Newspapers in London today published the claims of two local men who said they were the ones who had been skulking around the countryside under cover of darkness, trampling out patterns with wooden boards as a big joke.
To prove their point, the men, aided by a London tabloid, fooled a self-styled expert on the crop circle phenomena, who declared a pattern found over the weekend in a Kent wheat field to be the genuine article, of the sort no human could have made.
Then, while the expert looked in embarrassment, the two men -- described by the newspaper as "jovial con men in their 60's" -- gleefully revealed themselves as the artists.