A Utah filmmaker's search for crop circle creators left him open to the mysterious. 

• Courtesy Photo
• Filmmaker Erik Hutchins during production of A Field Full of Secrets, which tracked the not-fully-explained appearance of crop circles in England.

In 2009, one of the world's most complex crop circles appeared out of the blue, and Utahn Erik Hutchins was there to see it. He'd been trying to capture its creation on film, and he says his failure to do so was also a great success.

"My college buddy contacted me and said, 'I'm going to England [to make a film], would you be part of the crew?'" Hutchins said.

A man with a zeal for the paranormal, Hutchins is co-owner of Park City Ghost Tours, where he helps research the true stories behind Park City's most haunted locations. His interest in the space where fact and mystery intersect led him to accept the invitation to England.

The crew of five was making an investigative documentary of the crop circle phenomenon that most famously occurs in the grain fields of Wiltshire, and Hutchins accepted the role of second camera for the film, A Field Full of Secrets.

The crew spent the entire 10-week growing season in Wiltshire, and more than 40 crop circles popped up during that time. Crop circles only appear in the summer because the stalks of wheat, barley or rye standing in the field are the circle-makers' artistic medium and must be used before harvest.

The documentary chases the crop circles as they appear, aided by a bookstore owner whose Wiltshire shop happens to be the epicenter for crop circle "comms." A new crop circle is a huge tourist draw to these fields on private land.

"It was very important to be in with the bookstore, because he would immediately call us so we could be the first in the crop circles, like a crime scene," Hutchins explained. "When you start walking in there, you start breaking the plants with your weight."

According to media outlets like The New York Times, the supernatural origins of crop circles have been thoroughly debunked. A June 12, 2022, article's incredibly pat title said it all: "Crop Circles Were Made by Supernatural Forces. Named Doug and Dave."

The Times and other media claimed that hoaxers had demonstrated that they'd made all the crop circles in England using a string tied to a central post, a sighting loop on the end of a cap and boards strapped to their feet.

But crop circle enthusiasts like Hutchins and the documentary crew doubted this explanation. In the film, they host one of the hoaxers, who spends an entire day demonstrating how he makes an apparition in a field. The hoaxer certainly laid down a flattened circle of rye, but he wasn't able to even approximate the amazing fractal patterns that pop up overnight, like the Milk Hill design, comprised of 409 connected circles, or the Pi circle, which the UK Telegraph called "the most complex, 'mind-boggling' crop circle ever to be seen in Britain."

The hoaxer's methods also left the field's stems damaged.

"In a genuine crop circle, the stems aren't broken," Hutchins said. "The crops survive and you can actually harvest them in the fall."

He also noted that the circles, made on undulating hills, often need to be oval-shaped to account for the hillside and give the illusion of perfect symmetry from above. Then there's the fact that not all crop circles are even circular.

If the circles were the obvious creation of hoaxers, the crew thought they should be able to catch some in the act—other than the one they'd asked to demonstrate on film. Eight times they pulled all-nighters, staking out a likely field, keeping their cameras trained on it throughout the night. They knew that a group sneaking in to press a design into hundreds of acres of grain would inevitably be caught on camera. But the film crew was never in the right place at the right time.

And then they were.

"It was our last night that it happened," Hutchins recounted.

Two cameramen and a sound technician had spent the night on Silbury Hill, the highest point in the area. Hutchins and his college buddy were next to the field, on ground level.

In the film, they greet the dawn disappointed, thinking they've been skunked once again, but that's the moment when they get a radio call from the guys on the hilltop.

"Ryan [a crew member], could see the circle emerge as the sun was rising," says Hutchins. "He's like, 'Do you see what I'm seeing? I think there's something in the field.'"

The crop circle that materialized is now called "Mayan Mask," and it was spectacular. It was built within a single circle and seemed to be a stylized Indian headdress with long, pointed feathers coming out from a central point and a squared geometric border.

The whole thing was 200 yards in diameter, and it certainly wasn't made by Doug and Dave. Hutchins knows that the crew, who kept their cameras trained on the field throughout the night, would have caught human hoaxers at work.

"The crop circle that happened in front of us—Mayan Mask—wasn't there when the sun went down. It was there when the sun came up," he stated. "You can see a car coming from miles away or a person with a headlamp. But we saw nothing. Nobody was out there."

Hutchins says the film demonstrates that the origins of all crop circles can't be simplistically explained away. He adds that we should open our minds to bigger possibilities—not just for the thrill of a mystery, but for our own good.

"When we think there's something greater than us out there, it helps us coalesce with each other," he says.