Pasadena, California - Rogue herbal activities aboard the International Space Station were widely blamed last year for creating Earth's crop circles - including the infamous ganja pipe smoking alien at Alton Barnes in Wiltshire.
Today that theory has gone up in smoke amid reports that NASA's Grail (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory) probes have found a crop circle etching machine hidden on the dark side of the Moon.
The equipment is said to resemble bog standard terrestrial spin driers enhanced with telescopic laser functionality (WTF this? 'Ed') according to scientists at NASA's Jet Convulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Close-up shots of the centrifuge chassis appears to show various spin cycle settings linked to a projector that in turn beams light pulses and gamma ray encryptions responsible for some of the wackiest designs seen on British cereal fields.
"Light pulses?" The head of British Aerospace queried today as news of the discovery went viral. "Like, er, gravity-defying lentils?"
Not everybody shares that cynicism, of course, including Russian astrophysicists at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan who reckon the particle array could be controlled from pre-encoded computers hidden deep beneath the UK's Stonehenge monument.
"Someone in Alton Barnes is taking the piss," the Cosmodrome's Major General Dim Eatery Pissoff commented at lunchtime.
"Wanna see pix of Vladimir Putin striking oil in the Sea of Tranquility?"
Er, probably not.
