Since 2000 crop circles have appeared almost every summer in the fields by this village in Kuyavia — sometimes complex figures tens of metres across. The landowner, Tadeusz Filipczak, said he had seen glowing objects over the field and that the stalks inside the circles were not broken but bent at the base. Poland had barely known crop circles before, and Wylatowo became the country's centre for the subject: coach parties came, tents went up, films were made. In 2005 a group of students publicly made a circle in a neighbouring field in a single night with planks and rope, showing that it could be done. It made very little difference to the village's popularity.

Read next

The Min Min Lights

A town deep in Queensland that gave its name to the lights seen on the roads of the burnt west: glowing spheres that follow a car or a rider and keep their distance for hours. Aboriginal people described them before Europeans arrived. In 2003 the physicist Jack Pettigrew showed experimentally that under a temperature inversion a light source beyond the horizon can appear as a nearby object — an elegant explanation that does not cover every case.