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A new claim is circulating on the Internet: crop circles in Southern England during World War II! Crop circles that were investigated officially by British secret services!
Let's have a look at that.
One example of the claim is:
Crop Circles Investigated By British Government - Over a decade ago a secret meeting to debate the meaning of corp. circles was held by the British Government according to Crop Circle investigator George Wingfield. In The Wall Street Journal of the 28th August, 1989, it was stated "British agriculture and defence officials want to know more about the mysterious crop circles which have appeared across the countryside... so does Queen Elizabeth, who is said to have sharply questioned Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about the circles recently."
Nick Redfern writing in Phenomena Magazine says it isn't the first time the British government have investigated crop circles. According to a recently declassified file, "The early days of 1940 and 1941 produced an avalanche of reports about methods used in communicating to each other and to the enemy. According to reports from Poland, Holland, France and Belgium, they showed that they used ground markings for the guidance of bombers and paratroopers, and such ground markings might be the cutting of cornfields into guiding marks for aircraft." NIck Redfern reports that during World War II, British spies were sent into the fields to examine crop circles and decide if they were Nazi aircraft signals.
So it looks likes crop circles are not as new as we thought, They apparently were investigated by high level government departments over 60 years ago and still we do not have the answer as to who is making them and what are the patterns telling us.
Source: http://www.hufos.net/news_in_general_19.html
Indeed, Nick Redfern said in an interview:
Practically everyone who reads UFO Magazine, I am sure, has heard of Crop Circles and has seen photographs of the various formations - or pictograms - that appear throughout England and the world each year. But less well known is what has been learned about the subject at an official level. For more than a decade rumours have circulated to the effect that the British Government has undertaken covert investigations of Crop Circles. To an extent, at least, that is true. At the Public Record Office at Kew there exists an intriguing file prepared at the height of the Second World War by none other than MI5 and that was declassified in 2001. The file deals with the way in which MI5 suspected that Nazi sympathisers and Fifth Columnists in the UK were sending messages to - and communicating with - the enemy. Interestingly, MI5 learned that in Poland, Holland, France and Belgium, this included 'the cutting of cornfields into guiding marks for aircraft'. To illustrate how closely this parallels today's Crop Circles, the official file refers to enemy sympathisers 'beating out signs twenty metres in diameter on harrowed fields or mowing such signs on meadows or cornfields'. Crop circles in other words! Interestingly, MI5 investigated a number of such formations that appeared in various British fields from 1940-1943 to determine if any of those same formations were some form of coded message intended for German pilots flying overhead.
Source: http://www.steamshovelpress.com/latestword14.html
Okay!
Do we now have the evidence or proof the "crop circle phenomenon" is not just a big prank started in 1978?
What a joke!
One noted British ufologist privately reacted about this; unfortunately as this is private, I cannot go into details.
What he said was that indeed, in the beginning of World War II, mysterious markings in fields of growing crops, were brought to the attention of the Security Service, M.I.5.
Rumours spread, that German spies and fifth columnist were at work in the countryside preparing for an invasion, and would use crop marks for coded messages that could only be seen from the air to help German pilots fly above England.
He said that in May 1941 a 33-yard-long "unusual mark" in the form of the letter "G" was spotted by the RAF in a field of growing corn in South Wales, and it was investigated by the M.I.5. The investigators found out that it was the farmer who had created the marking with surplus barley that he had sown transversely across a field of growing corn in April, so that he could return a drilling machine to its owner. There was a written report by the M.I.5, that ended with: "He agreed to plough up this part of the field [and] as a satisfactory solution had been reached, the case was carried no further."
He said that despite hundreds of reports describing mysterious flashing lights and markings in fields and on telegraph poles during 1940-41, M.I.5 investigators failed to identify a single example as the handiwork of German spies.
So... Crop circles in England in World War 2?
Let's ignore that M.I.5 investigators failed to identify a single example as the handiwork of German spies. After all, I cannot prove that, I cannot provide a named source or document.
But...
Crop circle "experts" and buff says there is a real crop circle mystery because crop circles are not made by men with ordinary tools.
They say crop circles are made by aliens, angels, UFO, demonic entities, psychic forces, UFOs, god, laser beams, the Spirit of the Earth, you name it.
But not all by ordinary men with ordinary tools.
Well, I ask: how would crop circles made by German spies as landmarks for their pilots be evidence of such theories? Where is the evidence that these so-called "crop circles", if they even existed, are alien, or paranormal, or anything of that kind?
And if German spies really created such marks, would they not be more evidence that crop circles are made by men, in this case, German spies? What is "paranormal" or alien about that?
What we have here, again, is claims of evidence of "mysterious crop circles in the past" that should only be put to rest.
