Doug Bower and Dave Chorley's crop circle confession

Doug Bower had spent years in Australia. There he heard or read about the 1966 Tully "saucer nests" in Queensland. Three marks that Melbourne experts had called "definitely UFO nests." Back home, he told his friend Dave Chorley. Both men were watercolour painters from the Southampton area. "I said we could have quite a bit of fun," Bower recalled. Why circles? "Because flying saucers were circular, you see."

One Friday night in June 1976, by Rob Irving's account, the pair went into a wheat field on the Longwood Estate in Hampshire. They used the heavy iron bar that secured the back doors of Doug's gallery. They left a simple circle about 30 feet across, made to look "as if a flying saucer had landed." In the 1991 telling, it all began in 1978. "Our first few circles were made on our hands and knees with the security bar," Bower said. "My goodness, it was certainly hard work."

Then came Cheesefoot Head. The Punch Bowl, beside the A272 east of Winchester. Their first circle there was in the news the next evening. Chorley said it "was taken up by Mr. Pat Delgado, and from then on it took off!" The kit stayed primitive. A four foot plank with string tied to each end. A stake at the centre. A baseball cap with a wire sight for long straight runways. They went out on Friday nights, after the pub. Rings, pictograms and "insectograms" followed. By 1991 they claimed about 200 formations.

In 1991, Today reporter Graham Brough set a trap. The week before publication, the pair made an insectogram in a field at Ightham, near Sevenoaks in Kent. The paper asked Pat Delgado, co-author of Circular Evidence, for an expert opinion on a suspected hoax. By later accounts, he called it the work of a "higher intelligence." Then Bower and Chorley were brought in. Delgado recognised them as regulars at new formations. "Oh, my God, that's why you two were always there!" The next day he retracted. TIME quoted him: "We have all been conned."

Monday, 9 September 1991. The front page of Today read "Men who conned the world." Chorley told Michael Enright of CBC that the subject had become "a multi-million pounds business," and that experts were "harassing the Ministry of Defence." He added: "We made not a penny out of it!" That September, in a small field in Warminster, the two men pushed over wheat with wooden planks as the world's press watched. A few hours later they stood inside a finished circle. Other motives surfaced over the years. Bower's wife, Ilene, had noticed high mileage on the car and suspected an affair. In 2005 Bower said Dave's health was failing. He also said, "I was just a publicity seeker, really."

On 10 September, George Wingfield of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies faced Bower on BBC Radio 1 and accused the pair of lying. Delgado pointed to new circles in Canada: "Have these guys been out there with their board?" Believers still cite reports from before 1978, shifting details in the pair's stories, and demonstrations that went badly, including a 1999 attempt on Countryfile. Yet meteorologist Terence Meaden, author of the vortex theory, conceded by late 1991 that complex designs were man-made. Colin Andrews later put the man-made share at about 80%.

Doug Bower died on 21 July 2018, aged 94. Physicist Richard Taylor said the pair's work "inspired a second wave of crop artists." Skeptoid compared the case to Ray Wallace's Bigfoot footprints. A confession that did not end belief.