Crop circles: general discussion and resources

[Laird]

This is a sort of placeholder post to start this thread for general discussion of crop circles, something I want to come back to when I have finished other tasks. It might be presumptuous to place it under the general paranormal phenomena forum given that there is strong debate as to whether crop circles are at all paranormal, but it can be moved to SvP if folk think it better belongs there - or even to the UFO/UAP forum if sentiments move in the opposite direction.

The placeholder is a video of a crop circle, in the shape of a spider, with an interesting feature - woven lower belly - that appeared recently in the UK:

Crop Circle | Cerne Abbas Dorset | 10/07/25

Oddly enough, though this is a topic which caught my attention some years ago, I've never actually seen one for real myself. That doesn't imply or mean anything, it must be a matter of timing, since they tend to appear nowadays near to ancient sites such as Stonehenge or Silbury Hill, among others. Those are places I've visited a lot, mostly the lesser-known ones rather than the overly-crowded tourist features.

When I looked into this years ago, initially it piqued my interest, but I concluded that most or all were human-made. There was a language used sometimes, people would describe how to distinguish a genuine one from a fake, but I found that a somewhat impossible distinction.

I did feel that there might have been, decades ago, some actual phenomena of interest, but more recently I feel it is obscured by what I consider noise, a proliferation of human-made features. Was there something real, initially? I can't say. My opinion anyway.