Doug Bower and Dave Chorley claimed to have started the crop circle phenomenon in 1978[1] and were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 1992 for their crop circle hoaxing. Their work is continued by other groups of crop circle makers such as the circlemakers arts collective[2] founded by John Lundberg in the early 1990s.

Crop circles are patterns created by the flattening of crops such as wheat,    barley, rye, or corn.

It has been claimed that evidence suggesting these formations are caused by some force other than humans is found in hundreds of photographs of bent or warped growth nodes. Biophysicist W. C. Levengood's Crop Circle Reports are an example of claimed evidence and research gathered that attempts to show that these types of crop circles with these type of node-warping are clearly not man-made, and that they are not simply snapped and broken from impact or crushing, but by some intense focus of energy such as microwaves or spinning plasma vortex as concluded by Levengood.[3] This evidence has been discredited by several sources.

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