The news media have long portrayed the crop circle phenomenon as either real or a man made hoax. There is usually very little discussion of any other possibilities. However, if you take a careful look at the evidence, you'll see that for as long as the phenomenon has existed, it has been accompanied by "just plain weird" side-effects. In the early days of crop circles, UFOs and flying discs were seen in and around newly-formed crop circles. This was the case in the Tully saucer nests of Australia in the late and 1960's and early '70's. This type of association goes back for the last hundred years in the United States as is documented by Terry Wilson's excellent The Secret History of Crop Circles. Another phenomena historically associated with crop circles are balls of light and other luminal anomalies. In a few cases, balls of light were seen just before crop circles appeared. Sometimes, the balls of light are seen after a crop formation is created as is the case in the video taken by Steve Alexander of the Milk Hill formation in 1990.

More recently, crop circles have been connected with camera and battery failure. Typically, people report that the cameras stop working or malfunction around crop circles. Batteries have been know to drain almost instantly. Most importantly, these electronic mishaps happen in man made formations. It is almost reminiscent of the type of things that are reported to happen to cars, such as engines stalling, that are near UFOs. How can such activity be explained?

Since we've had reports of such strange electrical occurrences for several decades and that such happenings are now well-documented, we should treat them as real. To explain theses electronic anomalies we should take a look at similar types of properties in the current scientific literature. Some processes and materials that also create battery failure and other unusual properties include superconductivity, liquid crystals, and metamaterials.

Superconductivity has been known to create battery failure as a result of tunnelling quasiparticles that are created as a by product of Cooper pairing electrons. These quasiparticles can tunnel through materials and go off into random directions sometimes causing short circuits. Perhaps crop circles are exhibiting some sort of high-temperature superconductivity whereby the wheat or other plant materials cease to act like insulators and instead become conductors of electrical current.

Another possibility is that the large-scale arrangement of the wheat stalks allows the formation as whole to act like big crystal collecting or channeling energy in new or unexpected ways. Perhaps the sunlight is getting converted into another frequency. Along these lines, it's possible that the organization of all those plant stalks in a large pattern might create what is know as a metamaterial: ordinary materials with novel properties. These hybrid materials, engineered to be active at a nanoscale but exhibit unusual properties detectable by our senses, are capable bending light or creating room-temperature, unusual electric activity like graphene.

Whatever the ultimate explanation for crop circles' weird effects, we're likely to be puzzled by these strange phenomena for a long time.

Dr. Simeon Hein is the author of OPENING MINDS: A Journey of Extraordinary Encounters, Crop Circles, and Resonance and PLANETARY INTELLIGENCE: 101 Easy Steps to Energy, Well-Being, and Natural Insight. You can join him and other experts every summer for yearly crop circle and sacred site tours in England. His website is Crop Circle Tours. His blog, Crystal Blue Mind, contains more information and interviews about this subject.