What happened
In 1678 a pamphlet illustrated with a woodcut, “The Mowing-Devil: or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire,” was published in England. It tells of a Hertfordshire farmer who refused to pay a mower the price he asked for cutting a field of oats and swore that he would rather the Devil himself did it. That same night the field reportedly looked as if it were in flames, and in the morning the oats had been cut so neatly that “no mortal man was able to do the like.” The woodcut shows the Devil with a scythe cutting a circular pattern in the crop. The pamphlet was issued as sensational news, typical of the broadsides of the time. Three centuries later, crop circle researchers began citing it as evidence of the phenomenon’s antiquity.
Witnesses
No named witnesses – the story is known only from an anonymous pamphlet that does not even give the name of the village.
Explanations and hypotheses
Historians treat the pamphlet as a moralizing tale or a publishing sensation rather than a record of fact. Crop circle researcher Jim Schnabel points out that the oats described were cut, whereas in modern crop circles the plants are flattened, not mown. There are also no independent sources confirming the event.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
More: Wikipedia (en)