Some people have suggested that crop circles are the result of extraordinary meteorological phenomena. This hypothesis probably originated from a 1880 publication in Nature by John Rand Capron.
“The storms about this part of Western Surrey have been lately local and violent, and the effects produced in some instances curious. Visiting a neighbour’s farm on Wednesday evening (21st), we found a field of standing wheat considerably knocked about, not as an entirety, but in patches forming, as viewed from a distance, circular spots… I could not trace locally any circumstances accounting for the peculiar forms of the patches in the field, nor indicating whether it was wind or rain, or both combined, which had caused them, beyond the general evidence everywhere of heavy rainfall. They were suggestive to me of some cyclonic wind action…”
According to this theory, whirlwinds, created by heat thermals, would be the true cause of the crop circle anomaly. But whirlwinds or mini-tornadoes are not static, they travel around and it is very unlikely that they would create such intricate and symmetrical patterns.
Some New Age supporters have related crop circles to the Gaia hypothesis, alleging that “Gaia”, the earth, is actually alive and that crop circles are warning messages about global warming and human pollution. It asserts that the earth may be modeled as if a single super-organism, in that earthly components (e.g. biota, climate, temperature, sunlight, etc.) influence each other and are organized to function and develop as a whole.
