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It was a warm evening in the English countryside in the first few days of July 2009. Overnight, an interesting pattern appeared in a wheat field in Wiltshire right next to Silbury Hill, the tallest prehistoric manmade mound in Europe. This large circular design measured 350 feet across and featured what appeared to be a group of feathers atop repeating geometrical shapes. Local crop circle researcher, Karen Alexander, said:
“This is one of the most interesting crop circles I have ever seen. It is definitely a Mayan symbol and we are sure it is linked to the Mayan calendar, which ends in 2012. It appears to be a warning about the world coming to an end when the calendar does. For the ancient Maya, reaching the end of a cycle was a momentous event, so we are taking this crop circle very seriously as an indicator of a possibly huge event in 2012.”
Hindsight is 20/20 and nothing happened in 2012. It is interesting that in a field in England someone made a connection to Mexico where maybe there wasn’t any. The curious Maya-looking crop circle begs the question, are there similar such phenomena occurring in Mexico?
First, a definition. According to Wikipedia, “A crop circle, crop formation, or corn circle is a pattern created by flattening a crop, usually a cereal. The term was first coined in the early 1980s by Colin Andrews. Crop circles have been described as all falling ‘within the range of the sort of thing done in hoaxes’ by Taner Edis, professor of physics at Truman State University. Although obscure natural causes or alien origins of crop circles are suggested by fringe theorists, there is no scientific evidence for such explanations, and all crop circles are consistent with human causation.” The online encyclopedia goes on to say that, “formations are usually created overnight.” Many of the curious would disagree with Wikipedia’s hard stance that all crop circles are consistent with human causation. Some crop circles have been debunked as hoaxes while others have no reasonable explanation as to how or why they were formed. Oftentimes, they pop up quickly and with great detail in their designs which would be virtually impossible to create by humans. Crop circles have been appearing in fields since the 1670s in Europe with a strong concentration in Great Britain. The strange patterns were attributed early on in England to a creature called the Mowing Devil. Crop circles started to become more frequently seen in the late 1970s, and the phenomenon became worldwide. The debate still rages on as to how these are formed, why they are formed and who or what is doing the forming.
In Spanish they are called agrogramas and while there were rumors of crop circles in the Mexican state of Hidalgo dating back to the late 1990s, what may have been the first thoroughly documented crop circle incident in Mexican history happened in the year 2005. In a small field of oats in the state of Michoacán outside the state’s capital city of Morelia, a group of 10 figures, mostly circular formations, were first seen at dawn on Sunday, May 1, 2005. The oat stalks, approximately 3 feet tall at the time, were matted down – not broken, but bent – in a characteristic spiral pattern in these formations. Out of the 10 figures, three were circles and measured from 120 feet to just 3 feet across. The non-circular formations seemed random and haphazard and were not arranged in any discernable way. No one saw anyone enter the fields that night and there were no traces that any of the oat stalks were trampled by people walking to the areas of the agrogramas. A local paranormal investigation group out of Morelia called La Esfera Azul, or “The Blue Orb,” in English, submitted the felled stalks of oats to a chemical analysis, but that was inconclusive. This crop circle event attracted little attention and very little information exists about it outside a member of the La Esfera Azul group talking to the host of a paranormal television show out of Spain. Local newspapers didn’t bother themselves to carry the story at all.
The opposite occurred in October of 2012. The massive crop circle that appeared in an oat field outside of Tequixiac in the Mexican state of México received national television attention. News of this crop circle first appeared on the Mexican television program, “Mujeres,” in a segment of the show called “La Otra Realidad,” or in English, “The other reality.” The hostess of the show interviewed Mexican UFO researcher Yohanan Diaz Vargas to talk about this unusual anomaly, complete with helicopter news footage. The crop circle measured over 1,000 feet across and the design included 5 overlapping and embedded circles surrounded by a ring of small triangles. The hostess and Vargas tried to interpret the meaning. They both agreed that the design looked like a sun, or two suns, or possibly two planets in an eclipse. Within a week, this first “famous” crop circle had been trampled out of existence as locals and curiosity-seekers from throughout Mexico descended on the oat field by the thousands. Vargas emphasized in his interview that if crop circles were to become more commonplace in Mexico that Mexicans should behave more like the people in Britain, where they have an established culture around this phenomenon. When a crop circle appears in England, curious people wait for professional investigators and other researchers to survey the circle and conduct the appropriate tests. The 2012 crop circle at Tequixiac was such a novel thing that people really did not know how to react to it. Apparently, the famous October 2012 crop circle happened in a midst of a small wave that occurred in the same area. A total of 7 smaller designs appeared in various local fields at different times, all much smaller than the large one at Tequixiac.
The next major crop circle event that happened in Mexico, and perhaps the most famous, took place outside of Texcoco about 15 miles from Mexico City, on Christmas Eve of 2014. This series of crop circles not only garnered a great deal of local attention, but it received international recognition as well. In a field of barley, curious shapes appeared overnight, with grain stalks bent and not broken, as is characteristic of the crop circle phenomenon. These shapes in the field were far from circles, though, and appeared more erratic and random, with no discernable patterns. The shapes seem so haphazard that they are difficult to describe without visuals. People flocked to the area to see the mysterious shapes and a carnival-like atmosphere immediately developed, as is common in Mexico with unexpected events that attract large amounts of visitors. Nanas selling gorditas and tamales to hungry curiosity-seekers, joined balloon sellers and vendors with coolers full of bottled water and soft drinks. Locals estimated that over ten thousand people descended on the fields. Unlike other previous crop circle occurrences in Mexico, this one came with stories of associated paranormal activities. Local residents claimed that they had seen strange lights or orbs in the sky the night before. According to a local newspaper, the Texcoco police department received an anonymous call from a woman the night before claiming to have seen, “the presence of aliens in farming areas and various figures in the crops.” While many were convinced that what appeared in the barley fields was the creation of a mysterious alien race, Mexican social media erupted with farcical stories of drunk aliens because the designs were so terrible. Others claimed that it was all a big prank done by college kids from a nearby university. Some people also tied the strange shapes in the crops to sightings of the Chupacabra, a terrible mythical beast or cryptid, which had been lurking in the area for many years. How a strange creature like that could carry out that work is not readily explicable, nor has the Chupacabra ever been associated with crop circles. Maybe some wanted to equate the Latin American beast with the old English Mowing Devil. For more information about the Chupacabra, please see Mexico Unexplained episode number 4. https://mexicounexplained.com//the-chupacabra/ Some locals have sided with certain scientists who believed that strong winds were responsible for the strange patterns in the fields. But what caused these strong bursts of wind to blow apart only pieces of this barley crop in certain ways? The answer, to some, points to some paranormal or extraterrestrial origin to these sudden wind bursts. The whole series of patterns stretched across an area of seven hectares.
Perhaps the most unusual crop-circle-related event to happen in Mexico occurred on Isla del Carmen in the Gulf of California off the coast of Baja. Strange symbols resembling crop circles suddenly appeared on the beaches of this 37,000-acre island. Isla del Carmen belongs to the Loreto Municipality of the Mexican state of Baja California Sur and is part of Loreto Bay National Park. It is also a Mexican “World Heritage Site,” as it lies within the “Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California,” as declared by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Once the site of a salt packing plant, Isla del Carmen has no permanent population and visits to the island are restricted or severely limited. In December of 2019, a helicopter passing over Isla del Carmen noticed something very strange. On some of the island’s beaches there appeared circular designs connected to each other with lines, almost resembling a drawing of an atomic structure. The shapes were of uniform width – about 40 feet across – and were perfect circles. Although these patterns did not appear in crops, their shapes are eerily reminiscent of crop circles and their sudden appearance is baffling to researchers. One investigator, the publisher of UFO Sightings Daily, Scott Waring, has tied these mysterious circular sand formations to an alleged UFO base underneath the sea in the middle of the Gulf of California. In the summer of 2016 Waring discovered a strange anomaly on the seafloor using Google Maps, an 11-mile-long geometric pattern that looked too refined to be natural. For more information about this subject, please see Mexico Unexplained episode 115 titled “Secret UFO Bases in Mexico.” https://mexicounexplained.com//secret-ufo-bases-mexico/ Did UFOs from this underwater base make the strange formations on the sand, or is there another earthlier explanation? The National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, came out a few weeks after the photos from the helicopter pilot became public and claimed that the circles were part of a mangrove restoration project and part of ongoing conservation efforts. Many people, locals especially, allege that this is just a cover for other more clandestine or otherworldly activities, as the island has seen no human activity on a large scale for many years.
What can explain the Isla del Carmen connected circles or the other anomalies in fields of crops throughout Mexico? Crop circle investigation in Mexico is a relatively new field and still full of speculation and theory. Perhaps with time secrets of these mysterious formations will reveal themselves.
REFERENCES
Hopkins, Steve. “Aliens, Students, or the Chupacabra? Thousands Flock to Mexican Barley Field After Bizarre Crop Circles Materialise Overnight.” In Daily Mail, 29 Dec. 2014.
“Mayan ‘Apocalypse’ Crop Circle Appears at Silbury Hill.” In The Telegraph, 8 Jul. 2009
Monzon, Inigo. “Strange Symbols Resembling Crop Circles Appear in UNESCO Protected Island.” In International Business Times, 13 Dec. 2019.
“Mujuere” TV show (in Spanish)
Wikipedia