One of my cousins has a large farm near me. ‘Crop circles’ showed up one morning in one of his fields. I asked him about it because there seemed to be a pattern to the laid down stalks. He told me he watch a devils tail (TN word for a small whirlwind caused by sudden thunderstorm back-of-cloud winds dropping to ground level, creating a mini tornado) work across the field during series of thunder storms the night before. I asked him if this was a common thing. He said it was more common than the college students who got run off from one of his fields one night when trying to create a crop circle.