Early Encounters
It's no surprise that some of the earliest reports of crop circles come from Wessex, the region of England famous for these phenomenon. There is no clear record of when the circles first began to appear, but it is known that the "Devil's Twist", or a whirlwinds, had been blamed for creating these circles since the 1830s. A man named Roger Sear began to study the patterns in 1927, noting the magnetic disturbances found near the circles. In 1935, a young boy named Helions Bumpstead claims to have witnessed a crop circle in the making. His descriptions of a trilling sounds and the sudden bending of wheat stalks by a great vibration was similar to those of almost 80 other eyewitnesses since then.
In addition to these documented accounts, there have been countless unpublished and relatively unkown stories from around the world describing crop circles. Farmers and nature hikers have reported early morning strolls that revealed mysterious rings in the fields that were not present the previous day. Some of these stories also mention peculiar behavior of farm animals as well as strange sights and sounds in the vicinity of the crop circles. Despite the fact that most of these accounts were never published, they share an amazing similarity between them.
It was not until the 1980s that these stories were studied in detail.