by: Kristen Anderson

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Imagine your father, laughing, out in the middle of nowhere with a friend. Foot on a wooden board attached to strings he’s holding, like a swing except he’s the tree. Methodically stepping down, moving, stepping down again to flatten corn stalks underfoot, stamping out a predetermined pattern—doing this in the dead of night so he wouldn’t be seen, and then quietly coming home at 3:00, 4:00, or 5:00 in the morning only to say nothing about his escapade the next day. And let’s say your father did this every Saturday night, for years and years.

This was what Jim Chorley had to wrap his head around when he found out that his father, Dave, along with his father’s best friend, Doug Bower, were responsible for the mysterious crop circles that made news headlines worldwide for the past 15 years.

Crop circles are large-scale patterns mostly found in cornfields that are best seen and recognized from far above—you may have seen them on Unsolved Mysteries back in the day, or maybe in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. There’s a cottage industry around the mystery of crop circles, and who—or what—creates them. One popular fringe belief is that extraterrestrials made them as a means to communicate with humans.

However, we know that Dave Chorley and Doug Bower created the majority of the early crop circles, which then spawned copycats that led to even more worldwide interest. The two best friends told the world they were responsible for the decorative and large-scale crop designs, and they even had a demonstration. But it turned out that some people just didn’t want to believe.

Doug Bower lived in Australia for a time before moving to England and had heard stories about strange patterns appearing in sugarcane fields there. They were simple and purely circular, known as the Tully Saucer Nests, and were later attributed to whirlwinds briefly touching down (which became an agreed-upon theory all around for naturally-created circles).

One night, Bower told his friend Dave Chorley about them while they were at the pub. They were both in their late 40s and were watercolor painters, artists who had become fast friends with a weekly hangout appointment. They were drinking outside at a spot overlooking huge wheat fields while Bower told Chorley the story, and an idea took hold. They decided to have "a bit of a laugh." They decided to create their own saucer nests. 

Late at night, they headed over to Bower’s picture-framing store and grabbed the iron bar he used to prop the door open, and then made their way to the wheat fields. They pressed the bar down over the grain until they had created a large circle, and, satisfied, headed home, not saying anything about it to their families. 

And then they kept doing it. Bower and Chorley believed they were creating folk art upon a canvas of unlimited size. Week after week, they would head to the pub and then off to the fields to bring their ideas into existence in the middle of the night. They moved from wheat fields to cornfields. They eventually upgraded their tools to the 5-foot wooden boards with strings attached and fashioned hats with wires jutting straight out for perspective so they could create straighter lines. Chorley started placing an ear of corn on the kitchen table when he came home, which confused his son, Jim, whenever he woke to see it on Sunday mornings.

Bower and Chorley created their crop circles for two years with almost no fanfare, which started to become frustrating—it was time-consuming and tiring, and they weren’t spring chickens. Eventually, the two artists wanted their work to garner some attention.

Bower realized they needed to do it somewhere where there's a viewpoint, so "people could sit having picnics and look down in wonder on [their] work." So they found a spot near a tourist locale, made an 80-foot-wide crop circle, and boom—the next day, it was national news.

The friends were delighted with all the speculation about the origin of these “mysterious” circles. They even inserted themselves into the mystery, kind of like serial killers who show up at their own crime scene and blend in among the onlookers. At points, they approached crop circle experts, known as cereologists, and told them they were wildlife enthusiasts who were out in those areas a lot, promising them they would keep an eye out for more circles. Then they would make another one, go back to those same experts and excitedly tell them that they'd found one to make sure it got noticed.

They also paid attention to scientists looking for logical explanations for the formations and messed with them. When meteorologists reasoned that they were made by "downward spiraling winds," Bower and Chorley started making them more geometric, impossible to explain away with nature.

They kept this secret from their families, for years. Finally, nine years into it, in 1985, Bower’s wife noticed that the car's odometer was higher than it should be from just going to the bar once a week and wanted to know where he had been going. He told her the truth and she didn't buy it, so he told her to draw up a design. He said he would prove that he was telling the truth by recreating the drawing in a field—and he did just that.

Eventually, though, the two artists decided that they wanted more than their closest relatives to know what they had been up to. So in 1991, Bower and Chorley held a press conference in a field in Warminster, England. The press watched as these men, now in their 60s, revealed that they had been creating crop circles all over the countryside for 15 years—and to prove it, they made one right in front of the crowd.

But some refused to believe it.

 British newspaper Today contacted a retired radar expert named Pat Delgado, who had written books on crop circles and believed that they had to have been created by something “not of our planet or consciousness.” They showed him the circles, and at first, he said, “No human being could have done this. These crops are laid down in these sensational patterns by an energy that remains unexplained and is of a high level of intelligence.”

The paper then introduced Bower and Chorley to Delgado and explained what they had been doing. Delgado was understandably upset, saying, “We have been conned. This is a dirty trick. Thousands of lives are going to be wrecked over this.”

But he seemed to regroup quickly and found an alternative explanation. He and other cereologists moved to the conclusion that, sure, Bower and Chorley may have created some of the crop circles: but not all of them. 

Delgado was quoted by the New York Times as derisively saying: “Yesterday there were circles discovered on a prairie in Canada. Have these guys been out there with their board?” He didn’t seem to entertain the idea of copycats.

Delgado and his fellow cereologists left room for wonder; the possibility that non-human entities are still out there—and surprisingly, so did Doug Bower. He once said that although he knew the origins of crop circles, “It’s obvious that in all those millions of planets we saw out there in the night sky, there must be people out there.”

We don’t know whether Dave Chorley felt the same way, whether he and Doug spent any of their time alone together stamping out designs in cornfields under the vast night sky, wondering about what might be far away.

But Dave’s son Jim does feel there’s magic of a sort out there. While sitting in a crop circle, he told the BBC,

"I can understand why people would need to believe in the magic of it. I still believe in the magic of it as we're sitting here now. This is magical. As we walked into the crop circle and into the edge, I just took one moment to remember my dad and think about him, and it brought a smile to my face. To look around and see people here enjoying it, it's a lovely thing to know that his legacy lives on.”