By Tim Binnall
In a testament to the global nature of the crop circle phenomenon, one of the mysterious formations was recently found in a Brazilian wheat field. According to a local media report, the design was discovered on Tuesday morning in the community of Ipuaçu and consists of a series of concentric shapes beginning with a pentagon on the outside, followed by a circle, then a triangle, and ultimately finishing with a solid sphere at the center. As is almost always the case with such crop formations, the origins of the oddity are a mystery as the owner of the field had no clue that one had appeared on his property until someone alerted him to it during his morning coffee.
Similarly, a neighbor reported that he did not see anything unusual unfolding in the field when he arrived home on Monday evening, but spotted the strange sight when he woke up shortly after dawn on Tuesday. Strangely enough, this is actually the second time that the farmer has fallen victim to the phenomenon as another design had appeared in his field back in 2015. To that end, while certainly not as plentiful as they are in England, crop circles are not an altogether rare phenomenon in Brazil, where the formations have been appearing with some regularity since around 2008, when a design found in the community of Toldo Velho caused something of a stir and drew thousands of curious visitors.
Since that time, these agroglyphs as they've come to be known in Brazil, have appeared around once a year in the same general region where this week's formation was found. As for what could have created the design, physicist Diego Debastiani indicated to one media outlet that the fact that the design seems to begin where a tractor had laid down a track suggests people used that spot an entryway into the field to conceal their footprints. Meanwhile, an agricultural expert enlisted by a Brazilian TV station offered a more ambiguous take, noting that something as simple a stump could be used to create the agroglyph, but also observed that "the position and dimensions are extremely straight lines," which "leave doubt in the air" as to how exactly the formation was formed.