Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

The Mowing Devil pamphlet is often quoted as evidence that the crop circle phenomenon may have been going on for centuries.

Swirled News has an informative article by Andy Thomas, The ‘Mowing Devil’ Investigated, where he tracks the many versions and confirms the existence of the original.

But perhaps even more revealing is the transcription of the full story of the pamphlet quoted on an article by Francesco Grassi. It can be read on the end of this Italian page on CICAP, and if that is indeed the full original story, then it obviously has very little to do with crop circles, and a lot with religious and moral anecdotes.

Incidentally, why there are no actually mowed crop circles? That could be a little harder to do, but it would certainly be something new, as over two decades of crop circles pretty much exhausted most of what you can do pictorially stamping crop around.