The crop circles of Hoeven
From 1996, crop circles appeared around Hoeven in North Brabant, often linked to the self-proclaimed medium Robbert van den Broeke, who also claimed photographs of spirits.
1996 CE · 51.58, 4.58 · status: disputed
The account
Physicist Eltjo Haselhoff published a 2001 paper suggesting balls of light shaped the circles; his claims were contested.
The sceptical view
Dutch skeptics (Stichting Skepsis) argued the circles and photographs were man-made; no anomaly has been confirmed.
The researched reading
A run of crop circles tied to a self-styled medium whose spirit photographs were exposed as fakes. The botanical anomalies claimed for them have ordinary explanations, so a human origin is by far the best reading.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Undetermined | 65% | The share the reading had given to fabrication on doubt rather than evidence: the record does not settle it either way. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 15% | The circles cluster around one man, Robbert van den Broeke, who also produced "spirit photographs" that Dutch sceptics and journalists showed were made with printed pictures of real people. Circles appearing where the same person predicts them are best explained by that person or helpers making them. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 7% | Visitors and supporters read balls of light in photographs and plant changes as signs of a mystery, a pattern of expectation well known in crop-circle tourism. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 4% | The node lengthening Haselhoff measured can arise naturally when flattened stems bend back up towards the light (gravitropism), whatever flattened them; it is not a signature of an unknown energy. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 4% | Haselhoff’s ball-of-light model fits a radial node pattern, but it was never tested independently and a point-like trampling or setting-out pattern can mimic it. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 3% | Nothing confirmed at Hoeven requires a non-human cause, and the central witness’s record undermines the rest. |
| Something known, misidentified | 1% | There is no misidentified object in this case: the circles exist; only their maker is in question. |
| Secret human technology | 1% | No plausible military motive or technology applies to a series of circles in a Brabant village. |
Official position: No official investigation; Dutch sceptics (Skepsis) and investigative journalists judged the circles and photographs human-made.