Viral photos of odd-looking crop circles claiming to be found in Batangas and Nueva Ecija farms turned out to be a marketing gig for an upcoming show.
A video from Facebook page Spookify Pinoy showing drone shots of these crop circles had recently circulated on social media.
However, a TV network posted on August 9 a clip that revealed the bizarre visuals to be part of the promotion of History Channel’s three-day convention in August.
This event is set to feature one of the channel’s shows called Ancient Aliens, wherein its host Giorgio Tsoukalos will have a live session to selected participants.
Ancient Aliens is a long-running hit series in History Channel that “explores the controversial theory that extraterrestrials have visited Earth for millions of years.”
Tsoukalos believed that the country was once visited by aliens in ancient times due to folk myths and legends.
“I’m trying to figure out what was the initial spark of inspiration for such particular stories or legends,” Tsoukalos said in an interview shared on Facebook.
Other personalities who will appear in the convention are Xian Lim, Diego Loyzaga from “Celebrity Car Wars,” Katheryn Winnick from “Vikings” and Mong Chin from “Who Runs the World.”
Not really aliens
In the Spooky Pinoy video, the administrator claimed that the drone shots were emailed to him by a group introduced as UFO Imbestigador.
This group considered possible electrical interference from the crops due to instances of the drones nearly getting crashed or glitches in the footage.
Baffled Filipinos who have watched this recording immediately shared screenshots of it online with their witty comments and the hashtag #UFOmg.
Some, however, took them seriously and sought for someone to verify if these were real sightings.
A crop circle is “a geometric and especially a circular pattern of flattened stalks in a field of grain”
This phenomenon is usually associated with the never-ending speculation of life beyond Earth or alien life form, which patterns were discovered as early as 1678.
Centuries later, many other intriguing crop circles were found in many parts of the world, thus inspiring fictional books, movies and blogs.
So far, there has been no concrete evidence of a crop circle being found in the Philippines.