Although there are some faint historical references to Crop Circle like patterns even centuries ago, officially they have existed only since mid-seventies. In the early 90's they received a lot of publicity, as there was an increase in both their number and especially their complexity. In 1990 the first complex geometrical patterns known as "pictograms" were discovered. A complex triangular formation found in Barbury Castle, Wiltshire, in 1991 became known as "the mother of all pictograms".

In 1983 a British engineer called Colin Andrews founded an organisation called "Circles Phenomenon Research (C.P.R.) International" to collect research material and keep a record of discovered Crop Circles. Today the phenomenon is investigated by numerous people from various corners of the world, among them many academically educated scientists.

The public interest towards the Crop Circles dropped temporarily soon after the enthusiasm in the early 90's. This was because two elderly men known as "Doug and Dave" claimed to have made all the patterns. Despite of their claim, they were not able to publicly duplicate the quality of formations considered "genuine" by the researchers. Additionally there was no way they could have created so many Crop Circles over such a large area in such frequency without even their wives noticing anything going on! Nevertheless, the confession was effectively used by the media to discredit the actual phenomenon - especially outside of Britain.

Nowadays several groups and individuals claim to be making Crop Circles, and quite apparently some of them are. And it's not necessary that all people making these landscape artworks come to the open with it. It is very important (as it is also self-evident) to understand that the existence of man-made Crop Circles in no way reduces the true phenomenon - not any more than the existence of artificially manufactured diamonds reduce the reality of natural born diamonds! In my opinion it would be actually quite strange if people did NOT attempt to imitate a phenomenon like this.