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The First ‘Confidence Man’ And Other Historic Cheats

Khalid Elhassan November 18, 2019 28 min

Orson Welles - H. G. Wells — Orson Welles defending himself to journalists after the War of the Worlds panic. Corbis

7. The Silly Prank Behind It All

Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. Ninja Journal

The Wiltshire crop circles became magnets for New Age mystical tourism, which cracked up Doug Bower, an English prankster, and his pal Dave Chorley. One night in 1976 the duo had been drinking, when they got to talking about UFOs, aliens, flying saucers and the mysterious Australian circles. Midway through the conversation, Bower suddenly said: “Let’s go over there and make it look like a flying saucer has landed“. As they confessed in 1991, when they finally revealed the mystery to journalists, it had been incredibly easy.

As Bower and Chorley demonstrated to print and TV journalists by creating other crop circles in just minutes, all it took was rope, a wooden plank, and a wire to help them walk in a straight line. “Cereologist “Patrick Delgado – a crop circle “expert” who had made a living for years by writing and lecturing about the phenomenon – was called in. He declared the circles authentic. Then the hammer was dropped on him when it was revealed that it had been a simple hoax and prank all along. As Bower and Chorley explained, they had created all crop circles up to 1987, when other pranksters discovered how to make their own circles and patterns, and joined the ever-growing prank.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.