When Aliens Landed in Wiltshire | Halloween Season

Tim Harford (0:14)

As darkness falls late on a summer evening in the English countryside, twelve groups of people make their way towards a field of wheat, carrying planks of wood, ropes and various other implements. The year is 1992 We're in Buckinghamshire, England. The night is cloudy. A shame. What they're about to do in this field, they're supposed to do without being seen or heard. Moonlight would have helped. Some people have come in camouflage. Sensible. But they've got torches strapped to their heads. That'll draw unwelcome attention. There were schoolboys. There's a young American grad student who's working alone. Two women have brought their Pyrenean mountain dog, Yeti. These dogs are huge. They can weigh over a hundred pounds. They're bred to protect sheep. But Yeti has been specially trained for the task at hand. That task is making crop circles.

Over the previous few years, crop circles had caused a media sensation in England. They'd appear suddenly. Overnight, in some farmer's field, elaborate formations made from flattened crops. Newspapers would print aerial photos. So many curious people would turn up to look that farmers began to charge for admission, a way to recoup some losses from the damage they caused. What was making these crop circles? Was it aliens, or some unusual meteorological phenomenon, perhaps? Or aliens? Maybe it was humans doing it for a laugh, a kind of performance art? Or it could be aliens? And so, a competition, an experiment. Twelve teams will spend the night in a farmer's field in Buckinghamshire, tasked with completing a crop circle between the hours of 10pm and 3am. Not just a simple circle, they've been given a specific design. Concentric rings, a triangle, various lines. Each team has been assigned their own section of field. At dawn, a helicopter will fly over to photograph their efforts from above. Judges will award each team points for how well they've done. The winner will get 3,000 pounds, close to 15,000 dollars in today's money. Not bad for a night's work.

But the real point of this experiment isn't to crown a winner. It's to see what's possible. The organizers want to find out if humans really are capable of making intricate designs in crops. Cereptitiously, overnight, or if other explanations need to be sought.

I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

In England in the late 1950s, a common weekend leisure activity was to go for a drive. Not to get anywhere, just to enjoy pootling around the countryside in your car. On Sunday afternoons, 12-year-old Colin Andrews would often go for a drive with his dad and mum and younger brother. They lived near Stonehenge, the famous Stone Circle, thousands of years old, and a place of pilgrimage for pagans, neo-druids, and various other New Age movements. One Sunday, young Colin, for some inexplicable reason, decided to stay at home instead of joining his family on their drive. It's a decision he would bitterly regret. When his parents and brother got home, they told him what had happened. On a narrow country lane not far from Stonehenge, over the top of some conifer trees less than a hundred metres away, said Colin's family, a disc-shaped object suddenly appeared, a silvery craft swaying from side to side in the air. They stopped. Colin's dad and brother got out of the car. They watched as the craft began to rise up. Colin's mum had stayed in the car.

Get back, she yelled. Suddenly, they told Colin, a narrow beam of white light shot out of the bottom of the craft. It flew away at an extraordinary rate of speed.

The 12-year-old was deeply affected to hear of his family's close encounter. I felt somewhere deep inside, Colin recalls, that I should have been there with them.

The years passed. Colin grew up, got married, became an electrical engineer, and made a career in local government, where he enjoyed a series of rapid promotions into middle management. But Colin's conventional life was about to be turned upside down.

In summer 1983, Colin, now in his late thirties, happened upon a field in which crops lay flattened, mysteriously, in a set of five circles. Crop circles were not yet a media phenomenon. Hardly anyone had even noticed them. Indeed, they weren't even called crop circles. It was Colin himself who would later coin the term. Colin recalls that as he stood in that field, it was like a switch was thrown in my stomach. An overwhelming emotional and spiritual effect. Awe and wonder overwhelmed me like a white light permeating every cell of my body. The memories of missing out on a close encounter as a 12-year-old came flooding back.

Colin had a strong sense that he was being presented with an assignment, a mission. Understanding crop circles became his quest.