Editing Crop circle (section)

== Bower and Chorley ==
In 1991, two self-professed [[practical joke|pranksters]], Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, made headlines by saying they had started the crop circle phenomenon in 1978, using simple tools consisting of a plank of wood, rope, and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in straight lines.<ref name="today91">{{cite news |author= Graham Brough |year= 1991 |title= Men who conned the world |url= https://menwhoconnedtheworld.weebly.com/new-11-today-september-9-1991.html |newspaper= Today (defunct) |location= UK}}</ref> To prove their case they made a circle in front of journalists; a "cereologist" (advocate of paranormal explanations of crop circles), Pat Delgado, examined the circle and declared it authentic before it was revealed that it was a hoax.<ref name="nyt1991">{{cite news |title= 2 'Jovial Con Men' Demystify Those Crop Circles in Britain |newspaper=The New York Times |author= William E. Schmidt |date= 10 September 1991 |url= https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/10/world/2-jovial-con-men-demystify-those-crop-circles-in-britain.html}}</ref><ref name="today91"/><ref>{{cite news |title= Two British artists admit playing 'circles' hoax for the past 13 years |agency= Houston Chronicle News Services |date= 10 September 1991 |newspaper= Houston Chronicle |page= A2 |edition= Star |url= http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_808420/two-british-artists-admit-playing-circles-hoax-for.html}}</ref> 

Inspired by Australian crop circle accounts from 1966, Bower and Chorley claimed to be responsible for all circles made prior to 1987, and for more than 200 crop circles in 1978–1991 (with 1,000 other circles not being made by them).<ref name="Taylor2011" /><ref name="Ridley" /> Writing in ''[[Physics World]]'', Richard Taylor of the [[University of Oregon]] said that "the pictographs they created inspired a second wave of crop artists. Far from fizzling out, crop circles have evolved into an international phenomenon, with hundreds of sophisticated pictographs now appearing annually around the globe."<ref name="Taylor2011" />