But to what extent can the tales about official, government interest in crop circles be validated? Do governmental, military and intelligence files exist on this particularly emotive topic? The answer is yes – at least, to an extent.
Under the terms of the British Government’s Freedom of Information legislation, a number of files concerning the wartime activities of MI5 have recently been declassified and made available for inspection at the Public Record Office, Kew. According to one such file:
“The early days of 1940 and 1941 produced an avalanche of reports about the spys [sic] and fifth columnists who many people thought were roaming the land unhindered. Each village boasted of ‘enemy agents’ in their midst, and it is only by recapturing the atmosphere of those days that one can see the matter in its proper perspective. Everyone had heard of the activities of fifth columnists on the continent and of the alarmingly successful part they had played in the overthrow of France and Belgium. It was therefore natural with everyone tense for the threatened invasion that so many reports came in. Each had to be investigated, even if only to put the minds of the public and the services at rest.”
The report continues and outlines the nature of its content: “This account is not concerned with the activities of fifth columnists such as sabotage, capturing airfields and key points, and harassing he defending army, but in the methods used in communicating to each other and to the enemy. Reports from Poland, Holland, France and Belgium showed that they used ground markings for the guidance of bombers and paratroops (and of lights by night). Such ground markings might be the cutting of cornfields into guiding marks for aircraft, painting of roofs and the inside of chimneys white, setting haystacks on fire, and laying out strips of white linen in pre-arranged patterns. For guiding and giving information to advancing troops they would conceal messages behind advertisement hoardings and leave markings on walls and telegraph poles.”
For the most part, the unusual markings on telegraph poles, roofs and chimneys were dismissed as having perfectly innocent explanations and serve as a good indicator of the way in which rumor and misperception can run wildly out of control at times of hostility. But what of the “ground markings” in cornfields? With respect to the reference to the latter, MI5 elaborated that from interviews conducted with the personnel who had taken part in the hostilities in Poland, it had been determined that one of the ways that Nazi spies were communicating with Air Force pilots was by “beating out signs,” twenty meters in diameter, “on harrowed fields or mowing such signs on meadows or cornfields.” Crop circles, in other words!
The files reveal that MI5 agents were dispatched throughout the UK to examine similar crop formations found in British fields in an attempt to determine if they were linked with the activities of the Nazis. And while the investigations did not confirm this hypothesis, the files are a perfect (and, more importantly, an officially, documented) example of the fact that crop circles are not just a phenomenon of the modern era but were reported to - and investigated by - high-level government departments at least sixty years ago. The extent to which similar investigations may have been undertaken by British authorities in the modern era of the mystery, however, is an issue that still has many researchers of the puzzle going, quite literally, around in circles…
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