Mowing-Devil, an English pamphlet published in 1678, is the first recorded mention. Other sources also mention wheat plots that have been flattened.
The first modern-era circle was established in 1972, when two eyewitnesses (Arthur Shuttlewood and Bruce Bond) sat on a hillside on a moonlit night in England, hoping to see the elusive unidentified flying object that had made this region of England a mecca for ufologists.
However, the phenomenon did not become widely recognized until the late twentieth century, and then only in the early 1990s. Just about 500 different figures were discovered in 1990, and by the following years, the number had grown to many thousands.