FT264

One of the interesting problems in assessing how far back in time the crop circle phen­omenon stretches is that there is no substantial body of similar tales to be found before 1980. Over the years, a small body of recollection and testimony has been gathered, but it was extremely limited. Some of that earlier material has evaporated upon closer inspection. Take, for instance, what is seen as the earliest crop circle on record, the one supposedly found near the city of Assen, in the Nether­lands. I first read about this in Jenny Randles’s and Peter Hough’s Encyclopedia Of The Unexplained, published in 1995, where it is mentioned on p26. [1]

Conducting some research into this alleged event some years ago, I discovered that its source was not, as many thought, the 1686 book The Natural Hist­ory of Staffordshire by Oxford Professor Robert Plott, but a title that saw print almost a century earlier, namely, the Dæmonolatreia by infamous witch-hunter Nicholas Remy, published in Lyons in 1595. According to Remy, a woman named Nicolette Lang-Bernhard saw, on 25 July 1590 at high noon, a group of men and women dancing. They were witches, of course, and “…the final and incontrovertible proof of the truth of the occurrence was the fact that the place where this dancing had been enacted was found… trodden into a ring such as is found in a circus where horses run round in a circle, and among the other tracks were the recent marks of the hoofs of goats and oxen…” [2] Remy refers to a location between the cities of Guermingen and Assenoncourt,  in the Lorraine region in France. So, there never was a crop circle near Assen. A possible error in translation transported a ring made by the hooves of animals from Assenoncourt hundreds of miles to the north, where it was also transformed into a crop circle. Moreover, at the time of the alleged crop circle, the city of Assen itself did not even exist. While a small settlement existed in the 17th century, Assen only became a city proper as late as 1809, making it one of the youngest in the Netherlands.

The next piece of circum­stantial evidence, the well-known 17th-century Mowing Devil pamphlet, [3] is fraught with similar difficulties of interpret­ation. While it does describe an anomaly in a field, this isn’t the focus of the tale, which concerns a curse uttered by a farmer who refuses to pay the price a labourer demands for cutting his crops, and the Devil’s retri­bution. At night the farmer’s field glows mysteriously and in the morning his crop of oats has been cut down, rather than flattened into an intricate figure or glyph. Like the Assenoncourt story, this shares the idea that ring-shaped impressions in fields were seen as a sign of the Devil and his accomplices.

In Russia, there is a rich folklore concerning markings or circles in the fields. Fellow researcher Mikhail Gerstein alerted me to this tradition, and provided me with an example from IP Sakharov’s Tales of Russian People (AS Suvorin, St Petersburg, 1885). Here, we read of villagers who once believed that certain signs pointed towards the existence of a witch amongst them. Such signs – revealing where landowners had had dealings with the Devil – manifested themselves as green or yellow circles on the land. While Sakharov comes up with a somewhat shaky attempt at a scientific rationale, other Russian folk­lorists mention a further detail: that in these circles the crops could be flattened or broken as the result of a witches’ dance. [4]

America, too, has produced such crop-related folklore. In the same year that Sakharov’s book was published, a newspaper in Georgia printed this intriguing anecdote: “I heard a truthful, religious old lady say, that when she was a little girl she was sent to pick up corn stalks with the child of a reputed witch. Growing weary of the work, the child of the witch mother proposed to collect the stalks without further labour. A few minutes later, the wind began to rise, furious whirlwinds made their appearance in different parts of the field, the stalks were lifted in the air, but my informant, becoming frightened, begged that it might be stopped. The witch child waved her arms, the wind subsided and the stalks fell back in their places. These stories might be multiplied by scores; they were sufficiently well authenticated and corro­borated to produce conviction of their truth, if only within the bounds of reason and common experience.” [5]

While all of the above point to a widespread belief linking crop and field anomalies to the work of the Devil and his minions, that fascinating detail of “furious whirlwinds” in the American tale connects to a brief letter to the editor of Nature. It was published in 1880, and is also often cited as a precursor to the crop circle phenomenon. Entitled “Storm Effects”, the letter describes how violent storms rocked parts of Surrey, producing effects “in some instances curious. Visiting a neighbour’s farm… we found a field of standing wheat considerably knocked about, not as an entirety, but in patches forming, as viewed from a distance, circular spots.

“Examined more closely, these all presented much the same character, viz., a few standing stalks as a centre, some prostrate stalks with their heads arranged pretty evenly in a direction forming a circle round the centre, and outside these a circular wall of stalks which had not suffered.” [6]

But just how unusual is it to find stalks flattened or bent in various figures after a severe storm? Two years before the letter in Nature was published, a Wisconsin newspaper remarked on how an “unusually severe wind and rain storm, coming up from the southwest… flattened the grain and twisted it into all conceivable directions and shapes. The grain was very tall and heavy, and the damage of having it completely flattened can well be appreciated by all who have harvested lodged grain.” [7]

Are there, then, no genuinely weird tales involving crops and anomalous impressions or phenomena? I’ve been scouring digitised newspaper archives for almost a decade now, and, apart from the examples cited here there seems to be a dearth of tales possessing motifs truly similar to the current crop circle phenomenon. Surprising, when we know that those 19th- and early 20th-century newspaper had no qualms in publishing even the most outlandish yarns. During my searches I did, though, find one very curious story that might rank with that of the Mowing Devil. It has all the hallmarks of a tall tale (and was generally referred to as “the yarn of the season”, and “a marv­ellous story” in those American newspapers that published it), but is laudable in its invent­iveness. It offers us a strange aerial phenomenon manifesting itself as a green cloud, a radical temperature drop and some fireballs – and this weird atmo­spheric manifest­ation has, in turn, a decidedly strange influence on a field of corn. The tale was published between August and October 1890, and so far I have located it in four different American newspapers:

The people in the eastern port­ion of Claiborne County, Tenn., are excited over a remarkable occurr­ence which took place there not long ago. It is one of the most marvell­ous occurrences ever heard of, and it will prove to be a problem over which scientific minds may wrestle for some time to come.

Edgar Ramsey is a farmer who lives five miles from Lick Skillet. He arrived in Middlesboro recently. The story he told would not find believers at first, but since then it has been proven that he has told nothing but the truth. His statement is thus reported by a correspondent of the St Louis Globe-Democrat: “Last Sunday afternoon I noticed what appeared to be a large green-looking cloud coming from a westerly direction toward my house. It was a long distance off, and the rain was falling heavily. Shortly afterward It became very cold, in fact so cold that I went indoors, lit a big fire and put on a big heavy coat. When I came out again, the big green cloud was almost over the house, and the air was as cold as on a winter day. The wind howled and the hail fell in stones as big as eggs. All this lasted 20 minutes, and then the sky cleared up and I felt more like myself again.

“An hour after, I was sitting with my wife near the fire when I heard a horse galloping at full speed, and when I went out to see who it was there stood Jake Warren, a neighbour farmer who lives about a mile and a quarter from me. He was as pale as a ghost and was trembling all over. It took him over 10 minutes to commence to tell me what he had to say, and as he was talking I thought he was crazy.

“He stated that a big green cloud had come over his place, and that something which looked like balls of fire had fallen all around his house. He had five acres of corn growing in a field next to the house. After the storm had cleared away, he went to see what damage had been done. He saw that some corn had been blown down, and, entering the field, he found every stalk turned to stone. There were two fine hogs in the field, and they, too, were petrified and standing there as if cut out of solid rock. Myself and wife thought the man was raving mad, but induced him to remain over till morning, when we promised to visit his place with him. That we did, and what we saw will be remembered so long as we both live. There was the corn blown down, but every stalk of it was petri­fied. It was not as hard as granite, but it appeared to be more like soft stone. I took my knife and cut it, and it became powder. The ears were very hard, and they could not be broken with the hand. The leaves were brittle, and if you struck them they would break like glass. The hogs were there, too, looking natural enough, but they were as hard as stone.”

George E. Henry, of this city, John Rogers, Captain John B. Hull, ex-deputy marshal, and several others rode over the mountains into Tennessee to see for themselves if the things were really there as represented. Captain Hull, ex-United States deputy marshal, makes the following statement:

“We went over this morning. I doubted the story on starting, but thought I’d try it, anyhow. We found Warren’s farm about seven miles from the Gap, and there, sure enough, was the cornfield completely petrified. The stalks were somewhat blown down, but they seemed completely turned to stone. The two hogs were there also, and they looked like they were carved out of rock. It was the strangest sight I ever saw and I can’t begin to describe the thing. There were a number of men guarding the field with Winchester rifles and they wouldn’t let us go into it. They only let us go to the fence. We could touch some of the corn stalks and could see the hogs, but the men refused posit­ively to let us go any further than the fence. The women wouldn’t say why they would not let people go into the field, but I presume they were afraid people would break the corn stalks to pieces. There was quite a crowd there looking at the thing, and every one was thoroughly dumbfounded with what they saw.”

This statement is vouched for by a number of others, and naturally there is considerable excitement. [8] 

Notes
1 For an overview and mention of my research, published in 2003 online, see ufologie.net.
2 Nicolas Remy: Demon­olatry, edited with intro­duction and notes by Mont­ague Summers, Rodker, 1930, facsimilé reprint by Frederick Muller, 1970, pp50–51.
3 According to Gerstein, there are other old Russian folklore studies that mention these strange traces in crops and grass, for example AN Afanasiev’s Slavic Poetic Attitude for Nature, published between 1866 and 1869 in three volumes, and SV Maksimow’s Unknown, Unholy and Holy Forces, published in St Petersburg in 1903.
4 For a detailed overview of the many versions of the pamphlet, see Swirled News.
5 “The Obedient Whirlwind”, Telegraph and Mess­enger, Macon, Georgia, 29 Jan 1885.
6 “Letters To The Editor, Storm Effects”, Nature, 29 July 1880.
7 “Wind And Rain. Severe Wind and Rain Storm West of Here. Fields of High Waving Grain Lodged Flat to the Earth. Effects of the Recent Hot Spell. General Influence of the Weather on the Crops.”, Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 18 July 1878.
8 “Turned To Stone. A Strange Story from Claiborne County, Tennessee. A Big Green Cloud Passes Over the Lick Skillet Country and Petrifies Hogs as Well as a Field of Corn – The Yarn of the Season”, Reno Evening Gazette, Reno, Nevada, 4 Oct 1890. I also located the story in the Daily Journal and Journal and Tribune, Tennessee, 16 Aug 1890; Bradford Era, Bradford, Pennsylvania, 26 Aug 1890 and Syracuse Standard, Syracuse, New York, 7 Sept 1890.