In the mid-1970s, as the British countryside buzzed with tales of strange formations appearing overnight in barley and wheat fields, a curious thread of folklore began weaving itself into the public conversation. It started quietly, a handful of witnesses from Wiltshire, Hampshire, and parts of East Anglia claiming that the figures they saw near newly formed crop circles were not lights, not aircraft, and not the usual silhouettes of nocturnal trespassers. Instead, they described two small figures with green-tinged skin, dressed in clothing unlike anything modern, moving near the fields just before unusual circular impressions appeared. To many, the claims sounded like a revival of one of England’s oldest legends: the Green Children of Woolpit.
The original medieval story, dating back to the 12th century, told of two children found wandering out of the Suffolk countryside, their skin tinted green, their language unknown, their origin a mystery. They reportedly spoke of a land where the sun never shone, accessible through a tunnel beneath the earth. For centuries the tale was treated as folklore. But when crop circles began emerging across rural England eight hundred years later, some witnesses insisted the strange figures they saw resembled those same green-skinned children described in medieval texts.
The reports clustered most heavily in Wiltshire, an area already rich with ancient sites, Stonehenge, Avebury, and Silbury Hill, and a region where crop circles would soon become globally famous. In 1976, a farmer outside Devizes claimed he saw “two child-sized shapes” standing at the edge of a barley field moments before he discovered a perfect circle pressed into the crop. Their skin, he said, looked “washed in green, as though reflecting something not there.” The figures vanished when he approached, leaving no footprints in the soft soil.
Another report came from a lorry driver passing near Andover who described a similar sighting: two small figures at dawn, standing amid flattened grain, watching him before turning and disappearing into the morning mist. The driver assumed it was a prank until he saw the pattern in the field, a crisp, symmetrical circle that looked as if the crop had been woven down rather than crushed. When he mentioned the green tint he noticed on the children’s faces, investigators dismissed the detail as an illusion created by light. Still, the resemblance to the Woolpit legend was not lost on those familiar with local lore.
What made these accounts so persistent was that they came from witnesses with no connection to each other. The sightings occurred miles apart, under different conditions, and involved individuals from varied walks of life, farmers, hikers, and even an off-duty constable who later privately admitted the figures he saw “didn’t look quite human.” All described the same thing: a faint green coloration to the skin, clothing that seemed unfitted or antiquated, and an uncanny stillness, as if the figures were observing rather than participating.
Researchers who documented early crop circle cases noted another intriguing detail. Some of the formations associated with these sightings displayed anomalies later described as “plasma vortex characteristics”, grain bent near its base without breaking, subtle heat effects in the soil, and crisp edges untouched by footprints. Though many circles from the 1970s were simple compared to the complex geometric designs of later decades, the ones linked to the green-children reports tended to have unusually clean structure, suggesting a different method of formation from known human hoaxes.
Folklorists saw something else in these accounts: the merging of ancient narrative and modern mystery. In the Middle Ages, stories of the Green Children spoke to fears and wonders tied to the unknown landscapes beyond a village’s borders. In the 1970s, when crop circles were still new and largely unexplained, the sightings echoed those same cultural anxieties, strange visitors appearing from nowhere, leaving marks upon the land, moving silently through fields that had stood unchanged for generations. Whether literal or symbolic, the figures represented something outside the familiar world of rural life.
By the early 1980s, reports of the green children around crop circles faded as hoaxers took greater interest in the formations and more conventional explanations became widely accepted. Yet among the earliest witnesses, the memory of those silent figures never disappeared. Some remain convinced that what they saw was connected less to extraterrestrial speculation and more to the enduring thread of British folklore, a reminder that certain stories don’t vanish with centuries; they simply adapt to new landscapes and emerge in new forms.
The Green Children crop circle claims of the 1970s sit at an unusual intersection of history, legend, and unexplained phenomenon. They represent a moment when ancient myth briefly brushed against a modern mystery, leaving behind a series of sightings that now belong to one of the quieter, stranger corners of the crop circle era, neither fully believed nor fully forgotten.
Sources & Further Reading:
– Paul Fuller, early crop circle reports archived in the Centre for Fortean Zoology.
– “The Green Children of Woolpit,” primary medieval references by Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh.
– British Newspaper Archive: regional reporting on crop formations (1974–1981).
– Wiltshire local interviews recorded by the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society.
– Early circle surveys compiled by researcher Terence Meaden.
(One of many stories shared by Headcount Coffee — where mystery, history, and late-night reading meet.)
