Crop Circles | Can’t Sleep? Learn About One of History’s Strangest Mysteries

For decades, crop circles have been one of the most persistent and visually striking mysteries in modern folklore. The patterns—intricate geometric designs flattened into fields of wheat, barley, or corn—have inspired speculation about everything from extraterrestrial messages to bizarre meteorological phenomena. But as this episode of I Can’t Sleep explains, the story of crop circles is less about aliens and more about human ingenuity, media attention, and the psychology of belief.

The first known report of a crop circle in England dates back to 1678, when a pamphlet called The Mowing-Devil described a field of oats that appeared to have been cut in a circular pattern. In 1686, naturalist Robert Plot wrote about rings of mushrooms in The Natural History of Staffordshire, speculating they might have been caused by lightning. A more direct precursor came in 1880, when amateur scientist John Rand Capron wrote a letter to the journal Nature describing circular patches of flattened wheat after a storm, suggesting they were caused by "cyclonic wind action." In 1932, archaeologist E. C. Curwen examined a dark ring in a barley field near Chichester, finding the crop "lodged or beaten down" in a circle with a slightly mounded interior. These early reports were all simple circles, and they were rare.