Joe Nickell

In the late 1970s, cheerful pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley read a newspaper article about "crop circles"-geometric patterns of flattened grain crops-that had appeared in Queensland, Australia, and the subsequent panic about purported UFO landings. Looking for something fun to do on Friday nights, they decided to try the same trick in their native southern England-and it worked. Many of their crop circle designs attracted huge crowds of visitors and were attributed to unstable ion vortices or extraterrestrials. On September 8, 1991, they admitted the ruse and showed British newspapers how they had designed their crop circles. They were not, of course, the only source of crop circles in England (the number of crop circles produced annually has actually increased since they went public), but they were among the earliest, and they illustrated just...