UK crop circles, we now know, were at the start largely the work of a couple of pranksters called David Chorley and Douglas Bower, both landscape painters, who in 1978 came up with the idea for the hoax after a drink in the pub. For 13 years they sneaked around the fields of southern England with ropes, string and some planks of wood, constructing up to 30 new circles every growing season. They finally revealed that they were the creators of the circles in 1991, silencing a decade of wild UFO theories that had built up around them.
