Editing Crop circle (section)

=== Before the 20th century ===

A 1678 news pamphlet ''[[Mowing-Devil|The Mowing-Devil: or, Strange News Out of Hartfordshire]]'' describes a crop whose stalks were cut rather than bent.<ref name=dutch /> (see [[#Folklore|folklore section]]).

In 1686, an English [[naturalist]], [[Robert Plot]], reported on rings or arcs of mushrooms (see [[fairy ring]]s) in ''The Natural History of Stafford-Shire'', proposing air flows from the sky as a cause.<ref name=NatHist>{{cite book |author= John Aubrey |url= http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04/nhwil10.txt |title= The Natural History of Stafford-Shire |url-status= dead |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20070402233131/http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04/nhwil10.txt |archive-date= 2 April 2007 |df= dmy-all }} at [[Project Gutenberg]]</ref><ref name=PhiloTrans>{{cite journal |title= ''The Natural History of Staffordshire'' by Robert Plott; ''Sciotericum Telescopicum or a new Contrivance of adapting a Telescope to a Horizontall Diall, for observing the moment of time by day or night'' by Will Molineux |journal= Philosophical Transactions |volume= 16 |issue= 1686–1692 |jstor= 101866 |pages= 207–16 |department= Accounts of Books|year= 1686 }}</ref> In 1991, meteorologist Terence Meaden linked this report with modern crop circles, a claim that has been compared with those made by [[Erich von Däniken]].{{refn|group=n|Keving Greene wrote, <blockquote>The difficulties that exist in communicating the results of archaeology have undoubtedly contributed to the flourishing of writers, such as Erich von Däniken, who take a particular delight in deriding the inability of 'experts' to find explanations that seize the imagination of the public. (...) Few archaeologists have sold as many paperbacks as von Däniken; more recently, a meteorologist who linked crop circles to prehistoric ring-ditches or round barrows generated a reaction that no orthodox student of these monuments has ever achieved (Meaden 1991) [in reference to {{cite book |author= T. Meaden |year= 1991 |title= The Goddess of the Stones: The Language of the Megaliths |location= London |publisher= Souvenir Press}}]<ref>{{cite book |title= Archaeology: An Introduction: The History, Principles and Methods of Modern Archaeology |author= Kevin Greene |edition= 3, fully revised |publisher= Routledge |year= 1995 |isbn= 0203447204 |url= http://mey.homelinux.org/companions/Kevin%20Greene/Archaeology_%20An%20Introduction,%20The%20Histor%20(401)/Archaeology_%20An%20Introduction,%20The%20Histor%20-%20Kevin%20Greene.pdf |ref= {{harvid|Greene|1995}} }}{{dead link|date=March 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref></blockquote>}}

An 1880 letter to the editor of ''[[Nature (journal)|Nature]]'' by amateur scientist [[John Rand Capron]] describes how several circles of flattened crops in a field were formed under suspicious circumstances and possibly caused by "cyclonic wind action", stating "as viewed from a distance, circular spots (...) they 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 there a circular wall of stalks which had not suffered".{{refn|name="Capron1880"|group=n|John Rand Capron wrote, <blockquote>The storms about this part of Surrey have been lately local and violent, and the effects produced in some instances curious. Visiting a neighbour's farm on Wednesday evening (21st), 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 (...) they 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 there a circular wall of stalks which had not suffered. (...) I could not trace locally any circumstances accounting for the peculiar forms of the patches in the field, nor indicating whether it was wind or rain, or both combined, which had caused them, beyond the general evidence everywhere of heavy rainfall. They were suggestive to me of some cyclonic wind action, and may perhaps have been noticed elsewhere by some of your readers.<ref>{{cite journal |doi= 10.1038/022290d0 |bibcode= 1880Natur..22..290C |title= Storm Effects |url= http://www.iccra.org/Historical%20Research/Storm%20Effects_Nature_1880_J_Rand_Capron.pdf |year= 1880 |author= John Rand Capron |journal= Nature |volume= 22 |issue= 561 |page= [https://books.google.com/books?id=CJlFAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA290 290]|s2cid= 4078005 }} Retrieved from {{cite web |title= Nature archive for the decade 1880–1889 |url= http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/currentdecade.html?decade=1880&year=1880 |work= nature.com |publisher= Nature |access-date= 23 August 2011}} Republished in {{cite journal |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=BGIdAQAAIAAJ |title= A case of genuine crop circles dating from July 1880 – as published in Nature in the year 1880 |journal= Journal of Meteorology |volume= 25 |pages= 20–21 |date=January 2000}}</ref></blockquote>}}