Ancient Aliens

Bizarre shapes...

What in the world

is making these patterns and why?

...intricate designs...

Scientists are now saying

that this geometry

is the secret keys to the higher dimensions.

...and a mysterious method

that defies explanation.

Everyone was scratching their heads

and saying, "What's going on here?"

Are the patterns

appearing on fields across the globe

part of an elaborate hoax?

Or could there really be an otherworldly connection?

These are messages from elsewhere.

And elsewhere, in my opinion,

means of extraterrestrial origin.

Since the dawn of civilization,

mankind has credited its origins to gods

and other visitors from the stars.

What if it were true?

Did extraterrestrial beings

really help to shape our history?

And if so...

could they really be communicating

using circles from the sky?

Turin, Italy.

June 23, 2015.

Pilot Silvio Sirotto reports

that while flying over a wheat field

directly in the flight path of the local airport,

he spotted a mysterious design

seemingly pressed into the crops.

Investigators are baffled

as to how the design could have been created

without any detection in such a high-traffic area.

To date, it remains a mystery,

but it is only one of the latest examples

in a strange phenomenon

that has been going on for decades,

and possibly much, much longer.

Over 10,000 crop formations have been found worldwide.

They have been reported in over 50 different countries

and on nearly every continent on Earth.

Commonly known as crop circles,

the formations are designs pressed down into fields.

They range from small circles

to elaborate pictograms hundreds of feet across.

They have been found in various crops,

including wheat, barley,

oilseed rape and corn.

And they've been making worldwide headlines

since the mid-1960s.

One of the first, in 1966,

it was Tully, Queensland, Australia.

A farmer heard a buzzing sound

and literally saw this big, round,

maybe 30-feet-diameter craft, disk, rising up

out of what essentially was marshy, reedy ground.

And it goes up and disappears,

and left behind the circle.

Beginning in Tully, Australia,

there seems to be a kind of a smattering

of these circular impressions, relatively simple,

but in several locations around the world.

1960s, '70s, '80s, liberal sprinkling of circles,

1990... bang,

and the whole thing goes planet-wide.

By 1991,

over 2,500 formations had been reported

across 23 different countries.

As an investigative reporter

who began about three decades ago,

trying to get to the bottom of this phenomena,

I remember getting these photographs

and reading that there were no footprints.

No one was walking around, because if they had,

we would have seen broken stalks.

Everybody was raising this question:

"What in the world is making these patterns and why?"

They had scientists and meteorologists in the field,

and it was really fascinating

and people really got into it in a big, big way.

Nobody knew what to make of this.

Politicians, scientists, the UFO community...

Everyone was scratching their heads

and saying, "What's going on here? What is this?"

Some people thought that it was extraterrestrial.

Others thought it was a meteorological phenomenon

of some sort.

And other people said, "Well, it must be a hoax."

On September 9, 1991,

two retirees from the English countryside,

Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, came forward with an admission

that they were behind the crop formations.

Using nothing more than a board and strings,

the hoaxers demonstrated their technique

for pressing down the crop to form a design.

I won't forget when the news came

that there were these two men

saying they were responsible for all the crop formations.

And immediately,

because of all the work that I had been doing was,

well, they weren't traveling to 23 nations,

number one.

Number two, they were off-kilter.

They were not geometric.

And for those of us who have been in real crop formations,

there's just no comparison.

Doug and Dave, "the men that conned the world."

That was the headline in our local newspaper here.

And these two men came forward and said, "We done it all."

We made all the crop circles since 1976, everything."

Most people pretty much swallowed that,

hook, line and sinker.

There are some theories

that, uh, Doug and Dave were just government stooges,

that, uh, the plan

was to bring the whole subject into disrepute,

to discredit it,

and to-to make the media just go away.

But could it be

that there is more to the crop circle phenomenon

than a modern-day hoax orchestrated by pranksters?

Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest

that crop formations are not, in fact,

a modern phenomenon at all,

but can be traced back hundreds of years.

There is a report from the year 815,

of the Bishop of Lyon,

a warning, notifying another priest

who was going to take over his parish

that the locals are involved in something

he considers devil worship.

They're gathering seeds

in a flattened circle of the crops

and using them in fertility rituals.

There are some very strange accounts in the 1600s.

One of the original scientists, Dr. Robert Plot,

reported seeing crop circles appearing on his land

in Staffordshire, England.

And he actually drew diagrams of what he was seeing.

We also have the infamous legend, in the 1600s,

of the so-called "mowing-devil."

One of the first crop circles ever reported

was a mowing-devil that was in England

going through the wheat fields.

There's actually a woodcut that shows what,

for all intents and purposes, looks like a crop circle,

but has this black creature

that just runs around with the horns.

So the idea was, in folklore,

that something or someone laid down this formation

in a wheat field.

And that goes back all the way to 1678.

Some even have suggested that there may be a description

of a crop circle in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the Dead Sea Scrolls

is a cryptic reference to a light

that leaves a mark on the ground.

Interpreters ask: Is it possible that the marks on the land...

Specifically on the barley and the lentil...

Are crop circles?

Is it possible that crop circles

have appeared for hundreds, if not thousands of years?

And if so, could it be that while some of these formations

have been exposed as hoaxes,

many others are connected to otherworldly beings?

Perhaps further clues can be found

by putting a man-made crop formation to the test.

Wiltshire, England.

This sleepy countryside,

just over 100 miles west of London,

is considered ground zero for the crop circle phenomenon.

It is also home to many mysterious ancient sites,

including Stonehenge,

Avebury,

Silbury Hill

and West Kennet Long Barrow.

One could quite reasonably

and easy make the connection that these crop circles

are happening in these places

because these places are markings

of certain energetic corridors

or crossover points or very special places

that were used by people

in the past for presumably metaphysical reasons...

Meditating, praying, ritual, whatever.

Today, ancient astronaut theorist and explorer.

Giorgio Tsoukalos

is in Wiltshire to meet up with three men

who have a unique perspective on crop formations.

- Hi. - Giorgio.

John? Good to meet you.

John Lundberg, Rob Irving

and William Russell have over two decades of experience

creating artistic designs in crops.

So, thanks very much for meeting me out here.

Giorgio will challenge them to recreate