but he could sense that the aliens had just left,” Mr. Brough said.

Source: New York Times June 12, 2022 22:37 UTC